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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
In 2016, a young Afghan driver and translator named Omar makes the heart-wrenching choice to flee his war-torn country, saying goodbye to Laila, the love of his life, without knowing when they might be reunited again. He is one of millions of refugees who leave their homes that year. Matthieu Aikins, a journalist living in Kabul, decides to follow his friend. In order to do so, he must leave his own passport and identity behind to go underground on the refugee trail with Omar. Their odyssey across land and sea from Afghanistan to Europe brings them face to face with the people at heart of the migration crisis: smugglers, cops, activists, and the men, women and children fleeing war in search of a better life. As setbacks and dangers mount for the two friends, Matthieu is also drawn into the escape plans of Omar's entire family, including Maryam, the matriarch who has fought ferociously for her children's survival. Harrowing yet hopeful, this exceptional work brings into sharp focus one of the most contentious issues of our times. The Naked Don't Fear the Water is a tale of love and friendship across borders, and an inquiry into our shared journey in a divided world.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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‘The most affecting book I have read about the iniquity of the refugee crisis since Exit West. The reporting is totally immersive, without ever losing its clarity, and gives a heartbreaking insight into the lives of normal people taking terrible risks to save themselves.’
— Sam Knight, author of The Premonitions Bureau
‘This is a book of radical empathy, crossing many borders – not just borders that separate nations, but also borders of form, borders of meaning, and borders of possibility. It is powerful and humane and deserves to find a wide, wandering readership.’
— Mohsin Hamid, author of Exit West
‘A riveting and heartrending look at the hidden world of refugees that challenged everything I thought I knew about the consequences of war and globalization. It’s the most important work on the global refugee crisis to date, and a crucial document of these tumultuous times. It will go down as one of the great works of nonfiction literature of our generation.’
— Anand Gopal, author of No Good Men Among the Living
‘This is a gripping, devastating book, and it must have taken great courage and determination to write. The best way to honour this book would be for us all to read it and ask ourselves what we can do for the thousands of unknown and unrecognized people who are treading this terrifying path.’
— Hari Kunzru, author of Red Pill
‘Matthieu Aikins is that rarest of combinations – an intrepid journalist who writes beautifully. The Naked Don’t Fear the Water is a compellingly original piece of work, an unforgettable narrative about one of the great human epics of our day.’
— Jon Lee Anderson, author of The Fall of Baghdad4
56
THE NAKED DON’T FEAR THE WATER
AN UNDERGROUND JOURNEY WITH AFGHAN REFUGEES
MATTHIEU AIKINS
CONTENTS
8910
11
‘The naked don’t fear the water.’
— Dari proverb12
PART I: THE WAR
14
I.
At first light, I leaned against the window and looked down at the mountains. We were flying into the rising sun, and its rays threw the badlands into relief: corrugated brown cut by green valleys, and speckled with hamlets still reached by donkey. We were near the intersection of Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkmenistan, but which country I saw below I couldn’t say. Frost had crystallized on my porthole, rosy with the dawn just like our contrails would be to the people below.
I settled back against the headrest. We were still a few hours out from Kabul, where my friend Omar was waiting for me. When I closed my eyes, I could see his face when he dropped me off that summer at the airport, suddenly pleading, his hand gripping mine: ‘Come back, brother. Don’t leave me. Everyone else is leaving.’
The plane was quiet. The few passengers I could see were slumped forward or sprawled out asleep across the rows. These empty places would be filled on the return to Istanbul, I knew, with Afghans fleeing the war. My own seat might be taken by someone who planned to cross the water in the little rubber boats that departed from Turkey to Europe. Thousands of refugees were landing each day now on the Greek islands, and many more were on the way. It was late October 2015, and something miraculous was happening that fall, a violation of a fundamental law: under the weight of the people, the border had opened.
For years, the pressure outside Europe had been building as war spread through the Middle East and made millions homeless. The boat people were mostly Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi. Many were women and children, and, short of shooting them, there was no way to stop them. From Greece, they headed north through the Balkans, 16filling city squares and border crossings, a spectacle on the news, a crisis. To keep the European Union from tearing itself apart, Germany suspended its rules and let the migrants through; other countries followed suit, and now the five frontiers between Athens and Berlin were down. Screens around the world showed the masses walking through open borders, proof of the impossible, a clarion announcing universal freedom of movement—a dream for some, and a nightmare for others.
No one knew how long the miracle would last. Thousands of people were landing each day now in the little boats. A million would pass into Europe.
And Omar and I were going to cross with them.
We had made our decision back in August, when I’d returned home to Kabul after an assignment in Yemen. I’d known Omar since I’d started working in Afghanistan, and he’d always dreamed of living in the West, but his aspiration had grown urgent as the civil war intensified and his city was torn apart by bombings. American soldiers were on their way out of the country; I was trying to move on, too, burned out after seven years reporting here, but I couldn’t leave Omar behind. So when I’d flown back earlier that summer, my friend had been on my mind. I had no plan yet, but an idea was taking shape. Omar and I needed to talk.
welcome to hamid karzai international airport. At the immigration counter, I handed over my passport and placed my fingertips on the green glow of the scanner, then walked to the baggage carousel and got my suitcase, wheeled it to the X-ray machine. The cop at the monitor was looking for guns and bottles. Alcohol was illegal in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, except at the embassies and international agencies, but foreign visitors were 17allowed to bring in two precious bottles each. I hefted my suitcase onto the conveyor belt, along with the bag of scotch and gin from the duty-free in Istanbul, and walked to the other end, rehearsing my lines.
