The opinions and characterizations in this story are the author’s, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the United States Government.
Nuristan, 1972
Afghans used to call it Kafiristan, Land of the Non-Believers. They renamed it Nuristan, Land of Light, after the King’s soldiers pushed through in the 1890s and forcibly converted the inhabitants from animism to Islam. Not much else changed. Nuristanis still spoke their own languages — at least five — distinct from the Pashtu and Dari spoken elsewhere in the country. Afghanistan’s last king had a hunting lodge in the area, and a rough, rocky road ran to it. That was the extent of development. When I worked there the winter and spring of 1972, the government’s writ didn’t extend much beyond Asadabad, the capital of Kunar Province to which Nuristan belonged.
The previous year my housemates in Jalalabad, in the province just south of Kunar, and our neighbor Jeffrey talked about going on a holiday weekend to the untouched fastness that enticed Kipling’s heroes in The Man Who Would Be King and Eric Newby on his Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. Stories of Sufis and other mystics finding sanctuary there fueled our fantasies. We imagined that Nuristan was to Afghanistan as Afghanistan was to America — a refuge from modernity, with all that implied for us survivors of the Sixties. A visit might give us a new outlook on the country and our relation to it.
Easier said than done. The only Westerners who did it were trophy hunters paying big money for guided trips to the lodge in search of Marco Polo sheep and other rare game. But we were Peace Corps: no money, no guns, and the police in Asadabad checked for permits. That kept out foreign poachers and hippies. Being neither, we applied. Not yet, we were told. We lacked the connections. In the Afghan bureaucracy, it was always safer to say nothing or, if pressed, to say no.
Jeffrey never made it, even though Nuristan would be the subject of his master’s thesis. I was luckier. My job took me there. The program the Peace Corps sent me to carry out, with a driver and three “engineers” from the Ministry of Provincial Development, offered wheat for work, supposedly to prevent starvation from drought, though nobody was starving in Kunar, the wettest province in all Afghanistan. “Could be different in Nuristan,” I reminded the team. “Could be dry as a bone.”
We got an early start the day we left, too soon to tell if the sky would clear. Hills pressed in on the valley as the road led north from Asadabad to Barikot, by the border with Pakistan. They squeezed out the farmland and forced the road up against the river. Logs had tumbled over the banks. Others lay on the shoulder like remnants from another age. Though most people thereabouts farmed, the real money came through illegal logging. In a country with so few trees, scarcity drove demand.
The valley widened again at Barikot, and a bridge that appeared too flimsy and narrow for logging trucks crossed into Pakistan. From this point downstream to its confluence with the Kabul River in Jalalabad, the river we had followed was known as the Kunar. The left fork led to the Hindu Kush in northern Nuristan, and our route would take us into the gorge from which it emerged. A small fort on a slender butte overlooked the junction.
“Nuristan begins in Barikot,” the Governor had said when we briefed him on our plans. He was suggesting Barikot was far enough.
Later, the director of provincial development, who unlike the Governor had spent his entire life in the province, smiled and said in Pashtu, “Please, Barikot’s the lowlands. The air would make a Nuristani sick.”
“They used to live there,” a Dari-speaking member of our team said. “Then the Pashtuns moved in.”
Like the Governor, the director had not traveled beyond Barikot. He had no funding for projects and would have found himself in a quandary if his pickup broke down. Our presence changed the calculus for him: we brought a vehicle, a program, and connections to the ministry in Kabul. Not only could he associate himself with progress, he could contribute to the cause. And his contacts were ready for us. Moving quickly, we commissioned several new wells and repairs to an underground irrigation channel.
Erosion had taken its toll on the road past Barikot, both from the hills above and the river below, and we undertook to shore it up once we found a mason. We pushed on to Kamdesh, a large village high above the road. A footpath angled toward it. As we got out of the van, stretching, peeing, buttoning our jackets, the sun also emerged. We didn’t see much of it in Asadabad, which was often socked in. Its warming rays fought with gravity for the rain that had recently fallen. Their radiance made the earth shine. A breeze smelled like the first day of spring.
“Come on!” I urged, unable to hold myself back. I was lean and clean but out of shape from a bout with hepatitis. I knew the engineers and the director would catch up, as I knew our driver would remain with the vehicle, a Peace Corps Travelall. I’d stopped trying to assure him I’d be responsible if anything happened to it. He was like a cowboy with his horse.
