October 20, 2007.
“Today even the scarf is being left at home and miniskirts, worn by pert school girls, blossom on the streets of Kabul and on the Kabul University campus.”
Context: The good old days. Anthropologist and Afghanistan super-duper-expert Louis Dupree (deceased) writing in his 1973 book Afghanistan (page 247).
Pert?
pert (pûrt)
adjective pert·er, pert·est
- Trim and stylish in appearance; jaunty.
- High-spirited; vivacious.
- Impudently bold; saucy.
Saucy!
October 1, 2007.
A few months ago I had written an article in Pashto about media progress in Afghanistan. A survey report of Reporters without Borders was quoted in the article but unfortunately the name of the organization was misprinted when the article published in a local newspaper. In Pashto the organization is called ‘Da Besarhada Zhornalistano Tolana.’ But it printed ‘Da Besara’ which means Reporters without Brains.
Context: Abdulhadi Hairan, writing in his blog here, points out a misprint in one of his published articles. He then goes onto to link to his article wherein he discusses warlord journalists.
As much as this was an innocent mistake, I’m sure we could all think of a few reporters without brains.
Reporters Without Borders? They’re cool.
“It has been said that fences make for great neighbors. In Afghanistan, they have taken the concept a step further. Walls are as much a part of this culture as Islam and burqas. There are walls around homes. There are walls around villages. There are walls around entire towns and cities. [...]
I also can’t help but think how big a role walls play in the mindset of Afghans. [But] All the walls have not kept out invaders. The barriers have not repelled violence. Poverty has not known any restrictions. Walls have not limited pain.
Walls are really a false sense of security for most Afghans. Real protection comes from a government that is strong enough to protect its people and give them the economic security necessary to provide for themselves. Real security comes from caring about and helping those who are on the other side of the wall, not in fearing them or worrying about their differences.
Afghans will find peace and freedom not in the walls without but with the hearts within.”
Context: Michael Tomberlin, a reporter for an The Birmingham News and a Major in the Alabama Army National Guard, discusses walls in Afghan culture on his blog. Major Tomberlin offers some other interesting commentary on Afghan culture from an Alabama perspective in two other blog posts worth reading; Things I’ve Learned and Smilers and Non-smilers.
Pic by Mike Tomberlin: Smiler and Non-Smiler.
September 16, 2007.
Counterinsurgency is a strange game. I’ve had chai, nan (flat bread,) and cheese with Taliban members; everyone acting like we actually are civil to each other. I’ve had chai with minor officials who were trying to talk me out of sending a guy who had senior Taliban leaders in his house within an hour of our raid to detention so he could be questioned. [....]
I’ve sat in Shuras as the village elders pled their case, insisting that they hadn’t seen any Taliban in months, only to have a citizen on the outer reaches of the circle stand up and throw the “bullshit flag,” recounting a recent event. That changed the song… it became, “What are we to do? They will kill us if we tell you anything about them.”
Context: An American police mentor, who is alone with an Afghan National Police team in Eastern Afghanistan, writes in his blog about what you do when you are the only American for miles around in Taliban country.
Read the whole blog entry here.
August 28, 2007.
“Recent memoirs written by women from Afghanistan have also been critiqued for succumbing to the “neo-orientalist” paradigm of presenting yet another example of suffering, eastern women beaten down by their barbaric men and suffering at the hands of a medieval culture. To these critics, Hosseini’s heroines, Mariam and Laila, are not women emerging from a chasm of hopelessness but rather an indictment of a whole society that will be discarded and denigrated by the Western reader as inherently misogynistic.
In Gayatri Spivak’s now oft-quoted words, Hosseini’s tale (especially in light of the Allied invasion of Afghanistan) can quite literally be construed as yet another instance of “white men saving brown women from brown men.”
Yet allowing for such critiques leads us to an even more untenable thesis. Should the grim reality of abuse be abridged and disguised simply because it promotes negative stereotypes? Is the suffering of Afghan women not worthy of representation in literature because it can be appropriated for political agendas?”
