Kabul, July 2010
If you spend seventy-two hours in a place you’ve never been, talking to people whose language you don’t speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don’t understand, and you come back as the world’s biggest know-it-all, you’re a reporter. What do you want to know about Afghanistan, past, present, or future? Ask me anything.
As all good reporters do, I prepared for my assignment with extensive research. I went to an Afghan restaurant in Prague. Getting a foretaste—as it were—of my subject, I asked the restaurant’s owner (an actual Afghan), “So what’s up with Afghanistan?”
He said, “Americans must understand that Afghanistan is a country of honor. The honor of an Afghan is in his gun, his land, and his women. You take a man’s honor if you take his gun, his land, or his women.”
And the same goes for where I live in New Hampshire. I inquired whether exceptions could be made, on the third point of honor, for ex-wives.
“Oh yes,” he said.
Afghanistan—so foreign and yet so familiar and, like home, with such wonderful lamb chops. I asked the restaurateur about other similarities between New Hampshire and Afghanistan.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Most of my family lives in LA.”
In Kabul I was met at the airport by M. Amin Mudaqiq, bureau chief for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Afghan branch, Radio Azadi. “Our office is just down the main road,” he said, “but since it’s early in the morning we’ll take the back way, because of the Suicides.” That last word, I noticed, was pronounced as a proper noun, the way we would say “Beatles” slightly differently than “beetles.” And, in a sense, suicide bombers do aspire to be the rock stars of the Afghan insurgency (average career span being about the same in both professions).
“The Suicides usually attack early in the morning,” Amin said. “It’s a hot country and the explosive vests are thick and heavy.”
I’d never thought about suicide bombing in terms of comfort. Here’s some guy who’s decided to blow himself gloriously to bits and he’s pounding the pavement all dressed up in the blazing sun, sweat running down his face, thinking, “Gosh, this thing itches, I’m pooped, let’s call it off.”
“It’s the same with car bombs,” Amin said. “You don’t want to be driving around the whole day with police everywhere and maybe get a ticket.”
Imagine the indignity of winding up in traffic court instead of the terrorist equivalent of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Kabul is a walled city, which sounds romantic except the walls are precast reinforced concrete blast barriers, ten feet tall and fifteen feet long and moved into place with cranes. The walls are topped with sandbags and the sandbags are topped with guard posts from which gun barrels protrude.
Amin pointed out the sights. “There’s UN headquarters.” All I could see was blast barriers, sandbags, and gun barrels. “There’s the German embassy”—barriers, bags, and barrels. “There’s the embassy of China”—barriers, bags, and barrels. I spotted a rough-hewn stone fort on a hilltop, looking more the ancient way Kabul should look. “Oh, nineteenth-century British,” Amin said.
Security, in various senses of the term, was all over the place. I have never seen so many types and kinds of soldiers, policemen, and private security guards or such a welter of uniforms, each in a different pattern of camouflage every one of which stuck out like a toreador’s suit of lights against the white blast walls. Some of this security was on alert, some was asleep, some was spit-and-polish, some had its shoes untied, and some, rather unaccountably, was walking around without weapons.
None of the security was American. Americans don’t patrol Kabul. The American military is suffering its usual fate, the same as it does at an army base in Georgia—shunted off to places the locals don’t care to go.
The Kabul cityscape looks like a cornfield maze version of the old Berlin Wall without the graffiti, or like an unshelled Verdun gone condo with high-rise trenches. Afghanistan’s capital is located in a grand hollow, as if someone had closed the Rockies in tight around Denver. On the slopes of Kabul’s mountains there is another cityscape of small stone houses. They could be from the time of the Prophet, although they all seem to have aluminum window frames. This is where the poor live, with panes of glass to keep out the winter winds but not much else. At night you can see how far the electric wires run uphill—not very far. The water pipes don’t go up at all, and residents—women and children residents, I’m sure—must climb from the bottom with their water.
Then, around the corner from the blast walls, there’s a third Kabul, an ordinary city with stores and restaurants open to the street and parking impossible to find. The architecture is overseas modern in cement and chrome with some leftover Soviet modern in just cement. It looks a bit worn and torn but less so than Detroit or trans-Anacostia Washington, D.C. People are going about their business in Kabul with no apparent air of knowing that “people are going about their business in Kabul” is considered a very special thing at the U.S. State Department.
