In My Father's Country (24 page)

I stood in her house and inhaled deeply from beneath my scarf. This was the place I had come from, and these were my people. I felt that strange tug of guilt and pride I’d experienced while sitting at the bedside of the young bride who had set herself on fire, that now familiar internal struggle. I was headed to Jalalabad to work again as an interpreter, but it didn’t feel like that was enough. I was an American. I had freedom. I had these women who accepted me and my strange life without question. Shouldn’t I be doing more for them, more to fulfill my father’s prophecy for me? I had been alive more than half the life span of the average Afghan woman, and I was not even able to help these close relatives, much less Afghans all over the world. Suddenly, I heard the clock ticking, but it had nothing to do with a biological urge to reproduce. It had everything to do with fulfilling what had been foretold by a loving and caring father, about a daughter whom he didn’t know at the time and would never have the chance to get to know, but in whom he had faith. I vowed then to spend the rest of my years on earth making his words come true.

E
IGHTEEN

I
n late August 2005, when the Chinook touched down at the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Jalalabad, a sergeant greeted me with a crooked smile. He hoisted my duffel bags onto his shoulder, walked me off the helipad and around the wall that surrounded the compound, and led me to my new home in a barracks next to where the marines were housed. He showed me to an empty room at the end of a row of B-huts. “This should work for now,” he said. “I doubt you’ll be here long.” I tried not to think about what that meant.

If Eric knew I was being stuck in a barracks so close to the men, he would have thrown a fit. I missed him. But even though it was hard to imagine what it would be like to translate for another commander—and a female commander at that—I felt a flutter of excitement in my chest.

The sergeant told me that my new boss, Lieutenant Colonel Judy Cabano, was at a meeting at the governor’s, and he wasn’t sure when she’d return. I sat on the edge of my bed for a while. I was getting hungry. I wondered what time the chow hall served dinner. I left the barracks and walked around to begin getting my bearings. Jalalabad wasn’t a big PRT, but it was bigger than Farah.

I ran into an older Afghan who introduced himself as one of Judy’s former interpreters. He worked with the Civil Affairs Team on projects and village assessments. Tall and thin, with short gray hair, he had a
serious look, but as another Afghan passed him and greeted him as Engineer-Saab, he smiled and his face became that of any old Afghan man. He wasn’t an actual engineer;
engineer-saab
is a Pashtun term of respect for someone who has had the good fortune to acquire some basic education in any field. Engineer-Saab was eager to clue me in about how strict Judy was, how uncompromising. Judy—everyone called her PRT Commander, but when we met she asked me to call her Judy—used to yell at him for mumbling during meetings. She accused him of being a low talker, which simply wouldn’t do.

I knew from my own meetings with the governor in Farah that there was no telling how the pace of a conversation would go. Sometimes it stopped and started like a sulking child on the way to school, and sometimes it raced along so quickly it was almost impossible to keep up, much less convey the all-important details, the nuances that contained the most meaning. It would waste time and cause embarrassment for the commander to keep saying “What was that?” If you get the tone wrong, you miss so much nonverbal communication, and these meetings are conducted by U.S. personnel who pay so much attention to the exact translated words that they miss the tone, which often contains the essence. A good interpreter takes time to draw attention to that. The problem I noticed early on was that not only were most of the interpreters poorly trained, but they were too intimidated by the U.S. forces, as well as by the local Afghans, to stop the proceedings and take the time to explain. I never had any problems with feeling intimidated, and never felt bad asking either side to stop so I could do my job. I realized quickly that if the Americans understood the Afghans, there wouldn’t be any point in even having the meetings. It was crucial that the two parties understood each other, or we would be in that country forever and no one would benefit from our presence.

Engineer-Saab said he wasn’t the only one who had been sacked. Judy had gone through four other interpreters in less than a month. There had been a variety of problems. One of them spoke Pashtu at a third-grade level and kept lapsing into Dari when she got nervous. Another was simply too old and couldn’t keep up with the physical requirements of the
assignment. Engineer-Saab took a few minutes on his way to the prayer room to tell me this and then said he would find me later to introduce me to the rest of the interpreters, probably after the commander had had her talk with me. His look as he left me was a mixture of pity and glee—surely, I would be the next interpreter to be sacked.

