PART II: What it Felt Like to Come Home
CHAPTER 2 - 'Indian Country'
(A writing exercise in several parts, each composed in 60 minutes and posted without edits)
Part II – Chapter 2: Indian Country
Afghanistan is less a country with mountains than one massive escarpment, with ridges and valleys and peaks distributed atop it. Sitting at the confluence of some of the oldest and mightiest topographical zones on Earth Afghanistan sometimes gives the sense of a kind of absurd Penrose steps progression: mountains, with higher mountains behind them, and higher mountains behind them onward and onward ad infinitum.
Before I first deployed I had vague premonitions of a kind oft strange and forbidding maze of cliffs and burkas but the thing that struck me about Afghanistan was its warm light and quaint green fields. At the elevation of the major towns and road and rivers the mountains are a border and an otherworldly background to every view but they’re mostly trackless and empty, known only to goats and smugglers and talibs.
The thing that I would emphasize about the country most is its poverty, poverty unlike anything that you would see in this hemisphere. It’s very truly an entirely different state of being. Afghanistan was the place where I learned my dearest historical/political lesson, which I’ve never forgotten: civilization is a very thin veneer and for most of our time on this planet we have truly only eaten by the sweat of our brow. Afghanistan is what happens when you take an entire nation of 30 million people and drop them at random over a forbidding and fruitless landscape with nothing but the clothes on their backs and tell them: survive.
This is not literally the history of Afghanistan, of course, but it seems that it could be when you’re there. The houses are constructed of mud and rocks. There are no signs or streetlights and few vehicles.
Everything we enjoy and a hundred more things that we take for granted are due to networks of distributed cooperation (capitalism, money, social media) and well-developed institutions that are generally taken completely for granted by our citizens. Young Americans who I struggle to take seriously complain about power dynamics and structural inequities and our brutal history. Our institutions are notable for the RARITY which they have to use force and naked power. Even assuming a problem with ‘structural inequities’ it is a wonderful, impossible blessing to have a structure that protects us from hunger and murder. These seem like important points to make because so many people these days pivot immediately toward radical and even revolutionary fixes. If you’ve lived in Afghanistan you see the TRUE cost of revolutions and violence and they’re tragic. Lastly, our history was brutal and chaotic because historical periods were no different than the present: just a lot of people running around and crashing into each other’s narrow worldviews and trying to protect themselves and the people they loved from danger and suffering. That brutal and chaotic history BUILT the civilization we have today. Instead of knocking all the pieces off the board and starting again using a fantasy that exists only in your mind... lets’ take account of and appreciate the immense PRIVILEGE and comfort and ease that we ALL enjoy.
This is the landscape of the Kunar province then: empty fields, skinny goats, endless rock walls (like there was an entire generation of Afghans condemned to just gather and stack rocks - these walls are everywhere, even miles from any town, zig-zagging across fields full of dirt and rocks, with no conceivable worth or value) towns of 50-100 buildings, many surrounded by tall and thick mud walls. (for there’s no rebar or structural columns in these walls - just berms of mud brick, fat at the bottom and tapering as they rise, like miniature ziggurats). There are strong rivers, bridged only by a few roads constructed by the Soviets 40 years ago. There are not many trees and the ones that exists are scattered about and around the towns. As you climb into the mountains you begin to encounter green terraces, deciduous and pine forests, and even visible snow on the high peaks in the distance. It will be 120 degrees F in the valley and yet snow caps are visible.
I wrote in one of my endless notebooks at the time “Afghanistan is a place of relentless verticality.”
The landscape of Afghanistan is something that it still gives me pleasure to recall; the history of Afghanistan is not as pleasant. I will summarize it very briefly: Afghanistan had a monarchy and a kind of liberal intelligentsia in the cities and Western tourists who would come to hike and smoke weed. It was a harsher, Muslim Nepal: contented in its isolation.
The USSR knocked Afghanistan off whichever rustic and inconsequential path of development it had been on and plunged the country into unending war and lawlessness. That wasn’’t the intention, of course but this could be a lesson for would-be interventionists: take care before you invade another country on a pretext and throw its institutions into disorder. The Communist party of Afghanistan disputed elections, manufactured a political emergency, and invited the Soviets into the country. The Soviets accepted the invitation.
I think the first Soviet troopss rolled across the Uzbek border in 1978 or 1979. The Soviets promised foreign aid, institutional development, education for boys and girls, road, bridges, dams... sound familiar?
However, the Soviets took a different approach to counter-insurgency in this case. In the U.S. Army we talk about the importance of “winning hearts and minds” toward the goal of defeating an insurgency. The Soviets might have pursued this aim somewhat for a year or two but the appetite of your troops for building goodwill among the locals begins to run out pretty quickly once snipers and booby traps and hit-and-run ambushes and roadside bombs begin to take their toll (as many American soldiers in Vietnam or Iraq could presonally attest). The Soviets ran into stiff and intransigent opposition from the countryside: the patriarchal elites of (male) elders who ultimately control all of the power in their corner of the country and don’t regard the prospect of educated, liberated teenage daughters with joy.
The mujahideen (holy fighters ?) poured into Afghanistan and the U.S. eventually saw the outlines of a very promising proxy war to bloody the nose of our imperial rival and the Soviets bombed and strafed some villages indiscriminately. They mined fields and paths (and there are still more landmines in Afghanistan than any other country. They cost lives and limbs every day). They mined orchards. They collapsed the millenia-old irrigation systems around Kandahar. They created a denuded and brutal country where tragedy became so common that mourning mostly disappeared. I have watched in silent regard as fathers carry their wounded children to aid stations or bury their dead with no apparent emotion; their faces betraying only a deep weariness and gravity...
[PART III tomorrow, Indian Country continued...]