Homeland Elegies(15)

Then she leaped from her chair and bolted up the stairs.

In the ensuing silence, Anjum shot Latif an angry look. Latif held her gaze, then quietly rose, stepped away from his place at the table, and went up the stairs after his daughter. Years later—long after the Awans had left America and relocated to Peshawar—I would learn from Mother that the head cook at Latif’s family’s estate back in North Punjab had been caught in the pantry with his mouth on the girl’s private parts. I don’t know when this discovery took place, though I suspect Ramla’s outburst was a sign that the molestation had already begun. I don’t know what happened to the cook, though I can certainly imagine Latif snapping a man’s neck like a twig.





Jihad


We never saw them again in America. The fight with the Soviets got worse that winter, and in the spring of 1983, Latif moved his family, as promised, to Peshawar. They stayed with his brother for a time, then took a house in the western outskirts of the city. The United States was doubling down on its support for the Afghans that summer, and Peshawar was awash with dollars. The Americans offered to pay, soup to nuts, for Latif’s new clinic, on the condition that it would also be used to treat wounded mujahideen fighters from across the border. CIA money, Father said. Latif was given enough to set up a facility without precedent in those parts, where he could help the poor, tend to wounded mujahideen, and train young field medics to care for ailing soldiers on the front lines. But apparently, the clinic would function as more than just a medical center. Rumor had it that a back room on the second floor of that two-story concrete-brick building operated as the Pakistani army’s preferred meeting point in Peshawar for exchanges between American intelligence and the Afghan tribal powers waging the war against the Soviet forces. Clearly, Latif was finally doing all he could—save picking up a gun and heading for the Afghan mountains—to battle back the Russian infidels.

He never picked up arms himself, but his twin sons eventually would. In 1989, when—to much of the world’s surprise—the mujahideen prevailed, the Soviets withdrew their troops. But the battles wouldn’t end; Russia and the United States continued to fund a proxy war for another three years through various intermediaries, and Latif’s sons would both join the fight under the banner of the Americans. It was a conflict being paid for by opium grown under the logistical guidance of American intelligence, and one of the twins, Idris, would get deeply involved in the production of the drug; by the mid-1990s he was dead of an overdose. The other, Yahya, would work his way up a complicated chain of command, eventually forging close relationships with militia leaders who found their way into power during the Taliban era. When we visited in 1990, Anjum traveled south from Peshawar to see us; I barely recognized her. It had been only seven years since I last saw her, but her youth was gone. Under the white wool shawl draped around her torso and covering much of her head, her once russet hair was fully gray, her face gaunt and drawn. Ramla and Hafsa were with her—both wearing hijabs—and seemed to be flourishing. Ramla had been accepted to medical school and would be starting in the fall. Hafsa, then fifteen, aspired to do the same. If the girls missed America, they didn’t say it, though it was clear from Ramla’s avid queries about New Kids on the Block and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids that she was still plugged into the American experience. (This was well before the era of the internet.)

Anjum was worried about her sons. She didn’t recognize them. They’d dropped out of college to become vigilantes out of some B movie, racing about on motorbikes with assault rifles slung over their shoulders. Latif, too, had changed, she said. His tenderness had hardened; he was more unforgiving now. He had no patience for her misgivings about their new life. Instead, he expected an attitude of sacrifice equal to the occasion, which, as he saw it, was warfare. He thought it a defect in her character that she couldn’t see the battle for Afghanistan as her own.

But wasn’t the war over? Hadn’t they won?

The only thing that annoyed Latif more, Anjum said, than her dismay over the endless fighting was her inability to understand the supposed complexity of it. “What’s complex?” she mused out loud over tea and sweets that afternoon. “Maybe it’s all very simple. Men love to fight. They want to fight. They need to fight. And what’s complex are the reasons they come up with to do the thing they really want, which is just to keep killing each other.” I remember Mother offering every sign of sympathy, but it’s clear from the entry she made in her diary that evening that she’d actually been thinking mostly about herself:

Anjum came to see us today. L is too busy with jihad. No message from him. Not even hello. The marriage is fraying. She never loved him. Foolish to think it would have been different for me—but you’ve always been foolish.



In the days after Anjum’s visit, I heard Mother tell her sisters she thought Anjum would leave Latif and return to America. She was wrong on both counts: Anjum would stay with her husband until his death, in 1998; then, when she tried to return to America, she would discover that she couldn’t. Her naturalized citizenship had been revoked.





The Abundant Idyll Despoiled


I’ve held off long enough. Here’s what happened to Latif:

Once the Soviet empire collapsed—and with it, the covert war with America in Afghanistan—the United States discontinued its support for its partners in the region. Robert Gates, then deputy director of the CIA, would later confess the mistake the United States made in walking away from the groups it had funded all those years, a mistake that would lead directly to the first World Trade Center bombing and eventually to 9/11. The straight line from the American-backed mujahideen to Al Qaeda is still a story little told, little understood; in his way, Latif’s fate is emblematic of it. For once the American money dried up, like everyone else who’d depended on that cash, Latif pivoted. His allegiance didn’t change. His fundamental loyalty had always been to the Muslim rebels fighting the irreligious onslaught of the Soviets, not to the Americans. Now their wrath had turned from the Soviet empire to imperialism of the American variety. How this substitution took place is not particularly complicated. It was 1991, and George H. W. Bush made a fateful decision to intervene in the affairs of a regime the United States had put into place and supported for the better part of almost thirty years. Since the ayatollah’s ascent to power in Tehran, the Americans built up Saddam Hussein even further to keep the Iranians weak on their western flank. Iran and Iraq warred for eight years, and Iraq would eventually prevail in this proxy war on behalf of the Americans—so, of course, it was now time for America to get rid of its “friend” in Baghdad.