Afghanistan

I’ve always been fascinated by Afghanistan for a few reasons: the cradle of Central Asian Buddhism, the meeting place of Hellenic and Indic cultures. If you can get Twitter to work, this is a really neat thread about Afghanistan. I’ll quote some highlights:

During the first 75 years of the 20th century, 🇦🇫#Afghanistan experienced less war and political unrest than almost every country in the West, including eg. 🇳🇴Norway, 🇧🇪Belgium, and 🇫🇮Finland.

It’s a common trope re. the War in #Afghanistan that “Afghanistan has always been that way.”

Meaning: a place of war, violence, tyranny and chaos. But that’s total nonsense. Afghanistan became “that way” recently. And it did so as a result of modern ideological conflicts.

Afghanistan from 1900-1975 was, to be sure, a very poor country, with a weak central government, lagging behind most of its neighbors in areas such as education, healthcare, and women’s rights. But it was also (mostly) a rapidly developing country, and a country at peace.

Contrary to assumptions about never-ending tribal conflicts, the outbreak of war in Afghanistan brought about by a communist coup. The movement that brought war to Afghanistan was anti-traditionalist and anti-religious, motivated by a distinctly modern political ideology.

But - the men who bear the heaviest responsibility for failing to bring about peace in Afghanistan after the communists were defeated were also motivated by modern political ideology, albeit not one directly connected to the Cold War: Radical political Islamism.

Often wrongly confused with conservative Islamic traditionalism, radical political Islamism is a distinctly modern, 20th century movement - which often has been in conflict with traditionalist ones. It should be understood as a political ideology, not a religious movement.

Just like communism, political Islamism was a marginal movement in Afghanistan prior to the war. It was the purvey of a few radical activists, mostly university students and professors. Their radical and extremist political ideas had little appeal amongst ordinary people.

A measure of the radical Islamists’ lack of support prior to the war is their attempted insurrection in 1975. It was a complete failure. No one was interested in supporting the Islamists’ quixotic rebellion, which was dead-on-arrival and collapsed within days.

Some thoughts:

Rich, complex, and stable civilizations take centuries to form, but they can be wiped off the map almost overnight.

I spend a lot of time thinking about continuity with the past and tend to think that once a link’s been severed, that’s it. It’s gone.

Specifically, I’m thinking of Theravāda Buddhism. Much of what people today think of as Theravāda or mindfulness meditation is a construct of 19th and 20th Century Burma — it’s a reform movement based on textual reconstructions of what was presumed to be a pure Buddhism without the mixture of local cultures.

This stands in contrast to the Theravāda lineage that I practice within, which has roots in pre-reform Buddhism with a much stronger emphasis on living tradition and one-on-one training instead of a pure textual approach.

Interestingly enough, the reform movement was very much a Protestant driven thing. Buddhists adopted the methodology of Protestant missionaries and thought that a modernized, Protestant Buddhism would be better able to withstand proselytization.

My subjective take is that the traditions differ largely in emphasis, even if the content is identical. The pre-reform lineages are more relaxed, slow-paced, and down-to-earth. In contrast the more modern vipassanā practices are intense, focused on hammering the idea of “no-self”, and incredibly rigid. You’ll get enlightened now!

So what on earth does any of this have to do with Afghanistan? Radical Islam is an entirely Western creation. It was the same sort of response to the pressures from Christian missionaries. It took the same approach of cutting all ties with living tradition and building a textual reconstruction of pure Islam based on the Quran and Hadith.

And thus to counter one Western created ideology, Communism, another offspring of Western thought, Islamic fundamentalism, was unleashed on Afghanistan. Both of these ideologies are obsessed with erasing the past and building some pure future.

And the result is modern Afghanistan.

And this is one of the most pernicious bits of colonialism, when ideas that were birthed in the West such as nationalism, communism, religious fundamentalism get imported into a culture and destroy the living links to a culture’s own past.

That’s why I’m weary of movements that profess to make radical breaks with the past. Reevaluating things in the spirit of the growth and change that happen in any living culture needs to happen, otherwise you’re living in a museum. But it’s a slow, gradual process.