1
ELEVEN MONTHS LEFT
A policeman is holding the Teacher at a checkpoint.
There’s an event at the military base down the road, an important one with generals and ministers and members of parliament, so police set up a perimeter with checkpoints and big concrete blocks. Only the big people with the big cars get by, the big black up-armored bulletproof Land Cruisers riding low on their suspension. Smoked-glass windows are rolled down and arms emerge with credentials, and then these vehicles are waved on. The Teacher is made to stay.
He pleads his case but gets nowhere. He is not persuasive in this particular kind of situation; he’s a little man, physically unimpressive, the influence he’s won among his tribe has to do with the fact that this is a country where a lot of business gets done in rooms without furniture. Men sit on the floor and talk, their size becomes secondary, and the idea that tends to win is the one that’s delivered with the most poetry. In darkened rooms after power has gone out for the night, around the blinking lights of cell phone screens and single bulbs connected to generators, the Teacher is something of a master, a man with a golden tongue, soft-spoken and long-winded, whose circuitous explanations slowly unfold until he woos people to his side and makes admirers out of skeptics.
* * *
The policeman at the checkpoint knows none of this. All the policeman knows is that there is a small man with a small taxi and a bad suit asking to get by. It does not seem possible that the person standing in front of him is a leader of men. It does not seem possible that he is a person with influential friends, or that he and the two youths with him—malnourished-looking kids, really—have been invited to the very event for which this policeman is providing security. That General Allen himself, the man with his finger on the trigger, the owner of military power in this country, has requested their presence.
The Teacher can see this, and he knows that these checkpoints are places that produce violence. He’s familiar with the flinty way men’s pride becomes combustible when one tries to exert authority the other doesn’t recognize. He decides to stop arguing. He will simply walk the remaining mile to the base.
Or rather, he will run. This is not the kind of thing one should be late to, after all, and the Teacher knows the whole ritual that will play out when he arrives on base: the checks of identification, retinal scans, fingerprinting. After being booked he will be late, and then General Allen will be upset with him, so he and the two undersized teenagers pick up the pace. Soon they are sprinting, and he’s aware of the symbolism here, the locals running toward the foreign forces.
They dodge obstacles on the dimpled streets, trying and failing to avoid the puddles in old bomb craters, potholes born from shoddy construction and carved out by Kabul’s excited drivers. And from mortars. It is February 2013, over a decade since America began its campaign here with a series of air strikes, followed by special forces and then a convoy of aid groups. Many roads have been fixed since then, to cover up the scars of war; many haven’t. Some were fixed and have cracked again from bombs on belts strapped to men, or built into the trunks of cars. February, so there’s melted snow and cold, raw rain. Mud and dirt splash up on the Teacher’s clothes, waist high on the youths, and when they finally get to the gate they look like the filthy street urchins who orbit the base like an asteroid belt, hawking crappy trinkets to soldiers from Amrika and Englistan.
Only they’re not treated like street urchins. Now that they are in the embrace of the American military, no longer beholden to their own countrymen, it’s as if they’ve stepped across a threshold to an alternate universe. A man by the gate recognizes the three immediately and whisks them inside without even asking for identification, marches them past sandbags and giant cargo containers into the gymnasium where the event will be held.
Now they are the ones breezing through, past all the important government types who drove by them fifteen minutes before. Among the Americans, the Teacher is treated like an important person.
An important person because, like others who found ways to thrive when the foreign armies came, the Teacher provided those armies with a service. His service is less tangible than delivering dried fruit or pirated DVDs or translating conversations with village elders, but maybe more important. It’s psychological, and subtle, but critical. Especially for a soldier like the one running the war machine here, General John Allen, who lies awake at night thinking of the men and women lost—541, under his watch—and comes pretty damn close to tears, his voice cracking, when asked about them during television interviews.
For a man like General Allen, the service the Teacher provides is validation.
He’s the one they can point to and say, “Here is a thing those good kids died for. Here’s why it wasn’t all a waste.” The good local is what the Teacher is, a man who buys the whole democracy thing, who happens to be a minority, who happens to be concerned with the rights of women. Just one man, maybe, but one is proof of concept. It’s not impossible. That there are people like the Teacher means there is at least one good reason why so much has been sacrificed.
