Earthquake exposes political fault lines in Afghanistan

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In the hours before the earthquake in eastern Afghanistan last week, light rain fell over Kabul and there was thunder in the air. My 4-year-old daughter had just drifted off to sleep after I managed to convince her the storm wasn’t scary when my phone rang. It was 1:46 AM on the other end of the line, and I heard a panic in my sister’s voice. She lived nearby and told me that a few minutes ago she felt the ground shake very badly. While I was too exhausted to notice, she was clearly upset. She told me that the tremors were much worse than the ones that often hit Kabul and thanked God that we were all fine. I didn’t think of anything more until I woke up again later that morning and checked my phone.

I first heard about the scale of the devastation via WhatsApp, which is as common a method of communication among Afghans as it seems to anyone else in the world. As morning came, I received messages and calls from inside and outside the country, speculating on the death toll and bemoaning the tragic fate of our nation. Wars, epidemics, drought and famine have affected all of us severely in recent years; Now people in one of the country’s poorest regions have suffered the worst earthquake in decades. Inevitably, a vociferous minority of Afghans on social media soon used the tragedy to make ill-advised and insensitive political points.

The epicenter of the 5.9-magnitude earthquake was in southeastern Afghanistan, about 25 miles from the city of Khost. At least 1,000 people were killed in the surrounding area and about 2,000 were injured, though it’s unlikely we’ll ever know the true numbers. As the international community struggled to organize a coordinated relief effort thanks to the Taliban regime’s sanctions regime, many ordinary Afghans rushed to try to help by donating food, clothing, money and blood.

As a journalist, my work often seems like an inadequate response to acts of human cruelty and human kindness. But last Friday I decided that I could not stay in Kabul anymore and began the journey towards the worst affected areas. In addition to interviewing survivors so I can share their plight with the world, I wanted to take a closer look at the Taliban’s response to the earthquake – one of the first major crises they have faced since the restoration of power.

In the years that passed on the southeast route from Kabul, it passed through rebel territory, into the provinces of Logar and Paktia, and eventually Khost and Paktika. The Afghan police and army were regularly ambushed along the road, which was in an area of ​​the country controlled by what the US likes to call the Haqqani Network – a particularly formidable wing of the Taliban. The road is safe these days and I felt a glimmer of optimism driving the car, despite the terrible news I was going to report. This optimism was due to the resilience and compassion of the people I saw along the way. Trucks and trailers loaded with aid supplies were heading in the same direction as I was. At regular intervals on the side of the road, young people would wave placards in support of earthquake victims and use megaphones to call for donations.

Driving through the Tira Pass, surrounded by mountains and hills, I was reminded of the natural beauty of Andy Kotal in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, on the Pakistani side of the border. Three hours later, I reach Gardez, the capital of Paktia, and drive through the local bazaar before making another major road towards Khost. A few minutes later, I stop for my destination: a military base that was once home to the US-backed Afghan army’s 203rd Thunder Corps and is now home to the Taliban’s 203rd Mansouri Corps, named in honor of former Taliban leader Mullah Akthar Muhammad. Mansour, who was killed in a drone strike in May 2016.

As someone who has spent years writing about the Taliban insurgency and co-authored a book delving into the history of modern Islamic militancy in Afghanistan, it seems to me that the transition from war to peace is fraught with unexpected challenges for men who have dedicated their lives to armed jihad. We have already seen the consequences in Kabul, where Taliban officials have struggled to start the economy and keep the civil service running smoothly while still finding time to clamp down on basic women’s rights. The death and destruction caused by the earthquake offered them another kind of test. Even the most powerful governments can fail their citizens in the wake of natural disasters, as the United States demonstrated in 2005 in response to Hurricane Katrina. However, the Taliban has little room for error. Already treated as pariahs and distrusted by many Afghans, the West must prove they can build the country as effectively as waging war. The earthquake underlined how difficult this is.

Inside the Mansouri Corps, I met with Hajj Muhammad Ayoub Khaled to talk about some of these issues. An old friend of both Mullah Mansour and the founding leader of the Taliban, Mullah Muhammad Omar Mujahid, greeted me warmly and showed me the neighborhood. Khalid was born in the mid-1960s in the Maiwand district of Kandahar, which means that most of his adult life was spent in the war. Talk to me through the physical impact it has on him. His left hand was hit by a Russian mortar during the Soviet occupation and his right hand was badly wounded while fighting the Afghan Mujahideen Group in Herat in the 1990s. He also has a scar near his right eye, where a bullet hit him with a Canadian artillery bullet in Panjwai, Kandahar, in 2006. A tall, thin man wearing a white turban and carrying a Glock 17 pistol As we talked, Khaled described his injuries as true no self-pity or arrogance.

Khaled has established a school in the wire and teaches three subjects in the school himself. There was the night of the earthquake, and his feet were rammed by the force of the first tremors. After checking his radio to make sure there was no serious damage to the base, he began trying to mobilize some sort of relief effort. His deputy flew by helicopter to one of the worst-hit areas and returned with 15 seriously injured people. Khaled then flew to take a look for himself. At about 8:30 in the morning, he knew that he simply did not have the resources to deal with the enormity of the tragedy. He placed a request for more helicopters from other teams and ordered the regional division to begin transporting less severe casualties to local hospitals. On that first day, Khaled said there were 26 flights to and from the hardest-hit areas. He acknowledged the scale of the disaster but told me the Taliban knew how to cope because they tried to help people during the insurgency, “when they were bombed or attacked with heavy weapons” by US and Afghan government forces. As a result, he said, there was no need for the international community to assist in disaster relief. He also said that the West should not try to use any offer of assistance as a means of putting pressure on the Taliban regarding human rights. I think many senior Taliban leaders feel the same way.

I chose to focus on Khaled in this letter not because I think his response to the earthquake is more important than the suffering of the victims. Obviously it is not. But I think it makes an important point about the Taliban government and the problems that Afghanistan is facing now. After 20 years of war between the Taliban and the United States and more than two decades of conflict and political turmoil before that, there is an understandable lack of trust on all sides. It’s too early to expect anything less. However, we must certainly at some point try to reconcile our differences.

Khaled told me that the Taliban responded quickly and effectively to the earthquake, but he said no one outside Afghanistan would acknowledge these efforts. He insisted he was not bothered by this indifference. He released a Pashto joke to make his point, likening the Taliban’s relationship with America to an unhappy marriage. He said that even when the Taliban were trying to help people, the United States would not acknowledge these efforts because opinions were too deeply rooted to be changed.

Around 6 pm that same day I visited a military hospital with 100 beds inside the base. Built by the United States, it was clean and well stocked but lacked medicines and had an intermittent supply of electricity. There, I met Limar Gul, a man in his sixties from the Barmal district of the Paktika province. He described to me how the earthquake buried him under two stories of rubble. Terrified and struggling to breathe, he could hear his family and neighbors screaming loudly for help. When he also tried to scream, he started to choke on dust and debris. After most of the other villagers were rescued and trapped, he became convinced that he would not survive. Raising his finger, he said shahada – the Islamic profession of faith – and began to cry. Then he said he felt a slight breeze wash over him and spotted some people walking through the ruins. This time, they heard him when he screamed and made sure he was released.

14 members of the family of Limar Gul died in the earthquake. Having been dragged out of the rubble, he did not want to leave his village without saying goodbye to the dead. Before a Taliban helicopter arrived to take him to the hospital, he insisted on seeing their bodies. There was nothing more important to him than showing them some last respect.

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