Arguably: Selected Essays (69 page)

A hereditary head of state, as Thomas Paine so crisply phrased it, is as absurd a proposition as a hereditary physician or a hereditary astronomer. To this innate absurdity, Prince Charles manages to bring fatuities that are entirely his own. And, as he paged his way through his dreary wad of babble, there must have been some wolfish smiles among his Muslim audience. I quote from a recent document published by the Islamic Forum of Europe, a group dedicated to the restoration of the Islamic caliphate and the imposition of
sharia
, which has been very active in London mosques and in the infiltration of local political parties. “The primary work” in the establishment of a future Muslim empire, it announces, “is in Europe, because it is this continent, despite all the furore about its achievements, which has a moral and spiritual vacuum.”

So this is where all the vapid talk about the “soul” of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The “vacuum” will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.

(
Slate
, June 14, 2010)

OFFSHORE ACCOUNTS

Afghanistan’s Dangerous Bet

I
SPENT MY ENTIRE TIME in Afghanistan, from dawn until dusk and then beyond, utterly and completely obsessed with women. You may ask why I am telling you this. What about the land mines, the lurking Taliban, the warlords, the malaria and the dysentery, the battling tribes, the beating sun, and the forbidding landscape? These are all, I will happily concede, quite compelling in their way. But they pale, each of them and every time, when contrasted with the absolutely Himalayan question of Afghan womanhood. I could not get the subject out of my mind for an instant, waking or sleeping. (Violence and drugs featured, too, I must say, but only in second and third place. I’m seriously thinking of going back, quite soon. For one thing, the future of democracy may be at stake.)

“I gather,” I said to the official of the National Democratic Institute in Kabul, “that you are holding a mock election?” Down the cell phone came his cautious, Canadian-accented response. “We are,” he said, “as part of our training, conducting an election simulation.” I silently reproached myself for my thoughtless flippancy, and managed to get myself invited along nevertheless.

Under the shade of a large, cool, open-sided tent, in the courtyard of one of the many NGO (or “non-governmental organization”) buildings that now occupy so much of Afghanistan’s battered and filthy capital, a sample electorate had been assembled. More than half were women, of whom all had donned some kind of head covering, while none wore the all-enclosing burka. All, in other words, were showing the most ravishing part of the female form—the face—and almost all of them were displaying at least some of the second-most-hypnotizing feature—their hair. One had brought a daughter along and another a grandson (there are an awful lot of widows in Kabul). Good-humored, polite young men, most of them Afghan, were instructing them in how to cast a ballot. First, three “candidates” made ten-minute pitches for their hypothetical parties. Two of the candidates were women, and one an older man with a dark mustache that set off his whitening en brosse locks. Then the simulated electorate was invited to produce its voter-registration cards, to receive an indelible-ink stamp on the wrist, to show its punched voting paper to a man with Genghis Khan cheekbones, and to proceed into a curtained voting booth before emerging and modestly, proudly dropping the completed ballot into a locked box. The entire thing might have made a charming episode on Scandinavian public television: the blessings of universal suffrage, as brought by well-intentioned secular missionaries.

But three years ago, you could not look an Afghan woman or girl in the eye. Half the population was chattel or other property: invisible, enveloped, and voiceless. The male members of their families could literally give them away as bargaining chips, or prizes. Arbitrary and lascivious punishments, usually totted up in lashes but sometimes in lethal stones, were the enforcement of this slavery. You can still read, quite often, of young women who set themselves on fire to avoid forced marriage and other types of bondage. My sex obsession was nothing to that of the Taliban and their bin Ladenist “guests,” who regarded the world of their mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters with plain contempt and even horror. (Of the men-only “martyrs” of this movement, the fascinating thing is not how many of them dreamed of virgins, but how many of them were virgins.) Yet, as I arrived in Kabul, the females of the country were in the process of astonishing all observers. Of those who had registered to vote, fully 41 percent were women. And this was in no mean turnout; there are even parts of the country where the number registered is higher than the supposed number of voters. President Hamid Karzai has joked publicly about this Chicago-like development, attributing it rather airily to an excess of democratic exuberance. But since estimates of Afghanistan’s population fluctuate between 21 and 29 million, some allowance probably has to be made for its people’s first-ever visit to the polls.

These people will not be casting their ballots in shaded tents in urban courtyards, before admiring international witnesses. They will be risking—and have already defied—acid in the face, mines on the road, bombs in the schools and even the mosques where voters gather, and every other imaginable kind of discouragement. The worst discouragement of all is the fear that the vote really will be “an election simulation,” and that Afghanistan will continue to be run by gender-crazed old mullahs and bandits. A photo op from the twenty-first century can easily be negated by the terrible weight of the centuries that have gone before. As William Faulkner said about the Deep South, the past is never dead. Here, it’s not even past.

