Bookends to War: Afghanistan by Louis Dupree, and Taliban by Ahmed Rashid

It is difficult to say anything useful about either of these books: after all, both have been read and discussed to death—Dupree’s because, 35 years after its publication, it remains the definitive source on Afghanistan, and Rashid’s because, eight years after its publication, it remains the best source on the Taliban’s origins, and the U.S.’s and Pakistan’s complicity. But there remain a great deal to learn from both, especially when considered together, for they form the bookends on the worst era in Afghanistan’s recent history: first the Soviet invasion, then the civil war, then the Taliban, and now the civil war again.

By far the best account of what Afghanistan was “really like” before it was turned into a proxy graveyard is Dupree’s book. From religion to politics to language to folklore to history to whatever else you could imagine, Dupree’s book is as exhaustive as one could hope: though not locally focused, it gives an excellent accounting of the astonishing breadth of Afghanistan’s physical, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and societal variety.

But it isn’t just an overview of Afghanistan’s astonishingly complex society. Dupree is one of the few Afghan experts I’ve read who will passionately, and personally, defend and explain certain societal choices we in the West would consider questionable or offensive. While this is related to his pledge to cultural relativism as an anthropologist, it also makes perfect sense once some thought is given.

A case in point is the section mobility. “Even nomads,” Dupree writes, “lack real mobility.” He means this in the sense that while even nomads may move from place to place, their place in society is relatively static—and that goes for most people in the country. Dupree ties this to the “mud curtain” (an unfortunately obvious allusion to the Iron Curtain) villages build around themselves to limit contact with the outside world. While this curtain did a pretty decent job of protecting the village from the outside world, which, even in 1973 was almost entirely exploitative, it also protected the village from modern conveniences like literacy and antibiotics.

Indeed, given ISAF’s renewed emphasis on village-level engagement, it is interesting to see how Dupree describes this curtain. It is certainly not physical, but is a very clever social construct:

Sustained relations with the outside world have seldom been pleasant, for outsiders usually come to extract from, not bring anything into, the village… The process, therefore, has generally been one way, away from the village. As a consequence, most villagers simply cannot believe that central governments, provincial governments, or individual local or foreign technicians want to introduce permanent reforms. Previous attempts have generally been of short duration and abortive, for once the “modernization” teams leave, the villagers patch up the breaks in the “mud curtain” and revert to their old, group-reinforcing patters.

He continues:

Local and foreign experts cannot really be blamed for being duped by villagers who, over many generations, have developed excellent defensive mechanisms to protect themselves from the outside world. For example, villagers willingly accept any and all suggestions for technological change, because they realize that the sooner they accept, the sooner the “developers” will leave.

Dupree was writing this in 1971.

From a different perspective, Dupree’s history of British intervention in the country is also fascinating. Without boring everybody with too many details, that chapter would serve as a fantastic contrast with the unabashedly pro-Empire Hopkirk. Dupree, many years before Hopkirk, quite rightly spins the disastrous 1839 invasion of Afghanistan as a vain and arrogant gesture of contempt, brushing aside the popular Dost Mohammed for the hated Shah Shujah, flailing about misunderstanding Kabul society (to say nothing of the many societies outside Kabul), and only thinking something wrong when Sikunder Burnes was hacked to death by a furious mob (rather than popular and beloved until demagogues tricked a crowd into violence, as Hopkirk portrays Burnes death, Dupree tells the episode as if it were inevitable given the untold ways the British humiliated the Afghans).

Most interesting of the affair in a modern sense, however, is how they handled the various tribes. Upon their initial arrival in Kabul, the British paid handsome subsidies to local tribal leaders in return for not being harassed or attacked. Over the four very short years of occupation, these bribes dried up, and especially along the Kabul—Jalalabad route (which handled most communication with British India) the Ghilzai became infamous for their harassment of British carriers. Macnaghten, who as best I can tell was second only to Elphinstone for being an indecisive twit, tried bribing some tribal to desert the “rebels” only after Mohammad Akhbar Khan had gathered a tremendous anti-British movement in the countryside and was closing in around Kabul. Naturally, the entire affair ended in disaster. But that dynamic, of ineffectually paying off tribal elders for short-term gain only to have it very tragically explode in one’s face again, is darkly familiar to followers of the new U.S. plan to buy off tribal elders in Waziristan. They’ve seen this play before, and they know exactly how it will end; does the U.S.?

Regardless, Dupree’s book is essential for even thinking about having an understanding of Afghanistan. It will, for example, quickly disabuse you of any tendency to speak of “Afghan culture” (there is no one culture of Afghanistan, but many—from the basic rural/urban split to various types of rural cultures and ethnicities). It is a perspective that makes Ahmed Rashid’s work that much more penetrating, for you see how the Taliban is at once both intimate (though neither exhaustive nor exclusive) to the southern Pashtun experience, and utterly foreign to Afghanistan as a whole.

Indeed, Rashid, despite his notorious anti-Uzbek racism, has done for the Taliban what Dupree did for Afghanistan: crafted a definitive, even if still incomplete, history of a people we still barely understand.

While most of the Taliban threat today stems from the “lawless”* border regions of Pakistan, Rashid drives home the very important point that the Taliban in fact are Afghans—while they may be backward, borderline illiterate, and quite brutal, they are also the suns of the mujahideen, which is a fact many don’t often like to contemplate.

Unfortunately, Rashid happens to push some myths about Afghanistan. The first (and forgive me for relying on Afghanistanica’s work here, but he has done excellent research into these topics) is the myth of pre-Taliban anarchy—which formed one of the bases for Khaled Hosseini’s last weepfest. While the Taliban certainly did emerge from anarchy—by all accounts, Kandahar in 1994 was a wretched, chaotic rape party—the idea of the country in terror welcoming the calming Taliban is one Rashid skirts mostly, but nevertheless plays into. In particular, he portrays Kabul much as the popular accounts have it; while the city was ruined by the fighting, and while there were atrocious abuses on all sides (though most galling to me was Ahmed Shah Massoud’s campaign against the Hazara), it was not in total Mogadishu-style pandemonium when the Taliban rolled in.