Security here is merely ubiquitous as opposed to omnipresent. Men, women, and children mingle. Women cover themselves in public but not more than my Irish great-aunts did at Mass. An occasional down-to-the-ground burka is seen but not as often as in London. In the malls, clothing shops predominate. Men’s and women’s clothes are shinier and more vividly colored than those seen in a traditional society such as New Hampshire.
Traditionalism being one of the things that makes Afghanistan so hard for Americans to understand. We Americans have so many traditions. For instance, our political traditions date back to the twelfth-century English Parliament if not to the Roman Senate. Afghans, on the other hand, have had the representative-democracy kind of politics for only six years. Afghanistan’s political traditions are just beginning to develop. A Pashtun tribal leader told me that a “problem among Afghan politicians is that they do not tell the truth.” It’s a political system so new that this needed to be said out loud.
In the matter of opinion polling, however, Afghanistan is fully up-to-date. Concerning the popularity of President Hamid Karzai, the tribal leader said, “He is welcomed by bullets in many provinces.” Of course, in America, this would be a metaphorical statement—except in 1865, 1881, 1901, 1963, 1981, etc.
The Pashtun tribal leader was one of a number of people whom Amin Mudaqiq arranged for me to interview. Tribalism is another thing that makes Afghanistan hard to understand. We Americans are probably too tribal to grasp the subtlety of Afghan tribal concepts. The Pashtun tribal leader was joined by a Turkmen tribal leader who has a PhD in sociology. I asked the Turkmen tribal leader about the socioeconomic, class, and status aspects of Afghan tribalism.
“No tribe is resented for wealth,” he said. So, right off the bat, Afghans show greater tribal sophistication than Americans. There is no Wall Street Tribe upon which the Afghan government can blame everything.
I asked the Turkmen, “Did either the Communists or the Taliban try to use one tribe against another?”
“No,” he said, “I didn’t notice such a policy with the Soviets. And the Taliban does not publicly use tribalism.”
Even the worst of Afghan governments never acquired the special knack of pitting tribe against tribe that is vital to American politics—the Squishy Liberal Tribe versus the Kick-Butt Tribe; the Indignantly Entitled Tribe versus the Fed-Up Taxpayer Tribe; the Smug Tribe versus the Wipe-That-Smirk-Off-Your-Face Tribe.
“We are all one nation,” said the Pashtun tribal leader. “In the name of Afghan is included all the tribes of Afghanistan. Outsiders create divisions to serve their own interests.” Better than having insiders create divisions to serve their own interests. President Obama, take note.
“Are there land issues between the tribes?” I asked the Turkmen. He told me there are land issues between everybody. Land titles are a mess in Afghanistan, or, as the Turkmen put it with a nice PhD turn of phrase, “Definition of ownership is originally ambiguous.” The situation is so confused that the Soviets, of all people, attempted to impose private property in Afghanistan. “They tried to change the law, but the period was too short. Afghanistan,” the Turkmen said, and laughed, “did not use the benefits of colonialism.”
The problem in Afghanistan is really not so much land as water. It’s a dry country with ample amounts of water running through it but not to good enough effect. “We have a law to distribute water but not to manage water,” the Turkmen said. This lack of management combines with the age-old managerial conflicts between nomads who need watered pastures and farmers who need irrigation. Partly this is a nontribal matter, since there are both nomads and farmers in various tribes. But partly it is a tribal matter because of the different ways that tribes decide to cease to be nomads and become farmers.
“The Turkmen,” said the Turkmen, “settle close to the desert. The Pashtuns settle close to the source of the water.” Downstream and upstream. It’s the plot of Chinatown. If you don’t understand Afghanistan, blame Robert Towne.
Both the Pashtun tribal leader and the Turkmen tribal leader were unenthusiastic about the use of the word “tribal” and felt that “ethnic groups” is a better way to describe the differences among Afghans.
I held forth on American patriotism, how it had to do with our own ethnic groups, and the attempt to give American immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a sense of nationhood. The tribal leaders understood exactly what I meant, which is more than I can say for our NATO allies on the subject of American patriotism.
