A New Station in Life

Mohammed Shah Jahan Arif paces on the ornate red carpet in his living room as yet another caller from Kabul--today it’s the minister of agriculture--pleads with him to return to Afghanistan and take his place in the corridors of power.

Arif already has turned down Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, who wanted him as deputy defense minister. He has declined a slot as provincial governor. But the calls keep coming: He is a medical doctor, a military hero, a tribal leader.

“My people need me,” he explains. “They want me to come back.”

But Arif isn’t going: After two decades of fighting for his country, he is fighting for his wife and nine children now. They live off friends, food stamps and an $8-an-hour overnight shift at a Mobil station near this blue-collar Washington suburb.

If few Americans know of Arif’s remarkable past, few Afghans know of his desperate present. His is a riches-to-rags story.

“My people think I am in the White House with President Bush,” says Arif. “They don’t know I am pumping gas in Virginia.”

Arif, 48, was born in Ghazni, an ancient Afghan trading town southwest of Kabul. The area is home to the Hazaras, an ethnic minority group and Shia Muslim sect that supposedly arrived with Genghis Khan in the 13th century--and has been persecuted ever since.

When Arif was 6, his teacher slapped him so hard he was knocked off his feet. His crime: The Hazara boy had offered to show the Sunni Muslim class how Shias pray. Later he would learn that Hazaras were barred from Afghanistan’s Sunni-run mosques, army and universities.

“In school, I could not even say I am Hazara,” he recalls.

But Arif, son of a wealthy Hazara chieftain, would not be deterred. After attending high school in Kabul, he argued and bluffed his way into college and medical school at the University of Nangarhar in Jalalabad. He became one of the first Hazara doctors.

War intervened when Soviet forces invaded in 1979 to impose a communist regime. Like most Afghans, Arif saw the invaders as infidels who were killing Muslims. Quitting his post at the Ghazni hospital, the young physician grabbed a World War I bolt-action rifle from his father’s house and joined the holy war.

“I hate war,” he says. “But the communists killed so many people. They bombed us, they invaded us, they burned our houses. We had to defend ourselves. We had to fight back.”

Arif had no military training, but he was a natural leader, able to organize and inspire men. He soon commanded the largest moujahedeen force in the area, a Hazara army of 3,000 fighters and followers based in mountains east of Ghazni.

“We were guerrillas,” he says. “At night, we would come into the city and attack. We would hit their supply lines. We would ambush their convoys.”

Soviet military accounts from the time cite heavy losses around its Ghazni garrison. By Arif’s account, he and his fighters stole or captured 13 T-62 and T-54 tanks, heavy artillery, armored vehicles, and thousands of mortars, machine guns and other Soviet weapons during the war. They even traded a captured Soviet soldier to another rebel group for 25 Kalashnikov assault rifles.

But the cost was also high. In all, Arif lost about 1,300 men. He was wounded twice, suffering a broken leg and shrapnel in his head.

“It was very, very hard,” Arif says. “We were cold and hungry. Always hungry.”

A New Force Emerges

Photos show Arif then as an oak-limbed man with regal bearing under a mufti turban, posing by an antiaircraft gun, hiking with his men in the snow, treating a bloodied child in the dirt. Then, as now, he had a wide grin, piercing eyes and a bushy beard.

In 1989, the Soviets withdrew. Arif rejoiced with his men. The new president in Kabul, Berhanuddin Rabbani, named him deputy defense minister. Soon he joined the government ruling council, representing the Hazaras’ political party, and considered a new career.

“I thought I would be a politician,” he says. “I worked for my people. I was their representative.”

But a civil war erupted as rival warlords battled for power in the post-Soviet vacuum. Rabbani ordered Arif to hold the line in Ghazni, and in 1994, he gave Arif several satchels, each stuffed with $20,000 to $30,000 in cash, to deliver to a group of fundamentalist clerics and fighters who had entered the war. It was the Taliban.

“We liked them at first,” Arif recalls. “We thought they would fight with us against the warlords. The Taliban said they didn’t want power, or to take over the government. They wanted to end corruption and cleanse society. They wanted to help people. We believed them.”

It didn’t last. Taliban zealots soon seized control of Ghazni and began arresting and torturing opponents, especially Hazara Shias. Arif had met several times with Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader who now is a fugitive, and he felt personally betrayed.

“He was a brave man, but he was not educated,” Arif says of Omar. “He was not smart. He knows the Koran, but that’s all. Nothing about science, about medicine, about art, about the world.”

Arif soon led several hundred Hazaras back to the mountains to take up arms against the Taliban. “We stayed there and fought,” he says.

