A Scarf from Kabul
“Meester! Meester! You wanna buy bracelet? You wanna buy scarf?”
The girl holds up half-a-dozen cotton scarves in one hand and at least twenty plastic bracelets in the other. She’s about seven years old, Afghan, beautiful in both a childish and aesthetic way, and absolutely filthy. She has large, bright, brown eyes that call out to me from her soft but powerful features, a blend of the Pashtun, Hazara, Uzbek and Persian people who have lived in this country for centuries. Her skin is a rich brown, and dirt is not so much smeared on her face as it has become a part of it. She is crowned by a mop of short black hair, which is matted into visible knots in several places. I imagine her ten years from now in another place, somewhere she could bathe every day and wouldn’t have to sell trinkets on the street: she could be a model.
“How much for a scarf?”
“Ten dollars!” she yells at me confidently. The scarves would cost the equivalent of fifty cents anywhere else in Kabul but this, as they say, is a seller’s market. We’re on a street in the Green Zone, the central part of the city occupied by the U.S. military since we invaded Afghanistan in 2001. It’s ringed by concrete walls, and access is controlled by Afghan soldiers and policemen at numerous checkpoints. Every country represented in Afghanistan has located its embassy here, and NATO runs the war from several bases located behind their own guarded, concrete walls within this enclave. It’s easy to think that you’re safe here, but you’re still in Afghanistan, and the Taliban loves to kill Americans where they feel most secure. Soldiers from every NATO country serving here and contractors from many more besides walk the crumbling and uneven sidewalks with varying degrees of concern for their safety.
“Ten bucks! No way!” The negotiation begins. She may be only seven, but she’s a seasoned haggler and indicates she’s up for the exchange by beaming a broad smile and launching a confident counter-offer.
“Eight dollars!”
“Eight dollars! You’re crazy! Three dollars!”
This assessment of her sanity from me prompts another smile and a giggle, which is what I really wanted.
“Not three—seven dollars.” I’d already decided to give her five dollars, but the point wasn’t to buy another scarf—I already had about a dozen in my office—the point was to talk to one of this band of street vendors and give them five bucks every time I walked from my base to the larger NATO headquarters, less than a mile away. Five bucks was more than a day’s pay for a laborer in Kabul, and while I had no illusions that the kids would get to keep it, I thought that maybe it would make a difference somewhere in their lives.
“Five dollars, my final offer.” I say, pulling a bill out of my wallet and offering it to her.
At about this time, a small boy walked up to us. He was about nine or ten, equally dirty, and just as innocent in my eyes. He smiled at me as he walked up and stood behind her, observing the transaction. They were clearly part of the same sales team.
“Okay, five dollars. Which one you want?” She seamlessly transitioned from negotiating to delivering, eager to move onto her next mark. She held up the scarves, displaying them, expertly shifting half of them to her other hand while still holding onto the bracelets. I picked out the most colorful design I could see and took it.
“Tasha kir,” I said, exhausting my knowledge of Pashtun. Good thing I wasn’t selling.
While the little girl and I were completing our transaction, the boy had glanced at my wallet and seen that I had several twenty dollar bills in there. This prompted a rebuke from him, directed at the girl. I didn’t know the words, but I understood the message. The sharp tone and rapid-fire of his speech, his extinguished smile that became an accusatory glare, the stance that was now squared against the confused girl all said:
“You idiot! You sold too low! He has hundreds of dollars, and you settle for five!”
If there was any doubt as to his message, he punctuated its end with a beautiful right hook that caught the girl’s beautiful face right below her left eye. There was a second’s pause (if it was that long) while the girl and I both registered what had just happened, and then she started bawling, like the child she was.
I stood on that dusty street in the Green Zone, wondering what to do. What could I do? Take them home with me? Sit down with them and try to teach them the importance of respecting each other and not solving problems with violence? But I was an Army officer, a manager of violence, so that might be a hard sell. I thought about smacking the boy on the back of his head and explaining to him that you don’t hit people smaller than you, but I quickly realized how ironic that would be. I could pick the little girl up and hold her, rock her in my arms and tell her it would be alright, but I knew it wouldn’t be.
The fact was there was nothing I could do or say that would have any effect on these children, so I did nothing. I looked away from the tears streaming down the little girl’s dirty cheeks and walked away, carrying my scarf, pretending I couldn’t hear her crying. The little boy was already talking to two Dutch soldiers who were coming the other way. He had moved on, but I couldn’t.
I thought about what had just happened for the rest of that day, and on many other days since then, trying to make sense of it. I guessed the boy was the supervisor and was just trying to maximize his profits. At the end of every day, he would have to answer to the adult who owned the business. If he hadn’t made enough money that day, he’d probably get a smack in the face, too. Shit rolls downhill.
But why were they there at all, when kids their age in America were in school, or playing sports or Xbox? Did they have families, and was this the family business? Were they related? The children’s appearance and their presence on the street in the middle of the day suggested that no-one cared about them, so maybe they were orphans and if so, was this the only way for them to get by?
What about the girl? What did her future look like? A marriage not too long from now to a husband much like the little boy: older and with a penchant for making a point with his fists. Rushed into adulthood and motherhood too quickly, she would be old before her time. I doubted if there would be too many spontaneous giggles in her future.
As it turns out, I needn’t have worried about her. Two weeks later, a Taliban suicide bomber blew himself up about fifty yards from where our negotiation had taken place, killing her and four other children. He had been targeting soldiers like me, waiting for more than a couple of us to come walking down the street so he could kill us. This was the children’s beat, however, not his. They knew every inch of it, and they knew who belonged and who didn’t. This guy was out of place, so they pointed him out to an Afghan policeman guarding the entrance to one of the embassies nearby. As the policeman approached the nervous stranger, the children surrounded him and began shouting and pointing at him, preventing him from escaping. The scene ended when the insurgent detonated the vest of explosives, screws and nails that he had strapped to his body.
I was away from Kabul when he murdered those children, but when I returned a week later, I walked down the street where he had committed his heinous, unjustifiable crime. I’ve seen many explosions during my time in Iraq and Afghanistan, but an amateur could have found this site. Windows were blown out, street signs were gone and chunks of concrete had been etched from the wall running down the street, pointing in a fan to where the blast had originated, to the place where her young life had ended.
There were 88,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan when I was stationed there in 2012, but we couldn’t secure much beyond the ground we were actually standing on, so why were we there? This was the Green Zone—supposedly the most secure part of the country—but a Taliban suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest had somehow got past the checkpoints and walked down the street between two NATO bases. If children were at risk because they sold trinkets to soldiers, what chance did we have of creating an environment where they could safely go to school?
Life in Afghanistan is hard. The government is corrupt if it governs at all. There’s no justice, human rights, or civil rights. There are few doctors and even less medicine. There’s not much to eat, and the winters are brutal. Democracy is a punchline. There’s just survival.
It is human instinct to live, despite all hints to give up, and Afghans are survivors in a very primal sense. But, surviving in Afghanistan was not winning; it was just existing so that you could fight another day. Another day struggling against hunger and indignity. For that reason, I was glad the little girl was dead. For her, the struggle was over.