Category: Anthropology

Note 1 for Your Interest. 01032025

Dear Kim and Evan,

I read a Psalm today that prompted me to think about my failures and obligations as a father that I need to perform. I confess that I regret deeply some of the ways that I failed you as a father, and I would therefore like to begin trying to fulfill my obligations to you. So I propose to write a series of brief notes to you that would share with you my life, important experience, and current perspectives on my world. I want to tell you things about my personal struggles in the attempt to be a real Christian, but also I want to explain some secular issues that I realize now I should explain to you and hope you will think with me about.

So this is my first Note for Your Interest.

Psalm 78 begins:

My people, hear my teaching;
listen to the words of my mouth.
² I will open my mouth with a parable;
I will utter hidden things, things from of old—
³ things we have heard and known,
things our ancestors have told us.
⁴ We will not hide them from their descendants;
we will tell the next generation
the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord,
his power, and the wonders he has done.

The Psalm rehearses the crucial events in the past that shaped the moral sensibility of the Israelites. I can only presume that the Psalm was written long after Moses, certainly after the time of David, so roughly 900 BC. and was meant to help that generation to be remined of the crucial events in earlier time that shaped the moral orientation the Psalmist wants his heirs to commit to as was he. I hope you will read through the Psalm, to get sense of its flavor and intention.

This passage helped me to think about my obligation as a father. I hope that by sharing my past struggles and lessons you will understand issues that to me are important to share with you as my children and heirs.

In fact, I feel I owe you more than I have left you with, so this is a late but earnest attempt to explain to you how God has worked in my life. Key to what I am told in this passage is to give you some sense of how God became real in my life.

It began when I was in the seventh grade. An evangelist had come to town with a series of “lectures” and evangelical appeals for us to be saved. In those days radio was becoming important. I remember listening to Roosevelt’s occasional “fireside chats.” The whole family gathered around the radio to hear him. I remember his declaration on December 7 1941 his declaration that that was a “Day of Infamy.” We were shocked to hear of the attack on Pearl Harbor by a country we barely knew anything about.

Anyway, Jackie Burris came to town and started a series of evangelical calls for us to repent and be saved. After going to his meetings for a while I went forward “to be saved.” Actually, I don’t know anything much happening to me when I did that. I was met by someone who prayed with me, and I prayed something like “I would like to be saved. Please forgive me of my sins.” I didn’t want to go to hell, and truly I wanted to live a good life. That was all I knew.

I don’t know what difference that act made. I do know that because of Jackie Burris our family began to go to a different church. We had been going to a big Presbyterian church downtown. And because I was urged to by my mother, I joined the church. My mother cried. I didn’t understand why. The episode with Jackie Burris was different. It was an act of intension. It meant something to me even though I didn’t really know much about the gospel.

Now, a matter of secular interest I want to bring up for you.

If I die today you two together will inherit about 4 million dollars. What will you do with it?

-=

Lecture 2. For Your Interest 01042024

I have passed over the life of our family in the 1930s. My father grew up in a family that was well off. His father, George Washington Canfield had somehow gotten himself into Oklahoma Territory even before the “boomer” period when the state would be opened to settlers, or at least I don’t know how he accomplished that. He came as a single man and staked out a territory that he knew would be right alongside the place where the railroad would be built. Eventually when it was built he used his location to get a wife. He named his tract of land and his trading post “Canfield” in the OK territory. When the railroad was eventually built he was better located than the nearest Post Office, which was some miles away in a place called Yale PO. AI happened that a young woman was working there named Roxy Wright.

What Jim tells me is that at one time she was being courted by one of the Dalton brothers. These men were law-abiding citizens in OK territory but they were known for doing what the Jesse James gang was doing: raiding the main railroad to the west. The Dalton brothers would sometimes ride up into Kansas to as far north as the railroad which ran (I think) from Kansas City to Omaha, and they would stop the train and loot the mail, then dart away. Anyway, George Washington Canfield was interested in Roxy. And she was working at the Yale Post Office which was several miles from Canfield, OK – I’m guessing more than 20 miles. So George rode up to Yale and proposed to them that they could have his land close to the railroad. If they would move, they could change the name of his land to Yale OK. His agenda was to get Roxy closer so that he could court her. So, as the story goes, they moved to George’s site, which became Yale, OK, and he married Roxy.

My father was born in another town, I think it was the town from which Roxy came, Jennings, OK. Eventually George and Roxy would have a daughter who died in infancy and six sons. I order they were: Jesse James Canfield, Ralph (father of Jean, whom you may remember), Roy (my father), Ira, Theodore, and Wright. The family prospered for many years. George and Roxy took three of their children (three children at that time) to the St Louis World’s Fair in 1904. My father was one year old. Eventually all of the sons would graduate from a new college being built near Yale, Oklahoma Agriculture and Mechanics College. It was the second land grant university in the state. Most of them majored in chemical engineering. Oklahoma was discovering oil. Eventually, Jesse (J.J) would get a PhD in chemistry from Iowa State.

My father, born January 3, 1900, would attend OAMC and graduate at 18 as a major in Chemical Engineering, but the main topic was, as WWI was going on, Chemical Warfare. I discovered by looking at one of his Year Books that he had been elected Vice President of his class in his last year. His education was funded by the Reserve Officer’s Training Corps, and as soon as he graduated, he was mustered into the army. But the war ended soon afterwards. My father told us that as soon as he joined the army the Kaiser sued for peace.

While he was at the college he met another student, and she was a music major, a soprano in the music department, Leona Dobson. She was the only one in her family who went to college and she did not quite graduate. I suppose that was because Roy and Leona married before she graduated and the depression would soon shut down her education. Anyway, her father was a full-time painter at the college during the years it was being built. He would die of lead poisoning from the paint he used. I never knew him, but Kim has in her house a table and matching chairs that he built. That’s the table that has claw feet. The chairs are still functional but fragile. I hear that you, Kim, want to get them all fixed. They have to be roughly a century old. You may not have noticed but my mother had one finger on her left had that had one link of her finger in her hand missing. That happened by an accident. Her cousin was shopping on something and somehow it sliced offer her finger at the first knuckle.

More later, on the depression era.

01062024 LECTURE THREE

The depression period, 1930s.

My grasp of the period of my parents’ marriage is only vague. I’m hoping Jim will know/ remember more than I know. I know that my father entered the army as soon as he graduated from Oklahoma A and M College (OMAC). I thought he served altogether 8 years. That means he was mustered out in 1926. But they were married in 1929, January 27 and he was in the army then. I was born a year and half later, 1930. I know that he told me that in that period, before 1929?, he was selling Ford cars. This was, I think, the Model A. The model T had come out earlier but by that time it was being upstaged by a GM car. Model A came out in 1928, and so it is likely it was model A’s that he was selling. However, the most significant event in that period was the crash in 1929. That means that  hardly had they married when the bottom fell out of the economy. It was also a time when he father was pouring a lot of money into an oil well. I don’t’ know exactly where but it was in the area of Yale. Also, grandfather owned land that was contested by an Indian woman. The dispute was notable in Oklahoma affairs in the late 1920s. The way I heard it Grandfather made a deal with his lawyer that if they won the lawyer would get 1/8 of the money. I gather grandfather was pretty used to make deals on the basis of a handshake. In this case, the total amount awarded to the contestants was significant and grandfather’s amount was 1/8^th of it. On this basis the lawyer took all of grandfather’s award. Grandfather of course thought the contract meant that the lawyer would get 1/8^th of his share of the award, not 1/8^th of the total. The lawyer took it all. I heard that he became a big oil man eventually.

However, about that time the oil business dipped and that may have been the reason my father did not get a job in oil chemistry. Actually, he seems to have mainly been trained in Chemical Warfare, which seems not to have been useful after the war.

So several crises seem to have happened soon after my parents were married. The stock market crashed, soon afterwards the banks failed—my grandfather lost everything—the oil business cratered, and Grandfather’s oil drilling project came up dry. This was the early period of the depression. Of course the car business collapsed also. So my father was left struggling for work.

One of his jobs was carrying ice. This was before people had refrigerators. What they had were ice-boxes. An ice box was a wooden box with thick insulated walls, a similarly thick door into which big chunks of ice were kept along with the food that needed to be preserved. That mean that a whole system developed for delivering chunks of ice to people’s door. My father’s job was to deliver the ice chunks to peoples’ iceboxes. It must have been early in their marriage that he was doing this to pay for his new wife and after July 1930 a new son. In any case, my father had a habit of putting his togue between his teeth when he was doing something that required close concentration. And one time when he was carrying ice he fell and bit his togue nearly off. Somehow it was sewed up and his tongue eventually was healed. It must have been a terrible moment in their life together.

This may have been the time that my mother was teaching music. She was the director for the music in a church. I was told that as my mother was directing the choir I also stood up behind her and tried to direct the music Music.as she did. Years later I would tell myself that I would like to be a great Conductor like, say, Toscanini. That was after I had been the student director of the high school orchestra for two years.

-=-

01102025 LECTURE 4 FOUR

It would have been in these times that my father started studying accounting by long distance. Apparently, his degree in chemical warfare was useless and he had a growing family. I was born in July 5, 1930; Ben came in February 2 1932; Bryce in February 8, 1935. So in these years when the demand for money was rising Daddy was having trouble making a living. Just finding a job at all was difficult. Literally 25% of the workforce was out of work.

My father’s course was accomplished by long distance. You read an assignment and then answered questions, put them in the mail and in a few days you would get a grade on your answers. It must have been a long process. In the mean time he was working. The only job I heard about during that time was the ice-carrying job. I think they must have been living in Yale through this time and perhaps he got help from other members of the family, but as far as I know they were not doing well either.

It’s possible my mother made some money, I can’t believe it was much. But she directed the choir at a church and she might have gotten something for that. I was of course there, between 1-5 years old. But at some point after a program I started waving my arms like she did directing the choir, portending something I would be doing later on.

Anyway my father finally qualified as a Public Accountant and started looking for work. It seems that the jobs he found were in the trucking business, and those jobs drew him out of Oklahoma into Kansas. I don’t know the sequence but I believe he at various times he had jobs in Wichita and Arkansas City. But at least once when he came in and organized their records he discovered that they were broke and there was no money even to pay him. This was what it was like in the depression. I remember a time when we lived in Wichita. I was in Kindergarten. And the daughter of mother’s older sister Charity was living with us. Mary must have been about 15. I remember her as a red head and now I think she must have been pretty. Years later Rita and I met her when we were in Wichita (I think), and she was getting old, showing signs of dementia. It seemed such a tragedy, so different from when I knew her as a child. One event I vividly remember while were there was my experience when I stuck my finger into an open socket out of curiosity. That was a shock to remember. I never did that again.

One other memorable event took place during those years of may parents’ efforts to survive when there was hardly any money. They had a chevy at one point, perhaps left over from when the family had money. Anyway, one night as we were going home, the car was hit on the driver’s side. For me it was a terrifying instant. The other car came out of nowhere. I vaguely remember my father bleeding but apparently not very hurt. The car was totally demolished and I’m almost sure there was a loan on it. Thereafter I’m not sure how they survived. At least they had no car.

Anyway, in the late 1930s we moved into the Tulsa area. Actually to Sand Springs. I think the idea was to stay in that place while my father looked for work in the city. We lived in a little house on an oil reservation. That is, this was out in the country where a lot of large pumps were drawing oil out of the ground. All of them were operated by a huge diesel engine in a little shed near the house we lived in. The pumps, scattered far and wide even as far away I would guess now of a mile away across a barren land, driven by steel cables about two inches think that connected the power house with the pumps. Mr Martin’s job was to keep this system going. The cables had always to be kept taut and the diesel had to be kept going day and night. I remember following him around when the engine was not working. This system created a continuous sound, pump …pump …pump, in the ambience of the place day and night.

We were able to be there because my mother’s mother, Grandma Dobson, had married another older person named Martin. I must have been a marriage of convenience for both of them, and for my family it provided my father with an opportunity to look for work in Tulsa.

It was, as I now remember it, a pretty shabby place, although as a kid I had no sense of hardship. There as an out-house, where we used corncobs to wipe ourselves. No paper, as I remember.

My father found it hard going to look for a job walking the streets of Tulsa. He ran into an old friend and he asked if he could go up to his company and apply there. His “friend” said no. Jobs were precious to have and hard to find. Eventually he got a job with a shipping company, Parkhill Trucking.

-=-

Lecture 5 On our situation in Tulsa about 1936 to 1940.

Eventually, my father found a job. I think it was with the Trip Trucking company in Tulsa. That made it possible for us to move out and move out. Away from Mr. Martins. Well, reservation. And move into a small apartment, A duplex, In Tulsa.

I went to Springdale school for the first and 2nd grade. I remember it as a fun place. I don’t think I was particularly notable in the class, but I remember playing soccer on the on the fields. Under the supervision of the. Have an athletic coach.

I also remember a terrible moment when Ben caught fire. He must have been four or five years old. And there was a. A gas stove situated in the wall 0f the kitchen. I remember being concerned about it for myself. I didn’t want to get too close last time, might get burnt. Ben was 14 months younger. And he backed up too close to that stove. He was wearing his pajamas. And his pajamas caught on fire. Of course the pain was terrible and he started running. My father chased him down. And. Patted out all of the fire with his own hands. I do remember that his hands were burnt. But Ben was badly burned. I’m sure that my parents had no money. And they did not go to the doctor. They did not take Ben to the doctor. My mother bought ancient unguentine Has a salve for burns and treat And treated him. For many weeks. I remember, I remember the terrible scar on the backside of his legs. But years later. They could not be found. He must have been in his 40s or 50s by that time. But Ben grew up. Some marks on his body and have this terrible burn. And I don’t know what it did to him to suffer such pain for so long. He turned out to be amazing adult. Favorite of my father.

The other family in the duplex in the other side of the duplex. Was a family of girls about the same age. I think the oldest girl was older than me. And we did play with them sometimes. But they were. Aggressive. Girls. And they were. You’re very hostile and. Eventually, a couple of the girls would ride their bicycles around the duplex. And when they came around our back door. They taunted us, the boys. I remember my mother. Carefully timed her. Just move out of the. Back door. To deposit some trash at just the moment when when the girl was coming around on her bicycle and mother pushed her down. This created the crisis between our two families and it was finally agreed. That we would not play together anymore.

Across the street was another family that had two boys about the same age. The oldest was a year older than me and the youngest was a year old year younger than me. About Bens age. You played this with the shell boys? And, uh, their father was a. Painting contractor. So that they had a double or triple garage with lots of painting gear and materials in it. I remember learning from them how to use a bandsaw, and with the bandsaw we were able to make some. Very interesting. Toys for objects. We also played hockey with them. And we thought we were pretty good. Remember, this is the first and 2nd grade.

Next door to our apartment was an Open field, mostly thick with cockleburs. Cockleburs stick to everything and it’s difficult to pull them out. They get in your clothes. They can get in your hair and we were playing in that field. We always can home with cockleburs in our clothes and something in our hair. If they get in your hair, you never get them out. You have to cut them out with scissors. It came out many years later that a man who child was getting tangled up in a cockleburs decided to try to invent a new way to bind things together by making strands of plastic to stick together. The idea I heard, came from cockleburs. He called his new invention Velcro.

-=-

Next Lecture

After about two years we moved to a little better place, a house of out own. I wonder if the reason was to get away from those girls in the other side of the duplex. This house was on St Louis Street near Thirteenth Street. 1220 south St Louis I think it was. It does not exist now they tell me, since the Broken Arrow expressway runs through that area.

We stayed in that house. For several years. I remember being in the third grade there and we did not move until I was in the 9^th grade. The house was built on a terrace. And I remember trying to mow that terrace. Pushing the lawn mower up. The Terrace. Over and over again. There was a big job for me in the third grade. We had a wonderful dog named Butch. He was a mongrel. But he at least had some terrier blood in him. He had one fault, which was chasing cars. And once he caught one the. Car ran over him. And crushed his back legs. We picked him up and. Carried him back into the house. And put him on a pallet. Very close to the back door. And every day. He dragged himself out. To go outside, to go to go to the bathroom and then drag himself back inside. Crying. With pain. The whole time. He was such a brave dog. Such a faithful dog, such. A reliable dog. We all loved him. We had just four boys in that house. I’ve been in price. It was during that time that our mother got pregnant. Quiz. The fourth son, Jim. He would be 14 years younger than me. And he would not have a last name that began with B. For some reason they named him Jim. I remember playing. In the front St. as they were repairing the street. There was a 2 trenches running. Through the street and I remember throwing clots at each other. U It was great fun. Until one of the clouds hit me in the face. After that it didn’t seem so much fun. I was a fat white boy and we lived in a white community. And I had virtually no contact. There’s people from the black community. But I remember 1 moment. When I was on the bus. When the bus driver told a black man in the back. To get back in the back because he was sitting in front of a white woman. The black man was a young, well dressed. Gentlemanly person. And he was infuriated. And he was ready and threatened. To fight him to react with fit with his fists. But he did go back. And I remember the bus driver asked me. If I live near. 13th St. And had a telephone. These were days when telephones. No one had a phone. There was no such thing as a cell phone.

One of the most memorable days in my life was Christmas morning. Leading up to Christmas. My mother had. Kept us from going into the basement. For some reason the rule was we could not go into the basement. What I did not know, what we did not know, was that my parents. We’re preparing our Christmas present there. Only later did we learn. That this first Christmas on Saint Louis St. My parents had no money. So they decided. To buy a board. And my father would cut up the board into blocks. And my mother would paint them. And then? They would put them up as a in a stack for us to play with. I remember getting up that morning. And we found. A stack of blocks. Carefully. Place one upon another into a tall Edifice that nearly reached the ceiling. I remember staring at it. And wondering what to do with it. Bryce. Solve the problem for us. He crawled up and hit the bottom. Row of blocks with his fist and the whole thing came down. And then what would we do with them? My father suggested we make trains with it and we did. We put the blocks together and we pushed those blocks around and organize them in new ways of made cabooses and, uh. Engine cars. And played with those blocks all day. Only later did we know. That this was a gift. My parents put together for me and for our for the three of us. Because they had nothing else. It turns out, as I remember those blocks, they were the nicest Christmas present I ever remember. We played with them for years.

Another serious development in the House was that had  termites. Again, our parents had very little money. So my father somehow obtained a as device for spewing out liquids and he, along with me and Ben, crawled int to the crawl space to spray a chemical against the termites. It was a messy job and because Ben was a little smaller but also willing to crawl into the most inaccessible places he often did some of the most strenuous work in getting the poison deep under the floor of the house. As I remember it took a few days, but by the end we noted that there were no more bugs of any kind in the house. I have no idea what the substance was but it probably wasn’t good for us to be using it.

Ben was also much more aggressive about doing difficult tasks than me. I was offered the chance to dig a trench in the back yard to clean out the sceptic tank running toward the back. In the end he was more interested than me, and he did a wonderful job of digging the trench, which my father in the end cleaned out and replaced with new pipes. There was a reason that my father very much loved Ben. I was mostly lazy and self-centered. If you had gotten to know Ben you would agree that he was the one with the best qualities for success. Indeed, he was successful in his profession, something I was very late to understand.

In fact, Ben became a famous music teacher in Hobbs NM. He was famous for producing wonderful choral groups. He was names most outstanding music teacher of the year in New Mexico but the honor he was most proud of was his election by his colleagues as the most outstanding educator of the state.

Music

That musical tradition of course came from my mother. Often in those days she would sit down and play the piano and sing. She urged all of us to come and sing with her, which we did for a while but over time most of us declined to sing with her. It was Ben who kept singing and he would as I said, eventually (after his time in Korean war) make music teaching his career.

One important new development in my life was that my mother took me to a bank concert and afterwards asked me which instrument I would like to learn to play. I told her I would like to play the one where you seemed to swallow part of it. I meant the trombone.

The trombone became a powerful learning device in my life. I worked hard the learn to play. And after a while my parents found enough money for me to have lessons from a music school teacher named Duke Louks. When I started with  him I told him I had already worked through the first book on my own and was now working in the second. I thought I was doing fine. But he had me play the first exercise in the first book, only much faster than I had ever done it. Of course I couldn’t keep up with him—he was playing a French Horn. That taught me that I need a teacher and he was in fact a wonderful teacher. I worked hard for him and I think I learned to play almost as well as I ever played under his direction. He put together some of his other students to create a trombone quartet. We really sounded good. I was the weakest player, so it was a kind of inspiration for me, fifth and sixth grader, to see these older guys, high school age, playing so well. One of them was named John Tipton. He had a pretty girlfriend. The other guy, the best player, had a beautiful copper bell trombone which he kept in immaculate condition. Whenever he was finished playing he carefully wiped it down with a chamois skin. I was enthralled to watch him. Strangely, I can’t remember his name.

Eventually, the trombone became a critical part of my identity. I eventually began playing during the singing part of my church. I wasn’t very good at first but the experience of having to play with someone else, the piano, and before an audience helped me to get better. In high school I would hold the first chair in the regional high school band.

In those days I took trombone lessons from the head music teacher at the largest high school in Tulsa, Central High. He was a very gentle and gracious man. Played trumpet and had as a young man been in touch with some players in the John Philip Sousa Band, the most famous and most successful band in the world at the time and I suppose ever. Mr Gates told me that in the Sousa band he always got the two best players for the top seats in the band. The top two trumpet players in the country plays in his band. The second had only to be on hand if something happened to the first chair player. Otherwise, had little to do. I assume he played with the whole section had a part but only when the first chair could not function did he take over the solos.

Lincoln School and the discovery of girls

During the years we were in that house I went to Lincoln School. I didn’t’ realize it at the time but it was a school in which handicapped kids were “mainlined.” We had two or three students in wheel chairs in my class, and I think someone who had trouble walking.

What I do remember was that I was just then discovering something very mysterious, girls. One of them was named Jean Rhoads. She was beautiful. I remember that for one school play (otherwise I remember nothing about it) she sang “I dream of Jeannie with the light brown hair.” She was so beautiful that I had a hard time being around her. I remember running away from a practice sessions when she was learning the song.

There was also Rosalee Weston. Rosalee was very prissy and always came to school in frilly dresses. I remember being revulsed by her, I and some other guys in the class. She was just too, too much. So girlish. I could hardly stand to be around her. That was when I was in about the 4th grade. It happened that I would see her several years later. It was during graduation from high school prom time. I graduated from Will Rogers High School, which at that time was only a few years old. Rosalee and most of the people I knew at Lincoln School went to Central High School, a much bigger school, the oldest high school in the city. I somehow escaped the prom at Rogers but I happened to go with a friend to crash the prom at Central High School. I’m not sure how I got in. But at some point as I was walking through the building before the official affairs of the evening began I happened to peek into a room that seemed busy. There was Rosalee, in a beautiful evening gown with, again, lots of frills. She was encircled by several guys dressed in formal clothes and they were obviously dazzled by her. In fact, she was gorgeous. I’m sure she didn’t recognize me but I recognized her, and this time I was stunned by how beautiful she was. Yes, she was still dressed in fluffy frills, etc. but this time I saw her from different eyes. We were both 17 years old.

Church

Going back to the time we lived on St Louis street, this was the time when we went to see the programs of Jackie Burris, which is where I started out. Before Jackie Burris I went to church because my mother took me. I wasn’t much interested in it. Because she encouraged me at about 12 I joined the First Presbyterian church. My mother cried; I had no idea why.

Anyway, as indicated earlier we attended the meetings of the Jackie Burris group and I was impressed by the appeal. I went forward. I didn’t want to offend God and I wanted to be saved. What I understood was that Christ died for my sins and I should make a commitment to him. What that meant was vague, beyond going forward and praying with someone. The one thing I know that act did was that it redirected us to another church. We were recommended to attend a church near us. It was an Assemblage of God churh. We were there for a while but we were never much involved but eventually we started going to the United Brethren Church. It was maybe 10 blocks away and I became used to walking it. The pastor was named Bob Young, very charismatic, attractive. He had a young family, and drew a fairly active congregation. He was a graduate of Moody Bible Institute. I suspect that was his education. At least I suppose that he learned to be a dynamic preacher there. I was in the 6th or 7th grade and was impressed with the gospel he was preaching. There was a small group of young people more or less my age, mostly older, and I was glad to be involved with them. As I say, they were mostly older than me, and the most notable of them was a girl named Ruth Warren. She had an older sister, Kathleen. Anyway, I was entranced by Ruth. She was poised, attractive with a huge small. Every year as I was in the group Ruth was elected President of the group. She was, maybe in the 9th grade when I first met her. She had a boyfriend but this was during WWII and he was a young officer in the army. I would eventually meet him, the son of the Tulsa Fire Chief. I think I only saw him once. He was of course with Ruth and meeting new people in the church. He never came home; I remember the news only vaguely. In any case, as a young child just growing toward adulthood I was in love with Ruth. I had long conversations with her and Kathleen after church. I don’t know what my relationship with her did for me, but what I remember was how important she was to me at that time.

Another person I came to admire was a young woman who presented herself as much older. Jean Lock was beautiful, said she was 21, worked as a secretary for a law firm. In retrospect I think she must have been quite bright. Jean as well as Ruth played the piano in church and eventually I began, at their urging, to play along with the music in the church. I wasn’t very good at first but I think that the more I played publicly in church the better I got. I didn’t realize how valuable it was to my playing skill but I now believe I learned more doing that than I realized at the time. Eventually I got pretty good on the trombone.

I’ve talked mostly about women, girls. I was deeply in love with Ruth and I much admired Jean and enjoyed time with her as well. Jean had a “sister” living with her named Betty; strangely I can’t remember Betty’s last name. It seemed strange to me that Betty was living with Jean because it turned out that Betty had a brother who attended the church also. He was an attorney. I felt comfortable in the circle of young people at the church, not so much in school.

I had a friend who’s first name I don’t remember but his last name was Sheperd [?]. He lived in a big house, much nicer than the one I lived in. What I most remember about him was his dog, a Saint Bernard. I encountered this giant dog on the sidewalk, standing in my way. We just stood there looking at each other. He was almost as big as I was, was not hostile. I had never seen an animal that big that wasn’t a cow. I wondered if he was a cow at first. Somehow I got around him, but the encounter unsettled me. There were two other guys in my class that I palled around with. Alvin Hoffman was probably the smarted guy in the class, and apparently  in the past he had been a model student. But when I knew him he was always sabotaging whatever the teacher was trying to do. She was named Coonz and was the mother of a famous person on the local radio. But she could not control Alvin. The other guy I spent time with was Jack Voorhees. I remember going with him to his house after school and was stunned that there was no one in the house. It was so quiet, nothing like mine, where there were four noisy boys. And my mother was always home. Eventually I began to feel that Alvin and Jack became better friends than me. There was a kind of secret understanding between them that I didn’t understand. I now think they had some things in common that I didn’t understand. I think that their parents had divorced or were divorcing. Also, they seemed to be only children in the family, but much of the time in both houses there was no one there.I now think that may have been what was going on with Alvin’s causing so much trouble. Something going on in his life was inducing this wild behavior. Years later when I took a chemistry course at TU they both came to class together. I now wonder if they were both Jewish. In any case, they seem to have formed a bond that lasted through several years.

Move to Fourth Place and Gary

When I was in the 8th grade, I think, we moved to a new house on Fourth Place and Gary. It was nice, treelined street on the corner. Jim had been born I think while we were in the South St Louis house but this is where his earliest memories begin. He remembers when my father’s mother, Roxie, was staying with us. I don’t remember that she lived with us but he does. I have already said that grandfather Canfield lost everything in 1929-30 period and I think they were living on whatever their 6 sons would give them. I think that for most of them these were hard days, but my father was making more money, and I think the other brothers were doing a little better also. The one who was doing best was Jesse (J.J), the oldest. He had graduated from Oklahoma A and M College and entered graduate school at Iowa State, I think, before the collapse took place, so he was able to finish a PhD in chemistry. He got a job in Middletown, OH, near Cincinnati, in a steel making company. Eventually he would have a major role in the development of ceramic plating on steel. Anyway, I remember seeing my father giving his father a $20 bill. I could tell it bothered my mother because they were raising 4 boys on what was a limited salary. My father was still working, I think, for Parkhill Shipping company.

The house at fourth Place and Gary had some distinctive features. The most prominent feature was that it was made of granite. I remember pillars made of layers of granite at the corners of the house, and at either end of a large veranda that covered the front and the right side of the house (if you faced it). It was wide and I remember Jim riding his tricycle around that veranda. The interior of the house had a huge living room-dining room area, but the rest of the house consisted of small rooms, three bedroom, all of them very small, and a small kitchen. What we learned was that the house was built by an oil man who had struck it rich and started to build a large beautiful home when the bottom fell out of the oil business and he lost everything. So he had the unfinished part of the house finished at quickly and cheaply as possible. Evidence that he had exited quickly were the blocks of granite lying helter-skelter around the back yard. As I remember none of us could move them, so they remained in place. We just mowed around them. We mostly played ball in the street. I was pretty quiet so we were rarely disturbed by traffic.

Another thing notable about the house was the Black Walnut tree on the year. It was huge. And it produced nuts that we sometimes tried to eat. Black walnuts are different from the kind we find in the store– although recently I discovered small packages of black walnut nuts at Schuncks. The Black walnut nut is encased in an outer layer of wooden-like growth and once you broke into that you could get to the nut, but the interior of the nut is so convoluted that it is hard to get the edible part out without breaking up the whole hard cover into small pieces. You will never get a large piece of a Black Walnut nut. Also, the taste is different. What I most notice about those nuts is that they leave a bitter taste in my mouth.

Fro the first year that we lived in that house I went to Horace Mann junior high school, which was the one that graduates of Lincoln School went into at the ninth grade. I had to take a long bus ride to get there. The next year I went to Will Rogers High School, which was fairly new, maybe 4 years old, about a 8 minute walk from my house. We must have moved shortly after the end of World War II. The economy was doing better and as I say my father was making more money. The move into this house marked a notable change in my life and growth.

I must have been in the 9th grade attending Horace Mann when a young man named Ed Wicherin stopped by our house. He was new in town, had driven up from Dallas where he was a student in Dallas Seminary and he had come to town to start a unique ministry with high school kids. It was called Young Life. We learned about this from Ed in his first visit and because I was soon to go into high school he had been given my name to visit. My mother invited him to stay for dinner and I think he even stayed the night with us. Ed would have a profound influence on my life. He was tall, and I suppose he was good looking; he certainly was a great person to visit with and he became a staple visitor to our family.

I was present in the two early “meetings” from which Young Life was formed. One of them had been organized by a piano teacher who wanted to do something to encourge what Ed was doing and she asked all her students, high school age, to come to a party that Ed organized. It was in fact great fun and the woman was stunned at how much fun we kids could have. That was Ed’s introduction to the high school kids he wanted to work with. The other meeting that he organized was held in the home of a dentist who had a son a year older than me. His name was Jerry. This meeting was not mainly for high school kids even though I was there, and I think Jerry also. Mainly was the folks who might help support the program. The folks I remember being there were Ruth Warren, by that time a secretary for a law firm (I think), her sister Kathleen, Jean Lock and her “sister” Betty, and Bob Young. There were a few others but I don’t remember who they were. What now impresses me is something about the situation that I did not know at the time, but it turns out there was a kind of mystery in life of every one of those people I have  just named. It would be years before I came to know some of the unstated details, but now in retrospect I realize how naive I was about these people whom I very much admired.

I was quite naive—maybe I’ve always been naive—so when I came to know these people more I realized that their lives, like mine were as broken and mixed up as mine, but in those days I took them at face value and thought they were all wonderful, living more complete and orderly lives than me. Only much later did I learn that Jean Lock was not 7 years older than me, which is what she had led me to believe. She was only 4 years older. She had dropped out of high school because of a problem she had controlling her urine. She was a bed-wetter. I think what we know now is that bed-wetting is mostly an inherited problem but in those days it suggested that she had not been raised right, or her parents had abused her: something. She had dropped out of school and took classes in short-hand and typing. I have no doubt she was very bright, and she got a job working for a lawyer and seems to have done well there. I’m not sure how I came to know it. I think her mother told my mother, etc. As for Betty, for some reason she was booted out of her house. There seemed to be an issue there and eventually she  was taken in by Jean’s parents, who were indeed wonderful people as far as I could tell. I loved to play ping pong with her father as well as Jean herself.

So that was Jean and Betty. Ruth Warren and her sister Kathleen had a more strange background. When their father died it came out that they were both adopted. They had come from the same family–they were real sisters– but there was some kind of monetary dispute in the family. Apparently a lot of oil wealth was involved. And a contract had to be revised– something legal was at stake. Ruth never said anything about it to me. But the mystery showed up many years later when Ruth and her mother were sharing an apartment; by that time Kathleen had become a missionary and gone somewhere. One day Ruth came home and her mother had been beaten to death, clubbed as I remember by a vase or a metal object in their house. And some papers were gone. By that time I was not close to Ruth and so I learned nothing more of what happened. A mystery.

The other person I have mentioned about whom there was something that I did not know in the early years when I was just getting started going to the United Brethren church was Bob Young. As I said he was charismatic and very personable, clever, etc. I came to know that he had a problem that may not have surfaced in those days but became notable later: He seemed unable to keep from getting entangled with beautiful women. Because of problems with surperiors in his denomination he eventually joined the Southern Baptist Church. According to the gossip he developed relationships that required that he leave and start somewhere else. He had a sweet wife, Alma, who seems to have put up with the problem throughout many years of marriage. So that’s all the secrets I knew about some of the people whom I admired and who in some ways had an influence on me.

But of all those who shaped me, I think, it was Ed Wickerin. He became a kind of mentor for me during the formative high school years, although I didn’t realize it. I grew up participating in the Young Life meeting, and because Ed was invited to stay with us I came to know him. I now see mannerisms in myself that I believe I got from Ed. One of the most significant moments of my life came from a trip I and several other high school kids took with Ed to Star Ranch, a camp owned by Young Life in Colorado. We did things there at that time that I suppose would be against the law these days. The leaders of Young Life, Jim Rayburn, led us up the mountains into places were we could careen down the hill at break-neck speeds, sliding on the gravel sides of the mountains for hundreds of feet. It was great fun, but I believe that something terrible happened to someone doing that and that may have been the end of it. We played football and baseball and in the evening we had a meeting in which Jim or one of the other staff leaders spoke. I of course met new people and new friends. I got interested in a girl from someplace like Tennessee named Kubie, far from Tulsa. But it happened that when it was all over there were some things I did there about which I was deeply ashamed. So after the last night, as we drove home in the dark from Colorado Springs, a long night in the dark, with Ed driving, I came to face what I had done during this wonderful Christian camp.

I was mortified by what I had done. I had called myself a Christian, I had espoused the gospel, I had been a notable figure in our Young Life club—and at Star Ranch I had behaved shamelessly. I was so ashamed. And in that time as we drove through the night I had a crisis moment with Jesus. It marked my life. Even as I remember this moment and try to explain it I am weeping. I begged Jesus to forgive me and take me back. Yes, please forgive me, Jesus. I’m so ashamed. All that I had tried to be, had thought I was, was violated by what I did. And I was mortified, ashamed to my core. This was the moment for all that I had been learning, from the time I heard Bob Young preach, the times that I had heard Ed Wicherin explain what the grace and mercy of God was like when led our our Young Life meetings, all that I had been learning from my own fragmentary readings of the New Testament—it all came to bear on me. Now I knew that I was a sinner. I had always supposed so before, but now for the first time I knew what it felt like to feel like a sinner, to realize how grossly I had violated all that his love had called me to be. I lost control. I silently wept and wept through the night. I begged him to take me back. I felt that I had wrecked my life by that behavior, and I wanted so earnestly that he would not to give up on me. Things happened at that time, in that night in the front seat of the car, that I cannot tell. It was overwhelming. I learned then what the gospel was all about. It was for me, a sinner. I came away washed. Cleansed in a way I cannot describe. I knew I was forgiven. I came to realize in away I had never known before that Jesus loved me. Me, not just me as one among many but me personally. He knew me, he loved me, he knew all about what I had done. But he loved me anyway. I never got over that moment. For weeks on end I spent evenings sitting on the veranda looking at the stars, which seemed now to be a majestic display of Jesus’s love for me. It affected how I behaved with those around me. I became more open with my classmates in school, more free to be friendly, more able to love them. Somehow love for them became natural.

When I started classes at Rogers High School I took Orchestra, not band, throughout my three years there. During my second year in high school years at Rogers I became the student conductor of the orchestra. I had already been influenced by Ed Wicherin in another powerful way. He had no place to keep a wonderful set of classical records and so he asked if he could leave them with us. Those records exposed me to the wonder of Classical Music. He had a wonderful, highly sophisticated classical taste, and I soaked it all up. Because of those records, which I played over and over again, I came to love classical music. It was a fine collection and I began to fancy myself a possible professional conductor or a composer. That was the context in which I seized the first chance I had to direct the orchestra. In my sophomore  year the orchestra was directed by someone I much admired, a violinist who I thought did a great job leading the orchestra. But once he was gone I was chosen for the job– actually, I’m not sure how that worked. So I had several years of listening to classical music at home and two years directing the orchestra at school. The reason I was able to direct the orchestra so much was that Buck Freeman, the music teacher, had asthma. It must have been very severe because he missed lots of classes. In those cases I ran the whole affair myself. By the time I got out of high school I thought of myself as a hot shot musician. That I won a competition to compose the Alma Mater for Will Rogers high school simply enhanced my musical pretensions. The award was worth a bunch of money but I can’t remember how much it was. I knew at least one of the other guys who submitted music for the competition. I also got a scholarship to Northwestern University to study trombone under ??(his name escapes me, famous trombonist for the Chicago Symphony). It sounded good but in fact was not nearly enough for me to attend a place like Northwestern. In fact, I was deeply fraught by an internal struggle and did not get over it until late in my senior year. I attended Tulsa University because it was the cheapest place I could go. I had a band/Orchestra scholarship to play my horn.

Now I want to try to explain what ruined last several months in high school and bugged me for years afterwards. As I said earlier I had a wonderful experience in the summer before my senior year at Rogers after I had had such a wonderful personal experience with Jesus in the trip by car from Star Ranch to Tulsa. The result for me was that I felt more free and joyful than I had ever been before. And it affected my relations with my friends in school. It was my last year and like so many seniors in high school I thought I was at the top of the heap. I thought I was very well liked and I basked in the sense of eminence among my classmates.

The way I tell this is a construction of my own to explain developments in my mid- senior year. At the time I was completely flumoxed. I had no idea why or how this happened, but I believe I now know why I had a serious problem. This is my story: At one point I was, as I remember it, showing off for some girls and not paying attention, and I ran into the sharp corner of a table. I hit so hard that I had the sense that the point of the table had penetrated all the way through the soft matter to hit the pelvis with a shock. I was startled, and wondered if I should go to the doctor about whatever had happened to me. In fact, I was able to continue on and I thought no more about it. However, in the period afterwards I realized that my breath was so noxious that people were turning away from my face. Also, I had black stools, but made no connection between that the problem of my breath. My bad breath became, I think, notable—of course I could be exaggerating but I certainly had the sense that my friends were trying in various ways to tell me that I had a problem. I finally realized what they were saying. I was humiliated. I did everything I could to cleanse my breath. Chlorophyll gum had just come out and I chewed Chlorophyll gum all day, every day until after a while one of my back teeth was getting rotten. Eventually it had to be pulled. The problem hit me as I was a proud, arrogant, high school student, and I became desperate to cleanse my breath. It never happened. I believe it was a problem that lasted several years. Of course, the way I have described event suggest what I think happened. The bump into the table broke the flesh inside of me possibly in several places. I think it did puncture my abdomen and that caused bleeding, which showed up as black stools for many months. I suspect it slowed me down; at least I felt slowed down, and dirty and ugly, and repulsive to the girls I wanted to impress. All of that forced me into a depression. This is how I left high school, and how I was when I entered college.

So my early months at TU were hard for me to cope with my father had belonged to the Sigma Phi Epsilon Fraternity and because of that they recruited me for the fraternity. The last thing I wanted at that time was to socialize. I went to some of their rush parties but declined to join, and with relief escaped all the social affairs they stood for. Now, I believed in prayer. I thought God answered prayer. So you can be sure that throughout this time I prayed. I took off long periods of time to be alone and pray. There was a little room attached to the garage of our new house—we had moved to the Quebec address—and there I practiced my horn and prayed. I noticed that it would have been easy to tie a noose to the rafters above me. I did not stop praying. I continued to feel dirty, offensive, undesirable.

In the mean time of course I was taking courses at TU. I had entered as freshman majoring in music in the Music School. But it didn’t take long for me to be unimpressed with my classmates. They seemed not to be very good at their instruments and not very sophisticated in music. Also, I had a newly-hired trombone teacher who for some reason never clicked with me. I was not very interested in his ability. He had been a baritone horn soloist for the Navy band. The baritone horn is essentially the same instrument as the trombone and he was at that time training himself to play the trombone. So the music scene did not impress me. I still had pretensions of being a conductor or even a composer. I saw no chance I would want to get training in conducting orchestral music there, so I backed away from the music program, at least mentally, even though I kept playing in the band and the orchestra because I got a scholarship for that. I still thought about myself as a serious musician, superior to what was being taught at TU music school (!). Anyway, those students were being trained, I realized, to teach music in public schools. I had already been directing the orchestra at Rogers High school and I didn’t want to go to school to do that again. Before my freshman year at TU was over I was lo0king around for a different major. I learned that I could be a music major within the Liberal Arts School so I made the switch out of the Music school and into the Liberal Arts school and then started looking for another major. I thought about chemistry but got a C in the course. I thought about sociology but backed away from it: I took an anthropology course with someone who admitted he knew nothing about it. We read through the famous old textbook produced A.L. Kroeber. entitled Anthropology. I don’t remember anything I got out of it.

Such was my drift out of music and into, well, something else, I knew-not what.

In the mean time there was my problem with God. He seemed real to me in many ways, and I continued being inivovled with Young Life, but if there were doors into heaven they were shut and locked. On the one matter that most grieved me I got no help. I still felt dirty in my mouth—I still do.

5/6/2020

A verse for me:

“Behold, I am sending an angel before you, to guide you on the way, and to bring you into the place that I have prepared. Watch for him and listen to his voice. Do not rebel against him because he will not pardon your transgressions, for My Name is in him. But if you will listen closely to his voice, and do all that I say, I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries.” Ex 23: 20-22.

I feel such a need for guidance. My life is changing and many prospects for my future are frightening; much seems uncertain, as my world is changing in unpredicted and unpredictable ways. So I respond to this passage, “Yes! I want that angel! But I am so flawed. “Watch for him, listen to his voice” – how? I know for sure that I will mess it up. I’m sure to get it wrong. OK, I’ll watch, but how will I “see” him, and how will I “hear” his voice?

Of course, this statement was not given to me; it was given to the runaway slaves from Egypt who were now relatively lost in the desert. In the Exodus story they had just received the awesome and mysterious commandments brought down from the mount of Sinai by Moses. The text then enumerates a series of “laws.” Now, abruptly, the laws are interrupted by a promise, which reveals that the God who delivered them has given them new regulations to live by and has further plans for them beyond what they had envisioned. They are going to a new land, one that is to be allocated to them, and the vehicle for their finding it and appropriating it – it’s going to entail conflict! – is an “angel.” They are in fact unready for all that that will entail, so God is giving them someone — a person, not a principle or a regulation — who will lead them through the trials that lie ahead as they advance into the land of promise.

Only by analogy can I claim this passage for myself. What I can say, though, is that this story tells me that Yahweh, the Hebrew God, is a Person who has designs and protections for the people who belong to him. Seeing here that he is such a Person, I come to him and beg for a similar mercy: Lord, please grant me the kind of guidance and protection you provided the ancient Hebrew runaways that the book of Exodus tells me about. Yes, I don’t deserve your kindness; but I see that neither did they.

So by analogy and by the hubris of faith, I appeal to the God of the Hebrews to give me help for my life, my times, just as he did for them in their times. Like them I am confronting situations for which I am unready and unequipped. I want to be guided, I want to be led through the frightening, uncertain times ahead. And without his guidance I will surely get it wrong. So I appeal for his merciful presence and guidance like that provided to the Hebrews in the wilderness.

The meanings of objects in our living room to me, as an illustration of how objective forms serve as devices of cultural memory. For the interest of our grandchildren when they become curious about what their grandparents must have been like.

They are cultural in the sense that the objects in our living room are creations of the human imagination, and also mnemonic devices to which meanings are ascribed variously for individuals and societies. Here I describe what they mean to me. They will mean different things to Rita, even though in certain respects the meanings she ascribes to them are like what I ascribe to them, which makes them devices through which we together share common memories.

Two helpful definitions of culture:

Geertz:

This is a long discussion about things in our house that reflect our lives and our history, which I want to put together for the benefit of our family. But also it’s an illustration of how culture works. Culture in a sense is in the mind in the sense that what we carry with us in our experiences is all private, and when we die, all those experiences and all that history that is unique to us dies with us.

:              At the same time, it’s not just all in the mind. In fact, what we have in the mind is cues that bring to mind various associations, and those cues are all material. So the mind thought even itself is material in the sense that we have to make use of symbols or tokens to represent the things that we think about. So language is itself physical, but it stands for things that are [inaudible 00:01:22] what we remember stands for memories.

