Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (8 page)

In the wake of Khrushchev’s speech, Mao—intensely paranoid even in the best of times—resolved to safeguard against any potential de-Stalinizing tendencies in China. In 1957 he unleashed a vicious purge (the so-called Anti-Rightist Campaign) of critical intellectuals that ultimately sent hundreds of thousands of people to jails, concentration camps, or internal exile. Deng proved his fealty by running the campaign. It was only in 1960 that Deng finally dared to distance himself from the chairman, delicately addressing “problems in Mao’s thinking.”
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(This was just after the calamity of the Great Leap Forward, when Mao was probably more vulnerable politically than at just about any other time in his career.)

Now, allying himself with the newly ascendant Liu Shaoqi, Deng began to suggest that it was time for China to consolidate after the long years of upheaval and tend to the efficiency of production and the task of raising living standards. In 1961, during a speech to a party assembly, he uttered his famous aphorism: “I don’t care if it’s a black cat or white cat. It’s a good cat if it catches mice.”
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It was a line that opened him up to the inevitable accusation of infidelity to revolutionary ideals, but Deng dismissed the charge with aplomb: “If they tell you you’re a capitalist roader, it means you’re doing a good job,” he remarked.
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This stubbornness came in handy during the trials of the Cultural Revolution that were about to follow.

By the mid-1960s, Deng, like other Chinese Community Party leaders, had emerged from a chastening school. His experience in the civil war had hardened
him, reinforcing his belief in the essential rightness of Communist Party leadership. It gave him crucial on-the-job experience in military command as well as a web of valuable personal contacts, bolstered by a sense of shared adversity. It also taught him a great deal about political intrigue. From his master, Mao, he had learned the importance of controlling the terms of the debate if he wished to gain the upper hand over his enemies. At the same time, his stint as the de facto commander in chief of Taihang Mountain had provided him with a real-world laboratory in which he learned the virtues of pragmatic adaptation to complex political realities.

In the 1950s, then, Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” had shown Deng the threats posed by uncontrolled political liberalization, while the disaster of the Great Leap Forward had revealed for all to see the drawbacks of belief in Mao’s infallibility. For Deng, these two lessons were not contradictory; they were, in fact, equally crucial to his evolving administrative philosophy, which viewed the maintenance of political stability as a crucial precondition for much-needed economic reform and experimentation.

In the years ahead, it was Deng’s ruthless self-confidence, steeled in the long years of infighting and war, that would prove decisive. Winston Lord, a former US ambassador to China, recalled him this way:

            
He was four foot ten, but he dominated the room. His feet barely touched the floor. He was a chain smoker. He used the spittoon freely. He was very skillful in his meetings . . . [He] would get off a few pithy one-liners to dominate the international media, to get the themes across he wanted to make sure the world heard, then in a meeting he would draw out his interlocutor first, and then with seeming casualness, segue into two or three topics that he was determined to make points on.

                    
He was very straightforward. He didn’t use elusive symbols and allegories like Mao, and he didn’t have the elegance of [Zhou Enlai]. He was very practical. He could be self-deprecating about himself and about China, which of course reflected the fact that he had serene confidence in both.
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The word
practical
crops up in accounts of Deng’s life with benumbing frequency, and with good reason. This was a man who had mastered the art of survival. Now, as he assumed all the trappings of power, it was time to see what he could achieve with the time he had left.

I
n the early twenty-first century, we tend to think of Afghanistan as a place cursed by eternal warfare, an endlessly bleeding wound in the global body politic. What we tend to overlook is that this view is a recent invention, one conditioned by the country’s recent past. In the 1970s, before war broke out, the image of Afghanistan was starkly different—more Bali or Bhutan than geopolitical trouble spot. These were the years of the “Hippie Trail,” when self-designated “world travelers” piled into used Volkswagen vans and embarked on a path of self-discovery that led from Istanbul to Katmandu.