My ancestors came from Japan and Europe, but I look uncannily Afghan: almond eyes, black hair, wiry beard. So the border guards invariably assumed that I was a local with haram contraband, a lucrative catch, since the confiscated booze would likely end up on the black market. Over the years, my Persian got better, but that just made the conversations more awkward.
‘Brother, are you telling me you’re not Afghan?’
‘No, sir,’ I’d say, scrambling around the belt with my passport before the cop could snatch the bottles. ‘Look at my name, I’m not even Muslim—sorry.’
Outside the terminal, I inhaled the dry summer air. I hadn’t been sleeping much since Sanaa, but my tiredness left me as the scene came into focus: faraway snowcaps of the Hindu Kush, the slums on the hillside, the Humvee with its turret pointed at the gate. In the parking lot I spotted a gold Toyota Corolla and, listening to the radio with the window down and a cigarette lit, my friend Omar. He got out and walked forward: taller than me, broad-shouldered, with a fleshy grin and crow’s-feet. As we embraced, the heat made his stubble prick against my cheek; he smelled of cologne and smoke. Prying my suitcase from my hand, Omar hefted it into the trunk. We drove into the roundabout outside the airport, a gyre of taxis, armored SUVs, buses, the policemen shouting, the beggars tapping windows, the peddlers swinging racks of phone cards and dashboard ornaments. Omar nosed the Corolla forward, cursing softly, one hand on the wheel and the other clutching a Pine, from time to time leaving it between his lips to run his fingers through his dark mop 18of hair. It wasn’t until we got out onto the airport highway, with its long stretch of cavernous wedding halls, that we could relax and catch up.
‘It’s good that you’re back, baradar,’ he said in Persian. He smiled but kept his eyes on the road.
‘It’s good to see you too, brother,’ I said.
He knew my lease was expiring, and that I’d come back to clear out the house. It seemed like half the city was escaping that summer of raftan, raftan—going, going. Afghans were losing hope in their country’s future. The middle class spent their savings on flights and visas to Turkey; young men filled buses departing for the southern desert near Iran. Omar’s own family was leaving. Four of his siblings were already in Europe, and his mother and sister were getting ready to escape with smugglers. But for a long time, Omar’s plan had been to emigrate to America through the Special Immigrant Visa, a program created by Congress to reward loyal Afghan and Iraqi employees—a happy ending for a few, to soothe America’s conscience. Omar should have qualified; he’d served in combat as an interpreter for the Special Forces, and worked with USAID and demining contractors. But when he sent his application to me, I saw that he was in trouble. He needed all sorts of paperwork that he’d never thought to collect over the years: letters of recommendation from his supervisors, copies of his employers’ contracts with the US government. How was he supposed to track down a Green Beret captain he knew only by first name? Or get documents from the demining company, which had gone out of business? Hello my dear and sweet brother, he emailed while I was abroad. I hope you are fine and doing well. Please wish for me best of luck and find the chance to get the US visa and move there. I am really tired of life here.19
We sent in everything he had. It took two years for the answer to come back: We regret to advise you that your application for Chief of Mission (COM) approval to submit a petition for the SQ–Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program has been denied for the following reason(s): Lack sufficient documents to make a determination…
When his dream of America was dashed, Omar was left with the same prospect as his mother and sister: taking the smuggler’s road to Europe, a long and dangerous journey across the mountains and sea. That’s when I had my idea. If Omar was going to travel that way, then I wanted to go with him and write about it. Given the risk of being kidnapped or arrested, I’d have to disguise myself as a fellow Afghan migrant, but after all the dangerous assignments we’d done here together, I trusted Omar with my life. This way, I could see the refugee underground from the inside. And I wouldn’t have to leave my friend behind. We’d be helping each other. And I would pay for everything.
Omar was silent a moment after I laid it out for him, as we sat parked outside my house that August. He could tell I was serious. Then he grinned. ‘Of course we can go together.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure, brother.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘When can we leave?’
He sighed. ‘Not yet,’ he said. I’d assumed he was ready, but it wasn’t so simple. First, he had to get his parents out of the country.
‘Of course,’ I told him.
And there was someone else keeping him here in Kabul: Laila. She was his landlord’s daughter and lived two houses down. They’d been seeing each other in secret for several years now, but I hadn’t realized things 20had gotten serious. She was the love of his life, he told me. They planned to get married. But she came from a wealthy Shia family; Omar was Sunni and had only the Corolla to his name. If only he’d gotten the visa to America, he would have had something to offer her family. He could have taken her there legally. Now he had to get asylum in Europe first and then come back for her. But while he was gone, her father might try to marry her off to someone else; Laila told him that she could delay, but not defy, the patriarch’s decision.
That was his dilemma: to win Laila, Omar would have to leave, and risk losing her.
After I made my proposal that day in August, we dropped my luggage off at the house and ran errands. It was late by the time we came back, and there was a blackout in the neighborhood, as usual. We had a generator but as we drove up, I could see that the upstairs windows were dark above the courtyard wall, and I wondered if anyone was home; but then Omar honked, and old Turabaz, our chowkidar, creaked open the gate for us. As we pulled in, the dog barked and threw herself against her chain.
I’d lived in a few different houses in Kabul during the years I spent there as a freelance journalist, but this was the first I’d made my own. A few years earlier, I moved with three other foreigners. We renovated the house, planted roses in the garden, held parties, and then, one after the other, my friends left the country, replaced by other, increasingly transient housemates. Most expats didn’t come to Afghanistan for long. It was an adventure or a chance to make money.
I got out of the car and shone my light on the tufted, yellow lawn. I’d been away for months. The shed, where we’d once distilled vodka, was filled with trash. 21For security, someone had crudely bricked up one of the doorways that led to the street. And the dog, wild at the best of times, was matted with filth and mad with excitement, her tongue greeting my palms as I crouched to her. ‘Isn’t anyone taking care of her?’ I snapped at Turabaz.