:              In that sense, it’s the bridge between something very material and something marvelous. That is consciousness. I keep hearing a [inaudible 00:01:41] what consciousness is. But consciousness is not possible without the material devices through which the think, through which the remember. So I want to talk about the things that are brought to mind when I see them in our own living room. As an example, again, of how marvelous the mind is. And behind the things that we take so for granted, language, thought, simply consciousness are parts of our character and our world and our experience that are a kind of miracle.

:              They’re marvelous if you don’t want to call it a miracle. We can at least call it a marvel, because we don’t have a way to explain how consciousness somehow bridges into the material world. But science is a certain way of looking at the material world, looking at it in material terms. We assume that the universe can be understood in its own terms, and so we understand the universe as a material reality whose properties can be understood in terms of each other.

:              That doesn’t get very far when it comes to the great questions of the human experience, human private imagination, as I say, is a marvel. So I’m standing at the window, on the front window next to the front window, and I’m looking out upon the living room. I see, for example, far to my right, a hanging. Really it’s a prayer cloth that Rita bought in Afghanistan. We’ve seem some in museums, and this is as good as anything as we have seen in various museums.

:              It tells something about Rita. Rita would never call herself an artist, but she went around in Kabul with a dear friend and those days, Virginia Pruitt. Virginia Pruitt was a professor of home economics in Teachers College. I think she was in Teachers College. She graduated from Teachers College, but I think really she taught somewhere in Kentucky, because I think that’s where she was from.

:              Rita and she went around to Kabul, looking in the various shops where old things were kept or where pretty things were kept, craftwork and so on were kept. Rita found this, and brought it home. I’m sure that some of the things that reflect Rita’s taste come from her association with Virginia, because Virginia helped her to grasp something of what was desirable and appealing. So there’s that one thing.

:              Something else on the wall to my left is a [inaudible 00:05:42] This is, some people might call it a tablecloth, although it’s hanging against the wall. The other one I was looking at is a deep purple. This one is a rust color with all kinds of other handy work around it. Again, this is something Rita got, so when I look at these things, I think of my wife. I not only think of Rita, I think of her charm and grace and her subtle appreciation of nice things.

:              To explain what this [inaudible 00:06:22] is, it’s since the Afghans eat on the floor, they sit on the floor, and they bring their food and lay it on the floor. They sit around in a circle around it. This is usually, bread is wrapped in something like this and laid out on the floor, and then they put their dishes on that or around it. So it stands for, in the Afghan setting, this is what the Afghans would enjoy as part of their every day management of food. So I consider that a delightful memory of what Rita is like.

:              So something else that is an illustration of what Rita’s like, straight to the far end of the room on the wall is a [inaudible 00:07:26] board. There’s another one to my right on the side of the wall facing me, next to the carpet. Both of those, called [inaudible 00:07:39] boards, at least in English. I’m not sure what they’re called in Farsi. It’s interesting that I don’t know that. These were built, in the old Afghan tradition, they were built in the walls between the kitchen area and the [inaudible 00:08:07], the guest room, where guests were entertained.

:              It made it possible so that the women could peek through these boards into the room without showing themselves, because they were not usually … If it was not family, they probably wouldn’t come into the room, but they could look into the room and see what the food needs, or what the needs of people were. Rita, again, found those charming and illustrative of the creativity of the Afghans and their way in solving a social problem, but also of course you see the beauty of their work, of the craftsmen.

:              Also if I look back toward the window to my right, hanging on a tree horse, are some clothing, Afghan clothes. Most of these are of interest to me, although Rita saved some beautiful blouses hanging here. Again, you see the taste of the Afghans, the beauty, the capability, the artwork of Afghans, women. Again, the taste of my wife in choosing interesting kinds of clothes to bring home as souvenirs of our experience in Afghanistan.

:              Among these things hanging on this tree horse are two chapans, one of them more ornate than the other. Chapan is the word for an Afghan coat, and when I was in Hazarajat, some of those were considered priceless gifts. The nice ones that were given away, and I remember the peer would give to people, was felt white, felt warm coats. Notice they have long arms. That was a way of making sure if it really got cold they could crawl in it and wrap themselves in it. Even in summer though, men would wear them loosely around their shoulders, and especially if you’re walking in the heat. The sweat provided a way for them to survive wearing those coats.

:              The more ornate one, I bought as a birthday gift to Rita. I looked all over the place trying to find something nice for her, and I just couldn’t be satisfied. But this one I saw, I was told it was made in Nuristan. It’s a distinctive pattern, not like the other patterns, and it’s a very heavy wool. This wool is hand woven and there’s a name for it. I used to know the name. I’ve now forgotten what the name is for this wool. But they are, it’s of course a heavy wool and very, very warm.

:              I meant for it to be a bath robe for Rita, but if you were to put it on, you would see it weighs about 11 pounds [?]. So in the end she didn’t really use it as a bath robe, but it’s a memorial piece to me, of my intent anyway to do something nice for Rita and the discovery of something that appears to have been made in Nuristan. It’s certainly not the usual kind of thing you find in Kabul.

:              Next to that are the double doors that Rita got for me. It was an amazing decision on her part, and it’s a sign of her thoughtfulness and love for me to come home with these amazing doors. They are like the kinds of doors that we used to see in Afghanistan. They’re actually hanging upside down, I think, but in any case, they’re characteristic of the kinds of doors that you find all over Afghanistan. I’m not sure they’re from Afghanistan. They are from some place in that part of the world, but it was a big expenditure that Rita just somehow couldn’t pass up. Of course I cherish it as a special gift to me.

:              Just to remind you, none of this means anything to anybody else. But to Rita and mean, and what it means to Rita’s going to be a little different than what it means to me. Each one of us has a history, a view on history and a history we would tell. It’s an example to me what a marvel it is of the human mind to retain memory, to attach to specific objects all kinds of subtle sentiments, and for them to represent what we are.

:              So when I’m gone, this will be gone. Except however much I can remember to tell you about what’s here. I use the room as a way of providing a record of something of what our lives have been like. Obviously you look around the room and you see objects that tell that the Middle East Central Asia is an important part of the world for us.

:              I see hanging at my right a thin layer of, I’m not sure it’s wool, but hanging over covering a little lightweight door just to the right of the fireplace. This I got when I was this, and the one to the far end of the room hanging behind the bookcase, I believe I got them both at the time when I was in Kabul for the last time. I was in Kabul, I don’t know, six years, seven years ago. I was invited to give a paper for a conference on Tarzi.

:              That’s kind of another part of my life and experience that I think is interesting to say. I was invited to give a paper in Kabul as part of a conference on Mahmud Tarzi. He was the founder of the Office of Foreign Affairs in the time of Habibullāh. They were celebrating the founding of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Somehow they seemed to have lots of money and they invited a bunch of us to come and write about Mahmud Tarzi. Well I don’t know anything about Tarzi, although I know I read in a … There’s a very nice book about Tarzi by an Italian woman whose name I don’t remember.

:              All I know about Tarzi is what I read there, so I wrote them a note back and said, “I’d love to come. I’m flattered that you asked me to come, but I can’t say anything about Tarzi. If you would accept a paper, since I do want to go, I can give a paper on what was going on in Bamyan in the 1920s about the time when Tarzi was founding the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Habibullāh was the king.” So that seemed to me the only relevant topic I could offer.

:              I didn’t get an answer back. I thought … I actually got my passport up to date, started growing a beard so I would fit in with the scene in Afghanistan, and waited. I didn’t get an answer. Nothing came through to me, and so after several weeks, I gave up. I shaved off my beard and forgot about it. On the Monday before the conference, which was to begin on Saturday, I got a note in my email from the Ministry, from the Embassy of Afghanistan in Washington saying, “We’re so thankful you’re coming to conference.” They told me what to do.

:              Of course, I was thrilled to go, but I was totally unprepared. I didn’t have a paper, but nevertheless I scurried around and got some shots and so on. Fortunately I had a passport that was up to date, and I went. I wrote the paper on the plane and gave the paper. I arrived filthy dirty because I’d been traveling 24 hours, stopping overnight in Delhi, where I sat around for eight hours and then got on the plane. I was so embarrassed to arrive there, because as soon as I arrived, they drove a limousine up to the plane to pick me up and to take me to the conference.

:              I said, “No, no, no. I have to go my hotel. I have to get a shower. I have to get cleaned up. I’m so unworthy.” “No, no,” they said, “You have to go.” So they take me to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with all my baggage in total disarray. They did let me use the bathroom, so I brought all my baggage into the bathroom, and for half an hour did my best to clean myself up and change clothes. Then I went to the conference and I had to give a paper, so I gave that paper because they said they were going to publish all this. As far as I know, it was never published.

:              But in the end of course, I had time to meet other friends while I was there. It was a great time for me sort of as closure to the years I’d spent in Afghanistan. We stayed in a hotel that just above the hill was a little shrine. I went up there to … These shrines have all these hanging cloths that people would come up to the shrine and pray and leave a cloth and pray something will happen. Whatever they’re suffering with, whatever their pain is, crisis in the family, they’re coming there to pray.

:              For me it was a moment for me to give thanks for the great privilege I had of being in Afghanistan for so many years, and not only that, but I had the privilege of studying Afghanistan, learning more about the country that I hadn’t known when I was there. So it was a special privilege. In the meantime, a dear friend, Afghan woman whose name I’ll have to recover, invited me to go with her into the Bazaar. We went together to look what was there, and that’s when I bought these two hanging cloths in the Bazaar.

:              In the meantime, she took me to meet friends of hers, and I was entertained by a truly … a woman who was a member of the royal family. Didn’t meet her husband. She was tall, stately, graceful, and I thought she was even pretty. I thought, “What a wonderful tribute she is to the royal family.” She was married in. She actually was not born into the family, but she took me around her garden and showed me the things that she had there. I found a time when several other guests were there, and I was just privileged to be with them and enjoy the friendship that they provided, the graceful. They were so gracious. Of course the Afghans are always great [inaudible 00:23:00] I love to provide many good things to guests.

:              Now something else in the room, to my left is a [inaudible 00:23:20], this brass boiler. When I got it, I was so privileged to find it, and it turns out the man that he was doing it on, selling it on consignment for, someone in the family. It’s the family of the King of Bohara, who fled, who was driven out by the communists in the 1920s. The King of Bohara was driven out by the communists. After the Bolshevik Revolution, there was all through Central Asia, a number of uprisings against the communist regime. Those, they were known as, and I’ve forgotten the name. I’ll have to look it up.

:              But this [inaudible 00:24:36] from Bohara, you can see the insignia on it in Russian somewhere. In any case, it’s a beautiful piece of brass work that I was thrilled to have. It works. In Kabul, when we had a bunch of guests, we put it out and used it. It’s made for you to put charcoal in the bottom. You light the charcoal and then the air is drawn out through the center and heats the water. In order to make it heat faster, you use this handle that’s now formally attached to it, because I turned it into a lamp. It’s much nicer as a [inaudible 00:25:52] and it goes back to the 1920s in Central Asia. I don’t know if the story that it came from the family of the King of Bohara is true, but that’s what I was told. In any case, it obviously was owned by somebody of wealth.

:              On the floor in front of me is a tray, a copper tray, which we bought in Peshawar. Rita found it and because you can’t eat on copper, because whatever it does, all of these trays were covered with tin. This is very heavy copper, but was covered with tin so that it could be used. That’s in the local setting, it would be used as a tray for a feast. There would be a pile of rice, huge pile of rice on that tray, and people would dip into it. Inside that rice, of course, the way the Afghans do it, is the meat was hidden inside. People had to reach inside to find all the goodies that were inside. It was always delicious.

:              Rita didn’t want it for that purpose. She saw the value and charm of the copper base. So she had someone take that tin cover off with steel wool, and what it now has is copper. If it were cleaned up for guests, this would be gleaming copper, just as the brass [inaudible 00:28:12] would be gleaming brass if we would take the time to burnish it. So anyways, again a sign of Rita’s taste and Rita’s imagination in putting together, taking something local and using it for our own purposes. The frame, the legs under it come also from Peshawar. I think it was [Hyot 00:28:46] is the place where they’d make, they take very hard woods and make very beautiful cabinets and these legs.

:              When were away in Kabul another later time, we rented our house to some people, some girls for the first year. They were not very nice so the Wegmans, who managed it for us, got someone else, some guys. They were very nice except that somebody sat on this tray until the legs broke, so we had to have them repaired. But, poor thing. I’m so thankful for it.

:              Now to my right is a, hanging above the fireplace, is a print from the work of a British artist some time probably mid-to-late 19th century. It has been colored by hand, and it reflects what the British were doing. They always had artists to go with them when the military went out so that they would have a visual record of the places where their armies fought. I remember friends who would scour the old book sections of London looking for these kinds of pictures, and some of them a large price was paid for it.

:              I just said it was mid 19th century. On the lower left corner, the artist has provided his own name, David Roberts. March 18, ’39. This is Petra. Petra being the old Eden in Biblical times and Biblical history. There have been studies of Petra now to show that in fact they had a very elaborate water management system, which made it possible for the large population that lived here to survive. It’s a hidden place. It’s a great natural fortification area, and in fact in the Bible sometimes the word Eden was used to refer simply to a … metaphorically, as a metaphorical extension of the concept of fortress.

:              Then to my left, to my feet, you will see on the left and right side of the fireplace are more relics of our Afghanistan period. The pitcher on the left, we would love to use it but it’s full of holes. It’s rotted out so that it wouldn’t work, but that’s the kind of device that is used when dinner is served. They take one of these things around and pour it over everyone’s hands with, they have a basin under it to go with it. We don’t have the basin. They would pour it over … Everyone would wash hands. So it’s a memorial of mnemonic device of those times, again.

:              But to the left of that is something else. This is a pot that was given to me by my boss, the dean of the faculty. He had been brought in by the chancellor to make some major changes in a way that the university was managed. Turns out the way he did things offended a lot of people. He wanted to completely restructure and reexamine all the departments in the university under his authority, which is the liberal arts departments. I was chair of anthropology at the time, and virtually all over the university nobody wanted him to get into the file, into the department and began to tell them how they ought to reorganize.

:              We had a discussion, a faculty discussion. In the end, we decided to invite him to come and spend some money on getting counsel on what our department should look like and how to improve it. That gave us a special relationship to him. Until that took place, our department was a very marginal department in the university. Once we got his interest and the department began to prosper, we actually got a couple of positions out of it in the long run, and he brought in several people to look at the department and make suggestions.

:              One of them was Laura. This was Laura Nader, N-A-D-E-R. Sister of Ralph Nader, the famous guy who ran for president against Al Gore and probably caused his defeat. But Laura was a well known anthropologist in her own right. Her special area was the Arab Middle East. She is herself Lebanese. The Naders are from Lebanon. So, all other Middle East specialists, her recommendation was, “It’s a great department of anthropology. You have several really good people on the Islamic world, but you don’t have anybody that’s a specialist in the Arab Middle East, so it’ll be a great department if you bring in an Arabist anthropologist.”

:              We never did, but it was typical the way everyone who deals with the Arab Middle East thinks. In any case, the dean put a lot of effort into trying to give us support, and I think that was the beginning of what the department eventually became. It became the most popular department with respect to undergraduate majors proportionate to the student body anywhere in the country. The department of anthropology became the third largest major in the liberal arts college after biology and psychology.

