I Knew the War in Afghanistan Was a Lie
Nightmares still haunt me. Sometimes it’s the standard stuff associated with
classic post-traumatic stress disorder: flashbacks of horrible attacks and images
of my mutilated troopers. More often, though, peculiar as it may sound, I dream
that my sociopathic, career-obsessed colonel calls to give me another late-night
order to do something unnecessary – usually dangerous, always absurd – the
next day.
We never got along; the man distrusted me from the start. To him, my plainly
ironclad loyalty to my young soldiers was suspicious. Given his own deep-seated
predilection to climb the ranks on the backs of his exhausted subordinates,
he assumed I must have ulterior motives. I didn’t. Nonetheless, he kept me around
because I knew the region better than most and was capable of impressing visiting
generals with tactical briefings. And because, in the main, he found me useful.
It’s not that that lieutenant colonel believed in anything, even the mission
in Afghanistan. Deployment was a means to an end for the guy. That said, nearly
two decades as an unapologetic climber through the officer ranks had imbued
him, not with any real competence – he could hardly spell “Kandahar” – but with
an uncanny knack for mind-melding with his bosses. If they fancied a particular
mission, he loved it. So in 2011-2012, out in the sticks southwest of the city
of Kandahar, when his brigade commander championed democracy-building in the
district, my colonel was all in.
For the entirety of our unit’s year in country, the colonel and I battled over
the efficacy of imposing democracy (at the tip of a bayonet, of course) in rural
Afghanistan. Nevertheless, my repeated and often detailed assertions to him
that what the Army euphemistically titled our “governance” operations was doomed
to fail were always ignored. After all, the colonel had a career to advance.
In the prevailing acquiescence-over-effectiveness Army culture, questioning
the basis of his given mission wouldn’t play. Thus it was that this captain
would tirelessly toil to implement the boss’s fruitless attempts at promoting
democracy in the very district where the Taliban had been birthed.
It was a hell of a futile hoot of a year.
So, for the better part of a year, I pretended to promote “democracy” in rural
Kandahar, my dense squadron commander pretended to know what that entailed,
his commander pretended the endeavor was possible in the first place, and on
and up it went – straight to the top, to the White House. Everyone up and
down the chain of command put on a show and presented the illusion of “progress.”
I knew this, viscerally, as a young captain. Heck, I was complicit in a way.
Thus, I found the recent release by The Washington Post of what it titled The
Afghanistan Papers equal parts astonishing and unsurprising. The documents – consider
them the Pentagon
Papers of my generation – present proof-positive that the generals and
various U.S. officials misled the public for decades about supposed progress
in what they knew was a failing, unwinnable war. The reports left me
feeling partially vindicated, but mostly morose. Still, in the vein of the dark
humor that helps soldiers survive absurd combat tours, let me recall some true
episodes seen from a micro level that substantiate the Post’s macro scoop.
There were times that the war in southern Afghanistan, though horrifically
bloody – a 40% casualty rate for our troop of about 100 kids – was incredibly
funny. It was tragicomic, really. Though I knew my objections to the colonel
were destined to fail, I just couldn’t resist pinging him with flippant
pleas of why establishing a Jeffersonian-style representative democracy in the
Arghandab Valley was an absurd crusade. Somehow, running sarcastic intellectual
circles around the obtuse, knuckle-dragging colonel assuaged my admittedly arrogant
and angry tendencies. My evidentiary examples were so farcical that they bordered
on fiction.
I thought back on four such vignettes over Thanksgiving weekend, during lunch
in a Middle Eastern restaurant on Staten Island shared with my former interpreter
from Iraq and two of his Arab friends. They loved my stories about the mad,
medieval nature of rural southern Afghanistan. I suppose they found some comfort
in knowing their home country, for all its ongoing problems, is wildly modern
compared to my former stomping grounds in rural Kandahar.
We had been discussing the prospects for democracy across the post-Arab Spring
Greater Middle East. But a few beers deep, sensing that the table needed a bit
of levity, I started riffing about the buffoonery of bringing “democracy” to
Afghanistan. The stories I told were the very ones I’d once used to pointlessly
advise my former boss about the hopelessness of our mission.
Like this one time: I was chatting over some tea with an old man in a nearby,
dusty, mud-hut village. I asked the elder his age. He didn’t know; few
did. I pressed, asking if he had any sense of what year he’d been born. His
reply – “I was birthed during a full moon in the year before the Emir Habibullah
Khan was murdered” – wasn’t exactly what I’d expected. I realized
that the man didn’t even know what year it was right then, nor did he
likely adhere to our Western Gregorian calendar.
Still, being the history geek I am, I returned to base and googled the lineage
of various Afghan monarchs. I figured out, based on the information the elder
had provided, that he was probably born in 1918, making him, at that point,
around 94 years old. In a country with an average life
expectancy of about 46 years, this was profound.
The next day, I returned to the village to inform the old man of his actual
age. He seemed equal parts surprised and pleased. A few minutes later, he demonstrated
that he still had the libido to flagrantly hit on, even offer to buy, one of
my handsome young male lieutenants as a sex slave of sorts. I politely declined.
(And who says rural Afghanistan isn’t ready for democracy?)
Then there’s this memory: My troop ran a program we called “cash for work,”
through which we’d pay tens of thousands in US dollars per week to put some
1,500 local Afghans to work on small public works projects. The idea was that
if we gave the chronically unemployed men jobs, they’d eschew the Taliban’s
own version of our program – call it “cash for planting IEDs” – and thus violence
would lessen. I knew the inherent limitations of the scheme. It was utterly
temporal and unsustainable, would distort the local economy and empower corrupt
tribal leaders. I also knew that the Taliban would inevitably skim off the top
of the laborers’ salaries. Nevertheless, I was on board; by then, all I cared
about was keeping my troops as safe as possible.