Omar was crouched by our old gas generator. We yanked and cursed, but it wouldn’t start, so we went from room to room examining the house’s furnishings by flashlight. I wanted to sell them and give the money to Turabaz, since he’d soon be out of a job, although the secondhand markets in Kabul were glutted from emigrants liquidating their households. Omar had helped us move in, and he remembered exactly how much we’d overpaid for each item.
‘You spent a hundred dollars for that,’ he said, shining his beam on a dusty pressboard shelf. ‘It’s probably worth five dollars now.’
When Omar went to check out the kitchen, I sat down at a desk in the living room. I was starting to feel the jet lag. We used this room as our office, and I’d written a lot of my stories here, with a gas heater hissing in the winter, the door open to the garden in the summer. In the gloom, the carpet’s stains were faintly visible. I rubbed one with my toe—red wine. When we hosted parties we pushed the desks together into a bar that grew sticky with homemade punch. People from all over the world had danced together here. For a while we’d called this country home. Now we were leaving it like a shell we’d outgrown.
When we finished our inventory, Omar and I took the dog for a walk. Turabaz had named her Baad, which means ‘wind’ in Persian. She was mostly German shepherd, I think, and I liked to show her off because home invasions were becoming a problem. When I walked her, the kids in the street, seeing her daggerish grin, cried gorg, 22wolf. She was affectionate, but difficult to train due to a tic from some puppyhood trauma. At the slightest pressure on her hindquarters, she’d chase her tail in a snarling loop that brought to mind the self-swallowing serpent Ouroboros. One of my since-departed housemates had acquired her on a whim while I was out of town. I still had to figure out what to do with her.
Kabul’s streets were empty at night. We walked over to Kolola Pushta Hill, a pair of mounds with a graveyard on one and a mud-walled fort on the other, built by the British in the nineteenth century and now home to an Afghan army unit. As Baad snuffled at a gutter, Omar stalked ahead, whispering into his phone to Laila. He was telling her what he’d told me as we were driving home. He’d made up his mind to leave and become a refugee, but not until he and Laila were engaged. He was going to ask her father for her hand, on the assumption that Omar could get asylum and bring his bride to Europe. He’d warned me that it might take some time to convince the patriarch. I replied that I could be patient. I had to go back to the US anyway to finish an assignment but I planned to return in October. Surely Omar would be ready by then.
The track wound upward among the gravestones, jagged stones with sticks and rags tied to them. Across from us, the outline of the fort sunk against the streetlights beyond. A scraping cough came from the darkness of the graveyard, and then the smell of hashish. I tightened my grip on Baad’s leash. Let Omar try to win his beloved, I thought. If we were going to travel underground together, then I needed time to prepare to pass as Afghan. Once we started there would be no turning back, not without abandoning my friend. Because we might be searched, I’d have to leave behind the American and Canadian passports that allowed me to move so easily through this 23world full of borders. And yet it wasn’t just checkpoints and fences that governed our movements; there were laws and webs of surveillance and more intangible lines drawn by self-interest—the tracks our lives ran on, the limits to our imagination. The wall is also inside each one of us, John Berger wrote.
At the top of the hill, there was an empty lot ringed by trees. I walked to the edge and looked north, where I could see clear out past Qasaba, where the slum crept up the steep hills that enclosed the capital. The power had come back; many of the makeshift homes were electrified now. After Omar finished his call, he walked over and stood beside me.
‘When we first came here, there were no lights,’ he said.
Like so many Afghans from his generation, Omar had grown up as a refugee in Iran and Pakistan. In 2002, his family had returned from exile to a shattered capital, driving down the avenues of rubble past buildings whose shell holes were screened by ragged curtains. But the people had hope. Kabul had grown in spurts of concrete, sprouted shopping malls and neon-fronted gas stations, but the promise of peace had been a lie. The war that raged out in the countryside was drawing closer to the capital. The Taliban were coming. And yet at night you couldn’t see the blast walls topped with concertina wire, or the unpaved streets where widows begged come morning. The city before us was made of light.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I said.
‘It is. And, God willing, it will get better one day.’
‘But you’re ready to leave?’
When he turned to me, I could see he was tired.
‘There is no future for me here. You have a good job, you have documents, you can travel anywhere you want.’ 24He looked out at his city. ‘The only thing I have is my luck.’
II.
I left soon afterward for New York and when I returned three months later at the end of October, on that empty plane via Istanbul, I found the baggage carousel in Kabul crowded with men in white robes unloading containers of Zamzama holy water, which they’d brought back from Mecca. The hajj pilgrimage in 2015 had been a disaster, with more than two thousand killed in a stampede, and another hundred by the collapse of a crane belonging to the Saudi Binladin Group.
I got my booze through the scanner and went to find Omar in the parking lot. The guards at the airport seemed on edge; a few weeks earlier, the Taliban had captured Kunduz, a border city near Tajikistan. The government’s defenses crumbled under the sudden assault and, for the first time since 2001, the Taliban raised their white banner in a provincial capital. A stream of the displaced headed south to Kabul, spreading panic as they went. The fall of Kunduz added momentum to Afghanistan’s exodus, already at a fever pitch since the border had opened in Europe that fall.
