“We had never heard of bin Laden. How was this linked to us?”: what 9/11 was like for Afghans

By Payenda Sargand

When Taliban fighters raised their flag over Kabul last month I was in a state of shock, like most Afghans. Yet as the 20th anniversary of the previous fall of Kabul approaches, I realise I should have been paying more attention to history.

The first time the Taliban took the capital in 1996 I was sitting outside my family’s sign-painting studio working on a portrait of my father. I was 18, and harboured ambitions of being a proper artist. Rumours were flying around the street that the jihadi group was on its way to the city, but I reckoned I would at least have time to finish my oil painting before the invaders arrived. A couple of hours later pickup trucks crammed with turbaned fighters roared down the street. My brushwork got caked in the churned-up dust.

The most fun I remember having was making whistles out of bullet casings

Kabul is used to new rulers rolling in: Afghanistan has been in a state of violent turmoil for most of the past four decades. Analysing the balance of power between its various factions is a national pastime, which even street sweepers are well versed in (Afghans have no small talk, they go straight to politics). Yet each time Kabul changes hands, it catches people unprepared.

I was 14 the first time I experienced regime change. Back then Muhammad Najibullah was in charge. He had been installed as president in the 1980s by the Soviets during their occupation of the country. In 1992 he was overthrown by a group of warlords who called themselves mujahideen, or holy warriors, and were bankrolled by the CIA.

The warlords quickly splintered into rival factions, which battered Kabul with thousands of rockets as they fought for control. I stopped going to school; people stopped going anywhere. My whole life was suddenly reduced to a small neighbourhood of 500 families in the north of Kabul. That was the end of my childhood.

It wasn’t just the rocket fire that kept people from leaving their homes. The warlords’ men looted everything: private property, banks, the national museum. People whispered that they snatched young girls, and even boys. My father would tell me not to go out: “What if they take you and I never see you again?” We didn’t have much to entertain ourselves cooped up at home. The most fun I remember having was making whistles out of bullet casings.

By 1996 we’d heard a little about the Taliban, a group that had emerged in the south of the country. We knew its soldiers were religious, that they were against photography and music. They had a reputation for being brutal but not corrupt. I heard amazing stories about people living under Taliban control who no longer bothered to lock their shops at night because the Taliban punished thieves so severely. In a way, I looked forward to the Taliban coming to Kabul and getting rid of the warlords. Some people even put out flowers to welcome them.

Not long after the trucks of turbaned fighters arrived, however, I heard a terrible rumour: Najibullah, who had taken refuge in the United Nations building since 1992, was hanging in Aryana Square. I couldn’t believe it. I put my painting away in the studio, got my bicycle out and cycled there to see for myself.

I’ll never forget the sight of the president’s body dangling from a concrete traffic-control post

I went on to see many worse things in my life, but I’ll never forget the sight of the president’s body dangling from a concrete traffic-control post. Someone had stuffed banknotes into his hands, presumably to make him into a cartoonish figure of corruption. I got so close I even touched his foot. Then a Taliban fighter hit me and told me to get lost. I didn’t feel so optimistic about Taliban rule after that.

As we expected, the Taliban ruled strictly. You could be whipped for having a cassette player. A friend of mine used to run an underground video-rental service and someone reported him to the authorities. He was taken away for three months. Our new rulers didn’t routinely check inside people’s houses though. We carried on listening to music, cautiously, behind closed doors.

A few months after the takeover, Kabulis started to face more serious threats. The mujahideen warlords, now calling themselves the Northern Alliance, regrouped and started fighting back. The Taliban arrested anyone they suspected of supporting their enemies.

Both sides often used ethnicity as a proxy for allegiance. Afghanistan is made up of multiple ethnic groups: Tajiks dominated the leadership of the Northern Alliance, whereas the Taliban were predominantly Pushtun. That made things tricky for my family. By 2001, when it looked as though the Northern Alliance might retake Kabul, my father had become increasingly worried about what would happen to me as a young Pushtun. “They won’t look at who you really are, they’ll just shoot you in the street,” he would say. The fact that my mother was Tajik only made him more concerned, because it meant either side could pick on me.

