Jason Burke grew up in Philadelphia and served as an officer in the Navy. He retired, in 2013, as a Navy captain. During his last tour, he was stationed at the Naval War College as an associate professor of national security affairs. His grandfather served in the Army and fought in World War I.
The governor of Ghazni Province lives in a compound secured by wire fencing and armed guards that constantly patrol the area, day and night, on the lookout for attacks from the Taliban—who live right here in the city. When I step inside the man’s home and see chairs, lights, and walls, an actual floor, I feel as though I’ve stepped through a portal, back into the modern world.
I’ve spent my day traveling the rural areas, along with my savvy interpreter, speaking to Afghan tribal leaders and elders about the US-backed construction projects—everything from a thirty-million-dollar paved road to smaller but equally critical projects like women’s literacy programs and building more chicken coops. As part of the counterinsurgency mission, I need to secure the leaders’ support so their people will assist in helping rebuild their country.
Our western culture is based on municipalities and local and national government. Here, in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, government is very low on their list, if it’s on their list at all. Living their lives as Muslims is their top priority. After religion, they have family, their tribe, and then regional tribes.
When the elders and leaders invite me into their homes, it’s imperative that I show respect. I take off my helmet, body armor, and shoes. In more rural areas, the meetings usually include a small meal. We eat sitting on the floor, sometimes nothing more than hardened dirt covered by a few decorative rugs. The rugs get lined with plastic to protect them from food stains as we pass around bowls of rice and mutton, everyone sticking their ragged hands into the meal. I do that, too, without hesitation.
This is all profoundly different from my previous career as a naval aviator.
However, meetings with the governor are “off the floor.” After I wash up, I head to the dining room to eat with him, his staff, and my comrades with the US Army’s maneuver battalion. The governor is a good guy. Solid. He’s also vastly different from the first governor, who lasted only three months. The tribal leaders didn’t like him because he was too secular and wore western-style suits and spoke a little too much English in the rural areas. I liked him because he was easy to work with and he tried to reduce corruption within his constituency. This point made him unpopular with the other Afghan leaders who thought it “okay” to earn “extra” money. Ultimately, he was going to be ineffective with peers and subordinates, and therefore ineffective for our mission in Ghazni Province.
That’s the other part of my job: trying to reduce corruption. It’s a difficult and, at times, impossible task. Afghanistan in 2008 is like the Wild West—maybe even more primitive. The level of poverty here—people can’t imagine it. In some of these areas, you see groups of kids running around without shoes in forty-degree weather, dirty from head to toe, hair in dreadlocks, snot in their noses. But as a whole, they smiled and played like children anywhere else on the planet. They had hope.
The maneuver commander, the governor, and I are discussing the strategy for Afghanistan’s upcoming voter registration when the door opens. An Afghan police officer enters, flanked by the governor’s security guards. The officer speaks a few words in either Dari or Pashto, the two local dialects, and then the governor stands.
“Please excuse me for a moment,” he says to me, and leaves the room.
Has to be the Taliban, I think. The Taliban are actively disrupting and sabotaging all our projects. Earlier today, they kidnapped a dump truck and the driver of one of our funded health clinic projects. Now they’re holding them for ransom.
The Taliban has also started booby-trapping the province’s culverts with IEDs. In late winter of 2007, heavy snow on the mountains surrounding Ghazni Province had a very rapid snowmelt, causing the city to flood, killing dozens and washing out many of the dirt and paved roads. Since then, we’ve installed new culverts to prevent the roads from being washed out. The Taliban are intent on destroying them—and anyone who drives over them.
The governor returns an hour later. He looks troubled.
“The police have arrested a woman,” he explains. “They found her and a young boy—her adopted son, she told the police—outside the governor’s compound. She says she’s from here, but she speaks neither Dari nor Pashto.”
“Why was she arrested?”
“A shopkeeper noticed a woman in a burqa drawing a map and decided to alert the police.”
I understand the shopkeeper’s suspicions. Pashtun women in Afghanistan rarely travel without a male relative and are largely illiterate.
“When the police approached her,” the governor says, “they saw her crouching against the ground while holding two shopping bags. They thought she might be hiding a bomb underneath her burqa. Upon further inspection, the local police officer found she was carrying a large quantity of plastic explosives, some powdered poison, and a written manifesto of her hatred for America.”
His eyes cloud in thought. “The police found a considerable number of handwritten notes listing various US landmarks. They may be potential targets. I need to inform President Karzai.”
