What I Know About Afghanistan
Not much
Three years ago, I volunteered at a refugee camp called Koutsochero in northern Greece, near Larissa. I bring that up as often as possible because it just feels good to brag. It’s also the only time in my life I’ve talked to people from Afghanistan.
We’ll call my friend S. When S left Afghanistan, both the Taliban and Daesh (ISIS) were active in his rural town. He had a Masters degree and set up an adult education center and computer café. One day, the Taliban told him to close the school. He refused. They kidnapped him, held him for four days with no food, and tortured him until he agreed to join the Taliban. He still refused. They blew up his school and murdered his parents. His sons were still alive, but contacting them would mean their death too. So he left. S says, “Afghans come alone because everyone they would come with is dead.”
He found a smuggler. For nine months he traveled, sleeping in caves, sometimes walking for 80 hours on end. He rode from Pakistan to Iran in the trunk of a car, on foot from Iran to Turkey, floated from Turkey to the Greek islands on a liferaft with thirteen people. He got caught by police in a shipping container with 600 other Afghans. They sent him to go live in a different shipping container up north.
When we met, he had an asylum interview in three years. He told me he was going to wait for it. I don't know if it ever happened. The other options were too hard: get a fake passport (expensive); go to Serbia on foot (dangerous); travel by boat (extraordinarily dangerous); marry a European (competitive, even with a Masters degree).
If S ever does get an asylum interview, he still faces tough odds. Asylum requires you to prove personal persecution, not just coming from a warzone. Syrians get approved most of the time, but Afghans usually get rejected. S, due to his particular story, might be an exception. For a while, a man could boost his chances by saying he was gay. Now, authorities try to root that out by asking probing questions about how gay sex works, what gay sex feels like, what they like most about having gay sex. Most are unable or unwilling to answer that convincingly.
Refugee camps in Europe are usually run by Afghans. There are refugees from all over the world in Greece -- Iraqis, Kurds, Syrians, Eritreans, and more -- but they’re not in control. They’ve never been refugees before. They have to find their footing, try to survive. But the Afghans have been refugees for generations. That’s what happens after forty years of war.
At this camp, the Afghan gang took over after stabbing nine Kurds. They control the official distribution of goods, the informal economy of refugee-run stores, and the black market of smuggled goods. They organize protests to get more spending money from the Red Cross. They orchestrate road blockades to demand better treatment. They know what they’re doing.
The Afghans control who lives where in the camp. Refugees are housed in repurposed shipping containers, equipped with solar panels and a water hookup. International law prohibits sorting the residents by nationality, ethnicity, or language, so new arrivals are placed wherever there is space. But international law also says refugees need to be safe. So, if you’re placed near people unlike you, the enforcers of that area come to your container. Maybe they dump your clothes in the dirt. Maybe they stab you. Now you need to be moved for your safety, this time with your own kind.
The Afghans have the largest, best-enforced section in the camp, subdivided by language (Pashto or Dari) and ethnicity. There are more than a dozen ethnicities in Afghanistan. (Times columnists like to list them all to pretend they know what they’re talking about.) Everyone knows there are Taliban in the camp, but nobody really talks about it or particularly cares. It just doesn’t matter by the time you’re in Greece. At that point, a man has been many things.
One of my jobs was to run the rec room for teenage boys and young men. This is considered fairly dangerous, since the different gangs occasionally fight with knives over who gets to use the pool table. The Afghans got to play the most.
I also taught English classes. Lots of Afghans took them, and there were more women than men enrolled. The women want to learn so they can eventually get jobs as household workers. Men are pretty much screwed in terms of employment. (Skilled sheep herders are the rare exception in northern Greece.) Men and women tried to attend classes at different times. If a man was there, many of the women wouldn’t talk, which made language classes pretty useless. Sometimes, the classes had to be co-ed, but nobody likes to be seen with the other gender. It’s just a bad look.
We were supposed to cook dinner for them on New Year’s Eve. They wanted to do it themselves, to their taste. Who wouldn’t? So we were told to go door-to-door, handing out raw chickens from a garbage bag, instead of just letting them run the grill.
That’s what I know about Afghanistan. Everything else, I read: Taliban, opium, Malala, burqa, that girl with green eyes, those poor boys we sent to get blown up by the side of the road. My picture of Afghanistan is a back-of-the-napkin sketch of its most violent, tragic features. I know it as a place to flee. I only met Afghans to “help”, only heard their saddest stories, and I didn’t stick around to see what happened. Typical American.