Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

by Pankaj Mishra

  This was why Faiz had first thought well of the Taliban when they came from the south and chased out the commander. He didn’t mind their severity; only people in the cities chafed at their restrictions on women. But they hadn’t altered the essential things. The smuggling had gone on; the poppy cultivation was stopped only recently, and he knew of people who were still at it. A few well-connected merchants and traders in Jalalabad had grown rich. Most other people became poorer; his own two brothers had left with their families for Pakistan, where they worked as truck drivers. And there was the harassment. Some young men had shown up at his own house in order to draft his son into the war against the Tajiks in the north and had to be persuaded that he was unfit to be a soldier. Faiz also didn’t like the Taliban’s dependence on Arab and Pakistani jihadis, many of whom he saw in the province. Foreigners had done enough damage in Afghanistan; it was time for them to leave the country and its people alone.

  Dismay appeared on Ishrat’s face as he translated this, and a brief argument now broke out between him and Faiz. I couldn’t follow most of it, and I didn’t trust the account I heard from Ishrat who claimed to be arguing that the Arabs and Pakistanis helping the Taliban were fellow Muslims and not infidels like the Russians and Americans.

  I had wondered all afternoon about the emptiness of that large house, the absence of Faiz’s wife and his son. I now saw two emaciated cows stumbling into the courtyard, followed by a thin, stubble-faced man with a stick; this was, Ishrat said, Faiz’s “insane” son. He tethered the cows to an iron pigot and then walked out of sight. A little later I heard the shuffling of pots and pans in an adjacent room, and then I saw a chador-clad figure move briskly across the courtyard to throw some hay before the cows and then swiftly retreat. She had been there all through the afternoon, possibly sleeping or lying down silently on the ground.

  When Faiz left the room briefly, I asked Ishrat if it was possible to talk to her for a few minutes. He was quick to catch the hesitation in my voice. “Why do you want to talk to her?” he asked, slightly aggressively.

  I didn’t have time to respond. Faiz, who had gone out, came back to the room at that very moment; the lantern he held filled the room with the smell of kerosene. Ishrat explained my request to him in Pashtu while I looked on with some apprehension.

  I saw Faiz’s face go tense; I felt his narrow, shrewd eyes on me before they turned toward Ishrat.

  The answer was no. Ishrat, speaking once again on his own, said that local custom did not permit strange men to talk to women.

  Faiz suddenly interrupted him; he said that he could convey my question to his wife and bring me her reply.

  It was better than nothing, so I asked the obvious question about life for women under the Taliban. It took a while for Ishrat to translate this, and I wasn’t sure if he had done so accurately until the answer came back with a slightly more relaxed Faiz.

  Faiz laughed as he spoke, revealing childlike teeth, and Ishrat himself smiled as he translated. The one thing she disliked most about the rule of the Taliban was the traveling in buses to nearby towns. The roads were broken, the buses were few, and the journeys were roughest for women, who were forced to sit squashed at the back, separate from the men in the front of the bus.

  The light outside the room grew softer, and it was in the gray-blue dusk that Faiz and Ishrat went out to offer namaz. I watched them from the room: two silently vigorous figures on the scruffy floor of the courtyard, bending and straightening almost in unison, expressing a common faith, but so apart in their experiences, the fixer for foreign journalists in Peshawar, in touch with and amplifying ever new ideologies and passions, and Faiz, the retired fighter, all his previous disappointments and griefs bleached by his present struggles for survival, by the bare house and courtyard, and the greater blankness outside.

  Later I went outside myself and climbed up to the flat roof. Night had descended swiftly, and it was very quiet. The air carried a mysterious soft tinkling, and then a couple of goats became clear in the distance. A bright half-moon outlined the mountains in the south and north, bestowed calm upon the stony, treeless plain between them.

  In the morning, when the convoys of the Taliban had raced across it in great trails of dust, the plain had seemed a staging post for countless conquerors and marauders. Alexander the Great himself had crossed it on his way to India; I had picked up the fact from the books, and it had given the flat, futile land a kind of aura.