We agree. As we watch the governor call President Karzai on his cell, the battalion commander and I recall a recent report about a woman and a young boy traveling together through Afghanistan, trying to recruit women for suicide bombings.
Could this be the same woman?
The governor doesn’t need to explain the situation to the president. Karzai has already been informed.
“Has any harm come to her?” Karzai asks the governor.
“No.”
“That is probably a good thing. This woman—Aafia Siddiqui is her name. She’s a terrorist. The American FBI has her on their most-wanted list.”
And that’s when I make the connection. Aafia Siddiqui, a woman born in Pakistan to a Muslim family, is rumored to be a carrier for Al-Qaeda. She is the only female to have made the FBI’s list of most-wanted terrorists. The CIA, FBI, and Interpol have been actively looking for her—put her on their “kill or capture” list back in 2003. They call her Lady Al-Qaeda.
Then, as if this were a movie, the office door opens and in comes a group of American guys—bearded, dusty, and stinky. They look like Special Forces, either Delta Force or SEALs. Their lead officer introduces himself, says he’s with the FBI’s counterterrorism team. He has a few documents.
In the file he shows us there’s a photograph of a young dark-skinned woman with doe eyes, black hair, and an incredibly open, innocent-looking face.
“Why did she come here, to the compound?” I ask. “Was she going to try to assassinate the governor?”
The FBI agent shakes his head. “He wasn’t the only target.”
“Who else was?”
“The battalion CO and you,” he says.
I’m still registering his words when he informs us that he’s here to take Siddiqui into custody and fly her back to the US, to stand trial for attempting to kill Americans in Afghanistan. That snaps me back to the present. The battalion CO and I talk for a brief moment.
“You’ll have her,” the battalion CO says to the FBI agent. “But not right now.”
The fed shakes his head. “All due respect, this isn’t up for debate. The FBI—”
“We need to think of the larger picture here.”
The agent doesn’t try to hide his annoyance. “What’re you talking about?”
“The Afghans are proud that they’ve captured her. Let them have this victory—it’s theirs. It will help our efforts here, what we’re trying to build. Just a little bit of press for the governor, and then he’ll turn her over to your team.”
What we’re suggesting is a smart move—and the FBI agent knows it. We see our tactical point hit home.
“Okay,” he says. “In the meantime, we’re going to speak to her.”
When a small cadre of US Army forces arrive at the Afghan National Police facility in Ghanzi Province, the battalion intelligence officer positions himself in the meeting room, which has a small portion partitioned off by a black curtain. Several Afghan police, two federal agents, a military interpreter, a US Army captain, and a warrants officer file into the room and gather around the table.
The US team hasn’t been briefed by the Afghan police and doesn’t know that the prisoner is behind the curtain in the meeting room.
The curtain is suddenly drawn back. We see a dark-skinned, disheveled woman without a burqa or handcuffs holding an M4 rifle. Later, we’ll find out that she got the weapon from someone who leaned his weapon next to the part of the table near the curtain.
The woman is Aafia Siddiqui. I recognize her face from the picture.
She lurches forward. Everyone in the room scrambles for cover and reaches for their weapons.
She aims the M4 at the closest soldier—an intel officer.
The interpreter standing nearby pushes her as her M4 goes off.
The round barely misses the intel officer’s head.
The interpreter is wrestling with her, trying to disarm her, when she fires again. One of the FBI guys returns fire with his 9mm, hits her twice in the midsection. The interpreter manages to disarm her but she’s still struggling, kicking and screaming until she eventually passes out.
In the following days, while Aafia Siddiqui is recovering from her wounds at a nearby military hospital, I’ll learn more about the infamous woman who wanted to kill me. Things like how she was carrying sodium cyanide and a thumb drive containing manuals on bomb making, documents on how to weaponize Ebola, and thousands of electronic communications between terrorist cells operating in the US.
But the most unbelievable part, what I keep coming back to over and over again, is her connection to the United States. She left Pakistan and went to Texas on a student visa and attended the University of Houston. Massachusetts Institute of Technology took notice of her and offered her a full scholarship. After she graduated from MIT, she went to Brandeis University and earned a PhD in cognitive neuroscience.
While our country educated her, she studied ways to destroy America. While she lived in our country, she went to work for Al-Qaeda, first helping operatives renew US travel papers and open post office boxes; graduated to laundering money; and then, following the terrorist attack we would later call 9/11, engaged in assault with firearms on US officers.