A girl stands on a dry, rocky path, her shoes scuffed , her shabby green dress brushing against her ankles. Above her is a clear blue sky. Behind her a cliff rises, pocked with caves and empty alcoves where two proud statues of the Buddha once stood. Now their bodies lie in ruins, red-tinged fragments of sandstone limbs indistinguishable from the other rubble. She cries a low, muffled sniffle like an animal, but her sounds are masked by the brown paper bag pushed low down over her face; two holes for eyes, a slit for her mouth. Around her, in a rough arc, stand a dozen boys. Some point their guns, others grip stones. They too look grey and aged by the dirt. Their faces are cold like glass and their eyes unflinching.
“Girls don’t go to school. Hold up your hands. You are a sinner. We are the Taliban. We will stone you.”
Two more scrabble at the earth with their bare hands.
“Look. They’re digging your grave.”
Her fingers close around a small, red, cylindrical object.
“What are you holding? Lipstick is for heathen women. Repent.”
They manhandle her roughly towards the hole. But a paper kite, soaring overhead, distracts her tormentors.
“The American bombers are coming…….run.”
They pretend to shoot with their stick guns. The kite falls anyway.
Baktay pulls the bag from her head. Her fear is real.
“In god’s name let me go to school to learn funny stories. I don’t want to play the stoning game.”
Later the boys change roles, become Americans.
“Die bastard terrorist liar” they shout.

Baktay is six, the boys little older. Their country is Afghanistan. The scene is from Hana Makhmalbaf’s affecting film Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame. In early 2001 The Taliban exploded the 6th century Buddhas, two colossi approaching 180 feet tall, carved out of the cliff at Bamiyan, because they were un-islamic and the idols of infidels. Later that year another pair of towers would be brought down in the homeland of an infidel, this time unleashing not words but weapons upon the Afghan people.
As I watched the disturbing drama of those children I was all too aware of the hearses which, since 2005, have driven slowly through the Wiltshire town of Wootton Bassett bearing their union jack-draped coffins. Of the friends and relatives along the way who clutch each other dignified in their grief. Of young men and women who left this country whole but continue to be returned home dead or maimed.

What, I wondered, is this distant, landlocked, barren country to me? Is the war really for my own safety, the freedom to leave my house each day without the fear of a terrorist bomb as politicians try to tell me? Or just easier now to close our eyes and walk away. Forget our history there. Look after our own. The more I agonised the more I needed to know the Afghanistan behind the immediate stories of death and war. What of the children born into a country where war of a sort has raged since 1973? The average life expectancy is 45 years. Do the maths. How many have seen peace? Or of the mothers, aunts and sisters hidden for years behind mud walls and underneath their chadors or their sky blue burkas? What is it that has been destroyed? I at least owed it to both those being sent to fight and the people they are purporting to protect to try to understand.

I read some native literature: “My forbidden Face by Latifa, Samir and Samira by Siba Shakib, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. Reading them was like looking through the slats of blinds, tiny glimpses of what I was wanting to know. And also sad and desperate and deeply moving.

But then I found three journalists, all of them women, who between them have twenty three years first hand experience in the region, all of whom had put their lives on the line for their reporting. Christina Lamb, who was named Foreign Correspondent of the Year in the British Press Awards in 2002, wrote the book “The Sewing Circles of Herat.” Asne Seierstad, an award-winning Norwegian reporter, lived for four months in Kabul in the home of an Afghani bookseller and his family. Kathy Gannon’s book “I is for Infidel”, catalogues eighteen years of holy war and terror.

What these women showed me was somewhere far more complex and far more beautiful than any three minute clip on the national news ever could. They told me how long before the Taliban the ravages of war had already laid waste to cities, killed thousands, divided tribe from tribe and drawn great scars across the rugged, ancient, mountainous land; a stolen crown in 1973, cousin toppling cousin; five years later a coup by Marxist army officers followed closely by an invasion and years of Soviet occupation. Immediately America and her allies poured billions of dollars of arms into the hands of the resistance mujahadeen (warlords) to end the soviets’ ambition. Ten years on, in 1989, they conceded defeat. The retreating communist army left the detritus of war; rusting tanks, 4 million refugees displaced including much of the intellectual population, bridges and irrigation ditches destroyed and orchards felled.

The bitter civil war which followed between these same warlords was yet more brutal. Gorged with donated weapons Pashtuns turned against Uzbek against Tajik against Hazara. Alliances were forged between warlords and then just as easily betrayed. A shifting patchwork of fiefdoms each with their private militia seemed to have no shame, no limits to the atrocities they would commit.

