Come from the Shadows The Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan

by Glavin, Terry

• ISBN13: 9781553657828
• ISBN10: 1553657829
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-11-15
• Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre

Summary

An award-winning journalist overturns western stereotypes as he takes readers as he takes readers "outside the wire" of the war in Afghanistan and introduces the people whose defiant courage offers hope for the future. Far from the Taliban's grim desert strongholds, the country we visit with Terry Glavinis a surprisingly welcoming place, hidden away in alleys and narrow streets that bustle with blacksmiths, gem hawkers and spice merchants. This is the unseen Afghanistan, reawakening from decades of savagery and bloodletting. Glavinshows us how events have unfolded in Afghanistan since September 11, 2001. Travelling with fluent interpreters and Afghan human rights activists, Glavinmeets people from many walks of life -- key political figures, teachers, journalists, farmers, students, burqa-shrouded women and soccer players -- and in these pages they speak for themselves. And in the life story of Afghan-Canadian writer, translator and activist Abdulrahim Parwani, he finds the story of Afghanistan's agonies over the past 30 years. Glavindraws parallels between the west's unawareness of Afghanistan and the shock that greeted the "Arab Spring" uprisings of recent months. He writes about the little-known events that led up to "koran burning" riots in the Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, and explores the Afghanistan that is hidden behind fanciful stereotypes of the kind at the centre of the scandal surrounding Greg Mortenson's "Three Cups of Tea," a title marketed as a memoir that has turned out to be largely fiction. Glavinalso notes that although Mortenson is a massively best-selling author and celebrity in the English speaking world, few Afghans have ever heard of him. The irony, he says, is that North Americans turn to Mortenson's book for uplifting stories about Afghanistan, when all along there are true stories in abundance of courageous Afghans working for rebuild their country from decades of war. Celebrated as "a critical voice in the dialogue that sustains a civil society," Glavinis a co-founder of the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee and is increasingly seen as an expert on Canada's role in Afghanistan. He is also one of the best writers we have. Come from the Shadowsmounts a passionately, marvellously readable challenge to the usual depiction of the war in Afghanistan. What, Glavinasks, has made the West incapable of hearing the voices of Afghans at the forefront of the global struggle against slavery, misogyny and tyranny? His answers are often unexpected and always illuminating.

Author Biography

Terry Glavin is the author of six books and the co-author of four, traversing a variety of subjects from anthropology to natural history. He has won more than a dozen literary and journalism awards, including the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize, and in 2009 was the recipient of the British Columbia Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence. His writing appears regularly in newspapers, magazines and online publications as diverse as Democratiya (New York), Lettre Internationale (Berlin), the National Post, Canadian Geographic and The Tyee. He is a founding member of the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee.

Table of Contents

Welcome to Absurdistan	p. 1
The Children of Seth	p. 30
A Tale of Two Cities	p. 55
Women's Work	p. 90
"If Ever a Country Deserved Rape"	p. 123
The Partisans	p. 163
The International Brigades	p. 191
The Ashes of the Old	p. 206
Notes	p. 222
appendix Sources on Public Opinion	p. 234
Index	p. 236
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