As we drove away from the airport, I started to tell Omar about the so-called humanitarian corridor that had been opened for refugees through the Balkans, but he knew all about it from watching the news at home. A miracle had cleared the way for us, and yet he told me that he still hadn’t made his proposal to Laila’s family, or settled his own parents’ departure. It was complicated; he needed more time. But it was OK, I told him, because I wanted to do one last story together in Afghanistan. A shocking incident had taken place during the fall of Kunduz: A team of US Special Forces, battling to retake the city alongside Afghan troops, had called in an airstrike on a Doctors 26Without Borders hospital, killing forty-two people. The military claimed it was an accident, but I knew that local authorities had long held a grudge against the hospital for treating wounded insurgents. I wanted to investigate, and I needed Omar as a driver. We’d go to Kunduz together, and then I could finish writing the story while he sorted things out with Laila. We didn’t have to rush things. I was confident that we were going to leave Afghanistan together, no matter what. Our trip would close a circle, for there had been a reciprocity in our motion, it seemed to me, since the day we met.
I had been working with Omar since my first magazine story in Afghanistan, more than six and a half years earlier. It was the spring of 2009 and I was twenty-four. I’d just gotten an assignment from Harper’s to write a profile of Colonel Abdul Raziq, a border police commander who was a key ally of the US military and, it was rumored, in league with drug traffickers. I wanted to go to Raziq’s frontline province of Kandahar, but the magazine couldn’t afford any of the capital’s established fixers, who were charging hundreds of dollars per day to work in the dangerous south, if they were willing to go at all.
I was staying at the Mustafa Hotel in downtown Kabul, and when I explained my predicament to Abdullah, the lugubrious manager, he said he knew the right guy, a former military interpreter who was also getting started in journalism. So one day I walked into the lobby and there was a kid about my age waiting for me: Omar. He jumped to his feet and clasped his raspy palm on mine. ‘Nice to meet you, bro,’ he said. ‘I’ll go to Kandahar with you, no problem.’
It was midday, and he asked if I was hungry. We went out to the cordoned-off street that the Mustafa shared 27with the Indian embassy, a location that protected guests from kidnappings but exposed them to the occasional car bomb. Omar’s Corolla was parked nearby. It was a short drive to the restaurant but traffic moved at a crawl over the rutted, dusty streets past Shahr-e Nau Park.
‘Kandahar is fucked up,’ he told me. His nearly fluent English was larded with the locker-room expressions he’d learned from the soldiers. ‘I’ve been there with the coalition forces.’ He’d been working in the south for a few years now, on contracts with the Americans, Canadians, and British. He was getting tired of the dangerous patrols and the tedium of life on base, and wanted to work as a freelance fixer in Kabul, which was back then teeming with foreigners.
Like me, Omar’s adult life had been coeval with the war on terror. He’d grown up in exile, and he and his family had returned soon after the American invasion, eager to take part in the promised era of peace and reconstruction, but the country was in ruins and jobs were hard to find. He’d heard the foreign troops were paying good salaries to do dangerous work down in Kandahar; finally, in 2006 he took the bus without telling his mother where he was headed.
He didn’t speak much Pashto, the language of the south, but there was a shortage of English-speaking locals and he was hired right away by one of the companies that supplied interpreters to the foreigners. Omar’s first assignment was with the Canadians; his starting salary was six hundred dollars a month, six times what an ordinary Afghan soldier made. He and the other translators lived on the giant base that had sprouted in the desert by the airport, behind miles of earthen Hesco barriers and concertina wire, in a grid of housing containers and dusty gravel that threw back the harsh sunlight. Omar was 28dazzled by the hulking armored vehicles and the jets that rattled his teeth as they landed, the generators that guzzled fuel night and day to power air-conditioned tents, and the endless pallets of soft drinks and frozen steaks hauled here by jingle-ornamented trucks from ports in Pakistan.
Omar had observed Westerners on television since he was a little kid but this was the first time he’d gotten up close. He, like the other terps, learned to embody their trustworthiness by adopting the soldiers’ slang, clean shaves, and shades; their respect for rules; their attitude toward the bad guys. It was easy for Omar because he liked the Canadians. He knew they came from a land of plenty, but they seemed far more generous and honest than the people he’d grown up with as a refugee in Iran and Pakistan, where hardship and fear could turn kin against one another. The Canucks shared their stubby cigarettes and gave him winter jackets and boots made with synthetic materials he’d never touched before. Their eyes were full, as the Persian expression went. The foreigners said they came to fight terrorism and to help his country. Omar believed them.
But the Taliban were on the rise in the farmlands surrounding the city. From a helicopter, the Panjwai valley looked stark green against the desert, its mud-colored canals shaded by mulberry trees. There were rows of pomegranate orchards, each earth-walled plot with a cow and a few sheep and a guard dog, worked by subsistence farmers, tenants mostly. Sweating under helmets and body armor, the Canadians walked down embankments whose softness might hide jerricans of homemade explosive, leg lottery, they called it. The dogs sometimes had to be shot when they raided the little compounds, where they searched a couple of tin trunks and some bedding, 29probed the courtyard with bayonets and metal detectors, while the women and children sobbed quietly beside sullen youths with suspiciously soft hands, and old men who’d once watched the Soviets with the same hooded look.
The Canadian infantry patrolled in strength by day, accompanied by the Afghan army and police, but night belonged to the insurgents and to the foreigners who hunted them, the bearded men Omar saw sometimes with blindfolded captives, one of those things he knew never to ask about. The Taliban took prisoners too, who were judged by mobile sharia courts; collaborators like Omar were marked for assassination. Three of his fellow interpreters were shot outside the city, another five killed when their bus was hit by a bomb on the way to base. His mother begged him to quit, but he needed the money and kept going back to Kandahar and Helmand, working stints with the Royal Marines and Green Berets. The terps weren’t given combat training but they were part of the war. Not long after he started, he experienced his first battle when the Canadians launched an offensive into the valley west of Kandahar City. His platoon was sent to hold some earthen berms in the middle of grape orchards. On his second night spent trying to stay warm inside an armored vehicle, a soldier told Omar to get out, and handed him a rifle.
