Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteIn correpondence with a friend, I wrote:
In addition to calling the whole kit and caboodle of Islamic strife the “Islamic Small Wars”, I’ve also referred to the whole as a “detective’s war” as it seems a war custom-made for the men, families, and tribes that manage actions through tangles of manipulated personal obligations shielded in privacy separate from specific institutional imprimatur.
A secret involves information of known value to someone else—“tell no one”—but there’s much information of value not kept secret per se but rather maintained as private and seldom transmitted in any fashion.
While Hamid Karzai's government mobilizes to chase its "banditos" equivalents off its land and across the Pakistani border, it's soon and sure to be noticed that the Talibani numbers that may stand, fight, and die in a conventional scenario may not approach the numbers involved in this past week's prison breaks and subsequent "takeovers" of towns in Arghandab District in the south of the country.
As less involved citizens decamp, that old "hold and fold" may come into play, and the militant Taliban recede purposefully back into the populations from whence they came, protected not by their firearms, which may be abandoned or stashed, but rather the friendly arms of quiet kith and ken.
While even with overwhelming firepower on its side, battle may prove hard on young and untested Afghanistan government troops, the cultural battle overall and that part of the front characterized by detective work may prove the most merciless facet of all, for Afghanistan, and probably no less so the region, private relationships--the esteem, love, obligations, and promises of family and tribe and relationships that develop to resemble either--trump all official mouthwork.
Everyone understands a secret--i.e., information of value willfully kept from the party to whom it is most relevant; the notion of troves of information purloined within the privacy of one's own head, of family, and affiliates may be a close but quite different thing.
Let's deal with something banal.
If Joe Engineer, corporate "project manager" by day, plays in a "down and dirty" blues band at nights and on weekends, whose business is that? Provided J. Engineer avoids scheduling conflicts, who's to know of the avocation, and how wide or how high may that information pass? Whatever your answers, take it up a notch: J. E. does a little "smoke and blow" with the band: who's to know? What if JE brokers a bit of the same for this buddies?
The private way that becomes the secret way becomes both for the state and its enemies in Afghanistan: nepotism; officials on the take for all manner of services; a poppy industry much appreciated by Iran's addicts, one may be sure, and doubtless defended by skeins of invested--"in cahoots" we used to say--relationships, some looking the other way, some profiting from it, many not looking at all: who's to know?
Such things are private.
1. Sameem, Ismael. "Afghan start anti-Taliban offensive in south." Reuters, June 18, 2008.
2. Legg, Sonia. "Afghan battle with Taliban looms." Video. Reuters, June 18, 2008.
4. Jones, Ann. Kabul in Winter. New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Hold and Company, 2006.
5. Chayes, Sarah. The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban. New York: The Penguin Press, 2006.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
I have made it lighter reading yet by ordering the DVD! smile. Thank you, Tammy.
Posted by: James | June 20, 2008 at 11:03 AM
James,
For something of lighter weight with textured nuances on how relationships play out in the Middle East please consider reading "The Yacoubian Building" by Alaa Al Aswany with English translation by Humphrey Davies.
Dar el Kutub No: 7952/04
ISBN 977 424 862 7
This book was given to me by a businessman who has traveled extensively in Syria and Lebanon. You will have it read and digested in one afternoon, is my guess. smile
Tammy
Posted by: tammy swofford | June 19, 2008 at 11:33 PM