Context: Indiana University’s Rafia Zakaria, in her review of Khalid Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, has some choice words for both those who cry “neo-orientalism, neo-colonialism!” and for those who see the suffering of Afghan women as fitting into their conservative internationalist agenda. I will not discuss this issue at the present time even though gender issues and women’s studies are my forté (sarcasm alert). So instead, just read the review. It’s short and to the well-expressed point.
August 13, 2007.
Via Afghanwire:
When I visited Ghor province, a government official told me that a huge number of girls in the province were married by force. This means that they are sold. A while back, a girl was even sold in exchange for a horse. [...] It is better than the incident that happened last year in Kunduz province: there, a girl was exchanged for a dog. This, however, is a horse.
Context: A horse is a horse of course…..unless it’s being traded for a human being. Then it’s just part of some horrible equation. And noted somewhat sarcastically (I think) by the above journalist of the newspaper Eqtedar-e Milli, it is better than being traded for a dog. But the dog was an expenive prize fighting dog and who knows the quality of the horse involved in the trade.
Anyways, there is a list of NGOs that focus on women and children at the bottom of this page. And you may find numerous books and articles focusing on the problems faced by women and children in Afghanistan in the bibliographies on this page.
July 26, 2007.
“During my last trip to Afghanistan I’d met a guy in the hospital’s psychiatric ward who was concerned that he had no shadow. He proved to me, by means of excellent logic, that a man without a shadow cannot - and must not - live. He tried to commit suicide several times. I was reminded of this incident in Moscow when Zhenya Raevsky, an afghantsi [Afghan War veteran] and student at Moscow State University, shared with me his idea for a screenplay; his main characters were going to be Afghanistan veterans who’d returned home from the war. What makes them different from all other people, Raevsky told me, was that they had no shadows. Some hideous meaning was buried there, inaccessible to the sober mind.”
Context: Russian journalist Artyom Borovik ponders the meaning of shadows in The Hidden War, his book on the Soviet-Afghan War.
Pic (by a friend): A monument in Kygyzstan for Soviet veterans of the Afghan War, casting a shadow.
June 29, 2007.
“Who the bloody hell told you that?”
Context: The well-known journalist and author of Taliban, Ahmed Rashid, lets Barnett Rubin know that rumours of his death in Spain while celebrating his birthday have been greatly fabricated. He confirmed that he is alive and well and visiting Norway, a rather safe place. The rumour starters at The Far Eastern Economic Review defended themselves by stating that there are number of high profile “Ahmed Rashids:” 1) a best-selling author named Ahmed Rashid, 2) a former writer for The Far Eastern Economic Review, 3) a commmentator for the BBC, and 4) a blogger for the Washington Post. And perchance one of them died?
I checked out each one individually. They all sort of look and sound the same, in addition to having identical bios. But I understand if, as a journalist, you have a “scoop” and don’t have time to attempt a confirmation.
If you want accurate information I suggest signing up for Dr. Rubin’s excellent listserv.
May 16, 2007.
“the gist of it is this: chai good, Afghanistan good, Pakistan bad, Osama in Pakistan, Osama in Islamabad, a hand-gestured demonstration that we should bomb Islamabad, and American snuff makes their heads spin.”
Context: Afghan National Army soldiers and an American Embedded Tactical Trainer (ETT) find themselves without a translator. Nevertheless the Afghans manage to convey their opinions on the important issues of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Al Qaeda and chewing tobacco.
This quote is from the Afghanistan milblog Bill and Bob’s Excellent Afghan Adventure, which is quite good and regularly updated. As a soldier embedded with Afghan troops the author of this blog has a much higher level of interaction with locals, which makes for rather interesting blog entries.
Also, the soldier is from Cincinnati. This may explain why he went out of his way to volunteer to go to Afghanistan. I unknowingly went to Cincinnati right after the riots. I think Afghanistan may actually be safer than the neighborhood I rode my bike through.
May 6, 2007.