Hurrying toward us in the jiggedy-jog of old men going downhill, a hastily-composed delegation met us halfway. Good — they spoke Pashtu in addition to the local language. Some even looked Pashtun while others could have stepped out of the photos in Newby’s book.
Boys and girls came running from the village. Carpenters shaping a house beam looked up from their work pit and waved. Most of the men had gone to the high meadows, the elders reported. Women and girls watched from log houses with dried mud and stone in the chinks, the ground underneath so steep that roofs served as front decks for the neighbors in back.
Kamdesh, 1972
Excited by our visit, barefoot, bare-chested boys hopped on the dirt roof in front of a porch where we paused, at the director’s request, for tea and biscuits. They held one foot with one hand while trying to topple their friends. Survival of the fittest. Shirted and booted, I gave it a go. They were better, but I was bigger. Only a foreigner could get away with that as an adult.
After tea, the elders led us through highland pastures to a spring in disrepair. There, on a southern face, wild flowers bloomed. Across the way, snow still whitened the slopes. Down from the melt line, a goatherd and his charges turned to stare. He and I understood we’d never understand each other. That was our connection, and for a moment the Peace Corps as experienced crossed paths with the Peace Corps as imagined.
Unlike most volunteers, I hadn’t gotten into this right out of college, nor was I in it to avoid the draft. I had been an auditor for Special Forces in Vietnam. Visiting the team sites, outposts against the tide, I saw the real-time satisfaction that came from creating facts on the ground rather than searching, as those of us up the chain did, for words and numbers to describe them in the future or the past. I suppose that’s what I, a young man whose skills and training lay in the other direction, must have been seeking. Tangibility stood in for transcendence.
The joy that bubbled within me was lost on the team. At times like that I think they viewed me as a tourist, a stranger to the things that mattered to them. One who in Kabul bought new street shoes for Kunar had a rough go of it hiking to the village; he didn’t even attempt the spring. He and others noted Kamdesh was as green as Kunar, and they dismissed the project as something its residents could do, as they’d always done, on their own. They could have said that about everything we did.
Our most fundamental job, I reminded them, was to shake up the system. Outsiders could do things insiders couldn’t.
Bottom line, the government was nervous. There’d been signs of restiveness. Nationwide. Kabul wanted to show, at minimal cost, that it cared.
“Clean drinking water,” I added. “It saves lives.” Kamdesh wouldn’t be so green in the dry season. Water sought the low ground, Nuristanis the opposite. We could tighten the link.
The elders didn’t quite get what we were up to, but played along in the off chance we meant what we said. At their suggestion we also calculated the man-days to renovate a leaky aqueduct. We needed two or more projects to justify the trip, and I wanted a reason to come back.
Over bread and grilled mutton, the elders agreed to the terms. They even sent a watchman down to the road so our driver could join us. He said he’d seen a fox. There’s more than that, the elders replied. Those Marco Polo sheep, for example. The King’s lodge lay around the bend, but the temperature was dropping and our team had had enough for the day.
We didn’t inquire as to Sufis and mystics. Our quests were more practical. And ephemeral.
A visit changed nothing. You had to stick around. You had to engage. My successor arrived a few months after I left. To my knowledge, it was thirty years before anyone from the U.S. government returned.
The Pentagon, 2001
Six years later I joined the State Department, and I kept track of Afghanistan as best as I could from faraway posts. I figured the ragtag rebels stood no chance against the Soviet war machine. I assumed the absence of trees meant the absence of places to hide. I should have thought of caves since I’d first met my future wife coming out of one. I also hadn’t reckoned on Stingers, Pakistan, the Soviet Union’s weakened condition or the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism. And I hadn’t expected State to close our embassy just as the Soviets pulled out, nor did I expect the Afghan communists to hold power for three more years. After they were finally defeated, I thought tranquillity would return and our embassy would reopen, with positions available for my wife and me. Wrong again. Then I thought it would happen two years later, when the Taliban imposed peace over much of the country. Peace on their terms only, it soon became clear, and the rest of the world didn’t much interest them. That didn’t sound like the Afghans I knew. Finger on trigger, sure. Harsh? Well, so was the land. Intolerant, maybe. But ideological and inflexible? It couldn’t last.
Not after 9/11.
I was in the Pentagon that day, detailed to counterterrorism policy. We stayed until the smoke forced us out.
