I WALKED IN through the small door of the Taliban embassy in Islamabad, found the women’s section, and joined the line for passports. It was then that I noticed the sign hanging from the wall behind the employee at the counter. It was handwritten in black ink and beautiful calligraphy: A woman in a burqa is like a pearl in an oyster, it read.
I remembered how I had felt wearing a burqa in Kabul, and wondered how anyone could find such poetry in it. To me, a woman in a burqa is more like a live body locked in a coffin. But at least the Taliban could not stop Afghan women from traveling on their own outside the country.
I PACKED both my passport and my burqa when I made my first visit to America.
Eve Ensler, the playwright who wrote The Vagina Monologues, had invited RAWA to speak at a meeting in Madison Square Garden in February 2001, hosted by the V-Day Movement, which fights to end violence against women. Women representing associations from all over the world would get a chance to speak.
I had seen New York before in films on television in Pakistan, but when I got there I walked around in a daze. In my country, everything had been destroyed. I wondered how long it would take before even one building that could vaguely resemble what I saw before me would be built in Kabul. I thought of the energy and the work needed to bring this about, and realized that it would take centuries, and I would never live to see it.
The skyscrapers seemed like mountains to me. I dreamed that one day we would build a new Statue of Liberty in my country and that it would have the same meaning to Afghans as it did to Americans.
I noticed the wealth in the shops. I would have liked to buy medicine for the refugees, and small cameras that our members in Afghanistan could use. I noticed the happiness of the people, so busy at their jobs, free to worry about what they should cook for their guests that evening, and of the children, who could look forward to years of school and then college.
I met Eve Ensler and stayed at her home in the days before the meeting. She cried and hugged me when she saw me. Eve is very brave and a strong supporter of our cause. I first met her in Pakistan before she crossed the border with a RAWA member to talk to women in Afghanistan and to see our clandestine classes for children. She wrote a poem afterward called “Under the Burqa.” She told me that she had asked me to bring mine on my visit because she wanted to use it for my speech.
I met jane Fonda before the gathering and told her how much I and the other girls at school had enjoyed the film Julia and that it had inspired my work. I asked her whether she would like to make a film about Afghanistan, and she said we should discuss it. She was very kind to me. When I told her about what was happening in my country, she wept.
When the time came for me to go onstage, after Oprah Winfrey had read “Under the Burqa,” all the lights went off save for one that was aimed directly at me. I had been asked to wear my burqa, and the light streamed in through the mesh in front of my face and brought tears to my eyes. A group of singers was singing an American chant, a melody full of grief, and I was to walk as slowly as possible—one step and then pause; and again one step and then pause. I had to climb some steps, but because of the burqa and the tears in my eyes, which wet the fabric and made it cling to my skin, I had to be helped up the stairs.
Slowly, very slowly, Oprah lifted the burqa off me and let it fall to the stage. It was the first time I had spoken in front of a crowd of eighteen thousand people, but I wasn’t nervous. In any case, it was so dark out there that I couldn’t see them. When I finished speaking, the lights came back on and I saw that the people had got up from their seats to stand while they clapped. I was happy that they showed their solidarity in this way, but for me it was more important that they would be inspired to help.
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001. I arrived at the airport in Islamabad, accompanied by my RAWA friend Saima and a male supporter who was our bodyguard and driver. I was due to fly to Spain to attend several conferences at which I would represent the association.
When we entered the main hall of the airport, we noticed that many people were crowded around a television set that hung from the ceiling. None of them were speaking. I got closer and read the headline: “CNN breaking news—Attack on America.” There was nothing else on the screen, just dust, a lot of dust.
Soon the dust was replaced by the film of the twin towers.
So many times I had seen violence and terror in my country, but it had never been shown on television like this. I saw a man jumping from one of the towers. It was my nightmare. I imagined being in the tower, the tower that to me was like a mountain. I heard on the news that a man had called his mother, and I thought of my parents. I imagined that the planes hitting the towers were like bombs hitting the shelter under my house in Kabul, or the thousands of other shelters where people thought they were safe.
The commentator mentioned that the attacks might be linked to Osama bin Laden.
I went to phone one of the RAWA safe houses. I asked them if they had seen CNN or the BBC. They told me the television was switched off. I told them to switch it on immediately and that I would call back later. I no longer knew whether I should go on my trip or not.
We were all convinced that bin Laden was behind the attacks.
“If it was bin Laden, then America will want revenge,” I said.
Saima nodded. “And that will be dangerous for everybody, everybody in Afghanistan. America can’t wipe him out in just one day,” she said.
“It will be a family war,” I said. “Bin Laden was for many years used by the CIA when they helped him fight the Russians, and now he is rebelling against America and the father is angry. But many of our people will pay the price for this.”
“And afterward,” Saima said, “what if America does punish the Taliban, and they lose power, what will happen then?”
None of us had an answer.
Later, RAWA told me to go ahead with my trip. After boarding, I sat in my seat thinking of the people who had been in the towers and of what they would have wanted to say to their parents or children if they had any understanding of what was happening to them. I was trying not to feel afraid of the flight ahead—I always feel a little claustrophobic in planes—when a Western couple came to sit next to me.
They were both middle-aged, dressed in jeans and T-shirts. We did not speak to one another, but from their accent I guessed that they were Americans.
“Those Afghans,” the man said to his wife. “How can we let them do this to us?”
“Bush should just go ahead and bomb the place,” she said.
