Among the Paynim: Moonlight Sonata

by Stephen Masty

“I heard the Afghan crowds in the street. They were all chanting or mumbling,” said my Australian colleague the next morning. “I thought there was some kind of protest underway, but then I realised why. They were all staring into the night sky and praying aloud.”

Our Eastern Hemisphere had a lunar eclipse that evening and the public reaction puzzled me.

My colleague seemed convinced that our Afghan hosts had panicked and were outside praying for Allah to bring back the moon. There was no reason to doubt her except that it didn’t seem very Afghan, especially in her swank Kabul neighbourhood.

Perhaps the streets had filled with uneducated guards and servants, rather than the wealthy home-owners. But she insisted that they were all outside, praying up a storm so to speak: the civil engineer and his wife and children, the gynaecologist and his elderly parents, the well-heeled importer of electronic goods and his teenaged nieces visiting from Herat - the lot of them.

We all know of Columbus dazzling the Jamaican natives in 1503, predicting a lunar eclipse and how they begged him to bring back the moon. Earlier, a similar eclipse plunged the Ancient Greeks into confusion over bad omens, giving their foes in Syracuse a chance to break the siege and win the Peloponnesian Wars.

Meanwhile, superstitions die hard even among the modern and educated. Some Japanese are said to still cover wells lest the waters be polluted by a lunar eclipse, and some Eskimos allegedly overturn utensils to avoid contamination. 

But Afghans tend to be practical folk who, despite being often deprived of education, are still good Muslims who know that God created everything including science. The unlettered ones retain plenty of fascinating, medieval legends that coexist alongside antibiotics, for example, but science holds no threat to the Afghan Weltanschauung.

They are not much like the 40 percent of Americans who, a year ago, told pollsters that, “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." Afghans schooled enough to have heard of Natural Selection assume that it must be true; that at some time God turned earlier beings into humans; and that we call the first one Adam. No problems there.

Yet there they all were, outside and praying until the moon came back.

My friend and driver Fatah, bright and inquisitive despite his lack of formal education while he was a refugee, gave me a garbled answer in tentative English. The eclipse had something to do with planets “moving upstairs,” he suspected. But he is deeply religious, and concluded that any excuse that makes people remember Allah and pray is a good thing anyway. I was not fully convinced.

Over lunch I asked the Minister of Agriculture whether many Afghans had problems understanding eclipses. The wise and well-travelled man scowled thoughtfully. He had grown up in a rural village outside of Kabul, where his uncles were farmers and his father was a civil servant. “They taught us all that stuff when I was a small boy in school,” he replied, “but I can’t remember exactly when.”

Conveying Myth: What Still Works, What Doesn’t (I)

by Stephen Masty

No intelligent conservative doubts the necessity of promulgating myth to convey and sustain social values. However, both the physical structure and the rhythms of modern life are different than in earlier times, and this must be understood in order to revive myth in the West.

It may help to look first at the transmission of myth in a surviving traditional society, and then to draw contrasts with a more conventionally modern one.

Modern Afghans & Ancient Greeks

Today’s rural Afghans lead lives remarkably similar to Classical Greeks. While it would be rash to draw any causal relationship, both societies share the architecture, agricultural calendar and an oral tradition that kept Homer’s epics alive and culturally-central for two millennia or more, before literacy grew common among Greek farmers.

The poorest, modern, rural Afghans and Ancient Greeks have lived in single-room cottages where a family ate, slept and wintered together; more in single-family or small multi-family, mud-brick compounds offering a few rooms; and the wealthy fewest in villas. As agrarians, each have tended to grow two crops a year (usually cereals over winter, then fruits and vegetables through summer), affording them much leisure time among two annual cycles of planting and harvesting. Broadcast media, unavailable to Ancient Greeks of course, only reached Afghan cities a generation ago and is still unavailable in many rural areas.

So Ancient Greeks and many modern Afghans have spent much time crowded intimately among their families, with little else to do but talk and tell stories, repeat myths and convey values, until these grow quite unforgettable and become intrinsically second-nature to them.

As Greeks absorbed their pagan religious and Homeric myths, today rural Afghans all know their Aesop’s fables (brought by Alexander), plus ancient Iranian cycles such as the Shahnama or medieval love-stories of Leila and Majnoon, more indigenous and intrinsically Afghan mythic and historical tales together with vast quantities of poetry and proverbs, plus Islamic material reaching from the Holy Koran to Hadith (validated stories of their Prophet Mohammad), and mythic tales of various prophets and saints which are often as implausible as they are instructional, vivid and charming.

