Amid this destruction, government officials conducted their business under burlap or plastic sheets tethered to the remains of the various ministerial buildings. Passing the airport, I could spot pieces of bombed planes lying by the runway, and demining crews were clearing the edges of the taxiways with armored bulldozers. The national airline, Ariana, was in shambles: After the U.S. bombs had knocked six of its old planes out of business three months earlier, only a single aging Boeing 727 remained operational. In the months to come, I would learn that Ariana’s pilots and stewardesses who flew to New Delhi or Dubai were forced to sleep on the plane at night because the crew could not afford hotel rooms. The flight engineers used a slide rule to calculate weight and balance, and each flight had to carry cash in order to pay for fuel.
Eventually I made my way to a crumbling building on Bagh-e-Bala Road called the Peace Guest House. Snow had fallen, and there was no heat, electricity, or running water. The sparse surroundings reminded me of being in a remote mountain village in Pakistan, except that I was in a bustling city of 1.5 million. That first night, I lay in bed listening to the sporadic bursts of automatic weapon fire resounding across the city. After each volley, there was a brief lull of silence that was filled by a shrill chorus of howling dogs.
Over the next few days, I moved about the capital city with the help of a taxi driver named Abdullah Rahman, a man whose eyelids had been scorched away by an exploding land mine and whose hands had been so badly burned that he was unable to close them around his steering wheel. One of Abdullah’s several jobs involved safeguarding three locked cases of books at the Military Hospital library. Every morning, Abdullah, along with six other librarians, would sign in to the register to mark their presence, sit together at a long desk for about an hour, and then leave at the directive of their boss. Abdullah had been doing this six times a week for twelve years, and for his services he was paid $1.20 per month. He told me that on average, about one book a week was checked out.
During the next week and a half, I toured around the city with Adbullah in an effort to get a sense of how much damage had been done to the capital’s education system. Despite the fact that classes were scheduled to reopen later in the spring, only a handful of the 159 schools were prepared to receive students, and even these were in horrendous condition. In some cases, the buildings were so unstable that classes would have to be held outside or moved to metal shipping containers. In other cases, the students would have to scale crude ladders built from logs after the stairways had been destroyed.
Toward the end of my stay, I paid a visit to Dr. Ashraf Ghani, who was Afghanistan’s minister of finance and a personal adviser to Hamid Karzai, who would soon be appointed to serve as the country’s interim president. Dr. Ghani had received his graduate degree in anthropology from Columbia University and later pursued a successful career with the World Bank, but after 9/11 he had given up everything to return to Afghanistan and help his country get back on its feet.
When we met in his office, the minister informed me that less than a quarter of the aid money that President George W. Bush had promised to his country had actually been delivered. Of those funds, Dr. Ghani explained, $680 million had been “redirected” to build runways and bulk up supply depots in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar for the upcoming invasion of Iraq. Afghanistan was now receiving less than a third of the per-capita assistance that had been plowed into reconstruction efforts in Bosnia, East Timor, or Rwanda—and of that, less than half was going to long-term development projects such as education. Moreover, to administer this inadequate stream of cash, a massively expensive bureaucracy had sprung up.
As bad as this sounded, I learned later that the situation was even more bleak. A significant amount of the development money offered by the United States was, it turned out, simply recirculating into the hands of American contractors, some of whom were paying Afghan construction workers five or ten dollars a day to construct schools and clinics whose price tags could exceed a quarter million dollars per building. Equally disturbing, almost none of the tiny amount of money that was actually reaching Afghan citizens in Kabul was flowing beyond the capital and into the rural areas, where the devastation was even greater and the need for assistance even more desperate. Twenty miles beyond Kabul’s suburbs, most of the country was largely on its own—a state of affairs that seemed to be lost on Dr. Ghani, overwhelmed as he was by the devastation at his feet.
