Magic Hours

by Tom Bissell

  While reading up on the available English-language literature concerning Central Asia, I came across Kaplan’s The Ends of the Earth: A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy (1996), which features a long section on Uzbekistan. Until Kaplan reaches the Uzbek capital, I read The Ends of the Earth more or less attentively. While Kaplan’s prose was usually peahen drab and his use of illustrative detail unimaginative, the man was certainly intrepid. He wanders from Sierra Leone to Iran to Cambodia, all the while splattering the reader with regurgitations of various scholarly research: where the word Turk comes from, a pocket history of the Iranian city of Qom, the “deceptive” nature of the term Indochina. I did not mind Kaplan’s cribs; I have done the same, as has every travel writer. Kaplan’s tone, however, often troubled me. The disintegrating, anarchic world he conjures in The Ends of the Earth is irradiated with tribalism, fanaticism, and stupidity, but since I had no first-hand experience with the places Kaplan was writing about, I swallowed his essential points even as I grimaced at the castor-oil hectoring that accompanied them.

  Then Kaplan arrives in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, a city filled with what he calls “the most hideous and alienating example of Soviet design I had seen. It cried out, We crush the weak.” I actually find Tashkent lovely. But then there was no accounting for taste. Once ensconced in Tashkent, Kaplan regards a Russian-Uzbek marriage he encounters there as “potentially dangerous.” His visit took place in 1994, only three years after the Soviet collapse. My first visit to Tashkent was in 1996, and Russian-Uzbek intermarriage, at least in Uzbekistan’s cities, was common enough, though perhaps in 1994 these issues were still smoldering. He then moves on to Samarkand, the noblest and most famous city in Central Asia. The bus ride from Tashkent to Samarkand provides some spectacularly rocky and mountainous scenery, but somehow Kaplan notices only “high weeds” and an “achingly flat, monochrome landscape.” Once he reaches Samarkand he remarks on the “battered automobiles, and people in unsightly polyester clothing.” Battered automobiles? Most of Uzbekistan’s people are poor, and this seemed needlessly petty. As for people’s clothing, I have never found Uzbekistan’s city-dwellers to be anything but maniacally fastidious about their appearance. (Shoe-shining is practically the Uzbek national pastime.) He gets wrong the 1994 exchange rate of the Uzbek currency by a factor of 100. He visits the tomb of the fourteenth-century despot Tamerlane, known as the Guri Amir, which he spells Gul Emir. He says the word uzbek means “independent” or “free.” It doesn’t. His translator, Ulug Beg, a young Uzbek, claims to be “ashamed” in Samarkand because it has so many Tajiks. “How can I like them?” Ulug Beg asks Kaplan of the Tajiks. “We must settle Uzbeks here. We must settle many, many Uzbeks in Samarkand.” Problem: Samarkand, though a Tajik-majority city, has many, many Uzbeks. He writes that Samarkand is a “would-be Bangkok,” with its “army of whores.” I asked a friend who lived in Samarkand for years if that description at all rang true to him. My friend was still laughing when I hung up the phone. When Ulug Beg slurps as he eats Kaplan calls him “crude” and wonders if Ulug Beg’s manners might be explained this way: “Could these be pre-Byzantine Turks? Could this be what Turks might have been somewhat like before the great Seljuk and Osmanli migrations to Anatolia?” The Seljuks migrated to Anatolia around 900 years ago. That Kaplan does not understand how offensive such eugenic explanations are for one young man’s eating habits is appalling. That he does not recognize the basic implausibility of such an explanation is beyond reason. This is to say nothing of the fact that, in Uzbek culture, slurping one’s soup is considered neither crude nor uncouth.

  Kaplan’s big thesis in The Ends of the Earth is that “ethno-cultural tensions” are leading to a world in which “national borders will mean less, while political power falls increasingly into the hands of less educated, less sophisticated groups,” in whose dim minds “the real borders are the most tangible and intractable ones: those of culture and tribe.” Like every nation, Uzbekistan has its “ethno-cultural tensions.” But a race riot here or there, especially in a nation faced with Uzbekistan’s crushing Soviet legacy, is hardly indicative of a globe trending toward disaster. Kaplan claims to give us the gristly stuff of what he calls “tragic realism,” to show us how the world works, and how it will likely fracture. Was it thus a coincidence or something far uglier that the Uzbekistan Kaplan describes is unrecognizable to me but happens to align perfectly with his grand thesis?