I sat quietly, wondering how they would react if I told them I was from Afghanistan, that I had never protected bin Laden, and that I hated him as much as they did. A river red with blood separated the innocent people of Afghanistan from a handful of terrorists. I did not want to see bin Laden and the one-eyed Mullah Omar—the spiritual leader of the Taliban, who likes to describe himself as the Amir-ul Momineen, the Commander of the Faithful—killed right away. First I would take them, in a cage, around the most famous zoos of the world so that people could see what wild animals they were.
But I did not speak to them. I tried to concentrate instead on the film that was playing. Of all the films available, it was a comedy, Mr. Bean.
At Dubai airport, where I was due to change planes, I was stopped at passport control. The officer stared at the cover of the passport I had been given by the Taliban embassy. Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, it said on the cover.
“Who are you visiting in Spain?” the officer asked me, turning the passport over in his hands again and again.
“My family. My aunt lives in Madrid,” I lied.
My answer didn’t convince him. “Please wait for me. I need to take your passport with me for a short while,” he said.
Fifteen minutes later, he came back and handed my passport to me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “The flight is canceled. There is nothing else available, and you will have to wait three days before we can tell you whether there is room on another flight. If you want to wait…”
It had been his turn to lie. “Why can’t I fly? Is it the passport?” I insisted.
“Sorry. There’s nothing I can do. We have received instructions to be very careful with Afghan nationals. That’s all I can say,” he replied.
Through no fault of my own, my passport and my nationality had become a liability. I had no choice but to call RAWA again and find a plane to return to Pakistan.
As I sat waiting for my flight, I spent hours watching CNN. I felt that the Afghans, because of all they had suffered, were the people who could best feel the pain of the people in New York and Washington.
I watched the archive footage of bin Laden. The way he dressed, the way he sat silently with downcast eyes or a lost, mystical expression—I thought he was trying to play the part of a prophet.
When I got back to Islamabad, I found our computer operator, Mehmooda, sadder than I had seen her for a long time. It is she who spends hours at a time dealing with the E-mails we receive from people all over the world. She drinks coffee to keep herself going through the long nights when she works because that is when the telephone rates are lowest.
“Most of the E-mails we’ve received are supportive, but you can’t imagine how much hate mail we’ve had,” Mehmooda told me. She showed me some of the messages. They were full of insults, but worst of all, many were from people who had previously been among our supporters. They said they did not want to raise funds for RAWA anymore because they hated Afghanistan. Up to ten percent of the E-mails we had received since September 11 were negative, many of them obscene.
One man wrote, “Someday soon people will say: ‘You know, there used to be mountains in Afghanistan.’” Another, who signed himself as Lee, wrote, “Get out of your stupid country while you can. We (the USA) are going to blow you up with a nuclear bomb. You people should get rid of that stupid cloth on your head and join the real world. You ragheads.”
“What should I do?” Mehmooda asked me.
“Answer them. We should write an answer. Let’s make it as kind as possible and send it to as many people as we can,” I suggested.
Mehmooda wrote a message that said we understood their anger at such a moment, that we too were shocked by the attacks and shared the anger and sorrow of the American people. We pointed out that we too were victims of the Taliban, whom we called “a handful of brutal subhumans,” and other Moslem fundamentalists in Afghanistan.
Many people who received this message E-mailed us back, apologizing for their earlier message.
“ANOTHER BOMB has just landed not very far away, but don’t worry, we are all fine.”
The voice of Shabnam was faint, the line to Kabul crackly. It had taken me an hour and a half to get through to her on the telephone from Peshawar. Shabnam, one of our RAWA friends in the capital, told me that already several civilians had been killed, promised to send us pictures of the damage done by bombings as soon as possible, and then the line went dead.
The previous night I had sat up until two o’clock in the morning watching the lights flash across the television screen as the Americans launched their offensive. I stared at the screen, but in my mind’s eye I could see each of my friends in Kabul as clearly as if they were standing before me.
In the house where I was living at the time, CNN had been on from early morning to the small hours of the night, every day since the September 11 attacks, as we waited and waited.
Later, a member who managed to travel from Kabul to the frontier and then into Pakistan told me that right at the beginning of the offensive, a plane mistook a truck distributing water for an oil tanker and dropped a bomb on it. There was a severe drought, and the truck was in a central neighborhood of Kabul. The bomb destroyed five houses.
It was impossible for Washington to strike only at bin Laden. Many innocent people would die first.
THE MOTHER BLAMED HERSELF, although it was not her fault. She kept repeating that she and her husband had carried her six-year-old son for miles at night over the mountains—they only walked at night, to avoid the Taliban patrols—but that when she felt too tired and too weak to carry him any further, she had set him down on the narrow path and made him walk ahead of her. The path ran along the edge of a precipice, and in the darkness she was just able to see him slip and vanish down the mountainside.
“I was selfish, and this is my punishment,” said the woman, who was from the Uzbek tribe, as she sat on the floor of my house in the refugee camp. She had fled to Pakistan with her husband and their child when Mullah Omar declared a jihad, or holy war, against America and ordered that every family must designate one man who would enlist to fight. Pakistan had promptly closed its borders with Afghanistan to stop Afghans from escaping.
There was no room for the couple in the camp because so many refugees had arrived in the last few weeks, so Ameena invited the woman to stay in our house until we found a solution. Her plastic shoes were in bits, held together by string, and her feet were bloody from her long walk. She had spent all she had on her journey. She asked us to help her find work making carpets, and for her husband, work in the brick factory.
She had wanted to stay in the mountains and look for her son’s body, but her husband had said it was too dangerous and they had to move on. He told her there was no chance that the boy could have survived such a fall.