Krishnapur/Kabul

 It is rare to find a work of literary fiction that denies itself none of the pleasures of swashbuckling adventure, the full range of comedy from mordant irony to outright slapstick, the grand tragedy inherent in a protracted human disaster, all while making a serious thematic point. J.G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur must be one of the very few such works in existence. I picked it up over the weekend with little expectation that it would become such a consuming passion over the next few days. It is all of the things I named above in one; though if one has to ask the novel to present itself in only one of its roles for our purposes today, let us settle on reading it as a satire on the pretensions of Empire and Victorian civilization. 

Seen in this aspect, the novel is primarily the tale of one senior British official, Mr. Hopkins (the "Collector" of Krishnapur) —charged with overseeing the defense of a Company-controlled town in the midst of the 19th-century Sepoy Rebellion—as he gradually loses his faith, not only in the God of the Anglican Communion, but in the full roster of Victorian pieties. These include, as the Collector himself lists them in the course of one excited interior monologue: "Faith, Science, Respectability, Geology, Mechanical Invention, Ventilation and Rotation of Crops!" 

By the novel's end, after the siege has worn on for months and the old rules and decorum of English life have withered away under pressure, he has shed belief in one of these shibboleths after another, losing at last even his passion for the Great Exhibition and the Crystal Palace of 1851. In one scene mid-way through the novel, the Collector hears young George Fleury—the poet and romantic (at least in the beginning stages of his own transformation) of the garrison—declaim a piece of doctrinaire Rousseauism from the dining table: "All civilization is bad," says Fleury; "It mars the noble and natural instincts of the heart. Civilization is decadence." These words at first appall the Collector, striking at the heart of his deepest beliefs. 

But as the siege progresses, and the British defense collapses, the Collector finds that such convictions have gradually escaped from his mind practically without notice. At a later stage of events, he even falls so far into despair that, for a brief time, he retreats to his room and begins to babble incoherently. Among the phrases that escape his lips is a snatch of the words of the great French radical and social critic, whose ideas he had found so distasteful in the mouth of George Fleury: "And everywhere he is in chains!" Later still, it will be the recollection of seeing chains destined for use in the slave states of the U.S. South that causes him to question whether the display of technical invention he glimpsed at the "Great Exhibition" had truly all been in the name of "Progress"...

... A witty satire, then, on a way of life and belief system (Victorianism) that no longer exists, perhaps; one may wonder, therefore, whether it was worth the effort in 1973, when Farrell published it, and whether it has not even a more feeble claim to relevance now. But, I assure you, it has more than that. Like many novels that one takes up in ostensible flight from the world around one, this one led by an irresistible path back to current events. It is not only that under conditions of COVID-19 for the past year or more, it has felt at times rather as if we were living under siege. But it is also the fact that our own country is presently extricating itself from one of its own entangled foreign wars in Asia; and confronting in the process the hubris of its own ostensible civilizational ideals. 

What was the original justification for the U.S. war in Afghanistan; what was it that made this intervention an instance of a "just war"? Presumably it was an act of legitimate self-defense and retaliation for the attack perpetrated on U.S. soil by Al Qaeda and its leader; and since he was being sheltered by the Taliban, we were told, they became a legitimate military target as well. But Great Powers like to layer on rationales for good measure, in case the first don't stick or get forgotten. The war in Afghanistan wasn't just about Bin Laden, we were told; it was also about bringing democracy to Afghanistan (and, vaguely, the whole of the "Middle East," from which this Central Asian country is arguably at a distance); it was about human rights and economic development; in short, the whole of the our own list of Civilizational Ideals. 

Have any of those justifications stood up over time? Certainly a country is entitled to try and prosecute the mastermind of a terrorist attack that killed thousands of people, and secure his extradition if they can. And since the Taliban refused, that was that. Of course, there are some nagging voices of conscience such as those belonging to Akbar Ahmed who, in The Thistle and the Drone, suggests that if the U.S. government had engaged the services of people who actually understood the cultural landscape of Afghanistan, in their preliminary negotiations with the Taliban, they might have been able to secure a bloodless surrender of the Al Qaeda leader. 

And while I lack the independent expertise to assess the credibility of that hypothetical, it is possible to harbor a pestering suspicion that the U.S. didn't really try quite as hard as it might have to find a diplomatic route out of the scenario. We were, let's face it, out for blood. The thought of simply putting someone who masterminded 9/11 on trial and not having a big war about it failed to satisfy our primitive sense of proportion. They killed a bunch of our people; we have to kill a bunch of theirs, right? Of course, such notions of vengeance, retribution, and collective punishment have no sound basis whatsoever in either moral theory or the ostensible principles of our justice system. But then, neither do the torture and extraordinary rendition that we subsequently inflicted on terrorism suspects. 

But what, then, was the substance of that "democracy," that "rule of law," those "human rights," we were ostensibly bringing to Afghanistan, for the benefit of her people? We continue to believe that those noble things are still the real substance of our country; that they form the true purpose of our mission in Afghanistan, even if we violated all of the principles behind them in practice, in the course of prosecuting our war. 

