Notes on a Foreign Country

by Suzy Hansen

  Gopal reports that some Afghans believed the Americans were colonizing them like the British, but even that characterization is kind. Here is one typical example of how these Americans conducted their night raids on innocent Afghan villages:

  As the soldiers approached a home, a dog growled and they shot it. A villager ran out, thinking a thief was on the premises, and they shot him too. His younger brother emerged with a gun and fired into the darkness, yelling for his neighbors. The soldiers shot him as well, and the barrage of bullets also hit his mother as she peered out a window. The soldiers then tied the three bodies together, dragged them into a room, and set off explosives. A pair of children stood watching, and they would later report the scene. An old man stepped out of the neighboring house holding an oil lamp. He was shot. His son ran out to help, and he, too, was shot.

  McChrystal wanted to rectify some of this unpleasantness. “All ISAF personnel must show respect for local cultures and customs and demonstrate intellectual curiosity about the people of Afghanistan,” he said. The Americans developed a program called the Human Terrain System (HTS), the brainchild of idealistic anthropologists and disillusioned military veterans who believed that sending social scientists out with soldiers would help America win wars and kill fewer people. HTS drew on an argument of Marine General Anthony Zinni: “What we need is cultural intelligence. What makes them tick? Who makes the decisions? What is it about their society that’s so remarkably different in their values, in the way they think, compared to my values and the way I think in my western, white man mentality?” Out in the field, the HTS research scientists discovered that U.S. soldiers did not know not to smile when Afghans read from the Koran, did not know not to crowd disrespectfully into an Afghan house, did not know that rural Afghans didn’t have mailboxes. They could not connect with the people.

  But even after the American anthropologists went through the multimillion-dollar HTS training program in a military basement in Kansas, the same problems of cultural ignorance and indifference and purposelessness persisted, as did the most obvious truth—the most elusive one for Americans in denial—which was that Afghans would never accept Americans as their overlords.

  The HTS began to suffer from the typical flaws of the corporate occupation: cost cutting, rushing to get the job done, the overweening priority of profit. More than one HTS expedition ended in death, both Afghan and American. “If you could have found a way to project on a big screen the nation’s mixed feelings about its role as the sole superpower in a post–Cold War world, this was what it would have looked like,” the journalist Vanessa Gezari writes in The Tender Soldier. “American exceptionalism tempered by the political correctness of a postcolonial, globalized age and driven by a ravenous hunger for profit. The Human Terrain System was a cosmic expression of the national zeitgeist, neatly encapsulating both a justification for the war and the intoxicating belief that war could be less lethal, more anthropological. We claimed we want to understand the Afghans. What we wanted was to understand ourselves.”

  What Gezari was characterizing was the particular trajectory of American liberalism, which for people from minority races and cultures had become only superficially inclusive, and which was further undermined by an economic system so corrupt that it could not sustain all livelihoods. Acceptance to this system was always dependent on imitating the modern ways of the rulers. As usual, the Americans—after September 11, after Iraq, after the financial crisis—had sought in the delusions of empire proof of their own exceptional traits and strength. Why couldn’t we manage this occupation? If we can’t do this, does it mean everything we believed about ourselves is false? Why don’t they want to be like us?

  * * *

  THE LARGEST EXISTENTIAL threat to Americans might have been admitting the Afghans would be better off without them. In western Kabul, not far from the city center and across from a narrow riverbed filled with trash, a historic park called Bagh-e Babur, or Babur Gardens, extended from the road up to the top of a steep hill. From the crest you could see the entire city of Kabul. Babur, the first Mughal emperor, had ordered the gardens built in the mid-sixteenth century. The ongoing late-twentieth-century violence in Kabul destroyed the gardens as well as its palace. In 2003, the Aga Khan Foundation, one of the largest private employers in Afghanistan, began reconstruction of the park. It was one of the most beautiful places I had seen in Kabul.