‘Can you defend yourself with this?’ the Canadian asked. He sounded worried. ‘There are a lot of bad guys around.’
Omar gripped the cold plastic of the C7. In Iran, he and his classmates had learned to shoot Kalashnikovs, in case the Americans ever invaded. This rifle wasn’t so different.
They put him in the perimeter with the rest of the platoon, thirty-odd men and a female medic. Out there in the 30night were an unknown number of Taliban, massing to overrun their isolated strongpoint. He crouched behind a berm. Someone yelled that the insurgents were trying to flank them, and the gunfire started: the incoming cracking overhead and the Canadians’ deafening return fire, the 25-millimeters on the vehicles booming like pile drivers.
Omar fired his clip into the darkness. His ears rang and he tasted gunpowder. Finally, they heard the long arriving roar of the jets. A bomb strike lit up the night, showing the faces around him. At dawn, the Canadian tanks arrived, the earth rumbling as they passed. When the battle was over, the platoon moved forward and found the bodies in the vineyards and shattered farmhouses, youth in blood-soaked robes and ammo bandoliers. His countrymen.
It’s hard for me to recall Omar as the stranger he was that spring day we first met in 2009, telling me about his time in Kandahar over lunch. I do remember how lush the restaurant’s garden was, where we sat and ate skewers of grilled mutton. When Omar asked whether it was my first visit to Afghanistan, I explained that I’d visited the previous fall, during a backpacking trip through central Asia.
After graduating from college in 2006, I’d moved home with my parents in Nova Scotia. I wanted to be a writer and I thought I’d find in the world the material I lacked within myself. After a couple of years of working odd jobs, I’d saved enough for a one-way ticket to Paris in the spring of 2008. I hitchhiked to the Balkans, copying road maps into my notebook, alongside the names of cities that I spelled out in block letters so I could hold the pages open on the side of the road for drivers to see: trento, ljubljana, novi sad. I spent the summer in 31Croatia, swimming muddy rivers and drinking plum brandy with a group of punks who’d picked me up at a music festival. I slept on couches and said yes to whatever came my way. When autumn arrived I decided to travel overland to India and oriented myself through central Asia, which meant I had to pass through either Turkmenistan or Afghanistan. In Tashkent, it turned out to be easier to get an Afghan visa, so in October I walked south across the Friendship Bridge, where the last Soviet tanks had retreated two decades earlier.
The Amu Darya ran wide and silty below. I hadn’t made it halfway across when a driver slowed for me, a trader on his way back to Mazar-e-Sharif, the city where I was headed. Most people in northern Afghanistan spoke Dari, a dialect of Persian, and I tried out the first dozen words in the phrase book I’d picked up.
The road ran south through an expanse of gray dunes, where tent camps and herds of camels faded in and out of the distant haze. When we reached the villages on the outskirts of Mazar, I stared out the window at the mud-walled houses and bearded men in turbans. In the concrete ex-Soviet cities I’d just left, people had been drinking vodka in the cafés, even during Ramadan. I was most surprised to see women in head-to-toe burqas: Hadn’t that garment been defeated along with the Taliban?
Mazar was centered around the Blue Mosque, whose gates and grand domes were tessellated with thousands of turquoise tiles. Local legend had it that Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, was buried there. I found a hotel on the south side of the square called the Aamo. It was a three-story wreck frequented by truckers and pilgrims, the halls littered with tea dregs and cigarette butts. For ten dollars I got a room to myself with four worn beds 32that overlooked the Blue Mosque. That night, I sat at the window and tried to survey it all: although the square was lit up in neon like a Vegas casino, complete with blinking palm trees, it was deserted, and I couldn’t shake a sense of melancholy, thinking of the raw poverty I’d seen for the first time that day, little kids ragpicking amid the sewage.
My arrival was a source of great entertainment for the group of young men who worked at the hotel. There was Jawed, who put his hennaed hand in mine as we walked in our socks across the marble courtyard of the mosque. Kamran, the buff one, took me for ice cream and french fries, and tweaked my wrist after he insisted we arm-wrestle. Ibrahim, with hazel eyes and a push-broom mustache, spoke the best English and ran the front desk.
‘Do you know Brian Tracy? I think he is very famous in your country,’ he said. Ibrahim was reading a self-help book called Eat That Frog! ‘It shows you how not to waste your time.’ In his spare hours, he studied business management and computer programs. He asked me how he could emigrate to Canada. I had no idea. Was it even possible? Ibrahim knew one way: he was saving money to hire a smuggler. It’s really simple, I wrote in my diary. I come from a place they would like to go, but can’t. It would drive me crazy but for them it’s just matter-of-fact.
Even working in restaurants or construction sites back home, I had earned more in a day or two than they did in a month. There was a gulf between us, but I thought we could bridge it in our encounter as humans. In spite of all our cultural differences, I felt at ease hanging out with them. The intimacy they offered was different from the kind of male bonding I’d grown up with, the drunken roughhousing and predatory banter—here women were barely mentioned and they were not seen at all in public places like the chaikhana, the teahouses on the square. 33Afghan men were openly affectionate with one another. It was as if, having excluded women, they’d apportioned a surplus sociality among themselves. The boys took me to the bazaar and helped me buy a ready-made piran tombon, the knee-length tunic and baggy pantaloons that are the traditional garb in Afghanistan. When I unwrapped the pants in my room, I burst out laughing. I thought we’d bought the wrong size; the waist was as wide as my arm span. But no, Jawed came and showed me: you just cinched them tight with a cotton band, and let all that fabric balloon around you. When I came down dressed up, the boys hooted in approval. They wound a black-and-white-patterned scarf into a turban around my brow and then stared in amazement at how Afghan I looked.
