Afghanistan: Epilogue (11)

A memoir of life in Kabul, Afghanistan from 1976 to 1978: Part XI

In the last half century, the world has been watching a country burning, a nation crying and a generation dying.

—Masood Khalili*

In this—my final memoir post on Afghanistan—I want to provide a brief overview of what has happened in Afghanistan (and related events in the wider world) from 1978 to the present. The history is complex and multifaceted, so the following does not do it justice. But at least I can give you a feeling for what the Afghan people have experienced over the last 45 years.

In the first section, I present a timeline of major events; in the second section, I talk about the people I have mentioned in my memoir posts and bring you up-to-date on them (and on my own life) as much as I can.

I apologize in advance because this post is quite long, but I wanted to put the stories all together in one place.

The Timeline of Events

1978

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April 1978: Saur Revolution

The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) was founded in 1965 as a Marxist-Leninist political party with close ties to the Soviet Union. For most of its early existence, it consisted of two factions: the hardline Khalq, led by Nur Muhammad Taraki, and the somewhat more moderate Parcham, led by Babrak Karmal.

In April 1978, Taraki and a fellow Khalq leader, Hafizullah Amin, initiated a coup against the Afghan president, Mohammad Daud Khan. Daud, his wife and many other members of his family were immediately killed. Taraki then appointed himself as President and Amin as Prime Minister. This coup has become known as the Saur Revolution. (Saur is the word for April in Dari.)

The new government immediately initiated a program of rapid reform and modernization, which included separation of Mosque and State, land reform, the emancipation of women and the eradication of illiteracy. It also banned such practices as bride price/dowery, forced marriage and child marriage and stressed education for both men and women.

To a western mind, this seems like an admirable undertaking. To the Afghan mind, however, it was way too much way too soon. Many of the changes clashed directly with Afghans’ understanding of Islam, and people started to rebel.

In response, Taraki’s government met resistance with overwhelming force.

Anyone deemed to be a threat to the socialist revolution—including government officials, academics, businessmen, landowners, journalists and village mullahs—was arrested and sent to Pul-i-Charki prison. There they were tortured, executed and buried in mass graves. Between April 1978 and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, at least 27,000 political prisoners were executed.**

It is the knocks on our neighbors’ doors—and their arrests—that Hans experienced in the months before he was finally able to escape to Pakistan in May 1979.

We later heard that the police came to our house two days after Hans had escaped to Pakistan. Someone had decided that because Hans was a foreigner and a businessman, he was guilty of the drug charge and that he should be arrested and taken to Pul-i-Charkhi prison. If he had not escaped when he did, our lives would have taken a completely different direction.

1979

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January: Peace Corps pulls out of Afghanistan

Due to the unstable and dangerous political situation, Peace Corps closed down its operations in Afghanistan after 17 years of service.

Feb. 11: The Iranian Revolution

In addition to the revolution in Afghanistan, turmoil arrived in 1979 for Afghanistan’s western neighbor, Iran. After a series of events, the government of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fell to a theocratic government led by the religious cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The monarchy officially collapsed on 11 February, and Khomeini assumed leadership over Iran.

Feb 14-17: Ambassador Dubs kidnapped and killed

The American ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolph Dubs, was kidnapped by militants on 14 February 1979 and taken to the Kabul Hotel. The militants, who were thought to be sympathizers of the Afghan government, demanded the release of political prisoners in exchange for Ambassador Dubs' freedom.

On February 17, Afghan security forces and Soviet military advisers attempted to rescue Dubs, but he was killed in the ensuing gunfight. The details of the rescue are hazy, and it is not known whether Dubs was killed by his captors or caught in the crossfire between Afghan and Soviet forces.

October 8: Taraki assassinated

In the months following the coup, the relationship between Taraki and Amin began to sour. Amin overthrew Taraki in a palace shootout on 14 September and had him executed on 8 October. Over the next two months, Amin’s government became more and more unstable, morale plummeted, and Afghans began openly revolting against the Moscow-backed regime and its religious and social reforms.

