Unfinished business up north

Eighteenth in a series

While United States Marines go ashore – or touch down – south of Kandahar, two items of unfinished business are getting concluded in northern Afghanistan. The manner of their conclusion, while a sideshow to the hunt for Osama bin Laden, is important with consequences down the line. By now the two place names are familiar: Kunduz and Mazar-e-Sharif.

First Mazar, a city which as Robert Byron noted in May 1934, “owes it existence to a dream.”

(Those in need of a break from the action could do worse than “The Road to Oxiana.” First published in 1937, this slim volume of random anecdotes and off-the-wall pronouncements ranks as a classic of aesthete travel literature. Both Oxford oddball and brilliant observer, Byron revels in such absurdities as how the biggest city in northern Afghanistan is based on a hoax. “Mazar-e-Sharif” claims to be the Shrine/Tomb of Ali, cousin and favorite son-in-law of the Prophet himself.

It is no such thing. Ali’s bones lie in what we now call Iraq. Mazar-e-Sharif – with its famous mosque complex [archly deemed by Byron as “not unpleasing”] and annual spring equinox pilgrimage – was an obscure village until the 12th century. Then a religious vision combined with some civic boosterism to “discover” the holy remains intact. Strategically Mazar may be important; historically it’s a sham.)

Mazar has been the scene this week of an old-fashioned jail break which is still under way – but doomed – as this piece is written. Several hundred Taliban prisoners, captured recently by the northern alliance and held in the 19th century mud-walled bastion of Qala-i-Jangi (“Fort War”), revolted when a handful of the non-Afghans among them overcame their guards and grabbed their guns.

Note the term “non-Afghans.” We’ll encounter it again in Kunduz. These folks – from Arabia, Chechnya, Central Asia, South East Asia, and most of all Pakistan – represent the ultimate kernel of the Taliban hard-core. Some are long-time Islamist revolutionaries. Others are recent additions to the cause: young, poor, jobless, and otherwise lost-in-life recruits whose bearded faces peer at us from their ID cards and ask, “What would you, if a person of honor and piety and desperation, do in my shoes?”

These faces, my fellow Americans, haunt me. They may be our Enemy-of-the-Moment. We may need to kill them. And yet, every now and then, you and I and the person next door should look at one another and wonder, maybe even aloud, why it is that we were born (by world standards) rich and free. Why we and not they? “There but for fortune, go you or go I.”

Back to business… Jail breaks are jail-breaks: You end them. By force, if necessary. Here’s what the northern alliance, aided by British and American “operatives,” has tried to do and will do. Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, the hard-nosed Uzbek warlord who’s used War Fort as his HQ off and on, hustled back from Kunduz to take command. American air strikes were called in. There are lots of casualties (including, probably, the first American combat death). There’ll be even more casualties, because this kernel of the kernel won’t surrender. Watch in our press for the word “suicide.” Watch in the Muslim press for “martyr.” There but for fortune…

Meanwhile Amnesty International, that superb organization so deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize, has announced an investigation on the “proportionality” of Northern Alliance and Coalition responses. OK, go ahead and investigate. Find what you find. War’s war. The only reason that AI can investigate is because Mazar is in more or less civilized hands.

But please, before casting the first Mazar-e-Sharif stone, also investigate the countless Taliban massacres since 1994. Take a good, long look at the horrors you had such a hard time investigating then because the Taliban wouldn’t let you. You can start with the Taliban massacres of ethnic Hazaras in the self-same Mazar. Then move south into the Hazarajat where entire Hazara villages were massacred by the Taliban. These weren’t in response to jail-breaks; these were just plain mass killings. The mass graves are still there.

Now Kunduz where, for this writer, the zoom lens of memory became surreal earlier in the week. For two years in the 1970s, I lived as a field research anthropologist outside town in the village of Angur Bagh (Grape Garden). Tuesday’s New York Times mentioned not only Kunduz (briefly famous worldwide) but also my village – or “hamlet” as the Times calls it – Angur Bagh.

Angur Bagh is next to Kunduz airport, and therein lies a tale that may come back to haunt us. Indeed it may haunt us more concretely than the ID faces of those poor kids dead in Mazar. Here’s a segment of Times reporter Dexter Filkins’s text:

The village sits across the road from the Kunduz airport, where no regular commercial flight has landed or taken off in more than a year.

“An airplane landed every night for the past 12 days,” said Gul Muhammad, 35, a shop owner.

Another local merchant, Salahuddin, 24, added: “Every day the Taliban soldiers came in trucks and went into the airport. The planes left, and the troops went with them.”

These planes, if real, could have been coming from – and going to – only one place: Pakistan. They could have been coming and going for only one reason: to rescue key personnel – certainly Pakistani army and secret service (ISI) officers, possibly “Afghan-Arabs” whose capture would have embarrassed Islamabad. A Pakistan spokeman today (Wednesday) denied all such reports as “lies put forth by India.” According to Pakistan, there were no planes.

Someone’s lying – that’s for sure – and I know who it’s not. Gul Muhammed would have been 12 when I left Angur Bagh in 1978; Salahuddin would have been 1. I don’t recall them, but I doubtless knew their fathers. These men used to fib from time to time about their wealth (as others do every April 15). They used to filch water from each other’s irrigation ditches. Sometimes they’d take more than their share of a supposedly shared crop. They would not, please note, filch or share each other’s wives.

And there’s no conceivable reason, absolutely none, why they’d lie about those planes. Given the choice of whom to believe – Pakistan or Angur Bagh – I go with Gul Muhammed and Salahuddin.

Filkins’ well-reported story gets curiouser and curiouser: They [Angur Bagh residents] also said that American jets had bombed the airport repeatedly, and that Taliban crews came out almost every day to fix the runway. That assertion, if true, suggests that if Pakistani airplanes indeed landed here, they did so without any tacit agreement from the United States.

In one respect, that’s good news. It suggests that at least we’ve finally, finally, stopped playing “Yes sir, No sir, Three bags full” with Pakistan’s malicious and Islamist-leaning intelligence service.

It’s bad news in two respects. First, it suggests that our “total control of air space” doesn’t extend to its use by our “allies.” Second – and more serious – we’re left with the fact that some very extreme and very embittered opponents of the US, be they Pakistani intelligence officers or perhaps well-connected “Afghan-Arabs” (with ties to which Arabian elite?), have flown away. Now who’s to say they won’t come back to haunt us?

“Al-Qaida, fly away. Terrorize another day.”

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