"Taliban Man" at Yale

There is a whole bunch of ink being spilled, particularly by conservative editorialists, on the affront provided to Afghanistan and America by Yale's admission of a former Taliban spokesman and apologist as a student. Here are a couple of random examples, one from John Fund of the WSJ and other from Deborah Orin of the New York Post. But if you want a broader sampling, try googling "Taliban and Yale." The results range from the mostly querulous to the entirely vitriolic.

It seems to me that there are three things underlying all of this: one potentially legitimate, one probably fanciful, and one a bit ugly. And, only the last of these has anything at all to do with the merits of admitting Sayed Hashemi to Yale.

First, there are the questions as to why Yale would admit Hashemi yet turn down a number of Afghan women who have applied. That does seem to be a legitimate question. Since Hashemi's formal education ended at the fourth grade, it is unlikely that he was clearly more qualified academically than the Afghan women that were rejected. The thing that caught Yale's attention, no doubt, was Hashemi's history rather than his academics. But if that is the case, one would think that the history of the Afghan women would have been at least as compelling. Be that as it may, though, if we remove the fact that Hashemi's history was in support of the Taliban, then his acceptance and the rejection of the women would be no more or less inexplicable than the seeming randomness that surrounds much about the admission policies of universities like Yale. The point of the comparison between Hashemi and the Afghan women, in short, is to suggest that he should have been rejected because he was a Taliban and the women accepted because they were not --or even more compelling -- were actual or vicarious victims of the Taliban that Hashemi supported. The controversy, in short come down to the fact that Hashemi was a Taliban. Let's leave than point to one side for now.

The second thing that is lurking behind all of this is a suspicion of skullduggery. As Hashemi himself noted in the NY Times piece that first brought his admission to Yale to national attention: "In some ways I'm the luckiest person in the world. I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Instead I ended up at Yale." People are rightly skeptical of this kind of "luck," so much so that their first impulse is to suspect a conspiracy or at least some form of undue influence (e.g. the Bush administration's desire to facilitate the construction of an oil pipeline across Afghanistan, or cabalistic plot by ultraliberal Yale to "smack" the hated George Bush "while preening their liberal feathers like peacocks"). John Fund, who seems to be a one-man band on this issue, is reported by The Conservative Voice to have claimed that "a congressional committee is now investigating potential corruption in the US State Department‚’s issuance of student visas."

Given that it is an election year and that banging on the Taliban is always good politics, a Congessional investigation of this issue would hardly be surprising, although I have not seen this reported elsewhere. But, before one has an investigation, one would think that there ought to be something approaching probable cause, and in this case, grounds for suspecting a conspiracy or other skullduggery seem sorely missing. If the original NY Times article is even a remotely complete account of Mr. Hashemi's history, it is awfully hard to find a motive for the administratrion or anyone else to help him get into Yale. Hashemi was not a high Taliban official even before the US invasion. He was a 22-year old neophyte who came to American attention primarily becuase he was one of the few Taliban who actually spoke English, and his function was to be a spokesman for the Taliban in the English-speaking world. That would hardly have made him an attractive target for US government assistance even before the invasion. The admission to Yale came nearly five years after the invasion and (not coincidnetally) five years after Mr. Hashemi fled Afghanistan. Cui bono in having such a person go to Yale? This is not to say that there was no conspiracy or whatever. It is only to say that, at least so far as I know, there is precious little reason to suspect a conspiracy. Sometimes (in fact most of the time) "a cigar is just a cigar." Yes, Hashemi was lucky to end up at Yale rather than Guantanamo, but at this point it appears that luck is all there is to it.

The last thing that is going on of course is simply this: "He was Taliban, fer chrissakes. Not only that, he was a spokesman and apologist for the Taliban. What the hell is he doing in this country, much less at Yale."

In a Scripps Howard News Service editorial entitled Send Yale's Taliban Student to Guantanamo, Deroy Murdock expresses what we all feel to an extent:

[T]he Taliban was "a brutal regime of retrograde, misogynist, terrorist-abetting, drug-running, Buddha-blasting, gay-murdering, freedom-hating tyrants." They expressed their feminism by banning the education of girls over age 8, closing Afghanistan's women's university, banishing females from their jobs, and forcing them into burqas. They also celebrated diversity by fatally collapsing brick walls onto the heads of gay men. . . .[etc.] . . . The State Department must explain how it gave a student visa to a top official of a government whose agents still blast away at U.S. personnel. Yale owes America an apology for giving aid and comfort to a former member of the government that gave aid and comfort to al Qaeda as it plotted the Sept. 11 massacre.

There's the real rub, of course, and I am not entirely immune to its power. But I am not entirely proud of that impulse either, for it tastes a bit like accepting the theory of "collective guilt." No one claims that Hashemi actually did any of the things that made the Talban regime so dispicable. His sin is that spoke out -- and to an extent may still be speaking out -- in defense of the regime. Does that fact disqualify him from admission to Yale? If it does, then you have to ask who else would be similarly excluded for similar reasons. Is Yale, or America, closed to people who used to, or even still do, defend what most of us consider indefensible? I hope not. I hope, instead, that we continue to invite such people into dialogue, for it in that dialogue wherein our best hope for change lies. There is some possibility that four years at Yale may transform this man into a spokesman for modernity who can, becuase of his history, speak with some authority to his former compatriots. If that happens, it will be all to the good. If it doesn't, nothing will have been lost.

I don't applaud Yale for admitting Hashemi. I suspect, indeed, that Yale was seduced by the sheer novelty of having someone like him at Yale and by a sense that this somehow burnished their treasured view of Yale as enlightened and open-minded. But, neither do I condemn Yale for admitting him, and I most certainly do not believe he should be either sent back to Afghanistan or to Guantanamo. In fact, rather than sending Hashemi to Guantanamo, I would go to Guantanamo and look for other potential Yalies.