The Pessoptimist

My title comes from Emile Habiby's novel, The Secret Life of Saeed, the Pessoptimist. I turned to this book (which intentionally or not proves that Jews and Palestinians are secret twins) for help in answering one of the most puzzling questions people ask me: "Are you optimistic or pessimistic about Afghanistan?" In future posts I will also explore whether the glass is half full or half empty.

Far from helping me find an answer to this question, however, I found that the hero of this picaresque science fiction tale suffered if anything more intensely from the same doubts as I. As he explains, he inherited his anxiety from a long line of Pessoptimists:

That's the way our family is and why we bear the name Pessoptimist. For this word combines two qualities, pessimism and optimism, that have been blended perfectly in the character of all members of our family since our first divorced mother, the Cypriot. It is said that the first to so name us was Tamerlane, following the second massacre of Baghdad. This was when it was reported to him that my first ancestor, Abjar son of Abjar, mounted on his horse outside the city walls, had stared back at the tongues of flame and shouted, "After me, the deluge!"

Take me, for example. I don't differentiate between optimism and pessimism and am quite at a loss to which of the two characterizes me. When I awake each morning I thank the Lord he did not take my soul during the night. If harm befalls me during the day, I thank Him it was no worse. So which am I, a pessimist or an optimist?

But Saeed was lucky compared to me (as he would be the first to admit). He asked himself this question in the privacy of his own home.... Actually Saeed had neither privacy nor a home. But he did have a self, whose attitude toward the future he found difficult to define.

I, however, must answer this question at cocktail parties, on lecture stages, at conferences and seminars, not only in private (or, as we say, in "off-the-record" briefings) but to members of the press with cameras and microphones: "Professor Rubin, Are you optimistic or pessimistic about Afghanistan?"

First of all, I am not a professor. My job title is "senior research scientist." There are some doubts in the NYU Politics Department as to whether I am qualified to instruct PhD students. I understand these doubts as well as my unfortunate cousin Saeed would have. I do not profess anything. But I do try to be worthy of the title "senior research scientist."

I am as prone as anyone to make judgments based on superficial impressions, wishful thinking, or a bad mood. But I sought training as a social scientist to help overcome my mood swings, not use them as a guide to public life. As a result, I try to rely on information (limited as it is), data (faulty as they are), research results (contradictory and subject to revision as they may be) and unceasing questioning. I know that there is a Romantic school of thought that disdains such "reality-based" thinking (you know who I mean). But I remain a fallen classicist.

There are a few things we know about Afghanistan with a great deal of certainty, and there are a few pretty robust research results. We know that Afghanistan is the poorest country in the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa and that it has been at war for almost 30 years. We know that the great and also some rather mediocre powers have spent billions and billions of dollars sending weapons to anyone in the country who asked for them -- and some others as well. Actually, the value of these weapons has exceeded several multiples of Afghanistan's economy. Perhaps that's why some people are optimistic about Afghanistan -- it has attracted a lot of attention.

I say, "we know" these things, but I feel a Saeedian puzzlement. Who are "we?" Apparently many people - even people wielding history's most deadly weapons and budgets of billions of dollars -- have not bothered to acquaint themselves with these facts. Recently I attended an off-the-record meeting outside of Washington. At this meeting officials from many parts of the US government (but not the Department of Agriculture) met to discuss counter-narcotics policy in Afghanistan. I learned many things. I learned that Afghan farmers are too secure and are making too much money. That is why it is necessary to eradicate their crops. But no one at this meeting mentioned that 40 percent of the families in rural Afghanistan do not have enough food to eat, though they can easily find someone with an automatic weapon to "protect" them. I suggested that maybe Afghan farmers needed more rather than less security, but no one wants to reward bad behavior like growing opium poppies.

It's pretty clear that very poor countries with a lot of weapons, high unemployment, and insurgents and terrorists based in neighboring countries and remote, mountainous regions have, shall we way, a "high risk" for armed conflict. By the way, I also read a few history books. They disagree about a lot of things. But it does seem that foreign military interventions in Afghanistan have a poor track record.

