Page 1 of 2 Lies and illusions in Afghanistan
By Ann Jones
KABUL - I've come back to the Afghan capital again, after an absence of two
years, to find it ruined in a new way. Not by bombs this time, but by security.
The heart of the city is now hidden behind piles of Hescos - giant, grey
sandbags produced somewhere in Great Britain. They're stacked against the walls
of government buildings, United Nations agencies, embassies, non-governmental
organizations offices, and army camps (of which there are a lot) - and they
only seem to grow and multiply. A friend called just the other day from a UN
building, distressed that the view from her office window was vanishing behind
yet another row of Hescos. Urban life as Kabulis knew it in this once graceful
city has been lost to the security needs of strangers.
The creation of Hescostan in the middle of Kabul is both an effect
of, and a cause of, war: an effect because it seems to arise in response to
devious enemy tactics that are still relatively new to Afghanistan, such as the
use of roadside bombs (IEDs) and suicide bombers (though there has actually
been no attack in Kabul for six months now); a cause because it is so clearly a
projection, an externalization of the fears of men out of their depth. It is a
paradox of such "force protection" that the more you have, the more you feel
you need. What's called security generates fear. Now comes a documentary that
projects that fear onto the screen.
It is 2006, late in the year. A reporter stands on a rocky hillside near the
city of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan and points a wobbly camera at
dark-clad gunmen ranged at a distance before him. They've wrapped the tails of
their turbans to mask their faces. They carry their Kalashnikovs at the ready.
The reporter shouts a question: "Does the Taliban receive support from
Pakistan?"
As the camera jumps about to find the Talib who is speaking, a translator
voices his answer: "Yes, Pakistan stands with us. On the other side of the
border, we have our offices there. Some people in Pakistan is supporting us and
the government of Pakistan does not say anything to us. They provide us with
everything."
The reporter - Christian Parenti of the Nation magazine - has his story. For
years, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has charged Pakistan with backing the
Taliban, while Pakistan's then-president Musharraf denied it, and officials of
the George W Bush administration looked the other way. Now, Parenti has the
word of armed Taliban. This is the kind of story a foreign correspondent can't
get without a fixer; that is, a local guy who knows the language, the local
politics, the protocols of custom - and how to arrange a meeting like this in
the middle of nowhere with men who might kill you.
A Talib warns of an approaching reconnaissance plane. "We should go," the
scared reporter says. The camera spins wildly across a vast empty expanse of
rock and pale sky. "We should go." Moments later, safely back in a car speeding
away, Parenti turns the camera on his own grinning face: "This is the most
relieved American reporter in Afghanistan," he says, and describes the man
sitting beside him - Ajmal Nashqbandi, a 24-year-old Pashtun from Kabul - as
"the best fixer in Afghanistan". But we already know what Parenti doesn't
(because filmmaker Ian Olds has told us up front before the titles even hit the
screen): soon the fixer will be dead, murdered by the Taliban. We will be
witnesses.
If this sounds harrowing, it is. Fixer is the best documentary I've seen
on Afghanistan - so good it's hard to imagine a better one. It's all jagged
edges, blurs, and disconnects, catching as it does both the forbidding
emptiness of the land and the edginess of war-weary Afghans. One long segment,
apparently showing the inside of Parenti's shawl as he conceals a camera from
potentially hostile villagers, seems the visual correlative of the feeling that
unsettles all outsiders from time to time in this country: the sense of being
completely in the dark. In 2006-2007, as the Taliban surged back with
kidnappings, murders, bombs, and jihadi suicide attacks, this is how
Afghanistan felt. It's the feeling that still drives Hesco sales in the
capital.
Full disclosure: both Parenti and I have written about Afghanistan for the
Nation for several years. I write mostly about women, Parenti mostly about the
war, and I admire his work. We met for the first time only a couple of months
ago, after both of us were invited to take part in a conference on Afghanistan.
He told me about Fixer, then playing at the Tribeca Film Festival in New
York. I went to see it, and when it ended I could hardly get out of my seat.
Watching it again on DVD in Kabul made me weep.
By refusing to exploit Ajmal's murder for the sake of suspense - by revealing
it at the start - Olds has chosen to make a film full of the kind of fear that
seems to inhabit international centers of power in Afghanistan today. The
film's nervous visual style is strikingly different from the clean-cut look of Occupation:
Dreamland, his earlier documentary about American soldiers in Iraq.
Critics will surely have much more to say about the importance of Fixer as
a film. It has already won a raft of prizes, including firsts at Documenta
Madrid and the Pesaro (Italy) Film Festival, and Olds took home a Tribeca award
this year as the best new documentary filmmaker.
How lies begat illusions begat lies
What I want to focus on, though, is the way the film resonates with conditions
in Afghanistan today. Olds has the good sense to insert a quick history lesson
in this film, on the grounds that you can't understand the Taliban without
knowing about America's covert operations in the region in the 1980s. Back
then, president Ronald Reagan's administration, mainly through the CIA, used
the Pakistani Intelligence services to fund, arm, and train Afghan and foreign
Islamist jihadis to defeat the Soviet army in Afghanistan. Pakistan
subsequently used "channels built with US money" to install in Afghanistan a
friendly government - the Taliban.
Later, after the George W Bush administration invaded the country and the US
ousted the Taliban, it installed Hamid Karzai as president and returned many of
the old Islamist jihadis to power in his government. Thus, this peculiar,
well-established fact underlies the current war in Afghanistan: the United
States sponsored both sides.
Some analysts say the US "invented" all the "enemies" involved; others, that
the US (and Saudi Arabia) merely paid the bills, while Pakistan directed the
action to its own advantage. Either way, this history - much of it still secret
or repeatedly re-spun - leaves all parties to the current conflict in an
intellectual sweat. They must plan for the future on the basis of a past they
can't acknowledge. With Afghanistan national elections set for August 20, the
United States is planning for an Afghan future that still includes the jihadi
buddies its officials know they should long ago have left behind.
Only the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission has called, year after
year, for a moral accounting. Its surveys of Afghan citizens consistently find
that the people want lasting peace, and to attain it, they would prefer some
sort of truth and reconciliation procedure, like the one that took place in
South Africa, to cleanse the country and set it on an honest intellectual and
moral footing.
For obvious reasons, the United States wants no part of the truth that would
emerge from such a process. Just this week, the Barack Obama administration
first claimed it had no grounds to investigate General Abdul Rashid Dostum's
infamous 2001 massacre of Taliban prisoners, even though Dostum seems to have
been on the CIA payroll at the time, and his troops were backed by US military
operatives. Later, the president reversed course, ordering national security
officials to "look into" the matter. In the end, President Obama may prefer to
"move on." As does Dostum, who recently rejoined the Karzai
administration.
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