Imperial Corruption: Letter to a Patriotic Neo-Conservative

By Stephen Masty

Dear Sir or Madam,

Some very few of your Neo-Conservative colleagues may be deeper in love with Israel than with America. No doubt a much greater number including Christians and Jews, however naive, believe that the best interests of America and Israel are ever identical and that somehow the needs of these two states will never conflict. Whether or not that describes you, I’ll make the likely guess that you are a patriot ultimately prepared to put American interests first.

Since you identify yourself as a Neo-Conservative, I take another risk in presuming that you believe in traditional Judeo-Christian values and fear the unintended consequences of the welfare state, but think that some of the legitimate reasons for expanding the size, cost and power of American Government are to keep Americans safe, to vanquish her enemies wherever possible, and to spread American-inspired or even American-directed political systems across the world. If I missed the mark, you may stop reading now.

Plenty has already been written of the unintended consequences of government action, from socio-economics – such as New York City removing curb-stones to facilitate wheel-chair users that left the blind unable to find the curbs and be mowed down in traffic - to complaints of a counterproductive foreign policy that, say, props up dictators and drives suppressed moderates into the arms of extremists. So I won’t repeat the arguments.

What I will do is describe something that I see first-hand.

Governments pay private contractors to run development programs in poor countries, including Afghanistan where I have lived for some years. European and other non-US governments tend to hire small or medium-sized specialist firms, with an annual turnover of perhaps US$ 15 to 50 million, which take profits of around 20-25% on technical advisors excluding housing, security and airfares all billed at cost. Globally, an estimated 40% of civilian foreign-aid returns to the country of origin in terms of salaries for donor-nation nationals, company profits, etc. – which is nothing to be proud of.

Stinger Missiles, Stinger Cocktails

By Stephen Masty

Some 25 years ago this week, a few nervous young men walked hesitantly into a barren, autumn field and lifted heavy contraptions onto their shoulders as they tried to remember their training. They knew that failure would bring near-certain death as well as lasting shame to their surviving families. Mouthing silent prayers, they fumbled with the controls and trembled from the force and the roar as their projectiles wiggled and wove into the sky, and two heavily-armoured Soviet Hind helicopters burst into flame and went crashing to earth.

Afghanistan’s freedom-fighters had launched the first Stinger surface-to-air missiles against the Russian invaders, signalling the end of what the American President who provided the weapons called the Evil Empire.

For six years the beleaguered Afghan resistance had been helpless against the Soviet air-war, and Russian helicopters had hovered over their villages and mountain redoubts for hours at a time, firing rockets and machine-guns with impunity. Eventually a million Afghan civilians and freedom-fighters would lose their lives, and a million more would lose arms and legs to the communists – a higher percentage of casualties than the USSR suffered in its much-vaunted “Great Patriotic War” against the Nazis.

With the introduction of Stinger missiles, the Soviets scrambled to change air tactics but not fast enough to escape the American high-tech weapons and the Afghans who wielded them. Every week, we journalists read intelligence briefings that reported examples of USSR military might shot down in twos and threes across the embattled country. The Wall Street Journal reports: “One Soviet squadron lost 13 of 40 planes in the year that followed, 10 to Stingers.”

With four million Afghan refugees camped around them in Peshawar, Pakistan, Western expatriates from around the world gathered in what was effectively the only bar in town, The American Club, comprised of  “mercenaries, missionaries and misfits.”

French doctors, filthy from weeks behind enemy lines, bellied up to the bar beside taciturn Omaha agriculturalists, guarded Washington spooks, noisy British photo-journalists and journo-wannabes from everywhere in the Free World, alongside a United Nations of young volunteers washing down the internal dust from long days in refugee camps. Nurses and young diplomats rehearsed cabarets on the balcony, while inside the resident Irish band, “The Boys of County Khyber,” sang how far it was from Clare to here. At tables, wiry old men in civilian jobs made oblique references to their days in Vietnam, sure that everyone would draw the correct conclusions but certain that no one would blow their covers.

The Sun Also Sets: Legacies of Empire

By Stephen Masty

The British broadcaster and ‘household-name’ Jeremy Paxman is the BBC’s most fearsome interviewer. He also hosts ‘University Challenge’ which is easily the world’s most high-brow quiz show; and he writes books and essays of often interesting socio-history, the most recent being perhaps a useful warning to Americans - a writing on the wall, so to speak, along the lines of the Prophet Daniel’s “mene, mene, tekel upharsin.”

