“They would stop it if anyone asked them,” the General said. “But they have such a miserable life, poor chaps — nobody would ask them.”
There was a lovely purple sunset on the mountains, along which ran the Durand Line dividing Pakistan from Afghanistan.
The next day he walked over to see the camp. It was a hot morning, so hot that he became violently sick. Children were swimming in the big canal, in which, from time to time, excrements came cruising along. The women were washing their pots in that water. As the Young Man walked along the edge of the canal, boys waved at him and begged him to take their picture. He raised his camera. At once they formed two rows, smiling and extending their hands. When the shutter clicked, they bowed to him and hugged each other for happiness.
The camp extended for a long way. A man came up to him and showed him around. Now indeed helplessness was the Young Man’s leader, in the person of this man who strode ahead of him along the wall of the canal, brown heels lifting in white sandals; over his head, to keep off the sun, he wore a kerchief that resembled nothing so much as a red-and-white-checked tablecloth, and his baggy shirt and trousers hung limp in the breezeless air as he went on toward the wrinkled dirty tents between which little children toddled silently in the sand, toward the cornfields that did not belong to him, but in the canal a naked girl of three or four stood rubbing her belly and sucking her fingers; seeing the Young Man come, however, she rushed to squat down in the dirty water to cover herself. — Some of the families lived in tents, some in wretched grass-grown houses of earth. They all bowed or nodded to him: He could help them.§ It was still Ramazan, and their lips were cracked with the heat and the dryness, but they offered him tea. Guilty and ashamed, the Young Man refused. — Another little girl was running naked along the side of the canal. When she saw the foreigner she jumped into the water. Something gray and bloody floated by her and snagged itself in her hair.
As he came to a great cornfield (owned by Pakistanis), he found a dozing water buffalo blocking his way. He stood there for a minute, wondering what to do. Children ran up and slapped and pulled at the beast until it finally yawned and got up. As he walked on, they followed him. Presently they came to a mullah with sky-blue eyes and a white beard. The children stopped respectfully. The mullah took the Young Man’s face in his hands and looked at him for a while, then stepped back. — “Peace be upon you,” the Young Man said. — “And upon you, peace,” said the mullah. He stood there smiling and nodding after the Young Man…
So the refugees were not well off. At least, they were not as well off as he was. Well, what should be done about it? (Whether it could or would be done did not yet concern him, for the Young Man was methodical.
Before all else he must draw up his IDEAL PLAN. Then, if he had time, he would implement it.) So he would analyze; he would data-pick and wool-gather; he would take new batteries from their plastic bag in his camera pack; he would insert them plus to minus into his tape recorder in preparation for
The first thing to draw in one’s IDEAL PLAN is the Overall Picture, the theme, the constellation of significant data points, one, two, three like the three children whose father had been executed by the Roos, standing in the coolness between mud-straw walls, a big girl, a little girl and a boy in between. The girls wore red dresses with gorgeous patterns. They stood squinting at the Young Man with slightly averted heads. The youngest girl’s face was very dirty. The boy stared straight at the Young Man, his hand, half balled up, thrust before him. In the darkness behind the children, the grandmother was making green chai in the Young Man’s honor. The children looked at him shyly, curiously; and there was something else in their look as well that he would never understand. It was not hostility or anything like that. It had nothing to do with him. It had to do with something that had happened. — Next you must obtain a few random points that deviate enough from your curve to add the human interest of uniqueness, but not enough to make it look as if the curve was arbitrary. After that, history becomes an organic whole, susceptible to genteel understatements about human suffering and crisp recommendations toward the alleviation of aberrant conditions.
“Why did you leave Afghanistan?”
“The Russians beat me up because I was not loyal to the Karmal regime,” said the man. “And I had not enough firearms — only one rifle for five, six males in the family, so we could not protect our womenfolk and children to be safe.”
“Are you happy here?”
“No, we are no happy.”
“Do you have any request to make of the Americans?”
“Tell them that we are very grateful for what the Americans are doing, and we say, God be with them.”
