When Iggy met the Taliban
Colin Freeze, January 15, 2008 at 12:18 PM EST
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It’s a pithy paragraph, capturing as it does the Taliban’s contempt for international conventions and their predilection for medieval punishments.
The central image is very well crafted, too. One can almost imagine the blood-spattered rope circle, the vacant swinging space, which once held the neck of the fallen ruler who was lynched for being a superpower’s stooge.
“Three nights before I arrived, the Taliban had dragged him out of the [United Nations] guesthouse, castrated him and beaten him to death and hanged his pulpy body from the stanchion of a traffic warden’s observation tower. As I drove into the city, only the noose, flecked with blood, remained swinging from the tower.”
So wrote Michael Ignatieff in 1997 in an essay for The New Yorker. At the time, he was a celebrated writer -- one who happened to arrive in Kabul just as the Taliban was taking over and the world’s security situation was about to under go some seismic shifts. It was at this point that the writer became acquainted with what he called the “pitiless logic of jihad.”
The noose had been used to hang a Soviet-backed former Afghan president, Muhammed Najibullah. His final indignities were a major coup for the Taliban, who by then had captured three-quarters of the country, and were well en route to implementing what they regarded as God’s law.
Mr. Ignatieff actually met Taliban fighters face to face during his visit, experiences reflected in the 1997 essay that puts what he did and saw into the context of a big-picture rumination: How should the international community deal with the rise of remorseless irregular warriors, who care nothing about human rights nor the conventions of war?
Fast forward a decade later, and the question still hangs.
Mr. Ignatieff was back in Afghanistan this past weekend. This time, as a top Western politician, representing the Official Opposition of a country that has sent over 2,500 soldiers to help fight the Taliban.
Mr. Ignatieff, the Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, was travelling with his former political rival, Leader Stephane Dion. Their shared message was that Canada is going to want the soldiers back, sooner rather than later.
While the U.S. military and NATO allies, including Canada, have beaten back the Taliban over the past six years, the jihadists stubbornly linger. Now, the Liberals are pushing an agenda to ratchet down dangerous Canadian combat missions in the Taliban’s heartland, and crank up the less dangerous work, like development projects. (The position is fully articulated in an eight-page document released last week -- www.liberal.ca/story_13465_e.aspx .)
Because Mr. Ignatieff has hit hawkish notes in the past, he was asked within minutes of landing at Kandahar about whether he supported his party’s calls to start beating swords into ploughshares. “I wouldn’t be on this airfield if I didn’t,” he told reporters who asked whether he supported his party’s position.
While working with Mr. Dion in Kabul, the Liberal second-in-command said they both made sure that President Karzai got the message from a potential Canadian government-in-waiting “The key thing that the president understands, and the ministers understand, is that sooner or later this country is going to stand on its feet,” Mr. Ignatieff said.
For his part, President Karzai was gracious, but seemed unconvinced of the wisdom of the Liberal position. In a statement following the meeting, Mr. Karzai expressed thanks for Canada’s sacrifices, but pointedly added that “the events of September 11 serves us well in reminding ourselves that not fighting terrorism head-on can have disastrous consequences for Afghanistan, the region and the world at large.”
Not long after President Karzai’s statement, the Taliban issued a statement of their own.
It was called “Martyrdom attack performed in Capital Kabul city.”
On Monday. gunmen killed eight inside a Kabul hotel. The Islamists claimed the attack was a noteworthy blow against President Karzai's “Western-backed puppet government, as well as foreign embassies and businesses.”
*
It was only meant as an aside.
In a passing remark, Mr. Ignatieff told a group of reporters that he visited Afghanistan a decade ago. He made the remark in the darkness at the Kandahar Air Field, as he deferred to Mr. Dion, who was in the limelight.
The Leader was in front of a TV camera, being interviewed by TV news anchors in Canada who asked him questions through his earpiece. That left the Deputy Leader to chat informally in the shadows with reporters, but only on “background.”
Still, the mention of past travels to Afghanistan intrigued me so much, I asked Mr. Ignatieff about them when the TV cameras were rolling. “I’ve seen what the Taliban did to the women of Kabul in 1997, with my own eyes, which is why I feel passionate about what we’re trying to do here,” he said.
