Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium

by Tim Bonyhady

  Two days later came the attacks of 9/11 which, like the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, were a form of iconoclasm. While bin Laden conceived these attacks for maximum visual impact, he could not know they would eclipse the special effects of Hollywood. Bin Laden later revealed that, with his experience in high-rise construction, he expected the floors above those hit by the planes to collapse, not that both towers would fall. In Afghanistan, a few officials watched on the one television in the Foreign Ministry and a handful of Kabulis may have seen the attacks with illicit satellite dishes. Most Afghans remained oblivious or struggled to imagine what occurred since the tallest building in Kabul was just eight storeys. Elsewhere, the attacks were viewed by more people than any previous event.

  The role of the visual was much discussed. American theorist W. J. T. Mitchell observed that wars are being ‘fought over images, with images, by means of images’ meant ‘to shock and traumatise’. The Retort group in San Fransisco—influenced by Guy Debord’s writing in the 1960s about spectacle—identified a ‘battle for the control of appearances’ in which al-Qaeda had achieved an ‘image-victory’ and the US had suffered an ‘image-defeat’. British artist Damien Hirst sparked an outcry when he suggested the terrorists ‘need congratulating’ because they had created a ‘kind of an art work’, which was ‘visually stunning’.

  As many western artists struggled to find an effective means of representing 9/11, Afghan weavers created an array of new mats. The design that found the greatest market showed both the attacks on the Twin Towers and the American and British response. While based in part on American propaganda leaflets and intended to celebrate the ousting of the Taliban, suspicion of Afghans was such that these mats were frequently misinterpreted as glorifying the towers’ destruction. But debate about their meaning simply enhanced a new spike of interest in war rugs that started in the immediate wake of 9/11.

  An exhibition in the German city of Stuttgart featuring rugs from the collection of Hans Werner Mohm was the first instance. This show, which opened in July 2001, was the only exhibition in the world on 9/11 focused on contemporary Afghanistan. Following the attacks, the immediate response of local security officials was to question why Stuttgart’s ethnographic museum, the Linden, was showing war rugs, the next was to fear for its safety. With analysts predicting al-Qaeda could strike again soon, authorities in Baden-Würrtemberg thought the museum might be a target. Although the Linden was little known even in Stuttgart, security officials argued the risk was so great the exhibition should close. When the Linden persuaded the government otherwise, it was given special protection for days. The exhibition also took on new life, attracting the Linden’s biggest ever media coverage and second-largest crowds, despite having no publicity budget.

  The impact of Beneath the Veil was particularly great because its excoriation of the Taliban fitted the politics of the moment. From 23 September, CNN screened it in the United States in ‘heavy rotation’, to more than five-and-a-half million viewers, a record for a documentary on the network. Janelle Brown of Salon declared RAWA’s footage of Zarmeena’s execution, which broadcasters also took from RAWA’s website without its permission, ‘perhaps the best document that the West has of atrocities committed by the Taliban’. The video underpinned Washington’s ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’—a humanitarian intervention to free women from oppression—even as RAWA declared the Northern Alliance to be ‘just as bad as the Taliban, if not worse’, and many commentators questioned the Bush administration’s commitment to improving the lot of Afghan women.

  Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar also took on new life, its original title no longer a liability but a selling point because it identified the movie as Afghan. Kandahar became Makhmalbaf’s greatest box-office success, screening in forty countries, as distributors, who had rejected or ignored it, competed for its rights and invested heavily in publicity linking it to 9/11. The White House requested a special screening so President Bush ‘could better understand the conditions in Afghanistan’. Tony and Cherie Blair watched it in Downing Street. It was Time’s best film of the year, and the Guardian declared it ‘the most politically important movie in the world’. ‘Bombing does not help Afghan women’, Makhmalbaf declared. ‘We don’t need reaction, but action to change the economy of Afghanistan’. But the White House and Downing Street ignored his condemnation of the new war.

