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

by Pankaj Mishra

  Where was much of the money for reconstruction going? they asked, pointing to the Land Cruisers and the high-rent houses and offices of the expatriate community. Disarmament was a failure and would remain so until there was better security and rule of law in the country; most militia fighters had simply concealed their best weapons and turned in those that were old and ineffective. The new Afghan Army was already afflicted with desertions. There was no comprehensive plan to house and feed the millions of repatriated refugees. And though Afghans had turned out enthusiastically for their first-ever direct elections, they were disappointed to see U.S.-backed warlords still ruling much of the country.

  One evening, early in my time in Afghanistan, I went to see Dr. Massouda Jalal. In October 2004 she’d been in the news as the lone female candidate in the presidential elections. She had got only 1.2 percent of the votes cast, as compared to 55.4 percent for Karzai. But the very fact that a woman could stand for high office hinted at the immensity of the changes occurring in Afghanistan.

  So it was disconcerting when Dr. Jalal, sitting in a very cold dark room and speaking in slow, precise English, denounced the elections, and the registration process preceding it, as a fraud perpetrated upon Afghans, largely a show put on by the U.S. government to impress American voters in the year of the presidential elections.

  The international community, Dr. Jalal kept saying, believed in “quantity,” statistics about elections and registration processes but was indifferent to “quality.” The elections had not been free and fair. Many people had registered more than once, she claimed, and voted several times. Often men with guns had forced people to vote for Karzai; they had also tried to intimidate Dr. Jalal herself during her election campaign.

  Western nations, she said, had not given her a single dollar while pouring millions into Karzai’s campaign. Worse, they had forgotten about women’s rights, which Laura Bush and Cherie Blair had so ardently embraced in late 2001 and which were trampled daily across Afghanistan by men hired by the United States in its war on terror. Educated women like herself were not allowed to participate in political decision making. Karzai’s cabinet was dominated by corrupt warlords and had hardly any “qualified people”—people with the training and experience, she explained, to translate Western concepts of democracy into Afghan terms.

  As with other Afghans I had met, I felt unable to assess much of what she said. Given that there were only 250 international monitors for the elections in Afghanistan, caution does seem necessary while considering claims that 10.5 million people registered to vote and that 70 percent of them actually voted in October 2004. However, the scale of Karzai’s victory suggests that a better-organized election would have had the same overall result. It seemed to me that the election, though flawed, had been a positive step.

  As it turned out, within a few weeks, Dr. Jalal was appointed minister in charge of “women’s affairs.” It again occurred to me that in places like Afghanistan outsiders like myself bring their own assumptions of what constitutes progress and risk being limited by them.

  But to know, as the days passed and I traveled around Afghanistan, that the new mansions with the architectural adventurousness of Los Angeles belonged to corrupt government officials, often built upon lands stolen from poor Afghans; to learn that the provincial governor, who spoke fluently of “peace” “reconstruction,” “international community,” and “poppy eradication,” was a drug lord; to find out that the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), which was briefly famous in the West for highlighting the Taliban’s harsh treatment of women, was too fearful of radical Islamists to announce its presence in Kabul—to know this was to begin to have a different sense of the change that had come to Afghanistan in the last three years. It was also to realize that like the millions suffering from contaminated water, power and housing shortages, warlords, and disease, a club for foreign journalists would have to wait for better days.

  Few countries in modern times have had to wait for better days as long as Afghanistan. A bright future seemed imminent in late 2001, when the United States overthrew the Taliban regime. But the past seems hard to shake off in Afghanistan, and no events more so than the Soviet invasion of the country in 1979 and the American decision to help radical Islamists wage a jihad against Soviet communism.

