The Despondent
Nearly 70 million people live in Iran today. Seven in ten are young—under the age of thirty. Nearly one in four Iranians are under fifteen.420 They do not remember the heady days of the Revolution in 1979. They never experienced the thrill of overthrowing the shah. All they know are the broken promises. The ayatollahs pledged to their parents a society filled with hope, growth, and opportunity. Today, what they have instead is despair, unemployment, inflation, and chronic poverty. The vast majority of Iranians cannot defect, of course. Instead, they find themselves trapped and despondent.
Three decades after the Revolution, and despite the fact that Iran is sitting on a sea of oil and natural gas which should make for a robust export-driven economy, roughly a quarter of Iran’s eligible workforce—about 6.5 million people—cannot find a job, though the government officially acknowledges an unemployment rate of only about 10 percent.421 Inflation in 2008, meanwhile, hovered around 30 percent, making it difficult even for those with a job to keep up with the cost of essential goods and services.422 At least one in five Iranians live below the poverty level, and 5 million Iranians survive on less than two dollars a day, according to the CIA and the U.N.423
Some Iranians, however, say that the situation is far worse. “Ninety percent of the population are living under the poverty level, and only ten percent of the people have access to social services provided by the government,” said Mohammad Abbaspour, a member of the Iranian Majlis (parliament) who serves on the Social Affairs Committee, in 2005.424425
As the Revolution failed to deliver on its promises, drug use—particularly among young people—skyrocketed year after year. Despite the fact that every Iranian government beginning with Khomeini’s has cracked down on illegal drugs, today there are more than 4 million drug addicts in Iran, 11 million drug users, and half a million drug dealers. According to one top Iranian drug enforcement official, “every three minutes, one person in society becomes addicted to drugs.”426
According to the U.N.’s 2007 World Drug Report, Iran has the highest proportion of opium and heroin addicts on the entire planet—2.8 percent of the population. No other country is even close; Afghanistan comes in second at 1.4 percent.427 The director of the Iranian National Center for Addiction Studies told the Washington Post in 2005 that 20 percent of Iran’s adult population is “somehow involved in drug abuse,” while an Iranian doctor who treats drug abuse told the Post that 68 percent of his patients started using drugs before age twenty and said bluntly, “We have despair.”428
Worst of all, experts say Iran has not reached the peak of the drug addiction epidemic.429 Said Reza Sarami, a top Iranian antinarcotics official: “If nothing is done to reduce this increase in drug users, we will have some nine million addicts in less than twenty years,” more than double the 4 million addicts Iran has now.430
The Disgusted
Despair is one response for those who cannot defect.
Another is sheer anger and disgust. Tens of millions of Iranians are furious at the Radicals. Individually, they have no political power. But they are increasingly repulsed by the jihadists and particularly by the Muslim-on-Muslim violence they see being perpetrated in Iran, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, in Pakistan, in Sudan, and in suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks from Casablanca to Istanbul to Riyadh. As a result, they are listening carefully to whatever Reformers they can find on the radio, on satellite television, and on the Internet, and they are moving steadily into the Reformer camp.
While I was researching this book, I interviewed a senior official working for a Western intelligence agency. This man spent many years in Iran and was once his agency’s station chief in Tehran. The facts he shared with me about the magnitude of the Iranian leadership’s cruelty against their own people floored me. But such statistics are certainly no secret to Iranians trapped inside the country or to the estimated 5 million Iranians who live in exile. Consider the following:
• Iran has executed more than 120,000 of its citizens on political grounds since 1979, including pregnant women, elderly women, and schoolchildren.
• Iran massacred 30,000 political prisoners in 1988 alone.
• Iran’s secret police employ 170 forms of physical and psychological torture.
• The regime sends some 800,000 Iranians to prison every year.
• The regime employs stoning; public hangings; eye gouging; amputation of fingers, hands, and legs; beheading; and flogging in public as “punishment” for disobedience.
