Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  Many Afghans with a modicum of money living in Europe and America returned to Afghanistan to carry out idealistic development projects of their own. There was Mohammed Khan Kharoti, for example, a longtime resident of Portland, Oregon, who graduated from the same school I had attended in Lashkargah. He was the child of one of those nomad families who were settled in the model town of Nadi Ali by the government of that time. He had acquired expertise in medical technology and was making a good living in America, but he began journeying back to his hometown to build the Green Village Schools. Actually, he’d founded these schools in Taliban times, with the consent of local Taliban officials, who had even allowed some girls to be educated there, so long as Kharoti promised to do his work quietly. Now, he didn’t have to be surreptitious about his project anymore. Green Village Schools prospered and attracted donations and drew volunteers from abroad.

  In Khost, the town near the Pakistan border where Bin Laden and al Qaeda had sunk such deep roots, Ghafar Lakanwal, a onetime Communist official who had defected from that government in the eighties and had been working as a community organizer in Minneapolis, built a school funded by American donors but supported by the local population in Khost. Lakanwal’s school, too, educated both boys and girls. He insisted on it as a condition for building the school. Lakanwal had grown up near Khost, in one of those rural fortress/village communities that had only a few hundred inhabitants, the typical rural configuration of so much of Afghanistan. He wanted to give something back.

  Other countries also began building schools. In early 2003, I attended a fund-raiser organized by a group associated with the Iranian filmmaker Makhmalbaf, which had ambitious plans to construct scores of private schools in Afghanistan. It wasn’t clear to me where the schools would get their operating budget once they were built, and only later did I wonder what the curriculum would be and who would develop it. One thing was certain: these schools would educate girls as well as boys. In the aftermath of the Taliban’s notorious gender policies, this was the one thing everybody was sure of: every new enterprise planned for Afghanistan would function as an instrument for liberating and empowering Afghan women.

  Kabul University had never quite closed, but in Taliban times the clerics had reduced it to little more than a stunted madrassa. And, even before that, the Communists had compromised the academic integrity of the university by twining Marxist-Leninist doctrine into many courses. But now Kabul University became a full-fledged four-year university again, back on the road to academic respectability. By fall, the campus teemed with several thousand students, and already, I was told, about 40 percent of them were women. And the university didn’t just offer programs in technical, medical, and scientific fields but also in cultural disciplines such as literature, history, and the arts. When I visited the art college, I saw some students creating meticulous, nonrepresentational Islamic art, but others were painting or sculpting portraits, landscapes, and other figurative subjects that the Taliban would have found offensively pagan.

  Music burst out in the cities. Some people still had transistor radios from the old days and others acquired new ones now. Kabul Radio—dubbed Shari’a Radio in Taliban times—reclaimed its old name and began to broadcast popular tunes once more. Previously unheard-of pop singers came to instant prominence. I was particularly taken with singer Dil Agha’s merry song “Kabul Jan” (Kabul Dearest), a raucous celebration of his native city.

  Old music was heard again too—songs by the revered Ahmad Zahir for example—since it turned out that just about everybody still had cassette tapes hidden away from the old days. In Taliban times, they had listened to their tapes secretly, after dark, with the curtains drawn and the volume turned down low. Now they broke them out and blasted their music in public. In the streets, one saw people with Walkman-type players and earphones plugged into their ears, bobbing their heads and bopping as they strolled along.

  Both old and new music came flowing in from Pakistan, where some of the refugees had never stopped recording. In the heart of Kabul, near the river, at the very site of the Grand Bazaar that the British had burned down 161 years earlier, a labyrinthine covered market sprang up, with scores of stalls that vended audio- and videotapes. Arnold Schwarzenegger movies were popular, but the hottest video of them all was the James Cameron blockbuster Titanic. In fact, shopkeepers built stalls down in the riverbed of the Kabul River (the river had gone bone dry during the long drought that ended in 2002), and this came to be called the Titanic Bazaar (because if the river were running as in olden times, the shops would all have been underwater).

  The national theater, Kabul Nindari, opened up again. In the 1960s and ’70s, Kabul Nindari used to mount original Afghan plays during Jeshyn, the celebration that was banned by the Taliban for commemorating a secular event, Afghan independence from the British. Gul Makai Shah, who had acted on the Kabul Nindari stage as a girl, came back from exile as a middle-aged woman to revive the theater as its director. She recruited actors and scripts and, over the next few years, produced dozens of new plays and delivered over two hundred performances.2 A children’s vaudeville-type circus began touring the country, and another troupe hit the road with a Dari version of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost set in modern Afghanistan.

