In Search of the Lost Orient, page 9
I was immediately summoned to Paris by Monsieur Muglioni, who said to me with some discomfort, “It’s rather a sticky wicket, your affair, but we’re going to try and work something out.” I learned later that the inspector who had entered my classroom was a hard-ass member of the Gaullist RPR, someone imposed by L’Éducation nationale to restore order to the inspection system, but who was detested by his colleagues, and notably by Monsieur Muglioni, who entirely shared my dim view of this person’s philosophical competency. In short, my revolt suited his purposes. He explained to me that he was going to annul his colleague’s report but that I had to be evaluated, and then he proposed to come inspect me himself on such and such day and time, promising to arrive on time and sit quietly at the back of the room. Obviously, his visit went very well, so well in fact that he invited me back to his office and offered me a job teaching a prépa class of hypophâgne in a school worthy of my talents. I declined the offer, explaining that I was leaving for Afghanistan.
“But it’s just a holiday, right?”
“No, I’m taking a leave of absence and plan on staying in the country for some time, I don’t know how long.”
“But you’re not going to do like Lévi-Strauss? Not ethnology? You, a philosopher!” and he raised his arms to the ceiling as he said this.
He promised to hold my place for me and said upon my return that he would reclassify me within the corps of “professeurs de lettres supérieures.”
But I never returned.
PART III
THE AFGHAN DECADE
Chapter 9
ONCE AGAIN, AND FOR REAL, AFGHANISTAN
In 1980 you decide to return to Afghanistan.
As I’ve said, for some time I had been wanting to make a change in my life without really knowing what direction to take. I had begun a doctoral dissertation under the direction of Miguel Abensour on the notion of culture because this was an important problem for me: popular culture, literary culture, exotic culture, the culture of a group, era, or generation. Everywhere I turned, I bumped up against the idea that there were certain keys to understanding, a code, a hidden truth, or simply some meaning, and I couldn’t find it. I saw life as an enigma. At thirteen I had seen the Orson Welles adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial. As a prologue, there was a short film that retold a chapter from the book, “Before the Law.” A man waits his whole life for a porter to open a door, the door to the law, but he refuses, and when the man is about to die, the porter says to him, “No one else but you could ever have obtained admittance. No one else could enter this door. This door was intended only for you. And now I am going to close it.” I wanted to force my way through that door.
When the Russians invaded Afghanistan on December 27, 1979, I understood that the door had opened a bit and that my life was going to change. I knew right away that this invasion was a major event. No matter what their intentions or politics were, Western countries would need to pay attention and understand the situation. However, few people knew the country, and few of those who were already working there would stay there. Experts were needed and I would be one of them.
What’s more, now I could finally join a true guerilla movement and therefore pass to the other side of the curtain—away from exoticism, Orientalism, culture, and appearances and come in contact with “real life.” I had the odd idea that war was the real life because artifice was no longer possible—no decorum, no pretending (of course, I was mistaken), and I thought I was going to be at the heart of the true society. I thought it was my moment of truth, and that it happens only once.
A rather odd way of thinking, no?
Yes, odd it was, I admit, but war seemed to me to be the way to penetrate into a society that was refusing my admittance. The ten previous years, which included the failure in Dhofar and my repeated trips to Afghanistan, where I always had the impression I was missing something, now seemed like a prelude, a sort of dress rehearsal in preparation for the real opening act. There in Afghanistan, I felt, was an opportunity to find the entrance. I knew that I was changing lives, that I would never again be a high school teacher. But I was also not at all thinking that this path would lead me to one day get into higher education and that I would become a university professor. On the other hand, I was completely convinced that I was going to write the book about the war in Afghanistan—because, of course, I intended to write a book. I spoke the language (my Persian had become fairly decent), I already knew the country quite well from all the trips I had made there, and I had accumulated empirical knowledge about the society. I immersed myself in the scholarly literature, I pored over every relevant item in libraries and other document collections—I even took courses in Pashto. As for the future, I said to myself, whatever will be, will be. Perhaps I’d be an arms merchant like Rimbaud or a spy like John le Carré, or a researcher, consultant, novelist, diplomat, warlord, or prisoner—anything was possible. The only thing that I did not envision was dying. And about that I guess my premonition was correct, even if looking back I wonder how I survived when so many others died.