Jalalabad, 2003
In the summer of 2003 I returned to Jalalabad as the State Department’s representative on a Provincial Reconstruction Team. PRTs were experimental in those days. As the only one in eastern Afghanistan, we were assigned four provinces, Nuristan included.
Not yet fully staffed or officially designated a PRT, we squatted on one-third of a three-house compound in Jalalabad. Civilian operators and a Special Forces team occupied the other two-thirds. In all there were some forty armed Americans plus me. It was their first time in Afghanistan and they focused on the immediate, the near versus the far. If a person’s experience wasn’t tactically useful — and mine wasn’t — nobody had time for it.
We had plenty to do, even though Jalalabad’s infrastructure had come through the wars largely unscathed. The most striking differences were cultural: beards, burkhas, and references to the Koran. In the countryside there wasn’t much to “reconstruct.” So be it. Washington had resolved to do Afghanistan on the cheap. That’s where PRTs fit in.
We were given three objectives — enhance security, promote development, and help extend the authority of the national government. We added value by going places most NGOs, the UN, and Afghan officials couldn’t or wouldn’t go. Too long and rough a ride, too dangerous. Guns and radios made us different. They gave us range. I say “us” because I didn’t go anywhere without soldiers.
Unpredictability kept the bad guys guessing. We never pre-arranged meetings outside of town, and we never told our interpreters or guards where we were going until the wheels were rolling. Mostly we operated within a day’s drive of Jalalabad. Nuristan was too hard to get to, even for us. That had long been its history.
Having yielded to the King’s sword, the Nuristanis ceased to interest him. His attention, and that of his descendants, went elsewhere. Afghanistan’s royal rulers lacked the drive and resources to put their stamp on the region. Their totalitarian successors had the drive, but they couldn’t be everywhere. The communists hived Nuristan into a separate province. It turned out to be more a quarantine than a jurisdiction. Nobody in. Nobody out. That was fine by the inhabitants. They more than held their own against the Soviets early in the jihad, after which the invaders decided it wasn’t worth the candle. In their absence the Saudis bankrolled Wahhabi proselytization. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan eventually recognized Nuristan as an independent state.
Administratively the province made no sense. It had no government infrastructure, and its only two roads — the one to Kamdesh in the east, and another in the west — ran north-south. None connected east to west. The capital lay somewhere in the middle. Nobody we talked to had been there or knew anybody who had. An American in Jalalabad who had done research in Kamdesh many years before thought it was accessible only on foot. A UN agency had contracted for a road to the capital, but the Afghan contractor was out of pocket, and nobody knew how much progress he had made. Neither our embassy nor US military headquarters at Bagram could give the capital’s name or location. That’s your region, they told us.
From Jalalabad the drive and walk would take two days in one direction even if the known roads were safe, which they weren’t. As for helicopters, we had gotten them only once — for Tora Bora, a special case because Osama bin Ladin was last seen there. We hadn’t been able to use them for other travel except circuit flights to and from Bagram.
“The worst they can do is say no,” I told Rob, the PRT commander. It’s okay to be a pain in the ass if you’re just trying to do your job. As the man from State, I was seized with a fourth, albeit unstated, objective — shed light into obscure places that could go either way. I reminded Rob his colonel wanted us to hit all four of our provinces, and I told him how Nuristan was unlike any other, with real forests, monkeys, bears, goats with horns like a unicorn’s, sheep with horns like those you see in a marching band, snow leopards, regular leopards, wolves, foxes, snakes, peacocks, even parrots, or so I’d heard, and villages clinging to the mountainsides like some Afghan Shangri-La, their houses made of wood, not adobe like in the lowlands or stone like Tora Bora, men in leggings instead of baggy trousers. Fierce in battle, mellow in life, those mountain men went out with the flocks, smoked a little homegrown, stayed gone for days.
The women do all the work, I continued — tend the fields, cook, clean, sew, raise the children. True, a foreigner didn’t interact with them any more than in other parts of Afghanistan. But at least they didn’t wear burkhas. They draped scarves over their shoulders except when a stranger approached. The young ones paused before pulling them over their heads. The old ones never bothered. You’ll see red hair, I promised; blue eyes. Legend had it the Nuristanis descended from Alexander the Great’s army. Until their conversion, they were famous for their wine. Another legend had them the original Afghans, pushed into the mountains when Muslim invaders swept in from the west.