  The Asia Foundation funded a poignant project of the Afghan Media and Cultural Center, which resulted in a film called Afghanistan Unveiled. Fourteen young Afghan women were taught how to use video cameras and were trained as video journalists. The young women then journeyed to various parts of the country, urban and rural, to interview women. The resulting film was fascinating both for the documentary footage the girls got and for the dramatic story of the girls’ own lives unfolding. The women’s world recorded by these young women had been inaccessible to male filmmakers even in pre-Taliban times because Afghan families simply don’t let male strangers into the private portions of their homes; so these lives had been unseen by any public, even in the liberal era. What’s more, the young videographers had all come of age in Taliban times. They themselves had hardly ever set foot outside their own compounds and didn’t know what the street looked like one block over from their own. Now they were having the revelatory adventure of a lifetime, traveling to places as far away as Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, and Khost, talking to strangers, finding out about their fellow Afghans, and in the process—it’s plain from their commentary—finding out about themselves.3

  In the late 1960s, a fledgling film industry had been born in Kabul. A government institute, Kabul Films, had built a library of movies relevant to Afghanistan. Only about forty of them (mostly shorts and documentaries) were made in the country. The civil wars had strangled the industry in its cradle, and then the Taliban in their last days sent an official to the institute to demolish its collection. He burned about two thousand films and destroyed all the filmmaking equipment he could find. He didn’t know, however, that the institute’s employees had hidden one thousand films and some production equipment behind a false wall.4 Now, with the Taliban gone, they took down that false wall. Kabul Films rebuilt its production facilities with money from Japan. Expatriates such as USC film school graduate Yama Rahimi flew in from California to teach a summer film class at Kabul University to forty eager students.

  At this time, Siddiq Barmaq, former director of Kabul Films, began working on his powerful narrative feature Osama—which has nothing to do with Osama bin Laden: the title character is a young girl who masquerades as a boy named Osama during the Taliban era in order to survive; her ruse is discovered and she is absorbed into the harem of a Taliban-connected mullah as one more of his chattel. The film garnered broad acclaim and won awards at international film festivals, paving the way for other productions, such as Horace Shansab’s Zoleikha’s Secret, filmed entirely in Afghanistan and shown to considerable applause at film festivals around the world.

  The majestic Buddhas of Bamiyan had been destroyed by the Taliban, but several Kabul University professors now proposed that one of th
em be reconstructed—and the other left shattered as a solemn memorial to the tragedy that had befallen Afghan culture. The plan was controversial, but even as people were debating its pros and cons, an Afghan archeologist living in France, Professor Zemaryalai Tarzi, announced his belief that an even bigger reclining Buddha lay somewhere beneath the earth of this valley. His theory was based on a study of old travelers’ texts, which suggested that the “sleeping Buddha” might be as much as three times larger than the largest of the standing Buddhas. Every summer after that, Tarzi led a team of excavators to Bamiyan to search for the sleeping Buddha. (Lately, the quest has been on hold because of fears that, if it were unearthed in this still-volatile era, new barbarians might destroy this treasure too.)

  The Kabul Museum was a dramatic story in itself. In 1978, this was known as one of the world’s finest small museums. It had a rich collection of art from the country’s Gandharan period, when Buddhist influences mixed with Greek aesthetics to generate a Greco-Buddhist style found nowhere else in the world. But in the Communist era, Soviet and Afghan government officials had pilfered items from the museum and sold them into the international black market. After the Soviet withdrawal, the wars of Kabul had damaged the museum building. In the late nineties, the Taliban had hammered the remaining Greco-Buddhist statues into rubble. Now, museum officials set the rubble of each sculpture on a pedestal and above each pile of rubble hung a picture of the work as it once had looked: the museum became a testament to the cultural barbarity of the Taliban.

  Then came the most astonishing announcement. In April 2004, museum director Omara Massoudi revealed that fifteen years earlier, foreseeing the troubles that were coming, he and a few associates had hidden more than twenty thousand of the museum’s most precious artifacts in a secret vault. Archeologists from around the world gathered to watch him open that vault. It was practically like the discovery of King Tut’s tomb except televised. Several hundred items from that breathtaking collection later toured the world as a show called The Gold of Afghanistan.

  The fact that many of the artifacts are made from gold and silver and are studded with precious and semiprecious stones is the least of their fascination. The collection reflects the culture of this region from 2200 BC to about 100 CE, a span of more than two millennia. Here, in and around Afghanistan it turns out, someone was producing sophisticated bowls and flasks of gold and silver at the same time that the last pharaohs of Egypt’s Old Kingdom were building pyramids and Sargon of Akkad was forging the first great Mesopotamian empire. From the Bactrian city of Al Khanum, built around 300 BC, a host of Greek items were recovered, such as a bronze Hercules and a silver plaque depicting the nature goddess Cybele riding a Persian chariot.

  Nomads roaming northern Afghanistan at the time of Christ had their own workshops where they made refined artworks that combined influences from Persia, Greece, Rome, China, India, and Siberia: diadems encrusted with turquoise, a portable gold crown that folds for convenient storage, thin gold slippers worn by a nomad princess.