Mr. Paxman’s newest effort explores the legacy of the British Empire, chiefly on modern Britons themselves, although he can still be depended upon to exhume delightful anecdotes from far and wide: “’One Basuto king is said to have told Victoria: “My country is your blanket, O Queen, and my people the lice upon it.’” (Although I can say from experience that Lesotho’s bed-linen is now up to international standard). Here in Afghanistan I’ve only read the excerpts (linked above) and Mr. Paxman seems splendid as he tracks the psychology of loss of empire summed up a half-century past when “then US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson made the only remark for which he is remembered in Britain, that ‘Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role’”.

The author cites a credibly imperial legacy at arms: “When, for example, the Grenadier Guards were sent to Afghanistan in 2007, they arrived sporting battle honours from the Crimean War, the Opium Wars, a campaign against Islamist forces in Sudan in the 1890s, another to subdue the Boers in South Africa at the turn of the 20th century, and a “temporary” British intervention in Egypt which began in 1882 and lasted until the middle of the 20th century. Once you’ve got that sort of pedigree, you’re keen to measure yourself against it. And perhaps, at another level, this history of involvement overseas also helps to explain why it is that British charities play such a disproportionately large role in international development and disaster relief.”

Still, British children of the upper-middle-classes or better often spend a “gap year” between school and university gallivanting the world, riding horses in Central Asia, working for a South American charity, or taking the global equivalent of the Georgian ‘Grand Tour’ of continental Europe. This is usually no bad thing, and this habit might help to break Americans of their notoriously self-satisfied insularity. But, as it assumes that the world is but a playground for spoiled rich British kids, it stems from an empire upon which the sun never set. Other European nations have no similar tradition even though some travel.

Mr. Paxman continues: “When the British went to live in the lands they conquered, they were confronted immediately with the question of what made them distinct from the people among whom they lived. Indeed, when you read the popular literature of the period, its most offensive characteristic is the assumption of racial superiority over “brutes” and “savages”. As Cecil Rhodes put it, ‘We are the finest race in the world and the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.’”

This unquestioned sense of nationalistic superiority, racial no longer, is now more American than British, and in Afghanistan every step of interaction from American officials is calculated to diminish, insult or express official disdain for the foreign subjects of Empire.

An Intelligent Tourist’s Guide to Hell

By Stephen Masty

After 30 years as KGB archivist, Major Vasili Mitrokhin (1922-2004) gave British intelligence services 25,000 pages of classified Soviet documents dating back to the 1930s. The Mitrokhin Archive proved to be a goldmine for historians and among its treasures is a memorandum to Stalin from Mikhail Suslov (1902-1982), head of the USSR’s Central Committee Department for Agitation and Propaganda.

The architect of many purges, show-trials and executions early in his career, Suslov is thought by historian Roy Medvedev to have been made Stalin’s “secret heir,” and his name was for decades a synonym for any apparatchik responsible for murderous policy and scurrilous propaganda. In Suslov’s 1946 memo, we see a chilling glimpse inside of a brutal totalitarian state that murdered 50 million of its own citizens: where raw power, unrestrained and abused, eclipsed every last shred of morality and rule of law.

With the state’s domestic and foreign enemies in disarray, Suslov told Stalin that he had “a vertitable blank check,” giving the USSR “newfound advantages.” He bragged that “we have killed thousands around the world (and) the world cares not a whit...everything is on the table now and there are no self-restraints (sic)” from the state deploying an “assassination team...wherever it wishes,” and on to torture and the gulags.

Okay, this is a little white lie, as you have seen if you clicked on the second link in the first paragraph. The quotes come not from the KGB files, but from National Review Online, written not by Suslov but by someone named Victor Davis Hanson, who works not in the dank cellars of Lubyanka Prison but who teaches at America’s Hillsdale College and who holds another part-time job at The Hoover Institution. Yet there the dissimilarities end while the quotations and the sentiments that they portray are real, as you can see for yourself.

Among the Paynim: Afghan Women & Power

By Stephen Masty

Daniel Craig, an actor who plays James Bond as a spiv, demonstrated what many people suspect about British men anyway when he turned up in drag. He protested gender inequality on March 8, International Women’s Day, and it was a first for him having never been seen in public shorn of stubble.  Dependably, the British Public pulled the rug out from under his Jimmy Choos by stating that ‘sexism’ is no longer an issue in the UK.

The Daily Mail reported: “Most women do not believe that Britain is a sexist place, a poll has revealed. Fewer than four in ten say they have experienced derogatory remarks or behaviour because of their gender. And the majority of men and women think both sexes are equally capable of handling challenging and traditionally male tasks (while)… most women are far more concerned with solving day-to-day practical problems in their lives than fighting a battle for equality.”

