The Punishment of Virtue (26 page)

These men and women, like the vast majority of Kandaharis, blamed Karzai and the Americans.

“The foreigners must like
topak salaran
,” shrugged another delegate.

My friend Mahmad Anwar had put it even more starkly a few months earlier: “Why are we warlords still in power?”

I asked if he would please repeat what he had just said.

“We
topak salaran
should have been sent home by now. The Americans warned us that anyone who took power with their help when they came into Kandahar would have to leave after the
Loya Jirga
. They should have kicked us out. This was supposed to be a government of educated people.”

Disgusted at how swiftly the solemn oaths sworn with Governor Shirzai had been forgotten, Mahmad Anwar resigned a few weeks after this exchange with me, and went home to Chaman.

I have often been asked whether we in the West have the right to “im-pose democracy” on people who “just might not want it,” or might not be “ready for it.” I think, concerning Afghanistan at least, this question is exactly backward. From my discussions with these elders and with countless others, I have found that Afghans know precisely what democracy is—even if they might not be able to define the term. And they are crying out for it. They want from their government what most Americans and Europeans want from theirs: roads they can drive on, schools for their kids, doctors with certified qualifications so their prescriptions don't poison people, a minimum of public accountability, and security: law and order. And they want to participate in some real way in the fashioning of their nation's destiny.

But Afghans were getting precious little of any of that, thanks to warlords like Gul Agha Shirzai, whom America was helping maintain in power. American policy in Afghanistan was not imposing or even encouraging democracy, as the U.S. government claimed it was. Instead, it was standing in the way of democracy. It was institutionalizing violence.

Unpredictability destabilizes the human spirit. It was clear, and Kandaharis said as much, that the Taliban oppression had weighed more heavily than the oppression they were experiencing now. And yet under the Taliban there was a system: there was law and order—there was some version of
qanun
. One knew the rules, for they were explicit. And if one only followed them, harsh and intransigent as they were, one could be relatively sure to be left in peace.

Now there was no law. Oppression was arbitrary. It struck without reason, and so it unsettled people. Perhaps the number of actual incidents in Kandahar was not so high. It was surely not so high as it had been during the
mujahideen
time, and Kandaharis did recognize that. They were grateful to the American presence for the comparative calm, swearing that if the U.S. soldiers left, blood would surge through the streets again like the Arghandab River in snow-melt flood. Still, the unpredictability of the incidents, their arbitrariness, gave them a disproportionate power to destabilize spirits.

And the people began remembering how it was under the Taliban. They told of driving to Herat at night, free from fear. They recalled that time they left a whole pile of money tied up in a shawl, right out in the street, while they walked away to buy some melons. They began harking back to the Taliban peace with some nostalgia.

In this way, the sketchy former Taliban began reconstituting themselves, in people's minds, as an alternative. Not an attractive one by any means, but one that was not exclusively hostile to the people's interests either. Nothing ideological entered this calculation. Ironically, Afghans are among the least ideological people on earth. Their thinking was practical, and they remembered that they had enjoyed some practical benefits under Taliban rule.

ONCE UPON A TIME—CIRCA A.D. 870

T
HE
T
ALIBAN WERE
infamous outside Afghanistan precisely for their ideology—their exaggerated and rigid interpretation of Islam. To the rest of the world at the end of the twentieth century, Afghanistan was a symbol for the Muslim faith, in its scariest manifestation. Yet Islam is not indigenous to Afghanistan. In fact, it took some time gaining a foothold in that rocky land.

Paradoxically, this makes Afghans proud. A man boasted to me once about some graves in Kabul believed to be the tombs of Companions of Prophet Muhammad. The holy men had died trying to conquer Afghanistan, he explained to me, manifestly proud that Kabul boasted such sacred resting places. But it was a source of equal pride to him that Afghans had killed the would-be conquerors. It was like the Arab cemetery near my first home in Kandahar, where people visited the Al-Qaeda graves for their intercession value, even though they had hated having Arabs rule their town.

Given the Afghans' fierce and obviously complex attachment to their religion—the one thing, many say, that binds them together despite the searing scars cutting across tribes and ethnic groups—it seemed critical to me to come to a documented understanding of how Islam really did reach Afghanistan.

The place to start this quest was C. E. Bosworth, another Brit with two initials. He is the don, the absolute authority on the region around southern Afghanistan in the early Islamic period. He had recently retired from his professorship at Manchester University, as I found when I sent him this chapter to see if it would fly.

I photocopied his seminal monograph,
Sistan Under the Arabs
.
¹
To my surprise, I discovered among his sources for an early chapter several famous Persian poems. I hardly expected epic legends to be a foundation for a scholarly work of history. Nor did these particular poems seem to be all that relevant. They are the legends of Persia, as important to the national identity of Iran as Homer is to Greeks, even more visceral than Chaucer or Beowulf for England. But how, I wondered, did these Iranian folktales apply to the region that interested Bosworth—and me: southern Afghanistan at the time of the Muslim conquests?