Each month that summer, some twenty Nuristani women were brought to the hospital in Jalalabad for landmine injuries suffered while working the fields. Sixty of them had lost their legs in the last two years. There were rumors of al-Qaeda and even Osama himself moving in. Nuristan wasn’t Pashtun, but fathers still sent their sons to the madrassas in Pakistan from which the Taliban drew its most dedicated recruits.
One village burned another. Shepherds shot shepherds. Most violence went unreported. A distant sparrow falling, it didn’t threaten our interests, not directly, anyway. In Kabul the one ethnic Nuristani minister in the cabinet told the chargé d’affaires and me it was tribal, or village against village. The people would remain politically quiescent, he maintained, so long as our forces stopped hounding two reformed mullahs, one in Kamdesh, the other, in the central part of the province, who slipped through a trap door when he heard the helicopters and had been on the lam ever since.
Nuristan had no foreigners, civilian or military, and no soldiers from the national army. The only donor presence was an Afghan NGO in the old hunting lodge. Plus that UN road builder, wherever he might be. We were treating Nuristan the way the Soviets and Taliban had — with a neglect you couldn’t really call benign.
In that sense Nuristan remained as all Afghanistan had been to us in the decade before 9/11. As I said to Rob, we saw how that turned out. Wrapping personal motives into public policy, I argued for giving the Nuristanis something to think about, something new. And something old, I thought to myself. A resumption. Redemption, almost — if we followed through. If.
Bagram wouldn’t even consider our request until we provided the name of the capital and its coordinates. We eventually got that from a UN contact, and to our surprise Bagram came right back with a date. Two days before D Day, after further conversation with our UN friend, we called Bagram with a different name for the capital — Parun — and new coordinates. Rob was embarrassed. “All the more reason to go,” I said. And better a revision ahead of time than getting off the helicopter in the wrong location.
Kunar, 1972
Not often in life do peripatetics like me get to go over — in this case, fly over — our past. The prospect busied my brain with impulses I could not — then or now — articulate. If memory served, Kunar, including Nuristan, had been my favorite assignment in the Peace Corps. That may say more about me, or my state of mind, than the province, because conditions were the hardest there.
Kunar is where I learned to live alone.
At first I tried sleeping with the others on the floor of the development office. After a few nights of their snoring, I rented a room over the bazaar and arranged for a rough-hewn table with chair and a rope bed I laid my sleeping bag on. At night I draped a shawl over the window. Some might have called the room cozy, though it had neither heat, electricity, nor plumbing, and there was no public bath. Morning and evening I’d wash in the ditch out front. Every Friday around sunset I’d get a bucket of hot water from the tea house and take it behind a wall in the fields down toward the river. I’d bring a soap dish, shaving cream and razor, and a towel that never completely dried. That field also served as my toilet. I can’t remember doing any laundry. An old Army trick — when you can’t bathe, dispense with the underwear.
Some on the team were superb — effective, composed, and wise. They tended to be older, and it made me wonder if their generation had been raised differently. The youngest, the one with the inappropriate shoes, was always looking for an excuse to go back to Kabul. Only the oldest spoke Pashtu fluently. The other two were more comfortable with Dari, which I hadn’t trained for. There were no foreigners to bounce ideas off, not on a regular basis. A couple of UN engineers paid a visit, as did an English-speaking Afghan seconded from the Ministry as Peace Corps special assistant on wheat for work. He went with us for a long day on the north bank of the Pech River, a tributary of the Kunar. We kept having problems with the math. At the end of it he told me I was working the team too hard.
The Governor, like the current one, was useless. He spent his days either in Kabul or in the official residence. He knew better than to trust a young, smart-ass foreigner who lived over the bazaar. Attitudes changed once the wheat arrived. After that we couldn’t get him out of our hair.
Our most effective support came from a feudal lord called a khan, a tall, thin man in his forties, dignified and naturally tonsured, who helped us resolve disputes among the villages and convince them, against their better judgment, they’d be better off cooperating with us and each other. One day, after an extended walk along a canal that ran from the Pesh past a village where a few men stepped forward to pay their respects and ask for wells, on beyond a waterwheel at an abandoned mill with a pond where boys swam in the summer, mulberry trees alongside, everything man-made falling to ruin because the headman of the next village died and the villagers did not agree with the Governor’s choice for a successor, let alone how they should share the cost and effort of maintaining the pool — the khan said, “It’s crazy, isn’t it?”