“Fifty years ago,” the Turkmen said, “things in Afghanistan were going in the same direction as the U.S. growth of patriotism. These systems were disturbed by the events of the last thirty years. Also, the geographical location of Afghanistan is not helpful to building national ideals. The focal points of the tribes are outside the country.”
But not far enough outside. The Turkmen have their heartland in Turkmenistan, the Uzbeks in Uzbekistan, the Tajiks in Tajikistan and Iran. Even the Pashtuns, who are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, making up about 40 percent of the population, count Peshawar in the Northwest Territories of Pakistan as their cultural capital. And the language spoken by most educated Afghans, Dari, is a dialect of Persian. It is as if, around the time Emma Lazarus was penning “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” Dublin and Naples and Warsaw and Minsk had been moved—complete with every palace, slum, monument, gutter, princeling, priest, bum, thug, and man-at-arms—to Ellis Island, and all of America’s schools had started teaching their lessons in French.
Nonetheless Afghan patriotism obtains. Maybe because, as the Turkmen tribal leader pointed out, every “old country” to which an Afghan ethnic might turn manages—somewhat extraordinarily—to be a worse place than Afghanistan.
There’s that and what the Pashtun tribal leader had to say: “If Afghanistan is divided, why do we keep defeating outsiders?” He went on in that vein, like Lincoln but with 1,000 more years of history to go on, dating back to the twelfth-century outsider-defeating Afghan empire of Alauddin Husain, known as the “World-Burner.” In the Pashtun’s words, “A divided country cannot win.”
Earlier in the day I’d heard a mullah become heated on the subject of ethnocentric politics. He accused a politician in the Karzai government of being a “national traitor” for doing what in the United States would be called playing the Charlie Rangel card. The politician is a member of the Hazara tribe (the Afghan politician, that is, though I’m sure Charlie Rangel would be glad to claim Hazara blood if it got him a tribal casino in New York’s Fifteenth Congressional District). “Why I called him a national traitor,” said the mullah, “is because he said he would shed his blood in favor of Hazaras. Instead of saying this was a judicial matter, he said it was a fighting matter. He broke his constitutional obligation.”
The mullah represents another thing that makes Afghanistan hard to understand for Americans, although only for elite Americans who’ve had prestigious schooling and hold advanced opinions about everything. We ordinary Americans, far from such centers of heathen unbelief as the Brookings Institution, get the drift of a deeply religious polity.
I interviewed two mullahs at once. This might have been awkward, as they were opposite types, but they seemed fond of each other and the quieter mullah even took a few notes while the more voluble mullah was talking.
The quiet mullah was quietly dressed and modestly bearded, his close-cut hair topped with a simple turban. He was immediately recognizable as “mainstream.” I don’t mean he was hopelessly mainstream to the post-religious point, like some American clergy. I’d compare him to a solid Methodist or Presbyterian or picket-fence Baptist, not unwilling to make his sermons socially relevant but no electric guitars in the choir loft. “Preaching isn’t limited to the mosque,” he said, and told me how he spends time sitting with shopkeepers, listening to complaints about price gouging, and talking about the Islamic view of these matters. It is, by the way, things like price gouging that the Taliban casts itself as a defender against—the free market being one more of modernity’s villains.
“I make the subjects of my sermons both Islamic and scientific,” said the quiet mullah. “People are the enemy of those things they do not know.” He talked about peace, not harping on its somewhat obvious convenience for individuals, but speaking of “the importance of peace to Islam.” There’s something more than mortal men at stake in peace—God demands it.
Along with peace, the mullah said, one of the most frequent topics of his sermons is leadership. He tries to explain, as a prayer leader, how to select a political leader. This is an easy enough colloquy to have with fellow Muslims. There is no generally accepted earthly hierarchy in Islam, especially in Sunni Islam, and there’s certainly no pope. A Muslim may pray on any piece of ground. A mosque is an institution that adheres to the definition of a church given by Jesus: “Where two or three are gathered together.” Muslims choose their own mosque, and, ideally at least, those who pray at that mosque choose their own mullah. People who say the Muslim world isn’t ready for democracy ignore, among other things, the fact that Muslims already have it.
