Excerpts:
“I used to argue with the young men that they should finish school before they went off to fight, but they said, ‘Oh no, I’m going to the jihad!’ So now these young men, who should be at the peak of their productive abilities, don’t have the mental skills or the emotional skills to deal with ordinary, day-to-day life.” However, she remains optimistic because of the attitude of young Afghans, who she says are determined to make something of their lives and their country: “I find their honesty very appealing. I don’t like what’s happening in the politics here, but the young people give me hope. They don’t have much money because there aren’t many jobs, but they will spend what little they have to go take an IT course, or go take a business course, or do something. They haven’t given up.”
===
The Defender of Kabul: A librarian’s labour of love for Afghanistan
By Jon Boone
Published: February 14 2009 00:30 | Last updated: February 14 2009 00:30
In
the 1960s, when the historian and writer Nancy Hatch Dupree first
travelled from the US to Afghanistan during the country’s brief
flowering of social liberalism, Kabul was known as the Paris of the
East and visitors could travel freely. Girls in miniskirts made their
way to school, people left the city at the weekend to stay at ski
lodges, and the equestrian set amused themselves with dressage
competitions. Some 40 years later, Dupree and I meet on a gloomy autumn
evening in a once-grand manse in central Kabul. The neighbourhood is
smart, in spite of the broken roads and dilapidated buildings beginning
to give way to a rash of garish concrete mansions, built on the spoils
of the opium trade. The manse serves as a guesthouse for the young
people who work for Acted, a French aid agency. Dupree, who at 82 is
stooped but sprightly, says she spends time among the young aid workers
because they remind her of how things used to be.
“Everyone says you can’t move, you can’t travel, it’s too dangerous,” she says. “But here it’s like the old days. Acted people pop in and out and say, ‘Well, I’m off to Pul-i-Khumri, see you in a few days.’” Despite the tense, watchful security guard at the front door, who double-checks my credentials when I knock, and despite the high walls and the razor wire that hem in Kabul’s expats, there is at least a semblance of normality in the guesthouse. The sound of a drinks party and barbecue is just audible from the garden.
The party outside offers a faint, receding echo of the place Dupree found on her arrival, and where she discovered the two great loves of her life: a spectacular landscape, rich in the ruins of civilisations from Zoroaster to Alexander the Great, and her late husband Louis, an American paratrooper-turned-archaeologist and the greatest western expert on Afghanistan of his generation.
But there is no denying how far Afghanistan is from any sort of return to the “good old days”. Ziggy Garewal, the country director of Acted, puts her head round the door of the lounge to check whether her famous house guest needs a cup of tea. Overhearing Dupree’s remarks, she politely demurs. “We do travel,” she says, “except it’s more expensive now because we have to fly everywhere, rather than going by road.”
“Do you?” Dupree says, in a tone of surprise bordering on wonderment.
“Since the IRC incident – no expats by road,” says Garewal, referring to the murder in August 2008 of three foreign women working for the International Rescue Committee, a US charity, who were travelling by road close to the capital. “We can’t fly to Pul-i-Khumri, so we just don’t do it. Taloqan we can fly to, because there’s an airstrip. It’s fine for one or two of us to go, but not for 20 of us to go up and down.”
In the summer months, insurgents twice launched roadside bomb attacks on NGO vehicles in the mountainous central province of Bamyan, a destination that was regarded until then as an oasis of calm and a good place for foreigners, cooped up most of the time in their embassies and compounds, to take weekend breaks. “They’re coming after us, we’re a soft target,” continues Garewal. “We have 700 staff out in the field – the sheer number of people at risk, with so many moving around all the time.”
Dupree looks momentarily crestfallen. But then she perks up, dismissing the present jitters as only someone who has seen Afghanistan in its very darkest days can. “This is new and it probably won’t last,” she declares.
. . .
The street children in Kabul still hawk original, 1970 editions of Dupree’s most famous book, An Historical Guide to Afghanistan, which she wrote for the Afghan Tourist Organisation. In his 2001 play Homebody/Kabul, US playwright Tony Kushner uses great chunks of Dupree’s prose from an earlier work, An Historical Guide to Kabul, for the monologues of his main character, a woman dreaming of Afghanistan.
“Alexander the Great summoned to the Kabul valley a mighty army comprising tens of thousands of soldiers … ” Dupree writes and Kushner quotes “ … from Egypt, Persia and Central Asia and went on to conquer India. When Alexander’s own troops grew weary of battle, in 325BC, they forced their commander to desist from further conflict. Alexander died in 323BC, just as he was planning a return to the Hindu Kush to oversee the Grecianisation of this most remarkable land.”
