Humanizing the Monster

Humanizing the Monster
Book Review: My life with the Taliban

The Statesman
http://statesman.com.pk/opinion/op11.htm

By Dr.Mohammad Taqi



March 2,2010

In his foreword to Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef’s book, Professor Barnett Rubin of the New York University - and an employee of the US Department of State but not writing in that capacity- sets the stage for the launch, ostensibly, as a refreshingly authentic work of this inaccurate and revisionist take on contemporary Afghan history.

“My Life with the Taliban” by the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, has been praised across the board by the media “Afghanologists” as Ahmed Rashid and Peter Bergen to academics like Antonio Giustozzi of the London School of Economics, without any critical evaluation. Some like Christina Lamb have gone as far as calling it a must read.

To those of us who grew up in the NWFP or Afghanistan at the height of US-Saudi-Pakistani anti-Soviet war, the crude lies presented in the account are all too apparent from the get go, as is the translators-cum-editors’ - Felix Kuehn and Alex Strick van Linschoten - shallow understanding of the local languages and culture.

From the outset, the village prayer-leader (Imam) is presented as a religious scholar and mosque madrassah as almost the counterpart of the Notre Dame University. The basic Arabic text-booklet - Quaida Baghdadi - which all Muslim children from Kabul to Kolkata read as an Arabic primer, is mentioned as “Al-Quaida” only to be differentiated from the terrorist group in a tedious footnote - of which there is no dearth in the book. Frivolous and superfluous information is dignified by stuffing such footnotes with it, as is the glossary and an initial biography section. A flurry of names and events - as insignificant as a pinprick on the skin of Afghan history - have been deployed to bloat the work to roughly 300 pages.

Zaeef has taken serious liberties with the truth, which to their discredit the reviewers and endorsers have failed to point out. He confabulates that the Taliban were a distinct group during the anti-Soviet Mujahideen wars and operated as such, under their own identity and leadership.

While there is no doubt that the sundry madrassah students i.e. Talib-ul-ilm (pl. Taliban) were part of the Peshawar-based Mujahideen groups and were also included in the fold of the field commanders like Abdul Haq and Jalaluddin Haqqani, there is no evidence that the Taliban operated then as a distinct entity.

The Mujahideen, PDPA, Pakistani or international media and literature - including Ahmed Rashid and Peter Bergen’s books - have made no mention whatsoever of any anti-Soviet group fighting as the Taliban until their first appearance on the scene in the second half of 1994.

In doing so Zaeef - though making periodic anti-Pakistan whimpers throughout the book - glosses over and indeed suppresses the role of the Pakistani security agencies in conceiving, creating, training, arming, financing and letting loose the Taliban monster on Afghanistan.

Among the key historical developments in Afghanistan during the Taliban era, Zaeef makes no mention of the major international crimes committed on their watch. He does not mention, even in passing, the killing of the former president Dr. Najibullah, who was murdered by the Taliban and their handlers in utter disregard for any human, Pashtun or international conventions. That’s how the Taliban rule was ushered in, in Kabul in 1996.

Similarly, he skips over the genocide of the Shiite Hazaras and the ethnic cleansing of the Tajiks in Mazar e Sharif while remembering this much that the Pakistani interior minister Moinuddin Haider was supposedly a Shia.

According to the Amnesty International, in 1998 the Taliban slaughtered more than 4000 people in Mazar e Sharif alone. Amazing that a book which drops names like My Lai massacre in its opening pages would not mention the war crimes of this magnitude.

Zaeef and his editors make it a point to criticize and condemn the PDPA for its land reform policy and allege that the party systematically eliminated the traditional power brokers like the tribal chieftains, landlords and indeed the petty Mullahs.

In his selective amnesia, Zaeef makes no mention of a much more vicious version of the same strategy deployed by his regime, through which wholesale killing of the teachers, middle-class employees, politicians and tribal elders took place - on both side of the Durand Line. In fact the Afghan Taliban and its Pakistani counterpart commissioned and conducted the bombings of whole Jirgahs (assembly of tribal elders) creating a power vacuum that the militants themselves would subsequently fill.

There is complete silence in the book about the finances of the Taliban regime. It does mention its diplomatic recognition by three Muslim states including the Saudis but does not touch upon their massive financing of the Taliban regime. It completely ignores the military and technical expertise, oil and gas supplies, food items and human cannon fodder that the Taliban received from its three patrons.

