An Afghanistan Picture Show

 In the wake of the recent attack on two National Guardsmen in Washington, D.C., there has been a depressingly predictable wave of anti-Afghan scapegoating and stigmatizing—much of it fanned directly, of course, by our scapegoater-in-chief, Donald Trump. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, he froze all asylum hearings and banned travel for Afghan refugees (many of whom were already subject to his earlier xenophobic travel restrictions anyway). 

When the Wall Street Journal op-ed page—of all people—condemned this (correctly) as an unfair form of "collective punishment," Trump's top lieutenant Stephen Miller fired back on social media to publicly promote the idea of collectively condemning whole societies—including future generations—on the basis of the actions of one individual. "At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands," he wrote.

That "and their descendants" is a particularly chilling touch. Miller is not only officially okay with collective punishment against entire groups of innocent people—but he also apparently believes in a kind of genetic determinism, whereby their future offspring must be condemned on the same basis. Hmm... could it be that all those years of documentation pointing to Stephen Miller's affinity with white nationalist ideology were actually telling us something? 

Whatever Stephen Miller and Trump might say, though, there are of course some of us who still believe that it is wrong—as the Bible put it—to "punish the innocent together with the guilty." Some of us still think there is no moral justification for denying refuge to Afghan nationals who put themselves at risk for decades alongside U.S. forces, in our misguided war effort, and who now face retaliation from the Taliban if they are stranded in the country we left behind. 

Those people did nothing wrong. They had nothing to do with the attack in D.C. Still less can we blame their children, or their children's children—those "descendants" that Stephen Miller appears to believe will come into the world bearing a kind of mark of Cain. As Thomas Hardy once put it: "though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average human nature." And rightly so. 

It's obviously disgraceful to see this kind of racism and negative stereotyping of entire national groups—no matter who it is directed against. But there's something particularly tragic about watching our country turn its back on Afghanistan and sweepingly vilify its inhabitants (Trump just last night at a rally, for instance, derided the country as a "hellhole" and a "shithole")—as if its fate as a society were no concern of ours. 

What we appear to have forgotten—seemingly overnight—is that our country's history has actually been entwined with that of Afghanistan for the last half-century or more. If parts of that country are indeed a "broken homeland" at this point—even a "hellhole"—we bear some responsibility for making it that way. 

To ponder on this lesson, I pulled down William T. Vollmann's 1992 book An Afghanistan Picture Show from my shelf. The book is one of precious few by a major American literary author to take Afghanistan as its subject; and Vollmann relied on more than imagination to do so. It stems from his actual ill-fated journey to the Central Asian country in 1982, on a mission to "help" the Afghans—as so many other Americans would so arrive, proclaiming the same holy mission, a few decades later. 

The book certainly resonated with me—and indeed, it should have great personal meaning to every American, since—whether we like it or not—we have lived through this same history; and so, our lives have been bound up with the political and historical questions Vollmann seeks to answer in this book. 

Vollmann as the "Young Man" of the book's narrative realizes that people are suffering horribly and unjustifiably in Afghanistan, under the effects of the Soviet invasion, and that something ought to be done about it. But he is also intellectually honest enough to realize that the fact the Afghans are suffering does not mean that the political solution is necessarily obvious. 

And so, with poignant earnestness, he sets out to try to discover who the good guys are in Afghanistan—who is most worthy of U.S. aid—for whom he can fundraise at home. In order to be fair-minded in this quest, he even considers the possibility that the Russians might be in the right, and that they are accomplishing "something progressive" in Afghanistan—before rejecting this possibility outright, as he witnesses the scale of suffering and displacement their war has occasioned. 

Discovering that the Soviets have waged quasi-genocidal extermination operations in remote Afghan villages—in order to neutralize the insurgent threat; and that thousands of people have fled across the border into Pakistan, each having lost loved ones to Soviet atrocities and bearing tales of massacres and rapes—he concludes that nothing could justify this. 

But then comes the question of whether the people fighting the Russians were any better. And therein lies a moral enigma that we are still puzzling over—all these decades later. 

We all know that it was in the interests of American Cold War propaganda at the time to depict the Mujahideen in Afghanistan as noble "freedom fighters"—just as it was in the interests of the Soviets to portray them as reactionary feudalists opposed to the Soviet-backed government's progressive reforms. The reality may have been that they were something of both. 

Vollmann, in his interviews with refugees and Mujahideen fighters, pretty quickly comes to realize that the "freedom fighter" narrative has its gaps. Most of the Afghan groups he speaks to in 1982 were already committed to an Islamic fundamentalist ideology and were trying to weed out of the resistance movement any secular liberal or Marxist elements that also wanted to fight against the Soviet client state. 

