New York Times Sunday Magazine September 30, 2001

A Last Road Trip Through Premodern, Postmodern Afghanistan

By JOHN SIFTON

I got my last haircut in Kabul, but Sept. 11 found me standing on John
Street in lower Manhattan with about 20 volunteer rescue workers, amid
masses of scorched paper and debris, watching fires burn near where
the World Trade Center used to be. A recently returned humanitarian
aid worker, I had rushed downtown when the towers collapsed. Brushing
dust and ash out of my hair -- still short from my haircut -- I felt
the low-level shock that came often in Afghanistan, the kind of shock
I felt when I saw dead bodies, starving children, Taliban enemies hung
from lampposts by cable. I marveled at the fact that I was feeling
this familiar emotion in the financial district of Manhattan, an
unusual place to be in shock. For a moment I felt that I had somehow
not escaped Afghanistan, that I had brought its disaster home with
me to New York.

I have spent most of the past year working in Afghanistan and Pakistan
for one of the international nongovernmental organizations that
implement humanitarian aid programs for people suffering or fleeing
from Afghanistan's multiple crises: civil war, persecution by the
Taliban and by anti-Taliban military forces, economic stagnation,
severe drought and food and water shortages. We were the welfare
state for a failed state.

Of course, everything has changed now. Relief workers from
international groups and the United Nations have been evacuated
from Afghanistan in response to an expected military strike by the
United States. Humanitarian operations have been severely curtailed,
and an increasing number of refugees are pouring out of Afghanistan
into Iran and Pakistan. "The country was on a lifeline," one of my
colleagues said, "and we just cut the line."

Like many countries suffering from political instability, Afghanistan
is a complicated and weird place. In some areas, there are few traces
of modern life. Goods are carried by donkey or camel, and oxen plow
the ground. Old men with long beards sit beneath trees, fingering
prayer beads, their skin brown and wrinkled. Many rural people live as
their ancestors probably did 400 years ago: iron pots over the fire,
clothes they made themselves and babies delivered by candlelight.

In other parts of the country, life is more complicated. Taliban
troops speed around Kabul in their clean new Toyota pickup trucks,
tricked-out, hip-hop ghetto rigs. On the sides they have painted
pseudo-American phrases: "City Boy",  "Fast Crew",  "King of
Road". Inside, young solemn-looking Taliban men sit in their black
holy dress, sporting Ray-Bans.

The juxtapositions can make your mind reel. Donkey carts carrying
computer equipment. Hungry children digging through garbage piles
using shovels from a Mickey and Minnie Mouse sand-castle set.

The number of people displaced from their homes is enormous.
Populations of the desperate roam around, begging for money and scraps
of food. People eat wild plants, garbage, insects and old animal
parts discarded by butchers.  In one camp, an old man showed me a bowl
filled with rotten cow bowels, grass poking out in places. "This is
what we eat, sir!" he said, wiping away tears with his fist.

I often had a strange feeling in Afghanistan, a sort of temporal
vertigo.  It was impossible for me to get a proper sense of time. Like
many former cold-war battlefields, Afghanistan is partly frozen in
time; most of its urban buildings and infrastructure were completed
in the 1960's and 1970's during the height of Soviet and American
spending on foreign aid to the developing world. The telephone in the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Kabul is one of those heavy models
from the 1960's; in a pinch, you could probably knock someone out
with the handset. There is an old telex machine in one of the offices,
sitting dusty in the corner, making you think it's 1976. Then you see
the American and Soviet military remnants from the 1980's: broken
old Soviet tanks painted and lined up in town squares, a mural
on a wall in eastern Kabul showing a holy warrior with a Stinger
antiaircraft launcher on his shoulder. And still there are antique
doors on some buildings with designs from the 13th century. History
presents itself in a disorderly montage, like one of those heuristic
displays in natural-history museums -- dinosaurs, the bronze age,
the renaissance, space travel -- rearranged at random: pre-cold-war,
post-cold-war, cold war, Buddhist antiquities, Kalashnikovs. The
timelessness of this jumbled history made me feel like an old museum
curator: time-transcendent, fascinated and lonely. This is perhaps
why I felt so crazy at times.

Taliban troops and police are always easy to spot. They have black
flowing robelike clothes, long hair and big silky black turbans with
long tails running almost to the ankles. (These accouterments are
meant to identify them as direct descendants of Muhammad.) They are
often tall and imposing, even impressive. "The Taliban troops are like
gangsters," a colleague told me when I first arrived. "Tough guys." But
there is often a particular dandyism in them; many wear black eyeliner
(part of the descendant-of-Muhammad costume), and their hair is long
and curly. I once saw one buying Prell shampoo at the bazaar. They
carry themselves like supermodels.