  In the decades before the Soviet invasion, Afghanistan had been slowly making its own way into the modern world. It is hard to imagine now, but for students at Kabul University, 1968 was no less a hectic year than it was for students at Columbia, Berkeley, Oxford, and the Sorbonne. A king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, had been presiding over the many ethnic and tribal enclaves of Afghanistan since 1933. But he knew enough of the world elsewhere to attempt, cautiously, a few liberal reforms in his capital city, Kabul. The university was set up in 1946; a liberal constitution was introduced in 1964; the press was technically free; women ran for public office in 1965. By the sixties many students and teachers had traveled abroad, and new ideas about how to organize the state and society had come to the sons of peasants and nomads and artisans from their foreign or foreign-educated teachers.

  In the somewhat rarefied world of modernizing Kabul, where women were allowed to appear without the veil in 1959, communism and radical Islam attracted almost an equal number of believers; to these impatient men, the great Afghan countryside with its antique ways appeared ready for revolution. It was from this fledgling intelligentsia in Kabul that almost all of the crucial political figures of the next three decades emerged.

  Less than five years after 1968, King Zahir Shah was deposed in a military coup by his cousin, the ambitious former prime minister Mohammed Daoud. Daoud initially sought help from the Communists, whose influence in the army and bureaucracy had grown rapidly since the 1960s; together, they went after the radical Islamists, many of whom were imprisoned or murdered for ideological reasons. But when Daoud, wary of the increasing power of the Communists, tried to get rid of them, he was in turn overthrown and killed. In April 1978, the Communists, themselves divided, confusingly, into two factions, Khalq and Parcham, that roughly corresponded to the rural-urban divide in Afghanistan, assumed full control of the government in Kabul, and in their hurry to eliminate all potential opposition to their program of land redistribution and indoctrination—an attempt, really, to create a Communist society virtually overnight—they effectively inaugurated the brutalization and destruction of Afghanistan.

  Within just a few months, twelve thousand people considered to be anti-Communist, many of them members of the country’s educated elite, were killed in Kabul alone; thousands more were murdered in the countryside. Thousands of families began leaving the country for Pakistan and Iran. A significant number of radical Islamists of Kabul University were already in exile in Pakistan by 1978; some of them had even started a low-intensity guerrilla war against the Communist government. Several army garrisons across the country mutinied, and people in the villages, culturally very remote from Kabul, began many separate jihads, or holy wars, against the Communist regime.

  In 2001, in Peshawar, I met Anwar, whose father and uncle were among the earliest Afghans to take up arms against the Communists. Neither was an Islamist. Anwar’s father, a farmer, lived in a village north of Kabul, near the border with what is now Tajikistan; although a devout Muslim, he knew little about the modern ideologies of Islam that had traveled to Kabul University from Egypt, Pakistan, and Iran. It was Anwar’s uncle, an officer in Zahir Shah’s Finance Ministry in Kabul, who was a bit more in touch with them. He was friendly with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the prominent radical Islamists at Kabul University, who sought refuge in Pakistan in the mid-1970s after a failed uprising against Daoud and the Communists.

  Initially, the Russians were busy consolidating the Communist hold over Kabul and securing the country’s main highways and seemed very far from rural Afghanistan, which in any case had had for years relative autonomy from the government in the capital city. But later, with the aggressiv
e campaigns of land reforms and Marxist indoctrination emanating from Kabul, resistance built up swiftly throughout the country. Anwar’s father and uncle joined one of the mujahideen groups that, though equipped only with .303 Lee Enfield rifles, managed to keep their region free of Communist influence. Then, in December 1979, the Soviet Army entered Afghanistan in order to protect the Communist Revolution, which was being threatened by factional fighting among Afghan Communists and rebellions by the army, and the position of Anwar’s family became more precarious.

  In 1983, Russian planes bombed the villages where Anwar and his relatives lived, in retaliation for attacks on Afghan Army convoys by the mujahideen. Although Anwar’s father and uncle stayed to fight and to look after the animals and fields, there was no choice for many of the women and children but to leave.

  Anwar, seven years old at the time, couldn’t recall too many details of the long walk that took him and his mother and young brother to Pakistan. He did remember that it was very cold. There was snow on the ground and on the hills, and Anwar and his family walked all day, resting at night in roadside mosques. The 350-mile-long road to Pakistan was busy with thousands of refugees, but they had to avoid moving in large groups, which Russian helicopters buzzing ominously overhead liked to fire upon. They also had to stay as close as possible to the main road, for there were mines in the fields and on the dirt tracks, tiny “butterfly mines” that floated down from the helicopters and then lay in wait for unmindful children and animals.

