It is the body here that resists before the mind.
The bodies of the soldiers in battle, of the war victims with the stumps of arms and legs, the bodies of the children who drag themselves mournfully in search of something to sell in exchange for food. And the bodies of women on which, everywhere, the history of men who make war is written.
The resistance of Anisa is her face without a veil, the hair that falls on her shoulders and then long softens up to the middle of the back. The locks are colored with the dark brown of youth, the root, on the other hand, has the white of its fifty-seven years. The nuances of Anisa’s boss seem to follow the decades her life went through: Mohammed Daoud Khan’s coup in 1973, the abolition of the monarchy, the proclamation of the Republic, and endless wars, the Soviet invasion, the mujahideen, the first Islamic Emirate, in 1996, the American war, the occupation, and then again, today, the Afghanistan of the Taliban.
For each chapter of the story, Anisa has a photograph: one sees her smiling in her white wedding dress, another wears a summer suit while dancing in a flower garden in Kabul in the seventies, one still shows her thick black hair , backcoated and held firm on the right side of the forehead by a silver brooch, sitting smiling next to the elderly mother, of the last – which she carefully drags out of the protective tissue – Anisa points to her bare legs.
They are hers, she is twenty years old. He works for the Ministry of Mines and Oil. Around two other women, they are standing and talking, holding paper packets with their forearms.
The image holds them in their daily gestures: work, the relationship with the world, the beauty that radiates all around.
More than thirty years have passed since that photograph, Anisa still lives in Kabul, today she wears a pair of sweatpants, two sweaters and a scarf to protect her from the cold, on her nails the remains of a red nail polish spread too long ago and on her face an armor of beauty, alive but never exhibited, worn with the elegance and firmness of someone who has never resigned himself to covering it: rather closed in the house, says the battlefield which is his body, but never covered.
It is the resistance of Anisa, who never wanted to see the world from the grates of a burqa.
The radiant gaze of the photographs of youth has been transformed into an austere and alert disposition. She has everything under control: the private grandchildren of the school who sit in the only warm room in the house, the daughter-in-law who previously worked as a consultant for the UNDP, the United Nations Development Agency, and today spends her days shelling pomegranates and the two sons, Mustafa and Omid. The first was an official of the Afghan National Security Agency, the intelligence of the fugitive government of Ghani, the second a “combat interpreter” of the US military.
The first has lost his job, the second is in hiding.
Therefore, theirs, more than a home, is a refuge. The house, the real one, was quickly abandoned on September 2 when a neighbor informed them that the Taliban were coming to take Omid away, house-to-house raids began to make all those who had worked with US troops disappear and those of NATO.
Omid’s name was high on the list. So they ran away.
His mother took away the photographs and he took the letters of recommendation, one for each mission he completed with the Marine Task Force he worked with. He leafs through them, reads them: «The US forces thank Mahmoud Omid for the courage shown on the field. From today, he is not only a collaborator of the troops but a friend, therefore we recommend his inclusion in the SIV program ».
Omid is one of 20,000 Afghans who have applied to move to the United States through the SIV program, the special American immigration visa. He had presented the first question at the end of 2020, the means and men on the Afghan risk had already been moved, the Doha agreements between the Trump administration and the Taliban had established winners, losers and excluded, only the date remained to be defined , real, of the withdrawal of troops. His generals friends supported his visa request with letters and phone calls, certificates and medals, but the request was rejected: the control requirements were too strict, the polygraph test, the lie detector, too thorny. Omid passed the first two selections and failed the last, like hundreds of other performers. The polygraph noticed a suspected alteration of the breath, the emotions that moved the needles on the diagram indicated a level of stress not compatible with the required standards, on the bureaucratic graph of truth Omid’s disturbance could represent a “danger to US security”, so from “friend of the marines” he became one of the left behind, the left behind.
In the days of the airport rage, Omid slept with his mother in a tent for a week, he had with him only the transparent folder with the letters of recommendation: “look here, I’m one of yours, he said to the marines who guarded the entrance”.
But there was nothing to be done. As the soldiers took off, Omid saw the final flight depart from the ground, where chance and chaos separated the saved and the abandoned. He cried, turned his back on the airport, changed his phone number and started a life as a fugitive.
His days today have maintained a military field discipline, he wakes up, washes and dresses as if he were going out to go to the base. But he doesn’t go there. Stay locked in his room and study. The proof that the former life really existed is in the letters that did not help and in a few jigs of memory on his phone: in one photo he is in uniform, flying on an American Chinook towards Helmand, in a another hugged to the marines, while they give him the certificate of courage for saving the lives of the US and Afghan special forces. He did this twice, in 2017 by intercepting and having a member of the Haqqani network arrested who had infiltrated the Afghan army, and in 2019, by translating conversations of a group of Taliban under control in the district of Kabul10, who were organizing a kamikaze attack on the US embassy.
This is why, when the Taliban launched an attack on Western armies in the villages, the mandate was to kill the translators first, and this is why, when they took Kabul, before punishing other enemies, religious and ethnic minorities, journalists and the women sought the interpreters: because they were the mouths and ears of the Americans, the spies of the occupiers, a more execrable sin than apostasy.
The Taliban have not forgiven them for having been the bridge between the occupation forces and the community, the same bridge whose importance the occupation forces have underestimated for twenty years. Americans fought against terrorist groups, inaugurated schools and clinics, built roads, wells and semblances of institutions in an attempt to conquer the minds and hearts of the people, without knowing however for which values those hearts beat and which traditions protected the minds.
Thus, when Omid today, in his days made of nothing, reflects on what was the main mistake of Westerners, he does not talk about military tactics and strategies, he says rather that in the conversations he had with the soldiers the heart of the problem was missing, the most important thing. difficult to translate: the culture of diversity. “With the force of weapons you can conquer a few square kilometers but it is with the authority and respect for the values of others that you hold it back,” he says.
It is also for this reason that the United States and its allies lost the Afghan war, because together with the geographical notions, the mountain ranges in which the Taliban were hiding, the trajectories followed by Isis Khorasan on the road that connects Kabul to Jalalabad and Jalalabad to the Pakistan, it was necessary to build cultural literacy, to know that one never refuses a cup of green tea in an Afghan home because hospitality flows there, which in a rural village addressing a woman directly is tantamount to seriously violating a strict law. rule of conduct, that you do not reach out your hand to greet them, but that as a sign of respect you put your hand to your chest, bowing your head slightly, that exchanging verses from the Koran, as a greeting, is a shared tradition and not religious extremism .
Thus for twenty years the Afghans and the occupation forces spoke untranslatable languages, on the one hand that of the Afghan society which saw its countryside transformed into battlefields, houses disintegrated, fields unusable, children and husbands injured. , amputees or dead, on the other hand that of the combat troops first more and more armored then more and more retreating, in the armored military bases for fear of being attacked or in the Green Zone, blockhouse and altar of occupation. For the Afghans in the countryside, the only contact with the West happened in this way, speaking languages that they never understood, while the Taliban gathered consensus, between the two evils – people began to think – better the lesser, that who at least knows the culture of the community. In between, the vain effort of interpreters like Omid, the bridges between cultures, the betrayed, the left behind.
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