I tracked down some volumes of this poetry to try to figure it out, and started reading in an old French translation:

“After terrible suffering and great travails, King Jamshid climbed up to Zabulistan,” went one fairy-tale line.

Zabulistan
? I put down the book and actually clapped my hands. I had my answer. Zabul is the province immediately to the northeast of Kandahar, on the main road to Kabul. This Jamshid fellow and the other Iranian folkheroes that I had always connected with the heart and soul of Persia were not from Iran at all, it seemed. They had lived in my neck of the woods, the region around Kandahar. That was a discovery in and of itself.

I picked up the copied page and went on.

The description didn't fit any of the dry baked-mud towns
I
had seen; but perhaps things had changed since those mythical days. For what I was reading was nothing less than a creation myth—every bit as gritty and anthropomorphic and pagan as the Gilgamesh story or the Greek tales of the Titans and the Olympians.

Just after the dawn of time, according to these epic poems, King Jamshid ruled Iran. His father had subjugated the demons and the birds and evil spirits, leaving Jamshid centuries of leisure to order the affairs of men. He invented armor and textiles; he divided his subjects into the classes of priests, warriors, and craftsmen; and he set the demons to work as masons and architects.

But Jamshid grew arrogant, and “a mighty discontent arose throughout Iran.”
³
Disgruntled nobles replaced him with Zahhak the Evil-Doer, from whose shoulders two serpents sprouted; they had to be fed a daily ration of fresh human flesh. Jamshid was in hiding, for Zahhak had proclaimed that whoever caught him and delivered him bound hand and foot would receive a great reward.

And so Jamshid became a ghost of the byways, a sovereign reduced to beggary, in constant flight until he reached the land of Zabulistan—roughly the region of modern Kandahar. There he fathered the dynasty of Iran's national heroes.

It was during the eleventh century
A
.
D
., about five hundred years after the birth of Islam, that tales such as this began to be collected, translated from the archaic tongue that had conserved them, Pahlavi, and rendered into the exuberant poetry of a new language: Persian, or Farsi. This literary blossoming was part of an extraordinary Iranian renaissance that was to transform the culture of Central and South Asia over the course of the next six hundred years. It, just as much as the religion of Islam, defines the character of modern Afghanistan.

I had some familiarity with this terrain, and found myself drawing on knowledge buried since my stint in grad school as I plunged into Bosworth's exposition.

In the early 600s, the great Persian Empire was sacked—morally and materially—by the conquests of the Muslim Arabs. They exploded on camels from the barren desert, armed with their novel religion, Islam. Iran, which included most of today's Iraq, was the land of the king of kings and elaborate courtly culture, of complex linguistic overlays and choreographed rituals in honor of absolutism. And it came crashing down under the lance thrusts of barbarians raised on a diet of dates and milk. Nothing like this had happened to Iran since Alexander the Great tore a swathe through it about nine hundred years earlier. Even compared to Alexander's uncouth Macedonians—rowdy drinkers and vocal egalitarians, violently suspicious of Persian hierarchy—the Arabs must have looked pretty rough. It took Iran centuries to recover.

But gradually, fertilized by the new sounds of the Arabic language and the elegant curves of its evolving script, by Islam's leveling piety, by the intellectual challenges of studying the new holy texts and seeking their meaning, of the quest for scientific knowledge and the struggle to hammer out new judicial principles in line with the new ethos, and by the eventual need for the administrative tools of empire, Iranian culture was reborn. Starting in the tenth and eleventh centuries, it spread eastward so powerfully and took such a hold that it was able to win over the hearts and minds of all the successive waves of later conquerors.
⁴

The poetry that recounted the exploits of mythic heroes like Jamshid was at the forefront of this cultural reawakening. It was infused with a new Iranian consciousness. The Iranians are the good guys, beset on all sides by monstrous foes. And the language of the epics, an oral vernacular that had seldom been transcribed in the past, is defiantly Persian. While different from the old imperial Pahlavi or the Aramaic of the ancient scribes, it contains almost no Arabic neologisms, which were studding spoken Persian by then. The poets, reveling in the invention of their new literary language, took pains to avoid Arabic words.

Yet there is one striking aspect of these stories whose aim is to celebrate Iran—as I was only now discovering. Their heroes, the champions who time and again rescue Iran's honor and increase her lands or sail out to discover marvels for the shah, do not hail from the heart of the Iranian kingdom, but from its eastern marches. The heroes—Jamshid, Zal, Rustam, Garshasp—come from Kandahar.
⁵

And so, though the actual details I was reading were fancifully ahistorical, I would surely discover some truths about the past of the Kandahar region buried in the epic poetry, like almonds studding a gossamer sweet.

By far the most renowned and influential of the books is the
Shahnama
, or the
Book of Kings
, written in the first quarter of the eleventh century by a poet named Abul-Qasim Firdowsi. Its chief hero is Rustam. In the story, his centuries-long life spans the reigns of several Iranian kings.

