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

by Pankaj Mishra

  Karmal was only partly successful in restoring order, however. In 1986, the Soviets replaced Karmal with Mohammed Najibullah, the head of KHAD, the Communist intelligence agency. Najibullah, known for his role in the execution and torture of anti-Communists, tried even harder to win Afghan support. He toned down the Communist rhetoric, emphasized his faith in Islam, and began reaching out to the refugees and mujahideen, speaking all the time of compromise and national reconciliation. But his government couldn’t possibly acquire legitimacy among Afghans while being beholden to a foreign power. And in any case, things were out of his control; Afghanistan had already begun fighting in a new proxy war that would kill a million or more Afghans over the next decade.

  In the derelict Pashtun village I visited east of Kabul in the spring of 2001, five months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, in an area heavily bombed and mined by the Soviet military, people talked, as they did elsewhere, of the irrelevance, indeed the nonexistence, of the Taliban government. They spoke too of the good deeds of the white men from the foreign NGOs and the UN, who were active throughout the previous two decades of war, supplying seeds, food, and health care, despite the constant danger of being kidnapped and beaten up by the Taliban.

  There were three Afghans sitting on the floor of the bare, low-roofed room, all of them in their late forties, variously disabled during the anti-Communist jihad, and prematurely aged, even the dim light from the lantern seeming harsh on their sunburned wrinkled faces and wiry gray beards. Only men like these remained in the village. The soldiers in black turbans came regularly to look for fit young men. Those young men who had escaped the draft had fled to Pakistan, where many of their relatives already lived in the much worse conditions of the refugee camps.

  The conversation inside the room was of the quality of seeds, the lack of fodder and drinking water for the livestock, and the refugees from the war in the north, who, turned away at the border with Pakistan, were now draining away the already meager supply of food and water in the province. The three-year-long drought and ongoing civil war had created more than half a million internal refugees. It wasn’t as severe here as in central and northern parts of Afghanistan, but most of the land was still uncultivated. The harvest from last year’s seeds had been poor, just enough to feed a few families. The news had come of white men, most probably volunteers from the World Food Program, distributing seeds in a nearby town. The news was good, but there remained the complicated negotiation about how to divide the subsequent harvest; there remained the long journey to the town, on foot and on trucks, past many checkpoints where the bribes—corruption, despite draconian Islamic punishments, flourished as usual—could be very steep.

  Outside, in the courtyard, where tufts of grass grew wild in the cracks of the mud walls, an emaciated cow slumped on the ground, and somewhere inside the rooms around us I could sense the presence of women, could hear occasionally the rustle of thick cloth and the clink of pots and pans. I could imagine them: brisk, silent figures in the dusk, whose shapeless heavy chadoris, with the narrow mesh across their eyes, resembling the habit of a viciously persecuted medieval sisterhood.

  But this was the outsider’s vision; the chadori, I learned later, has usually been worn by village women as a status symbol—a sign of their husbands’ education or employment—and was more common in the towns and cities. Under the Taliban you could still glimpse women without it in the villages, where everyday life was traditionally autonomous of what went on in the cities. Women in rural Afghanistan, where 90 percent of the country’s approximately twenty million people still live, were less vulnerable to the Taliban’s arbitrary brutality. Nancy Hatch Dupree mentions instances of women being beaten and killed outside Kabul, but on the whole they weren’t as affected by the restrictions and controversies arising out of the Taliban’s harsh gender policies as women in the cities. Of the minuscule 3 percent of school-age Afghan females who went to school during Communist rule, the majority came from the urban areas. It was the women in the cities, encouraged into education and employment by Zahir Shah, the Communists, and, most recently, the UN agencies, who suffered most.

