From the WSJ Opinion Archives
AFGHAN DISPATCH
Oh, Omar
Afghans never looked so defeated as in their moment of liberation.
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan--At first, the idea of looting Mullah Mohammad Omar's house seemed hilarious. It's one of the most basic instincts, isn't it, for the victor to carry off a trophy from the vanquished? Never mind that few who approach Omar's wrecked compound these days can claim any connection with the events that brought the Taliban to their knees and scattered their al Qaeda guests to the winds.
The American soldiers who searched the Taliban leader's compound after it was bombed, looking for documents and other bits of intelligence, may have chipped off some souvenir pieces of a lapis lazuli hearth. But there are slim pickings for scavengers today in this sad little house that Afghans saw as very luxe, yet to Westerners just seems like a two-story cinderblock box with gaudy fittings. And not even well-made ones. The kitchen's faux-marble countertops aren't joined cleanly at the corners, and the wooden built-in cabinets look scuffed and worn after only a short period of use. The bathroom has marble walls with painted flowers on them, but any effect of grandeur is undermined by the presence of a squat-toilet cut into the floor.
After the beating the rest of Omar's compound took from the air, it's amazing that the house itself still stands. Kandaharis attribute that to its unusual roof, composed of several layers of old tires and said to be part of a bunker design dreamed up by Osama bin Laden himself. (For years, locals say, the Taliban imported amazing quantities of used car and truck tires and nobody could figure out what they were for. Now we know.) The tires do appear to have cushioned the blow of one direct hit on Omar's house. The bomb literally bounced off and fell instead onto the attached barn, collapsing its roof, smashing the little device which the seven cows Omar kept there could nudge to serve themselves water and, according to Afghan guards on the site, sending the animals to heaven.
What the guards made of the sight of Westerners duck-walking through the living room rubble, combing through bits of painted rock (from a blasted off mural) is hard to say. But they soon got into the spirit of the moment, using the tips of their rifles to point out decorative details and offering comments on how Omar had lived in this fancy place like a king even as he was torturing the poor people of Afghanistan with twisted interpretations of the Koran and lots of nasty Arabs that nobody liked.
But there's a limit to any kind of fun, and for at least one of the Afghans present it was reached when the foreigners started yanking plastic pendants off the chandelier that now dangles crookedly above Omar's former bed. The pendants were hard to unhook and as the chandelier began to sway and clack, it was all too much for one of the onlookers--and there escaped from his lips a cry so plaintive, so wounded, that all hilarity ceased.
"Oh, Omar," he whimpered. "Oh, Omar." Not out of any sympathy with the man, but for the pain of a nation reduced to this scene, a bunch of foreigners roaming at will through an Afghan house and dismembering it. Oh, my country, my poor country, he seemed to be saying. So much sadness. So much shame.
The point of this story, which is not at all flattering to the teller, is that at the moment of their liberation, Afghans have never seemed so defeated. At the lowest moments of the anti-Soviet war, their spirits stayed high. Through 23 years of warfare, in fact, they never stopped dreaming about Afghanistan the way it once was and they would make it again. A country poor and backward by Western standards, but modernizing, with an elected parliament and even a bowling alley in Kabul where teenagers could listen to pop music.
A country where the fruit hung so heavy on the trees, an old man once told me, that when it fell to the ground nobody bothered to pick it up, but people simply walked through carpets of mulberry slush, like the rest of us wade through mud or snow at certain times of year. A country where there was crime, to be sure, but where a kind-hearted king pardoned every convicted murderer except one, a case where the family of the victim refused to grant permission for a death sentence to be lifted.
These memories, gilded with nostalgia, sustained Afghans for so long. But now it seems as if they are too tired, too beaten down by past disappointments to muster even a cheer. The hospitality is still there; guests are served feasts of rice and meat and vegetables, followed by fruit and plates of candy, nuts and raisins to take with tea. But the hosts rarely eat much themselves now and there are no more easy evenings of jollity, with everyone sprawled out on the carpets popping sugar-coated almonds into their mouth between jokes. The talk is serious, resigned, and often the room falls silent for long periods.
Superficially, life does go on. Even the dustiest town has a marketplace that looks bustling for part of the day. Sides of beef hang from hooks in the open air, and there are pyramids of oranges for sale at every corner. Trucks laden with barrels of fuel or mysterious crates of consumer goods imported from Dubai rumble along the roads. From Kabul to Kandahar, Afghans are busy crafting everything from tools to satellite dishes out of scrap metal.
More often than not, though, when curious crowds gather around foreigners passing through their little town, the one who speaks a few words of English inevitably says, "Take me to America with you. There is nothing here anymore." That is something new, at least among ordinary folks, who used to believe that their country was a kind of paradise, or would be again. Now, it's as if everything, from the Bonn agreement--a mechanism by which the United Nations and its handmaidens have conspired to tell Afghans how they must form their future government--to the four-year drought, have combined to make sure that there's no way of putting Afghanistan back together the way it once was.
Imagine. As recently as the 1970s, as Afghans settled down to sleep each night, the king waited in his palace to hear status reports from all the country's provinces. And one by one they radioed in: Herat calling--all quiet here. Kandahar, all quiet. Nimroz, one road accident, nobody hurt. Badakhshan, Paktia, Bamiyan, Farah . . . all quiet, all quiet, all quiet.
And so it went.
Never again. And you get the feeling that when Afghanistan gets back on its feet again, it will be with aching bones, not in restored glory but with a whimper. Oh, Omar. Does anybody want a piece of his chandelier?
Ms. Smith is a member of the Journal's editorial board.