Two of the criteria that the quiet mullah gave for political leadership would eliminate most U.S. politicians: “Be educated. Know the society.” But the first criterion was to be Muslim.
The more voluble mullah explained, “Since the time of Adam until now there are four books from God.” (Muslims, like Jews, separate the Pentateuch from the rest of the Old Testament.) “This is our constitution.”
It’s a little long, I suppose—even longer than the proposed EU Constitution. But there are worse documents by which to live and govern—the proposed EU Constitution, for example.
Being a person who believes in God-given rights, I don’t find a God-given constitution very disturbing. But some Americans—Americans involved in Afghan policy—apparently do. The next night I had dinner with the governor of a province that has its share of Taliban troubles. Talking about the hindrances he faces in getting assistance from the United States, the governor protested against something that he must have been told by some American, that there is a “ban on religion” in the U.S. Constitution.
“Disarm the Taliban,” the governor said. “Take the Islamic weapon away from them.” He wasn’t talking about secularization.
“The best reason for belief,” said the voluble mullah, “is that every country has its own laws. The death of a person is the beginning of another, greater journey—more dangerous than the journey you’re taking now. Like police at the airport when you leave here, Allah will be asking the same way, ‘Have you obeyed the law?’”
This mullah was a splendid figure, a big man in a bright white shalwar kameez with a magnificence of beard in elaborate curls and a turban that looked as if it would take all night to unwind and all day to wind up again. He was an evangelical. I say that in the original complimentary Gospel way. (I’m Low Church Protestant on my mother’s side.) I was swept up with his eloquence before its translation arrived, when I didn’t even know what he was saying. What he was saying was, “There is God. There is no rival to God, or there would have been an election or a coup d’étate.”
He was concerned that I’d made it only three-quarters of the way through the four books from God since the time of Adam. I was concerned that if I spent another twenty minutes with him I’d be in trouble with my parish priest.
I asked both mullahs about the idea of a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West. The quiet mullah thought there might be some truth in the notion, arising from three things: inappropriate behavior of Muslims, materialism (in the metaphysical sense) of non-Muslims, and mutual ignorance.
“Maybe,” I volunteered, “the real clash of civilizations is between people who believe in God and people who don’t.”
The voluble mullah said, “There are those who don’t believe in God. Fortunately neither Muslims or Afghans or Americans are among them.” I hope he’s not being too optimistic about the last named. (Later I would get a more dismissive answer to the question abou the clash of civilizations, from a member of the Afghan parliament. He said, “Chinese, Muslims, Jews, Europeans—they work together in international finance markets every day.”)
As the mullahs were departing, an Afghan journalist gestured toward the more prepossessing of the two. “He’s a drone problem,” said the journalist. “They see the clothes and the turban from up in the air and they think, ‘Taliban!’ And he is like Taliban, but on the good side.”
Yet someone in Afghanistan must think the Taliban on the other side are good for something, too. Otherwise there wouldn’t be an “Afghan issue.”
The Taliban offer bad law—chopping off hands, stoning desperate housewives, the usual things. Perhaps you have to live in a place that has had no law for a long time—since the Soviets invaded in 1979—before you welcome bad law as an improvement. An Afghan civil society activist, whose work has put him under threat from the Taliban, admitted, “People picked Taliban as the lesser of evils.” He explained that lesser of evils with one word, “stability.”
A woman member of the Afghan parliament said that it was simply a fact that the Taliban insurgency was strongest “where the government is not providing services.” Rule of law being the first service a government must provide.
The member of parliament who laughed at the clash of civilizations laughed as well at what has passed for rule of law in Afghanistan. “Sure, Afghanistan is unruly,” he said. “Afghans don’t like rules. No one likes rules. And that is what we have been—ruled. We have been ruled, not governed.”
“The insurgency is also strongest,” the woman member of parliament said, “where private security is stirring up trouble.”
United States and NATO forces are also seen to have a hand in the churning. A Shia candidate for parliament said, “The Afghan people hate your troops when they support a corrupt governor or a warlord.”
A journalist for Radio Azadi said, “Afghans were happy in principle that Americans brought peace and democracy. But when rival tribes began to use the U.S. to crush each other, the attitude of the Afghan people changed.”
