Kandahar city and film

Six months ago few of us had heard of either one. Now the first – that hard, contentious city in southern Afghanistan – is seldom off the front page. The second – a surreal and tragically gorgeous film – should have us all in the front row. Both are crammed with intriguing, disturbing contradictions. Among these problems is how to spell it. Afghans prefer “Qandahar” whose q without a u may confound BDN’s spell-checker. Prepare yourselves, in this piece, to be as confounded as I am.

As a city, Kandahar is birthplace of both the Afghan nation (1747) and the Taliban movement (1994). But don’t think of Kandaharis as post-modernist innovators. While Kabul sports the paraphernalia of central government and a comparatively sophisticated populace, Kandahar turns its back on trendiness. Its disdain for outsiders is adamantine. Several examples from recent Kandahar history:

That Kandahar International Airport is currently a key U.S. installation has ironic appropriateness: The United States built it between 1956 and 1962. Note the “International.” At the project’s mid-1950s inception, prop planes still flew the world with frequent refueling stops. Concerned about the USSR which loomed on Afghanistan’s north, America tried to enhance the South. How? By creating a new Asian hub where great flocks of conventional aircraft would touch down and gas up. Kandahar – or at least its vaunted International Airport – would become a prime 20th century caravan crossroads.

By completion time, just six years and 15 million tax dollars later, the airline industry had shifted from short-hop props to long-jaunt jets. Kandahar airspace was as empty as ever…until the 1980s when it became a vital Soviet military base in the war against the U.S.-supported Afghan jihad. Come the free trade 1990s, its vast runways opened to heroine and antiquities (outgoing), al-Qaida arms (incoming), and Saudi princes (round-tripping) who used Kandahar as a base for super-luxurious falconry safaris complete with tent cities and top-of-the-line SUVs (all left behind for the Taliban). Now Kandahar Airport is more “International” than ever as Americans export Arabs to Cuba from Afghanistan.

Then there was (and still is) Mullah Mohammed Omar, obscure peasant turned Commander of the Taliban Faithful based in Kandahar. It’s typical of Kandahari worldview that the boss man avoided Kabul – avoided, in fact, almost everywhere else and everybody outside his narrow circle. Certainly he avoided the paparazzi. Again it’s consistent with Kandahar’s inwardness that so few pictures exist of Mullah Omar – and that the one we know best is so unexplained in worldwide TV outlets.

You know the footage I mean: We see a mass of bearded, turbaned Pashtuns at whose center, elevated on some invisible platform, is another bearded, turbaned Pashtun. He’s so indistinguishable that TV producers highlight him with a white oval on his head – presumably not meant as a halo by CNN. Usually unexplained is the piece of cloth which he holds on display – and the rationale for his allowing this exceptional video coverage. Mullah Omar is holding a cloak worn by Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) more than 1,400 years ago. Kept locked away in a Kandahar shrine, the sacred garment was shown only two other times in the 20th century, both at key moments of spiritual affirmation. (“PBUH” is the acronym for “Peace Be Upon Him” which Muslims always use to follow the Prophet’s name in written English. In speech they use the original Arabic phrase. I use it here not because I’m a good Muslim but to exemplify, yet again, the pervasiveness of religion in what is now for us The Other Culture.)

Then there’s the current and contradictory status of Kandahar. Is it or is it not under central control from Kabul? Hamid Karzai says Yes; when he came to Kabul and his installation as Interim Authority Chairman, it was via supposedly secure Kandahar. Gul Agha, the provincial governor and our “go-to warlord” in Kandahar, says Yes … at least in public. Our U.S. military marches the streets, controls the airport (despite Thursday night’s firefight), and still has its back-up position at the nearby (and memorably named) Camp Rhino.

How then did seven top Taliban officials get released last week in Kandahar after surrendering to authorities? One of them, Mullah Nooruddin Turabi, was the justice minister instrumental in brutalizing women and blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas. Who let them go? And on whose authority? U.S. military spokesman in Kandahar: “We’re not in the business of determining who should and should not be in custody right now.”

Well, then, what are we in the business of determining right now? If it’s not about custody, then why all this air traffic between Kandahar and Guantanamo Bay? Mullah Turabi, like the similarly missing Mullah Omar, is blind in one eye. Who in Kandahar is winking at whom?

You’ll keep both eyes appreciatively open when watching the film Kandahar. Simply stated, it glows: with scenic color, with narrative surprise, and with compelling, unnerving contradictions. Kandahar was shot by prolific Iranian director Mosen Makhmalbaf (www.makhmalbaf.com) along the Iran-Afghanistan border using Afghan refugees as actors – with one surreal exception (see at end). Art uncannily imitates life in the person of its chief character “Nafas” as played by Nelofer Pazira. This beautiful, talented, hitherto non-actress has been, in real life, an Afghan refugee in Canada. Several years ago, still in real life, she received a suicide-threatening letter from a woman friend in Taliban Afghanistan. In trying to enter Afghanistan and forestall the suicide, still in real life, Ms. Pazira met Mr. Makhmalbaf, and the idea for a film was born.

As Nafas travels into Afghanistan and starts toward Kandahar, she races a three-day suicide deadline due to end with a solar eclipse. Those three days include what Christophe Ayad, film critic of the Paris daily Lib?ration, calls “pure moments of grace.” Sometimes the grace involves troubling incongruities: a burqa-billowing wedding party murmuring sad songs, a madrassa (Taliban religious school) whose students are entranced/terrified and whose instructor is implacable/soft-spoken, the parachuting of prosthesis limbs to (real life and film life) landmine victims who rush on slow-motion crutches toward the drop site. Indeed, only one non-ambiguous situation sticks in my memory: an abrupt and pitiless robbery is which wayfarers are left destitute. (Think of it is as a micro-scale example of what Enron executives have done to their shareholders.) Otherwise the film is notable for the way in which everyone – indeed the whole culture – does so much with so little. (What will the Enron fat cats do with their last minute winnings?)

From first to last, the camera work makes Kandahar spectacular. Ayad’s take: “The problem is that the message and the camera go in opposite directions. The burqa is an abomination, that’s understood, but it does not prevent one from thinking that it is also photogenic.” For me, it’s less a problem than a chance to have one’s sensibilities challenged, perhaps even to reconsider one’s priorities.

Francesc de Carraeras, professor of constitutional law at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, has this advice for those leaving the theater: “Walk out onto the streets, and stroll through a shopping area. Note the variety of products on display, the need we feel for them, and the dubious well-being which many of them bring us. All along, keep thinking of what you saw in the film. Think of some of the characters’ observations, of the meaning they give their lives, and of their concept of happiness. Maybe you’ll come to the same conclusion as I do: They must change in many ways. But so must we.”

One last note of surrealism. After Ms. Pazira, the film’s second lead is an African-American named David Belfield who became Daoud Salahuddin and then Hassan Tantai. He’s absolutely terrific in Kandahar as an ex-pat convert to Islam who’s joined in Afghanistan’s shattered hall of mirrors. (His flat matter-of-factness reminds us of American Talib John Walker.) You may already know the real life twist: That Belfield-Salahuddin-Tantai is wanted in Maryland for the 1980 Islamist killing of an Iranian supporter of the Shah. And here he is, an actual murder suspect, acting (brilliantly) in a movie.

What’s real? What’s not? Kandahar, both city and film, provides more questions than answers.

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