  The number of western journalists in Kabul was greater than usual on 9/11 because of the trial of the workers from Shelter Now International accused of proselytism. On 14 September the Taliban ordered them out of Afghanistan, which left only al-Jazeera’s bureau and three Afghan employees of Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse. Then, the Taliban recognised their exclusion of westerners was a mistake and readmitted several, hosting tours for photographers and cameramen to record the civilian consequences of the American and British bombing. But while there was interest in their reports in Europe, there was little in the United States, where CNN declared it ‘perverse to focus too much on casualties or hardship in Afghanistan’.

  Other photographers and cameramen travelled with the forces of the Northern Alliance that soon prevailed because of the immense American bombardment, Pakistan’s cessation of military and financial assistance to the Taliban and the limited support for them in large parts of Afghanistan. Kunduz in the north was the one city where there was a major battle. Kabul fell to the Alliance without a fight in November as did Kandahar in December. As the Alliance triumphed, its fighters reprised the horror of the civil war of the mid-1990s, placing Taliban prisoners of war in shipping containers, then shooting into them or leaving the prisoners to die.

  Photographers failed to record these mass killings. The images that reached the biggest audience, taken by Tyler Hicks of the New York Times, as Alliance troops approached Kabul, were of one execution. These photographs, which won Hicks a World Press Photo prize and many other awards, showed Alliance soldiers killing a member of the Taliban they found hiding, unarmed, in a roadside ditch. The Times captioned them ‘Vengeance’—that term used in 1980 for photographs of mujahideen executions suggesting such brutality was explicable if not justified. But in the UK where there was much more scepticism about the new war, Hicks’s photographs triggered questions about the West’s choice of allies. ‘Have Taliban’s terrors been replaced by callous killers of the Alliance?’ asked the Daily Mail. When quizzed about his role, Hicks responded, ‘Had I known this man was going to be executed, I would have tried to do something to interfere.’ He also stated, ‘People should be able to see the atrocities from both sides’; ‘the film I took was a reflex’.

  Ahmad Shah Massoud, whom al-Qaeda had assassinated in September 2001, became Kabul’s new icon—his face more prominent than those of Zahir Shah, Mohammad Daoud or Nur Mohammad Taraki had ever been. In a myriad of poses, but always wearing his trademark pakul hat, he looked down from walls, stared through windshields and decorated storefronts. Postcards and calendars of him sold well, while posters of him loomed large in government ministries and offices and on military bases. But while many northerners regarded Massoud as a martyr and venerated him as a traditional Afghan saint, many Kabulis hated Massoud for his part in the war between the mujahideen. When some responded by pasting up posters of Abdul Haq, the Pashtun mujahideen commander whom the Taliban also killed late in 2001, members of the Alliance tore them down and pasted up ever more of Massoud.

  Because of the excoriation of the Taliban for imposing the chadari, most westerners expected Afghan women to unveil immediately. But most did not for fear of the Northern Alliance. As reports spread of gang rapes, a woman observed, ‘We felt safer under the Taliban.’ Some women also declared the focus on clothing misconceived. Zohra Yousuf Daoud, who had embodied modernity in 1972 as Miss Afghanistan, observed from Malibu where she had founded an Afghan women’s association and hosted a talk show on Afghan radio, ‘We must start slowly: the right to work, to education, to healthcare. If a woman has to wear a chada
ri head to toe but can go to school, that is something I approve of.’

  Cinemas in Kabul reopened a week after the Taliban’s fall, starting with the city’s biggest, the Bakhtar. Its wooden seats were dilapidated, the ceiling full of holes, the screen a patched cloth. Its foyer was decorated as of old with Bollywood posters, hidden by the cinema’s manager from the Taliban. The reels came from a cache secreted by the proprietor. While Bollywood soon resumed its dominance of Afghan cinemas, the choice for the first screening was obvious. With Massoud’s followers back in the city, it had to be Uruj, the last locally-made movie, about Jamiat’s fight against the Soviets in the Panjshir Valley. The screening caused a near stampede, with demand for tickets far exceeding supply, even after 250 viewers stood in the aisles. All were men. Women and girls ‘were not yet brave enough to come,’ the proprietor observed. ‘Even if they were’, he ‘would not let them in’ without Alliance approval.