With my dark hair and Asian eyes, I had crossed a color line somewhere over the Atlantic. In Europe, I was no longer included with the whites. I got called a Paki in England; in France, I was arabe. But as I traveled into central Asia, it was like walking toward a mirror; in northern Afghanistan, with its mix of Hazaras, Tajiks, and Uzbeks, I’d found my phenotype. People saw their face in mine.
At the teahouses, the boys amused themselves by calling over a passing friend and, motioning for me to be silent, making him guess which province I was from. ‘He’s a foreigner!’ they exclaimed at last. ‘But why does he look so Afghan?’ the other asked in amazement.
In halting Dari, I explained that my father is European Canadian, and that my mother was born in America, but her grandparents were Asian. ‘Japan is here, Canada is there,’ I said, holding two fingers apart, then bringing them together and grinning. ‘And Afghanistan is in between.’
From Mazar, I took the bus to Kabul, where I checked into the Mustafa, a blocky high-rise built in the 1960s 34that had been a popular stop on the Hippie Trail. During Taliban times the Mustafa was converted into an indoor bazaar but, after the US invasion, it was one of the first hotels to reopen, and anyone who couldn’t afford the Intercontinental stayed there. By the time I arrived in late 2008, there were plenty of cleaner options, but at twenty bucks a night, the Mustafa was the cheapest one safe for foreigners. The clientele came from the bottom rung of expats, unemployable contractors, freelance humanitarians, and wannabe writers like me. Sitting at the pink onyx bar, I met a leathery soldier of fortune who told me he was from Rhodesia. Another guest, a sad-eyed Swiss correspondent, said he’d spent the past decade battling a heroin addiction. He and I were sitting in the lounge, listening to the street dogs howl after everyone had gone to bed, when he brought out his pipe and showed me how to melt a ball of opium and inhale the fragrant vapor, which spread through my limbs and floated me to bed through hallways of mirrored bazaar stalls.
My monthlong tourist visa was running out, and I wanted to go to Iran next, but the main road, Highway 1, which ran south through Kandahar to the border, was too dangerous—the Taliban might stop the bus and kidnap you. But flying was for tourists. There was a less-used route that crossed the spine of the Hindu Kush; however, you had to take local transport and stay in teahouses which doubled as roadside inns. Since Mazar, I’d told people I was Kazakh whenever I felt unsafe, and I decided to pretend I was a migrant laborer headed to Iran in search of work.
I was scared, but once I climbed into the van in Bamiyan there was no turning back from the lie. For days, we followed dirt roads up through the snow line. This was the roof of the world, mountain chains that stretched 35all the way to Tibet, and the panorama seemed like a dream I couldn’t interpret. I kept calling attention to myself by making blunders, like peeing standing up instead of squatting, or praying like a Shia when I’d said I was Sunni. Still, as strange as I must have seemed as a Kazakh migrant, none of my fellow travelers guessed the weirder truth. People were suspicious of one another anyway, and hid their origins and destinations, afraid of what could happen on a road menaced by bandits and insurgents. At night, when we lay down in rows on a teahouse floor, the travelers whispered about recent beheadings and abductions. Like a lot of kids who’d grown up safe, I’d been curious about death, and here it was, all around us.
A week after I set out from Kabul, our van rattled down a river valley and into the border city of Herat. Relieved that I had made it there alive, I splurged on a hotel with hot water. As I stood in the shower, I kept the door open so that I could watch the TV in the corner of the room. Barack Obama had just been elected president of the United States. He was giving his victory speech in Chicago. I turned the volume up so that his voice rose above the hiss:
And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces, to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world, our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.
I closed my eyes under the water.
After Omar and I finished introducing ourselves over lunch the following spring, I came to the business at hand. ‘Do you know who Abdul Raziq is?’ I asked. Of course he did. Raziq wasn’t famous across the whole country yet, but anyone who’d worked in Kandahar knew 36about the boyish, ruthless, thirty-year-old master of Spin Boldak, the main border crossing with Pakistan in the south. Already a colonel in the border police, Raziq was feared and admired for his take-no-prisoners attitude toward the Taliban, but there were persistent allegations that he was trafficking opium and murdering his tribal opponents. Investigating him could be risky. And there was something else I had to tell Omar: I’d already been to Spin Boldak with Raziq’s men, on a quasi-undercover journey.
The previous fall, after I had made it across the country to Herat, I entered Iran with my Canadian passport and spent a couple of months traveling there. I returned to the pleasures of backpacking—a visit to a nearly empty Persepolis, a Christmas swim in the Strait of Hormuz—and Afghanistan’s war faded from my mind. I started thinking about applying to grad school, for journalism maybe, and still thought the end of my journey lay in India. To get there overland I had to cross Pakistan via the border city of Quetta, a dangerous place—an American working for the UN was abducted there around that time. The day I arrived from Iran, I was walking down the street, feeling conspicuous in Western garb, when a luxury SUV pulled up. The tinted window rolled down, and two young men in robes, with shaggy haircuts, beckoned me over.
‘Oh, you’re a tourist?’ one said in English, smiling. He invited me to join them for lunch. I hesitated, but something about their frank curiosity suggested they weren’t going to kidnap me. I got in, and we spent the next week hanging out together, smoking hash and shooting guns. They began to tell me secrets, like the mistresses they kept hidden from their families. Knowledgeable about Quetta’s underworld, my two friends showed me the 37hospital where wounded Taliban were being treated. Pakistan was supposed to be a US ally, but the military was playing both sides by supporting the insurgency in Afghanistan. Quetta seethed with shadow wars: sectarians killing Shias, Baloch separatists attacking the government, mafia and tribal vendettas.
