Bashir’s father was the district commissioner for this area before he left to take up a government post in Kabul. The commander tells us there are pockets of Taliban and al Qaeda supporters in the area. If we are captured, he warns, they will cut off our ears and noses. But Bashir assures us that this is his home turf, that we will be safe with him. Finally, an agreement is reached: the police will drive us as far as our vehicles can go, then one of the officers will go along with us on foot. “We cannot be held responsible if anything bad happens to you,” says the commander. We agree and push on into the mountains.
My first encounter with the nomads occurred while I was embedded with Canadian troops in Kandahar in mid-March. I was accompanying them on Operation Peacemaker in the Sha Wali Kot district. The meeting was a simple case of paths crossing: we were taking a rest during a three-day foot patrol into the mountains, and a Kuchi teenager was grazing his family’s camels. When the youth passed through, Captain Kevin Schamuhn asked the translator to question him briefly. It was a surreal experience: a modern warrior and an abadi, a free person, meeting each other with equal reserves of curiosity and stoicism.
No one in the platoon had any idea how to deal with the nomads, but for the remainder of the patrol, the Kuchi were all around us—sometimes specks in the distant foothills, occasionally close enough to raise concerns that their animals would set off the trip flares acting as an early-warning system around the patrol camp. At the time, the troops were hunting for Taliban fighters in Sha Wali Kot, the gruesome incident in the region that saw one of their fellow soldiers wounded by an axe blow to the head still fresh in their minds.
“I wouldn’t recommend going there again,” says Faisal Rahman, a nomad from Bamiyan who, with his wife and three children, is making the trek by foot from Jalalabad on the Pakistan border to Logar, just south of Kabul. “There are Kuchi tribes in the area who are involved in some illegal things. Some of them support the Taliban; others just do it for the money. Either way, they are dangerous people.”
The Rahmans are relatives of Laoor, the Kuchi man we met earlier. Walking together, surrounded by lambs, donkeys, camels, and a couple of refreshingly docile dogs, Rahman is at ease and talks passionately about his love for the “free” life. “If you offered me the whole of Kabul,” he declares, “I would not take it in exchange for this life. We are free people; no one can bother us. We’ve lived through all of Afghanistan’s governments and still we are free.”
For Rahman, crossing borders unchecked is a sacred right. The only time he has ever been searched is when he attempted to go through the official crossing between Pakistan and Afghanistan at Torkham, the gateway to the storied Khyber Pass. He has never been searched in the more remote mountain passes, let alone during journeys within Afghanistan’s national boundaries.
This lack of domestic security has made smuggling a major problem inside Afghanistan’s borders. According to a nomad from the Musa Khel tribe, notorious for its involvement in smuggling, “If the Taliban need guns to be moved from one location to another, they often hire Kuchi to carry them.”
The Kuchi also transported arms during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. “We were helping the mujahedeen by bringing them weapons and food,” says Rahman. “Sometimes we would tell them where the Russians were and where they were moving.” Another sexagenarian nomad acknowledges that Kuchi tribes captured large caches of Russian weapons, many of which are still hidden in the mountains. Many people, including some members of Afghanistan’s parliament, believe that without the Kuchi, the mujahedeen would have lost the war. “No doubt,” says Shahzadah Masood, adviser to the Minister of Borders and Tribal Affairs, whom I interviewed in his lavishly furnished office in Kabul. “The Kuchi have always been very powerful in this country.”
So powerful, in fact, that the government has bowed to many of their demands. Article fourteen of the Afghan constitution holds the state responsible for “improving the economic, social and living conditions of nomads.” And last year, the government passed legislation guaranteeing the Kuchi ten seats in the legislature. Nearly 600,000 Kuchi voted in the last election, and keeping them in the national fold is something Afghan authorities are determined to do. One plan involves settling the nomads on farms, but while there is plenty of land available, the required money has not been forthcoming. In the meantime, to survive, some have accepted humanitarian food aid, while others have stayed allied with the Taliban, with some becoming involved in the heroin trade. “Some of them smuggle for the Taliban out of allegiance,” says major General Kamal Sadaat, Director-General of Afghanistan’s counter-narcotics police force. “Others do it for money.”
For Canadian troops, the Kuchi present a particularly delicate problem. As wanderers who are technically unaligned, they are, in a sense, untouchable. But with foreign troops now patrolling the less accessible passes of the east and south in search of Taliban, clashes with the Kuchi may be inevitable. Their determination to uphold their independence in the face of foreign troops is expressed by Janat Khan and his family, who have been walking for three weeks on a dirt track southeast of Kabul. “No one can search us,” says the defiant Khan, an ageing and slightly hunched grandfather with a ragged salt-and-pepper beard. “Especially those of us who travel by foot over the mountains. We are very close. We share each other’s happiness and sadness. We help each other when we are moving.”