• Iran’s government has engaged in no fewer than 450 terrorist operations around the world, including bombings, hijacking, abductions, and assassinations.
• At least eighty newspapers and periodicals have been closed down by the regime since April 2000, dozens of Iranians journalists are in jail, and some have called Iran “the world’s biggest prison for journalists.”
• Iran has the highest suicide rate in the world (200 fatal suicide attempts for every 100,000 people).
• Some 1,500 Iranians flee the country every day.431
With a burning desire to speak out against such atrocities—but with few means to talk to each other, much less the outside world—“the Disgusted” in Iran have turned to blogging. Today, there are at least eighty thousand Iranian blogs on the World Wide Web, electronic personal journals in which people write daily, and sometimes hourly, entries about their thoughts, feelings, political views, and the issues of the day. Farsi is actually the third most popular language on the Internet, after English and Mandarin Chinese.432
To scan such Farsi blogs is to take the temperature of the molten anger building up pressure underneath the regime in Tehran and threatening to explode like a volcano. Consider a sampling from a half dozen different Iranian bloggers:
“I [expletive deleted] the whole of Hezbollah [party of Allah] . . . and your distorted Islam and its ideology that you use to diminish a human being through torture. . . . This generation [of young people] finally . . . realize[s] what sort of hole it’s in. . . . People put an ayatollah and the clergy on the same level as pimps and thugs.”
“In my life there have been times when, consumed with rage, I have felt infinite helplessness and loss . . . a time when you feel that an injustice is crushing your mind. . . . You want to scream and shout and all you can see is the sneering face of your enemy . . . an opponent who seems only to get turned on even more at the spectre of your wet eyes and red cheeks. . . . [These are] times when you feel that God must feel ashamed to have created man.”
“I have lived for 27 years . . . under revolution, repression, assassinations, hangings, and war. . . . My youth and childhood passed away during bombings . . . gazing at the trembling hands of my elders. . . . Sometimes I think this place is the land cursed by God.”
“If only those Muslim idiots in our neighboring countries knew about our failed experiment with an Islamic government they would come to their senses, too. . . . [The Revolution] is finished . . . and when these mullahs are dethroned . . . it will be like the Berlin Wall coming down. . . . Soon we will be rid of them. . . . A little patience . . . our dawn is near.”
“For me the most shocking aspect of 9/11 was that this was not some lone gunman but a group of people who voluntarily colluded in this evil act. . . . Didn’t any of those involved have moments of sanity and say to themselves: ‘What we are doing is pure evil’? . . . But it’s no longer just 9/11. We are seeing so many acts of pure evil around the world committed by Muslims. . . . I have no doubt about the evil nature of our rulers and their ability to perpetrate acts of pure wickedness. . . . I cannot stop feeling an enormous sense of shame, guilt, and helplessness.”
“I keep a weblog so that I can breathe in this suffocating air. . . . In a society where one is taken to [prison] for the mere crime of thinking, I write so as not to be lost in despair . . . so that I feel that I am somewhere where my calls for justice can be uttered. . . . I write a weblog so that I can shout, cry, and laugh, and do th
e things that they have taken away from me in Iran today.”433
It is not just millions of Iranians who are despondent and disgusted by the ideas and the acts of the Radicals. Hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world feel similarly.
Consider, for example, an intriguing trend in Pakistan in recent years. A 2004 Pew poll found that Osama bin Laden enjoyed a 65 percent favorable rating among Pakistani men.434 Though profoundly disturbing in a country of 170 million people—and a nation that possesses nuclear weapons—this finding should not really be surprising. Pakistan has long been considered a hotbed of Radical Islam and, as noted earlier in this book, is very possibly the country where Osama bin Laden has been hiding since the liberation of Afghanistan.
But by September of 2007, after three years of highly publicized and at times spectacular al Qaeda violence against Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, bin Laden’s approval rating in Pakistan was down to 46 percent.435
Who was the most popular political leader in Pakistan at the time? Not bin Laden. Not President Musharraf, either, who had an approval rating of only 38 percent.
