You have all seen since three, four, five years, nay longer, upon our dear soil of Afghanistan, from Kunduz to Khost to Herat to Badakhshan to Faryab, to the environs of Kabul, that two graves lie side by side…upon one lies a flag of Black and Green and Red, on the other the White flag of the Taliban…dwa kabira tsang peh tsang prot dee….both entrusted to the soil…
-Hamid Karzai, quoted in The American War in Afghanistan, Carter Malkasian
If asked why I thought those wars were a bad idea, I’d answer…I started studying Arabic in 1974, before those wars. I spent a year in Egypt and got pretty good, to the point some Egyptians asked if I were Lebanese. I learned the words they called me, some nice and accurate enough…Khawaja, Ajnabi, Masīhi (meaning Christian, literally, Messiahian), Nasrāni (Nazarene, meaning the same, from al-Nāsira, Jesus’ hometown), Amrīki, Amrikāni, Rūmi (from Roman, but meaning Byzantine or Greek)…and some not so nice…Musta’mir, colonialist…Sahyūni, Zionist…Mustawtin, settler…Ra’smāli, capitalist. And I learned a lot of words for nationalism and nationality…Qawmiyya, Wataniyya, Jinsiyya…and the words Bilād and Buldān, both broken plurals for Balad, country, but also meaning village, town, community, or even simply…place. All words with subtle, site- and situation-specific meanings that go over the heads of most Westerners, including mine. Given all that, I knew something would come up once we- being the Khawaja, the Masīhi, but soon enough perceived as the Musta’mir or the Sahyūni- put our boots on their ground- their Qawm, their Watan, or simply their Balad…their place.