Of Time and Direction

Dusty Huscher

Thirty-five years of business and daily life experiences yield innumerable lessons. Some are validated through foresight, others by mistakes. Without diminishing their importance, in my case I would categorize most as blinding glimpses of what should have been obvious.

About fifteen years ago, my West Point background led me to a more foreign experience. Many of my friends and classmates were serving in senior roles in either Iraq or Afghanistan. A vague twinge of obligation prodded me to establish community-based, secondary schools for girls in a rural province in Afghanistan. Now in our fourteenth year, we enroll 750 to 800 women and fully fund the university education of about 80 of our graduates annually. Fortuitously, I also became deeply involved in the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, established to revive Afghanistan’s artistic traditions and to rebuild Kabul’s old city using traditional architecture.

Separate from these endeavors, my time spent in the country and with Afghans triggered a curiosity about an alien culture and history that lead to the realization that certain lessons needed to be unlearned, that there are limits to what can be known. Skepticism (as opposed to cynicism) and uncertainty became a form of wisdom.

When you first arrive in Kabul ringed by chiseled mountains, or an oasis city like Herat perched at the edge of an Iranian desert, the impulse is to congratulate yourself on reaching the edge of the world. On the contrary, you have reached a center of the world.

Largely hidden and misunderstood is an Afghan heritage of extraordinary richness, an ancient culture of inspirational architecture, calligraphy, painting, and poetry, with its own sophisticated forms of laws, governance, and patronage. Dusting off the country’s cultural wealth, hidden by recent tragedies and overlooked by news reports, uncovered my own ignorance of a civilization that has flowered since ancient times as a cradle and crossroads of many peoples, religions, and empires: Greek, Persian, Turkic, Chinese, Arab, Mongol, Indian, and Russian.

Most of Central and South Asian history is neglected or slighted by western textbooks; even the importance of the Silk Route seems pedestrian when viewed from the classroom. Yet standing at the tomb of Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, surveying the Kabuli mountain vista he claimed as the most magnificent in all the world, the past is exotic and relevant. The ubiquitous pomegranate has become my analogy for Afghan history: a tough, dappled rind concealing succulent seeds.

The reflex is to think of Afghanistan as a devout Muslim country, but some of its people fiercely resisted Islamic conquest. Herat converted to Islam in the year 642 and Kabul in 870. But isolated in the center of the country, Bamiyan only converted from Buddhism and Zoroastrianism in the 18th century. Mountainous Nuristan was once called Kafiristan, meaning “Land of Unbelievers.” It only gave up its mix of animism and polytheism in 1896 at the tip of a sword. The new name, Nuristan, means “Land of the Enlightened”.

Fifteen hundred years ago, Buddhism flowered in the Bamiyan valley. It reached its apogee as a center of art and pilgrimage with the creation of the giant Buddha statues. Carved in the 6th century, the two tallest statues stood 175 feet and 115 feet high. Genghis Khan left them standing; the Taliban did not.

Traveling around Afghanistan, the flotsam of history hits with the force of revelation. Cut off from Kabul by 500 miles of mountains, Herat was originally part of the Persian Empire until overrun by Alexander the Great. Herat’s Citadel fortress was largely rebuilt in 1415 on the foundations of a fort built by Alexander the Great around 335 BC.

The city became an important oasis on the Silk Route. In the 12th century, Herat’s population exceeded that of both Paris and Rome. In 1405 Timur’s son moved the empire’s capital from Samarkand to Herat, sparking what is known as the Timurid Renaissance, combining both humanism and Islam. Shah Rukh and his extraordinary wife were collectors of poets, painters, calligraphers, scientists and philosophers. The city became one of the great centers of medieval Islamic culture and learning. When Babur visited early in 1506, it was the most civilized city in the Islamic world, and he joked that you only had to stretch your leg to kick a poet.

Most moving are the minarets of the Musalla Complex, which date from around 1500. Originally, a forest of over twenty minarets were joined by walls or arches to form part of a complex of buildings. Now a road bisects the minarets, the vibrations of heavy trucks shaking their fragile foundations. Their history is a wretched story. For four centuries the towers survived, dilapidated but intact. Then engineers of the British-Indian army advising the King and fearful of a Russian advance on India, blew up all but nine in 1855 to create an open field of fire – the Russians never came. Of the nine that lasted into the 20th century, two were lost to an earthquake in 1931. Another fell in 1951, and in 1979 Soviet gunfire reduced another to a stump.