Kathy Gannon describes how she watched women and children being blown up.
“The victims were usually the children who scurried out whenever there was a lull in the fighting to scavenge and collect scrap to sell or who had been sent by their parents to retrieve some essentials items left behind during the heat of a battle. The mujahedeen were maliciously clever. They never booby-trapped the entrance to a home, where even the young knew to be cautious. Instead they would string the tripwire across a second storey staircase or at the entrance to a bedroom”

It was to stop this unfeeling carnage that the Taliban was born. The promises they gave were seductive; an end to bloodshed, corruption and excess - and a purer society. They would disarm the warlords and clear roads of chains and bandits. Their leader, one-eyed Mullah Omar, was a man from humble beginnings, not well-educated, from a conservative southern Pashtun state where women had always gone fully-veiled and no girls went to school because there were none.
“Omar wasn’t a big talker” Gannon writes. “His interpretation of the Koran was literal, basic……he didn’t know big meanings but he loves Islam.”
Sixty men reputedly founded the Taliban.
“In 1994 it was just a group of angry men, looking for an end to the lawlessness.”
“We didn’t know where the Taliban would go,” says a former soldier. “We didn’t begin it with the idea of taking over the country.”

“The Taliban promised our people security,” Malalai Joya, a young female Afghan politician wrote. “They were so exhausted by the years of war and anarchy that once again our people welcomed the new regime with hope that they might bring a positive change. But unfortunately hopes quickly turned into ashes…….and their security was like that of a graveyard.”

As the movement gathered momentum it gained recruits. Many talibs had not even lived in the country they hoped to save. They had grown up in the refugee camps in neighbouring Pakistan, poor, young, uneducated. And ultimately malleable. Many boys were sent to the madrassas or religious schools where they would be housed and fed for free and where the Koran was the only text and sharia the only true Islamic law. They had no sense of history, of their origins, only what the prophet taught. But it was a perversion of the tenets of Islam, a brutalisation not recognised by ordinary Muslims.

Christina Lamb recalls a conversation in a madrassa with two young boys.
“I was intrigued by these young boys who rather than wanting to be pilots, engine drivers or astronauts longed to die in combat.”

Then Arabs came from the strict Wahabi sects in Saudi Arabia. An austere philosophy took hold: to purge society by reverting to a 7th century world, the time of the prophet. These new, narrow purists despised intellectuals and technocrats, refused to negotiate with more moderate Muslims or ethnic groups. They went into battle with a Kalashnikov in one hand and the Koran in the other. Many detected the hand of the Pakistan Intelligence service, the ISI. The clean-up operation soon became much, much more. Gradually the country fell to them – Kandahar, then Herat then Kabul.



In The bookseller of Kabul by the journalist Asne Seierstad, Sultan Khan, the owner of three bookshops, described to her the arrival of the Taliban in the city on 27th September 1996.
“The city was totally quiet ………two bodies hung from a pole outside the presidential palace. The larger was soaked through with blood from head to foot……….the other had merely been shot and hanged.”
The first was the former president Najibullah who had been living in safety in Kabul since being deposed by the mujahedeen. The second was his brother. The mujahedeen had fled.
“Kabul’s inhabitants gathered in disbelief round the pole in Ariana Square. …..The war was over. A new war would start – a war that would trample all joy underfoot.”
Within weeks the regime issued their decrees.

Women and girls were virtually to disappear into the home, forbidden to work, to attend school or to leave the house without a mahram (male relative). They were not to stand so close to windows or on balconies as to be visible to men outside. In public they had to wear the full burqa with only a small mesh hole through which to see. Ankles could not show, shoes could not be white or make a noise on the road. Their voices must not be loud. They could no longer wash clothes in the river, talk to or shake hands with men or attend hospitals with men in them. Tailors would no longer be able to sew women’s garments or measure women.

Music, movies, dancing, television, portraits, photographs and images of people were banned, even from packaging. No books except the Koran. Men were to grow beards, wear Islamic clothes and to observe prayers five times a day. Bird rearing and fighting, kite flying and most games, including the traditional buzkashi – an aggressive form of polo - cards and chess were forbidden as was gambling. Only golf and cricket were approved. Non-Muslims were to wear a yellow cloth stitched onto their clothes. No-one was to cheer or clap at sports events, only to chant Allah-o-Akbar.

Except in the privacy of the home there was to be no laughter.

“Women didn’t live under the Taliban,” a young woman tells Lamb. They just stayed in their rooms doing nothing “like cows in their sheds.”
But amidst the ruins she found people who had taken enormous risks to defy those edicts: the professor whose sewing group for women was a clandestine literature class; the poet who hid his writing behind a false wall; the artist who saved over a hundred oil paintings in the national gallery by painting over the forbidden human and animal figures with watercolours which could later be wiped away. All had witnessed the book burnings, the whippings, the hangings in the streets, the shootings and stonings in the football stadium. Still there were a hundred silent heroes. She asked one why he did it.
“A lot of fighters sacrificed their lives over the years for the freedom of this city. Shouldn’t a person of letters make that sacrifice too?.............If we had not done what we did to keep up the literary spirit of the city, the depths of our tragedy would have been ever greater.”

