Is This Your First War? (23 page)

Hassan said that before 1947, the wars and the expulsions, his family had good relations with Jews who lived nearby. “My brother used to know a Jewish guy in the fruit market. Back then we had a lot of problems with animals wrecking our crops. So this Jewish man gave my brother his gun. In the end, we were never able to shoot the animals that were doing the damage, so we gave the gun back. We trusted each other. Maybe it's possible to have those days again.”

Israeli historian Benny Morris has described Zionism as a colonizing and expansionist movement. It was. And Israel's creation was accompanied by the ethnic cleansing of much of the indigenous Palestinian population. This process was less brutal than other mass expulsions of the era. Morris estimates about 800 Arab civilians and prisoners of war were deliberately murdered during the 1948 war, with an unknown number of civilians also raped. By comparison, in 1922, the Greek and Armenian population of Smyrna and its environs were driven into the sea by Turkish nationalists in an orgy of rape and murder that left tens of thousands dead and ended a Christian presence on the Aegean coast of Anatolia that had persisted for centuries. That comparatively few are aware of this event speaks to the unique scrutiny to which Israel is subjected. That some insist on comparing the plight of the Palestinians to that of Jews during the Holocaust is obscene. It is nevertheless a dishonest manipulation of history to deny that Palestinians were murdered and driven from their homes during Israel's creation. For the Palestinians,
Nabka
, or catastrophe, is an apt description of what happened to them in 1948.

But Zionism was also a liberation movement for a people whose suffering was long and had reached a previously unimaginable level of horror during the Second World War. There was justice in Israel's birth, even as it came at the expense of Palestinians who were not responsible for the European Holocaust. And there is justice in it continuing to thrive.

Israel's victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, however, was wasted. Israel captured the West Bank, which is rich in Jewish history and tradition, in a war that likely saved the country and its citizens. But Israel's settlement of the territories it occupied morally tarnished its military triumph and weakened the country, leaving it with few good options. Formally annexing the West Bank will result in Israeli Jews becoming a minority in a bi-national state, or governing an undemocratic one. Some Israelis advocate expelling, or “transferring” Palestinians from territory they control. Most Israelis, to the credit of their country, will not contemplate such harsh and illiberal measures.

This leaves a peace deal that would result in an independent Palestinian state next door to Israel. Such an outcome is in Israel's interests, but every new outpost and expanding settlement in the West Bank makes it less likely. In consolidating its victory in the 1967 war, Israel threatens its future. One is reminded of a cat in a poem by Spyros Kyriazopoulos:

She was licking
the opened tin
for hours and hours
without realizing
that she was drinking
her own blood.

David Rubinger still remembers the exhilaration that accompanied the November 29, 1947, United Nations vote to partition Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state. “There wasn't a person in Jerusalem who stayed home,” he said. “They all went into the streets.” Rubinger's wife tried to buy cigarettes and couldn't get a shopkeeper to accept her money.

Rubinger was also jubilant that night. At the time, he said, Israel meant the same thing for him that it does today: “A home for the Jews, where what happened to my mother could not happen to another woman.” But he didn't have much time to celebrate. Independence was formally declared the following May. He barely noticed. By then, a member of the Haganah militia, he was holed up in a building opposite Jerusalem's Jaffa Gate, under fire from the Arab Legion.

I spoke with him a few weeks before Israel's sixtieth anniversary. He wasn't planning on celebrating. “I'm not in the mood,” he said. “If my friends' sons have to chase Arab kids, that's not what I want. True independence will be when peace comes.”

Return to Afghanistan

M
assoud
Khalili stood among the fruit trees in the garden of his summer home overlooking the Shomali Plain north of Kabul and asked if I could hear birdsong. Because so many people had perished in Afghanistan's wars, he said, he didn't allow his gardener to shoot birds.

Khalili, son of one of Afghanistan's greatest modern poets, Khalilullah Khalili, was a close friend of Ahmed Shah Massoud. They fought the Soviets together, and then the Taliban. He was beside Massoud in Khodja Bahuddin when al-Qaeda agents posing as journalists blew up a bomb hidden in their video camera and murdered him. Khalili, then the anti-Taliban United Front's ambassador to India, was partially blinded and riddled with shrapnel. He still has metal shards in his lungs and eye socket. He woke a week after the bombing in a hospital bed and saw his wife of more than twenty years standing over him. She watched him open his one good eye and recited a verse from the Quran: “From God we come, and to him we will return.”