So am I pessimistic? Look at the facts. What are the chances that Afghanistan will become a stable, prosperous, democratic, gender-sensitive country? But as I sometimes say, being pessimistic about Afghanistan is not an intellectual challenge. I didn't become a "senior research scientist" just to assert the obvious. Perhaps this is why I am no longer a professor.

In the past several years I have become a practicing pessoptimist, not just a theoretician. In October 2001 I stated on television that, even though the US and other countries should help Afghanistan rebuild, there was no chance that the country could become a stable democracy in two years. Then I went to Bonn as part of the UN team, and at the end we produced an agreement saying that Afghanistan should become a stable (and gender-sensitive!) Islamic democracy in.... two and a half years.

I guess the Bonn Agreement has provided a lot of the water to fill up that glass (more on how thirsty Afghanistan is in later posts). I guess I should boast about it like the other things I have been involved in -- the Afghan Constitution, the Afghanistan National Development Strategy, the Afghanistan Compact.... Of course people call me an "adviser," meaning someone who gives advice. They never call themselves "advisees," meaning someone who takes advice. There is a reason for this, but it is a professional secret. It is known only to other "senior research scientists."

I even did something stranger. I invested my own money in Afghanistan. With some Afghan and French investors I started Gulestan Ltd., to manufacture essential oils for the fragrance and personal care industries. It's easy to register a business with the Afghanistan Investment Support Agency, but just try to operate it once you leave the AISA compound! My business is just like opium, but the flowers are different. Also it's legal. And Afghanistan is not really set up for legal businesses. According to the World Bank Investment Climate Survey, Afghanistan is, more or less, the worst place in the world to invest. Maybe I will start a new fund: Pessoptimist Venture Capital.

I know a senior diplomat who says that there should be a time limit for work on Afghanistan, because it warps your mind. But this same person, who supposedly retired several years ago, has just signed up for another year in Kabul. Those of us who have been around for a while get used to the new faces telling us how they will fix everything. Their optimism will soon turn to pessimism, and then they will leave.

Except for a few of us. Just like Saeed, every morning we thank the Lord that he did not destroy Afghanistan during the night. And if harm befalls Afghanistan during the day, we thank the Lord it was not worse.

And then we get to work.

As Saeed's mother used to say, "And why should we not praise God?" Read more on this article...

Return from Herat: Wherein One Pessoptimist Meets Another

A visitor just left my office: Homa Sorouri, an Afghan woman from Herat who is studying international relations as a Fulbright Scholar at the New School University. She just returned from her first visit home in over a year.
Homa told me she was tired of the American (and other non-Afghan) students at her university asking her whether she was optimistic or pessimistic or if the glass is half full or half empty. She missed my Pessoptimist blogs because she had no internet access in Herat. When I showed them to her, she proclaimed that she too was a pessoptimist.
Here's what she told me. She was shocked at how the situation had deteriorated in Herat. Her parents would not let her leave the house, because it was so unsafe. This had nothing to do with the Taliban or al-Qaida. Her father told her that a man had been murdered in a nearby house. Her brother told her about a robbery. There are three main rumors about the causes of crime: (1) the followers of ousted governor Ismail Khan (the former commander who is now Minister of Energy and Water in Kabul), who burned the UN office (right) in September 2004 when their chief was removed, are staging crimes to show that Herat is not secure without Ismail Khan; (2) because the justice system is so corrupt and there is no rule of law, personal and family disputes frequently escalate into violence; and
(3) the police, who have become part of the same criminal network as drug traffickers and smugglers (oil smugglers at Islam Qala on the right), are responsible for most of the crime. These hypotheses are not mutually exclusive.


