And then Shirzai come out with his second local proverb, the import of which stayed with me for weeks. "Kill me," the governor said. "But don't put out in the sun."
Better dead than exposed. It was a notion that cut to the core of the worst cultural clash I confronted in this land I had adopted: its utterly incomprehensible relationship with the truth. Words were not all that important, it seemed, sine people lied so systematically. And yet words were terribly important, since they outlasted deeds; so the battles that counted were about getting the last word. I could not make it compute. Tome words were precious and weighty--but only in their power to communicate the truth. For the truth, once communicated, was a potent force for good. So I thought.
The governor repeated his kind invitation. "Any time, day or night," he effused, "if you have something to say to me, you come here. If I'm asleep, slap me on the ass and wake me up." [1]
I'll have some things to say about Sarah Chayes' book, The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban, but the above passage so fit into the OA&L bin, "Conflict, Culture, and Language" I thought to rush the process and give it play.
# # #
1. Chayes, Sarah. The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban. p. 391. New York: The Penguin Press, 2006.
What for citizens of all of the world's open societies would be a 15-second experience of newspaper op-ed page art continues to play on the main stage in Afghanistan. As the "We've been insulted," behavior becomes more the message than the message spoken, something else may be happening as regards the management of the perception of Islam in a core conflict culture: the viel held in place by various political leaders--those considered allies as well as those not--may be slipping.
Reading on deck for my eyes:
Chayes, Sarah. The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban. New York: The Penguin Press, 2006.
Jones, Ann. Kabul in Winter. New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2006.
We are told, of course, that wherever the U.S. goes, democracy thrives and economic development, education, equality, and justice--clear, consistently administered, humane, sensible--must certainly follow, but the western journalism derived from around 2005 for publishing in books in 2006, and I'm making this observation from about half way through Ann Jones' book, is that Afghani culture itself may be overwhelmingly characterized by the abuse and enslavement of women, by corruption in virtually every aspect of bureaucracy and business, and by intolerance.
But then, you know how women get . . . .
:)
That's all the facetious bonding I'm going to do.
The problem is the same observations may repeat themselves through many eyes and possibly across the Small Wars landscape: then what--more war? Better salesmanship by "the west"? More trade (or bribery in the form of aid that makes it into every pocket but the ones that need it most)?
I suspect I'll be reading more unpleasant reporting out of Afghanistan (and Pakistan) on cultural issues havng a direct impact on development and the provision of legal, health, and social services.
---
The irony of printing a cartoon, an art form inherently critical of facets of political culture, suggestive of an explosive state of affairs and having it matched by video illustrating the same in protest of it seems inescapable.
Language, Dutch, English, or Dari, should prove flexible and universal enough to resolve issues having to do with vanity, power, and respect, but clearly it does not.
Languages display metonymy, or, within each language culture, the natural affilations and affinities formed in the mind through commonly held symbols, starting with words but including also the elements of expression across modes: sketches, photographs, dances, songs. Here there's the cartoon, the insult, the robust response, and back of that the whole weight of a threatened patriarchal fascism unable to field, absorb, dismiss, or, alternatively, counter the slight with similarly creative, perhaps even entertaining, ridicule.
As I may not take Ann Jones' scathing portrayal of Afghani culture as final say (but you can bet I'll be looking for its echoes in the Sarah Chayes' book), I may be as skeptical as regards the Reuters' video as representing the response of all Afghani men to adverse political cartooning.
However, where language transmission and reception and related behavior are concerned, I may also wonder whether Afghani men have either intellectual choice or wherewithal as regards their reception of and response to a common enough political cartoon that owes its continuing presence in their lives directly to the attention they continue to give it.
There is one thing all the world's generals, politicians, guerrilla fighters, and terrorists value in equal measure: loyalty.
Loyalty may be a noble thing--indeed, it is on general principles good to be trustworthy, and loyalty is a part of that--but too often, it may also get in the way of good sense and sensibility in the equally noble creation and implementation of responsible public policy in states worldwide.
Violence gets our attention, no doubt, but loyalty in conflicted cultures may be a thing worth examining all by itself.
Aitzaa Ahsan's "Pakistan's Forgotten Man," a paean to Pakistani Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, currently under house arrest by the man who appointed him in the first place, General come President Pervez Musharraf, may provide the way into such a study, but I dare not undertake that today in as small a space as this.
However, feeling a bit locked out elsewhere, I wanted to use my own blog to post a brief response to Aitzaa Ahsan's article, and this is that:
The elephant in the room that no one wants to look at: simple corruption.
Google's robots, unallied and without sentiment, dredge up the old news on every search.
The other elephant in the room, about which discussion may be intimidated, is how a well vocalized disenchantment with the U.S., to put it mildly, affects or represents attitudes about guerrilla movements in the territories.
