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I was at Royal Blackburn Hospital to see my mum, who had suffered a heart attack and had fluid in her lungs, when a text message arrived asking if I could go to Afghanistan and help produce radio packages from the site of last week’s earthquake. My mum hadn’t understood the doctors and, sitting alongside her, I read the form in Punjabi about the surgery that they needed to perform. She signed, saying that whatever happens — meaning if she died, since she already had a weak heart — it was up to Allah.
I’d been working in Afghanistan on and off for the past 18 months. “Allah they Wahlay,” she said, when I told her I was returning: “Go in God’s way”.
Landing at Kabul airport three days later, I felt good: happy to be back. We spent little time in the capital and set off driving for many hours down to the village of Gayan near the Pakistani border, where several aid organisations had set up tents. One had a sign saying: “Welcome to the Grief of the People of Gayan, District of Paktika Province of Afghanistan”. Mum called to say the surgery had removed an obstruction in an artery.
The area of eastern Afghanistan hit by the 5.9-magnitude earthquake is mountainous and takes time to reach. Driving from Kabul, the good roads, some built by the US near former western military bases and surrounded by Hesco Bastion barriers developed in England, eventually give way to rough tracks that wind through the peaks. This is how the aid trucks and journalists get in. The Taliban leadership flew in on the helicopters previously deployed against them by the Afghan army. They declared the search operation over in a couple of days and tweeted that the world’s aid agencies should help.
Afghanistan’s state news agency said that more than 1,000 people had died, with 1,500 injured — estimates that a doctor told me on Wednesday, a week after the earthquake, had been revised down slightly. The earthquake hit Afghanistan as the country was already dealing with economic collapse in the wake of the takeover of the Taliban last August and the imposition of sanctions.
On the first day, I saw what an earthquake does to a building and what it does to people. There were crushed cars that looked like they’d been sitting under others in a scrapyard; traditional string-and-wood beds that we called manjees in Pakistan smashed and surrounded by rocks; dead livestock in pits; bright hangings on walls left standing in ruined houses; and surrounding us mountains with rocks the size of houses threatening to tumble if the ground shook again.
It came in the night as the villagers slept. A man described how his house collapsed and his wife, trapped under the rubble, shouted for help. He tried lifting it with his hands and could not move it, so ran out to get a car jack. By the time he returned, she was dead. He told this story without crying.
I met a boy who had lost his whole immediate family. He stared but didn’t cry. We had arrived a few days after the earthquake. Maybe they’d cried before, maybe they’d cry after.
On the road to Gayan, I saw trucks of aid and relief packages from the UN World Food Programme, the Norwegian Refugee Council, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Emergency from Italy and IHH from Turkey. I saw them running hospitals out of tents, delivering food, surveying the damage and assessing families’ needs.
In the earthquake-affected areas you’ll see the white Taliban flag. The locals seem to appreciate seeing the Taliban directing the effort to save them. In the villages you’ll see men and hardly any women — girls, yes, but not women; in one house, a young boy shooed away his sister. It’s not just a reflection of the rule of the Taliban; this area of Afghanistan is deeply conservative.
The Taliban and locals directed us away from walls that they feared could fall, while men visited to pick up belongings to carry back to their families who were living in tents, too scared to go back home. Unicef tents were there but also some with Chinese characters on them.
Overnight, we slept in tents surrounded by mountains, taping the sides with my supply of medical tape and creating barriers inside to keep out snakes and scorpions. We were woken at 4am by a tremor and then by a helicopter that brought Khalil Haqqani, the Taliban minister of refugees, who talked to the press surrounded by aid from the UK’s Al Khair Foundation and sunflower oil from Russia.
A few hours later, another helicopter arrived with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Afghanistan’s acting first deputy prime minister, who brought cash with him. The boy we met the previous day who’d lost his whole immediate family was given some, and his uncle said they’d use it to rebuild the house. The Taliban said they gave away 40mn afghanis ($450,000) in cash that day. We got back to our tent to find our kettle missing. Ah well.
One man asked the international community to do something, and maybe it was because of the way he said it or because of where we were, but I felt I fully understood the term — that we’re all part of the same family. Later, I went from Gayan to Barmal, a district two hours’ drive south, which had suffered some of the worst devastation. There I saw the tents and the jeeps of the aid organisations, the Red Crescent, MSF, Emergency (the Italian NGO); some of the international community was here. I met the Iranian Red Crescent in the camp in Gayan, saw flour and oil being given away; we were told it came from a Kandahari businessman called Noorzai.
On entering Barmal, I saw three cows lying dead in the sun. They’d been killed in the earthquake, dragged and dumped next to the road, and as I got close with my camera, the hot rotting smell was consuming. Inside the camp there, I met a doctor who told me about longstanding problems of unclean water and diarrhoea. Luckily, I had water filters with me. I gave him what I could, enough to filter 400,000 gallons, a small dent. I felt glad he was there, someone who knew what they were doing and had a plan in a situation where most people would not know where to start.
Soon we had to leave for Kabul. On the last day near the site, we had breakfast of local green tea (our driver had found a kettle) and biscuits from Iran. We are among the ones who got to leave. Many journalists know the privilege of visiting someone’s life and then the unease of getting to leave. It’s too easy to call the Afghans resilient and tell them to get on with it. Life isn’t easy, it’s complicated.
We may not agree with the Taliban but we should help. Both the west and east are doing so, in ways they can. There is no apparent way of removing the Taliban: they control the country, have the weapons and the manpower, and there’s a population of 40mn people struggling, and right now, specifically, a set of villages destroyed.
An Afghan friend taught me a local saying, meaning to concentrate on one thing at a time without worrying about what you can’t do, to be like the doctors, midwives, aid workers on long shifts in 30C heat and sleeping in tents in the mountains close to sites affected and experiencing tremors working with the Taliban — even if they disagree with them — to help people.
You can’t hold two melons in one hand.
Adnan Sarwar won the 2013 Bodley Head/FT Essay Prize for ‘British Muslim Soldier’. On Twitter @adnansarwar
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