A Native View of War-Torn Land

On Oct. 4, Jahan Stanizai stood on her front porch and gazed blankly at the fallen magnolias that littered the street of her Los Angeles neighborhood.

Her thoughts were focused on two times when she felt sure the world was collapsing. The first was in 1978 when she was giving birth, confined without anesthetic to her Kabul apartment, as Soviet bombs exploded outside. The other was Sept. 11, as she watched the horrific images from New York City.

Where could she go now to feel safe? she wondered. Where could her children live in peace? No matter that she and her husband, Zaman, were U.S. citizens now, intellectuals and assimilated. Anyone could confuse them with Arabs or hate them for being Afghans and Muslims. Even stepping outside her home seemed like a risk.

Jahan apologized for her tears. The old fears and anxieties had persisted since President Bush started talking about punishing Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders if they didn’t hand over accused terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, hiding in the already devastated and drought-stricken countryside.

“I hope he gets his man and leaves the rest of them alone,” she said flatly.

On Oct. 7, airstrikes on her homeland began.

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A few days later, Jahan and Zaman fortified themselves with prayer and rest. In the study of their home--bright, spare and modern--they spoke passionately about their heightened concerns: the loss of humanity abroad and freedom at home, the direction of U.S. policy, and public misperceptions fueled by the media.

Expressing rarely heard voices of native Afghans, the couple have also appeared in public. They spoke Wednesday at a forum on Afghanistan at USC; Zaman has participated in several radio programs.

Softly outspoken, Jahan, 47, a psychology student, sat barefoot on a leather easy chair. Thin with sharp features and gray eyes, Zaman, 52, sat at the desk they share. His prayer rug hung neatly over a chair.

The couple, united through a traditionally arranged marriage, consider themselves cosmopolitan, with friends from many cultures and religions. They laughed easily and disagreed openly.

A former Fulbright scholar, Zaman particularly was eager to educate on a variety of topics, unspooling digressions on Central Asian history, poetry or politics, then reeling them back in to his point of departure.

Among other things, the couple wanted to explain what many Americans do not realize: that some Afghans are not eager to be rid of the Taliban. Worse, they said, would be the return of the opposition, the Northern Alliance, a mix of warring ethnic militias that overpowered the country when the Soviets left in 1992 and stayed until the Taliban took over in 1996.

“Most Westerners don’t know how bad that period was,” Zaman said. “Now we are judging how bad the Taliban are. When people ask me, I say it’s bad, but 10 times better than it was.”

Zaman holds two master’s degrees and a doctorate in political science. He has taught at USC, UCLA and several local colleges. In the 1980s, he published a Los Angeles-based anti-Soviet newspaper, Freedom.

Currently, he teaches English as a second language in adult school and at UCLA, where he also teaches about the 13th century poet and mystic Jelaluddin Rumi.

Jahan, who has a degree in English and a master’s in psychology, worked for 10 years in real estate investment and is pursuing a doctorate in psychology. They have three children: Mustafa, 23, Sara, 16, and Nadia, 14.

They know their views are shared by some, but not all of their compatriots--unofficially estimated at 120,000 across the United States. But they believe it’s their duty to publicize a different point of view so the public can make better-informed decisions.

“We have a saying,” Zaman said. “When a blind man is headed toward a well and you say nothing, it’s a sin.”

Jahan also wants to heal her own heart. She feels as if she were a child and her mother and father were engaged in an angry and bitter divorce.

“You just want them to stop fighting,” she said.

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Jahan and Zaman remember when Afghanistan was known as the “Switzerland of Asia,” before its landscape was pockmarked with bullet holes and stuffed with land mines. Rumi is just one of the country’s influential intellectuals, scientists and philosophers, Zaman said proudly.

In the 1960s, when Afghanistan experimented with democracy, it was the only country with an “all PhD cabinet,” he said. There were 17 daily newspapers and numerous weeklies, he remembered.

Relatively privileged children of prominent intellectuals, Jahan and Zaman were raised to value education and equality as well as cultural tradition. Jahan did not cover her face or head and was free to wear short skirts. “I was a modern woman,” she said, “but I was not allowed to go anywhere alone. I never questioned it. It’s part of the culture.”

