Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

by Pankaj Mishra

  One day in 1994, in a village near the city of Kandahar, a Pashtun man in his thirties called Mohammed Omar heard about two women who had been abducted and raped by some local commanders. Like many young Pashtuns from his village, Omar the son of landless peasants, had participated in the jihad against local and foreign Communists. He had been wounded several times and lost his right eye. After the Soviet withdrawal he had recommenced teaching at his village madrassa. He was deeply aggrieved by the anarchy around him and often spoke with his friends in the village about ways to end it and establish the law of the Koran. The news of the raped women finally incited him into action. He went out to the local madrassas and raised a band of thirty students for a rescue mission. The students mustered around sixteen rifles among themselves. They then went and freed the girls and hanged the commanders from the barrel of a tank. A few months later there was another incident in which two commanders. fought a gun battle in the streets of Kandahar over a boy both wished to rape. Once again Omar showed up with his students, releasing the boy and executing the commanders.

  These were the stories Rahmat had heard in his mosque in the Punjab; they were also the stories Babur heard in Islamabad. The fame of the Taliban had grown very fast. Afghans everywhere began appealing to them for protection from the warlords. Very soon these requests for help, along with large cash donations, came to the Taliban from the traders and smugglers who needed peace and open roads in southern Afghanistan to ensure the transport of goods to Iran and the Central Asian republics.

  Babur himself had long been looking into roads and oil and gas pipelines through Afghanistan to these Central Asian republics. There had also been much interest from multinational oil companies. But Kabul was still being fought over. The ISI, which both Babur and Bhutto distrusted, insisted on supporting Hekmatyar who was far away from imposing the stability needed to conduct business in Afghanistan. The only other route to Central Asia ran through southern Afghanistan, but anyone taking it risked an infinite number of tollbooths and other forms of banditry.

  Babur produced a plan to rebuild the road from Pakistan to Herat with funding from international agencies; in October 1994 he took a group of Western and Chinese diplomats on an exploratory trip to Herat. Later that month he attempted something riskier; he arranged for thirty Pakistani trucks to drive through Afghanistan to the capital of Turkmenistan Ashkhabad.

  Babur told me that he was advised against this. The commanders who controlled the roads in southern Afghanistan were reportedly very angry with him. They hadn’t been told about the visit with the diplomats and thought it meant Babur was supporting the Taliban which just a few days previously had captured a massive arsenal built up during the days when the CIA sent arms to the mujahideen.

  Babur said, “I went ahead. It was an experiment. I thought, let’s see what happens.”

  A few miles outside Kandahar the convoy was stopped by local commanders. They ordered the Pakistani drivers, including some army officers, to park in a nearby village. The men were outnumbered and so did not resist, merely passing on to their superiors in Islamabad the demands from the commanders: money, share of the goods on the convoy, and a promise to stop supporting the Taliban.

  For three days Pakistani officials in Islamabad wondered what to do; a commando operation to rescue the convoy was discussed and finally dropped. Then Babur asked the Taliban to help.

  The students assaulted the village where the convoy was parked and chased out the commanders and their men. That same evening they attacked Kandahar and after two days of fighting conquered the city and expelled the remaining warlords from the area.

  This was the absurdly successful beginning of the military campaign that brought the Taliban almost the whole of Afghanistan in just two years. Early in 1995 they took Herat; a year later they were in Kabul. They didn’t do it all by themselves. Thousands of Pakistanis like Rahmat volunteered to fight with them while cash bribes fund-raised by transporters and smugglers neutralized most of the warlords, and Babur put considerable Pakistani expertise at their disposal.

  He sent Pakistani engineers to replace the phone system, to repair Kandahar airport, and to improve the roads, and although Babur wouldn’t deny or confirm it to me, and only broke into his impish smile again, Pakistani Army regulars allegedly fought alongside the Taliban, and high-ranking officers planned their campaigns. Babur himself in 1996 closely monitored the capture of Kabul, from where he was to carry away, like the invaders of the past, his own booty, the statues of the Buddha and bodhisattva that now adorned his living room.