“Look around you—Kabul is a mess,” he exclaimed. “We don’t have enough buildings to live in, not to mention electricity, food, communications, plumbing, or water. At least in the countryside the people have land on which to grow crops and rivers to drink from. They can sleep in a tent under the stars wherever they please, and they have animals to eat.”
He reached for a black book filled with contact information. “So you should begin your work right here in the city,” he continued, opening the book and running his finger down a list of names. “I know many good contractors that can help you.”
Clearly, there was a compelling case to be made that the CAI should devote its limited resources to working in Kabul. Serving the girls of Afghanistan’s ravaged capital city would be enough to keep us busy for the next two decades. The problem, however, was that I already had given my word to the Kirghiz—and in order to honor that commitment, I was going to have to find a way to disengage from Kabul and begin making my way toward the Wakhan.
“I’m sorry,” I told him, “but our mission is to serve remote areas and to set up schools where none already exist.”
“Well, young man, have it as you wish,” said Dr. Ghani, clearly disappointed. “But as you will find out, the last thing the people in the remote areas want is schools.”
“Thank you for the information,” I replied. “But I still need to head north.”
CHAPTER 4
The Sound of Peace
Traveling in Afghanistan was like wandering through the shadows of shattered things.
—CHRISTINA LAMB, The Sewing Circles of Heart
Greg with schoolgirls in Lalander village, Afghanistan
When the Kirghiz horsemen and I had met for the first time in the fall of 1999, I had told them I needed a rough count of the number of school-age children in the eastern Wakhan. More than a year later, a group of traders crossed over the Irshad Pass, rode into Zuudkhan, and delivered up to Sarfraz a sheaf of several dozen pages of yellow, legal-sized notebook paper, bound between two pieces of cardboard and wrapped in a purple velvet cloth. The pages contained the first comprehensive census of every single household in the Afghan Pamir, painstakingly recorded by hand with a black fountain pen. According to this document, in a total population of 1,942 Kirghiz nomads, there were more than nine hundred children under the age of nineteen who were cut off from any access to education and whose families spent the year roaming over an area of approximately one thousand square miles. Farther west, along the banks of the Amu Darya, the river that delineates the Russian and Afghan frontiers, there were also more than six thousand Wakhi farmers scattered among twenty-eight villages who, having received word of our pledge to the Kirghiz, were now apparently clamoring for schools for their own children.
When Sarfraz showed me this census, I was dumbfounded not only by its thoroughness but also by what the numbers revealed about the true scope of the demand for education in the Wakhan.
By this point, it was clear to me that Sarfraz’s many years of wheeling and dealing throughout the Corridor qualified him as the perfect point man to ramrod this initiative—so I decided to offer him a job as the Central Asia Institute’s “Most-Remote-Area Project Director” with a salary of two thousand dollars a year. It would be his responsibility, I explained, to coordinate our most far-reaching ventures at every level, from drinking tea with the elders in each community to hiring the masons and carpenters who would do the work. He accepted with enthusiasm, exclaiming that he was finally about to embark on an enterprise that would involve much success.
“
So if we want to put things in motion in the Wakhan,” I then said to him, “how do we figure out where to actually put the schools that we need to build?”
Sarfraz—who as always was one step ahead of me—promptly whipped out another sheet of paper with a list of eight locations. Langhar, Bozai Gumbaz, and Gozkhon I had heard of; the other five were new to me. Then he unfolded a map of northern Afghanistan and started pointing with his index finger.
“We will build here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here,” he declared. “And once these schools are finished, the children will come.”
That sounded straightforward enough, but he went on to explain that we had two problems. First, if we wanted to set up operations inside the Wakhan, it was necessary to enlist the permission and support of the network of “big men” who ran the affairs of the Corridor, which meant that we needed to figure out a way to get from Kabul to the northernmost part of Afghanistan and start building relationships.
The second problem was that Sarfraz did not yet have a passport—which meant that for the first phase of this new venture, I was going to be flying solo.