John Willson & The Un-Making Of Savages

by Stephen Masty

In his fine talk “Was There a Founding?” (reprinted on this site), John Willson warns of "obtuse secularism" making it hard for American students “to connect liberty and religion in a way that will help effect a recovery of our past.” While he calls for “unshakable books” to inform and inspire, an objective (rather than a method) might be defined as ]re-integrating history, culture and traditional, time-tested values into modern thought and modern living. Uncertain if this can be done in America, I watched as an ancient and integrated society disintegrated at the cost of more than one million lives, and how it may come together again.

Professor Sayyid Bahauddin Majrooh was an Afghan intellectual on a grand and even a theatrical scale. Balding and approaching his 60s, his remaining hair competed for attention with his unruly eyebrows but his sparkling eyes always won. He had been Dean of the Humanities Faculty at Kabul University before the 1978 communist coup and the 1979 Soviet invasion. Earlier he had been a diplomat and then appointed by the king as a provincial governor; he had earned a doctorate in France and published a large body of journalism, essays and poetry chiefly in Dari, Pushtu and French. The poems ranged from unique translations of “landai” – short verses, often wickedly satirical and ribald, traditionally composed by illiterate Pushtoon peasant women – to “Ego Monster,” an epic poem in French of grand intellectual proportions and still admired by many in France and Afghanistan. Majrooh was bright, witty, sometimes provocative and often profound, while across Peshawar where he chose to work in exile alongside of his four million refugee countrymen, he was ever in demand at the best soirees Afghan or international.

In the late 1980s, Majrooh ran his tiny, hand-to-mouth, Afghan Information Centre which published news, opinion surveys of the refugees and editorials ever at odds with the orthodoxies of the American and Pakistani governments who backed the radical, Islamist Afghan resistance parties that intentionally eclipsed the more popular moderate factions. After meeting him at a party, as impressed as everyone else, I volunteered as much time as I could spare to help him to proofread his publications in English (which I gathered was his fifth language):  it was a small price to pay for his company.

Among the Paynim: Turkish Letters (1)

by Stephen Masty

Anyone wondering how to have fun with history needs to spend a few evenings in the magnificent company of Ogier de Busbecq, whose four long letters written to the Habsburg Court during the reign of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent were used for centuries as models of what modern diplomats would today call ‘cable traffic.’ It’s Renaissance WikiLeaks.

His “Turkish Letters,” are a feast of observation and description: from travelogue to costume, economics, strategy, warfare and diplomacy, plus food, wildlife and curiosities. Written beautifully and accessibly for modern audiences, he even offers up a few observations pertinent to today’s America though written a mere 62 years after Columbus. Meanwhile, the Flemish diplomat keeps busy deciphering classical inscriptions and hunting down decent wine, while collecting animals and plants to bring home to Europe: he was supposedly the first to introduce tulips from Asia Minor.

The Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, Francis I, sends him twice to Turkey seeking pledges of peace from Suleiman, whose Muslim armies are well into Europe. But the sultan is distracted for he must kill his own son who, not surprisingly, is less than fully cooperative. Ottoman sultans chose one son as successor then slew the brothers to protect the throne from internal challenges – being born an Ottoman prince was often a bad career move. Suleiman is great and wise and no slouch at poetry as well as warfare but his Ukrainian wife, Roxelana, has him wrapped around her finger and prefers her own son, later called Selim the Sot, to his better-respected brothers from her husband’s concubines. When Busbecq arrives, Suleiman has just had his most talented son, Mustafa, murdered and he sends his brilliant Grand Vizier, Rustem Pasha, leading troops into Persia where another son has fled. Busbecq writes to his masters that this should keep the heathens preoccupied for a few years at least, and it did.

Meanwhile, under something close to house arrest as an ambassador from a hostile power, Busbecq plays cat-and-mouse with his imposed guards and minders, and writes back on all that he can see of Istanbul and beyond.

Among the Paynim: Afghanistan in Perspective (Part 2)

(Part 1 can be found here) 

By Stephen Masty

The Afghan war grows unpopular in a financially stricken America, and every time that US President Obama talks of withdrawal he encourages Afghan corruption. Knowing that if America scoots in less than five years the Taliban will return, every petty official is encouraged to fill his desk drawers with as much loot as he can to support his children against the promised American retreat and the impending 25 years economic hardship, misrule and brutality. Bigger officials steal more, much of it taken in backhanders from US contractors. The promise of sustained US support would not end corruption, but would diminish it.