From chapter 3, "A Tale of Two Cities":Arriving in Kabul on an Indian Airways flight from Delhi will bring you in low and slowly over the Kabul Plain from the east, allowing a glimpse of the architectural, social, and aesthetic context that spirals outward from its epicentre at the Murad Khane. The first thing you notice when you come out of the clouds is that the bleak and barren Hindu Kush mountains form a ragged wall that appears to nearly encircle the sandswept landscape of the Kabul Plain. The country below appears wholly empty of life. But then you notice occasional rectangular fortresses, and they look long abandoned, half covered in motionless waves of dust.Soon, there are more fortresses, and in between them the land becomes green in places, and sometimes there are trees. The plane continues to descend, and the fortresses quickly multiply in number, and you see they are really mud-walled compounds. Nearing Kabul, the compounds begin to shrink in size and almost merge with one another into the erratic Kabuli jumble of flat-roofed rectangles and jagged streets. Then comes something almost like modern cityscape, with a stadium here, a glass hotel there, boulevards and traffic-choked thoroughfares, and yet rising up out of it all are forbidding, steep-sided hills. Dense and byzantine slums climb up their ramparts. Grand tombs and ruined castles straddle their summits.The plane touches down on the runway of a sprawling airport with huge military transport planes and fleets of troop-carrying helicopters in orderly rows, and it taxis past two parked fighter jets and comes to a stop on the tarmac. It's just a short walk to the decaying terminal, but a bus comes to fetch the passengers, and everyone stands in lines for the brief mayhem of security checkpoints, and visa checks. There's a similar rigmarole just to get out of the place. Beyond two more security perimeters, beside a chain link fence and a guard post at an outer-ring parking lot, is my friend and collaborator Lauryn Oates, and our driver, Shuja.There are the usual embraces, and we're soon roaring through traffic to get me settled in at the Park Palace, a comfortable little compound with a nonetheless ostentatious name in the Shar-e-Now district, by the Dutch Embassy. I've come to help with a research project for the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee and to do a bit of freelancing, and I've been well advised about all the necessary security precautions. But as one day bleeds into the next, while I'm filling up my notebooks and zipping around town with Shuja in his Toyota, there's a thought I can't get out of my head. It didn't really crystallize until Zabi Majidi talked to me about the notion of hidden places that day in the Murad Khane. This is a metropolis of nearly four million people, ten times what it was only a generation or so ago. It's a very real, flesh and blood, ancient and glorious city, and its name is Kabul. The thought that struck me in the Murad Khane is that there are times when it's as if all of Kabul is taqunya, that the real city, the whole city, is hidden from the outside world. It's hidden behind the headlines and between the lines of the interminable reports of every English-language daily newspaper in the world.The Kabul you read about is a dreary, white-knuckle dangerous Central Asian backwater where the locals are crazy, they're all just itching to slit your throat, the people hate our guts, and it's all falling back into the hands of the Taliban anyway. This is the city "as dangerous as Baghdad at its worst," from the screaming Telegraph headline. But spend some time in the backstreets, buying naan and bananas at the bazaars, popping into bookstores, getting invited in to tea in mud houses and half-collapsed buildings, sitting at tables in pleasant offices and coffee shops, and there is the other city. I can "pass" as an Afghan easily enough, but up close, with my Afghan shawl and Mahsoud hat, I'm not fooling anyone, certainly not when Shuja and I are chatting in English and shambling down the street, or wandering the markets on some errand. Everyone smiles and nods, salaam. This is not to say it's not perilous. But Kabulis tend to regard foreigners with a sympathetic affection, especially the lower-tier workers and the non-governmental-organisation employees who actually spend time with ordinary Afghans. And though you might not know it from your newspapers, six years of polling data shows that most Afghans also consistently express support for the presence of foreign troops. There is a range of opinion on these subjects, of course. At one end there is bemusement, and at the other was fury, with a great deal of worry and dread in between.One of the most furious Afghans I've met is Fatana Gilani, the head of the Afghanistan Women's Council. Gilani yearns for an Afghanistan that eventually stands on its own without foreign soldiers, and she's a leading voice for a traditional, nation-wide "jirga" as a possible way forward to disarmament and reconciliation. But she is emphatic in her disgust with all the talk filling the pages of the foreign press about drawing the Taliban into some sort of negotiated power-sharing arrangement. "Anybody who does this is not a friend of Afghanistan," she said.Mahboob Shah, a tireless Kabul anti-poverty activist, said the entrenchment of therule of law in Afghanistan is critical to the alleviation of hunger, joblessness anddisease here, and international troops are playing an irreplaceable role in providingnecessary security. "People who say the foreign soldiers should go away, they do notknow what they are saying," Shah said. "Yes, it should be Afghans who decide, butAnd that is the way my conversations went, from Sharifa Ahmadzai, a 75-year-olddressmaker who teaches women how to read in an informal classroom in her homein Baghlan, to the perilous heart of Kandahar City, where 38-year-old Ehsan UllahEhsan runs a school for women, a library, a computer lab, an adult-education centreand a free internet cafe.Ahmadzai lives only a few blocks from a mosque where Taliban thugs routinelydeliver written pronouncements calling for her murder. In the days before I visitedwith Ehsan in Kandahar, the Taliban gunned down a friend of his for the merecrime of working for a government-owned electrical power company. Ehsan himselfhad just received yet another Taliban "night letter," warning him he would be killedunless he stopped doing his work. A few days later, a gang of men sprayed acid inthe unveiled faces of a group of Kandahar girls on their way to classes. But the girlsremained defiant. Nothing will stop us from going to school, they vowed.The day before I arrived, Gayle Williams, a British aid worker, was shot dead by two Taliban thugs on a motorcycle, just outside the gates to Kabul University. Humayun Shah Asefi, a prince from the old royal family of Zahir Shah, was kidnapped, along with his son. A few days later, while I was chatting with Fatana Gilani at her offices, one of her staff ran in with a cellular phone. She took the call and gasped. It was a young man she'd just sent to pick up some office supplies, and he'd been caught in the blast from a suicide bombing at the Ministry of Information building over on Feroshgah Street. Five people were killed. The office boy was okay, though. Just a bit shaken up.Something lousy and bloodcurdling happens in Kabul almost every day. The trick is to run with savvy Kabulis, don't keep routines, avoid making obvious ransom bait out of yourself, and get on with it. It helps enormously to have an accomplice like Shuja, whose very name means "brave." A bit of bravery does help, but an aversion to recklessness will do. It's not like you can just hail a cop if you get into a scrape. A man in a uniform can be anyone, from any one of several dodgy private security outfits staffed almost entirely by demobilized militiamen from one warlord army or another. The hated pro-Soviet Uzbek gangster Abdul Rashid Dostum has his own informal regiment of these louts, and it's best to steer clear of their turf entirely. Dostum lives in an absurdly opulent, heavily guarded mansion on a street where all his cronies live in similarly ridiculous and only slightly less huge wedding-cake houses plucked straight out of one of those catastrophically bad-taste nouveau riche districts in Islamabad. In the grocery store around the corner from Dostum's place you can buy fancy smoked salmon and frozen lobsters. Just two blocks away, you're back in the seventh century again, with people trundling around in donkey carts.You can live easy inside the guest houses and hotel compounds, with their own pleasant little passageways and corridors and tiny shops hidden away behind blast walls and razor wire. But the whole scene feels just a bit too much like an unearned privilege, a hiding place, and maybe just a bit of an affront to the bravery of all those Kabulis who have chosen to come from the shadows, out into the light.