In My Father's Country (46 page)

“Baba, I don’t wish you any harm. Please, please don’t be alarmed,” I tried to reassure him.

“It is not you, daughter, that I am scared of. They are watching from that hill, and when you leave they will be here, beating anyone who was talking to you. Don’t you see, talking to you means I am going to be beaten?” he pleaded, looking around with genuine terror.

I stepped away from him, too shocked to even apologize for what I had just done to this poor old man, whose only mistake was that he looked like Baba. Suddenly I missed my Baba terribly. How could I convey the horror I felt for not being aware of this basic tool of intimidation of the insurgents? How could I tell my soldiers to know my people, when I had put this man in grave danger because I didn’t understand him, I didn’t understand the environment he lived in? At that moment, I wanted to crawl under a rock to hide from my shame, guilt, and deep sense of personal failure.

In all my time in Afghanistan, I had never been more intensely aware of the danger in which our presence put the villagers than I was at that moment. When we single someone out and approach him, we are also picking him to be the one approached, after we leave, by the insurgents, who never forget or forgive.

I walked back to where our guys were pulling security and signaled that we were done and moving on. This failure could easily have caused
me to give up and return to Oregon. There was no contractual obligation that I needed to fulfill. But I refused to give up at that point. If anything, my error in understanding served to strengthen my resolve to try even harder to know more about my people. I would never make that mistake again. I might make others, but I would never make the same one twice.

I linked up with Tom, the battalion commander, by the MRAPs and told him I needed a couple of minutes to figure out how to proceed. Thoughts were zipping through my head at the speed of lightning. I would not let the insurgents limit
my
interaction with
my
people. True, they were brutal, and I was restricted by laws of international conduct, but I was a Pashtun and hated the thought that I was being intimidated into giving up on a goal that was so close to my heart. I had to come up with a quick solution because I knew the insurgents were watching, and I imagined them smirking over their victory and their belief that we were about to leave the area. I got it! I would try to talk to a crowd of people from now on and not seek out one-on-one conversations. The insurgents might beat up one old man, but even they couldn’t beat up a whole village. Reckless, I know, but my life had already become the story of calculated risk.

I went back to Tom and asked him if he thought we could make an unplanned stop at a village nearby. I wanted to make sure the insurgents were able to see that we did not go back to our COP. We drove around and I noticed a handful of elders sitting outside their small mosque, staring at us as we drove by. We dismounted a few yards from where the elders were sitting. They didn’t run off and hide. This was a good sign.

Some kids playing nearby ran up to us, yelling, “Pen, mister! Pen, mister!” I laughed, remembering my first trip outside the wire at Farah several years earlier. At the time I had thought it was evidence of their desire to be educated. Along the way I’d learned that kids ask for pens because they sold reliably well in the local economy.

I looked like an American soldier; the stern-looking Pashtun men didn’t realize I was one of them. As I was looking for my recorder and pen the five soldiers around me nudged the kids away a little, in case one of them tried to grab my weapon.

I approached one of the men I assumed was the oldest based on his bright red beard. Pashtun men can be as vain as any other—when their beards go gray, since they don’t have Just For Men, they often color them with henna.

“Asalaam alaikum,”
I said, to which Red Beard replied,
“Wa ’alaikum as-salaam”
(and upon you be peace). He was still wary; a lot of soldiers knew enough to offer the traditional Arabic greeting.

Then I said in Pashtu, “Would you mind if I sit here and enjoy the sun with you guys?” Suddenly, Red Beard and all the men gathered around him started exclaiming to one another, “She speaks Pashtu! The woman speaks Pashtu!”

“Yes, I speak Pashtu. And you don’t have to talk about me like I can’t understand you. I understand you completely,” I replied.

They all asked the standard questions at once. Where was I from? What was my name? How did I know Pashtu? Why had they never heard of me? Why had they never seen me before?

They asked whether I was married, and what my husband thought of what I was doing. I told them I was married, because they would wonder what I’d done to render myself unmarriageable. Did I sleep around? Was I an adulteress? they might wonder.