:              The dean told me one time, a different dean, told me one time that … He pointed out that students come to the university knowing what biology was and what psychology was, but they had no idea what anthropology was. But once they began to find out what it was, it began to be very popular. It is very popular even now. In any case, we had a good relationship with the dean who was trying to transform the university. In the meantime, he made lots of enemies. At the certain moment, to this great surprise while he was traveling in the far east, he was fired.

:              Most chairs of departments rejoiced. I was conflicted about all that. He had been so nice to us, so I wrote a note to him telling him how much we appreciated what he had done, and especially regret that he was fired. I sent a carbon copy of that to the chancellor who had fired him. I worried about it, what would that do, I didn’t really know what it meant. I actually didn’t have any impression with that respect. But the dean was so grateful that I would in any case, and our department would in any case, express regret that he had been fired. We took him to lunch as a group one time afterwards, and then he called me over to come to his house.

:              I had no idea what he was doing. He asked Rita and me to come over for coffee and for drinks I think he said, and to the house. I didn’t know what to take, so I got a bottle of wine. Well, I don’t know what wines are. So I paid $20 for a bottle of wine. This guy turns out, is a connoisseur of wines. He’d never heard of it, and I suspect he found out it was not anything special. In any case, what he gave me when we came over to the house was this pot. This pot he bought I’m sure for several hundred dollars in Mexico. It’s a pot in which the locals, some tribe, he didn’t know, I say paperwork goes with it. This is how they make beer. The beer is made out of corn, and you can see around the edge of the pot the ways that it has actually been used.

:              The scorching on the bottom is evident, and you can also see places around the edge where people reached in and got something, some of the beer and dripped onto the edge. It was of course very hot. So it’s a really beautiful piece. It’s a beautiful piece for an anthropologist to have because it’s, again, physical manifestation of the handiwork of a certain group of people in Mexico. But also for me it stands a lot for a special relationship we had with this dean and the ways in which he treated us. One of the things that I also noticed was he thought my wife was very pretty. And she was.

:              So anyway, this stands for a lot of things. There are many other things I could tell you about what it stands for to me, but it’s a relic, a memorial of a special moment in my own history, and relationship with somebody. This man was a close friend of … He was an economist himself, and he’s a close friend of Douglass North, who got The Nobel Prize at one time. The Norths had invited us over for dinner to meet them. The reason I knew the Norths was because as chair, one of the signs of the dean’s support for us was he provided me a small stipend for my own research so I could continue to doing research.

:              I used that to ask for the editorial help of Elisabeth Case. Elisabeth Case had been an editor for Cambridge Press many years ago, many years prior to this. Then she had married Douglass North, and so I came to know her. She was a great critic of my own work. I learned a lot by working with her. It was thanks to her, I think in the long run, that the School of American Research agreed to publish the Turko-Persia book.

Second Half of my exposition of the meanings of souvenirs in our living room.

:              This begins the second portion of my dictation on what exists in our living room that reminds me of our life and our affairs. And I want to just look around the room and point out some of the things that I have not yet commented on.

One of the things that we appreciate so much is a pillow that Kim produced for us with a picture of Kim, Howard, and Steve on it, and everyone who comes into this room notices it and makes some kind of comment on it. We’re grateful for that.

As I stand here looking with the window at my back, I’m looking at the far end of the room, and at the center of the room, of course, is this cabinet of things that Rita has mostly inherited from her mother and her great aunts. Above that is [inaudible 00:01:13] board there, I’ve already said something about. And on either side of this are gifts that were given to me. The bow that’s on the wall there is a replica of Ottoman work given to me. It’s modern. It’s not old. It was given to me by one of my graduate students who’s Turkish herself. She did her work in Kyrgyzstan, and I appreciate very much to see it.

She also wove a scarf for me at one time, which made out of local wool. I suppose that a lot of times when we’re in the field we don’t know what to do with our time. And often we have time, we write up our notes, and we have lots of times when we’re sort of marginal to everything that’s going on. And she must’ve been making scarves for people. So it was very nice to have that. It’s been stolen by now.

The other side is a panel of a Chinese, I guess, it’s meant to be a wall hanging, given to me by another student of mine. He had already had a PhD when he came into anthropology, and he had a hard time getting out of the abstract mode of philosophy into the more empirical mode of what we do in anthropology. We’d go out and talk to people, and it’s what we have to say and what we find out in our conversations with people that are sort of the fundamental baseline of what ethnographic work is. And he gave that to me.

His wife is Chinese. He didn’t do his researching on China, as he at one time had intended to. But his wife is Chinese, and they spent a lot of time in Taiwan, and this comes, I think, from Taiwan. So it’s another relic of a relationship that I appreciate it very much from the past.

On the walls to my right and to my left are other pictures that remind us of special things. On the wall to my right, came to us from Eloise James. Eloise was in Kabul with us for much of the time we were there. She was a teacher of, I think, Howard and later on Steve because she taught in the international school, I think, second and third grade. And she had, in Kabul, collected many interesting things. And also I think this comes from London. The British saved… As I mentioned before, the British had artists to go with them to produce images of the world that these military people were living with. So it’s not the original, but it is a print from it, and it has been colored by hand, and is an image of Kabul in about 1841 or 1842 when the British were there about the time of the first Afghan war.

This is downtown Kabul. I don’t know why I thought so, but I thought it was [inaudible 00:05:15]. [inaudible 00:05:16] was a place that did exist the first time I went there, but it was torn out later and a major hotel was built there later. In any case, it’s a treasure that reminds us of the many years we spent in Kabul.

And then I had a very interesting experience that also I attach to this picture. Several years ago, I got a note from a man who had decided he wanted to translate into Farsi an article that I wrote in anthropology. He liked it well enough that.. He himself has a PhD from Germany, did not have a stable teaching job, but nevertheless was still interested in academic affairs. I, of course, was flattered that he would want to do that. And at one time he then presented me with a Farsi translation of this article.

Actually, it’s a difficult article, and so I’m sure that he had a lot of trouble figuring out the kind of terms he wanted to use. It’s about spatial relations and the way that special relations affected the way that power was exerted out from Kabul to its provincial areas. So in any case, I was flattered.

Then one day he wrote, and he said he wants to come and visit me. And it turns out that the time he was going to come was the weekend of Easter. And I thought he was coming by himself then it turns out he’s bringing his wife, and I said, “Okay, well then, you will be our guest at Washington University. We’ll find a place to put you up, and it’ll be great to have you here.”

Then he sent me a note and said, well, his son who is a student in California wants to come, so they will be coming. And he has a daughter who was a student at Boston University, it turned out, she wants to come. So here is a whole family of five that wants to be my guest on Easter weekend.

And so they showed up, and we decided we had no choice but to put them up at the Knight Center at Washington University, which a very nice place. And so then I said, “I don’t know how much time I can give you because it turns out it’s Easter, and we will be going to church on Easter Sunday, and you’re welcome to join us if you want or not.” And so he said, “Well, we will join you.”

So here this Afghan family comes and joins us to go to an Easter service produced by The Journey. There were probably six or 7,000 people there in the Shabbat Sabbath Center because The Journey at that time had several satellite areas, and they all came together for one major Easter service. And so this family came with me. Fahim was in town, and he came as well, so we all had a huge [inaudible 00:08:51] that then went to the Easter service.

I don’t know how we managed lunch. Did we have lunch here? We must have had lunch here because they came to the house, and it was nice to see them. They were certainly interesting people. And I pointed out this painting. They all were dazzled by this painting and they wanted to have their picture taken with it.

So they came, their whole family arrayed around the picture, and we took a picture of them for their benefit. What I don’t know is did I get one for myself? I’m not sure that I did. In any case, what I remember is this weekend when what I thought would be a man coming himself to visit, but his whole family came, and they were our guests for that weekend. It was a privilege to be with them, and it was fun to see how much they enjoyed being able to see this picture, which of course, reminded them of many things that have long passed in Afghanistan.

Opposite this picture, on the other wall, is a painting of a young girl wearing Kalash dress. Kalash are the peoples who lived up in the mountains between the northern part of Pakistan and of Afghanistan. And she was on the Pakistani side. On the Pakistani side, they’re called Kalash or sometimes called Kafir, Kafir Kalash, unbeliever Kalash. But the unbelievers and the Kafirs point goes back to the days when they were being harassed by a Muslim population. They had retained all traditions that went back before the founding, before the arrival of Islam into Afghanistan and Pakistan.

On the Afghanistan side, Abdur Rahman, in the late 1890s, decided that as a way of securing his credentials as a proper Muslim ruler, he decided that he would convert the people of Nuristan, what is now called Nuristan. It was then called Kalfitistan, and he took an army up into Nuristan and forcibly converted the people in that area to be Muslims and changed the name from what he was calling Kalfitistan to now Nuristan, the place of light. And here she is, she represents that old tradition which is better preserved on the Pakistani side where Abdur Rahman did not venture in his war against unbelievers.

Now I want to say something about the carpet that is hanging on the wall near the fireplace. When we were in Kabul, this would have been in about 1960, I decided I wanted a really nice carpet. And I looked all through the bazaar and negotiated at various times. Never bought anything until I finally found a carpet that was the finest, most beautiful carpet I could find anywhere. It was just glorious. The Turkmen were out, of course. That’s what are available in Afghanistan, and I brought it home.

I was so proud of it. We put it on the wall and turns out after a while the gardener, [Imam Ali 00:00:13:40], wasn’t paying attention and somehow he poured water…. He was watering the lawn. He wasn’t paying attention and the water came into the house and got all over this glorious carpet. And I was humiliated. Of course, it’s shriveled up and it began to have parts of it that need to be straightened. It could be straightened, but nonetheless, it wasn’t straight at that. It was all messed up.

So I took it. I realized that for me, for my family, with three kids, to have something this nice was just too much. So I took it back. The man who sold it to me had said that he would buy it back at that price, so I could take it back. I took it back, and he straightened it, and he gave me my money back. But I did decide with that money I would buy several less perfect carpets. This was one of my favorites of those that I retrieved from that experience. I bought two or three. And this is pretty old. It was old when I bought it, old in the sense it was like 30 years old when I bought it.

I bought it, as I said, about 1960. So it’s probably getting close to a hundred years old and I like it very much. It reminds me of many of the beautiful things about Afghanistan. There are lots of better carpets and finer carpets around, but the colors fit our color scheme here, and it certainly represents the fine workmanship of the Turkmens in Northern Afghanistan.

As far as I can note right now, this concludes my comments, my discussion of the memories that I bring to the souvenirs of my mind in the many years and times past. And as I say, they are mnemonic devices that remind me of my affairs, my life, and my experience because they are shared because in various ways each one shares something about the mnemonic device for me with other people. They’re Cultural. They’re devices that bring to mind significant memories and associations. But they’re different for each one of us. So when I’m gone, maybe somebody will be interested. I can’t believe there are very many people that would care about our experience, but I assume that we will someday have grandchildren or great grandchildren that will want to know all of this.

Let me add one more thing. There is a table in this room. We call it the red rosewood table. I can’t remember what part of it is rosewood. The legs were not invented to go with this table, but it’s a nice combination, and Rita was delighted to have it. She was thrilled. Rita went through a time when she wanted to… She loved furniture, and she wanted to get an additional few things. And so this is one of them.

I think that she is really proud of of it. And you’ll notice the lion claw legs. The lion claw legs are sort of like the lion claw legs that Kim has in her house on the table that Kim has in her house that was made by my grandfather on my mother’s side, a man whom I never knew because he died young. I understand he had been a painter, mostly busy on the Oklahoma A and M Campus, now named Oklahoma State University, in Stillwater.

[Friday, February 21, 2020]

Zohrab and Roy networks; find also the details on the swindle of the Soviet Union by the Uzbek bureaucrats [???]

2006. F. Robertson. 2006. Misunderstanding Corruption.  AT 22(2): 8-11. See

The JI was founded in Malaysia on 1 January 1993 by Abdullah Sungkar who was there in exile from Indonesia with Abu Bakar Ba’asyir (Conboy, 2005: 34). [FROM:  Al Qaeda’s Southeast Asia, Jamaah Islamiyah and Regional Terrorism: Kinship and Family Links, By Noor Huda Ismail, Jan 8, 07:  http://japanfocus.org/products/details/2318, accessed Jan 10,2007]

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The Underside of State Power in Greater Central Asia

1. Preliminaries

The collapse of the Soviet Union was an event of public note, not only formally announced by Gorbachev but also widely remarked around the world, but since then some very non-public developments have been taking place in Central Asia that may equal it in importance.  As the ex-Soviet states in Central Asia have sought to exercise their new sovereignty, as Iran and Pakistan have sought to establish new positions in the world, and as Afghanistan has tried to form a viable state, other developments have been taking place on the underside of these public affairs.  Secret activities — non-legal, illegal, criminal practices – have been becoming a way of life for growing numbers of otherwise ordinary “law-abiding” citizens.

What Nordstrom has called “shadow networks” have become a powerful force in many parts of the world.  Shadow networks are “vast extra-state networks who move goods and services worldwide – networks that broker power comparable to, and in many cases greater than, a number of the world’s states.”[1]  “While these networks are not comprised by states themselves, neither are they entirely distinct from, or opposite to states – they work both through and around formal state representatives and institutions.”  “They cross various divides between legal, quasi-legal, gray markets and downright illegal activities.”[2]  They “forge economic policies, … operate within political realms, … fashion foreign policy. … [develop] dispute resolution systems and systems of enforcements… [and] have codes of conduct and rules of behavior set in social and cultural systems …”[3]  Because they persist even when states collapse they provide vital mechanisms of social integration.  Black markets are, in effect, “more powerful than formal institutions:  they set the ‘true’ currency prices for an entire nation.”  Such extra-state mechanisms of pricing are “both vast and powerful, transmitting untold fortunes through family and ethnic linkages, business partnership and triad associations.”[4]

They are significant in their economic importance and, owing to their informal connections with powerful people, in their political influence.  Altogether they “employ millions of people and generate more than a trillion dollars annually”; the combined annual value of illicit drug and weapons sales, for instance, amounts to one trillion dollars.[5]  The scale of the underground economy and its political mechanisms is something new.  As Manuel Castells puts it, “Crime is as old as humankind.  But global crime, the networking of powerful criminal organizations, and their associates, in shared activities throughout the planet, is a new phenomenon that profoundly affects international and natural economies, politics, security, and ultimately, societies at large.”[6]

Considered illicit in some contexts these networks are nonetheless integrated into the world market system, which operates outside the reach of all state controls.  Susan Strange says, “… the impersonal forces of world markets, integrated over the post-war period more by private enterprise in finance, industry and trade than by the cooperative decisions of government, are now more powerful than the state to whom ultimate political authority over society and economy is supposed to belong.”[7]

In this article I point out the significance of such networks in the region of our concern, Greater Central Asia, by examining the evidence for the rising power of shadow networks in the last few decades.

My project does have an obvious problem, however:  the inaccessibility and unreliability of information.  Shadow networks exist of course by avoiding public scrutiny and escaping state controls so that an attempt to describe how they are constituted, what they do, and how they have grown is hampered by the paucity of reliable information.  Enough is available, however – and much of it is undisputed even if it is of necessity only speculative – so that it is possible to construct from secondary sources a narrative of their activities over the last few decades in Greater Central Asia.