  How to deal with this fractious world is Kaplan’s great question. Some years ago, he has written, after a conference where “intellectuals held forth about the moral responsibility of the United States in the Balkans,” he took a cab back to the airport and was asked by the cabbie, “If there’s no oil there, what’s in it for us?” This was, Kaplan says, “a question none of the intellectuals had answered.” And shame on them, because “thousands of words and a shelf of books in recent years about our moral interest in the region do not add up to one sentence of national interest... It is only from bottom-line summaries that clear-cut policy emerges, not from academic deconstruction.” Kaplan once believed that something called “amoral self-interest” should be the defining aspect of American foreign policy. His hope for the Clinton administration was that it could “condense” a justification for Balkan intervention “into folksy shorthand,” because “speaking and writing for an elite audience is not enough.” Robert D. Kaplan, meet George W. Bush. The writer who could once argue that “the world is too vast and its problems too complicated for it to be stabilized by American authority,” has found his leader in a man who in the 2000 presidential debates proclaimed that the job of the military was “to fight and win war,” not toil as “nation builders.” Kaplan is said to have briefed President Bush in 2001, and today finds these protean gentlemen in a surlier and far more interventionist mood. They have fused an apparent personal fondness for strutting machismo with a fetishized idea of simplicity’s value. Both have willed into unsteady reality extremely forced senses of personal identification with the common American, whose imagined need for that which is clear and cut trumps all other moral and political considerations. Bush has gone from an isolationist to an interventionist minus the crucial intermediary stage wherein he actually became interested in other places. Kaplan has traveled from the belief that America should only “insert troops where overwhelming moral considerations crosshatch with strategic ones” to arguing that “September 11 had given the U.S. military the justification to go out scouting for trouble, and at the same time to do some good” seemingly without understanding that he has even changed. Doubtless both men would sit any skeptic down and soberly explain that September 11 changed everything. What September 11 changed, however, was not the world itself but their understanding of America’s role in the world. For President Bush and Robert D. Kaplan, September 11 primarily seems to mean never having to say you’re sorry.

  Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote that war is the extension of politics by other means. Bush and Kaplan, on the other hand, appear to advocate war as cultural politics by other means. This has resulted in a collision of second-rate minds with third-rate policies. While one man attempts to make the world as simple as he is able to comprehend it, the other whispers in his various adjutants’ ears that they are on the side of History itself.

  In Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece (2004), we learn a bit about Kaplan’s background. He began his career as a small-town newspaper journalist in Vermont, after which he attempted to get a job with “wire services, the television networks, and over a dozen large metropolitan newspapers.” Because of his “forgettable” resume and education at a “non-prestigious college,” Kaplan believes, he was unable to find work. So he went traveling. A graceful man might recount his early, humbling attempts to become a writer with, well, grace. Kaplan, however, has hewn from this block of youthfully ordinary frustration a chip he has spot-welded to his shoulder: “Like so many other free-lance journalists I would
meet over the years, I was never to enjoy the social and professional status—or the generous travel budgets—of foreign correspondents for major media organizations.” Never? This man has written for the Atlantic Monthly for twenty years. His books have been bestsellers. He has briefed two American presidents. It is either comical or pathetic or both that a writer so disdainful of “elites” and their fancy educations can write, “Just as military officers who have known war first-hand can grasp more fully the meaning of Thucydides, only after I married and had a family would I grasp what Virgil, Homer, Tennyson, and others meant by the hardship of travel.” The classics, that most elite form of moral instruction, are for Kaplan a Casaubonian key to experiential enlightenment. They allow him to pretend he’s Ulysses.

  In all of his books, but especially in Mediterranean Winter, Kaplan is incapable of making a point about the past without pointing a finger at the present. To wit: “Carthage’s defeat in the First Punic War—like Germany’s in World War I—led to anarchy at home.” But how is the 2,200-year-old First Punic War at all otherwise comparable to Weimar Germany? (In another book he again rolls out this hot rod, slightly modulated, and writes how the Second Punic War has “many resemblances to World War II that seems to warn against the hubris of our own era.”) He also connects, preposterously, a fourth-century BCE Athenian invasion of Sicily with “President Lyndon Johnson dispatching half a million American troops to South Vietnam.” Of course he acknowledges the differences, but they “seemed less interesting than the similarities.” That is because Kaplan is addicted to similarities and blind to differences. “One can write endlessly about the differences between the first and twenty-first centuries A.D.,” he writes in another book. Yes. One can.

