Holidays in Heck (30 page)

Afghans know that we are still committed to our mission in Afghanistan. The minister of education said, “I have complete faith. But whether we are able and smart enough to express this mission to the people of Afghanistan . . .” He let his words trail off.

Afghans don't know that we're still committed to our mission in Afghanistan. The provincial governor said, “If perception is created by your actions that democracy is against Islam, that a controlled insurgency is all that's wanted, that Afghanistan is being used as a jump point for other geopolitical concerns—that justifies the insurgency.”

Afghans hope like heck that we're still committed to our mission in Afghanistan. The woman member of parliament said, “From 2001 to 2004 people were very optimistic. With the switch to Iraq things began to change.”

Afghans can't live on hope alone. The voluble mullah said, “There is a saying, ‘A blind man will not lose his stick twice.' But the people of Afghanistan have lost their stick twenty times.”

We should talk to the Taliban. The Pashtun tribal leader said, “Accept the fact that we cannot eliminate all Taliban from Afghanistan.”

We shouldn't talk to the Taliban. The governor said, “Talks further strengthen the enemy's position.”

We must fight the war the Afghan way. The governor said, “The Taliban are very quick. Our current units need too much preparation to move.”

We must fight the war the American way. The governor also said, “There is an Arab proverb about fear as a tactic: ‘I win the war a month away.' ” And the U.S. military has been doing some fearsome things for month upon month in Afghanistan.

The Afghan government can be reformed from within. The governor said, “Blaming corruption is just a way to put blame on others for our own shortcomings. Internal strategies are needed to strengthen military and civil society.”

The Afghan government can't be reformed from within. Bashardost proposed something like what General MacArthur did in Japan after World War II.

Poverty is the root of Afghanistan's problems. Bashardost said, “We are ready to support you for three hundred years.
If
we have electricity.
If
we have a life.”

Poverty is not the root of Afghanistan's problems. “Or Haiti would be the most terroristic country in the world,” the governor said.

There must be
something
in Afghanistan that we've got right. There is. Radio Azadi, the Afghan bureau of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, is on the air twelve hours a day, seven days a week, half the time in Pashto, half the time in Dari. What Radio
Azadi does is known as “surrogate broadcasting,” meaning the content is Afghan-produced as a way for Afghans to get news and views in a place where, otherwise, these have to be delivered mostly face-to-face. And there is no agenda except to be factual (although facts are an agenda item if you care about freedom, which is what Azadi means in Dari).

Radio Azadi's bureau chief, and my host in Kabul, Amin Madaqiq, has 120 staff members and freelancers. They produce news bulletins, news in depth, and features on social, political, and economic topics, plus a couple of hours a day of Afghan music and even some comedy: “Police announced today that all the people who have passed their driver's license test must now learn to drive.”

A missing persons program,
In Search of a Loved One
, tries to reunite families separated by decades of chaos. A medical program is hosted by doctors with eminent specialists, often from overseas, as guests.
Azadi and Listeners
is devoted to getting individuals individual responses from government ministries.

The call-in shows are popular. On a day when I was in the studio Afghanistan's minister of communications and minister of the interior were taking random phoners, trying to clear up confusion about a confusing-sounding system of national ID cards. I don't think it's likely that the head of the FCC and a member of President Obama's cabinet would spend two hours in a spartan, airless broadcast booth helping people who are unable to read through a form-filling process and suggesting work-arounds when local government corruption is encountered.

The quiet mullah told me that the day before an elderly religious scholar had asked for help buying a radio so that Azadi could be listened to in his mosque.

The Pashtun tribal leader said, “Azadi is doing very well because they are telling the facts.” He griped that other media were insensitive to religion and culture.

The civil society activist thought that wisdom and social relationships were best established in person, but second best was radio. “Radio can pass wisdom,” he said.

The woman member of parliament told me about how, after the fall of the Taliban, Radio Azadi had conducted four hours a week of open political debate. “The Afghans
got it
,” she said. She praised Azadi's “diversity of opinion” and the fact that it sometimes has “the government getting upset.”

“Even the U.S. ambassador is afraid of our show,” an Azadi journalist told me with a big smile.

“Any feeling of censorship from the U.S.?” I asked Amin.

“We haven't felt any,” he said.

“A good channel,” the minister of education called it. “An important institution. I've never had the feeling it was unnecessarily taking sides in the Afghan conflict. It maintains its impartiality.”

“I wasn't sure what you'd hear from the minister,” a journalist with Radio Azadi told me later. “We've been critical of him.”

The member of parliament to whom I'd talked about clashing civilizations and deteriorating neighborhoods was a bit surprised at America sponsoring Azadi, the more so, I think, because he's an American. That is, he lived for a long time in America, where he spent ten years as a commercial airline pilot.

“America,” he said, not without pride, “is spending money for you to express your opinions—not to twist your opinions but to
express
your opinions.”

Ramazan Bashardost's only complaint about Radio Azadi
was that he wasn't on it often enough. He was reminded that, only recently, he had been named by Radio Azadi as “Person of the Year.”

“Yes,” he said, and apologized for bringing too much documentation to radio interviews. “One positive point in Afghanistan is media,” he said. “And the only positive point in Afghanistan is media.”

Even the Taliban call in to Radio Azadi—to argue with the hosts and guests.

“We know you are funded by the U.S. Congress,” a Taliban spokesman told Amin. “But we judge you by your deeds.”

“The Taliban call to argue—this is
good
,” said the woman member of parliament.