Hamid Karzai was a friend of mine starting 26 years ago, and (although I’ve only seen him once since he became president and he might have changed with power) he was bright, brave, honest, stable and admirably selfless. He was too kind and too conservative, not radical enough to shatter old coalitions that would have freed him from dealing with too many rat-bags whom he believed were needed to retain a vestige of order. Perhaps he was right, but many Afghans disagree even though many still respect him. Meanwhile, a new study from Chatham House correlates insurgency with injustice from warlords, government and its allies.

Every week for at least the last year, leaks obviously generated from Washington intentionally humiliate President Karzai in front of his countrymen, weaken his fragile national coalition when there is no viable democratic alternative waiting in the wings, and – importantly - attempt to mask American policy failures. And boy, what failures!

America subsidises the Pakistan military that supports the insurgency that kills American soldiers. As the US Congress confirms, American contractors pay bribes to the Taliban who blow up American troops. American contractors and spooks provide millions to strengthen brutal warlords and corrupt officials against whom American leaders rail, usually blaming President Karzai. Ten years of often-failed American development work, and little cooperation to help Afghans build their own government, policies and priorities, have still had a few good results – but almost none of which are visible to ordinary Afghans who believe it was all a trick and America stole back the money it promised. American agencies fight each another within the US Embassy and on Capitol Hill, lobbying for one another’s budgets and mandates, mindless of the work thwarted and the damage done to Afghanistan.  Americans say they support dialogue with the insurgents while the CIA helps the Pakistani intelligence services arrest those Taliban leaders most likely to parley.

Among the Paynim: Afghanistan in Perspective (Part 1)

By Stephen Masty

A recent and ill-conceived letter to a conservative magazine suggests that we take a moment to review American involvement in its war in Afghanistan and to dispel a few pernicious errors.

The author of the letter, a former British politician, dusts off every mistake and canard produced by his country since they were roundly thrashed by the Afghans in 1841 (they were clobbered again in 1878 and either lost or earned a draw in 1919, but most of us put them at 0 for 3).

You have heard the palaver before: Afghans are warlike savages never happier than when slitting one another’s throats; they have never been subdued, occupied or defeated (choose two or more options); Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires; they never had a “real” country, only a sort of daemonic Disneyland of internecine warfare, corruption and the cruel oppression of women; these fiends in human form will blow us to bits and then torture to death any poor sods misfortunate enough to survive the blast; so, we had better cut and run ek dum super juldee hai (Anglo-Indian Hindi-English for bloody fast). This is historically inaccurate, plus incorrect and meaningless in a modern setting, but it is a venerable and effective excuse for three-time losers and so it gets trotted out generation after generation, like great-grandad’s soup-stained cummerbund long overdue for dry-cleaning or replacement.

A century or more of upper-class Britons began to be fed this malarkey in the 19^th Century by their popular children’s novelist G. A. Henty, who wrote blood-and-thunder epics with titles rather like “Pig-Sticking Moslem Fanatics with General ‘Bobs’ Roberts,” or “Slaughtering Uppity Black Kaffirs for Queen & Country.” The novels are largely forgotten, thank God, but the propaganda survives and the letter-writer captures some of the content while choosing not to replicate the crass language.

Among the Paynim: Doin’ the Camel-Step

By Stephen Masty

It is an ancient and almost forgotten Pushtoon tradition that should be embraced by Americans immediately and enthusiastically. So, consider it a little Christmas gift from Afghanistan.

 And why not? Like Christians, Muslims also venerate Hazrat-sahib Issa (Jesus) and Bibi Miriam (the Virgin Mary), so Christmas can be a shared celebration even if the two religions hold different perspectives on the principal characters of the Nativity. But enough of this – it is time to unwrap the present.

It’s called a camel-step and it works like this, no batteries required.

Let us say that you are an Afghan of some importance, a local khan or squire, and someone does the dirty on you. Because it’s Afghanistan, an ancient place full of big families and thus devoid of secrets, everyone gets to know about it.

You cannot afford to ignore the affront for then you appear to be stupid, weak or cowardly and your prestige and influence diminishes accordingly. You could send your retainers to kill your betrayer, but contrary to rumours spread by the British to justify three wars lost, Afghans are rarely bloodthirsty, are normally soft-hearted and cannot even bring themselves to kill a suffering animal. Besides, killing a deserving scoundrel sometimes kicks off a blood-feud of family retribution that can quite easily result in a century or more of reciprocal slaughter – as it did with the tribal Scots a few centuries back. So what to do?

Among the Paynim: De-Radicalising an Afghan Town

By Stephen Masty

“I simply had enough!” exclaimed my friend, Haji Haroon.