  I visited the gardens with its development director, a South African architect named Jolyon Leslie, one late Friday afternoon, when thousands of Kabul Afghans had gone there to enjoy their day off. The lines to get into the garden were long. Afghan guards gave Afghans a once-over before letting them pass. No body patting, no bag X-rays, no closet where women were dispatched to be felt up by other women. I realized what had made the difference in security: as many as seventy thousand foreigners lived in Kabul, but that Friday at Babur Gardens, I was the only foreigner in sight.

  The entryway spit us out into the lovely courtyard of a caravansary. Women, in varying degrees of concealing dress, held tight to their daughters’ hands, little girls in miniskirts. Inside, the steppes of the park rose before us, and beautiful paths lined with trees shaded us from the brutal sun. The Aga Khan Foundation had set aside areas for women and areas for men. The marble palace and a tiny, ornate mosque hung above the city like magic orbs.

  The garden was not without its problems; people did drugs and got into fights. Leslie, who had lived in Afghanistan for twenty years, ticked off these issues as if Kabul were just any other city. It didn’t make sense; this was a war zone! Wasn’t this a great place to smuggle in a bomb? Yet here a segment of the population of Kabul lived a normal day: kids ran around a jungle gym, men danced, women picnicked under trees. Up near Babur’s tomb, an elderly tour guide spoke to a rapt group of boys. He was teaching them their history.

  “This was built by an all-Afghan team,” Leslie said.

  “Really?”

  “I’m sick of people saying Afghans can’t manage anything,” he said. “I’m from South Africa, and we call that racism.”

  Everyone looked so happy. Inside the palace, Afghans were setting up for a film festival. In one of the palace rooms, the U.S. embassy had installed a new exhibition called Picturing America: reproductions of Joseph Stella’s Brooklyn Bridge and N. C. Wyeth’s The Last of the Mohicans; images of Selma, Alabama, in 1965; Abraham Lincoln; Yosemite Valley. To me, too, they looked like postcards from a foreign country. None of the park goers frolicking on the grass were inside at the exhibit puzzling out images from America’s history. It was only me, the American.

  On the way home, passengers who were stuck in traffic, their cars squeezed together in the narrow streets, smiled at one another and waved. I watched a man and a woman chat as they waited to cross the street. I could not stop staring at them, and since I was in typical Kabul traffic, I could have stared at them for the next half hour. Just a man and a woman chatting on the street in Kabul before they crossed to the other side, where men twinkled their bicycle bells, and a girl in a sequin tutu chased after her mother. Whenever we got stuck in traffic in the days prior, I’d grow anxious that this would be the moment a bomb would go off. That day I was mesmerized by the casual banter of the Afghan man and the Western-looking Afghan woman, their hand gestures and smiles, and also by the fact that while I was watching them live their normal, unfettered lives, nothing terrible happened at all.

  * * *

  WHILE I WAS IN KABUL, I heard from everyone—from the Afghans who worked at the house I was staying in to upper-class politicians—that the best school for children in the city was, hands down, the “Turkish school.” From the road, it looked no different from the other pastel-hued bureaucratic buildings in Kabul, the kind that could have been a hospital as easily as it could have been the Department of Public Works. But inside I found myself in Turkey, not only because the school was sparklingly clean and well ordered, but because there hung on the walls a giant photograph of Atatürk. The schoo
l, however, was not some last-ditch attempt at Kemalist evangelism; the school was run by the Gülenists.

  The Gülenists by then had established thousands of schools in hundreds of countries; Central Asia was one of their most important regions of influence. The other was the United States. With the schools came fleets of Turkish teachers and their families, nonprofit organizations and cultural festivals, and eventually, Turkey’s foreign policy apparatus. Erdoğan recognized the international diplomatic and financial potential in countries where the Gülenists had made such inroads, such as Somalia, Indonesia, and Japan. Through their schools, the Gülenists had created diplomatic outposts all over the world, which made doing business in those countries a lot easier, and in turn made the spread of the Gülen movement a financial reality. As one man formerly affiliated with the movement told me, “Those schools are not only there because they care so much about education. Those schools are there to further the movement.” I was too blind at the time to realize that the Erdoğan government was building an empire.