Afghanistan was not the end of the road, but it was certainly one of the high points. “Herat [on the border with Iran] was the first real destination on the hippie trail,” one traveler recalls. “The paranoia of oppressive control in Turkey and Iran was left behind for a wilder but welcoming state of anarchy.”
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Afghans seemed to love foreigners. You could always find someone who was willing to take time off for a friendly chat—or for a shared sampling of the fine local hashish. Everyone seemed to be smoking it. And the prices were hard to beat. Yes, of course, this was the result of local impoverishment. But surely the best thing you could do to remedy that was to spend your own money.

In Kabul you could stay at Sigi’s Hotel, a landmark on the trail. Since the dollar or the D-mark went such a long way in 1970s Afghanistan, you could easily linger
for weeks, getting high, feasting on cheap kebab, or venturing out to the fantastic archaeological sites that dotted the city and its environs. (True hippies especially enjoyed communing with the giant Buddhas carved out of a hillside in Bamiyan, a day’s drive away from the capital.) Then, when the time was ready, you could continue the journey all the way to Nepal, the El Dorado for recreational drug users. Still, trail adventurers later recalled their sojourns in Afghanistan—easygoing, soporific Afghanistan—with particular fondness.

But they weren’t the only ones. The Westerners who actually lived in Afghanistan in the 1970s, on their tours of duty with the Peace Corps or European-sponsored development projects, loved the place for its laid-back exoticism. If you needed a bit of modern luxury, all you had to do was pop over to one of the foreigners’ clubs, which offered all the amenities, or pay a visit to the Hotel Intercontinental for a dip in its fine pool. And crime was minimal. An American high school student whose father was doing a stint at the University of Kabul thought nothing of riding alone on the bus to Peshawar, across the border in Pakistan, for the weekend.
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Such views were not entirely illusory. As the 1970s dawned, Afghanistan was unquestionably poor and backward, but it seemed to be making remarkable progress in its efforts to embrace modern life. In the 1971 edition of her guidebook to Kabul, the American author Nancy Hatch Dupree bemoaned the difficulties of tracking the attractions of a city in which “change is rampant.” But she was determined to document the many charms that remained—like the Khyber Restaurant on the first floor of the Finance Ministry in Pashtunistan Square: “It is a popular meeting place in Kabul, especially during the summer when sidewalk tables set under gay umbrellas beckon weary sightseers. The Ariana Cinema next to the restaurant shows foreign pictures in many different languages.” There were magnificent museums and countless historical sites—all of them catering to the influx of foreign tourists: “Rounding the curve on Mohammad Jan Khan Wat, one notes many modern stores and small hotels which have sprung up in the last few years to attract the ever-increasing number of visitors to Kabul.” There was also the Nejat School for Boys, which “will soon shift to ultra-modern quarters currently nearing completion on the road to the airport, across from the area hotel.” (More and more of Kabul’s schools, as she noted, were going coed.) Dupree also pointed out the Kabul Zoo, which received some of its animals from its sister institution in the West German city of Cologne. There were the bazaars where you could purchase yarn or lentils or the garlands of paper flowers that were used to decorate cars during weddings and the shops where you could buy lapis lazuli or dried fruits or karakul skins, “for which Afghanistan is justly famous.”

One of the most conspicuous features of Afghanistan’s tentative modernization was the prominent role of outside sponsors. On the outskirts of Kabul, Dupree noted the construction of the Mikrorayon, “a series of high-rise apartments being constructed with assistance from the Soviet Union.”
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For years Afghanistan had been playing both sides in the Cold War. As part of their strategic rivalry in Asia, both the Soviets and the Americans were willing to contribute significant amounts of aid in return for Kabul’s friendship. The trick with “nonalignment,” as this policy was known, was keeping one’s balance.

