Reclaiming Identities

Not all's lost in Afghanistan. A few weeks ago, a shipment from the Afghan Museum in Exile in Switzerland landed on the doorstep of the National Museum in Kabul. It's still sitting there, a potent symbol of the painfully slow pace of progress. But at least I feel comfortable using the word "progress" in the Afghan context. There is progress.

Afghanistan's treasures rival Egypt, if not in scale, then in quality and variety. The largest artefacts, the Bamiyan Buddhas, were destroyed by what I referred to in my last post as the Taliban's religious reductionism. Countless others were obliterated by the civil war, looters, more Taliban zealots and the wrath of nature, but these 1 400 pieces survived, along with an unknown number of others locked away somewhere in the dungeons of the Presidential Palace.

Afghanistan's history is coming out of hiding - in bits and pieces of course, as stolen artefacts are located, shattered ceramics delicately reassembled, statues re-excavated from rubble, stories patched together from a jumbled mess of ideology, hatred and greed. The disintegration of the museum is a sad but salient reminder of what some people will do for a sip from the goblet of power - steal a peoples' history, demolish it, crush identities and reduce multiple selves to a manageable singularity. Over 70% of Afghanistan's cultural history is still missing, circulating among profiteers who place their own selfish desire for wealth above the shared history of humankind.

But history is not so easily defeated. In Kabul, it's showing just how resilient it can be. The museum is on the mend, rising out of the rubble like a New Iram. Its first show will open on April 25th - an exhibition of photographs of the Tashqurghan Bazaar before and after it was leveled by fighting between the Soviet Red Army and Afghan mujahideen in the mid-1980s by writer, photographer and ethnographer Dr. Roelof J. Munneke. From what I've seen, it's a moving tribute to what has been lost and a determined statement for what can be saved (full story to be published in the travel section of the Hindustan Times shortly).

The Museum should be fully operational by sometime in mid-Summer. Some pics:

War and Peace - Afghanistan's

National Museum on the mend

Rebuilding

Dr. Munneke - Reclaiming Identities,

photos from Tashqurghan Bazaar

Dr. Munneke - promotional cards

Seated Boddhisatva Statue from Kunduz

4th-6th Century C.E.

Pre-Islamic wood figure

Nuristan

Afghanistan - Missing Voices

Trying to see Afghan society with new eyes, with what I consider to be sight unencumbered by filters. In this case, the filter I've discarded is the one that tries to reduce identities to an essential, Platonic core. Pashtuns are such a way, Tajiks are inclined to such and such, Hazaras and Turkomens...these facile categories confuse rather than clarify; they muddy the picture.

Not to say these ethnic groups don't exist in Afghanistan, they certainly do and there is something to be said about the tensions between them. Those tensions, I think now, are a product of the categories themselves, a by-product of syllogistic reductionism that leaves us with an easy-to-use lexicon for the discussion of Afghans but at the expense of the reality of Afghanistan itself. The problem is that by framing the discussion this way, by capturing and controlling the language, we create the images, we set the boundaries and we set the cycle of conflict in motion.

Ironically, during the Russian occupation, it was the exact opposite situation: Lenin's socialism tried to eliminate all difference; it was an all-encompassing reductionism, the reducing of distinct cultures into a homogeneous whole. That failed. The modern, liberal-inspired reduction of Afghan society into distinct ethnic groups which are then subvidived into tribes and clans will also fail. Both approaches to Afghanistan anchor themselves in the extremes and inevitably lead to policies that do nothing to address the actual needs of Afghans. U.S. and Pakistani policy, for example, manipulates tribal and clan distinctions in a hopeless effort to achieve some sort of strategic advantage, a strategic peace that will be beneficial to them.

Unfortunately, some powerful Afghans have bought into this reductionist strategy (and it is a strategy, conscious or not), whereby guarding their own interests means playing to the interest of one group or another. Karzai himself is playing the game. Rather than appeal to the multiple identities that exist in every Afghan, he appeals at times to ethnic identity, at another to national identity at still another to tribal and clan identities, depending on his strategic needs. In the end, he ends up looking like a player. Afghans pick up on this and that's why so many mistrust the central government.

The Taliban, on the other hand, like the Russians, tried to reduce Afghan identity to a singularity, one based on their image of the pious Muslim. All Afghans are Muslims, therefore all Afghan women must where the burqa, all men must have beards long enough to clench in a fist and dress in the traditional shalwar kameez. Other identities rebelled against this idea and formed the Northern Alliance, in part to protect their identities but also to inflict upon Afghanistan those same identities. That is what is happening now, now that the Northern Alliance is in power.

Many Pashtuns, as a result, are not happy. What they see is a government whose central mission is to wipe their way of life out of existence, especially in the south and east where Pashtun identity is the most crystallized. But the fact remains that in these regions there are people who speak for Pashtuns, not the Jihadist Taliban whose inspiration is the apocalyptic vision of the End of Days, but the Pashtun leaders (who also call themselves Taliban - students of Islam) who are genuinely protecting the Pashtun way of life. This way of life is also a part of Afghanistan, regardless of how much some in the current government and others in the world community may despise that identity. Engaging them, bringing them into the political fold will finally give the Pashtuns a voice in government, a voice that is, at the present time, conspicuously absent.

I'll end this post with a few pics: