It was especially dismaying to Afghanistan’s democrats, reformers and women’s rights leaders. They had been counting on Canada, a wealthy liberal democracy with no history of overseas imperialist adventures and no hand in any of the invasions, betrayals and sabotage to which Afghanistan had been so cruelly subjected during the final decades of the twentieth century. And Canada was letting them down. It was in the effort to make sense of all this that Abdulrahim and I ended up in Afghanistan together.
One thing that took me a while to figure out—Abdulrahim isn’t exactly the boastful type—was that he’d been something of a big deal in Afghanistan, back before the Taliban came. Having trained as an engineer in Moscow and graduated with a degree in ideological issues from the University of Marxism-Leninism at Volgograd, Abdulrahim was a devoted liberal democrat. He’d stuck it out in Afghanistan right up until the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996. Over the years, through all the sorrow he’d endured, Abdulrahim remained a loyal partisan of the great Ahmad Shah Massoud, scourge of the Red Army, the Taliban’s worst nightmare, the “Lion of Panjshir,” who was assassinated by an al-Qaida suicide bomb squad only two days before something came out of the sky above Manhattan on September 11, 2001. That’s what you could call Abdulrahim’s bias. I’ve written this book as a partisan in the cause of Afghanistan’s democrats. That’s my bias.
There may be readers of this book who will remain unshaken in a conviction that Western countries should not “interfere” in Afghanistan, and it’s all too expensive anyway. Some readers may cleave to the wishful hope that the jihadists will confine their depravities and torments to the people of Afghanistan and leave the rest of us out of it. Some who do this may even be morally untroubled to find solace in such a wish. There may also be readers who will make it to the very last page and still prefer readings from Absurdistan, as though it were all just a matter of choosing one’s favourite version from the competing hermeneutics and narratives within the discourse.
Everyone’s entitled to their opinions, but if Abdulrahim and I ended up taking the delirium about Afghanistan a bit personally, we did so because the implications involved not just some unreal place that was a mere function of various and conflicting narratives. There is also a real country called Afghanistan, with real, living, breathing human beings, for whom the debates in Western countries could mean the difference between freedom and slavery, life and death. For me, it was also because the “misjudgment of historic proportions” involved the clamour for troop withdrawal.
What Irish historian Fred Halliday had to say about that aspect of things is especially unsettling to people who think of themselves as of “the Left,” which is how I’ve always situated myself. Halliday’s insight happens to have an overwhelming body of evidence in its favour, which is why it’s all the more disturbing.
A keen observer of Afghan history, Halliday, who died on April 26, 2010, was a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. He was competent in a dozen languages and the author of more than twenty books, most of them concerning political history in Muslim countries. Halliday paid close attention to the broad arcs of history, and he insisted that the so-called war in Afghanistan is properly situated in a direct line that originates in the anti-fascist struggles of the 1930s: “To my mind, Afghanistan is central to the history of the Left and to the history of the world since the 1980s. It is to the early 21st century, to the years we’re now living through, what the Spanish Civil War was to Europe in the mid and late 20th century.” One thing I hope to show in this book is that Halliday was, if anything, more right than he knew. If I’ve done my job properly, the evidence will speak for itself.
Another thing I hope to show is that the way we in the West talk about Afghanistan has meant more to the course of events in that country than all the soldiers and guns and money we’ve sent there since September 11. What we say matters. It will continue to matter for some long while. It determines what Afghans hear from us, how much they allow themselves to hope for a peaceful and democratic future and how far they’re prepared to come from the shadows, out into the light.
CAIN SLEW ABEL. On that much the Torah and the Bible and the Quran agree, though in the Quran, these first sons of Adam and Eve are called Qabeel and Habeel. Qabeel wandered eastwards from Eden to the Land of Nod with a mark of some kind on him, a curse. His lineage came to nought, so it fell to his younger brother Shiith, known in the Bible as Seth, to be the settler, the farmer, the builder. Allah bestowed psalms upon Shiith, and Adam taught him the hours of prayer, bequeathed to him the duties of prophethood and further burdened him with the knowledge of the Great Flood that was to come. It is from Shiith Ibn Adam that all humankind today is said to descend. It is also said that Balkh, the “Mother of All Cities,” as the first Arabs called it, a city once greater than Babylon and lovelier than Nineveh, is where Shiith died and was buried.
Balkh is now little more than a sleepy northern Afghan town of overgrown ruins, forgotten by the world. On market day, down lanes that wind through apple orchards and cherry orchards, merchants slowly make their way to the central bazaar, their wares teetering on donkey carts. The alleyways they follow traverse vine-covered tombs and shrines and zigzag across a series of mysterious, concentric roads that radiate outwards from the centre of town, just as much of the long, joyful and sorrowful story of human civilization radiates outwards from Balkh. It is a story sometimes celebrated and sometimes mourned, but always contested. It is not at that tomb near Babylon but here in Balkh that the prophet Ezekiel was buried, the locals will tell you. There are also Islamic scholars who insist that it was to Balkh, and not to Egypt, that the prophet Jeremiah fled.
What is without controversy is that the metropolis, which once sprawled across a fertile floodplain of the Oxus River, was one of the world’s first cities. About 3,500 years ago, when a patriarch called Moses is said to have led a tribe of Seth’s descendants out of the deserts of the Sinai Peninsula, another tribe of shepherds and pastoralists had already established a small kingdom at Balkh. We know that this tribe had crossed the Oxus River—the Amu Darya—from the north, centuries before. We know the language they spoke bloomed into dozens of languages from the Ganges to the Danube. About a billion people speak those tongues today, in an orchestral echo of Scythians, Hittites, Persians and scores of empires and dynasties forged down through time. Among these were the Timurids, the Mughals who ruled India before the British came, and the Achaemenid Empire of Cyrus the Great.
The hybrid Greco-Bactrian Kingdom that arose from the death of Alexander, the conquering Macedonian, was called the Kingdom of a Thousand Cities. Its capital was the city of Bactrus, also called Paktria, also called Balkh. The world’s first emperor to be called sultan was Mahmud of Ghazni, grandson of a slave keeper from Balkh, conqueror of all of what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan, most of Iran and great swathes of northwestern India. It was here in Balkh in 1370 that Tamerlane crowned himself before setting off as the Sword of Islam to slaughter and conquer from the Tigris to the Volga. It was in Balkh that Aurangzeb, Conqueror of the World, first held court. “In its heyday, Balkh was larger than Paris, Rome, Beijing, or Delhi,” says S. Frederick Starr, a research professor with Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. “Like all the great regional centers, it had running water, baths, and majestic palaces.”
The heart of Balkh nowadays is a jumble of pleasantly unkempt gardens where old men sit on park benches or lounge under trees on ratty blankets playing chess. Women haggle with spice vendors in the shadow of the towering, blue-domed mausoleum of the Sufi philosopher-prince Khwaja Abu Nasr Parsa, whose shrine was built in the late fifteenth century by the sultan Husayn Bayqarah, Tamerlane’s great-great-grandson. But there is nothing of Tamerlane’s bloody glory here now. Balkh is one of the world’s great cradles of empire, but there are no interpretive centres, no splendid museums and no fleets of tour buses. There aren’t even any stores that sell garish souvenirs.
