Introduction to the new edition

William T. Vollmann

An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World

This book is dedicated

to all who try to help others,

whether they succeed or fail

And I have admitted that the foreigner will probably pronounce a sentence differently if he conceives it differently; but what we call his wrong conception need not lie in anything that accompanies the utterance…

WITTGENSTEIN, Philosophical Investigations, I.20

INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION

“Bill’s come a long way from An Afghanistan Picture Show, ” said an editor to my agent in the course of rejecting my latest book; so far as he was concerned, I must not have come far enough. Never mind that I could say the same about him; for when I look back on the product of sincerity and gaucherie which you are now reading, I believe in both his propositions. As it stands, An Afghanistan Picture Show is a much delayed revision and amplification of the very first book I wrote, which was not the first book I published. As such, it suffers deficiencies of both form and content. One of my German translators recently told me: “ An Afghanistan Picture Show is your weakest book, in my opinion. I hope you don’t mind my saying that.” Indeed, I do not. First of all, I had just begun to teach myself how to write. It takes years to learn how to observe, when to make a sentence terse or flowery, and which questions to write. The book’s attempts at humor and whimsicality embarrass me, although some of its irony still entertains me.

Of course what embarrasses me far more is the pitiless recounting of my myriad failures. I cannot reread portions of this book without shame — at my ignorance, my smug conviction that I could somehow do the Afghans a favor, my physical inability to keep up with the Mujahideen, my utter uselessness. And this puts me on the track of why An Afghanistan Picture Show may be of value. It is not a political analysis, although it hoped to be. It is hardly even much of an “adventure memoir.” But it delineates, with an honesty I remain proud of, the attempt of one young man to be of service to others.

It continues to astonish me how easy it is to harm people and how difficult it is to help them. Most of my books deal with this issue, but never so directly as here.

I wanted to “help the Afghans.” I assumed that goodwill and a degree of intrepidity would be enough.

I believed, and still do, that every human being is my brother or sister, and therefore that we are all of us equally deserving of help.

I love Afghanistan as much today as I did when I first crossed the border in 1982. The land is beautiful and the people were kind to me.

The wish I have always had to be of service made me very lonely when I first decided to go to Afghanistan. No one could understand me. When I returned, with observations and descriptions which I considered important, my fellow Americans told me: “No one cares about Afghanistan, ” or, better yet: “Afghanistan, Bananastan! ”

September eleventh changed everything, and, in more ways than the obvious ones, it altered Americans, most of whom, like me, had been lucky enough to grow up without knowing what was happening in the rest of the world. Needless to say, by “Americans” I pointedly exclude my own government, which has intervened, to great ill and frequent good effect, without the knowledge or comprehension of its so-called electorate. It poked its foreign policy stick in a number of ant-hills, and finally some ants bit back.

Afghanistan accordingly transformed itself from a comical Nowheresville into an evil place of which Americans were all too aware. If only we could kill all those killers and murder all those murderers! Then we would be safe again.

In 1998, returning from sanctioned Iraq, I wrote:

The notion that stern domination of a country can prevent its evil resurgence did not work against Germany after World War I. It will not work here. It will succeed only in creating and hardening new enemies for America and her sister powers. Sooner or later, some Iraqi clever enough to build a destructive device will try again, and his hatred will not be restrained by memories of our kindness. ^†

Unfortunately, the events of September eleventh have borne me out, although they appear to have been planned in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia instead of Iraq. Well, what’s the difference? Afghanistan, Bananastan! As some fellow citizens said while watching television coverage of the first Gulf War: “That’s right, that’s right; we’ve got to stop those goddamned Iranians.”

I am not a diplomat or a strategist. My only gift as a political observer is my ability to see and state the obvious. If you went to a Muslim country such as Iraq and saw the children dying for lack of anti-diarrhetic medicines, if you witnessed the hatred, grief, and defiance of the people, furthermore, if you returned home and found out that your friends and neighbors, in whose name your government was causing this suffering, possessed neither knowledge nor interest about the situation, how could you not anticipate something like September eleventh? Sometimes I can almost excuse President Bush (who ought to be in a cell in The Hague) for the second Gulf War. After all, even though Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction, and his links to al-Qaeda were falsified, he certainly could have wanted to avenge himself on us!

In An Afghanistan Picture Show you will similarly find statements of the obvious: Victims are not necessarily saints; nor are would-be benefactors. “The Afghans” are no more homogenous than “the Americans.” Good intentions alone do not elicit gratitude. Helpfulness cannot be scientifically calculated. Generosity and fairness may be mutually exclusive. The give and take in human relations is often unpredictable. How astonished these discoveries made me!

I was very foolish, but I never knowingly did harm, and I tried not to lie about myself.

Please let me tell you the obvious about Afghanistan: Every child and grandmother we kill makes us new enemies. We will never “win” over there.

I used to say that I hoped to see the September eleventh plotters all hunted down and killed. Now I am ashamed of having thought so. Osama bin Laden should have been put on trial instead of being gunned down. From what little I have read, he was wounded and helpless and they kept pumping lead into him. I would have liked to hear him explain why he did what he did.

