american "smart power" and a smart analysis of' afghan' literature

At times like these ,one needs to read the occasional 'literary' analysis. This is one of the best that I have come across.

Melodrama in the Service of Empire

“Smart Power” and the Afghanistan Novel

by PADMAJA CHALLAKERE

In the context of the much-talked about Afghan drawdown of 2013-14, it is relevant to consider the successful Afghanistan novel and the work it has done in waging the Afghanistan war. One could argue that the Afghanistan Novel is the ghost in this war machine. Novels like Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite-Runner (2003) and A Thousand Splendid Suns(2007) and the torrent of immensely popular “blue burqa” books like My Forbidden Face: Growing Up Under the Taliban (2002) and Behind the Burqa (2002) produce a televisual feeling for Afghanistan history which has influenced the form and content of literary novels like Nadeem Aslam’s A Wasted Vigil or Philip Hensher’s The Mulberry Empire.

But more fundamentally, the blockbuster Afghanistan novel has generated  our support for and acquiescence to the long and bloody NATO war on Afghanistan. These novels provide the “narrative container” into which truth (figured as surplus) about Afghanistan’s war-torn history must be confined. The gestures that this container allows are, of course, predictably narrow in range: sensational narratives of violence (never ours), or a catastrophism which declares that Afghanistan is “the wall against which empires crash” or “the land where Empires go to die” (Philip Hensher’s The Mulberry Empire) or, the most sensational horrorism wherein the Afghan woman is brutally assaulted (Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns) or, narratives of self-exoneration or self-indemnity (Hosseini’s The Kite-Runner).

First and foremost, there is complete silence about the NATO war on Afghanistan in these novels and in memoirs like Asne Seierstad’s The Book-Seller of Kabul (2002) or, in the now discredited Three Cups of Tea (2006) or, in  Suraya Sadeed’s Forbidden Lessons in a Kabul Guesthoust (2011). The appeal of these texts and the positive reviews they garner lies in the way in which they produce affect by minimizing culpability and accountability. What is also missing in these books is the long history of  US support for the most violent and reactionary Islamistmujahideen who now go under the banner of Northern Alliance, our current allies in the war against the Taliban.

The immense energy spent in transforming the “invasion of Afghanistan” into a narrative about “the Afghanistan tragedy” has its own political history, one which shows this war to be, to quote Chomsky, “the most doctrinal and the ideological war of our times.” This political history has to do not merely with differentiating between good violence (ours) and bad violence (theirs) but about producing new fictions of evil which offer a salve to those most deeply implicated in the violence in Afghanistan. The popular novels and memoirs have played a significant role not only in sensationalizing or selling violence but in licensing our aggression and recovering our innocence.

The one exception is Malalai Joya’s memoir A Woman Among Warlordswhich reverses the truism about improving conditions of Afghan women as a result of the NATO war:

We are caught between two enemies: the Taliban on one side and US/NATO forces and their warlord hirelings on the other…. Obama’s military build-up will only bring more suffering and death to innocent civilians…. I hope that the lessons in this book will reach President Obama and his policymakers in Washington, and warn them that the people of Afghanistan reject their brutal occupation and their support of the warlords and drug-lords. (p. 5)

Where, she asks, is the much-touted  “progress in the condition of the Afghan women” when it passes without notice among the US intelligentsia that the “U.S.-backed Afghan president Karzai signed a law which, among other horrors, allows men to deny food and housing to their wives if the husbands’ sexual demands are not met, and prohibits a woman from leaving her home without her husband’s permission.” And in plain speech, Joya’s memoir details the vast destruction brought on by the US invasion:

The people of Afghanistan are fed up with the occupation of their country and with the corrupt, Mafia-state of Hamid Karzai and the warlords and drug lords backed by NATO…. It is clear now that the real motive of the U.S. and its allies, hidden behind the so-called “war on terror,” was to convert Afghanistan into a military base in Central Asia . . . . But those who get their news from the corporate media may not realize that allied attacks on supposed al-Qaeda and Taliban targets are also killing, maiming, and terrorizing innocent Afghan civilians. We live everyday of our lives in the terror of an endless war. (196)

This is the kind of anchoring that is required in times like this when Suzanne Nossel, a former State Department Official (known for coining the term “Smart Power” which was adopted as Obama administration’s foreign-policy slogan) is now the Executive Director of PEN–the “world’s oldest literary and human rights organization.” Yes, “Smart power” has the right sound, both of homage and parody to absolute power, welded during the Obama administration through the expanded use of drones and of the CIA.

When Suzaane Nossel was at the helm of Amnesty International, this organization, known for opposing the Iraq War and the prison at Guantanamo Bay, was making common cause with the US government. Now that Nossel, hot on the heels of securing the passage of the Afghan Women and Girls Security Promotion Act of 2012, is getting ready to “promote literature and free expression,” we can surely expect a lot many more “redemptive” novels about the “Afghanistan tragedy.”

If Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” can be sold as “empowering for blacks” and as “healing the wounds of slavery,” by the same logic, the Afghanistan novel can make us feel good about the violence of our wars. For, supporting war today is not illiberal but rather most committedly liberal.

Padmaja Challakere lives in St. Paul, MN and teaches in the English Department at Metropolitan State University.  

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/22/smart-power-and-the-afghanistan-novel/