Sen. Collins in the Kingdom of Caubul

Susan Collins and I sat together – a pleasure and honor for me – at dinner last week in Bangor. She spoke of her trip to Afghanistan last January. “I’m so glad to have gone,” said Maine’s junior senator. “You understand so much more when you’ve gone there.” Correct.

“I remember spiraling downwards in the dark towards Bagram [air force base where some 8,000 U.S. troops are quartered]. We landed at night to avoid attacks. Security was really tight. Hamid Karzai and some of his cabinet had come from Kabul to meet us. He’s a great man. Terrific charisma!” Correct.

“It was dark and cold and dusty.” Correct, compared to Maine during Indian summer.

Then Sen. Collins asked a good question. “I got the impression of a harsh place. Was it always that way?”

Three decades and counting into my romance with Afghanistan, I answered like any sometimes abused but still besotted lover: Yes and no. Yes, the winters are cold, especially on that high plain which leads to the Hindu Kush mountains. Nights are dark for want of electricity, generated at Bagram but absent in surrounding villages. And most Third World military bases are dusty – except when they’re muddy.

“Harsh” is harder to call, particularly for an Afghanophile. Love takes the bad with the good. I tried to explain over dinner, but the excellent lobster precluded deep talk, even next to a senator. Mouth full, my mind went back to another dignitary, The Right Honorable Mounstuart Elphinstone, British envoy to Afghanistan in 1808-09. His “Account of the Kingdom of Caubul” marks the start of informed outsider assessments. Would “Elphie,” as Afghan groupies call him, have agreed with “harsh”?

Like me, Elphinstone struggles to reconcile contradictions. Afghan temperament is so intense – so powerful, so compelling, and so distinct from our own – that Western minds get swamped in the cross-currents. The Right Hon. Envoy complicates matters by introducing two perspectives, those of Britain and India. A traveler from England, he writes, “would discover … hills and wastes, unmarked by enclosures, not embellished by trees, and destitute of navigable canals, public roads, and all the great and elaborate productions of human industry and refinement.” But the sojourner from India would find much to enjoy in the scenery (“wild and novel”), personal dress (“soberly and decently attired … in brown mantles”), and character traits (“barbarous” but “virtuous” and worthy of “interest, kindness, and esteem.”)

“Caubul,” says Elphie, is “compact and handsome, [known for] the abundance and arrangement of its bazaars.” Its “most pleasing spot” is the tomb of Babur (see below) who founded India’s Moghul dynasty in the much larger Delhi but ordered that his resting place be Afghanistan. Elphie records it as “situated at the top of a hill over the city, surrounded by beds of anemonies and other flowers, and commanding a noble prospect.”

North of town he describes the same flat plane where Susan Collins landed at Bagram. Rather than harsh, he finds it “the finest part of these districts, and perhaps of the kingdom.” Foothills provide “an abundant supply of water; and so numerous are the fruit trees that [one section] alone is reckoned to contain six thousand orchards.” Locals are “remarkable for their activity and ingenuity.” Their “energy” had built complex irrigation networks. Two centuries ago, Bagram sat in a long-settled and richly cultivated landscape.

It had been that way for at least three centuries. Kabul (conventional spelling) is lyrically described in 1506 by the emperor Babur, otherwise hard-bitten descendant of both Genghis Khan and Tamurlaine. He conquered the city at 22; it conquered him for a lifetime. Babur took pride in plain talk, but Kabul softened his hard Central Asian edges. “It is a pretty little province…completely surrounded by mountains. On the slopes are orchards. At the end [of one irrigation canal] is an area called Gulkana, a secluded cozy spot where much debauchery is indulged in.”

Harsh? Babur would never have tolerated the Taliban. On the contrary – albeit as an envious non-participant – he quotes the Persian master poet Hafiz: “How happy that time when, unbridled and unconstrained/ We spent a few days at Gulkana with persons of ill repute.”

“No place in the world,” according to Babur, “is known to have such a pleasing climate as Kabul.” It roused the florist in him: “Once I had the types of tulip counted, and there turned out to be thirty or forty varieties.” He lists the local farm produce: Grapes, pomegranates, apricots, apples, quinces, rhubarb, pears, peaches, plums, jujubes, almonds, oranges, honey, and nuts.

He calls Kabul “an excellent mercantile center. Merchants who go to Cathay [China] and Anatolia [Turkey] do no greater business.”

Babur died in luxuriant India. His tombstone was carved there by the order of great-grandson Janhangir (Grasper of the World). Its style of carving was meant to recall the Taj Mahal. But Babur himself never felt at home amid grandiosity. He rests in what was, until recently, Kabul’s simplest, finest garden.

An exotic civility remained intact well into the 20th century. Even when reduced to buffer state status – first in the Great Game, then in the Cold War – Afghanistan retained its independence and character: harsh, perhaps, but admirable, even enviable. As Robert Byron observed in 1933, “Here at last is Asia without an inferiority complex.”

Byron describes one suburb not far from Babur’s tomb: “Dar-al-Aman is joined to Kabul by one of the most beautiful avenues in the world, four miles long, dead straight, as broad as [England’s] Great West Road, and lined with tall, white-stemmed poplars. In front of the poplars run streams confined by grass margins. Behind them are shady footwalks and a tangle of yellow and white roses, now in full flower and richly scented.” And I, as a young diplomat in 1973, would nonchalantly drive that long, straight road to Dar-al-Aman. Once there, I’d visit the Kabul Museum with its millennia of cultured artifacts. Or stroll the shady footpaths. Or climb (a mild and easy climb) to Babur’s tomb.

Then came superpower warfare, civil breakdown, terrorist occupation, and Sen. Collins’ question. Harsh? Yes, brutally harsh for the past quarter century. Before then? Harsh in some ways, but marvelous in others. I learned much of human value from pre-conflict Afghanistan, became more fully human for having lived there.

Now the Dar-al-Aman road is a risk after dusk. The Kabul Museum is wrecked and looted. The lovely pathway to Babur’s tomb has been mined, swept, and mined again. And the plain north of Kabul, including Bagram, was transformed by the Taliban in 1997 from orchards and vineyards to poisoned wells and charred bomb craters. Harsh indeed.

Susan Collins deserves no small credit for going to Afghanistan. Back from Bagram last winter, she spoke of the need for long-term U.S. commitment: “The Afghan people are fearful that the United States will now abandon them when there’s so much to be done to rebuild Afghan society.” Correct then. Correct now.

But now the much-admired President Karzai fears that sudden and immediate “crisis” in Iraq will a shift attention away from unfinished work in Afghanistan – the last, least exciting, but most demanding parts. That our resources will go instead to this new, simplistically phrased, suspiciously timed, and voter-distracting adventure. He is, inevitably, correct. Example: administration talk of long-term military occupation of Iraq – in effect, nation-building – while analogous assistance to peacekeeping in Afghanistan, so desperately requested by Karzai, gets nixed time and again.

Susan Collins and I spoke of getting beyond Bagram next time. Of traveling more broadly in Elphie’s Kingdom of Caubul. To do so, she’ll need more physical security than is available now. All of Afghanistan needs it. Only consistent, comprehensive U.S. attention can make it stick. Lack thereof will lead to more than senatorial travel restrictions. Distraction of U.S. attention from Afghanistan means return of power vacuum and revival of al-Qaida.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. He was last in Afghanistan in May on a U.S. government contract.