  The rural-urban divide has always complicated the process of change in Afghanistan, as it has in many underdeveloped countries. So too have the heavy-handed ways in which change has often been imposed upon the countryside from above, by Afghanistan’s tiny, Westernized, and mostly non-Pashtun, Persian-speaking urban elite in Kabul. The rural elite of religious and tribal leaders has tended to respond to their efforts at modernization by retreating even further in time. In 1929, conservative mullahs bullied women back into thicker chadoris and sacked museums and libraries after overthrowing the liberal minded king Amanullah, who had abolished the veil, opened coed schools, and ordered Afghans in Kabul to wear Western clothes. Not until 1959 did women appear without the chadori on the streets of Kabul, and this continued for over thirty-five years, until they faced the cruelest restrictions yet on their freedom of movement and dress.

  The Afghan Communists had encouraged women in Kabul to wear skirts and employed them in the government. This was part of their plan to modernize Afghanistan. New textbooks sent out to the villages carried an image of three men in European suits leading a traditionally dressed crowd to a glorious future. Volunteer teachers in the literacy campaign forced old men and girls to attend classes while at the same time, and often in the same villages, the Communists were arresting and massacring tens of thousands of young Muslim men.

  Much of the chaos and violence suffered in Afghan villages during the Communist era was engineered by a Westernized elite at the head of an active government in Kabul, a city which, with its Persian-speaking population and apparently liberated women, was already alien to most Pashtuns. This may partly explain why the sons of Pashtun peasants and nomads who made up the Taliban imposed their harshest laws upon the women of Kabul soon after driving out the moderate Islamist Tajik commander Ahmad Shah Massoud from this most Westernized of Afghan cities in 1996 and forcing him to the north.

  Suddenly, in yet another Afghan regression, women found themselves sentenced to the chadori and confined to their homes. They could neither educate themselves nor work; Dupree estimates that the prohibitions directly affected anywhere between 40,000 and 150,000 workingwomen and about 100,000 girls at school. Women had to be accompanied by male relatives outside their homes, where the possibility of public humiliation, usually beatings with sticks but also harsher punishments, by the religious police was ever present.

  The Taliban. claimed they were shielding women from the sexual predation they had suffered in the days of the mujahideen warlords. A Taliban official, who had studied at a madrassa in Pakistan, told me that he couldn’t trust his men with unveiled women, and in any case Mullah Omar, whose original mission had allegedly been to protect women from rapists and bandits, had to preserve at all costs the Taliban’s reputation as uncorrupted men who had brought peace and security and “true Islam” to Kabul.

  The Taliban official wouldn’t be drawn into a discussion of what “true Islam” was or could be. But then what he really seemed to be articulating was the deep and long-standing fear and resentment of Western lifestyles, particularly the independence of women, among Pashtun men in the countryside, the modern ways that the Communists had brutally imposed upon Afghanistan and that Kabul, with the presence of foreign nationals there, represented. Mullah Omar expressed his contempt by staying away from what remained the official capital of Afghanistan and living in Kandahar. For the rural men who dominated the Taliban, the women in Kabul and other Afghan cities, the relatively modern Shiite and Persian-speaking minorities, the Communists of the past, and the foreign aid workers of today were all part of the same large, undifferentiated threat to the Pashtun dictatorship that they, with some help from the Sharia, or Islamic law, wished to maintain.

  These complex social and economic resentments help to explain why the Taliban, while ruthless with the Shiites and NGO workers, d
id not curtail the religious practices of the five thousand or so mostly poor Hindus and Sikhs in Afghanistan, even though the latter were briefly required—to avoid harassment from the religious police, the Taliban, claimed—to carry yellow identification badges at all times. They also help to explain the many incidents such as the one in which the religious police, who were answerable only to Mullah Omar in Kandahar, closed down an Italian-funded hospital in mid-May 2001 after they caught women workers during with the male staff.

  There were fewer such problems in the rural areas, where women, confined to looking after their families, already appeared part of the premodern moral order Mullah Omar apparently wished to re-create. You sensed that there was paradoxically a slightly greater freedom available to the women you saw traveling in the same buses as men, albeit in segregated rows, than was available to the women in Kabul, where the lines were clearly drawn.

