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Democracy, Middle East styleTHROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: Not so foreign travels

A search for footage to promote Afghanistan’s election.

Written and photographed by Andrew Blackwell / Kabul, AfghanistanPublished Thursday, March 10, 2005

Two women inspect the merchandise in a Kabul street bazaar.

From the air, Afghanistan is a more rugged version of the moon. Approaching Kabul, our plane flies low overthe surrounding mountains as we prepare to land. With the city center out of view, Kabul looks like thedesiccated remnants of an ancient civilization. Only a few small patches of green glimmer in the haze —everything else is the color of dust.

It is my debut as a government agent. Two weeks before Afghanistan’s first-ever presidential elections, I ampart of a State Department team helping shape global public opinion of the elections — and, by implication,improving America’s poor overseas reputation. It might be more appropriate to describe us as a fewopportunistic freelance TV workers dabbling in propaganda. We have been hired by the U.S. government toproduce video footage of the elections, footage that will be freely available to any television station thatwants to use it. And although we will be operating independently, it is understood, of course, that we aren’there to look for bad news.

Everyone knows Hamid Karzai, the American backed interim president, is going to win the election. The onlyquestions are by how much, and whether or not Afghans — and the world —will believe the results. Our job isto make sure that, whatever the slant of the international media coverage, someone will be covering the goodnews in Afghanistan — if there is any. I wonder, though — as a hyper-liberal, anti-Bush zealot, do I reallywant to help put a good spin on United States foreign policy? On the other hand, we’re not exactly here tocreate a White House-sanctioned fantasy world a la Wag the Dog, either. So let’s call it “public relations”instead of propaganda. Or maybe “propaganda lite.”

Looking for trouble — and good camera angles

My friend Mathieu told me about the job a few months ago. He needed someone to come to Kabul with himand his colleague Siri, to be an audio tech during the day and a video editor at night. I had worked with

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them both before, and trusted them. Siri had been to Afghanistan several times in the last two years, andknew her way around the country.

I thought about it for a couple days. Things in Afghanistan looked less than promising. The U.N. Staff Unionwas lobbying to have U.N. employees pulled out of Afghanistan, and Doctors Without Borders, an non-governmental organization with a reputation for fearlessness, had pulled out altogether after 24 years in thecountry.

But how often do you get the chance to visit Afghanistan? I called Mathieu to tell him I would come. Secondthoughts immediately followed when he asked for my hat and chest size to buy me a helmet and vest of bodyarmor.

Once we land in Kabul, my doubts only grow.

At the airport we are met by Farid and Qais. Farid is our translator and guide, an earnest man in his earlythirties. Qais is our driver, a snappy dresser with a mustache poised on his broad, slightly plump face. Hisminivan is bedecked with sunroofs, a metallic grey paint job, and the words “SUPER EXTRA” emblazoned onthe sliding door. We pile in with our equipment, and Qais sends the Super Extra through Kabul’s chaotic trafficwith a carefree recklessness bordering on glee.

I had imagined our security would be tight, envisioning fortified U.S. compounds as our lodging and fearsomeconvoys of armed humvees as escorts. In reality, the U.S.embassy hardly seems to know that we’re here,and our freewheeling Super Extra is apparently all the convoy we’re going to get. I tell myself incognito isbetter.

Qais and Farid drop us off at a modest Kabul guesthouse, run by an affable Australian chef. The outside is adrab wall with a metal door, but the inside is surprisingly pleasant. There is a central garden with a shadyarbor where the other inhabitants — two dozen development workers and U.N. contractors — lounge in theevenings, drinking and playing ping-pong. After dumping our gear in our rooms, and setting up our editingcomputer, we sit on the patio and drink beers. There is a rumbling in the sky. We crane our heads. Two U.S.helicopters circle over the city, bristling with guns and rockets, rattling our windows.

Kabul is congested and dusty. Its recent history is evident in the sagging skeleton of a ravaged building or awall pockmarked with the splash of a shell burst. But the etchings of violence are mainly just the backdrop foreveryday bustle. Streams of men form a parade of flowing vests and tight cylindrical caps or flat pakol hats,which perch on the back of the head like a felt pancake. The flood of beige and brown is punctuated by anoccasional Western suit, or by dark green camouflage jackets thrown over traditional clothing. Women in thestreets wear conservative headscarves and long skirts with quietly defiant high heels and fishnet hose. Thereare also the almost genderless figures of women in flowing, sky-blue burqas, looking out through theembroidered face screen of a garment that, for an object so symbolic to us of sexual repression, issurprisingly beautiful.