Then he added that “I am absolutely convinced the Taliban are not going to win here.”
The travels he was alluding to seemed to distill uneasily into sound bites. So I had The Globe and Mail library dig up the full text of the March, 24, 1997, New Yorker article, “Unarmed Warriors,” and email it to Kandahar.
It’s a prescient article, centring on the 1990s-era existential struggles of the International Committee of the Red Cross, but still worth a read today.
Read it and you’ll find out the Taliban who attacked the Serena Hotel in Kabul this week had some spiritual ancestors who checked into Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel back in 1996. That was where Mr. Ignatieff met the Taliban.
Here’s how he recalls the meeting in The New Yorker:
“They were sitting crosslegged, their bearded faces framed by their turbans and were languidly dismembering roses from the hotel gardens or turning over worry beads in their fingers. They had new watches and new shoes.
“I asked what they were fighting for and they turned to the one who was apparently the most educated of them – a fierce young seminarian with a Western haircut and a long beard. ‘For Islam,’ he said. ‘To stop the fighting among the brothers. And to have an Islamic state.’
“But then, I asked, why are the brothers still killing one another.
“ ‘Why are the brothers fighting? The Prophet Muhammad, may his name be blessed, instructed us that when corruption is on the earth one must fight to bring peace.”
It was shortly after that conversation that Mr. Ignatieff witnessed a jihad against booze. He wrote that he watched 1,400 cans of beer and 1,800 bottles of alcohol be put on display in the hotel parking lot. Taliban members charged with the protection of virtue and punishment of vice then smashed all the bottles.
The essay goes on to describe Mr. Ignatieff working with the ICRC to visit Tajik teenagers jailed by the Taliban. He also saw the radicals string up cassette tapes around trees -- the videos apparently depicted God’s living creatures and the militants felt this was not permissible in Islam.
As Najibullah’s noose swung in the breeze, and the ICRC’s headquarters hid behind a fortress of sandbags, Mr. Ignatieff observed that “war is always at its most unrestrained when religion vests it with holy purpose and the Taliban is perhaps the most militantly religious militia on earth.”
Remarking on the ransacked mosques, hospitals, and schools, he marveled at the complete lack of restraint that exists in most modern wars. To him, Afghanistan’s capital amounted to “mile upon mile of rubble and dust, abandoned and windswept, populated here and there by ragged families eking out their survival inside abandoned truck containers." Having arrived on an international aid flight to the city, he called Kabul both “the Dresden of the post-Cold War conflict” and the “graveyard of the Afghan warriors’ honour.”
Today it’s become almost a hackneyed point to write that Afghanistan is a graveyard of empires. Though in the mid-1990s, back when fewer people could find the country on a map, the reference was were well worth making. Mr. Ignatieff reflected on the Afghans centuries-old reputation for “stubborn independence,” and of being “redoubtable guerillas” who ambushed the enemy rather than fight frontally.
Time after time he said, warlords united against common enemies, only to fight amongst themselves after the enemy fled. “The radicalization of Islam made things worse,” he wrote in the 1997 New Yorker essay. “Instead of bringing the militaries together, religious principle now set them at gun point.”
A deluge of U.S. and Soviet weaponry added into the mix as a legacy of the Cold War only added fuel to the fire.
Mr. Ignatieff pondered how the West is to resolve irresolvable conflict. He wrestled with the limitations of aid programs and non-governmental organizations.
The Red Cross, he pointed out, did good work in Afghanistan, thematically similar to some of the proposals now being espoused by the Liberals.
“It feeds a large number of people, has rebuilt the shattered limbs of mine victims, visits prisoners on all sides of the conflict, and has taught the mujahideen, versed in the pitiless logic of jihad, the laws of war.”
But unlike the bloodthirst of irregular warriors, NGOs have their limits.
“But how do you judge a program a success in a country where a million people have died since 1979?,” Mr. Ignatieff asked.
The question, posed in 1997, was rhetorical and remains unanswered.
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