Kabul

A Lesson In Truth: All Life Breathes Together

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November 2012 Salon

Josephine Wall: Breath of Gaia

The other day I flew to Newark, New Jersey, to give a benefit lecture on behalf of the Trenton Soup Kitchen. I have been involved with the TSK for five years now and I consider the work this charity does to be absolutely magnificent. Anyway, I arrived midday and was met by a lovely, middle-aged driver. Within minutes we were in his immaculate car heading to our destination, which, according to his GPS, was an hour away. My first reaction was, “Ugh, that’s half the flight time from Chicago.” My second reaction was, “I hope this guy isn’t a chatterbox because I need to make notes for my talk.”

Heading out of the airport, the driver and I both settled into our normal routines. He got his GPS going and I pulled out my notebook. Then he asked, “Is the temperature okay for you?” All he wanted to know was if the air in the car was warm enough, right? That required a yes or a no and a thanks for asking. But instead, something in me found his accent very curious. Why? I grew up in a home in which half my relatives had foreign accents, as did half the people in the neighborhood. People with accents are so common in my life that I hardly notice them, but I noticed his. Then I noticed that I needed to know where he came from – I mean I absolutely needed to know. Why? I don’t know why.

So I asked him, “Where are you from? I am intrigued with your accent.”

He smiled and said, “Where do you think?” I looked at his face through the driver’s mirror and the deep lines around his dark brown eyes blending in with his warm smile told me that this was a good man, a very good man.

I said, “Persia.”

His eyes sparkled, “Very good, but not quite. Close. What’s next to Persia?”

I froze for a moment. My mind went blank. I needed to bring up the globe in my mind’s eye. I said, “Okay, just a minute. You’re not Turkish. You must be from Afghanistan.”

“Yes, I am Afghani. I came here when the Russians invaded my country. I had just completed my degree at the university in Kabul. You can’t imagine how beautiful Afghanistan was before all these wars. Now I have two sons and a daughter here.”

I put my notebook down and we began to discuss his life, his journey, his world. He told me how the turmoil of decades of war in Afghanistan has affected his family and the lives of so many people he knows. And then he told me that he lost his job when the company he was working for let go of many of their employees. As a result, he was losing his home. That struck him as among the more overwhelming events of his life, as he did not think such a thing could happen in America. I told him about how many people I knew in that same situation.

Lest you think his man was complaining about the events that had unfolded in his life or drowning in his sorrows, that was not at all the case. Rather, he presented these chapters of his life with a type of “matter of fact” voice that was devoid of self-pity or anger. I was the one pressing for more details, asking him to expand on how and why events happened as they did in his life. I was the one picking at his wounds. If anything, he should have dropped me off at a bus station and told me to catch the next bus to Trenton.

Then he said, “I should be quiet now. I notice you have work to do.”

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Charles P. Pierce ~ Why the Hell Are We in Afghanistan?

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Esquire Magazine | RS_News | April 16 2012

OPINION ~ The attacks, they said, were “orchestrated.” Or, if the people reporting them were being particularly precise, the attacks were “carefully orchestrated.” The order of the adverbs is the order of battle. In Kabul on Sunday, Taliban fighters attacked the Afghan parliament building, and several embassies, and a NATO base. There also were attacks in the provinces. Those people old enough to remember the Tet Offensive can be excused if they mention the obvious parallels. Whatever its historical ambiguity as a military operation, Tet was a mind-quake in the United States. It forced the country to face squarely the sheer mendacity of its own government’s statements about the war as a war. It redefined for the United States what “winning” in Vietnam meant and it redefined it as an impossibility. In Afgantsy, his admirably lucid history of the Russian catastrophe in Afghanistan, Rodric Braithwaite quotes an old aphorism of which the guerrilla fighters in that country were fond: The foreigners have the watches, but the locals have the time.

But the fact is that, in terms of the domestic reaction it provoked, Tet was closer to a beginning than it was to an end. The war would grind on for seven more years, two years longer than the Americans chose to stay with it. The domestic antiwar movement was just building toward a crescendo that few people could imagine; the shootings at Kent State were still two years away. Lyndon Johnson was still president, and the presumptive nominee of his party. Nixon was still something of an underdog. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. – they were still alive. The Vietnam War was just beginning to reach all corners of American society like a dark, living thing with a thousand faces.

Now, though, we’ve been in Afghanistan for 11 years – for 3,844 days, for nearly 520 billion dollars – and the war is less of a presence in our lives than Hilary Rosen is. The country has soured on the war; in an ABC-Washington Post poll taken two weeks ago, 66 percent of the respondents said they thought the war was not worth fighting. At the end of March, a CNN poll showed 72 percent of the people polled disapproved of the war. What happened in Kabul over the weekend was not Tet because Tet was the beginning of something, and the attacks on Sunday were not. What happened in Kabul was not Tet because there is no sign yet that there is the political will in this country of ours to put its money where its polling mouth is. The issues in the election are jobs and the economy, not the suppurating business in which the country never heavily invested its time or its attention anyway. It has been a war in a bell jar. It was conducted off the books and (relatively, but not really) on the cheap. It was such a secondary thing that, when George W. Bush and the unspeakable Richard Cheney wanted to gin up a case for war in Iraq, they were able to strip the military in Afghanistan and hardly anyone noticed or cared, except the people who had to live with the consequences in the field. It is shapeless now, with no discernable beginning, middle, or end. With Iraq wound down, there are rockets being fired at the parliament building, and the most basic questions are not being asked.

What in the hell are we doing over there anymore?

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