Indeed, while they preach "unity" in front of Vollmann, he easily uncovers evidence that they have disappeared and extrajudicially executed people suspected of being "Communist" or anti-Islamic from within their ranks. 

He also learns that their origins were hardly as noble as he'd imagined. Many of them were already engaged in guerrilla insurgent activities against the Afghan government long before it became a Soviet client state. Indeed, he discovers that Pakistan had been funding them under the table for decades, in an effort to destabilize their neighbor and undermine the secularizing and modernizing reform efforts of previous governments. 

To read Vollmann's book is thus to be reminded of an era of profoundly warped geopolitics—when the U.S., Pakistan, and the People's Republic of China all found themselves on the same side of a conflict, bankrolling Islamic fundamentalists to wage jihad—all purely as a result of a cynical realpolitik that assumed any counterweight to Soviet power must inherently be good. It's hard to come away from that spectacle and still view the Mujahideen as morally pure. 

All of this was news to William Vollmann in 1982; but it would hardly shock us to hear about this in, say, 2002—two decades later. By then, we all knew that the same Islamist militants we'd been supporting two decades previously were now running the oppressively patriarchal and authoritarian Taliban state, while providing a haven for the terrorists who had committed 9/11. 

By that point, the dominant U.S. narrative of the Mujahideen had been turned on its head: we now regarded them as backward, feudal warlords who were oppressing their people—just as the Soviets had once claimed they were. And indeed, it became trendy as a left-wing talking point for a while to say that basically, the U.S. in the '80s had gotten the Soviet-Afghan war all wrong: maybe the Russians and their client state in Kabul had been the "good guys" after all. 

But this is obviously not right either. The original Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion was ideologically plural—even if fundamentalist elements ultimately sought to consolidate power, and the most extreme elements rose to the top (as tends to happen in revolutions). Besides, even the "feudal" and "patriarchal"Afghan tribesmen of the country's East had good reason to fight back against a foreign power that was bombing and massacring their people. 

Vollmann himself—even as he makes fun of his naivety in idealizing the Mujahideen fighters—eventually concludes that their struggle is just and they are worth supporting. As Akbar Ahmed's outstanding book The Thistle and the Drone portrays it, the Afghan fighters saw themselves—not without reason—as waging a heroic struggle for independence, and they regarded it as a strange and inexplicable betrayal that the U.S. government would take up arms against them itself just two decades later. 

Vollmann's book is pregnant with ominous hints of what was to come. He writes at one point that Afghanistan is almost certainly going to be invaded again. Though at the time he was writing in 1992 the Soviet Union had finally left the country, he notes that this surely constitutes a mere hiatus in the fighting. And in his darkest moments, he even ponders to himself whether the whole situation is futile. 

What he could not have foreseen—though—either at the time he was living through these events, or when his account was published a decade later—was that it would be the United States government that would step into the shoes of the Soviet oppressor: that the same war between the Afghan tribesmen and the central government would continue, but that it would be U.S. forces now who were fighting on the side of a nominal "Afghan" government that was effectively a foreign client state. 

So, the question remains: who were/are the good guys in Afghanistan? Certainly not the Taliban; but certainly not the Soviets or the U.S. either. If you want moral purity, you need to look to heroic but marginal groups like the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), who have operated clandestinely for decades and have made—along the way—all the right enemies: Taliban fundamentalists, Northern Alliance warlords, and Soviet and NATO invading forces alike. 

If one has to settle for less than moral purity—as Vollmann says he is ultimately willing to do—then the Mujahideen of the 1980s come across as less black than they would be painted a few decades later—once U.S. geopolitical interests in the region had shifted back in the opposite direction. 

It's probably because I just finished reading Victor Hugo's Ninety-Three, but what the Mujahideen in Vollmann's narrative remind me of most of all are the protagonists of the 1793 revolt in the Vendée—specifically, they seem morally and historically ambiguous in almost precisely the same way. 

Like the Vendeans, the Mujahideen were a curious mixture of the heroic and the reactionary. On the one hand, they were fighting a justified struggle for autonomy against an oppressive government—what Hugo calls "the war of the Local Spirit against the Central" (Benedict trans.)—the eternal struggle between the encroaching center and the tribal periphery that Akbar Ahmed described as a perennial dynamic in Afghan politics and throughout the Muslim world. 

On the other hand, they were fighting an essentially rearguard action—just as the Vendeans were, in Hugo's telling—to restore feudal privileges that were threatened under the central government's modernizing reforms. 

