An Uncomfortable Truth (and my comments)

By Sabrina Tavernise

The New York Times "At War: Notes From the Front Lines" Blog
November 10, 2009

JURM, Afghanistan – I got a lesson on a recent reporting trip in northern Afghanistan in what not to say to a mullah.

I will admit my guard was down. I had been talking to extremely reasonable Afghans at a school in an impossibly beautiful landscape, above a blue river with mountains on all sides. I was not expecting a lecture on jihad and the sins of the West.

But there it was, shot like a rocket from the mouth of Shamsullah, a 36-year-old mullah, who had been trained in a madrasa in Karachi, Pakistan.

He began with the familiar refrain that one of my Iraqi colleagues once famously termed “the answering machine,” because the message of the hard core never varies (with some regional differences). The colonialist West is trying to enslave Islam. Pakistan is an infidel state because its day of rest is Sunday, not Friday. It calls its capital Islamabad, but its courts are not Islamic. All bad.

He asked why I was not able to speak Dari, and then he snidely remarked, “They are all like that.” He meant that colonialists like me always have minions to assist. True, sort of.

“We not only hate Americans,” he said, squinting at the sun, “We hate all foreigners.”

But he made clear his opinion that it was American imperialists who unlawfully controlled Afghanistan and propped up a puppet, President Hamid Karzai.

Fine, but who did he vote for?

“Karzai,” he said with a smile.

But wasn’t he an American puppet?

“He refused to obey the orders of America,” he said, unsure of where this was going.

The real reason, in his own words, is that he, Shamsullah, is loyal to a rich former warlord who is Mr. Karzai’s ally, and he voted exactly how that man told him. He said this with pride.

By now we were driving him home to his village in our S.U.V. Walking would normally take him two hours. We sat in silence for a while. He took the front seat. We were two women in the back, and negotiating seating arrangements would have been tricky.

Suddenly he turned around to face us and said brightly: “If they held the election tomorrow, Hekmatyar would win.”

He was referring to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the militant Afghan leader who fought the Soviets in the 1980s, a man who is a living lesson for the United States. Once an American ally — the C.I.A. funneled millions of dollars in weapons and aid to him through Pakistan’s intelligence service – he is now on American wanted lists for his support of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. He is believed to live in Peshawar, Pakistan, a city where Shamsullah lived for two years.

“Do you know who Hekmatyar is?” he asked me, grinning.

I do not know what came over me. Perhaps it was pent up frustration at having absorbed hundreds of answering machines messages over six years. The proper answer in this situation would have been: Hekmatyar is a glorious mujahedeen hero! But on this day, I said what was on my mind.

“He was an Afghan mujahedeen who took money from the C.I.A.,” I said loudly over the hum of the car’s engine.

As I spoke, Shamsullah’s face cracked. His grin vanished. He swung his head away angrily and glared out the window, his body rigid. It was as if his brain had simply rejected the information. But the process had made him very angry.

My colleagues were pinching me. Their eyes were big and alarmed. The C.I.A. is the most despised institution in this part of the world, and everybody knows that you should never utter its acronym to anyone, never mind a militant mullah.

Soon after, we reached his village. I tried to make up for my mistake, but he was not buying it. Somehow the exchange had felt secretly exhilarating. He got out stiffly, thanked us for the ride and walked up the hill away from us. He did not look back or wave. We drove away as fast as we could.

Militant mullahs do not have a monopoly on hypocrisy. It happens in all faiths. But in recent years the world I have inhabited has been here, and every once in a while I reserve the right to leave the script.

Mark says:

I can understand her frustrations and the feelings that were pent up for so long and the need to respond just once to puncture someone's hypocrisy in such circumstances. I've been in similar situations, though I hasten to qualify that by emphasizing that it was not in Afghanistan and it was not with people who could kidnap or kill me (or at least I didn't think so at the time on a few of those occasions back in my youth).

But I think she was lucky this time to get away with it. It made her feel better, but I'm very sure that his views were not changed one iota. If anything, he will look for an opportunity the next time he may encounter her to get his revenge for her one upmanship.

I might suggest that, rather than challenging him so directly by stating, "He was an Afghan mujahedeen who took money from the C.I.A.," she could have phrased it as a question. Then again, maybe not.