  I still heard about the mines when I traveled in the spring of 2001 on the road that links Kabul to Pakistan, through Nangrahar Province. The land seemed vacant, and the stubborn bareness of rock and desert was relieved only occasionally by a green field and a black-tented encampment of nomads. In the days of Zahir Shah this land was reclaimed, with Soviet assistance, for cultivation, and orchards and fields, watered by broad canals, sprang up. In a half-abandoned village, rusty padlocks hanging from the doors set into long mud walls, an old Afghan was startled when I mentioned that time. Rasool had been in his late teens then, had known some of the prosperity that came to the region, could even, with some prompting by me, remember the white men—Russian experts—traveling through the fields.

  Unlike Anwar’s father and uncle, Rasool wasn’t a mujahid. He hadn’t revolted against the Russians or the Communists; he had been content to tend his land. The jihad had almost bypassed him, and he had known hard times only when, sometime in the mid-1980s, Russian planes bombed the canals that brought water to his land. There had been another recovery after the Russian Army withdrew in 1989, when white men, this time from the UN, came and supervised the repair of the canals. By then the local mujahideen commanders were in charge. They taxed all the traffic on the roads; they took over the land that had once belonged to the Afghan state, forcing the farmers to grow high-yield poppy.

  There was no point in Rasool’s defying the commanders; he wouldn’t have got cash credit from the traders in the town for anything other than opium. Not that the poppy growing had improved his circumstances. It was the mujahideen commanders who had grown very rich from converting the poppy into heroin and then smuggling it across the border into Iran and Pakistan.

  And then, suddenly, before Rasool had even heard of the Taliban, its young soldiers arrived from the southern provinces, banished the mujahideen commanders, and claimed the checkpoints. They supervised, and profited from, the drug business until 1999, when they abruptly banned the cultivation of poppy, leaving most farmers with no sources of livelihood and the option only of migrating to Pakistan.

  Rasool still lived in the vast, now arid land, enduring, in just three decades, a whole fruitless cycle of Afghan history. The long reign of Zahir Shah was no more than a faint memory. All the slow, steady work of previous generations was canceled out; Afghanistan was even further away from its tryst with the modern world.

  But then, as in many Muslim countries suddenly confronted in the nineteenth century with the rising power of the West, Afghanistan’s route to modern development could only have been tortuous. The Afghan empire of the eighteenth century had reached as far as Kashmir in the east and up to the Iranian city of Mashhad in the west. Like present-day Afghanistan, it contained many different ethnic groups, the dominant Pashtun tribes in the east and south, Tajiks and Uzbeks in the north and west, and the Shia Hazaras in the central provinces. Almost all of them were Sunni or Shia Muslims. Fiercely autonomous and proud, they had successfully resisted the British attempt to extend their Indian empire up to Kabul, but after two Anglo-Afghan wars, 1838-1842 and 1878-1880, the Afghans had been sufficiently subdued to serve as a buffer state between the expanding empires of Britain and Russia.

  The British were content to exercise influence from afar without troubling themselves with direct rule. It was under their supervision that the present-day boundaries of Afghanistan were drawn, leaving a lot of Pashtun tribes in what is now Pakistan. The British also subsidized the Afghan Army. Until 1919, when the Afghans won complete independence from the British, the ruler in Kabul reported to Delhi in matters of foreign policy, which essentially involved keeping the Russians out of Afghanistan.

  The British-backed rulers of Afghanistan in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were insecure and ruthless, obsessed with protecting their regime from any local challenges as well; Afghanistan’s continued isolation was in their best interests. During the twenty-one-year rule of Amir Abdur Rahman (1880-1901), one of Afghanistan’s more pro-British rulers, only one school was built in Kabul, and that was a madrassa. Condemned to play a passive part in an imperial Great Game, Afghanistan missed out on the indirect benefits of colonial rule, the creation of an educated class such as would supply the basic infrastructure of the postcolonial states of India, Pakistan, and Egypt.

