Notes on a Foreign Country

by Suzy Hansen

  What did he mean, my country had everything to do with what Iraq was like then? There I had the usual problems. One, I did not know the history. Two, I did not know to imagine how that history affected people on an individual level. Our foreign policy, our wars, almost never affected Americans. What did he mean? He meant the bombs of 1991, which nearly destroyed Baghdad and killed thousands of people, and he meant the support for Saddam in the 1980s, which prolonged the Iran-Iraq War. And he meant the sanctions, which destroyed the livelihoods of men and families, plunged people into poverty, and caused as many as five hundred thousand children to die. (About which Madeleine Albright—today a feminist icon—once said, “We think the price is worth it.”) The sanctions were still in effect when we invaded Iraq in 2003, but I remember hearing little about them. The Iraqi man said he despised America for the sanctions above all else.

  If as an American I merely ignored, was not incensed or heartbroken by American actions like sanctions, then it must have been because I somehow believed that those Iraqis were deserving of sanctions. What this does in the end is create a distance between myself and those foreigners I thought deserving of sanctions. It is one that cannot be bridged. The difference between us and them is that our country has created this universe in which sanctions are acceptable punishment for everyone except our country. It means that no other country can force my father to lose his job, or force my family to go hungry, or to break up my family, or to forever distort my future, but my country can do that to almost any other foreigner, including the man sitting across from you at a café.

  One of the assumptions that allowed for sanctions was that life under the madman Saddam Hussein was terrible anyway, which was true, it was terrible. But what Americans likely didn’t know was that the Iraqi government had for a long time provided its people with adequate health care, schools, and social programs. “Baghdad University in the 1980s had more female professors than Princeton did in 2009,” according to the British-Pakistani writer Tariq Ali. Literacy was almost ninety percent, people had gone to university for free. Sanctions only hastened Iraq’s decline. Before the invasion, some optimistic Iraqis might have hoped that the United States, in promising them freedom and prosperity, would herald a return to the golden age of the 1970s, when Baghdad was, according to the journalist Anthony Shadid, a libertine paradise of vibrant cultural production and dazzling street life. While the Americans were promising a fantasy version of American life—all freedom and democracy—Iraqis likely envisioned a better version of Iraqi life, one rooted in history and reality. Americans never grasped that Iraqis might have their own idea of what a good life would entail. In the first days of the American occupation—and what would turn out to be the next decade—Iraqis were bewildered that the United States could not even provide them with electricity, Shadid writes. In 1991, after the first Gulf War, Saddam got the lights back up within months.

  But such was our sense, rooted in modernization theory, that all other nations were decades behind us and thus needed our interference, all of these fantasies we held on to even as America’s own infrastructure—its airports, its roads, its hospitals, its schools—deteriorated. In his introduction to Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society, David Riesman writes, “The Arabs were once a great civilization. The illiterate in his depression, and the modernizer in his impatience, live amid the ruins of greatness. How open and how empathic will Americans be, how magnanimous, if our turn comes to live amid the ruins of our modernity?” Instead, like the featherweight symbols Americans had turned themselves into, they believed their mere presence in Iraq would incarnate some illusory democracy. It was because we did not see Iraqis as humans that we did not know that “democracy,” a word by then sucked of most of its meaning by the American century, might have mattered less to most parents than the ability to feed, house, educate, and protect their children.

  “Either you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists,” President George W. Bush said before the invasion, echoing Truman. For sixty years, all over the world, people struggled with the binary universe Americans created—wouldn’t someone want to resist it merely because of the hypocrisy? You can be free as long as you want our freedom. Such dichotomies, such totalitarian views, created many little monsters in its image. It is shocking to read Shadid’s Night Draws Near now and notice that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the ideological founder of ISIS, emerges during the first years of the occupation. The book was published in 2005, eight years before ISIS became known to the world.

  In 2017, the articles still appear with anguished regularity in the papers: “Who is ISIS and what do they want?” When ISIS first declared itself, so many American policy makers said its existence wouldn’t have been possible without the collapse of Syria into civil war. But ISIS was born from the Iraqi occupation; it came from the Americans. It may have grown from the darkness, because the Americans couldn’t make the electricity work. It may have grown from the world we created in Iraq: the night raids by scary hulks draped in weaponry, kicking open doors and humiliating men and dishonoring women, the bombs from the air, the tanks in the street. Our mercenary thugs, the Blackwater men sitting off the backs of trucks with machine guns and wraparound glasses and leathery skin, grimacing at everything that moved, lawless individuals attached to no army, were no less terrifying to an Iraqi child than is ISIS to us, with its black flags and hoods and macabre videos. It was hardly noticed, as ISIS ran across the map of the Middle East, gobbling up pieces of land like an amazingly fast zombie free-for-all, that this militant army now occupying lands was born during an occupation, that they were thousands of occupied men who likely knew of no better way to gain power than to imitate the occupier, to defeat him at his own game.

  6.

  LITTLE AMERICAS: AFGHANISTAN, PAKISTAN, AND TURKEY

  When we revert to the final solution of kill or be killed, all warring parties in the name of clan tribe nation religion violate the first law of civilization—that human life is precious. In this general collapse, one of the first victims is language. Words are deployed as weapons to identify, stigmatize, eliminate, the enemy.