His Eastern Afghan home-province of Nangarhar was, five years ago and ever since, plagued with Taliban resistance and many districts remain off-limits to government officials. But Haroon decided on a clever strategy to purge extremism from his green and attractive village on the edge of their major city, Jalalabad.

“Really, I’d had it,” the 45-year old Pushtoon continued. “Particularly in the misrepresentation of Islam, with these radicals insisting that Islam is about killing anyone you disagree with. I love my religion and what these people say is simply not Islam.” His strategy began with the village mullah.

Village mullahs are – often quite unintentionally - the initial agents of radicalisation, he explained. Almost inevitably the poorest members of any village, the cleric and his family live without a salary. Daily they go door-to-door collecting their food from their neighbours, begging to buy clothes or to pay a medical bill. Poor, unable to pay a share of village costs and usually not the brightest fellow around, the mullah tends to be excluded from village decision-making.

Among the Paynim: a Jew on Jihad

By Stephen Masty

Jews probably lived in Afghanistan since they were freed from captivity in Babylon and maybe before. Silver coins from the Graeco-Bactrian satraps (circa 200 BC to almost the time of Christ and still available for a few dollars each in the Kabul bazaars) are written in Classical Greek on the obverse and on the reverse in Aramaic, the language of Jesus and of commerce through the caravan trade eastwards from the Holy Land, across Iraq and Iran into Afghanistan and modern day Pakistan.

 In the 19^th Century and maybe still, many Afghans believed that they were themselves Jewish and that the Pushtoons are one of the Lost Tribes of Israel: some scientists now talk of a mitochondrial DNA backtracking experiment to see if the legend is true.  From my own somewhat limited and not very scientific researches, both Jews and Pushtoons have strong family and ethnic bonds, are reassuringly traditional, uncommonly warm-hearted and at the first sign of a friend’s sniffles trot out steaming bowls of delicious chicken soup. That’s proof enough for me, Philosemitic and an Afghanophilic in equal measures.

But back during the Soviet invasion, deep inside Afghanistan with the anti-communist mujahideen, my friend Rachel was more than just a little discomfited when the Muslim resistance commander repeated her surname quizzically and asked if she was Jewish.

Still an old friend from the Reagan Era, Rachel and I worked in Washington on the cusp of political speechwriting, conservative activism and journalism. Then she came to visit me in Peshawar, determined to ‘go inside’ meaning to travel into Afghanistan with the anti-communist warriors and to report back to a prominent Midwestern newspaper. My friends and I introduced her to a responsible, moderate party of freedom-fighters who generally kept a sensible distance away from the bloodshed, and early one morning a band of them turned up at my house to smuggle her past the Pakistani authorities and escort her into Afghanistan. Then they collapsed in fits of giggles, as Afghans sometimes do.

Among the Paynim: Homily from Hogville

By Stephen Masty

Hogville is a peculiar name for a district full of Afghan Muslims who never eat pork, rather like finding a synagogue named after bacon or a Hindu village called Beefburgerpur. Yet it makes sense if the people of Khogiani tell you their secret.

Driving from the bustling city of Jalalabad, or coming the other way over the Pakistan border and the Khyber Pass, one motors over pitiless, rocky desert with vast snowy mountains in the far distance until one comes to Pigtown (an alternative translation). 

Nestled in an ancient river valley, it is breath-takingly green and lush, shaded by slim poplars and broad-leafed chinar trees with bark mottled white and silver like sycamores, their trunks so thick that four people could scarcely get their arms around one. Everywhere are babbling brooks, some natural and others dug to irrigate the postage-stamp wheat-fields each surrounded by its own grassy hummocks sown thick with fodder for the animals, or dense orchards so heavily and improbably laden with oranges or apricots that a visitor thinks he has wandered into a storybook illustration forgotten since childhood. Over the treetops peek qalas, stately mud-brick towers built for defence longer ago than even the oldest and best-loved spin-girai, or grey-beards, can remember.

It is an enchanted place and they have lived there for a long time, a very long time. If you ask them to, some of the elders will recite their patrimony going back a thousand years but that is just for starters. Five hundred years before Christ (Hazrat Issa or the Prophet Jesus to your hosts), the Greek historian Herodotus reported clans living there with names that sound almost identical to the Pushtoon tribes there now. And they did not arrive just as Herodotus scribbled it down: these families have lived there for at least 3,000 years, since the days of Homer and Zoroaster, probably since Stonehenge or before.

Among the Paynim: Gringo Degringolade

 By Stephen Masty

When a disaster strikes far away and good-hearted people try to help, are they on the pathway to progress or that road paved with good intentions?

