Читать книгу Come from the Shadows - Terry Glavin - Страница 9
Оглавление“Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events. For example, it is impossible to calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of millions, the number of deaths caused by the present war. The calamities that are constantly being reported—battles, massacres, famines, revolutions—tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources . . . Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs.”
—from George Orwell’s “Notes on Nationalism,” in Polemic, October 1945
THE LITTLE CITY of Daste Barchi is not on any official map, and there are no road signs to tell you how to find it. To get there, you look for a particular dirt track that seems to come out of nowhere from behind the bombed-out hulk of the Duralaman Palace on the outskirts of Kabul. You follow the track into the foothills of the snow-covered Paghman Mountains. It becomes a rutted, westward-twisting dirt road for about an hour or so, and then it begins to weave through Jabarhan, a teeming place of tiny, flat-roofed mud brick houses and narrow alleyways alive with children and flocks of sheep and chickens. Just when you think you’re lost, and the road could not get any narrower, you are in Daste Barchi.
Daste Barchi means Barchi Desert. It is not a desert. It is a city. Perhaps as many as a million people live in Daste Barchi and its environs. The people are mainly Hazaras, from Afghanistan’s Shia minority. These are the people you see at first light down in Kabul, sweeping the streets and pulling handcarts heavy with cauliflowers and pomegranates. They’re the day labourers, the house servants, the people who take out Kabul’s washing. Without them, Kabul would come apart. The area encompassing Daste Barchi lies within an administrative unit called Police District 13. Apart from what some people manage to procure from diesel generators, there is no electricity. There is no running water. The residents of Police District 13 are classified as Internally Displaced Persons. Daste Barchi does not officially exist.
It is in places like Daste Barchi that the terrain I set out to explore in this book appears in sharp relief. This is the landscape between the Afghanistan that animates debates in Western democracies and the places “outside the wire,” as the entire country is often bizarrely and euphemistically described. Having spent fifteen years of my life working for daily newspapers, I’m well acquainted with the distance that can exist between the way the world really is and the way accounts of that world enliven the public imagination. But between the real Afghanistan and the imaginary one, there is a chasm. I travelled to Kabul and Kandahar in 2008, and to Kandahar again in 2009. In 2010 I was back in Afghanistan twice, with Abdulrahim Parwani, a friend from Canada, a colleague and fellow journalist whose story will figure prominently in this book. We went to Daste Barchi in the spring of 2010 to learn about a story that casts light down into that chasm. It involves an event that had come to be called the Battle of Marefat High School.
In the activist polemics of North America’s wealthy, privileged students, Afghanistan shows up as a project of American imperialism, an effort by “us” in the capitalist West to impose our hegemonic, democratic values on “them.” It brooks only one response: troops out. At Marefat High School, in a cold and poorly lit classroom, the students have decorated the walls with oil paintings of some of the great champions of values that do not draw such distinctions between “them” and “us.” The students painted the portraits themselves: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, René Descartes, Rosa Parks, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Ali Akbar Dehkhoda, Immanuel Kant, Abraham Lincoln, Voltaire, Baruch Spinoza and Jawaharlal Nehru. This may seem a mere incongruity, a touching detail, a small matter. It isn’t. It’s not just a mark of the distance between the imaginary Afghanistan and the real one, either. It’s what the Battle of Marefat High School was all about.
Marefat High School is supported almost entirely by the poor of Daste Barchi. The school’s focus is on humanism and civic education. The school is accredited by the Afghan government, but it has had a rocky relationship with the education ministry, owing to the students’ demands for fully co-educational classes. The roughly three thousand students who attend the school are encouraged to use the Internet, set up personal web pages and communicate with the outside world. Elected class councils and discipline councils allow students to evaluate teachers, tutor one another and manage their own affairs, right down to the amount of the fines levied for overdue library books. The school is governed by a board of trustees elected by parents, students and teachers. There is also an independent student parliament. The idea is that these forms of self-government will encourage students to get into the habit of taking charge of their own lives. This requires practice, hard work and a lot of give and take. It is the art that is known in the West as democracy.
The battle at the school began on the morning of April 15, 2009, when a mob of dozens from Kabul arrived screaming for Marefat principal Aziz Royesh. “I was right here,” Royesh told me, as we stood in the rutted, muddy alley outside the school. “The school is a dirty nest of Christians, communists and prostitutes,” the mob shouted. “There are boys and girls together. Royesh is an apostate; Royesh must die.” In the school courtyard, several boys ran to the doors and quickly locked them. “I ran into my house, right there,” said Royesh, pointing across the narrow alley. “The school fought back. The boys didn’t run away. They barred the door. They called the police.” The battle was more of a riot, but it lasted most of the day. The school was pelted with rocks. Windows were broken. The local police were useless. It took riot police firing into the air to break things up.
The Battle of Marefat High School was directly related to a story that showed up in headlines all over the world, in a version that went something like this: In April 2009, to the great consternation of his Western backers and international human rights organizations, Afghan president Hamid Karzai approved a “rape law,” which would forbid women from refusing sex to their husbands and require them to obtain permission from a male relative before leaving the house, as a sop to the country’s Shia minority. Afghanistan’s Shias wanted to entrench Taliban-like misogynist brutality within a Shia-specific marriage law that would be separate from laws applying to the Sunni majority. Some Afghan women staged a protest in Kabul but were shouted down and threatened by a much larger group of violent counter-protesters. Moral of the story: It all goes to show that we should stop propping up Karzai’s warlord regime and pull our soldiers from the country. Troops out.