The Taliban captured Kabul in September 1996. In Ghazni, a Taliban emissary offered to let Arif and his men--the last armed rebel group in the province--surrender without punishment. Deciding further struggle was futile, they handed over their weapons and went home. Arif joined the local ruling council, or shura, and resumed work as a doctor.

“Everything was OK for the first two months, but then Taliban sent me a message to close the school for girls,” Arif says. “The next day

Arif quietly resumed his fight. He slipped out of the country to attend anti-Taliban conferences in Pakistan, Turkey and Germany. Back home, the Taliban made no secret of their reign of religious terror.

Taliban “Voice of Sharia” radio announced when Ghazni authorities jailed moneylenders, whipped “an adulteress” 100 times and stoned to death an accused murderer “in front of thousands of people.” The radio also noted when Taliban troops smashed relics in the Ghazni museum and used pickaxes to destroy a reclining stone Buddha.

At the Ghazni hospital, doctors were ordered to amputate limbs from accused thieves. Arif was horrified. “We became doctors to cure the sick, not to maim people,” he says he told the Taliban.

Ultimately, his resistance went too far. In April 1999, the Taliban tried to arrest him. He hid, so Taliban troops instead beat and jailed Arif’s younger brother, Ghulam Ihya. That night, Arif donned a black Taliban turban as a disguise and escaped on a motorbike over the mountains to Pakistan. His family soon joined him in Peshawar.

That summer, fellow exile and future president Karzai called to invite Arif to a six-week symposium he was helping to organize at the Center for Afghan Studies at the University of Nebraska. Twelve anti-Taliban leaders soon flew to Omaha to discuss a post-Taliban future.

The State Department’s U.S. Information Agency paid most of the bill, but the Clinton administration ignored the group’s recommendations. “No one was interested in Afghanistan,” said Tom Gouttierre, head of the Afghan studies center.

When the session ended, Arif and three other Afghans applied for political asylum in America.

“Unfortunately, I cannot return to Afghanistan now,” he wrote in his application affidavit. “There is no possibility of peace and there is no room for me in the Taliban regime. Taliban will kill me, of that there is no doubt.”

He was granted asylum that fall. Still, it was not an easy decision to stay. “In Afghanistan, I was a medical doctor, a political leader, a rich man,” he says. “I had the good life. When I came to America, I had nothing. I was looking for shelter, for food, for a job.”

Since his medical degree is not accepted here, he first waited tables at an Afghan restaurant in Virginia. Then he went to New York to join a friend at a Mama’s fried chicken stand in Harlem. They cooked behind bulletproof glass, he says, because robberies were so common. He quit after three months.

“It was too dangerous,” he says. “I felt everyone had a gun except me.”

He moved back to Virginia, and his wife, three girls and five boys finally were granted visas and arrived in April 2001. Overjoyed to be together again, they jammed into a three-bedroom house on a leafy street of split-level homes. Friends donated sofas and beds, a nephew lent a minivan, and the Arifs settled in as strangers in a strange land--immigrants in America.

Until Sept. 11.

Several days later, Arif received a letter from Zahir Shah, the long-exiled Afghan king. He invited Arif to his villa in Rome, where Afghan opposition leaders were gathering.

Arif was torn--his wife, Rahima, was pregnant again and spoke no English. His children had to go to school. But he couldn’t stand idle at a time of crisis. The nephew, who drives an airport taxi, promised to help Rahima and the children. Arif caught the next plane.

Joseph and James Ritchie, retired stock option traders from Chicago, also went to Rome. The Ritchie brothers grew up in Kabul and were obsessed with Afghanistan. They had begun bankrolling the Afghan king and opposition in 1998, mostly because no one else would.

The Ritchies had pleaded with senior officials at the CIA, Pentagon, State Department and White House, as well as members of Congress, for three years in a futile effort to win Washington’s support for anti-Taliban leaders. “No one would listen,” says James Ritchie.

In Rome, after Sept. 11, the Ritchies gave $10,000 checks to Arif and six other Afghan commanders to return to Afghanistan and join forces against the Taliban. Arif was determined to topple the regime before America could start its war.

“We had to fight,” he says. “That was very clear. I did not want the United States to fight in Afghanistan. It would be dangerous for them, dangerous for Afghans. Also, my people [the Hazaras] did not have a military leader. They were lost. I had to help them.”

5 Days in Jail

Arif flew back to Virginia first to see his family. But when he landed at Dulles International Airport, six FBI agents boarded the plane, hustled him out the door and into a jail cell for five days. The charge: a 1994 bank fraud case in Philadelphia.

FBI agents came to the Alexandria jail each night to ask him questions. “I was very angry,” he says. “I told them I was in Afghanistan in 1994.”