I wondered whether he was right, and if Judy would fire me, too. Perhaps it would be a good thing. I could return to the States, marry Eric, and move to Florida to start my new life. At the same time I was thinking, There’s no way I will let her fire me. I will be the best interpreter she’s ever had. This was a challenge too personal to ignore.

I ate dinner at a long table with the other CAT II interpreters. Just as I was finishing my tea, Judy walked in. She reminded me of an elf. I don’t know what I had expected, but this tiny woman with a heart-shaped face and big blue-green eyes was not it. She scanned the room and when she spied me, the new girl on campus, she came over and introduced herself.

“Maybe when you’re done here you can stop by the office,” she said. My first impression was that she was uptight and angry. I wasn’t surprised. By then I knew that she hadn’t gotten to where she had in the army by being sweet. It was dark outside when I arrived at her office in the TOC. I sat down on the sofa in front of her desk. She asked me where I had interpreted before. I tried to stress that I was not a professional interpreter.

“If my experience is any indication, it looks like none of the interpreters are professionals,” she said.

“I just spent six months in Farah,” I said. It sounded so meager, even to my ears.

“I think it’s a matter of personality and attitude,” she said. We talked for a while about the difficulties of interpreting in a language that differed so much from region to region, and the fact that there was no training that any of us interpreters went through, or even much rigorous testing to screen out the bad from the mediocre. I spoke in a concise manner, at what I thought was the perfect volume to let her hear that I was capable of communicating clearly with her and for her. She must
have liked what she heard because she said that I could go with her to the morning meeting at the governor’s.

Before I left, she asked about my accommodations. When I told her where they’d put me she called in the sergeant with the lopsided smile, who apparently was the PRT sergeant major, and told him to get me out of there immediately. “I don’t care what time it is,” she said. “I don’t care if there are no empty rooms. Move your soldiers around and give Miriam the room on the floor above mine.”

I could tell that the SM wasn’t thrilled to receive an order to move his people around after they’d all bedded down for the night. And he wasn’t about to say that he’d only dumped me there because it was convenient, and he hadn’t thought I’d last more than a few days. I smiled at him; aware that as a civilian he thought I was a nuisance. Still, an order was an order. He’d been tasked to move me, and move me he would. Before he left, Judy, sensing his displeasure, said, “Cultural sensitivity starts at the PRT, Sergeant Major.”

I was moved to a room inside the dilapidated building known fondly as Motel 6. A former resort built by the Soviets for short in-country vacations, it had been repurposed as the hub of PRT Jalalabad. My room was on the second floor, directly over Judy’s. It had a private bath and a deck with a view of a stand of tall trees and an enormous swimming pool. The pool, which had been dug at least eight feet deep all around, was empty, and served as a makeshift basketball court; a hoop and backboard were affixed to one side of the pool.

UNLIKE FARAH, DOZING
beneath the sun in the far west like an old frontier town, Jalalabad, in Nangarhar Province in eastern Afghanistan, was a happening place. The main road from Pakistan to Kabul ran through its center, and much of the food that fed the country was grown on the fertile, irrigated lands around the city. Palm trees lined the streets. The wind carries the tangy scent of basil and citrus. Jalalabad was Afghanistan’s own sensual Mediterranean city. Unfortunately, it was also infamous for sheltering insurgents.

Most Afghans hold a negative view of Arabs. There is no love lost between the two ethnic groups. When Osama bin Laden was expelled from Sudan in 1996, he sought refuge in Jalalabad. The predominately Pashtun city was quiet and prosperous; the economic freedom gave the people the luxury of practicing
Pashtunwali
in its strictest form.

To Westerners,
Pashtunwali
is an utter mystery. Literally, it means “the way of Pashtuns.” It is a set of principles that guide the behavior of Pashtuns in everyday life and unites them with other Pashtuns spread out all over Afghanistan and, after the Russians attacked, to those who emigrated as well. The Farsiban—the main minority ethnic group in Afghanistan—in their inherent contempt for the Pashtuns, have simplified
Pashtunwali
into three words:
zan
(woman),
zar
(gold), and
zameen
(land).