The tasks the Afghans did for us weren’t particularly useful. I had to
manufacture much of the work, telling them to clean out irrigation canals, paint
yellow divider lines on the district’s one paved road, and paint Afghan flags
on the hundreds of concrete barrier walls surrounding the hopelessly indefensible
nearby police station. The absurdity of the program was perhaps best illustrated
by my troop’s favorite laborer-mascots: “backpack man” and “the ride.” The former
was a triple amputee with just one arm. The latter had no arms but carried his
one-armed friend on his back to work each day. Both had lost their limbs by
stepping on errant, ubiquitous IEDs. Despite their physical limitations, we
paid them the same salaries as the other workers. “The ride” would carry “backpack
man” to the canal, where that one-armed go-getter would grab a pickax and start
digging. The whole scene was a macabre inspiration for us all.
Friday was payday for the cash-for-workers. The Army, bureaucratic beast that
it is, insisted that we adhere to regulations stipulating that each and every
Afghan line up each week and “sign” their names on a standardized form prior
to cashing in. (This is despite the fact that it had no qualms about handing
out a backpack full of cash.) No one seemed to care when I reminded the bosses
that 95% of these guys were illiterate; they had to sign, I was told. So, some
Afghans would scribble something random, others would make a thumbprint in ink.
One drew a marvelous little chicken next to his name each week. (And who says
rural Afghanistan isn’t ready for democracy?)
Another time, the colonel informed me that the time had come to update the
local Afghans’ farming techniques. The brigade sent me a nice fellow from the
US Agency for International Development (USAID) – an agriculture expert from
Kansas – to revitalize husbandry in rural Kandahar. I asked my boss not to bother.
Better for the USAID guy to earn his bloated salary from the safety of headquarters
than risk his life down in my sector, where soldiers got killed on the regular.
The USAID expert’s plan was to introduce PVC pipe-based irrigation to the district.
To that end, he built what he called a “model farm” outside my combat outpost
as an example for the Afghans to follow. The local farmers were going to ignore
the new technology, or steal the materials, I’d told my colonel. These people
were content with their 13th-century-era but fairly functional irrigation
methods, I’d emphasized.
As expected, the colonel ignored me. When some locals stripped the “model farm”
of its materials one dark night, the colonel summoned the Kansan to headquarters.
We never heard from him again, the poor, well-meaning guy. (And who says rural
Afghanistan isn’t ready for democracy?)
More ludicrous still, my senior commanders decided that our stuck-in-the-Middle-Ages
district was ready for some third-wave feminism. In the Army way, they came
up with an acronym for a new unit: the Female Engagement Team (FET). The idea
was to pluck one of the handful of female staff officers in our male-dominated
cavalry reconnaissance squadron and assign her to go on combat patrols and “engage”
with local Afghan women, to assess their concerns, and … well, it was never
clear what the squadron would actually do after that. In a bit of particularly
ironic slapstick, the young West Point-trained officer chosen was – wait
for it! – a New York Jew. The whole charade dovetailed with the preposterous
fiction that establishment elites have bandied about: that the original purpose
of America’s post-9/11 foray into Afghanistan had anything
to do with women’s rights.
When I heard about the new FETs, I felt obliged to remind my colonel that after
nine months spent in the villages of the sector, I hadn’t seen a grown
woman, given that the local men cloistered their wives as if the entire district
were a Catholic convent. I reminded him of the maybe 12-year-old girl in the
nearest village I’d taken a shine to months before. She had piercing green eyes,
a boisterous personality and had impressively held her own while playing rough
games with the village boys.
For months, I’d given her candy, dolls and anything else I could scrounge up.
My mother started sending toys and snacks specifically for this girl. Then one
day, she disappeared. I started asking around about her. Finally, one of the
local elders told me what had happened. She’d had her period, he explained,
and, as per local tradition, she was immediately clothed in a full-length burka
and stashed indoors until her parents could arrange a marriage with, inevitably,
some older man. I never saw her again.
Oh, and nothing useful ever transpired from the squadron’s FET experiment.
(Who says rural Afghanistan isn’t ready for democracy?)
I can’t help but surmise that the original
sin of America’s Afghan war, particularly after the initial 2001 invasion,
was the reflexive assumption that within this landlocked Central Asian country,
an imposed, Western-style representative democracy could take root. Seen from
the relatively cosmopolitan capital city of Kabul, where most American generals
and diplomats resided, that might have seemed plausible. However, the “view
from Kabul” was different from my perspective from the Afghan version of Appalachian
Kentucky.
My vignettes are admittedly personal, local, area-specific and, one might argue,
the equivalent of viewing a complex war from 30,000 feet through a soda straw.
But humility be damned – I’m also a scholar,
and I’m confident in my widely shared assessment that on a macro level, Afghanistan
as
it stands today remains a mess. And now I’ve got The Washington Post’s Afghanistan
Papers in my evidentiary corner. Fact: Nineteen years into America’s longest
war, Afghanistan is in a worse state than at any time since the US military
invasion.
More of the country is contested or controlled by the Taliban than ever before
(to such an extent that the US military has decided to stop
measuring that inconvenient data). The Afghan government’s revenues can’t
pay for its security forces without foreign aid. Local police and army casualties
are unsustainable, and the country’s opium crop has had another record bumper
crop of a year.
None of this bodes well, yet American troops remain and still
die there. Worse, this year, no doubt, one of the dead will be a young man
or woman born after Sept. 11, 2001.
To ask one final time: Who says rural Afghanistan isn’t ready for democracy?
I do.
Danny Sjursen is a retired US Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.com
He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and
later taught history at his alma mater, West Point.
Comments
Post a Comment