Book Review: Between the Bear and the Lioness

Title: Between the Bear and the Lioness

Author: Hanan Habibzai

Date: 2021

Publisher: Book Trail Agency

ISBN: 978-1-63767-351-5 (for the e-book, which is what I received for review); 978-1-63767-350-8 (for the paperback book)

Length: 282 e-pages

Quote: “The Taliban are mostly rural and they have a lot of support because they are simple, don’t have any special uniforms, and don’t ask anyone for food. Whoever brings anything, they eat it. They do not take bribes, are not involved in corruption, and do not have big bungalows. They do not drive in armoured vehicles. They walk like other poor villagers. This has helped them to gain the support of the people. Because there is not much distance between them and the people. If you compare government officials with poor Afghans, there is a huge economic and social gap between them. Expensive dresses, expensive cars, and lascivious body gardens, all in Hollywood style. Hand in hand; gun point towards people. They have surrounded these officials and discusses money, buildings, business, and modern life.”

When I was invited to pick a recent e-book to review I vacillated over this one. My web site needs U.S. readers. We have Asian readers, which is nice, we like them, but our U.S. sponsors (such as they are) want U.S. readers. I have consciously tried to engage with a mix of ethnic groups and political viewpoints but most of our U.S. readers are, in any case, middle-aged women. (This probably won’t change.) What did my American women readers want to read next? Another Asian book or something about these United States? Hanan Habibzai happened to reply to a tweet from me before the U.S. writer did, and I’m glad that he did. 

This collection of essays and reportage was put together in aid of charitable organizations in Afghanistan. It’s a must-read for Americans who have harshly criticized the Biden Administration for withdrawing our armed forces from Afghanistan. “Turn them back over to the loathsome Taliban, now? Whyyyy?” my readers and I asked, and those readers who do comment on foreign policy typed things that must have scorched their keyboards. Well...I don’t do foreign policy...in any case, Habibzai is here to tell us why.

The title of this book tactfully reflects the concerns of Afghans caught between the symbols of power in empire-building nations, the Russian bear and the British lion, without mentioning the American eagle. The U.S.-backed government was also seen as greedy, feudal, and oppressive. The price of rice, and wheat and school supplies and whatever else, exceeded the people’s ability to pay. The current generation of Afghans felt the need for a change of régimes. Their collective memory is short, we drily observe, and Habibzai explains that, too. Forty years of warfare and poverty have not left a lot of elders to remind people of the abuses of the Taliban led by Mullah Omar. Though still evidently very repressive toward women and ethnic minorities today’s Taliban is a new generation—one that has studied practical politics.

If you’ve known Afghans who were able to come to a more fortunate country, you probably like them, and so this book is not pleasant to read. These people have a culture very different from U.S. Protestants but they are easy to like. Habibzai writes the way they talk, in fluent English that breaks back down to a foreign kind of grammar in moments of stress. A party that literally stood “hand in hand; gun point towards people” would be in an awkward position, easy to disarm and overthrow, but we know what the idioms mean. Nobody should have to go through what these people have been going through during my lifetime. It reminds one of the Southern States in my great-grandparents’ time, just before, during, and long after the Civil War: “The Yanks took our corn and the Rebs took our cotton; the banks took our land, and the tax took our home.” Everyone claims to want power to help the people and somehow the people feel that everyone just wants to take. Omar’s Taliban did some taking too but, after twenty years of poverty with U.S. “help,” the living—who are mostly young—think the current generation of Taliban might not be so bad, so far. Give them time...

Habibzai documents what American readers (including Canadians, and also British and Australian readers) might have feared would happen when the U.S. went into Afghanistan. Despite the genuine good will of U.S. citizens a top-down approach from Big Government did not make life much better for many people. We helped an allegedly democratic U.S.-style government gain power. Afghans did not experience this government as actually being as democratic as we hoped it would be. Habibzai claims that “you can’t find a hospital” Americans built and left to Afghan people to operate. Families like his, who fled to Pakistan and lived as refugees during the Russian invasion, have been able to trickle back to their homes but still don’t feel secure there. A large sector of the economy consists of teenagers who are doing the real work because the people who ought to be teaching and supervising them aren’t there. Afghanistan is still a very unhealthy place to live; people who live to be as “old” as thirty or forty are likely to be living as refugees in other countries.

