phobocracy

I love this word coined by Michael Chabon in his Washington Post op-ed for Obama. If you didn't read it, here's the money graph:

The point of Obama's candidacy is that the damaged state of American democracy is not the fault of George W. Bush and his minions, the corporate-controlled media, the insurance industry, the oil industry, lobbyists, terrorists, illegal immigrants or Satan. The point is that this mess is our fault. We let in the serpents and liars, we exchanged shining ideals for a handful of nails and some two-by-fours, and we did it by resorting to the simplest, deepest-seated and readiest method we possess as human beings for trying to make sense of the world: through our fear. America has become a phobocracy.

It reminded me of something that I heard on the news just yesterday. We were driving through downtown kabul in a taxi listening to the radio. The woman announcer told us that Mullah Omar had ordered his Taliban fighters no longer to slit the throats of Afghans accused of working with foreigners. He said that slitting people's throats, even if they were working with foreigners, was barbaric and against Islam.

"From now on," he said, "Just shoot them."

Why did Omar say this? Why now? No one could say, though one humanitarian worker mag covered it this way:

Video clips showing horrific scenes of human decapitations and other forms of severe physical torture had been circulated by the insurgents, apparently in an effort to threaten people who support and/or work with the Afghan government and its international supporters. Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) and other international rights watchdogs have repeatedly accused Taliban insurgents of deliberately attacking civilians and systematically violating international humanitarian law. "No more beheadings."

"Mullah Omar's order is effective immediately and there will be no more beheadings by the Taliban," said Zabiullah Mujahid, who claims to be a spokesman for Taliban fighters. About 100 people have been beheaded by Taliban insurgents on charges of espionage in the past 12 months, a leading Afghan news agency, Pajwhok, reported on 4 February.

The implication seems to be, Omar picked up his morning copy of Pajwhok news, saw how many local folks they'd beheaded, and finally saw the light. Right. Since Taliban has never ever as far as I know bowed to the complaints of human rights activists, I feel like this can only mean a few things. One, Omar really hopes to be president of this country again, and so wants to assume some pretense of civility. Or at least not seem like a totally sick and bloodthirsty savage. Two, Omar wants to compare his strong hand with Karzai's impotent one. Karzai makes speeches, Omar makes change. (I wonder what will happen if some Taliban don't follow the rules? Will the beheaders get beheaded? Or shot?)

But I have a third theory, and it gets back to this idea of fear. When the Taliban controlled this country, they were a phobocracy. They ruled by inspiring fear. (Even their fighting technique was designed primarily to intimidate: black Range Rovers barreling full-speed through the dust.) And, well, everyone knows that if you want to really scare someone, you hold back. You don't do the thing you most do show. Not... yet.

I've written to you already about how we're living through grim days in Kabul. Foreigners are spooked. Restaurants have closed. The nightlife, such as it was, is limited. They have us cowering. Everyone's waiting to see what the Taliban will do next.

And, for the moment at least, they do nothing. They sheathe their knife. Slowly bend down to clean some snow off their boots. Even old one-eyed Mullah Omar himself steps out of his cave to give a little papal wave to his people. My good children, he says, no longer will we cut your throats like dogs. Now, if you don't listen, we'll just kill you. Capiche?

And then he winks.

If this was a movie, the audience would be squealing.

prom night

Weekend morning. Bright sunshine. The pushcart peddlers hollering about potatoes in the quiet street. I eat my cereal in the cold then light a stove and open my laptop. At noon a friend stops by; she seems happy at first but once in the house she slowly crumbles down onto the rug. "Not too good," she says in response to the obvious question. She's a party girl by nature, now having to spend nights in her rented room watching reruns of Lost. Since the Serena hotel got attacked, all the restaurants are closed. Every bar but the bars on the embassy are off-limits. Her days are spent keeping development projects afloat as expats back out of their contracts. Everyone is spooked.

She tells me about her two friends that were in Kabul’s luxury hotel the night it was attacked. One felt bullets wizzing around her head and saw a man shot in front of her. Another hid in the women's locker room but when they came to rescue them he had to jump over the dead Filipino woman. "He told us the story cheerfully, laughing" she says gnawing the ruby stone on her middle finger. "He'd fucking lost it." Both of the friends had left Afghanistan, never to return.

We meet another friend at a restaurant, a reedy Canadian journalist with blue eyes and red beard. The last time I saw Red, he was planning to stay a year and write a book about the Canadian experience. Now he's put in notice. He got another job in Sierra Leone and leaves in two weeks. He'll be running to the airplane when it comes.

"I'm done with this country," says Red. "Done done done done done." We are eating the restaurant's specialty bolani, a sort of pastry stuffed with potato cut into bite sized squares. There are two dipping sauces for the pastry, a green one and a red one. Both are delicious. Red says he’s done trying to figure out the Afghan puzzle. He doesn't want to know anymore.

The rest of the meal arrives. Mung beans smeared with yoghurt and cardamon, comforting and succulent, also a kind of ravioli stuffed with leeks and parsely, some south asian-style meatballs, plain rice and fresh cucumber salad. Baklavah for desert. When we put on our coats it is almost four o'clock. We've been here three hours and the restaurant has had only two other customers.

The grocery store where we go next is the only crowded spot. I buy 10 boxes of juice, four jars of pasta sauce and four kinds of pasta. I buy so much food that the store owners laugh at me. I joke back and do not tell them that I have been hungry for four days.

That night I have dinner with three more friends, one of whom just broke her contract and another of whom is thinking about it. The third is sick since Christmas vacation. We are sitting in a living room on couches and cushions whispering on the edge of the circle while a British guy is holding forth to a Bulgarian woman on how when he went to Africa he failed to fix the bloody special setting in automatic cameras that you need to adjust to photograph black people. A christmas tree is in the other corner and a gas stove is making us lightheaded.

It might have been the fumes or perhaps nostalgic longings that drove me after dinner to a party at the US Embassy. The taxi drops me off at the barbed wire and concrete gate and I walk the rest of the way on foot. The concrete path is swept clean and well lit. I walk deeper into the compound. I see no one, just me and my breath under the spotlights. I wonder if there are snipers watching me somewhere in the darkness. Then out from the concrete wall steps a guard with a kalashnikov.

"Ho there!" he shouts. (He doesn't actually say 'ho there,' but the Dari phrase he uses sounds so ornate and old-fashioned. And the cold concrete platform feels like a stage.)

"Hey," i say.

When I finally arrive at the party I hear it before I see it. A guy is screaming into a microphone, something about a queen and a kiss. “It’s prom night!” someone says.

The embassy people, the USAID people, the people that pass out multi-million dollar development contracts several times a month, they're here, quite literally Playing That Funky Music (White Boy) in a cafeteria strewn with paper streamers and string lights and Betty Crocker cake. Someone hands me a slice, on a paper plate.