The Mood of a Restive Border Town Deteriorates Under Hardship of War

In the main bazaar of this dusty border town, the best barometer of the fighting in neighboring Afghanistan is a shelf in a bare shop. It is stacked high with Afghan and Pakistani bills--two currencies for a community that straddles two countries.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, money changers set the rates of exchange, betting on the news that comes from travelers arriving on foot, by donkey cart and by jeep and from the shortwave radio that crackles in the corner.

“The money here, this is money for fighting. When blood is being spilled in Afghanistan, the afghani goes up,” says Haji Abdul Bari, 35, the dapper proprietor, as he flips through a 6-inch stack of 10 million afghanis, or about $262. An afghani is worth a tiny fraction of a cent. Since U.S. Marines arrived in Afghanistan, though, its value has been rising, because people believe the Americans are on the side of the popular exiled Afghan king, Mohammad Zaher Shah, Bari says.

Chaman, long the epitome of the Kalashnikov culture and smuggling economy of the Afghan-Pakistani border, has become even more rough and ready since the war began. Desperation, a traditional driver of the community, is on the ascent. Anti-foreign feelings run high, in no small part because the U.S.-led bombing has put a dent in the town’s economy.

Robberies, especially of foreigners, are not uncommon. A jang, the word for “fight” in Pashto, the local language, is always imminent. Yet for everyone--expatriate Afghan politicians, spies, journalists and soldiers--this is the transit point for everything that comes and goes, legally or illegally, from and to southern Afghanistan.

“The war has really affected our business,” says Salahuddin Achakzai, the mayor of Chaman, who implicitly acknowledges that the town is built on smuggling. “For the young people, it is worse now. There are no schools, so they are just finding daily work, taking goods from here to there, and these are bad times for that.”

Chaman is in Baluchistan, the westernmost province of Pakistan--an area that was part of Afghanistan until the British drew one of their fabled arbitrary borders on a map. Not far from the border post with Afghanistan, the great railway that Britain built to connect the vast trade routes of Central Asia with its empire in India ends in the desert sand.

A Loyalty to Tribe Over Nation

Those who live here are known as Chaman people, a designation that conveys a loyalty to tribe over country. Above all, this is the world of a desert border, of smugglers, traders and refugees--often desperate but always resourceful. The city is now also filled with deserters from Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, many still recognizable by their trademark black or white head coverings.

“These are border people. Since the British times, they have been coming back and forth. They belong to their tribes, that’s all,” says Haji Jiliani Khan, a leader of a tribe that has members on both sides of the border.

“We cannot say how many are Taliban coming over here, or how many are people against the Taliban going to fight over there. This is not a real border. This was all Afghanistan,” he adds.

In the afternoon, the desert dust and sand mingle in the air like fog, except that there is not a drop of water. The miasma leaves faces and shoes, goods and food with a fine coating and lends an almost otherworldly aspect to the barely visible desert track at the city’s edge. Donkey- and horse-drawn carts, their drivers often standing with whip in hand, appear faintly through the blowing sand as if they were approaching straight out of “The Arabian Nights.”

Just outside the money-changer’s shop stretches the hurly-burly of the bazaar, with its hundreds of storefronts. Here, everything is available--cheap plastic shoes from China, traditional mirrored Baluchistani caps, Sony televisions smuggled, according to the merchant, in batches of 300 from Hong Kong. Men in traditional flowing garments, many wearing Afghan turbans, walk along deliberately, considering the hawkers’ offerings. The smell of open sewers mixes with the aroma of sweet pastries being fried for Ramadan and the odor of sweaty men--only men--doing business.

In three days, a visitor counted only eight women on the street. In contrast, elsewhere in Pakistan it is not uncommon to see at least older women in the bazaars, buying cloth or carrying a child. But Chaman has a conservative rural culture. The only schools most people go to are madrasas, conservative religious institutions from whose ranks many in the Taliban came.

Walk a few blocks and the bazaar peters out into the free-for-all atmosphere of the desert, where the poor glean everything that can be sold and smugglers of all ages ply their trade. At the top end of these entrepreneurs are the smugglers of cigarettes, cars and opium, who do little of their own transport but have phalanxes of couriers moving their goods. On the Afghan side of the border, it is easy, for instance, to spot lots full of Toyotas, the car of choice for the Taliban.

At the other end of the spectrum are the desert woodcutters. Their camp on the edge of Chaman is surrounded by a large circle of wagons piled 15 feet high with stacks of a desert bush known as the buti. The plant grows only chest high but has both a thick, sturdy trunk--prized for generating the high heat required for baking traditional Afghan bread--and finely twigged branches, valued as kindling.

The cutters gather the wood in southern Afghanistan--not far from where the Marines have set up camp--and transport it to Chaman. For a truckload--which takes four men four to five days to gather--cutters earn about $50.

But the war has taken a bite out of even this meager income.

“We are afraid of the bombardment,” says Mahmoud Omar, a woodcutter who, like many people in this part of the world, is unsure of his age. “We do not dare burn the wood, because the helicopters would see us and kill us.”

Helicopters Torch Wagons in the Night

One night, he says, helicopters landed near the woodcutters’ camp and set fire to two of their wagonloads, destroying both the wood and the tractors that drew them.

“They damaged a lot of people’s livelihood,” Omar says. “Please tell the pilots that, because of them, we cannot burn the wood and we sleep in the desert and we feel terribly cold.”

Not far from the woodcutters, there are more gleaners. Four makeshift wooden wagons piled with scrap metal teeter as burros haul them across the sand. The drivers, 14-, 15- and 16-year-olds, earn $2 to $3 a trip for transporting the scrap, gathered in Afghanistan, from the border bazaar of Wesh to Chaman. From here, it is shipped to the Pakistani metropolises of Lahore and Karachi.

The border crossing itself, especially at early morning and dusk, is a stream of people passing to and from Afghanistan. No visas or passports are required of Chaman people, and they move like shadows wrapped in their long brown, beige or olive shawls, whose colors fuse into those of the desert.

It is on the border that daily news comes from the besieged city of Kandahar, from travelers who have dared to make the journey on the dangerous road between the two cities. However, their accounts, like so many here, often fail to jibe. Travelers disagree on who holds the Kandahar airport, whether there has been shooting and whose troops are on the road. The only consistent information is whether the vegetable market was open when they left the Afghan city.

At dusk, there is an edge of danger in Chaman. The crowd in the bazaar is almost impenetrable. And now, during the middle of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, when people fast from before sunrise until sunset, tempers flare quickly.

In a refugee Afghan neighborhood filled these days with deserting Taliban, the mood can change from curious to hostile in a matter of seconds. Blink, and the crowd becomes a mob.

A former Taliban official chats cheerfully with foreigners. But others are not so friendly. In a few minutes, the foreigners are surrounded by 50 to 60 youths.

One turbaned man in the back calls out: “Why are you talking to them? They are kafir,” which means “infidel.”

Another man says, “We can kill them, because we are doing jihad.”

As the foreigners hurry into their car, the crowd swells. Faces press against the window. One man pulls open the driver’s door and forces him out. Another yanks open the door on the other side. Soon the car is being rocked, banged on, and then, as the driver regains his seat and floors the accelerator, the crowd vanishes in the dust.

All that can be heard as the moon rises is the lonely call of the muezzin from a nearby mosque, calling the Muslim faithful to Asar, the first evening prayer.