A U.S. soldier ran amok and killed Afghan people. “But not as part of a policy of tyranny! He had a mental illness. He would have been just as dangerous to other Americans if he’d been at home.” (This is true. People whose Prozac Dementia leads to homicide-suicide seem to want to kill as many people as they can, and some have managed to take more than nineteen lives out along with their own.) Affluent Americans have developed the idea that verbal apologies are all that is necessary when people have been injured or killed accidentally, or while someone was insane. “All human laws” around the world have always recognized that, if the victim’s family happen not to be affluent, verbal apologies alone are mockery. When other people depended on the victim’s work or income, in order for claims of good intentions to be accepted, the homicide or those accepting responsibility for him or her should try to compensate the bereaved family. This is still unsatisfactory, because it makes no provision for “feelings” or the desire to believe that all people should have equal value. U.S. readers shouldn’t have to have this spelled out for them; old British and Biblical laws used to set standard amounts for what the English used to call wergild payments, but “wergild” seems like a foreign word for many U.S. students.

In Afghanistan, while the Taliban were poor and out of power, the U.S. “peacekeepers” were not even culturally prepared to help poor families with funerals, much less surviving bereavement. “Outside Kabul, mostly in the south and the east of the country, enough instances exist which contribute to the Taliban propaganda campaign. The US–led foreign airstrikes have killed thousands of civilians across the country since 2001. In the aftermath of those attacks, there is no high-profile government official or any foreign official to show immediate sympathy and help the remnants, but Taliban and the Imams are already there. They are there to serve and bury the dead bodies according to Islamic principles. They are there to recite the Quran and pray for the success of Islam and those who lost their loved ones.” Even if this was an utterly coldblooded (and tribalistic) bid for emotional sympathy, one can imagine how effective it would have been. “Peacekeepers” did not know the reason why people were gathering. In some cases hypervigilant U.S. troops might have been sincerely trying to stop a Taliban rally before it started; the men visiting a house might even have been talking of their pro-Taliban feelings, for all that will ever be known, but in any case, when the house was blown up, the casualties included women and children gathering for a wedding or some such family celebration. A general policy favoring education and employment for women can be mistaken, after a mistake of this magnitude, for a scheme to lure women and children out into the streets where they can be murdered. Americans may think “But of course nobody could misunderstand us in such appalling ways, good lord, what sort of person would even think...?!” Habibzai testifies that the Taliban could and did misunderstand us in exactly those ways.

Habibzai gives an Afghan perspective on events from recent Afghan history that were reported in newspapers like the Washington Post or New York Times. Typical U.S. readers who didn’t follow those stories can look them up at the archives of major newspapers. Most reports from after 2000 are available online. We the people of the United States rather passively helped Hamid Karzai become the head of his state. He was mortal and fallible. Because he was supported by the U.S. he could be seen as a puppet governor, thus presumed corrupt and feeble; and, by those who chose to restore the Taliban to power, he was seen that way.

We feel that Taliban notions of shariah justice are likely to kill more Afghan people than U.S. troops among whom one soldier happens to become insane. So do some Afghan people who disagree with the Taliban. Nevertheless, young Afghans see today’s Taliban as at least living by their cultural rules of modesty, frugality in hard times and presumably generosity in better times. “Lascivious body gardens” are part of Afghan culture—historically people had farms, and those who could afford it cultivated pretty flower gardens just for pleasure—but government officials might have done better to focus on helping private citizens rebuild their homes before they built flower gardens in which to entertain foreigners.

We have had something like this in U.S. history. Habibzai observes that “Afghanistan is introduced to the world as a horrible country.” What was reported, even what was fairly and accurately reported, after our own Civil War was driving many of our ancestors to the “Wild” West as our Southern States were (accurately) portrayed as a disaster area and our Northern States as a place of triumphant greed, abuse, and bigotry. In the South ex-slaves who were still poor were spouting revenge, the Ku Klux Klan was terrorizing the ex-slaves, nobody ate well, all valuables including food were likely to be stolen and wasted, any education that took place was haphazard, land was ruined, and disease germs were proliferating in preparation for the plague years in the early twentieth century. In the North some business tycoons lured in immigrants, from the South and from Europe, and others hated and persecuted them. We were a horrible country, a place where intertribal bickering threatened to destroy beautiful land. Only God could have saved us. Only God can save Afghanistan now, I believe, and their best hope is that they are people of faith. They have some misbeliefs that have contributed to their current disaster conditions. If they sincerely pray for guidance to correct the misbeliefs and clean up the mess, they will receive it, but real improvement may take a long time. In our Southern States very few ex-slaves, ex-slavemasters, or Confederate veterans lived to see either economic recovery or recovery from the plagues.