  Five years later the “boys,” as Babur called the Taliban had grown more ambitious. They weren’t content, as in the old days, to expel the warlords and institute a kind of rough-and-ready justice. They wanted to create the purest Islamic society in the world. Their leaders called themselves mullahs, although few had had the necessary educational qualifications; Mohammed Omar had gone a step further and anointed himself amir-ul-momineem, commander of the faithful. They had designed a new flag for Afghanistan. Men from the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice were responsible for checking the length of beards and beating up women without male escorts.

  Babur disapproved of the Taliban’s restrictions on women. But they no longer turned to men like Babur for advice. They had their own boosters, the mullahs of rural Afghanistan and the jihadis, Islamist politicians, and ISI officers of Pakistan.

  And they had their sympathizers. Ishrat was one of them, although he hadn’t lived in Afghanistan since 1981, when as a sixteen-year-old refugee he had made the long journey from the southern province of Helmand to Pakistan. He had gone to a school in Peshawar during the anti-Soviet jihad and picked up enough English to be able to act as a guide and interpreter to foreign journalists. Ishrat was, Shafiq said, the best person to take to Afghanistan. His English was excellent; he knew his way around not only the police and customs men but also the potentially troublesome tribals in the border areas.

  “You must write the truth,” he kept saying, “and see things in context. Don’t be influenced by what you read in the Western media.” There was, he said, nothing unprecedented about the Taliban’s restrictions on women, their harshness toward petty criminals, their religious strictures; the tribal system that had ruled the lives of the majority of Afghans had always been severe.

  Ishrat was a short man; the beard hanging from his small face seemed very long; the shalwar kurtas he wore were always too big for his thin body. I thought his admiration for the Taliban contained something of the fascination that the physically unprepossessing have for demonstrations of brute power and strength.

  It made me uneasy, but I was stuck with him. And there was that discomfiting kernel of truth in his wildest assertions. In the two months that had lapsed since my first trip to Pakistan, the Taliban had destroyed the giant Buddha statues in Bamiyan, and Ishrat was obsessed with the attention given to the event in the West. “Why do Western people care so much about old Buddhist statues no one worships? Why are they not writing front page articles about millions of starving and dying people in Afghanistan? They want to give money for the statues and take them to their museums, but what about human beings?”

  It was hard to respond to Ishrat partly because I wasn’t sure of my own feelings. I had visited the refugee camps near Peshawar where whole families huddled under tiny plastic tents erected between narrow lanes muddied with soapy water and urine. I had read the alarming NGO (nongovernmental organization) reports about famine and mass starvation in Afghanistan. I knew about the UN’s failure to fund-raise even $221 million as humanitarian aid for Afghanistan.

  I had also just started writing a book about the Buddha and had been reading about the way merchant caravans had traveled with his ideas from North India to Central Asia. In Pakistan, I had traveled to some of the sites where the merchants had built great monasteries. I hadn’t been much interested in Bamiyan; the giant statues looked ugly in the photographs, and there was Robert Byron�
�s testimony, offered in the early 1930s, about their lacking “even the dignity of labour.” Nevertheless, their antiquity gave them a kind of poise; for fifteen centuries, standing quietly in a broad mountain valley, they had weathered the change of seasons and religions around them and the news of their defacement appalled me.

  But then, as the days passed, I grew somewhat weary of the outrage and scorn; there seemed something too easy and glib about the demonizing of the Taliban. In India the loudest protests had come from those Hindu nationalists who had demolished the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992. In the angry editorials in London, the Taliban once again appeared as particularly vicious barbarians from the Middle Ages instead of the bastard children they increasingly seemed to me of the West’s arrogant meddling in Afghanistan in very recent times. Much history was either forgotten or ignored in even the more ambitious denunciations: the earlier Muslim attempts to destroy the Buddha statues, British vandalism in Herat, and the relative newness of the West’s reverence for monuments from the past. And when Ishrat said, “It is all hypocrisy, the Western people are afraid of Islam, they want to protect the statues, but they had never heard of these statues, they don’t know anything about Afghanistan, they are not interested in whether people live or die there,” I kept quiet.