Today, they lean at various angles braced by steel cables, their bases twisted and eaten away. Once gleaming blue with mosaics, they are now the color of earth, and lean like drunken companions, chipped and torn by bullets, shaken by artillery. At their feet lies the heart-breaking debris of turquoise, white and lapis-colored flakes reminiscent of glittering tears.

Up near the Uzbeki border lies the ancient town of Balkh. Some consider Balkh the oldest city in the world, and certain Islamic traditions contend Balkh was founded by Noah after the Flood. However, it is better recognized as the birthplace in the 6th century of Zoroaster, the founder of Persia’s ancient pre-Islamic faith and thought by some to be the first monotheistic religion. After crushing Persia, Alexander the Great turned Balkh into his Eastern capital, renaming it Bactria, and married the daughter of the local chief. It grew to be a major trading center on the Silk Route.

The remains of Balkh’s Citadel sit on a gaunt hill bleached by the sun. In the 13th century, Genghis Khan invaded with a hundred thousand horsemen. He devastated an Islamic cosmopolitan city rich in Zoroastrian and Buddhist temples, even a Nestorian Christian cathedral. The city never recovered its former glory.

What Helmand Province is to opium poppies, Balkh province is to cannabis. A local, pre-Islamic holy man is credited with being the first to refine hashish. Locals still visit his tomb as a shrine.

The nearby pilgrimage city of Mazar-e-Sharif was a nondescript village until the 12th century when there arose a rumor that Ali, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, was buried nearby. Miraculously, Ali appeared to a local mullah in a dream and confirmed the report. Supposedly the grave was found and a shrine was erected over it in 1136, which Genghis Khan destroyed, but which was later rebuilt by the Timurids. Most scholars are certain Ali is buried in the Iranian holy city of Najaf. But, of course, as are those that hold Christian relics, shrines are profitable tourist destinations, and so local belief has reason to live on.

To get out of Kabul for a day, I often visit the Panjshir Valley driven by Zia. Born in the Panjshir, he is one eight brothers and seven sisters. The road proceeds up the valley which gradually widens and is marked by irrigated fields of wheat and corn, dotted with villages, and groves of walnuts and mulberries. The sky, an adventure all to itself, is filled with the clamor of magpies and kestrels.

In the 1980s the Panjshir became a symbol of resistance to the Soviets, the unconquerable holdout of the mujahedin leader and poet Shah Massoud. Having fought for over 20 years, Massoud was killed by Al-Qaeda two days before the 9/11 attacks as a favor to the Taliban. A newly built shrine holds his grave. Corroding Russian tanks stand in testimony throughout the valley, simultaneously serving as jungle gyms for local children.

Often we come upon a game of buzkashi, Afghanistan’s national sport. It is frequently compared to polo. Both games are played on horseback, but rather than using mallets and a ball, buzkashi is played with a headless goat, the aim being to deposit the carcass in a goal. The game was imported by nomadic Turkic tribes moving westward from China and Mongolia beginning in the 10th century. The Taliban banned the game, considering it immoral, but matches resumed upon their ouster. It is a thrilling display of acrobatic horsemanship.

History is everywhere, its remnants faintly stitched throughout the fabric of daily life.

Turquoise Mountain’s Institute aspires to remind Afghans of their distinctive traditions and spotlight them beyond the country’s borders. I am particularly fond of the calligraphers and miniature painters. The meticulous process of calligraphy etches the verse on the mind. Its swirling patterns and graceful shapes can even be appreciated by the illiterate who, having memorized ghazals (lyric poems) or portions of the Qur’an, only need to decipher a word or two to recall the complete verse. The splendor of the form is integral to the power of the text, just as the handwritten love letter is superior to a typed version. Watching the calligraphers, I often feel a secret shame at my own contorted handwriting. Our mass-produced images and increasing reliance on the Internet as a substitute for human memory both have become symbols of negligence toward our own language and culture.