What Rashid gets right, though, is just how terribly brutal the Taliban were—and how they were aided and abetted by the ISI and even the U.S. Across the north, where Abdul Rashid Dostum held sway over large cities like Mazar-i-sharif, Kunduz, Taloqan, and so on, and in the west where Islamil Khan held sway over Herat and Farah, things were slowly improving and stabilizing until the Taliban swept through and murdered thousands. The Hazarajat in particular was traumatized by the Taliban—and remember, that was a main reason they destroyed the giant Buddhas.

Indeed, to borrow one of Dupree’s frameworks, it is interesting to think of the Taliban as an aggressive, expansionist version of the “mud curtain”—an attempt to shut out the outside world and remain in solid, immovable, ancient structures. That the Taliban’s structures, from their insistence on “returning to Mohammed’s (PBUH) time” whilst wielding AK-47s and driving Hilux trucks, to the very salient fact that most were illiterate orphans, never had any connection to the past save xenophobia is almost immaterial—it is the same ethos at work (please don’t confuse this with me equating the two; I’m simply saying one, which is a healthy expression of cultural defense, comes from the same general place as a very unhealthy expression of cultural defense).

Rashid makes some other curious claims as well. In his chapter on the “vanished gender,” about women, he says that Mullah Omar and his cronies decided to generalize their limited experiences in the poorest, “least literate southern Pashtun provinces.” It is important to realize, he writes, that “[no] Afghan ruler before the Taliban ever insisted on such dress codes as compulsory beards for men and the burkha.” While I’m unaware of any specific mention of the burkkha before the Taliban, at least from the rulers in Kabul, women were wearing the burkha for quite some time—long before the current wave of radicalism. Rosanne Klass wrote of the purdah—which was the deliberate segregation of women that existed even under Zahir Shah and Haqqani—throughout Afghanistan. While she, as a non-Muslim and honored guest, was not required to obey purdah, her photos indicate it demanded the burkha across Afghanistan, from Kabul (Klass writes glowingly of Kuchi women visiting the city, as they did not wear the burkha and thus had a magical quality) through the Hazarajat and over to Jalalabad. In fact, she even noted that, once purdah was abolished in 1959 (thanks in part, she says, to the “American village” in Lashkar Gah—now a Taliban stronghold—where the Americans running the Helmand Valley Authority allowed Afghan women to wear bathing suits right next to the men, and her friend Abdul Kayeum convinced Prince Daoud to relent on enforcing it), women spoke of “coming out into the light.” These are similar to how many women described finally escaping the veil once the Taliban were removed from Kabul in 2002.

Of course, there remains a tremendous amount of resentment in Afghanistan over how the West has abused it for its own ends for centuries. Rashid mentions this, and adds a rather prescient criticism:

By walking away from Afghanistan as early as it did [in 1989], the USA faced within a few years dead diplomats, destroyed embassies, bombs in New York and cheap heroin on its streets, as Afghanistan became a sanctuary for international terrorism and the drugs mafia…Today [i.e. in 2000] the USA, by picking single issues and creating entire policies around them, whether it be oil pipelines, the treatment of women or terrorism, is only demonstrating that it has learnt little…

Indeed. Rashid ends his book with a dark warning. “Pakistan,” he writes,

[W]ill face a Taliban-style Islamic revolution which will further destabilize it and the entire region. Iran will remain on the periphery of the world community and its eastern borders will continue to be wracked by instability. The Central Asian states will not be able to deliver their energy and mineral exports by the shortest routes and as their economies crash, they will face an Islamic upsurge and instability. Russia will continue to bristle with hegemonic aims in Central Asia even as its own society and economy crumbles. The stakes are extremely high.

No better explanation for the vital importance of Afghanistan will be found in any media outlet today. Eight years on, Pakistan is closer to a Taliban-style revolution than ever before, Iran remains painfully isolated thanks largely to American intransigence, the Ferghana valley continues to breed Islamism while even successful Kazakhstan sees its credit markets wobble precipitously, and Russia’s house of cards cannot stand for much longer.

Taken as a whole, both books show that solid scholarship, and a keen, non-ideological grasp of history can point the way toward constructive, interest-serving policy. Both Britain and the U.S. (and USSR for that matter) only ever focused on Afghanistan as the means for some shallow, narrowly-defined end—and the same can be said for Iran and Pakistan as well. Years of clumsy intervention have enabled tyrants and thugs to brutalize their own people, and a myopic view of the many issues in play—whether nuclear weapons, opium, or terrorism—has so far served only to make things worse.

Indeed, though they represent nearly 1000 pages of not-breezy reading, both books should be read (chronologically!) by anyone looking for a reasonable grasp of Afghanistan’s issues. All of the problems faced by that country are rooted in history, and that history is essential to avoid repeating the mistakes and failures of the past. While the U.S. is notoriously bad at this, one would think European countries, always eager to lecture Americans about their superior grasp of world history—even when it is clearly not the case (such as ISAF expressing surprise at having to do actual peace keeping upon taking over in 2006).

Regardless of how hopeful or depressed you become after contemplating these books and the missed opportunities they represent, I cannot recommend reading either nearly enough.

* This is a misleading term. The western regions of Pakistan are generally not under the purview of Islamabad, in a de facto if not de jure sense, but they do have their own systems of laws and codes—mostly the very fluid concept of Pashtunwali in FATA and NWFP, though there are other tribal structures further south in Balochistan.