The problem with the story is that it was pretty much the opposite of the truth. The sternest opponents of the “rape law” included Shia clerics. Mohammad Mohaqiq, one of Afghanistan’s most influential Shia parliamentarians, called the law “an offence to the Hazaras.” The contents had actually been written in Tehran a couple of years before. The law’s champion was Iran’s senior ayatollah in Afghanistan, the powerful Mohammad Asif Mohseni. The international human rights outfits in Kabul mainly kept quiet about it all until it was almost too late. Among the Hazara women leading protests against the law were student parliamentarians from Daste Barchi. The mob that showed up at the school came straight from Mohseni’s opulent mosque and madrassa complex in Kabul. If there is a moral to this story, it would be something like this: Afghans want more democracy, less misogyny, and more democratic international intervention to help hold their government accountable. In their demonstrations against the “rape law,” Afghans were not chanting “troops out.”
This wasn’t a story about imperialists from the Western democracies trying to cope with an intractable Muslim puppet government that was refusing to behave respectably. It was more accurately a story about wealthy Iranian-backed bullies pushing around poor Afghan Shias who were standing up for the universal values the West dubiously claims as its own.
The closer you look at the Afghanistan that has animated Western debates in the decade since September 11, 2001, that’s the sort of thing you find. It is as though some undiagnosed trauma from the gruesome, live-broadcast spectacle of that September morning had gone on to induce a kind of mass psychosis, a “sealing-off of one part of the world from another,” as Orwell put it.
In April 2011, during its 219th week on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list, celebrity philanthropist Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea, a book that purports to set out a schools-based formula for winning the “war on terror” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, was exposed as a fairytale. Journalist Jon Krakauer and a CBS 60 Minutes crew revealed that Mortenson’s account of his exploits was largely a work of fiction. Krakauer, a journalist who is not afflicted with what Orwell politely described as an “indifference to objective truth,” discovered that Mortenson had fabricated his most gripping yarns, not least a tale of being captured and held hostage by a strangely jolly group of Taliban fighters. “The image of Mortenson that has been created for public consumption is an artifact born of fantasy, audacity, and an apparently insatiable hunger for esteem,” Krakauer found. “Mortenson has lied about the noble deeds he has done, the risks he has taken, the people he has met.” On it goes, in painful detail.
Mortenson’s “phony memoir,” with its various editions, its sequel and its children’s book version, bilked enormous sums of money from unsuspecting donors to build schools that were not built, or were built and left empty or turned out to have been built by someone else. Some of his schools were indeed functioning, but Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute issued bogus financial statements and misused millions of dollars, including payments for fancy hotels and flights in private jets for Mortenson’s lucrative speaking engagements. Tellingly, all along, few Afghans had ever even heard of the world-famous Mortenson. Hardly anyone in Afghanistan involved in education had ever come across his Central Asia Institute. And yet, Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea was a Time Asia Book of the Year winner.
Something similar has been at work with regard to another bestseller about Afghanistan by another globetrotting celebrity. Malalai Joya’s polemical autohagiography, A Woman among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice, tells the story of an Afghan parliamentarian so courageous that the BBC bestowed the title “bravest woman in Afghanistan” upon her. Joya’s book is not what you would call a work of fiction, but in 2010, the year Time chose her for inclusion on its list of the 100 most influential people in the world, she was only dimly remembered in Afghanistan as a former MP who once made an angry speech, got kicked out of Parliament and then left the country. A decade after September 11, throughout Europe and North America, especially among people who considered themselves staunchly progressive, Malalai Joya was a larger-than-life, heroic figure. But among Afghanistan’s human rights activists and women’s rights leaders, Joya was remembered with a mix of pity and contempt.
All over the English-speaking world, there was something about September 11 that seemed to cause otherwise intelligent people to give vent to all sorts of unhinged declarations. A mere two weeks after al-Qaida’s July 7, 2005, suicide bombings in London claimed the lives of fifty-two innocents, London mayor Ken Livingstone declared: “The Americans recruited and trained Osama bin Laden, taught him how to kill, to make bombs, and set him off to kill the Russians and drive them out of Afghanistan.” Six years later, when a U.S. Navy SEAL team killed bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the famous American documentary filmmaker Michael Moore typed the news into his Twitter account this way: “The monster we created—yes, WE—in the 1980s by ARMING, FUNDING, & TRAINING him in the art of terror agnst the USSR, finally had 2 b put down.” But the United States did no such thing. The CIA never organized, trained, armed or funded bin Laden or al-Qaida. During the anti-Soviet jihad, bin Laden was a deranged millionaire construction-industry magnate whose al-Qaida outfit was a marginal presence in Afghanistan. Neither al-Qaida nor the Taliban (which didn’t even exist during the 1980s) were ever U.S. allies or CIA assets. But there was nothing unusual about Livingstone’s pronouncement, or about Moore’s bizarre outburst. These are the kinds of things you hear from all sorts of people, all the time.