  In fact, the period of the Gülenists and the AK Party’s power expansion had begun around the same time Zia-ul-Haq was using Islam to quell communism in Pakistan and funding the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Zia had shared his ideas with Kenan Evren, the military general who staged the 1980 coup in Turkey. It is one of the ironies of Turkish history that it was the Kemalist-secularist military’s coup that would usher in Turkey’s era of political Islam.

  At the time, NATO approved of using Islam as a green belt, or a “wall,” to stop the advance of communism. Following this lead, Evren, and later Turgut Özal, the prime minister who eventually succeeded the general, took a series of radical measures that changed Turkish society forever. Engin Cezzar had tried to explain this history to me when I visited his apartment. “I’m very sorry, but this awful American policy is killing us,” he said. “They want Turkey to be a mild Islamic republic.” I hadn’t listened.

  Months before the coup, Turkey accepted an IMF package that would open up the country to global markets. Evren, who needed more capital to rebuild the country after the economic paralysis of the 1970s, turned to a country flush with oil revenue: Saudi Arabia. In 1976, an Islamic conference had been held in Pakistan called the Siret-i Nebi Congress. It was organized by Rabitat, which had been founded by the Saudis in 1962 in reaction to the rise of Egypt’s Nasser, and later Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. Rabitat, according to the scholar Banu Eligür, “aimed at propagating a strict religious fundamentalism in the Muslim world,” by supplying countries with books, money for mosques, and salaries for imams. In 1981, the Saudis even began paying the salaries of imams in Turkish communities in Germany and Belgium.

  Evren’s sudden alliance with Saudi Arabia set off a furor in Turkey, but he defensively praised the “improvement of our relations with the Middle East and Islamic countries.” Turkey is “an inextricable part of the Islamic community,” he said, words that for some were blasphemy. After the instability of the 1970s, Evren had come to believe that if the state did not offer a strict and moral religious upbringing for its citizens, then an inevitable void would be filled by Marxism or fascism. To counter such threats, Evren adopted something called the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis, which had been developed in the 1960s by a group of right-wing nationalist intellectuals. These “idealists,” as they called themselves, saw the rise of Marxist militancy, as well as the Kemalists’ desperation to imitate the West, as an attack on “Turkishness” as well as on Islamic culture. “Both ‘red imperialism’ and ‘capitalist imperialism’ aim to destroy the Turkish nation by turning people against each other and provoking internal disorder,” a primary text on the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis suggested. “In order to achieve these purposes they alienated people from their religious and national values and conquered their souls and hearts with the fake ideals of equality and freedom.” Imperialism in all forms was to blame.

  Once, Atatürk had sought to adopt Western lifestyles, while denouncing the West’s foreign policy. Under Kenan Evren, the Turks reversed course. Though Evren was pro-American, he wanted to wrest control of the Turks’ identity. Evren’s new Turkish ideology emphasized loyalty to the state, to the mosque, and to the family (i.e., the father). He saw Sunni Islam as a “useful tool for creating citizens who would be respectful and loyal.” Turkish students were required to take a course on Islam called “Religion and Ethics.” Evren began building hundreds of imam-hatip schools, which offered students a religious education, as well as many more mosques. “In this way,” writes Banu Eligür, the professedly secular military “tactically opened up a social and political space for Islamist mobilization in Turkey.”

  The civilian who eventually took over from Evren, Turgut Özal, would propel Turkey further in this nationalist-Islamist direction. Özal was himself pious, and a member of the Nakşibendi brotherhood, the country’s largest Islamic sect, which had been banned during the Kemalist revolution. With Evren’s blessing, and Özal’s enthusiasm, a measure of freedom and independence was returned to all of Turkey’s brotherhoods in the 1980s. Among these brotherhoods was the Nur, which spawned the Fethullah Gülen movement. The Gülenists, who had been proselytizing underground since the 1960s, were allowed to flourish—even more so with the help of a liberalizing market economy. Gülenist businessmen founded holding firms, publishing companies, newspapers, radio stations, and, crucially, schools. Turgut Özal championed them.

