I wasn’t getting the point that it was all around us.
The woman pulled at my sleeve. There was a heady perfume in the air, not from the orange blossom which was still only in bud, but from crimson and yellow narcissi growing nearby and often sold in the bazaar in Peshawar. The flowers were meant to signify hope and the coming of spring.
‘Her name is Lela,’ she said, ‘please you can help us.’
‘I’m sorry. I am not a doctor,’ I said as I got back in the Pajero with the mujaheddin who had been signalling impatiently. We drove off leaving the woman staring disbelieving after us, her arms in the air in a gesture of supplication. It was a picture that would stay frozen in my mind and later sometimes come to me in the unlikeliest places, ice-skating under the Christmas tree of the Rockefeller Center and seeing a young girl with head back and green eyes shining as her mother twirled her round and round.
It turned out there wasn’t really a front, just a mess in which everyone was trying to survive and turning on each other, and for which later everyone would blame everyone else, the commanders saying they had never wanted to fight and were not equipped or trained for such a frontal assault. The previous year General Zia had promised Jalalabad as a Christmas present to Congressman Charlie Wilson, a frequent visitor to Peshawar and fervent supporter of the war against the Communist Russians. But Zia was dead now after an explosion brought down his plane, so you couldn’t blame him.
The Soviet ambassador in Kabul, Yuli Vorontsov, told me a few months later that ‘the amount of ammunition spent in Jalalabad was four times that spent in the battle of Stalingrad because unlike the German and Soviet armies the Afghans are getting it for free and so are not economical’.
In the midst of it all as we were crouching down trying not to get hit by bullets that may well have been from our side, I felt the man next to me stiffen. I followed his gaze and saw an ISI colonel we all recognised from Peshawar. Rahim Wardak, the commander, was furious and strode towards him, said something and walked back. The ISI man looked stunned so I asked Rahim what he had said. ‘I asked him “How do you who have never won a war, dare try and order us who have never lost one?”’ he replied. Later, much later, I read that Osama bin Laden was also there in that battle and was so shocked by the needless slaughter of both civilians and mujaheddin that he became convinced that it was part of a US conspiracy implemented through the Pakistanis to discredit and end the jihad.
Whatever your point of view you couldn’t be part of Jalalabad and not be affected.
War wasn’t beautiful at all. It was the ugliest thing I had ever seen and it made me do the ugliest thing I had ever done. The real story of war wasn’t about the firing and the fighting, some Boy’s Own adventure of goodies and baddies. It wasn’t about sitting around in bars making up songs about the mujaheddin we called ‘The Gucci Muj’ with their designer camouflage and pens made from AK47 bullets. It was about the people, the Naems and Lelas, the sons and daughters, the mothers and fathers. I had let someone die and I knew however far away I went there would be no forgetting.
I had never gone back to Afghanistan after that. The world had used and forgotten Afghanistan and it gave me an excuse to pretend I had forgotten too.
Kabul, October 12, 2001
Dear Christina
This week I listen to the bombs falling on the airport and military command just a few miles away and though we are scared by the bangs which shake our flat, we believe they will not hurt us and we come out and watch the flashes in the sky and we pray this will be an end to our suffering.
Now it is good that after all this time the world has turned its face towards Afghanistan. Right now I want to laugh a lot because in other countries of the civilised and progressive world no one knew about our problems before those attacks on America and now we are all the time on the BBC.
Many people have left but my family is staying, praying for change. The market is still working – we Kabulis are tough – and there is food in the market but we have stocked up in case it runs out. Already there is no oil. At night there is no light. We eat by candles and moonlight.
This week a bad thing happened. For a long time my mother mostly just sits silent in her room because she has a cough that does not go and is nervous after all the fighting thinking her sons will be conscripted – also I did not tell you before that in 1993 when the rocketing was very bad, she was not well and we children went with my uncle to live in Pakistan. That was the worst time because we knew there were rockets and bombings every day between Hekmatyar and Massoud and we didn’t know if our parents were alright. We do not have a telephone. The only way to get messages was if someone went to Kabul.
Anyway on Tuesday my brother persuaded her to go with him to his tailor’s shop because he had some spare material for winter shalwar kamiz. So she lifted her burqa to look at the material and a Taliban from the Bin Marouf in the bazaar saw her and came and slapped her and called her bad insults. Under their laws if a woman shows her face the punishment is twenty-nine lashes. Now she is always crying again.
You cannot imagine how an educated Afghan girl lives or how even when we go out for something in the market, the Taliban, in particular Pakistani Taliban, tease us a lot. They insult us and say ‘you Kabuli girls, still coming out on the streets, shame on you’, and worse. Now think, Afghanistan is my motherland and a Pakistani Talib treats me like that.
You might wonder why I am not married at my age. My father lost his job in the Foreign Ministry when the Taliban took over because they knew we were supporters of the king and now he makes some few Afghanis bringing oil from Pakistan to sell, so I must help my parents by teaching to earn some money. It is not much. When things are better they will arrange me a marriage – I think that’s odd for you. Anyway it’s hard to find love in this situation, we are so tired. What is a wedding when there can be no music and all the women even the bride must wear burqas? I look in the mirror and I see a face that does not remember a time before war, and I would not want to bring a child in this city of fear.
The Taliban say this is a war on Afghanistan. Some of our friends say we must now support the Taliban against the outside but how can we support those who lock us away?
We listen secretly to the BBC and hope that Mr Bush and Mr Blair mean what they say.
I hope they do not come and bomb and forget us again. Maybe when you watch the bombs on television you will think of me and know we are real feeling people here, a girl who likes to wear red lipstick and dreams of dancing, not just the men of beards and guns.
Marri
1 Until Mullah Omar took it out in November 1996 and displayed it to a crowd of ulema or religious scholars to have himself declared Amir-ul Momineen, Prince of all Islam, the last time had been when the city was struck by a cholera epidemic in the 1930s.
2 The Koh-i-noor left Afghanistan when it was given by Shah Shuja to Ranjit Singh, the wily one-eyed ruler of Punjab, as payment for helping restore him to the Kabul throne in 1839, then was appropriated by the British after the defeat of the Sikhs and annexation of the Punjab in 1849. It was the prize exhibit in the Great Exhibition of 1851 and was then recut to the present 109 carats and worn in the crowns of Queen Victoria, Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, but no kings for it is still considered unlucky for males.
3 ‘Salah furush’, or weapons seller, had become a term of abuse in Afghanistan as many commanders enriched themselves by selling off arms or signing false receipts to the ISI for more arms than they actually received, getting a kickback in return.
4 Although