Haq’s prediction had some of the force of a malediction, and it echoed the often-quoted claim that Afghanistan is the ‘graveyard of empires’. Whatever one makes of his militant rhetoric, Haq captured something of the repeated cycles of violence that had afflicted his country for almost a century and damaged other nation states that attempted to shape, aid, exploit, or influence Afghanistan.

Haq was killed by the Taliban in 2001. He was forty-three. Najibullah was murdered and hanged as a brutal exhibit in Kabul in 1996. He was forty-nine. The famed Northern Alliance guerrilla leader Ahmad Shah Massoud was assassinated in 2001, two days before the Twin Towers were destroyed in New York. He was forty-eight. I note the ages of these Afghan men (all of whom, had they lived, would be younger now than US President Joe Biden) to emphasise the contemporaneity of Afghanistan’s conflict and suffering. It has been called ‘the forgotten war’. It is back in our minds (and media) because of the horrifying August scenes at Kabul airport, and, in Australia, because of the unresolved matter of alleged unlawful killings by Australian special forces in Afghanistan. But we will forget again. And even if some of us don’t put Afghanistan behind us completely, Australia’s attention will soon turn inward, and perhaps vindicate Jonathan Swift’s bleak pronouncement: ‘In all distresses of our friends, / … We first consult our private ends.’

Tim Bonyhady’s unusual book, Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium, is a vivid prompt to memory. Published just weeks before the Taliban stormed into Kabul (again), brandishing their newly scavenged armoury, it provides an intriguingly tangential and complex history – no predictable parade of powerful men rising and falling in bewildering sequence. Rather, by looking through clothes, carpets and the camera (his subtitle), Bonyhady brings a lens to Afghanistan, sometimes wide-angled, often intensely individualising. His approach is deliberate and ambitious: ‘Sustained attention to the visual also creates a new kind of narrative,’ he argues. ‘Material otherwise neglected is here centre stage, revealing how the visual has been pivotal not just to Afghanistan’s internal politics but also to the international response to it. This book provides a new way of understanding Afghanistan as well as a new way of seeing it.’

Large claims. And his readers will decide if they are borne out by the book, or whether, indeed, they even needed to be enunciated. Bonyhady is clearly focused on the people of Afghanistan, on the way they dress, trade, manufacture, create art, worship, marry, entertain, play sport, and exert influence. Wars rage but Afghan lives have to go on, in their distinctive ways. Bonyhady demonstrates, over and over, ‘the heft of the visual’. He catalogues the images that linger and define – for good and ill. He understands that the powder-blue anonymity of the chadari was a gift to international photographers, but not the full story about Afghan women. He is also an acute scrutiniser of Afghanistan’s representation of itself, by itself (more than twenty-three differing national flags in the twentieth century) and by outsiders.

Bonyhady is also a debunker of myths – those promoted by Afghans themselves and those adopted by various international leaders, for strategic reasons, or out of romanticising ignorance. Bonyhady’s copious sources yield many examples, but this, from President Ronald Reagan, takes some beating: ‘To watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom.’ Haq, the ‘freedom fighter’ saluted here, ordered his forces to fire unguided rockets, and explode bombs in civilian crowds, killing many, including children, in the process. And like many of the mujahideen warriors championed by Washington during the 1980s Russian occupation of Afghanistan and its aftermath, Haq was too fluid in his allegiances ever to be neatly slotted into a US binary of Cowboys and Indians. Bonyhady understands this, and painstakingly documents the moral ambiguity, the ‘fog’ that always obscures the truth of war.

In 2021, the departing Western allies have used the improvement in education and employment opportunities for Afghan women as one of the badges of honour earned during the twenty years since President George W. Bush launched ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’. Listening now to members of the Australian forces who worked with Afghan individuals and organisations during their deployment, you would not begrudge them credit for genuine humanitarian endeavours. Their vocal support for Afghan people who became friends and colleagues may be one of the few saving graces of this long, tragic episode. But, as Bonyhady shows, the emancipation of Afghan women and girls did not begin in 2001, and it was never simply an offshoot of Western enlightenment.