Another commonplace fiction shows up when you type “Afghanistan” and “graveyard of empires” into Google: 259,000 results. “It’s the mother of all clichés,” writes Christian Caryl, a veteran journalist and a senior fellow at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Almost no one can resist it. It’s wielded by everyone from thoughtful ex-generals to vitriolic bloggers. It crops up everywhere from Russia’s English-language TV channel to scruffy Pakistani newspapers to America’s stately National Public Radio.” Caryl warns: “If we really want Afghans to attain the future they deserve, clinging to a fake version of their history won’t help.”
It’s not just “their history” that has gotten so absurdly faked, and getting Afghanistan’s story backwards or sideways is not confined to the Americans or the English. The Canadian case is especially illustrative, because unlike Britain and the United States, Canada did not muddle things with passionate and furious arguments about Iraq. Canada wasn’t a member of the Anglo-American “coalition of the willing” in Iraq. Still, Canada ended up a flotsam-cluttered back eddy for the most manic of the prevailing Euro-American fables floating around about Afghanistan.
It had gotten so that in January 2008, New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton could utter these words, with a straight face, without even having to worry that someone in Canada’s national news media would notice: “For six years, the Liberals and Conservatives have had Canada involved in a counter-insurgency combat mission in southern Afghanistan.” It wasn’t even close to being true. In early 2002, a Canadian battle group of about 750 soldiers took on a combat role with American troops in the Afghan south, but by July of that year, Canada’s battle group came home. After NATO took the helm of the UN’s International Security Assistance Force in 2003, about 700 Canadian soldiers returned to Afghanistan to assume a fairly conventional “peacekeeping” role in and around Kabul, in northern Afghanistan. In October 2005, Canadian troops handed off the assignment to Turkish soldiers, and nearly all Canadian Forces personnel in Afghanistan were brought home for a second time. It wasn’t until early 2006, after Canada answered the call from the UN to set up a provincial reconstruction team in Kandahar, that a Canadian battle group was deployed to southern Afghanistan.
In these ways, the Afghanistan that has insinuated itself into the attentions of the English-speaking world since September 11 is a lot like Absurdistan, which is what the dissidents of Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Hungary called the world they read about in their East bloc newspapers before the Berlin Wall came down. In its post-9/11 iteration in the West, Absurdistan is a world that replaces Afghanistan with an apparatus sustained only by the suspension of disbelief, a contrivance wholly impervious to the objective realities of the world in which Afghanistan actually exists.
If that seems a bold claim, let’s try a little thought experiment. It will take the form of an account of Afghanistan’s story that situates September 11, 2001, at its heart. It will take up only two paragraphs. You could quibble with it according to your political sensibilities, but you won’t be presented with the lunatic belief that September 11 was an inside job, or that it’s all about oil, or that we’re all engaged in an illegal and imperialist war in that country. No Zionists enter into it, either. It may even be the least contentious way of talking about Afghanistan. It goes like this:
After Soviet troops poured into Afghanistan in the late 1970s, the United States opened up a decisive front in the Cold War by arming and training anti-Soviet mujahideen in order to overthrow Afghanistan’s communist government and drive out the Russians. U.S. president Ronald Reagan’s mujahideen forces were victorious, but they then turned on one another in a long and horrific civil war that ended only in 1996, when the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban seized control of the country. At first welcomed by war-weary Afghans, the Taliban soon imposed an oppressive and brutal order derived from a strict interpretation of the Quran. The Taliban ended the anarchy of the warlord years, halted opium production and tackled corruption, but in a classic case of foreign-policy “blowback,” America’s former anti-Soviet allies became America’s sworn enemies. Owing to the strict Afghan tribal code of Pashtunwali, which demands that Afghans protect their guests, the Taliban continued to provide shelter to Osama bin Laden, whose al-Qaida terrorist network had targeted the United States.
In response to the catastrophe of September 11, the White House rallied America’s NATO partners to a “war on terror” coalition that invaded Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban government. But it wasn’t long before the NATO coalition was sinking into a quagmire of Afghan hostility. Resentment of the U.S. occupation soon evolved into defiance of Hamid Karzai’s corrupt government and a dramatic upsurge in popular support for the Taliban insurgency. The ambitions of the U.S.-led mission failed to take into account the deeply rooted religious traditions the Taliban represented in Afghan culture. While they are Muslim extremists, the Taliban have no ambitions for global terrorism, and Afghanistan is chronically plagued by insurgencies. Afghan society is conservative and profoundly misogynistic, and Afghans are fiercely independent and quick to take up arms against any foreign intervention. This is why the West has failed in its efforts to impose democracy on Afghanistan at the point of a gun.
There.
You could tell that story just about anywhere. You could tell it during Question Period in the House of Commons in Ottawa, at a union meeting in Manchester, in a Toronto Star column, or in a lecture at a university symposium in California. Nevertheless, each sentence in those two paragraphs contains an outright falsehood. Most contain at least two. What is at work here is not merely a matter of differing opinions, either.
Opinions are fine things to have, and none of us are without our biases. I have mine. We’re all “embedded” in something, somehow, and while I make no grand claims upon the truth in these pages, I have written this book from the standpoint that evidence should matter to what we accept as the truth, and the truth should actually matter to what we believe. What we believe about Afghanistan determines the way we talk about Afghanistan, and whether we like it or not, the way we talk about Afghanistan determines to a great extent what happens in that country. It makes a difference.