  Siddiq Barmak, who wrote the script for Uruj while head of Afghan Film under the mujahideen, had escaped to Pakistan when the Taliban took Kabul. When he returned in early 2002 for another stint as head of Afghan Film, he set about making a new movie with an all-amateur Afghan cast, spurred by a report about a widow, deprived of work by the Taliban, who sent her daughter to school disguised as a boy. While his movie had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Barmak called it Osama to attract more attention. It depicted the Taliban as cruel, depraved, lascivious and stupid, at their worst in their treatment of women. It fabricated the extent of public opposition to them—opening with a mass protest by women demanding work. It had the Taliban execute a westerner for covert filming, though they had never publicly punished an Afghan for filming and never executed a westerner. It became the first Afghan movie to premiere at Cannes, received a Special Mention there, and won a Golden Globe. In Kabul it screened at the Park Cinema for just a week and only one session for women and children.

  A new name and flag also suggested Afghanistan’s trajectory after 9/11. A loya jirga decided on the ‘Islamic Transitional State of Afghanistan’, with just one delegate opposing its religious designation on the basis that: ‘We’ve had enough war since twenty-five years ago in the name of Islam…Everybody knows we admire Islam and don’t need to put its name on the government.’ The flag reverted to being a tricolour but its seal included the Shahada, which the mujahideen had first placed on it in 1992 when Afghanistan became an Islamic State.

  Zalmay Khalilzad, the one Afghan in the White House, who became George W. Bush’s Special Presidential Envoy for Afghanistan, chose the chair of Afghanistan’s interim administration, effectively its president. His choice was Hamid Karzai, a member of a prominent Pashtun family, whose father had been a deputy in the Afghan parliament under King Zahir Shah. After Karzai spent much of the 1980s in Peshawar, often working as a translator for Sebghatullah Mojadiddi because of his excellent English, he became a junior minister in the mujahideen government in Kabul. In the mid-1990s he supported the Taliban until they failed to make him their Washington representative. While the Taliban were probably responsible for his father’s assassination, they did not bother to kill him.

  Karzai had long attracted attention because of his appearance. Sometimes he embraced fine British jackets and shoes, sometimes immaculate salwar kameez, depending on what was opportune. Where most Pashtun leaders of the mujahideen had big beards, Karzai sometimes sported just a moustache. When Khalilzad selected him to lead Afghanistan, the forty-three-year-old Karzai was quick to create a new identity. While his combination of a karakul hat with a calf-length, collarless, silk chapan coat and a closely cropped beard had been adopted by other wealthy Afghans, such as rug dealer Abdul Noor Sher, westerners explained Karzai’s style as an original sartorial response to novel political circumstances.

  The argument went that his choices were constrained because Karzai did not want to offend key groups. Because turbans were associated with the Taliban, Karzai could not wear one. While the pakul hat was again fashionable in Kabul, Karzai would have antagonised southerners by embracing it. Hence the karakul hat, which was not identified with a particular group, had been worn fifty years before in Kabul by men of power including Karzai’s father, and remained a luxury item. At the same time, Karzai needed to reach out to northerners because of their power. The chapan did so since it was originally Uzbek, primarily associated with Mazar-e Sharif. Most clearly, it signified that Karzai did not represent a return to westernisation, for all Washington intended his selection to mark an end to fundamentalism.

  One endorsement came from Tom Ford of Gucci, who had an interest in lauding Karzai because Ford’s latest collection of menswear also featured cloaks. In January 2002, when Karzai went on an international tour, Ford described him as ‘the chicest man on the planet’. Other plaudits followed. As Karzai acquired a wardrobe of chapans, some in single colours, some striped, some fur-lined, a Canadian journalist observed, ‘Not since Princess Di has a figure risen from obscurity to international fashion-plate status so quickly.’ Where Mullah Omar had been invisible as Afghanistan’s ruler, Karzai became an icon.

