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by
Suzy Hansen
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July 14 - August 26, 2018
international assumption that only an inferior (crazy, irrational, corrupt) people would have allowed such a calamity to befall them, not that the calamity might have been part of a larger calamity, and certainly not that the calamity might have begun, at least somewhat, in the United
employment for life in the public sector, politicians with stuffed pockets, an aversion to foreign investment, snail-like growth, a communal lifestyle that kept people happy at the taverna table but stifled individual creativity, a national belief that beating the “system” was something the smart people did.
Only three years ago, this had been a stylish part of town. Then the police decided to push the refugees out of the main city squares where they often lingered, essentially corralling them into these back streets.
leftist language surprised me then, but soon everyone would be discussing capitalism in this way, like any other phase of history, one that would pass.
condescending, but a kind of Trojan horse: it implied progress and hope—You, young Greece, may be a miserable mess now, but you, too, will grow up one day to be just like us—and so seemed somewhat harmless. But in the process weren’t all foreign countries condemned to failure so that the United States could remain the ideal? These countries would be selected as candidates in need of endless salvation by the United States—and, by extension, me, one of its foreign journalists asking that patronizing question, “What-ever in the devil went wrong here, guys?”
“Didn’t you know the first U.S. intervention of the post–Cold War period was in Greece?” In Greece? As I sat with them, not knowing about these things—about my own country—I felt as if a physical separation lay between us, as if I inhabited an entirely other universe. I had been charged with writing about them, for a magazine thousands of people would read, and yet whatever I wrote would to Greeks inevitably be read as if the magazine had dispatched an alien from another planet.
believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. Thus began a key component of American exceptionalism: the idea that America’s duty to the world was to liberate foreign peoples.
was handsome, flirtatious, outspoken, ambitious, and skeptical of the American project in Greece. “We have to stand for decency and for freedom,” he said. “We’re no better than the Russians otherwise.”
is no place of such thoroughgoing capitalist-imperialist horror as Latin America. But there is a tendency among Americans, even those marginally well-read, to rely on a number of assumptions about their history—for example, that the Soviets did pose a genuine threat to the United States—which serves to diminish the emotional impact of such imperial actions.
word “capitalism” had become associated with imperialism, he was disturbed. From then on, according to von Tunzelmann, he decreed that capitalism would be replaced with words such
“free enterprise,” “the free world,” or, most simple, “freedom.”
John Foster Dulles.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
My perception of the Truman Doctrine had been mostly all benevolence and protection. It is one of our origin stories.
American factories were overproducing at that time. They needed the Europeans to buy their goods, but the Europeans had no money. So they put two and two together and said, Okay, we’ll give them money. That’s surplus recycling. And this worked brilliantly, until a very important linchpin fell off this global plan.”
foment
Indonesia. American stuff.” He was referring to the coup of 1965 against Indonesia’s President Sukarno, a nationalist who sympathized with his country’s Communist Party. What followed was a campaign of lawless violence, in which the military incited militias of ordinary men to behead, shoot, and stab anyone Communist or accused of being Communist. Between five hundred thousand and one million people were killed. Today, thanks to the 2001 U.S. State Department publication Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, it is known that CIA officers and embassy officials supplied the army
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junta,
Menderes was hanged on the island of Imralı. In response to Menderes’s authoritarianism, the generals drafted a new constitution intended to strengthen civil society. When Baldwin arrived in Turkey in the early sixties, he landed in a country in which newspapers, writers, playwrights—and, in effect, leftist movements—had been newly set
theorists,” or skeptics, like Emre, like the Greeks, like the Guatemalans, the Indonesians. Right-wing paramilitary violence, as had been used in Greece and Latin America, however, wouldn’t quell the Cold War crisis in Turkey. There, the Americans would become so terrified of the rise of communism that they would soon encourage the Turkish government to use an unlikely force against it: Islam.
souk,
The first missionaries, Pliny Fisk and Levi Parsons, left Boston in 1819 for the Ottoman Empire, or Palestine, “to attempt to evangelize the lands of the Bible” and reclaim them from “a withering infidel grasp,” writes the historian Ussama Makdisi (who is himself a descendant of Arab Protestants). But the Americans would not have an easy time converting the infidels of Palestine. They had a faulty belief that the entire religion of Islam would soon collapse. Other successful military conquests in the East—the British conquest of India, for example—had convinced them that Christians could
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They had not realized that the Ottoman Empire was multireligious, where coexistence was possible because Ottomans tried not to “openly blaspheme or insult other people’s religions,” as Makdisi writes. The Maronites, Muslims, Jews, Druze, and Armenians shared a way of life. The Ottoman authorities viewed the American intruders as a “threat to diversity.” Protestantism was unquestionably alien.
They had no modern armies, few sympathetic representatives abroad. Arab intellectuals debated the correct response to such a catastrophic betrayal: nationalism or Islamism, democracy or authoritarianism, pro-Western or anti. The Arab thinker from this general era that Americans may know today is, again, Sayyid Qutb; after September 11, his texts were pored over to understand Muslim fundamentalism, the hidden strain of Arab life that explained everything.