Rather, the leader of the pack was Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistani prime minister who was promising to come home from exile and run for president on a bold and sweeping platform of reform. In September 2007, Bhutto had an approval rating of 63 percent.436 Many intelligence and political analysts believe she was well poised to defeat Musharraf in the next elections and emerge as the next president of Pakistan. As noted in the last chapter, however, she was assassinated.
Did bin Laden’s approval rating bounce back as a result? To the contrary, by January 2008, bin Laden’s approval rating among Pakistanis had sunk to just 24 percent, a record low in seven years of polling. Al Qaeda’s approval rating, meanwhile, dropped from 33 percent in August 2007 to just 18 percent in January 2008.437
Chapter Seventeen
Meet Hamid Karzai
The inside story of the first democratically elected president of Afghanistan
It is hard to imagine a country less likely to become a democracy. Indeed, Afghanistan is still a work in progress, and it remains to be seen whether democracy can truly take hold. But Afghanistan and its fiercely independent people have certainly had a knack for defying the odds.
Long ruled by kings, the landlocked and poverty-stricken region became a nation-state in 1747 but held little interest for the West until the Soviets invaded in 1979. That should have been the end. To jaded Washington eyes, Afghanistan seemed destined to be swallowed up by Moscow to serve as another satellite state. But the Afghan people refused to surrender. And Ronald Reagan refused to let them.
By the early 1980s, Afghanistan was quickly becoming the central front in the epic struggle between the forces of freedom and the Communists of the Kremlin. With tremendous bravery, unflinching resolve, and billions of dollars in American aid and weaponry—including state-of-the-art Stinger antiaircraft missiles—the Afghans eventually defeated the mighty Red Army and, by the end of the 1980s, drove every single Soviet soldier out of their country. It was a stunning victory. One for the storybooks. And then, to our shame, we forgot about Afghanistan again.
The United States had built up significant goodwill inside Afghanistan. We had forged strong, albeit covert, relationships with national leaders, tribal chieftains, and well-educated young people eager to reclaim and rebuild their nation. We could have provided humanitarian relief for the 5 million refugees wasting away in squalid camps on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. We could have helped the Afghans build schools and hospitals and farms and factories. We could have helped them build roads and electrical plants and drill thousands of wells to provide fresh water.
I’m not saying we should have done everything for them, but we could have helped. We should have helped. But we did not. Once the Soviets pulled out, we pulled out too.
A Radical “Paradise”
The provisional post-Soviet Afghan government collapsed in 1992, and into the vacuum rushed the Radicals, specifically Mohammed Omar—aka “Mullah Omar”—the ferocious and fanatical mujahadeen commander who once lost an eye in a firefight with the Russians but recovered and went on to found the Taliban, one of the most extreme jihadist organizations on the planet.
The Afghanis had been raped and pillaged by the Evil Empire from the North, Omar noted, and they had now been abandoned and betrayed by the infidels from the West.
But this was cause for celebration, not sadness, Omar insisted. He argued that Allah had given the Afghan people a great victory in war and now it was time to give him thanks by constructing a purely Islamic country, governed by Sharia law, built on the sacred ashes of the past.
Not everyone was enamored of Omar’s vision, much less wanted to see him in charge. But Omar was not about to take no for an answer. He believed he was chosen by God and was fighting for God and that God would give him victory. By the mid-1990s, after years of brutal, bloody tribal warfare and horrific sectarian violence, the fighters of the Taliban had successfully suppressed most of their opposition and had secured control of the country. In a world of blind men, a one-eyed man—literally—was now king.
It is difficult to put into words the reign of terror the Taliban unleashed on the people of Afghanistan. To talk to Afghans who suffered through the hellish conditions these Radicals created, as I had the opportunity to do on a research trip to Kabul in October 2008, is to wind up in tears at the nearly unbelievable stories they tell. Wives were beaten by their husbands without reason, with the regime’s encouragement. Women were forbidden to style their hair. They were forbidden to wear nail polish. They were forced to wear blue burkas that covered them head to toe and were practically suffocating in hot weather.