I told them that I missed my kids. Still, I was happy to meet their children because they were just as bratty as my own brats back home. The elders laughed.

They asked if I was there to find out what they wanted from the Americans. “No. I already know what you want. Clinics. Schools. Food. Clean water. Jobs. You want to feel safe in your community. You want our help, but you also want to be respected.”

“You’ve been talking to a lot of Afghans,” said Red Beard.

“I’ve been talking to a lot of Afghans,” I said, “but I am struggling to understand the root of the Pashtun problem. Why are you so unhappy? Why would you rather fight than live in peace?”

“Why do you think?”

“I am the same as you,” I said. “As a Pashtun I have a long history, and that history has created an image that I sometimes feel obligated to
maintain. The image is of the warrior who fights to the death to protect what is his. If I lived here, I would do that, just as you do. I would fight to the death to protect what is mine. But I am also American, and I see we have a great chance for Afghanistan to do so much better. We have the support of the most powerful country on earth, and also their dollars, to improve our lives and the lives of our children. Instead of seeing opportunity, you are obeying history, choosing to be insulted when these soldiers mean you no harm, but on the contrary are here, risking their lives, to help you.”

Red Beard looked at me with ageless wisdom. “We don’t have much, but we are going to fight to keep the little bit that we do have. It’s important for our kids to go to school, but it’s more important, for us elders, to look our children in the eye and tell them we lived correctly, according to our culture.”

We spoke about our obligations toward our culture versus our children and a better future for them. We could have talked about this for hours. But I had more pressing questions that had been puzzling me for months.

I didn’t know whether I dared ask this one: Earlier in the day I’d been at a meeting at the subgovernor’s office where I’d met several elders from this village who’d presented themselves as power brokers, the movers and the shakers of the communities. Were these elders who they claimed to be?

I had first gotten suspicious of such a group of elders in Jalalabad, when I would notice the same token elders representing different villages at different
shura
. Once I started paying attention, I noticed this everywhere I worked in Afghanistan. I started calling them “elders for hire.” In my job with HTS, it was more than just a joke for me; I wanted to know why the villagers were sending these men when traditionally they would want to build relationships with us directly.

Red Beard laughed and confessed that these men were simply players. I had long suspected that the elders at all the PRTs were being presented as men of influence when they were only spies—and now my suspicion was confirmed.

This was a breakthrough. I saw with my own eyes. The kind old man I was talking to was the real power broker of this village. He sat in the village center and addressed everyone’s problems. He made decisions while I was sitting there, deciding cases, networking, and making sure his people had what they needed from him: cultural knowledge and wisdom that had served as the law of the land for centuries. He was the heart of the village.

I asked him why he was sending others to represent him, and before he could answer, a light went on in my head: Of course, I knew the reason! I remembered the countless accounts of “elders” being killed on their way to meetings with Afghan officials. They were being targeted by the insurgents for working with GIRoA and showing support to the foreign forces—the United States—by coming to these gatherings. This was another form of intimidation that the insurgents were using to subjugate the population of Afghanistan. There was no way Karzai would be able to provide protection for these participants, even as he was calling
shura
after
shura
to convey the participation of Pashtuns in his government. This was causing a lot of resentment toward his government because if he would stop calling these gatherings, the villagers wouldn’t have to send elders, and the elders wouldn’t be killed on their way there. Just as I had done earlier that day, Karzai had made a cultural blunder, revealing his lack of understanding of how his people lived and died.

This was among the biggest reasons why the villagers were deeply unhappy with the U.S. and ANA presence in their village.

“You have trusted me,” I said gratefully. “I have more respect for Pashtun culture than you might imagine. Now I am going to ask you for a favor. If you grant me this favor, I promise I will not violate any laws of
Pashtunwali
.” I was really pushing my luck, I knew, but what had happened with the men at the bazaar still stung me pretty bad, and I wanted to recapture a feeling of accomplishment.

