Captain Afsoon Setara sat just outside her tent, under the shade of a pistachio tree. They grew wild here in the foothills of the Tian Shan. She was compiling a report on recent activity by Hizbut-al-Tahrir, which had been recruiting Uzbek youth displaced by the genocide of 2010 to guerilla bases from which they harassed the Kyrgyz herders who grazed their flocks up in these mountains in the summer time. It was early autumn now and the tribes were leaving. The air was crisp and cold, the apple trees and walnut trees and pistachio trees heavy with fruit, their leaves gold against the lapis lazuli sky. On one screen she had the notes submitted by her Human Terrain Team’s social scientists; on another she was mapping out the complex relationships between kinship, sectarian, and political networks. Analyst Notebook made that easy. The hard part was figuring out what was moving the urbane Uzbeks to align themselves with this Wahabi nonsense –and what could be done to lure them away. That would be the topic of the upcoming secret conference in Bukhara. And then three weeks of well earned leave before she returned to the University of Washington to finish her doctorate in Central Asian Studies.
Not a bad deal, all in all: four years military service as a linguist and research analyst for a Human Terrain Team in return for a green card, a graduate fellowship –and refugee status for her family which, like the young Uzbek youths she was monitoring, had been displaced by the genocide three years ago. It was Salvador who had finally convinced her to take the deal. “Not everything the Empire does is imperialist,” he had said. “And this war, even it is also about US geopolitical interests, is a war for the soul of Dar-al-Islam.” Four years of military service, a chance to use all of her extraordinary linguistic skills –Arabic, Turkish, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Pashto, Farsi, Uygur …
What he didn’t know was that in the process she had created a cluster of revolutionary cells –mostly disillusioned Tajik Ismailis like herself, frustrated with the Aga Khan’s reformism and seeking to return their community to the revolutionary glory days of Alamut. That and the fact that while she was mapping out Wahabi networks for the US government she was also mapping out the growing US sociocultural intelligence apparatus for …
There, of course, was the rub. She wasn’t exactly sure who it was for. During her training at Fort Leavenworth one of her fellow trainees, an anthropology grad student from the University of New Mexico, had invited her to join her during an extended weekend leave on a trip to the Gila Wilderness. She had expected a relaxing weekend hiking in the mountains and exploring Mogollan archeological sites. Instead she found herself at the mountain headquarters of an intense young woman who called herself Fatima and claimed, quite matter of factly, to be the Imam of the Age. She invited Afsoon to join her in an effort to do nothing less than restore the Fatimid dynasty.
Her appeal was simple. Fatima tapped into her rage, which ran deep: rage against the old Soviet Union, which had used her people, and against the cleptocratic Tajikistan which had succeeded it, rage against Salvador, who had set her on this “revolutionary road” and then abandoned her, and above all rage at the Aga Khan and his reformism. And all Fatima wanted was a map of the emerging US sociocultural intelligence apparatus, to which she certainly felt no profound loyalty. In return, Fatima offered her a renewed sense of purpose, an energy and excitement she had not felt since those days ten years ago when she first met Salvador and sat in his courses absorbing his vision.
She must have paused for a moment, caught in this reverie, because when she returned to her work the computer had gone into hibernation. As it revived there appeared on her screen, not the map of Uzbek kinship networks she expected, but rather what looked like a complex yantra or mandala of some kind. Assuming that she had accidently downloaded a new screen saver, or that the US Army had done it for her, she double clicked on the screen and then and space bar, but nothing happened. Pressing Esc did nothing either. Then she began clicking wildly around different places on the yantra. Each click led her to a new and more complex yantra. Realizing that she must have picked up a virus, she, she wandered off to find Colonel Edwards, the Human Terrain Team Leader, who would no doubt forward the problem to the Brigade G2.