“The Taliban fights the U.S. militarily,” said the former airline pilot, “but uses the U.S. media to express themselves.” He chuckled. “I say to them, ‘If this system is bad, you are using it! When you had your radio, would you let
us
call in?'” He saw the Taliban as caught in a trap by the logic of freedom. “This is a format that must be expanded.”

The governor thought the Taliban itself might accidentally expand it. He recalled the days before Radio Azadi, during Taliban rule, when the only outside media was the BBC Afghan service. “The Taliban told people that they would go to hell if they listened to the BBC. Then
everyone
listened.”

There was one other point that people in Kabul agreed on. Whatever it is that America does in Afghanistan, America should proceed with wisdom. The governor told a story about wisdom.

There was a student who had been studying for many years at a madrassa. He had memorized the Qu'ran and
learned all the lessons his teacher taught. One day he went to his teacher and said, “I am ready to leave and go be a mullah.”

His teacher said, “I think you should stay here for a few more years.”

“Why?” asked the student. “Is there some additional degree or higher certificate that I will get?”

“No,” said the teacher, “all you will get is wisdom.”

“But I'm ready to be a mullah now,” said the student. And he left the madrassa and wandered from village to village looking for a mosque where he could be the prayer leader.

Finally the student came to a village where a corrupt old mullah was using the mosque as a stall for his cow. The student was outraged. He gathered the villagers together and told them, “I have studied at a madrassa. I have memorized the Qu'ran. It is a great sacrilege for your mullah to use the mosque as a stall for his cow.” The villagers beat him up.

The student limped back to the madrassa and told his teacher what had happened. The teacher said, “Follow me.” They went back to the village where the mullah was using the mosque as a stall.

The teacher gathered the villagers together and told them, “I see you have a beautiful cow being kept in your mosque. It must be a very blessed animal. And I hear the cow belongs to your mullah. He must be a very holy man. In fact, I think that this cow is so blessed and your mullah is so holy that if you were to take one hair from the cow's hide and one hair from the mullah's beard and rub them together, you would be assured of paradise.”

The villagers ran into the mosque and began plucking hairs from the cow's hide. The cow started to buck and kick and it bolted from the mosque and disappeared. Then the
villagers ran to the corrupt old mullah's house and began plucking hairs from his beard. And they tugged and they yanked so hard at the mullah's beard that he had a heart attack and died.

“You see,” said the teacher to the student. “No cow in the mosque and a need for a new mullah—
that
is wisdom.”

Washington, D.C., August 2010

W
e take the kids to Washington once or twice a year. In fact, Muffin and Poppet were born there, and until 2005 we split our time between an apartment in Washington and Breakwind Oaks, our house in New Hampshire's Beige Mountains. Eventually teachers lost their sense of humor about children being pulled out of school when New Hampshire got too cold and icy (October) and reinserted when Washington got too hot and muggy (March). We gave up the apartment and resigned ourselves to being year-round summer people in a state with no summer.

The kids still have friends in Washington and so do Mrs. O. and I, even if they do look at us funny when we arrive at the Capital Grill in muck boots and six layers of fleece
and talk about what the hens, instead of the congressmen, are laying. Yet, although our children had been to Washington, they'd never BEEN TO WASHINGTON. That is, they'd never gone on the formal pilgrimage to our nation's capital, the expedition through history and civics that is all but mandatory for our country's young people and which, when not provided by parents, is supplied by the junior high class trip. Our kids hadn't yet journeyed to Washington for the specific purpose of being awed by America's saga-filled past, august institutions of democratic government, and many public buildings with lots of columns in the front.

Mrs. O. and I had each gone with our families, I in the 1950s, she in the 1970s. My memories of the experience remain vivid to this day. We toured the FBI building and got to see a machine gun fired. And we stayed in a hotel. “We stayed in a hotel!” I endlessly told my friends back in Toledo, when I wasn't endlessly telling them I'd seen a machine gun fired. I confess that many of the rest of my memories are not so vivid. I was impressed by how thick the piece of glass was over the top of the Declaration of Independence. The Smithsonian had the better part of a railroad train indoors. The lantern that hung from the front porch of the White House was huge. At the hotel you could call on the telephone and a man brought ice cream.

Mrs. O. did not think so much of the FBI building. Her father was an FBI agent, so they got the special tour that went on forever. To Mrs. O. it was as if Dagwood had taken Cookie to Mr. Dithers's office. She liked the room in the Smithsonian devoted to the first ladies' ball gowns. She can still recall a multitude of details about color, fabric, and style, if you let her.

“Our kids need these vivid memories,” I said to Mrs. O. I decided that this time when we went to Washington we would be real tourists.

I immediately encountered resistance from the children. When I suggested a sightseeing excursion on one of the fake trolleys that lumber around the Mall, Muffin, age twelve, rolled her eyes so far back in her head that I wanted to ask her what the medulla oblongata looks like. “We used to live here, Dad,” she sighed.

“What kind of sightseeing is seeing sights you've always seen?” asked Poppet, age ten.

“It's ninety-two degrees,” said Mrs. O.

Buster, six, is usually game for anything on wheels, but he eyed the trolley and said, “That's a dumb bus.”

We'd been through the White House the previous Christmas to see the holiday decorations, which were, to put it politely, Texan. The kids weren't impressed. There's some nut in the nearby town of Quaintford, New Hampshire, who has Mr. and Mrs. Claus and all the little Clauses on his roof along with a real sleigh drawn by the full complement of reindeer, Dancer through Rudolph, plus the Grinch and
his
sleigh over the garage and twenty giant candy canes made from old phone poles in his yard, all of this covered in blinking red and green lights, giving him an electric bill in an amount that would alarm Ben Bernanke and a long-running fight with the local zoning board. The Christmas White House was drab by comparison.