Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan - Softcover

Jones, Ann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312426593 ISBN 13: 9780312426590

Publisher: Picador, 2007

Synopsis

Soon after the bombs stopped falling on Kabul, award-winning journalist and women's rights activist Ann Jones set out for the shattered city. This is her trenchant report from the city where she spent the next four winters working in humanitarian aid. Investigating the city's prison for women, retraining Kabul's long-silenced English teachers, Jones enters the lives of everyday women and men and reveals through small events some big disjunctions: between the new Afghan "democracy" and the still-entrenched warlords, between American promises and performance, between what's boasted of and what is. At once angry, profound, and starkly beautiful, Kabul in Winter brings alive the people and day-to-day life of a place whose future depends upon our own.

About this title

About the Author:

Ann Jones is the author of eight books, including Women Who Kill, Next Time She'll Be Dead, and Looking for Lovedu. An authority on women and violence, her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times and The Nation.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

KABUL IN WINTER
PART IIN THE STREETSI went to Afghanistan after the bombing stopped. Somehow I felt obliged to try to help pick up the pieces. I was a New Yorker who had always lived downtown, and for a long time after the towers fell I experienced moments when I couldn't get my bearings. I'd turn a corner and draw a blank. I'd have to stop to look around and think for a minute--which way is home?--as if all these years I'd relied on some subliminal sense of the mass of the towers behind me, or perhaps a shadow over my shoulder, so that I knew which way was which. I'd seen George W. Bush come to town to strut and bluster among the ruins, and as I watched him lug the stunned country into violence, my sorrow turned to anger and a bone-deep disappointment that hasn't left me yet. Surely America was capable of some act more creative than bombing a small, defenseless, pre-destroyed country on the other side of the world, or so I believed. Four thousand collateral civilian deaths in Kabul brought no consolation for the death of thousands, from around the world, in the fallen towers of the city that had so long been my home.1 I thought America had lost its bearing too. So I left.I came to Kabul by air, as most international travelers do,because roadways in Afghanistan discourage overland travel. That was in December 2002, just about a year after the United States gave up on bombing the countryside to flush al-Qaeda out of the mountains where they'd holed up. In retrospect, high altitude heavy bombing was clearly not the best way to attack specific small bearded men on the ground--a practice Colin Powell called "bomb and hope"--but it shattered the country and made a mess of the roads.2 They were already a shambles after twenty-three years of war--the Afghans fighting the Soviets, and then fighting each other. The Americans complained that by the time they got there, a month after September 11, 2001, in search of Osama bin Laden, there were no good targets left to bomb, but they bombed anyway. A year after they stopped, some of the main roads were still impassable while others were shell-pocked and worn down to the bare rocks of the roadbed. Rusting carcasses of Soviet tanks and upended armored personnel carriers lay along the track like fallen dinosaurs. Bridges had been blown up, and some of them had been replaced by makeshift structures that spread across the water like rafts. There were land mines everywhere, more per square mile than any place else on earth. Truck drivers stepped from the road to piss and lifted off in clouds of dust. So the way to travel was by plane.In 2002, Ariana Afghan Airlines was the only international commercial carrier that could deliver me to Kabul, but it conducted business with a kind of blithe spontaneity unknown to airlines that sell you tickets in advance for scheduled flights. Unless you had influential friends or money for "gifts," you caught an Ariana flight by showing up in Dubai or Islamabad and asking around. They were doing the best they could, I supposed, considering that only months before American bombsights had locked on the Ariana fleet parked at Kabul Airport. I flew into Dubai in the middle of the night and snooped around the terminal, looking for an Ariana counter or an office. Nothing. A cleaner in the women's toilets,a small, dark woman from Sri Lanka named Gloria, led me to a café table in the lobby of terminal 2 and sat down to chat about the good working conditions in Dubai. The rich rulers of the Emirates, she said, respect the working class and take care of them. She'd been working in the women's toilet for nine years. (It was very clean.) The work was not too hard. The salary was good and she got fifteen sick days yearly besides her paid vacation. She'd earned enough to buy a house near the beach, and she invited me to stay with her if the flight didn't materialize. I was on the verge of changing my plans when she pointed to a young man hurrying toward the café, lugging a big black briefcase. He was dressed in black trousers and white shirt like any waiter in the West. "That's him," Gloria said. "That's the ticket man."He opened the briefcase at a nearby table and began to write out tickets by hand. Business was cash only, as if even then with a plane on the runway and tickets passing into passengers' pockets, the company might still have to skip town. "Kabul," I said and put down $185. "Kabul," the man said, writing out the ticket. When he finished with me and a crowd of men wearing perahan-o tomban--the long tunic and baggy pants of the Afghan man's national outfit--he shoved the money into his briefcase and hurried away. For another couple of hours we waited, joined by other passengers sufficiently well-connected to warrant tickets in advance. Then someone at a gate called out "Kabul," and we rushed forward in a mighty wedge, afraid of being left behind. The men shouldered the women aside and jostled one another through the door. I followed with two or three other Western women, and we found ourselves on a bus where the men already occupied all the seats. When the bus reached the airplane, the men jumped up, plowed through the women, and charged up the gangway. "It's the culture," said a young British woman who'd been standing next to me, reading the look on my face. "Men first." She was returning from leave to her job with a United Nations aidprogram in Afghanistan. "Wait 'til you see the Afghan airports," she said. "They shut the women in a little room and don't let us out until the men are nicely comfortable on the plane."The plane was old--a gift from India--bare bones and not crowded. There were no movie screens, no glossy magazines, no duty-free sales. The flight attendants were men, except for one young woman who carried a tin teapot up and down the aisle. She clutched a pale pink scarf over her face and politely averted her eyes as she addressed the passengers: "Tea?" The plane climbed out of Dubai and crossed the Gulf. Then we were over Iran where dark mountains rose in clumps like fortresses. The pilot announced that we had passed into Afghan air space. The passengers applauded. The wave-washed desert below was dark and dun-colored and forbidding, with no sign of village or road. Desolate. Then a river appeared, and fields and enclosures--signs of life after all--as the terrain began to gather itself in ridges rising toward a horizon white with snow and ice. The Hindu Kush. Then we were flying over mountains--treeless, featureless mountains--not the discrete picturesque peaks of Swiss postcards but a random snarl of jagged rocks, as if a great swath of the earth's surface had been thrust up from beneath. Men in caves perhaps, striking back. At last the plane topped the mountains and swung into a broad deep bowl that opened out before us, pale in the bright sun and thin air. Above the center of the bowl, trapped by a hedge of mountains, lay a mass of black smog, dense and opaque: a tangle of twisted strands of oily soot and smoke, like a great pot-blackened Brillo pad. Here and there it thinned to reveal aspects of the city beneath: flat roofs, dirt roads, a ruined fort. Then the plane descended into that soup and the light dimmed. 
 