In 2009, the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) carried out a massive survey of public opinion in twenty countries around the world. The survey showed that most people thought Afghans wanted foreign troops out of their country—which wasn’t true. But it made a world of difference: “Among those who believe that the Afghan people want NATO forces to leave, 76 percent say that NATO forces should leave,” PIPA found. “Among those who believe that the Afghan people want NATO forces to stay, 83 percent say NATO forces should stay.”
This book provides a glimpse of what Afghanistan has meant to Canadian soldiers engaged in the NATO effort in Afghanistan, but mainly I want to show something of what has been happening in the democratic spaces those soldiers have helped to open up. Some of the bravest people I’ve ever met live out there, and their courageous devotion to the values Westerners profess as their own would put most Westerners to shame. If I do my job well, you will see that Afghanistan is a country whose people are more worthy of our sacrifices and solidarity than you might have imagined. When you finish reading this book, maybe you won’t think about Afghanistan in quite the same way you did when you started. Maybe you will think about some other things quite differently, too. But whatever we think or believe, to remain indifferent to objective truth is to submit to the “sealing-off of one part of the world from another” that George Orwell noticed all those years ago. It will only make it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs, and harder to know what is really happening, as the years pass.
So, to begin, I want to dispense with the Absurdistan that is set out in those two earlier paragraphs. There’s some history that’s important to get right, straight away, because if it’s left upside down or sideways, nothing about Afghanistan will make any sense. What follows is how Absurdistan comes apart.
THERE IS NOTHING uniquely or hopelessly misogynistic about Afghan society. Afghan women have been no less enslaved than women elsewhere in the so-called Muslim world and, in the purdah tradition of the full-veil burqa, perhaps more noticeably. But by the late 1800s, Afghanistan was among the leading Muslim-majority countries in the cause of women’s emancipation. By the 1920s, unveiled Afghan women were taking up posts as university professors and government ministers. By the 1970s, Afghan women were attending the theatre in Kabul and Kunduz, taking in the plays of Chekhov and Molière and Brecht, and they could look back on two generations of women who were university graduates, skilled-trades workers, judges, doctors, lawyers, teachers and senior government officials. When the Taliban swept into Kabul in 1996, 40 percent of the women there were holding down jobs; a third of the city’s doctors, half of the university students and civil servants and most of the teachers were women. Afghan women have waged a valiant struggle, and their struggle continues. Their fight for equality has nothing to do with anything the West is trying to impose on them or on Afghan men.
The Taliban do not represent religious values that are deeply rooted in Afghan culture. You can inquire into their mumbo jumbo as closely as you want, and you will not find an Islamic antecedent for it in Afghanistan. “Before the Taliban, Islamic extremism had never flourished in Afghanistan,” notes Ahmed Rashid, the Pakistani journalist and author who is one of the few authorities on Taliban history. “The Taliban represented nobody but themselves and recognized no Islam except their own.” In the nineteenth century, when the tyrannical amir Abdur Rahman was attempting to stoke jihadist xenophobia among Afghans, he appealed to the country’s Muslim clerical council to condemn a mullah who had been preaching peaceful coexistence with Islam’s Christian “brothers.” The council defied the amir and refused to condemn the mullah. Twice.
It is untrue that Afghanistan is chronically plagued by insurgencies. “Afghanis do not want us in their country. They have been fighting this war or that since the beginning of time,” declared a leaflet titled “Get Out of Afghanistan Now,” distributed at the World Peace Forum at the University of British Columbia in 2006. The sentiment in this “left-wing” leaflet was echoed by Canada’s Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper in 2009: “We are not going to ever defeat the insurgency. Afghanistan has probably had—my reading of Afghanistan history—it’s probably had an insurgency forever, of some kind.” But as Boston University anthropologist Thomas Barfield, author of Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History, observes, if a bit too generally: “From 1929 to 1978, the country was completely at peace.”
As for the origins of Afghanistan’s most recent agonies, it is important to know that the United States was already funding Islamist forces in Afghanistan before the Soviet period, during the time of the mildly Moscow-friendly Daoud government. Further, in his 1996 memoir, former Central Intelligence Agency director Robert M. Gates disclosed that the American president who first armed Afghan Islamist groups against the communist regime that overthrew Daoud in 1978 was not Ronald Reagan, but Jimmy Carter, the peace-loving southerner. Carter’s interventions began a full six months before Soviets soldiers poured across the border and a year and a half before Reagan’s election.
The United States was by no means alone in funding anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan. Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and uncounted numbers of oil-rich Arab privateers spent billions of dollars funding Afghan mujahideen armies through the 1980s. Still, for all the money they cost and the trouble they caused, the mujahideen never did manage to chase out the Russians. The Soviets’ 1989 pullout was the culmination of a carefully planned, three-year phased withdrawal based on diplomatic, economic and military terms guaranteed by the White House. The withdrawal had little to do with Ronald Reagan’s geostrategic genius, and nothing to do with the Afghans’ legendary ferocity and cunning in warfare.