There was a bizarre flap in Congress this week, for instance, when Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota made on Twitter the simple and irrefutable assertion that the United States, along with a number of other parties to conflicts in the region that she listed, has committed "unthinkable atrocities" in the course of the war in Afghanistan. An uproar immediately followed. A group of Omar's fellow House Democrats penned a letter accusing her (incorrectly) of equating the United States with the Taliban, and Israel with Hamas. The Congresspeople accused her of "[i]gnoring the differences between democracies governed by the rule of law and contemptible organizations that engage in terrorism[.]"

But can anyone seriously deny that the United States has committed war crimes in Afghanistan, and in its broader "War on Terror"? Did we not commit torture and extraordinary rendition? Have these evils not been well-documented and laid before the public in full? And do they not constitute, when regarded up close, "unthinkable atrocities" indeed? And have we not witnessed a total lack of domestic accountability for these crimes; has there not been utter impunity to this day for the architects of the Bush administration's torture program and its policy of detaining people in remote CIA black sites? What, then, does our vaunted "rule of law" amount to? 

Perhaps the House Democrats would reply as the Collector does to George Fleury and the cynical atheist Magistrate. In a conversation among the three men in which they try to assess and quantify exactly which benefits the British have brought to India in the course of Company rule, the Collector invokes (much like our members of Congress with their "rule of law"), the noble "system of justice that the Company has brought to India." "This justice is a fiction," the Magistrate retorts: "In the Krishnapur district we have two magistrates for almost a million people." The Collector is alarmed by this reply, and fears that it may influence young Fleury. He therefore takes the latter aside, aiming to tell him "something about the principles behind a civilization being more important than the question of whether they were actually realized in a concrete manner."

That is us in Afghanistan. We continue to believe (even I basically believe it), that "democracy," the "rule of law" and "human rights" somehow lie at the basis of our civilization, however much we depart from them "in a concrete manner." But can we really say we are doing a good job of "bringing" these admirable ideals to Afghanistan? I have mentioned already our own government's betrayal of fundamental human rights principles. What about the state of democracy in this country? When the principle of majority rule and one person/one vote recedes further each day, are we in any state to lecture other countries about the perfect realization of the system? When our own previous president sought to overthrow the results of the election that turned him out of office, all without even having received the majority of votes the first time he was elected? 

What about modern technology; modern medicine? These are things the Collector often turns to in his own mind when seeking to rationalize Company rule. Surely these at least, are undisguised benefits of adopting "enlightened", "Western" civilization. But then, when a cholera epidemic sweeps the garrison, the Collector is forced to confront the fact that ignorance and prejudice win out among the British as well, in the face of mortality. They plump for the quack remedies of the familiar Dr. Dunstaple, who recommends applying leeches and hot compresses in order to ward off the disease, and maintains that cholera is spread by a noxious cloud, over the theories of Dr. McNab, who is read up on the latest proto-epidemiological researches of Dr. Snow in London, and realizes (correctly) that the disease is more likely to be spread through contaminated water. 

Is the United States today doing much better? To be sure, we developed COVID-19 vaccines. But only after encouraging the disease's spread through much of our society by following the lead of a president who openly promulgated quack remedies and medical pseudo-science. And our response globally has fallen far short of what it will take to protect the rest of the world and ensure the virus does not continue to mutate and throw off new variants that may eventually prove to be vaccine-resistant. Right now, a COVID-19 outbreak is in fact ravaging Afghanistan. The U.S. embassy in Kabul just put out a statement earlier this week that they have suspended interviews for visa applications, due to the risks involved in spreading COVID; thus creating yet another barrier between the thousands of Afghan interpreters and allies who risked their lives to aid U.S. forces and who now risk being stranded behind to face retaliation and murder from the Taliban. 

This final failure too is a way in which we resemble the characters in Farrell's book. We came to Afghanistan to promote "human rights," to "save" the people of that country from the medieval tyranny exercised by their Taliban rulers. Will it prove at last that we lack even the political will to "save" the relative handful of people who put their lives on the line to support U.S. troops? Will we fail to evacuate them and leave them to perish at the hands of those self-same tyrants? There is a scene in Farrell's novel when a group of "natives" who have remained loyal to the Company show up at Krishnapur, asking to be allowed in so that they will not be butchered by the Company's adversaries outside the city gates. 

The British officials decline to allow them in, but they offer instead to draw up some printed "certificates of loyalty," to be invoked some day when the Company is restored to power. One is reminded of the U.S. telling visa applicants in Afghanistan to be patient through half a year of processing, when U.S. troops are themselves scheduled to exit the country en masse in the next hundred days. "A fat lot of good a certificate will be!" the Collector acknowledges to himself, even as he writes them out by hand. 

Faced with these hypocrisies and these visible signs of hubris pursued by nemesis, I have not followed the Collector or the Magistrate quite as far into despair and cynicism as they plunge by the novel's end. I continue to believe in all the principles listed above—human rights, democracy, the rule of law, modern medicine. Indeed, one cannot criticize our government for betraying or falling short of these without underlining in the same act one's persistent belief in them. But at the same time, one can and should dispute the right of any one country to claim to embody these universal aspirations, particularly when it violates them in practice. The United States is no more destined to carry forward the goals of democracy and human rights than any other flawed human collective; for us, as for all others, these ideals will forever be a work in progress. 

There is much to be said, in short, whether we are speaking of Dr. Dunstaple and his leeches, or of the arrogance of the British Empire or the American Century, for the wisdom of that ancient proverb: "Physician, heal thyself!"