Looking back, I am appalled at the unimaginativeness of my questions. I remember that I wanted to ask everyone the same things (“Are you happy here in the camps?” —“Why did you leave Afghanistan?” —“How could the United States best help you?”), because I was looking for some underlying structure or other to explain things. Then I could draw a blueprint showing where the refugee money came from, itemized down to the cent; I could draw elegant flow lines showing where it went: to a diamond entitled “RELIEF,” to a wide thin rectangle called “CORRUPTION”—and I could logically determine from this exactly how much was needed, and what was needed. (If ninety percent of the Afghans I asked said that they needed guns, I would try to send them guns.‖) The next step would be to calculate how efficient the workings of the Mujahideen parties were, and which party was the best to support; from these and related computations I could begin the totaling of broader-based sums to discover who Afghans, Soviets, Pakistanis were … when all they were was people.
To get the Overall Picture, you also talk to officials. Through a friend of the General’s who worked at the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, the Young Man arranged an interview with Marie Sardie, the U.N.H.C.R. nutritionist. — The Young Man she found slightly bewildering. — “Now, what is your purpose here?” she said at one point. “Is your purpose to increase aid for the refugees, or decrease aid for the refugees, or what?” —The Young Man replied that he wanted only to determine what exactly the refugees needed, and whether they were getting more or less than that. If they were getting less, then he would say in his presentation (which you are now reading)a that more should be sent. If they were getting more, then clearly he need not trouble himself with that problem. — This sort of fact-finding is essential to the draftsmen of arbitrary curves. — I for my part am probably even more irresponsible, since in my hesitation to draw arbitrary curves I forget that some curves are not arbitrary, that living, breathing life demands its due, which was hardly what it got when, for instance, I was picking apricots from a tree in Afghanistan with my friend Suleiman and found that I was standing on a human jaw with the flesh still on it, the flesh of a person killed by another person brought specially to kill him by people with their own great dues of state to pay; and I will never forget how blue the sky was. So let me pose a non-arbitrary question for the Young Man to ask Marie Sardie in her pleasant office in Peshawar: Are the Afghan refugees in the camps receiving enough nutrition to sustain life and to keep them — men, women, children — physically and mentally healthy? — Of course, replies the Young Man, if your seemingly straightforward question is broken down into its component atoms and particles, the arbitrariness of it comes to light; you see that, don’t you? That must be why your reflection is staring back at me so sadly from the darkness in the window. Yessir, Heisenberg was right, for consider: Whether or not the refugees receive enough, what proportion of what we give them goes to them, and what proportion is sold by Pakistanis in the stores at Saddar? How much of what gets to the camps is distributed fairly? — Surely such matters are subject to some ethical calculus, though what the axia of it are would be wretchedly difficult to say. — Is handing out rations year after year a satisfactory method of feeding people? If they don’t eat their own food, does something in them go unfed? — And how much from the rations is taken into Afghanistan with the Mujahideen? And is that fair? — Mujahideen are also refugees; many of them are registered at the camps, and they have as much of a right as any other refugees to the supplies provided — possibly more, since the idea of Afghans as refugees-in-perpetuity is repugnant to all of us who believe that the invasion was wrong, and the Mujahideen are at least trying to use those supplies to regain their homeland, and thus end their dependence on our subsidies. One has to respect them for that; and yet, is it right for the Mujahideen to eat U.N.I.C.E.F. tablets of condensed milk intended for their children? It seems to me right, but maybe it wouldn’t to U.N.I.C.E.F. — Round and round, round and round went such butterflies in the Young Man’s amoeba-ridden stomach; now these questions make me impatient, because, having resolved that the Afghans are in the right, and knowing that waste and corruption exist everywhere, I don’t care how many tons of supplies are diverted to uses other than feeding the refugees, as long as the refugees have enough; I cannot be bothered to wish that everything were perfect when all that I wish is that I never had to find that jaw beneath the apricot tree, with the flies on its one black lip; if I had the power, I would send them tons of food and missiles and tanks and airplanes and not worry about where they all went, because here the end justifies the means. It has to. And, so believing, I relinquish that aspect of innocence known as good faith, and my dreams are just a little stained; no doubt that is why the Young Man’s reflection is looking so sadly at me in the mirror. (Until he went to Afghanistan, he had scarcely even fired a gun!)