Arguably: Selected Essays (70 page)

I had my own exposure to abrupt, vertiginous change when I journeyed to the provincial capital of Herat, in the far west of the country. Herat abuts the border with Iran, and its main flavor is Persian. It boasts a marvelous blue mosque and a still-standing cluster of antique minarets, from the times of Tamerlane, or “Timur the Lame.” Its big-city boss was until recently a relatively jovial old warlord named Ismail Khan, who fought against the Red Army and the Taliban with equal gusto, but is said to be a bit twisted from his long imprisonment by the latter, and also a little distraught at the murder of his son last March. The killing was the result of a rivalry between Ismail and yet another local warlord, a representative of the Pashtun minority named Amanullah Khan. A few days before I arrived, Amanullah (or A.K.) had seized the old Russian-built airfield at Shindand, about sixty miles away, but this was thought to be mostly in the nature of a gesture. Herat itself continued to boom and bustle, prospering by the virtually open borders with Iran and Turkmenistan and from the trade in everything from opium to SUVs which results. Ismail Khan (I.K.) had been a political appointee of Karzai’s and legally recognized as governor of Herat, but he didn’t much relish passing on his portion of the revenues he raised. He preferred to distribute these locally, and thus be “a river to his people.” Hence the well-kept streets, the humming bazaar, and the preservation—very rare in Afghanistan—of the groves and avenues of trees that would otherwise have gone to charcoal. (I passed an eating place called Shame Restaurant, but it was modestly closed.)

At about one o’clock one baking afternoon, as I was mincing happily through the fragrant and laden flower stalls, and noticing that, though burkas had become rarer, no woman was “manning” any shop, a definite pulse or tremor ran through the town. It was like watching a rumor take physical form: Suddenly there were clusters and clumps of people talking earnestly together, then the sound of shutters descending over windows, succeeded swiftly by the scamper of feet and then the arrival of pickup trucks, bearing bearded men with rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikov rifles. (Just what you don’t want when taking in the local atmosphere in Afghanistan: to have your passport studied, unsmilingly and upside down, by some of these beauties.) In the course of the succeeding few hours, I was told by “the street” that A.K.’s men were at the edge of town, that A.K. and fifty of his followers had been killed by an American air strike, that the Americans were behind A.K. in an attempt to weaken I.K., and that the airport road had been closed. Only the last—and just possibly the second—of these stories turned out to be true. Kabul, about 600 miles distant by a road that was also closed, might as well have been on another planet: It suddenly began to seem to me like a shimmering metropolis.

“Street” opinion, as elsewhere in the region, is almost invariably deluded and distorted. And all the women, I noticed, were off the streets right away, which rather reduced the sample of viewpoints. But, during the hours of chaos, one could still get three strong and consistent impressions. The first is that the central government is not very highly regarded in the country’s westernmost city. Hardly anyone had a good word for Karzai. The second is that pickup trucks with bearded gunmen are not popular, even when they seem to represent the winning side. (Applause from the sidewalk was perfunctory: Most people moved away and kept their counsel to themselves.) The third is that I.K. has a genuine following. “And he is a
jihadi
!” exclaimed one man as he finished reeling off a list of I.K.’s virtues. “Against whom?” I inquired. “You do not know what means ‘jihad’?” “Well, yes I do, I think. That’s why I asked, ‘Against whom?’ ” I was still made to feel that I had asked a dumb question, which perhaps I had. Any war this guy fights is holy to some. An interlude of arduous phone-calling got me inside the “bubble” that is formed by the coalition forces, the United Nations teams, and the NGOs. I was able to spend a not-too-tense night inside the perimeter of the P.R.T., or Provisional Reconstruction Team: the system of decentralized mini-bases that some NATO contingents now wisely use to stay close to events. The HQ was right in the middle of town, and its compound contained several dozen armed Afghans. Many of them were awake and on guard while the bulk of the garrison was sleeping: a thing you would not see inside the equivalent American base in Iraq. (“Yeah, they’re family,” said a central-casting farm-boy soldier from Wisconsin. “Buddies for life.”)

It was rather nice inside the bubble. I met some tough and smart guys, who had become good at collecting local intelligence and who mingle the job of collecting it with the job of distributing aid. One officer I met was carrying a briefcase with $150,000 in cash—“for schools,” as he put it. I got a briefing or two, and found opinion divided on whether it was wise for the central government to try to undermine old Ismail Khan before the elections. I found it generally to be true that American soldiers—especially the ones this “far from the flagpole” and way out on the western frontier—felt less valued and less noticed since the invasion of Iraq. Eventually, I got a hitchhike from a Humvee, which took me to the airport, where I secured another hitchhike from a U.N. evacuation plane, flown by enormous bronzed South Africans. This international bubble, in theory, stretches protectively across the whole jagged country. But, boy, is it pulled thin and tight, and you don’t want to be there when it punctures or leaks. Not many days after I had left, President Karzai did dismiss Ismail Khan as governor of Herat—which implied that perhaps the American Embassy had after all been behind the attacks on him—and at least nine of the bubble’s offices were burned out.

What exactly
is
a warlord? The species clusters into two main groups: local pashas such as Ismail Khan, roughly content to harvest their own fiefdoms, and ethnic or confessional leaders with big ideas. Into the latter category would fall the grisly, sadistic figure of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, once a favorite of Pakistan and the CIA but now a wanted man who combines Taliban rhetoric with extreme corruption and opportunism. Yet we would also find the late Ahmed Shah Massoud, the brilliantly charismatic leader of the Northern Alliance, who was both a Tajik tribal commander and a devout Islamist. He it was who tried to warn the West that the Taliban were harboring Osama bin Laden, and he it was who was murdered by al-Qaeda suicide killers on September 9, 2001, to try to ensure that their upcoming assault on New York and Washington would be matched by the extinction of resistance within Afghanistan itself. I shall not forget those three days three years ago: It must have seemed to the fanatics that god was laughing along with them, and that everything was ordained in their favor. One must never again feel such defenseless shame.

