COME from the SHADOWS
the LONG and LONELY
STRUGGLE for PEACE in
AFGHANISTAN
TERRY GLAVIN
COME FROM THE
SHADOWS
Copyright © 2011 by Terry Glavin
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Douglas & McIntyre
An imprint of D&M Publishers Inc.
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201
Vancouver BC Canada V5T 4S7
Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN 978-1-55365-782-8 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-55365-783-5 (ebook)
Editing by Barbara Pulling
Copyediting by Lara Kordic
Jacket design by Naomi MacDougall
Map by Eric Leinberger
Jacket photograph: © Veronique de Viguerie/Getty Images.
The photo depicts a Kuchi woman of the Niazi tribe, Kandahar, 2004.
Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.
Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing,
through the graves the wind is blowing,
freedom soon will come;
then we’ll come from the shadows.
—“The Partisan,” Leonard Cohen, 1969
The wind blows through the graves,
freedom will return.
We will be forgotten. We will return to the shadows.
—“Le Complainte du Partisan,” Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie and Anna Marly, 1943
CONTENTS
five “If Ever a Country Deserved Rape”
seven The International Brigades
appendix Sources on Public Opinion
“Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events. For example, it is impossible to calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of millions, the number of deaths caused by the present war. The calamities that are constantly being reported—battles, massacres, famines, revolutions—tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources . . . Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs.”
—from George Orwell’s “Notes on Nationalism,” in Polemic, October 1945
THE LITTLE CITY of Daste Barchi is not on any official map, and there are no road signs to tell you how to find it. To get there, you look for a particular dirt track that seems to come out of nowhere from behind the bombed-out hulk of the Duralaman Palace on the outskirts of Kabul. You follow the track into the foothills of the snow-covered Paghman Mountains. It becomes a rutted, westward-twisting dirt road for about an hour or so, and then it begins to weave through Jabarhan, a teeming place of tiny, flat-roofed mud brick houses and narrow alleyways alive with children and flocks of sheep and chickens. Just when you think you’re lost, and the road could not get any narrower, you are in Daste Barchi.
Daste Barchi means Barchi Desert. It is not a desert. It is a city. Perhaps as many as a million people live in Daste Barchi and its environs. The people are mainly Hazaras, from Afghanistan’s Shia minority. These are the people you see at first light down in Kabul, sweeping the streets and pulling handcarts heavy with cauliflowers and pomegranates. They’re the day labourers, the house servants, the people who take out Kabul’s washing. Without them, Kabul would come apart. The area encompassing Daste Barchi lies within an administrative unit called Police District 13. Apart from what some people manage to procure from diesel generators, there is no electricity. There is no running water. The residents of Police District 13 are classified as Internally Displaced Persons. Daste Barchi does not officially exist.
It is in places like Daste Barchi that the terrain I set out to explore in this book appears in sharp relief. This is the landscape between the Afghanistan that animates debates in Western democracies and the places “outside the wire,” as the entire country is often bizarrely and euphemistically described. Having spent fifteen