  I saw it differently now. Faiz’s story had animated it with many different human achievements and disasters: the irrigation systems, the olive orchards, the helicopter bombings, the mines, the poppy cultivators, and the drugs smugglers.

  And you could, if you wanted, connect them to larger histories and geopolitics, to the cold war strategists in comfortable suburban retirement in America and the generals in their mansions in Pakistan still fantasizing about pan-Islamic empires, trade routes, and oil pipelines. But when you saw it from Faiz’s point of view, the events still lacked a redeeming pattern. They spoke—in the house with the emaciated cows and the mad son and the unseeable woman with her silent sufferings—only of the dwindling of human possibilities and the steady grinding down of individual lives.

  In Peshawar later in 2001 I heard about Jamal from one of the other men I had met at the offices of The Frontier Post. Terrible things had happened to both Jamal and the newspaper. Just a few days after my previous visit, a letter had come by e-mail. It started innocuously enough but then insulted Prophet Mohammed in the grossest terms. Jamal approved it for publication without reading through to the end. No one else noticed it, before it was pounced upon by one of the fundamentalist organizations, always waiting to undermine the English-language press. A mob of bearded men emerged from nowhere and burned down the press. The police sealed the offices and arrested several journalists; the editor I had met managed to escape the police and was hiding with his fellow tribesmen somewhere near the Khyber Pass. Most of the journalists had now been released, but Jamal was in prison, awaiting trial for blasphemy.

  The punishment for blasphemy in Pakistan is death. But Jamal was already close to dying; the journalist was surprised to discover that I didn’t know, or hadn’t guessed from his dull yellow eyes, about his heroin addiction. It had begun soon after Jamal arrived in Peshawar and got to know some drugs dealers; he had been in and out of several hospitals.

  No one could do anything for him now, the journalist said. I was shocked at first at the callousness, and then I felt slightly guilty myself. In London I had received a couple of e-mails from Jamal about the book he wanted to write. I hadn’t responded; the book had seemed to me a doomed idea.

  The journalist, who himself had barely escaped the fury of the fundamentalists, was only being truthful in a brutal, unarguable kind of way. I didn’t feel that I could even offer to help. My own situation in Pakistan, as a Hindu and Indian, was already complicated. It would have been too risky to get involved with an assassin, a heroin addict, and a blasphemer.

  “They are all such fanatics here!” Jamal had said at our first meeting, and I had been grateful for the sentiment, even though I knew it to be a commonplace exaggeration, because the words stoked something I felt during my early days in Pakistan, that deeper anxiety about Muslims I began to acknowledge to myself only after I left Pakistan and felt safe again in India.

  The unease had never entirely gone. But I had felt myself change during the weeks in Pakistan, and there had been an unexpected moment toward the end of my stay. I had gone to see a Moghul mosque in Peshawar. The spies hadn’t followed me into the courtyard, where a few men sat in the late-afternoon sun, and I felt I was alone until I saw an old man sleeping in one dark corner. He was obviously an Afghan refugee. His long white beard and sharp features made me think he was from Herat or the western provinces close to Iran. His head, resting on a silk-wrapped bundle, displayed the fine profile of monks and wayfarers in Persian and Moghul miniatures, and watching him in the decaying old building
, where the inlaid tiles were all faded or chipped, the broad-blade fans swayed dangerously as they spun, and birds invisibly chattered somewhere above in the dark domes, I suddenly felt myself pulled centuries back. I had a sense, fleeting but vivid and exhilarating, of the greatness of the old global civilization of Islam, the glory and splendor of once-famous and now-devastated cities—Herat, Balkh, Baghdad—of the whole life and world the religion had once created.

  That world was now in turmoil; it had been broken into by the invincible modern civilization of the West. From the outside it seemed capable only of producing fanaticisms of the kind that had crushed Jamal, and it was hard not to be repelled by it.

