Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

* * *

Of course, I was moved by Zafar’s passionate charge for mathematics. I had studied the subject in my own youth, so that what he described sounded echoes in the corridors of my memory. It’s said of mathematicians that mathematics is their mistress, their first love, or the great love of their lives. It is a hackneyed metaphor and, come to think about it, one not uniquely applicable to mathematicians. But in my time, I’ve had enough of a feel for mathematics, have dipped in her shallows if not plumbed her depths, to vouch for the quality of intimacy.

Zafar moved on to an exposition of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, but this took us along yet another digression carrying us further afield. He did not, in fact, lose his thread, and, in due course, he returned to his story of meeting the Hampton-Wyverns and then the narrative of events in Afghanistan (in fact there was only ever just one thread, winding in ways that are now apparent). Even so, I am inclined to skip over the account concerning Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, a digression too far, which should not be taken as an indication of anything other than my own need to keep a grip on the twisting and turning of Zafar’s discussion, the ranging back and forth.

In 2000, how many people knew what subprime mortgages were? he asked me.

Hang on! How did we get to mortgages? I responded.

Zafar simply repeated the question.

Not many, I said, giving up and going along with him.

And before September 11, 2001, how many do you think had read Ahmed Rashid’s book about Afghanistan?

Taliban ?

Yes.

Your point is?

When a journalist asked Harold Macmillan what he feared most in politics, his reply was, Events, dear boy, events. The event defines everything, changes everything, not just afterward but also before. People can’t bear the unexpected, they won’t let it stand and they’ll change their memories to make what was unexpected now expected. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, men abhor the vacuum in history, the discontinuity wrought by the unexpected, and they’ll go back and fill it out, go back and try to figure out how it happened, try to identify what we didn’t see before, that to which we once were blind but now can see. We go back and revise our understanding of the world, with the benefit of having experienced the event.

What event?

Unexpected events. Things we just didn’t see coming. We plan our policies, making predictions every which way. But look at the past, even the written one. What is it but a chain of surprises?

9/11? The financial crisis?

External events, events that come out of the blue, said Zafar, changing lives all the time, every year, if not every day. Our choices are made, our will flexed, in the teeth of events that overwhelm and devour us.

As Churchill said, I added, history is just one bloody thing after another.

Was that Churchill? asked Zafar.

Isn’t there a convention that if you don’t know who the author is, you can always attribute it to Churchill?

I thought it was Edna St. Vincent Millay.

You can always attribute it to Edna St. Vincent Millay? I asked Zafar.

No. Millay said, It is not true that life is one damn thing after another; it’s one damn thing over and over.

That’s actually more interesting, I responded.

But I suppose you’re right. In fact, as Churchill himself said, the false attribution of epigrams is the friend of letters and the enemy of history.

He said that?

No, replied Zafar.

* * *

Our conversation ended there for the day. It is from this point, I think, that his Afghan account took on a markedly darker hue. If I think now, as I am inclined to do, that this was the moment Zafar began setting out the case for his defense — defense of what happened in Afghanistan, of what he did there — then I am forced to accept that he was no less setting out a case for prosecution, a case to establish the culpability of others, and of me. This is what I think he meant by his references to 9/11 and the financial crisis, and in a narrower way a reference to why and how things changed between him and Emily. It is only once the dust from historic events has settled that people pick their way back across the battlefield to survey the damage, and then rewrite history. Alan Greenspan, that wily chairman of the Federal Reserve, was lauded once, not long ago, as possibly the greatest Fed chairman ever, a master of the markets, manipulating interest rates to perfection. Today, even in the eyes of former acolytes, Greenspan’s reputation is in tatters. Too free and easy with money, they say, always was. Under him interest rates fell and money became so cheap that there was little to give investors and banks pause before putting more and more borrowed funds into riskier and riskier investments. Enter subprime mortgages, mortgages to those who couldn’t really afford them, who would default in due course. But it is only after the event that the eyes of history look back. Who could know that in the hills of Central Asia, trouble was brewing that would spill from the skies of Manhattan? Yet afterward the eyes of the West, if not of the world, and all the thunder of its armory came down on Afghanistan. There are some words in one of Zafar’s notebooks that appear to have been taken down at a museum in Copenhagen (if one is to go by the surrounding notes and observations on that city) and are attributed to Søren Kierkegaard: Life can only be understood backward; the trouble is, it has to be lived forward.

* * *

I met Mohammed and Sila Jalaluddin, said Zafar, in the summer of 2001 in Washington, D.C., where the husband had been a midranking World Bank official. Beginning in the autumn of 2001, Afghani-born professionals working in public policy or international development, numbering a few scattered across the globe, were drawn into the incipient reconstruction efforts after the American invasion of their mother country. Mohammed Jalaluddin’s career had until then been trapped in the doldrums of D.C., in no small part due to his reputation as a difficult man, but it was now carried up on the wind radiating from the crashing Twin Towers that lifted everyone in his business. He, like so many of them, came from that breed of international development experts unsparing in its love for all humanity but having no interest in people. What else explains the implacable set of the lips? They peddle an august wisdom safe in the knowledge that it can never be proven false. They know that such advice, bought and paid for in good money and in the kind of honors and offices they crave, will only be tossed into the maelstrom of conflicting political demands and corrupt claims, in which their advice will lose its identity, so that disappointments and failed outcomes only exonerate them and justify each new contract for further service.

But no one works alone, not even the most curmudgeonly, not when a job has tasks to be delegated. On a day in June 2001, Penelope Hampton-Wyvern received a telephone call from an old paramour, one Rudiger Dornhoff, an ex-UN staffer, who had heard that a former colleague was looking for a junior consultant to hire. Emily had taken a degree in public administration from Harvard, but her grades fell some way short of the triple-A rating for the elite young professional program. So, like many aspirants to UN jobs before her, she sought a route in through the many unguarded passages known to insiders. Consultants under contract are never subject to the same degree of scrutiny.

I never met Dornhoff, continued Zafar. I know some facts, but I have speculated about the rest. He was retired, but, having no family to mind, he remained at his former employer’s side, like an old sheepdog, and offered his services as a consultant on projects in which he had once been involved.