As summer approached my father became so anxious about my safety that I agreed to go and live with a friend in Peshawar in Pakistan. That’s where I was on September 11th 2001, which meant that I watched the events that unfolded on live news, unlike my family in Kabul, where TV was banned.

“They won’t look at who you really are, they’ll just shoot you in the street”

Everything about that day was stupefying: that the planes were flying into the buildings, that it was somehow linked to us. There had been rumours that Arabs in Afghanistan were helping the Taliban fight the Northern Alliance, but we had never heard of Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda. Even when President Bush warned that America was planning to invade Afghanistan no one believed it would happen. We thought we were too far away for the Americans to bother with, just a forgotten nation that the superpowers had left in the hands of Pakistan.

In October 2001 the Americans made good on their threat. By the time I returned to Kabul in December they were running the city. It was extraordinary to see all these white people with their uniforms, as though aliens had come from Mars and landed in Afghanistan.

We didn’t know whether to like or hate the Americans. They entered the city in the company of Northern Alliance warlords, which didn’t make a good impression. But even those warlords were scared of the Americans at first. I remember everyone talking about how the Americans had bombed a Taliban pickup truck on the road to the Intercontinental Hotel, squashing it as if it were nothing more than a Coca-Cola can. What amazed people was the precision: the road all around the lorry was undamaged. These people could do anything, to anyone.

I also remember the beard hair piled up on the streets: barbers re-opened as soon as the Taliban left, but the municipal government wasn’t up and running, so no one was sweeping away the cuttings. It was bizarre seeing all my friends and acquaintances clean-shaven; the skin on their cheeks and chins was bizarrely pale. Many of my friends grew their beards back eventually, because it suited them better. But in 2001 they had a point to make: those beards were ones the Taliban had made them wear.

Americans brought money and Western goods. Much of their unwanted stuff was sold in a market called Bush Bazaar and Afghans began to set their aspirations beyond survival. We didn’t have sunglasses before 9/11; we’d never seen a kettle before, and people couldn’t stop talking about the fact that it switched off by itself when it boiled.

We knew a lot of the money was going to warlords but at the beginning there seemed to be enough to go round. For the first two or three years I really thought that Afghanistan was going to find its way out of the endless cycle of civil war. The Taliban were defeated and troops from more than 40 countries were there to keep the peace.

We didn’t see what was happening in Uruzgan and Kandahar until it was too late. In these provinces, the warlords had manipulated the Americans into killing their rivals by claiming they were insurgents. Civilian deaths soared with indiscriminate bombings and night raids, creating new support for the Taliban.

As America was squandering goodwill, the Taliban regrouped in Pakistan. By 2010 it was clear that the Afghan government couldn’t hold the country without American firepower. It was only a matter of time before the Americans left and the Taliban came back. I got a job in Britain. Every time I went back to Kabul the news was worse.

Afghans didn’t have sunglasses before 9/11

You can usually get a good sense of the mood in Kabul by listening to the conversation in a shared taxi. When I was last there this spring, there was lively debate about the return of the Taliban. People were expecting it but didn’t realise quite how soon it would come. Half the passengers were furious with the Americans for their eagerness to leave, which they saw as tantamount to handing Kabul over to the Taliban. The other half thought that Taliban rule couldn’t be any worse than the corruption of the Afghan government. “How can you trust them?” came the retort.

Now we will find out which side was right. In some ways it feels very different to the last time the Taliban took over. Afghanistan cannot go back to how it was 20 years ago. People have had a taste of democracy and a free press. Social media has changed things too: videos of Taliban fighters beating women who attended a protest in Kabul are circulating, and the new government cannot block them.

Yet some things feel very familiar. The sudden change of power, the unknown intentions of the new rulers, the risk of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the taint of past associations. Now I’m sick with worry about my father in the same way he used to fret about me.

This happens again and again to Afghans: people are punished just for living somewhere. But the people who perpetuate the fighting keep winning support. Twenty, thirty, forty years on, we don’t seem to learn our lessons. ■

Payenda Sargand is a journalist from Kabul

PHOTOGRAPHS: ANDREW QUILTY/Agence VU’