What’s Going On?

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You don’t mess with Sher Brute.

“Sher” means lion, and at nearly 60 he’s still built like one. “Brute,” a nickname, is Persian for his extravagant handlebar mustache, an affectation which pre-dates our 20 year friendship. But “brute” would also work in English if you asked his war-time enemies. No other Afghan Resistance commander – some would say “warlord” – was more ruthlessly determined in the 1980s anti-Soviet Holy War. Sher Brute pulled no punches. The rumor persists that he once used a live Soviet prisoner – rather than a dead goat – as the “ball” in buzkashi, the violent, equestrian game of northern Afghanistan and Central Asia.

I hadn’t been face-to-face with Sher Brute since 1988. Now here we were, almost two decades older, at his homestead early this summer in northern Afghanistan. His mustache, unlike my follicle production, was still coal black. “He dyes it,” one retainer whispered. “Yes,” said another, “but he still has five wives [one more than is allowed in Islam], and none of them seems restless.”

Sher Brute asked me, point-blank, “What’s going on?”

He meant nationally – as in putative nation-state Afghanistan. I had come across the mountains from capital city Kabul. I was supposed to know. Anyway, when Sher Brute asks, you answer.

President Karzai, I told him, was trying to “reintegrate moderate Taliban.” Even in my mouth, the phrase felt disingenuous. In Sher Brute’s ears, it was sacrilege.

“Who defeated the Soviet infidels?” he stormed. “Then who defeated the Taliban and their Pakistani supporters and their maniac al-Qaeda Arab friends? We did. We of the North. And now Karzai and you Americans want us to disarm?” Then, as often happens in Afghanistan, he got ethnic. “You want us to accept these Pushtun Taliban and these Pushtun communists all over again?”

Background: In search of reconciliation, Hamid Karzai and his US advisors have broadened the range of ideological correctness and, especially, have courted ethnic Pushtuns of whatever political stripe. Pushtuns have always dominated national politics, inevitably at the expense of other groups. They still do – as both good guys and bad guys. Karzai is a Pushtun, and so is the recently departed American ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. But so are the current “neo-Taliban insurgents” based in Pushtun sectors of Pakistan. And Pakistan, even some Pushtuns admit, still schemes at controlling Afghanistan.

Confusing? Not to Sher Brute. The new word on his tongue is fedraleezm. Distrustful of any central government, Sher Brute and his Northern brethren want, as much as possible, to run their own affairs. Politically they want their own officials chosen in their own way – rather than outsider appointees foisted upon them by Kabul. They oppose the pre-conflict Afghan practice, now revived, of provincial governors being appointed from the center. “Do not you Americans,” I was asked, “select your own state governors? Why can we Afghans not do the same?” (Answer: Because for all their talk of democracy, neither Karzai nor his American policy pundits trust the Afghan people that far.)

Sher Brute feels the same way about economic development: desirous of certain initiatives, but wary of external influences and determined to call his own shots. By way of example, he showed me a new road – not far from his property and built by some vaguely identified outside organization. To my eyes, it looked innocent enough: a strip of graded earth covered unevenly with gravel and already going to potholes after only one spring of rains.

Sher Brute saw it differently: “Roads,” he said “are also inroads. Who knows the intent of those who built this one? Who knows what may travel on it? In the name of trade, the Soviets built roads across our mountains in the 1960s. But their tanks traveled those same roads in the 1980s. God be praised, I survived to learn this lesson: If there are roads to be built, let us be the ones to build them.”

And, with comic seriousness, he has done so. Parallel to the offending thoroughfare, Sher Brute has built a road of his own. Not as long and not as well-graveled and already even more potholed … but his own. “I and my people,” he told me with a grim smile, “will decide what travels this road.”

The Soviets, in their time, called Sher Brute a “terrorist.” He stopped at nothing – not even “terror” – to oppose outsider inroads. In the end and against all odds, the so-called terrorists won. “Where,” Sher Brute asks rhetorically, “is the Soviet Union today?”

Perhaps we’d do well to ponder Sher Brute’s question. How can it inform our own “War on Terror”? Or, as he would say, “What’s going on?”

I think the unthinkable: That we risk losing the War on Terror – and maybe are losing it already – precisely because we conceive of it in “terrorist” terms.

Last month I watched the BBC from London: eye-witness reports of the latest mass transit attacks, hopeful claims of accumulating forensic evidence, speculation on airport-type security on subways, reassurance from firm-faced police superintendents, regret over mistaken shooting of a swarthy Brazilian, self-congratulation on arrest of more likely suspects, and repeated praise for the stoicism of British character.

All well and good … except for the Brazilian. And all beside the point for millions of Muslims who remember history differently and in greater detail than we in the West. Here’s what they remember:

For starters, they remember The Crusades – which we started and they won. But then, five centuries later and unprovoked by Islam, Napoleon invaded Egypt. From 1798 onwards, the Muslim world was attacked and defeated, year after year, by Western forces with superior weaponry. When “necessary,” civilian populations were massacred in what, by any standard, qualifies as state-sponsored terrorism.

By the end of World War One, only deepest Arabia still lay under Muslim control. Elsewhere, their Land of Islam was divided by Western powers into separate political units. Those units survive today – fragile, illegitimate, and resentful – as nation-states with names like Afghanistan and Iraq.

Fragile because, like both Afghanistan and Iraq, their boundaries were drawn by outsiders for outsider purposes. Illegitimate because nothing like the nation-state is sanctioned in Muslim scripture. Resentful because Western power has meant Muslim impotence, especially military impotence.

Technology has now changed that military dynamic. As nation-states, of course, Islam is still no match for the West, and most Muslim heads of state depend on Western support. But as individuals using Western weapons and Western transport, militant Islamists can now wage backpack-suicide war wherever they please. We call it “terror.” They think of it as a phase, only the current phase, of their centuries-old military struggle.

For several centuries Islam has been at a military disadvantage. Now, suddenly, militant Islamists have the means to hit us at home – much, they say, as the West has been hitting their homes for hundreds of years. In the early 21st century things are more even. “Leave us alone,” they say, “and we’ll leave you alone.”

Back to mustaschioed and many-wived Sher Brute. He’s no Islamist militant, at least not since the Soviets left, and he bears the West no ill-will. But his opposition to unwelcome outsider inroads is bred to the bone. Here’s the lesson:

The main aim of Islamist struggle is, purely and simply, to be left alone – politically, economically, and even culturally. True, there’s some talk of worldwide domination, but few Islamists take it seriously. Most, instead, merely want us out – out of Palestine, out of Chechnya, out of Iraq, out of their military bases, out of their royal or presidential palaces, out of their oil reserves and profits, even out of their print and broadcast media.

Given Western temperament, we won’t get out, at least not to the extent demanded by Islamist extremists. Given Globalization (which is really global Westernization) we probably wouldn’t know how to get out even if we tried.

So, given the above, let’s proceed with our various defenses. But let’s also, however uncomfortably, recognize the historical record, proceed with a measure of humility, and dispense with Red State-style demonization. Let’s realize that militant Islamists are not – repeat not – inherently “evil.” Otherwise we may reap what we sow. Sher Brute may not welcome me next time.

You don’t mess with Sher Brute.

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