The reputation for religious conservatism in the Taliban obviously
doesn't come from their foppish troops. It comes instead from the
leadership in the southern city of Kandahar, who founded the Taliban
in the early 1990's.  They are considered mullahs now, but 10 years
ago they were essentially no more than a collection of seminary
teachers from the rural south. These "original Taliban" are the ones
who present the decrees barring women from work, making men wear long
beards and prohibiting me from entering the country with "pork products
or lobsters" (as one recent decree dictated).  These are the people
who proudly call themselves "the Mosquitoes of Islam," proclaiming,
"Islamic faith is a bright light: we seek to be so close to it that
we catch fire."

In urban Afghanistan, crime was rare (one of the seldom-mentioned
upsides to Taliban authority), and expatriates were treated with a
good deal of respect by government officials and the military. "He
who believes in Allah and the hereafter shall perform good service
for his guests," reads a sign in one small government office in
the north. This is a telling poster. It might seem strange, but
aid workers were considered guests of Afghanistan, and the title
bestowed a special status on us. Even if we were seen as an enemy of
sorts (perhaps by a particularly grumpy mullah), we were guests --
distrusted and carefully examined, but still welcomed.

In our humanitarian work, my colleagues and I interacted with
neither the black-robed troops nor the mullahs from Kandahar. We
dealt mostly with the "new Taliban" -- the civil servants who in
recent years have appeared from between the cracks to run the country
for the predominantly illiterate and uneducated "original Taliban".
These people form the real bureaucracy of Afghanistan. Though they now
sport the same flowing black turbans and long hair as the troops, many
were ordinary municipal leaders a few years ago, local politicians. For
the most part, they are opportunists who saw the direction the wind
was blowing when the Taliban took power and adjusted accordingly;
they grew out their beards and put on black robes and became Talibs.

Of course, these new leaders' commitment to the moral righteousness of
the Talib movement is questionable. Many seem fascinated by Americans
and the West, eager to learn more English, more American phrases and
more about America. (One afternoon, a Talib in Kabul kept me in his
office for an hour to go over some English grammar rules and ask about
New York and the "Hollywood movie company".) Still, the new Taliban
follow the orders of the Taliban leadership. The decrees are enforced.

The summer wind up in Mazar-i-Sharif in the north is just absurd --
you feel as if you are on another planet. The temperature is usually
well over 100 degrees and the wind blows about 40 to 50 miles an hour
almost every day, raising huge clouds of dust that hang hundreds of
feet over the desert. You feel as if you're standing in front of a
space heater in a dusty attic at the height of summer. Your nostrils
fill with dust and dry up; your eyes turn to red slits. You have to
wrap a turban around your head and nose and drink a great deal of
water. It is a war against desiccation.

On a particularly windy and hot day in June, some colleagues and
I took an almost insane trip from Mazar-i-Sharif west into the
scorching Iranian Plateau, to a province called Jozjan, to gather
some information about the drought crisis areas there.

We started out at 5 in the morning to avoid some of the heat and drove
for hours through the desert -- or what I thought was desert. I learned
later that it was, in normal years, productive agricultural land. The
heat and dust were intense. The car rocked in the wind, and sometimes
visibility was reduced to only a few car lengths. To pass the time, the
young Afghan staff members told me about their time in the jihad when
they bombed Soviet installations from the mountains. I recited hip-hop
verses at the request of one of the young Afghans, who wanted to know
"about the African people with black skin in America" who "sing,
but without music, like shouting." We drank huge amounts of water.

We arrived in a small village called Aqchah, a dusty and extremely
windy trading town. We stumbled out of the car, clothes soaked with
sweat and filthy from the dust, and walked into the local Taliban
office to "check in". (One must indulge in this courtesy in order
to avoid problems later.)  Then we sat for an hour with the entire
village leadership -- 15 or so men with long beards who argued among
themselves about what sorts of aid projects might keep more people from
leaving town for the city. (We had this sort of meeting all the time.)

We drank a lot of tea. The men spoke in Persian, and my interpreter
just filled me in on essentials. In the next room, through the
doorway, a man with a large knife stood cutting fat from a sheep
carcass hanging from the ceiling. Every so often, the man would come
halfway into the doorway in his blood-stained apron, knife in hand,
join the conversation briefly, make a point and then go back to his
butchering in the next room. The others listened to him with respect,
but I never found out why. Our meeting finished when the tea ran out.

