We pulled up to the gates, and to our surprise encountered a long stretch of suvs parked outside. Armed guards led us to the living room, where about a dozen men reclined against cushions on the carpet, their gazes fixed on the large TV in the corner. News footage of the embassy bombing cycled through the same severed limbs, the same bloodied bodies, the same wailing woman.
The Commander rose and greeted me. He was a tall man, over six feet, his hair greying and grizzled, with drooping eyes and a permanent, half-amused smile. He led me around the room, introducing me to each of his guests and adding a tidbit to explain his personal connection to them, as in: “Meet Dr. so-and-so, professor of economics; we know each other from our days in Peshawar. This is such-and-such, the former governor of Kunar; we liberated Logar province together. Here is so-and-so; he is in parliament, and we fought in Khost together.”
Most of the men glanced at me and nodded, smiling. Others didn’t acknowledge me at all. The Commander pointed to an empty space on the carpet and invited me to sit. Then he left to sit with his friends at the opposite end of the room. He remained there for forty-five minutes before venturing back to check on me. When I mentioned that it was getting late and asked about the interview, he laughed: “First we eat, then we drink, then we talk!” And he returned to his spot.
Almost two hours after I arrived, he rose and pulled aside a curtain that ran the width of the room behind me, revealing a long dining table covered from end to end with food. As the men made their way in, I hung back, feeling out of place. The doctor of economics who knew Falah from Peshawar paused as he walked past: “The Commander tells me you are a journalist. How do you like our country?” I told him that other than the bombing, everything was going well. He leaned over and whispered conspiratorially, “Pakistan. The isi [Inter-Services Intelligence] will never let us have peace.”
I found a place at one end of the table and made Bashir sit beside me. The core of the meal — rice and meat — was no different from the $4 meals I’d been eating at the Herat restaurant, but quality wise it was Kobe beef versus Big Mac. Heaped on several platters along the table were Kabuli rice with fat, golden raisins and carrot slivers, and hunks of lamb that fell away from the bone at the touch of my fork. There were also several plates of mantoo — dumplings stuffed with seasoned ground beef and covered in yogurt and mint — and several varieties of kebab and bread.
The luxuriousness of the meal wasn’t especially surprising, given how well off the Commander was. Not only was he a high-ranking official, but his family owned land in Logar province. After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, he had moved them to Hayatabad, an upscale neighbourhood in Peshawar.
During dinner, he called out to me from his end of the table and pointed to his guests. He’d already mentioned my background to them, but they wanted to know my specific ethnicity, and my family name, which my father had dropped more than forty years earlier when he came to Canada. I told them, and they nodded knowingly, or perhaps politely.
Watching the men eat and laugh and talk, I thought about their long and often violent history together. They were, in a sense, the only continuity in Afghanistan’s recent narrative, which has been marked by steady warfare for the past thirty years. Intellectuals and engineers and teachers by profession, they had become dissenters, then fighters. Now they were politicians. But as I was soon to learn, they weren’t bound by their new identity and its challenges so much as by who they’d once been.
The guests began to leave when dinner ended. Almost three hours after I’d arrived, the Commander was finally ready for the interview. We sat on the floor, and I started to ask my questions. He sighed often during his replies, his tone alternately condescending and earnest as he recounted the suffering of Afghans before touting his government’s progress. “When we came back from Pakistan six years ago,” he said, “we hadn’t any electricity, we hadn’t any drinking water, we hadn’t one kilometre of asphalt road, we hadn’t one school. We now supply about 60 percent of the electricity in Kabul. And we have established and constructed many schools, so millions of children, daughters and sons, are going to school.”
When I asked him about Afghans’ obvious frustration with the government, specifically the security situation, the corruption, and the lack of services, he grew impatient, then tsked and smiled indulgently before deflecting. Non-answer piled upon non-answer until he finally wrapped up the interview with “We hope on our God, as we received support during our jihad with the Soviets. Everybody [has come back] from abroad and made their houses and their agricultural fields. Now I’m thinking everybody has a car in their house.”
I thanked him for his time and started packing away my recording equipment, but he told me I couldn’t leave yet. I hadn’t met his wife, hadn’t had tea. And he had something to show me.
The Commander’s son, who’d sat with us at dinner, brought in some weathered photo albums, and an animated Falah began to tour me through his jihad days. He’d cut an impressive figure back then: a wiry frame, with a handsome face accentuated by a long beard and the pakol perched on his head. In many of the shots, he stood with other armed men in shalwar kameez and pakols, or sometimes jackets or shawls. They posed on mountains or while trekking through valleys. On one page, they threw snowballs at each other, and on another slid down snowy hills on their backsides, holding their guns aloft and laughing. The album also contained professional shots by photojournalists, emphasizing the men’s common heroism. One showed the Commander posing with a Stinger missile. He told me, with evident pride, that he was the first to receive the weapon.
Falah explained that he had been given the rank of commander by Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, a man from a powerful religious family who was the spiritual guide of the mujahedeen, and who became the country’s first president after the collapse of the Communist government in 1992. Mojaddedi now serves as president of the Meshrano Jirga and chair of the Independent National Commission for Peace and Reconciliation.
