Rock and Hard Places Read Online Free PDF Page A

bit more to it than that.”
    A closing line, if ever I’ve heard one.
    “Mmm. I’m dying for a piss, as well.”

    THE INTERIOR OF the urinal in the Paramount’s lobby is covered—ceilings, walls and floors—in gleaming, mercilessly reflective, polished steel. There is nowhere you can look without seeing everything else that’s going on while you’re in there, and from an alarming variety of angles. Thom and I pause, aghast, just inside the door.
    “You go first,” says Thom. “I’ll wait outside. I’m still too British for this.”

2
    I’M THE TURBAN SPACEMAN, BABY
    Afghanistan under the Taliban
MAY 1998
     
     
     
    W HAT FOLLOWS STANDS as an example of the sort of thing that used to happen back when the absence of email made it necessary for editors and writers to interact in person. I was having lunch with Craig McLean, then features editor of The Face , the venerable British monthly style and culture periodical. Britain was, at the time, still invigorated by the removal, the previous year, of a decrepit, incompetent Conservative administration which had often seemed at least as bored and annoyed with Britain’s people as Britain’s people were with it, and by the election of the Labour government of Tony Blair, who had ostentatiously embraced pretty much everything that The Face had spent years promoting as an edgy counter-culture. The appalling phrase “Cool Britannia” was being routinely deployed to suggest the accession of a gilded new generation.
    Which was balls, obviously—Britain’s new prime minister was, after all, a mid-forty-something lawyer. Craig thought it might be fun, therefore, to write a story about a place where the people of our generation really were in charge, and suggested Afghanistan, then under the control of a disproportionately youth-run Islamist cult trading as the Taliban. In many crucial respects, Craig noted, the Taliban were typical Face readers: crazy students who sold drugs and had firm opinions about facial hair. He suggested I go and meet them.
    I still feel a bit weird about the piece that resulted. I was, I think, seduced
by how easy it was—both journalistically and morally—to regard the Taliban’s lunacy as amusing rather than malevolent (that said, I think America and the West could have lurched yards ahead, these last few years, by depicting Osama bin Laden and his fellow travellers as dimwitted, ranting wingnuts rather than omnipotent evil geniuses). I was possibly a few years’ more hard travelling from shedding my final vestiges of idiot relativism (although my brief experience of the world as the Taliban would prefer it has been useful, subsequently, as ammunition in disputes with idiot relativists). And it didn’t occur to me, even for a second, that these people could ever pose any threat to anybody other than those sufficiently unfortunate to live in their dingbat fiefdom. (It’s not much consolation that entire western intelligence services made approximately the same assessment.)
    So, I wish I hadn’t written this story. I wish—for all the difference it would have made—I’d come home and written an impassioned jeremiad demanding a massive international intervention in Afghanistan. I wish I’d demanded that the civilised world send bombers, troops and aid on the grounds of elementary human compassion. I wish I’d suggested that we harry the Taliban up hill, down dale and out of business. I wish I’d urged that surely, whatever else we may respectfully disagree about, some ideas are such obvious transgressions against sense and decency that we can occasionally get together as a planet and solemnly, forecfully declare: this is bullshit. We said it, or words to that effect, about South Africa when it treated black people like barnyard animals; I fail to understand why so many other countries continue to get a free pass to do the same to women.
    As I write, of course, a massive international intervention in Afghanistan has been under way