Photo: Associated PressYou are not supposed to be happy over a person’s death. But the business I am in does not allow for such conventional decencies, nor does the fact that I’m an Afghan.
I am not sure --- at least until the Arab revolutions of the last six months opened our eyes --- how many people knew of the monsters among us. One of these was Ahmad Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, shot to death this morning in Kandahar.
You may have heard the name. Wali Karzai was a powerful and corrupt politician, the owner of a large private militia, and perhaps Afghanistan's biggest drug lord.
These sins might have been forgiven because after all, the guy was a vehement supporter of US presence in Afghanistan. But to us Afghans, he was just the latest in the line of a corrupt politicians, tribal leaders, keeper of militias, and drugs lords who have destroyed any hope that we can ever live in our country in peace, at least not with the borders you see today.
I remember hearing the phrase, "Hanoz chee ra deedi (You ain't seen nothing yet)" over and over again during the 90s when Afghanistan was going through the hell of civil war. Every time that a story broke about men getting butchered, women and children getting raped, villages getting destroyed, and tens of thousands of Afghans flowing out of the country and I showed outrage, I would hear it, "Hanoz che ra deedi."
So dire was the condition of Afghanistan that I remember the exact day when my father quietly stopped using the words, “And bring peace to our homeland, God,” when he prayed at the end of a reading of the Koran. It was under these conditions that the Taliban came to power --- but so great was the barbarity of Wali-Karzai-esque warlords, drugs lords, and opportunisitic ethnic and tribal leaders that people breathed a sigh of relief.
It might confuse people that I and many other educated Afghans do not blame the Taliban as much as we blame Wali Karzai and his kin. Well, the Taliban are like a brainless pandemic. They are uneducated. They are uninformed. They are unaware of the world outside of the mountains where they were born and raised.
The Taliban aren’t profiteers of war in the usual sense of the word. They are an army of religious fanatics who want to convert everyone on the face of the planet to ensure their "eternal" place in their imaginary heaven.
You can certainly hate these people. You can kill them too. But you cannot expect them to understand exactly what it is that they are doing because they live in a fantastical world where they’re participants in a war between angels and demons, a conflict in which if they do not participate, they will be condemned to the eternal flames of hell.
That is in stark contrast to people like Ahmad Wali Karzai and General Daoud –-- another drug lord killed earlier this year –-- who are out to make a buck out of the misery of an entire nation. They profit from the broken dreams and lost hopes of a country.
You see, back in 2001 when Afghans reluctantly agreed to an international military presence in Afghanistan, it was our only hope at the cost of the only commodity we had left –-- our imaginary dignity. We had for millennia fought everyone to their deaths or our destruction to keep that intact. It never fed, clothed or sheltered anyone. All it did was make it slightly easier to exist as a people.
We could always boast about how we were one of the very few countries who had defeated the British when they were the mightiest force on the face of the earth or how we had forced the Soviet bear to run back to its den. But that really was not worth much, except for a good story rather than one, say, where we plundered India shamelessly for centuries and still have not apologised for it.
We had already killed our brothers, raped our sisters, orphaned our children, destroyed our homes, schools and hospitals, rendered large swathes of our land uninhabitable, and squandered our national wealth and our historical artifacts. We had absolutely nothing left of which we could be proud. We the nation of butchers, rapists, and generally very unpleasant people had nothing left but "dignity".
But in 2001, when we bowed our heads and submitted to international military presence, we could no longer boast or hold our heads up high. We were citizens of a shamed nation who had tried one last time to salvage the lives of our children, if not our own. But before we could even begin to rebuild our hopes and dreams, back were the men responsible for the atrocities of the early 1990s.
And with them, they brought people like Wali Karzai, his brother, and others who gleefully joined together to squander our last chance at some semblance of our past inhuman but, to a degree peaceful existence. I remember, I stopped hearing the words, "Hanoz chee ra deedi" --- now I was subjected to "Ale deedi (now you see)"? Now you see how bad it can get.
For the past ten years, they thwarted every attempt at rooting out corruption, demilitarising militias, and stopping Afghanistan from turning into Drug-istan. They rigged every election to make sure that no one else would get a chance to do so. They even contributed to insecurity so they could continue to hold power in the name of keeping the country stable.
A joke, huh? But, as Wali Karzai is buried, not to us.
We are the victims of a tragedy we always try to describe --- but will never be able to unless we invent new words, for the current English dictionary has no words to describe our plight. As if that trauma is not enough, soon NATO will exit and the Taliban will be back to "re-re-educate" us into good Muslims. I will get to hear "Ale deedi (now you see)" some more.
But we live in a chaotic and accident-prone universe. Very rarely, some victims get justice. Today I do not have to fill this opinion piece with links to evidence or interviews with foreign observers to detail the evil deeds of Wali Karzai, his brother, or their friends. Nor do I or other Afghans have to beg Washington once more to remove him and the likes of him from powerful positions in Afghanistan. Today, it is sweet to not have to work in vain to get these guys to court, waiting instead for when they leave the country in 2014, fleeing the Taliban tide that is most surely going to wash over Afghanistan again.
No, today, I get to be a victim who got some justice. I do not care who killed the man or how. I can quietly rejoice in knowing that first General Daoud and now Wali Karzai are dead. Now if I could only hear about the fates of Gen. Baba Jan, Gen. Qaseem Fahim, Haji Mohaqiq, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, Gen. Dostum, and, who knows, maybe even Hamid Karzai. I and millions of others would get at least some closure.
My only regret? I wasn’t there when Karzai was taking his last breath to peer into his eyes and whisper, “Ale deedi?!”