The Taliban fell to the Northern Alliance and the United States two months after 9/11 and the population rejoiced. Marri, a young woman in Kabul, sees her brothers come home without their beards.
“They say everyone is shaving them off. Our new neighbours have small children and they are laughing ………how long is it since we heard laughter…..Now I can hear Indian music playing along the street.”

Afghanistan was once a land of colour, of orchards of pomegranates, figs and peaches and vines of grapes; of fields of flowers; of mosques and minarets once covered in turquoise and opal glazed tiles. Statues and vases filled the museum; women wore reds and primrose yellows, pinks and greens, bright emerald and midnight blue. They had tambourines, drums and poems. But it was also a land mired in poverty and illiteracy and a deep urban-rural divide.

When the maverick humanitarian campaigner and author of Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools, Greg Mortenson, arrived in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban in 2001 he found a country where two thirds of people over the age of 15 could not read or write. For him, education is the key to break the cycle of suffering and bloodshed. He has helped local communities to build schools for girls, in places so remote that they sometimes have no telephones, faxes, email or postal services and materials have to be transported on the backs of yaks or Bactrian camels.

“If you teach a boy,” he quotes a proverb, “you educate an individual. But if you teach a girl you educate a community. No other factor comes close to matching the cascade of positive changes triggered by teaching a single girl how to read and write….. to deprive Afghan children of education is to bankrupt the future of their country.”
An educated woman’s children are less likely to die, just as later they are less likely to hold extremist views. He discovered a thirst for learning - people re-opening schools in buildings without roofs, basements, toilet blocks and disused shipping crates. Sadhan Khan, a local commandhan, pointed to the mountain slopes from his rooftop home.
“Look here….there has been too much dying in these hills. Every rock, every boulder you see before you is one of my mujahdeen, shahids, martyrs who sacrificed their lives fighting. Now we must make their sacrifice worthwhile. We must turn those stones into schools.”
His skills at winning hearts and minds has been noticed by top US army officials and he was nominated for the Nobel Peace prize.

I didn’t set out to answer the web of political, military and economic questions now confronting Afghanistan, its neighbours and its NATO occupiers. Should talks be instigated with the Taliban and if so with whom? Can people with a fierce tribal loyalty work together in a single government and one army? How hard should the west fight to promote the fair participation of women in Afghan society?I am glad that those decisions are not mine. What I did do was embark on a journey into the heart of a people in whose lands my fellow countrymen and women are laying down their lives, to learn how their history has brought them to this desperate point. Insurgency or no insurgency it is still a country crying out for help. And Al Quaeda has shown it has many other havens, not least in the borders of Pakistan. As I travelled I kept coming back to the words of Christina Lamb back in the eighties.

“It was about being among a people who had nothing but gave everything. It was a land where people learnt to smell the first snows or the mountain bear on the wind and for whom an hour spent staring at a beautiful flower was an hour gained rather than wasted. A land where elders rather than libraries were the true source of knowledge and the family and the tribe meant more than the sum of individuals. …At a dinner party in north London I listened to friends bragging about buying porches with their bonuses and sending out from their offices for pizzas and clean shirts because they were clinching a deal and could not leave their desks. I wanted to tell them of a place where every family had lost a son or a husband or had a leg blown off, almost every child seen someone die in a rocket attack and where a small boy had told me his dream was to have a brightly coloured ball. But, when I began to talk about Afghanistan, I watched eyes glaze and felt as if I was trying to have a conversation about a movie no-one else had seen.”

Today more people have an opinion but it is invariably to turn our backs and walk away. But listen to Malalai Joya.
“Afghans are a brave and a freedom loving people with a rich culture and a proud history……….today the soil is full of landmines, bullets and bombs when what we really need is an invasion of hospitals, clinics and schools….We need a helping hand of friends around the world.”

Another young girl writes this:
“Peace is not sold. Otherwise I would have bought it for my country.”







2887 words

My Children Opened My Eyes to the Wonders of the World……………

In my fusty all-girls’ school, in the backwaters of Cornwall, over thirty years ago, science was definitely the poor relation: a subject to be endured but not enjoyed (one compulsory O level – I chose physics). Even the word brings back the smells of the dank and dismal old laboratories - biology of pickled gherkins and furniture polish, chemistry of baking soda and toilet cleaner. I remember holding a test tube over a bunsen burner, watching light refract through a prism, staring into murky tanks at newts and frogs which I dreaded having to dissect. There were strings of formulas - SO4, CAC03, 2Fe - a language with no attraction for me, not like the French and Latin I eagerly lapped up. If only it had been Hogwarts and we’d made cupid crystals and befuddlement potion.