He said this in English, not the Pashtu in which we had always spoken. Taken aback, I saw him in a new light. He never wore a hat, I realized, and the hair above his ears grew out untamed and curly to compensate for the bald spot on top. Most men in the valley who could afford it wore a sport coat that time of year. He always appeared in a sweater.
I asked why he hadn’t let on about the English.
“I want you to learn,” he replied. He could be Delphic at times, one of those quirks you put up with in a friend. I could have asked, learn what? But if it wasn’t Pashtu, I didn’t want to know. That special assistant from Kabul had given me enough advice for a while.
I asked how he learned. Nobody else in the province came close.
He stopped for a dip of snuff.
I got out a cigarette, and the director caught up. We resumed walking.
In English, the khan said his father had also been a khan, and the Governor at the time asked him to turn in his weapons. His father possessed mortars, machine guns, and rockets. In Pakistan you could get anything. His family, employees, and neighbors depended on him. So he refused.
Sometime thereafter the Governor invited him to a dinner in his residence. This khan’s father was suspicious, but he couldn’t say no, and he figured the code of hospitality would protect him. At dinner’s end the Governor announced he had a present. He clapped his hands, and a soldier came forward with a package. The khan unwrapped it. Inside were handcuffs. More soldiers entered the room.
They took him to Jalalabad and then Kabul. The Minister of Interior threatened to kill him unless all his sons age ten and over reported to the capital. So the khan I knew went. He was twelve, and they put him in jail. Conditions were decent. The family had money, and the father hired English tutors for his sons so their time would not be wasted. After seven years they were released. The khan seemed to bear no grudges. It was water over the dam.
To my further surprise the director seemed to understand him. “Do you also speak English?” I asked.
“No,” he replied in Pashtu. “But I know the story.”
The lesson I took from Kunar was that projects aren’t so important. People are.
I met the woman who would become my wife a week after I left the province. Done with the Peace Corps, I was taking in the Bamiyan valley from the head of the Buddha the Taliban later blew up. She stepped out of the cave that led to it, her boyfriend close behind.
In 2003 she was in Denmark with our daughter.
Toward the end of my time in Kunar we drove through a fork in the road where a madman, a leewanai, which derives from the Pashtu for wolf, stood chained to a nearby tree. Hunched over, hair matted, shirt not much more than a rag, shoeless, he prowled the ground between tree and road, and he gestured, wild-eyed, at us, hands moving to his mouth.
I asked my companions if he was hungry. The man was skin and bones. An earthen jar, probably for water, sat next to the tree.
“The mullah blessed that tree,” responded my oldest colleague, who came from just down the road. It was warmer here; we could already feel it. We were traveling to the burial of his daughter, not quite two years of age. “The practice goes way back,” he added. “Our father’s fathers.”
“It’s supposed to cure him,” our driver said. We called him Haji because he’d made the pilgrimage. A modern man in a primitive place, he wanted to believe.
“There’s a shrine near Jalalabad,” I remembered. A shrine for the insane.
“It costs money,” our colleague said. “And this is closer.” Here was a man who’d lost every one of his kids to disease. Malaria, he figured. Bad water, I guessed.
The cemetery lay outside the village, in a field with white pebbles, the grave already dug. A mullah presided. Family and neighbors stood in support. The mother moaned. Her husband stayed the night. For all the gray in his mustache he might have been in his thirties, his wife — his only wife — probably younger.
The rest of us drove to Jalalabad. I found a room in a cheap hotel, as Jeffrey was in grad school, my former housemates had quit or moved to Kabul, and I didn’t know the new crop of volunteers well enough to want to talk with them. The Afghans stayed at a tea house.
We stopped for our colleague on the way back. I asked how he was doing and he said something in Arabic that probably equated to the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh. He shrugged. He grimaced. What could he do? I had been worried — without him and Haji the team could have fallen apart. Both were calm, confident, and competent. Neither had an ax to grind. They understood how things got done and — the colleague, anyway — still wanted to leave a mark.
At the fork in the road the leewanai was gone.
“It worked,” Haji commented. In the front passenger seat, I looked over at him, a city dweller who wore Western trousers and a karakul cap. He looked at me. Almost everything he said could be taken two ways.
“Good,” I responded. We all wanted to believe.
Only once did Haji lose his cool and the ambiguity that went with it. We were on that same road, a week or so later but before the trip to Kamdesh. We were shot at, sort of. Pop pop, nothing automatic or close. I heard but didn’t understand until he pointed to two guys on a rock toward the back of a knoll receding into the distance. They were leaning against it, leering and sneering, rifles at rest. Single shots. Haji had his foot on the gas, and we were soon out of range.