Because the Teacher has built something amazing: an oasis in the middle of the desert off the west end of the capital. If you make the drive, over bad roads, past a little bit of misery, past men wrapped in so many blankets they seem to be receding from the world, past women whose faces are wrinkled and leathery and dark, and youths giddy and oblivious, you will arrive at a school where a few thousand boys and girls, mostly poor, mostly happy, all members of the same oppressed minority group, are learning. Not just learning to read and write and add, but to question, criticize, make provocative art. To sing, poke fun at one another, to protest. Learning to love Islam but actively—not by being administered the religion but by interrogating it. The Teacher named the school Marefat because it means “knowledge” but also all its derivatives: “wisdom,” “education,” “intellect,” “awareness.”
And if you make this journey to the outskirts of Kabul, if you witness this diamond in the rough, if a kid comes up to you and shakes your hand and respects you but isn’t afraid of you, it all has the effect of making you feel like you yourself are some great explorer; like just by witnessing the thing you are somehow deserving of credit, if only for having abided the long miserable trip to get there.
And it’s a feeling the Teacher will let you have, because it is part of a covenant he has made with the foreign armies. He will allow this thing he has built to be theirs, too. He will allow it to be proof that the people who have died and been dismembered, that the empty shirtsleeves and empty pant legs and empty chairs at dinner tables back in Amrika and Englistan have not been for nothing.
In return, the foreigners protect him and his four thousand students.
That is the other part of this covenant. When soldiers came to his land a decade ago and said “Disarm,” the Teacher, and his community, said, “Okay.” They accepted the deal they thought was on offer: that if you give up your weapons and stop fighting, and if you build yourself up, build institutions for yourself, you will have equal rights. You will have access to positions in the new government if you want them; we will help you build roads and factories and hospitals. We will destroy the Taliban. We will eliminate your enemy for good.
So his people are unarmed, in a country where everyone is armed. His people, nearly all of them, gave up their weapons, which means they depend on America for one thing most of all: protection.
And today, when you get right down to it, they are being asked to celebrate the end of that protection. The Teacher and his students are there to watch the general who ran Operation Enduring Freedom hand command over to the man who will end it.
The general’s aide deposits them in the very front row.
* * *
Today, an hour north of the gymnasium where Aziz and his students sit, the Taliban dismantles a man with an axe. The reason is that this man spied for the Americans. Everyone knows “spied” is synonym for “agreed with.” So Aziz is also a spy.
By that logic, he is of course much more than a spy. He’s a sympathizer, an appeaser, and an apostate. He’s been called these and other things: Communist (although he took up arms against the communists). Christian (although he is a scholar of Islam’s holy book). Pimp (although he encouraged girls to protest laws that would legalize their rape). And perhaps most ominously: American.
The Americans are wasting no time: at almost the same moment a man is dying from axe wounds in the north for siding with the Americans, the Americans are getting their military equipment out of the country to the south and east. A local news outlet in Pakistan spotted twenty-five cargo containers marked USFOR-A on their way out of Afghanistan, heading to a port in Karachi, where they’ll be put on a cargo ship and taken far away. The things the foreign armies use to fight are leaving; this is the beginning of the withdrawal, the rug being slowly tugged from beneath Aziz’s feet by fifty defense ministers from NATO member countries. All around Afghanistan, the lights are going out. Bases are being handed over to the locals, bases are closing, vehicles are being cleaned and inspected and packed up, soldiers are standing next to shipping containers waiting for C-130s to come take it all away.
Aziz tries to push these things from his mind. He takes in the room: big and dull and a kind of purgatorial gray that someone tried to liven up with aquamarine siding. It looks like giant, cheap headboards ringing the room. A sliver of garish morning sunlight arcs down across the crowd like a blade, and it finally makes sense why the generals from America wear their caps indoors, with the brims pulled so low you can’t see their eyes. The first infantry division band is playing, poorly: a regal melody made muddy and distorted by a flat tuba and a wobbly clarinet and a room built without acoustics in mind. General Allen enters, a war paint shadow over his eyes. The band switches to a gleeful rendition of Afghanistan’s national anthem, and the four NATO generals, each in camouflage uniform, no two of which would blend into the same forest, face the audience. They salute, then sit down, then stand back up for the American national anthem.
