Peace Later!

The New York Times asks the former “Ground Zero Mosque” imam to weigh in on the religious correctness of the Met’s new Islamic world galleries

Ah, the New York Times. Its Sunday “Arts & Leisure” section can usually cure any bout of insomnia, with tiresome articles on artistic “trends” years old. But this week’s front-page summary of the Metropolitan Museum’s freshly redesigned Islamic art galleries manages to open some old wounds and set new records in abasement to the least liberal interpreters of Islam.

SABRATHA, Libya, August 27th — After a cumulative two months in Libya, I’ve come to believe that the fears of an Iraq-style post-Qaddafi fragmentation are misplaced. Many Libyans express the wish to kill Qaddafi—but not his fighters. This augurs well for the future of this closely knit, small-population country. Even ethnic tensions here are at a lower key, with the Berber minority seeking cultural freedom but not separatism.

JADU, Jebel Nafusa, Libya — Spending time with Libya’s revolutionary brigades is fascinating, both for the light it sheds on a Libya deformed by 42 years of a bizarre dictatorship and for the reflections it inspires on the American military.

BENGHAZI, Libya — On February 20th, a mild-mannered, bespectacled, diabetic oil company bureaucrat with an interest in diving and spearfishing sacrificed himself in an act that had arguably the greatest single impact on the Libyan revolution. Its reverberations also suggest the double-edged nature of suicide attacks, which have been almost nonexistent on the rebel side.

Here in Tunis, the war in Libya is ever-present, in the rumored 100,000 Libyans temporarily relocated to the city. You can’t drive for ten minutes without spotting Libyan license plates. The five-star beach hotels, like the Barcelo Carthage that I stayed at, and the El Mouradi, are filled with wealthy Libyan families. This has been a boon at a time when tourism to Tunis has crashed due to lingering fears of unrest—and with hotel rooms running just $100 or so, its a boon to the Libyans as well. Some are rich indeed; I heard of a young man living for two months at the Sheraton, which is not discounting much. “Half my friends from Tripoli are living in Tunis now,” 19-year-old Shadda told me from Benghazi. Of course, there are those too poor to leave, those engaged in underground activities against Qaddafi, and also substantial numbers of Qaddafi loyalists.

When I met the late Kandahar Mayor Ghulam Hamidi in December 2010, he struck me as the sort of quietly decent, competent civil servant that are so woefully scarce in Afghanistan. A white-haired, bespectacled man who looked like the accountant he was, he spoke fluent, rapidfire English like the American citizen he also was. His daughter, Rangina—a fiery, charismatic University of Virginia graduate who runs a women’s embroidery cooperative in Kandahar—was terribly worried about the danger he faced, telling me that the Taliban already controlled the city. She explained that he would answer his own phone, because the two deputy mayors had been killed and he couldn’t find anyone who wanted the job.

I’m frankly tired of writing about Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. One of the reasons, in fact, that I’m tired of writing about Afghanistan is that it so often involves writing about horrible people and how the US has empowered them. So AWK’s slaying on July 12th is interesting to me more for the chance it offers to discuss a fatal error in American strategy, one that goes far beyond the Afghan war.

What’s important for the US and Afghanistan going forward is the trope of destabilization that has occurred in a lot of discussion, both professional and popular, of the slaying of Kandahar’s Al Capone. We hear that with the elimination of one powerbroker, Kandahar will be less stable. This theme also occurs in analysis of the revolutions of the Arab Spring. If Saleh or Assad falls, the pundits wonder, will Yemen or Syria be less stable?

“Back in civilization!” my companion in Libya exclaimed as we drove from Libya into Egypt in late April. “I’ll be able to get my e-mail and my newspapers!”

I thought we had just left civilization.

Two weeks in Benghazi and three days in other towns in eastern Libya had shown me civilization as I wished it were: public civility, private effort, generosity, responsibility, egalitarianism. And part of the magic of Libya al Hurra (“Libya the Free,” as the eastern part of the country is known) was the absence of the Internet.

You could still check your e-mail—very slowly on laptop at my hotel, the Uzu, where the link was too weak for my BlackBerry to get e-mail, or quickly on BlackBerry at the Al Jazeera Net Café, which, on the other hand, had a terribly slow connection for laptops.

In the two weeks since I returned from Free Libya, I’ve been amazed at how many people I talk with repeat the same misapprehensions about the country, the revolution, and what the US is doing there. I hear that Libya is “tribal,” that what is going on is a “civil war,” that we “don’t know anything” about the people currently governing Eastern Libya. The average person I have talked with thinks that the free Libyan forces are either a bunch of al-Qaeda, or Islamists at best, or savage tribesmen. And everyone believes we are involved in training and supplying the free Libyan forces, with a fair number of people somehow having got the notion that we have special forces working on the ground.

So, a quick clarification is in order.