If you begin reading An Afghanistan Picture Show in the expectation of more political discussion than this, you will be disappointed. To be sure, people who remain onstage today, such as the infamous Gulbuddin, or who disappeared from it only yesterday, such as Rabbani and Masoud, get mentioned. I remember interviewing Rabbani for this book and feeling very pleased with myself; by the time he became the head of the Afghan government I no longer particularly cared about my so-called accomplishment. After all, this book, as much as it originally wanted to be, is not about Afghanistan at all. First and foremost, it portrays, far more than its shallow young author could have imagined, a certain kind of social relationship. The epigraph to one of my latest European short stories was derived from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. It could equally be the epigraph to this book: “Every attempt to present altruism as a route to the transformation of an antagonistic society on nonegoistic principles leads ultimately to ideological hypocrisy, masking the antagonism of class relations.” I wanted to do good, and “help the Afghans.” Ignorant of the very evident implications of the fact that I was the semi-privileged citizen of an extremely privileged country, I believed in the simple equality of all human beings, and expected that one of the Mujahideen commanders would set me some task, which I would do my best to fulfill — haul water, document a battle, or fight — and that would be that. It was shocking to me that, instead, quasi-divine powers were ascribed to my person. I was an American; I could do anything. And because I could not do anything, not even walk over the mountains very well (I had already lost forty pounds from amoebic dysentery), I failed all parties, inevitably. Had I been physically fit, with a million dollars in my pocket, I still would have failed the Afghans, for I was nobody but myself. And myself was all I ever wanted to be — an illusion which masks “the antagonism of class relations.”

Nonetheless, while I now suspect that the Great Soviet Encyclopedia ’s entry on altruism is very likely true, and the longer I think about it, the more examples of its truth I can see — French Jesuit missionaries saving Amerindians from their satanic idols, and destroying their societies in the process; American missionaries saving Afghan women from the misogyny of the Taliban, and in the process bringing about a revival of the same warlordism which raped and abducted vast numbers of Afghan women — the passage of years also strengthens my belief in the absolute necessity of encouraging altruistic aspirations all over this earth of ours. What should I have done, with the knowledge, wealth, and health I had? Exactly what I did. My memories of failure haunt and humiliate me, which is all to the good.

In the year 2000, on the eve of entering what was then Taliban Afghanistan, I paid a visit to my former host and adopted father, General N., who gets considerable mention in An Afghanistan Picture Show. The old man had grown older; his mind was not quite as focused as it used to be; two digits had been added to the telephone number on the card I’d kept since 1982. He remembered me most joyfully; he welcomed me; I took his hand with love and respect.

When I set out to participate in, and then to write, An Afghanistan Picture Show, I egotistically supposed myself to be the protagonist of that tragicomic do-gooder’s saga. The truth is that the real hero of my book is General N. He sheltered and fed me, clothed me as a Pathan, arranged my safe passage to Afghanistan and back; above all, he reached my mind before it was fully closed. He told me that we were now friends for life, and we were, although we communicated only by letter for most of our friendship, and after a number of years even the letter-writing stopped. I know in my heart that this fine man took me on not because I was an American or because he thought I could do anything or even necessarily learn anything, but because I was one of his many charity cases.

I had at least shown enough forethought to come to Pakistan with a parallel-text Qur’an, which indeed I still have and always bring with me to Muslim countries. Studying the Qur’an with one’s hosts is an excellent way for non-Muslims such as myself to express interest, show sincerity and respect, and gain knowledge of local custom. I used to read the Qur’an with General N., for much the same reason that I used to read Marx, Lenin, and Stalin in Communist countries, and on my return in 2000 it gave both him and me great pleasure when I asked him to explain a certain passage. I learned something about the text, and meanwhile got to look one more time into his mind.

I remember reading the Qur’an with him in the hot summer of 1982, and I remember his lime tree, and his children now all grown and gone; above all I know and believe in the goodness of his otherness. I will probably never be a Muslim. Nor can I be a Pathan. Yet I have a partial sense of what it might be like to be what General N. is. It is so different from what I am, and the fact that my world and his are now at war breaks my heart; but I’ll never give up believing, and trying to help others see, that we and they are brothers and sisters together. Well, so what? Isn’t that obvious? How I wish it were obvious!

As is mentioned in An Afghanistan Picture Show, the general said to me that in order to carry out any project one needs a brain, a heart, and hands. The average brain is perfectly good enough for most worthwhile things, and by definition at least half of you who read this will be above average in this respect.^‡ Many of us also have the heart, the desire to do something good. (I think I was once purehearted.) The hands are another matter. By “hands, ” General N. meant “capability.” What are you good at? More practically, what are you good at that you have the resources to accomplish? Can you paint a mural of goodness and truth before you’ve found the right wall? The terrifying issues related to September eleventh will not resolve themselves in our lifetimes. It is up to each of us to do whatever he or she can to understand the grievances of others and, to the extent that we can lovingly and legitimately do so, to help them be satisfied. This defines not only our obligation as decent human beings, but our self-interest as terrorist targets.

W.T.V. (2013)

* Part of this essay is taken from a lecture I gave to the student body of Deep Springs College in 2002. Much is revised from the introduction I wrote to the German edition in 2003. Some is unique to this edition.

† See my essay Rising Up and Rising Down (around 3, 500 pages), which contains, among other things, sections on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Taliban Afghanistan.

‡ I steal a line here from my late father, a retired professor, who used to address his first class of business students each year as follows, in order to encourage due diligence on their part: “Half of you gentlemen are below average.”