Imagining Afghanistan

Global Fiction and Film of the 9/11 Wars

Alla Ivanchikova

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781557538468
• eBook ISBN: 9781612495804
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism

Imagining Afghanistan examines how Afghanistan has been imagined in literary and visual texts that were published after the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent U.S.-led invasion—the era that propelled Afghanistan into the center of global media visibility. Through an analysis of fiction, graphic novels, memoirs, drama, and film, the book demonstrates that writing and screening "Afghanistan" has become a conduit for understanding our shared post-9/11 condition. "Afghanistan" serves as a lens through which contemporary cultural producers contend with the moral ambiguities of twenty-first-century humanitarianism, interpret the legacy of the Cold War, debate the role of the U.S. in the rise of transnational terror, and grapple with the long-term impact of war on both human and nonhuman ecologies.

Post-9/11 global Afghanistan literary production remains largely NATO-centric insofar as it is marked by an uncritical investment in humanitarianism as an approach to Third World suffering and in anti-communism as an unquestioned premise. The book's first half exposes how persisting anti-socialist biases—including anti-statist bias—not only shaped recent literary and visual texts on Afghanistan, resulting in a distorted portrayal of its tragic history, but also informed these texts' reception by critics. In the book's second half, the author examines cultural texts that challenge this limited horizon and forge alternative ways of representing traumatic histories. Captured by the author through the concepts of deep time, nonhuman witness, and war as a multispecies ecology, these new aesthetics bring readers a sophisticated portrait of Afghanistan as a rich multispecies habitat affected in dramatic ways by decades of war but not annihilated.

1

Humanitarian Sublime and the Politics of Pity: Writing and Screening “Afghanistan” Circa 2001

On March 5, 2016, Tina Fey’s blockbuster Whiskey Tango Foxtrot—a film described by a New York Times reviewer as “Live from Kabul, It’s a Feminist Comedy”¹—premiered in US theaters. The film revealed, among other things, that during the fifteen years after the start of the US-led intervention in Afghanistan, the global West and its pundits have learned something important, although what that is may not be easy to pinpoint. For instance, Fey’s film followed none of the conventions that structured representations of Afghanistan in the cultural texts that emerged in the early days of Operation Enduring Freedom, around 2001–2002. Instead of drawing attention to the cultural, religious, and moral difference (and inferiority) of the Afghan “other,” as compared to the deeply sympathetic, ethical, selfless humanitarians or saviors from the West (a frequent trope in the early works), Fey’s film accomplished a 180-degree reversal, subjecting the international community in post-9/11 Kabul to a scrutiny worthy of a trained cultural anthropologist. These substance-abusing, death-drive-obsessed, transnational humanitarian workers are an oddity observed and studied, akin to zoo animals, by the curious and cross-culturally competent Afghan residents of Kabul. The expats, in the film, represent a distinct breed of rather unscrupulous thrill-addicts who seek personal and career advancement as they gather in reconstruction-era Kabul—deemed “Kabubble” in the film to underscore the community’s solipsism and vanity. In this savvy rendition, the Afghans are situated as the subjects rather than the objects of the gaze, marveling at, and judging in various ways, members of this humanitarian cohort, as well as lusting after them, flirting with them, manipulating them, educating them, and protecting them from various dangers.²

The film comes on the heels of several other cultural texts that describe the humanitarian cohort that flocked to Afghanistan in the aftermath of the US-led invasion and sought to take advantage of the billions of dollars in reconstruction money pledged by the international community. The most notable of them include French illustrator Nicolas Wild’s Kabul Disco graphic novel series (2009–2013)—a humorous portrayal of a cross-culturally incompetent graphic designer’s (presumably, the author) residency in Kabul. In similar vein, Kim Barker’s memoir The Taliban Shuffle (2011), which served as an inspiration for Fey’s film, uses comedy to portray her misadventures in the Afghan capital as she navigates her first assignment as a foreign correspondent. These self-deprecating texts deploy humor, rather than humanitarian imagery, to portray life in Kabul, and refuse to take their narrators’ work too seriously—the designer in Wild’s series, for instance, is not very successful, either in France or in Afghanistan. When compared to their agile, multilingual Afghan guides and fixers, members of the international cohort in these texts seem ill-adapted, lacking in skill as well as in purpose, skeptical about their role in Afghanistan but not having much going on back in their austerity-stricken home countries either. These narratives portray “Kabubble” as a theater of the absurd, where self-professed humanitarians from the global North congregate in temporary walled-off communities to compete for a piece of the pie in the transnational job market (that now includes Afghanistan). These texts thus are reflective of the later stages of the US-led war in Afghanistan; they mine the disparity between the rhetoric of humanitarianism (such as the perceived need to save Afghan women) and the harsh realities of neoliberalism that prompt Western professionals’ flight to a war zone in search for job opportunities.