  —JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN

  A FEW YEARS AFTER the financial crisis, America’s jobs, it seemed, were in Kabul. I knew a lot of journalists and photographers in Istanbul who worked there regularly, and they would return with terrifying stories of night raids and Taliban ambushes and rides in Black Hawk helicopters, at the end of the day collapsing into bed, caked in dirt. But it seemed journalism was not the only reason to go to Kabul. At the time, an unemployed American friend in Istanbul could not get any government jobs in D.C., but in any case, he said, “all the good jobs,” those for a hundred thousand dollars a year or more, were in Kabul. For a lot of those jobs, you had to have a master’s degree, at least; even in their desperation for applicants the American government maintains high standards for positions with inexplicable purposes: “program officer,” “regional governance specialist,” “communication and reporting officer.” A recent Harvard graduate I met in Istanbul was furious that she wasn’t qualified to work in Kabul—so many of her friends were there, and she had even studied Dari, and “wouldn’t it just be interesting to go?”

  My boyfriend at the time, a journalist, first brought up the possibility of my visiting Kabul at my parents’ dinner table: “Suzy’s really gotta come to Kabul,” he said in a way that sounded like, “You really gotta get out to Des Moines some time.” The table had fallen silent, that being the first time my parents reconsidered how much they thought they liked my new boyfriend. “Are you insane?” I said to him with my eyes, my hands frozen on either side of my plate, but he was chewing his steak and rhapsodizing about how beautiful we’d all find Afghanistan. Foreigners fall in love with Afghanistan like they would a young girl.

  My family, by then, had come to accept my life in Istanbul. They even visited several times, shocked by how beautiful and modern and gentle the country was. Not only was I safe there but, post–financial
crisis, there were fewer opportunities for me at home. My parents were pragmatists, little different from the Americans Googling for high salaries in Kandahar. Americans were trying to figure out how to either take advantage of or survive in this new world.

  At that time, suicide bombers struck Kabul once a month, but my journalist friends said it was safe, compared to Helmand. Foreign correspondents had well-honed ways of deflecting fear. At night they still filled up Kabul’s one Italian restaurant or Thai place, marveled over how they got that kind of fish in Afghanistan. I wanted to see this parallel world that had been created in the semipeaceful headquarters of our nine-year war. “But remember, it’s not really like an occupation,” I was told. The military had recently announced, in the eerily professional and nonsensical jargon with which it announces important battles, that they would invade Kandahar soon, and “reverse the momentum and gain time and space for the Afghan capacity.” To protest this incursion in their “political and spiritual center,” the Taliban began firing rockets; journalists in Istanbul put in their requests for a seat on the bus.

  Many reporters and photographers chose to live in Istanbul, but rarely covered Turkey, mainly because American newspapers couldn’t make much sense out of its Islamic-democracy-secularist-autocracy mishmash, and also because, at the time anyway, there were no wars in Turkey. Some reporters would come to Istanbul from places like Basra or Karachi and gush anew at the wonders of Atatürk, still the main reason in their minds that this “Muslim country” was so stable, that it didn’t have suicide bombers, that women in spaghetti straps danced on tables by the Bosphorus. Istanbul was the relief, but also the exception, which might have had the unintended consequence of reminding them the Muslim world was hopeless, and that only the West could save it.

  Machismo almost necessarily amplified the latent savior complex, if not a secret thrill for violence, in so many of us. Yet despite war correspondents’ reputation for superficiality and adrenaline addiction, the ones I knew were idealists, so much more so than the self-centered New York writers I had known. I was surprised at first to hear the sincerity in the correspondents’ voices, the concern for the fate of other countries. They had a necessary belief in the importance of journalism, not only because it was among the ways they could justify why they imperiled their bodies. These Americans had a purpose for living I had not yet glimpsed in my generation, and I suspected that the snide remarks often made about war journalists—that they were self-important—likely came from a place of profound envy and longing to do something for the greater good of the world. But what power did journalists have? How often did we hurt the very people we claimed to represent with our own muddled vision of the world, of America, of ourselves?

  In retrospect, the dissolution of the Arab world also meant the dissolution of a certain kind of foreign journalism. Before it, the West had set up their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with elaborate infrastructures. In Afghanistan they had an easy blueprint to follow; the Americans had a muscle memory of the occupations in Germany and Japan, and a convenient amnesia of the German and Japanese people’s total devastation and easy capitulation to them. America was not the same country in 2001 as it was in 1945, but Americans thought it was, so frozen was their conception of reality in those myth-production years. The contemporary occupations would instead become temporary containment strategies for chaos, market economies for occupation, a dream factory of empire. Later, a foreign friend observed harshly that perhaps ISIS went after journalists because during the war on terror, journalists had become associated with that vast infrastructure of the American military. The country’s imperial soul had hardened into a vulnerable exoskeleton, all of us visible to anyone who wanted to attack it. In those years, I, too, participated in my first and only American occupation, in Kabul.

