Reading more Afghanistan

The Photographer, a graphic memoir of a Frenchman traveling with Doctors Without Borders, presents a picture of surviving a trek through Afghanistan in 1986, by being sensitive to and accommodating to local customs and leaders.  The Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton provides a similar lesson 15 years later.   The message here, however, is that the same sensitivity and accommodation can also be the key to winning a war.

This incredibly well-researched book tells the story behind the photo we all saw of American military men riding horses across a golden Afghan valley shortly after the World Trade Center was destroyed on September 11, 2001.    Around the world there was surprise and some laughter:  “What’s this?  The U.S. cavalry rides again?” 

Horse Soldiers follows the day by day actions of the Special Forces (aka Green Berets) and some CIA paramilitary following 9/11 as they leave their families and their U.S. base, fly to Uzbekistan, then proceed into Afghanistan to launch the war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.   We see their skills, their adroitness in working with competing local warlords, their determination, the dangers and, ultimately, the success they experienced in those first weeks in Northern Afghanistan.

For those of us who remember the Green Berets from the Vietnam era as wild men running amok in the jungle, as depicted in Apocalypse Now, these Special Forces soldiers are depicted–and I think truthfully so– as intelligent, highly skilled, and self-disciplined.   They are what we would prefer all our military men and women to be.

Now, eight years later I hope that President Obama listens to General McChrystal, whose background includes Special Forces, to lead the U.S. military in Afghanistan today.  And that President Obama learns the right lesson from Iraq: that it was only when the U.S. began to work with the local Iraqi Sunni leaders that the deaths and bombings began to subside.    Horse Soldiers reinforces the wisdom of that course of action.

(This post is part of an experimental memoir.  I teach memoir writing and will edit your memoir to make it better.  Learn more at www.onedaymemoir.com)

Reading the Middle East

Over the last year I have tried to find books that provided me with insights into that part of the world which stretches from the eastern Mediterranean to the Himalayas.

The first I came across was “Bliss”, which has now been made into a movie.   The movie opens next week here in Los Angeles and will play for one week only.  The book is so remarkable that I may not go see it.

“Bliss” begins in a small isolated village in southeastern Turkey, not far from the Iraq border.   While the novel is set in the present, the village seems to be centuries older in some ways.  A young woman is disgraced and expected by her family to destroy herself.   Another fate awaits her as she and a male family member, who promises to kill her, travel from the village to the western part of the country.  It is a fascinating story that highlights the enormous differences between village life and urban life in contemporary Istanbul.  The author, Ömer Zülfü Livane, is one of Turkey’s best.  There were, however, two translators involved, which may explain a certain awkwardness in the early pages of the book.

“Kara Kush”, a ripping good novel by Idries Shah, about Afghanis during the Russian occupation, complements the documentary vision presented in The Photographer.  The Afghans are presented as bold, brave and enormously varied as this tale of resistance fighters–both men and women–ranges across the country from north to south.

After reading “Kara Kush”  I searched for a book about the Russian experience in Afghanistan and came up empty.  Then I stumbled across “One Soldier’s War”, a memoir of a Russian soldier, Arkady Babchenko, in the two Chechen wars.  He was drafted for the first one; voluntarily rejoined the army for the second one.  Is is a fascinating depiction of Russian military life, as seen from the bottom up.  Treatment of the soldiers seems not to have changed much from the time of the Czars.  After his second tour in the army, Babchenko became a journalist and the book is well written.

Last night about 10 p.m. I put down the “The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You A Happy Birthday” by New York Times reporter Neil MacFarquhar.  The subtitle is “Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East”.   It is incredibly informative and utterly depressing.   I didn’t finish it and this book goes back to the Pasadena Public Library today. 

More hopeful than “The Media Department…” are the conversations I’ve had with the Afghani grocer in our local farmers’ market.  He told me he does not understand why there are wars.  “Everyone”, he said, “wants the same thing: a peaceful life with work and family.”    I would argue with his choice of the word “everyone”.  “Most people” would be more accurate.  There are always those who crave power and will seek it through war.