– And, James? he said finally.
– Yes, Mir?
– I am werry excited.
– Good, I said. We’ll talk when you get here.
– Insha’allah, he replied.
But he didn’t call that evening, causing me to spend a good part of the night wondering what had gone wrong. Perhaps it had been a mistake after all to allow someone else to collect him. I had stupidly taken no telephone number or address for Hamid. Mir was therefore in a position simply to melt into the immigrant underworld forever if he chose, because there would be no practical means of tracing him. And what then? What of the legal responsibility I bore as his official sponsor? How far did that extend? It would be a simple matter for Mir to give the officials at Heathrow a false address. Could they hold me to account if that happened? Yet I knew I was right to have taken this risk, and my conscience was clear.
By working as an interpreter-fixer for me and other foreign journalists, Mir’s and indeed his family’s prospects for a normal life in Mazar had been wrecked. I thought of the Hazara Shi’ites who had come banging on the doors of his family home one night, wild mountain men who reeked of dirt and blood, grenades dangling from their long, matted hair. Mir had exited through a back window with a small prepacked suitcase and kept on running, days and nights of dodging patrols and tramping the secret goat paths of the Hindu Kush, a heroic journey of danger and hardship that had ended in virtual destitution on an Islamabad office sofa. There was no question: we, the Western press collectively, owed him a second chance. I had talked over the decision to help him with friends of mine, fellow journalists as well as expatriate aid workers with years of experience in Afghanistan. They mostly thought I was mad. They said I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for, and nor did he – the immigrant life would be nothing like his imagination. The streets of London were not paved with gold. Far from disappearing into the underworld, they predicted, Mir would pester me forever. Alone in the West he would fade, not thrive, and sooner or later he would return to his only certain source of financial and psychological support: me. These expats were not cynics. But they said I needed to understand that an Afghan refugee was for life, not just for Christmas. They understood what it meant to give a poor Third Worlder a leg-up. After all, that was what they did for a living. At the same time they were surrounded by so much suffering in their daily work that they had developed a tough skin, a means of separating themselves from the poor they sought to help. The best and most humane among them would no doubt like to help everyone they met. But the obvious impossibility of this, the ethical difficulty of picking out some for special treatment while ignoring others, meant that they had a blanket rule: arm’s length for all of them, and no exceptions. Otherwise there would be moral as well as organisational chaos.
Perhaps it was once possible to put this dilemma aside, to box it off as one of the hazards of working in the Third World, but in these post-9/11 days it is a harder issue to ignore. Like it or not, the armies of the West have reengaged in Central Asia. They are fighting in our name, and our taxes are paying for them. For them at least, the dilemma is inescapable. In the spring of 2002 the BBC made a documentary about the tiny force of British paratroopers charged with keeping the peace in Kabul, the West’s advance guard. They were shown patrolling in full battle order through neighbourhoods where buildings had been reduced to broken stumps by shellfire a decade before, their trademark red berets bobbing in the market crowds. We saw them struggling to comprehend the vengeful motives of duplicitous warlords, eating the same rations day after day, manning their Spartan barracks on full alert by night. At one point the interviewer asked a lieutenant what the most difficult thing about his mission was. The officer’s name was Oz Mohammed, which must have titillated the documentary’s producers, and he thought hard before answering. Was it the danger? The discomfort? The frustrations of working in an alien language and culture?
– No, he said. The most difficult thing is when a kid comes up and asks for something. You can’t respond, obviously, because then you’d have to give all of them something. That’s the hardest thing. Because these people have got absolutely nothing at all.
A year before Mir’s arrival at Heathrow I touched down in Mazar-i-Sharif in a tiny Red Cross plane armed with $1000 in cash, a two-thirds-grown beard and a scrappy map showing how to get to the Oxfam compound from the airport. The plane made the trip from Peshawar two or three times a week, weather permitting, and at that time was the only practical means of reaching northern Afghanistan from the outside; yet there were no other passengers. The other seats were heaped with packages and supplies for the offices of the various international aid agencies scattered around the town. It was a glorious spring morning, so bright that I had to narrow my eyes to look out through the little portholes. We flew low over the snowy tops of sun-blitzed mountain peaks, jagged and cruel-looking. I’d read somewhere that Hindu Kush means Indian Killer: it was not a place to crash. After an hour or so we cleared the mountain range and flew high over rolling hills and then, in a wide dusty plain, the dun-coloured blocks of Mazar itself. The buildings sprawled outwards from the famous shrine in the city’s very centre, the lustrous cobalt of its domes and mosaic-studded flanks glittering like an eye.
I had chosen Mazar as my entry point into Afghanistan because it was the only major city still unconquered by the Taliban. Over the winter it had become an important focus of resistance, the gathering place for the various factions of the new opposition Northern Alliance. This unlikely grouping of Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazara Shi’ites and others had spent an uneasy winter preparing for the spring fighting season. The previous summer the Taliban had seemed unstoppable. In September they had taken Jalalabad and then Kabul, where they dragged the Western-backed President Mohammed Najibullah from his UN safe-house and hanged him in the street. Massoud and Rabbani, the Tajik leaders who had been holding the capital, fled northwards in disarray. Only the onset of winter, when the stupefying cold and snowbound passes make fighting in Afghanistan impractical, saved the resistance from being routed. But now the snows were melting and the unconquered part of the country was holding its breath for what would happen next.
There was no doubt that the Taliban wanted Mazar badly. The city was the key to control of the northern regions where most of the country’s agriculture and almost all of its gas and mineral reserves were located. Moreover the new regime craved international recognition, which had so far been withheld on the grounds that it did not control all of the country. Conquest of Mazar therefore represented the ultimate prize of legitimacy to power. The Afghans called Mazar a city. In reality it was no more than a large town, although its population was greatly swollen now by refugees from the war and by an influx of fighting men from all over the country. This was interesting from a purely anthropological point of view, a rare cross-section of the country’s extraordinary ethnic diversity. In the words of an old Afghan hand I had met in London, Mazar was like the bar scene in Star Wars.
And indeed the mix of people I found there was extraordinary. There were Uzbeks, Tajiks, Pashtuns, Arabs, Ismaili, Hazara, Turkmen and Mongols. There were men in turbans and silk sashes, in flat caps and in skullcaps, in combat gear and in waistcoats, in robes and in trousers, in long-sleeved chapans and in shalwar qamiz, the long cotton shirt and matching baggy trousers favoured throughout the region. The women were mostly veiled, though many were not; the men were bearded and unbearded, with slant eyes and kohl eyes, brown, green and even blue eyes. There were subtleties here, ethnic and social gradations unfathomable to a stranger like me. Stopping to ask for directions it was impossible at first to make myself understood, and a curious crowd quickly gathered. Even in this ethnic melting pot my disguising beard had evidently fooled nobody. An old man was pushed forward and gave me directions in what sounded like broken Russian. It was a relief to reach the sanctuary of the Oxfam compound, its blue steel doors decorated with a small poster of a crossed-out Kalashnikov and the slogan Working for a Fairer World. The Oxfam staff rented out a few dormitory-like rooms for $40 a night. It was one of the few places that visiting foreigners were permitted to stay.
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