Room for a View

Visioning Afghanistan
An Unexpected Light

By Jason Elliot . Edited by Lorna Tychostup
Photos by Craig Y. Fujii

It was the kind of experience you are grateful for afterwards, but have little wish to ever repeat.
I had been told that the operation was to liaise with enemy deserters and escort them back to our headquarters. The prospect, at the time, was an exciting one: I was 19 and knew little of war. As the clandestine guest of a mujaheddin group fighting Soviet troops from the hills and valleys southeast of Kabul, my goal was to witness and report on a conflict largely hidden from Western eyes. But my first experience of war itself was not as I had expected.
We walked half the night, but the deserters failed to materialize. In a moonlit cornfield some 20 miles from the capital, beyond which a mountainous horizon was lit with the bursts of flame from distant explosions, we raided an apple orchard instead. With 20 other men I helped load our donkey with several hundred of the captured fruits, and began the long walk back.

It had been an uneventful operation so far. It was nearly dawn and, now a few hours from our headquarters, we were looking forward to the promise of food and sleep. It was then, as we were wading knee-deep through a tree-lined stream, the moonlight dancing on the ripples around our legs, that we came under attack. From whom, I never found out. But my first experience of coming under fire was, I remember, spectacular.

A roar of gunfire erupted above our heads, where bullets whipped through the leaves. The men scattered and scrambled for cover, firing back wildly into the night. Time seemed to slow: the sight was new and bewildering. It did not seem real at all, but hypnotic and strangely beautiful. Oblivious to the danger, I wandered into the open, searching for my companions. The night was scarred in every direction with the incandescent lines of tracer bullets, exploding and ricocheting from the rocks behind me; the air itself shook with the deafening noise of automatic rifles and the sound of heavier guns somewhere in the darkness beyond us.

There was a loud burst of fire nearby; I felt myself falling, and thought how painless it was, after all, to have been shot. But I had been brought to the ground, and my senses, by one of the other men, who had tackled me and dragged me into cover behind some rocks. I cowered with them, pressed against a man whose body was trembling violently.

“These poor men,” I thought to myself, “are even more frightened that I am.” But then I turned to see their faces: they were convulsed in fits of laughter.
A few minutes later, as suddenly as it had started, the shooting stopped. We brushed ourselves off, gathered up a number of the apples that lay scattered around us, and set off for our base as carefree as men returning from a weekend jaunt in the countryside.
I was upset that I had risked my life for a donkey load of apples, and shared my frustration with my guide and interpreter. “Even in war,” he said gently, “we have to eat, you know.” Then he put a consoling hand on my shoulder and told me not to be too disappointed: next time, he joked, we could fetch some pumpkins.

This was my first of many encounters with the contradictory and frequently bizarre experience of war in Afghanistan, and with the people involved in it. I learned from it that the circumstances of conflict were both unexpected and bewildering, and driven by exigencies almost incomprehensible to an outsider.
And I learned from it about the Afghans; their toughness and determination, their scorn for personal safety, their concern for the welfare of a foreign guest, their irrepressible sense of humor under extreme conditions. Today the war, its players, and its aims, have changed dramatically. But the fundamental characteristics of the people involved have not.
Today’s prevailing images of Afghanistan portray its peoples all too often as religious fanatics fueled by a hatred of the West, or as helpless refugees, bereft of hope. Neither of these extremes do much justice to the Afghan character, which is so vital to understand for a clearer picture of the present conflict.

No one who has visited Afghanistan can fail to be touched by the character of its people; their hospitality, resilience, and dignity in the face of overwhelming odds. And, perhaps most importantly, their very particular sense of identity and attachment to their culture.

Ten years after that first trip, after Kabul had fallen to the Taliban, I met up with a shopkeeper I had known in better days. Why, I asked him, had he not left the city, and chosen instead to live under the brutal rule of its new rulers? He shook his head as if I had failed to understand something fundamental.

“Some of us,” he said, “have to stay behind and civilize these people.”

It was a very Afghan reply: to the point, proud, and defiant. It also spoke volumes about the traditional Afghan outlook. In the mid-1990s, the evangelical thuggery of the Taliban was something new to most Afghans. Traditionally, Afghanistan has been home neither to enmity toward the West, nor of religious fanaticism. And despite the upheavals of the past two decades, tradition remains uppermost in the lives of the vast majority of Afghans, whose deep sense of place in history has been transmitted through poetry and legend, rather than in the classroom or by films and television.

The Afghans are also for the most a pious and inward-looking people. Religion, certainly, is one of the pillars of Afghan life and culture. But the Islam that shapes the life of rural Afghanistan would be virtually unrecognizable to a radical Islamic cleric from the Middle East—as different, say, as the Christianity of a snake-charming Appalachian pastor from that of an English country priest.

Such traits are partly a mirror of the land itself; harsh, beautiful and painstakingly cultivated by a people largely dependent on hard physical work for their very survival. Until the 1980s more than 90 percent of Afghanistan’s population was engaged in agriculture. Rural Afghanistan was only barely touched by the outside world, and the majority of its settlements were inaccessible to motorized transport. Such a society lacks the cohesion borne of transport and communications which are the norm elsewhere. Instead, local tribal and ethnic allegiances run deep, in a country which has never really experienced allegiance to a central government.