Our job is to record life in Kabul and digest it into video clips for mass distribution, hopefully in a way thatshows the current situation in a positive light. But these decisions aren’t up to me. I’m making absolutely nodecisions about where we go and what we cover. My role is to tag along and get audio, leaving the thinkingto Siri. She has been talking to the U.S. embassy in Kabul ever since we landed, and they aren’t offering hermuch guidance. Mostly, our movements are based on her gut feelings of what our employers will considerappropriate and — above all — what will make good television.

At the top of any cameraman’s list this week are the walls plastered with election materials. U.N. posterscheerily depict how an election is supposed to work. One shows a man and a woman, both smiling broadly, intraditional dress. A giant speech bubble hovers over them displaying the address of the nearest polling station.

There are also campaign advertisements from all 18 presidential hopefuls. Multiple posters for each candidatedisplay the contender in varied poses of purposeful concentration. In vying for the passerby’s attention,however, a common image hovers in the background of many of the flyers: a man’s lined face, framed with agoatee, a shock of gray hair and a pakol hat. It is Massoud, the former head of the Northern Alliance, whowas assassinated on September 9, 2001. His exploits are legendary: he defied more than hald a dozen Sovietassaults on his native Panjshir Valley, and later became the linchpin of anti-Taliban resistance. Now, with thefall of the Taliban, it seems Massoud is Afghanistan’s George Washington. And his sad-eyed ghost iseveryone’s running mate.

Above the hubbub of modern Kabul, gutted buildings linger as stark reminders of the civil war of the 1990s.

Democracy school

On the outskirts of Kabul, we visit a voter education class at a local high school. (Fresh-faced youth learningabout democracy equals good video.) The classroom is packed with young men, few of whom look over 18,which is the Afghan voting age. The teacher explains that the boys are given the class in the hope that theywill pass the information on to their families. We tape the teacher gesturing to a set of U.N. posters thatillustrate parts of the election process — voter verification, the secret ballot, collection and counting of votes.The teenagers’ concentration is intense. Do American high school civics class ever look like this? Perhaps thepresence of a news crew has a focusing effect, but their attention seems genuine.

Siri interviews the teacher. In broken English, he tells us it isn’t always easy to get across the idea of how anelection works. “Of course, we think it’s difficult for them,” he says. “But we are explaining more.

He continues: “In the past government, has any president asked you, ‘Can I be your representative, yourpresident?’ They say, ‘No.’ So it is the election, that they are asking, ‘Can you give your vote to me? Can I beyour president?’ This is democracy!”

My skepticism weakens. It is one thing to sit home in front of the newspaper and make knowing commentsabout power politics. How legitimate is “democracy” when it is imposed by an invading superpower, and whena country’s human development and rule of law remain in ruins? Those sentiments fade, however, whenconfronted with the straight-faced optimism of a classroom like this. Clearly, this is what we were paid tofind, with the idea that our footage will have the same effect on viewers.

One dawn, Mathieu, Farid and I decide to hike up to the old city wall for a panoramic view. Mathieu has theconstant, almost visceral craving for high, unobstructed wide shots that is common among good cameramen.To get to the crumbling ruin, we walk through a shantytown of mud brick houses. Several boys run out toaccompany us. We climb on top of the wall, which runs precipitously down the side of the mountainous ridgethat divides the city into two lobes. The boys tell us we shouldn’t go any farther, as there is a guard whohaunts the other side of the hill, and he will be tempted to shoot at us if we continue. We are happy to stayput on the wall. From here, we can see Kabul stretching into the distance, a high flat plain ringed by baremountains. Clouds of smog and dust rise towards the harsh morning sun.

In the town of Nasri, voters wait outside a mosque. An election worker checks registration cards at the door.

Fallout

Siri decides we should go to Bamiyan, the site of a pair of giant Buddha statues that were destroyed by theTaliban in 2001. There is a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) there, a small military base run by the NewZealand army. It is an irresistible opportunity to make a favorable contrast between the multinational forcesand the Taliban.

Bamiyan is perhaps a hundred miles away, but it takes us twelve hours by van to negotiate the bumps andpotholes of Afghanistan’s country roads. Between Kabul and Bamiyan, the landscape morphs. We rise throughhigh, mountainous desert, almost totally devoid of vegetation, with giant toothy peaks looming in thedistance. We pass drought-stricken villages with plowed fields of dust. Other villages are labyrinths of mudbrick walls razed halfway to the ground. We spot an occasional Soviet tank lying destroyed beside the road, avestige of the 1980s. Sometimes their cannon barrels are burnished and shining from years of being climbedby local children, or their sides are stenciled with advertisements (“Afghan tourism organization — BamiyanHotel”). Tank treads turn up as speed bumps on village roads. Spent shells appear as eaves holding up roofs,or as the edges of packed-earth porches.