To bring order to his welter of documentary material, Tim Bonyhady selects two symbolic events. Both took place in Kabul’s Ghazi stadium. In 1959, during independence celebrations, the Afghan government under Prime Minister Mohammad Daoud Khan (later president of Afghanistan from 1973) organised an ‘unveiling’. A small group of upper-class women appeared in the royal pavilion of the Ghazi wearing Western dress and headscarves, a symbolic departure from the enveloping chadaris that had been required (for women who could afford them) despite a brief flurry of ‘modernisation’ in the late 1920s under King Amanullah and Queen Soruya. The unveiling spectacle was low-key (lest it inflame ever-present male and religious tensions), and Daoud allowed no filming or photography.

Forty years later, in 1999, and also in the Ghazi, a woman known as Zarmeena was executed by the Taliban, in front of a crowd, principally of men plus some international journalists who were forbidden to take photographs. A small group of women from the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan were also present. Using the cover of her chadari, one of them videoed Zarmeena being shot in the back of the head by a man using a Kalashnikov.

Bonyhady tracks what happened to that video (initially deemed too shocking for Western viewers to bear) over many pages, detailing the ways it was used – as revelation and as propaganda. He concludes with this:

London’s Daily Express thought it ‘very difficult to watch, and not think, “It’s straightforward. We’ll bomb the swine.”’

Bonyhady is an everyman-historian with very diverse interests (his previous book was The Enchantment of the Long-Haired Rat: A rodent history of Australia). In the introduction to Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium, he owns that ‘A small rug dominated by a Kalashnikov sparked my interest’.

Detail of a rug exhibited at the Drill Hall Gallery in 2021 as part of the I Weave What I Have Seen exhibition, curated by Tim Bonyhady and Nigel Lendon. (Maker unknown, private collection. Photograph by Rob Little)

In 2003, collaborating with art historian and artist Nigel Lendon, Bonyhady curated an exhibition of Afghan war rugs in Canberra’s Drill Hall Gallery. Like many who saw it, I have never been able to forget it – neither its searing beauty nor its historical burden. In July this year, again at the Drill Hall Gallery, Lendon and Bonyhady mounted a second exhibition of war rugs. Titled I Weave What I Have Seen: The War Rugs of Afghanistan, it was open during the serene Canberra weeks that preceded lockdown and before the Taliban takeover of Kabul. The catalogue carries these words, written in Iran in 1993 by Safer Ali, a refugee rug weaver: ‘I want to show something of the war, in the hope that, even later, people will be touched by it, and won’t simply forget it.’

How can rugs carry such a freight of meaning? How transcend the utilitarian, commercial, or even propagandistic purposes to which they have been put? (In Two Afternoons, Bonyhady notes that Soldier of Fortune magazine advised its readers that if they wanted ‘something martial yet practical for peaceful use’ as a souvenir of war, they should buy a Kalashnikov mat.)

Some war-rug weavers, as Bonyhady records, were directed in their designs by agents of commerce or politics. But many (some of them women) did what they have always done: painstakingly translate the world as they experience it, in an ancient craft of pattern, symbol, and colour. At that second exhibition, I was reminded constantly of the way in which the animated borders of the Bayeux Tapestry subvert every dictate of state or patriotism and use simple stitches to expose the arbitrary violence of war. And to enchant.

Bonyhady’s book is dense and often harrowing. Against its detailed background of dynastic and international politics, matters of fashion that might be seen as trivial – Queen Soruya’s hairstyle, the miniskirts in which young Afghan women were photographed by Laurence Brun in 1972, Hamid Karzai’s karakul hat, or Ahmad Shah Massoud’s signature pakul (you could buy one in Australian craft shops in the 1980s) – all tell tales, often cautionary. Miniskirts ‘provoked’ acid attacks on revealed female skin. Hats were invariably political, just as the Taliban’s black turbans are today. Bonyhady quotes American theorist W.J.T. Mitchell’s observation that wars are being ‘fought over images, with images, by means of images’. Bombardment does not only come with shells.

No one commissioned Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War series. That is not even the title Goya gave them, and the prints were not published until years after his death. But they remain one of the world’s most potent visual reckonings with war and human violence. The images and events Bonyhady documents and chronicles are potent, but also ambiguous, multivalent. Massoud was assassinated by young suicide bombers posing as journalists. They hid their explosives in a video camera.

In a world dominated by images, we will need books like this to help us unpack their meaning, to arm us against their seductions, and perhaps prompt rejoicing when they embody integrity and hope.