by Tamim Ansary
In the race for Afghanistan’s minerals, China has emerged as the big winner so far. The year before the New York Times broke the news about Afghanistan’s enormous trove of copper ore, the Chinese company Metallurgical Corp signed a $3.5 billion deal for the country’s copper. (This is the deal for which the Afghan minister of mines allegedly took the big kickback.) In late 2011, China’s National Petroleum Corporation announced a joint venture with the Afghan-owned Watan Company to develop the country’s oil and gas. Over the next ten years, the Afghan government expects to reap $5 billion from royalties and taxes on this operation. No word yet on what money changed hands privately to grease this deal. Maybe none did. Miracles do happen.
The Colorado-based Newmont Mining Corporation, America’s biggest gold producer, bid on Afghanistan’s major iron deposits but lost out to a consortium of seven Indian companies. The Indian investors plan to spend between $7 and $11 billion on developing the iron. Meanwhile, British, Iranian, and Turkish companies have been circling like hungry hawks over the other mineral resources of Afghanistan, competing to form joint ventures with Afghan companies to develop the gold, the uranium, the cobalt, and more.
The Chinese have committed no troops to Afghanistan nor spent a yuan on military operations there, so it’s ironic that they are winning the rights to so much of the country’s minerals. Then again, their lack of any military footprint may have given them an edge. At Mes Aynak, the Chinese company’s contract binds it to building schools, roads, mosques, and a 400-megawatt coal-fired electric power plant in the area. The mining will displace some villagers, but Metallurgical Corp has reportedly offered to hire the displaced people to build new villages for themselves outside the affected area, replicating the ones that will be destroyed. The villagers get new homes and also get good jobs building them. At least that’s the promise.
As it happens, French and Afghan archaeologists have found a Buddhist monastery at Mes Aynak, built in the seventh century BC. This amazing site is loaded with enough precious artifacts to fill the Kabul Museum to overflowing, but the Chinese mining operations will destroy it. The Chinese had planned to start mining in 2011, but they agreed to hold off for three years, supposedly to let the archeologists complete their excavations. Actually, it will take at least that long to set up the mining operation, so it’s not clear that the Chinese made any financial sacrifices, and archeologists working on the site say they will need at least ten years to complete their work. Still, the Chinese reaped good PR out of their postponement announcement.
Afghanistan never had a single railroad in the past, but thanks to the mining it will soon have three and maybe more. The Chinese are building one railroad from Afghanistan’s northern border to Logar Province, south of Kabul, in order to extract the copper from Mes Aynak. The Indians will need a railroad to mine the iron at Hajigak, so they’re building one from Bamiyan Province, just west of Kabul, all the way to the Iranian port of Charbahar. Once built, these railroads will be available to transport other goods within and beyond Afghanistan. Meanwhile, a railroad running from Uzbekistan to the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif was completed in 2012 and is carrying passengers and freight today.
In Mazar-i-Sharif, the capital of Balkh Province, economic development is flourishing despite the insurgency. Turkish investors have built factories here that produce edible oils and canned food products for domestic consumption and export. The province has textile mills, garment factories, and a motorcycle assembly plant.
In fact, business is flourishing throughout much of the country right alongside the violence. An Afghan-owned company (headquartered in Dubai) has signed a $60 million deal with Pepsi to distribute its products in Afghanistan. Another Afghan company with ties to business interests in the UAE is planning to invest $100 million to develop 3-G telecom services. It expects to add six million new subscribers to the millions of Afghans who already have cell phone service provided by three companies founded since 9/11. One of these companies offers sophisticated banking by phone, allowing people to conduct business from anywhere in the country that has cell phone towers.
Millions of Afghans are mired in grim poverty, yet Kabul and other cities are booming. The abundance of cash sloshing around becomes obvious when you look at the wedding celebrations of the nouveau super-rich. Afghans have always mounted extravagant weddings and funerals as badges of family honor. Even in the old days, young men sometimes couldn’t get married simply because they couldn’t host a wedding sufficiently grandiose to uphold their family’s image in the community.