November 4: American Embassy in Tehran seized

On 4 November, Iranian students seized the American Embassy in Tehran and detained more than 50 Americans. The hostages not only included the Chargé d'Affaires, but also junior members of staff.

December 24: The Soviets invade Afghanistan

On 24 December, Soviet airborne forces and approximately 30,000 troops invaded Afghanistan and toppled the Amin regime. On 26 December, Soviets assassinated Amin and installed Babrak Karmal (who had been in exile in Czechoslovakia) in his place.

1980

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Rise of the Mujahideen

The Soviets pursued a policy known as rubblization. This meant they systematically destroyed large portions of Afghanistan and its culture, including mosques, libraries, schools, museums and archaeological sites. They bombed the ancient network of canals that brought water to farmers’ fields, and they dropped booby-trapped toys whose sole purpose was to maim and kill innocent Afghan children.

But the Afghans simply refused to give up. Diverse groups from different ethnic, tribal and political affiliations began to form across Afghanistan and to actively resist the government and the Soviet forces.

These freedom fighters, who became known as mujahideen (warriors of God), were mainly located in the rural and mountainous regions of Afghanistan. Such locations provided numerous strategic advantages for guerilla warfare, enabling them to use hit-and-run tactics against the heavily armored Soviet soldiers. The terrain also provided a natural fortress for bases and training camps.

Using the ancient custom of jirgas—an assembly of leaders that makes decisions by consensus—the mujahideen established an incredibly courageous and powerful network of resistance that attracted soldiers from all over the Muslim world as well as deserters from the Afghan army. They started off using what they had: hand-made bullets made from used shell casings, Lee Enfield guns from World War II, and muskets from the 19th century.***

1981

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January 20: American hostages in Tehran released

The hostages at the American Embassy in Tehran were finally released on January 20, 1981, just minutes after the inauguration of the new U.S. president, Ronald Reagan. They had been held hostage for 444 days.

1984

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The mujahidin finally receive major support from world powers

In 1984 a coalition of world powers finally agreed to provide the mujahideen with serious weaponry and training. These powers included the U.S., Britain, China, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

1986

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May: Soviets replace Karmal with Muhammad Najibullah

Karmal’s regime was weak, ineffectual and unpopular. So in May 1986 the Soviets replaced him with Muhammad Najibullah, who was the former chief of the Afghan secret police. Amazingly enough(!), the Soviets did not assassinate Karmal, but allowed him to go into exile in the Soviet Union, where he died of liver cancer in 1996.

Najibullah’s regime did not fare any better than Karmal’s. As Prime Minister, he was ineffective, highly dependent on the Soviet Union, and failed to broaden his government’s base of support among the Afghan people.

1988

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Osama bin Laden founds al Qaeda

Born in 1957 in Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden was the son of a wealthy Saudi businessman. Following the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, he began providing financial and logistical support to the Islamic fighters battling the Soviets. 

In 1988, bin Laden founded al Qaeda with the purpose of promoting worldwide jihad (holy war) through violence and aggression. The group soon began raising money, setting up training camps, and providing military and intelligence instruction in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sudan.

1989

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February 15: The Soviets completely withdraw from Afghanistan

After almost ten years of warfare, the Soviet Union finally recognized the impossibility of victory in Afghanistan. The Soviet Army began to withdraw its troops on 15 May 1988 and completed its withdrawal on 15 February 1989.

The Kremlin promised a months-long operation; a ten-year occupation followed. In that time, over 600,000 Russian troops would be sent to Afghanistan. Fourteen thousand of them would be killed, according to official estimates (unofficial estimates go as high as 75,000) and 400,000 injured or taken ill. Roughly a million and a half Afghans—most of them civilians—would die, and numberless villages and towns would be leveled.***

Afghan Migration

During the 10-year war with the Soviet Union, at least six million Afghans migrated to other countries. About 3.5 million fled to Pakistan, 2 million to Iran, and the rest to other countries.