1. A fragmentary social history of shadow developments in Central Asia

I review the growth of these networks — non-statal “protection rackets” [8] – in the following periods:  (1) notable shadow activities extant in the 1970s; (2) the decade of the 1980s ending in 1991 when the Soviet Union evaporated; (3) the first half of the 1990s to 1996 when the Taliban seized Kabul and Osama bin Laden returned to Afghanistan; (4) the latter half of the 1990s up to autumn, 2001, when the Americans attacked the Taliban; and finally (5) the period from late 2001 to the present (2006).

(1) Some notable shadow activities in the 1970s. 

As a general rule it appears that many ordinary people in the countries of greater Central Asia fear and resent their governments and use various devices of holding officials at a distance.  Subterfuge is a way of life.  But it takes different forms in different places.  In the Central Asian states of the Soviet Union the government had in the 1970s so thoroughly penetrated local affairs and the economy that most people effectively worked in the service of the Soviet Union.  We know little about how carefully ordinary people complied with government regulations, but we do know that some officials in the Soviet system found ways to subvert the system to their own benefit, the most famous of them being Sharif Rashidov, head of the Communist Party, Uzbekistan, from 1959 to 1983, who bilked the Soviet Union of millions of dollars by over reporting cotton production.[9]

In the countries to the south of the Soviet Union political affairs were generally unsettled in the 1980s.  In 1978 and 1979 Iran and Afghanistan were in the throes of “revolutions”.  The Iranian Revolution was a broadly supported popular movement, although the specific nature of the new system being established under Ayatollah Khomeini was as yet unclear.  But Afghanistan’s “revolution” was something different altogether.  Despite their “revolutionary” claims, those who seized power in spring, 1978, were a relatively unknown group of Communists, and hardly had they come to power than they faced rebellions in many rural communities.  By mid-1979 they were losing their army to desertions and defections, a situation that prompted the Soviet Union to make the fatal decision to send troops into Afghanistan to stabilize the situation.  The war that continued for the next decade provided a context for the development of shadow activities that have become important today.

Pakistan, whose fortunes became more linked with inner Asia, was closely involved in activities in the Afghanistan war.  But another development that would become a vital secret project for the country started in 1976.  Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan had recently returned to Pakistan from Europe bringing “stolen uranium enrichment technologies from Europe,” acquired through his position at the classified URENCO uranium enrichment plant in the Netherlands.  Put in charge of building, equipping and operating Pakistan’s Kahuta facility, he developed an extensive clandestine network in order to obtain the necessary materials and technology to enrich uranium preparatory to developing a nuclear bomb.[10]  As a government sponsored program this project was kept under wraps for years, but Dr. Khan would – perhaps without the knowledge of Pakistani authorities (?) – eventually peddle his nuclear expertise to other countries, notably (as far as we know so far) to Libya, North Korea, and Iran.  What was a state-sponsored clandestine activity in the 1970s became a private “shadow” enterprise unmonitored by any state in the 1980s and 1990s.

Another sub rosa activity, with the Pakistan government’s consent if not connivance, was the anti-American activity of the Jamaat-i Islami party – a small elite party in which “full membership … was given only after years of proven service …”  The party had, according to Abbas “thousands of adherents, mostly among the student community, many of whom were toughs adept at strong-arm tactics.”[11]  They showed off their skills in November, 1979, when they organized a mob to storm and burn down the United States Embassy in Islamabad, killing two Americans and two Pakistani employees.  Mobs also attacked American cultural centers in Rawalpindi and Lahore.  The demonstrations had apparently been prompted by Iranian-inspired rumors that Americans were responsible for an attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca, but they were less spontaneous than they appeared:  the Jama’at-i Islami party had been looking for an excuse to mimic the student attack on the American in Tehran few weeks earlier and the rumors provided it.[12]

1980 -1991:  A decade of many changes

In the 1980s new conflicts and abrupt shifts in social and political situations would upset the lives of people in many parts of the region, culminating in one of the momentous events in history, the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Intending to remain in Afghanistan for only a brief period, the Soviets had found themselves bogged down in what became an unwinable war.  American support for the opposition was one of the reasons and its involvement gave birth to several important “shadow” movements that would affect the rest of the world.  Essentially to punish the Soviets for their part in the Viet Nam war, the American CIA was  pouring billions of dollars into the opposition groups who called themselves “mujahedin.”  The conduit for this wealth was Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), originally a modest agency that was transformed by the war effort into a huge “parallel structure to the Pakistani state”[13] that funneled billions of dollars worth of assistance to the mujahedin.

But as the war dragged on, despite the large infusions of cash, more was required.  The CIA/ISI hatched the idea of expanding the financial resources of the opposition effort by encouraging the Afghan peasants to produce opium for international consumption.  The relatively limited practice by a few peasants of cultivating some opium poppies for local consumption, often for medicinal purposes, was transformed into a huge international drug industry that nourished the insatiable demand of the capitalist world.  “As the Mujahedin advanced and conquered new regions, they were told to impose a levy on opium to finance the revolution.  To pay the tax, farmers planted more poppies.  Drug merchants from Iran… offered growers credit in advance of their crops … [W]ith the help of the ISI the Mujahedin opened hundreds of heroin laboratories.  Within two years the Pakistan –Afghanistan borderland had become the biggest center for the production of heroin in the world … Annual profits were estimated between $100 billion and $200 billion.”[14]

Broadening of the drug trade:  Global corrupt networks

N93  “Between 1983 and 1992, narcotics revenues for Pakistan rose from $384 million to $1.8 Billion thanks to the intervention of the ISI.  “

The opium/heroin industry in turn financed other forms of illicit trade.  “While heroin was smuggled out of the region, high-tech equipment was smuggled in.  … [The ISI started] a prosperous smuggling business of duty-free goods.  The trucks were ‘taxed’ at various roadblocks by corrupt Pakistani customs officers and the transport Mafia; warlords who controlled the territories they had to cross levied their own taxes and even customs officials in Kabul took their own cut.”[15]  By the 1990s the smuggling network would “extend into Central Asia, Iran and the Persian Gulf, [and would represent] a crippling loss of revenue for all these countries but particularly Pakistan, where local industry has been decimated by the smuggling of foreign consumer goods.”  It became the biggest smuggling racket in the world.  Rashid reports that in the 1990s “[m]any of the huge Mercedes and Bedford trucks [passing through the Afghanistan-Pakistan border] are stolen and have false number plates.  The goods they carry have no invoices.  The drivers may cross up to six international frontiers on false driving licenses and without route permits or passports.  The consignments range from Japanese camcorders to English underwear and Earl Grey tea, Chinese silk to American computer parts, Afghan heroin to Pakistani wheat and sugar, East European Kalashnikovs to Iranian petroleum – and nobody pays customs duties or sales tax.”[16]

N86:  “The costs throughout the anti-Soviet Jihad were phenomenal. … To function, the pipeline relied on complex and expensive infrastructures located around the world.  The keep arms, drugs, duty-free good, smuggled products and cash moving, money had to change hands many times, and each exchange had a cost.  … handled by very expensive hidden banking structures … Theft was rampant …”

The impact of this contraband industry was to corrupt a widening circle of Pakistani officials, especially those directly engaged in the war effort.   “Pakistani customs officers at the various borders with Afghanistan … often demanded bribes to let the convoys of supplies pass. Commanders and fighters needed cash to buy their way out of jail.”[17]  “All the Pakistani agencies involved were taking bribes – Customs, Customs Intelligence, CBR [Central Board of Revenue], the Frontier Constabulary and the administrators in the tribal belt.  Lucrative customs jobs on the Afghan border were ‘bought’ by applicants who paid bribes to senior bureaucrats ….”[18]

To enable the flow of cash for this enterprise the CIA sought “an ad hoc infrastructure” of international finance.  The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) turned out to be an ideal vehicle for transferring and laundering money.  “[T]he CIA regularly utilized BCCI accounts to fund its covert operations.  Moreover, the BCCI was extremely well connected in the murky underworld of illegal arms.  … its ‘black network’ [was] virtually a secret banking institution within the bank [BCCI].”   “By the mid-1980s, the black network had gained control of the port of Karachi and handled all customs operations for CIA shipments to Afghanistan, including the necessary bribes for the ISI.”[19]

Another underground funding activity of the BCCI was the nuclear project already underway in Pakistan.  “From the mid-1980s, the bank [BCCI] donated large sums of money (up to $10 million) to finance a secret science laboratory run by Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan …”[20]  Its support would have been vital to the success of the project.  “In 1985 Pakistan crossed the threshold of weapons-grade uranium production, and by 1986 it is thought to have produced enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon. Pakistan continued advancing its uranium enrichment program, and according to Pakistani sources, the nation acquired the ability to carry out a nuclear explosion in 1987.”[21]

There was another source of shadow activity that would be born and nourished in this setting and then exported to many other places.  In “[a] joint venture between the Saudis, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jamaat-e-Islami, put together by the ISI”[22] Muslims from other countries were invited to participate in the “holy war” against the Soviets.  Most of them came from the Arab world, although many were from elsewhere.  Rashid calls those who came “radicals”:  “Between 1982 and 1992 some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 43 Islamic countries in the Middle East, North and East Africa, Central Asia and the Far East would pass their baptism under fire with the Afghan Mujahedin.  Tens of thousands more foreign Muslim radicals came to study in the hundreds of new madrassas that Zia’s military government began to fund in Pakistan and along the Afghan border.  Eventually more than 100,000 Muslim radicals were to have direct contact with Pakistan and Afghanistan and be influenced by the jihad.”[23]  But I wonder if some of them were perhaps less radical Islamists than disaffected progressives, frustrated with the repressions of their own Middle Eastern governments.  In those countries mere criticism was taken as evidence of disloyalty, even treason, so that those who objected to state abuses of power were effectively criminalized.  Kohlman says that “[a]mong these radical youth, talk of overthrowing hated Middle Eastern governments in a suicidal wave of terror resonated much more clearly than manning an artillery post … in Afghanistan.”[24]  No wonder their governments were happy to ship off such people to fight “holy war” elsewhere.[25]

The arrival of the “Arab-Afghans” in Afghanistan was facilitated by a devout Wahhabi cleric from Saudi Arabia named Sheikh Abdullah Azzam.  In 1984 with funds received from Saudi Intelligence, the Saudi Red Crescent, the World Muslim League and individual Saudi princes, he established an organization in Peshawar, Makhtab al Khidmat (“services center”), to support the Arab-Afghan project.  In 1985 he reached an agreement with Abd-i-Rab Rasoul Sayyaf, head of the “Islamic Unity of Afghanistan Mujahideen” organization, for one of its training camps to be used to train the first twenty-five Arab-Afghans.  At about that time, among those who came from the Middle East[26] was a former student of Azzam, Osama Bin Laden, whose wealth and connections gave him prominence and influence among the Arab-Afghan visitors.  When Azzam was mysteriously assassinated in November, 1989, Bin Ladin took over the organization, and under his leadership the organization transform into something new.  Wht began as an organization to support the holy war against the Soviet Union became an international “web of radical organizations that helped carry out the World Trade Centre bombing and the bombings of US Embassies in Africa in 1998.”[27]  And more.

Thus, in the 1980s several notable shadow enterprises took form and rose in scale and financial importance in greater Central Asia.  The CIA’s “secret” supply system for the mujahedin was developed in this period; the illicit drug industry and the attendant system of smuggling manufactured goods into the area was encouraged and financially enabled by the CIA/ISI and the BCCI; and Dr. Khan’s secret nuclear project for the Pakistan government and his private marketing network to other governments began to develop in this period.

1989-1992

But systemic changes were in the offing throughout the region that would allow and in some cases require adjustments in the shadow already operating.  In 1988 it became clear to everyone that the effort in Afghanistan against the Soviets was paying off, for on January 11 Gorbachev announced that the Soviets would withdraw their troops from Afghanistan and be completely out by spring of the next year.  Also, the Soviets and Americans jointly announced an agreement to cease support for their respective sides by December, 1991.   That alignments would have to change was now clear.  Everyone would have to scramble for new ways to protect themselves and their interests as the old relations of power gave way.  On element of the coming realignment could scarcely have been foreseen by many:  The mighty Soviet Union would expire with scarcely a whimper.

Momentous events began to take place in rapid succession.  By February, 1989, Soviet troops had quit Afghanistan.  Within the Soviet Union there were signs that the integrity of the empire was weakening:  In 1987 the Polish government recognized the Solidarity movement and within a few months the Communists would be voted out in Poland.

1988:  In Tajikistan a three-sided struggle for dominance was already underway – Communists (centered in Khojand), officially recognized Islamic leaders (centered in Dushambe), and revivalist-democratic forces (centered in Kulab).

In 1988 there is ethnic unrest in the Baltic republics; the Nagorno-Karabakh soviet breaks for Azerbaijan to join with the Armenian republic, creating a violent conflict.  In June Gorbachev becomes president of the Soviet Union.  In 1989 the first multi-candidate elections are held in various sectors of the Soviet Union; Yeltsin and Sakharov overwhelmingly win seats in the Congress of People’s Deputies.  In the mean time protesters in Georgia demand independence; Coal miners strike in Siberia, Ukraine, Central Asia; there are demonstrations in the Baltic states and the Ukraine for independence; Armenia and Azerbaijani engaged in civil war.  And in eastern Europe the Berlin Wall comes down.  In 1990 Lithuania declares independence; Yeltsin resigns from the Communist Party; the Russian republic declares its own sovereignty.  The year 1991 was decisive: Boris Yeltsin became the first democratically elected President of independent Russia; an attempted coup fails; Latvia declares its independence; Gorbachev resigns as head of CP and Yeltsin closes Pravda and disbands CP; the independence of the Baltic states is  recognized; Ukraine becomes independent; the Presidents of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, without consulting any other republic presidents, sign a treaty to abolish USSR and form themselves as a Commonwealth of Independent States; Gorbachev announces his resignation and USSR ceases to exist.

In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell.  The Soviet bloc collapsed as communist governments lost elections or underwent democratization in Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania.  The first elections for the Congress of People’s Deputies were held in the USSR.  In June, 1989, riots and other disturbances broke out in Soviet Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan).  New political parties were formed in Soviet Central Asia:  Birlik in Uzbekistan (May, 1989), Rastokhiz (Rebirth) National Front, which would become important in Tajikistan (September, 1989), the Democratic Party of Tajikistan (January, 1990), Erk, which broke away from Birlik in February, 1990.  In May, 1991, Boris Yeltsin was elected President of the Russian Republic in the first free election in the Soviet Union.  In August, 1991, a putsch attempt against Gorbachev collapsed in four days, but not before several leaders of Central Asian republics had embarrassed themselves by supporting the putsch.   In December Kazakhstan seceded from the Soviet Union, several Slavic republic leaders formed the Commonwealth of Independent States, and Gorbachev resigned as President of the Soviet Union, effectively announcing its final expiration.  The Communist government of Afghanistan survives for three more months but finally falls in April, 1992, marking the conclusion of a long struggle in Afghanistan, and of an era.  But it would almost immediately segue into another painful war, only perhaps even more cruel than ever, among the mujahedin themselves.