The FBI also called Joseph Ritchie to ask why Arif carried his $10,000 check. “I gave them references from the CIA and the White House,” Ritchie says. “They said, ‘Oh.’ ”

Court records show Magistrate Barry Poretz ordered Arif released on Oct. 3 after prosecutors admitted the FBI had erred.

The Ritchies are skeptical; they suspect U.S. officials sought to sabotage their freelance foreign policy operation. The FBI declines to comment.

Out of jail, Arif flew to Pakistan two weeks later and linked up with another former commander supported by the Ritchies, Abdul Haq.

The CIA had backed Haq in the 1980s, but the agency refused to provide the helicopters and weapons he now wanted to fight the Taliban.

Haq decided to go anyway, convinced that moderate Taliban leaders were ready to defect. But the Taliban quickly captured and executed him, prompting headlines in America.

Arif believes Haq was betrayed. He would not make the same mistake. “When I [left for] Afghanistan, nobody knows. I go alone. I go on foot. I take back roads.”

He reached Ghazni in four days and quickly reassembled 200 Hazara gunmen. They dug up caches of buried assault rifles, grenade launchers and other weapons, and began scouting Taliban and Al Qaeda positions. The war was raging farther north, but had not yet reached Ghazni.

It didn’t take long. On Nov. 7, Al Jazeera TV broadcast video from Ghazni’s Naor District of what it said were four sons of Osama bin Laden celebrating beside the wreckage of a U.S. helicopter.

A week later, Northern Alliance forces captured Kabul without a fight. The Taliban abandoned Ghazni the same day but then turned and made a stand west of the city.

After a 13-hour battle, Arif’s fighters captured 54 prisoners plus hundreds of weapons and scores of vehicles.

“It felt very good,” he says. “The Taliban was finished.”

Arif’s group commander, Mohammed Ismail, liberated the local jail. To his surprise, he found eight Western aid workers, including two American women, inside a shipping container. The Taliban had imprisoned them for preaching Christianity, then abandoned them when they fled.

Ismail called Arif, who sent a message to the International Red Cross. They in turn contacted U.S. authorities, who sent a helicopter the next day to ferry the relieved women to Pakistan.

Mopping up took another month. On Dec. 9, a reporter for the Independent, a British newspaper, interviewed Arif as he negotiated the surrender of the last Taliban troops in the province.

The story described Arif as “an avuncular man who seems amused by the rapid change in his fortunes” from gas pump jockey to head of the local shura, or council.

The story was wrong. Arif was increasingly worried about his family, alone and impoverished in a faraway land. Seven weeks later, he flew back to Virginia.

Rahima was having a difficult pregnancy. Their ninth child, Abdullah, was born in April. The infant had a lung infection, and Arif shuttled to and from the hospital for weeks.

“In our culture, a man must stay with the baby,” he explains. “So I stay for the baby. I must do my duty.”

Abdullah is fine now, and most of Arif’s other children are studying English or are in summer classes. And Arif has found a new duty: his family.

For the first time, his children attend schools with books and computers. For the first time, they live in a land without war. Their school portraits line the living room mantel: Each is posed before an American flag.

It is an apt symbol. Arif insists the children’s future is in America now, not Afghanistan. He wants them all to go to college.

“For 20 years I worked only for my country,” he says.

“I forgot my family. I never thought of my wife and children. But in Afghanistan, it is OK. Others could help them for me. Now I must help them. I have to work and make money for them.”

Adjusting to America

The adjustment has not been easy. He always had a driver in Afghanistan, so he had to learn to drive here. His wife, who had servants, learned to cook and clean. A brother sends bundles of clothes from Pakistan.

“Life in America is very difficult,” Arif says. “Because everyone is running for the dollar. All the time. And everyone is always tired. They work so hard.”

Afghans don’t. Arif pours aromatic tea slowly for a visitor and shares a leisurely lunch of spicy lamb, chicken and naan at the dining room table. At night, the family dines cross-legged on the floor, the dishes spread across an elegant Afghan carpet. Then they pray.

Arif talks wistfully of going back to Afghanistan someday to help the Hazaras. But he also talks of opening an Afghan restaurant here, where his family could work.

For now, he heads out at 9 each night for the graveyard shift at the gas station, where he sits in a dingy booth and watches the pumps and the clock. He knows he’s better off than most Afghans and insists he is not bitter.

Still, Arif is writing his autobiography, about a life that was and a life that might have been.

“I call it ’19 plus 20 equals 0,’ ” he explains. “I spent 19 years in school and 20 years fighting. Now I am nothing.”