Afghans think Americans have sided with the wrong people. It’s not that Afghans think Americans have sided with the wrong people in a systematic, strategic, or calculated way. It’s just that we came to a place that we didn’t know much about, where there are a lot of sides to be on, and we started siding with this side and that side and the other side. We were bound to wind up on the wrong side sometimes. We’re outsiders in Afghanistan, and this is Occam’s razor for explaining the Taliban. Imagine if America were a country beset with all sorts of intractable difficulties. Or don’t imagine it—America is a country beset with all sorts of intractable difficulties. Our government is out of control, wantonly interfering in every aspect of our private lives and heedlessly squandering our national treasure at a time when Americans are suffering grave economic woes. Meanwhile vicious tribal conflicts are being fought for control of America’s culture and way of life. (I’ve been watching FoxNews.)
What if some friendly, well-meaning, but very foreign power, with incomprehensible lingo and outrageous clothes, were to arrive on our shores to set things right? What if it were Highland Scots? There they go marching around wearing skirts and purses and ugly plaids, playing their hideous bagpipe music, handing out haggis to our kiddies, and offending our sensibilities with a lack of BVDs under their kilts. Maybe they do cut taxes, lower the federal deficit, eliminate the Department of Health and Human Services and the EPA, give people jobs at their tartan factories, and launch a manhunt for Harry Reid and the UC-Berkeley faculty. We still wouldn’t like them. In New Hampshire there’d be more than one neighbor of mine up in his tree stand taking potshots at the Scotties with his deer rifle, especially if Jock left a nickel tip at the local diner for the neighbor’s waitress wife.
Maybe my neighbor doing the shooting at silly ribboned bonnets isn’t my favorite neighbor. Maybe he’s the neighborhood jerk. But you can suppose how I might feel about my fellow Granite State nutcases, and I can suppose how Afghans might feel about the Taliban. They’re assholes, but they’re our assholes.
The Pashtun tribal leader said, “I tell my own tribesmen to not support the Taliban, but they don’t listen. They see the Taliban as fighting invaders.”
It’s not just an invasion by soldiers that the Taliban could be seen as fighting. It’s an invasion by a whole outlandish other world, as alien to Afghans as a lot of cable TV is to me. Indeed, the provincial governor said that people in villages will ask him, “Why is a naked fellow on television?” I said I’d like to know myself.
The journalist with Radio Azadi said, “When people felt they were dishonored, they needed revenge. The Taliban gave them revenge.”
To fully sympathize with the dishonor an Afghan might feel, foreign government, UN, and NGO aid agencies must be considered. A myriad of them operate in Afghanistan, staffed by people from around the globe. So it’s not just that you’ve got Highland Scots marching in hairy-kneed formations up and down your subdevelopment’s cul-de-sac. Many of the most ordinary functions of your society have been taken over by weird strangers. When you need a flu shot or a dog license or a permit to burn leaves, you have to go see Bulgarians and Bolivians and Nigerians and Fiji Islanders. Some Mumbai babu is sitting on your zoning board saying, “Oh my gosh golly no, it is most inefficient use of land to forbid parking of the camper vans on war memorials.”
Afghanistan’s minister of education, Farooq Wardak, is no friend of the Taliban, but he did sound like a potential recruit for the Tea Party. ”I am absolutely unhappy with the U.S. role in Afghan education,” he said. “Zero percent of U.S. aid to Afghan education is spent through the Afghan government.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because the Ministry of Education is not certified by USAID because no one from USAID has evaluated me or my ministry in the two years that I’ve held the job.” Without the evaluation he can’t get the certification.
He said that the U.S. government wanted to spend money on a program called “Community-Based Education.” But that was a program the ministry had developed when the Taliban were attacking girls’ schools across Afghanistan. It was a way to provide, he said, “covert education for girls. Now we need overt schools.”
The U.S. also wants to spend money, he complained, on “accelerated teacher training” when what Afghanistan needs is just plain teacher training. “Either give the money to us or align with the program,” he said. “This accelerated training leaves no bricks and mortar behind. You are spending U.S. tax dollars building something taxpayers can’t see.” His pocket critique of U.S. aid: “Everything is air, nothing is on the ground.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him about No Child Left Behind back in America.
