Like most people in America I have spent too many hours this past week sitting in front of a television set and watching recurring images on the screen, while listening to a revolving panel of journalists, eyewitnesses, experts, and politicians, who are trying to make sense of the horrific events in New York and Washington. After the initial shock and disbelief of seeing skyscrapers destroyed by airplanes, then realizing that people were inside, inevitably one feels a need to recast those terrifying images as stories in which we somehow play a part, however peripheral that may be.

In my own case, I connect those images and voices on television with a journey I made in 1997, crossing the India-Pakistan border and traveling to the Khyber Pass, which leads into Afghanistan. At the time my objective was to try to unravel the meaning of borders and the ways in which personal and national identity are shaped and confined by lines on a map. As a writer I wanted to describe both the people and the landscape that I encountered while trying to connect contemporary experiences with the history of this region. Now,as I look back on that journey and try to comprehend the events of the past week, what strikes me is the false mythology of a frontier "a lawless, no man's land," where justice is delivered through the barrel of a gun. What frightens me most of all is that these distorted myths are being perpetuated in both the media coverage and in the rhetoric of our leaders.

Too often Afghanistan is portrayed as a desolate, ungoverned and ungovernable land, where guerrilla fighters wage a perpetual war against outsiders and against themselves. While certain elements of this may be true, it is a preconception that displaces reality. The vast majority of Afghans are not warlords, terrorists or fanatics as we are led to believe. Instead they are farmers, merchants, teachers and students who have endured many years of civil war and drought. A large number of Afghans have been forced to flee into Pakistan as refugees, where they live in camps near the border, waiting to go home. The Taliban, who control most of the territory and institutions in Afghanistan, deserve criticism for many of their policies but it would be wrong to say that they represent the majority of the population. Nevertheless, there is a tendency in the west to caricature the Afghan people as lawless tribes of men with beards and turbans who carry weapons. Recently this image has been reinforced through pictures of Osama Bin Laden, though he himself is not an Afghan. This is a stereotype that can be traced back to the frontier mythology of the British Empire and it is rooted in colonial prejudice.

America's own frontier myths took shape at the same time as the British were fighting their Afghan wars. It is both ironic and unfortunate that current events have brought these narratives together. When one hears the president of the United States say that we will "smoke (the terrorists) out of their holes," and "hunt them down," and that Osama Bin Laden will be taken, "dead or alive," one cannot help but wonder where this rhetoric will take us. By depicting Afghanistan as a lawless state and its inhabitants as renegades, we begin to persuade ourselves that the only course of action is a military assault. In this way it becomes easier to accept the idea of frontier justice and to ignore the innocent casualties that will occur when cruise missiles are launched against Kabul and Kandahar. Here in America, where one would imagine there have been enough deaths already, we can see the terrible consequences of these misconceptions. On September 16, in Mesa, Arizona, a gas station owner named Balbir Singh Sodhi was gunned down on the street,apparently in retribution for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Sodhi was not an Afghan nor an Arab. He was not a Muslim but a Sikh. And the only reason he was killed is that he had a beard, was dark skinned, and wore a turban.

Stephen is a Writer-in-Residence in MIT's Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies. His book, Amritsar to Lahore: A Journey Across the India-Pakistan Border, was published in November 2000.

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