PART III: What it Felt Like to Come Home
CHAPTER 2 (Continued...)
(A writing exercise in several parts, each composed in 60 minutes and posted without edits)
Part III – Chapter 2: Indian Country (continued…)
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. The 1980’s saw the reputation of Afghanistan as a ‘graveyeard of empires’ borne out, as the insurgency overwhelmed the tens of thousands of Soviet troops operating across the country. Their elite paratroop infantry and mechanized columns and helicopter gunships just couldn’t maintain order and so the effective area of control by the Soviets extended to 5-6 large cities and airfields and a single ‘ring’ road that connected them (hence the minefields on either side... if guerillas couldn’t get close to the road they couldn’t snipe or ambush the interminable heavy Soviet columns, but it made the countryside much more dangerous for the average farmer and sheperd... and child). But The Afghans were truly living in a graveyard. The remit of the Soviets diminished and their effective control wavered and collapsed and the country became the domain of warlords: some large (like Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Northern Alliance commander whose death in a covert bomb attack preceded 9/11 by two days) and some small. In a country without effective military or police any psychopath with a rifle and a dozen loyal peers becomes the law.
I watched in amazement in 2020 when parts of American cities were reduced to the same model that Afghanistan had suffered under for decades: impulsive young men with guns and no civil or institutional authority searching and blocking and detaining American citizens with a forced assent by local police departments. More people died in the first ten days of the BLM protests than the entire number of unarmed black Americans killed by police in the average YEAR but these stories weren’t deemed very important. A child was shot by ‘guards’ with automatic rifles manning a checkpoint. I’m no genius, but police are something that we want in this society. Checkpoints manned by whoever has an AK-47 and a sense of self-importance are not.
The warlords destroyed what the Soviets had been unable or unwilling to raze and kill. The country was divided into 500 fiefs. Trucking is probably the most important economic sector for bringing wealth and foreign currency into Afghanistan (other than heroin export) and the truck routes were slowed and ‘taxed’ by ruffians every 30 miles. ‘Jingle trucks’ are a common sight even in the most suspicious rural area. They’re flat bed diesel cabs with a kind of box built onto the bed for storage) and the whole exterior - the cab, the bed, the hub caps - are festooned with elaborate and colorful patterns in paint and aluminum. Chains and charms dangle off the vehicle at every edge and corner. No well-traveled valley is complete in Afghanistan without an upended Jingle truck on the valley floor, its days off hauling ended forever by a 900-foot drop. I give even odds that the driver got out in time but every burned out tank and crushed long-haul truck along the route kind of makes one pause and wonder.
For the inconvenience and costs and complete lack of predictability or fairness the trucking mafia hated the warlords, but their feeling was nothing compared to the average person. The jingle truck had to navigate checkpoints and pay extra spot duties. The average farmer was at risk of having all of his wealth or food taken at any time. The sexual enslavement of young men and (especially) boys was rampant and if your child was taken and chained to some man’s bed there was absolutely no recourse. You hoped that they would be released alive and soon. Inshallah.
The Taliban were a natural outgrowth of the poverty and trauma of Afghanistan. The refugee crisis of Afghans fleeing over the Pakistani border was the worse on the planet during its time. MILLIONS (+5 at most, I think) of shell-shocked families fled the killing dealt by the Soviets and huddled in vast refugee camps in the FATA (Federally-Adminitered Tribal Areas) of Pakistan (a region which look very similar to Afghanistan and is the poorest part of poor Pakistan). These camps had the basics: tents, bags of grain and pallets of bottled water, some medicine, but there was nothing like opportunity or promise or purpose. Gulf Arab countries with large sums of cash and very distinct ideological/religious agendas organized countless Madrassas, Islamic schools where boys and young men were instructed in the Koran and in the extreme modern political outlook of Wahabism.
The Taliban were a generation of boys whose fathers had been killed, their mothers dispossessed, their lives and communities erased. They were taught a myth of holy war and began to cross the border going in the other direction. Some of them had never actually been in Afghanistan. Talib means ‘student’ and the Taliban proved to be suspicious, ignorant, incurious, and less-than-naturally-gifted policymakers, but they were loyal, honest, effective, and predictable. Given a choice between the rape and anarchy of the late 1980’s, early 1990’s and rule by a bunch of earnest young men who forbade the flying of kites the majority of Afghans chose the latter. By 1994 the Tabliban controlled the entire country, save for a single large ethnic enclave along the Northern border.
If you’re interested read about the battles for Mazar-i-Sharif and the Taliban arch-nemesis, the Uzbek Rashid Dostum. Figures like this simply don’t exist in our world anymore.
That was the situation in Afghanistan until 2001, when the Pashtun norm of offering shelter to ANY person who came to your home and asked for it backfired for the Taliban somewhat after one of their guests (Bin Laden) engineered the most epic and terrifying terrorist attack in human history.
Our war was just from the beginning, and was regarded with some hope by the Afghans. The Taliban were especially unpopular in the cities (where the lawlessness had never been as bad and the harsh edicts against music and free passage by adult women rankled) and they melted away in front of our advance.
ISAF was the European task force charged with administering the training and support mission in Afghanistan. Some of their members were formidable (the Poles, for instance... or the Latvians, who stayed at our base for weeks and distinguished themselves by (1) their size - every man and woman in their unit was over 6 feet tall (2) their complete rejection of deodorant. After they use our tiny gym it had to be aired out for 12 hours before it was safe, every time) and some were not. The Italians had the development of Pol-e-Charka prison as their remit, for instance, and corruption and incompetence were legendary. The Germans had worked with the Afghan Border Police (ABP) in previous years but they were unaware that the ABP was actually a paramilitary force. Their confusion is understandable: they never ventured to any of the border posts or kandaks (company headquarters) of the ABP and so knew about as much as anyone might in the United States from reading the paper. Apparently they were forbidden from venturing more than 60 minutes from a class 4 medical facility, which put the entire Kunar province out of bounds. The idea that soldiers might be endangered or killed was not well-understood by the Germans, which seems odd given their history.
One positive effect of this was the ABP getting relatively little foreign aid (meaning less corruption) and having no real military support. They developed a resilience and independent action style that was seen too rarely in that government. They were also all local boys, so they had a real and deep connection to the areas being patrolled and had local support in resisting the AAM (anti-afghan militia... like the terminology for nonwhite people in the US, the term seemed to change every year or two, with no new laabel any more natural or revealing than the previous ones).
‘AAM’ does reflect one profound truth though: our enemy was NOT the Taliban. I mean sometimes it was but the animating force behind all of our adversaries (the timber smugglers, the Taliban, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Jalaluddin Haqanni) was the Pakistani state, and specifically their foreign intelligence service (the ISI, famously without accountability and deep penetration by extremists and military fanatics).
The pace of military activity ebbs and flows in Afghanistan with the season and the snowfalls... and the moon. Bright nights a high-lum cycle, as we called them) were always liable to turn into something, even if the Afghans could usually handle it on their own. I spent dozens of bright nights standing in my gun turret and scanning the landscape for muj and dozens of dark ones making plodding and difficult progress over mountain trails with 80 pounds of gear, to reinforce some outposts or lay some ambush. We never got the jump on our enemies.
I had only been in country for maybe a month during one high-lum cycle night, when the radios crackled to life as dull concussion echoed over the Eastern mountains...