Since both things are true—what should foreign powers have done? Vollmann is clear that he thinks the U.S. government was still right to back the Mujahideen, even recognizing their moral flaws. My own view is that we should have sheltered the refugees, and sent food for the hungry—but not bombs or guns (even though, as Vollmann quotes several refugees, this was the opposite of what they asked for—keep your bread and send us more guns so we can retake our country, they said). 

The moral opacity of the conflict of Afghanistan, to my mind, suggests that we should probably not have been arming any party in the first place. And even though this is the opposite of the conclusion Vollmann comes to, it is in many ways a logical consequence of the narrative he tells. His book is, among other things, a parable about the foolhardiness of rushing in where angels fear to tread—the problem with having too many good intentions. 

Vollmann, we know, set out to "help"—maybe even "save"—Afghanistan. And, as he freely admits—he failed. 

And in this, we have a microcosm of the entire U.S. role in the country over the last half-century as well. American forces relentlessly proclaimed their noble intentions—just as the Soviet invaders had done before them. But all we managed to leave behind was a wrecked society—a "broken homeland," as Miller called it. 

Miller was not wrong that it is "broken"; the tragedy is that the government he serves now seeks to disavow its own role in breaking it—to say it owes no moral obligation whatsoever to the people whose lives were shattered or are in imminent danger now from the Taliban because of the role our country played in breaking their country. 

And so many Americans are willing to go along with this cruel dismissal of Afghan refugees—this shrugging, "Am I my brother's keeper?" attitude—because we have already forgotten all those intentions we once proclaimed of "helping" and "saving" them. 

We came into the country boisterously claiming that we were going to be their saviors. We bombed and killed and destroyed them instead (indeed, the man who is believed to have committed the recent D.C. shooting reportedly worked for a CIA unit that many have described as a "death squad"). And now, we disavow the wreckage. When the people we allied with most closely for decades come to say: "please, our lives are in danger because of your actions"—we say: "Who are you? Never met you before. None of that rings a bell." 

We are like the speaker in a haunting poem by Robert Frost, "The Exposed Nest"—a micro-parable about "saviorism"—who comes upon a bird's nest in the wood full of chicks and tries to build a shelter to "protect" its young inhabitants. In doing so, the poet observes, he runs the risk of separating the young birds from their mother—since she may not recognize the altered nest upon her return, or may be frightened off by the change. "[M]ight our meddling make her more afraid[?]" the poet ponders. 

Nonetheless, he proceeds: "That was a thing we could not wait to learn. / We saw the risk we took in doing good, / But dared not spare to do the best we could / Though harm should come of it [...] All this to prove we cared." 

The poet admits, though, that he never returned to the spot to see if the young birds had been helped or harmed by his actions. Why? Because he lost interest. "Why is there then / No more to tell? We turned to other things. / I haven't any memory—have you?—/ Of ever coming to the place again[.]"

That's the U.S. in Afghanistan all over. Twenty years ago, we were so certain of our righteous intentions that we did not hesitate to bomb and kill in their name; to enroll people in CIA death squads to hunt down and execute our suspected enemies—all for the sake, we assured ourselves, of "democracy" and "human rights." 

Perhaps "we saw the risk we took in doing good," but we did not spare to act—"though harm might come of it"—"All this to prove we cared." 

And then—just as the poem describes—we lost interest. Saving Afghanistan took too long, it turned out. It was kind of a drag. We didn't feel like heroes anymore. It's hard to still seem like a hero after two decades of bloodshed and drone strikes and death squads. So we wandered off. We "turned to other things." 

And now, there are thousands of human beings who worked with the government we installed—or U.S. forces, or Western NGOs set up in post-Taliban Kabul—whose lives are in jeopardy from the same people we had bankrolled—alongside Pakistan and China—two decades before that. They say: will you at least let us move to the United States where we might be safe? Don't you at least owe us that? 

And we say: I don't know what you're talking about. Who are you, again? "I haven't any memory—have you?"

And time and again—in Iraq, in Vietnam, and now again—today—in Venezuela—this is the same lesson history teaches and that we fail to learn. Trumpeting our good intentions to "save" people and build democracy does not magically work a beneficent result. So often—it does the opposite. Our vaunted righteous intentions turn to blood and slaughter in the event. Our meddling does more harm than good. To borrow a phrase from G.M. Hopkins: "even where we mean/ To mend her we end her[.]"

O if we but knew what we do

         When we delve or hew — he wrote. 

Indeed, if we would but learn to look our good intentions in the mouth.