  UNESCO had supported the Communist literacy campaign that was opposed by many Muslims, and during the anti-Communist jihad in the eighties many UN agencies and other NGOs carried on, among other development projects, the tasks of women’s education and empowerment in Communist-controlled Kabul. When the UN agencies argued that the Taliban had to allow Afghan women to work—particularly as nurses and doctors, since under the Taliban women could not be treated by men—the hard-line leaders of the Taliban interpreted such insistence as further proof of the UN’s complicity with the various forms of Western imperialism—cultural, social, military—they imagined were arrayed against them.

  This is where some earlier exposure to the outside world might have helped; one can’t overestimate the value, in these circumstances, of the small educated Afghan middle class that twenty years of war dispersed across the world. But the Pashtun village mullahs who formed the central leadership of the Taliban knew little else besides the Koran. This is why the Taliban, unlike such radical Islamist groups as the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt and Pakistan’s Jarnaat-i-Islami, offered no coherent ideology or doctrine, as distinct from the fatwas that emanated randomly from Kandahar against women, idolatry, kite flying, football, music, dancing, squeaky shoes, and American hairstyles.

  The outlay for the Taliban’s powerful Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which punished those whose beards were not the prescribed eight centimeters long and those who did not observe prayers and fasts and worked hard to ensure that male minds remained free of the sinful thoughts incited by the presence of unveiled women, was three times as much as that for development. For Mullah Omar and his advisers from the rural clergy, it was enough to be pious and virtuous, and a healthy Islamic society would be created by itself. And the punishment for those who strayed from virtue was draconian: adulterers were stoned to death, while women were known to have the tips of their thumbs cut off for wearing nail polish. Not surprisingly, such cloud-cuckoo-land ideas—partty the result of their limited madrassa educations—and their brutal consequences made the Taliban increasingly unpopular among even the Pashtuns in the countryside, who, oppressed by the mujahideen, had initially welcomed them as liberators.

  Their aggressive puritanism, which includes a distrust of Shiite Muslims, hundreds of whom were massacred by Taliban soldiers, is far from the twentieth-century modernist ideologies of Islam that influenced an earlier generation of Afghan Islamists. Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani, the president of Afghanistan for two years in the early 1990s, was a graduate of the al-Azhar University in Cairo, while Mullah Omar doesn’t have the basic educational qualifications required to be called a mullah.

  The harsh arbitrariness of the mullahs in Kandahar and the religious police was justified under the name of “true Islam” but sought for the most part to reconfigure the Pashtun dominance over Afghanistan’s ethnic minorities, a new alignment of power that imposed Pashtun tribal ways over most of the country and made unassailable the Pashtun religious elites in the villages that had been, over the last century, continuously threatened and undermined by the modernizing rulers of Afghanistan in Kabul.

  The obstinacy and destructiveness of the Taliban now appear part of the history of Afghanistan’s calamitous encounter with the modern world. Afghanistan missed the nineteenth century, which was a period of new beginnings for many old societies in the region. No country was less equipped to deal with the twentieth-century ideologies of communism, anticommunism, and radical Islam. No country was less prepared for the assortment of strategists and adventurers, people alien to and uncomprehending of Afghanistan, who managed to enlist the country’s already great inner turmoil, the tragic violence and disorder of a near primitive society modernizing too fast, into the wider conflict of the cold war, who managed to introduce more effective means of destruction and left behind a ruin more extensive than any the Afghans had known in their war-weary history.

  The past two decades had probably weighed most heavily on the women in the country’s small middle class, which had briefly flourished in the decade before 1979. In Kabul in Christmas 2004, I met Hawa Nooristani, a popular state TV anchor in Afghanistan. We sat in a damply carpeted room at the Ministry of Women’s Affairs in Kabul. Pale light came through the windows, illuminating the dust on an old fax machine. A valentine in the form of a screen saver pirouetted on the screen of one of the two desktop computers in the room; the other screen displayed a message advising that its Norton antivirus subscription had expired. Two young women in head scarves appeared after five minutes or so with a large samovar and replenished our cups of green tea.

