Life and Honor in Afghanistan

09/20/2011

"Honor."

A word with significant, cultural depth that seldom dives beyond the surface in Western conversation. A concept old world cultures hold as closely as one's faith in God. A tangibly-measurable value swept aside after decades of materially-driven accumulation, self-preservation, and cultural sodomy.

Please forgive the hyperbole. An honorable Afghan died today.

This man who died, a local hero as brave as any soldier, went unburdened to his death this morning attempting to disarm an IED. The device itself, by the analysis of the US soldiers with whom I worked, was likely rigged towards his particular tendencies to disarm. This is a new pattern in the manufacture of Afghan IEDs: bomb makers focus on the bomb disarmers when creating.

Who this man really was, I do not know beyond his role as the Gardez site team leader on my State Department program. And his name: Atiquallah. In Arabic, this literally translates to "Ancient God" and more metaphorically represents a human being bursting with self-love and courage.

Atiqullah's mission was simple: locate and destroy explosive ordnance, weapons and ammunition in his specific, Afghan province of Gardez. Guns, bombs, rockets, mines, bullets, IEDs: anything that could take a life was in his charge.

After hearing of his passing, one of my program employees, charged with the administrative handling of his death, started upon a discussion of faith and Islam as a way of talking through the incident. He said that Afghans believe in Allah's creative discretion: He plans all things, life and death.

So today's death was not one in vain, but simply part of the natural order. Our man lived to do as he did: struggle to support his family, be humble in his faith and love for God and country and expect that when he did pass, it would be into the arms of a loving God, at a certain moment, in a certain way. An existence good, to whom simple Christians anywhere could certainly relate.

"This is the way of the good Muslim, Ali," I uttered with conviction. "He believes in family, and Allah, and a struggle to survive. But he does not do evil upon his neighbor."

Ali did not smile - the occasion was still too somber and fresh. But he nodded in acknowledgement, and followed my statement with his a wisdom much older than his age:

"In Afghanistan, you work for family. You struggle to live for them. You are a good man to people around you. If you kill even one person, it is as if you killed the world. This is Islam."

And therein lay the separation between the Afghans, and those like the Taliban. The good Afghan values life as the world itself. To the contrary, those who abuse Islam see death in that same way. Good Afghans believed that life spent in the service of others was the means to end with Allah in heaven.

Yet those who interpreted Islam for violent means saw death leading to the exact same end.

So who then should be in heaven after today? The honorable man who dedicated his life to disarming objects of destruction? Or the one who built the device who killed that honorable man in the name of something twisted in its violent righteousness?

That is the difference between men and women in Afghanistan who have honor, and those that do not. Those on one side valued life above all else; those on the other side sought to take it at the world's expense.

Our team lost a good man today. But for many Afghans, the world died again. 

---

The WRA Mission

Our State Department-funded program, Weapons Removal and Abatement (WRA) funded local, Afghan teams and consequent training by US EOD (explosive ordnance) experts. These Afghan-led teams, working in the toughest provinces in Afghanistan, sortied every day within their provincial boundaries to root out items of war.

These rural Afghan leaders worked hand-in-hand with foreigners - like the US and other militaries - so that citizens across Afghanistan could walk their roads, fields, and villages without worry for the next gut-wrenching explosion...and the loss of limb or life that nearly always ensued.