  The show included amazing artifacts excavated from two sealed rooms found at Bagram. Originally, archeologists thought the rooms must have housed some king’s treasures. Now, they know those were commercial warehouses where some merchant stored the items he was buying and selling: flasks of blown glass from Roman Egypt, bronze statues from Syria, Chinese lacquer, Indian ivory sculptures, pendants depicting Greek myths, plaques recounting the life of Buddha, and complex sculptures of big-breasted mother goddesses intertwined with dancing Hindu gods. Journalism professor Joel Brinkley recently described Afghans as the most brutal and primitive people on Earth and casually asserted that “Afghans are like wolf spiders. They eat their young.”5 When one stands before these artifacts and reflects on the risks that Massoudi and his aides took to protect and preserve them, one can’t help but find Brinkley’s racist utterance particularly loathsome. The horrors seen in Afghanistan recently were not spawned by a genetic resemblance between Afghans and wolf spiders but by decades of catastrophic tragedy. Now, however, the dark ages seemed to have ended. Afghans were poised to embark upon another epoch of civilized achievement. Or were they?

  THE MARSHALL PLAN FOR AFGHANISTAN NEVER MATERIALIZED, unfortunately. The thousands of Afghans with small-scale schemes never got the starter money they needed to ignite their dreams. It was private enterprise on a larger scale that took off with a vengeance. Many of the returning exiles had enough money, savvy, and connections to raise capital for such enterprises as banks and cell phone companies and TV stations. A country that never fully made it into the industrial age looked like it was about to proceed directly to the postindustrial age. A place that never had railroads would now have air service to every city—this was the promise. A place that never had much in the way of telephone landlines would jump directly into the age of the cell phone. A place that never managed to get a truly national postal system working would have the Internet now, and everyone would acquire an e-mail address.

  In the world at large, multinational corporations and international agencies were rendering national borders ambiguous; in Afghanistan, a place that never completely coalesced into a nation-state, the first post-national society seemed to be emerging, a territory in which private companies headquartered in China, Russia, Turkey, India, Iran, Holland, Australia, Germany, Canada and elsewhere would shape everyday life, and government would be an afterthought, shriveled to irrelevance, for it would scarcely be needed once untrammeled private enterprise really felt its oats.

  30

  The Persistence of Trouble

  STILL NO ONE COULD KID THEMSELVES: THE URBAN ARCHITECTS OF A NEW Afghanistan faced daunting problems. Take, for example, the refugees—by whom I mean those poor, mostly rural Afghans who, when they fled the Afghan holocaust, got only as far as camps in Pakistan and Iran. (I reserve the term exile for educated Afghans who had the resources and skills to make it to developed countries and establish new lives.) In 2002, Afghans constituted the world’s biggest refugee population, the Cambodians being a distant second. Many of those six million refugees now wanted to come home, and host countries were pushing them to go.

  But home to what? Many of these folks had eked out a living as herders, but they couldn’t go back to herding; their flocks had mostly been slaughtered by Soviet gunners and the rest they had lost when they fled.

  Fruits and nuts had been big commercial crops for Afghan farmers in the old days. Afghan grapes had once supplied over 10 percent of the world’s raisins including most of those found in Raisin Bran.1 The country had also earned cash from figs, pomegranates, pears, almonds, walnuts, mulberries, melons, and the like. But Pakistan produced many of these same fruits and nuts, and during the wars Pakistanis had paid cash for Afghan bare root fruit trees, especially pistachios. Afghan orchards had gone unplanted and neglected. Now, even if farmers were to plant new trees, they would take years to mature.

  Of course, Afghans had harvested other crops such as wheat and cotton in the old days, but they lacked seeds, and irrigating their desert soil would be difficult now—not just due to the drought the country was going through but also because the old underground irrigation canals had been destroyed. Some had silted up, some had been bombed, and many had been converted into guerilla hideouts. (When you hear about Afghans living in caves, the “caves” in question are often these underground irrigation tunnels retrofitted with concrete for military use.)

  Besides, their fields were filled with land mines. No country on earth had more of these pernicious devices. A land mine costs about $3 to plant and about $1,000 to remove.2 Rural Afghans didn’t have the sophisticated equipment they needed to remove the mines safely. They simply had to crawl over their fields on their hands and knees, looking for the dust-colored triggers. If they missed one and crawled over it, they would be crippled or dead. Children were still losing limbs to land mines every day, and farmers had to clear a lot of acres to make a living growing wheat. Too many. It just wasn’t feasible.
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br />   Many of the refugees therefore didn’t go back to their original homes. They went to the cities to look for jobs. Jobs being scarce, many ended up as homeless squatters living in the shells of abandoned ruins. The returning families were preponderantly made up of widows and orphans. The widows roamed the streets in their blue burqas, begging for change, and anyone who looked like he or she had money was well advised to keep moving so as not to be mobbed by these burqa-clad beggars. The children roamed the streets scavenging cans to sell as scrap metal and discarded shoes to sell for leather and anything else of value they could sort from piles of trash.

  Into these cities crowded with homeless female beggars and packs of parentless children came the exiles from the west. They had the skills needed to rebuild the country, and they felt equipped to undertake the job, but there were problems inherent to projects in which upper-echelon managers who had lived abroad in safety and comfort were directing workers who had lived in Afghanistan all along and had suffered through the horrors of those years. The latter began to call the former “dog washers,” a jesting suggestion that, in the West, the exiles had made their living washing dogs for rich folks. (Dogs are considered unclean by Muslims.) It was a way of saying, “We stayed, we suffered, but we never bowed our heads; you went abroad and prospered but you lost your honor kowtowing to infidels.”