  Afghanistan’s resolute backwardness in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was appealing to Western romantics. Kipling, who was repelled by the educated Bengali, commended the Pashtun tribesmen—the traditional rulers of Afghanistan and also a majority among Afghans—for their courage, love of freedom, and sense of honor. These clichés about the Afghans, which would be amplified in our own time by American journalists and politicians, also had some effect on Muslims themselves.

  One such man was Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, a polemicist of the nineteenth century, who sought to alert the Muslim peoples to their growing subjugation to the imperial powers of the West. The radical Islamists I spoke to didn’t remember that in 1968, while student groups at Kabul University were organizing large demonstrations, distributing fiery pamphlets, and fighting one another on the streets, a huge mausoleum for al-Afghani went up inside the campus, to honor someone who, although born in Iran and educated in India, adopted the pen name al-Afghani and even began to tell other people that he was from Afghanistan.

  The increasing influence of the West, and the related undermining of Muslim power, were the inescapable reality of al-Afghani’s lifetime; he witnessed it more closely than most Muslims during long stints in India, Iran, Egypt, France, England, and Turkey. But Afghanistan had hardly been affected by the lifestyles and new knowledge of Europe, by the passion and energy of white men from the West who were transforming old worlds elsewhere in the nineteenth century. This resistance to Western-style modernization would have impressed al-Afghani, who, while stressing the need to modernize Muslim societies, disapproved of the wholesale adoption of European ways of the kind Kemal Atatürk would impose upon Turkey just two decades after al-Afghani’s death in 1897.

  Nevertheless, al-Afghani failed to see how even small but strategically placed countries such as Afghanistan were being drawn into the great imperial games of nineteenth-century Europe and then sentenced to isolation and backwardness as buffer states. Behind his romantic attachment to Afghanistan lay fear and defensiveness, his painful awareness, shared by many other educated people in once-great Asian societies, that they had fallen behind the West and that they had not only to catch up but also to keep in che
ck its increasing power to alter their lives, mostly for the worse.

  For many educated people in premodern societies, communism offered a way of both catching up with and resisting the West, and the ideology had a powerful and often generous sponsor in the Soviet Union. But the hasty, ill-adapted borrowings from Soviet communism—the simplistic notion, for instance, of Afghans as feudal people who had to be turned into proletarians—more often than not imposed new kinds of pain and trauma on such a traditional society as Afghanistan and helped to push the country even further away from the modern world.

  The Soviet Union had supported the Communist coup of 1978 in Kabul and subsequently grown concerned about the clumsy and brutal way in which the Khalq faction of the Afghan Communist Party, led by the fanatical ideologue Hafizullah Amin, a onetime student at Columbia University, had hijacked the coup and then had tried violently—and, as spontaneous revolts across the country proved, disastrously—to weld the incoherent ethnic-tribal worlds of Afghanistan into a Communist society.

  As records of Politburo conversations reveal, the aging leaders of the Soviet Union at first resisted military intervention in Afghanistan. However, they feared that the United States, unsettled by the fall of the shah of Iran, was hoping to find, with the help of the wily Amin, an alternative anti-Soviet base in Afghanistan. They suspected Amin of being “an ambitious, cruel, treacherous person” who “may change the political orientation of the regime.”

  This sounds like cold war paranoia. It wasn’t softened by the mutinies against the Communist regime by Afghan military garrisons, one of which, in the city of Herat, ended in the deaths of several Soviet and East European advisers. In the last days of 1979, when the Communist regime looked close to collapse, a contingent of Soviet soldiers flew into Kabul, stormed Amin’s palace, and killed him. A more moderate leader, Babrak Karmal, who belonged to the urban-based Parcham faction, took his place and attempted to avert the collapse of the Afghan state and bring an end to the brutalities.