Her father and all of her brothers and sisters are employed, mostly making decent salaries working for international organizations, but they know so many people who are in deep economic difficulties. Her brothers and sisters have made up a list -- apparently a rather long list -- of people they know personally who are in desperate straits. Next to each person's name is a percentage -- that is the percentage of the family's resources those people are given. Every month when their salary arrives, the brothers and sisters pool a portion of their money and give it to their mother, who distributes it to these needy people.

But the most shocking thing was her encounter with a neighbor. This woman, she told me, was beautiful! She was so young and so beautiful, and she had two daughters who were also so beautiful.
When Homa saw them on the street in the past, she felt happy. This woman came to visit to ask Homa what she should do. Homa was shocked at how this woman looked. She said she wanted to commit suicide. Her husband had become a heroin addict and had sold one daughter to pay for his drugs. I asked Homa what this meant. The daughter was 13 or 14 years old and very pretty, so the father married her to a rich man for a high brideprice. Now this educated young girl who grew up in Iran is more or less imprisoned in an extended family compound in a rural district of Herat in a "terrible situation." The mother had to work in order to earn money not only to support her family but also to pay for her husband's drug addiction -- but she was afraid to leave the house, because her husband might sell the other daughter as well. Homa's neighbor saw no way out but suicide, which many reports indicate is increasing in Afghan urban areas.


You decide: are you optimistic or pessimistic? Is the glass half full or half empty?


(All photos from Herat Province, Afghanistan, December 2004, by Barnett R. Rubin and Humayun Hamidzada)


Read more on this article...

The Pessoptimist in Istanbul: Will Bin Laden Win?

Today I am in Istanbul in a hotel overlooking the Sea of Marmora. I am here for -- of all things -- a conference on the Durand Line. Of course it is about much more than the Line itself, demarcated by Sir Henry Mortimer Durand in 1893 as the limit of the dominion of the Amir of Afghanistan.

Today this line through a mountainous, arid, sparsely populated area is regarded by Pakistan, and most of the world, as the international border with Afghanistan, but Afghanistan has never formally recognized it as such. Above all, the people living around the line have never recognized it as a border. They were there before these states. They wonder who gave Durand or anyone in London, Kabul, Delhi, or Islamabad the right to divide them?

There is nowhere more different from the Durand Line than the Sea of Marmora. This morning I walked along the seafront, by a stone wall that once constituted the fortifications of the entry to the Golden Horn and the Strait of Bosporus. Yesterday from the terrace of my hotel, my colleagues and I saw an enormous container ship traveling from the Black Sea through the Strait and outward to the Mediterranean. Would it then cross the Suez canal and enter the Indian Ocean?
The ship was registered with the Maersk shipping line; I remembered seeing the same containers while driving from Kabul to Jalalabad in the spring of 2005 with Omar Zakhilwal, head of the Afghanistan Investment Support Agency. The main road from Kabul to Sarobi was closed for construction, so we had to take the old road, over the Lataband Pass, the same route taken by the Army of the Indus when it retreated under fire from Kabul to Jalalabad in 1841. The Army of the Indus, however, had long since mutated into the Armed Forces of Pakistan, and today most of the traffic was in the other direction. Truck after truck lumbered with full loads of Maersk containers headed for Kabul from the port of Karachi via Peshawar and Jalalabad, carrying, what? -- Ukrainian airplane parts shipped from Odessa (where my great-grandfather was born) through the Strait of Bosporus and on through the Sea of Marmora?

So much for the unchanging Afghan frontier. Amir Abdul Rahman Khan, during whose reign (1880-1901) the Durand Line was demarcated, decided against building roads through the country's passes, as the same roads that facilitated trade facilitated conquest as well. Afghanistan's isolation protected both his rule -- and the British Empire in India. Britain, which subsidized the Amir's
government and army to assure that it could control the territory on the frontier, forbade Kabul to welcome any foreign legation but one from Delhi. The Amir depicted his realm as a just Islamic order under his command: But to the British this isolated Afghanistan state with a subsidized army fulfilled the function of a buffer state: keeping Russia far from their Empire. The British and Russian governments demarcated the rest of the country's borders and formalized their agreement in the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention on Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet.