It is from this perspective that I will revisit, in this chapter, the early days of the War on Terror and cultural texts that emerged around 2001–2002. Quite consistently, with some variation across genres, in these early representations, Kabul figures as a humanitarian disaster: a nonspecific zone of suffering that requires an intervention from the West—a landscape of suffering so extreme that it becomes sublime. Understanding these early texts’ deep investment in unequivocally benevolent humanitarianism as a mode of global engagement as well as as a mode of writing and screening traumatic histories will allow us to trace a trajectory of the global West’s learning, disillusionment, and self-critique from 2001 through the second decade of the 9/11 wars.

The Onset: Operation Enduring Freedom

Corinne Fowler calls the time following the start of Operation Enduring Freedom in the fall of 2001 the period of a “scramble for knowledge on Afghanistan” pointing to the lack of public knowledge about the distant country with which the West was now at war (23). This chapter deals with the cultural texts that, while written and produced just prior to 9/11, were destined to fill the void of knowledge about Afghanistan—a country that was suddenly propelled into media hypervisibility on a global scale. While mass media offered gripping, albeit decontextualized images—of the Taliban, of ruined buildings in Kabul, of burqa-clad women, and of orphaned Afghan children begging in the streets—available literary and cinematic texts were called upon to perform a much finer task: to educate the Western audience about the country’s recent history, thus making the images circulated by mass media legible. However, there was little cultural material of this sort available. Since the withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan in 1989, and with the subsequent collapse of the Afghan state and the civil war that led to the rise of the Taliban in 1996, Afghanistan was a dark void, entirely outside of global attention. Feminist playwright Eve Ensler, who traveled to Afghanistan in 1999, tried to start public discussion of Afghan women’s plight, but her efforts were stymied by the lack of public curiosity: “With the exception of one magazine, Marie Claire, I could not engender any interest in the story,” Ensler complained later (36). The events of September 2001 changed everything.

Just after the attacks on the Twin Towers, two works about Afghanistan were available and thus in great demand—the film Kandahar by Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Tony Kushner’s play Homebody/Kabul. Kandahar was produced in 2001 and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2001. It did not receive much attention prior to 9/11; subsequently, however, this minor flick became a runaway hit. In December 2001, a New York Times reviewer stated that Kandahar “may be the only film whose name gets more mentions than Harry Potter on CNN.”³ It was listed in Time magazine as one of 100 all-time movies.⁴ Kushner’s play Homebody/Kabul has a similar history. While it was written over the course of a few years (1997–2001), it premiered in New York on December 19, 2001, ten weeks after the start of the US-led military operation in Afghanistan, and in the words of one critic, “generated enormous publicity for its political topicality and the playwright’s uncanny ability to anticipate history.”⁵ It was published as a book in 2002. Post-9/11, Kandahar and Homebody/Kabul often appeared side-by-side. In 2003, for instance, Seattle’s Intiman Theater hosted a screening of Kandahar after staging Kushner’s play.⁶ Both texts thus greatly benefited from a certain kairos—a fortuitous moment of media frenzy and public curiosity sparked by a distant war. That fall, phrases such as “the battle for Kandahar” (the Taliban’s stronghold) and “the fall of Kabul” were on everyone’s minds. The third cultural text I engage with in this chapter—Yasmina Khadra’s The Swallows of Kabul—was released in 2002 in French with the explicit aim of familiarizing the Western audience with the tragedy of Afghanistan. The author of the novel—a former Algerian army officer named Mohammed Moulessehoul, took a female pen name, allegedly to avoid censorship by the army. He says, in relation to The Swallows: “I wanted to bring a new look from a Muslim on the tragedy of Afghanistan, and to bring to it a western perspective at the same time—I have written a western tragedy, but also a book that is filled with eastern storytelling.”⁷

