Things went wrong twice on a recent weekend in Kabul. (The Muslim “weekend” is traditionally limited to Friday after the midday prayer, but Thursday evening is also a time for special gatherings.) That Thursday evening and again last Friday afternoon, life, as Afghans sometimes put it, “became a buzkashi.”

This column began (BDN, Oct. 4, 2001) with a discussion of Afghanistan’s great equestrian game. Details of its sponsorship relate to Afghan politics, and any sponsored undertaking, such as U.S. military action in Afghanistan, can be assessed in buzkashi terms (Jan. 7). What happened that weekend evokes buzkashi somewhat differently: as a figure of speech that, back in 1972, redirected my life.

I was in the same city, Kabul, at an Afghan government ministry reception. I’d been in Afghanistan as a fledgling diplomat for nine months which, while pregnant with experience, had not yet quite delivered as expected. Life seemed far tamer than what I’d read of wild and woolly Afghan history: ambuscades, assassinations, mobs in the streets, warlords in the hills. What had happened, I wondered in the fall of ’72, to all that wildness and woolliness?

So I posed this question to a sleek and skilled Afghan counterpart. His response was characteristically indirect. “Here,” he said with an eyebrow arched over the pin-striped reception, “we’re always shaking hands and calling each other ‘Excellency.’ If you want to know what we’re really like, go to a buzkashi game.”

I did … and was blown away by the roughest, toughest, most volatile game on earth. My next six years focused on buzkashi which, in turn, provided a unique window on Afghan day-to-day existence. Most of that life, unlike the game, was peaceable, fairly cooperative, and mostly predictable. Beneath the surface, however, lurked a potential for sudden upheaval: chaotic, uninhibited, and uncontrollable. At those moments, typically without warning, life “becomes a buzkashi.”

On the national level, it happened the very next year – 1973 – when the king was deposed by his cousin and brother-in-law. Far more catastrophically, it struck again in 1978 with a Marxist coup and in 1979 with a Soviet invasion. The present moment and Hamid Karzai’s (American-sponsored) Interim Authority mark the best hope, after two dozen years of enormously destructive “buzkashi,” to suppress the game’s metaphorical expression and to contain it, once again, with literal bounds.

Reality, we know, is more than skin deep, but cosmetics can change appearances which, in turn, can shape subsequent reality. Call it “spin” or “image management,” politicians everywhere take pains to portray events to their advantage. Afghanistan now is a bit (only a bit) liked America after World War I, with the excellent Hamid Karzai (only in this way) like presidential embarrassment Warren Harding. The post-trauma task of both: To effect a “Return to Normalcy.” The way to spin it: Represent life, in large and small ways, as getting more normal again.

Harding already had stable institutions in place – which Karzai does not. (Harding’s corrupt business cronies challenged some of those invaluable institutions, much the Bush pals in Enron have now also done.) America did return to a kind of nutty normalcy called the Roaring ’20s. Afghanistan, without strong institutions, has less margin of error. Hence the increased significance of last weekend’s cabinet assassination and soccer riot. Both were figurative buzkashis of the sort that Karzai can’t afford.

The soccer riot should not be confused with the skinhead hooliganism which mars games in northern Europe. Sport-starved by the Taliban, thousands of fans tried to scale the walls and force the gates of Ghazi Stadium, recently the site of Islamist executions and, long ago, of an annual national buzkashi tournament. On the surface, Friday’s disturbance was apolitical: too many fans for too few seats. Finally a game was played – and good-naturedly lost by out-of-practice Afghans against members of the International Security and Assistance Force. On the scoreboard (3-1), no great loss for Afghanistan.

The off-field riot constituted a greater loss, more politically significant than in settled countries. In a culture without firm political institutions – and thus with basic issues of power always uncertain – all things are constantly analyzed and assessed for their political implications. Even in the pre-war days, for instance, great pains were taken (and sometimes inflicted) to ensure that the government-sponsored buzkashi tournament – or any government sponsored event – would go without a hitch. Players who sassed the umpire (usually a military officer) were more than penalized or thrown out of the game. They were, in some cases, thrown in prison. Likewise the spectators were controlled, subtly and not-so-subtly, by police.

The recent afternoon riot, while not meant as anti-government, revealed the government’s limitations in controlling events. Not even the peacekeeping ISAF were able to keep the peace. Consciously or otherwise, spectators went home with a diminished sense of government capacity – which, since in Afghan politics all things are personalized, means Karzai capacity. The peace-keepers’ team may have won, but peace-keeping lost. Notions of Afghan normalcy lost.

The losses were greater on Thursday evening when Abdul Rahman, Karzai’s chief of tourism and civil aviation was murdered while trying to board a plane at newly re-opened Kabul airport. (Because Karzai leads an “authority” rather than a full “government,” cabinet heads are not yet, technically, “ministers.” While of no great importance to Afghans, this distinction reminds us how embryonic the process remains.) Much rests not only on why he was killed, but also on who’s saying what about why.

First story (from eyewitnesses): Rahman was killed by paid-up but delayed and thus infuriated Afghan pilgrims to Mecca. These trippers-of-a-lifetime had spent $1500 each on a journey with a deadline which, if not met, would exclude their participation in the full hajj and thus their becoming full-fledged hajjis. Is this story credible?

Having been on one of those deadline flights last week – on almost the same date but with different departure point and, for me, different destination – I can testify to the single-minded spirituality of Mecca-bound pilgrims. These were devout, determined folks: reading their Qorans, praying in the aisles, exhorting and supporting each other … and being extremely solicitous toward the non-Muslim in their midst. Was my

legroom OK? Would I like an extra lunch on Yemenia Airlines?

I felt entirely safe – and quite proud – among them. And, for my own safety, I would never want to be perceived as obstructing their passage. VIP Abdul Rahman, in charge of civil aviation, was at his own airport going somewhere else when time was short, planes were few, and pilgrims had been camping outside for days. Bad time and place for him to be. Those campers, whatever else, were not happy.

Second story (from defense chief Mohammed Fahim, erstwhile warlord of the northern alliance): Rahman was killed by “al-Qaida terrorists. … They were trying to sabotage the interim government and the peace process.”

Third story (from Hamid Karzai and his chief of information): Rahman was killed by personal enemies in a vendetta dating to “the days of the Resistance.” Suspects have been named, all reportedly belonging to the northern alliance.

Who knows? With only a borrowed laptop at the moment and a most uncertain e-mail connection, I don’t have the facts. Nor do I wish to cast aspersions on Hamid Karzai’s account. Note, however, that his story of personal vengeance is least damaging in terms of impression management. Afghans have always feuded. It’s normal, as in normalcy.

For Fahim to accuse al-Qaida is, perhaps, to divert suspicion from his own faction. But this same accusation – from Karzai’s standpoint – is to empower al-Qaida, to admit that they can still do harm even in his capital city Kabul. Such is not the impression Karzai wants. There’ll be no normalcy with al-Qaida still in town.

Still worse for Karzai is the original story of righteous Muslim rage. Why? Because Islam remains the sine qua non core of legitimacy for any Afghan ruler. Above all, Karzai must protect Islamic rights and obligations. The pilgrimage is obligatory; Muslims have the right to go; governments should facilitate passage. This set of reciprocal rights and obligations may seem strange to non-Muslims. For Afghans they constitute normalcy. To neglect them – worse still, to impede them – is to invite life’s becoming a buzkashi … again.

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