The northern province of Badakshan has always stood somewhat aloof from the rest of Afghanistan—an isolated region, cut off from the south by the soaring escarpments of the Hindu Kush, whose deepest cultural and historical links extend north into Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Between Kabul and Badakshan, the dry, rust-colored plains of southern Afghanistan give way to the Pamir Knot, the great tangle of peaks that marks the point where the Himalayas collide with the Karakoram. It is an implacable geographic barrier, and thanks to this great divide, Kabul can sometimes seems more distant—and more foreign—than the remote central Asian khanates of Bukhara, Bishkek, and Samarkhand.
Harshly beautiful and horrendously poor, Badakshan has historical ties to the kingdoms beyond its borders mainly because some of the most popular trade routes linking China, Kashmir, and central Asia passed through this area—and it was along these thoroughfares that one of the province’s few treasures was shipped to the outside world. For more than six thousand years, the mines of Sar-e Sang, forty miles north of the Panjshir Valley, have provided the world’s most important source of lapis lazuli, the gemstone that lent its intense blue fire to the death mask of Egypt’s King Tutankhamen, the official seals of Assyrian and Babylonian governments, and the paintings of Renaissance Europe. (The stone was ground into a powder to make the pigment the Venetians called ultramarine.) In ancient times, Badakshan’s seams of lapis were mined by lighting fires in the tunnels and then cracking the hot rock by packing it with ice. In recent years, the mujahadeen commanders who control the mines have preferred the use of military explosives.
Until recently, Badakshan’s only other source of wealth was opium. The terrain and climate qualify this as perfect poppy country: suitable soil, steep and well-drained hillsides, long hours of sunshine, and the right amount of rainfall. The province sits directly in the middle of the “heroin highway” that transports raw opium north into Tajikistan, then Tashkent, Moscow, and points beyond.
As in other remote parts of Afghanistan, Badakshan’s political and economic power has traditionally rested in the hands of local warlords, or commandhans, who fulfill many of the functions of a centralized government: guaranteeing security, providing small-business loans, maintaining roads, digging wells, sitting as judge and jury, supporting education, and, of course, levying taxes. It was the commandhans who led the mujahadeen struggle against the Soviets from the moment the first Russian tanks clattered across the borders of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in the winter of 1979; and it was these men who kept the resistance alive when the Taliban swept over the rest of the country during the mid-1990s.
Since Hamid Karzai was first appointed interim president in 2002, this hierarchy has remained unchanged. Nothing takes place inside Badakshan’s rocky gorges, lush valleys, and highland plateaus—no business venture, no marital alliance, no negotiation with outside authorities—without the express permission and the blessing of the commandhans.
For the previous five years, the reigning commandhan in eastern Badakshan had been a mujahadeen by the name of Sadhar Khan, a man who possessed the mind of a West Point military tactician and the soul of a poet. Born in a tiny hamlet not far from the mouth of the Wakhan Corridor, he had hoped to become a historian and scholar but was forced to abandon those plans when the Russians invaded in 1979 and virtually every able-bodied man and boy within a hundred miles of Baharak fled into the surrounding mountains to join the resistance.
During the early years of the war, Sadhar Khan’s speed and cunning often got him picked to lead quick, dangerous raids deep into enemy territory. Thanks to these exploits, he rose swiftly through the mujahadeen ranks and eventually emerged as a lieutenant of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the famous “Lion of the Panjshir,” who was perhaps the most gifted and formidable mujahadeen to fight against the Soviets. In addition to his leadership and planning skills, Khan also acquired a reputation for ruthlessness and ferocity. Inside the northeastern corner of Badakshan, his power was absolute.
Khan’s base lay just outside of Baharak, a town of about twenty-eight thousand people where the roads arriving east from the regional capital of Faizabad and north from the Panjshir Valley converge. There is also a third road in Baharak that provides the only motorized means of accessing the Wakhan—and thanks to this, Sadhar Khan was effectively the gatekeeper for the entire Corridor. Without him, it would be impossible to drive a nail or lay a single brick for a school anywhere between the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush.