Although Dupree never got to see a live production of the play, on a cold winter’s day in Kabul, she wears a Homebody T-shirt under her clothes. Her books all highlight how far and tragically the country has fallen. Most of An Historical Guide to Afghanistan is entirely irrelevant to the handful of modern travellers increasingly confined to the largely safe districts of the capital. Only the clinically insane would contemplate following her recommendation of a “leisurely walking tour of the bazaars” of Kandahar, the southern city whose prison used to hold hundreds of Taliban insurgents, until they were freed in a spectacular jail break last summer. Even Kabul is barely recognisable from her descriptions.
Not even the two giant Buddhas of Bamyan have escaped the ravages. Dupree first visited the magical mountain valley and the monumental statues soon after her arrival in the country with her first husband, a US diplomat. It was the sight of the buddhas – built in the sixth century AD, and blown to smithereens by the Taliban in March 2001 – that transformed her from diplomatic wife into one of the world’s foremost scholars on Afghanistan. It also led to what she calls the “great scandal” of her divorce and remarriage to Louis Dupree.
She knew something of the dramatic valley from a handful of classes she had taken at Columbia University as part of a Chinese degree. She was enlisted as “trip historian” for the US ambassador’s first visit to the Bamyan valley in the early 1960s. At a diplomatic cocktail party shortly after her return to Kabul, she berated the head of the Afghan Tourist Organisation for the lack of any guides to one of the wonders of the world. He replied that she should write a guide herself. A French diplomat who overheard the challenge taunted Dupree, saying she had better take the project on “unless you enjoy playing bridge and ladies’ coffee mornings”.
Already fearful of being underemployed in Kabul, her work on the book led to her first meeting with Louis, whom she approached for information about Bamyan’s prehistory. But when she submitted her manuscript to “the great professor”, his initial, scribbled verdict was that her work was “adequate but nothing original”.
It was an unpromising start to what would turn into the great intellectual companionship they would ultimately share, which Louis would describe as his attempt to “understand Afghanistan one cell up, from prehistoric to modern”. He was well placed to do that, running archaeological digs in the countryside for part of the year and spending the rest of the time writing reports on anything he chose, including contemporary politics, for the American Field Service.
Two years after that first meeting, Nancy Hatch divorced her diplomat husband who, in turn, went on to remarry Louis’s first wife. Aware that this could cause embarrassment in the small world of Kabul expat society, she wrote to the US ambassador to inform him of their plans.
“His solution was to throw a huge party for us when we returned so that we could get it all out in the open,” she says. Nancy and Louis married on a winter’s day in 1966 in a shrine on the western outskirts of the city (which both had lobbied to save from demolition) with a top Islamic scholar officiating – “a maulana”, she explains, “much higher up than a mullah”.
. . .
For almost 20 years, Afghanistan became the Duprees’ adopted country, and they lived through all the successive tragedies that befell it: Soviet occupation, civil war and the brutal Taliban regime that would eventually declare war on the pre-Islamic antiquities of Afghanistan that the couple loved. Most recently, Dupree has watched at close quarters the spectacular failure of the post-2001 international effort to put Afghanistan back on its feet, with billions of dollars that she believes have been wasted on “massive projects with no follow-up”.
Her unrivalled knowledge of Afghanistan has been sought by everyone from the United Nations, which commissioned her to investigate the cultural damage inflicted on the country, to Osama bin Laden, who once approached her for help in acquiring import certificates to bring heavy digging equipment from Pakistan. He was “very shy and polite”, she recalls, but she was puzzled why he thought she could help with such “outlandish requests”.
Louis’s failing health eventually prompted the couple to return to the US, where Louis “had the bad grace to die” in March 1989. But after a few months as a lecturer at Duke University, where Dupree had taken over her husband’s courses, she felt the pull of Afghanistan once again. “For the rest of the school year I was so busy preparing lectures that it wasn’t until the classes finished that I realised what had happened. I went into a big depression. But then, Acbar [an NGO umbrella group, then based in Peshawar in Pakistan] called and said, ‘We bought Louis’s big idea but it’s not working, so you come here and put yourself where his big mouth is.’ ”
Louis’s “big idea” was to preserve the knowledge accumulated by the many anthropologists, aid workers and experts who have been coming to Afghanistan since the 1960s, generating huge numbers of surveys, reports and project proposals. The vast collection not only chronicles 40 years of development efforts, but also stands as a memorial to Louis, the former soldier who took advantage of America’s GI Bill to go to Harvard and turned himself into an expert in the prehistoric archaeology of central Asia.
