Reporting from Afghanistan

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THE WILD WORLD OF AFGHAN CIVIL SOCIETY

The PAOs at Bagram tell me a British op is in the planning stages, but there is no chance of a pool for about five or six days. I take the opportunity to escape the elements (I sleep in a tent, eat in a tent, and work in another tent. I live in an ocean of tents. It's like camping--starry nights, lousy food, a ubiquity of dirt--but without the marshmallows and "Kumbaya" singalongs.) I kick down to Kabul to check out the loya jirga, or "grand council" meeting, the indigenous electoral process that is based on a 300-year-old Afghan tradition.

Starting June 10, 2002, 1,501 Afghans from across the country will meet to hash out the structure of a two-year transitional government. Representatives to the meeting are being selected by secret ballot in the nation's 381 districts. So far, 109 delegates, including six women, have been chosen.

Selection has been delayed, and the first of the three rounds is still going on. Part of the problem is predictable corruption, especially in outlying provinces where international observers, who are overseeing the balloting in the capital, can't monitor abuses. Vote buying, intimidation and disruption of the process are rife. People on the street are talking about war breaking out after June 16, when the loya jirga will have produced a new government.

I attended a first-round election in a western Kabul neighborhood of ethnic Hazaras that was completely destroyed in the fighting following the Russian pullout. Hazaras are descendants of Genghis Khan, it is said. They look Chinese and have a reputation for being wild, warlike and unpredictable.

At ten in the morning, it is already broiling hot. A crowd of some 5,000 people mills out in the sun, their attention partially centered on a large stage. They wear traditional Afghan garb. Women are cloaked in burkas; some hold umbrellas, others carry placards bearing mimeographed campaign posters--just a one-color run off of a face, a name, in green, red, black. I work my way up on the stage to talk to an official, and he offers me a seat. The floor of the stage is covered in Afghan rugs, and a bouquet of plastic flowers livens up a rough podium. Just as I'm beginning to feel comfortable, the official is addressing the sea of people from behind a podium. He speaks into a microphone wired to a car battery, and I am being introduced.

"With us is a journalist from Kabul. Please welcome him."

The people put their hands together and clap for me; the applause spatters like a sudden rainfall. I notice that the official's hand is missing four fingers; only a thumb remains. An explosion has blown off his hand down past the knuckles, halfway to the wrist. The wound looks old--there are no pink scars, and the man holds a cigarette pinched between the thumb and the stump.

This happens out here--you suddenly notice that the person you're talking to is missing fingers or a foot.

The man with the bad hand starts singing verses of the Koran, as if to soothe and pacify the crowd for the bad news to come: most of them are in the wrong polling place. Apparently, that morning officials from the Ministry of the Interior had announced polling places that amounted to complete disinformation. Rumors say the Ministry has been obstructing the process. The ministry is headed by a Panjshiri, which is an ethnic group concerned about its political future. The Panjshir Valley, two hours north of Kabul, was the stronghold of Ahmed Shah Massoud during the Taliban years. Massoud and his followers formed a bulwark that prevented the Taliban from taking over the entire country. He was assassinated by al Qaeda operatives posing as journalists two days before September 11th, but his people inherited the key ministries--defense, interior, and foreign affairs--when the Karzai government was assembled in Bonn late last year. The Panjshiris, 100,000 people in a country of 24 million, control the government, and they'll never have it this good again if they don't manipulate the electoral process. So they manipulate away--threats, intimidation, bribes, lies, thuggery. They know how to fight, but are perhaps less deft at diplomacy.

An Afghan loya jirga rep informs the people that four districts have shown up in a polling place intended for only one. Not only that, people who were meant to be here has gone elsewhere. People start whistling their displeasure. Notes are passed through the crowd and reach the platform, intended for Lucy, a flaxen-haired British UN observer. One is written in Russian. No one deciphers that one. Another pleads, "Please don't daze and confuse the people. Don't send us home. Let us vote here today."

Another warns in Dari, "The people are afraid that the police will know whom they vote for. Someone should announce that the vote is secret."

Another note says, "Police officers came early this morning dressed in civilian clothes."

Another: "You must give me the microphone. I have something to say."

