Tom Perriello: A Policy Break

On Carl's urging, I am going to attempt a brief detour from my policy wonk observations for a comment or two about my personal experiences over this month.

First, I have again spent the trip asking unmarried Afghan male what they hope their future wife will be like. Well-mannered. A good friend. Dedicated to family. Smart. Dedicated to me. Kind. Like me. Wise. I have heard all these things many times, but I was making a concerted effort this time to see if I could find a single guy who lists beauty as an important attribute. To no avail. When I pushed one guy about it today, his answer was typical - "Well, I want her to look normal." "You mean not very ugly?" "Well, not very ugly. Not very beautiful. Just normal."

Sometimes the conversation would be with a taxi driver whose Indian music cassettes are covered with beautiful women - "That is fine for posters, but not for a real woman." If these responses are indicative, what does it mean for a culture to divorce the concept of beauty from the ideal of a life partner? Is that liberating for women here (who are harder to interview at random) compared to living in our beauty-obsessed culture, and at what cost?

Speaking of marriage, I have been told by guys in both Kabul and Kandahar that the going rate to get married is a US$6,000 dowry (probably getting a fairly middle-class read on this). Whereas American guys feel put out to spend a few months of salary on a ring (not that I’m supporting that), this amounts to about 5 years of pay for most of these Afghan men. MORE

Most have to save what bits they can while they wait for an overseas relative to come through for them.

Another sociological phenomena here that seem to hold the deepest secrets of how this place works -– like in most countries -– are the norms governing driving. As an outsider it seems like bedlam, and I am used to that in developing countries and Manhattan. What strikes me as odd here is the eerie lack of aggression and anger that accompanies even the most absurd road tactics. Drivers regularly pull U-turns through several lanes of moving traffic, and everyone simply stops or accelerates in uncoordinated ways that force the person to weave and pause, turn back, reverse, and then proceed over a couple of minutes of delay. Even the most egregious swerves or stops are met with more of a chuckle than a yell, without, to the foreign eye at least, a seething, passive aggressive undercurrent. It is as if people here have enough real problems in life not to waste antipathy on such disputes.

The same mentality seems to govern the rules of pick-up sports. Most mornings, I have been joining into a soccer or basketball game at the local public park. There, players are content to include college-level athletes going all out on the same team with small kids and old men. The serious players will call walks and fouls while a lumbering 300 pound teammate will be allowed to walk the full distance of the court without a single dribble. Some groups have been quick to invite me into their games, while others avoid eye contact. So far, this treatment does not seem to track with age, tribe, or skill level.

I asked one of the guys about these patterns and he suggested that there is no reason why a single game cannot allow each person to get what they need from the process. The undertaking is more about meetings various expectations than on winning the contest. Perhaps this explains why a couple of the games to 15 simply ended around 12 or 13 as people tapered off. Given that my other recent reference point for hoops is Brooklyn, it is just nice to see no argument over a call last longer than 10 seconds, no smack talk, and certainly no fights. Then again, I have to put up with hot tea breaks at “halftime” and culture dictates that I join them for cooling off with scalding hot tea as the temperature edges up towards 100.

Travel journalism is clearly not my forte. Back to policy tomorrow.

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