In addition, millions of people were displaced internally. The majority moved from rural areas to urban areas, where young men could more easily avoid conscription into the army. Kabul’s population grew from around 600,000 in 1979 to more than 2 million by 1989.

Civil War Begins

The departure of the Soviets left a power vacuum that turned into a civil war as various leaders among the mujahideen vied for control of the country. In the entire ten years of war with the Soviets, Kabul had been spared from bombing and destruction. The civil war, however, quickly brought death and destruction to the capital city itself. The rebel leaders battled block by block for control of the city while the last Soviet-backed president, Muhammed Najibullah, tried in vain to hold on to power. 

November 9: The Berlin Wall falls

Thanks in no small part to its 10-year war in Afghanistan, Russia’s iron grip on the countries within the Soviet Union began to weaken. A series of events began to challenge communism in Central and Eastern Europe, in particular the rise of the Solidarity Movement in Poland. On 9 November, the Berlin Wall fell during the Peaceful Revolution, marking the end of the Iron Curtain.

1990

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October 3: East and West Germany reunify.

1991

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Afghanistan’s northern neighbors declare their independence

Afghanistan’s neighbors declared their independence from the Soviet Union in the late summer of 1991: Turkmenistan on 22 August, Uzbekistan on 31 August, and Tajikistan on 9 September.

December 26: The Soviet Union comes to an end

The Soviet Union officially dissolved on 26 December 1991.

1994

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Rise of the Taliban

During the war with the Soviets, young boys in southern Afghanistan and Afghan refugees in Pakistan began attending madrassas, which were religious schools mainly funded by Saudi Arabia. Students in these “schools” studied almost nothing but the Koran—as interpreted by a strict, puritanical form of Saudi Islam called Wahhabism.

Wahhabism, whose name derives from an eighteenth century reformer in Saudi Arabia named Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792), seeks to purify Islam through strict obedience to the literal text of the Koran and hadith (the recorded sayings and practices of the Prophet Muhammad). It rejects the rich and nuanced Islamic theology and philosophy that developed after Muhammad's death, as well as innovations like Sufi mysticism. It also forbids both dancing and music.

In 1994, an Afghan man named Muhammad Umar brought together and armed approximately 50 students he had recruited from madrassas in southern Afghanistan and Pakistan. The group became known as the Taliban, which simply means students in Pashto. Their goal was to combat the crime, chaos and corruption that were rampant throughout the country.

Umar, who is known in the West as Mullah Omar, came from a poor, religious, Pashtun family in Kandahar Province. He attended a local madrassa in his village and joined the mujahideen as a young man when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. During the war, he served as a military general in numerous battles.

The newly-formed Taliban successfully subdued a local warlord and then began expanding its area of control. Many Afghans welcomed this development because they longed for a government that could provide them with security and freedom from corruption after so many years of war and upheaval.

1996

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The Taliban take Kabul

In late 1996 the Taliban seized Kabul and gained effective control over two-thirds of the country. They then began to implement a brutally repressive regime that imposed restrictions on every aspect of Afghans’ lives, including their appearance, freedom of movement and right to work or study.

For example, men were banned from shaving their beards and could be publicly flogged if their beards were deemed to be too short. But it is the women who bore the brunt of the Taliban’s hatred and fanaticism.

Hatred of women

The Taliban created laws that completely excluded women from public life, such as banning them from the workplace. Female teachers, doctors, nurses, business owners and students were forced into the prison of their homes, with no way of contributing to society. The Taliban even required that the windows of the houses be painted over to prevent outsiders from possibly seeing women inside their homes. Girls over the age of eight were prohibited from attending school.

Women were allowed to appear in public only if they were in the company of a male relative, and when they did so, they had to wear the all-encompassing chadri. Many women were also raped, abducted and forced into marriage.

As many as 50,000 women had lost their husbands and other male relatives during the war with Russia and the civil war. Because they could no longer work and had no source of income, they were forced to sell all of their possessions and beg in the streets (or worse) to feed their families.