The U.S.-funded anti-Soviet mujahideen couldn’t even manage to bring down the government the Soviets left behind in Kabul. By the time Soviet soldiers left Afghanistan, more than a million Afghans were dead and a third of the country’s people lived in exile as refugees. The Afghan countryside was a moonscape of bomb craters. The country was littered with several million landmines. Human Rights Watch reckons that by the time of the Russian departure there were more small arms in Afghanistan than in Pakistan and India combined. Still, Mohammad Najibullah’s reformist republic carried on quite competently for another three years after the Russian troops left, fending off assaults and mutinies from unreconstructed Stalinists and from mujahideen militias. Najibullah’s government ended up outlasting the Soviet Union. When his regime collapsed in 1992, it was mainly because it ran out of gas. With Washington’s quiet blessing, Moscow’s proto-capitalist Russian Federation cut off all fuel shipments to Afghanistan and scuppered a UN-brokered transition plan Najibullah was in the middle of implementing, which was to have opened the way for a new multi-party Afghan state.
The long Afghan civil war that followed was mostly a bloody campaign of bombardment and massacre that Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia waged by proxy armies almost wholly upon Kabul and its civilian population. Enflamed by the prospect of a sovereign Muslim democracy emerging in Afghanistan, each Islamist bloc competed with the other to be the first to capture the Afghan capital and sabotage the Peshawar Accord, the successor to Najibullah’s aborted UN-brokered transition plan. The accord contained a two-year roadmap to the new Islamic State of Afghanistan and national elections, which were to be held in 1994. While incoming U.S. president Bill Clinton was famously playing his saxophone on the Arsenio Hall Show, Kabul was being turned into a human abattoir. The massacres that began in 1992 left three-quarters of Kabul’s two million people dead, missing or wandering the roads as half-mad refugees.
The sociopathology of Talibanism is not attributable to a too-strict interpretation of the Quran. The Taliban arose in the 1990s from lowbrow madrassas in Pakistan where poor hill-country Pashtun boys were indoctrinated into a cargo-cult perversion of a debased form of Deobandism, which originated in India in the nineteenth century. (These same Pakistani madrassas were still churning out roughly 250,000 fanatics every year, ten years after September 11). The Deobandi-inspired doctrine the Taliban adopted was itself a corruption of an eighteenth-century Arab-supremacist Salafism, which asserts that Islam’s glory days were in the ninth-century Arabian deserts, and it has all been downhill ever since.
Apart from the fighters in the Taliban ranks whose illiteracy rendered them incapable of reading the Quran in the first place, literate Taliban commanders would indeed resort to a Quranic lexicon when they issued death-by-stoning verdicts. The Quran was likely the only book they’d ever read. But nowhere does the Quran stipulate death by stoning as the punishment for any crime, and all that mattered in Taliban discipline was what the supreme leader Mullah Omar said. Omar was the Taliban führer-figure, the Amir al-Mu’minin, Commander of the Faithful. Omar’s word was religious law, and for his followers, a proper Muslim was burdened by a religious duty to murder anyone who disobeyed Omar. The only consistency in the purportedly Islamic order Omar imposed on Afghanistan during the Taliban years was the cruelty of his rules and the sadism of the prescribed punishments for breaking them.
Despite their own boasts, the Taliban are not owed any credit for having been anti-Soviet holy warriors. Mullah Omar was once employed by a third-tier anti-Soviet mujahideen groupuscule, and any number of ageing Taliban soldiers-for-hire may once have been retained by the Pakistani ISI and paid with American money to fight the Soviets. But among the mercenary Taliban generals in bin Laden’s circle were cold-eyed men who had been senior Afghan army officers in the Stalinist coup that took over Afghanistan in 1978. Some had served the Soviet-backed Afghan police state at the highest levels of command.
To trust the Taliban claim that they have no global ambitions, you’d have to forget that they were claiming the same back in the late 1990s. It’s true that the Taliban have had a lot of the stuffing knocked out of them since September 11, 2001. But it was only about six years before September 11 that the Taliban began as a Pakistan-financed project to hijack Afghan sovereignty, and it quickly leveraged itself into a multinational joint venture and crime syndicate involving several foreign jihadist organizations, only one of which was al-Qaida. By the early months of 2001, China, Russia and all the Central Asian states were girding themselves for a renewed wave of terrorist attacks launched from Taliban-held Afghanistan. In the days leading up to September 11, Pakistan was still sending convoys of free supplies and armaments to camps in Taliban-controlled districts where thousands of Algerians, Yemenis, Turks, Palestinians, Lebanese, Filipinos, Jordanians, Uzbeks, Chechens and others were studying, training and preparing for their assignments in the Maghreb, the Levant, the Philippines, the Caucasus, Kashmir and beyond.
Afghanistan’s so-called civil war did not come to an end because war-weary Afghans welcomed the Taliban. Most of the country was stable and at peace by the time the Taliban began their reign of terror in 1994. By then, the Saudi, Pakistani and Iranian proxy armies had fought each other to a standstill and had been collectively fought to a draw by the Northern Alliance forces of Ahmad Shah Massoud, who had remained loyal to the embryonic Islamic State of Afghanistan. Kandahar was a free-for-all of Pashtun gangsterism and internecine warlord feuding, but life in most of the tentatively constituted Islamic State of Afghanistan—Herat, Mazar-e Sharif, Hazarajat, Kunduz, the Shomali Plains, the Panjshir Valley and so on—was trundling along in a fairly orderly fashion before the Taliban showed up. The Taliban had to bomb, bribe and bully their way across Afghanistan. Christian Bleuer, a leading Afghanistan analyst with the Australian National University’s Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, has looked long and hard for evidence to support the fable of war-weary Afghans welcoming the Taliban. He hasn’t found any, outside parts of the Pashtun belt, and neither has anyone else. “I call it a ridiculous lie,” says Bleuer, “because the ‘pre-Taliban chaos’ myth is basically Pakistani ISI and Taliban propaganda.”