We drive past healthier-looking villages of square adobe houses, puzzle-like assemblies of clay cubes nestledat the bottom of ridges. Children steer herds of goat and sheep, waving as we drive by. It is impossible to tellhow old the houses are. Everything is made of baked, dust-covered earth. A ruined village: Was it left manydecades ago to fall into disrepair? Or was it reduced to rubble in the civil war of the 1990s?

Thick clouds of powdery dust rise around us everywhere as we drive, entering the less-than-hermetically-sealed Super Extra. Soon all of us and our gear are the same color as the landscape. We wrap bandanasaround our faces and Mathieu wraps a scarf around his video camera, the source of his livelihood, andclutches it to himself. “It’s alright, baby,” he croons. “It’ll be over soon.” We reach the hotel in Bamiyan after dark, and in the morning we awake to the most inviting place we haveseen in Afghanistan so far. The valley is a lively patchwork of green and earthy fields flanked by soaringrocky cliffs. The cliffs bear scores of little alcoves, carved by Buddhist monks fifteen hundred years ago. Thisrocky honeycomb houses three giant alcoves, the larger two of which once hosted Bamiyan’s famed Buddhas.

The Taliban achieved a special level of notoriety when they destroyed Bamiyan’s two giant Buddhas in early2001. Perhaps more serious than the destruction of those ancient statues, though, were the attacks on thelocal people. In the ethnically Hazara region around Bamiyan, the rule of the Taliban, who are ethnicPashtuns, was especially harsh. To tighten control over the region, they massacred locals and destroyed theircommunities.

Looming over one end of the valley are the ancient ruins of the hill fortress Gholghola — a labyrinthine citadelthat eerily suggests Bosch’s image of the tower of Babel. In the 13th century, Genghis Khan laid siege to thisfortress city as he took control of the valley. The death in combat of one of his grandsons made him evenmore brutal than usual, and when the city fell he slaughtered all its residents and laid waste to thesurrounding valley. Only in Afghanistan, perhaps, do such tales not seem dusty and ancient. They live on intheir modern versions: Russian gunships obliterating entire villages, Taliban massacres, giant statues fallingfrom their ancient places in the cliffs — and, although I can’t tell which craters are which, U.S. bombs alsofigure in the litany of destruction. Genghis Khan’s wrath was just a signpost on a bleak road that stillstretches on.

Now that both Khan and the Taliban are gone, however, life is returning to Bamiyan. Farid, who knows thetown from earlier times, notices renewed life and activity. The central bazaar, a dirt road lined with two rowsof trees, has doubled in size over the last year. It is now the bustling center of town, with a quorum ofenthusiastic rug and trinket sellers that recalls the days, several decades past, when Afghanistan hosted moretourists than journalists. The story is perhaps not so rosy in other parts of the country, though, where thecollapse of the Taliban’s strong central rule may have been politically liberating, but has also created anatmosphere of lawlessness that does little to help the common people. But lawlessness is not our beat, whichis why we are in a place like Bamiyan.

Dragon slaying

Even in Bamiyan, times of relative peace have a military undercurrent. On a hill just opposite Gholghola is aNew Zealand military base. We spend some time following a patrol, the Super Extra falling in line with theconvoy. After recording a good amount of friendly-soldiers-interact-with-peaceful-locals footage, the Kiwistake us to the Valley of the Dragon for some heavily armed sightseeing.

According to local legend, the valley is named for a dragon that used to terrorize the villagers. A prince, witha single blow of his sword, hewed the beast into two rocky halves separated by a narrow fissure. The valleyis a wide, forbidding gorge of Martian rock and dust. At the end, the ground rises steeply to close off thebasin with a high, rocky ridge — the dragon’s carcass. To climb the precipice, we abandon our overheatingSuper Extra for military pickups, bumping and jolting as we ascend the dragon’s side. At the top, the soldierskindly set up a perimeter to guard our sightseeing. On our right lies the gigantic, empty expanse of thevalley. On the left, the ridge descends gradually to a bleak stretch of desert peppered with two shepherds anda dozen motley sheep.

On the road back to Kabul, we come across a village road crowded with people eagerly awaiting a campaignvisit from Mohaqiq, one of the major presidential candidates. In a few minutes, as if on cue, the crowd startsto clap. At the bottom of the hill appears a green sport-utility vehicle with the candidate standing in thesunroof. The SUV creeps forward, a handful of machine-gun bearing guards surrounding it. The crowd mobsthe truck. A man in sunglasses is screaming slogans into a microphone. Mathieu and I fight our way back and

forth to get different shots.

Mohaqiq eventually dismounts from his SUV and makes his way over the side of the road towards a fieldwhere his fans will convene. When we reach the edge of the road, I see the rocks are spattered with blood. Asacrificed sheep, still kicking, lies at an old man’s feet, opened at the throat, glistening red in the sun. Theman, wizened and toothy, salutes the camera, smiling as he raises his palms skyward, the knife dripping, hishands covered with blood.

