O Afghanistan!

Kabul has fallen. Lacking cable TV at home (a conscious decision), I woke up before the crack of dawn this morning (August 16, 2021) to be able to watch the 5:00 AM news on the BBC (my only reliable international news service) rebroadcast via the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). The news was unexpected and historic—it reported the fall of Kabul (and all of Afghanistan) to the Taliban.

Memories fly back thirteen years, almost to the month, to my one and only visit to Afghanistan in 2008. The plane’s steep descent into Kabul to avoid rockets; dragging my luggage nearly half a mile outside the airport because vehicles were not allowed any closer for fear of bombs, and my colleague and I did not want to use the service of small children with wheelbarrows; the stay at the Gandamack Lodge for expats, mostly journalists, with its rack of muskets and sabers, and Churchill posters; the flight due west two days later to the town of Herat (the software autocorrecting the name to Heart every single time on my laptop); the two weeks’ stay in the spacious, high-walled, former UN staff housing there, with visits to the maternity hospital and children’s home supported by a grant from USAID; a roadside bomb explosion thrown in gratis; and rushing to the distinctive KFC sign on our way back in Kabul only to find “Kabul Fried Chicken” in smaller print below.

Before this trip, my closest exposure to Afghanistan was Kipling’s Kim which was set in the period after the Second Anglo-Afghan War that ended in 1881. Needless to say, the visit changed my perception entirely. At the Gandamack Lodge which provided transit accommodation, there is a cracked plaque honoring the memory of Marla Ruzicka, a young woman from California who had founded the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC) a nonprofit to help families of civilians affected by military conflict. Sadly, she was killed by a roadside bomb near the Baghdad airport at the young age of twenty-nine.

As the visit happened in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and the Afghan staff at the office in Herat observed the fast to the letter, we were shuttled back to our expat quarters for lunch. On one such trip, we were startled by a loud explosion about five hundred yards down the road. The stunned driver, instead of making a swift U-turn, confusedly gunned the vehicle towards the site, and it took all our frantic yelling to make him apply the brakes and turn into a side-alley and safety.

The visit to the maternity hospital was a moving experience which I shall never forget. In a patriarchal society where women are treated as dispensable chattel by the Taliban, it was gratifying to see the USAID grant working to save the women who would otherwise have died in childbirth. Even more moving was the visit to a childcare center where orphaned children were taken care of. The children in the picture must be in their teens now and my heart breaks to think of the impact the present conflict must be having on them.

It was only after reaching Herat, that I learned of its history dating back to 330 BC when Alexander the Great besieged the city. Later, Herat flourished as a caravan stop on the Silk Road from Levant to China and India. N- S-, a staff at the local office, was kind enough to drive us around in his car to the Qala Ikhtiaruddin fort, the Blue Mosque, the graveyard of Soviet tanks just outside Herat where forty to fifty destroyed tanks lay scattered on the countryside, and then to lunch at the Arghavan Restaurant. After being at the mercy of the resident cook’s “Western food” for over a week, it was an exquisite treat to finally experience authentic Afghan cuisine. Another staff, F- D-, led me to a local tailor and had an Afghan shalwar kameez custom stitched for me.

But by far, the most enduring memory I have is something I do not have a picture of, for obvious reasons, but the image is forever etched indelibly in my mind. It was the look on the face of a young Afghan woman crossing a road in Kabul surrounded by other pedestrians. She did not wear a hijab, but what she had on was the most confident, self-assured, poised look I have ever seen on any woman’s face anywhere, before or since. In Afghanistan! In the midst of all the conflict and danger, she was serenity personified.

With the re-imposition of Taliban standards, women’s faces will be hidden from view, as also, I am certain, their anguish and their tears.

My heart weeps for Afghanistan.