Hatred of the arts

The Taliban not only hated women, but they also hated music, art, museums—anything, basically, that brought joy to people’s lives. Here are some of the things they banned:

• Music: According to the Taliban’s strict interpretation of Islam, only the human voice should produce music, and then only in praise of God. Therefore, they banned musicians from performing and people from listening to music—even to CDs within their own homes. They set fire to musical instruments and imprisoned and murdered many musicians.

• Art: Taliban fighters banned artists, writers and poets and murdered many of them as well. They even banned the artistic painting of trucks, which was an old and much-loved custom.

• Kite flying: This had traditionally been one of Afghans’ favorite sports. The Taliban banned it because they said it distracted young men from praying and performing religious activities.

The Taliban destroyed antiquities, burned down libraries, and let museums crumble.

Osama bin Laden moves to Afghanistan

In 1996, Osama bin Laden moved from Sudan, where he had been living, to Afghanistan. The Taliban welcomed him and supported al Qaeda’s mission to perpetrate violent acts in order to free the Islamic world from non-Muslim influence.

2001

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By 2001 the Taliban controlled all but a small section of northern Afghanistan. The only countries in the world who recognized the regime were Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates.

March: The Taliban destroys the 1,400-year-old Buddhas of Bamiyan

In March 2001, Mullah Omar ordered the destruction of the two giant Buddhas of Bamiyan. It took over a week to accomplish this feat, but the Buddhas were finally obliterated.

Omar then ordered the destruction of what remained of Kabul Museum’s priceless antiquities. Employees from the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice dutifully arrived at the museum with hammers in hand and began to smash whatever they could.

September 9: Ahmad Shah Massoud assassinated

Ahmad Shah Massoud commanded the Northern Alliance, an anti-Taliban coalition that had managed to repel Taliban advances and maintain independence for a small chunk of northern Afghanistan. Also known as the Lion of the Panjshir, he was a master of guerilla warfare. On 9 September, Massoud was assassinated by al Qaeda operatives posing as journalists.

If we are fanatical about anything, it is in our love of poetry. I will always remember how, during my last night on earth with my dear friend Commander Ahmed Shah Massoud, it got very late and he said to me, “For God’s sake, let us finish with all the politics. I’ve got the best thing here.” And it was Hafiz, one of his favorite poets. And we stayed up together and read him until three in the morning. Later that day, on 9 September 2001, two days before Al Qaeda’s attacks on the United States, he was killed by two terrorists posing as journalists—assassinated in cold blood while I was sitting next to him. Even in the midst of war, one of the last acts of his too short life was reading his beloved Hafiz. That is what Afghans are like. Poetry is as important to us as the air we breathe and the water we drink.

—Masood Khalili*

Massoud’s death dealt a serious blow to the anti-Taliban resistance. It also bought bin Laden favor with the Taliban and helped to ensure they would protect him after the 9/11 attacks.

September 11: Al Qaeda terrorists attack the United States

On 11 September, nineteen al Qaeda terrorists (from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon and Egypt) hijacked four commercial airliners scheduled to travel from the New England and Mid-Atlantic regions of the East Coast to California.

Two of the planes struck the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, and one struck the Pentagon, the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense outside of Arlington, Virginia. The fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania after a revolt by its passengers.

Altogether, nearly 3,000 people lost their lives that day in the deadliest terrorist attack in human history.

October 7: US invades Afghanistan

After the 9/11 attack, the Taliban refused to extradite bin Laden. So on 7 October, at the direction of President George W. Bush, the U.S. military officially launched Operation Enduring Freedom by starting a bombing operation against Taliban and al Qaeda fighters with British assistance. The stated goal was to dismantle al Qaeda and topple the Taliban government, thereby denying Islamic militants a safe base of operations in Afghanistan.