So I made my first real trip in the summer of 1980 and returned in time for the start of school; but my head was elsewhere, and in June 1981 I applied for a sabbatical and left for Peshawar.
Was it an unpaid leave of absence?
Yes, and so there remained the problem of how to pay for what I planned on doing (I had saved enough to last one year) and where my entrance into Afghanistan would be. I could go to Kabul with a visa, but once there, how would I join the other side? Was I going to jump off a bus and walk straight until I bumped into a guerilla unit? Not easy. It made more sense to go to Pakistan, to Peshawar, and make contact with representatives of the resistance. But to tell them what? What reason would they have to take me into their organization? In fact, they didn’t give a damn and were willing to take in anybody, but I didn’t know that. As usual, I wanted to have a reason for being where I was. There were only two possible gateways: humanitarian work or the military—in this case, arms merchant. On the humanitarian side, my old circle of acquaintances from Louis-le-Grand played a role. Bernard-Henri Lévy had just founded a hunger relief organization, AICF (Action internationale contre la faim), in collaboration with Françoise Giroud, Jacques Attali, Guy Sorman, and others. Afghanistan was a terrain to further their antitotalitarian combat. Moreover, Bernard-Henri Lévy had put forward a lucid diagnosis: Afghanistan was going to be a long-term problem, and the presence of the Soviet Union made this a just cause, all the more so since the guerilla movement itself was not Marxist.
He had imagined organizing a caravan of camels and horses that would travel to Afghanistan with food and medical supplies—no doubt with the idea of making a great film out of the whole thing. The leader was supposed to be Jean-Christophe Victor, an ethnologist who spoke Persian and had lived in Kabul. Meanwhile, the AICF had rented advertising space in the Paris metro for the last week in August—a time when rates were cheaper. The poster announced that the maiden voyage of the humanitarian caravan was ready—except there was no caravan. For complicated reasons, nothing had been concretely settled in Peshawar. The announcement of the event preceded the event—a foul-up that was quite typical of the times. And yet, a caravan needed to pass through before August 15.
Bernard-Henri Lévy contacted his former codisciple, Philippe Roger, who then got in touch with me, and we went together to the headquarters of the AICF. We were given a sack of $10,000 in small bills and were promised a wire transfer at a later date along with our plane tickets. There were only two hotels in Peshawar, we were told, by which was meant hotels that were up to Parisian standards, for I knew that in fact there were hundreds of hotels—but it was explained to us that humanitarian organizations were not supposed to fall into roughing it in misery. Nevertheless, the Hotel InterContinental was too luxurious for our brand image, and so we were to stay at the Dean’s Hotel that had become the mythical waystation of adventurers of every stripe who were looking to pass to the other side, all the while guzzling the beer and gin that was reserved for foreign non-Muslims. So we arrived in Peshawar in early July with our boots, jeans, and dollars and the aim of mounting a caravan in only two weeks. And we managed to do it. The caravan, which transported shoes and clothes and included more journalists and humanitarian workers than Afghans, finally passed to the other side with only a little doctoring of the dates—it was announced that it had happened before we had even set off. I therefore had to nudge the real date to something more compatible with the announcement that had been made, but also in time to launch the advertising campaign. The grand humanitarian adventure, from the country hospital to TV talk shows, was launched.