But the weddings of recent years have put the conspicuous consumption of the past to shame. Guests at these weddings routinely number in the hundreds. The sons and daughters of the richest power brokers have been known to host two thousand guests at a single party. (Power broker has replaced warlord as the standard title for a big shot in Afghanistan.) Even middle-class families straining to maintain appearances host celebrations that drag them to the edge of financial ruin.
The upside of this excess is the economic stimulus it provides. There is good money to be made operating a wedding hall, a palatial building fitted out specifically for these outlandish parties. Kabul has more than eighty such palaces now.1 The expenses of a wedding may be one person’s road to ruin, but they’re another person’s road to wealth, for this industry has opened up numerous jobs for Afghan women and afforded new opportunities for female entrepreneurs. Beauty shops have flourished, because men with money will open their wallets to enable their womenfolk to look stylish at these events. Women who make fancy gowns do a brisk business. A catering industry has spun off from the wedding trade. Pot and dish rental companies are flourishing. Musicians have no trouble getting work in modern Kabul.
In fact, the celebrations have been so extravagantly over the top that the government has tried to pass laws restraining big fat Afghan weddings—to no avail. People who want to flaunt their success by spending enough money to ruin themselves will find a way to do it, no matter what the law might say.
In 2001, shortly before the events of 9/11, development worker Idrees Ahmad Rahmani traveled extensively around rural Afghanistan; he reported that as soon as he left any road big or small, he found villages with no electricity, no municipal plumbing, no mail service, and no phones—inward-looking settlements so cut off from news of the outside world they didn’t even know what was happening in Kabul, much less Pakistan, much less Paris or Peoria. In 2010, Rahmani made the same journey as a researcher and said he found no untouched villages of this type. The Afghan rural world had changed more in a decade than it had in a thousand years. How could this be?
Rahmani attributed the change partly to television. In every village he visited, he saw at least one set, always attached to a satellite dish, and often installed in a communal building that functioned as a town hall, where villagers could gather in the evening to watch programs from around the world.
Where do they get the electricity to run their TV sets? They have gas-powered generators, says Rahmani, which they own because the Chinese have been marketing generators cheap enough for almost every village to afford at least one. How do they get gas to run the generators? Well, says Rahmani, the elders send the young men of their village on regular runs to the nearest towns, on motorcycles, to bring back gas. And how can the young men afford motorcycles? You guessed it: the Chinese and Iranians have been producing rugged bikes at prices so cheap, every village can afford a few.2 What’s more, solar panels are popping up in rural Afghanistan. Where do villagers in remote places get the money to buy solar panels, motorcycles, or even the cheapest generators, much less the gas to run them? Rahmani didn’t say, but the answer seems obvious. Many villagers throughout Afghanistan have a type of currency negotiable in world markets: opium.
When drug exporters tied in with the Taliban come to out-of-the-way villages to buy narcotics that they can smuggle abroad and resell in order to fund their insurgency, they don’t necessarily pay with cash. Often they pay with commodi
ties such as cell phones, television sets, motorcycles, SUVs, and even computers.3 The Taliban are generally (and correctly) seen as a force that is trying to drag Afghanistan back to the seventh century socially, yet they are helping to diffuse technology throughout the country, thereby inadvertently facilitating the flow of information and cultural influences into the Afghan countryside, which may render their core project hopeless: for when villagers gather around their communal TV sets, they can see shows from all over the world, thanks to their satellite dishes. Rahmani claims some even watch pirated HBO shows. I have no way to confirm that they do, but I guess they could.
