The Punishment of Virtue Read Free Page B

Americans were profound. I began to feel—but the thought took days to surface—that the horror that had befallen us might just hide a miracle. It might shock the United States awake, get us to adjust our course. It might goad us to go to work again, to be what we kept saying we were: the champions of human dignity, the exemplars of public participation in government, of government acting in good faith, the mentors of peoples struggling to be free.
    Or it might not.
    For there was something about the reaction to 9/11 that disturbed me. Along with the new openness, the self-questioning in America—the e-mail messages people were sending around and reading aloud to their friends, the searching conversations between strangers—another tendency was emerging, and it was gaining emphasis. It was a reflex to divide the world in our hearts into two opposing blocs: We the West versus Them, now embodied by Islam, which had suddenly appeared on the world stage to fill the role left vacant by the vanquished Soviet Union. The shorthand term for this notion, taken from the title of a book, entered our vocabulary: the clash of civilizations. 1
    It was clear to me that the Al-Qaeda terrorists who flew their planes into those enormously symbolic American buildings were trying to force people everywhere into splitting apart along these lines. Quite aside from the terrorists’ use of mass murder, it was this intent that made them abhorrent to me.
    But some of us seemed to want the selfsame thing. And some of our leaders seemed to be showing the way, deliberately blurring all the myriad distinctions that gave our world its depth and richness. Suddenly the world was being described in binary terms, and instinctively I knew that was wrong. An us-versus-them reaction may be normal in humans who are attacked, but is it accurate? Is it productive? Is it the reaction that those to whom we look for guidance should be bringing out in us? Is this the best we can do?
    I don’t think so. I don’t believe in the clash of civilizations. I believe that most human beings share some basic aspirations and some basic values: the right to participate in fashioning the rules that govern them, accountability, access to learning, and the reasonably equitable distribution of wealth, for example. The extent to which different peoples have been able to achieve these things depends a lot on what has befallen them over the course of time—not on some irrevocable cultural difference.
    And so it seemed urgent to me at that assumption-shattering moment—that moment full of potential and peril—to counteract the tendency to caricature, to help bring out the human complexity of this new exchange. My background and abilities equipped me. I could talk to people on both sides of the alleged divide. I could help them hear each other. This was a way for me to serve.
    I called my NPR editor: “If you need me,” I told him, “I’m yours. I’d like to make a contribution.”
    So he sent me to Quetta, Pakistan, exactly where I wanted to go. Considered the most conservative and anti-American town in all of Pakistan, it had been the cradle of the Taliban movement. It was from Quetta that the Taliban, a reactionary group that used a radical reading of Islam as the basis for the world’s latest experiment in totalitarianism, had set off in 1994 to capture nearby Kandahar—to widespread indifference internationally. A few years later, Usama bin Laden joined the Taliban leadership there, as their welcome guest. In return for financial and military assistance in their effort to conquer Afghanistan, the Taliban offered Bin Laden a haven where he could nurture and develop his Al-Qaeda network. Kandahar became the base from which the Taliban and Al-Qaeda forces took over ever-larger amounts of Afghanistan, until an opposing militia called the Northern Alliance was left clinging to only a tiny sliver of the country in the far