Although this Farsiban judgment of
Pashtunwali
as being barbaric is meant to be insulting, these three words do hold great importance for any Pashtun. The main principle revolves around the concept that a man’s pride is directly linked to his possessions and how he protects them. His possessions are twofold: his land and his women. Anyone who tries to take either of these from him is his enemy; avenging any wrongdoing is a duty, and the only honorable way to exact revenge is by death of the enemy, or of oneself, if one fails at the former. This is not necessarily a passionate act; it is not vengeance taken in the heat of the moment. A true Pashtun will take years to plan his retaliation, with a cool and calm head. And, if he dies trying to restore respect for his family and himself, then it becomes the responsibility of his sons to carry on the mission. Families may take centuries to avenge their lost honor, and during that time the sons are unable to enjoy everyday life. The simple fact that their enemy—or their enemy’s children or children’s children—continues to live and breathe without having paid for dishonoring them makes life unbearable for a Pashtun.

A man’s honor is linked directly to the conduct of his women; thus, the females in Pashtun society carry the heaviest burden of
Pashtunwali
. One careless action from a silly teenage girl—such as starting a romance
with a boy—can easily trigger a family feud that may take the lives of hundreds of men and women over generations.

But what most non-Pashtuns don’t realize is that if you ask a Pashtun for forgiveness, and you follow the customs of
Pashtunwali
while asking him, he will be obligated to forgive you for all you have done to him and his family. His forgiveness exacts a price, however. In exchange, you have to give him your most precious belonging: one of your women (or more, depending on the severity of the offense being forgiven). It is called a blood bride, and my grandmother was one. The life of most Afghan women is difficult, but the life of a blood bride is insufferable. When a woman marries, she leaves her own family and moves in with her husband’s. A blood bride is surrounded for the rest of her life by people who were the sworn enemies of her family and who most likely have killed her close relatives. She is forced not only to live with them but to take care of them for as long as she lives.

As ancient and seemingly intractable as
Pashtunwali
may seem, even it has changed with the times and with the past forty-plus years of war in Afghanistan. Due to the Soviet invasion and the resulting Pashtun diaspora, its rules as practiced by the younger generation are far more lax; they tend to forgo family agendas and revenge seeking, although they still hold their women to a strict code of conduct (which I feel has less to do with
Pashtunwali
and more to do with misogyny and the belief that their women belong to them).

That being said, there are pockets of Afghanistan, such as Jalalabad, that have enjoyed relative peace even over the last thirty years of national tumult; in these places, strict Pashtun communities still flourish. A visitor to the region, savvy to the ways of the Pashtuns and well aware that a single village can protect you better than an entire company of Afghan National Army soldiers, could easily exploit Pashtun
melmastia
, or hospitality. This is what Osama bin Laden did.

Bin Laden knew
Pashtunwali
, and what it would mean if he sought
melmastia
from a Pashtun village, which in its simplest form can be defined as protection. Regardless of whether the Pashtuns to whom he presented
himself as a guest agreed or disagreed with him and his fledgling movement, Al-Qaeda, the code of
Pashtunwali
required them to treat him as a guest and assure his safety. Bin Laden was shrewd. He knew Afghan culture and used it to his advantage. He knew the Pashtuns would be unable to refuse him, especially in Jalalabad, where the practice of
Pashtunwali
was still relatively strong. He hid out there for those first few years of Tora Bora fighting and later was rumored to have moved across the border to Pakistan.

In the fall of 2005, Jalalabad, despite what was going on in the rest of the country, was among the safest cities in the country. The Taliban was anemic, still recovering from having been ousted four years earlier. That year, there had been only a single suicide bomber. All over the city men fearlessly shaved their beards. There was even a gym in the middle of the city, with a large banner out front depicting a muscled man posing. A few small music stores had opened and were doing big business in Bollywood CDs and DVDs. But as I write this, a mere six years later, it’s as if we have gone back in time. The city is nervous. Just a few months ago, a group of seven militants entered a bank in downtown Jalalabad and killed eighteen ANA soldiers who were getting paid that day—something none of us in Jalalabad in 2005 would have ever predicted.