We drove through another desert -- a real desert -- to arrive in the
capital of Jozjan, Shiberghan. The trip took about three hours. We
arrived dusty, wind-blasted and spacey. We staggered into the
local Taliban office -- a bombed-out building without windows --
to check in. The local liaison official for international relief
workers in Shiberghan was about 22 years old. We were invited into
his office, a room facing the courtyard with no furniture, just a
rug on the floor and a phone. After the regular introductions, the
young official explained that he would need to "ensure my safety"
by supplying me with guarded accommodations. I insisted that this
wouldn't be necessary. I told the official that I did not fear for
my safety. I even flattered him and said that I was sure that his
city was exceedingly safe. Still, after 15 minutes, he stood up,
put on his black turban and left to go secure my lodging.

We had to wait for more than two hours. We got bored. I examined
a curious calendar on the wall that displayed a map of Afghanistan
surrounded by planes, tanks and ships all labeled "U.S. ARMY" and all
pointing missiles toward the center of Afghanistan. Various Taliban
functionaries came and went -- new Talibs mostly. Finally, the official
returned to inform me that I would be staying at a hotel reserved
"for foreign dignitaries" (this is how my interpreter translated it)
called Dostum's Castle. It was obvious that this was an honor, so I
made an effort to thank him profusely, despite the fact that I did
not want to go. I insisted, however, that the Afghan staff accompany
me. He obliged me at least on this point. Off we went.

Dostum's Castle. What can I say? It was chintzy Soviet-style public
architecture combined with low-rent Miami design: long frosted-glass
windows and a faux marble facade. There were peacocks on the front lawn
-- peacocks -- and a swimming pool filled with algae-plagued water.

Inside, it was like "The Shining". We walked down long wide corridors
with dark red carpeting; each of the hotel-room doors had a padlock
on it.  We were the only guests. The air-conditioner in my room sounded
like a Harrier jet, and there were bullet holes in the furniture.

The bathroom in our room didn't work, so we had to go down two floors
to use another one. On the landing of the stairs two floors down,
there was a large landscape painting, about 16 feet by 12 feet,
of a pond, some flowers, a forest and a few animals. The heads of
the three animals had been cut out of the painting to comply with
Taliban aesthetic restrictions: the creation of images of living
beings is forbidden under the Taliban's kooky interpretation of
Islamic law. This left a decapitated deer standing by a pond and a
headless beaver sitting on a tree stump.

I considered the piece as I stood on the landing. A terrible painting
in the style of Bob Ross, done entirely with two shades of green and
one shade of brown and then vandalized by Taliban police trying to
ensure its innocence before God without destroying it altogether. In
its own way, I thought, it is a post-postmodern masterpiece. But
surely I could add still more to this artwork. I could buy it from the
Taliban, sell it for a fortune in New York and give the money to the
Afghan opposition. Yes.  Participatory political art. It just might
be crazy enough to work. How much would a rich New York liberal with a
sense of irony pay for this, this bad art, vandalized by the Mosquitoes
of Islam and then sold to raise money against them? A new school:
censorship as an art form unto itself. Politics as art. Art-dealing
as art. I could be rich.

I was still chuckling to myself when one of the Afghan engineers
came down the stairs. "What are you laughing about?" he asked.
"I don't know", I answered.

The next day was a nightmare: human suffering on a shocking scale.
Displaced persons without enough food to eat were drinking water taken
from muddy ponds -- mud really. "They're drinking mud," I said into
my tape recorder. "They're drinking mud." I remember one particular
experience especially. We were in a windy camp for displaced persons,
and a man was showing us the graves of his three children, who had
died of disease on three consecutive days: Thursday, Friday and
Saturday. It was Monday, and he had buried his last child the day
before. After he described all this, we stood around the graves in
the strangely loud silence of the wind, hot as an oven, and the man
absent-mindedly adjusted a rock atop one child's grave.

It was a very emotional moment, yet I didn't really feel sad. I was
just fascinated by the realness of it all. You look out an office
window, and you see a displaced family living in a bombed-out school,
sleeping on the balcony and cooking some birds they caught, doves. This
is their life. They can't change the channel.

There are no channels, in fact. We are "off the grid", not linked up
with the world's information sources or any of its culture. There are
no telephones outside the cities. There is no television reception. We
have no access to "entertainment". There are no theaters, films,
galleries or circuses. The Taliban has even banned music. All this is
in contrast with the Western world, with its many reality-altering
and distance-distorting mechanisms: television, cellphones, the
Internet. Again, there seems to be a time warp. Sometimes it feels
as if we have been brought back not just to a time before modern
entertainment but to a time before art -- a time in which reality was
just more real, a time without images and ideas and representations,
only actual events.