The newspapers and television may have been telling you every day that the shrine of Imam Ali, cousin and son-in-law to the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), lies beneath the Golden Dome in Najaf, in southern Iraq. But no pious Afghan entirely believes this version. After his killing in
A.D
. 661, according to the local story, Ali’s followers feared for the desecration of his corpse. They embalmed it, placed it on the back of a white female camel, and made the beast canter until it dropped. That spot would be the burial place. The camel gave up in northern Afghanistan, and the great imam is therefore interred in what is now the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, or “the tomb of the exalted one.” The shrine is still there, even though its original was pretty thoroughly trampled by Genghis Khan. One of President Hamid Karzai’s earlier actions, after the defeat and flight of the Taliban, was to journey to Mazar-i-Sharif and, in front of a huge
nawroz
, or “New Year,” crowd, unfurl Ali’s green flag. The Sunni Taliban had forbidden the pilgrimage because the origins of
nawroz
lie in Babylonian and Zoroastrian antiquity, and were considered—like the shell-blasted statues of the Buddhas in Bamiyan—pre-Islamic and therefore profane.

Then again, the early chroniclers among the Afghans claimed that it was they, and no others, who were the lost tribe of the Jews: descendants of King Saul and the true survivors of the Babylonian captivity. This claim was examined and disputed in 1815 by the Honorable Mountstuart Elphinstone of the East India Company (later to cut a sorry figure in the “memoirs” of Harry Flashman). But the idea resurfaced in the famous 11th edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, published in 1910, when imperial ethnography was at its zenith: “A respectable number of intelligent officers, well acquainted with the Afghans, have been strong in their belief of it; and though the customs alleged in proof will not bear the stress laid on them, undoubtedly a prevailing type of the Afghan physiognomy has a character strongly Jewish.”

Perhaps we have been fighting over the wrong Holy Land all along? I personally began to find consolation in the small victories of the profane over the sacred. It’s jolly to sit in “Flashman’s” restaurant, sipping scotch and wine in the restored Gandamack Lodge, and know that this house used to be the sheltered enclave of one of Osama bin Laden’s luckless wives. (No waitresses, yet, I had to notice: Only old men and young boys are trusted with the job.) It’s a treat to get your glossy copy of
Afghan Scene
and read of the films and plays and photographic exhibitions that are on offer in town. It’s heartening to see the female students at Kabul University, flaunting knockoffs of international fashion, and often earning enough as part-time translators to support their parents (and thus undermine patriarchal authority). It’s cheering to see groups clustered around flickering TV sets, riveted to videos of swimsuit contests. It was a delight to sit with Wais in his pizza restaurant—more than 3.4 million Afghan refugees have come home since the fall of the Taliban—and hear his cut-with-a-knife New Jersey accent as he described how things had improved. “Night and day, man. Fuckin’ night and day.”

I think of my inspiring but sedate interview with Dr. Masuda Jalal, the only woman candidate for the presidency and the only female to have challenged Karzai’s candidacy in the famous Loya Jirga, or Grand Council, which also prepared the new Afghan constitution. She’s a well-known physician, who ran a clinic and a secret school during the Taliban years and was briefly detained. She lives, like a number of Kabul’s educated middle class, in a hideous district of “People’s Republic”—type apartment blocks, built by Soviet “advisers” on the outskirts of the capital. Indeed, I think her secret is that she’s a former leftist, though of the pro-Chinese variety. Her rhetoric still bears traces of that “serve the people” idiom, and she speaks without embarrassment of a constituency of “progressive scholars, intellectuals, and democrats,” not omitting a few, newer terms about “civil society.” President Karzai, she says firmly, has “signed too many protocols” with warlords and mullahs. She herself would prefer a Cabinet of “technocrats,” including the “cleaner” supporters of President Karzai, and even of Zahir Shah, the returned king who is recognized not quite as monarch of the country but as “father of his people.”

In her anteroom, I met her three delightful daughters, ages nine, seven, and three, as well as her husband—a professor of law at the university—and her campaign manager, a grizzled old bear of a man from the border province of Khost, who looks like a retired chieftain. More men support the Masuda Jalal campaign than you might guess: They can at least be sure that they are not getting another warlord, possibly from the “wrong” ethnicity.

Before I said good-bye, my sex obsession got the better of me again. Throughout our conversation, Dr. Jalal had been toying with a headscarf that didn’t seem all that comfortable. “How long,” I made bold to inquire, “have you been wearing that? Have you always worn one?” Her downcast-eyed yet stirring reply was that, in her days as a medical student, she had worn what she liked. This was a nervous compromise. Even her revolutionary candidacy was, in a sense, being conducted with male permission.

You get the same sense, all the time, of a culture poised on a razor’s edge. People mock President Karzai for being too compromising and for being “only the mayor of Kabul,” but he’s been brave enough to drop a militia leader as his running mate and, if he were to be assassinated, the effect would be felt way beyond the capital. In other words, this is a society which is still only one bullet away from chaos. (Cheer up: The same is probably true of neighboring Pakistan, with its reliable General Musharraf and its nuclear weapons.)