This Treaty was an part of the same process that Usama Bin Laden evoked in his warning to the United States on October 7, 2001. Seated not far from the Durand Line before an outcropping of the mountains of Afghanistan, whose name and history he did not mention, the Amir of al-Qa'ida informed his global audience:

What the United States tastes today is a very small thing compared to what we have tasted for tens of years. Our nation has been tasting this humiliation and contempt for more than 80 years.

What was he talking about? He was talking about the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), in which "THE BRITISH EMPIRE, FRANCE, ITALY, JAPAN, GREECE, ROUMANIA and the SERB-CROAT-SLOVENE STATE, of the one part,and TURKEY,of the other part" agreed to the demarcation of today's Republic of Turkey.
Lausanne followed on the Treaty of Versailles (1919), which separated most of the Ottoman Empire from Anatolia. Together these treaties abolished the Islamic caliphate, which had been claimed for centuries by the Ottoman Sultan and recognized by most Sunni Muslims. The Treaty of Lausanne stipulated:

No power or jurisdiction in political, legislative or administrative matters shall be exercised outside Turkish territory by the Turkish Government or authorities, for any reason whatsoever, over the nationals of a territory placed under the sovereignty or protectorate of the other Powers signatory of the present Treaty, or over the nationals of a territory detached from Turkey.
It is understood that the spiritual attributions of the Moslem religious authorities are in no way infringed.

The division of the Islamic umma, the Muslim community, into nation states by the European colonial powers the better to dominate them and nullify the temporal power of the Islamic caliphate is at the heart of Bin Laden's grievances against the contemporary world order. Destruction of the caliphate based in Istanbul prepared the ground, in his view, for the catastrophe of the Palestinians, sanctions and war against Iraq, and the "occupation of the Land of Muhammad" by "infidel troops."
Though Bin Laden mentioned neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan, al-Qaida respects the border dividing these two states no more than it does the State of Israel or the secular Republic of Turkey. All are equally products of aggression against the Muslims.

It is no coincidence that al-Qaida, though led and conceived by Arabs, was founded in these borderlands. To Westerners it may appear that Bin Laden is now trapped in an isolated region. But this region, never fully integrated into the modern system of states, provides an appropriate seat for this transnational insurgency against that very system.

And as the itinerary of the containers shows, that region is no longer the isolated backwater it remains in the National Geographic mind. While in the days of Abdul Rahman Khan only British India was permitted a legation in Kabul, today the capital of the Mughal Emperor Babur is a major outpost of the UN, NATO, the US Central Command, and the European Union, with enormous embassies of every major country under construction. The people whom Amir Abdul Rahman Khan informed about his rule with an illustrated map are now more likely to have traveled abroad than Americans, if not usually as tourists, and listen to far more international news in several languages.

Their country, which used to rely on subsistence farming, has become a commercial single-crop economy. Opium poppy -- like sugar cane in Cuba, rubber in Liberia, or tea in Sri Lanka -- encroaches further every year on land used for subsistence farming and traditional horticulture. Traffickers and traders from all major markets reserve their share of the Afghan product through futures markets. Every family includes migrants in Karachi, Iran, or the states of the Persian Gulf. The remittances sent by these workers finance many new houses and shops, while the workers, separated for years at a time from family, tribe, and village, seek refuge and meaning in mosques frequented by global preachers. Cash, once rare, reaches the remotest villages through this global trade and the omnipresent hawala system, which links Afghans to global electronic banking networks through mobile phones and itinerant traders.

It is common enough to observe that globalization has transformed sovereignty, transferring functions of states to larger organizations like the European Union and shattering the weak institutions of others. It is less commonly realized that Bin Laden's vision of the caliphate constitutes a revolutionary response to globalization. The states drawn by imperial powers on the territory of the Islamic umma have excluded the Palestinians from nationhood and placed one of Islam's holiest places under Israeli control. The zone from where Bin Laden and his Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawihiri now issue their pronouncements symbolizes how the same process of state making has divided and ill-served the Pashtuns.