The Northern Alliance, ethnic Pashtuns opposed to the Taliban, and around a thousand U.S. special forces worked together to support U.S. airstrikes against al Qaeda and Taliban forces. Twelve days later, the first wave of conventional ground forces arrived.

December

Cities around the country quickly fell to the new coalition; by December, the Taliban had been forced out of Kabul and Hamid Karzai had been chosen to lead the Afghan Interim Administration. In response, Mullah Omar then began waging a multi-year insurgency against the U.S.-backed Afghan government.

2011

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May 2: Osama bin Laden killed

After the U.S. entered Afghanistan, bin Laden became the subject of a decade-long international manhunt. During this period, he hid in several mountainous regions of Afghanistan then moved to neighboring Pakistan.

On May 2, under the direction of President Barak Obama, U.S. special operations forces attacked bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan and killed him. He was 54.

2013

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April 23: Mullah Omar dies

Mullah Omar, who successfully evaded capture by the Americans, died in 2013 from tuberculosis. He was 53.

A cultural renaissance

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During the twenty years that the United States, United Nations and others occupied the country, many people in Afghanistan—especially in the cities—began to blossom. Women returned to the workplace, to education and to life. Refugees who had fled political persecution returned to create new businesses, help rebuild the universities and museums, and take high-ranking positions in the new government. Artists, writers and musicians also experienced an explosion of creativity.

The last 20 years has seen a renaissance in Afghan culture, reflective of the country's diversity of ethnicities and languages and fueled by its enormous population of young people. A folk music scene has flourished, playing music passed down by oral tradition; a new generation of authors, poets and filmmakers have created exciting new works; an explosion of media outlets have entrenched a vibrant, free press culture; and a surge in translation and academic study has elevated and unearthed the ancient culture of modern-day Afghanistan.****

2021

The U.S., its coalition partners, and NATO provided Afghanistan with soldiers, weapons, advisors and billions of dollars of economic assistance for twenty years in the effort to help it become a stable, democratic country. Unfortunately, Afghanistan is an extremely complicated place, and the western coalition continually faced challenges from the Taliban insurgency and the lack of honest, effective leadership.

Despite—or maybe because of—the changes taking place in society, many Afghans, especially in rural areas, remained opposed to the U.S. occupation and strongly supported the Taliban.

April 21: Biden announces his intention to withdraw

Unable to justify the tremendous costs of engagement in Afghanistan—both in money and in human lives—after twenty years with little success, the Biden administration announced it would pull out all U.S. troops by September 2021 without leaving a residual force.

August 15: The Taliban retake Kabul

Biden’s announcement led to the rapid collapse of the Afghan National Security Forces, and the Taliban soon retook Kabul.

August 30: The Americans withdraw from Afghanistan

The United States completed a precipitous and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan on 30 August.

The end result

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Thousands of people died over the 20-year effort to stabilize Afghanistan. This includes:******

• 2,448 American service members and 3,846 U.S. contractors

• 66,000 Afghan national military and police

• 1,144 allied service members, including from other NATO member states

• 47,245 Afghan civilians

• 51,191 Taliban and other opposition fighters

• 444 Aid workers

The Taliban have returned and once again imposed control over every facet of Afghan life. The women have once again been imprisoned in their homes, and the voices of musicians, writers, poets and artists have been silenced. Afghanistan's cultural heritage—its poetry, film, music, art, artifacts, antiquities, statues, museums and more—is once again under threat. Furthermore, under the Taliban, Afghanistan has once again become a safe haven for al Qaeda and other terrorists.

Thanks to the events set in motion in 1978 by the Saur Revolution, Afghanistan has become a tragedy of huge proportions for all concerned. Unfortunately, it is one with no end in sight. With all my heart, I hope the following quote is prophetic:

The Taliban will not last forever. This land of poets and writers will not allow it.

—Masood Khalili*

The People

In this section, I provide an update on the people I have mentioned in these posts, as well as on my own life.

