Afghanistan by Donkey: One Year in a War Zone

121 Pages·13.636 MB·English

by  Badkhen, Anna

AFGHANISTAN
BY DONKEY
ONE YEAR IN A WAR ZONE
BY ANNA BADKHEN
INTRODUCTION BY
BESTSELLING AUTHOR
PETER BERGEN
© 2012 Foreign Policy
Published by The FP Group, a division of
The Washington Post Company
In partnership with the
www.foreignpolicy.com
AFGHANISTAN
BY DONKEY
ONE YEAR IN A WAR ZONE
BY ANNA BADKHEN
PREFACE BY BESTSELLING
AUTHOR PETER BERGEN
Edited by Britt Peterson and Susan B. Glasser
Photographs by Thorne Anderson and Javier Manzano
Art-directed by Dennis Brack with assistance from Erin Aulov
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ANNA BADKHEN • AFGHANISTAN BY DONKEY
III. SUMMER
16. Bombs in Mazar: Mazar-e-Sharif, Balkh Province
64
17. The Taliban Are Here. Does It Matter?: Karaghuzhlah, Balkh Province
67
18. A Minuteman’s War: Shahraq, Balkh Province
71
19. Praying for Change: Kampirak, Balkh Province
74
20. The Drought: Karaghuzhlah, Balkh Province
77
21. The Cruel Way: Dasht-e-Shor Road, Balkh Province
80
IV. FALL TO WINTER
22. War’s Off-Season: Karaghuzhlah, Balkh Province;
Andkhoi, Faryab Province
84
23. Crime Scene: Mazar-e-Sharif, Balkh Province
87
24. Outside the Frame: Oqa, Balkh Province
90
25. Written on the Body: Jalalabad, Nangarhar Province
93
Acknowledgements
105
About the Author
106
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ANNA BADKHEN • AFGHANISTAN BY DONKEY
PREFACE
BY PETER BERGEN
IF YOU CAN’T UNDERSTAND A COUNTRY just from looking at
the cities, you certainly can’t understand a war just from reading about
the battles. A decade after the fall of the Taliban, as the Afghan war spread
alarmingly from the south and the east of the country into what had hith-
erto been the relatively peaceful provinces of Northern Afghanistan, Anna
Badkhen spent a year embedded not with NATO forces but with the rural
population of the often ignored north. She did this at considerable personal
risk, traveling alone to villages and cities to deliver a story that has rarely
been told by Western journalists.
The Afghans who hosted Badkhen on her remarkable journey rep-
resent millions in the country who have seen not a cent of the tens of
billions of dollars lavished on Afghanistan by the United States and its
allies since 2001. Their lives are deeply scarred by three decades of war:
As Badkhen reports, two out of three Afghans are in the grips of what
the West would term post-traumatic stress disorder.
Badkhen focuses in particular on the hamlet of Oqa, whose inhabit-
ants are illiterate and unaware of the 9/11 attacks. Without access to
education or modern medicine, they toil like medieval peasants, gath-
ering tumbleweed to use as fuel for fires in the nearest town. Badkhen
shares in their weddings and funerals, observes their children growing
addicted to the opium that is their cure-all, and documents their lives
of quiet desperation, as they try to eke out a semblance of existence
from the harsh desert soil. She describes this all with a painterly evo-
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ANNA BADKHEN • AFGHANISTAN BY DONKEY
cation of place that recalls Brueghel’s darkest portraits of rural life in
sixteenth-century Holland.
Most ominously, Badkhen observes the steady advance of the Taliban—
young men wearing turbans and riding motorcycles—who take over village
after village without firing a shot because the Afghan security forces are
spread too thin or are too feckless to halt the rising Taliban tide. Once in
power, the Taliban install their ultra-fundamentalist interpretation of sharia
law. They even take over Badkhen’s beloved hamlet of Oqa.
It’s a bleak tale told by an expert storyteller that should give pause to
those—like myself—who had hoped for an Afghan future in which the Tal-
iban were completely marginalized and ordinary Afghans could hope for
some modicum of a better life. In much of northern Afghanistan Badkhen
has shown us that this is as much of a pipe dream as the opium smoke that
is the only solace of the men, women, and children of the village of Oqa.
Peter Bergen, a director of the New America Foundation and frequent visitor
to Afghanistan since 1993, is the author of The Longest War: The Enduring
Conflict between America and al-Qaeda and the forthcoming Manhunt: The
Ten-Year Search for bin Laden.
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ANNA BADKHEN • AFGHANISTAN BY DONKEY
Maybe there are no fields other than battlefields,
those still remembered,
and those long forgotten,
birch woods and cedar woods,
snows and sands, iridescent swamps,
and ravines of dark defeat.
— Wislawa Szymborska, Reality Demands
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