The dialectic of terrorism and counter-terrorism has transformed the tribal areas. In 2003, when US pressure to search for the al-Qaida leadership led General Pervez Musharraf to send the Army of Pakistan (a direct descendant of the Army of the Indus) into the Momand Tribal Agency, elders awoke officials in Kabul with midnight calls -- Pakistan had invaded "Afghanistan." For in these elders' minds, while the Afghan state administration ended at the Durand Line, Afghanistan did not.

Islamabad's invocation of US pressure to fence and even mine that border has led elders to tell President Hamid Karzai that if he allows Pashtuns to be divided in this way, his name will be remembered with shame. The Afghan Army has responded by firing on the Pakistan Army, the same Pakistan Army that is fighting al-Qaida. The lives of the people need a soft border, but Washington's counter-terrorism needs a hard one.

In my Istanbul hotel room, as sea traffic traverses the Bosporus outside my window, al-Jazeera English broadcasts the news: the battle of the Red Mosque in Islamabad; demonstrations in Bajaur; the anniversary of the latest war in Lebanon; the ongoing massacres in Iraq and Sudan; more suicide bombers in Afghanistan. And on CNN and Bloomberg I see the growth of the US trade deficit, the fall of the dollar against other currencies, and the unstoppable growth of the US debt, as our government sells securities to China to cover the costs of the war in Iraq.

Amir Abdul Rahman Khan used the British subsidy to build his army; he used his army to build his revenues; he used his revenues to build a justice system; and the justice system enabled his people -- those he had not massacred or exiled -- to till their lands in peace. He died in his bed in 1901 bequeathing to his son both rulership and a surplus of 40 million rupees in the national treasury.

This Circle of Justice, first described in an Islamic text of the eighth century, has for centuries constituted the model of governance for the people of South and West Asia; today the Afghan Government uses it to describe the goals of its Afghanistan National Devleopment Strategy.

But in response to the challenge of Bin Laden, rather than building its army, the US has mobilized thousands of private contractors and exhausted its army in the fatal venture of Iraq. Rather than calling our people to fight and sacrifice, our government cut the taxes of those most able to afford to pay and financed its military ventures with subsidies, not from an imperial hegemon, but from financial markets that are far more arbitrary than Lord Curzon. To retain its monopoly on power in the face of failure, the ruling party has undermined the system of justice. We could have responded more wisely to Bin Laden's challenge, but we have drawn this circle of injustice around ourselves.

In 1919, Abdul Rahman's grandson, Amanullah Khan, made Afghanistan independent and renounced the British subsidy. Less than ten years later, he was overthrown. Amanullah had attempted a grand transformation for which he had no resources. His efforts to raise taxes and strengthen the state provoked a peasant uprising that brought a Tajik commander to power, ending the dynasty of Amir Abdul Rahman Khan. Soon Pashtun tribes from the same areas now hosting Bin Laden and Zawahiri descended on Kabul to loot it and install a new, much weakened king.

Neither Bin Laden nor the neo-Taliban of the tribal zone are Pashtun nationalists -- that ideology serves the interest of a state in Kabul and politicians in Peshawar and Quetta. But the ideology of the caliphate provides another vehicle for the grievances and ambitions of people whom the nation-state system always served poorly.

In Afghanistan and Pakistan, in Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon, the "international community," acting unilaterally, bilaterally, and multilaterally, is trying to shore up, strengthen, and create states to provide peace and stability. Some, even many, people of those areas long to become full citizens of states that protect their rights and provide services. But for many others, it is harder to imagine that they might one day be citizens of an effective accountable nation-state than that they might be joined with their fellow Muslims in a renewed caliphate. Somewhere in the mountains of the land its inhabitants call Pakhtunkhwa, Bin Laden is waiting. Read more on this article...