After voting, two burqa-clad women return to their village.

Day of anticipation

Back in Kabul, Election Day dawns with a strange, yellow sky. There has been a dust storm during the night,and the sun is invisible behind an ochre haze. Wisps of sand swirl across the city’s eerily deserted streets.Finally the moment is here, when all hell is supposed to break lose, vindicating the months of media hype.

We drive north to visit polling places in the countryside. Next to a low-slung adobe mosque in the village ofNasri, crowds of men mill around and talk. There are no women — voting is segregated, and Nasri’s womenare casting their ballots at a polling station up the road. Two Afghan policemen sit on chairs in a field to theside, AK-47s resting across their laps. Snaking into the green-framed doorway is a line of men. At theentrance, a local man with a blue polyester U.N. vest checks registration cards and thumbs. Each voter getshis registration card punched and his thumb painted with indelible ink, which ensures that only one vote willbe cast per person. We later learn this system has been bungled in some parts of the country, leading tocharges of fraud.

The hush inside the mosque brings a sacred air to an otherwise secular ritual. Yellow plastic tape divides theroom into two voting sections. After checking in at one table (and getting his thumb painted), each man goesto another table to get his ballot — a long, green sheet of paper. The photograph of each of the 18candidates appears next to each name, accommodating the 70-odd percent of Afghans who are illiterate.

The men working the polling station have put on the slightly huffy air of the petty bureaucrat, but otherwiseare indistinguishable from the townspeople casting their votes. At the ballot table, one man in a white Afghancap dutifully folds each ballot and marks it with an official stamp before handing it to the voter, explainingwith an upraised finger that they must remember to fold it up again before emerging from the curtainedvoting booth. After ducking under the curtain for a short while, each man emerges and tucks his ballot into alarge plastic bin, which is guarded by another election worker. Through the clear plastic, we can see it slowlyfilling up with ballots.

Up the road, Siri is allowed into a women’s polling station with a small camcorder. The women all arrivedraped in burqas, but inside the polling station, they throw them back like shawls as they shuttle from thecheck-in table to the booths to the ballot box. The polling station supervisor, a woman called Najiba,interprets for Siri as she asks a pair of women what they think of their first election. “I’m happy to vote,”says one. “I hope for a peaceful country where our children can get an education.” The woman next to heradds, “We want peace and stability and a free country.”

“They are very happy,” adds Najiba in halting English, beaming. “They say, ‘We were waiting for such a day,that we can come and put [our votes] in the box.’ They look happy.”

They do look happy, and they are making our job surprisingly easy. At the other voting sites we visit —indeed, at polling stations all across the country, we later learn — the scene is peaceful, almost beatific. Weask several men for their impressions, and they reel off answers that George Bush should havemonogrammed on his suit lapels:

“Elections means selecting someone who will help the country and the poor. I have made my choice from theballot, and I hope my candidate will win.”

“It was completely confidential. Nobody checked my ballot. I voted they way I wanted to, and I’m verypleased.”

“We’re happy to have these elections after 23 years of war. We cast our ballots without being told whom tovote for, and everyone has voted according to his own choice.”

I feel like I’ve been cornered into PR heaven. Where is the bitterness? Where is the distrust? The worst wehave found is a certain resignation, born from experience, that the United States and its allies may leave andallow another civil war. But under the circumstances, such a wait-and-see attitude seems remarkably hopeful,if not idealistic.

When we return to the guesthouse, we will watch BBC and CNN on satellite TV. The international media willfocus initially on failures of the Afghan election system — ink that rubs off thumbs, voters with multipleregistrations — before noting the miraculous: no polling places have been attacked, and turnout has beenheavy, especially considering the climate of fear during the campaign.

The election seems to have been a great leap of faith on the part of the Afghans. But does it represent aturning point for their country? I wonder how much relevance a peaceful election has for a country beset bywarlords and overwhelmed with poverty and illiteracy. I suppose it is naive to be optimistic.

Cruising back to Kabul, I watch from the windows of the Super Extra. As a landscape of destroyed buildingsslides by, painted with the white checkmarks and red stripes of the de-mining crews, I quietly hopeAfghanistan’s good news will continue.

STORY INDEX

CONTRIBUTOR>

The writerAndrew Blackwell, INTHEFRAY.COM Contributor

TOPICS>

Human Rights Watch Afghanistan page, including Election JournalURL: http://www.hrw.org/doc?t=asia&c=afghan

Afghanistan country studyURL: http://countrystudies.us/afghanistan/index.htm

Taliban massacres in BamiyanURL: http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2001/02/19/afghan282.htm

United Nations Development ProgramNational Human Development Report –AfghanistanURL: http://hdr.undp.org/reports/view_reports.cfm?year=0&country=C1®ion=0&type=0&theme=0

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