President Karzai, as of late in one of his fugue states, having blasted the British on a trip to Britain with a rhetorical wad of phlegm for their failure to secure a southern province, is not in attendance; Aziz makes note of his absence. He makes note of who is in attendance: next to him sit Kabul’s police commander and the chairman of the country’s armed forces. These men, upon whom he and his four thousand students will soon be dependent for security, are right now chatting and tittering like adolescents. Aziz thinks they’re not even listening. They take off their simultaneous translation headphones, and he knows they’re not listening. Aziz is amazed. They are nakedly uninterested in what’s going on in front of them. They are the people charged with keeping the country intact after these foreign generals up on the podium are gone; these are the men who are supposed to carry on the fight and keep the country together.
Aziz thinks they are not at all ready. He is beginning to think that at the first possible instant, they will resort to the only sense of belonging they feel at marrow level. To the people who look like them and come from the same places they do and speak the same languages with the same accents. These are men who have a shaky understanding of history, who will break off based on allegiance to the sects of their fathers and mothers, drawn to their separate corners until each side is big enough for it to turn into war. He has seen that before.
It’s a shame, Aziz thinks. If only the men at the top weren’t so … “empty” is the word he keeps coming back to. They are empty and it’s not even that they and President Karzai and his cabinet are bad people. They are simply lightweights. Incapable of or disinclined to deep thought. Juvenile, that’s what these men sitting next to him are. They are juvenile and it is what will destroy the country when the Americans leave.
Aziz now forces himself to stop thinking about this, because to entertain the thought further leads him to its logical conclusion: instability, collapse, factional war. And the ones who will suffer most will be Aziz and his people, for these three reasons: His people, the Hazaras, look different, in a country where most people look mostly the same; their flat faces and narrow eyes have been their curse for centuries. And where everyone else is Sunni, they are Shia. So they are different, and everyone can see it. And finally, when America came in and asked everyone to disarm, they did. The Hazaras are seen as collaborators. They look different, they are different, and they took our side. So as the ceremony proceeds it is frightening to watch the foreign generals talking about Afghan security forces like they are very close to being ready, while Aziz can see very clearly that they are not. The foreigners talk about “continuing mission momentum” and in the same breath of taking men, women, and equipment out of the theater. They speak of Afghanistan’s security forces being just about all trained up, as if it were enough that everyone would really like them to be.
It’s not a new idea. All these generals, sitting with their brims pulled low, began their careers when Vietnam was ending, when training up the locals made as much political sense as it did military. If you can train locals to continue the fight, you get to leave without admitting defeat.
A German general takes the podium and speaks from a wistful place, with romance even, about the Afghan forces and the “progress that you can almost touch,” and how the “transition has gained momentum to the point that it is irreversible.”
These are parents who love their sons too much and are blind to their flaws. “We commend the work of the Afghan national security forces for the way they have risen to the challenge,” the German says. Aziz is presented with an ominous image: foreign generals talking about how it will all be okay because the Afghan forces are so professional, while the leaders of the Afghan forces are sitting next to him, not even pretending to listen.
* * *
General Allen is a man who prefers to think of war like a grand physics experiment. To imagine it on a big planar field where things like “force vectors” and “threat streams” go about their contest until one triumphs over the other. Thus, the general’s job is to arrange the pieces so that the appropriate threat streams are overcome by the correct force vectors and all the bad things are neutralized and the good things prevail. He’s a man drawn to the science of warfare. He gave up Princeton to study fighting instead; it was what fascinated him. A week before this ceremony he explained to the Wall Street Journal how he planned to solve the logistical brainteaser of removing thirteen years’ worth of military hardware from a landlocked country with no catcher’s mitt next door, no Kuwait like you had with Iraq, where you could park your planes and tanks for a while. Here the closest ocean was on the other side of Pakistan, where the people were screaming about sovereignty and tended toward the mind-set that dodging drone strikes was plenty of exposure to the American military, thank you very much. Who would be damned if they let us use their backyard to store our weapons Until Further Notice. So Allen took to the chessboard. The military built up an air path, a land path, and a coordinated communication system to keep the whole thing humming. They sent test shipments through to find blockages and bottlenecks, so they could make sure it was all “flowing and to achieve full velocity on all three in order for us to have removed the preponderance of equipment out of theater for all fifty nations by the end of ’14.”
