DEB WEISS - The Taliban and the Times (another good one from Weiss)

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A VIEW FROM HERE by deb weiss every tuesday

The Taliban And The Times November 13, 2001

The fortunes of war really can turn on a dime.

Only last week, the war in Afghanistan was being waged too slowly, too hesitantly, and with far too much restraint to satisfy such military and strategic masterminds as California's Dianne Feinstein and North Carolina's John Edwards.

But just one jolly march into Kabul, and all at once it's being waged too aggressively, too hastily, with no thought to the endgame (much less to that spiffy new all-purpose Deadly Menace, the Pakistani Nukes).

Last week, the Taliban were a wily enemy, heirs to those ruthless warriors who had held off the Soviet Union in an endless David-versus-Goliath showdown ("quagmire"), bringing ruin to the communist giant as they surely would to us, with our own soldiers so sadly unprepared for the brutal snow and cold of an Afghanistan winter (it IS a shame the Pentagon doesn't have those nifty weather maps they have in all the newsrooms).

This week, though, the Taliban are a tiny band of inadequately armed zealots with silly beards, clearly no match (The New York Times could have told you this) for American air power, their unbridled but pathetic rage a mere symptom of the discontent induced by global inequities in the distribution of cash and other goodies.

And that's just last week's war and this week's war. Think of all the other weeks we've endured to date -- not to mention those weeks yet to be endured, when that Greek chorus that is the American press establishment will once again link arms and swivel smartly, wailing in unison the message of the week.

Bad War. Good War. Lost War. Won War. Hot War. Cold War. Nine Days' Old War.

Yet certain images seep through the fog and become part of our experience, more profound and surely more satisfying than all the words in Washington.

Picture crowds of people laughing, in a city where, until yesterday, it was forbidden (literally) to laugh.

Picture men standing in line, chatting easily as they wait for exhausted but elated barbers to shave off grubby beards, all at once no longer mandatory.

Imagine music blaring out from a previously-banned frequency, intercepted by previously-forbidden radios. Imagine women lifting their wretched veils to show faces made beautiful, if not necessarily by nature, then by sheer and simple joy.

The New York Times, naturally, requests that I rush past these pleasant imagines, to picture instead the atrocities that sully the festival atmosphere of liberated cities as weeping captives -- yesterday's ubermenschen -- fall victim to their conquerors.

Well: all right. It's not so hard to imagine, if you've studied up on other wars, in other times and places. It is a sad fact of nature that when we are pushed beyond endurance -- beaten, brutalized, widowed, orphaned, humiliated, starved, tortured, terrorized, and otherwise robbed of the most fundamental claims of our humanity -- we tend to wait in shadows for the tables to turn, and when they turn, sometimes (in the first heady moments) we behave in less than saintly ways.

To The New York Times, such horrors of war reflect poor planning on the part of Mr. Bush. To me, they reflect the same tragic impulse that has from time to time unleashed the savagery of Greek widows, Rumanian peasants, Chinese villagers, and French shopkeepers, at the instant they realized their tormentors had been defanged.

In short, much as I regret all such evidences of the human capacity for cruelty, the lynchings of a few enforcers from the Ministry for the Preservation of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice are not about to break my heart.

Even from the safe remove of an American living room, I have come to loathe those turbaned men with their whips and their arrogance and their lists of forbidden acts: I can only dimly imagine how I would feel about them if it had been my husband they had killed, my daughters they had beaten, my sons they had menaced into silence.

So for me, whatever kind of war it is next week, or even tomorrow, the images of the day suffice. All in all, Tuesday was a very good day, except, I guess, for the Taliban and The Times.

-- Anonymous, November 14, 2001


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