In line with the title of this book, the makers of these cultural texts engage in the act of imagining Afghanistan from their particular geo-cultural perspectives. All three texts were produced in the era of Afghanistan’s relative inaccessibility to foreigners. Kandahar was shot in its entirety outside of Afghanistan, in Iran along the Iran-Afghanistan border. Neither Kushner nor Moulessehoul (a.k.a. Khadra) traveled to Afghanistan, and thus had to defend their credibility by engaging with this question when talking to journalists: “I have never been to Afghanistan but I met a lot of journalists who worked there who told me that they read the book and said, ‘I see these incidents all the time, but I never noted them,’” said Moulessehoul.⁸ In turn, Kushner defended his credibility with “it’s not the easiest place to get to, after all”⁹ and “there was no need for me to be in the middle of a war.”¹⁰ Positioned not only as outsiders, but entirely outside the country they attempt to portray, these authors thus rely less on observation and experience than on conventions guiding representation of zones of conflict and humanitarian crisis. Specifically, they draw upon the legacy of human rights literature—a body of works that emerged in the 1990s and relied heavily on empathy—a sentimental mode of reading that depends on the reader’s imaginary identification with the suffering other.¹¹ Aware of their role as readers’ guides into unknown cultural territory, Kandahar, The Swallows of Kabul, and Homebody/Kabul deploy powerful, often hyperbolic images of distant suffering focusing on the long-lasting humanitarian crisis that preceded the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. These stories functioned, in a way, as a prequel to the liberation narrative associated with the invasion. Specifically, all three texts expose the stark poverty of 1990s Afghanistan, the plight of women, and human rights violations under Taliban rule. As such, these texts were promptly conscripted into the post-9/11 media ecology that centered on framing and justifying the US invasion of Afghanistan as a humanitarian effort. The narrative scaffolding of these three works relies on the trope of rescue—specifically, a rescue of a woman from the grips of death for which the Taliban regime is held responsible.

All three texts are NATO-centric: although Makhmalbaf, the director of Kandahar, is Iranian, Nelofer Pazira, who plays the lead role in Kandahar and on whose story the plot of the film is based, is an Afghan Canadian. In addition, as film scholar Mark Graham explains, Iranian cinema is produced for global consumption, which results in “a careful tailoring of stories and images to appeal to Western audiences’ preconceived notions” (65). Such films’ destination—the Western film festival circuit—means that “[a]ny politically sensitive issues that might offend Western viewers tend to be carefully excised in the cause of higher profit and greater distribution” (65).¹² Khadra is of Algerian origin; however, he resides in France and his audience for this novel was unmistakably European.¹³ Kushner is an American playwright who during the 1980s supported Reagan’s anti-communist intervention in Afghanistan.¹⁴ Taken together, these three cultural texts became part of the moral assemblage that provided a context for, justified, and made legible the US-led coalition’s operation in Afghanistan as an ethically necessary humanitarian endeavor—and more specifically, a mission to rescue Afghan women from the grips of an intolerable life under a repressive regime. Or as Laura Bush said, famously, “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.”¹⁵

The ways in which women’s rights were co-opted by the George W. Bush administration to justify the invasion of Afghanistan have been well documented by feminist critics and I will not reiterate these critiques here.¹⁶ Instead, I will bring into the foreground what remains rather hidden in these timely and insightful critiques. Taking as a point of departure Didier Fassin’s critique of humanitarian reason, I posit the three texts discussed in this chapter as acts of deployment of a humanitarian imaginary—a repertoire of images and tropes that came to define the way in which we were (and still are) invited to imagine global engagement in the aftermath of the Cold War’s end. It is critical, in my view, to understand the humanitarian imaginary as a symptom and as a symbol of what Enzo Traverso calls “Left melancholia”—a sense of hopelessness and unlocalizable despair that accompanied the demise of the socialist world, experienced even by those who generally supported this demise. The focus on Afghanistan—a country that is universally referred to as “third world,” but that was in fact, during its key era, a part of the second (socialist) world, provides us with a lens with which to sharpen, through localizing, our understanding of the logic and limitations of the humanitarian (or human rights) narrative as well as its imbrications with post-Cold War impasses.

