The New Afghan Justice: Smaller Rocks at Stonings; Black Hawk Bilge; Hitchens Reminds Me of Lunchtime O'Booze

Stone Him! (But Lightly)

The disjuncture these days between reality and what one reads in the press here is pretty much absolute. The other day I opened up the San Francisco Chronicle and found a piece hailing what the writer described as something most unusual for Afghanistan, a "peaceful" transfer of power. Now granted, the mostly civilian casualties are probably in the low thousands, and the most effective agent in that same transference of power was large cash bribes to all the relevant warlords, but even so, the word "peaceful" is scarcely the mot juste. Similarly, the press is mostly full of glowing descriptions of the new social order now prevailing in Kabul. Nonetheless one can find reports that suggest that the pace of change may be leisurely.

Shortly before the turn of the year Justice Minister Karimi declared Afghanistan's new government would still impose Sharia Islamic law on its people, but with less harshness. The details were fleshed out by Judge Ahamat Ullha Zarif, who told the French news agency Agence France Presse that public executions and amputations will continue, but there will be changes: "For example, the Taliban used to hang the victim's body in public for four days. We will only hang the body for a short time, say 15 minutes." Very Warholian.

Kabul's sports stadium, financed by the International Monetary Fund, was where the Taliban used to carry out public executions and amputations every Friday. No longer. "The stadium is for sports. We will find a new place for public executions," says Judge Zarif.

Judge Zarif makes it clear that the ultimate penalty will remain in force for adulterers, both male and female. They would still be stoned to death, Zarif told the French news agency, "but we will use only small stones."

Now there's progress!

This adjustment in the size of the executive munitions will, the judge explains, allow the condemned person a chance to escape. "If they are able to run away, they are free."

It turns out that this avenue of escape is only available to those adulterers who admit their sexual misdeeds. "Those who refuse to confess their wrongdoing and are condemned by a judge will have their hands and feet bound so that they cannot run away. They will certainly be stoned to death," Zarif said.

Afghanistan's farmers faced bankruptcy after Mullah Omar ordered a halt to the planting of opium poppies last year. In the years that the CIA was rallying Afghanistan's landlords and mullahs against the Soviets, Afghanistan became the West's prime supplier of heroin and morphine. Mullah Omar's ban has been variously explained as an effort to ingratiate the Taliban regime with the U.S. in hopes of getting aid, or as an effort to restrict supply and thus hike prices.

Whatever the motive, the prohibition led to a 96 percent fall in Afghanistan's production of raw opium?from more than 1 million pounds in 1999 to 40,600 pounds this year, according to the United Nations Drug Control Program.

Now news reports, such as this from Craig Nelson, describe renewed poppy cultivation in lyrical terms: "'Everyone is planting,' says Ashoqullah, a 25-year-old landowner? 'In a few months, these fields will be covered in a blanket of spectacular red and white flowers. We'll draw the ooze from the flower bulbs, pack it in plastic bags or small soap cartons and sell it at the bazaar.'"

From the bazaars the raw opium will makes its way north or south to processing labs in Pakistan or Tajikistan, two members of the great antiterror coalition, and then westward to the veins of addicts in Europe and the United States.

But Afghanistan's swift return to preeminent status as this country's number-one heroin supplier is surely a small price to pay for the extinction of the Taliban and routing of Al Qaeda. Alas, this raises the question of just how extinct the Taliban is. Fudge the numbers as you may, not too many of them ended up dead, aside from those prisoners killed at Mazar-e-Sharif or suffocated on their way to other prisons. Presumably the rest dispersed to their homes, awaiting further instructions from their Pakistani supervisors.

Osama bin Laden? Suppose he pops up in Kashmir, calling for a renewed jihad against the Indian occupiers. Now that would set the cat among the pigeons!

So perhaps it's not quite so clear how much has really been achieved in the great crusade, but for sure, it is a famous victory!

Black Hawk Bilge

Now for disjuncture on another front, viz., Somalia, these days touted as a prospective target nation in the war on terror. The new movie Black Hawk Down hails the heroism of U.S. special forces, in the form of the Delta Force and Army Rangers. The reality was somewhat different. Recall that prior to U.S. intervention by Bush I in 1993 Somalia had spent many years under the corrupt sway of Siad Barre, and that the role of U.S. oil companies was sufficiently strong for the postintervention U.S. embassy to be located in the Conoco compound.

But, citing famine in Mogadishu and in the southern part of the country, and an urgent need to restore order, President Bush I sent in the Marines. The United States meant business in Somalia: this was obvious from the location of the American embassy, established a few days before the U.S. marines arrived in Mogadishu, in the Conoco corporate compound.