“They want this,” he said, patting the dashboard. I suppose they’d never seen a Travelall before. By the time we reached Asadabad he was proposing we pack up for Kabul. He wasn’t frightened. He was angry.
I argued it was random, meaning them on that rock and us on that road at that time. And if it wasn’t random, why return so soon to the shooting gallery? That road was the only way out. Were we going to let two derelicts wipe out everything we had started?
I couldn’t stop Haji. I couldn’t stop the engineers, either. The youngest two figured they’d get another assignment. The oldest wasn’t so sure, and he wanted to stay close to home. Whatever they did, even if it was nothing, they would do as a group. Safety in numbers. You didn’t always see that in Afghanistan. While they consulted with the director of development, Haji drove off in the Travelall and I walked to the Governor’s office to call Peace Corps Kabul.
The country director got on the line. Interrupting me, he said, “What’s with these death threats?” His special assistant must have gotten that from the kid with bad shoes, who claimed locals had warned him of additional attacks.
I told him what I told the kid. “No way it’ll happen. Pashtun code, you can’t do that to a guest.” Nobody had it in for us. They had it in for each other. Sometimes we got caught in the middle. What happened on that road could have happened to anybody, anywhere. Did he want to pull us for that?
“Mmm,” he grumbled. For political reasons the government needed a program in Kunar, and Peace Corps wanted to be part of the solution. I’m counting on you, he said. Use your head.
Haji was back two days later, a pistol in his pocket, a smile on his face. He’d met with the country director, and the pistol seemed to give him peace of mind. We got a lot of wells dug, roads improved, irrigation systems enhanced, mouths fed, and were never shot at again.
The Pech River Valley, 1972, 1979, and 2003
The earplugs you wear on a Chinook tend to keep you to yourself. You can mug and make gestures, but you can’t maintain a conversation with anybody who’s not next to you. Eddie, our seniormost operator, sat on my right, but he was talking to his interpreter on his right. On my other side was the back door, ramp down for a view of where we’d been. No dust in Kunar. You could see right through the air.
There’d been some discussion about who would go. Bagram reserved space for its own and so had been parsimonious with the seat allocations, giving us only nine, apportioned to Rob, his interpreter, a captain, three PRT soldiers, Eddie, his interpreter, and me. That left no room for our resident Special Forces. As it turned out, there were plenty of extra seats. The Chinook arrived early that morning with just five passengers — young Americans in backpacking attire. Each carried an M-4 rifle. Beards were optional.
We followed the Kunar River north to Asadabad. Seeing the road below us reminded me how it sometimes ran right beside the river and sometimes crept up the cliffs that formed the valley walls. At the high points you could stop and take a reckoning. In some ways the view was better than from a helicopter because you could take your time and look around, not just out the back door or through a smudged porthole. Where touched by water, the valley was so intensely green and different from the rest of the country that we volunteers used to take visitors there on day trips out of Jalalabad. Once we took a ferry to the east bank and chatted with nomads hauling firewood to their camp. They were our zoo; we were theirs. Unless heavily armed, foreigners didn’t cross the river anymore. The other side was too close to Pakistan.
The infantry base and then Asadabad came up. It seemed larger and leafier than the muddy, dark, and spare town I remembered. In those days kerosene lanterns hung from shop eaves, and a bright, mantled version burned at the tea house. I bought candles for reading and had a flashlight I stopped using. I thought I saw better without it.
From the town center the Chinook swerved west into the Pech valley. In 1979 the communists executed more than a thousand men and boys in the first village up, the most infamous massacre of the war. The khan, the director, and I must have started our walk to the waterwheel from or near this future killing field. He wanted me to see the men at work, some knee-deep in the river hauling rocks to form a weir, others digging a diversion ditch that led to the existing canal. Later they would build a protection wall. It was our most ambitious project, a scene out of a movie. Mud-splattered faces made the laborers’ teeth look whiter than they were. We stopped to talk. This is good, the men said. But it’s hard. You should pay us more. I smiled until they did, too. They were working together, not a common occurrence, and they liked it.
No sign of that now. The whole valley looked different. I had been there in the winter, at a time when snow reached the valley floor. Our second day into it, a truck overturned on the road at the edge of a high precipice between us and Asadabad. The cab projected over space. We peeked in. It was empty. Boys told us the driver and his helper crawled out and were down in the nearest village. It took us several days to assemble enough men to right the truck so that we — or any vehicle — could pass.