My hosts were scions of local Pashtun clans that were deeply enmeshed in smuggling; the British had drawn a border through their extended families about a century earlier. Some of their kin were in the Taliban; one uncle was the deputy chief of police in Quetta. My new friends were proud of their success, and explained they were shipping two metric tons of opium from Afghanistan to Iran each month, making around a quarter-million dollars in profit each time. A heavily armed convoy of Land Cruisers sped through the stony wasteland that was the nexus of three countries. The Iranian border guards were dangerous and had to be evaded, whereas the Pakistanis were easily bribed, they said. But the Afghan connection was the most important one.
‘Who is it?’ I asked.
‘The big boss. Abdul Raziq.’
I had told them I was a writer, but not an aspiring journalist. When they explained that Raziq was supported by the American military, I smelled a story. My hosts had bought a baby tiger as a gift for Raziq, and I asked them if they would take me with them, the next time they went to Spin Boldak. They agreed; I’m not sure why, except out of friendship and boredom. They had trusted me, as I trusted them. They knew the cops at the border, and it was easy to cross into Afghanistan without having to show my passport. We passed through poppy fields on the outskirts of town; the country supplied nearly all of the world’s illicit opium. The border generated profit; 38Spin Boldak had a shantytown of shipping containers converted into shops and dwellings, where men and boys toiled to unload secondhand microwave ovens, guitars, DVD players, bicycles, propane stoves, motorized wheelchairs, generators, children’s toys, and cars, lots of used cars. Most of these goods were imported cheap into Afghanistan and then smuggled back to Pakistan, where duties were high. The smugglers and the police were often the same people and Raziq’s men were taxing everything, legal and illegal.
I had to spend ten days waiting there until Raziq returned for his maternal grandmother’s funeral. At the ceremony, my friend pointed out one of the guests, a burly, bearded man: ‘That’s Rahmatullah Sangaryar,’ he whispered. ‘He was in Guantanamo.’
I approached the dais; Raziq looked even younger than his thirty years. He had a close-cropped beard and a widow’s peak that poked out from his cap, and was dressed in a simple white robe and pinstriped waistcoat. He shook my hand, smiled politely, and turned to the next visitor. I went back to Pakistan.
I had proof of Raziq’s connection with drug traffickers, but I had to do more reporting. I got an Afghan visa in Pakistan, flew to Kabul, and checked into the Mustafa, where I first met Omar.
After I explained the whole story, I said I’d understand if Omar changed his mind about going to Kandahar. Raziq might not be happy to see me again. But Omar didn’t flinch. We flew south together, where he did his best to translate Pashto, and I did my best to translate our interviews into a magazine article. Sometimes, hearing us speak together in English, the locals guessed that Omar, in his T-shirt and wraparound shades, was the foreigner, and that I in my robe was his interpreter, something that 39amused him no end.
We heard lots about opium trafficking but also darker stories of bodies dumped in the desert by Raziq’s men, bearing signs of torture. In explaining Raziq’s sudden rise, people kept coming back to his close relationship with the Americans, and his frequent visits to the CIA and Special Forces’ base in town. America needed allies, particularly on strategic routes like Spin Boldak. The first combat brigades sent by the new president had already deployed in the south; by the end of the following year, the number of US troops in Afghanistan would triple. ‘This is a war we have to win,’ Obama said.
At night in our hotel in Kandahar City, Omar and I lay in our twin beds in the dark and listened to the gun battles raging in the suburbs. The Taliban were on the city’s doorstep. He and I tried to untangle the stories we heard that day, about tribes and blood feuds and business deals, which explained the fractal pattern of the war better than the binaries I’d arrived with, police and criminals, the Taliban and the government, and the West and terrorism. But how to explain it to the people back home who were interested, belatedly, in this faraway country they’d invaded? When we grew tired of discussing the day’s work, Omar and I talked instead about ourselves, and of the past and future, to the drumming of distant guns.
‘What’s Canada like, bro?’
‘It’s cold.’
‘That’s OK,’ he said, and I could picture his eyes gazing up into the dark. ‘I like the cold.’
III.
On our final reporting trip together that fall of 2015 to investigate the American airstrike on a hospital, Omar seemed distracted. He was up all night on his phone. He backed the car into a wall outside the provincial council in Kunduz. When I left him with Victor, our photographer, they got briefly detained after they bumbled into a commando operation. And Omar kept playing his favorite sad song, ‘My Heart Will Go On,’ on the car stereo until finally Vic and I made him stop. Then he put on headphones.
Kunduz was a combat zone and we had to stay focused, but once we were on our way back to Kabul, I asked Omar what was bothering him. He said his mother had gone to present his suit to Laila’s father, their landlord, who heard her out politely but rejected Omar, saying that his daughter was still too young. ‘She’s already nineteen,’ Omar seethed to me. ‘It’s just an excuse. There will be many suitors for her.’
I asked Omar what this meant for our trip to Europe, but he said he didn’t know. He needed more time; he had to try to persuade her father. ‘I can’t leave without getting engaged,’ he told me.
In Kabul, Omar dropped me off at the house where I was staying, now that I’d moved out of my place. I poured myself a drink and went out into the rose garden. Poor Omar. He was Sunni and, worse, he was broke. He wanted to marry a rich Shia’s daughter, but there was no logic to love. Yet I’d never seen him like this. He’d had a string of girlfriends over the years, not easy in a place as conservative as Kabul. He’d dedicated himself to chasing good times, back in the days when the capital was flush with easy money. But something had changed with Laila. I 41didn’t think much of it when I first heard about her, after I had moved into my old house. It must have been the fall of 2012, around the time when we had a big party, although my housemate Bette and I had called it a reception, in order to distinguish it from the typical Kabul booze-up.
