Kabul, at last! This is the phrase that came to my mind the other night when one of the commanders of the Northern Alliance told me over the telephone that the Afghan capital had been liberated.
Almost 30 years earlier I had pronounced the same phrase when our plane, coming from Tehran, had landed at what looked a dangerously narrow and short runway close to Kabul. With my head full of the romantic ideas of the 1960s, I had dreamed of Kabul as an earthly paradise of simple life, freedom, and human bonding. The décor was certainly right: the snow-capped peaks, the orchards all around the city, the modest buildings, the sleepy bazaar, and the almost traffic free streets produced calming effect in sharp contrast with the mad hustle and bustle of congested and polluted Tehran.
The first thing that impressed a visitor was the slowness of the pace of life. Well, we called it slowness because we had become speed mad; the truth is that the life in Kabul had the normal, natural human rhythm. People always had time for you and knew how to allocate the time needed for every activity. The next thing that was impressive was the presence of large numbers of highly educated Afghans, often with degrees from leading Western universities, who were prepared to work hard for meager salaries. Although 85 percent of Afghans were illiterate at the time, the country probably had the best-educated governing elite in the Muslim world. There was one university in the whole country, in Kabul, whose rector, a French-educated academic of much intellectual worth had left a prestigious and well-paid position in Paris in exchange for a salary of $10 a month. Cabinet ministers were paid even less and often lived more on idealism than material comfort.
This was one of the world’s poorest countries. And yet its people, at all levels, loved it beyond all measure. No one could have imagined that the day will come when millions of Afghans would be refugees in more than 100 countries across the globe. (I wonder how many of the educated elite, now scattered abroad, will return home to help rebuild their shattered country.)
The government, headed by the King Muhammad Zaher Shah who had been in power since 1932, had a limited, partly symbolic, role. What the king liked best was to go on hunting trips in a land that was a hunter’s paradise. On one occasion we had to wait a week before seeing his majesty because he had simply decided to prolong one of his shooting trips. Afghanistan’s 30,000 villages were mostly self-governing. A token police force existed in Kabul, mostly in charge of an often non-existent traffic. There were just six political prisoners, including Nur-Muhammad Taraki who was to become president of the Communist regime. There were rumors that the king’s cousin, Muhammad Dawood, was plotting against the king, but no one took him seriously.
In those days Kabul was a favorite destination for millions of young Westerners who came in search of what they believed was “oriental simplicity and truth.” Life was inexpensive. A tourist could live in Kabul for months on a few dollars. Even if you had no money the Afghans, the most hospitable people I have met, would never leave you in dire straits. A foreign visitor was always welcome for meals or spending weeks and months as houseguest even in the most modest Afghan families. There was of course no sign of the Taleban-imposed burqa, which had been abolished by the king’s grandfather a generation earlier. Nor were any Salafi-style beards, and Afghan men were content with moustaches modeled on that of Sultan Mahmoud Ghaznavi, the man who conquered the Indian Subcontinent for Islam.
Afghanistan was the only country, apart from Saudi Arabia, to be 100 percent Muslim. (The last non-Muslim tribes of Kaffiristan had converted a century earlier and changed their province’s name to Nuristan.) Islam formed a major part of national life, but to most Afghans religion was meant to serve man rather than the other way round.
As proud as any nation, the Afghans, even the poorest, were aware of their land’s plurimillennial history that represented the synthesis of many cultures and civilizations.
No one could have imagined at the time that a band of Communist fanatics would reject that heritage in the name of a non-existent proletariat. Nor could one imagine that one day a semi-literate religious fanatic would try to wipe out the nation’s entire history in the name of an Islam reduced to the level of appearances.
My first impressions of Afghanistan were further confirmed by numerous subsequent visits. Each time I went to Afghanistan I loved it more. Afghanistan of the 1970s was, for me at least, likely to escape Iran’s brutal encounter with modernity; it was to enter the modern world much later but more smoothly and with less loss of the positive and humane aspects of its heritage.
I recall those days, no doubt further romanticized by the passage of time and the effect of nostalgia, the nectarine of despair, to emphasize an important point. Afghans are not the barbarous warriors portrayed by the global media in recent years.
The Communist gang that seized power and murdered virtually the whole of the nation’s highest echelon of leadership in 1973 first introduced the savage brutality that has become part of Afghan politics. That was followed by massacres of ordinary people on a larger scale in more than a dozen provinces.
The overwhelming majority of Afghans hated the Communists not only because of their ideology, of which the average Afghan had only a vague notion, but also as agents of the Soviet Union, an ancestral enemy that had always wanted to dominate Afghanistan.
After the Communists were defeated Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord backed by Pakistan, introduced a new level of brutality in Afghan politics. People talk of how Kabul was destroyed after the collapse of Communism, but forget to point the finger of blame at the man chiefly responsible for that crime. Later, the Pakistani and Arab “volunteers” who sided with the Taleban injected even more savage brutality into Afghan politics. Bamiyan was almost completely destroyed, all its 40,000 inhabitants murdered or driven into the surrounding caves. The United Nations has established that non-Afghan “volunteers” did most of the killing.
Take the foreign element out and I doubt that Afghans will massacre one another in a scramble for power.
And that brings me to a second misconception spread by the global media. This presents the Afghans not as a nation but as a patchwork of tribes. Self-styled experts keep guessing who is a Pashtun and who a Tajik or an Uzbek. They ignore the fact that a strong sense of “ Afghanitude” has come into being ever since Afghanistan was constituted into a distinct state from the 18th century onwards.
There are seven ethnic communities, each with sub-branches, and four linguistic families, again with many branches each. But these are not like streams flowing away from one another. They are streams that all flow into the same river. Inside Afghanistan a man may describe himself as Pashtun or Tajik. Outside Afghanistan, however, he is only an Afghan and proud of it. I have noticed less ethnic parochialism and tribalism in Afghanistan than in the United States where hyphenated identity, e.g. African-American or Muslim-American, is the fashion.
Finally, let me emphasize one more point: It is in everybody’s interest to leave Afghanistan alone. Afghanistan’s current tragedy is due to the fact that it became one of the hottest theaters of the Cold War in the 1980s. That was followed by a proxy war fought between Iran and Pakistan through their respective Afghan clients. By 1998 the Pakistanis seemed to have won through the Taleban. The Taleban and the Osama Bin Laden gang represented the last attempt at foreign domination in Afghanistan.
It would be wrong, and ultimately as futile, for the US and its allies to try to impose a new form of foreign domination.
Leave the Afghans alone, stop financing rival warlords, and prevent Afghanistan’s neighbors, especially Iran and Pakistan, from meddling, and the country will soon become peaceful and, once again, forgotten. Except may be by young Westerners seeking “oriental simplicity and peace.”