And yet moments here often seem cinematic to me. I constantly see
things as scenes. Here we are walking in Kabul, near some women in
their concealing blue burqas; goats are running by and an ancient
Soviet tank lies gutted by the side of the road. Here we see the
schoolchildren running by in their little Taliban uniforms, black
turbans hanging to their knees, yelling to me in robot English:
"Hello! Hello! How are you?" And here we are at the U.S. government
club in Peshawar, over the border in Pakistan, sitting by the pool with
some Belgian journalist, drinking Grand Marnier and orange juice and
talking about German novels. I feel outside myself seeing these scenes
play out: absurdities that seem so normal while they're happening.

There is a propensity among some aid workers (usually younger ones)
to work endless hours during a crisis. You cannot take a break, it
is argued, when children are hungry. You cannot sleep, have a beer or
lie in your bed. You have to act. And so you work endlessly. And then,
inevitably, you crack: you go nuts, start acting righteous and weird,
and your colleagues come to despise you. Ultimately, your organization
evacuates you on psychological grounds -- a procedure churlishly
referred to as a "psycho-vac".  You end up back home: unemployed,
asocial, crazy, useless and pathetic.

I remember a story that a friend told me about an aid worker she
worked with in Albania. During the Kosovo crisis, they were working
together in a huge new refugee settlement across the border with
inadequate sanitation facilities.

"We had to get 5,000 latrines built, like immediately. But I'll tell
you, he was gone, man -- his brain was fried by trauma. He had been at
Goma -- in the Congo -- dead bodies and hacked-off limbs in a pile,
and they had to clean it up. I guess he was scarred. Anyway, he got
like a pound of pot from some Albanian mafia playboy in Tirana. He
would drink huge amounts of that terrible instant coffee, Nestle's --
I think they put speed in that stuff. He was high all the time. He
didn't talk to anyone. He just drank that crank coffee and smoked
pot. He worked like a madman. But we did it, man. We built those 5,000
latrines. They psycho-vac'd him a little later though. He lost it."

Just a few weeks ago, on an unusually cool summer evening in
southeast Afghanistan, I was sitting with some colleagues at an
outdoor restaurant above a small pond beneath the beautiful mountain
ranges southeast of Kabul. We were enjoying a rare night of relaxation
away from the madness of our work. We sat on carpets, drinking tea,
waiting for food and enjoying the evening sky.

The pond below was unnatural -- the result of a small hydroelectric dam
built by Soviet contractors decades before -- but it was pretty enough,
and we were enjoying the scene. We had come to have some fried fish,
a rare dish in this landlocked country.

We watched as a young boy climbed down to the pond to retrieve our
dinner, some fish previously caught but still alive, swimming in a
burlap bag laid in the water. In Afghanistan, dried to the bone by
three years of drought and enduring a decreasing food supply, the
sight of both fish and water was strange.

Some Taliban troops appeared from the nearby road. "We are here
for fish!" they announced in Pashtu. (My interpreter told me this
later.) They sat beside us. My colleagues stiffened.

"Is he a Muslim?" one of the Talibs asked, indicating me. (He appeared,
incidentally, to be very stoned.) My interpreter answered in the
negative.  "Christian?" the Talib asked.

My interpreter turned to me. "Are you a Christian?" he asked.

"Basically", I answered.

My interpreter translated this, somehow.

Questions began to fly: "Is he an American?" the Talib asked. "Where
is America? How close is America to Saudi Arabia? Are there Muslims
in America?"

My interpreter turned to me again. "These are very uneducated peasant
people from the south." I nodded.

"Is this a problem?" I asked. "Should we leave?"

"No. They are bemused by you."

The Talibs ordered some fish. Although we had ordered our dinners
first, the owner gave the Talibs our fish and started to cook some
more for us.  The Talibs ate with gusto, spitting bones onto the floor,
fish catching in their beards. When they finished, they rose and went
to the next room for prayers.

Our fish arrived. We began to eat, but soon the Talibs returned and
sat down with us. "Which province are you from in America?" one of
them asked. I told them I was from New York. "This is a place with
many black people, from Africa, is this right? Very dangerous." I
tried to explain that this was a misperception.

One Talib began to help himself to our fish, taking it from our basket
as though he hadn't just eaten. "The black people are very dangerous,"
he said. "I hear that they are very tall. How tall are they?"

I tried my best. There is only so much that can be translated from
one language to another, from one culture to another.

After a while, the Talibs rose to leave. Amazingly, the one who had
stolen from our bowl of fish wiped his hands on my turban, lying untied
on the ground next to me. Then he started to leave, but turned back,
and a smile came across his face.

"God bless America," he said in English, inexplicably.

---------------------------------------------------------

John Sifton is a human rights attorney and humanitarian aid worker.
The views expressed here are personal reflections and do not represent
the organization for which he worked. For security reasons, it is
not named here.