I returned to Kabul in early March 2002, a few months after the allied invasion, but Sven got there first.

He was a contemplative Swede who resembled a tall, aristocratic hussar from the age of Gustavus Adolphus. Amid the refugees in Pakistan twenty years before, he had started The Swedish Committee for Afghanistan where he ran important agricultural missions over the border and behind the backs of the invading Red Army.  He was one of a fearless handful who stopped the US Government from hushing up a famine and thus saved countless Afghan lives, but that is a story for another day.

Sven was No. 2 at the tiny UN mission. In his practical, unflappable, Scandinavian manner he tried to help organise post-Taliban emergency relief, support the confused and devastated Afghan government, introduce various newly-arrived donors who had little idea of how to help, coordinate humanitarian assistance from the coalition forces and so forth.

Then the satellite telephone rang from the Pakistan aerodrome where the UN chartered airplane was based. In those early days, the UN flights were virtually the only way in which civilians could reach Kabul unless one drove up through the Khyber Pass.

“Mind if we fly the actresses up to Kabul?” crackled a voice. Sven went outside because, even at ten dollars a minute, the sat-phones never seemed to work indoors.

Among the Paynim: Bats Without Bungs

by Stephen Masty

Listening to Professor Brad Birzer’s spell-binding, videotaped lecture on John Randolph (available on this website), one is startled by his vivid, contagious and nearly gleeful description of Randolph and Henry Clay squaring off for a duel on the site of today’s Reagan National Airport on the Potomac. Then it struck me how similar people may look but how different we are.

How many living Americans fully understand men such as Randolph or Clay, who rode out on a chill morning prepared to die for honour? Yet they are not so far from us and our times: three respective five-year-olds talking to their respective grandfathers take us there in a mere third-hand conversation. Yet, compared to us and our attitudes, Randolph and Clay might as well have been Homeric warriors at the gates of Troy, three thousand years gone instead of but two centuries.

In England, the last cabinet minister to resign on a point of principle (not fight a duel and maybe die), was Lord Carrington almost 30 years ago. Recently, when US Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack offered his resignation over (false) accusations of a bigoted statement from a deputy, it was a jaw-dropper. Why we are scared to resign, much less to die, and whatever became of honour is another story for another day: just as interesting may be how different are we from our fairly recent ancestors, not to mention people in other countries who seem just like us until we get to know them.

Depending on Kabul traffic I spend up to two hours a day, or 12 hours a week, with my pleasant, dependable and admirable driver. Fatah, a devoted father of seven, is a 38-year-old Afghan whose education was severely curtailed by war and exile, but he is quick with languages and his English gallops ahead much faster than my pitiful Dari (don’t even ask about my Pushtu). Back in Peshawar, Pakistan, we were in the anti-Soviet jihad together although we never met, me running emergency food and medical projects and Fatah, in his early teens, taking brave battlefield photographs for one of the moderate resistance parties that the Afghans loved and the US and Pakistani clandestine services despised. He is a devout Muslim who starts every journey with a short prayer (as did my Irish-American grandmother, albeit using different prayers), and his favourite drive-time DJ is a Kabul radio mullah who explains, for example, how good Muslims are obliged to respect and protect Jews and Christians. Such is modern Kabul.

Report from TIC's man in Kabul--Steve Masty

Our friend Steve Masty gave me permission to pass on some of his emails from Kabul where he is a civilian adviser to the Afghan government.  Steve will be joining us as a new contributor so I offer this preview of his wit, wisdom and experience. Thanks Steve, we look forward to hearing more from you when you aren't busy helping to bring Russell Kirk's wisdom to Afghanistan.

Report from our man in Kabul--Steve Masty

I think...many good people, may have a slightly romanticised picture of my afghan chums, coloured by GA Henty and all his blood-and-thunder boys' books long unread by the Brits but still influential. Things titled 'With Kitchener to Khartoum' or 'Captured by the Crazed Ghilzai Ragheads.' the british bungled three invasions and the recollection remains a sore spot, so it helps them to brand all these people as knife-wielding savages. afghans know this and giggle about it behind their backs. the posher bit of kabul where the gringos live is called wazir acbar khan, after the afghan freedom fighter who killed a lot of them when they rudely invaded in 1878 - afghans giggle about that too but most honkies have no idea.