But the Taliban aren’t winning much love, either—otherwise we and our NATO allies would have already gone the way of the Soviets. The civil society activist had a very Afghan insult for the Taliban: “The Taliban has the power to kill, and people still don’t like them.”
Radio Liberty’s Pakistan bureau, which broadcasts in Pashto, had just run a story about the Taliban being as clumsy as the United States in dealing with tribalism—as clumsy but much more brutal. Unable to penetrate Pashtun tribal hierarchies, the Taliban had, according to the report, begun killing tribal elders, with more than 1,000 murdered so far.
“The older tribal leaders are everyone’s target,” the woman member of parliament said. She also described how the Taliban, in areas under their control, go to villagers and demand, “Son or money.” This insistence on either payoff or cannon fodder (drone fodder, I suppose) must undercut the Taliban’s reputation for incorruptibility. But corruption in the Afghan government remains a raw material of insurgency.
As I mentioned, there’s a lot of security in Kabul. The only place I saw that lacked any security—not a gun or a goon to be seen—was at the office of the Shia candidate for parliament, Ramazan Bashardost. He has a reputation for fanatical opposition to corruption. And, actually, he doesn’t have an office; he refuses to have an office. Instead he has a tent pitched across the street from the parliament building, a large, simple nomad’s tent staked in an empty lot and without so much as a carpet on the stony ground.
Bashardost has something of the look of a young Ralph Nader, with that Nader gleam of indignation in his eyes and that Nader tendency to pull out thick sheaves of documentation concerning each subject he’s indignant about. He had been in the parliament before. He quit over what might seem a fine point. “I left Parliament because Karzai said salaries should run through September when Parliament had ended in May.”
He had also been minister of planning. “I left the Ministry of Planning for my values,” he said. He pointed to the pavement between his tent and the fortified parliament building. The four-lane avenue was completely torn up, littered in construction machinery, and nearly impassable. “We are three years into a six-month road project.”
Asked to summarize corruption in Afghanistan, he said, “It is a Mafia economy disguised as a market economy.”
Not that Bashardost is at all like Ralph Nader is his attitude toward a market economy. He has a PhD in economics and believes Afghanistan should be using private investment for development rather than international aid. But, he said, “Afghans hate a ‘market economy’ because it equals corruption.” (Being fluent in English, he put “market economy” into phonetic quotation marks. He did the same with “democracy.”) “Afghans hate ‘democracy’ because democracy equals power of the warlords, equals power of corruption, equals no rule of law.”
If Americans claim not to understand Afghan corruption, we’re lying. Bribery has been a dominant part of our foreign policy in Afghanistan, the way it’s been a dominant part of everyone’s foreign policy in Afghanistan, including al Qaeda’s. What we Americans don’t understand about Afghan corruption is why it’s so transparent, just a matter of taking money. Don’t the Afghans know that you should take bribes indirectly—by collecting publicity, popularity, public recognition, prestige, influence, and, most of all, power? Then big corporations put you on their boards of directors and that’s when you get the money. Meanwhile you’ve been riding in government cars, flying on government planes, eating out of the government pork barrel (lamb barrel in Afghanistan), so why worry about payoffs up front?
Afghans have failed to move their corruption from the Rod Blagojevich model, which we all deplore, to the Barack Obama model, which we all admire. Afghanistan should, as the minister of education says, “align with the program.”
How can we know what America should do in Afghanistan? I’ve returned fully informed on this subject as well. We should stay. The member of parliament who dismissed the clash of civilizations said, “It’s like buying a beautiful home somewhere and letting your neighborhood deteriorate.”
Really, seriously, we should stay. Otherwise, Ramazan Bashardost said, “You’ll see Chinese soldiers in the street. We have a border with China. They’re a very rich country. We’re very poor people—in a most strategic region.”
We should leave. The Pashtun tribal leader said, “We don’t have war. What we have is instability. Armies create instability. If you try this for twenty more years you’ll never succeed.”
We should do both. One of the journalists with Radio Azadi said, “There’s the same feeling in Afghanistan as there is in the U.S. We worry about the U.S. staying, and we worry about the U.S. leaving.”
