A rug covered the ground and cushions ran along the walls that were a minimum of two-feet thick. a couple of treasures were on display. alittle cabinet with half a dozen tiny coloured glass bottles. But the family are poor, and any possessions that they had were destroyed or looted during the last 20 years of war.
The house was a refuge from the recent sun and dusty air outside. it had been surrounded by high mud walls, like all the family compounds within the fields that became battlefields in Marjah, Helmand province. Inside the walls they were able to harvest a couple of more puffballs of cotton to be added to the bale Shamsullah had already taken from the fields outside.
Shamsullah ushered in his mother, Goljuma. He said she was 65. She had wrapped herself during a long shawl that covered her head and body right down to her knees, with alittle gap so she could peer out.
Sometimes I caught the flash of an eye fixed and therefore the bridge of a nose. Goljuma’s voice was strong as she talked a few life filled with sadness and a war that destroyed her life and killed her four eldest sons. Shamsullah, the youngest, was the sole one left. He was 24, but his face was 10 years older.
Goljuma’s first son to die, 11 years ago, was Zia Ul Huq. He was a fighter for the Taliban. “My son joined the Taliban because he understood that the Americans wanted to destroy Islam and Afghanistan,” she said.
The other three sons died within a couple of months in 2014. Quadratallah was killed in an air strike. Two other brothers, Hayatullah and Aminullah, were arrested during a police raid on the family home. Shamsullah said his brothers were forced to check in for the military , where they were killed. because the only survivor, Shamsullah said God decided he had to require on the responsibilities of the family.
“Have you ever tried to balance five water melons on one hand? That’s how it’s on behalf of me ,” he told me. His duties include ensuring the welfare of the widow of his oldest brother, Zia, the Taliban fighter.
“I miss my brothers,” Shamsullah said. “My eldest brother’s wife married my next brother when he died. When he was killed, my next brother married her. When he was killed my fourth brother married her. I married her when he was killed.”
In 2010, Marjah was chosen because the first scenery operation of the US troop “surge” ordered by President Barack Obama. the thought was that reinforcements would deliver knockout blows that might change the course of the war decisively in favour of the govt in Kabul and therefore the American, British and other allied forces that sustained it.
“As we push the Taliban out, there’s nothing but a bright future ahead: good schools, healthiness clinics, a free-flowing market,” a US press release that year predicted.
The fields of cotton and opium poppies in Marjah became a nightmare for the foreign troops that fought the elusive Taliban insurgents. Three months into the long drawn-out operation the US Commander General Stanley McChrystal called Marjah “a bleeding ulcer”. it had been fought over repeatedly within the next 10 years.
Goljuma was contemptuous of Western leaders who said they were trying to form Afghanistan a far better place for the people. “I do not know anything about their mission. They destroyed the country,” she said.
She was incredulous once I asked her about the opportunities that ladies were ready to take and now are heartbroken to lose. “So many of our people suffered tons while they were here. They killed our husbands, our brothers and our sons,” she said. “I just like the Taliban because they respect Islam. Women like me aren’t like women in Kabul.”
She said before the Taliban won the war everyone was frightened of them. Now they’re relieved it’s over.
One question, however, is whether or not she was speaking freely. The Taliban media office insisted the BBC team travelled with an armed Talib bodyguard and a translator it approved as a condition of our presence in Helmand. If that they had not been there, we’d have heard more about the fear the Taliban drilled into many Afghans.
But I didn’t doubt Goljuma’s sincerity when she condemned the destruction inflicted on Helmand’s traditional farming community by the world’s most powerful militaries, and her grief about her four dead sons.
In 2001, shortly after the 9/11 attacks on America the US, the united kingdom and their allies invaded Afghanistan with a transparent mission: to destroy al-Qaeda and punish the Taliban for harbouring them.
It is what happened next that’s much harder to know and to justify; an unwinnable war that cut across all that they tried to try to to to enhance the lives of Afghans.
Development, like democracy, cannot come from the barrel of a gun. The West had victories along the way. Indeed, a generation of urban men and ladies were educated and had their horizons transformed. But those benefits didn’t reach poor and barely educated people within the countryside like Goljuma’s family.
When the Taliban first seized power in 1996, they used violence to enforce their religious and cultural beliefs. Now, most Afghans are too young to recollect the years before 9/11 and therefore the invasion.
In Lashkar Gah, young Talibs reacted to the BBC cameras by removing their mobile phones, filming us and taking selfies with the foreigners. Mobile data is reasonable here; our Taliban escort watched BBC Pashto on his phone. the planet is hospitable them during a way that it wasn’t within the 1990s, when the Taliban banned photography.
Their group’s fighters are not any longer boys who grew up with no knowledge of the surface world. So will they force their own fighters, including the remainder of the population, to offer up smartphones, the web and a world that beckons them on? this point it’d be harder to bend and break a rustic .
