Communicating Arts - Main Web Site"After U.S.-backed mujahideen forced Soviet troops to end their almost decade-long occupation in 1989, Washington turned its back on Afghanistan as it collapsed into a ferocious civil war. Five years later, as local legend has it, members of a warlord's militia kidnapped and gang-raped two teenaged girls at a checkpoint in his home village of Singesar, in the dust-blown badlands an hour's drive from the southern city of Kandahar. It was a common crime, one that normally would have faded into the brutal monotony of violence that was strangling Afghanistan in 1994. But this time the atrocity changed the destiny not only of a country, but the world.
"Mullah Mohammed Omar, an obscure country cleric and mujahideen veteran who lost an eye to shrapnel during the war against the Soviets, decided he had had enough. He mustered a small group of fighters, attacked the checkpoint, and then hanged the militia commander from a tank barrel. He then fled across the Pakistan border to the province of Baluchistan, where, with the help of military intelligence, he recruited fighters fired up for a new jihad by the puritanical Wahabi theology exported from Saudi Arabia and taught in hundreds of Pakistan's madrassas, or Koranic schools. These students of religion, or Talibs, formed a militia called the Taliban, which used Pakistan army officers as front-line advisers, and war material and other supplies from Pakistan, to win a series of stunning victories in their sweep across southern Afghanistan." [1]
What would any father, had he the power, have done?
I've often suggested that we don't choose books: they choose us.
Paul Watson's recently published book, Where War Lives, has done that to me with a vengeance and on several levels. The last paragraphs read, the ones quoted here, lock a lot of questions into place, starting with why, then who and how.
For just those two paragraphs, one may wonder less at the ferocity of Taliban motivation, Pakistani President Musharraf’s ambivalence, long patience, or hesitation at Lal Masjid before students brazenly baited and then, armed with AK-47’s, attacked police, and the acid stew of anger, mistrust, tribal affiliation, and religion that sustains the horrific violence swirling through each of the Islamic conflict zones.
As the truth in things never resists examination and has a mighty persistence, I believe Paul Watson, a much humbled and stumbling Everyman of a journalist, the guy who got, or rather took, That Picture of a dead American soldier being dragged by a mob through the streets of Mogadishu, has here written a terrific book, one in which one may glimpse the inexorable working of things well enough to inch ahead, perhaps, of some of part of the horror.
1. Watson, Paul. Where War Lives. Toronto, Ontario: McClelland & Stewart, Ltd., 2007, p. 167-8.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
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