Holidays in Heck

  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 o
f 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 positi
on.”

  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.”