  One early criticism was that Karzai’s hats were made, as was the usual custom, from the foetuses of long-haired sheep, said to have been removed from ewes slaughtered for that purpose or whipped until they aborted. The international preoccupation with Karzai’s appearance aroused more concern. Critics lamented that the world was more interested in Karzai’s outfits than his links with Big Oil; that the media paid more attention to his clothes than his capacity to rule. Karzai was increasingly viewed with contempt for leading a government ‘corrupt, hopelessly inefficient, soft on drug trafficking and friendly to warlords’, as well as derided as an ‘absurdly dandyish figure’ reminiscent of Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi. Because of all this attention, the British Museum accepted one of Karzai’s chapans for its collection.

  Karzai’s wife, Zinat, also emblemised the country’s direction. Raised and schooled in Kandahar, Zinat studied medicine at university in Kabul in the 1980s when an unprecedented number of Afghan women received tertiary education under Najibullah. The mujahideen’s taking of the capital in 1992 set her fleeing to Quetta where she began working as an obstetrician in a hospital, while Hamid returned to Kabul as part of the new government. They married in Quetta in 1998 when he was forty and she was twenty-eight, both old for marriage by Afghan standards. Although theirs was a traditional arranged marriage, Zinat continued working. When first interviewed after Karzai became Afghanistan’s leader in 2001, Zinat explained that she was eager to remain an obstetrician, that she wanted to improve women’s rights, education and employment and that she did not wear the chadari.

  Instead, Zinat stopped working and took almost no part in public life. When she registered to vote for the 2004 national elections, Karzai kept photographers away because he feared ‘extremists’ might use images of her as ‘propaganda’, just as photographs of Queen Soruya had undermined Amanullah’s rule. After Karzai was questioned about Zinat’s absence from the celebration in Kabul of International Women’s Day in 2004, he allowed her to attend in 2005 but announced that because women had achieved a ‘great deal’ since 2001 and their constitutional rights were ‘being observed every single day’, he did ‘not want to talk too much about women’s rights’.

  Karzai would not let photographers picture Zinat with him. One of the rare occasions when she was photographed and filmed was when she met President Bush’s wife, Laura, at the Presidential Palace in 2006. Otherwise, Zinat had so little profile that most Afghans had no idea that Karzai was married, until 2007 when Zinat and he had their first child. Perhaps the only other public event attended by Zinat in Kabul was the 2009 celebration of International Women’s Day when Ahmad Massoud of Associated Press photographed her wearing a headscarf and smiling, as other women repeatedly interrupted Karzai to tell him of their plight.

  CHAPTER 28

  The Ghazi

  There were many public celebrations at the Ghazi Stadium after the Taliba
n fell. In March 2002 it was the prime venue for three days of festivities to mark the Persian New Year, which the Taliban had largely suppressed. One feature was a giant portrait rug of Ahmad Shah Massoud carried by leaders of the buzkashi team from the Panjshir Valley. Another was the appearance of Kahtool Mohammadzai who began parachute training aged sixteen under Babrak Karmal, performed through the Najibullah era, and jumped once for the mujahideen holding Burhanuddin Rabbani’s portrait. While her performance in March 2002 was hailed as a symbol of the increased possibilities for women since the fall of the Taliban, her skill as a parachutist was a mark of the unprecedented opportunities that had been enjoyed by women under the communists.

  Independence Day on 19 August came next: a hollow celebration in 2002 since Afghanistan was subject to American domination, and the Afghans’ old enemy, the British, had the second-largest contingent in the international security force protecting Kabul, established by the United Nations in December 2001. The government cancelled its military parade, fearing attack because Karzai’s vice-president, Haji Abdul Qadeer, had just been assassinated by his own bodyguards. All the government staged was a march-past by schoolchildren, some martial arts, the firing of rifles from the 1919 war and another parachute drop by Kahtool Mohammadzai.

  The first anniversary of Massoud’s death, on 9 September, was much more of an occasion, partly because the government used its soldiers to ensure that Kabulis displayed his portrait and marshalled students into participating. A giant billboard of him was unveiled in the stadium; his son gave a speech; a girl read a poem; and Massoud Khalili, diplomat, poet and close friend, spoke too. ‘This was once a stadium of terror,’ Khalili declared, as if Ahmad Shah Massoud was there, having defeated the Taliban. ‘You liberated the stadium from the hand of terror and your nation from the hand of fanaticism.’