Afghan Lessons: Culture, Diplomacy, and Counterinsurgency

Awkward Neighbors

97 twenty-four Awkward Neighbors I was in Gazar Gah, on the outskirts of Herat, visiting the tomb of the eleventh-century Sufi poet Khoja Abdullah Ansari when I saw the gatekeeper approach, dragging a boy behind him to interpret. He wanted to know who I was and what I was doing in one of Afghanistan ’s most sacred places. He listened to my replies; then he informed me that when Ansari was alive, he would come to compose his verses in this very place, every day as the sun set. “He’d always arrive from there,” he said, pointing to a mound of sun-parched earth, “because his home was back there, in the district of the flower growers.” Such is the soul of Asia, this ability to penetrate time and refer to centuries-old events as if they’d happened the day before. In Afghanistan this is a common phenomenon for any situation or social class. In Peter Levi’s book The Light Garden of the Angel King, I’d already read about his encounter with an old inhabitant of Nuristan Province who remembered by heart the names of the fifty generations who’d preceded him (which means a thousand years). It was also happening to me, time and again. I’d meet Afghans who preferred to explain the present by bringing up their country’s ancient history. When they put their minds to it, the Afghans did it with some elegance, nothing to do with the desire to seem educated or erudite, and the simple result was that they abolished time, removing the distance between past and present. “The greatest dangers for our people have always come from outside, like the time we were vanquished by hordes of Genghis Khan,” an Afghan diplomat told me one day, speaking of relations between Afghanistan and its neighbors. “Since then, things haven’t changed a bit,” he went on with a sigh. “Geography is part of the problem and we can’t change that . . . unfortunately our neighbors are who they are and we can’t change that 24-2423-0 ch24.indd 97 6/3/13 1:54 PM 98 Afghan Lessons either.” He shook his head in an almost theatrical gesture and concluded, saying that apart from Tajikistan, none of Afghanistan’s neighbors had any interest in seeing the country stand on its own two feet. it was clear that Afghanistan was still the “battleground of Asia,” as Lord Curzon had commented a century earlier. That was why, from the time of the international Paris conference of 2008, the international community had begun to promote the idea of a regional approach. Neighboring countries would have to stop being part of the problem and become part of the solution. In this sense, Richard Holbrooke’s attempt to sit them all around the Af-Pak table was intuitively a good idea. There wasn’t a single Afghan problem that didn’t have a cross-border element: insurgence, drug trafficking, energy issues, major infrastructure projects. It was truly short-sighted to think they might be solved unilaterally. In Kabul I regularly saw the ambassadors of neighboring countries, chiefly those of Pakistan and India, who were not only both very affable but also very knowledgeable about what was going on in Afghanistan. When we discussed a regional approach, we were, in fact, all looking past the southern border: it doesn’t take an expert in international policy to know that the Afghan problem is just the tip of the iceberg. What is below the surface includes the rivalry between India and Pakistan that has existed since 1947, of which Kashmir is the main theater of conflict. Then there’s Iran, of course, another significant variable in this new version of the “Great Game,” as are Russia and China, while the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan are used primarily as alternatives to Pakistan for communication and supply routes. the pakistani diplomats were witty and talkative, but you had to have at least three cups of tea before you got anything serious out of them. Islamabad’s policy was no secret, nor had it changed much in recent times, except for some superficial developments. The military hierarchies that traditionally control the country have always believed that an Afghan regime favorable to their interests is crucial to national security. They were obsessed by a fear that Kabul would end up under Indian influence, thereby leaving Pakistan in the unfortunate situation of being caught...