But in the photographs that accompanied the advertising campaign, one could not see a single image of a caravan that had actually traversed the border—mine. The photos had all been taken elsewhere, far from the front, in Pakistan. When I expressed some surprise at this, the person in charge replied, “Come on, take a good look at the film footage you brought back! It looks like a jaunt in the Swiss Alps. There’s no war, no suffering, no desert. Think of the public we’re trying to reach! We need to show emotion, willpower, and hardship, my friend. Look at the final shot in your video!” And as he said this, he threw onto the table, with a certain contempt, a photo of a splendid edelweiss in bloom on the slope of one of the Pamir Mountains. He would probably have preferred a palm tree, or better yet a cactus with a vulture on top of it looking wide-eyed and content.
For me, the essential thing had finally been attained: I was in the loop. I knew where to present myself in Peshawar, and I had passed my initiation test. And as fate would have it, if I can say that, this expedition took place in Nuristan, thus taking up again one of the multiple incomplete stories that endlessly return in my life.
But you returned to France after this expedition.
Yes, I spent another year at the lycée in Dreux, but my decision to ship out for good had been made. I wanted to return to Afghanistan no matter what. But although the humanitarian groups were willing to pay my traveling expenses, they had no intention of giving me a steady salary. It was then that I was contacted by a Belgian arms merchant, a Colonel Patou, perhaps his real name, which means “blanket” in Persian. He informed me that he was an arms merchant, which was fortuitous since the Americans had decided to arm the Afghan resistance. Except the CIA did not want to go in itself—they thought it was a lost cause, that the terrain was too poorly known, and so forth, and so they preferred to subcontract with private actors, an obsession that would be the source of no end of high costs for the American taxpayer in particular, and in general for all the people involved. Patou tells me he knows nothing about Afghanistan, is getting on in years, and is more than willing to hire me. I would be living in Peshawar and be responsible for dispatching arms to Afghanistan. My pay would be $5,000 per month plus life insurance. Of course, the arms would be delivered at no charge to the Afghan resistance fighters, and I was supposed to sort out the good ones from the fanatics, fakes, hotheads, and corrupt. It was a position with “managerial responsibilities,” as they say in the want ads.
It was an ideal arrangement for me, but in the end the project collapsed because the CIA finally decided not to let clowns like this Belgian and me do the work and they did it themselves. And it has to be said that they were true professionals—I mean they were bureaucrats, not cowboys, even if I’m not sure they made the right choices. I didn’t give up trying, however, since I needed to find some source of support for the periods between my trips, because once in Afghanistan I hardly had any expenses. Luckily, the Left came to power in May 1981, and Mitterrand was an old anti-Soviet. He decided it was important to at least try and discreetly help the Afghan resistance, so he gave a sort of yellow light to go ahead. But at the same time, he was suspicious of the army and intelligence services. He thought, not incorrectly perhaps, that they were against him. In addition, he owed some favors to retired officers on the left who had never been promoted to general or who lacked a star or two because of their affinity for the Socialist Party—yes, there really were leftist military personnel, at least there used to be! So these officers were put in charge of research institutes. The Institut de polémologie, devoted to the study of war, was put under the direction of Colonel Paucot, a former officer of the Second Tank Division.1 He was a decent man who agreed to hire young researchers of my generation such as André Brigot and Dominique David, who thought, as I did, that one ought not leave questions of geostrategy entirely up to the Right. They received some funds to work with, and Brigot, who had heard about me from Abensour, called to offer me a job. This is how I came to sign a contract with the Institut de polémologie, but really it was with the Ministry of Defense, and so for two years I was paid a research stipend that allowed me to continue making trips to Afghanistan.
So you traveled in an Afghanistan that had been invaded by the Soviets?