Khalili thought he might die and wanted to do so with a clean conscience. He asked his wife to forgive him if he had ever raised his voice against her in all their years of marriage. Then he asked what happened to his friends and comrades who were in the room when the bomb went off.

Some are dead, some lived, she said. Massoud is gone.

Khalili asked about the al-Qaeda agents who tried to kill him.

They're dead, she told him.

Khalili saw his son and called him over.

“I said, ‘Listen to me. I may be dead soon. Whatever I am about to ask of you, you tell me you'll agree.'”

His son refused, but Khalili's wife yelled at him and he gave in.

“I said, ‘Son, I know you're an Afghan and revenge is part of your culture. And if there is a war and you are recruited, go. Mercy to the wolf is cruelty to the lamb. But listen to me. I want to go from this life with no pain. Don't fight on my behalf. I have already forgiven the boys who did this.'”

Khalili, when I met him in May 2011, was Afghanistan's ambassador to Spain. When he is in Afghanistan, Khalili lives at either his summer home above the Shomali Plain, or in another house in Kabul that the late king of Afghanistan, Mohammad Zahir Shah, built for Khalili's father. He is more of an intellectual than a politician, but he still has power and influence. He funds local schools for boys and girls and gives talks in them. He encourages moderation. “I'm a Muslim,” he said, “but not an Islamist. As I tell my Pashtun friends, ‘Be a strong Pashtun, but not a Pashtunist. Be a strong Tajik, but not a Tajikist. Be a strong Jew, but not a Zionist.'”

Pacing with gusto between the rows of trees behind his house, Khalili cradled their blossoms, described how the irrigation channels running between them worked, and talked about plans for a fountain. He pointed to a distant hilltop and said that was where Alexander the Great made his camp.

“Of all the conquerors we've had, we loved Alexander the most because he brought all this civilization and thinkers and philosophers with him. He conquered us with this, and we believe if he wasn't a prophet, he was one of the saints, and God sent him to bring these things to this land.

“You know,” Khalili continued, “my father never called him Alexander. It was always Sir Alexander.”

Khalili shifted his gaze to a row of mountain peaks to the east. He traced a fingertip from one to the other. There was the route, he said, that he and Massoud would use to hike into their stronghold in the Panjshir Valley after picking up weapons and meeting with CIA spooks in Pakistan during the jihad against the Soviets.

“They couldn't move on the ground,” he said of the Russians. “But their helicopters would just fly over our houses. Then in 1986 we got Stinger missiles. The first Stinger strike was a warning that they no longer controlled the skies.”

On another night I ate with Khalili in his Kabul house, its walls covered with his wife's artwork. On a shelf was one of the last photographs ever taken of Ahmed Shah Massoud. Khalili snapped it when the two were sitting in an airborne helicopter. The film was in Khalili's pocket when the assassin's bomb exploded. It somehow survived intact, and when Khalili recovered, he developed it to see an image of his late friend calmly reading a biography of the prophets as their helicopter buzzed over northern Afghanistan. Khalili had only been back to the Panjshir Valley once since then, to see Massoud's tomb. “It was the first time I was there alone. Before it was always with him. There was always someone there, someone tall, who I was walking with or following.”

Khalili's mood drifted toward melancholy when he talked about Massoud and especially his death. “It matters how you die,” he said. “And he died as he promised us. He said would fight until the last drop of his blood, and he did.”

Elsewhere in the house was a photo of Khalili himself, bearded and much younger. It was taken on a mountainside in 1984, during the Afghan guerilla war against the Soviet Union. In the photo, Khalili sits on the ground, leaning back and tilting his tanned face toward the sun. There is a bandolier of bullets draped across his shoulders. His eyes are closed. He looks blissfully happy.

“The only thing we had was hope. The only weapon we had was hope,” he said when I asked him about the photo. “In the mountains, it was a dream to have a parliament and a president, and boys and girls going to school. The worst parliament in the world is still something. Because you have it.”

Afghanistan had its parliament when we met, but also the Taliban. An insurgency burned in the south of the country. Khalili feared what might be bargained away to end it. “You can't fly with one wing broken, and that wing is women,” he said, referring to the Taliban's views on female emancipation. “Some things are so principled that you cannot make a deal on: human rights, rights of women, education. You bring peace to Afghanistan like that, with no media, no freedom, it's like peace in a graveyard. Stability in a graveyard is good for dead people.”

But Khalili still had hope. “I have an army now, a police, though not very strong. Despite corruption, we have money. And people have not raised their white flag to the Taliban. Some, yes. But not all.”