“What was more important in the world view of history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”
Context: Former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski speaking in the mid-1990s about American funding for the anti-Soviet Jihad and the rise of the Taliban. The quote is available all over the place with its date and context removed to make it seem as if Brzezinski is being quoted post 9-11. The earliest I can trace it back is to 1995 in Olivier Roy’s book Afghanistan: From Holy War to Civil War (Princeton University Press).
But this quote is post- 9-11:
“Had our leaders known that the cost of bringing down the Soviets would be over 3,000 dead Americans, the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center, an attack on the Pentagon, simultaneous embassy bombings in Africa, the disabling of the USS Cole and radical cells sprinkled across the globe operating against the United States, it is almost certain that they still would have deemed the costs acceptable.”
Context: Council on Foreign Relations scholar Rachel Bronson testifying before The September 11 Commission in 2003. Testimony available here.
Related to Brzezinski is this fascinating one minute video clip stolen from some documentary that I have seen several times. Thanks to Some BitsNPieces for posting about this clip.
April 26, 2007.
“I have written ten books over the last five years and over the last six months I have written a book on the bible which I hope will be printed soon. It will be called The Bible in the Light of the Qur’an.”
Context: Renowned biblical scholar (and part-time Jihadi) Gulbuddin Hekmatyar discusses his book publishing aspirations, among other things, with Cheragh journalist Mr. Safi. From the March 6th edition translated by AfghanWire.
Here’s a pic of “Engineer” Hekmatyar from an ealier time when he still had no gray hair.
I’ll just be presumptuous and provide a bibliographical citation for the eagerly anticipated forthcoming book:
Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin. 2008a. The Bible in the Light of the Qur’an: A Comparative Analysis from Somewhere Near the Durand Line. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
April 12, 2007.
“I hate this country and every single person in it. Including you.”
Context: Journalist Jean MacKenzie has a “foreigner meltdown” after a mullah at Radio Helmand suggests she is too old for marriage. She then storms out and vents her anger at her translator. Note to all mullahs: don’t suggest to a Western woman that she is old. That’s like picking a fight with a Marine Corps Force Recon team at a North Carolina jarhead bar.
Find the whole story at Jean MacKenzie’s Afghan blog.
March 31, 2007.
“…roughly 650,000 soldiers.”
Context: This is the number of troops that the Soviet General Staff estimated would be required for a successful occupation of Afghanistan. The Soviet Politburo put a cap on troop levels at 115,000. You can read about the Soviet troop levels in this article in pdf.
March 13, 2007.
“I often hear the Afghans designated as cowards…..and I can only suppose it arises from the British idea among civilised people that assassination is a cowardly act. The Afghans never [hesistate] to use their long knives for that purpose, ergo they are cowards; but they show no cowardice in standing as they do against guns without using any themselves, and in escalading and taking forts which we cannot retake.”
Context: Lady Florentia Sale, wife of a British officer and one of the few members of the British expeditionary force to survive, comments on the bravery of the Afghans. Quote taken from her book Journal of the Disasters in Afghanistan 1841-2. (Published in numerous versions by various publishers.)
The book is a great critique of the incompetent and arrogant officers who led the expedition in the First Anglo-Afghan War. Some officers brought as many as 40 servants for a total of 38,000 servants for half as many soldiers, one brigadier had 60 camels to carry his belongings, one general had 260 camels for his necessities, one officer brought two camels to carry his cigar collection, one brigade brought their foxhounds, and Lady Sale cut back her entourage to 45 servants.
The military and political errors that followed inside Afghanistan secured the destruction of the British forces.
March 5, 2007.
“The worst is behind us. The traitors have betrayed. The corrupt have led their war of corruption. A purified army remains. A fine army that will now mount a counter-attack. I promise you.”
Context: Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the anti-Taliban Shura-yi Nazar, speaking in 1998 to village elders in the Panjshir valley. Quote taken from page 332 of Bernard-Henri Levy’s book “War, Evil, and the End of History.” (Melville House Publishing, 2004).