“Anything,
looray
,” he said, using the Pashtu endearment that means “daughter.”

“I don’t mean any disrespect to you by mentioning your women in
public, but I would love to talk to your daughters, and I would love to talk to your wife, and I would love to go inside the
qalat
and have some tea with them. I will leave my American agenda, as you call it, out here with you. I just want to see some real Pastun women.”

He looked doubtful. I kept going, “My mother is a Pashtun woman, and I have not seen her for many months. I miss her so much. I just want to sit and talk with your women for a while.”

He sighed. “I told you I would not refuse you anything, daughter. You may go inside, but you must leave your soldiers here. You have to go alone. You have to trust me when I say you will be protected. Here is your test of
Pashtunwali
! You know when I say you will be safe in my house, you can trust me.”

It was completely out of the question for me to leave behind all the guys pulling security for me. Tom would not let me go inside unprotected. I might have felt safe knowing that Red Beard had given me his word, but Tom was a military commander and I was his “on loan” from his superior, and no way was he going to risk losing me to
Pashtunwali
. I told the elder that I would have to clear it with my commander.

I took Tom aside and told him what had happened. “I know you’re freaking out, but this is a huge opportunity. You’ll be able to brag about the fact that under your watch one of your people was granted access to Zadran women. Imagine how happy Jason would be.”

“Yes, but what if under my watch I lose a Pashtun woman on HTT? Imagine how upset Jason would be.”

He refused to let me go in completely alone. I could take Mark, my teammate. He was twenty-five or twenty-six but looked like one of the many younger boys in the crowd. He was terrified. As we walked over to the old man Mark kept muttering, “They’re going to kill me, they’re going to kill me.”

“Relax,” I whispered. “I know these guys. You’re going to be fine.”

I told Red Beard that I wanted to take him up on his hospitality to meet his women, but I couldn’t possibly go in without Mark, who was like my brother.

Even though he was the decision maker of his house, in fact, the whole village, the old man still had to consult the other men, who told him that since he had already promised me anything, he should let me go inside.

As he led Mark and me to his compound, he said, “Daughter, must you be armed?” I told him that these weapons were my responsibility, and he laughed.

“I’m just a little worried,” he replied. “A Pashtun woman with American weapons. I hope you don’t give my women any ideas!”

As soon as I stepped inside, I felt at home. This
qalat
could have been the
qalat
I spent a year in when I was little, or it could have been the
qalat
that I had spent a week in just a couple of years earlier with my family in Ghazni. There were rooms all around the four walls, a courtyard in the center, colorful rugs spread out on the ground. There were a couple of women sitting there with several children, feeding them. They got up when they saw me, shocked, and probably scared that the Americans had invaded. Before they could panic, Red Beard, who was following a couple of steps behind me, stepped inside the compound and told them that everything was okay. I jumped in quickly, apologizing for scaring them, and talking to them in Pashtu so they could feel safer. Once I was inside, only a few women appeared at first. They wore the most beautiful clothes I’d ever seen, brightly colored tunics woven with gold and silver thread, gold bangles and earrings. Then more and more women arrived. The houses shared common walls, and it looked as if they were literally pouring out of the walls. Sisters, wives, cousins, aunties. Suddenly, I was very homesick.

One by one they came to have a look at the American who spoke their language. They were shocked by everything: my Pashtu, my knowledge of
Pashtunwali
, my M-4, my nine-millimeter, my enormous boots and body armor. Even my bright orange hair, as they each took turns touching it.

I could distinguish them by the way they dressed. The most modest girls, wearing simple clothes with little jewelry, were the single girls, waiting for their arranged marriages. The women in the brightest colors wearing the most opulent jewelry were the newlyweds. The women who
wore more subdued colors, smaller earrings, and only a few rings had been married for a while. The woman in charge wore no jewelry at all but had a huge key ring on her belt, with keys to the sugar, the flour, the butter, and the money. She made a jingling noise when she walked. She looked like my own grandmother, just a few hundred miles away.