A not-so-secret police officer climbs on the stage, palms the mic and announces his plan for fixing the problem. His plan involves a complicated arrangement to reselect delegates from each neighborhood gozar, or zone, right then and there. The result would be 32 new delegates, as opposed to the 20 that have already been selected at the neighborhood level. His plan seems to please the crowd, which is waiting for something that might salvage the vote. The people cheer, and clap their hands, and break into massive groups to select new delegates. Fights erupt as names are scrawled on whatever paper is available. The surreptitious officer stands on the stage watching with a policeman's demeanor. He wears a salwar kameez and a gray vest, and his face, with its salt-and-pepper beard, appears to be Hazara. He holds the microphone as if has has no plans to share it. He has taken control of the process, and no one on the stage knows who he is. Lucy is outraged. She has spent much of the morning shooing uniformed police off the stage, from where they would just stand and glower at the crowd.

"Who is that guy?" she asks. "By whose authority did he make that announcement?" She sends her interpreter to kick the man off the stage. The man stares at her with a cruel look. Lucy stares back, scowling, and the man slowly steps down. Then he turns around, lifts his foot and props it on the stage in defiance.

"I am the intelligence officer for this area," he says. "Everyone knows me."

He seems to be employed by the Ministry of the Interior. The guy has nothing to hide. At least in Afghanistan, people are totally open about interfering with the electoral process.

Lucy makes a call back to the loya jirga commission for guidance. Sorting out the problem will take hours, and people come onto the stage to make their cases, or to gawk, and it isn't long before the density of people on the stage equals the density of the people in the crowd. The stage might collapse. A soldier wades into the crowd and swings elbows to clear a space. Lunchtime has passed, and there is no voting going on. People are agitated. The sun is whipping down on us, and its oppressive heat thins the crowd and subdues the hotheads. When the UN winds up canceling the election, people are just grateful to sift back down the alleys and into their adobe houses to beat the heat.

The next day, in a neighborhood that is basically a labyrinth of adobe houses and alleys, with a mosque in the middle, district elections are held, the first time in 20 years for this area. Tarps and woven rugs are laid out on the streets, and a bombed-out building is covered with a massive floral tapestry. Everyone sits cross-legged in a crowd of incredible density, about one thousand people, 30% female.

What ensues is kind of like an auction. A turbaned man at a podium delivers an incredibly long-winded speech, and then calls out names. Groups in the crowd raise their hands. This goes on for a few hours: calling names, raising hands. A man with a plastic pitcher and a glass works his way through the crowd, doling out water. The polling goes completely without incident, perhaps due to the massive police presence. Forty riot police swinging batons stand at either end of the crowd, looking on. One teenaged kid tries to walk past them, and two soldiers push him back where he came from.

"What are you doing? Go select your representative," a cop scolds. The kid struggles to slip the gauntlet and takes a solid whack in the back of the head that sends him reeling.

Other cops frisk kids who emerge from an adobe alleyway. A three-year-old they let toddle past without a pat down, but the six-year-olds are thoroughly searched.

One of the cops explains the heavy police presence. "To make people feel secure," he says. He wears a white helmet with a visor. "We don't want to interfere. If they call us, we come."

The cop lingers, following me. He wants to make sure I write something down.

"We haven't been paid in six months," he says. "We've gotten no salary. I'm broke. If they paid us, things would get better. If they don't give us money, things will get worse."

How exactly might things get worse?

"If I catch a thief, I'll take his money and let him go. I won't take him to jail."

The cop gives his name as Mahamadim--the Muslim equivalent of John Doe.

In the buildings around the election, the windows are packed with people watching. A woman, a would-be delegate, ascends the election platform, monitored by the same crew from the morning before--Lucy and the man with the half-hand. "Take your burka off so we can see who you are," the announcer says. Women cheer and raise their hands. Children in the crowd raise their hands too, although only 18 and older can vote.

In the morning, I return to Bagram Airbase. Waiting as always for a combat mission, I ask to accompany a civil affairs team to a local village. I travel in a van with Major Brian Cole, US Army, a Tennessee native with a thick accent, to a girls' school in Jabal Saraj, a half hour north of Bagram. All along the way children goose-step like Russian troops and wave or salute. Ahmed Shah Massoud blew all of the bridges leading north in his defensive stand against the Taliban. The civil affairs guys are helping rebuild one. At almost every turn, massive brick and stone structures lie in the riverbeds. A pontoon bridge has been constructed at one crossing; further on, we drive on metal planks that have been laid from bank to bank, with no guardrails. The van's driver edges the wheels just onto the planks, with a few inches of room for error on either side.