For years, the Duprees housed their archive in Peshawar, which straddles one of the main routes into Afghanistan from the east. The couple had retreated there temporarily in 1978, when they were thrown out of Afghanistan after Louis was accused of spying. It’s a charge Dupree totally denies, but following Louis’s death, US Senator Gordon Humphrey is reported to have confirmed that Louis had indeed consulted for the CIA.
The Duprees’ exile marked the end of a halcyon period during which the couple’s home in Quola Pushta – a central Kabul neighbourhood which she says was a bit “fringe” compared to where the rest of the foreign community lived – became the centre of Kabul’s social life. Its doors were permanently open to top Afghans and foreign diplomats for what became known as “the five o’clock follies” – a daily bar to which all were invited. But disaster was looming. Fifty years of stable monarchy, during which Afghanistan had prospered by successfully navigating a path between rival cold war blocs, came to an end in 1973 when the king’s brother-in-law seized power and declared himself president. The socialist government of Mohammed Daoud Khan pursued modernisation policies, including a push for women’s rights, threatening the traditional lifestyle of the religiously conservative countryside. Meanwhile, Kabul University student politics laid the seeds for future disaster with clashes between communists and Islamists, who would later emerge as the mujahideen. Another coup in 1978 brought in a more hardline, communist regime and interference in Afghanistan’s affairs by Moscow and Washington only increased.
Dupree recalls how modern ideas had seeped into Afghanistan, largely from a fast-rising and dissatisfied middle class that had been sent overseas to acquire the skills needed for the government’s modernisation programmes, but had also picked up ideas about democracy.
“Sure, in the 1960s and 1970s we had a great time here and we loved it and we thought that this was the Paris of the East,” says Dupree. “But Louis wasn’t connected with any official office here, so he was quite independent in making his acquaintances and he knew that [while] it was all beautiful on the surface, there was this terrible spy network underneath. When he was arrested they interrogated him all night and all day in three different languages, trying to trip him up. It was obvious that they had had a mole in those five o’clock follies.”
The couple were finally kicked out of the country after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, 1979, and sought sanctuary in Peshawar. Millions of Afghans were to follow suit, as their country descended into nearly three decades of war. Louis semi-seriously claimed “refugee status”, and the couple took up residence in Dean’s Hotel – the hang-out of spies and journalists during the city’s cold war heyday. The colonial-era building has now been pulled down to make way for the sort of concrete-and-glass monstrosities popular on both sides of the border.
Before it was demolished, Peter Jouvenal, a legendary freelance cameraman who now runs a hotel in Kabul, rescued the bronze plaque on room 22 that marked it out as the “Dupree Suite”. He says he liked spending time with the Duprees in the days of jihad because they were among the few people who cared about Afghanistan, rather than about “beating the Soviets without worrying what would happen afterwards”.
“They were very peaceful people,” recalls Jouvenal. “Louis was not interested in getting involved in mujahideen groups, despite being a former paratrooper.” But although the Pakistani government asked Louis to keep a low profile during his exile in their country, he made several forays with the mujahideen into Afghanistan. His wife never accompanied him, worried that she would slow the resistance fighters and endanger them – “just so I could say, ‘When I was with the mujahideen ... ’”
They continued their work among the world’s largest refugee population. It was here that Louis had the idea of establishing a resource centre for all the different aid workers and Afghan experts who could no longer travel freely in Afghanistan, and creating an archive of their work. Louis died just after the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan in 1989.
“Louis was in the hospital and he died soon after that and I said to him – he was still composed then – ‘Well, you’ve always said the Soviets would leave and people made fun of you, but now they’re gone and you should be pleased.’ He looked at me and said, ‘The trouble is just beginning.’” He was right; for Dupree, by far the bleakest period was after 1992, when the government of communist placeman Mohammad Najibullah finally fell and rival mujahideen factions fought for control of Kabul.
“Actually the Soviets didn’t destroy this city very much,” she says sadly. “The Afghans did it themselves, and that hurt.”
. . .
As the struggle against the Soviet army turned into a war between rival Afghan factions, the country’s cultural heritage sustained huge damage. Historic sites were pillaged and most of the collection in Kabul’s museum (for which Dupree had written a guide) was stolen and sold on the black market. Dupree managed to buy back a tiny fraction under the auspices of the Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan’s Cultural Heritage, which she founded.