  Kaplan’s bibliographies are usually anchored with fiction and poetry, and he can write how an iron balustrade reminds him of a line from Wallace Stevens. All of which makes the damage he has done to literature unforgivable. Kaplan’s “Euphorias of Hatred: The Grim Lessons of a Novel by Gogol,” an introduction to the Modern Library edition of Nikolai Gogol’s short novel Taras Bulba, is a bracing case in point. “The signal error of the American elite after the end of the Cold War,” Kaplan writes, “was its trust in rationalism, which, it was assumed, would eventually propel the world’s people toward societies based on individual rights, united by American-style capitalism and technology.” Again, this is by way of introducing a novel by Gogol (1809-1852). “The work has a Kiplingesque gusto, too, that makes it a pleasure to read.... We need more works like Taras Bulba, to better understand the emotional well-springs of the threat we face today in places like the Middle East and Central Asia.”

  Taras Bulba is about a few things—Ukraine in the seventeenth century, the Russian ideal of the romantic, a guy named Taras Bulba—but it cannot, under any reasonably sane reading, be said to warn us about Wahhabism or the Taliban. Late in his life Gogol himself abandoned rationality, burned the second volume of Dead Souls, surrendered to Christian mysticism, and starved himself to death. The original draft of Taras Bulba was written early in Gogol’s career, when he was gleefully strip-mining his exotic Ukrainian homeland to the delight of parochial Moscow’s literary circles, about which Kaplan has exactly zero to say. Kaplan’s take on Taras Bulba is so absurd it is amazing that when his introduction arrived at the Modern Library’s offices, the pages were not locked in a lead-walled time capsule.

  What happened to this man? Kaplan’s early books suggest a clue. His first, Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea (1988), an account of the famine that devastated Ethiopia in the mid-1980s, is not a bad book. “Drought,” he writes, “according to those first, memorable media reports, was the villain, and if anyone was to blame, it was the overfed West.” In fact, as Kaplan tells it, the famine was a neo-Stalinist device used by Ethiopia’s Marxist and politically powerful Amhara minority against their rebellious, also largely Marxist, and more numerous Eritrean and Tigrean fellows. His grief at the major media’s inability to grasp the famine’s classically Soviet character is compelling and convincing, and his account of traveling with the region’s Eritrean rebels is terrific. Even if the Ethiopian famine did not turn out to have the global ramifications Kaplan projected—wherever Kaplan travels, we are assured that whatever is happening there is going to have vast consequences—his attempt from within one of hell’s inner circles to make others take note of the suffering he has witnessed is salutary, and even moving. For once this monopolist of doom was looking around him rather than only forward and back.

  Soldiers of God, his next book, concerns Kaplan’s travels with the mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan war. He admits in the foreword to the paperback version that he “was caught up in the struggle to liberate Afghanistan, and my lack of objectivity shows; nor was I fair to some people, or as critical of others, as I should have been.” Actually, Kaplan is fairer and more objective in this book than anywhere else. Nonetheless, he still defends his “brutal, tragic” position that U.S. policy in Afghanistan was morally appropriate: “The United States, in the 1980s, was doing what great powers have done throughout history.... A state that neglects the projection of power has little chance of spreading its values.” But surely foresight is called for while the great power in question is spreading its values. American “policy” in Afghanistan consisted mainly of throwing guns and money at whichever nationalist, religious psychopath, or “commander” Pakistan’s secret service put forth as a slayer of Communist infidels. To be sure, the Soviet disaster in Afghanistan was well deserved and did help hasten the collapse of the Soviet regime, but many CIA agents on the ground and even many Afghans warned the State Department that it was financing its own assassins. As is now abundantly clear, the United States’ Afghanistan policy did not spread its values but undermine them.

