Holidays in Heck

  In my case at least, the amiability had something to do with painkilling drugs, of which I was on plenty. Opiates are a blessing—and a revelation. Now when I see people on skid row nodding in doorways I am forced to question myself. Have they, maybe, chosen a reasonable response to their condition in life? Being addicted to drugs is doubtless a bad plan for the future, but having cancer also lets you off the hook about taking long-term views.

  I’m sure that various holy martyrs and pious ascetics will disagree, but I saw no point to adding suffering to my suffering. And I can’t say I had a sign from God that I should, at least not if God was speaking through my old friend Greg Grip.

  Greg was baching it in a cottage on Lake Mascoma, fifteen minutes from Dartmouth-Hitchcock. He’s divorced and his college-age daughter was away at a summer job. “I’m not saying you can stay at the cottage while you get treated,” Greg said. “I’m saying I will be deeply offended if you don’t.”

  Dr. Zaki arranged my radiation treatments, late on Monday afternoons and early on Friday mornings. My wife and children were spared self-pitiful weekday grousings. And I missed them, so I was on good behavior over weekends.

  Greg is a splendid Weber grill cook. Charcoal fires produce carcinogens, but the chemotherapy had that covered. Dr. Pipas said I could have one measured Scotch each evening. But he failed to specify the measure. I think the pint is a fine old measure, although the liter is more up-to-date.

  I couldn’t tolerate the sun, but Greg’s cottage is on the southwest shore of Mascoma. The patio was in shade all afternoon. I read a lot, mostly histories of World War II concerning the Russian front. Everyone on the Russian front in World War II was having it worse than I was.

  Tony Snow, the former Bush administration press secretary, wrote an essay about dying from colon cancer. Tony said that the sense of mortality promoted “the ability to sit back and appreciate the wonder of every created thing.” Every created thing put on a wonderful show for me at Lake Mascoma. A family of mergansers with six ducklings was living under the dock. A pair of mallards had taken up residence in the shrubbery. Beavers swam up and down the lake; I don’t know why—Mascoma has a concrete dam. There were bird sightings—hawks, turkey vultures, kingfishers, a bald eagle, even an extremely wayward pelican. A hummingbird visited the patio every evening. Skinny-dipping sightings were also made at a nature reserve across the lake. Water skiers and Jet Ski riders took amusing falls. Not to engage in the pathetic fallacy, but the weather itself was kind and cool. Greg’s pointer Weezy slept on my bed each night, though this may have had less to do with doggy compassion than the fact that Greg won’t let her sleep on his. Weezy’s dulcet snoring drowned out the chemo fanny pack pump.

  I’m doing fine now. Anal cancer can be invasive, but mine seems to have had a wimpy EU-style foreign policy. The cancer is gone, as far as can be told. I still have a colonoscopy to worry about and a CAT scan to dread and six-month checkups to fret over. I’ll be OK. Or I won’t. Or I’ll go through it all again.

  This summer was not the worst summer of my life—loving family, kind friends, skilled and considerate care, a big warm dog in the bed. The worst summer of my life was forty years ago when I was young and healthy and didn’t have a care in the world. But there was this girl, and a novel that refused to write itself, and anomie, and angst, and weltschmerz. . . . Nothing brings us closer to God than age and illness. I only hope the Almighty doesn’t mind having nothing but sick old people around.

  17

  THE SEVENTY-TWO-HOUR AFGHAN EXPERT

  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.

  Th
e 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.