Problem solved.
That’s the disciplined way the general prefers to think, but he’s not always the best at maintaining that mind-set. When an interviewer gets Allen off logistics and onto the stories of people, the general needs a minute to compose himself. He’s not very good at keeping casualties out of mind. On this mission, Allen has even more emotional exposure, because he made the mistake of growing close to the country. He met Aziz Royesh and the students and started making trips out to the school in the slums. By the end of his tour Allen was so moved by what he’d seen in this country that he donated enough money for twenty-five scholarships to Marefat out of his own pocket. He lobbied the president of the United States not to abandon these people, to keep more troops here for the long haul. Perhaps because he’s aware of something the other generals do not acknowledge: that it is actually going to be very hard to get Afghan forces ready in time. When Allen took command of the NATO mission here there were roughly four hundred thousand Afghans under arms, many of whom were not only poorly trained but illiterate.
Those men will soon be in control of the police and army. Which means that in order for the country to be secure these men who couldn’t read now must believe in something called the “rule of law” with more force than they believe in their own ethnicity so that they’ll fight for the former, never the latter. Because here’s an added challenge the United States never faced in Vietnam: the South Vietnamese might not have been very motivated to fight for us, but they at least weren’t motivated to fight against each other. Here, there is a long history of ethnic differences exploited by political leaders, warlords, and foreign countries, including ours.
Though Allen would go hoarse trying to keep the U.S. army in this country, he had little chance of succeeding. He had respect but no leverage in Washington, and the war here was becoming less popular by the day. As he ran directly against political headwinds he was kneecapped by a string of “green on blue” insider attacks, Afghan troops killing their Western mentors. “Even the good guys don’t want us there,” Americans thought, and Allen was placed in the awful position of wanting the world to keep protecting Aziz and the students and others like them, but having the duty to make the world stop.
* * *
When General Allen takes the dais to give his remarks, he speaks first in his earnest but clipped way. He is formal and stolid. He is thanking people, so many people to thank, which is an odd thing, it seems, for a mission that’s still very much undecided. But just now his tone is changing. He is becoming looser, he looks up from his notes to address the room, he’s actually becoming expressive, his hand moving to the side of the dais and his torso relaxing, sinking, as he explains how he feels about the people in this country, how “in a very real sense, we have become brothers.” This is also odd. It’s the language of aid workers in their constant state of minor hysteria, not of hardened Marine generals. It is striking and inspiring and disconcerting that a general is doing this, like when a stern father shows warmth, and you are elevated, but also concerned that something must be very wrong.
“The people of Afghanistan have become my family. Part of me.” Now Aziz is paying close attention. “And normally on an occasion like this my family would be with me, my wife and my daughters would attend a ceremony such as this, but they’re not able to be here, so I asked two young students from a high school nearby with whom we have a strong relationship, Somaya and Mustafa Ibrahim”—now Aziz thinks he must be mishearing—“to join me today, because they are very much my family, they will always be very much my family.” The general’s voice cracks a little, and he gestures to where Aziz and the two youths are sitting, and they stand up in this room full of all the most powerful people in the country, some of the more powerful people in the world. Aziz and two students from his school in the slums are being shown off by the commander of the most powerful military in the world, who is now transparently emotional—“and in their bright faces, we see the future of this great country. Today they are my precious family and they have served to form the memories that I will take from Afghanistan.”
Aziz can’t believe what he is hearing. He expected to show up and have a handshake with the general and leave; instead, his students have been called the very future of the country. The commanding general has called them his own family.
* * *
Tomorrow, newspapers around the world will report this. They will carry the story of General Allen’s emotional farewell, in which he mentioned a school and two of its students. They will not report the name of the Teacher, the name of the school, or the name of the youths. Reporters believe this omission protects them. Aziz thinks that’s a mistake. Reporters think an American mentioning your name makes you a spy, and everyone knows what happens to spies. But Aziz wishes the journalists would do it anyway. Print my name! he thinks, as if he could will them to do so. Print the children’s names! He understands something the reporters don’t: tying him so closely to the American military doesn’t make him a spy. He already is a spy. At this point, the general’s pronouncement means legitimacy. Anyone who might take offense with the school—the students who are always protesting some religious figure or demonstrating against some law, the extracurricular activities in which boys and girls sit in the same classroom, the school’s new radio station, broadcasting provocative ideas and women’s voices—these people will know that there are powerful American military men who care about the school. For Aziz, being named is not being outed, it’s armor.
