Creating "many, many Osamas"

Novelist William Vollmann says if the U.S. convinces Afghans of bin Laden's guilt, they'll support the move against him. If not, only "genocide" will defeat them.

By Steve Kettmann

Sep 27, 2001 | Novelist William T. Vollmann, author of a dozen books including "The Rainbow Stories" and "An Afghanistan Picture Show," has a different perspective on the Taliban than most of us. Not only has he read the Quran at least twice, as he explained last year in a New Yorker article about the Taliban, he has also interviewed Taliban leaders face to face and spoken with many ordinary Afghans about the regime. His experience with Afghanistan goes back to the early '80s, when as a young writer he joined the mujahedin in the mountains for several weeks. He did not actually fight, he said Wednesday in a phone interview with Salon -- that is, he did not fire a gun "at anyone." But he was very much with the fighters in their struggle.

Vollmann offered this sobering warning in that New Yorker piece: "Americans worry that Afghanistan has become a petri dish in which the germs of Islamic fanaticism are replicating -- soon Afghans will be hijacking American planes and bombing embassies everywhere. And their fears are not necessarily unfounded. The Taliban are unemployed war veterans, ready and even eager to return to the battlefield. 'In the nineteenth century, we beat the British more than once,' Afghans often told me. 'In the twentieth century, we beat the Russians. In the twenty-first, if we have to, we'll beat the Americans!'"

To start with the obvious question, where were you on Sept. 11? And what was your reaction to the news?

I was in Bangkok. I don't watch television, so I saw the news in the Bangkok Post on the evening of the 12th or the 13th. I felt very, very sad. I still feel extremely sad about it. In the Bangkok slum where I was conducting my research, I saw that a lot of the Thais were very, very happy, particularly some of the people I knew with ties to Muslims in southern Thailand. And I wasn't a bit surprised. But it's always painful and unpleasant. For the past few years, I've known better than the average American, I would say, how much we are hated around the world. Some of that hatred is justified, and a lot of it is just that we are the big kid on the block, and any time the big kid gets a punch, a lot of people are going to be happy about it. That's human nature. It's not even anything personal. But it's still a little sad and unpleasant.

Back in 1982, you spent several weeks in the mountains of Afghanistan with the mujahedin fighting against the Soviet army. What was your impression of them?

They were my heroes. I've never met anyone who was so serenely confident of doing the right thing, so willing to sacrifice his life for his homeland, so brave and so disciplined. The case of Afghanistan vs. the Soviet Union is the clearest case of good against evil that I've seen in my lifetime. I thought it was terrific the way they got their country back. I'm deeply saddened by the fact we stopped helping them once we got what we wanted, which was for them to be a thorn in the Russians' side. I feel like we sort of let them down.

At the same time, they obviously share some of the blame for their problems. They never could get it together to be unified, at least until the Taliban came along. They never have trusted each other. They are very quick to blame outsiders for all of their problems. Of course that's partly justified. Outsiders have done a lot of meddling in Afghanistan through the centuries. The average person in Afghanistan has become very used to thinking of themselves as playthings of foreign powers. That's what makes it so easy for them to think that our indictment of Osama bin Laden is some kind of great power strategy. That's why I think it's very important that we go the extra mile and explain to everyone what we're doing and why.

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