I is for Infidel
By Kathy Gannon
Public Affairs
****

By Nelofer Pazira
Free Press
***

Reviewed by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

The United States pumped out inspirational literature for the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan, where the alphabet was taught thus: J is for Jihad, K is for Kalashnikov, I is for infidel.  Mathematical problems would be something like: “If you had fifty Communist soldiers and you killed ten, how many would you still have?”

In her excellent book, I is for Infidel, Kathy Gannon informs how the US provided financial and military support for ten years to the mujahedeen to overthrow Afghanistan’s communist regime. Training camps were jointly set up with Pakistan. Osama bin Laden, US’s present nemesis, trained in one of these. The Stinger antiaircraft missiles that finally forced the Soviets to the negotiating table came from the US.

In 1992 it handed the spoils of its last Cold War battle to the mujahedeen and hastily exited. It had no interest in carefully assembling a unified government to rule Afghanistan, to rebuild and bring stability. Archrivals Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a Pashtun, Ahmad Shah Masood, an ethnic Tajik, and Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek, formed the mujahedeen “government.” Amongst them they had been responsible for 50,000 civilian deaths. Ms Gannon chronicles Afghanistan’s descent into anarchy as the factions collided disastrously and Kabul too disintegrated into a battlefield.

In 1994 disillusioned with the mujahedeen, Mullah Omar, a teacher of Quran who had lost one eye resisting the Soviets, along with sixty men founded the Taliban to tackle lawlessness. Soon he was visited by fifteen bearded men, powerful clerics who operated some of the biggest madrassas in Pakistan. They had come to position themselves as the godfathers of the young Taliban movement. Propping them up with money and weapons were Pakistan’s military and it’s secret service, ISI.  Mullah Omar’s literal interpretation of Islam offered a powerful living symbol around which to fire the Jihadi spirit. Thereon, Al Qaeda, with its Arab fighters, and Pakistan, with its student jihadis, began to form the backbone of Taliban’s military operations in Afghanistan.

Ms Gannon, the only western journalist allowed into Kabul after 9/11, illustrates the stunning audacity with which the United States indulges in double speak and double standards in order to achieve its goals. Its policy on Afghanistan was one of “plausible denial.” It was the biggest backer of mujahedeen, fractious feuding mix of tribal warlords who dealt in drugs and precious stones. Bin Laden was a member of Abdul Rasul Sayyaf’s mujahedeen group, the same group financed by the US. (That very same Sayyaf is today a key advisor in Hamid Karzai’s government.)

Post 9/11 Washington declared Pakistan its ally in the war on terror despite Pakistan’s close alliance with the terrorists in the first place. The Pakistani general sent to persuade Mullah Omar to hand over bin laden was the chief of the ISI and carried an entirely different message: resist the United States, do not give up bin Laden. When the US strike finally came on October 7, 2001, only a few thousand US soldiers were amassed to launch a ground offensive against the Taliban. The US was relying on its coalition partners, the Northern Alliance. It was an astonishing act of delegation. The Northern Alliance were mujahedeen who had close links with Arab militants – no wonder they were unable to find bin Laden.

Apart from Kabul, Ms Gannon informs, Afghanistan today looks the same as in 1992. Once again, it has been carved up and relinquished to the warlords. The Afghans feel cheated. They have a constitution but no rule of law. Militia, kneed-deep in drug trade are waiting for the over-stretched West to pull out its few remaining soldiers. Disgruntled jihadis meanwhile are persisting in their holy war.

While Gannon’s book is about the rulers, Nelofer Pazira’s gentle-paced narrative, A Bed of Red Flowers, focuses on the ruled. She limns the life of an ordinary Afghan family, from its days of idyllic picnics when the countryside was carpeted with red poppies to their eventual flight from a city reduced to rubble due to internecine fighting. Her book is also about the 26 million ordinary Afghans, each one of them a hero, as daily they attempt living through an unfair war thrust upon them.

Nelofer was just five when the Communists took power and imprisoned her father, a respected doctor who was vocal about his dislike for the “group of imbeciles”. The following year Russian tanks rolled into Afghanistan pitching Soviet forces against America-backed mujahedeen fighters.

The new educational system was based on the Soviet model and excluded religious studies.  Fearing for their religion and culture the Afghans started to send their young children to mosques to learn the Quran. While Nelofer’s younger brother learnt to debate religious matters, she joined a resistance group, hiding her gun from her parents. After a decade of war, and another imprisonment, Doctor Pazira agreed to flee his ravaged homeland with his family.

However, in the Afghan quarter of Peshawar Nelofer discovered that Jihad had become about women’s clothing - she was reprimanded for her hair showing beneath her scarf.  When they reached Canada, people asked the Paziras what they liked about their adopted homeland. The answer, “Peaceful” confounded them, having never experienced a war.

If it were not for journalists like Ms. Gannon and Ms. Pazira, the true story of the ‘land that has been visited only by people on their way to somewhere else’, would remain obscured. For the US is a superpower that tailors the alphabet to suit its message of the moment. Currently, it is espousing: I is for Iraq.