Afghanistan Opinion: The How, Why, and Hope Around the "Quran Burning" Protests

Photo: Akhtar Soomro (Reuters)It is very difficult when every day you wake up and write and talk about revolutions in the Middle East, where people live and die for freedom, justice and, democracy, while your country is a 100 years behind. Make that 200 when your country happens to be Afghanistan.

It is hard as a journalist to remain unbiased, avoiding emotion when you see your people die over the accidental burning of the Qur'an.

Let me say this clearly: the burnings must be condemned. It is against the spirit of respect for religions not to be careful when handling their holy books. It doesn't matter whether this the Quran, the Geeta, the Torah, or the Bible

In the case of this burning, though, there remains a sense of grief and shock, not just among foreigners but also Afghans. In almost a week of protests, more than 30 people have died because of anger unleashed on the Afghan government and foreigners. While the violence should be deplored --- there have been apologies by even the most minimally involved --- it is important to examine why this has happened.

Anger and Frustration  

Afghans, like people of any other nation, are human beings. They don't like being oppressed, even if most of the men are pretty OK with oppressing women. They don't like justice not to be served. They don't like their government to be corrupt. They don't like living under the shadows of warlords with their militias. Most of all, they don't like not having work --- unemployment in Afghanistan is almost 35%.

They also don't like going home to their kids and seeing them without the prospect of proper schooling, starving, and dying of cold. And that younger generation feels the same about the word "change" as other peoples around the world standing up for their demands. After ten years of promises from the government and the international community, people want a change from where they were in the early years of the millennium.

Every Afghan I've spoken to desires this deeply. The trouble is, desiring something and attaining it require struggles and sacrifices. Those struggles and sacrifices in turn require planning and leadership. That's where the problem lies.  

Lack of Intellectual Leadership  

Some part of Afghanistan, often the majority of the country, has been engulfed in armed conflict for more than three decades. Add terrorist attacks, attacks against terrorists, and infighting among Afghan warlords during the past 10 years, and even the relative peace achieved after the US onvasion looks pretty damn non-peaceful.

This warfare resulted in an exodus of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Afghans out of the country with each twist in the conflict. At one point in the late 1990s, there were 8 million Afghan refugees --- the largest such crisis after 1945

It is true that, every time there was an exodus, it was followed by a large influx as relative peace arrived. Twice, the influx was massive, in the 1990s when the Russians left, and then in 2001-2005 when the US invasion allowed a rather stable government to be established. The second influx was also helped by the fact that Afghanistan's neighbors, Iran and Pakistan, had tired of hosting millions of Afghans on their soil for two decades and wanted them to go back home and stop being an economic burden.

What many don't seem to understand is that although much of the Afghan refugee populations returned, from Pakistan and Iran, the intellectual class --- if you can call it that --- largely escaped to the West. This was true in the 80s, the 90s, and, with the increase in violence, in the 2000s and 2010s. Smart, educated, slightly progressive Afghans do not want to live in a country where ignorant, illiterate and violent warlords rule under the protection of a corrupt and reactionary government. They want better economic and political opportunities which Afghanistan in its current condition cannot offer.  

The recent exodus is of men and women who were mostly raised in the neighboring countries and returned to Afghanistan with more education than their compatriots. They are joined by the generation who grew up in the 2000s and were able to attain what little they could in the few early years of relative prosperity from the fractured education system of the country. 

This group may not consider themselves better than the the average Afghan, but their presence is intolerable to not just the Taliban, but also to many inside the country who would rather Afghanistan remain as conservative as possible. That conservatism in turn can be exploited to continue ruling the population under the guise of Islam, even though the rulers may be as far removed from actual Islamic values as possible.

More than 30,000 Afghans applied for asylum abroad last year alone. This year, the number may eclipse last year's. In essence, you have a country where the elder intellectuals have already disappeared, and the up-and-coming ones are slowly having to run away for economic, political and other reasons. 

Mullahs to the Rescue  

This brain drain has left the people with three choices for leadership --- the corrupt government, the violent warlords, and the mullahs. 

As strange as it may seem to outsiders, seven years of brutal Taliban rule and almost a decade of suicide attacks have not been enough to erase the deep mark of Islam, ingrained on the hearts of Afghans over almost 1300 years. The government and the warlords don't want to lead people to protest for political change --- they're pretty okay with being in power. The mullahs, on the other hand, have had their powers curbed to an extent after the fall of the Taliban and they face a new political atmosphere which further threatens that power with a certain degree of freedoms, education for women, and rapid Westernization of the younger generation in the large urban centres.

Hence, when opportunities like this arise, they are quick to exploit them. This is not to say that the responsibility lies solely with the religious leaders, as a large part of the protests was made up of people who came out on their own initiative. However, at the crux of the demonstrations lies the thought of mullahs who have continued to rule mosques and communities through religious reverence.

These are the real thought leaders of Afghanistan. If Egypt has young bloggers, hungering for democrcacy, if Bahrain has Abdulhadi Alkhawaja and Nabeel Rajab, if Iran has Mousavi and Karroubi, Afghanistan has mullahs. They form a collective of thousands of anonymous domains, ruled not by wealth or force but by their almost complete monopoly over people's religious beliefs and feelings --- and because of the absence of secular intellectuals -- they are de facto leaders of Afghan hearts and minds. 

iotas of Change 

During the reaction to the news of Quran desecrations at the US base at Guantanamo Bay, when protests took the lives of more than a dozen Afghans in 2005, I remember walking to our paper's office. Everyone was slightly concerned. What depressed me was that no one was ready to ask the whys or the hows. The same was true in my conversations with family, friends, and ordinary Afghans --- the complete externalization of blame for something we were at least partly responsible. 

Everyone was ready to condemn the foreigners for not respecting Islam; for not understanding Afghans. Few pondered if Afghans understood Afghans well enough. More importantly: no one considered if we were ready to ask tough questions and look for solutions.

Not much had changed when a similar incident took more lives last year, but there is a tiny, almost miniscule, shift this time, I have noticed a small number of young Afghan professionals quietly criticise the protests. Their voices are so faint, their numbers so low that this by no means can be considered an event. But, given the silence before this, it is a near-miracle.

What the coy this-is-not-right and we-shouldn't-be-protesting gave me and others like me is a glimmer of almost unreachable hope. Maybe this is the beginning of a small, on-line progressive movement that seeks a voice. Maybe it is just frustrated young men and women who will be bullied back into conformity, but it is a change.

It may not be the change we're all looking for. Not the jobs, not the education, not the human rights, not a clean government, the rule of law, or the disarming of warlords. But it is change nonetheless, and a positive one.