I propose the term “humanitarian sublime” to designate the specific mode of representation all three texts employ. Humanitarian sublime is an act of freezing an image of suffering by removing it from the historical process that brought it on. Subtracting history from the scene sediments a timeless figure of despair that then depends on a hyperbolic mode of representation to have effect. While Kandahar and The Swallows of Kabul demonstrate a wholehearted investment in the conventions of the humanitarian narrative, creating a moral universe where the reader/viewer is invited to feel compassion toward the suffering other and outrage at the perpetrators of violence, Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul problematizes humanitarian sentiments and offers a critique of humanitarianism as a mode of relating to distant tragedy. Yet, while exposing and critiquing the limits of “the pedagogy of pity”¹⁷ that is a hallmark of the post-Cold War liberal empathy project, Kushner’s play remains trapped inside the humanitarian imaginary, unwittingly reenacting the tropes of humanitarianism. His text can be said to suffer from a humanitarian unconscious and thus performs the same role as the other two—creating a victim and an object of humanitarian intervention. As such, all three texts illustrate the particular impasses of the post-Cold War cultural obsessions with human rights—they bring into visibility the suffering of distant others without being able to name its causes or point to solutions. They suffer paradoxical amnesias and aphasias when engaging Afghan socialist histories and thus prefer to bracket them out. They do not yet have a language in which to talk about the US role in creating the conditions in which forces such as the Taliban were able to thrive. In sum, they already are in the double-bind, or the Faustian bargain, that will become most vivid in the works of best-selling Afghan American physician-turned-writer Khaled Hosseini, which I analyze in chapter two.

Humanitarian Narrative

Operation Enduring Freedom officially began on October 7, 2001; positioned more broadly as the global War on Terror, it started as a US-led military operation to invade Afghanistan with the purpose of removing the Taliban regime, striking at the territorial base of the Al-Qaeda network, and installing a US-friendly client democracy. The invasion of Afghanistan was presented by the US government as a humanitarian act—a concerted effort to free Afghan people from the suffering and oppression they endured under the Taliban rule. This “humanitarian” war was to become a model for the many invasions and interventions of the subsequent two decades, in which military aims were made indistinguishable from humanitarian aims. Indisputably, humanitarian images disseminated in fiction and film proved useful as they played a key role in legitimizing such efforts.

As Joseph R. Slaughter points out in Human Rights, Inc., the very act of reading a human rights novel can be construed as a kind of a humanitarian intervention in itself, preempting and foreshadowing a fair international order “still to come” by recognizing the rights and dignity of the characters who endure suffering (33–34). The decade preceding the 9/11 attacks can be dubbed the era of human rights (and the high point for the human rights novel) insofar as it saw a proliferation of stories that made distant suffering their central focus. Didier Fassin describes the period spanning from mid-1990s to mid-2000s as “the humanitarian moment in contemporary history” (13). It is not coincidental that human rights discourse gained traction as a moral framework in the wake of the collapse of the communist bloc. “Human rights finally triumphed in 1989,” states Costas Douzinas in his critical account of what he calls “human rights imperialism” (32). Fraught with contradictions, the humanitarian imaginary as it manifests today is a distinctly post-Cold War phenomenon, ripening in the era characterized by disillusionment and the waning of equality-based projects spearheaded by socialism.¹⁸ It is noteworthy that Richard Rorty’s influential essay in praise of empathy (as a preferred mode of relating to the “other”) was published in 1993—two years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the same year as Samuel Huntington’s provocative and widely cited “The Clash of Civilizations”—an essay that foretells the coming of the era of inter-civilizational wars—was published in Foreign Affairs. There is a connection there, as well as a link to Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 thesis about the end of history: The clash of civilizations produces suffering, but because history has ended, there is nothing that can be done about it, aside from the more fortunate ones offering humanitarian aid to (and empathizing with) the victims of suffering. After the end of history, transnational empathy replaces comradeship—a relation of solidarity in the common struggle. In the ideological vacuum spurred by the breakdown of the USSR (which Odd Arne Westad calls the “empire of j...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Global Afghanistan
• 1. Humanitarian Sublime and the Politics of Pity: Writing and Screening “Afghanistan” Circa 2001
• 2. Imagining the Soviets: The Faustian Bargain of Khaled Hosseini’s Kabul “Trilogy”
• 3. Humanitarian Jihad: Unearthing the Contemporary in the Narratives of the Long 1979
• 4. Witness: Modes of Writing the Disaster
• 5. The Deep Time of War: Nadeem Aslam and the Aesthetics of the Geologic Turn
• 6. The Kabubble: The Humanitarian Community Under Scrutiny
• Conclusion: The End of an Era
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author