“Before you do anything, you must first go to Baharak and speak to Sadhar Khan,” Sarfraz advised. “He is the chabi.”
He twisted his wrist—the key.
Northeast of Afghanistan’s capital city, nearly every mountain pass through the Hindu Kush is over ten thousand feet and thus is locked down by snow for six months of the year. In the 1960s, however, a three-mile-long tunnel was drilled by Soviet engineers below the Salang Pass to create an all-season route linking Kabul with Badakshan. The tunnel is reached by a winding road on which Soviet military convoys were ambushed repeatedly by mujahadeen units that specialized in dismantling trucks, artillery cannons, even tanks, and hauling them, piece by piece, over the mountains and back to the Panjshir Valley. In the spring of 2003, I headed through the Salang in a rented Russian jeep driven by Abdullah Rahman, the taxi-driving librarian with the scorched hands and eyelids, in the hope of paying my first visit to Baharak.
In the years to come, I would look back on the obstacles I encountered during that first trip north and understand that together they represented a kind of metaphor for what our “Afghan adventure” would be like. When we were driving through the tunnel, the dust and the fumes became so dense that we were forced to stop the jeep and get out. Hoping to find an exit, I climbed through a viaduct leading to the outside, stumbled into a field where the rocks had been painted bright red, and realized I was surrounded by land mines. (After I carefully retraced my steps and descended back into the tunnel, Abdullah and I eventually blundered through and resumed our drive.) Later on that same journey, we found ourselves caught in a firefight between opium smugglers and were forced to take cover in a roadside ditch. When the shooting subsided, I told Abdullah that it was too dangerous for him to continue, jumped onto the back of a truck, and hid myself beneath a pile of putrid animal hides headed to a leather-tanning factory.
In the end, I made it to Baharak but was forced by my schedule to turn around without having met Sadhar Khan, return to Kabul, and fly home to the United States. A few months later, however, I was back in Afghanistan, repeated the same journey, and upon arriving in Baharak, immediately started casting around for the commandhan. Standing in the middle of the market, I spotted a white Russian jeep packed with gunmen rolling toward me and flagged it down on the assumption that anyone who could afford such a vehicle in Baharak would probably know Sadhar Khan.
The driver, a small, e
lfin man with refined features and a neatly trimmed beard, got out to address me.
“I am looking for Sadhar Kahn,” I said in broken Dari.
“He is here,” the man replied, in English.
“Where, exactly?”
“I am Commandhan Khan.”
Having anticipated being forced to spend a week waiting for a meeting with a man who did his business from behind a wall of gatekeepers and armed guards, I was momentarily at a loss for words.
“Oh, I am sorry,” I stammered, realizing that I had failed to introduce myself in proper Afghan fashion. “As-Salaam Alaaikum, I have come from America—”
“I apologize, but right now it is time for prayers,” interjected Khan. “Please get in and I will take you to a safe place while I go to the mosque.”
He drove us through the bazaar and to the northern end of the town’s center and parked in the middle of the road next to the Najmuddin Khan Wosiq mosque. While a handful of plain-clothes guards surrounded the jeep and whisked Khan into the mosque, I was led by a single uniformed guard to the second story of a nearby office building. When the guard ushered me into a dingy, windowless room, I requested to be permitted to go up to the roof. He was a bit puzzled but ushered me up the stairs and invited me to sit on a reed mat, where I had a dramatic view of the Hindu Kush range. Turning my gaze down into the street, I watched as several hundred men streamed out of the bazaar and into the mosque for their afternoon prayers.
About thirty minutes later, the procession of men emerged from the mosque, led by Sadhar Khan and the local ulema (religious leader). As he stepped into the street, Khan looked up, spotted me on the roof, and pointed. I watched, startled, as several hundred pairs of eyes followed the motion of his hand toward me. Then Khan gave a wave and cracked a smile.