In My Father's Country (47 page)

I paid my respects to her first, and told her that one of my brothers was posted just outside the gate, and to please tell the ladies to stay clear of the gate.

They brought me tea, but I couldn’t sit down to drink it—my body armor weighed fifty pounds and my boots were so high I couldn’t bend my knees, so I tried to just perch on the edge of a chair they brought out to the courtyard. The women were all sitting on the ground, still staring and talking to me all at once.

If I felt bad for them being shut away from the world, they felt equally bad for me for being in the outside world in my unflattering fatigues, having to deal with the world day in, day out, with nothing but men for company. They worried about my mother—did she know I was wearing these clothes? And doing what I was doing? I said she knew, and she didn’t like any of it. They insisted that I should listen to my mother and just go home and be with her. They reminded me of the Muslim wisdom that heaven lies beneath a mother’s feet. I said it was too late, I was an American now, and as an American I expected my mother to just simply give me heaven to show me she loves me. They laughed so easily, just like the men outside. It amazed me to realize that in this environment that I found so suffocating, where I would struggle to last a day, they lived and laughed with such ease. I envied them this wonderful ability to find joy when their lives were so harsh and their futures so bleak.

I asked them what they were thinking about, what their concerns were, and they surprised me again. Their issues were the same as those of their men outside: security, employment, education, health care, the well-being of their children, their fear of outsiders causing instability in their community. The difference was that they wanted these issues resolved for their men, so that their men could have jobs and live in a more stable and secure society, so their boys could go to school.

I had thought these locked-away women would be completely out of touch, but apparently their husbands spoke to them (or around them, while the women brought them tea and served them dinner), about the world and what was going on in it. These women, who are clever and well informed, are a lost resource, and Afghanistan—at least as it operates now—is unwilling to benefit from their wisdom and insight. The Afghan men feel so threatened by what is going on in the country—the war, unemployment, insecurity—that they lash out against any efforts that might cause them to lose even more control. Since their women seem to be the only part of their lives they still exert control over, they would rather lock the women up inside the
qalat
than let them join the international development efforts and risk losing control over them.

I was in there for about fifteen minutes. Tom forbade me to stay any longer. I said my good-byes to the ladies, knowing I would most likely not be able to repeat the experience, and savoring the chance to see real-life Pashtun women. They made me promise that I would go home and stop stressing out my mother. The loss of human potential in this house alone broke my heart. I wanted to do so much for the country, and I knew every one of these ladies would have been a perfect partner in my efforts. Leaving with a heavy heart, I walked outside, where both the Afghan and the American men were anxiously waiting.

T
HIRTY-THREE

O
ne day in the fall of 2009, I was sitting in my office, finishing up a PowerPoint that I had to give to the brigade commander on the last mission I had just completed in Paktya. The day was sunny but awfully cold, which is probably why I was on my fifth cup of hot coffee. I was coming up on my deadline for the presentation and had missed lunch while trying to finish it. Audrey was outside the wire on another mission, and so no one was there to remind me that it was time to eat. I didn’t mind. I could always stop by Aziz’s for some warm bread and local gossip. As I was thinking about taking a short break, a soldier from the brigade TOC came looking for me. The new commander needed to see me in his office, right away, please.

I sent the soldier back so I could have some alone time while walking from my office to the commander’s in the TOC building. In a combat zone, where you work and live in such close quarters, it’s hard to get time to yourself, surrounded as you are by obligations, thoughts of work, and other people bustling around. You learn to take every chance you can to step away from it all and savor the isolation, so whenever I would get summoned to the commander’s office I would take the longer route from our outside office to his inside the TOC. Unless it was an emergency—and I knew, on that occasion, that it wasn’t, or he would have used the phone in the office to reach me. The reflection of the sun off of the gravel
was so bright that I had to squint as I walked, but I could still feel the chill in my bones. Appearances were so deceiving in Afghanistan—how was it that the bright sun was so cold? I was in one of my reflective moods, bordering on gloomy. I had talked to Mamai that morning, and as usual she had been crying, worried again that I might not leave Afghanistan alive, and I had to think that maybe she was right. I had been there for well over a year. Was it time for me to take a break, to live a normal life again? I had forgotten what my American life used to be like. When I first got to Afghanistan, I used to think about favorite places in Oregon, and talk about what I would do when I got back home. But lately I had begun to do nothing but talk about Afghanistan, the soldiers, the people; before one mission had even finished I’d be thinking about the next one. Afghanistan had completely consumed my life; I lived Afghanistan and I dreamt Afghanistan. In my dreams I was constantly running away from the insurgents, and for some reason, Najiba and Khalid were there in every one of my dreams, and I was trying to help them escape. U.S. soldiers were conspicuously absent in these dreams. I was all alone, trying to protect myself and my siblings.

Lost in my thoughts, I walked into the commander’s office and saw that his political advisor, Kelly, was already there. Kelly was a tiny, petite woman, but God save the fool who thought that her size was indicative of what was inside her! She was beyond knowledgeable in the region, having worked and lived in Pakistan, Turkey, and several of the -stans, among other countries. She vehemently spoke her mind when she felt mistakes were being made, which was the trait that brought the two of us close together in an environment where emotions ran high but no one talked about feelings. Kelly had become something like the older sister I never had and had always tried to be to Najiba. We shared many late-night dinners in the courtyard outside the chow hall, where—because of light restrictions—we had to use our flashlights to see what we were eating.

