Three-month buzkashi score card

Today marks three months of U.S. military action in and above Afghanistan. Time to take stock, and how better than in terms of buzkashi, the ancient and violent equestrian game of Central Asia. We sense remarkable success, if not yet complete triumph. Buzkashi helps us assess the score more precisely.

Buzkashi consists of horsemen, sometimes hundreds, struggling for control of an animal carcass. The resulting pandemonium – strong men on powerful horses battering and slamming into each other in pursuit of exclusive control – is a popular metaphor for Afghan politics. Will the Bonn agreement and its new Afghan government end two dozen years of internal buzkashi? Or will these hopeful developments be remembered as merely a lull in the chaotic game? We return to this question at column’s end.

Below the buzkashi surface – and of far wider reaching importance – are issues of sponsorship, momentum, and image management. It is in these terms that we can best score the past three months of U.S. involvement. Some background from the first column in this series (Oct. 4, 2001):

The key role in any buzkashi is that of overall sponsor: the man who announces the game, invites the guests, organizes the extensive hospitality, supplies the vast sums of prize money, and – acid test – proves himself able to restrict three or four days of equestrian mayhem to the actual game itself. Significantly, this overall sponsor is seldom himself on horseback. Rather he sits to one side, powerful in apparent repose. A nod here, a raised finger there, and his will is done

The man who can manage a buzkashi successfully gains enormous prestige. People speak for years of his achievement. Henceforth he is known as someone who can order events, achieve his ends, and impose his purpose on chaos – the sort of man to support in real world struggles for concrete spoils.

But sponsorship entails risk. Some games go wrong and turn into brawls beyond sponsor control. Such management collapse leads to image ruin. The sponsor is … disgraced in this public arena. His initiative has failed, his name “falls,” and then – worst of all – his supporters abandon him. They ride away, literally and figuratively, in search of some other patron, now in the ascendancy, who is more likely to provide them with political rewards.

On Oct. 7 George W. Bush undertook the sponsorship of a buzkashi. By game standards, he and his vaunted team have done extremely well. (“Team” here evokes two contrary associations. In Afghanistan a would-be buzkashi sponsor uses his ablest, most trusted associates as a team of core supporters in the planned enterprise. From the first, however, he presents himself as the undeniable front man. In America’s election 2000, candidate W did the reverse: downplayed his own slim CV by promising an all-star team to front for him. He made this pitch in all seriousness and with much ado – and, amazingly, won. Some Afghans shook their heads in disbelief a year ago. Now they’re still baffled … but also glad. Would Al Gore have delivered them from the Taliban? Maybe, maybe not.)

Let’s score America’s accomplishments, impressive on five buzkashi counts:

1. Having patiently marshaled the necessary resources – and benefiting from remarkable patience among post-9/11 Americans – the president chose his moment and announced his buzkashi on Oct. 7, precisely as the first bombs fell. He was clear then; he’s been clear since. Well done, Mr. President.

2. Coalition allies (analogous to buzkashi guests) were invited with the urgent message that “you’re with us, or you’re with the terrorists.” Western leaders, especially the irrepressible and indispensably Tony Blair, quickly accepted. Some, like Spanish President Aznar, are lampooned by their own press for being rather too eager to get on board.

More problematic invitees merited special inducements. These goodies (analogous to buzkashi hospitality) included support on Chechnya and a trip to Crawford, Texas (but no dropping of Star Wars) for Russia’s Valery Putin, and lifting of economic sanctions (and who knows what else?) for Pakistan’s Parvez Musharraf.

Others would have been welcome but were not pressed to come. The fear was that face could be lost on both sides. Prominent among the ambivalent non-attendees was the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a petro-glorified family business crammed with as many contradictions as princelings.

But nobody “rode away.” Well done, Secretary Powell and, I strongly suspect, Bush the father as well as Bush the son.

3. Grand prizes, otherwise inconceivable, have been offered from deep American pockets by buzkashi sponsor Bush … and won by various Afghans. Hamid Karzai received much U.S. assistance – sometimes more publicly than was useful – and is now both interim head of state and a splendid candidate for long-haul leadership. More comprehensive winners, for now, are the Northerners, in particular ethnic Tajiks from one valley (Panjshir) and one party (Jamiat-i-Islami) of the northern alliance. Three such men control the three top ministries (Interior, Defense and Foreign Affairs.) Never before in Afghan history has so much national power been in northern hands. Prognosis: problems because this overdue corrective also represents an unsustainable imbalance.

Prizes keep being offered to ho-hum Pashtuns around Tora Bora. These include, we are told, “money and winter clothes.” (Which is preferred? Many of these cold climate duds, like much of the air-dropped food, will soon be sold for money.) Our aims are to find Osama bin Laden and extricate al-Qaida. Prognosis: Problems with war-weary Pashtuns and with long-gone Osama.

Even so, well done the U.S. taxpayers whose money Bush has spent liberally and, in this case, wisely. (“Liberally” should not be taken the wrong way in Crawford.)

4. Sponsor Bush & Team have wonderfully contained the mayhem of this buzkashi. It did not spread, as feared, to unstable Pakistan and other Muslim lands. It was not exacerbated by Ramadan. Reason: Momentum. At first, with scant military advances and the death of Abdul Haq, opposition sentiment ominously swelled. But then, with the capture of Mazar-e-Sharif on Nov. 9, it all turned round. City after city fell into friendly hands: Kabul a mere four days before the start of what otherwise could have been a Ramadan PR disaster. Lesson: Even for the Faithful, nothing talks like momentum.

5. “Image management, stupid!” is buzkashi’s paraphrase of the famous Clinton maxim. And not only, not even primarily, in Afghanistan. Sept. 11 thrust upon Bush the (not altogether unwelcome) responsibility of demonstrating our country’s awesome, fearful power. This need goes beyond getting Osama and al-Qaida. Indeed, albeit not explicitly, it goes beyond the War on Terror. It recalls Nixon and Kissinger’s need to salvage national prestige from our Vietnam debacle. Love them or loath them, they did so with remarkable success…and considerable bloodshed. Their message: Don’t be misled by American misfortune. Don’t mess with the USA.

Prognosis: After the overwhelming display of military power in Afghanistan, prospective enemies will pause a bit longer before messing with America. Put positively, we have gained enormous, if grudgingly acknowledged, prestige. Rebounding from Sept. 11, the United States (like a successful buzkashi sponsor) is now forcefully known as the country which can order events, achieve its ends, and impose its purpose on chaos – the country to support in real world struggles for concrete spoils. Well done, Secretary Rumsfeld, my choice for this buzkashi’s MVP … and to William Jefferson Clinton, whose responsibly maintained military Rumsfeld used to do the job.

Problems remain. Having highlighted Osama (perhaps too repeatedly) as Evil incarnate, we now have to get him and to prove it. Ditto the main al-Qaida network, not an easy task. But for Bush & Team the big work in Afghanistan is done and well done.

For Afghanistan itself, big problems remain. But Afghans and Afghanophiles are reconnecting in hope after decades of diaspora. As it happens, I reconnected last week with the most widely respected of all buzkashi khans. Go anywhere in the world of that game, mention this man’s name, and hear the buzz: his great kashka horse, his great rider Tosh – now both gone but never forgotten – his own sponsorship of legendary games, and his consequently legendary prestige. Here’s what the great khan said:

“Thank God for the Americans and the British. We still need them. For the sake of my country, they must stay involved.”

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