Airport Afghans

Thirteenth in a series

Last week I got on airplanes again. No big deal: Barcelona-Rome-Barcelona. Coming and going, I encountered two Afghans and guess what? They weren’t pseudo pilots or box-cutter terrorists. They were plain folks, far from home, flying from one side of the Mediterranean to the other. But they came – and herein lies the tale – from the two different sides of Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush. To hear them talk, at different airports and on different days, they might as well have represented different sides of the moon.

At the (shorter than used-to-be) Alitalia ticket line in Barcelona was a man who said goodbye to his companion in Pashto. You don’t hear much Pashto in Spain, or indeed any Afghan language, so I zoned in. We checked our luggage and had a coffee – which, out of deference to Afghan thirst patterns, we called chai or tea. We spoke, of course, of Afghanistan, current epicenter of the cosmos.

What he said failed to register at first because, coming from a Pushtun, it was so unremarkably familiar. The Pushtuns, he began by saying, had always ruled Afghanistan (essentially true) because they constituted a numerical majority (almost certainly false). He began at 52-55 percent; by the time our planes were called (to different cities) it was “nearly 60 percent.” He condemned the U.S. bombings and lamented civilian causalities “beyond number.” He praised the Taliban for their initially peace-giving intentions and muttered darkly about their being subsequently “misunderstood.” Arabs, he said, rather than Taliban Pushtuns were responsible for destroying the Bamiyan Buddhist statues (probably true, in terms of influence). He disparaged the northern alliance leaders as “brutal, barbarous warlords” and recounted (exaggerated) the massacres attributed to them when Northerners were in power from 1992 to 1996.

“Speaking of deaths,” I said, “what about the martyrdom of Ahmad Shah Masood [legendary, charismatic general of the northern alliance (Tajik faction) killed by Arab (pro-Taliban) operatives just before Sept. 11]?” “Martyr” is a loaded concept in Islam; only good guys (that is, the guys on one’s own side) are accorded the memory of martyrdom, no matter how glorious or ignoble their actual death.

“He was not martyred,” the Pushtun said. “He was not even murdered. He was just killed; it happens in war.” I asked then if he’d say the Tajik commander had been “executed.”

“No,” responded the Pushtun, perhaps sensing a word trap. “Let’s say ‘killed.’ He’s dead.”

Four days later at Fiumacino Airport in Rome, I spotted an item of distinctive headgear: the pakool or pancake-flat beret made famous by Ahmad Shah Masood and emblematic of Tajik forces within the northern alliance. (Ethnographers of haberdashery will recall that this hat was initially native to Afghan Nuristan and to the adjacent area of Chitral in Pakistan. Art history provides at least speculative evidence that the same stylish cap impressed Alexander’s Macedonian troops and returned with them to Greece 23 centuries ago.) I made for the pakool.

Mazar-e-Sharif had been “liberated” the day before, albeit by mostly Uzbeks rather than Tajiks, and this Afghan from the North was celebrating by wearing his ethnic hat. “It feels good to be recognized,” he said. “And to be recognized as a victor again. Inshallah (God willing), we’ll soon be wearing these in Kabul.”

That capital city fashion statement took place only three days later. Who is/are the Northern alliance? What to make of these people who have so swiftly captured or occupied or (if you prefer the non-military, nonpolitical spin) merely moseyed into Kabul? What does it mean that Kabulis can now shave and play music and even – gasp! – fly kites without going to jail? (Quick reality check: Note that no Kabuli women are burning their shroud-like burqas just yet. Stay tuned for “What Women Want” in the Bangor Daily News.)

First the rest of the Tajik’s conversation – not quite a rant, but every bit as partisan as that of the Pushtun and diametrically opposite in slant. An accurate census, he said, would reveal very different demographics from those published by the Taliban or any pre-war Afghan government. The Pushtun were only one group among many (technically true) and not much more numerous than the Tajiks (false). The Taliban had been “no more than medieval mullahs and Pushtun imperialists” from the start (not quite correct) and showed their real colors when they attempted to conquer the non-Pushtun North (flat-out correct). U.S. bombing of them should be increased and “collateral damage,” while unfortunate, was small price to be pay for a peaceful Afghan future. Ahmad Shah Masood was one of the great martyrs of Afghan history, of Muslim history. His picture would soon be all over Kabul (100 percent prophetic … at least for now).

“What about 1992-1996?” I asked. “Didn’t your people fall apart? Kill each other and tens of thousands of civilians? Wreck Kabul which even the communists had protected?”

“We failed,” he said, “because of Pakistani subversion (largely true) and because of their insistence on Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. He was not one of ours. He was forced on us (largely true). He’s a power-crazed assassin (entirely true). You Westerners believed what the Pakistanis told you. What the Pushtuns in [Pushtun] Peshawar told you.”

“What about the charge that the Northern alliance is as radically Islamist – and as oppressive towards women – as the Taliban?”

“Go the areas we control,” he said. “See for yourself.” In fact, I had been to the northern alliance city of Faizabad only five months earlier … and the guy has a point. Unescorted and unexpected, I’d wandered up to the front gate of a girls’ secondary school. The weather was filthy and so was the footing: cold April rain and mud everywhere. There were two armed soldiers at the door, but they served to protect rather than abuse. Inside was an open courtyard full of parents (fathers and mothers) trying desperately to enroll their girls in an already overflowing institution. I was shown into a classroom: cement ceiling, walls, and floor, not a stick of furniture, no blackboards, a few tattered books … but one dignified woman teacher (with threadbare, spotless clothes) and a dozen 16-year-old girls unveiled and spotlessly uniformed and (God forgive an old man this observation) absolutely beautiful. I was asked to address the class and did so in Persian.

“Speak to us in English,” one girl said … in English. I asked her where she’d learned this language from so far away. “Here in school,” she said. “That’s why we go to school: to learn things.”

The Northern alliance is almost exclusively northern. They cannot and should not govern all Afghanistan. They should not boss Kabul permanently. Their “alliance,” furthermore, is shaky and includes a few quite nasty customers who, given the chance, would behave like Tamurlane and make piles of skulls. But because of Pakistani government and Peshawar Pushtun spin, the Northern alliance may also have gotten a worse press than it deserves.

Two European airports, two sides of Afghanistan’s ethnic divide. Let’s remember a third airport: Kabul. How quickly can a broad-based Afghan government be formed … and/or flown into town? Quicker the better.

One more thing on my mind, related to Afghanistan because – in the surreal autumn of 2001 – all things are related, amazingly, to Afghanistan. This column has not led cheers for George W. Bush. Its writer did not vote for him a year ago and, given the same choice, would perhaps not vote for him now. He lacks the comprehensive knowledge of his father with whom I once sat at a prep school football game decades ago. He’s not a great deal more articulate than what I recall of his 17-year-old brother Marvin (an altogether fine young man) who was playing football that day.

Well, you can’t have everything. What Mr. Bush (W) does now have is a palpable sense of authentic self-confidence. We saw and heard it on Tuesday in his White House press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He stood up there, squarely and evenly alongside the slick, canny former Soviet intelligence chieftain. He spoke of places like Mazar-e-Sharif and people like the Pushtuns and the northern alliance. He spoke, if not with elegance, at least with clarity and energy. He did fine.

We need such speech at this time. We need square, even talk. Well done, Mr. President.

Now what about a Bush-Putin Plan for the reconstruction of post-catastrophe Afghanistan? Stay tuned.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world.