Zaman was introduced to the West in 1966 when he spent a year in Anacordes, Wash., as an American Field Service student with the family of Walter Vonnegut, a second cousin to writer Kurt Vonnegut.

The couple met at Kabul University when Jahan was a freshman and Zaman about to become a professor of linguistics and English. The first time he saw her in a class, he said he knew it was love. Traditionally, there is no dating in Afghan culture because while a man can express his interest in a woman, parents arrange the marriages.

As custom dictated, Zaman approached her on campus one day and asked her to marry him. Jahan said no. A week later, he asked if she had been thinking about what he said. She said maybe. The third time he asked, she said he could talk to her father about it. After six months of interviews with her father and brother, the wedding was arranged in 1973.

The marriage has been happy, and they have grown together, they said.

A year after they married, the couple obtained visas to study at the University of Washington. She received a bachelor’s, while he earned his doctorate. They returned in 1977 to Kabul, where he taught at the university and worked at the U.S. Information Center and the U.S. Embassy. Jahan worked for the United Nations.

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the country was plunged into fear and chaos. The Russians closed the airport. Hospitals, bridges and schools were closed or destroyed. Electricity was rationed. The Soviets began to imprison and assassinate university faculty who refused to join the Communist Party.

“Our relatives were being killed left and right. My students were taken from my classroom and killed,” Zaman said. It became common for students to bring AK47s to class, he said. Some of those who converted to communism formed their own ideological offshoot. “One member of the Communist Party killed one of the brightest students in my class who was a member of the other Communist Party,” he said.

Women started covering themselves to underscore their difference from the Soviets. While other women chose traditional covering, Jahan traded her short skirts for pants and tops with longer sleeves.

The couple were blacklisted, they said, partly because they belonged to the small core of intellectuals and partly because of their ties with the United States. Zaman also was said to be teaching the language of the “imperialists.” Jahan was threatened at gunpoint by an Afghan who believed the U.N. was controlled by the United States.

In the beginning, the thought of fleeing made them feel guilty, as if they would be abandoning their country in its time of need. But when an opportunity arose, they decided it was the only thing they could do. By that time, 26 members of their extended family were dead, and many colleagues had been imprisoned and shot. Nearly all the surviving Afghans of the intellectual, educated class fled to Europe, Canada, Australia, the United States or other countries.

Their escape began with a doctor’s diagnosis, Zaman said. Jahan had a thyroid condition that needed treatment available only in westernized countries. It took her six months to obtain a passport from Soviet officials because she insisted the document include her 16-month-old son. To ensure her return, the officials ordered Zaman to remain.

Soon after she flew to Pakistan, however, Zaman disguised himself as a fruit merchant, then negotiated his way through a network of spies and border officials. After several tense days, they reunited in Pakistan.

Before he left Afghanistan, Zaman paused at a rest stop and grabbed a clump of rain-hardened soil from an abandoned hut. The tan lump is now displayed in their study like a museum artifact under a dome of glass. It is labeled in English and Pashtu, “This is Afghanistan.”

The Stanizais settled in Los Angeles in 1980. Zaman sometimes worked three jobs, 14 hours a day, so they could afford to buy their home. Afghan Americans in exile form a loose-knit community, they said. Most have settled down in scattered pockets or by themselves, quietly working to send their children to school.

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The Stanizais keep in touch with other native Afghans at weddings and funerals and by phone in periods of crisis.

Among Afghan immigrants in California, supporters of the Northern Alliance mingle with their detractors in the East Bay, Sacramento, San Diego and Orange County. Hundreds of royalists, related to the exiled Afghan king, reportedly live in Orange County.

The Stanizais are Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s majority ethnic group, most often identified with the Taliban. Perhaps as much as half the Afghan American community shares the Stanizais’ points of view, said Esmael Burhan, retired director of the University of Nebraska’s Center for Afghanistan Studies.

Since the start of recent hostilities, the media have been a continual source of aggravation for Jahan, Zaman and some other Afghan Americans.