Time and again, the Americans saw nationalism as support for Moscow, not an assertion of independence. Eisenhower would eventually turn his back on Nasser, and Woodrow Wilson’s principles of self-determination,
pogrom.
somehow believed that those Iraqis were deserving of sanctions. What this does in the end is create a distance between myself and those foreigners I thought deserving of sanctions. It is one that cannot be bridged. The difference between us and them is that our country has created this universe in which sanctions are acceptable punishment for everyone except our country.
“The Arabs were once a great civilization. The illiterate in his depression, and the modernizer in his impatience, live amid the ruins of greatness. How open and how empathic will Americans be, how magnanimous, if our turn comes to live amid the ruins of our modernity?” Instead, like the featherweight symbols Americans had turned themselves into, they believed their mere presence in Iraq would incarnate some illusory democracy.
reporters and photographers chose to live in Istanbul, but rarely covered Turkey, mainly because American newspapers couldn’t make much sense out of its Islamic-democracy-secularist-autocracy mishmash, and also because, at the time anyway, there were no wars in Turkey.
gush anew at the wonders of Atatürk, still the main reason in their minds that this “Muslim country” was so stable, that it didn’t have suicide bombers, that women in spaghetti straps danced on tables by the Bosphorus.
Serotype
unintended consequence of reminding them the Muslim world was hopeless, and that only the West could save it. Machismo almost necessarily amplified the latent savior complex, if not a secret thrill for violence, in so many
Afghanistan they had an easy blueprint to follow; the Americans had a muscle memory of the occupations in Germany and Japan, and a convenient amnesia of the German and Japanese people’s total devastation and easy capitulation to them. America was not the same country in 2001 as it was in 1945, but Americans thought it was, so frozen was their conception of reality in those myth-production years.
those years, I, too, participated in my first and only American occupation, in Kabul.
Hamid
The Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, which was established in Saddam’s old palace, served meals laden with pork products in a Muslim country. I can imagine that Americans—who cannot live without their hot peppers or pork products—did not consider that perhaps there were foods that Iraqis and Afghans also cannot live without.
who made money off the war, which, I couldn’t help but acknowledge—as I smiled widely back at them in some automatic species-response signal—included me as well. We were all contractors now.
Some of the American men looked positively deranged: tanned and wiry, wound up like teenagers on steroids, their horse-saddle skin betraying abuse of tobacco, alcohol, sun, and near-death experiences. This was who we were attracting to Afghanistan; it felt like a massive illegal operation as shot by a Hollywood director.
The Afghan elite lived in enormous “poppy palaces,” the Central Asian disco version of a McMansion, homes so unbearably ugly and ostentatious, they seemed to be engaged in satire.
resplendent
mujahideen
her, Afghanistan—its apples rotting on the ground, its factories rusting, and its lapis lazuli mines inactive—was a kingdom of untapped wealth that hadn’t become much improved with the influx of aid projects. If Afghans in the countryside complained about bombs, Afghans in Kabul complained about USAID. General Stanley McChrystal’s surge (and Obama’s) had meant billions of more dollars for USAID, which built schools, “implemented farming initiatives,” and set up weaving looms for poor women, generally serving as the kinder face of America in the world. But USAID, too, was in a state of decline.
USAID officials decided to build a medical clinic, instead of erecting it themselves, they hired Louis Berger Group to do so. Louis Berger Group was then free to hire a whole slew of private subcontractors, and ultimate accountability vanished into the recursive transactions. When the windows in the clinic didn’t close in winter, was it the responsibility of USAID or of some corporation they outsourced to?
There was a sense that we were there to get things done very quickly, what James Baldwin had called America’s “funny sense of time,” as if “with enough time and all that fearful energy and virtue you people have, everything will be settled, solved, put in its place.”
USAID
Everybody in Kabul loved the phrase “capacity building.” Everyone talked about capacity building, building capacity, getting capacity up, improving, growing, and discovering capacity in the Afghans. I heard it so much that I wondered how it translated, whether bureaucratic jargon was actually translatable.
Eikenberry was by all accounts a sincere man who cared deeply about Afghanistan, someone who tried his best. But I felt a crushing kind of pain in that room, to see an American leader behave in his faux jovial press-conference American way, seeming to believe his kindness was all that truly mattered. As he spoke, I was again reminded of the way Baldwin and Camus and so many others had described Americans, as people with no sense of tragedy.
AMERICA HAD a much longer history in Afghanistan than most Americans knew. Saadat Manto’s prediction in the 1950s that the Americans would resort to using the mullahs and the mujahideen to defeat the Soviet empire in Afghanistan came true.
Islam, they believed—as they would in Turkey—was the only force strong enough to defeat communism.
“Please explain,” Shamsie asks, “why you are in our stories but we are not in yours.” She generously assumes that Americans want to fuse their own national stories with those of others, that they aspire to a greater complexity and understanding of their own motivations and actions. But as would become clear in Afghanistan, that was not at all what the Americans were trying to
unpleasantness. “All ISAF personnel must show respect for local cultures and customs and demonstrate intellectual curiosity about the people of Afghanistan,” he said. The Americans developed a program called the Human Terrain System (HTS), the brainchild of idealistic anthropologists and disillusioned military veterans who believed that sending social scientists out with soldiers would help America win wars and kill fewer people.