Where armed conflict exists, what is not said or spoken about may become as important, or more important, than anything discussed.
The thing about loyalty, even to one's own self according to some customs in language, is it wants to overlook what it does not want to examine too closely.
When it comes to those to whom we are loyal, and for various reasons, we accentuate the positive and ditch the negative; we "identify" while ignoring villification from other quarters; we like who we like with not much patience for considering qualities we may not like so much.
In the far more open rumble but far less colorful pageant that is American politics--we have yet to produce a powerful third party, much less half a dozen or more of them--the candidate excoriated in today's news may well turn out tomorrow the popularly elected and much honored leader of the state.
One may hope as much becomes the case for Judge Chaudhry or any other Pakistani candidate who in a democratic system may vie for and win election to local or national power.
However: first, let the press be open and free of intimidation from every quarter; may some next but soon generation achieve near 100 percent literacy and equally irreversible achievement in education; and may attention migrate from personalities (and sentimental loyalties) to the broadest interest in public policy issues and proposed laws and programs.
"Dozens of riot police kept the groups apart as they threw rocks at each other outside the Lake Naivasha Country Club." [1]
The observation appears midway down the filing by Tim Cocks and David Lewis, but it's in keeping with all I've read and seen (in media) of war over the past year: one may wonder whether oddness helps define war as much as violence.
Things get displaced in wars.
Old neighbors throw rocks at one another.
The country club, which course and clubhouse must have brought in some money, starts to look a pretty good place for a battle.
This is the best, most succinct paragraph I have yet to read on the origins of the conflict:
"The violence since Kenya's Dec. 27 election now has a momentum of its own, with cycles of killing and revenge linked to land and wealth disputes tied to British colonial policy that politicians have revived during most of Kenya's elections."
Most of the world, when it has a choice, wants its politicians to "work things out", bring in trade (economic development), and allay disease and hunger.
By way of comparison, Kenyans seems to have perhaps accepted a long course of social neglect (of urban and rural poverty) by the incumbent Administration and increased ethnic baiting (in the United States, the near similar process would be called racist) by the opposition.
Today's reported violence seems to differ from last week's in its adding to the invention of an excuse for conflict and mob mayhem institutional discipline on the opposition's part and the taking of defensive measures all around.
Last week, no one really knew who was killing whom.
Whether out of Kenya or the Gaza Strip, there's a "root cause" for violence motivated by political rhetoric and propaganda.
It is irresponsible, mendacious, and vindictive language.
In Kenya, opposition leader Raila Odinga chose willfully to launch three days of "protests" knowing each day would spark and see violence distilled out of an atmosphere bent on producing just such grief.
While the less articulate got into the business of hacking strangers apart with machete [3], Odinga seems to have been borrowing a page from Martin Luther King, a champion of nonviolent civil disobedience, to mouth the "judged by the content of their character" clause.
Where one cannot "play the race card", the tribal one will do, I guess.
Out of Gaza: children using their chests as placards to entreat Israel's mercy in its latest siege of the Hamas-controlled strip in response to unrelenting rocket attacks against its people, Jews and Arabs (20 percent of Israel's population) alike.
Are the children not told about the rockets launched against Israel?
Are they unaware of the peace brewing by Fatah's hand in the West Bank?
One may wonder too whether any child (or adult) in Gaza has sufficient freedom from intimidation to protest the protest, to refrain from the support of Hamas, to argue for the more secular position held by Fatah, which seems lately to have engaged in talks with Israel and the United States without apology, just across the rocky and sandy way, .
If disease, illiteracy, and war travel together, I'm sure language keeps them so.
In several of the world's conflict zones, whether children, functionally literate adults, or adults whose information menu has been intimidated or narrowed or both, language that passes blame to The Other Tribe or The Great Satan (and, always, The Jewish Lobby) finds little countermeasure in the established press.
Sideways (my ways) comments feel "iffy", but what can, may, should one do when others lie outright or through omission (and at great, cumbersome lengths as well)?
The live and reporting press may presume not to judge: it only purports to illustrate in words or through photography what it has witnessed.
Fair enough.
However one may ask any number of public interest groups, pundits, scholars: where are you?
Why do you let so much lethal rhetoric fly through the air without comment?
Worse, and back to Kenya's Raila Odinga who seems to want some kind of affirmative action justice to rise out of the pools of blood that may be associated with identification with his political stance: what do you think you're doing other than getting your people killed by sewing the seeds that encourage violence and producing the circumstances that let it breath like fire?
While one may understand Kenya's drift into division, one also may have expected the country's top politicians to have hammered out course corrections off the streets long before social issues had cooked themselves into the perfect tinder for war.
Of democracy, it has been said that "people get the leadership they deserve."
People, wherever you are, and this especially if your neighborhood has become host to violent conflict, you deserve much, much better.
