Love and War Under an Afghan Sky

The killing of Osama bin Laden and its fallout continue to be major stories dominating the 24-hour news cycle and crystallizing an array of responses from celebration to condemnation.

Did bin Laden get what he deserved? It’s hard to not feel that way. But I found the responses of many—the tailgate-party-like celebrations, the chest-thumping, and the rah-rah-rah’ing—a little distasteful, though I suppose I can understand the underlying emotion. Revelling in a person’s death is not a response I would choose, however. Yet at the same time I recognize the blunt and ugly truth in the phrase “live by the sword; die by the sword.” I certainly feel no sorrow in the killing of a man who planned and ordered the deaths of thousands of innocent people. I do not weep for Osama bin Laden, but neither do I see his killing as an appropriate theme for a keg party.

Was it justice, or was it revenge? That’s a hard one to call. Hearing the accounts of the raid, it sounds more like an assassination. If bin Laden wasn’t armed, I see no reason why they couldn’t have captured him and whisked him off to stand trial. Unless they simply didn’t want to have a trial for whatever reason—political reasons, perhaps. And maybe that’s justified. But is that truly Justice? It seems more like a decision based on pragmatism rather than principle. Justice shouldn’t feel this ugly.

I found a needed antidote to this ugliness in an interview with CBC reporter Mellissa Fung. She talked with CBC anchor Peter Mansbridge recently about her book “Under an Afghan Sky: A Memoir of Captivity,” chronicling her 2008 kidnapping in Afghanistan while there reporting on the war and its impact on Afghanis. Fung was snatched while filing a story from a refugee camp. She was taken into the hills and kept in a tiny hole in the ground, barely large enough to stand in, until her release 28 days later (apparently through a prisoner exchange).

Watch the interview here.

What I find most admirable about her response to the ordeal is not the way she kept her hopes from faltering, though that is impressive, or that the royalties from her book will go to a foundation in Afghanistan where women can learn computer and internet skills, though that is also admirable, but rather the fact that she was able to forgive her captors. There’s some small optimism to be found in the way she was able to maintain her own humanity throughout her ordeal and, more importantly, was able to see her captors’ humanity as well.

When asked how she managed to see the decency in her main captor, a young Afghani man perhaps no more than 18 or 19 years old, when it was he who had kept her a prisoner in a hole in the ground, Fung responds, “I couldn’t dwell on that. I had to see him for the whole person he was.”

The lesson of her book? “That the world is not about good and evil,” Fung explains. “I mean, sure, these kidnappers did something horrible, but that doesn’t mean they’re evil people. There’s still humanity in them.”

She sees her captors as people who have their own problems and issues they’re dealing with “in a country where there’s not much of a future for most young men.”

“It’s not black and white. It’s all grey,” Fung says. “And that’s why I love being a journalist. It’s exploring those areas of grey.”

That’s a key point. One of the things that feeds various kinds the fundamentalist ideology, or any kind of hatred, is that people want things to be black and white, good and evil, us and them. As a professor of religion points out in this article about doomsday cults, “Quite a few people are attracted to fundamentalist groups of all stripes because many people don’t like to live with ambiguity.”

Politicians, terrorists, jihadists, war-mongers, fear-mongers, and anyone who has an agenda that benefits from keeping people divided and fearful of those who are different from themselves, will perpetuate a black-and-white view of the world. But most of the time that’s not the reality of things.

In light of the debate over the glee and vengeance of the Osama bin Laden killing, and the shadow that the events of 9/11, and their antecedents, have cast over the world, it’s good to know that there are still those who can enter that cauldron of chaos, vengeance, hatred, bigotry and war, suffer personal injury and captivity, and ultimately see in the face of their captor, not an enemy, not evil, not the Other, but a fellow human, replete with all the faults, fears, sins and shortcomings that we all share—the things that mark each of us as members of a common tribe.

Something tells me that if peace and prosperity, justice and equality are ever to gain ground in places like Afghanistan and Iraq—or anywhere for that matter—the catalyst will be our ability to see humanity when there are powerful forces—internal and external—telling us to see evil and enemies and to think only of our own interests.

Can quiet acts of personal forgiveness ever speak louder than the mobs howling for revenge and blood, demanding an eye for an eye? Can empathy and understanding ever gain dominion where too many live by the sword?

No easy answers, but as I was pondering these questions this past week, I attended Neil Young’s second of two Toronto solo concerts at Massey Hall. When he performed his song “Love and War,” I couldn’t help but find the lyrics and the sentiment resonating quite strongly in light of this topic.

If more people take a page from Fung’s book, maybe there’s hope that we can find the courage to live more by the heart and less by the sword.