Even if they watch only programs coming out of Kabul, rural Afghans have plenty of eye-openers to choose from. They can watch Afghan Star, a reality show modeled after American Idol. Singers perform for a panel of judges, some are eliminated, and some are approved to go on to the next round, a thinning process that eventually produces a single winner. Even in its first year, a couple of women made it into the final rounds. One of them, Herati singer Setara, shocked the Afghan audience by dancing without a head scarf when she sang her final number—and by dancing I don’t mean Afghan wedding dancing, which involves side-to-side head movements, serpentine arm gestures, and eye flirting; I mean disco dancing complete with wiggling hips. Don’t get me wrong: in America, her dancing would have been considered downright prim; in Afghanistan, it earned her death threats.
The death threats made the international news, reinforcing the theme of regressive barbarity so often associated with Afghanistan; but for me, the big news was that women were competing in this show and making it into the late rounds, not to mention the fact that the contestants included Pushtoons, Tajiks, and Hazaras; that the winner is selected by a television audience of millions voting by cell phone; and that when a Hazara guy won the first year, no one found his ethnicity worth remarking upon.
Afghan Star is not the only show of its kind. Another TOLO TV offering is a game show based on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? In 2010, a dramatic series called The Secrets of This House premiered on TOLO. This was a soap opera produced entirely in Kabul and written by award-winning writer Atiq Rahimi, who came back from exile in France to work on the show.4 Eagle Four, a cop show funded largely by the American Embassy, also began a run on TOLO in 2010. It featured an antiterrorism unit within the Afghan national police force that hunts down evildoers without bothering too much about the picayune niceties of the so-called regulations, much like the Kiefer Sutherland vehicle 24. The team is coed, which is not completely fanciful, because the first women accepted into the police training program graduated in 2010 and joined the force. So did the first women to enter the officer ranks of the ANA. And, in 2012, I saw a reality show in Kabul about recent kidnappings in the country, which featured documentary footage interspersed with dramatic re-enactments.
The arts are back with astonishing vigor. In 2011, impresario Rameen Javed brought a collection of thirty avant-garde paintings by new Afghan artists on a gallery tour of America. Turquoise Mountain Foundation, founded by British author Rory Stewart but run entirely by Afghans now, has paired up aging Afghan artisans with aspiring younger ones to keep traditional arts alive. Shireen Pasha’s documentary Slowly, Slowly, Mud and Lotus offers a stunning glimpse of these artisans and their work.5 In 2011, Turquoise Mountain launched a project to restore the intricate labyrinth of buildings and narrow alleys comprising Kabul’s oldest neighborhood, a neighborhood devastated in the urban civil wars of the nineties. Here, some of the last living masters of traditional Afghan arts and crafts—woodworkers, ceramicists, tile workers, metalsmiths, and such—are carrying out this restoration in conjunction with their young apprentices.
Film arts remain alive so far as well. German-Afghan director Burhan Qurbanni’s feature Shahada made it into the prestigious Berlin International Film Festival. Two month later, Sonia Nassery Cole’s movie Black Swan opened in Kabul’s Ariana Cinema. Filmed entirely in Afghanistan, Cole’s movie follows the travails of a Kabul family trying to run a cafe that stages poetry readings. Her film suffered a tragic blow when reactionaries kidnapped the actress playing the lead role and cut off her feet to punish her for her supposed infidelity to religion—whereupon Cole herself stepped into the role to finish the film.
And master musicians such as drummer Asif Mohammed and singer Farhad Darya have returned to their country from exile. The National Museum is being refurbished. Afghan entrepreneurs have built a National Sports Museum in Kabul, and Afghanistan sent athletes to the Olympics again in 2012, including female sprinter Tahmina Kohistani, who ran in the 100-meter event wearing a headscarf, and Rohullah Nikpai, who won a bronze medal in tae kwon do, as he did in 2008.
