The civilian who eventually took over from Evren, Turgut ?zal, would propel Turkey further in this nationalist-Islamist direction. ?zal was himself pious, and a member of the Nak?ibendi brotherhood, the country’s largest Islamic sect, which had been banned during the Kemalist revolution. With Evren’s blessing, and ?zal’s enthusiasm, a measure of freedom and independence was returned to all of Turkey’s brotherhoods in the 1980s. Among these brotherhoods was the Nur, which spawned the Fethullah Gülen movement. The Gülenists, who had been proselytizing underground since the 1960s, were allowed to flourish—even more so with the help of a liberalizing market economy. Gülenist businessmen founded holding firms, publishing companies, newspapers, radio stations, and, crucially, schools. Turgut ?zal championed them.
?zal loved America. He had studied engineering in the United States and came to believe that the country owed its success to liberalism and capitalism. “His dream was to make Turkey another America—his role model,” writes the academic Sedat La?iner. “It can be said that one of the main pillars of ?zalism, with its Turkism and Islamism, was liberalism and American-type democracy. For ?zal, all these principles were compatible, not contradictory … ?zal’s ideology consisted of American secularism, American democracy, American capitalism and American liberalism.” Once again Turkey was imitating America, but this time, Turkey turned itself into a model of Reaganite and Thatcherite neoliberalism (?zal loved them, too). Many Islamist politicians would mimic ?zal’s way of combining Islamism and capitalism. ?zal empowered the Islamic youth of Turkey. Most prominent among them was a young man who once sold simit on the streets of a decrepit Istanbul neighborhood: Recep Tayyip Erdo?an.
*
THE 2010 FOURTH OF JULY party at the American embassy in Kabul started at nine in the morning on July 3. My driver dropped me off far outside the gate of the embassy. The whole road was blocked off; many roads in Kabul were like this. Sandbags lined the sidewalks. You’d walk for a while, and you’d pass a checkpoint, and then another. To the left were the white USAID trailers, and to the right, the old and new embassy buildings. A large sign read: THE U.S. EMBASSY WOULD BE GRATEFUL IF ANY OF OUR FRIENDS WHO HAVE INFORMATION ON TERRORIST ACTIVITY OR THREATS TO PLEASE COME TO THIS GATE.
A receiving line waited for foreigners and Afghans to meet Ambassador Eikenberry, his wife, and the newly arrived General David Petraeus. They stood before a giant wooden American flag. Red, white, and blue bunting hung from the drab modern embassy buildings. Off to one side Afghan men stood around a kebab stand and some tents. USAID had set up tables about their various programs, like at a county fair. The popular local band Kabul Dreams, made up of four young Afghan boys, played “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” Hassina Syed stood in line, waiting patiently to shake the general’s hand. She wore a gray pantsuit and head scarf—“the other me,” she said. General Petraeus, now in for his second war, looked older than his years.
After the American and Afghan national anthems, we gathered around the lectern for some speeches. First, Eikenberry read a message from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Throughout the day, red, white, and blue balloons had been spontaneously popping, due to the heat—even the snipers up on the tops of buildings sat under a big striped sun umbrella—and the sound of the loud pops did much to set an already jittery crowd on edge, a sea of slightly jumping shoulders.
“Welcome to America’s birthday party,” Eikenberry read. “I’m delighted we can mark it together … All of us have to take responsibility to work together.”
Those bland, company-man words. In Kabul these words sounded criminal. These were loveless, soulless words. How could we speak to Afghans like this? I saw a country and a people completely divorced, alienated, severed from itself and its reality, as if superimposed on someone else’s photo. Our administration of all these little empires had rendered all of us into half-hearted automatons; no one believed in the words they were saying, and yet this language was about real things: flesh and death and war, people’s homelands, and their children.
“Let us use this to make new connections.”
Pop!
“… Find solutions…”
“… challenges…”
Pop!
Petraeus was up next. I hoped for better.
“We cherish the relationship.”
“Your success is our success.”
Pop!
“What an all-star team has been assembled here in Kabul.”
I glanced around at the pink American faces, the blue and white polka-dot scarves, the dreary midcalf navy skirts and hopeful red ties. Somber Afghan men in Western suits bore name tags that revealed they were professors. We smiled at one another like bored students at a class assembly. Progress. Mutual objectives. Thank you for raising your hand and answering the call.
The language reminded me of a tiny book a friend gave me before I left for Istanbul; she had found it in a used bookshop. It was called A Pocket Guide to Turkey, and had been produced by the U.S. Department of Defense for all the soldiers heading to one of their first Cold War satellites, in the early days of the postwar empire. People liked to say of Afghanistan that the occupation failed because we weren’t good at occupations anymore, but I suspect we were always the same way:
Of course Uncle Sam isn’t sending you to Turkey to observe social trends. You have a couple of jobs to do. Your bread-and-butter job is to teach the Turks all you can about American military know-how. That’s plenty important. The Turks wouldn’t have invited you over if they didn’t think it was worth while—if they didn’t feel that you knew your stuff.
The Americans in Kabul brought out a five-by-seven-foot flag made out of cupcakes. I saw a platter of potato skins and, feeling an unexpected rush of nostalgia, grabbed one. Karl Eikenberry thanked “sponsors” for the event. Apparently, local Afghan and foreign businesses had paid for the American embassy’s Fourth of July party.
The embassy band was singing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” Hassina Syed seemed upbeat. She said this Fourth of July party was better than last year’s.
We shuffled out to wait for our drivers. The cars whipped and halted around a monument to Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Northern Alliance leader who was assassinated two days before September 11. The dust and the noise and the heat—it all felt different out there. Big cement trucks paused in front of the gates. Life felt uncertain. A few of us backed away from the traffic to wait behind a pile of sandbags. I wondered whether the Afghans driving by knew it was our Independence Day.
“Ha,” Arif said, when he picked me up. “We’ve had like four independence days. Independence from the British, independence from the Soviets, independence from the Taliban, and … inshallah, someday, independence from you.”