Some stories are factually wrong, they said. Burhan, for instance, saw a CNN report that announced the Taliban was fleeing Afghanistan, but the people they interviewed were speaking Urdu. “They weren’t even Taliban,” he said.

The Stanizais said many media portrayals are at odds with what they have heard. Although they fled Afghanistan years before the Taliban took over, they kept current by calling family and friends there, and through listening to firsthand accounts of fellow countrymen who have traveled there and returned. They also questioned Taliban representatives who came to Southern California.

Jahan called the documentary “Behind the Veil,” for instance, “pure Hollywood.” She said it didn’t make sense that the filmmaker happened on an execution of women at an out-of-the-way stadium. “She wanted to show the Taliban are that kind of people, and they’re not. They’re not out of the ordinary from any other government we have had in that regard,” she said.

In fact, when the Taliban came to power in 1996, it provided security for women who had been mass raped by soldiers in the warring ethnic militias that now comprise the Northern Alliance, and others, the Stanizais said.

“What [Afghans] needed was security, so the women would not be raped, their property not taken, their noses not cut because they were too long, or because they belonged to a particular ethnic group, so that people would not drive nails into other people’s heads,” Zaman said.

“The people were not coming to the Taliban because they have these great democratic rules and regulations,” Zaman said. “They come because they have to survive. Civil liberty is the price people pay, and they have willingly paid that price. Not that they are happy with it.”

As the Stanizais see it, Osama bin Laden must have been “dumped” on the Taliban because no other country would take him. Rather than “harboring” the Saudi Arabian billionaire, they believe, the Taliban was forced to take him because it was economically vulnerable to his money, Zaman said.

Why else would Bin Laden need his own bodyguards from the Arab world? he asked. “Why would they want their country destroyed at the expense of one individual?”

Afghans are fiercely independent, Jahan said, and would never want Arabs fighting their battles for them. The Stanizais hope the U.S. will work with moderate elements within the Taliban, as Secretary of State Colin Powell has suggested he would be willing to do, to eliminate the extremists or reduce their role. Ultimately, they would like to see a broad-based government that includes some of the Taliban with economic support from the West.

In 1999 and 2000, the Stanizais participated in several meetings of the so-called Cypress Process, a convention of Afghan exiles who want to form a peace plan and a loya jirga , or “grand assembly,” the traditional method accepted by all ethnic and religious groups to solve their political crises.

But while the meetings were fruitful, Jahan said their votes counted for little. She said she suspected they had been used as “pawns,” just to say that Pashtuns had participated. The meetings for this year were canceled, they said.

The Stanizais disagree with President Bush’s assertion that terrorists hate Americans for their freedom. “Nobody hates us,” Jahan said. “Most people in the world love Americans. Not for our blue jeans and Coca-Cola. It’s for our democracy,” she said. “They want a piece of the pie.”

If they hate anything, it’s the U.S. foreign policies that support despotic or dictatorial regimes, Zaman said. “We take their freedom. Directly, or indirectly, we take their resources or we take their hopes and their dreams and their future away from them. We go and build these huge McDonald’s arches in front of a beautiful 9th century mosque in Cairo, for example. We just drag it right in front of their faces,” he said.

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The Stanizais worry about relatives and other Afghans who are enduring the U.S. attacks. Communication has been suspended. When they talked before the airstrikes began, they said their relatives were worried about them.

Zaman said he had only one negative experience and also felt much support from colleagues. A ninth-grade classmate told the couple’s daughter she was going to hell.

The hardest part for Jahan is the thought that their hard work, their education, their love of the United States and their standing as good people and good citizens can’t protect them from discrimination. On the contrary, as quiet, longtime residents, she knows some may suspect they are “sleepers”--terrorists who are said to infiltrate countries by settling in and waiting for years for their instructions.

When she hears Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft talk about detaining people based on their ethnic or racial profiles, she feels suffocated. When he appears on TV, she sends her children to their room.

Jahan said she feels as much fear now as she did when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The only protection she feels now, she says, is the U.S. Constitution.