The book’s author and his editors have taken pains to construct a positive image of the simple and pristine Afghan village life in building a narrative of Kandahar and Zaeef’s childhood spent therein. They attempt to project this early down-to-earth image of the author - and by extension of the whole Taliban regime- throughout the book.

This quasi-romantic interplay of the village life, characters like the author’s widower father -a Spartan prayer-leader, mention of music and Pashtun dance Atan, is a blatant attempt to put a humane face on members of a fascist regime which inarguably remains the most brutal phenomenon of the late twentieth century.

That Mullah Zaeef, his editors and academics like Professor Rubin have attempted to humanize a monster is clear. But the question is why?

Zaeef in this book emphatically criticizes and condemns the notion of hard vs. soft Taliban. However, ever since his image holding an iPhone appeared in the US a couple of years ago, he has been a focus of attention of the regional and world players involved in Afghanistan. Faced with an economic crunch and running against an election clock, the US is clutching at straws to bolster its flawed plan for the endgame in Afghanistan.

While Obama had his Gorbachev moment on December 1, 2009, the nuts and bolts of the withdrawal were not clear. In their quest to turn failure into at least a perceived success, the US policy-makers are now scrambling to resuscitate, retrofit and rehabilitate such dubious characters as Abdul Salam Zaeef.

My life with the Taliban is a poor narrative by a tainted and poor historian (raavi e zaeef). The glorification of the book by authors of repute, impugns their credibility too.

Hardcover: 360 pages
Publisher: Hurst/Columbia University Press (January 31, 2010)
Language: English
Price: US$ 29.99 / £20




(Author teaches and practices Medicine at the University of Florida and contributes to the think-tanks www.Politact.com and Aryana Institute. Email:mazdaki@me.com)

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010\02\15\story_15-2-2010_pg3_5

Ajmal Khattak: the Revolutionary Dervish

by Dr. Mohammad Taqi

February 10, 2010

“To become truly great, one has to stand with people, not above them”.


He was a true polymath – a poet, journalist, broadcaster, linguist, scholar and a politician .However despite all his patrician qualities this Renaissance man was a plebeian at heart.

Despite his capability to – and opportunities available to him for – upward social mobility, Ajmal Khattak chose to live and die in his dignified poverty. In a polity where comprador bourgeoisie, feudals and their quislings were rising to power, Ajmal stood head and shoulders above that upstart crowd, relying solely on his intellectual and political acumen. He was a giant in a political landscape dotted with pygmies.

For the Pashtuns he was the voice of their voiceless angst, expression in the muted humiliation and their freedom cry for the subjugated human dignity. Ajmal Khattak was a man of letters who, in the tradition of the warrior-poet Khushal Khan Khattak, also unfurled the standard of struggle for Pashtun unity.

Whereas Baacha Khan and his colleagues like the late Hussain Bux Kausar conceived the idea of modern Pashtun unity, it was Ajmal Khattak who eventually provided the ideological backbone of this thesis.

In his book on Baacha Khan, the late Farigh Bokhari had noted that by Pashtunistan, Ghaffar Khan merely meant a renamed province within Pakistan. Narrating to this author the discussions leading to the Bannu Declaration on Pashtunistan, Hussain Bux Kausar corroborated Bokhari’s assertion. Kausar had added though, that for many, including him, the idea was much more than renaming a province – it was a thesis proposing the reunification of the Pashtun irredentas.

Ajmal Khattak provided the modern theoretical basis for the idea of the Greater Pashtunistan. Well-versed in the Marxist-Leninist theory - prevalent and ascendant at the time- Ajmal Khattak deployed it to strengthen the case for the right of self-determination for the Pashtuns.

In this, Ajmal Khattak put Afghanistan on notice as well. In 1969 the Afghan government had published a Pashtunistan postage stamp on which Pashtunistan included only the areas of FATA, the NWFP and the Baluchistan. As a claimant to the mantle of Mirwais Hotaki, Aimal Khan and Ahmad Shah Durrani, Ajmal Khattak was not pleased with this not-so-subtle gimmick of the Afghan state excluding the Pashtun territories under their control from Pashtunistan.

On the Pakistani side, Ajmal Khattak and the Pashtun nationalists were up not only against the establishment but also large sections of the Pakistani Left, who considered secession a dirty word. According to the socialists of West-Pakistan it was sufficient to believe the unverified cliché that “scientific socialism would automatically solve all problems, including the national question”.