In the meantime we trekked up side valleys to look for potential projects, waving as we walked at fathers and sons shoveling their roofs, boys sledding on cardboard slabs. One day we stopped to talk to four men with iron staves who had journeyed down a trail from the north. They hailed from the westernmost part of Nuristan, happy to have made it that far. Their breath came out in pillowy puffs. Snow was on their clothes and in their hair. Bigger than us, they conveyed the bumptious, ebullient air of backwoodsmen on a holiday. They were looking for work. In Asadabad, they hoped. If not there, Jalalabad.
Most people we talked to couldn’t have been friendlier, and we came up with a number of projects. One valley went differently. It was snowing hard and starting to stick. A group of men met us as we climbed to their village. They asked our business and said they wouldn’t be needing any help, thank you. They didn’t want to speak to me, the foreigner with the bad Pashtu. That didn’t keep them from staring. Kafir? they asked my counterparts. I must have been their first non-believer. I tried to smile but it wasn’t in my heart. He believes in the Bible, the oldest replied on my behalf. A Christian. They nodded. They might have been early fundamentalists. Or maybe they, like the Governor and director at first, didn’t think we could deliver the wheat.
A man with a wheelbarrow looked up, shading his eyes. The shadow of our Chinook must have passed over him. A farmer in a nearby field gawked, mouth open, at the pantomime before he too looked up. Could he have been deaf? I wondered if any vestige of wheat for work, any memory of the visitors who prompted it, remained. Whereas those men might have wanted to fly like us, I envisioned my feet on solid ground, with them. Crazy. I was happy to be going to Parun. Kamdesh a second time would have made me even happier.
In that area the Pech River veered north. So the Chinook did, too, flying below the ridgelines. Downriver, scrub trees too small to log marked the canyon walls. Up this way, trees covered the slopes. The helicopter slowed; the pitch changed. Fifty-seven minutes after takeoff, we landed in the headwaters of the Pech, here a shallow stream in a high, narrow valley.
Nuristan, 2003
The mountaintops glistened with snow. A forest of deciduous trees, a rare sight in Afghanistan, blanketed the hillside between us and the sun. The leaves were changing color. Upstream the valley broadened into cultivated fields, and wooden houses perched on a sunlit ridge to the west. A man approached to say the Governor’s office was in the village ahead.
The government had built a new provincial headquarters in a low setting down from the main village. The concrete and wood structure had a reception room on the second floor with a red carpet and cushions against the wall. A deck overlooked the Pech and a tributary to the east. The Governor and provincial director of security kept offices on the floor below. Other officials — there weren’t many — worked out of their houses.
The Governor was in Kabul, so the deputy received us. He exhibited the quiet authority you often see in large, older men like him. A fuzzy, gray beard you could imagine grandchildren playing with covered his cheeks. The security director’s beard was stern, black, and well-suited to his uniform, which included epaulettes, necktie, and a saucer cap with braid on the brim.
Jalalabad’s intelligence chief happened to be visiting. His winter jacket showed him as a lowlander not used to the mountain air. Sharing information with a colleague, he explained. Getting him to do something, he later confided. The whole time he held a satellite phone in his hand, all the good it did. He couldn’t get through. I let him try mine. Same result. Eddie got to talking with him.
The deputy insisted, as Afghans tend to do with strangers, that Nuristan was totally safe. He had walked the breadth of the province without incident. The people supported the government. They just wanted teachers and doctors and donors and such.
What about the mullah on the lam?
“Living peacefully in a side valley down the Pech,” the deputy said. He squinted, pointing toward where the helicopter had landed. “A little past that. We could go ourselves.” He smiled as he thought about it. Maybe, he corrected, it would be better if he arranged a meeting. That might take a day or two. His eyes took on a sly look. How long were we here for?
A servant brought tea on a polished, silver platter. The glass mugs sparkled. At first the deputy worried whether he had enough. No problem. Our five tagalongs had not joined us. They were out getting the lay of the land.
“And the mullah in Kamdesh,” I asked, “the one said to have reformed?”
The deputy didn’t know about him. Kamdesh was a world apart. The path there went to 12,000 feet, a difficult passage this time of year. Kamdesh people weren’t like Parun people. They were political. They sold off their timber.
“Will you sell yours,” I asked, “when the road comes to Parun?”
