Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2009/10/20/adam_curtis_afghanistan_interview/

Adam Curtis uncovers the secrets of Helmand

Heroin, hippies and hero engineers

By Andrew Orlowski

Posted in Legal, 20th October 2009 11:16 GMT

Documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis is trying something new on the web. It's unearthing a secret, patchwork history that reads like a novel. It's about Afghanistan, and what he calls "our dreams of Afghanistan, and their dreams of us".

As part of a mission to unearth lost gems from the BBC archive, it's full of extraordinary stories - how hippies created the heroin business, for example, or how American engineers tried to build a model democracy in the 1950s. It's old fashioned journalism, the kind that TV news seems reluctant to do. Adam kindly offered to explain it to us.

If you've missed it, here are Kabul, City Number One Kinshasha, City Number Two, and The Secret History of Helmand. Much of what we discussed follows on from the latter - which explores the grand, techno-utopian designs of US nation building in the 1950s.

Q. When people read it, people who know your work, they'll recognise a few familiar Adam Curtis themes. What was it that caught your eye?

I was completely shocked by the way it was being reported. Our relationship to Afghanistan the way it's reported now is not even two-dimensional, it's one-dimensional.

Documentaries, and a lot of television now, is possessed by the mantra that people will only watch your film, or listen to your program, if it "touches something in them". So the reporting has to find something in Afghanistan that's some terrible thing that has happened "to somebody like you, or just like your child".

It's done with the best intentions, and a certain kind of desperation to keep an audience. But it makes it more and more incomprehensible. Because it becomes a land full of victims and out there in the darkness, dark forces we don't understand.

I'm trying to build up a body of evidence of just how complicated our relationship to that country has been.

One thing that fits in to your canon is psychologists, and another is nation building, with both sets of people trying to form society to a model.

I did not know America had tried a kind of nation building before. The whole idea that you could use scientific ideas to substitute for what was essentially a political project. That instead of political fallabilities you have a series of certainties - scientific principles - on which you could build nations. They really did believe that. But they tried it on Afghanistan and it's one of the biggest they ever did. It shocked me.

Like everyone else I have watched the picture of Helmand, and had the impression that this is a dusty old landscape where we've disturbed something really complicated. To quote: "It has been there a long time, we're better out of it."

It's not, it's a bit more like Ancient Greece, we're fighting amongst the ruins of one of the giant American technocratic projects. In five years nobody's done a proper history.

Documentary strands have become very worthy - it's as if they're not addressing us as an audience, but policy makers. And they start with the basis that it's an intractable problem.

How evil is Dr Evil?

The leading Islamists and the people they fought against between 1978 and 1982, out of which came the Mujahadeen, were all radicalised Western educated students. I found that absolutely fascinating.

Take Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, or "Dr Evil", who has survived through all the jihads, and is thought of as the most terrifying thing in the universe. He was a Communist student [who developed] revolutionary ideas at Kabul University, in a department built by American money. He decided he didn't like the Maoists and defected to the Islamists instead. Well, we depict people like him as terrifying dark ogres, which relate to Lord of the Rings, almost. I think that's really bad reporting and our journalism has become trapped by that.

I'm just trying to do a form of journalism that makes you look at the history. And how the chaos there today is a product of the dreams we had of Afghanistan - be it American technocrats, Western revolutionaries or conceptual artists - and the dreams that Afghans had of the West. And it's out of that strange interplay of extreme visions of each other. I don't think our reporting gets there, because it's limited, and also because no one does the history.

It's a bit like when I did The Power of Nightmares - nobody had done a series on the history of ideas that led the World Trade Centre being destroyed. Nobody on TV has done a history of Afghanistan from the 1870s to now. I think that's a dereliction of duty.

We've only been in Afghanistan seven years - give them a chance.

I may be being unfair but it's about time.

Will the blog become a TV documentary - er, blogumentary?

The basic fact is they gave me a website on which I put up this film, It Felt Like A Kiss and things associated with it. When I'd done that they asked what I wanted to do next. They wanted me to all sorts of bloggy stuff and I just would not do that. I think that's so boring. It's noodling and doodling and it's exactly what I criticise the web for being - the idea that half formed, half, vague, badly researched aperçu, we used to call them, can be some new form of journalism.

Out of desperation I just started taking the stories I knew about Afghanistan and started feeding them into short descriptive pieces. One was a moment in time where in Kabul, four separate things were happening which were to change the way we dream about Afghanistan, and the way they dream about us.

Walt Rostow, who's in Part 3 - "The Lost History of Helmand" - seems like the quintessential American technocrat of his time. What about his involvement there reminds you of now?

He is a fascinating character. He pushes these projects into ever grander dreams - with a series of scientific stages you go through - and captures the ear of John F Kennedy. Then he becomes one of the main and most fervent supporters of bombing in Vietnam - coupled with this weird idea that you can transform the Vietnamese into model citizens, at the same time as you are bombing them.

Through rational education and behavioural psychology - it's B F Skinner - if you put people in the right environment they will behave in the right way. That's what they tried in these essentially guarded villages and expected democratic beings at the other end. It reminded me so much of Afghanistan today.

You wonder if there is for all the failure of those technocratic projects by the end of the 1970s, the dream didn't carry on somehow. And although Blair and Clinton weren't inspired by that, what you've got is the return of that idea.

Waking the technocratic ghost

In the 1950s engineering was key. By 1990 the idea of nation building had been abandoned. You had shock treatment in Russia, but that was economic reform.

That was the idea that if you get rid of institutions the state has imposed on people then as individuals they will create a harmonious market network, we see what happened with that. It sort of re-emerged later the liberation of Afghanistan in 2001.

As the political dream of a moral intervention became mired in the horrors of an insurgency, the ghost of this idea of a technocratic ideal re-emerged. Their argument is that politics always messes up - if only we follow the principles of engineering models, of feedback, and get this down in the right place, and move people around, the system will approach.

The idea that politics corrupts people fundamentally. It's fundamentally a set of conservative ideas, with a pessimistic view of human nature. Whatever the desires of people they will always be corrupted by people in power.

So you need principles that are beyond corruption. Rostow is the absolute epitome of that. But because it tries to apply engineering principles to what is really an area of politics, it always collapses because it's so rigid. It doesn't understand power.

It has a very reduced idea of what humans are, their autonomous choices don't matter. Nice line in Anton's Hume piece last year - "The phrase 'hearts and minds' admits that people feel and think, but implies that what matters is to ascertain which feelings and thoughts affect them most strongly" - which is focus group politics.

Yes, absolutely. Rostow is a classic example of someone who starts with a set of principles, and he ends up supporting one of the most corrupt regimes in the world, and building what are in any terms concentration camps [that] "collect citizens for their own protection and re-educate them".

So how have we found ourselves supporting an increasingly corrupt government that cares little for democratic processes? And they tell us "it's on track". ®