Jabal Saraj itself is on the far side of the Solang River. The town has some of the grandeur of a small city in Europe, with stone walls and twisting alleys, and the bridge leading into town is old and elegant, and blown to smithereens. In the river on the verge of the village are armored cars and tanks, lots of them, all destroyed, flipped over, ripped open. Some armored cars have been stacked one on top of another and filled with rocks to prop up the new temporary bridge that goes into the village. The Afghan translator says that the far side of the riverbank was the site of a slaughter. The Taliban crossed over into the village on the bridge, which was then blown. Massoud's men boiled out of their hiding places to spring the trap. Some 200 Taliban were butchered in the cross fire, on both sides of the river. On a grassy verge on the side, there is a mass grave. Jabal Saraj stayed in the hands of the Northern Alliance for the entire war, with four exceptions. It fell to the Taliban for a one-week period, one time, a few days, another. The longest was three weeks. The people fled into the Panjshir Valley, Massoud's impregnable redoubt to the west.

The school we are to visit sits at the top of a hill in the small city full of shops, labyrinths and adobe houses. We follow a rivulet up the hill to its source, under the school, a mud-walled affair with a battered metal gate.

"This is where we're going to build a new roof," Cole announces. The school has been shelled, and one section of the mud walls is shattered and melting back into the earth.

Major Cole and two of his men heft boxes of school supplies from the back of the van, pass the gate and walk into a packed-earth courtyard. The courtyard is no bigger than a backyard swimming pool. Water bubbles up from a gash in the earth and cuts through the courtyard in rivulets that sneak under the wall and out into the street. About 200 schoolgirls, most wearing black shawls, stand in groups. School is out for the day; lessons in Dari, English, Pashto, Psysique, Arab, geography and biology are all finished, but the kids want to watch the exotic foreigners, especially since they seem to be bearing gifts.

Major Cole enters the principal's cool, dark office. The walls are adobe, 18 inches thick. The concrete floor is cracked, and wasp nests are nestled in the plank ceiling, crossed with thick, rough-hewn beams.

Three desks line the room. Huge holes have been patched where chunks of mud fell out of the walls during shelling. Charts of Arabic writing and attendance records are pinned to the mottled, mud walls. A kerosene lantern hangs from a nail. An aluminum teakettle sits in a windowsill. Three portraits of Massoud, obligatory in this part of the country, are nailed up. A massive metal, battered filing cabinet, battleship gray, fills up one corner.

About 12 people are seated on wooden benches and two old office chairs: eight women, one old man, major Cole the translator, and me. No burkas are worn in the room. Scarves and turbans are used for headgear, the same color as the walls. Cole's soldiers linger in the courtyard, snapping photos.

Cole introduces himself through his interpreter.

"We have brought school supplies today to give to you all. And I also have some food that is for the teachers and people that work here. We, my soldiers and I, believe that school is very important, especially for girls. I have two girls at home, one is three years old and another is a two-month-old that was born since I've been here."

The principal, Zakia Zaki, swathed in a black veil, a woman with deep brown eyes and strong, veined, man's hands, speaks to Cole through the translator.

"I'm very sorry you have had to leave your family to come serve the people of Afghanistan. Thank you for helping our people."

"Tell her she's welcome, and tell her that in my country, and in all countries, school is the future. Because no matter where you live, children are the future."

Zaki is also a radio announcer. She works from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. at the station, then from 8 to 1230 at the school, and then back from 4 to 6 at the radio station. Zaki, with 17 years of teaching experience (including the Taliban years, when women were forbidden from working outside the home), is a thick, strong, pillar of Afghan society.

A teacher says there are 2,000 kids in the school, 450 books and 35 teachers. Most of the teachers are graduates of the school.

The ceremonies over, I ask if any of the teachers were still working at the school during the fighting against the Taliban. .

"There were five or six that were here during the fighting."

Zaki points to the wall.

