The "enemy" we barely know

A writer who has traveled extensively in Afghanistan talks about how little we understand its people, how dangerous it is to underestimate them and why they have cause to resent the U.S.

By Laura Miller

Sept. 19, 2001 | Since his first visit to Afghanistan in 1979, at the age of 19, British writer Jason Elliot has journeyed through that troubled nation several times, during the Soviet occupation, which ended in 1989, as well as afterward. Two of those visits, including time spent fighting with the anti-Soviet mujahedin resistance, became the basis for a recently published book, "An Unexpected Light," a travelogue and paean to what he describes as "a place you either love or hate. I came to love it for better or worse." In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Elliot has seen the land he loves so much characterized as a vipers' nest of terrorism and threatened with the military wrath of the United States. Salon reached him at his home in London to obtain a different view on Afghanistan.

Even before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, you felt that Afghanistan wasn't being fairly represented in the press, right?

Yes, my book was meant to be an endeavor to open a door onto this culture, its people and its history, to paint them in three dimensions. One only hears bad news about this place. And in the reports I'm hearing, I don't recognize the place I know. It sounds like another world.

What time period does your book cover?

It's mostly based on a six-month trip that I made just before the country fell under the control of the Taliban, a time when the former government was nominally in control. I've visited Afghanistan since then as well.

That government still exists, but in exile, right? They still control a small territory in the country.

Yes, they have been fighting the Taliban since their rise. I hesitate to talk about controlling a "small territory" because things are always changing and "small territory" is an ambiguous term in Afghanistan. Territory is not always a good measure. The Taliban is fighting opposition on several different fronts -- to the west, the north and the northeast.

What in the media depictions of Afghanistan strikes you as most alien to your own sense of the country?

The most worrisome aspect is this reductionism which equates all terrorism with bin Laden and bin Laden with Afghanistan in three easy steps. Afghanistan, like any country, is a complex and diverse place. They may all wear the same headgear, but they can't be lumped together. Ordinary Afghans have never liked bin Laden and they don't even like Arabs much in any case. For one thing, bin Laden is unpopular for giving Afghanistan a bad reputation for the last few years. When I say "ordinary Afghans" I mean people who are not sucked into this stern interpretation of things that the Taliban espouse.

Are you talking about Muslims?

Afghanistan is probably the most Muslim place in the world. That doesn't mean that they support bin Laden. There's this tendency to lump things together. Taliban rule is as close to order as any regime that's preceded it in Afghanistan. But the thing that's seldom pointed out is that if you have no choice as to your leader, anyone who restores a modicum of peace is better than a condition of no civil security whatsoever. If they make it possible to cross the road without being shot, there will be an element of support there. But ideologically that support is not unified. The Taliban are from a particular part of southern Afghanistan and they've never represented the wholesale views of all Afghanistan.

Next page: "The Taliban is by no means popular"