My time in a jail in Afghanistan

[ConsAreLiars]

No, not locked up, just a visitor. But I thought posting this of bit personal experience might help a few to understand that stereotyping Muslim soceities in general or Afghanistan in particular as inherenly brutal or evil is a bit simplistic.

This happened in 1970, before Brzezinsky-Carter and Kissinger-Reagan decided that encouraging Islamic fanaticism and importing batshit crazy homicidal fundies from Saudi Arabia and provoking a civil war in that poor land was in the best interest of Capitalism. At that time Afghanistan was regarded just as a buffer state, just a geographically non-strategic (at the time) and extremely inhospitable land with barely enough natural resources to keep the people from starving into extinction.

So, to the story. I was traveling the overland route between Europe and South Asia and paused for a while in Kabul. While there I learned that there were a couple of Brits (and an Indian cellmate, as it turned out) locked up in the local jail and they depended on charity from the outside for food and whatever. So I and my companion visited a few times, bringing fresh fruits and vegetables and such. The "jail" turned out to be series of rickety garages and horse stalls behind a gate, once used to house the city's fire department.

I suppose (no specific recollection) that I inquired (using gestures, probably) at the entrance about how to find the proper cell/stall, but on subsequent visits it was just a matter of walikng through the open gate carrying whatever and spending a few hours together. We cooked up a some rice and stuff, smoked some pot and talked and ate together. It was an honor system, essentially, and that was true of the culture generally. They wouldn't try to escape, but if they did try they would face they same kind of retribution that we here would apply to someone who cuts in line at the grocery or ticket queue, times 1000. Not a good idea, possibly lethal, but absent that breach of honor, far less primitive, irrational and rigid than our own system.

This kind of honor based society is a system that few of us understand, and it took a long discussion in Peshawer with an English school trained Pashtun (his family had been killed, semi-adopted by a Brit diplomat and educated in England, then returning to his home country, to give me half a clue.

[catnhatnh]

1. If you Haven't....

you might enjoy reading Mitchener's "Caravans" which involves the area in the decade before you were there.Sounds like a Hell of a ride and thanks for the post.

[ConsAreLiars]

6. I haven't read it,

but based on this brief excerpt from a review: http://www.globalthink.net/global/caravans.html

"It is this very adolescent romance that had the U.S. arming the worst--and most hateful--factions of Afghan Muslim Fundamentalists in their war against Russia. What we didn't see, and what Mitchener's Caravans could have told us, the war was only tangentially against Russia; it was really against modernization. These men want to remain as 15-year-old Bronze Age warriors forever--but with better weapons."

It is certainly rather more insightful than the usual tripe. Thank you. In my experience (before Brzezinski) Afghanistan was quite tolerant and accepting of "modernization." In small degrees, here and there, but not at the price of honor. Being forced into subservience, being raped, murdered, plundered, and brutalized by foreigners, well, those are not honorable.

[KillCapitalism]

2. Interesting story.

Have you ever seen the series "Locked up Abroad" on National Geographic Channel? It's full of horrible stories of Americans/Canadians/Brits, etc. getting into bad situations abroad usually in corrupt 3rd world countries, and getting locked up. I know our prison system here isn't the greatest, but I'd rather do a year in a U.S. prison than spend a day in prison in some of these foreign countries.

[Adsos Letter]

3. Very interesting, ConsAreLiars...!

I am consistently amazed by the broad range of experience DUer's bring to these forums...

Question: do they have the same "honor system for serious crime (like physical stuff) or just minor things?

Also: how was the pot? I smoked my share of Afghan Black hash...from what I remember, anyway... :D

[ConsAreLiars]

4. I am no expert on their legal system.

Just one particular bit of fact posted to counter the prevailing stereotype of them as some sort of bloodthirsty unthinking subhumans. But being honorable, doing the right thing, was (then if not now -- who knows what the Brzezinski game has done to destroy that culture) was the highest of values.

In Kandahar I spent a night at an inn. Like most of the buildings, constructed of mud and sticks, with the bed made of strapped together tree limbs criss-crossed with ropes to support whatever bedding one might have.

So, being a paranoid westerner, I discovered there was no way to lock the door from the inside before going to sleep. Somehow I managed to communicate my want to the owner. Sign language, gestures, whatever. I was provided with a 10 cent padlock that would lock from the outside on the assumption that I might want to keep my female companion under lock the next day when I went out.

The idea that the innkeeper would offer a service that did not protect those who spent a night under his roof (and thus needed a internally lockable door) was just not imaginable.

(edit to add a few words to maybe clarify)

[ConsAreLiars]

9. And regarding the pot. ....l

The Brits were jailed for bringing pot/hash (I forget) into the country. Why bother? Why worry about it? But somehow they ended up there.

I'd dumped my stash several countries previously (the Romania-Bulgaria border crossing detainment made me a bit itchy so I asked for and got a toilet break), so never encountered that particular risk. But when I entered the country the customs station was closed so we set up our tent in a planting strip dividing the two lanes. Across from the cu8stoms office was a small restaurant/bar/teahouse/whatever. When I entered, looking for some form of sustenance, I was approached by some guy who, through whatever means, signs and gestures and such, managed to offer a palm-pressed disc of an opium/hash compound.

A US dollar settled the deal. Customs the next day was pro forma = the dealer might have ben the one eho wielded that stamp or guarded the door. Well, that was the best dollar I ever spent, by far. I spent that night reassuring my companion that the world was not dissolving while watching it (not really real) happen.

The next couple nights in Herat I listened to the tinsmiths beating metal into pots, pans,and such (nighttime in summer is far better for such hard labor), knowing that they were listening to one another. And were responding with rhythms of their own to enhance the whole. OK, maybe just my imagination. But their sounds permeated the whole city. Like it or not. And they heard one another, like any band of percussionists. This was a land where hash was far more common than tobacco or alcohol.

So I think they made music. By choice and by nature. Not war. Unless forced into that kind of life by invaders.

[Adsos Letter]

10. yup...

the opium/hash compound was what we called "Afghan Black" was all about...

I can still taste it, though it has been over 30 years ago.

:hi:

[mahina]

5. Wow.

Amazing.
I would really like to understand Afghanistan.

[ConsAreLiars]

7. Your sig photo suggests you already understand

the essence. Respect and trust. A brutal land, both in terms of the climate and other human marauders (my friend's family was murdered by bandits), where violations of that trust were/are punished with equal brutality. Honor and justice, unfortunately often defined by the by the dominant religionists, as here, were worthy goals that defined that culture.

People can get a better idea of how things were before the US Corps turned it into an armed fundie nutcase slaughterhouse by browsing through this site: http://avalon.unomaha.edu/afghan/afghanistan/A1.HTM

[mahina]

8. I thought it was you who posted that page!

I was looking at those photos for at least an hour. I'm blown away by the history, especially the ancient water infrastructure. You increased my understanding tremendously by sharing that. Thank you.

I had a classmate a few years ago who is Pashtun. He and his family fled Afghanistan during the war with the Soviet Union. He said that they were pretty well off originally, sold everything to pay the guides, and were betrayed by the guides who left them in a terrible situation. Then during one of many hairy close calls, with guns drawn, tribal alliances were found to exist with the gunmen (not original betrayers) and they were allowed passage, and their lives, solely because his grandfather had been a very well respected tribal elder.

Totally, totally foreign to us. Like another planet. And so deeply beautiful.

Thanks again, aloha.

[ConsAreLiars]

11. kick for another evening.(nt)