During the surge, the expat bubble was filled with embassy soirées, barbecues at UN agencies, welcome and goodbye parties with themes like Tarts and Taliban. Our event was going to be a classy affair. That afternoon, Omar and Turabaz had hung up strings of colored lights and stacked wood in our firepit. We’d stashed the alcohol in the kitchen, out of respect for the Afghan dignitaries we’d invited, but there were soft drinks in tubs of ice under a long bench table laden with fresh vegetables from the bazaar, along with the bloodred pomegranates that were in season.
Bette was a Dutch freelancer who traveled the south in a burqa, interviewing the Taliban. She and I had social ambitions that night. We wanted to show we could draw as good a crowd as the newspaper bureaus; we’d invited generals and ministers, Afghan celebrities and foreign diplomats. But would anyone show up? Various advance security teams for the VIPs had looked over our house, grimly noting the lack of a safe room or armed guards—all we had was the dog and a shotgun I kept under my bed. Kabul was wracked by suicide bombings and kidnappings, and many of the internationals weren’t allowed off their compounds anymore. But if enough bigwigs came, the party would have its own guard force.
That spring, I’d moved in with three friends: Bette; Elsbeth, who was also Dutch and worked for an NGO; and Misha, a Russian photographer. We’d found a two-story house with a little courtyard in Qala-e Fatullah, close enough to the Green Zone that Black Hawks would 42roar overhead on their landing approach. Rent was cheap but the place needed work, and Misha and I squatted for a couple of weeks on bare carpets while Omar helped us wrangle the carpenter and plumber, our hair shock-stiff from the dust the mason kicked up cutting the new countertop, black-and-white-flecked marble from Herat.
Our party was on November 14, 2012. Obama had just been reelected. We were in the third year of his surge which, at its peak, had a hundred thousand US troops in country, plus an equal number of contractors doing everything from security to plumbing, and on top of that, another forty thousand allied forces—a force double the size of the Soviets’, led by America’s best and brightest, warrior scholars who’d read Three Cups of Tea.
Employ money as a weapon system, General David Petraeus had counseled. By that point, the US had spent half a trillion dollars on the war. An entire economy was created around foreign money, with locals at the bottom of the pyramid, digging ditches and driving cargo trucks. Then you had what the military dubbed third country nationals, which usually meant people recruited from poor and middle-income countries, like Filipina accountants and Nepali guards. At the pinnacle were the expats who, by virtue of their English, Western degrees, and personal connections, commanded international salaries at the big NGOs, contracting firms, and UN agencies. They were the ones inside the armored SUVs that shuttled around town, mostly male, mostly white; some trailing conflicts and disasters for decades, others fresh out of college, enjoying tax-free salaries and the sudden jump in seniority that a war-zone job offered. Back home in the States, people were still reeling from the Great Recession, with twelve million unemployed, but here you might find yourself with a six-figure job, with a free house, a 43chauffeur, a cook, a gardener, a gatekeeper, and a maid.
As freelancers, we weren’t quite living that lifestyle. When our guests started showing up, I told Turabaz, who couldn’t read, to pretend he was checking their names off a list. Darkness had improved the rustic charms of our courtyard, lit now with the tiki torches and Christmas lights. I asked Omar to start the bonfire. The local musicians, seated cross-legged on the carpets, played some classical Persian melodies. Bette was holding court near the kebab table, where the ustad laid skewers on a charcoal brazier that he stoked with a reed fan. Omar sidled up to me and murmured, ‘The musicians want some whiskey in regular cups, not glasses.’
I glanced over at the rubab player, a mustachioed gallant in an embroidered vest, who winked. ‘OK, follow me.’
Pushing my way through the crowd by the fridge, I mixed some Ballantine’s with Coke, handed the coffee mugs to Omar, and then went to check on Turabaz at the gate.
‘How is it out there?’
‘See for yourself.’
I peered out. Our street was choked with armored cars and pickups. There was nearly an infantry platoon’s worth of firepower out there: troopers in tiger stripes, a British army security detail, expat contractors with accessorized bullpups, Kandaharis with glitter tape on their rifle stocks.
I walked back through the courtyard, where the flames cast a mob along the wall. I spotted Dr. Abdullah, the perpetual runner-up presidential candidate, bent over Nancy Hatch Dupree, at eighty-five the grande dame of Afghanistan scholars. Our reception was a success.
When the dignitaries—at least the ones who might 44have been offended—left, the booze and hash came out, and Baad was unleashed to frolic among the fallen kebab. The party would last until the muezzin called. But was that the night that we took everyone out to the shed to admire the pot still, branded ‘Katyusha,’ that Misha brought back from Moscow? Or the night the head of a UN agency lost his wallet, with his security badge inside, while grinding to ‘Call Me Maybe’? Either way, we crowded into the foyer to dance, where a disco light spun, and raised the volume and our glasses to drown what was beyond the courtyard wall, the war that was getting worse, our collective failure, and the fact that this wasn’t our home and that maybe we had none, at least not together.
And where was Omar? After the musicians and dignitaries went home, I plied him with whiskey and backslapping, told him to dance, to enjoy himself, to pick someone up. Our other Afghan friends were doing it, but he came from a different social class. From amid the press of bodies in the foyer, I spotted Omar leaning against the wall, his glass in hand, a faint smile on his face.