Many children were beaten by their fathers and psychologically abused. Their schools were shut down. Their toys were taken from them. Movies were forbidden. Television was forbidden. Radio was forbidden, except for a station that continuously taught from the Qur’an. Games were forbidden. Kite flying was forbidden. Concerts were forbidden. Playing music in public was forbidden. New Year’s celebrations were forbidden. Christmas decorations were forbidden. Christianity was most certainly forbidden.
Museums were closed. Zoos were closed. Dissenters were jailed. Others were murdered. Apostates were executed. “If you ever wanted to see Satan operating in the open, Afghanistan was it,” said a friend of mine who used to travel to Kabul frequently before 9/11. “The Taliban was true evil, unmasked, unrestricted. I have never seen anything like it.”438
It was into this Radical “paradise” that Mullah Omar invited Osama bin Laden.
Omar extended an invitation for the al Qaeda leader and his terror network to come back to Afghanistan after a season in Sudan, set up their training camps in the Hindu Kush Mountains, and enjoy a sanctuary far from the Americans, the British, and the Israelis, who were beginning to understand the threat they posed to the West. Bin Laden gladly accepted the offer. Sure, he would rather have overthrown the Saudi royal family, seized control of the Arabian Peninsula, and set up “the base” in Mecca or Medina. But the icon of Sunni jihadists considered Afghanistan holy ground, and a second home. And it was there that he and his colleagues began plotting the 9/11 attacks and trying to purchase weapons of mass destruction.
Once again, all seemed lost for the Afghan people. Yes, the vast majority were proud, traditional Muslims. Yes, most believed the Qur’an taught them to wage jihad in defense of their country, and they had done so to repel the Soviets. Yes, they had been grateful for outside help from America and Saudi Arabia alike. But they had not signed up for this. They were not ethnically Arabs. They were not theologically Wahhabis. They were not politically Fascists. And yet now, suddenly, after all their sacrifice and suffering, here they were, slaves of the Salafists. Their children were being recruited for jihad or forced to do unspeakable things in the name of Allah. Hope was fading quickly. Depression was rising. Drug use was rampant. The country was becoming the world’s number
-one source for opium and heroin, and there seemed no way out.
Yet to their credit, the Afghans never gave up. In the north, an anti-Taliban resistance movement was recruiting, training, and building an army from a range of Afghan tribes known as the Northern Alliance. In the West, Afghan exiles—such as King Zahir Shah (no relation to the shah of Iran), who had been deposed in 1973 and was living in Rome—were trying to explain the enormous and growing danger posed by the Taliban and al Qaeda and appealing to the U.S. and the E.U. for financial and political assistance to push back and eventually take them down. In Pakistan, a young Afghan exile by the name of Hamid Karzai—once a member of the mujahadeen and briefly a Taliban sympathizer himself—was going through a remarkable personal and political transformation and emerging as the leader of the anti-Taliban opposition.
Then came 9/11. The West was suddenly awakened from its slumber. It suddenly remembered Afghanistan. It suddenly had to. And once the liberation of that ancient country began, its people and the international community turned to Karzai to lead the way.
A Family of Moderates
Hamid Karzai was born one of eight children—seven boys and one girl—in the village of Karz, in the Kandahar Province of Afghanistan, on Christmas Eve, 1957.
His family was prominent and well-off. His father was the educated and widely respected chief of the Popolzai tribe. A devout, traditional Muslim, Karzai’s father had made his pilgrimage to Mecca but did not believe his country should be governed by Sharia law. To the contrary, he was a political moderate and a constitutional monarchist who was personally close to the king, who was then still in power. He continually encouraged the king to expand personal freedoms and give tribal leaders more opportunities to participate in the decision making of the country.
Inside the Revolution Page 28