"This was damaged during the fighting. The teachers brought food and supplies to Massoud's soldiers. My brother, my cousin, my uncle were all fighting. I myself had to bring them food, because they were fighting Taliban."

"That took great courage to be a teacher then," Cole says.

An ancient man, Mir Baba Sahed, who says he is only 55, says, "When the Taliban came here all the people moved to Panjshir. The old people stayed. They were killed. We are sorry. During the fighting the school was damaged. We are happy that you are going to fix the school."

Out in the courtyard, shaded by healthy young saplings, kids are playing and jostling. The creek bubbles up out of the ground and splits into two streams that cut across the courtyard. The kids hop over the water. Nina Shirzai, 11 years old, stands beside to a tree that has a tank shell dangling from a rope. Next to the long brass casing there is a stick with a 20 mm anti-aircraft shell jammed on the end. A bell. Nina says she wants to be a doctor when she grows up. She has red hair and gray green eyes, her hair back in a pony tail.

Farshta Abdulahad, also 11, says, "In the future, I want to graduate and go to college. I want to be an engineer, repair the streets, and buildings.

A thick knot of onlookers forms, National Geographic cover girls swathed in scarves and eager to share their dreams and aspirations.

Fatima Rika, 15, has been in school for five years. She wears a black coat and a white scarf. "In seven years I will graduate, and I want to be a doctor. I want to work for my country, my province.

"But I don't want to wear a burka," she adds. "I don't like it.

"During the fighting, we moved to Panjshir," she continues. "An airplane dropped a bomb. When it exploded, I was very afraid, and we ran. When the airplane came, we were in school. We didn't know: where should we go? All the people were crying. Where should we go?"

Nina says that her brother Mohaba was injured during the civil war fighting.

"Also, I am very, very sorry: my father during the fighting, he died. He was a teacher. He died here in Jabal Saraj. Whenever I walk to school, I think of my father."

His name was Mohammad Taheb. He was 40.

Once Nina tells her story, it seems as though every kid there has family members that died in war. The students tug on my arm, look up at me with their piercing, Afghan eyes, and tell me about death, as if I could do something about it.

Mariam Farid, 13, lost her brother. Her cousin, Zia, is 20 years old; he lost one leg, up to the hip, and another, at the knee, when he stepped on a land mine. He was both lucky and unlucky to be alive.

"It's all he thinks about," Farid says. "'I am a young man. I have no feet. I can't walk. We have no food. I want to be working.' It has made him crazy."

More children throng around to tell about their dead. "My father, my aunt, my brother, my mother...."

One child, Namiola, ten, reveals that her head had been injured in a bombing attack. She runs her hand over her thick, coarse black hair. A bony ridge as thick as a finger runs across the top of her skull, where it had been fractured. There is a depression on one side of the ridge, where a plate of bone has shifted down toward her brain.

I slip into a classroom, and the kids follow me in. The classroom is like the principal's office: a poured-concrete floor, a plank roof filled in with thatch. On one wall, a splash of black paint makes a blackboard. Kids have scrawled in Arabic with pieces of charcoal everywhere else. In big letters, "I LOVE" is spelled out in English.

Shahista, 16, carries a blue burka over her arm, ready for the outside world (women often are unveiled when they are at work or at school, and carry the burka in a bag for the walk home). Shahista, swathed in white, wants to tell me something.

"My grandmother died during the fighting. She was bombed."

Major Cole waves me out. It's time to go back to Bagram. Zakia Zaki, the school principal, comes out to say good-bye.

"We want all of the guns collected so that we can go to school, college, work in the hospital, everything, without dying. We're happy the Taliban is finished. It's a good opportunity for peace."

In the van, Major Cole explains why the Army, which is supposed to kill people, bothers fixing schools and handing out pencils, notebooks and chalk.

"There's the kinetic solution, bombs and things, and then there's the long-term solution," he says. "Let's say the kids see us come in, and we're being friendly to them, we help them rebuild schools, that way we can help them make a better Afghanistan, a safer Afghanistan."

Major Cole must realize that the Russians originally made many of the schools and bridges that the Americans are rebuilding. Kids back in the 1980s probably waved to the Soviet soldiers, just the same as they wave to us as we drive back to base.

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