The Afghan people are pro-American. The woman member of parliament said, “We say, ‘Our enemy is their enemy.’ ”
The Afghan people are anti-American. Ramazan Bashardost said, “Frankly, people are generally against the U.S.” But he tries to argue with them. “I say U.S. troops are in Afghanistan for values, not for oil—there is not enough of it.”
Afghans know that we are still committed to our mission in Afghanistan. The minister of education said, “I have complete faith. But whether we are able and smart enough to express this mission to the people of Afghanistan . . .” He let his words trail off.
Afghans don’t know that we’re still committed to our mission in Afghanistan. The provincial governor said, “If perception is created by your actions that democracy is against Islam, that a controlled insurgency is all that’s wanted, that Afghanistan is being used as a jump point for other geopolitical concerns—that justifies the insurgency.”
Afghans hope like heck that we’re still committed to our mission in Afghanistan. The woman member of parliament said, “From 2001 to 2004 people were very optimistic. With the switch to Iraq things began to change.”
Afghans can’t live on hope alone. The voluble mullah said, “There is a saying, ‘A blind man will not lose his stick twice.’ But the people of Afghanistan have lost their stick twenty times.”
We should talk to the Taliban. The Pashtun tribal leader said, “Accept the fact that we cannot eliminate all Taliban from Afghanistan.”
We shouldn’t talk to the Taliban. The governor said, “Talks further strengthen the enemy’s position.”
We must fight the war the Afghan way. The governor said, “The Taliban are very quick. Our current units need too much preparation to move.”
We must fight the war the American way. The governor also said, “There is an Arab proverb about fear as a tactic: ‘I win the war a month away.’ ” And the U.S. military has been doing some fearsome things for month upon month in Afghanistan.
The Afghan government can be reformed from within. The governor said, “Blaming corruption is just a way to put blame on others for our own shortcomings. Internal strategies are needed to strengthen military and civil society.”
The Afghan government can’t be reformed from within. Bashardost proposed something like what General MacArthur did in Japan after World War II.
Poverty is the root of Afghanistan’s problems. Bashardost said, “We are ready to support you for three hundred years. If we have electricity. If we have a life.”
Poverty is not the root of Afghanistan’s problems. “Or Haiti would be the most terroristic country in the world,” the governor said.
There must be something in Afghanistan that we’ve got right. There is. Radio Azadi, the Afghan bureau of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, is on the air twelve hours a day, seven days a week, half the time in Pashto, half the time in Dari. What Radio Azadi does is known as “surrogate broadcasting,” meaning the content is Afghan-produced as a way for Afghans to get news and views in a place where, otherwise, these have to be delivered mostly face-to-face. And there is no agenda except to be factual (although facts are an agenda item if you care about freedom, which is what Azadi means in Dari).
Radio Azadi’s bureau chief, and my host in Kabul, Amin Madaqiq, has 120 staff members and freelancers. They produce news bulletins, news in depth, and features on social, political, and economic topics, plus a couple of hours a day of Afghan music and even some comedy: “Police announced today that all the people who have passed their driver’s license test must now learn to drive.”
A missing persons program, In Search of a Loved One, tries to reunite families separated by decades of chaos. A medical program is hosted by doctors with eminent specialists, often from overseas, as guests. Azadi and Listeners is devoted to getting individuals individual responses from government ministries.
The call-in shows are popular. On a day when I was in the studio Afghanistan’s minister of communications and minister of the interior were taking random phoners, trying to clear up confusion about a confusing-sounding system of national ID cards. I don’t think it’s likely that the head of the FCC and a member of President Obama’s cabinet would spend two hours in a spartan, airless broadcast booth helping people who are unable to read through a form-filling process and suggesting work-arounds when local government corruption is encountered.
The quiet mullah told me that the day before an elderly religious scholar had asked for help buying a radio so that Azadi could be listened to in his mosque.
The Pashtun tribal leader said, “Azadi is doing very well because they are telling the facts.” He griped that other media were insensitive to religion and culture.
The civil society activist thought that wisdom and social relationships were best established in person, but second best was radio. “Radio can pass wisdom,” he said.
