The Girl from Jalozai

She illustrates the inspiration a single person can provide – sometimes just by their existence. The inspiration to stop and think, really think, about what is and what might be.

It’s late-August, 2001 – I’ve just spent two weeks in Afghanistan filming with the Taliban, and for all the horror stories I’d read about them – it’s clear to me that a large and growing moderate group within their regime is gaining power. Amongst this group there’s a general detestation of the man they called ‘The Arab’: Osama bin Laden, a virtual unknown to most of us at the time.

The girl ... she’s a chance meeting in the Jalozai Refugee camp, outside Peshawar in Pakistan on the Afghan border. The camp is a teeming slum. Over fifty thousand Afghan refugees call it home. Some have been here since the Soviet invasion of the 1980’s. Thousands more are recent arrivals – having fled the Taliban (Version 1.0). Jalozai is a terrible place but there’s a strange blamelessness to its squalor that’s not obvious to me then – for it exists in a world not yet riven by 9/11.

That world – pre-Cheney/Bush, pre-Bin Laden – is a place I know now only in illusory retrospect. I had no idea then what extremes America and its opponents (real and imagined) would go to. I had no idea then how, overnight – a new glossary of intolerance would become the new world order. How life would be drawn in abject black and white by the twin hands of Bin Laden’s idiot-son radicalism and Cheney’s (and his overling Bush’s) malicious ‘might is right’ myopia.

I had no idea that caught between these symbiotic absolutists would be the vast majority of the rest of us: reasonable people consigned to the back rows while the nuts and the weirdoes slugged it out and their nutty weirdo cheer squads pressed the centre ring.

But enough words have been written about the nuts and the weirdoes. One has left the White House to start his picture-book memorial library – the other is in a cave somewhere, struggling vainly for relevance with an outdated video camera.

So to the girl. Hers was the last photo I took before 9/11. She was an innocent amidst Jalozai’s venality, with a model’s poise and a child’s unlikely joy. I took the shot with her complete involvement: to her I was a difference, a glimpse beyond Jalozai. To me she was the same.

The world could have gotten better. For her – for me – for everyone. But for the 9/11 dragnet of fate, when history became a terrible living thing we wanted to be over.

For her – the girl – there would have been no going home to Afghanistan. The druglords and the thuggish warlords were written a blank American cheque to retake her country and remind Afghanis why most of them had chosen the brutal order of the Taliban Version 1.0 versus the chaotic brutality of the previous regime. With the inevitability of night following day, Taliban Version 2.0 arose from the corruption of the reinvading gangsters … worse and utterly uncompromising.

Democracy won – in the long long run. The American people removed one fulcrum of the axis of evil by cleaning out the White House, and thereby terminally unbalanced the other. Hope has broken the grey dawn. But it’s nearly ten years since I took this photo. She must be in her mid-twenties. How has she lived? Does she still smile like this?

Is she alive?

I look at this photo and wonder … and hope.