Press be damned, Aziz will go back and tell all his friends in rooms without furniture about this remarkable moment, when the kids stood up and the room clapped for them and the General seemed close to tears. Aziz will tell his faculty and his students and the students’ families that the General thinks they are all his family, and everyone will for a time be just so incredibly hopeful, furnished for the moment with the notion that the Americans might not leave after all, because you don’t leave family.
* * *
“This spring, our forces will move into a support role, while Afghan security forces take the lead. Tonight, I can announce that over the next year, another 34,000 American troops will come home from Afghanistan. This drawdown will continue and by the end of next year, our war in Afghanistan will be over.”
So said the president of the United States during his state of the union address in February 2013, forty-eight hours after the general’s speech in Kabul. Back in Washington, the tectonic plates had shifted and made way for the withdrawal. A slack-faced nominee for secretary of defense, a man who always looked like he needed a shower and an aspirin, and who was known to favor the “zero option”—leaving no troops at all behind—was wobbling his way toward Senate confirmation.
Thirty-four thousand troops leaving in a year—the biggest, fastest withdrawal of troops yet. The United States needed one hundred thousand troops here to fight and subdue the Taliban, and by this time next year, they’ll have a third of that. Maybe less, if their new defense secretary has his way. Aziz knows that’s not a fighting force. That is not enough to hold the Taliban back. Not enough to protect Aziz and his people from whatever new insurgency emerges. The foreigners are saying they’re serious that the Afghan commanders, who Aziz can see are not ready, are going to be in charge of securing the whole country by next year. By next year, there will only be enough American troops left here for mop-up and Aziz has seen enough to know that if the United States is done, whoever’s left will follow them out. Maybe, by the end of it, a few thousand troops will stay behind for good measure; maybe they won’t. What Aziz is hearing is that the troops are leaving faster than ever and that by this time next year, the U.S. mission to protect this place will be as good as done. The clock is ticking.
Aziz tries to be sanguine about this at first. He doesn’t allow himself to be down. This is part of his resilience, a key ingredient: he just ignores those things that would upset him. “When God gives you a locked door,” he says, “be grateful it’s not a wall!” There’s always a way, and bad things are not that bad because they’re not that real. The United States won’t leave.
There were things even at the ceremony that he saw but didn’t allow himself to register. How General Allen, after calling everyone’s attention to Aziz and the students, had continued a speech that sounded less like a man celebrating a career milestone than one memorializing a catastrophe that has already happened.
“I will miss you all,” Allen said, “and I will miss those who are with me here today and I will miss this mission beyond words. I don’t want to say good-bye today. Instead I’d like to reflect and to thank and to pay tribute to you,” he said. Aziz chose not to see a foreboding in this, to not be concerned by how, for example, the hugs General Allen is administering are a little excessive, the general is really emotional. These hugs are uneven, the kind that require large men to adjust ballast, like two seniors slow-dancing. It’s been that way all day. His hug with Dumford, the general taking over, was a bit unsteady, a slight sway to the side before they recalibrated. And after his speech, when the ceremony is over and the flags have been passed from the old general to the new, General Allen finds Aziz, and offers him one of these big hugs, just swallows Aziz in his camouflage as if he might hide the little man forever.
After his good-bye Aziz will present himself to the new general, who will receive him kindly but coolly and will say in his disinterested Quincy accent, “So you are members of Allen’s family…” a comment in unsure space between compliment and condescension. Aziz will not take offense. He knows what this is. The new general is not as invested as the old, and Aziz knows why. It’s for the same reason a doctor knows not to be too invested in a patient with late-stage cancer. Both men stand there for a moment after this handover ceremony. Both men know that one, by doing his job, may bring about the demise of the other.
Aziz has eleven months to prepare.
Copyright © 2016 by Jeffrey E. Stern