  Özal loved America. He had studied engineering in the United States and came to believe that the country owed its success to liberalism and capitalism. “His dream was to make Turkey another America—his role model,” writes the academic Sedat Laçiner. “It can be said that one of the main pillars of Özalism, with its Turkism and Islamism, was liberalism and American-type democracy. For Özal, all these principles were compatible, not contradictory … Özal’s ideology consisted of American secularism, American democracy, American capitalism and American liberalism.” Once again Turkey was imitating America, but this time, Turkey turned itself into a model of Reaganite and Thatcherite neoliberalism (Özal loved them, too). Many Islamist politicians would mimic Özal’s way of combining Islamism and capitalism. Özal empowered the Islamic youth of Turkey. Most prominent among them was a young man who once sold simit on the streets of a decrepit Istanbul neighborhood: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

  * * *

  THE 2010 FOURTH OF JULY party at the American embassy in Kabul started at nine in the morning on July 3. My driver dropped me off far outside the gate of the embassy. The whole road was blocked off; many roads in Kabul were like this. Sandbags lined the sidewalks. You’d walk for a while, and you’d pass a checkpoint, and then another. To the left were the white USAID trailers, and to the right, the old and new embassy buildings. A large sign read: THE U.S. EMBASSY WOULD BE GRATEFUL IF ANY OF OUR FRIENDS WHO HAVE INFORMATION ON TERRORIST ACTIVITY OR THREATS TO PLEASE COME TO THIS GATE.

  A receiving line waited for foreigners and Afghans to meet Ambassador Eikenberry, his wife, and the newly arrived General David Petraeus. They stood before a giant wooden American flag. Red, white, and blue bunting hung from the drab modern embassy buildings. Off to one side Afghan men stood around a kebab stand and some tents. USAID had set up tables about their various programs, like at a county fair. The popular local band Kabul Dreams, made up of four young Afghan boys, played “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” Hassina Syed stood in line, waiting patiently to shake the general’s hand. She wore a gray pantsuit and head scarf—“the other me,” she said. General Petraeus, now in for his second war, looked older than his years.

  After the American and Afghan national anthems, we gathered around the lectern for some speeches. First, Eikenberry read a message from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Throughout the day, red, white, and blue balloons had been spontaneously popping, due to the heat—even the snipers up on the tops of buildings sat under a big striped sun umbrella—and the sound of the loud pops did much to set an already jittery crowd on edge, a sea of sl
ightly jumping shoulders.

  “Welcome to America’s birthday party,” Eikenberry read. “I’m delighted we can mark it together … All of us have to take responsibility to work together.”

  Those bland, company-man words. In Kabul these words sounded criminal. These were loveless, soulless words. How could we speak to Afghans like this? I saw a country and a people completely divorced, alienated, severed from itself and its reality, as if superimposed on someone else’s photo. Our administration of all these little empires had rendered all of us into half-hearted automatons; no one believed in the words they were saying, and yet this language was about real things: flesh and death and war, people’s homelands, and their children.

  “Let us use this to make new connections.”

  Pop!

  “… Find solutions…”

  “… challenges…”

  Pop!

  Petraeus was up next. I hoped for better.

  “We cherish the relationship.”

  “Your success is our success.”

  Pop!

  “What an all-star team has been assembled here in Kabul.”

  I glanced around at the pink American faces, the blue and white polka-dot scarves, the dreary midcalf navy skirts and hopeful red ties. Somber Afghan men in Western suits bore name tags that revealed they were professors. We smiled at one another like bored students at a class assembly. Progress. Mutual objectives. Thank you for raising your hand and answering the call.