The country’s remoteness helps to explain the Afghan’s profound attachment to their traditions and their land, as well as their hospitality: a sense of kinship and reciprocal obligation runs deeply through Afghan life. Other Afghan characteristics, such as their fondness for arms; the tendency for local fiefdoms to develop around charismatic leaders (often and misleadingly called “warlords”) as well as a deep-seated mistrust of the motives of foreigners, are better understood by a glance at history.

Seldom has there been a period in the country’s tumultuous history when outsiders have not attempted to control the country. Seldom have Afghans failed to resist them.

For as long as history records, the region that is today Afghanistan has been repeatedly invaded and occupied by powerful neighbors: Centuries before Christ, Alexander the Great entered from the west, the nomadic Kushans of central Asia from the north, and the Mauryan Buddhist kings from the south, each in turn leaving their mark on the on the land they coveted. The early Christian era saw Afghanistan invaded, annexed, and abandoned by the Mongol hordes of Chingiz Khan, and by powerful Turkish, Persian and Indian armies.

Throughout the 19th century, Afghanistan was mauled between the empires of Russia and Britain, each vying for political clout in the capital. The present-day frontiers of Afghanistan, with scant regard for tribal and ethnic boundaries, were drawn up in London and Moscow.

What is less known is that throughout the 20th century, Afghanistan was similarly courted—and fought over—by outside powers. Through the decades of the Cold War, influence in Afghanistan was simultaneously cultivated by both Washington and Moscow. The American-built airport at Kandahar was designed for long-range American nuclear bombers; the streets in Kabul, built to withstand the weight of tanks, were paved with Soviet concrete.
A Marxist coup in 1978 sparked widespread resistance across the country, prompting the Soviet invasion the following year. Moscow confidently predicting the defeat of the “counterrevolutionary bandits” within months. But 10 years of war followed, providing America with an unprecedented opportunity: to slowly bleed the military might of the Red Army in a distant land, and to avenge the Soviet Union for the humiliation of Vietnam. It was an opportunity, as a CIA cynic expressed it at the time, “to fight the Soviets to the last Afghan.”

Afghans were only too willing to oblige. More than a million Afghans died, and their country was largely ruined in the process.

The key foreign players in this very unholy war—America, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia—poured guns and money into Afghanistan with reckless abandon. By the mid-1980s, several hundred million dollars were being approved in Washington each year for the CIA’s not-so-covert war. Pakistan provided a land conduit for the flow of arms, as well as advisors, while its expenses were offset by vast revenues from a blossoming trade in heroin.

It is timely to recall that during this period, radical Islamic groups from a dozen different countries—particularly from the Arab world, with which Afghanistan has little in common—were actively encouraged to join the war in Afghanistan. Never had so many people of extreme persuasion been funded so generously, or converged in such numbers on a formerly inward-looking and moderate country.
By 1990, Afghanistan, a ruined state, had disappeared off the international agenda. New players filled the places of old, while extremists found safe haven in a shattered land too poor to rebuild itself. The decade of conflict that followed was not so much a civil war, but a war of influence, fueled cynically by foreign powers vying once again for a role in the critically strategic region. Moderate Afghans meanwhile felt betrayed by their former allies—in Europe, the Middle East, and America—who had contributed so generously to the war effort, and so meanly to the restoration of peace and stability.

This conflict continues. But today the world, as America has been so forcefully reminded, is now a smaller place, and Afghanistan is no longer the far-off and forgettable land it used to be. What happens there will affect the lives of other nations and peoples: The world is connected.

While many Afghans are undoubtedly grateful for assistance in displacing a brutal leadership, many more are watching to see whether American willingness to wage war in Afghanistan will be matched by a willingness to assist in the rebuilding of their nation. Hundreds of Afghan civilians have lost their lives in the past few weeks alone. Thousands more have been traumatized and displaced, and entire areas of the country are faced with starvation. Ordinary Afghans have suffered hugely as a consequence of American intervention. It should be remembered that these are the people who will shape the future policy and outlook of the country. It is not unpatriotic to call into question the scope and aims of American-led intervention in Afghanistan, but a matter of urgent scrutiny.

There is no glory for outsiders to claim in Afghanistan. Before September 11, there was little interest in the plight of the Afghan people, or much mention of the role of foreign players in prolonging the course of the war. “America,” lamented an Afghan to me recently, “is attacking the branch. It is the root that should be cut.” Lately there has been too much talk about killing people and not enough talk about terrorism and its origins.

Once the world’s attention is less diverted by the dramatic events in Afghanistan, it should return to the issue that more than ever requires understanding: the causes of terrorism and the forces that nourish it.
Only then will Afghanistan—and all those influenced by it—be able to build on the foundations of peace and security for which all nations hunger.

In the mid-1980s at the age of 19, Jason Elliot entered Soviet-invaded Afghanistan. Covertly making his way to the front lines, Elliot spent several weeks living and fighting alongside the mujahideen. In the mid-1990s Elliot returned to Afghanistan as the Taliban pushed its way into power. Written through the sonorous heart of a poet, An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan is an illuminating and profound glimpse into Afghan culture and spirit. Tears gather and laughter sounds as the reader is taken through a roller coaster ride of vision and emotion. Currently on the BookSense independent bookstore bestseller list, it is a highly recommended read.

The photos accompanying Elliot’s piece were taken by Craig Fujii, an American photojournalist on assignment in Kabul in 1995, where the two first met. Widely published for the AP and in major media outlets, Fujii currently works saving lives as an intensive care nurse in California.

—Lorna Tychostup