It occurred to me, listening to Khalili, that on the ledger balancing the costs and benefits of the war against the Taliban and the West's intervention in this country, the fact it is a man like Khalili, rather than some backward misogynist, who now represents the government in Kabul to the outside world, must count for something.

After dinner we retired to a circular meditation room built into Khalili's house. It had Muslim prayer rugs and also a Buddhist singing bowl given to him by the Indian government after he recovered from the 2001 bombing. Khalili sat cross-legged on the floor, eyes closed, tracing the rim of the inverted bell with a wooden mallet while a soft ringing sound rose, filled the room, and then faded into silence. Khalili or his wife had painted verses on the walls of the room. Among them were lines from Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet known as Rumi, who wrote about the unity of mankind. Khalili recited them in Dari and then in English:

Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer, fire worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn't matter.
Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times.
Come, yet again, come, come.

My return to Afghanistan began earlier, in Kandahar. I took a military flight from Ottawa to the Kandahar Airfield, a sprawling city-like complex where NATO runs much of its military operations in the Taliban heartland of southern Afghanistan. There had been maybe a few hundred special operations soldiers and CIA paramilitaries in the country when I left in 2001. Now there were more than 100,000 foreign soldiers battling the still-resilient Taliban.

The initial campaign to overthrow them relied heavily on air strikes and special forces allied with Afghan fighters on the ground. This minimalist strategy was built on the hope that intervention would be quick and light. For a while it was. The Taliban were seemingly defeated, and a friendly government was installed in Kabul. America then moved much of its personnel and resources from Afghanistan to Iraq. The shift allowed the Taliban to rebuild. Soon a full-blown insurgency was raging.

“As they look back over this, they'll probably figure that there were some opportunities early on that we didn't take advantage of,” Lieutenant-General David Rodriguez, the American commander of the International Security Assistance Force Joint Command, said when we met in Kabul.

“The enemy regrouped and by 2005 was starting to come back stronger and stronger. And then we kind of were a little bit behind it each time and didn't leap ahead to get the strength and density of forces to improve the security to enable all the other things that are important. The numbers came late. The speed and growth of the Afghan national security forces came late. And what we couldn't do is just keep catching up to an ever-growing, strengthening insurgency, and basically shooting behind them.”

Canada's deployment of more than 2,500 soldiers to Kandahar in 2006 coincided with the Taliban's resurgence. The Canadian Forces suffered more than thirty fatalities that year, and again in each of the three years to come. Responsible for much of Kandahar province, the Canadians didn't have the numbers necessary to control territory. “It has been difficult, because we weren't a large enough force to fight an all-out counter-insurgency,” said Brigadier-General Dean Milner, the Canadian commander of Task Force Kandahar. They contained the Taliban and beat them whenever they stood to fight, but could not defeat them.

Then, in 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama announced an additional 30,000 American troops would “surge” into Afghanistan. Most of them arrived in the south. The Canadian area of responsibility shrunk. For the first time, Canadian soldiers had the troop density, as Milner put it, “to live with the people, to be everywhere we wanted to be.”

The Canadians, freed from trying to secure the entire province, deployed throughout Panjwaii district in a network of forward operating bases, patrols bases, and combat outposts. Some were large, fortified camps with rows of tanks and staffed kitchens. Others were small compounds where soldiers slept in hovels or outside and ate cold rations or whatever they prepared themselves.

An Afghan policeman near the village of Salavat, Kandahar province.

Canadian soldiers prepare for an armoured patrol at dawn in Kandahar province.

My visit came at a time when the Canadians fighting in Panjwaii felt they had finally reversed the Taliban's momentum. Only two members of their battle group had died due to enemy action since their deployment began the previous fall. Firefights and bombings were rare. Refugees were returning. They were opening schools. Members of the battle group, most from the Royal 22e Régiment, the Quebec unit known as the Van Doos, were proud. They had accomplished a lot. They were also on their way home. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper had promised to end Canada's combat mission by July 2011, only a couple of months away.

“As long as we're here, our work should be to create an option,” Alexis Legros, a captain who commanded a platoon at the Folad patrol base, told me. “They chose the Taliban because they provided security. Now we're giving them another choice. In the end it will be the population that decides. They know the Taliban closed schools and we opened one. There's no point trying to impose anything, because it won't work. The only thing we can do is give them time and an alternative when we leave.”

Canadian soldiers at a forward operating base in Kandahar province.