Trying to stay sane in an insane world

The peerless war correspondent Martha Gellhorn said it best:

“The way people stay sane in war, I imagine, is to suspend a large part of their reasoning minds, lose most of their sensitivity, laugh when they get the smallest chance, and go a bit, but increasingly, crazy.”

In my own case, after seven years in Afghanistan, I’m afraid that the craziness is winning out over the sanity on an almost daily basis.

But I can leave when it becomes unbearable. What of the Afghans, who have been living in this hell for the past 30 years?

A few days ago a friend of mine was telling me about an “amusing” incident he had recently witnessed. Kabul had been having unsettled weather, with heavy rains blowing in each afternoon, and the few river beds in the city, usually bone-dry, were experiencing flash floods.

“I was out for a walk after the rain stopped,” he said. “I saw a group of people on Pul-e-Sokhta, all pointing and laughing.”

Pul-e-Sokhta is a bridge in the western part of the city, known for attracting heroin addicts, who camp out underneath it.

“A torrent of water had come down the mountain,” he continued. “And it washed the addicts away. There were four or five of them struggling to get out of the flood. Two of them went down while I was there, and never came up.”

I listened in shock.

“Didn’t anyone try to help them?” I asked.

Another Afghan man in our group simply shrugged.

“They are just addicts. They are already expired,” he said.

I suppose this is as good an illustration as any of the desensitizing properties of conflict.

But there are many such examples in this land of eternal war.

Another friend of mine, an American who teaches in a school that caters mainly to privileged Afghan students, had a similar tale.

“Last January there was a suicide attack quite close to us,” she said. “The children told me it was a bomb, although I thought it might have been a car backfiring or something like that. At first the children were upset, some of them crying. But 20 minutes later they were asking to go outside and play volleyball. The bomb was forgotten.”

It is difficult to comprehend just how much violence Afghans have seen, and how inured they have become to it. After one attack in Helmand province that left me a bit shaken, a friend tried to calm me down. Being an Afghan male faced with a foreign female, derision came more easily than sympathy.

“Haven’t you ever seen a dead body before?” he asked.

“Well, not one blown to bits. Have you?”

He laughed. This was a young man who had lived through the civil war in Kabul, when rival mujaheddin factions tore the city apart in their quest for power.

“The first time was when I was about 12. I had gone to the market with my mother, and one of the mujaheddin groups fired a rocket into the crowd. There must have been 10 or 20 people killed. I saw body parts everywhere.”

He did not seem unduly upset by the memory.

This is a country where casual brutality is a constant fact of life; where there are few who have not lost a loved one to war, prison, or easily treatable disease.

Bibi Aisha, the woman on TIME magazine’s cover who lost her nose and ears when her husband’s family punished her for running away from their abuse, is much more than a symbol of Taliban cruelty. She is the face of Afghanistan itself, a society where the unthinkable is commonplace, where a rape victim can go to prison or even be stoned to death for having sex outside of marriage, where a 6-year-old can be given away as a bride to a grandfather to settle a debt, where a woman hit by a car can writhe by the side of the road for an hour or more before someone thinks to call an ambulance.

It often puzzles, and sometimes infuriates, me that Afghans are so quick to believe in the most bizarre rumors. But here again Gellhorn comes to the rescue. Suspending a large part of one’s reasoning mind might indeed help to get through the seeming senselessness of day-to-day existence here.

Take the attack on the defense ministry last Monday, which left three dead and at least six injured. The defense ministry attributed the violence to the insurgents; the Taliban were happy to take the “credit.”

But inside Kabul, no one believes this version of events.

“It was a plot originating inside the government,” several people have insisted, all citing “highly credible sources” inside various ministries and offices. “The president wants to get rid of Wardak.”

General Abdul Rahim Wardak is the Afghan Defense Minister.

“Wouldn’t it be simpler to fire him?” I countered. There had been strong and “highly credible” rumors a few weeks ago that Wardak was on his way out.

“Well, (President Hamid) Karzai doesn’t want to upset the Americans.”

It seems to me that the U.S. forces, who do appear to have a soft spot for the Afghan general, might be a bit more peeved by murder than sacking, but what do I know?

Ever since I have come to Afghanistan I have been told by “those who know” that U.S. and British soldiers are actually in league with the Taliban. The Americans fund and equip them, say the Afghans, so that the foreign forces have an excuse to prolong the fight.

“Why would they want to prolong the fight?” I ask.

“They have their reasons,” the Afghans mutter darkly.

I used to protest, but now I say nothing. There is no sense mounting a logical, coherent argument. This is a country where logic does not hold sway.

After seven years of this craziness, I cannot blame them. All I can do is try to document the madness.

Once again I cite Gellhorn, who, some 50 years before this conflict, summed it all up:

“The sense of the insanity and the wickedness of this war grew in me until, for the purposes of mental hygiene, I gave up trying to think or judge, and turned myself into a walking tape recorder with eyes.”