  “The foreigners should leave us alone,” Faiz had said. “We will find our own way.” But countless men had tried and failed, many societies had been exposed to new kinds of pain, and it still wasn’t clear what that way could be, whether the new versions of Islam could bring justice and peace and prosperity to the faithful, whether they even stood a chance against globalization.

  In any case, I could always feel myself distant from these debates and struggles. None of them had touched my own life before I went to Pakistan and Afghanistan. I belonged to another, more fortunate world. The American diplomats in Islamabad had guessed correctly: I already had my side chosen for me.

  But I was confused. I had thought Jamal an ally. His fate, however, was tied to the faceless people on the other side, people who were persecutors as much as victims. I couldn’t see how things, given the way they were now, could work out for them. But the thought of their failure was painful. I wanted these people to flourish. I wanted them to have as much dignity and freedom as I had been allowed in recent years, even though I couldn’t but feel the absurdity of my wish and increasingly doubted whether the kind of life I lived was what these apparently deprived people longed for or could be content with.

  AFGHANISTAN

  Communists, Mullahs, and Warlords

  Much of Kabul is built of mud. And when it rained before the Christmas of 2004, relieving a long and severe drought, the whole city seemed to melt. The piles of slush on its unpaved lanes rose, as though in a slow-moving tide, until it spattered everything: the big white Land Cruisers of aid agencies and Afghan ministers, the beat-up yellow taxis, the bombed-out palaces of western Kabul and the bullet pocked huts on steep hills, the fortified foreign embassies and UN offices, and even the high billboards exhorting Afghans, in idiosyncratic English, to “national reconciliation and peace.”

  Despite the rain and the cold, the bazaars were crowded. Shopkeepers representing almost all of Afghanistan’s ethnic groups—Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, and Turkmens—hawked oranges, carpets, Chinese-made windbreakers and electronic goods, while beggars, mostly disabled children and widows in burkas, squatted beside the sewers and tugged at the wide trousers of passing men. Thousands of refugee families huddled around small bonfires at the abandoned Soviet Embassy, amid bomb-shattered slabs of concrete and open manholes.

  It was strange to see no white faces in these crowds. Even in the modern part of Kabul, where thousands of Europeans and Americans—mostly soldiers, diplomats, aid workers, and businessmen—live, the streets were empty. Afghan guards with Kalashnikovs stood in front of iron gates set in high concrete walls topped with barbed wire. The gates occasionally opened to reveal a new or renovated mansion and to release or admit a Land Cruiser with tinted windows.

  To be a foreigner in Afghanistan, it seemed, is to move from one protected enclave to another. An Indian journalist I met soon after arriving in Kabul that December told me that security had deteriorated soon after the presidential election in October, which the Taliban had failed to disrupt and which Hamid Karzai had won convincingly. That same month a suicide bomber, apparently from the Taliban, had killed an American woman and injured three European soldiers at a shopping district a few meters away from my hotel.

  The Indian journalist seemed lonely, frustrated by the restrictions on both his travel and social life. For some months now he had wished to set up a FCC (Foreign Correspondents Club) in Kabul, on the lines of one in Hong Kong. One cold, rainy evening I traveled to his home with one of the foreign journalists he had invited to join the club. When we arrived, we found several other potential members already there.

  As usual, there was no power. A diesel generator spluttered outside the journalist’s fortresslike home, one of the thousands simultaneously going on in Kabul, giving to the city its characteristic low rumble. Inside, Afghan servants, chauffeurs, and bodyguards, part of the new service economy of Kabul, bustled around, replenishing bowls of dry fruits. The journalist opened a case full of alcohol; smuggled bottles wickedly gleamed in the dim, flickering light. Sipping scotch whiskey and German beer, the journalists loudly exchanged local gossip I would hear repeatedly in the next few days from Afghans, about kickbacks from an Afghan mobile phone operator to a cabinet minister and about one million dollars allegedly missing from the coffers of Ariana, the Afghan national airline. They speculated about whether Karzai would be confident enough to exclude the most corrupt and powerful warlords—Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim and his deputy, Abdul Rashid Dostum—from his new cabinet. There were complaints about extravagant UN agencies and NGOs pushing up rents in Kabul (up to three thousand dollars for a dingy two-bedroom apartment); about the arrogant employees of the American company DynCorp who worked as Karzai’s bodyguards.