“The road’s already here,” he said. We hadn’t seen any vehicles or other signs of it. “It needs work,” he explained. Not a month old, and the river was already nibbling at the verges. Snow would close it five months a year. We were at 8,700 feet.
They gave us a lunch and afterward a boy chorus sang of their homeland. We never saw a shop or a woman. Neither school nor clinic. The Nuristanis understood. They knew isolation had costs as well as benefits.
We hiked back to the stream bed that served as a landing zone. All the men came to watch. Most — there must have been a hundred — squatted in a line. One man stood apart. A wiry, white-bearded farmer, he tied a rope to a large, bundled stack of hay in our midst. He looped the other end of the rope around his foot. Tumpline around his forehead, he rolled back onto the haystack, kicked forward, rocked up, and staggered off with his load. The heck with our circus, he’d been around long enough to know you made hay while the sun shone — a storm was blowing in fast from the north. You wouldn’t want to fly through that, not in these mountains.
We couldn’t establish radio contact with the helicopters, Bagram, Jalalabad, or anybody. My satellite phone proved equally ineffective. The rain shear came to within a kilometer or two before helicopters approached low out of the valley to the south. An Apache circled and the Chinook eased in, keeping close to the eastern slopes. In an unexpected whoosh it blew the leaves off in a flash of red and yellow. They fluttered like leaflets, and I grabbed one out of the air. Continuing down, the helicopter sent out a refreshing spray, like liquid dust, as it landed in the stream.
To tell the truth, part of me had been hoping for a no-show. Just for a day. Or two. We had packed for it. Travelling to remote destinations made them not so distant any more, especially if multiplied by time spent there. What became distant was that which used to be near. We understood this without thinking through the ramifications. And of course the perspective reversed itself after our return. For me that occurred in segments, like the chapters in a book.
The three officials who had hosted us waved. The hundred men on their haunches gave no sign. One day — a few hours, really — wasn’t much more than a tease. We hadn’t set eyes on a single project. That mullah on the lam represented other unfinished business. He must have been lonely, nobody to talk to. And the Sufis were long gone.
On the flight out I felt good, better than good, and much better than I had a right to. I think we all felt that way. We felt like pioneers. Not pioneers… explorers. The trick was not to become occupiers. Countries with muscle and money tended to go down that road. We had reason, and we hoped we could give the Nuristanis reason, to believe we would prove the exception to the rule. Yes, Americans went everywhere. But then we moved on.
A couple weeks after that the 10th Mountain Division launched Operation Mountain Resolve in Nuristan and Kunar. In the course of it four American soldiers died in a helicopter crash and another in a Humvee hit by a mine. Afghan civilians died in U.S. airstrikes, according to news reports. Several months later, two British contractors for the UN were gunned down with their interpreter in western Nuristan. Taliban or the like, the government said. Bandits, others speculated. Anybody’s guess. Their guides disappeared. Maybe they did it. Or maybe they were scared. Nobody was arrested. President Karzai appointed a new governor, an Afghan-American said to be a cousin of the mullah on the lam. And then Nuristan got quiet again, as best I could tell from Copenhagen. When you’re alone, or cut off, everybody and everything become special. Perceptions change.
The quiet caused some to wonder if we were letting the bad Afghanistan happen all over again in tiny little Nuristan. Not us. To prove it, American forces seeded the area with outposts. When that led to some of the war’s bloodiest battles, including one at Kamdesh, we decided there was no better place to start the drawdown.
Author’s Note: I believe I took all the photos except that Eddie (not his real name, which I never learned) took the one captioned “Wait and See” and possibly “Choral Anxiety.” He gave me the images soon after the trip. I don’t think he would object to their publication, but I have no way of contacting him. Either he or Rob’s interpreter (also no way to contact) probably took the one titled “Waiting for a Lift.” It couldn’t have been me, because I’m in it.
A previous version of this story appeared in the Asia Literary Review in 2015.
In his retirement, Frank Light has returned to the love of writing that led, years ago, to an MFA in fiction from the University of California at Irvine. Fifteen literary journals and anthologies have published adaptations such as this from a draft memoir titled Adjust to Dust: On the Backroads of Southern Afghanistan. A number of his poems and other essays have also recently been published. He is donating his prize money to Friends of Afghanistan (afghanconnections.org), whose mission is to “sustain an information exchange about Afghanistan and its people and to network for their peace and prosperity.”