  * * *

  IN MAY 2013, over ten years into the war in Afghanistan, an Afghan writer named Qais Akbar Omar penned an op-ed for The New York Times titled “Where’s My Ghost Money?” Omar had heard that the CIA was secretly paying Hamid Karzai in cash in suitcases and plastic shopping bags, and wanted to tell Americans that if they would secretly give him money, he would “do the things we thought the Americans were going to help us do when they came to Afghanistan nearly 12 years ago.” These things included digging wells in villages and building modern water systems in the cities; constructing sewers to replace the “open drains in the streets,” because “Afghans, like Americans, use toilets every day”; and repairing broken hydroelectric dams to bring electricity to the two-thirds of the country that still didn’t have it. Instead, he observed, the Americans had spent billions of dollars building cobblestone streets “our donkeys cannot walk on,” and teaching farmers to “grow hot red peppers that Afghans do not like to eat.” I could see Americans snapping, “But you should be grateful. Eat the peppers.” The Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, which was established in Saddam’s old palace, served meals laden with pork products in a Muslim country. I can imagine that Americans—who cannot live without their hot peppers or pork products—did not consider that perhaps there were foods that Iraqis and Afghans also cannot live without.

  I finally went to Kabul because I had heard from a friend, in passing, that the roads in Kabul were not paved. This didn’t make any sense to me. The image contradicted my romantic image of a country that prized its own fine roads, and even once built roads for the nation of Turkey. When you rebuild a country, don’t the roads go down first? Were we rebuilding the country? Of Afghanistan, I had imagined military compounds and broken buildings and Westerners huddled in armored vehicles, but I assumed, if only for our own ease of transport, or to signal progress to the world, that we had repaired the Afghans’ roads. These were the twilight years of our time in Afghanistan. If we hadn’t done that, what had we done?

  In the check-in line at Dubai International Airport, where I transferred planes for Kabul, everyone going to Afghanistan was white. I met one stocky American guy with a jockish voice (that sounds as if a cave lies at the back of the throat) and a muscular body. I asked him whether he was in the military. “Nope. I’m a contractor. Just like everyone else in this line.” I watched nearby as a large white man with electric-white teeth, his plain white T-shirt tucked tight into khaki pants, laughed with wild panic as he crashed into another middle-aged guy, his skin bronze as a penny. “Hey, man, how ya doin’! Ha- ha!” The Dubai waiting area for the flight to Kabul was as exotic as Columbus, Ohio. The whole room was littered with people who made money off the war, which, I couldn’t help but acknowledge—as I smiled widely back at them in some automatic species-response signal—included me as well. We were all contractors now.

  Like the unpaved roads, contractors hadn’t played a big role in my imagination of the occupation; they were too new. My imagined American occupier—who of course, to me, was never called an occupier—was still a fit and dignified soldier in uniform, even after all the satirical war movies I had seen: Three Kings, Jarhead. The men in this room reminded me of Wall Street guys at a strip club, hedge funders launching into a round of steaks. Some of the American men looked positively deranged: tanned and wiry, wound up like teenagers on steroids, their horse-saddle skin betraying abuse of tobacco, alcohol, sun, and near-death experiences. This was who we were attracting to Afghanistan; it felt like a massive illegal operation as shot by a Hollywood director.

  We boarded the plane, and finally cut loose from strange Dubai, where the sky and the water melt into an aluminum-hued oblivion. Dubai had recently become the world’s most disreputable construction site. Now it served as the Kabul elite’s vacation spot. Western war profiteers cooled off in Dubai hotel pools and the Afghan criminal elite bought houses on a man-made island shaped like a palm. They were buying up the waterfront property, one resident told me, in anticipation of the day Kabul collapsed.

  * * *

  KABUL, FOR THE TIME BEING, was the boomtown. President Obama had in recent years launched a “surge” of troops to finally win the dec
ade-long war. In Kabul, that meant a surge in wartime entrepreneurship. A strange ecosystem of soldiers, aid workers, businessmen, journalists, and other civilians flourished in the base of the bowl-like city. Kabul, landlocked, ringed with improbably steep mountains, felt like a defiant fortress with its inhabitants peering out into the wild. A fragile, jagged peace saturated the everyday life, as if the manic effort to house, feed, and protect the executors of the war mostly amounted to staving off the chaos outside. Someday, America in Kabul would vanish. It was impossible to imagine what the city would look like when it did.

  When I visited, modern midlevel high-rises and wedding halls as gaudy as anything in Vegas rose above the traditional mud houses. SUVs in white, a rich man’s clean-city color, had ascended to prominence as the power-status symbol of choice. Shiny grocery stores were stocked with vitamin supplements and condoms and The Economist. But the presence of Westerners didn’t mean any part of the city met Western standards, not by a long shot. People delighted in reminding me of the percentage of fecal matter in the air—10 percent, 16 percent, 30 percent—which bothered me far less than the prospect of tripping into one of the drains that lined the roads. Some of the roads were indeed so rocky and cratered that driving on them recalled off-roading in Colorado. To my driver, Arif, and many other Afghans, I expressed surprise that “we” hadn’t even bothered to fix the roads of our imperial city in nine years, but they blamed Karzai instead.