Pictures of Massoud are now everywhere in Kabul, his brother is Karzai’s vice-presidential pick, and a large monument is being built in his honor. But there is an older and surer definition of a warlord: He is someone who can control a piece of road and force you to pay a rent or a toll to pass along it. Roll a few rocks and oil drums onto the highway, place some gun-wielding desperadoes next to the barrier, and begin your extortion. It is the fear of this that keeps many Afghans ghettoized in their miserable villages, and that also keeps many humanitarians and diplomats penned up in the safety of the cities, or traveling only within the bubble. It is the same fear that Kipling called upon (you didn’t think I was going to leave him out, did you?) in his extraordinary Afghan poem “Arithmetic on the Frontier”:

A scrimmage in a Border Station—
A canter down some dark defile
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee
jezail
 …
Strike hard who cares—shoot straight who can
The odds are on the cheaper man.

You can still see homemade
jezail
rifles, along with fearsome daggers, in the front of shops along Chicken Street and Flower Street in Kabul—placed there mainly to give the handful of tourists a cheap thrill. But it takes only an inexpensive improvised roadside or handheld weapon to put fright into the aid workers and election supervisors who have to leave the compounds or venture through the arid rural communities where 70 percent of Afghans still try to exist. In the town of Ghazni, for example, a young Frenchwoman named Bettina Goislard was cut down in broad daylight last November while working for the U.N. high commissioner for refugees. Not far away, a bomb exploded in a mosque—a mosque!—while voters were attempting to register the names they could barely write.

I will venture a prediction: The Taliban/al-Qaeda riffraff, as we know them, will never come back to power. They were able to seize Kabul in the first place only because the country had been reduced to “Year Zero” conditions by civil war, and they are now so much hated, and so heavily outgunned, that they can’t expect to do any better than make life miserable in the more wretched areas of the South. Vicious though their tactics are, they don’t show any sign of having a plan, or a coordinated leadership, or a directing brain. (If Osama bin Laden is still alive, he has a very faint and unconvincing way of demonstrating it. He doesn’t even issue fiery sermons anymore. His deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, got the job of making the September-anniversary rant this year, and of issuing the false claim that Americans were cowering in their trenches in southern and eastern Afghanistan. And Osama used to be so voluble …)

I selected Ghazni just now for a reason: I paid it a visit just as the registration of voters was being completed. My expedition from Kabul was remarkably swift and easy, because the place lies along the new highway from the capital to Kandahar: the southern city that may well have been named for Iskandar, local name for Alexander the Great. The South is still in the danger zone; it abuts the near ungovernable Pakistani tribal areas, and even in Kandahar itself the female registration for the election is little more than half the national average. But two years ago that journey would have been an extremely rugged and hazardous undertaking that could consume at least a whole day. Now you can drive from Kabul to Kandahar in six hours. (Pedal to the metal, I hit eighty miles per hour on the straight and level, than which the car itself could do no more.) Roadblocks become redundant or archaic in these conditions. People sometimes sneer at the Kabul-Kandahar highway, saying that it’s still unsafe and that, in order for it to be completed in time for President Bush to celebrate it in a speech, a couple of inches of blacktop had to be omitted from its surface. Well, I have now driven along a good bit of it, in daytime and darkness, and perhaps I was just lucky. It’s patchy in places, but backup gravel and Tarmac are both being heaped lavishly on the roadside. Even more noticeable is that enterprise is beginning to rise up along the way—from gas stations to the outlines of factories and construction sites.

It is mainly a superstition from our own past that can absolutely ruin the hopes of those who wait on line in the sun and hope against hope that their votes will count. We can still get a failed state or a rogue state in Afghanistan, if we really work at it. Nothing is crazier, when you see it up close, than the stupid “war on drugs.” Nobody believes in it for a second. The military specialists all think it is a waste of time, or at best (as the saying goes) a distraction from the hunt for al-Qaeda. The farmers all think it is an assault on their only viable crop. The warlords just can’t believe their luck. There are whole areas of the country, recovered from Taliban control, where the “hearts and minds” battle is being lost every hour of every day, with dumb attempts to root out the only thing that grows, and the only thing that sells. After years of withering drought, and even more years of devastating crop burning and desolation, which would you plant: a vine that takes five years to grow to maturity—grapes used to be Afghanistan’s main crop export—or a poppy that yields pods in six months? It has been calculated that as much as a fourth of the country’s G.D.P. is opium-related, and that the crop gives a livelihood to millions in the countryside. Some of these are coerced into poppy farming, but until another economy has been created, or this one recognized, it’s futile to be emulating the Untouchables. Thirty years of experience have not yet taught us that Westerners will buy the fruit of this poppy at almost any price, and that therefore Easterners and Southerners will stolidly continue to cultivate it. Many people think that the Taliban did a better job of drug “interdiction,” which is a clue in itself to the madness of this calculus. In fact, the Taliban “banned” the trade in order to drive up the price of the existing tonnage that they held. The U.S. government actually grows opium in Turkey for our domestic painkiller market: Why not give Afghans a slice of the business?

Afghanistan is not in our past: Its astonishing inhabitants are our formerly abandoned and now half-adopted relations. And one can so easily fall for a place where everybody thinks about sex, where bombing has blasted a society out of the Stone Age, and where opium is the religion of the people.

(
Vanity Fair
, November 2004)

First, Silence the Whistle-Blower