Afghanistan may be a tragedy but is not without its comedians. There’s Amanullah Mujaddedi, for example, a prankster in the Andy Kaufman mode. Once, he set up a checkpoint at a public road and stopped cars, as so many thugs have done in Afghanistan, but instead of demanding a toll, he gave money away, real money—to the consternation and befuddlement of his “victims.” His comedy sketches have featured a “jihadi gangsta” character he has developed, who wears gold robes and dark glasses and is attended by suggestively-clad, burqa-wearing female attendants. Making fun of jihadis in Afghanistan gives new meaning to the phrase “edgy comedy.” You might suppose a fellow like this comes from a long line of cultural radicals; in fact, his uncle is Subghatullah Mujaddedi, the conservative religious leader who headed up one of those seven main Mujahideen parties based in Peshawar during the anti-Soviet war.
In short, the contest is not over. The rural conservatives keep pressing in upon the cities, sending their suicide bombers into crowded markets and trying as hard as they can to subvert the social cohesion developing around modernist ideas and values; but the other side is fighting fiercely to pull the country into an unknowable future and a full engagement with the great, wide world.
The money keeps pouring into the country, the thievery is beyond belief, the energy is uproarious, the days and nights are shattered by bombs and rockets and gunfire, and the singers keep singing and the comedians go on cracking jokes. Afghanistan, a project often interrupted but just as often resumed, is a country still coalescing—into what is anybody’s guess.
Postscript
The Big Picture
THERE’S NO BRINGING THIS CHRONICLE TO THE PRESENT MOMENT, GIVEN that the present is a moving platform; and yet I do want to end this book by speaking of Afghanistan today, because “today,” after all, is part of a larger pattern in Afghan history, a pattern generated by enduring factors.
For Afghanistan, the most important of these has always been location. This is the land-in-between, the land squeezed between mighty powers wrestling for stakes much bigger than Afghanistan. In ancient times, it was here that Turkish, Persian, and Indian civilizations went head-to-head. Afghans partook of all three civilizations and belonged to none. The people intermingled, but the territory never simply became the frontier of Persia or the northernmost edge of India. There was always a here here. Through the ages, the great powers kept changing, the contention never ended, and yet the land-in-between never disappeared. Far from being absorbed, Afghanistan keeps absorbing elements from all who encroach upon it, reconfiguring itself endlessly as an entity distinct from its neighbors and invaders.
In 2002, just after the original Taliban had been ousted, I visited Kabul for the first time in thirty-seven years and roamed the countryside north as far as Panjsher Valley, onetime headquarters of Ahmad Shah Massoud. Fully one-third of the capital had been reduced to rubble, perhaps more, and the plains north of the city were still charred from the fires of recent wars, and yet, in crucial ways, I found Afghanistan much the same as it had been when I left.
My friends and I could still stop at a random spot by the Panjsher River and within minutes find ourselves surrounded by local shepherds and farmers who strolled by to see who we were and to offer us fresh mulberries and hot tea. Everywhere, strangers casually engaged
us in storytelling and conversation that lasted for hours, though I could not remember later what we talked about. The material world had sustained unbelievable damage, but the culture retained that calm indifference to deadlines and time, not to mention an aggressive sociability that had always characterized Afghan life at ground level, no matter what sultan was currently abiding his hour or two upon the country’s throne.
But also, despite all the blood that had been shed over gender roles, Afghanistan remained a world divided into public and private realms, with the public world belonging almost entirely to men and with women still living mostly within compound walls, sequestered from the eyes of strangers. Yet, as an Afghan privy to the hidden world of at least my own clan and family, I can attest that these women remained as forceful, voluble, and vigorous as ever.
I visited Afghanistan again ten years later and found that much had changed—but much had not. In 2002, the city had been cluttered with the rubble of bombed-out buildings. In 2012, it was still cluttered, but with the rubble of new construction. In 2002, hardly anyone had a telephone. Now, although no one had a landline, almost everyone had at least one cell phone, and many had two. On my earlier visit, although I saw few people riding donkeys within the city limits anymore, I saw many riding them in the country. Now, I still saw donkeys in the countryside, but the people riding them were sometimes packing computers in their saddlebags.
