Afghanistan as Art

Do you want to know why you don't understand Afghanistan? It's because no one understands Afghanistan. It's because Afghanistan is a huge mix of cultures with no - let me repeat that, NO - unifying traditions or values.

What else is like this? Where in the world can we find examples to help us gain a measure of confidence in discussing the future of our involvement in this "country"? I believe art can help.

If you know me, you know I hate modern art. I don't understand it all, and I think most of it is a huge joke perpetrated on the public by people without the skill, time, or inclination to learn how to paint or sculpt realistically.

But I digress. You've probably seen this painting before:

"A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" by Georbes Seurat. I think it's the key to Afghanistan. This is - according to my Kindergarten level understanding of art - the first popular example of Pointillism. Rather than brush strokes, the artist used the tip to make small circles of color. Viewed from a distance, these dots appear to be a picture of a lot of strangely dressed people hanging out next to a river. With umbrellas in the shade. In reality, it's a bunch of dots - we only see a picture because that's how our minds make sense of it.

Enter the war. I've discovered that reading news about Afghanistan while deployed doesn't reflect anything I experience on a day to day basis. Hell, listening to other guys on my team talk about a village two kilometers from my patrol base is like hearing about a different universe.

Each small area here is its own dot. There's very little resemblance in behavior or composition from one to the next, and they often lack the sort of interaction we'd expect in a more developed country. This is especially true of the more rural areas in southern Afghanistan where the Marine Corps doggedly pursues the Taliban with one hand tied behind its weary back.

You'd think this isolation, variation, and complexity would inject a little humility into the writing about Afghanistan, but it doesn't. Everyone has their opinion about what's happening, and these always deal with the broad trends of the war. Discussing the true war - the amalgamation of blood, sweat, and tears unique to each area - necessarily reduces one's scope to the point where you'd have to have 10,000 long conversations rather than an 800 word-tall pile of goat shit.

But hey, it's always possible that I only understand Afghanistan as well as I understand modern art. Maybe the joke's on me . . . but I doubt it.