Born via cesarean-section, Rustam has already accomplished various exploits when the first event really defining his heroic identity takes place. He chooses a horse that will be his lifelong companion. “I need a horse of mountain height,” he declares, “one that no man but myself can take with a lasoo.”
⁶

And so all of the horses in Zabulistan and Kabulistan are driven before him. Rustam places a hand on the back of each, and each one's spine gives under the pressure. They won't do. “At last there arrived a troop from Kabul, and a spate of horses of every color rushed before him.” A colt catches his eye, whose “skin was bright and dappled as though flecked with the petals of red roses on saffron.” But the herdsman warns Rustam away, for whenever anyone draws near this colt, his dam “comes forward and fights like a lion.”
⁷

Grasping the sense of the omen, Rustam lassos the mare, overcomes her, and gains his four-footed comrade in arms.

As a backdrop, this episode evokes the importance of the Kabul-to-Kandahar zone in the transcontinental horse trade that was crucial to war making for centuries. Neither Iran, nor especially India, was as suited to raising horses as were the highland plateaus of this region. The animals foaled there, or those driven overland from Central Asia of the grassy steppes, often spent a season near Kandahar to rest and fatten up. Chaman, the name of that Pakistani border-town where my Achekzai friends live, means “grass” or “field.” The sight of those great herds of horses, pasturing in the city's environs as they awaited the spring and fall fairs, must have punctuated the rhythm of Kandaharis' lives. As late as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Afghans from near Kandahar still dominated the horse trade that provisioned the British army in India.
⁸

Examined more closely, the tale of Rustam and his horse Rakhsh echoes the historical encounter of Alexander the Great and his horse Bucephalas—which had momentous ramifications for Afghanistan.

The fiery steed Bucephalas, when presented at the royal court for inspection, was so aggressive that no one dared approach him, let alone throw a leg across his back. Disgusted, Alexander's father, Philip of Macedon, waved at the groom to take him away. But young Alexander instantly perceived the animal's worth. He made a bet with his father, and, understanding that Bucephalas was afraid, he mastered the creature with kindness and the complicit awareness of a shared destiny. And so was born one of the most profound friendships between a man and a beast in recorded history.
⁹

It was Bucephalas who carried Alexander the Great on an earth-shattering campaign of conquest and discovery across Iran and Central Asia and through the border areas—where he founded a city near Kandahar on his way to India.
¹⁰
Alexander appears in many of the Persian epics, including the
Shahnama
. But he is a purely whimsical character who does little more than gallivant around discovering fabulous creatures and strangely garbed humans. It is not surprising that such a telling incident as the gaining of an unrivaled horse should be transposed to Iran's most emblematic hero, Rustam.

Another animal appears frequently on the field of battle in the Persian epics: the elephant. Rustam himself is often referred to as “elephant bodied,” and his earliest feat was to kill the king's white elephant, which had gone on a rampage. The colossal elephant, with its utterly improbable nose and curving tusks, appears in the Persian poems not in the catalog of marvelous or mythical animals, as it did in Western medieval texts, but as an ordinary element of the royal household. For example, “The king's elephant advanced in the midst of the army, with golden bells and cymbals upon it.”
¹¹
It is a symbol of strength and courage in battle. The elephant's unre-markable presence in these stories attests to the cultural proximity, to their audience, of that other great basin of civilization: neighboring India.

In Kandahar, above the north side of town, a ragged chain of hills bars the way to leafy Arghandab and Khakrez beyond. The one on the end, a bit apart from the others, rests its trunk vertically along its front legs till it touches the ground. It is called Elephant Rock.

Kandahar has, age after age, marked the border between Iran and India. The struggle between the Safavis and the Moghuls was just a late chapter in a long tale. After Alexander's death on the road in 323
B
.
C
.—and a murderous, double-crossing, eye-clawing struggle for his succession—his general Seleucus Nikator gained sway over the part of the far-flung new empire that included the lands of modern Afghanistan. But Seleucus abandoned the region to the first Mauryan emperor of India. In fact, he
sold
Kandahar to India for the sum of five hundred elephants.
¹²

That delicious fact was lodged in another book I found on my visit to the Kabul library. It was an analysis of some inscriptions cut into a rock face, which archaeologists discovered in Kandahar in 1957.

The Indian ruler who ordered the inscriptions, Ashoka, was a grandson of the emperor who had bought Kandahar. Ashoka reigned from around 270 to 233
B
.
C
.. Inspired by Buddhism, he published a series of edicts encouraging nonviolence and tolerance and giving advice on how to live a happy life. The westernmost of these edicts is carved into the face of a rock wall outside Kandahar. Constant warfare in recent decades has effaced the memory of its location. (In 2002, an official of the UN educational agency, UNESCO, asked me if I could locate it for him. I could not.)