The impact on the Islamist imagination was extreme elation.  As the Muslims who had fought the Soviets saw it, they had defeated the second most powerful empire in the world.  Some of them now believed they were ready to take on the other great world empire in the name of Islam, the United States.  But also it was perhaps time to bring their skills to bear on the apostate regimes in their various home countries.  Many of the “Arab Afghans” began to disperse back to their home countries, where they would promote Islamism.

They were a new kind of ideological force.  By 1990 “a small group of motivated fundamentalists, upset by the degraded state of the Muslim world, had been transformed in five short years into an influential transnational terrorist army backed by the fabulous wealth of Usama Bin Laden, ….”[28]  What the Arab-Afghans took back to their respective countries was a knowledge of warfare and a commitment to Islamism that would generate crises wherever they went.  “[T]he Afghan jihad, with the support of the CIA, had spawned dozens of fundamentalist movements across the Muslim world which were led by militants who had grievances, not so much against the Americans, but their own corrupt, incompetent regimes.”[29]  The first notable indication of their impact would take place in Algeria in 1991, when the Islamic Salvation Front won the first round of parliamentary elections, prompting a military crackdown and a civil war that in the next seven years would take the lives of  70,000 Algerians.[30]  Similarly, the activities of “Afghan Arabs” in Egypt, Chechnya, Bosnia, and the Philippines would be expressed in violent activities.

In the mean time they had become unwelcome back in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  By 1993 the Pakistani government was closing down the Arab-Afghan offices, creating a problem for the unbroken flow of new volunteers for holy war coming from virtually all over the world by now.  The Bosnian civil war conveniently provided a new site for them to fight in the name of God. [31]

Osama Bin Laden himself had left Afghanistan in 1990, disappointed at the internal bickering among the mujahedin.  His return to Saudi Arabia at that time seemed to be fortuitous, as it was just before Saddam Hussein’s August invasion of Kuwait.  Bin Laden volunteered the services of the Arab-Afghans, confident of their ability to repulse the Iraqi army.  He opposed the use of American troops as they become ensconced on the sacred soil where Islam began.  But his proposal was rejected, and the clash that eventuated between him and the Saudi establishement became so intense that the was expelled from the country and deprived of his citizenship.  [Griffin]

These events stimulated the imagination of young Muslims all over the Middle East and Central and South Asia.  Young volunteers were still coming forward to join the holy war, inspired by the successes of the Afghanistan war.  They reflected the growing sense among many that the secular tradition that had dominated public affairs in the Muslim world had not worked, and they were ready to consider Islam as a way to deal with the problems of their world.  Young people in many parts of the Muslim world were reading the works of Ibn Taymiya and Sayyed Qutb[32].  In Pakistan “The jihad literature became a popular genre in the 1990s …Readers of these materials are often younger people who are searching for meaning in their lives and who have little to look forward to in a stagnant economy and disintegrating society.”[33]  Zia’s emphasis on Islam as a way of legitimating his claims on power and of directing attention to Kashmir no doublt contributed to this new interest in Islam.

As the war in Afghanistan wound down the Pakistan government in 1989 instigated a new “Kashmir insurgency”[34] where the young warriors graduating from the many local madrassas of the country could be absorbed.  They had been educated in the Saudi Arabian funded madrassas that become every more important to the citizenry as the Pakistan government failed to provide sufficient funds for its own educational system.[35]

Moreover, the Pakistan government committed itself clandestinely to promoting Islam all over the Central Asian world left high and dry by the demise of the Soviet Union.

1. 89: “The ISI continued to export Islamist warriors from Pakistan to Central Asia and the Caucasus.  While Soviet troops began a painful retreat from Afghanistan, a stream of covert operations was launched in Central Asia.  The ISI acted as ‘a catalyst for the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of new republics in Central Asia’.  … [with the demise of the Sov Un] the ISI played a pivotal role in supporting Islamist armed insurgencies which destabilized [the Central Asian republics].”

N94  [re Chechnya] The Pakistani plan was to encourage Islamist insurgency in Chechnya, forcing the Russians to fight in the Caucasus.  Accordingly, in 1994 the ISI began nurturing Shamil Basayev, a young Chechen field commander.  He was trained and indoctrinated among with a small group of lieutenants at the Amir Muawi camp in the Khost province in Afghanistan.  … Experienced instructors … were also sent to Chechnya to train future fighters. … [95] The master plan for Islamist insurgency in the Caucasus and Kashmir was drawn up at a meeting held in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1996 and attended by the ISI and various Islamist armed groups.  Osama bin Laden and high-ranking Iranian intelligence officers were also present.”

N 95 [in 1995] Basyev, and later Khattab [his deputy], linked up with criminal organizations in Russia as well as with Albanian organized crime and the Kosovo Liberation Army… These alliances proved fruitful in generating profits from the drug trade and contraband, especially that of arms.  Chechnya soon became an important hub for various rackets, including kidnapping and the trade in counterfeit dollars…”

N96:  “… from Chechnya, Mujahedin fighters would continue to move west along the drug route to Albania and Kosovo, reaching the eastern frontier of Europe

Moreover, inside Pakistan many local Islamist organizations took form.  For instance, Lashkar-i Tayba.

1. 213: LT “receives grants from around the world, mostly from well-to-do Ahle-Hadith/Wahhabi sympathizers, though their primary source has been contributions from Saudi Arabia. … Handsome monetary rewards to the families of boys who sacrificed their lives in Kashmir and regular monthly income for the families of jihadis fighting in Kashmir made jihad an attractive venture for unemployed youth …”[36]

Another factor in the grown numbers of young men committing themselves to holy war was the weak economy.  In the region of the former Soviet states of Central Asia, as Pakistan survived by soaking up funds for holy war from the oil-rich Muslim nations, the economy faltered.  All across Central Asia there was a collapse of employment opportunity created by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

N 109  “from 1990 to 2000, income inequality more than tripled, a third of the world population was forced to live below the poverty line …  Along the periphery of the former Soviet Union, extreme poverty supplied armed groups with fertile ground for recruitment. Secessionist movements inside the new federation, as in the Caucasus, produced ethnic conflicts, as did nationalist movements within newly formed states.”

While Pakistan was skimping on funds for its own educational system it was funding Islamist groups in the ex-Soviet states of Central Asia, especially the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.

N 92 “Financially and militarily backed by ISI, the IMU found widespread support among the local tribes of the Fergana valley in its fight against the newly formed governments of the republics.

N 92 “Given that 60 percent of the [Fergana] valley’s population is below the age of 25, it is a fertile recruitment ground for Islamist armed groups.

Criminal connections with Islamism

P207:  “Realizing that sectarian outfits were untouchable entities, professional criminals hastened to join these groups and benefit from this window of opportunity.  For instance, when about five hundred trained gunmen belonging to MQM [????] were abandoned by their masters [date???] , they tentatively turned to the SSP [Sepahi Sahaba] in search of a job.  They found it to be a promising career.  All they had to do was grow beards and learn a few anti-Shia lessons.  The rest they were accustomed to – butchering people.”

P206:  “local criminals and thugs were hired [by the SSP] to do the “needful” [eliminate Shias].  Criminal elements soon realized that this was a mutually beneficial deal – coming under the umbrella of religious outfits provided a perfect cover for their own activities.  Over time, the drug traders also developed their ties with sectarian groups, especially the SSP, reproducing in Pakistan relationships between militant groups and drug traffickers that had already evolved in Afghanistan.”

p.207:  “… other small outfits were mainly ‘personal mafias of influential feudals, led by local mullahs’” [source:  Herald, Karachi, June 1994, p. 29].

P 206-7:  Riaz Basra [who murdered someone on behalf of SSP] was arrested “but he had ‘influential’ friends … who helped Basra escape …  Basra was operating in league with some junior ISI agents …”

The illicit trade that linked Afghanistan and Pakistan with the rest of the world was matched by some specifidc attempts of Pakistani intelligence to foster Islamist movements in Kashmir but also in Chechnya and elsewhere.

Islamism and illicit support is exported to Central Asia and elsewhere

N 119:  Partnership in the Afghan heroin trade financed Islamist groups all over Asia, including China.  Opium and heroin flooded the province of Xinjiang and also helped to support the Uighur rebellion against the government of Beijing.”

2.23 Afghanistan

2.23.1  1992-96:  Afghanistan – Mujahedin war

Destruction of Kabul [Rashid, griffin]

All these affairs were taking place as the Mujahedin were fighting over control of Kabul, destroying the city.

2.23.2  1994:   Rise of the Taliban

>  Taliban:  appeal to local demand for order, Islamic ideals [early Taliban, later Pak Taliban, ;

Powerful link with Pakistan:

Benazir’s involvement:  linking up of Pakistan’s NWFP to Afghanistan

2.3 1996-2001

In Afghanistan:

>  1996:

Two critical events in 1996:  Taliban take Kabul; Osama returns.  This time to wage holy war against the U.S.

Taliban vs Northern Alliance

N119:  “… relations between state-shells, Muslim and Islamic states tend to be cooperative and characterized by trust, sometimes even among enemies. … A delegation from [the two sides] met and negotiated a deal.  Accordingly, a corridor was opened between the two forces to allow the drug couriers through, while Northern Alliance and Taliban warriors continued killing each other.”

Osama returns from Sudan

Bin Laden himself left Afghanistan in 1990 disillusioned by the local bickering among the parties and many were already establishing themselves elsewhere.

1996-2001:  the radicalization of Islamism in Afghanistan and the wider region

>  1996-2001  Northern Alliance vs Taliban

>  1998: [1996?]

Osama declares war

In Pakistan?

Pak has acquired the bomb?  When?

Abbas 232:  A possible “Pakistani hand in the development of North Korea’s nuclear program…“It is widely known that Pak had imported North Korean missle technology, and its nuclear-capable missile “Ghauri” greatly resembles North Korea’s Nodong …

Abbas 231:  “… Pakistan nuclear scientists’ links with Iranian and Libyan nuclear programs were unearthed in late 2003….

Nuclear Tests:  “On May 28, 1998 Pakistan announced that it had successfully conducted five nuclear tests.”  http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/pakistan/nuke/index.html

Lee 2006:27-28:  “state-sponsored proliferation” [of corruption] ‘in which high government officials covertly transfer strategic nuclear goods to client states or groups, either for personal gain or as a matter of policy.  The black market network run by Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan … pioneered the centrifuge enrichment program that enabled Pakistan to prodeuce nuclear arms.  Khan is known to have sold key components of a nuclear weapons program … to Iran, North Korea and Lybia.  Libya also received blueprints … .  [A]n Iranian exile group claims that the network provided an undisclosed quantity of HEU [????] to the Iranian government in 2001.

P293:  “… a U.S. State Department report [released April 2000]… pinpointed South Asia for the first time as a major center of international terrorism… asserted that Pakistan ‘has tolerated terrorists living and moving freely within its territory’ besides supporting ‘groups that engage in violence in Kashmir’… The report concluded that the treat of terrorism now came less from state-sponsored attacks than form ‘loose networks’ of groups and individuals motivated more by religion or ideology than by politics and financed increasingly by drug trafficking, crime, and illegal trade.”

>  Central Asian movements:  Chechnya

By this time the deals were done and the secrets [all of them?] were out.  In March, 2001, Qadeer Khan was removed from his position in the Khan research laboratories  and given a ceremonial positon… … to a majority of Pakistanis, Qadeer Khan continues to be viewed as a national hero because very few people in Pakistan are ready to believe that he did all this [deception] on his own.””

2. history

2.4  2001 – 2006.  After the attacks of 9/11/01.

2.41.  Pakistan and Afghanistan.  At this time the two countries – at least the southern part of Afghanistan – were linked up.  Phone exchange.

2.41.1 After the attack:

P223-4:  “General Hamed Gul …[argued] that, besides Zionist collaborators, elements from within the U.S. government were involved in the terrorist act.”

2.41.2  Musharaf changes course

Musharraf forced to change course away from Taliban [but not Kashmir]

Internally Pak is conflicted:  Islamists vs secular/westernized Pak

Kashmir continues

2.41.3:  Continued popular support fort the Taliban in Pakistan

>  Taliban, with many Pakistanis helping:  popular and government

Abbas 223: “… the call for jihad in support of the Taliban [against the Americans in Oct, 2001] resounded from mosques all across Pakistan. …. It is estimated that around ten thousand Pakistani jihadis crossed into Afghanistan to fight along with the Taliban.”

2.41.4:   Taliban defeated:  Pakistan allowed to bring out its people [gov’t and popular] [Griffin??]

2.42  Afghanistan

2.42.1     In Afghanistan a government is formed, elections

“warlords” and tribal elements

Progressives come in, with support of outside $

Local drug industry continues

2.42.2 Iraq war upstages the Afghanistan war

2002:  Americans start leaving even though they have not caught Osama

Madrassahs gain in importance and Pak $ goes into armaments

Criminal elements join the cause

Pakistan public objects

2002/??  American attack on Iraq

Pak public objects

2.43 Central Asian states
Uzbekistan gives airport to Americans [date??]

2.5  Contemporary picture

Mihalka 2006:  136.  In addition to corruption, drug trafficking and criminality continue to destabilize the countries in the region. … In 2001, 26 metric tons of heroin and morphine were seized in the countries surrounding Afghanistan, 48 percent in Iran and 33 pe3rcent in Pakistan.  Tajikistan accounted for 16 percent …  Of opium seizures 84 percent were in Iran, 9 percent in Pakistan and 4 percent in Tajikistan … UNODC estimates that 23 percent of Afghanistan’s drugs transit Tajikistan … … [G]ross profits from illegal drug trade in Central Asia exceed US$2 billion a year and make up more than 7 percent of the region’s GDP … Moreover, the relative size of the drug abusing population in Central Asia is about three times higher than in Western Europe, with 2.3 percent of the population over 15 in Kyrgyzstan, 1.2 percent on Tajikistan and 1.1 percent in Kazakhstan estimated to be drug users.

2.50 Blank 2006:  122:  “… at least three states in Central Asia: Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan appear to be increasingly unstable. …[and] far too many of [Tajikistan’s] people and to much of its economy depend on the drug trade for sustenance to be complacent about its chance.”

2.50 Guang 2006: 22.  “…the new surge of terrorist attacks sweeping the world following the Iraq War, the formation of a ‘terrorist arc’ stretching across the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia is being formed. … [entailing] intellectual connections, organizational networks, and activities.”

2.50 Another part is that so many issues in the region are contested:  the several wars in the region generate, of course, various and competing “official” definitions of the situation, all of them presumably driven by particular interests.

2.50 Blank 2006: 115:  “… in Central Asia … there is already what Lord George Robertson, as Secretary General of NATO, called ‘a guaranteed supply chain of instability.’”

2.51  Afghanistan

In Afghanistan:  state institutions have been formed, hope for an independent government

Jalal, and women

Still:  drug industry, little development

2.52  China, Xinjiang

Shichor 2006: 108.  “Chinese have underlined Uyghur activism and Islamic radicalism and have frequently exaggerated their threat.  For one reason, they want to forestall and preempt a likely deterioration in the ethno-religious power balance in Xinjiang … For another, …to justify and legitimize a further crackdown campaign – ultimately aimed at integrating China’s restive nationalists into the ‘people’ .. or to educate and …  warn other nationalists about the consequences… Finally by depicting national separatism and religious radicalism as a threat  … Beijing can (and does) scare potential external supporters … This has opened the door for the PRC to join the U.S.-led international crusade against terrorism…”

2.53 In Pak:  gov’t and criminal elements are both involved in the same institutions [parliament, military]

2.53.1  Pakistan on the ground, local levels

I Pak growing resentment

Tribal Territory

Abbas 234:  “The military operation against Al-Qaeda operators in the Waziristan region in March-April 2004 resulted in heavy casualties for the Pakistan army.”  [p230, was “For the first time the Pak Army is operating in the Waziristan region.”