They are an endlessly hospitable and curious people, but knowledgeably happy with their own traditions, comfy in their own skins, lacking that sense of inferiority sometimes still held by nations long colonised. while they have elegant manners to put to shame a renaissance french court, they will let you know precisely what they think be one a driver or a cabinet minister. i like that - a heap of politesse but not a spoonful of subservience.

and endless merriment and good humour in all its forms, and a keen eye for gasbags or the insincere and a deft way to puncture balloons -often without a gringo knowing what happened. once you know what these sophisticated and fundamentally good folk are up to - and they know that you know - then you are in on all the jokes. but most foreigners keep swaggering around deaf to all subtlety. as afghans say, amid their hundreds of proverbs, you can send a donkey on Haj but he's still a donkey.

i keep collecting afghan jokes for a lecture at london's school of oriental and african studies that i never get around to delivering. even the clean ones are terrific. and they run the gamut between perceptive and goofy, between whimsy and pointed satire, and on and on. they have very sophisticated minds, just running sometimes on a very different wavelength that makes living among them a constantly rewarding challenge.

a random joke told by afghans who don't know much about cocktail parties. the jungle is having its spring ball and the nimble monkeys tend bar. the elephant objects to his 50ml dram because he is so big, so they pour him 250ml. the lion, king of beasts, wants a bigger measure too and so each animal gets a tumbler full until the donkey asks for only 10ml. why? he tells the monkeys, 'these animals drink to become donkeys but, hey, i'm already a donkey!'

A follow up to my post on Pat Buchanan's "Coming Home at Last"

In light of Bruce Frohnen's post which references the "combox" conversation between Kevin Roberts, John Willson and myself, I am taking the liberty of posting my comments regarding my post (Pat Buchanan post) below. I have sanitized it a bit as my wife said we should play nice.

1) Kevin,...I don't believe Buchanan is a pacifist, and I know I am not. However, I do believe that prudence demands we count the costs of our actions, especially so that we learn from the past and may make better decisions in the future. Certainly 4,200 U.S. dead, 35,000 wounded, and $700 billion is a very high cost indeed. 

Is it not legitimate to ask was it worth it?

Should we have stayed in Afghanistan for almost 10 years after we destroyed the terrorist training camps we went there for? Are you so much more enamored with the new political structure in Iraq (voting followed by chaos and violence) over the old system (dictatorship followed by repression and violence)? 

Is it truly a conservative position to go beyond punishing the terrorists, and destroying their camps, with a 10 year attempt to remake Afghan political culture in our own image? Come now, you must admit this has all the signs of going from justified military action to hubris on a grand scale. Or perhaps you don't.



Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet, and other notable conservatives, have expressed great concern that centralization and militarization have been the greatest threats to preservation of the principles of the American Republic. They were not pacifists. They were true patriots who wished to guard against taking actions to destroy the enemy which may simultaneously lead to undermining the ordered liberty we claim to fight to preserve. Is the current TSA/NSA security culture in our nation consistent with freedom in this or any other century?

I am for taking military action against those who clear evidence indicates threaten the safety of our Republic and its citizens. But, does this necessitate a permanent military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan? How about Germany, South Korea and Japan? Is there no end to this? If not, I fear that we must (as Brad Birzer has suggested on this site) admit that the Republic is lost and that we fight to defend a democratic empire. 

Kevin, I would welcome a duel if you think me a pacifist. I say kill the enemy and come home. Don't move into his house and call it self-defense.

Excellent essay by Pat Buchanan on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

Perhaps it is time to admit our program for "democracy in the middle east" is a failure before we spend more treasure and precious blood of fine American men and women.

Excerpt from "Coming Home at Last"

What did they accomplish — and at what cost?

Saddam and his Baathist regime were overthrown, the dictator was hanged, elections were held, and a government that reflects the will of a majority of Iraqis put in its place.

Cost to the United States: More than 4,200 U.S. dead, 35,000 wounded, $700 billion sunk. In the Islamic world, the Iraq War led to pandemic hostility toward America. At home, the war led to the rout of the Republicans and the election of an anti-war liberal Democrat.

If Obama is indeed leading America into socialism, the War Party that led us into Iraq can take a full measure of credit.

And what is the cost to the Iraqi people of a U.S. invasion and occupation and seven-year war, the end of which is nowhere in sight?

Perhaps 100,000 dead, half a million widows and orphans, 4 million refugees, half having fled their country, devastation of a Christian community that dated to the time of Christ and the ethnic cleansing of the Sunnis from Baghdad.

Four months after elections, they have no government, and bombs that kill dozens still go off daily. And, when the Americans leave, a civil and sectarian war may return. The breakup of Iraq along ethnic and religious lines remains a possibility. The price of liberation is high.

(Read "Coming Home at Last" by Pat Buchanan)