Anne, Ilhan, Hussein and my students

I have no idea what happened to any of these people. I hope Anne, Ilhan, their husbands and children were able to leave Afghanistan safely and are now living in the UK and US, respectively. But I have no way to know this. As for my students and Hussein, I fear the worst, but I hope for the best.

My Peace Corps roommate, Alcy

Alcy joined the Foreign Service and served in countries around the world, including China and Iraq. She and her husband are now enjoying retirement in Virginia.

My Peace Corps friends, Chopin and Jackie

After finishing their Peace Corps service, Jackie and Chopin returned to the U.S. and divorced. I have lost touch with Jackie, but Chopin is very happily remarried to his second wife and living in Texas.

Frau Farhadi

Frau Farhadi’s husband, Ghulam Mohammad Farhad, was arrested by the communists on 14 October 1979, accused of being the leader of a plot against the regime. Thankfully, he was freed in a general amnesty in early 1980. He died in Kabul of natural causes in 1984. (I can find information about him online because he was a major political figure in Kabul. There is no mention, however, of his wives and children.)

After leaving Kabul, Hans and I completely lost touch with Frau Farhadi except that we heard through Hans’ father in the 1980s that she was in Germany. I am assuming she left Kabul for good after her husband’s death, but I do not know this for sure. I am hoping that both her son and daughter—and their families—were able to find refuge in Germany, but there is no way of knowing this, either.

I can find no mention of the Gulzar Hotel or of Frau Farhadi on any online sites, so I am assuming that the Gulzar exits no more. I have no idea when Frau Farhadi died, what her life was like at the end, or how she felt about the vast changes in her life. I wish I did.

In the absence of any other recognition, I want to provide this testimony, my witness, that this remarkable woman existed and that she made an important contribution to her adopted homeland as well as to the many travelers who spent time in her hotel and restaurant. May she rest in peace.

Father Panigoti

Father Panigoti remained in Kabul until 1990, when the Taliban expelled him from the country. He spent the last years of his life at the Barnabite convent of San Luca in Cremona, Italy. He died of an illness on 5 June 2005 at the age of 79.

Louis and Nancy Dupree

In November 1978, the communist government accused Louis Dupree of being a CIA spy and arrested him. After being held for five days, he was released and told to leave the country immediately. He and Nancy drove their Land Rover over the Khyber Pass to Peshawar, Pakistan, where other expatriate and Afghan friends were gathering.

While there, Nancy and Louis began to realize that unique documents relating to Afghanistan’s history and culture could be destroyed and lost forever. Therefore, they formed the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief (ACBAR) and began to collect both government and non-government documents relating to the country's history, culture and Soviet-Afghan War.

I’m not sure of the timeline, but they apparently divided their time between Peshawar and Louis’ job as a professor at Duke University in North Carolina. In 1981, Louis was in a near fatal car accident in North Carolina. He underwent two brain surgeries and remained in hospital for a year. Still partially paralyzed after being discharged (and newly diagnosed with lung cancer), he went to Washington to urge lawmakers to send the Afghan resistance fighters more weapons.

Louis died of lung cancer on 21 March 1989 in Durham, North Carolina—just a month after the last Soviet tanks left Afghanistan. He was 63 years old.

Nancy mourned deeply for Louis, but she also mourned for Afghanistan. Shortly after his death, she was invited to return to Peshawar, Pakistan, to head an Afghan cultural organization, and she accepted immediately. While she was there, the ACBAR collection grew to include books, documents, maps, photographs and even rare recordings of folk music.

In 2005, Nancy moved back to Kabul along with the ACBAR collection. In 2012, the collection was moved to Kabul University, and its name was changed to the Afghan Center at Kabul University (ACKU). This was the first facility in the country dedicated to the study of Afghanistan's history, culture and society, and it now encompasses over 100,000 documents. The digital collection consists of over 1.7 million pages of documents in Pashto, Persian and English.

Nancy’s efforts were greatly appreciated by the Afghans, many of whom referred to her as the Grandmother of Afghanistan. She died on 10 September 2017 in Kabul—just a month shy of her 90th birthday—and was buried in Kabul next to the tomb of her husband.

