Whatever You Think About Afghanistan Is Probably Wrong

By Marc Kaufman

Sunday, September 23, 2001; Page B03

Prepare to enter Afghanistan. Leave your assumptions at the border.

It was winter in Kabul, the winter of 1997, when the Taliban was first consolidating its power in the capital. The city was in ruins, food was scarce and thousands of war widows had converged on a makeshift distribution center, begging for help.

A van showed up with foreign-sponsored aid workers, women who were supposed to hand out plastic ID cards allowing the widows to receive cheap food. The widows, most covered in head-to-toe burqas, surrounded the van. From inside, where I was riding with the aid workers, we could see their pained faces and pleading eyes through the mesh of their coverings. The workers -- ghost-like in their burqas, too -- had difficulty opening the van doors. Then the vehicle began to rock from the crush of widows.

That was when two young Taliban guards pushed forward, their arms swinging. One had a sharpened green stick, one had a small metal chain, and they were striking anyone they could reach. Women howled as they were hit, some went down, and the crowd pulled back. When the women surged again, the guards -- barely old enough to grow beards -- started swinging once more. Several harrowing minutes later, the van sped away. As I looked back, I could see the women being herded into line.

Until Sept. 11, few Americans knew or cared about people and events such as these in distant Afghanistan. Now -- because the Taliban harbors Osama bin Laden and is unwilling to hand him over -- millionsare eager to drop bombs on the place.

The reaction is understandable. But the tempting call for revenge is based on a distorted view of a complicated and long-tragic history. Because our focus is almost exclusively on the incomprehensibly rigid and heartless Taliban, we conclude that cruelty and zealotry define Afghanistan.

But most Afghans are not like the guards I saw. Overwhelmingly, they are like the widows -- a once proud, rugged and extremely appealing people who have been reduced by endless war and misfortune to a desperate level of existence.

The Taliban is not the protector of most of these Afghans, not their government -- at least not as we understand the word. The Taliban rulers took control largely by force and maintain it with anextreme Islamic regimen that is not in the Afghan tradition, and by most accounts appeals only to a limited minority of Afghans. They promised an end to fighting and have delivered that in many areas. But the price was a heavy hand that ruthlessly rules over every aspect of Afghani daily life. As Peter Tomsen, a former U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan, commented to me last week: The only working part of the Taliban government outside of the military is the General Department for the Preservation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.

The demonizing of Afghanistan also misses the sacrifices and success of the Afghan mujaheddin -- the guerrilla army that, with massive American aid, fought the former Soviet Union and the Soviet-backed Afghan army for a decade and, amazingly, prevailed. Those men -- the fathers, husbands and sons of the widows of Kabul -- were widely credited with helping to speed the Soviet Union's collapse, and were eagerly embraced by U.S. and European leaders not so long ago as world heroes. More than a million Afghans (out of a population today of an estimated -- no one knows for sure -- 20 million) are believed to have died in the war against the Soviets. President Bush understands this distinction between the Taliban and the Afghan people -- he took pains in his speech Thursday night to say most Afghans are victims of the Taliban, too.

But what the American public has perhaps least understood is how directly the United States helped spawn and build the object of our wrath. During the anti-Soviet war, the United States sent billions in military aid to the most fundamentalist and aggressive of the rebel Afghan commanders, and encouraged our Arab allies to do the same. But as soon as the Soviets left and the Afghan communist government fell, the American interest in Afghanistan quickly declined. Promised help for an Afghan Marshall Plan disappeared after the mujaheddin groups began to fight each other in the early 1990s, and by all accounts a toxic vacuum developed in Afghanistan and the refugee camps across the Pakistan border. The Taliban came to life, and later to power, in response to the chaos and violence that U.N. officials and two U.S. presidents (the elder George Bush and Bill Clinton) failed -- or declined -- to address.

The public's limited understanding of Afghanistan also ignores the fact that an array of Afghans are still actively battling the Taliban. The Taliban's members come largely from one ethnic group -- the historically dominant Pashtuns -- but other ethnic groups together make up a near or slim majority of Afghans, and the core of the current opposition. Convinced the opposition would never prevail, however, and weary of its eternal infighting, the U.S. government stopped giving much (if any) military aid years ago.

