Nazir and the news, two years later

The first U.S. bombs fell here in Kabul two years ago this past Tuesday. “I wasn’t scared,” says my driver Nazir, “when the explosions began. I’d been scared for what seemed my whole life. And, ever since yaazdawum-i-eseptembar [9-11], we’d expected an attack. Bombs fall where they fall. Whether we lived or died would be God’s will. So I was more excited than scared. We prayed to God that the attack would succeed.”

The attack did succeed (at least militarily), the Taliban were routed (at least temporarily), and a month later Nazir and a younger brother were on the street early one morning when the first American Special Forces arrived. “Jalil and I were just standing there, wondering if – as we’d heard in the bakery after dawn prayers – the Taliban had fled in the dark. We prayed that they had. Then, suddenly, these big men appeared speaking English.”

Nazir knew no English then, and not much now. During the Taliban era, which began in his teens, he’d worked and scrimped and sacrificed his own education so that Jalil and three other brothers, all junior to him, could go to school. So when “these big men” began talking ingleesi, Jalil was the one who talked back – in his bare handful of English words.

Meestar Jeem (Mr. Jim) gave Jalil a handful of dollars and hired him on the spot. Jalil climbed aboard a tank. “By noon,” Nazir says with pride and pardonable hyperbole, his little brother was “fully fluent.” Two years later, it is true that, yes, Jalil has become vividly conversant in best and worst of our American idiom. He, Nazir, and one other brother are also flush with cash.

As translators, drivers, and “fixers” whom we can’t do without, they deserve it. As brothers whose father is still alive, they take every bit of it home. As Afghans living in Kabul, they pray that God will bless America (good news in an otherwise U.S.-phobic, post-Iraq, Muslim world). They also pray that America will stay here forever. The bad news is that God, if He/She is on their side, will need to agree.

“Otherwise,” Nazir observed on the clogged, fume-fogged road to my office yesterday, “the whole country will be like this traffic: no safety, no order, no control, no justice.” An even more upscale Land Cruiser than mine, complete with blackened windows and an AK-47 poking out the shotgun window, cut us off. Nazir cursed in Persian, asked me to teach him the English version, and (all the while practicing his new phrase) proceeded to run a mere Russian jeep into the ditch.

Our car radio is tuned to the news – in Persian and Pashto on a U.S. funded station called “Freedom” which broadcasts from the Czech Republic – and yesterday, typically, it was both good and bad. The good news was that ISAF (the International Security and Assistance Force authorized in late 2001 and now manned by NATO) may finally be allowed to operate outside Kabul. The bad news: Maybe too little, too late.

ISAF extension into the provinces has been a no-brainer since it first proved so helpful in Kabul. Later yesterday Nazir drove me to the ISAF compound: Italians at the gate, Belgians and Germans at my meeting, Canadians surmounting the bomb death of two comrades outside Kabul last week. Altogether nearly 20 nations have been involved. And yet – neocons take note – multilateralism doesn’t equal weakness. Swiftly and literally under the gun, ISAF has created an ethos of urban security. What works in the city should at least be tried in the country. Hopefully, the necessary U.N. resolution will now be passed.

Why has this rustication of ISAF taken so long? Because our Pentagon wanted the boondocks to its unilateral self. Rumsfeld & Co. repeatedly nixed the pleas of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the NGO community. This week the SecDef – who once dreamed of “fabulous regime change” in Iraq – told one of his fabulous fibs: “We’ve always favored an expansion outside of Kabul,” he told reporters in Colorado. “But there weren’t a lot of countries in line, standing in the queue, to do it.”

Precisely the reverse is true. Back in 2002, as ISAF proved its worth in Kabul and the provinces started to implode, other countries offered their help in the proposed rural extension. Rumsfeld said No. Others stopped offering. And now, faced with further provincial implosion (plus the need for good Afghan news to bolster Bush re-election), the United States must talk those others into offering again.

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Meanwhile what’s happened? The good news is that Afghanistan’s own triumvirate of evil – the Taliban, al-Qaida, and bad-guy warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar – has been prevented, mostly by American forces, from making a comeback beyond a few border areas. Give the credit to our brave troops, most of them reservists.

The bad news is that supposedly good-guy warlords, supported by millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars, have turned on both the central government and each other. Give that credit to Pentagon policy. Yesterday’s example was open warfare in the northern center of Mazar-e-Sharif.

Nazir and most other ordinary Afghans hate all warlords, “good” or “bad.” They want them, as does President Karzai, barred from politics. This attitude, albeit abstract, represents good news. The bad news has to do with concrete situations. There was, en route to work yesterday, a certain glint in Nazir’s eye when the radio spoke of tank battles up north. Clearly it was more than the usual dustup. “Khub sa’i jang ast,” he said with regrettable enthusiasm: “It’s a real-deal war.”

We listened this summer to good news about additional U.S. aid for Afghan reconstruction: an announced $1.2 billion. No, as Bush has said, we’re not abandoning Afghanistan. The bad news has to do with detail and context. Detail: Fully a third of that initially impressive figure is more recycled than additional, coming from existing accounts and earmarked for programs such as embassy reconstruction.

And consider two contexts – two points of perspective – regarding that $1.2 billion for Afghan reconstruction. Context A: Bush has asked for $11 billion – nearly 10 times as much – for military spending in Afghanistan. Context B: Bush has asked for $87 billion for Afghanistan and Iraq together. Let’s do the numbers.

Take that astounding total ($87 billion), subtract what’s slated for Afghanistan (by my calculation, $12.2 billion), and you get some idea of how completely Bush has bungled War on Terror priorities. Afghanistan, not Iraq, is where 9-11-style Terror used to be based. It’s where Terror still lurks on the borders. It’s where, given wrong U.S. priorities, Terror will return. Saddam was terrible for most Iraqis, but 9-11-style Terror never had a foothold there.

Nazir’s take is classic Persian proverb: “You can’t hold two watermelons in one hand.” The good news is that he, a barely literate Afghan, can phrase it so clearly. The bad news is that so many Americans can’t.

A packet of Mr. Jim’s letters – from Oshkosh, Wisc., and translated for Nazir by Jamil – sits iconically in the family sitting room. This family admires Americans enormously. They want us to lead the world. That’s good news. The bad news is that Americans have themselves been so abysmally led.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. The second edition of Dr. Azoy’s study, “Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan,” is available from Waveland Press.