Police in surgical masks and sunglasses greet people arriving on planes. Children sell masks on street corners. A bartender at the popular Gandamack Hotel wears gloves to protect himself from the germs of foreigners. A planned Friday match of buzkachi, the Afghan traditional game where players fight on horseback over a goat or calf carcass, has been canceled in the Panjshir Valley. And for three weeks, all of the schools, universities, and wedding halls in Afghanistan have been closed.
Judging by the country’s reaction to swine flu, Afghans are dropping left and right from the virus. Only Ukraine has adopted stricter restrictions—barely—but as many as 70 people have died there.
“It’s just to avoid people going to political demonstrations,” said Ahmad Jhyashi, 28, a restaurant manager. “The day before the final results of the elections were announced, they said, ‘OK, how to make people stay home? Let’s do some swine flu propaganda.’”
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As of last week, 713 people have tested positive for swine flu in Afghanistan, including 271 foreigners on Bagram Air Base, the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan, and two foreigners in Kabul. But the death toll stands at just one—a 35-year-old Afghan engineer, who died in a Kabul hospital Oct. 28—making many Afghans suspicious that the timing of this health emergency has a lot more to do with politics than any epidemic. (An Afghan woman died Monday night of the disease in a hospital in Peshawar, Pakistan, but it was unclear whether she lived in Afghanistan or Pakistan.)
Some Afghans now refer to “swine politics” instead of swine flu, saying that these new restrictions are an attempt to prevent anti-government protests after last week’s resolution of a flawed presidential election.
“It’s just to avoid people going to political demonstrations,” said Ahmad Jhyashi, 28, a restaurant manager. “The day before the final results of the elections were announced, they said, ‘OK, how to make people stay home? Let’s do some swine flu propaganda.’”
The health ministry denies the allegation, but trying to fight a disease by canceling school in Afghanistan is kind of like trying to stop a flood with a sand bag. The streets are lined with garbage and framed by open sewers, which flow with human feces and the blood of slaughtered cows. Speaking of those cows, they hang openly on the aptly named Butcher Street, often covered in flies. The air of Kabul is thick with dust and laced with feces; trying to breathe is sometimes like trying to suck an orange through a straw. The whole country feels like a health epidemic waiting to happen.
Yet to take the political temperature of Afghanistan, there’s almost no better barometer than the reaction to a flu named after a pig, considered a dirty animal in Islam and especially in Afghanistan. The government’s response to swine flu highlights the allegations of misuse of government authority rampant here, such as using state resources to set up ghost polling stations in the recent election and to stuff ballots on behalf of President Hamid Karzai. And the reaction of many Afghans to the idea of swine flu underlines just how suspiciously foreigners are now viewed, eight years after the Taliban was driven from power and just as the U.S. administration is deciding whether to send in more troops on top of the 68,000 already here.
My translator’s mother warned him to stop working with foreigners because of swine flu. A pregnant woman’s mother made her stop working at a friend’s company, a USAID contractor. After picking up a foreigner, one taxi driver put on a mask.
“In Afghanistan, we don’t have pigs to get swine flu,” said Amin Yunussi, 45, who wore a mask along with his two sons as they walked down a Kabul street Thursday morning. “Foreigners have pigs.”
“People say the foreigners brought this here on the airplane,” added his older brother, Naeem Yunussi.
Afghanistan is facing so many crises, locusts are expected any moment. Insurgents seem to be able to strike anywhere, even at a U.N. guesthouse full of election workers in the middle of Kabul. The interior ministry has warned the U.N. mission that Afghan police can’t protect its workers. The United Nations, meanwhile, has temporarily evacuated 600 of its 1,100 workers in Afghanistan while trying to shore up security at guesthouses.
And then there is the election fallout. The Aug. 20 presidential poll, so fraught with fraud that it made Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe look like an amateur, finally drew to a sad whimper of a conclusion this week when the challenger to incumbent Karzai opted to drop out of a runoff, leading Karzai to be declared the winner by default. The international community scrambled to somehow put a happy face on the result as the Obama administration continued its debate over Afghan strategy.
Everywhere, Afghans worried about a violent reaction to five more years of Karzai. Many feared that supporters of Karzai’s opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, the former foreign minister popular mainly in the north and with ethnic Tajiks, would take to the streets. Since Afghanistan has no history of peaceful protests, such a reaction could lead to violence and even fighting between Tajiks and ethnic Pashtuns, many of whom support Karzai, a Pashtun.
Enter swine flu. Convenient, topical and scary.
On Nov. 1, Abdullah dropped out of the runoff. That evening, after being granted Karzai’s approval, the minister of public health, flanked by doctors in white lab coats and masks, announced a public-health emergency and canceled school for three weeks. Protests have traditionally been fueled by universities here—last month, Kabul University students led demonstrations after a rumor that U.S. troops had bombed a mosque and burned the Holy Quran in nearby Wardak province.
Nazir Ahmad Hanafi, a parliament member who supported Karzai's main opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, said he believed that the swine-flu precautions were a joke.
"It's political, to stop people from gathering," said Hanafi, who also blamed me for bringing swine flu to Afghanistan because I was a foreigner. He said the extra police also helped convince Abdullah's supporters to stay home.
Another parliament member who supports Abdullah, Habiba Danish, said she thought swine flu was declared for political reasons, but by this point, could be a reality.
On Nov. 2, the Independent Election Commission canceled the runoff and declared Karzai the winner. The price of masks and hand sanitizer shot up.
Ahmad Farid Raaid, the public-relations director at the ministry of public health, took pains to insist that the emergency had nothing to do with politics.
“This is not a political decision,” Raaid said. “This is a technical decision.”
On Monday night, Raaid’s boss, the public health minister, held a press conference, saying that swine flu is a real threat and discounting rumors of political swine flu. He also said that anyone spreading that rumor could face consequences. On Tuesday morning, Raaid backed off that statement, saying no one would face consequences or be arrested for spreading the rumor.
To be fair, Afghanistan has a history of overreacting to swine flu. In May, the Kabul Zoo briefly quarantined the country’s one domestic pig, a gift from China.
And there’s no doubt that Afghanistan would be vulnerable to any epidemic. So far, the government has stockpiled only about 50,000 doses of Tamiflu, with another 50,000 on the way. There is no vaccine yet available. Health care is generally weak here—the engineer was hospitalized for two days before being diagnosed, and Tamiflu was given only in his final minutes.
But fueling suspicion of the government’s motives, Friday prayers, which can attract tens of thousands of the devout, were not canceled. Maybe there, people are considered to be immune—from both disease and politics.
For almost five years, Kim Barker was the South Asia bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, directing coverage of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India. After the Tribune decided to cut back on foreign coverage, Barker quit in May to write a book and become the Edward R. Murrow fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