And for a long time, it worked just fine. Afghanistan dispatched students to the United States on Fulbright scholarships for business degrees; others headed off to the USSR to study the technical professions. Foreign aid poured in. The Americans helped build dams and schools, West Germans trained the police force, and the Russians laid out natural gas pipelines and power plants. Development money also helped the Afghans to jump-start locally run businesses, like textile factories. And some of the funds were also used to build up the institutions of government. Every year, it seemed, Kabul erected yet another ministry building in the brutalist concrete style that was supposed to signify enlightened modernity. Each month brought a new announcement about some new agreement on technical assistance or foreign investment. The country was moving ahead. Peace reigned. The last serious uprising against the government had taken place in 1929.
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What the foreigners tended to overlook, however, was the extent to which their own presence reflected the weakness of the Afghan state, which remained critically dependent on aid from outsiders and had little motive for change as long as the money from its patrons kept flowing in. Both the Americans and the Soviets were happy to buy influence in the strategically important country. From 1956 to 1973, foreign grants and loans made up 80 percent of the country’s spending on investment and development. Afghanistan was also heavily dependent on the export of agricultural products and natural resources, including, eventually, natural gas, most of which went to the USSR, which had also supplied virtually all of the engineering know-how and facilities for the nascent industry. One of Afghanistan’s biggest export hits consisted of the skins of those karakul sheep mentioned by Dupree, which were prized by hatmakers around the world. Still, taken together, these weren’t exactly the ingredients of a robust modern economy. In the early 1960s, indeed, 80 percent of all taxes came from exports. By the 1970s, taxes from domestic sources, mainly on land and livestock, accounted for less than 2 percent of government revenues. A survey of fifty developing countries from this period showed that only one—Nepal—had a poorer record than Afghanistan’s when it came to collecting taxes from the citizenry.
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Afghanistan in the 1970s thus offered a textbook example of what the economists like to call a “rentier state”—one that lives by exploiting the advantages of good fortune (natural resources or favorable strategic position) rather than capitalizing on the talents and skills of its people. There were deep-seated historical reasons for this. Afghan rulers had long governed according to a somewhat minimalist philosophy, dictated, to some extent, by the country’s bewildering ethnic diversity and its fantastically rugged terrain. Roads were few and far between. The high mountains and deep valleys fragmented the population, exacerbating differences of language and custom. When the Soviets finally completed the Salang Tunnel in 1964, the world’s highest traffic tunnel at the time, they supplied the missing link to a road that connected the northern and southern halves of the country for the first time in its history. The Americans, meanwhile, had already built the first east-west highway, from Kabul to Kandahar. This new infrastructure transformed Afghanistan’s economy and dramatically simplified the government’s ability to communicate with the interior.

Even so, the average Afghan’s dealings with Kabul remained shallow and infrequent. The primary function of the local administration was less to provide people with public services, few of which were available in the countryside to begin with, than to prevent them from organizing opposition. Most people correspondingly regarded officials as a remote and somewhat unnecessary presence, better avoided than engaged. American anthropologist Thomas Barfield, who conducted field research in Afghanistan in the mid-1970s, noted that, for most Afghans in the countryside, “government” meant not a concept but a place, namely, the local government compound. “On passing out its front gate, and particularly after leaving the road that led to it, ‘government’ ended,” he wrote.
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(And this, in turn, helps to explain why literacy rates in the country were so shockingly low. In the 1970s, only 10 percent of the population could read or write—and only 2 percent of women.)
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The real power in most communities came from traditional leaders, usually tribal notables or landowners. The local khan might provide jobs, adjudicate disputes, or allocate resources (especially water, that scarce but vital commodity for this overwhelmingly rural population), and his authority rippled through the intricate networks of kinship that structured most of society. The leader’s followers judged his legitimacy in part according to his success at distributing wealth. In the old days, that might have meant the booty from battle, but in the 1960s and 1970s, this often translated into access to a cushy government job or a place in the university in Kabul. Afghanistan is often described rather loosely as a “tribal society,” but the reality is more complex, given the fantastic ethnic and social diversity of the
place. The word Afghans use for the defining characteristic of their society is
qawm
, which can refer not only to networks of blood relationships but also to linguistic, religious, and geographical traits that shape the group to which an individual belongs.
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A Turkic-speaking Uzbek might define himself above all by the dialect that he speaks, a Persian-speaking Tajik by the district that he hails from, a Pashtun by his tribal affiliation.