I went there clandestinely, dressed in Afghan clothes. Those were extraordinary years. I finally penetrated into the real country—a country of mountain trails, paths through the desert, tiny secluded villages, passes at ten thousand feet, lost valleys that led nowhere but that allowed one to avoid the zones controlled by the Soviets. We traveled on foot, on horseback, or by camel for days, sometimes weeks. I got lost, ruined my feet, was detained for days for reasons that were often impossible to decipher by petty commandants who were either wonderfully hospitable or completely paranoid. I bought horses, learned how to take care of them, crossed enemy lines at night, was taken for a Soviet spy, abandoned by my guides, handed over by them to shady characters, saved by total strangers, fed and lodged by poor folks, or sometimes hosted like a pasha by strange local bigwigs whose allegiance in the conflict was not entirely clear. I was bombarded by planes and helicopters, pinned down by barrages of artillery fire, escaped from ambushes (most often organized by other mujahideen), exchanged blows with young Algerian jihadists, made friends with their Turkish colleagues, rode a motorcycle, and learned to shoot. It was one adventure after another.
Everything began each time in Peshawar—going to meet the various mujahideen representatives so as to have the greatest number of favorable recommendations from different parties; choosing the right smuggler, who would get you across the Afghan-Pakistan border and then pass you from front to front, each time handed on from one guide to the next in exchange for a “receipt.” Often the guides would sacrifice their lives for us, but sometimes they would abandon us, and I would have to make my way alone from village to village, not knowing whom I was going to come upon, friends or foes or what.
Do you recall your itineraries and your destinations?
The first year I went to Nuristan. The second time I was supposed to go to Panjshir, where there were some doctors and Jean-José Puig, a Centrale2 graduate who had kept up the hobby of fly-fishing for trout in Afghanistan, with or without Soviets invading his streams.3 Puig was the first person who spoke to me about Commander Massoud. The following years, I went to fantastically beautiful places that no one knew anything about: the central route, Herat, the Sistan, Faryab, Kandahar, and the village of Mullah Omar were some of them. To get to Panjshir, one had to get over five passes at elevations of around ten thousand feet. We walked, camels carried our bags, and, of course, there was snow. In 1982 I traversed all of Afghanistan, from the eastern border to the Iranian border. From there I descended to Pakistan, passing from one nomad camp to another on foot, motorcycle, or boat, before rejoining a caravan of Baluchis (who, by the way, spoke Brahui), and finally, with a guide and camels, I crossed the desert of Registan. But since it took me a month to do all that, instead of the four days that had been announced when I was near the Iranian border, in Peshawar I was declared missing, a situation further complicated by the fact that the chain of transmission of receipts had broken down because the nomads I had met were illiterate. Chantal, my companion, was back in France and had lost track of my whereabouts after Herat. I wasn’t able to send news from the desert region that we crossed on camelback while also trying to avoid Russian ambushes that sent helicopters with instructions to shoot at every camel and motorcycle that moved. So we traveled at night. During the day, we would lie down among low scrubby bushes after taking care to disperse the camels so that the Russians didn’t identify them as part of a caravan. At dusk we had to gather them together again before traveling on. We crossed the Helmand River on camelback in broad daylight, which was quite risky.
I also remember a region of lakes and marshes that we crossed during this same trip in October 1982. In this place, called Hamun-i-Helmand, people traveled in open boats made from braiding together dried reeds very much like the ones I’d seen in encyclopedias of Lake Titicaca. The boats were maneuvered by poles among reeds ten feet high as well as around some placid cows that the local inhabitants, Persian-speaking Shiites moved from island to island in search of a little pasture for grazing. These people were called gawdar, which translates roughly as “cowboys.” I spent ten days on an island that was about a thousand square feet welcomed by a group of mujahideen. They had taken refuge there because they were safe from Russian tanks on account of the water, and the helicopters couldn’t see us because we’d quickly hide in the reeds as soon as we heard them coming. Our principal source of food was migrating birds that we killed with muskets that shot little lead pellets. It was early November, the period of migration for woodcocks, ducks, curlews, ortolans, and lapwings. Two young boys would leave very early in the morning to get bread from the nearest Iranian village, which was about twelve miles away, and they’d get back around six at night when the birds had nicely finished cooking in the pot.