I GOT SICK RIGHT AWAY. EVERYONE DOES. IT'S NOT JUST THE ALTITUDE. It's a kind of initiation for new arrivals from more fortunate lands that enjoy such luxuries as unleaded gasoline and pollutioncontrol. The airport stinks of petrochemicals. Outside the odor is the same, and on the drive into town, my nose closes, stuffed with dust. Breathing becomes an effort and then a struggle. Within days my chest feels bruised and aching from the job of staying alive, and my head hurts through and through. I envy the Afghans their impressive and practical high-bridged noses, the natural air filters of people in arid lands everywhere. It's depressing to realize that people like me, with small pitiful noses unsuited to life in this high, dry, dusty air, have been winnowed from the local populace over the course of generations by natural selection. And now I'm being winnowed myself, suffocated not just by incidental illness but by inexorable natural forces that find me ill equipped. Under such pressure, my nose wheezes and drips. It cries out for pity and attention. Weeks later, at gatherings of "internationals"--as Western aid workers, diplomats, smugglers, and spies are known--I spot the telltale tissue clutched in the palm or thrust up the sleeve of the newly arrived. Some never get well. They always look pained, their eyes narrowed against the grit and glare, their noses dripping, their tissues close at hand. I am among the lucky ones who somehow adapt, against all odds, to the new environment; like some fishy creature that learns to live in air, I develop the ability to breathe after all in dust.Before the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979, a pair of French photographers, Roland and Sabrina Michaud, roamed the country for fourteen years, documenting the land and its people. You can look back now at the pages of Afghanistan: The Land That Was and see a panoramic shot of Kabul, taken in March 1968 from the height of the Bala Hissar (the High Fort) and spread across two pages of the book. The caption offers this description: "The city rolls around the Kabul River. In the area south of the Pul-e Khesti (Brick Bridge) mosque, bazaars alternate with labyrinthine narrow streets interrupted by a great commercial avenue, Jada-e-Maiwand."3 The river is there, wide and full, zigzagging across the pages. In the foreground stands a maze ofsmall mud-brown houses, while the broad avenue beyond this residential quarter is lined with three- and four-story buildings, the facades painted in shades of blue and umber and cream. The air is so clear that you can count the windows in the miniature houses, distinguish nearly twenty cars--green, white, black--and half a dozen buses on the streets, see the dark-clad people strolling the riverbank, and even make out the tiny clustered villages far in t...

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0312426593
• ISBN 13: 9780312426590
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336