  Nevertheless, Soldiers of God is Kaplan’s most well written book, his most empathetic, and his most humane. An early description of Kaplan’s waltz through a Soviet minefield is a model of descriptive writing. His take on Afghan’s guerrillas, while somewhat naive (as he himself admits), is, all the same, winningly honest: “Sympathizing with guerrilla movements is an occupational hazard of foreign correspondents everywhere, but the Afghans were the first guerrillas whom journalists not only sympathized with but actually looked up to.” The other Kaplan, however, shoulders his way forward from time to time, as when he condemns “the elite establishment media and the new brand of 1980s foreign correspondents who stocked their fridges with Perrier water and talked incessantly of their computer modems.”

  In Soldiers of God one finds what is surely a partial source of Kaplan’s later unhingedness: “Away from Pakistan and Afghanistan, I could barely speak about the war. When I told people where I had been, their blank expressions indicated I might as well have been on the moon. Of the few who were truly interested in what I had to say, the retort that often greeted me was: ‘Really? Well then, how come we read so little about it in the newspapers?’” Never again, he surely decided, would people doubt why being concerned with strife in faraway places is important. Kaplan would make it important, even if that meant being disingenuous and, indeed, often wrong about the places and conflicts he covered. Even if it meant Balkan Ghosts.

  Although it was widely acclaimed when published in 1993, Balkan Ghosts (called by Kaplan “an idiosyncratic travel book”) has over the years been savaged by many Balkan experts, and Kaplan himself has been blamed for President Clinton’s hesitancy to intervene against the Serbs’ slaughter of their Bosnian Muslim countrymen. Clinton, according to the political journalist Elizabeth Drew, used Kaplan’s dour, hopeless portrayal of the region to justify American inaction. Kaplan laments this in a new foreword to the most recent paperback edition: “That policy makers, indeed a president, might rely on such a book in reaching a momentous military decision would be frightening, if true. My personal suspicion is that back in 1993, at the beginning of his term, Clinton had so little resolve that he was casting around for any excus
e not to act.” This is doubly unfortunate, Kaplan writes, because “I myself have been a hawk on the issue” of intervening militarily in the Balkans.

  One can tell the charge has stung him. “Neither Martians nor President Clinton killed Bosnians,” Kaplan writes. “Other Bosnians did.” This is a perfectly reasonable thing to point out. What is less reasonable is his belief that Bosnians killed other Bosnians because they had been programmed to do so by history and ethnicity. Kaplan can complain about the unwarranted aftereffects of Balkan Ghosts all he wants, but he is the man who salted his book with statements such as, “while the Greeks and the Macedonian Slavs despise each other, as Orthodox Christians they equally despise the Muslim Kosovars.” The metaphysics of what makes people suddenly garrote and rape their neighbors can be debated from now until the end of time, but to generalize so complacently gives hatred a mask that too many can hide behind. In Kaplan’s telling, Balkan mass-murder was inevitable and unsurprising, given the region’s history. One wonders why, then, those who were slaughtered did not see it coming, and get out. “Nevertheless,” Kaplan writes in Balkan Ghosts’s new foreword, “nothing I write should be taken as a justification, however mild, for the war crimes committed by ethnic Serb troops in Bosnia, which I heartily condemn.” Here is a writer reassuring us that he does not think genocide is justifiable, and that he condemns it. Any book written in a way to require such a statement is on thin moral ice.

  Once the book proper begins, Kaplan tells us, “The Balkans produced the century’s first terrorists.” That is pretty definitively untrue, but at any rate terrorism is at least as old as warfare itself. Who gives a shit which region introduced it to the twentieth century? “Even the fanaticism of the Iranian clergy has a Balkan precedent.” It also has an American, English, Russian, French, and Spanish precedent. “Twentieth-century history came from the Balkans. Here men have been isolated by poverty and ethnic rivalry, dooming them to hate.” In Carinthia, Austria’s southernmost province, Kaplan notes that “a shop sold women’s undergarments from Paris that were as expensive as they were naughty. The perfume worn by the blond shop girl had a sweaty, animal scent.” Could this be a quirk of Kaplan’s inquisitive sniffer? No. You see, “The offspring of the SS have become expensively groomed, performing tigers, safely tucked away in middle-class box houses... Carinthians have become a tamed species.” It takes a special kind of man to waltz into a foreign city, tar the entire populace as recessive Nazis, and then refer to them as animals.