Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Asefi is an artist who, at great personal risk, had disguised the figures of human beings in eighty oil paintings at the gallery by applying a veneer of watercolor paint over them. He had thus saved the pictures from destruction at the hands of the Taliban, who had forbidden representations of the human form as sacrilege. Now, as an assortment of ministers, journalists, artists, and local intellectuals looked on, Asefi, scrubbed up in a starchy new suit, approached a painting, dipped a cloth in water, and began washing the watercolor away, revealing the original figures beneath, still intact. There was applause all around.

I had come to Afghanistan to see what remained of the country’s culture after the depredations of the Taliban and the devastation of war. I was astonished to find, amid the bombed-out ruins of Kabul, an artistic community that was not merely optimistic but exuberant. Everyone I talked to had extraordinary stories to tell about the Taliban era, but members of this community had survived that time surprisingly well and were taking up much where they had left off. You would think from the Western news reports that Kabul is populated only by desperate peasants, many of them warlike, and government bureaucrats and soldiers. In fact, Kabul also has a population of cultured, soigné Afghans, some of whom stayed through the Taliban years, some of whom have flooded back into the country from self-imposed exile.

But the beginning of a renaissance is not taking place only among a small elite. The Union of Artists, closed by the Taliban, quietly reopened three months ago and has already attracted more than three thousand members countrywide, including two hundred women. “Our future depends on these people,” Karzai told me. “We need to save our culture and bring it forward, make a new culture of Afghanistan. This is at the top of our agenda.”

Afghan women have been slow to give up the enshrouding burka, to Westerners the most potent symbol of the Taliban’s oppression. During a two-week visit to Kabul in mid-February, I spotted no more than a dozen women showing their faces on the streets, and none showing their hair, despite the lifting of the ban. Their clinging to the garment points to a deep cultural basis for this concealment. But while the emergence of women has been slow and ambivalent, the recent proliferation of art—high, low, traditional, new, Western, Eastern—shows how suddenly free urban Afghans now are.

Contrary to the Taliban’s propaganda, the prohibitions against art were never based in Islam. “The very idea is ridiculous,” said the minister of information and culture, Said Makhtoum Rahim. “There is no religious justification for such laws.” Nancy Hatch Dupree, a leading Western expert on Afghan culture, calls the restrictions “total claptrap, entirely political.” Abdul Mansour, director of Afghanistan television and former president of the cultural ministry, said, “They said it was religion, but it was just a combination of thuggery, profiteering, and fulfilling the agenda of the ISI.” He was referring to Pakistan’s intelligence service, then underwriting the Taliban. The ISI, he said, “wanted to see the weakest possible Afghanistan.” He continued, “And Pakistan is jealous. Pakistan is a new country, a fake country, with no history. While we—we have a splendid history.”

Rahim said, “Afghan culture has been destroyed many times. By Alexander the Great. By the British army. In the thirteenth century, Genghis Khan attacked Herat and killed everyone. Sixteen people were out of town for various reasons, and they returned to find that their city no longer existed. First, they wept. But then they decided to rebuild, and though they were just sixteen, Herat rose from the ashes. We will do it again. We want to export a message of love and cooperation for all the world, and to show our great art, so that people understand this is not just a country of warlords and battle.”