Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea was a Time Asia Book of the Year winner.
Something similar has been at work with regard to another bestseller about Afghanistan by another globetrotting celebrity. Malalai Joya’s polemical autohagiography, A Woman among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice, tells the story of an Afghan parliamentarian so courageous that the BBC bestowed the title “bravest woman in Afghanistan” upon her. Joya’s book is not what you would call a work of fiction, but in 2010, the year Time chose her for inclusion on its list of the 100 most influential people in the world, she was only dimly remembered in Afghanistan as a former MP who once made an angry speech, got kicked out of Parliament and then left the country. A decade after September 11, throughout Europe and North America, especially among people who considered themselves staunchly progressive, Malalai Joya was a larger-than-life, heroic figure. But among Afghanistan’s human rights activists and women’s rights leaders, Joya was remembered with a mix of pity and contempt.
All over the English-speaking world, there was something about September 11 that seemed to cause otherwise intelligent people to give vent to all sorts of unhinged declarations. A mere two weeks after al-Qaida’s July 7, 2005, suicide bombings in London claimed the lives of fifty-two innocents, London mayor Ken Livingstone declared: “The Americans recruited and trained Osama bin Laden, taught him how to kill, to make bombs, and set him off to kill the Russians and drive them out of Afghanistan.” Six years later, when a U.S. Navy SEAL team killed bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the famous American documentary filmmaker Michael Moore typed the news into his Twitter account this way: “The monster we created—yes, WE—in the 1980s by ARMING, FUNDING, & TRAINING him in the art of terror agnst the USSR, finally had 2 b put down.” But the United States did no such thing. The CIA never organized, trained, armed or funded bin Laden or al-Qaida. During the anti-Soviet jihad, bin Laden was a deranged millionaire construction-industry magnate whose al-Qaida outfit was a marginal presence in Afghanistan. Neither al-Qaida nor the Taliban (which didn’t even exist during the 1980s) were ever U.S. allies or CIA assets. But there was nothing unusual about Livingstone’s pronouncement, or about Moore’s bizarre outburst. These are the kinds of things you hear from all sorts of people, all the time.
Another commonplace fiction shows up when you type “Afghanistan” and “graveyard of empires” into Google: 259,000 results. “It’s the mother of all clichés,” writes Christian Caryl, a veteran journalist and a senior fellow at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Almost no one can resist it. It’s wielded by everyone from thoughtful ex-generals to vitriolic bloggers. It crops up everywhere from Russia’s English-language TV channel to scruffy Pakistani newspapers to America’s stately National Public Radio.” Caryl warns: “If we really want Afghans to attain the future they deserve, clinging to a fake version of their history won’t help.”
It’s not just “their history” that has gotten so absurdly faked, and getting Afghanistan’s story backwards or sideways is not confined to the Americans or the English. The Canadian case is especially illustrative, because unlike Britain and the United States, Canada did not muddle things with passionate and furious arguments about Iraq. Canada wasn’t a member of the Anglo-American “coalition of the willing” in Iraq. Still, Canada ended up a flotsam-cluttered back eddy for the most manic of the prevailing Euro-American fables floating around about Afghanistan.
It had gotten so that in January 2008, New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton could utter these words, with a straight face, without even having to worry that someone in Canada’s national news media would notice: “For six years, the Liberals and Conservatives have had Canada involved in a counter-insurgency combat mission in southern Afghanistan.” It wasn’t even close to being true. In early 2002, a Canadian battle group of about 750 soldiers took on a combat role with American troops in the Afghan south, but by July of that year, Canada’s battle group came home. After NATO took the helm of the UN’s International Security Assistance Force in 2003, about 700 Canadian soldiers returned to Afghanistan to assume a fairly conventional “peacekeeping” role in and around Kabul, in northern Afghanistan. In October 2005, Canadian troops handed off the assignment to Turkish soldiers, and nearly all Canadian Forces personnel in Afghanistan were brought home for a second time. It wasn’t until early 2006, after Canada answered the call from the UN to set up a provincial reconstruction team in Kandahar, that a Canadian battle group was deployed to southern Afghanistan.
In these ways, the Afghanistan that has insinuated itself into the attentions of the English-speaking world since September 11 is a lot like Absurdistan, which is what the dissidents of Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Hungary called the world they read about in their East bloc newspapers before the Berlin Wall came down. In its post-9/11 iteration in the West, Absurdistan is a world that replaces Afghanistan with an apparatus sustained only by the suspension of disbelief, a contrivance wholly impervious to the objective realities of the world in which Afghanistan actually exists.
If that seems a bold claim, let’s try a little thought experiment. It will take the form of an account of Afghanistan’s story that situates September 11, 2001, at its heart. It will take up only two paragraphs. You could quibble with it according to your political sensibilities, but you won’t be presented with the lunatic belief that September 11 was an inside job, or that it’s all about oil, or that we’re all engaged in an illegal and imperialist war in that country. No Zionists enter into it, either. It may even be the least contentious way of talking about Afghanistan. It goes like this:
After Soviet troops poured into Afghanistan in the late 1970s, the United States opened up a decisive front in the Cold War by arming and training anti-Soviet mujahideen in order to overthrow Afghanistan’s communist government and drive out the Russians. U.S. president Ronald Reagan’s mujahideen forces were victorious, but they then turned on one another in a long and horrific civil war that ended only in 1996, when the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban seized control of the country. At first welcomed by war-weary Afghans, the Taliban soon imposed an oppressive and brutal order derived from a strict interpretation of the Quran. The Taliban ended the anarchy of the warlord years, halted opium production and tackled corruption, but in a classic case of foreign-policy “blowback,” America’s former anti-Soviet allies became America’s sworn enemies. Owing to the strict Afghan tribal code of Pashtunwali, which demands that Afghans protect their guests, the Taliban continued to provide shelter to Osama bin Laden, whose al-Qaida terrorist network had targeted the United States.
In response to the catastrophe of September 11, the White House rallied America’s NATO partners to a “war on terror” coalition that invaded Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban government. But it wasn’t long before the NATO coalition was sinking into a quagmire of Afghan hostility. Resentment of the U.S. occupation soon evolved into defiance of Hamid Karzai’s corrupt government and a dramatic upsurge in popular support for the Taliban insurgency. The ambitions of the U.S.-led mission failed to take into account the deeply rooted religious traditions the Taliban represented in Afghan culture. While they are Muslim extremists, the Taliban have no ambitions for global terrorism, and Afghanistan is chronically plagued by insurgencies. Afghan society is conservative and profoundly misogynistic, and Afghans are fiercely independent and quick to take up arms against any foreign intervention. This is why the West has failed in its efforts to impose democracy on Afghanistan at the point of a gun.
There.
You could tell that story just about anywhere. You could tell it during Question Period in the House of Commons in Ottawa, at a union meeting in Manchester, in a Toronto Star column, or in a lecture at a university symposium in California. Nevertheless, each sentence in those two paragraphs contains an outright falsehood. Most contain at least two. What is at work here is not merely a matter of differing opinions, either.
Opinions are fine things to have, and none of us are without our biases. I have mine. We’re all “embedded” in something, somehow, and while I make no grand claims upon the truth in these pages,