  Born in Nangrahar Province, Nooristani had gone to a local school and then in the late seventies passed the entrance test for the medical faculty at Kabul University. But the antimodern backlash had already begun in the country. Islamist mujahideen attacked schools in the provinces; they often kidnapped female students from the university in Kabul. Nooristani’s father, a tribal leader, was “open-minded” enough to educate his daughters, but he was worried. “What will I do if they kidnap you?” he asked her. “I will have to kill you.”

  Nooristani joined the faculty of journalism at Nangrahar University. After three years, she married a government official and moved to Kabul, where she began to work for a women’s magazine run by the Communist government. She rose to be the magazine’s deputy editor, reporting on such social issues as the marriage of minors and profiling famous women singers and writers. She also wrote fiction and poetry in Pashtu and raised a family of five children. This apparently placid life continued for twelve years, even as the war went on in Afghanistan. Then, in 1996, the Taliban came to Kabul and closed down the magazine. They also detained her husband in Kandahar on false charges. Since the Taliban allowed women to work only in the health sector, Nooristani had to go underground while working for UN-Habitat, which was running a big project for widows. When the Taliban found out and began looking for her, then began a fearful phase for Nooristani. She and her five children had to seek shelter with friends and relatives and move from house to house in order to avoid arrest. By now her father and other relatives had already left for Pakistan. But she couldn’t leave the country as long as her husband was in prison.

  Nooristani smiled often, a sweet, guileless smile, while describing her life, but tears suddenly appeared to brim in her eyes as she said, “While I am talking to you, I remember those days and feel insecure once again. I realize again how weak were the foundations of our lives.”

  The overthrow of the Taliban had given her fresh hope. She had restarted the women’s magazine. She anchored news programs on both TV and radio. She was also doing a computer course. Her teacher had told her, “You are an intelligent student,” and as she reported this to me, she burst into girlish laughter. She was also working on a new collection of poems on a computer. She had written her two previous collections in longhand and lost both manuscripts. A friend had misplaced the first, and the other was destroyed when the Uzbek warlord Dostum bombed her home during the civil war in Kabul in 1992-1994.

  The United States lost interest
in Afghanistan soon after the Soviet withdrawal from the country in 1989, although Afghans continued to pay a high price for having hosted one of the bloodiest battles of the cold war. In late 2001 the United States was faced with fresh responsibilities in Afghanistan after overthrowing the Taliban regime. It was obliged not only to engage in nation building, a task President Bush rejected during a presidential debate with Al Gore in 2000 as unsuitable for the United States, but also to provide basic security to more than twenty-five million people in a country as big as Texas. As it turns out, the way the Bush administration conducted the war, and dealt with its aftermath, has complicated both tasks.

  Apart from Americans serving at bases in countries near Afghanistan and aerial bombing, the United States committed only about 110 CIA officers and 316 Special Forces personnel to the overthrow of the Taliban. The Bush administration may have feared a stalemate in Afghanistan, where the armies of the British Empire and the Soviet Union fared poorly in the past. Or it may have planned to save ground troops for future military operations in Iraq. In any case, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld preferred using small, highly mobile forces supported by precision bombing in Afghanistan.

  This forced the United States to recruit proxies on the ground. The most easily available of these turned out to be the anti-Taliban warlords in the so-called Northern Alliance, which consisted mainly of Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, and Turkmens and which the Pashtun-dominated Taliban had defeated repeatedly. The CIA had helped arm many of these warlords during the anti-Soviet jihad. As the jihad ended, the CIA, and the State Department deferred to the Pakistani ISI and Saudi princes who had encouraged Muslims all over the world to join the jihad against the godless Communist regime in Kabul and who now tried to install the most extreme radical Islamists in power. Thus, billions of dollars of American taxpayer funding went into supporting a ruthless anti-American cabal of Islamists and Pakistani intelligence officers.