The fiction that the Taliban eliminated opium production also originates in propaganda. The Taliban first claimed to have banned opium farming in 1997, but the UN Office on Drugs and Crime database shows an upward trend in Afghan opium production straight through the Taliban years. The Taliban ran profitable protection rackets in the transport and export of opium and heroin, and brought in more cash through their 10 percent zakat tax on farmers. The Taliban’s July 2000 fatwa against opium farming accrued a measurable propaganda value; U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration data show an immediate surge in the price of stockpiled Afghan opium that year, from $44 a kilo to $350, and on a good day, $700. Whether that benefit was intentionally gained or not, the fatwa was especially cunning in the way it opened up a speculative stream of revenue from U.S. drug war coffers and lucrative UN Drug Control Program disbursements. The only year Afghan opium production actually fell was 2001, which was a rather busy year for the Taliban, as things turned out. But they were soon back in the drug trade. The Taliban subsidized their post-2001 mayhem not just with racketeering and strong-arm taxation but through the direct ownership and operation of heroin refineries.
Nor did the Taliban tackle corruption. They just monopolized it in the areas they controlled. Pashtun Taliban commanders stole thousands of non-Pashtun farms for themselves and their cronies. For the crime of not being Pashtun, tens of thousands of Afghans were robbed, dispossessed of their homes or simply put to death. The Taliban murdered aid workers, extorted enormous sums of money from international aid agencies and murdered and robbed each other. A bag of cash and the wink of an eye could often get you anything you wanted. You could buy a woman from the Taliban for as little as $100, but the price might depend on who you were. A wealthy Arab jihadist in Khost was reported to have paid $10,000 for a slave girl. In Parwan province alone, the Taliban captured hundreds of women to sell into the slave markets that supply Pakistani brothels.
As for the code of Pashtunwali that is so strict it binds Afghans to protect even guests like bin Laden (as its name suggests, this code applies to Afghanistan’s minority Pashtuns, when it applies at all), it is a fiction that the Taliban were prepared to hand him over after September 11 if only evidence against him had been produced. Osama bin Laden had been Mullah Omar’s most-valued partner in crime since 1996. By September 11, the Taliban had already laughed off numerous and elaborately detailed international warrants for bin Laden’s arrest, not least an October 1999 demand from the UN Security Council. In the three years leading up to September 11, U.S. officials met with Omar’s envoys and intermediaries more than twenty times in Bonn, Islamabad, Kandahar, New York, Tashkent and Washington.
The Taliban persisted in their refusal to give up bin Laden, but less than two weeks after al-Qaida had so dangerously enraged the Americans on September 11, the pantomime of Pashtunwali was dropped. The Pashtun-dominated religious council ruled: If the Americans want Osama, they can have Osama. The High Council of the Honourable Ulema met in Kabul, uttered the usual high-pitched threats of jihad against any crusaders or infidels who were thinking about attacking Afghanistan and rendered their decision: Osama, please go; Mullah Omar, please make him go away. Mullah Omar said no.
It isn’t true, in any conventional meaning of the term, that the United States or its NATO partners “invaded” Afghanistan. By September 11, there was no sovereign country left to invade. At the time, while the multinational jihadist joint venture known as the Taliban did control most of Afghanistan, Pakistan was the only country that formally recognized the regime. The only other countries that had ever recognized the Taliban as Afghanistan’s government were the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, but they’d bailed long before September 11. Afghanistan’s seat at the UN in New York was occupied by the Islamic State of Afghanistan, led by the Northern Alliance chief Berhanuddin Rabbani and the charismatic Ahmad Shah Massoud. They’d been pleading for military help for years. Immediately after September 11, even Pakistan was scrambling to give the appearance of disowning its Taliban progeny, and Rabbani’s government was loudly reiterating its long-standing invitation to the Americans to help chase the Taliban out.
Strictly speaking, it isn’t even true that the Taliban were overthrown by the United States, or by the United States and its NATO allies. The Northern Alliance would have remained dug in up in the mountains had it not been for a U.S. bombing campaign, American arms and supplies drops and all the Special Forces soldiers skulking around. But the Taliban, al-Qaida and their sundry jihadist brothers-in-arms had been driven out of Kabul by a ragtag assemblage of Afghans before any regular American troops arrived. The Taliban were even chased out of their legendary heartland of Kandahar by the locals before any U.S. combat troops showed up.
Neither is it true that the White House rallied NATO to America’s side in Afghanistan. Immediately after September 11, the NATO countries invoked the all-for-one clause in the NATO charter. Washington only begrudgingly acknowledged the move and made it plain that NATO’s help wasn’t particularly wanted. As late as 2005, the United States was still only lukewarm to the idea of an expansion of the international military and reconstruction effort in the country.