In 1959, Afghan women were no longer required to wear the chador in public, and fashions were changing. A 1960s Life magazine article pictured the Afghan queen in a mid-length skirt suit paired with high heels; another of young women in European dress attending school. Afghan women were on the move. Large numbers of girls began to attend university and enter the work force. This was especially true when once the government was controlled by the Afghan communist party, which aggressively promoted the rights of women. These were golden years as both the Soviets and Americans provided development money in an attempt to curry favor. The country was a stop on the “hippie trail,” prized for its lambskin coats and cheap hashish. Then civil war and the years under the Taliban set back the cause of women, human dignity, and economic progress.

Our country’s involvement in Afghanistan has been a genuine American mixture of admirable goodwill and sacrifice laced with self-interest and arrogance. After two decades of enormous international aid, more Afghans now live in poverty than in the aftermath of the Taliban’s fall. Not to mention, little progress has been made toward a multi-ethnic, gender-neutral, democratic, accountable government or functioning justice system.

Afghanistan’s decline from past glories and more recent reversals make me wonder about the complacency of our culture and the assumption that history moves in only one direction. The notion is artfully expressed in a passage from the novel The Siege of Krishnapur: “We look on past ages with condescension, as mere preparations for us … but what if we’re only an after-glow of them.”

It is not just Afghanistan. In the 18th century Mughal India overtook China as the richest country in the world, accounting for over 40% of global GDP and endowed with a rich cultural and intellectual heritage. Britain at the time contributed 3%. The region of Bengal was to the 18th century what Manchester was to the 19th. The Mughals thrived for over three hundred years before being overthrown by a private company, no less.

The Sassanids, more cultured and sophisticated than the Greeks, lasted four hundred years; the Ottomans six hundred. The Abbasid Caliphate, which launched the Graeco-Arabic translation movement that preserved western classical learning, crumbled after over seven hundred years. The Byzantine and Holy Roman Empires each lasted about a thousand years.

The western world’s progress was knocked back centuries during the Dark Ages. The period of intense intellectual, social, creative, and technological growth that was the Renaissance was spurred in part by the rediscovery of classical scientific, medical, and philosophical texts which had been lost to western Europe, particularly Greek ones translated and kept alive by Muslim scholars.

In our country, continual progress is the assumption. Odd that a precise word for its opposite is so elusive. Decline, decrease, deterioration do not seem to capture the sustained transformation that progress implies. Maybe retrogression? But how often does one hear it used?

Time doesn’t fly forward, it merely elapses.
At my bedside for many years has been a copy of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. The poem is ever relevant:

It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence –
Or even the development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.

Both the Army and, to a lesser degree, business school instilled the notion that problems have solutions. Moreover, that a leader’s obligation is to have the answers, decisiveness, and conviction being essential to a strong leadership profile. Thanks to Afghanistan, this is a lesson I have unlearned. As my friend, the Scottish writer-politician Rory Stewart likes to say, “you can’t have a moral obligation to do something that you are incapable of.”

I am frequently asked about Afghanistan. Is it safe? What should be U.S. policy? Will the Taliban return to power? Years ago, I felt obligated to say something informed and illuminating. Now I say, “I don’t know.” I have been exposed to the culture but I am not of the culture. It is nearly impossible to underestimate hatred or history or the complexity of alien places or the unfamiliar. I have no certain answers to questions about the future and few about the present. Often there is no answer, sometimes it exceeds my grasp. It took this journey to a distant place to acknowledge what I don’t know. Isn’t that a form of wisdom?

Once again, Eliot:

And what you do not know is the only thing you know.

The news on Afghanistan mainly consists of tragedies. But when I visit, I witness optimism, not just despair. In Islam, I am told it is an actual sin to give up hope. Though they have never fully embraced the nation state, Afghans are committed to making their communities better. History influences the future but it does not determine it. In that I see hope.

My comments are not meant to be a history lesson or travelogue, more an affirmation of curiosity that experiences can unexpectedly set in motion. I find the country mesmeric, am drawn in by its history and its untamed, feral way of life. Nevertheless, I try to see Afghans as they are, not how I would like them to be. Afghans can be mercurial, cruel, puritanical, and insular. At the same time, they are gracious hosts, endearing, ingenious, and hard-working. In other words, they are intensely human, living in a country that is unspeakably poor yet with a history and culture that is incalculably rich.