Hans and me

I did not realize it until I was writing these posts, but I think that some Higher Power must have been protecting me throughout my time in Afghanistan. If it hadn’t been for the depression I developed in January and February 1978, I would have been in Kabul for the Saur Revolution—rather than in Seattle visiting my family.

And if it hadn’t been for the dreams that led to the urgency to get pregnant, I would have remained in Kabul and experienced the screams of our neighbors being taken away in the middle of the night as Hans did. Furthermore, if we had both been at home when the police came to take Hans to Pul-i-Charkhi prison, I might well have been in danger, too.

And so I am very grateful to whatever Higher Power is protecting me that such experiences did not become my reality.

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Hans and I picked up the pieces of our lives and began again in Seattle. We stayed there for about nine months and then moved to Boardman, Oregon, to be closer to my mother, who was alone and still in mourning for my father.

Our second daughter, Jessica, was born on 8 September 1981. I had wanted to give birth to her at home with a midwife as well, but about 6 months into my pregnancy, I developed pre-eclampsia, and my midwife said she could no longer support me. She then recommended a doctor who had a small hospital in Forest Grove, about an hour west of Portland (and a 4-hour drive from Boardman).

I was admitted to the hospital three weeks before my due date. They could not control my skyrocketing blood pressure, however, and performed an emergency c-section the day after I was admitted. Thank goodness, Jessica was strong and healthy, and I soon recovered as well.

We stayed in Boardman for three years, spent a year in Santa Barbara, and then moved to Portland, where we lived for the next 30-some years.

Unfortunately, our marriage was not a happy one. Hans was completely uncommunicative and an alcoholic. He was neither a supportive husband nor a supportive father. In fact, although physically present, he was mentally and emotionally absent from all of us. He was also unfaithful.

He could design and build just about any piece of equipment you can imagine, but he was terrible at business. Since he insisted on working for himself, our finances were often limited and precarious. In the end, I was the one who supported us, with very little help from him.

I thought many times about divorcing him, but somehow could not do so. One of the major excuses I told myself was “Who else would understand what we went through in Afghanistan?” Somehow the experiences we had there bound us together, regardless of what came later.

In the last two years of his life, Hans became very ill with COPD and heart disease and eventually died in early January 2014. He was 66 at the time, and I was 62. And so our story together ended.

I am very grateful that a whole new life began for me soon after that. In July, my most important editing client asked me to move to Vienna, Austria, to work for his organization full time. In late September 2014 I did just that. Over the next five years, my entire life blossomed, and I was happier in Vienna than I have ever been before.

After two years, I met and fell in love with an Austrian. Gerhard has become a true partner, one who supports me emotionally and financially and with whom I can laugh and share my life.

We were married in April 2019. After five years of working in Vienna, I retired on 1 December 2019. On 24 December, Gerhard and I arrived at our new home on the west coast of Ireland and began a new chapter of our lives as retirees living in one of the most beautiful places on earth.

References

* Khalili, M. (2023). Foreword. In J. Marozzi, A thousand golden cities (pp. XVII-XXI). Head Zeus.

**Soviet-Afghan War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War

***Verini, J. Love and ruin. Atavist magazine, No. 34. https://magazine.atavist.com/loveandruin/

**** Kumar, R. (2023, August 15) When the music stops: how the Taliban’s fear of art is killing Afghan culture. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/aug/15/when-the-music-stops-how-the-talibans-fear-of-art-is-killing-afghan-culture

*****Finegan, C. (2021, August 2). Taliban pose threat to Afghan cultural heritage as they sweep back into power. ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/taliban-pose-threat-afghan-cultural-heritage-sweep-back/story?id=79508223

******Knickmeyer, E. (2021, August 17). Costs of the Afghanistan war, in lives and dollars. AP. 2021https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-business-afghanistan-43d8f53b35e80ec18c130cd683e1a38f