The NATO coalition did not quickly sink into a quagmire of Afghan hostility. That happened neither quickly nor slowly, because it didn’t happen at all. At least fourteen major national opinion polls and focus group surveys were undertaken by various independent agencies across Afghanistan in the decade following 2001. All the available data show unambiguous Afghan support for the so-called U.S. occupation of their country and for the military intervention overseen by the UN’s poorly resourced, forty-three-nation NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). The polls do show Afghans to be impatient about the paucity and ineffectiveness of American and NATO troops, however. The United States deployed a mere 7,000 troops to Afghanistan during the first two years after September 11—this was before the White House could use Iraq as an excuse—and almost all the U.S. troops in Afghanistan were dispatched in a “war on terror” exercise known as Operation Enduring Freedom, mostly in the country’s remote southeastern borderlands. As late as the autumn of 2005, ISAF had extended its reach to only half of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, and there were only about 40,000 ISAF troops in the whole country. It took until 2009 for the combined ISAF troop strength to reach roughly 150,000.
Paul D. Miller, who served as Afghanistan director for the U.S. National Security Council from 2007 to 2009, put it this way: “The insurgency did not pick up steam until late 2005, and ISAF, which started changing its posture and strategy in late 2006, arguably did not implement a coherent counter-insurgency campaign until 2009. It would be myopic and irresponsible to conclude that the international community should walk away from the mission due to a lack of adequate progress. The greatest threat to long-term success in Afghanistan is not the Taliban, who are fairly weak compared to other insurgent movements around the world. It is the Afghan government’s endemic weakness and the international community’s failure to address it.”
For all the persistent stories about rising Taliban popularity, by 2009 opinion surveys were finding no more than 4 percent of the Afghan people expressing support for the Taliban. Despite his weakness, his cronyism, the ballot stuffing that tainted his 2009 re-election and the corruption that undermined his government, President Hamid Karzai consistently enjoyed approval ratings that would cause any Western politician to writhe with envy. As late as 2009, 90 percent of Afghans reckoned Karzai’s performance was excellent, good or fair. Afghan polling also showed consistent country-wide support for democracy, the right of girls to go to school and the rights of women to get an education, to work outside the home and to run for political office. Eighty-six percent of Afghans opposed polygamy. Eight years after September 11, 2001, in a poll conducted for the BBC and ABC News, the Afghan Center for Socio-Economic Research found that in spite of the great failures of the UN mission and the ISAFled foreign forces in their country, only 2 percent of Afghans listed “foreign influence” as Afghanistan’s biggest problem. Seventy percent of respondents reckoned their country was still headed in the right direction.
It wasn’t the West that was trying to impose anything on Afghanistan after September 11. The Americans took years to rethink the ruinous “we don’t do nation-building” approach counselled by Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld. Although American and NATO troops figured disproportionately in it, the UN’s ISAF alliance included soldiers from Singapore, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia and Azerbaijan. By 2006, ISAF’s marching orders were set out in the UN-backed Afghanistan Compact, authored by more than sixty countries, among them Bahrain, Brunei, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Iran and quite a few others that don’t show up in the usual rogues’ gallery of Western imperialist puppet states.
There.
Subject Absurdistan’s claims to scrutiny, and what you find is the opposite of evidence for a quagmire of hostile, irredeemably xenophobic and crazy misogynists chafing against attempts by the West to impose democracy on them at the point of a gun. You might also notice that Absurdistan invites a racist view of the Afghan people and absolves the rest of us from the responsibility of seeing in Afghans the fundamental human rights we ordinarily claim to recognize in one another. Absurdistan flatters the postures of the Western liberal nomenklatura and generally affirms the prejudices of conservatives. It says a lot more about “us” than it does about “them.” The story Absurdistan presents might be powerful and seductive. But that still won’t make it true.
ABDULRAHIM PARWANI, WHO visited Marefat High School with me in the spring of 2010, is someone from whom I’ve learned a lot. When we met back in 2006, he was a wiry, goateed and cerebral forty-two-year-old journalist working for free with a seat-of-the-pants outfit called Ariana TV, a program with Vancouver’s M Channel that served the city’s Afghan community. He was also a frequent contributor to a variety of Afghan- and Farsi-language journals, and was well known in Afghan, Iranian and Pakistani émigré circles. His wage work was a job with the federal government at Vancouver International Airport, helping newly arrived immigrants and refugees get themselves sorted out. On weekends, he was a pizza delivery driver. He’d settled in Canada only six years before we met, and he lived with his wife, Sima, and their daughters, Soraya, Maryam and Asma, on the outskirts of Vancouver in the neighbourhood where I’d grown up in my own immigrant family.
We’d both cut our teeth as journalists, Abdulrahim in Afghanistan and me in Canada, and by 2006 we’d both begun to question why the loudest Canadian debates about Afghanistan involved fairytales about Third World resistance to hegemonic American imperialism and the crimes of the Zionists. If we held anything in common to guide us in our inquiries, it was only a kind of a compass bearing, a way of knowing magnetic north. We were both “embedded” in the old-fashioned conviction that objective truth should matter to the way we make sense of the world around us. You could say we hit it off straight away. Abdulrahim had a knack of finding things to laugh about in the most melancholy circumstances, which also helped.