The woman member of parliament told me about how, after the fall of the Taliban, Radio Azadi had conducted four hours a week of open political debate. “The Afghans got it,” she said. She praised Azadi’s “diversity of opinion” and the fact that it sometimes has “the government getting upset.”
“Even the U.S. ambassador is afraid of our show,” an Azadi journalist told me with a big smile.
“Any feeling of censorship from the U.S.?” I asked Amin.
“We haven’t felt any,” he said.
“A good channel,” the minister of education called it. “An important institution. I’ve never had the feeling it was unnecessarily taking sides in the Afghan conflict. It maintains its impartiality.”
“I wasn’t sure what you’d hear from the minister,” a journalist with Radio Azadi told me later. “We’ve been critical of him.”
The member of parliament to whom I’d talked about clashing civilizations and deteriorating neighborhoods was a bit surprised at America sponsoring Azadi, the more so, I think, because he’s an American. That is, he lived for a long time in America, where he spent ten years as a commercial airline pilot.
“America,” he said, not without pride, “is spending money for you to express your opinions—not to twist your opinions but to express your opinions.”
Ramazan Bashardost’s only complaint about Radio Azadi was that he wasn’t on it often enough. He was reminded that, only recently, he had been named by Radio Azadi as “Person of the Year.”
“Yes,” he said, and apologized for bringing too much documentation to radio interviews. “One positive point in Afghanistan is media,” he said. “And the only positive point in Afghanistan is media.”
Even the Taliban call in to Radio Azadi—to argue with the hosts and guests.
“We know you are funded by the U.S. Congress,” a Taliban spokesman told Amin. “But we judge you by your deeds.”
“The Taliban call to argue—this is good,” said the woman member of parliament.
“The Taliban fights the U.S. militarily,” said the former airline pilot, “but uses the U.S. media to express themselves.” He chuckled. “I say to them, ‘If this system is bad, you are using it! When you had your radio, would you let us call in?’” He saw the Taliban as caught in a trap by the logic of freedom. “This is a format that must be expanded.”
The governor thought the Taliban itself might accidentally expand it. He recalled the days before Radio Azadi, during Taliban rule, when the only outside media was the BBC Afghan service. “The Taliban told people that they would go to hell if they listened to the BBC. Then everyone listened.”
There was one other point that people in Kabul agreed on. Whatever it is that America does in Afghanistan, America should proceed with wisdom. The governor told a story about wisdom.
There was a student who had been studying for many years at a madrassa. He had memorized the Qu’ran and learned all the lessons his teacher taught. One day he went to his teacher and said, “I am ready to leave and go be a mullah.”
His teacher said, “I think you should stay here for a few more years.”
“Why?” asked the student. “Is there some additional degree or higher certificate that I will get?”
“No,” said the teacher, “all you will get is wisdom.”
“But I’m ready to be a mullah now,” said the student. And he left the madrassa and wandered from village to village looking for a mosque where he could be the prayer leader.
Finally the student came to a village where a corrupt old mullah was using the mosque as a stall for his cow. The student was outraged. He gathered the villagers together and told them, “I have studied at a madrassa. I have memorized the Qu’ran. It is a great sacrilege for your mullah to use the mosque as a stall for his cow.” The villagers beat him up.
The student limped back to the madrassa and told his teacher what had happened. The teacher said, “Follow me.” They went back to the village where the mullah was using the mosque as a stall.
The teacher gathered the villagers together and told them, “I see you have a beautiful cow being kept in your mosque. It must be a very blessed animal. And I hear the cow belongs to your mullah. He must be a very holy man. In fact, I think that this cow is so blessed and your mullah is so holy that if you were to take one hair from the cow’s hide and one hair from the mullah’s beard and rub them together, you would be assured of paradise.”
The villagers ran into the mosque and began plucking hairs from the cow’s hide. The cow started to buck and kick and it bolted from the mosque and disappeared. Then the villagers ran to the corrupt old mullah’s house and began plucking hairs from his beard. And they tugged and they yanked so hard at the mullah’s beard that he had a heart attack and died.
“You see,” said the teacher to the student. “No cow in the mosque and a need for a new mullah—that is wisdom.”