In the activist polemics of North America’s wealthy, privileged students, Afghanistan shows up as a project of American imperialism, an effort by “us” in the capitalist West to impose our hegemonic, democratic values on “them.” It brooks only one response: troops out. At Marefat High School, in a cold and poorly lit classroom, the students have decorated the walls with oil paintings of some of the great champions of values that do not draw such distinctions between “them” and “us.” The students painted the portraits themselves: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, René Descartes, Rosa Parks, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Ali Akbar Dehkhoda, Immanuel Kant, Abraham Lincoln, Voltaire, Baruch Spinoza and Jawaharlal Nehru. This may seem a mere incongruity, a touching detail, a small matter. It isn’t. It’s not just a mark of the distance between the imaginary Afghanistan and the real one, either. It’s what the Battle of Marefat High School was all about.
Marefat High School is supported almost entirely by the poor of Daste Barchi. The school’s focus is on humanism and civic education. The school is accredited by the Afghan government, but it has had a rocky relationship with the education ministry, owing to the students’ demands for fully co-educational classes. The roughly three thousand students who attend the school are encouraged to use the Internet, set up personal web pages and communicate with the outside world. Elected class councils and discipline councils allow students to evaluate teachers, tutor one another and manage their own affairs, right down to the amount of the fines levied for overdue library books. The school is governed by a board of trustees elected by parents, students and teachers. There is also an independent student parliament. The idea is that these forms of self-government will encourage students to get into the habit of taking charge of their own lives. This requires practice, hard work and a lot of give and take. It is the art that is known in the West as democracy.
The battle at the school began on the morning of April 15, 2009, when a mob of dozens from Kabul arrived screaming for Marefat principal Aziz Royesh. “I was right here,” Royesh told me, as we stood in the rutted, muddy alley outside the school. “The school is a dirty nest of Christians, communists and prostitutes,” the mob shouted. “There are boys and girls together. Royesh is an apostate; Royesh must die.” In the school courtyard, several boys ran to the doors and quickly locked them. “I ran into my house, right there,” said Royesh, pointing across the narrow alley. “The school fought back. The boys didn’t run away. They barred the door. They called the police.” The battle was more of a riot, but it lasted most of the day. The school was pelted with rocks. Windows were broken. The local police were useless. It took riot police firing into the air to break things up.
The Battle of Marefat High School was directly related to a story that showed up in headlines all over the world, in a version that went something like this: In April 2009, to the great consternation of his Western backers and international human rights organizations, Afghan president Hamid Karzai approved a “rape law,” which would forbid women from refusing sex to their husbands and require them to obtain permission from a male relative before leaving the house, as a sop to the country’s Shia minority. Afghanistan’s Shias wanted to entrench Taliban-like misogynist brutality within a Shia-specific marriage law that would be separate from laws applying to the Sunni majority. Some Afghan women staged a protest in Kabul but were shouted down and threatened by a much larger group of violent counter-protesters. Moral of the story: It all goes to show that we should stop propping up Karzai’s warlord regime and pull our soldiers from the country. Troops out.
The problem with the story is that it was pretty much the opposite of the truth. The sternest opponents of the “rape law” included Shia clerics. Mohammad Mohaqiq, one of Afghanistan’s most influential Shia parliamentarians, called the law “an offence to the Hazaras.” The contents had actually been written in Tehran a couple of years before. The law’s champion was Iran’s senior ayatollah in Afghanistan, the powerful Mohammad Asif Mohseni. The international human rights outfits in Kabul mainly kept quiet about it all until it was almost too late. Among the Hazara women leading protests against the law were student parliamentarians from Daste Barchi. The mob that showed up at the school came straight from Mohseni’s opulent mosque and madrassa complex in Kabul. If there is a moral to this story, it would be something like this: Afghans want more democracy, less misogyny, and more democratic international intervention to help hold their government accountable. In their demonstrations against the “rape law,” Afghans were not chanting “troops out.”
This wasn’t a story about imperialists from the Western democracies trying to cope with an intractable Muslim puppet government that was refusing to behave respectably. It was more accurately a story about wealthy Iranian-backed bullies pushing around poor Afghan Shias who were standing up for the universal values the West dubiously claims as its own.
The closer you look at the Afghanistan that has animated Western debates in the decade since September 11, 2001, that’s the sort of thing you find. It is as though some undiagnosed trauma from the gruesome, live-broadcast spectacle of that September morning had gone on to induce a kind of mass psychosis, a “sealing-off of one part of the world from another,” as Orwell put it.
In April 2011, during its 219th week on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list, celebrity philanthropist Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea, a book that purports to set out a schools-based formula for winning the “war on terror” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, was exposed as a fairytale. Journalist Jon Krakauer and a CBS 60 Minutes crew revealed that Mortenson’s account of his exploits was largely a work of fiction. Krakauer, a journalist who is not afflicted with what Orwell politely described as an “indifference to objective truth,” discovered that Mortenson had fabricated his most gripping yarns, not least a tale of being captured and held hostage by a strangely jolly group of Taliban fighters. “The image of Mortenson that has been created for public consumption is an artifact born of fantasy, audacity, and an apparently insatiable hunger for esteem,” Krakauer found. “Mortenson has lied about the noble deeds he has done, the risks he has taken, the people he has met.” On it goes, in painful detail.
Mortenson’s “phony memoir,” with its various editions, its sequel and its children’s book version, bilked enormous sums of money from unsuspecting donors to build schools that were not built, or were built and left empty or turned out to have been built by someone else. Some of his schools were indeed functioning, but Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute issued bogus financial statements and misused millions of dollars, including payments for fancy hotels and flights in private jets for Mortenson’s lucrative speaking engagements. Tellingly, all along, few Afghans had ever even heard of the world-famous Mortenson. Hardly anyone in Afghanistan involved in education had ever come across his Central Asia Institute. And yet, Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea was a Time Asia Book of the Year winner.
Something similar has been at work with regard to another bestseller about Afghanistan by another globetrotting celebrity. Malalai Joya’s polemical autohagiography, A Woman among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice, tells the story of an Afghan parliamentarian so courageous that the BBC bestowed the title “bravest woman in Afghanistan” upon her. Joya’s book is not what you would call a work of fiction, but in 2010, the year Time chose her for inclusion on its list of the 100 most influential people in the world, she was only dimly remembered in Afghanistan as a former MP who once made an angry speech, got kicked out of Parliament and then left the country. A decade after September 11, throughout Europe and North America, especially among people who considered themselves staunchly progressive, Malalai Joya was a larger-than-life, heroic figure. But among Afghanistan’s human rights activists and women’s rights leaders, Joya was remembered with a mix of pity and contempt.
All over the English-speaking world, there was something about