In some of the circles I moved in, it had become perfectly acceptable to refer to Canada’s UN-mandated engagement in Afghanistan as complicity in an illegal war in aid of covertly helping American neoconservatives do the devil’s work in Fallujah. But the Afghan immigrants I knew were fully supportive of Canada’s military engagement in Afghanistan. They had no time for the Islamists—the “political Islam” zealots who were always barking about Israel. They were all “progressive” Muslims, and they were proud Canadians, like Abdulrahim. To varying degrees, they were all perplexed by the masses of white people staging demonstrations to demand that Canada pull its soldiers from Afghanistan. Abdulrahim and I ended up with a cross-section of Canadians in forming the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee. The group came together around the starting position that the UN wanted Canadians in Afghanistan, the Afghan people wanted us there and Canadian soldiers were necessary to the work required of us. It was going to be an uphill slog. In 2007, Canada came close to becoming the only NATO country to defy a UN-brokered Afghanistan consensus of more than sixty nations and bolt from what was then a thirty-nine-nation ISAF alliance. While Canadians boasted that unlike the Yanks, we were for “multilateralism,” the House of Commons came a mere handful of votes from snubbing its nose at the UN Security Council and pulling Canadian troops from Afghanistan entirely.
That’s how close Canada was to plunging headlong into what the otherwise scrupulously taciturn UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon called “a misjudgement of historic proportions.” It was dismaying enough that the rich world’s disorientation had allowed the Taliban to regroup and relaunch a crusade of drug running, suicide bombing, aid-convoy hijacking, kidnapping and murder. “Almost more dismaying is the response of some outside Afghanistan,” the UN secretary-general wrote, “who react by calling for a disengagement or the full withdrawal of international forces.” It was especially dismaying to Afghanistan’s democrats, reformers and women’s rights leaders. They had been counting on Canada, a wealthy liberal democracy with no history of overseas imperialist adventures and no hand in any of the invasions, betrayals and sabotage to which Afghanistan had been so cruelly subjected during the final decades of the twentieth century. And Canada was letting them down. It was in the effort to make sense of all this that Abdulrahim and I ended up in Afghanistan together.
One thing that took me a while to figure out—Abdulrahim isn’t exactly the boastful type—was that he’d been something of a big deal in Afghanistan, back before the Taliban came. Having trained as an engineer in Moscow and graduated with a degree in ideological issues from the University of Marxism-Leninism at Volgograd, Abdulrahim was a devoted liberal democrat. He’d stuck it out in Afghanistan right up until the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996. Over the years, through all the sorrow he’d endured, Abdulrahim remained a loyal partisan of the great Ahmad Shah Massoud, scourge of the Red Army, the Taliban’s worst nightmare, the “Lion of Panjshir,” who was assassinated by an al-Qaida suicide bomb squad only two days before something came out of the sky above Manhattan on September 11, 2001. That’s what you could call Abdulrahim’s bias. I’ve written this book as a partisan in the cause of Afghanistan’s democrats. That’s my bias.
There may be readers of this book who will remain unshaken in a conviction that Western countries should not “interfere” in Afghanistan, and it’s all too expensive anyway. Some readers may cleave to the wishful hope that the jihadists will confine their depravities and torments to the people of Afghanistan and leave the rest of us out of it. Some who do this may even be morally untroubled to find solace in such a wish. There may also be readers who will make it to the very last page and still prefer readings from Absurdistan, as though it were all just a matter of choosing one’s favourite version from the competing hermeneutics and narratives within the discourse.
Everyone’s entitled to their opinions, but if Abdulrahim and I ended up taking the delirium about Afghanistan a bit personally, we did so because the implications involved not just some unreal place that was a mere function of various and conflicting narratives. There is also a real country called Afghanistan, with real, living, breathing human beings, for whom the debates in Western countries could mean the difference between freedom and slavery, life and death. For me, it was also because the “misjudgment of historic proportions” involved the clamour for troop withdrawal.
What Irish historian Fred Halliday had to say about that aspect of things is especially unsettling to people who think of themselves as of “the Left,” which is how I’ve always situated myself. Halliday’s insight happens to have an overwhelming body of evidence in its favour, which is why it’s all the more disturbing.
A keen observer of Afghan history, Halliday, who died on April 26, 2010, was a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. He was competent in a dozen languages and the author of more than twenty books, most of them concerning political history in Muslim countries. Halliday paid close attention to the broad arcs of history, and he insisted that the so-called war in Afghanistan is properly situated in a direct line that originates in the anti-fascist struggles of the 1930s: “To my mind, Afghanistan is central to the history of the Left and to the history of the world since the 1980s. It is to the early 21st century, to the years we’re now living through, what the Spanish Civil War was to Europe in the mid and late 20th century.” One thing I hope to show in this book is that Halliday was, if anything, more right than he knew. If I’ve done my job properly, the evidence will speak for itself.
Another thing I hope to show is that the way we in the West talk about Afghanistan has meant more to the course of events in that country than all the soldiers and guns and money we’ve sent there since September 11. What we say matters. It will continue to matter for some long while. It determines what Afghans hear from us, how much they allow themselves to hope for a peaceful and democratic future and how far they’re prepared to come from the shadows, out into the light.
