Before Taliban

Introduction / 17
Just as Thomas tried to fit the country into the preconceptions of his day,
Western writers—Americans in particular—have resorted to modes of representation
that make the complexity of the people and place simpler to
comprehend. In the early days of the conflict, Afghans were widely portrayed
as “freedom fighters”—twentieth-century throwbacks to Ethan
Allen and the Green Mountain Boys, transplanted to the Hindu Kush. This
was especially the case after the Soviet invasion in 1979, when Afghans
were perceived as standing up single-handedly to a superpower. Vietnam
still rankled in the United States, and the Afghans seemed to want nothing
from that superpower other than the barest military necessities. Democrats
and Republicans alike could support this cause, as theatrically illustrated
first by Zbigniew Brezhinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security
advisor, firing an AK-47 into Afghanistan from the Khyber Pass and later by
President Ronald Reagan parleying in the White House with a group of
bearded mujahidin leaders.
All of this cozying up to men in turbans ended abruptly after the Soviet
withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. The first U.S. response to this event
was massive indifference—Afghanistan ceased to matter, at least to non-
Afghans. It simply fell off the radar screen of international attention.
Indifference eventually gave way to another round of intense interest, this
time precipitated by the World Trade Center bombing in New York City and
the news that several of those arrested for the attack had fought with the
resistance forces in Afghanistan. Investigative reports into the bombing
hinted at vast conspiracies involving mosques in the outer boroughs of New
York City, immigrant taxi drivers, and a blind cleric named Abdur Rahman,
who appeared to have incited the bombers to declare jihad against the
United States itself. The effect of this second wave of attention was to
change people’s minds about who it was the United States had been supporting
and what those bearded men really wanted. Now, instead of being
viewed as “freedom fighters,” Afghans came to be thought of as terrorists,
and Afghanistan took its place beside Syria, Libya, and Iran as a pariah state
beyond the pale of President George H. W. Bush’s much heralded “new
world order.”
Afghanistan’s association with terrorism was not entirely unwarranted.
And it was not simply a Western concern, for many of the Islamic militants
who committed acts of terror in Algeria, Egypt, and other Middle Eastern
nations received their basic training in Afghanistan and were often referred
to in these countries as “Afghanis.” Then, too, there was Osama bin Laden,
who maintained a base in Afghanistan and who may or may not have
financed the embassy bombings in East Africa in 1998 and the attack on the