Charles Wilson was one of a handful in Congress who pushed hard to fund the mujaheddin's fight against the Soviets, and the retired House Democrat from Texas still believes it was the right thing to do. But he acknowledges that U.S. policy after the Soviet withdrawal helped set the stage for today's catastrophe. "If there's one thing I regret in this, and I personally deeply regret it, is that after the war we abandoned them," he said last week. "The glamour was gone from Afghanistan, and we're paying for that inattention now."

Desperate people will reach for whatever help they can get, and help came in the form of wealthy, disaffected fundamentalists from Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf -- including bin Laden -- who saw an opportunity to spread their branch of Islam. I saw that process at work several years after the Taliban had taken over eastern Afghanistan, when I traveled as a journalist to the provincial city of Khost. Half of the bazaar remained in ruins from missile attacks during the war years; the university (built with German aid) and the American-funded airport were badly damaged and unused. But amid the destruction, a huge and elaborate mosque was rising. Taliban officials told me with pride that money for the mosque had come from Persian Gulf sponsors.

The Arab benefactors often brought with them the Wahabi creed of Islam, an austere Saudi interpretation of the religion, and that mixed with doctrines taught by Pakistani fundamentalists to Afghan refugees in camps and Islamic schools during the war years. The result was a religious leadership never seen before in Afghanistan. The country has always been a tribal and socially conservative society, especially in the towns and villages of the parched Pashtun south, but centuries ago it embraced a decentralized, non-hierarchial Sunni Hanafi branch of Islam that featured wide tolerance. The jihad against the Afghan communists and Soviets radicalized many people, but the Muslims from the Arabian peninsula and elsewhere who fought alongside the mujaheddin during that long war were never widely popular. Those Arab newcomers became central to Afghan life only after the Taliban began its national conquest in 1994. Many Afghans I spoke with believed their jihad had been hijacked by these foreigners.

In Khost, for instance, I met a veteran mujaheddin commander whose daughter was attending a girls' school. By then the Taliban had banned education for girls, but many larger towns and cities kept their schools open anyway. The commander said that many parents in Khost would never accept such a ban, and the Taliban would not dare impose it on people who fought so hard to defeat the communists. I've often wondered what the man's convictions might have cost him later.

America's abandonment of Afghanistan after the communists left, and its untallied cost, was also on display in the Helmand Valley in southern Afghanistan, where American taxpayer money had built an extensive system of dams and irrigation canals in the 1960s and '70s. This was when the United States and the Soviet Union were competing for influence, and the aim was to make Afghanistan more prosperous by growing cotton for Asian markets. Thousands of Afghans were trained tomake it happen.

But by 1997, the Helmand Valley had instead become the world's greatest producer of opium poppies for heroin. The poppies were grown openly on land made fertile through American largess, and I was told the crop was taxed by Taliban officials. Farmers said they grew poppies because it was the only crop they could make a living on. Some trained Afghan irrigation specialists remained in the area -- idle, heartbroken and dreaming of an American return. (In May, the United States released $43 million in drought aid to Afghanistan after the Taliban began a campaign against poppy growers.)

An American presence brings more than technical advancements. It helps combat Afghan myths about our culture and our people. On my travels around Afghanistan and the neighboring Pashtun areas of Pakistan -- where women in burqas are a common sight -- I remember puzzled questions from drivers and guides about American relations between the sexes. These were generally educated people, but they wanted to know why American men let their wives be filmed naked for other men to see. I tried to explain that pornography was an industry, not a family business, and that most American women have never been filmed, clothed or unclothed. But they dismissed my explanations, pointing out that American pornography was circulated widely in Pakistan and even in some parts of Afghanistan. To imagine their bewilderment and disgust at what they saw in those porno magazines and films, think about the effect of dropping Penthouse into Puritan New England.

The men saw it all as a highly dishonorable reflection on our society -- they weren't keen on divorce, either -- and confirmation of their view that women should remain at home whenever possible and should travel outside only when fully covered. Their understanding of our nation was grotesquely limited, but they thought they knew a lot.

Let's not make the same mistake as we pursue bin Laden and the terrorists. Let's leave our easy assumptions at the border.

Marc Kaufman, a reporter on The Post national staff, visited Afghanistan and Afghan refugees more than a dozen times between 1988 and 1997 as a correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer.