The Arab Mujahedeen who went to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight against the Soviet occupation chose the wrong side in the wrong war in the wrong place and at the wrong time.
This is the message of “The Road to Kabul”, a new Arab television series which is captivating millions of spectators as the Arab world is put in low gear for the annual fasting month of Ramadan. The series was made in 38 hour-long episodes by a group of Palestinian and Jordanian filmmakers for the Qatari television that, in turn, sold it to several networks, including MBC, a Saudi-owned satellite channel. The Qatari television, however, decided to cancel its own screening, scheduled for the start of Ramadan just over a week ago, ostensibly for “ technical reasons”. It then informed other channels that had bought the series that they would not receive the remaining 30 episodes. The Qatari decision has triggered threats of lawsuits from the concerned channels. It has also produced an avalanche of rumors about the reasons for the cancellation. One such is that Condoleezza Rice, President George W Bush’s national security advisor, phoned the Qatari leaders to ask them not to air the series.
The series is woven around a love story between a Palestinian whose parents lost their homes when Israel was created, and an Afghan woman whose family were forced to flee Kabul when the Communists seized power in 1979.
Once he develops an interest in the Afghan imbroglio, the Palestinian quickly concludes that this is the wrong war, provoked by the United States against the Soviet Union in the context of the Cold War. In one dramatic scene, he gives an Arab volunteer who is going to Afghanistan a lecture on how the whole thing is an American conspiracy to divert attention from the only war that matters: The war to liberate Palestine, presumably by wiping Israel off the map.
That view is hammered in throughout. One scene shows American intelligence agents encouraging Afghans to grow opium poppies that can then be used to produce heroin to be sold to Soviet soldiers.
We see one particularly obnoxious American agent boasting about an “igneous plan” worked out by his boss William Casey, CIA director under President Ronald Reagan, to finance the Afghan war with money from heroin sold to the Soviet Army. The agent says that the US has tested the method with “The Opium War” that brought China to its knees in the 19th century. (The US, of course, had nothing to do with the Chinese Opium War that involved only the British at the time.)
The series also claims that the Islamist radical movement that began to develop from the late 1970s onwards was the fruit of an American conspiracy to mobilize Muslims against the USSR and use the Mujahedeen as foot soldiers in a proxy war.
“You are not fighting for Islam or the Afghan people,” the Palestinian character tells one Arab volunteer. “You are fighting for the Americans.”
In a roundabout way the series tries to relay another message: The Americans have only themselves to blame for the Sept. 11 attacks against New York and Washington. The jihadists who carried out the attacks were fruits of a deadly seed sowed by the United States and its regional allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In order to portray the American as evil incarnate, the series tries to humanize the Soviet occupation. The Red Army is represented by a number of kindly officers led by a bumbling general with a special fondness for the bottle. There is no sign of the systematic destruction that the Red Army carried out throughout Afghanistan. If anything the Red Army is depicted as a double victim, first of unidentified “conspirators” in the Kremlin who fell into the American trap, and then the jihadists who kill indiscriminately. In one scene the series’ heroine, a British-educated doctor whose son has just been injured in an explosion meets the Soviet general and gives him a lecture on poverty and despair in Afghanistan. The general, having just emptied his vodka bottle, nods in sympathy and orders that medical supplies be provided for treating the injured boy.
Judging by anecdotal evidence many Arab viewers love the series. They are comforted in their deep-rooted belief that the only issue that deserves their sympathy is Palestine. Even if Afghans are Muslims and six times as numerous as the Palestinians, their occupation and massacre by the Soviets does not appear as shocking as the oppression of the Palestinians by Israel.
The series exaggerates the role played by the so-called “Arab Afghans” who are presented as the backbone of the war against the Red Army. In fact, the “Arab Afghans” never numbered more than 3,000 compared to over 250,000 native Afghan fighters operating in dozens of guerrilla groups throughout the country.
The “Arab Afghans” were mostly attached to three Pushtun groups led respectively by Abdul-Rasul Sayyaf, Yunus Khalis and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
According to most experts, the impact of these groups on the course of the war in Afghanistan was minimal at best. And when the final crunch came in 1992, none of those groups played any role in capturing Kabul that fell to a coalition of Tajik warriors, led by the late Ahmad Shah Massoud, and the Uzbek militia of Abdul-Rashid Dostum. The series elevates Osama Bin Laden, the fugitive Al-Qaeda terror chief, to the position of a major war leader and a “sheikh” with implied religious authority. Again, this flies in the face of historic facts. Despite his claims about having won a Kalashnikov by killing a Russian general in battle, Bin Laden never saw any serious combat in Afghanistan.
Shot in Jordan with Arab actors and soldiers from the Jordanian Army as extras, the series fails to reproduce an Afghan atmosphere. Jordan is a desert land while Afghanistan is a land of high mountains. The decors and the costumes are also more Arab than Afghan while the theme and background music is either Arabic or Western. Much of the dialogue consists of tearjerkers or pseudo-philosophico-religious clichés.
In one scene an Arab jihadist boasts that he is fighting with “the book in my heart and the gun in my hand.” The series does not question the combination. It only suggests that the jihadists chose the wrong enemy.
