NP - A Last Road Trip Through Premodern, Postmodern Afghanistan

[David Morris]

A few exceprt from an exceptional article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/30/magazine/30AFGHAN.html?ex=1002942879&ei=1&en=b94cf9b3c9e0feaa

September 30, 2001
MAGAZINE
A Last Road Trip Through Premodern, Postmodern Afghanistan
By JOHN SIFTON

[...]
Like many countries suffering from political instability, Afghanistan is a 
complicated and weird place. In some areas, there are few traces of modern 
life. Goods are carried by donkey or camel, and oxen plow the ground. Old 
men with long beards sit beneath trees, fingering prayer beads, their skin 
brown and wrinkled. Many rural people live as their ancestors probably did 
400 years ago: iron pots over the fire, clothes they made themselves and 
babies delivered by candlelight.

In other parts of the country, life is more complicated. Taliban troops 
speed around Kabul in their clean new Toyota pickup trucks, tricked-out, 
hip-hop ghetto rigs. On the sides they have painted pseudo-American phrases: 
''City Boy,'' ''Fast Crew,'' ''King of Road.'' Inside, young solemn-looking 
Taliban men sit in their black holy dress, sporting Ray-Bans.

The juxtapositions can make your mind reel. Donkey carts carrying computer 
equipment. Hungry children digging through garbage piles using shovels from 
a Mickey and Minnie Mouse sand-castle set.

[...]
Taliban troops and police are always easy to spot. They have black flowing 
robelike clothes, long hair and big silky black turbans with long tails 
running almost to the ankles. (These accouterments are meant to identify 
them as direct descendants of Muhammad.) They are often tall and imposing, 
even impressive. ''The Taliban troops are like gangsters,'' a colleague told 
me when I first arrived. ''Tough guys.'' But there is often a particular 
dandyism in them; many wear black eyeliner (part of the 
descendant-of-Muhammad costume), and their hair is long and curly. I once 
saw one buying Prell shampoo at the bazaar. They carry themselves like 
supermodels.

The reputation for religious conservatism in the Taliban obviously doesn't 
come from their foppish troops. It comes instead from the leadership in the 
southern city of Kandahar, who founded the Taliban in the early 1990's. They 
are considered mullahs now, but 10 years ago they were essentially no more 
than a collection of seminary teachers from the rural south. These 
''original Taliban'' are the ones who present the decrees barring women from 
work, making men wear long beards and prohibiting me from entering the 
country with ''pork products or lobsters'' (as one recent decree dictated). 
These are the people who proudly call themselves ''the Mosquitoes of 
Islam,'' proclaiming, ''Islamic faith is a bright light: we seek to be so 
close to it that we catch fire.''

[...]
In our humanitarian work, my colleagues and I interacted with neither the 
black-robed troops nor the mullahs from Kandahar. We dealt mostly with the 
''new Taliban'' -- the civil servants who in recent years have appeared from 
between the cracks to run the country for the predominantly illiterate and 
uneducated ''original Taliban.'' These people form the real bureaucracy of 
Afghanistan. Though they now sport the same flowing black turbans and long 
hair as the troops, many were ordinary municipal leaders a few years ago, 
local politicians. For the most part, they are opportunists who saw the 
direction the wind was blowing when the Taliban took power and adjusted 
accordingly; they grew out their beards and put on black robes and became 
Talibs.

Of course, these new leaders' commitment to the moral righteousness of the 
Talib movement is questionable. Many seem fascinated by Americans and the 
West, eager to learn more English, more American phrases and more about 
America. (One afternoon, a Talib in Kabul kept me in his office for an hour 
to go over some English grammar rules and ask about New York and the 
''Hollywood movie company.'') Still, the new Taliban follow the orders of 
the Taliban leadership. The decrees are enforced.

[...]
There is a propensity among some aid workers (usually younger ones) to work 
endless hours during a crisis. You cannot take a break, it is argued, when 
children are hungry. You cannot sleep, have a beer or lie in your bed. You 
have to act. And so you work endlessly. And then, inevitably, you crack: you 
go nuts, start acting righteous and weird, and your colleagues come to 
despise you. Ultimately, your organization evacuates you on psychological 
grounds -- a procedure churlishly referred to as a ''psycho-vac.'' You end 
up back home: unemployed, asocial, crazy, useless and pathetic.

I remember a story that a friend told me about an aid worker she worked with 
in Albania. During the Kosovo crisis, they were working together in a huge 
new refugee settlement across the border with inadequate sanitation 
facilities.

''We had to get 5,000 latrines built, like immediately. But I'll tell you, 
he was gone, man -- his brain was fried by trauma. He had been at Goma'' -- 
in the Congo -- dead bodies and hacked-off limbs in a pile, and they had to 
clean it up. I guess he was scarred. Anyway, he got like a pound of pot from 
some Albanian mafia playboy in Tirana. He would drink huge amounts of that 
terrible instant coffee, Nestle's -- I think they put speed in that stuff. 
He was high all the time. He didn't talk to anyone. He just drank that crank 
coffee and smoked pot. He worked like a madman. But we did it, man. We built 
those 5,000 latrines. They psycho-vac'd him a little later though. He lost 
it.''

[...]
John Sifton is a human rights attorney and humanitarian aid worker. The 
views expressed here are personal reflections and do not represent the 
organization for which he worked. For security reasons, it is not named 
here.

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