In the days after the Taliban was toppled, the Bibi Mahro Road from Kabul’s airport was an obstacle course of snipers, roadside bombs, and grenades. But by July 2008, Afghan soldiers flanked the now-glass-smooth pavement, their bodies hidden behind monstrous guns. Some sat casually on white plastic patio chairs. As a first look at Afghanistan, this summery scene was a surprising and incongruous image — one that spoke, perhaps, to the war-as-usual mindset I would encounter in many of the country’s inhabitants.
I share an ethnicity with half of Afghanistan’s people, but my ancestral connection to this place is tenuous. In the subcontinent’s post-colonial era (begun in Afghanistan after World War I, and elsewhere with the end of the British Raj after World War II) allegiances, like homelands, were determined by imposed borders. My ancestors belonged ethnically to Afghanistan; emotionally to India; and then, officially, to Pakistan. My family’s looping narrative of migration — mostly willing, occasionally forced — thus began here. At its root is a legend, dating back more than a millennium, that all Pashtuns have a common ancestor who lived and died in Afghanistan.
This shared heritage ensured that I would rarely be treated as a khariji, a foreigner, as I roamed the country. I looked like people on the street and shared their faith, and often had to devote the first ten minutes of conversations to asserting that I wasn’t actually Afghan. I received numerous invitations to visit, and spent hours sitting for meals with families, talking about the country, its past, and its future.
These encounters were an antidote to the Afghanistan Westerners see through the lens of military campaigns and troop movements. We tend to imagine the country as a desolate and violent place — a moonscape of dirt trails and khaki-coloured mountains with insurgents around every bend. Or we see it as the product of its development statistics: an array of indicators suggesting that despite the insurgency, poverty, and corruption, Afghans’ lives are improving.
The international community likes to talk about transparency, governance, and human rights in Afghanistan. And these goals, in their most basic applications — not having to pay bribes, developing trust in leaders, not being forced into marriage — are certainly things Afghans want for themselves. But the view I got while sitting for those meals, during my first visit and a second one in the spring of 2009, was that though the country might desperately need those kinds of forward-looking changes, it continues to hold tight to its past.
Kabul in 2008 was full of people who were losing hope yet still praying that hope could be restored. The cityscape was a dusty tangle of vehicles, pedestrians, and hawkers. Burka-clad women begged in the streets, reaching up to passing cars as young babies lolled in their laps and toddlers dangled across their shoulders. Children as young as six carried tins of smouldering coal. For the equivalent of a few cents, they would wave some in your face to stave off the evil eye.
There was ample opportunity to confront horror in this city. Ordinary people recounted harrowing tales of war, counting up the personal price they had paid in lost lives and limbs as they poured juice at a stand or arranged vegetables on a cart. They’d tell me their story, then in the next breath invite me into their homes.
On July 7, about a week into my trip, I had an interview scheduled with Asadullah Falah, secretary-general of the Meshrano Jirga, the upper house of the national assembly. I was still in my room at the guest house that morning when I heard a roar outside. It rose louder and louder, then peaked and faded into absolute silence. The eerie quiet lasted perhaps a second or two, then: chaos. People screamed, sirens and whistles blew, horns honked, and helicopters rushed in overhead, whirring low to the ground. I ran out and saw a dark plume of smoke rising to my left, beyond the garden wall.
The Indian embassy had been hit by a suicide bomber. Had I left fifteen minutes earlier, I would have been in the middle of the street when the bomb went off. The bombing, which killed fifty-eight people, the vast majority of them Afghans, turned out to be the worst in a string of recent attacks. Since 2005, the country’s security situation had been worsening, and many pointed to that year’s parliamentary elections as the cause. Warlords and drug barons had been making their presence felt since the ouster of the Taliban in 2001, but the elections brought them into formal positions of power, turning parliament into a gathering of feudal lords and power brokers. As a local journalist told me, “Afghans saw that the people in the powerful factions who used to come to power yesterday by gun, today they can come to power by election. It was just a game; it was just a show.”
In the ensuing years, that belief eroded confidence in civil institutions and opened up opportunities for the Taliban and other insurgents. The government, riddled with corruption and profoundly ineffective, was having trouble maintaining control of the country, even with the help of its nato allies. And from the perspective of many Afghans, those allies were complicit in, even responsible for, all that was going wrong.
Asadullah Falah was among those who had once acquired power by gun, though by the night of my visit he was sitting squarely on the side of democracy. Part of the anti-Soviet mujahedeen during the ’80s, he had earned the title of commander, which he retained even after the war ended. His job now was to see that the parliament’s upper house functioned smoothly, and to attend to the needs of its members.
I set out for his house after dark, intent on getting perhaps a half-hour of his time. I wasn’t expecting the Commander to say anything controversial, only hoping for an honest assessment of the challenges Afghanistan faced. I assumed the meeting would be between me, my translator Bashir, and the Commander. Language wouldn’t really be an issue — Falah spoke English well enough — but Bashir was his nephew, and the main reason I’d been invited to Falah’s home instead of his office.
