The DiCaprio Connection
Sparkle Hayter, New York

The policy experts and old Afghan hands are better equipped to tell you about the late Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Afghan resistance to the Taliban, Osama bin-Laden, and the complexities of fighting in a country that has been a "graveyard for the world's great armies."

I want to talk about Leonardo DiCaprio.

Late last year, a story ran that young men in Kabul were getting their hair cut like Dicaprio. It seems illegal videos of Titanic had made it to Kabul and had become an underground hit. The movie was so popular merchants rushed to cash in by stamping the name Titanic on everything from cosmetics to rice. But it was the Leonardo haircuts that got the Taliban's attention. The Taliban was so threatened, its moral police began arresting barbers who gave men the DiCaprio cut to go with their untrimmed beards, which were mandated by law.

Most people know that Afghan women have no rights, cannot work, cannot go to school, must cover themselves and go out in the company of a responsible male relative. Break the rules and risk a flogging, or worse. Afghanistan got a lot of attention earlier this year when it destroyed the beautiful Buddhas of Bamiyan, carved into the sides of mountains centuries ago and protected all that time by non-Buddhist Afghans, until the Taliban decided they must go.

But overt cruelty and cultural destruction isn't enough for the Taliban. They have to go the extra mile and suck the little joys out of the people's lives as well. Children cannot play games, fly kites, or play with the pigeons lest it distract them from their religious studies. Videos, and most forms of entertainment are illegal in Afghanistan, along with white socks, paper bags, multicolored signs and a host of other things. The Taliban leaders are like villains out of Grimm's. Most Muslim scholars, even many in Iran where an Islamic reform and freedom movement has flourished in recent years, think the Taliban's leader Mullah Omar is nuts.

Just watching a video was an act of defiance for the youth of Kabul. But it was the choice of movie that caught my attention. Why Titanic? I had to rent the movie again to understand the attraction, and why young men so wanted to emulate the hero played by DiCaprio.

What had seemed a hokey movie with great special effects to me before, suddenly became a great subversive statement about freedom: a story about a rebellious couple crossing societal lines to thwart tradition and authorities. That Afghan boys wanted to emulate the hero who lives life on his own terms and wants the woman he loves to be free to do so too struck me as a great glimmer of hope. The Taliban had not extinguished the spirit of young Afghans I had seen, when I was there in 1988.

Despite the war with the Soviets, it was still a beautiful country then. Somehow, the parts that had been destroyed by bombing just accentuated the beauty of that which was left. There was the great natural beauty of the mountains, the adobe houses that seem to rise seamlessly out of the ground, and the camel caravans of colorfully dressed Turkmen traders whose steady progress through the war-torn country to Pakistan proved the march of commerce is almost unstoppable.

The men who took our party into Afghanistan were young, educated men with the Jamiat-i-Islami faction, devout Muslims but considered moderates. One was a mullah, though he preferred we call him the Judge. The year before, he'd taken in an American reporter who taught him some American phrases. At one point, we had to cross a minefield while Soviet jets buzzed overhead, dropping orange flares to help illuminate the valley for the snipers in the hills. We were tired and scared, but the Judge egged us on with, "no pain, no gain!" When we got to the other side and finally made it to a safe house, he announced tea with, "It's Miller Time." Another of our escorts, a very gentle, soft-spoken man, teased the Judge. We were told that while Afghans will listen to their mullahs, they don't like to be dictated to by them, and to support this, he told us a legend about a great mullah visiting a village, where he chastised the people harshly for not having any shrines to dead Muslim saints. The council of elders, the loya jirga, met to discuss this and agreed he was right. So they killed him and built a shrine to him.

During the day we rested at safe houses, traveling only at night. At one stop, a young mujahed came to see us. He was wearing mujahedin garb with the mandatory bandolier of bullets across his chest, the kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, and a big tribal turban. In his arms, he carried a baby blue photo album with the words, "Happy Memories" in gold English letters on the cover. He used to live in India, he told us, before he came back to fight the Soviets. The pictures in the album showed a very modern young man in western dress, and they looked like publicity photos would-be film stars have taken when they arrive in Bombay.

"Did you want to be a Bollywood movie star?" I asked.

"I don't remember," he wept. "Too many bombs."

He didn't remember much of anything. It turned out the photo album he carried around so lovingly was the only memory he had left of his life before the war and somehow, sharing it with us brought it alive for him again, for a moment.

The next safe house was a mosque run by a less tolerant group. As a woman, I wasn't allowed into parts of the mosque, so my boyfriend and I and the muj guarding us slept in the room where they kept the dead before burial. We spent a sleepless night next to a dead man in a body bag. Our muj escorts apologized profusely for that.

In one town, I was taken to visit a young Afghan doctor, an overworked man with a big grin who spoke English and had a Mecca snow globe on his desk. He was funny, and gave me a ride back on his motorcycle to the camp where I was staying. A single woman alone on the back of a bike with a man she's not related to would get us both killed today. It was no big deal then.

At the camp, two fierce looking mujaheds came to our room one night, pulled out a deck of cards and said, "Bridge?" They were very disappointed to find neither my boyfriend nor I played bridge, but were more than willing to teach us. Every night we were there, they came in to drink tea and play bridge with us. They spoke little English, but somehow we managed to communicate. They wanted to push the Russians out and build a freer, more modern Afghanistan. They were young and idealistic, as we were. They had a sense of humor. When I had to wear my head-to-toe burqa on the road to conceal my nationality, one handed me my sunglasses to wear over it, another stuck a cigarette in my mouth.

Little moments spoke volumes, like seeing a young fighter walking with his veiled wife, side by side, holding hands in clear defiance of social rules against public displays of affection.

The muj we knew kept songbirds, and when they fought, they put flowers behind their ears, flowers from the garden they lovingly tended at the camp. They were happy to have their pictures taken, but you could never catch them laughing or smiling. As soon as the lens was pointed in their direction, they adopted a fierce fighting pose.

They are a fierce people. Mess with them at your peril. Kipling wrote: "When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains An' go to your Gawd like a soldier."

Not all the mujahedin were as humane as the muj who took us in, and some groups, stinted on foreign aid which went largely to more extremist groups, ran drugs to support their fighting.

But we met the most beautiful young men and women there. There was a youthful spirit that wanted to reach out, to conspire against the authorities and to dream of a more modern, peaceful country, which, of course, did not happen.

I don't know how many of those young men, if any, are still alive, but when I read about Titanic and the Leonardo DiCaprio haircut that swept Kabul, I knew that spirit was still there. Score one for American cultural imperialism. I pray that whatever the West does there won't kill that glimmer. I owe those young people my life.