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.
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