The brigade commander, Mike, asked me if I would go to the governor’s compound with the PRT commander to deal with a situation that was highly political and could easily get out of hand. I had attended
the battle update brief (BUB) that morning, so I knew he was talking about the civilian casualties from a night raid in a nearby village. The raid had not been conducted by Mike’s soldiers, but because he was the battle-space owner, he was responsible for every action by any soldier, so he wanted to be represented at the meeting. He asked me to be an observer at the meeting and report the villagers’ disposition back to him. There were so many things that were not in my job description for which I knew that I was the most qualified person, so there was no question of whether or not I’d go.

We were leaving in half an hour, just enough time for me to tell my team leader that I had to go outside the wire and to prepare. I couldn’t find him but sent him a quick e-mail to tell him I would be back in a couple of hours, hopefully; then I met the PRT team, who had come by the brigade TOC to pick me up on the way. The drive to the governor’s compound was quick, and for once there were no incidents to slow us down. All the troublemakers were already at the governor’s compound, one of the soldiers said through the headset in my ear, which made communicating over the loud noises of the vehicle possible.

The night raids and civilian deaths were just starting to be a political issue in early 2009. Already there was talk that Karzai was upset and wanted an investigation, but this was before he had made a public outcry about U.S. night raids. As I walked in with the rest of the U.S. soldiers, in my military uniform and armed, the villagers glared at us. There were chairs all around the room, and as we walked up to the section where some of the other U.S. elements were already sitting, I heard bits and pieces of conversations, all sounding very intense and upset. The meeting was called to session by one of the villagers getting up to say a quick prayer in Arabic. As soon as he sat down, all hell broke loose. The villagers wanted to know if the Americans were their friends, or invaders of Afghanistan. Not waiting for an answer, they charged ahead with accusations that the Americans had shamed the whole village by going over the walls, inside the compound, in the middle of the night, knowing that there were women, Pashtun women, asleep. Why didn’t they just kill the whole tribe? Everyone knew that there was no reason for any of the
villagers to live after this kind of shame. I looked to see if the interpreters were doing their job well for the Americans, and what their reaction was. The American faces around me were expressionless, while the Afghan faces were incensed, indignant, full of rage. I tried to make my face blank, too, because in a gathering like this, you do
not
want to stand out in any way. Any emotions on my face would make me the center of attention and thus the target of all those impossible-to-answer questions.

I had heard complaints about night raids all over the provinces but had never been in a room full of villagers who had just been raided. It was a horrendous experience, as I could see the damage that had been done to our relationship with this village as well as the surrounding ones. I didn’t know whether it had been worth it. Of course, I knew this was not the place to ask the ones who had authorized the raid, and decided that later I would ask the team who had conducted it. I felt enraged, not just about the cultural offense but also because I realized that Mike’s new soldiers, the ones who I was mentoring in building relationships with the community, had just been set back by several years in their efforts. To the villagers, it made no difference which soldiers were looking for bad guys and which ones were building schools. To this village especially, all U.S. soldiers were the same—the ones who had raided their village and insulted the whole tribe.

THE MEETING ENDED
when the governor, together with the PRT commander and other parties present, decided to meet again when tempers had cooled down, so they could have a more productive discussion.

As I walked toward the door to follow my group, one of the elders came running toward me, eyes flashing red, screaming, “You took my brother! You came into my house last night and took my brother. Release him now! He is innocent. We have tribal enemies and they gave you the wrong information!”

The elder, not knowing I spoke Pashtu, started looking for a
turjuman
, while trying to block my exit from the room. The two soldiers guarding me started to come between us to push me away from the old man. I told them it was okay, and told the old man calmly, “No, Baba, you are
mistaken. I did not come into your house and take your brother, but if your brother is innocent, he will be released.”

He looked at me, teary, and said, “
Looray
, you can speak Pashtu; you must know how Pashtun don’t like their women to be seen by anyone. How could you come into my house and bring all these men with you?”

I knew what I had been doing the night before, and it was not raiding this man’s compound, but there was nothing I could say to convince him that I personally had no part in it. I was held responsible for the Americans’ actions, and to this old man, I had been there the previous night, insulting him and his culture. Suddenly, I felt a different kind of responsibility, one that I had been too distracted to see until then. I had been more concerned with arming the soldiers with the cultural knowledge to make their deployment a success, without considering that when they did anything wrong, I could and would be held personally accountable by the Afghans for the actions of all U.S. soldiers.

I WENT BACK
into Mike’s office in an even more reflective, gloomy mood than I had been in earlier. It was after 9:00
P.M.
, but you couldn’t tell that by looking at all the officers and soldiers still working in their offices. I knew I was going to have a long night finishing my brief, and I needed to talk to Mamai and Najiba again. Sometimes it was therapeutic to hear about their daily lives, their routine American existence, one that I suddenly ached for.

Mike had already gotten an update from his PRT commander, so he knew what had actually happened. He wanted to know what could be done for damage control. He also informed me that Karzai had decided to take a political stance about what had happened, and there were rumors that he would be coming into Khost to meet with the villagers. On the American-leadership side, there was going to be an investigation and recommendations were going to be made to prevent this from happening again. He wanted me to meet with the three-star general who would be coming through Salerno in a few days to conduct an army investigation.

This was Mike’s third tour in Afghanistan, all of them in Pashtun areas. He knew the investigation was going to look into what had gone
wrong, but he was not interested in that nearly as much as in how it was going to affect our future relations. He wanted recommended courses of action for his soldiers to succeed.

“Saima, no one knows this area, or Pashtuns, like you do. None of the people the general will talk to can give him the background to his investigation that I know you can. I want you to tell him three to five cultural guidelines that those soldiers can follow to show the villagers that we are listening to them, and trying to do things the right way.”