Students listen as Afghan government adviser Mohammed Qayoumi describes the situation in his native land, in a sping course on Afghanistan developed and taught by Caltech historian Robert Rosenstone and his Afghan-born wife, Nahid Massoud.

Afghanistan Examined

By Rhonda Hillbery

The 1980s and 1990s were particularly cruel decades for Afghanistan. From buildings to bridges, pistachios to grape crops, what the Soviet occupation didn’t destroy, tribal infighting and the Taliban later demolished. Most people have seen and heard about the wholesale devastation from afar, through a post–September 11 prism. Mohammad Qayoumi has seen it up close, and this spring he spoke to Caltech students about it.

Qayoumi, who returned to the streets of Kabul earlier this year in a visit to his former homeland, was a guest lecturer in a undergraduate class on Afghanistan. The spring course was developed and taught by Professor of History Robert Rosenstone and his wife, Nahid Massoud, a specialist on Afghan women and family relations.

A key aim of the class has been to help students see recent events in light of the troubled history of a country that would-be conquerors have found a tempting target for thousands of years.
Rosenstone says, “If there’s one theme, it’s that Afghanistan has always been a crossroads country, invaded or pushed about by its neighbors. From ancient to modern times, it’s always been a place that other countries have sought to conquer.”

As Qayoumi put it, “Afghanistan is not in the nicest neighborhood in the world. How do you create and blossom democracy when you are surrounded by so many despotic nations, and they all think they have a stake in the future of Afghanistan?”

The guest speaker, who is vice president for administration and finance at Cal State Northridge, described his ongoing work advising Hamid Karzai, the head of the Afghan government, as the country attempts to rebuild itself in the months since the Taliban government was driven out.

During his evening talk on campus, Qayoumi screened a short video that he shot from a moving car, depicting the bleak winter streets of Kabul. A few bicyclists and walkers moved ghostlike through sections of the city in which all of the buildings appear to be destroyed, not unlike newsreel images of a devastated post–World War II Europe.

As bad as it looks, the reality is much worse, said Qayoumi, who described his work in Afghanistan as an advisory, unpaid effort to help rebuild the nation’s shattered infrastructure. “The level of destruction seen is only physical. The challenges faced by the country are much deeper than that.”
Somehow, an Afghan spirit remains. Qayoumi said that despite dueling regional warlords and two decades of war and instability, the Afghan people retain hope for a democratic future.

The development analyst was one of several experts recruited for the course, which Rosenstone and Massoud decided to design and teach in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the subsequent military operation in Afghanistan.

Within the humanities and social sciences division, where he teaches, Rosenstone quickly gained support for the course, which the couple developed through immersing themselves in articles, books, movies, and discussions about Afghanistan. “One of the beauties of Caltech is, if you have an idea for a course, they say, ‘Sure, sounds interesting. Go teach it.’”

Rosenstone doesn’t profess to be an Afghanistan expert, calling himself an “interested amateur,” but he is married to someone who is. Massoud, a psychiatric nurse at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, helped teach the course and delivered one of its lectures.

During the nine-week class, students covered territory as wide ranging as Afghanistan’s rugged landscape. Topics included the ancient art of the region, the formation of modern Afghanistan, the Soviet invasion, the rise and fall of the Taliban, Afghan family and tribal structure, and the role of women, as well as political and economic prospects for the future.

Course materials included movies, a major research interest of Rosenstone’s.

“Film brings a sort of immediacy to students that books may not,” he said. “Movies show them the look of the land, show them the way people look and sound and speak, how people dress and talk.” Students watched an Iranian love story dramatizing the plight of Afghan refugees, an Italian documentary showing life and conditions behind the lines of the Northern Alliance, and a feature film about life under the Taliban. They also saw a sequence from Rambo III, depicting the national sport of buzkashi, in which men on horseback knock around the carcass of a headless sheep. Polo it’s not, but it is a revealing pastime.

“This sequence is really brilliant; it’s almost like a metaphor for Afghanistan,” Rosenstone says, explaining that despite participation from two teams, each player seems to be competing for himself, making the sport a symbol of extreme individualism.

About 30 undergraduates and members of the Caltech community attended class regularly. “That to me shows a real interest in the topic,” the professor adds. He points out that while many Caltech students have a background in American and European history, few of them know much about the history of central Asia.

Other guest speakers included Khalil Hashemeyam, a former professor at Kabul University; Robert Brown, UCLA art history professor; and Galal Elkholy, a specialist in Islamic law.

Sina Yeganeh, a sophomore chemistry major, said he enjoyed the chance to survey a broad swatch of Afghan history, “ranging from the early art of the region to the basis of Islamic law, which was so grossly misinterpreted by the Taliban. I realized that although I know some things about the current situation in Afghanistan, like many other people, I knew very little about what conditions led to the Taliban control of the country.”

When Jane Greenham learned about the course, she jumped at the chance to enroll. The junior in planetary science grew up as a diplomat’s child in the predominantly Muslim country of Jordan. A few years ago, reading through a large stack of National Geographic magazines, she read several issues featuring Afghanistan.

“An issue from the 1970s showed an Afghanistan emerging into the modern world, and the pictures from a decade later showed complete destruction of that modernization,” said Greenham.

“I wondered how the world could care so little—and how I could have known so little.” She was struck by how the country’s quality of life had foundered, and was especially moved by the plight of Afghan refugees.

“When the terrorist attacks on 11 September turned all eyes on Afghan-istan, I hoped that all this attention would cause improvements in the lives of Afghan civilians, and my desire to learn more about Afghanistan increased even further.”

The students said that their exposure to Afghanistan’s history helps them better see the country’s contemporary problems, which seem monumental. Today, Afghanistan has the world’s highest concentration of refugees and land mines, as well as a dismal infant mortality rate. An estimated one in four children dies before age five, and adults have a life expectancy of just 44 years. To make matters worse, the country is in the grip of a years-long drought. “The war is the major problem, but the convergence of all these factors has increased the level of human suffering significantly,” Qayoumi said.

Throughout the term, classroom discussions often came back to the Taliban and its harsh treatment of women, symbolized by the burka, the head-to-toe garment that they were required to wear in public.

In the last class, Massoud briefly donned a burka, and allowed curious students to put it on as well. The garment is nothing she grew up wearing in Afghanistan, but for many observers it stands as a suffocating symbol of patriarchy run amok under the Taliban.

Massoud maintains that the real problem for Afghan women today is not the burka, which some women prefer out of tradition and female modesty, but whether they are able to fully participate in society. “Give Afghan women a decent education and economic opportunities, and they will soon feel free enough to shed their burkas,” she said.