“Women rights, democracy, human rights, and political stability are the constant battle cry of the invaders. But ordinary Afghans’ appreciation of such gifts is tempered by heavy bombs.” A top-down federal government attempt at “reconstruction” did more harm than good after our Civil War. In some ways, at least, similar effects were observed in Afghanistan. People who came to Afghanistan on humanitarian missions did some good and were liked, and troops were needed to protect them, but is the military model of operations really suited to helping?

Another parallel with the United States in the late nineteenth centuries is Habibzai’s claim that tribal wars, though responsible for much of Afghanistan’s trouble, are being fed and exploited by foreign interests. Europeans who wanted to see American Democracy fail funded both sides of our Civil War, just as, before that, European immigrants had deliberately tried to aggravate conflicts among different groups of Native Americans. The Soviets apparently looked for trouble when they claimed they wanted to liberate Afghan “minority” tribes from the dominance of Pashtun tribesmen. Pashtun people were persecuted as having been rich oppressors, whether they were or not. The conflicts grew as chaos and poverty increased, so the end result is a nation of desperate, barely literate young men (and boys) squabbling over scraps, invoking old tribal hostilities when their grandfathers were able to work and trade together in peace. It’s a bad situation that Americans ought to be able to relate to.

(Full disclosure: Habibzai is a descendant of an old Pashtun landowning family. My Indian foster brother’s family traced their male-line descent to the Moguls, but Pashto was commonly spoken in their part of India and they claimed Pashtun cousins. Habibzai is not writing as a tribalist and I hardly know one Afghan ethnic group from another but there is some possibility of bias simply from exposure, in both book and review.)

Even charitable outsiders, as everywhere, come in and demonstrate cluelessness. Poor people in ruined cities, Habibzai says, would be satisfied with bread and water, but relief workers think they need chicken and rice. Afghans have traditionally liked chicken and rice, or lamb and rice, etc., well seasoned and scooped up on bits of naan bread, but in a burnt-out city cooking meat and rice can be problematic. Fuel needs to be saved for cold weather, and cooking on a small, frugal open fire in cold weather is a long difficult process. Storing cooked meat is even more difficult. Sanitation is a problem even when people choose to go vegan. They don’t have electricity, they don’t have water-flush toilets, and they certainly don’t have refrigerators. Bread made from wheat grown in the United States, or anywhere else where wheat farmers “protect their crops” with glyphosate, is toxic waste but people who don’t actually lose blood immediately after eating it are likely to feel that bread is safer than chicken and rice would be, for them. People who are already weak from other infections, malnutrition, and the emotional turmoil a doctor cited in the book mentions, have died from salmonella.

The chapters on Afghan popular culture may be obscure or off-putting to U.S. readers but they shed light on this country. All Islamic cultures value education, science, poetry, but fear of religious corruption and plain old poverty often produce situations where many people never learn to read. When people have to work to support themselves and the one surviving disabled elder in the family, starting at age ten, they are very unlikely to learn enough to feel confident even about teaching their children to read, so the next generation grow up illiterate. Nevertheless they value learning when they can get any of it, so after a hard day’s work illiterate laborers will listen to poetry readings or scientific discussions. Their understanding may be limited, and the science may be garbled and the poetry may be bad, but they are keen lifelong learners, like early Anglo-Americans or medieval Jews. Though currently very poor, they have a rich culture that should not be swept away by well-meaning people wanting to offer everyone a “global,” English-based or perhaps Chinese-based “education.” They need the chance to educate themselves and build up their contributions to the world’s knowledge and culture in their own way.

Habibzai’s motive is of course to call attention to how long the hard times have gone on in Afghanistan, to encourage anyone feeling munificent to send money to charitable organizations, like his, to help the people. And how selective is their help likely to be? First the relief workers eat steak, then they hand out rice and aspirin to other people? “Medical school for as many of my fifteen children as can keep up with the work, and at least a third grade education for other children”? Child. That is what we call Human Nature. U.S., U.K., and U.N. aid enabled it too, greedheads in Kabul rebuilding colorful “palaces” before they even considered putting roofs on what was left of neighbors’ houses, and of course both U.S. and Soviet “helpers” were distrusted because they didn’t live by the local cultural rules. As Greg Mortenson observed about twenty years ago, when local people are doing the humanitarian work they’re likely to be less resented and less distrusted because at least they’re doing their selective helping by the local rules.

The Taliban have historically resented and distrusted the United States, and may (again) vent their feelings on individuals we might try to help unless aid is delivered by trusted local men. How far this trust should go, this web site cannot say...but let all people of faith pray for the Afghan people. They needed prayers before; they will need them more now.