The "humanitarian" intervention was talked up as one of the first bouts of nation-building of the New World Order, supervised by various nonprofit aid groups and protected by the UN-sponsored military force. Soon ugly stories of murder and torture by Canadian "peacekeepers" appeared in the Canadian press. To efface such unpleasantness the U.S. press whipped up a frenzy about a local warlord called Mohammed Aidid, a sort of mini-Osama, and he became public enemy number-one, target of various bumbling efforts to kill or capture him.

On Oct. 3, 1993, a team of so-called "elite troops" composed of Delta Force and Rangers tried to nab Aidid again, in central Mogadishu. But the American troops became confused. Shortly after, they were surrounded by angry crowds. There ensued a massacre in which somewhere between 500 and 1000 Somalians were killed, along with 18 Americans.

In 1999, Mark Bowden's book Black Hawk Down appeared. Bowden had worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer and had filed pieces right after the 1993 massacre. As the movie director Alex Cox points out in a recent, excellent discussion of Black Hawk Down in The Independent, "It's interesting to observe how the story was re-told over that time. An article by the former Independent correspondent Richard Dowden [not to be confused with Mark Bowden] the previous year makes the clear point that US troops killed unarmed men, women and children from the outset of their mission: 'In one incident, Rangers took a family hostage. When one of the women started screaming at the Americans, she was shot dead. In another incident, a Somali prisoner was allegedly shot dead when he refused to stop praying outside. Another was clubbed into silence. The killer is not identified.'"

Bowden's original articles were filled with these unpleasant details. They are not to be found in the book. I am reliably informed that the publisher, Grove Atlantic, thought it politic to remove them, preferring an unblemished epic of American heroism. The only blemish that disfigures the release of the movie is the fact that GI John "Stebby" Stebbins, renamed as Company Clerk John Grimes in the film, is now serving a 30-year sentence in Fort Leavenworth military prison for raping a 12-year-old girl.

Cox cites a subsequent U.S. Army investigation of organized racism in the U.S. Army, which concluded the problem was particularly serious in all-white, so-called "elite" and "Special Operations" units. Such racial separatism could lead to problems, the report warned, because it "foster[s] supremacist attitudes among white combat soldiers" (the Secretary of the Army's Task Force Report on Extremist Activities, Defending American Values, March 21, 1996, Washington, DC, p. 15).

After the massacre, Canada, Italy and Belgium all held inquiries into the behavior of their troops. Canada put some of its soldiers on trial for torture and murder. The U.S. never held such public investigation or reprimanded any of its commanders or troops for the Somalian debacle.

Hitchens: New Amazing Claim

Bumping along like a rickety caboose in the wake of all these disjunctures, we find Ron Rosenbaum claiming at interminable length in The New York Observer that the spirit of Orwell lives on in the corporeal envelopes of Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens, hailed by the fervent Rosenbaum as "the most forceful, eloquent and influential voices in the American debate over the Sept. 11 attacks and their meaning."

I've managed to avoid almost all of Sullivan's outpourings, though I do recall one piece of comical nonsense about America's "fifth column" deployed on the East and West Coasts, held apart by the great "red" (i.e., pro-Bush) interior states. Hitchens' prime contribution has been to supply a disgusting one-liner, delightedly seized upon by the press, to the effect that Noam Chomsky is "soft on fascism" and that the heroism displayed by the passengers on AA Flight 93 is "worth all the writings of Noam Chomsky."

Rosenbaum claims that Hitchens "succeeded in turning around the Left, or a large segment of it (aside from the Chomskyites). Turning around those who saw America as somehow to blame, who sought to portray our power as the real culprit."

It's a sweeping claim, marred only by the fact that Rosenbaum furnishes not one single example of who or what in the left spectrum Hitchens managed to lead from error into bright-eyed belief in the efficacy of B-52s. I doubt he could. The importance of Hitchens these days is not his supposed persuasive power among the left, but the fact that he can be cited by the non-left as an example of how refreshingly sensible a "leftist" can be. If Hitchens were labeled "a rightist" his fungible value as a self-proclaimed contrarian would dwindle abruptly, since his views are mostly identical to the usual bluster of the broad right. To judge from the comments of the audience on a recent Nation cruise, those lefties who still have regard for Hitchens don't actually listen to what he says, or read what he writes. They just enjoy the act. After one cruise seminar in which Hitchens had lauded the West's great crusade and denounced the left, several oldsters remarked to me that they assumed he had been speaking ironically, or was merely jesting. To me, these days, he recalls George Gale, rendered immortal in Private Eye as one of the echoes of that archetypal sodden Fleet Street hack, Lunchtime O'Booze.

If Clinton "choked on a pretzel" while watching a football game alone, passed out and later flaunted a vivid facial bruise, they'd say that he was getting a blowjob from one of his girlfriends, got hit by Hillary with a lamp and then bombed Afghanistan to distract public attention. With George no one even asks how you can black out from eating a pretzel, or if the choking caused brain damage. How would they know?