  In Afghanistan I had an argument with Ishrat. He wanted me to go to Jalalabad and talk to Hindus and Sikhs who would confirm his account of the great peace and stability brought to the country by the Taliban. But it wasn’t what I wanted to do; the story had been done by twenty journalists. I wanted to go to the villages.

  “What will you do in the villages?” Ishrat asked. “There is nothing there.” I thought he resisted me only because his contacts were all in the cities. But in the end he backed down He said he knew someone I could talk to. He kept up the propaganda inside the taxi. “During the jihad against Russia,” he said, “the whole place was full with drugs smugglers. You have heard of the Afridis? Pashtun tribe people. They control the drug business. Poppy grown in Afghanistan, turned into heroin in Pakistan, and then smuggled out to Europe and America through Iran and Karachi. No one was writing about that. America’s favorite mujahid Hekmatyar, was running dozens of heroin laboratories. Now Taliban has banned poppy, the smugglers are angry at them, but they say heroin is against Islam. They lose money because of their faith. But still no one is writing. They all talk about Osama bin Laden. But who is bin Laden? He is America’s man; America made him who he is.”

  Ishrat pointed to the ancient-looking cassette of Indian film music on the dashboard and said, “See, Afghans can listen to music. All you Western journalists are saying Taliban banned music.” But then a checkpost approached in the distance, and the driver reached for the cassette and stuffed it quickly into the pocket of his frayed jacket before the boys with black turbans and Kalashnikovs could strut over to the car, poke their tender-skinned faces through the open window, and ask severe questions.

  Ishrat was quiet after that. The sun rose higher; the light steadily grew harsh, draining color even out of the roadside tents of the nomads; a pall of white dissolved the sky, veiled the high distant mountains, and then hung over the barren fields overrun with bush and the low mud houses set against stone-littered hillsides. There was little traffic: big trucks that small, straggly families by the road would try to wave down—Ishrat identified them as Pakistan-bound refugees from the Tajik-majority northern provinces—and more frequently, the Toyota pickups, fast and dangerous on the broken road, black-turbaned men with Kalashnikovs and blank stares crammed uncomfortably in the back.

  The Toyotas—famously the vehicles with which the Taliban had achieved their military victory in Herat—kicked up vast swaying clouds of dust that were then quietly absorbed into the stubborn white haze. There was more dust once we turned off the road to Jalalabad, and the car began to rock and shudder through a rutted dirt path; it blew in through the rolled-up windows and settled in a film on the battered brown leather of the car seats, powdered the beards of Ishrat and the taxi driver, blotted out the occasional groups of children and chador draped women carrying dung cakes on their head, and scared off the scrawny goats sitting in the narrow shade of the mud wall before which we suddenly stopped.

  Yellowed grass sagged from the weblike cracks in the wall. But then the low wooden door opened; a tall man with a long white beard came out and embraced Ishrat, and his quick quizzical glance at me modulated into a smile as Ishrat explained my presence, suddenly speaking fast and unintelligibly in Pashtu.

  He took us, not saying much, either to Ishrat or to me, through the empty hay-littered courtyard to what seemed like a special room for visitors. He then brought me water in a shallow trough; he indicated the place in the courtyard—before a furrowed drain that ran around the compound—where I was to wash my face and hands. He came back with green tea shortly afterward. The tea tasted slightly of dust and made the bone china cup, an unexpected touch of luxury in the bare room, seem as if it had been sitting unused in one of the dark low-roofed rooms around the courtyard in one of the little niches in the wall, for a long time.

  I felt expectant, also slightly exhausted by the drive, by the nervousness that the Taliban men in the Toyotas forced in me. Ishrat hadn’t promised much in the car. He had given me the name of our host, Faiz. He had told me about his involvement in the anti-Soviet jihad and the injuries—always glamorous items in these accounts of the mujahideen—he had sustained from a mortar attack by the Communists.

  And it was of that life Faiz spoke to me intermittently that afternoon and evening in that cool bare room Ishrat translating, the driver looking on blankly, and he spoke not as a man who thought himself successful would, with pride or nostalgia. He spoke, leaning against the wall, his knees drawn up, narrow eyes wandering restlessly across the room, with the neutral air of a man who had simply lived his life in the only way he could.