Zeb 2006: 72.  Talk of building a fence between Pakistan and Afghanistan [can’t be serious]

Pakistan’s independent Islamist movements, now out of control [or too strong for M. to control?]

Abbas 240:  “No one has a clear idea about their exact numbers [the Jehadis of Pakistan], but their potential capability resides in the subconscious of those in authority [in Pakistan], and this stays there because the reality of it is too hard to confront.  Their funding will not dry up because thousands of Pakistanis and Arabs believe in them and contribute to them.”

N105.  “The country’s [Pakistan] formal economy is on the verge of collapse; with 65.5 percent of GDP takern up by debt servicing and 40 percent by defense, the financial year starts with a negative balance.  The country’s wealth has been depleted by a deeply corrupted oligarchy… Over $88 billion has been deposited in American and European banks, more than the $67 billion and the $82 billion of the country’s total domestic and foreign debt respectively.  Unemployment is rampant; of the 800,000 people who enter the labor market every year, very few find work.  …Every year 135,000 women die in childbirth due to lack of medical assistance…. [106] Against this bleak background, the black economy has been growing steadily and, at the end of the 1990s, was three times the size of the formal economy.”

Abbas 229:  “The military campaign in Iraq created such an anti-American perception in Pakistan that Musharraf’s pro-U.S. policies came under increasing attack.”

Abbas 232:  “General Aziz Khan, Musharraf’s longtime right-hand man … said that America was the No. 1 enemy of the Muslim world…”

Nek M.  Paracha/Dalrymple

Abbas 214:  “LT… around half a million people attend this gathering annual, which is second only to Tableeghi-Jamaat’s (preaching group) assembly, which attracts around a million people every year.  LT used these occasions to expand its network …, by linking up wht extremist groups oerating in other parts of the world…”

Abbas 240:  “Resulting from a lack of educational opportunities, and ongoing sense of strategic insecurity, and streams of financial support from Wahhabi sources in the Arab states, the Madrasa industry [in Pakistan] … was producing tens of thousands of deadly earnest future “heroes.”  Their one unity is their common hatred of the westernized Pakistani elite, India, America, and Israel.

Islamist beliefs / claims NOW

Abbas 211-12:  “Hafiz Saeed,.. [creator of Lashkar-i Taiba, the militant wing of the group Markaz Dawat-ul-Irshad] [212] [asserted that] ‘We believe in Huntington’s clash of civilizations, and our jihad will continue until Islam becomes the dominant religion.”

Who the jehadis are:

P202:  “These jehadis belong to all social classes, … the majority come from the nonweapon-bearing areas of the country [Pakistan], as opposed to the ‘marital’ areas, indicating that the generally peace-loving people of the country had been sufficiently militarized in the aftermath of the Afghan war. … On the news of the martyrdom of one sone, the family of the deceased celebrated the event by distributing sweets and offered another son to the cause. The unemployed youth of Pakistan had found an occupation, an ideology, and a new family in which they found bounding and brotherhood. … they consider themselves the elite in the cause of Allah, and they have developed the infectious pride to inspire thousands of others into following them.”[37]

Criminal connections in government

Mihalka 2006:  137. “Criminals have also been more aggressive in entering politics  For example, a reputed criminal boss. Ryspek Akmatbayev, won a special by-election with almost 80 percent of the vote in Kyrgyzstan on April 9, 2006.”

Pakistan power structures

P 228:  “… both Irfanullah Marwat, a despicable criminal, and Maulana Azam Tariq, a committed and self-advertised terrorist, became members of the houses of the legislature while some of the most corrupt politicians were also inducted into the King’s party.  It was obvious that Musharraf had not just forgiven corruption but sanctified it.”

1. 225: “The obstacle in the way of a complete and effective clampdown on jihadi outfits was Pakistan’ Kashmir policy. … giving up jihadis who had been groomed and financed to operate in Kashmir was considered a suicidal step for Musharraf and the army. … extremism inside Pakistan was inherently and inextricably linked with the actions and ideology of jihadi groups operating in Kashmir.”

Afghan after 2002

Afghan in Kandahar who misses the Taliban

>  Al Qaeda:  appeal to ME concerns (Saudi Arabian leadership, Israel), Islamist/Muslim ideals, networks, imagination around Muslim world

>  Osama’s original struggle with the royal family, Saudi Arabia.

>  IMU:  appeal to local struggle against repression, for Muslim regional integrity [early Islamist movement]

>  HT:  appeal to struggle against local oppression [woman’s comment]

III.  The trajectory, prospects

3.1  Principles, or general propositions that seem to be worth following.

“As war gives way to peace in the conflict zones … people begin to rebuild war- devastated economies … often rely on buying and selling the same goods they did during war, along the same non-state channels …Those most successful … amass economic fortunes that can be translated into political power, fortunes that can reshape social, economic and political landscapes.”[36]

Contemporary situation in CA:  instability.  Stephen Blank.

“Business people who profit from shadow transactions are unlikely to give up shadow sources of power, profit and supply as they develop legitimate enterprises, and in fact, their success may depend on keeping these networks current.”[43]

Ordinary people are involved in shadow systems

“Average people, to survive, must trade outside formal state channels.” [41]  “… drug and illicit weapons trade … is often the means by which citizens gain the currency to buy industrial necessities, agricultural supplies and development goods… purchase hard currency,.. broker power, … allow investments into land, legal industries and political partnerships.  They spawn and support subsidiary industries, both legal and illicit…”[43]

“Profiteers, smugglers and black/gray market merchants are not isolated actors loosely linked into a web of profit.  Farmers who plant drug related crops or miners … have families and children they must provide for… from paying mortgages to celebrating birthdays.  Truckers who transport illicit goods need tires and tune-ups for their trucks, and dental work …Pilots … fly smuggled goods, …  The banker that launders the money and the college student who buys a smuggled [object]… are as essential to the whole enterprise as the growers and transporters.  All of these polpe are deeply immersed in society and civil life.”[46] [these are not ] “merely markets – devoid of social, cultural, political and legal ramifications.”  “… up to a third of global transactional exchanges.” [46]

Shadow systems link into legitimate systems

Nordstrom has tried to show “links across areas of politico-economic activity that are traditionally divided in theory and analysis – links that show complex socio-cultural and political as well as economic organization …” [39].  “Networks overlap.  The dangerously criminal, the illicit and the informally mundane cannot, in actual practice, be always or easily disaggregated.” [40].

Conclusion

In fact, these social networks are not haphazard and are not without important social controls:  “From diamonds to drugs, dominions exist that follow hierarchies of authority, rules of conduct, ways of punishing transgression and codes of behavior.  Within these dominions, communities forms, ideologies evolve and worldwide alliances and antagonisms are developed.  These cannot be confused with states, but [they]… do have governing structures, law-like apparatuses and security forces.”[46]

The broadening of networks around the world and linking up criminal and state interests

CNp48 quotes Strange [1996:111]:  “what is new and of importance in the international political economy is the networks of links being forged between organized crime in different parts of the world.” CNp48 quotes Castells [1998:167] “there is money laundering by the hundreds of billions (maybe trillions) of dollars.  Complex financial schemes and international trade networks link up the criminal economy to the formal economy.”  CN: “I can stand in the most remote war zones of the world and watch a veritab le supermarket of goods move into and out of this country along extra-state lines. … it would appear that non-formal economies play a formidable role in countries like Japan, Germany and the USA as well as in areas of more rapid economic and political change and development.”[49]

Remember to end with the rapid pace of change in the modern world

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Blank, Stephen.  2006.  Strategic surprise?  Central Asia in 2006.  China and Eurasiua Forum Quarterly 4(2): 109-130.

Evans-Pritchard, E. E.  1962.  Social anthropology:  Past and present.  In:  Social Anthropology and Other Essays.  New York:  Free Press.

Guang, Pan. 2006.  East Turkestan terrorism and the terrorist arc:  China’s post-9/11 anti-terror strategy.  China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly 4(2):19-24.

Lee, Rensselaer.  2006.  Nuclear smuggling, rogue states and terrorists.  China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly 4(2): 25-32.

Nordstrom, Carolyn.  2000.  Shadows and Sovereigns.  Theory, Culture & Society 17(4): 35-74.

Shichor, Yitzhak.  2006.  Fact and fiction:  A Chinese documentary on Eastern Turkestan terrorism.  China and Eurasia Forum        Quarterly 4(2):80-108.

Sivan, Emmanuel.  1985.  Radical Islam:  Medieval Theology and Modern Politics.  New Haven:  Yale University.

Strange, Susan.  1996.  The Retreat of the State:  The Diffusions of Power in the World Economy.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University.

Tilly, Charles.  1985.  “War making and state making as organized crime”, in PB. Evans, D. Rueschemeyer and T. Skocpol (eds.), Bring the State Back In.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University.

Zeb, Rizwan.  2006.  Cross border terrorism issues plaguing Pakistan-Afghanistan relations.  China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly 4(2): 69-74.

===============

CN51:    “What theory lacks is an understanding of the ways in which shadow networks function in daily international life – how for example, disputes are settled and judgments enforced; who wields authority …; and how extra-state realities shape global markets and fashion political power.”

One informed observer of the region says “the pace of political developments [in Central Asia] has greatly accelerated and could develop in faster and even unpredictable ways in 2006.”[38]

Surprising turns of events, Stephen Blank has argued, “is intrinsic to the nature of the contemporary world order…”[39]

Charles Tilly’s terms,

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ICSSA.org ???

Lesson from ISI’s killing of a Journalist in Pakistan By abid ullah jan June 19, 2006. ——————————————————————————– It seems the conscience of humanity doesn’t stir until someone pays the price for resisting oppression and our right to know and tell the truth. On June 16, 2006, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) silenced another journalist, Hidayatullah Khan, forever. He was handcuffed and shot from behind after experiencing unknown torment at the hands of his abductors for six months. That is why you are reading this column, which I am writing with utter shame for not having said a word in Mr. Khan’s favor when he was alive. The question, however, is: What type of words would have saved his life? Appeals, protests, or exposing the real faces of his persecutors? Read at: http://www.icssa.org/isi_murder.html Also see: Journalism in Pakistan: http://www.icssa.org/Journalism%20in%20Pakistan.htm Unlearn old lessons of journalism: http://www.icssa.org/unlearn_old_lessons.htm

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Rashid Taliban 135-6:  on Arab-Afghans that went to Algeria [Islamic Salvation Front] and to Egypt[where they bombed…]

====================

Bin Laden himself left Afghanistan in 1990 disillusioned by the local bickering among the parties and many were already establishing themselves elsewhere.

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In July, 1977, Army chief of staff General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq deposed the duly elected Prime Minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, appointing himself Chief Marshall Law Administrator.  And in April, 1979 – another fatal decision — he hanged Bhutto, whom he accused of corruption.

[1] Nordstrom 2000: 36.

[2] Nordstrom 2000: 36.  Shadow powers are similar to what Napoleoni (2005:255) describes as “state shells”:  armed organizations that resemble the socio-economic infrastructure (taxation, employment services, etc.) of a state without the political claims of sovereignty and self-determination.

[3] Nordstrom 2000: 51.

[4] Nordstrom 2000: 45.

[5] Nordstrom 2000: 36-37.

[6] Castells 1998: 166, quoted in Nordstrom 2000: 38.  See also Wm Reno “shadow states” [“nation-based systems of power and patronage paralleling state power” Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone [Cambridge]; Warlord Politics and African States [Reinner]]]

[7] Strange 1996:4, quoted in Nordstrom 2000: 38)

[8] The term comes from Charles Tilly (1985:169) who actually used it for governments, calling them “quintessential protection rackets with the advantage of legitimacy.”  His provocative language effectively places shadow networks on a par with states.  Certainly shadow networks are the real “protection rackets,” only lacking of course any semblance of legitimacy, which of course one reason they carry on their affairs surreptitiously and welcome all appearances of legitimacy they can muster.

[9] Rashid 2002:80.

[10] Pakistan Nuclear Weapons; A Brief History of Pakistan’s Nuclear Program http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/pakistan/nuke/index.html

[11] Abbas 2005: 100.

[12] Steve Coll ????.  On the Jamaat-i Islami party of Pakistan see Abbas 2005: 100-101 and elsewhere.

[13] Napoleoni 2005: 82

[14] Napoleoni 2005:85

[15] Napoleoni 2005: 85, 86

[16] Rashid 2000:189.

[17] Napoleoni 2005: 83.

[18] Rashid 2000: 191.

[19] Napoleoni 2005: 84.

[20] Napoleoni 2005: 122

[21] http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/pakistan/nuke/index.html.

[22] Roy 1995:86.

[23] Rashid 2000:130.

[24] Kohlman 2004: 10.

[25] Rashid 2000:129.

[26] Kohlman 2004: 7.

[27] Rashid 2000:131.

[28] Kohlman 2004: 11.

[29] Rashid 2000: 135.

[30] Rashid 2000: 135.

[31] Kohlman 2004:16-18.

[32] Sivan 1985.

[33] Abbas 2005: 213.

[34] Abbas 2005: 212.

[35] Abbas 2005: 203.

[36] Abbas 2005: 213.

[37] Darfur renegade groups:  P…Darfur:  97:  “Sociologically the Janjaweed seems to have been of six main origins:  former bandits and highwaymen who had been ‘in the trade’, since the 1980s; demobilized soldiers from the regular army; young members of Arab tribes having a running land conflict with a neighbouring ‘African’ group – most appeared to be members of the smaller Arab tribes; common criminals who were pardoned and released from gaol if they joined the militia; fanatical members of the Tajammu al-Arabi; and young unemployed ‘Arab’ men, quite similar to those who joined the rebels on the ‘African’ side.”

[38] Blank 2006:109.

[39] Blank 2006: 115.

Notes for future research 9/11/07

Shumbul hanging file, selections

10-5.  … with him was a man from labi-aw (Wakil’s place) who said he is a chaprasti in UN school at DarulAman road in Kabul.  He also had told the merchant [Tajik] about the rumer [re MGHW and me.  The news is vicious, where it originated is not clear.  A;sp om the Dukaan-i Bulola they were talking about me and this story.  Thus the story spreads.

4-34 and 4-62.  [Shia] Conversation with Laal M –i- Sayed M –i- M Aamad … about his land and family members.  He was 55, w was ~30, were married 20 years ago.  She was ~12 years old. … His F and M had selected the girl for him and contracted her parents who agreed the first time. If they had refused it that would have been final.  He was about 20-21 years old at the time [nb the discrepancy in age references] .  … the Mullah from Sar-I Kotal did the nekaa… The people – all from Shumbul [came] – from his own millat but in that time all were the same sect… [NB the time frame, 55 now, 21 at time of marriage: i.e. 24 years ago].  [Q:  was he simply blowing off the question?  Or was he telling the truth?]

[at another time [??] he said he threw the food of the Ismailis [given to them on some occasion] into the river …]