In this context Ajmal Khattak relied heavily on the Lenin’s writings, such as:” The right of nations to self-determination implies exclusively the right to independence in the political sense, the right to free political separation from the oppressor nation. Specifically, this demand for political democracy implies complete freedom to agitate for secession and for a referendum on secession by the seceding nation ….”

Though a fixture in the Kabul political circles of the 1970s and 80s, self-exiled Ajmal Khattak never toed anyone’s ideological line – not even Moscow’s.

At the height of their intervention in Afghanistan, the Soviets solicited input from the Pakistani leftists. Out of the two opposing proposals submitted by the pro-PDPA politicians of Pakistan, the Soviets adopted the one calling for restraint as against the one proposing broadening the scope of their operations to drain the guerilla swamp in Pakistan.

Upon his return from exile in 1989, I put this question to Ajmal Khattak during a discussion held at a mutual friend’s residence in the Board area of Peshawar, and asked him if he and Wali Khan were the ones who opposed the Soviet intervention on our side of the Durand. He deflected the question.

Incidentally, after the program, he and I were supposed to travel in the same vehicle driven by the host’s son. I had already taken seat in the rear, when Ajmal sahib entered and sat in the front passenger seat. Not realizing that I was in the car, he leaned over to the host’s son and asked if the lad who asked about opposing the Soviets belonged to a certain political group (which he did name). I whispered in his ear that indeed I was and that my father was proud of having remained his sub-editor during their days at the dailies Shahbaz and Anjam and then deputizing for him as the news editor when he and Qalandar Momand were jailed. He asked me to step out of the car and hugged me. But he still didn’t answer the question.

Many years later he confided to a vice-president of his National Awami Party Pakistan (NAPP) that indeed he had written a strong critique of any proposed Soviet intervention into Pakistan. He was being treated at a Moscow hospital when a senior Soviet official came to see him and chided him about his opposition to spilling-over of hostilities into Pakistan. He stood his ground.

Ajmal Khattak stood his ground based on his reading of Lenin who concluded at the end of the aforementioned quote that:”… this demand (secession), therefore, is not the equivalent of a demand for separation, fragmentation and the formation of small states. It implies only a consistent expression of struggle against all national oppression.”

He, therefore, was neither a secessionist nor was contradicting himself. To him the right of self-determination was an evolutionary stage, not just of politics or modern statehood, but of humanism.

Indeed, Ajmal Khattak’s poetry is humanism personified and transcends time and frontiers. Sa’adi Shirzai wrote that stones have been chained while dogs are let loose (سنگ ہا را بستند و سگاں را کشادند - sung-ha ra bastand o sugaaN ra khushadand) and Faiz’s adaption of the same is well-known. However, Ajmal Khattak’s rendition of this thought in his poem “چرتھ چھ باران د خداۓ د قہر وریدلے دے

-cherta che baran da Khudai da qahar waraidalay de” (where it has been raining the wrath of God, is indeed my home, it is your home), makes the contrasts and ironies of our society clearer than ever to the common reader and the activist alike.

Like many leaders of his time, Ajmal Khattak was deeply influenced by Abul Kalam Azad and almost took Azad’s persona – in journalism, literary pursuits, politics, and indeed looks.

Arguably, Baacha Khan was the most influential person in Ajmal Khattak’s life. While he could not be cowed down easily, the son of Hikmat Khan Khattak, at times would succumb to Ghaffar Khan, the son of Behram Khan. Fond of psychoanalysis, including his own, Ajmal Khattak has mentioned this “weakness” of his in verse as well was personal conversations. He would allude to Baacha Khan as “nabigha” or genius.

What is clear though is that the literary genius in Ajmal Khattak brought the Pashto poetry in sync with the modern times. He not only experimented with and improved on the prevalent forms as ghazal (sonnet) and ruba’ee (quatrain) but introduced the progressive political thought in his nazm, with a vigor and craft that puts him at par with Neruda, Sahir and Faiz.

Though cognizant of his political and literary stature, Ajmal Khattak remained down to earth till his death. At a friend’s house during hot summer days, he would sleep without air-conditioning or even a fan. This was at a time when the ruling General of the era would have gladly given him anything he asked for. But contentment was the wealth that Ajmal Khattak had amassed over the years and he would not squander that for something petty, for he was the revolutionary dervish.

(Author teaches and practices Medicine at the University of Florida and can be reached at mazdaki@me.com )