  He could barely remember his childhood, when his father owned a few cows and goats. But he spoke vividly of the time in the 1970s when the desertlike area around him was irrigated with Soviet assistance, and orange and olive orchards came up on previously infertile land. Faiz’s family was one of the beneficiaries. There had been a brief moment of relative prosperity. The house we were sitting in had been built then; Faiz’s elder brother had been sent to Kabul for higher education.

  Very soon afterward, there was trouble. Faiz couldn’t remember the date, but his brother was probably killed in 1978, during the purges that followed the Communist coup. He was suspected of being an Islamist although he was only a student and kept away from politics altogether.

  The Communists had even come to the province, had rounded up and killed a few mullahs and arrested anyone they suspected of being counterrevolutionary. And then the Russians had arrived.

  Ishrat, translating and embellishing at the same time, told me of the Afghan rage and contempt for foreign invaders and how every Afghan spontaneously joined the uprising against the Russians. But this didn’t match what he translated immediately afterward, how Faiz had stayed away from the young men in the province who came together to fight the Russians. He was married by then; he had a young son; there were the orchards to look after.

  But then the bombing began from the Russian helicopters, in response to guerrilla attacks on Communist convoys. Many of the cultivated fields near the highway to Kabul were mined, and once the canals were destroyed it became harder and harder to keep the orchards going.

  Faiz’s parents, on their way to Jalalabad for a wedding, died when the bus they were traveling on was hit by a stray mortar. There were other tragedies. Faiz’s son turned out to be “insane”; Ishrat used the Urdu word, paagal and I didn’t feel I could ask him to clarify. Faiz took him to various shrines and pirs including one near Jalalabad famous for curing insanity, and made him wear various amulets. But none of these attempts worked.

  Faiz’s two brothers were already with the mujahideen when he began fighting alongside them. It wasn’t a full-time job. Th
ere were specific expeditions he joined, mostly ambushes of government convoys. He was home the rest of the time, taking care of his diminishing farmland.

  It was Ishrat who volunteered the information in Urdu while Faiz looked on uncomprehendingly that Faiz had earned a reputation as a brave man very early in the war. It was why he was smuggled across the border and into a hospital in Peshawar when he suffered serious injuries in the abdomen during a mortar attack on his position in the mountains around Jalalabad.

  Pakistan, where he first met Ishrat was a revelation for Faiz. It was where he first saw how the jihad against the Communists had become a big business. Some of the so-called leaders of the Afghan mujahideen living in grand villas in Hayatabad were not even known to him by name. But there they were, handling the disbursement of arms and aid to the refugees and the mujahideen. They made him think with pity and rage of the poor young men he was fighting with, people who started out with just a few .303 rifles among them until they managed to ambush an arms convoy and equip themselves with the latest Soviet equipment.

  By the time Faiz returned to Afghanistan, the jihad against the Russians was almost over. A local mujahideen commander was already ruling over his home province, and so peace came quickly and lasted longer in his part of Afghanistan. White men from UN agencies came to repair the canals; many of the destroyed orchards and fields were got going again.

  Faiz wasn’t one of the lucky farmers. None of the canals close to him were repaired. He had to go back to where his father had started out, making a living by selling the milk of the few cows and goats he had left over from the days of the jihad; he also made a bit of money by working as a laborer.

  This was at a time when great wealth was being created all around him. Most of the restored fields grew poppy, under orders from the mujahideen commander, who lived in a mansion and maintained a private army. He wasn’t as bad as the warlords in Helmand Province; he wasn’t a bandit or rapist. In fact, he was quite helpful to people who had fought in the jihad. But everyone knew he was involved in smuggling and drugs; the big business Faiz had seen in Pakistan had come to Afghanistan. Planes arrived in Jalalabad from Dubai loaded with color TV sets that were then smuggled into Pakistan on big trucks. The opium went out to labs in southern Afghanistan and then as heroin to Iran.