My ancient teachers, quietly stagnating amongst the sea of mud brown and yellow uniforms – which earned us the insult “brass knobs” from our rival school - made little effort to capture our imagination. When the physics master – surely reincarnated as Grantly Budgen on Waterloo Road – retired a year before my exam his new, younger successor was appalled at how little he had actually taught us. I scraped a C, breathed a sigh of relief and moved into the sixth form and the comforting embrace of the arts.

And so I have continued untroubled. I read novels, quote poets, write grammatically correct prose and spell in my sleep. David Starkey beats Eastenders. My favourite book is a thesaurus. I love to feast on the words as I roll them over playfully in my mind before committing them to paper. The quick crossword is my morning fix, the cryptic one a sporadic pleasure. I know where I am with the humanities; words are my bread and butter.

So of course my children would love them too. It started so well. Proudly, at primary school parents’ evenings I listened to Jack’s teacher praise his story writing, his painting and his project on the London blitz. He played the piano and the violin – and with polar bears in his imaginary games. For two whole weeks one summer he dressed as a mouse. At bedtime we rattled through the Narnia novels, Doctor Doolittle, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. His sister Morwenna wrote a book called Little Cat, with seven pages. Childish art covered the walls. No hint of trouble.

Yet ten years on my son has been lured to a degree in chemistry, my daughter to A Levels in chemistry, physics and maths. They read New Scientist and Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”. No love of metaphors, Matisse, The Culture Show or Sylvia Plath. They’re hooked on positrons, covalent bonding, string theory, quarks. I have Shakespeare, they have Schrodinger – with and without his cat. They have Einstein, I have McEwan. C is a letter: to them it is the speed of light. When did I go wrong?

They laugh when I tentatively ask if there is gravity on Mars (Yes, but not quite as strong as on Earth). Are there elements in the solar system which have not yet been discovered? (Definitely not) Isn’t the Large Hadron Collider just a very big boys’ toy, an excuse to propel things very fast towards each other and then watch them collide? Eat your heart out Richard Hammond. I call myself educated yet there is a vast gaping hole in my essential knowledge of the world. My ignorance is no longer good enough. Time for a bit of self-improvement.

It seems I’m not alone. Suddenly “popular” science seems to be where it’s at – in bookshops, in documentaries, in magazines. So I’m curled up on the sofa, watching a man on my television who claims to be a particle physicist but looks more like a member of a minor rock band. That’s because he was, in his early days, on keyboards for D:Ream. Yes, Professor Brian Cox – complete with OBE (Overwhelming Boyish Enthusiasm) – is science’s first pin up. Okay, Einstein coined the archetypal mad scientist look but he was hardly hot. Brian – I already feel I can call him that - is young, has cool hair and likes fast military jets (I’ve just watched him go up in one to the thin blue line, the edge of earth’s border with outer space, 18 km almost vertically straight up and it’s stunning.)

He’s very excited - in an over-exuberant puppy sort of way. I fancy bringing him home, giving him a cuddle, feeding him up. But he’s far too busy eulogising about the laws of physics and the solar system. As is Jim Al-Khalili, as he makes a diamond disappear into a cloud of gas. So who said they were forever? (“Chemistry: A Volatile History”). Or the Egyptologist who pushes an endoscope up a two and a half thousand year old mummy’s nose (“The Story of Science: Power, Proof and Passion”). This no longer feels the enigma it used to be. It’s just what stuff is and what stuff does. And it’s all around me.

I’m growing to love the periodic table in all its brilliant beauty – and not just for its names, though I must admit that antimony, lutetium and titanium sit elegantly on the page. I’ve learnt the second law of thermodynamics: that left to their own devices hot things get colder and not vice versa. Like my cup of tea. That entropy (science’s posh word for chaos) will always catch up with us in the end; my daughter’s bedroom is proof of that. I can now balance a chemical equation and explain electron sharing. A reaction is not just a scowl on a teenager’s face, a mole not only a furry mammal. Precipitate is not to hurry. I know an angstrom from an isotope, my loops from my buckyballs. Neon is a cocky, noble gas. Cosmic rays are real not a fiction. It’s not so hard.

My family are impressed. I still get stuck on the space-time horizon and the uncertainty principle, never mind the gluons. Hawking lost me at the six flavours of quarks: up, down, strange, charm, top, bottom. Is he kidding? For now I’ll pass on Planck’s quantum hypothesis, the singularity theorem and red shift. But I’ll hold my own in the dinner party conversations about black holes and all that missing anti-matter. (Just put a mother on to it – believe me, we find things all the time!)

And have I enjoyed it? I can honestly say yes. My children have given me a story just as gripping, magnificent and magical as the ones I read to them. Only this one’s true. And that Large Collider and its quest for the elusive particle, the mythical Higgs Boson? I can hardly wait - bring it on!




Annie Hitch
oliver@ohitch.eclipse.co.uk