With so much lost and destroyed, Dupree’s archive is not just a precious store of historical knowledge but also a personal memorial to the loves of her life. Tellingly, she refers to the collection of some 40,000 documents as part of herself, and says that it was this that kept her in Peshawar after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 evicted the Taliban regime, prompting many exiles to return. “There was this big exodus from Pakistan – all the NGOs, UN, everybody came to Kabul,” she says. “But I didn’t because I wasn’t sure it was secure and I’m very vulnerable – it’s all paper. At that point I had no scanning, no back-up. It would have only taken one daisy cutter from an American, or a match from a mullah, and I’d be finished.”
Fearing Pakistani bureaucrats would find some way to keep her precious collection in Peshawar, the archive was finally moved piecemeal in 2003, smuggled out by Dupree’s devoted staff in hidden sacks of documents amid the cargoes trundling through the Khyber Pass. A new $2m library is being built on Kabul University’s leafy campus to house it, with the money and land provided by powerful friends, some of them dating back to the 1960s and the five o’clock follies.
She hopes her collection will do something to prevent the hordes of aid workers and development experts who descended on Afghanistan after 2001 repeating old mistakes and perpetually drawing up the same tired strategies. But in the past seven years there has been a flood of reports written on Afghanistan and, she concedes, “they just write the same thing over and over again – just regurgitating it. That’s why their strategies are so humdrum. They are based on work that doesn’t have much basis in fact, or in the realities of Afghan culture, because the people don’t go out and talk to Afghans.”
And then it becomes clear that there is more to Dupree’s disappointment with today’s travel restrictions for foreigners than a simple nostalgia for those prewar, halcyon days. “I saw with my own eyes a piece of paper from one of the embassies that said, ‘If you must go out and do shopping you go in your armoured car, with your escort, with your radio. You go in the shop and you pick out what you want. Don’t talk to the shopkeeper’ – it actually said that.
“So they don’t interact with the Afghans and they sit there staring into their computers dreaming up fantasy strategies.” Too often, she says, foreigners compound this mistake by believing they can fix Afghanistan’s problems with cash. “For the US particularly, money is the remedy to everything. Throw money at it and have instant implementation of massive projects and then turn away and don’t pay any attention to the follow-up. That is not sustainable and it won’t work. But they are doing it in Pakistan now, in the Fata [Federally Administered Tribal Areas on the frontier where the Taliban and al-Qaeda leaderships are based] – and what are they doing? They are creating friction because everyone is trying to get hold of their money. But it’s hard to dissuade these people.”
. . .
Dupree has great confidence in the power of books to bring about change in Afghanistan, not just through her collection of documents, but also a village library scheme she has set up to help bolster literacy rates in a country where, like so much else, basic skills have been destroyed by three decades of war.
“I used to argue with the young men that they should finish school before they went off to fight, but they said, ‘Oh no, I’m going to the jihad!’ So now these young men, who should be at the peak of their productive abilities, don’t have the mental skills or the emotional skills to deal with ordinary, day-to-day life.”
However, she remains optimistic because of the attitude of young Afghans, who she says are determined to make something of their lives and their country: “I find their honesty very appealing. I don’t like what’s happening in the politics here, but the young people give me hope. They don’t have much money because there aren’t many jobs, but they will spend what little they have to go take an IT course, or go take a business course, or do something. They haven’t given up.”
Likewise Dupree. She says there is nothing to draw her back to the US, and every few weeks she visits Kabul from Peshawar, despite the fact that the frontier city is now extraordinarily dangerous. The Tribal Areas are in what looks like full-scale revolt against efforts by unmanned US drone aircraft and the Pakistani military to stem the rising tide of the Taliban. When I met Dupree again in January, amid the freezing book stacks of Kabul University, where staff are laboriously digitising part of the collection, she is not quite as cheerily optimistic about the region’s future as she had been the previous autumn, noting how the Taliban have infested some of the provinces to the south of Kabul.
At 82, she has recently had to move from the house in Peshawar where she has lived with a large collection of cats for the past 15 years, after her landlady pushed up her rent. She rarely ventures out from her new abode after a rash of kidnappings and killings of foreigners in Peshawar, including an attempt to shoot the top US diplomat in the city. Absurdly, it would be safer for her to live full-time in Kabul, but she says Peshawar is the only place where she is left alone for long enough to “get on with my writing”.
But for all the difficulties and dangers, she isn’t leaving. “I think there’s a future for these people and I think maybe I can help. That’s why I stay here. A lot of people call it the Afghan virus. You get it and it’s like malaria: you think you are free of it and you go away, and suddenly you’re back.”
Jon Boone is the FT’s Afghanistan correspondent.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
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