  The Indian journalist abruptly called for silence and read out what he said was a draft constitution, adopted from the FCC in Hong Kong. He then asked for suggestions. As it turned out, almost every idea proposed that evening ran into an obstacle. The club needed a permanent home. But this seemed possible only when rents in Kabul were less extortionate. High-paying corporate members? Perhaps, when there were many more multinational corporations in Afghanistan. Honorary membership for such visiting foreign dignitaries, as Dick Cheney or the powerful U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad? Possibly, once the American Embassy had become more accessible. Even a bar, indispensable to foreign correspondent clubs, seemed unobtainable. Seeking official permission for the consumption of alcohol in Kabul could only cause offense in what was still a deeply religious and conservative country.

  Returning to my hotel late that night, past the sandbagged, barbwire topped compounds of foreign embassies and UN offices, I felt sorry for the journalist. He had seemed right to argue, as his cherished project collapsed, that Kabul had advanced greatly since the collapse of the Taliban and that with its new, one million-strong population of repatriated refugees, many of them rich people who had spent decades in liberal societies, it was poised for a social revolution.

  Earlier that evening I had seen two Afghan girls at a pizza parlor. They wore tight blue jeans, their faces were uncovered, and they sipped Pepsi-Cola as they watched American women playing softball on ESPN. They would have been an unthinkable sight in the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan I had visited in early 2001. Almost four years later, Kabul was full of such surprises: new walled-off villas with mock-Palladian façades, well-stocked supermarkets, Internet cafés, beauty parlors, restaurants, and stores selling DVDs of Bollywood as well as pornographic films. Sitting in one of Kabul’s great traffic jams caused by the Land Cruisers, surrounded by the vivacious banter of Afghanistan’s new radio stations and children hawking newspapers, I felt as if I were in a small Indian city, among people prospering under the globalized economy.

  In brightly lit and heated offices, diplomats, NGO workers, and government officials radiated optimism as they offered facts and figures attesting to progress in Afghanistan. The first ever presidential elections in the country had been successfully conducted without any major disruptions. Three million Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran had expressed their confidence in their homeland by returning to it. More than three million children had been enrolled in schools, as compared with nine hundred thousand under the Taliban. The eight thousand-strong International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) und
er NATO command was beginning to cover regions beyond Kabul. A Human Rights Commission had been established. The $4.4 billion pledged by international donors in Tokyo in 2002 for Afghanistan was coming in—albeit slowly.

  There was finally a tarmac road, stretching from Kabul to Kandahar, three hundred miles away to the south. More roads linking major Afghan cities were being constructed and renovated. Small civil military provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs), which repaired schools and roads and were run by the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands, existed in the northern provinces and were expected to cover the entire country by 2007. Japan was at the forefront of the DDR (demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration) program, targeting warlord armies, and had disarmed about 25,000 of the more than 150,000 fighters in private militias. The United States was creating the Afghan National Army, with 10,000 soldiers already trained. The United States and Germany had trained 18,000 police officers. The U.K. was leading antinarcotics efforts. The Italians were reforming the judiciary.

  To hear this litany of efforts was to feel the words “international community,” which Afghans commonly used, acquire a moral dimension in Afghanistan. With one of the lowest life expectancies and the highest infant mortality rates in the world, Afghanistan seemed to need all the help it could get. But three years after the United States brought together several nations to rebuild Afghanistan, many Afghans tended to blame rather than praise that international community.