Tomgram: Ann Jones, The Never-Ending War
By Ann Jones
Posted on November 5, 2015, Printed on November 5, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176065/
In an effort to attack Taliban fighters, an air strike by a U.S. plane
killed dozens of civilians in Kunduz, Afghanistan. In the wake of the
attack, an American general responded in unequivocal fashion. I take this
possible loss of life or injury to innocent Afghans very seriously, he
said. I have ordered a complete investigation into the reasons and results
of this attack, which I will share with the Afghan people.
In an effort to attack Taliban fighters, an air strike by a U.S. plane
killed dozens of civilians in Kunduz, Afghanistan. In the wake of the
attack, an American general responded in unequivocal fashion. I want to
offer my deepest condolences to those innocent civilians who were harmed and
killed on Saturday, he said. I've ordered a thorough investigation into
this tragic incident... we will share the results of the investigation once
it is complete.
The first of those air strikes took place in 2009 and targeted fuel tankers
hijacked by the Taliban. The second took place last month and targeted a
hospital that Afghan officials say was used as a safe haven by the Taliban.
The striking similarities between the two attacks are rooted not in uncanny
coincidence but in the law of averages. Bomb a country long enough and such
echoes are bound to occur.
Of course, U.S. planes have been carrying out attacks and terrorizing
innocent Afghans in and around Kunduz (and elsewhere in the country) since
2001. This is, after all, Americas war in Afghanistan, which has produced
eerily repetitive tragedies; a war thats also seen almost endless
announcements of achievements, improvements, and progress; a war that seems
to regularly circle back on itself.
"The Taliban is gone," Army General Tommy Franks, the chief of U.S. Central
Command, announced in 2002. Afghanistan is rising from the oppression of
the Taliban into an independent, democratic nation. Six years later, the
Taliban was, oddly enough, still around. But things were still going well.
Were clearly not done
But I do know that were making good progress, and
each and every day were making a difference in the Afghan peoples lives,
said Army Major General Jeffrey Schloesser. In 2010, Army General David
Petraeus offered his unique assessment of the war. We're making progress,
and progress is winning, if you will, he insisted. This summer, another
five years having passed, Army General John Campbell weighed in: We have
done a great job, both from both a conventional perspective and our special
operating forces, and from the Afghan security forces
I see [the Afghans]
continue to progress and continue to be very resilient.
There have been so many claims of progress these last 14 years (and so
many air strike apologies as well) and yet each announcement of further
success seems to signal the very opposite. Days after Campbell spoke, for
instance, Brigadier General Wilson Shoffner, the U.S. deputy chief of staff
for communications in Afghanistan, told reporters, Kunduz is -- is not now,
and has not been in danger of being overrun by the Taliban
that's sort of
how we see it. Just over a month later, Kunduz fell to the Taliban.
This is the war that TomDispatch regular Ann Jones has monitored, analyzed,
and covered since its opening stages, first as a humanitarian worker and
then as a reporter. While the military was spinning tales of progress, Jones
had a far more realistic assessment. The story of success in Afghanistan
was always more fairy tale than fact -- one scam used to sell another, she
wrote at this site in 2006, drawing attention to a threefold failure: no
peace, no democracy, and no reconstruction. After embedding with U.S.
troops in 2010 she said all the things America's generals never did. Id
been on the front of this war for less than two weeks, and I already
needed a vacation, she wrote. Being outside the wire had filled me with
sorrow as I watched earnest, heavily armed and armored boys try to win over
white-bearded Afghans -- men of extraordinary dignity -- who have seen all
this before and know the outcome.
All this is to say Jones has been remarkably, consistently, undeniably ahead
of the curve on the conflict, a reality reflected in her revelatory look at
the deeply personal costs of Americas second Afghan War in her now-classic
book, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars -- The
Untold Story. Shes done what billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars, 17 U.S.
intelligence agencies, the finest officers produced by Americas premier
military academies, and untold numbers of analysts with access to highly
classified information, have failed to do: accurately assess the situation
in a country the U.S. has been intimately enmeshed in, on and off now, for
the better part of four decades. With that in mind, let Jones give you the
lowdown on the current state of progress there. When youre through,
chances are -- even if you lack a top-secret clearance and have never set
foot in the Greater Middle East -- youll have a better grasp of the reality
of the war than either the Pentagon or the president has ever had. Nick
Turse
Afghanistan After the American War
Once More Down the Rabbit Hole
By Ann Jones
Ten months ago, on December 28, 2014, a ceremony in Kabul officially marked
the conclusion of Americas very long war in Afghanistan. President Obama
called that day a milestone for our country. After more than 13 years, he
said, our combat mission in Afghanistan is ending, and the longest war in
American history is coming to a responsible conclusion.
That was then. This is now. In between, on September 28, 2015, came another
milestone: the Taliban takeover of Kunduz, the capital of the province of
the same name in northern Afghanistan, and with a population of about
270,000, the countrys fifth-largest city.
A few invaders strolled unopposed to the city center to raise the white flag
of the Taliban. Others went door to door, searching for Afghan women who
worked for womens organizations or the government. They looted homes,
offices, and schools, stealing cars and smashing computers. They destroyed
three radio stations run by women. They attacked the offices of the
American-led organization Women for Afghan Women and burned its womens
shelter to the ground. They denied reports on Kabul TV stations that they
had raped women in the university dormitory and the womens prison, then
threatened to kill the reporters who broadcast the stories.
They called the mobile phones of targeted women who had escaped the city and
warned them they would be killed if they returned. No longer safe in
Kunduz, those women found that they were not safe in the places to which
they had fled either. Londons Telegraph reported that the lasting legacy
of [the Talibans] invasion may ultimately prove to be the dismantlement of
the citys womens rights network.
The next day I got an email from a woman newly assigned to the American
Embassy in Afghanistan. Security rules keep her confined behind the walls of
the embassy grounds, she said. Still, knowing that Afghan women are not
secure, she is determined to help them. Her plan, admittedly still in the
brainstorming stage, calls for programs that will teach women how to defend
themselves in some form or another, because the best way for women to be
safe is for them to know how to keep themselves safe.
I think of all my brave Afghan colleagues who go to work in womens
organizations, like those in Kunduz, every day under threat of death. I
think of fearless Afghan women across the country -- activists,
parliamentarians, doctors, teachers, organizers, policewomen, actresses, TV
presenters, singers, radio broadcasters, journalists, government ministers,
provincial officials, candidates for public office -- who over the last 10
years have been assassinated one by one, by teams of armed men on
motorcycles, or by a bomb attached to the underside of a car, or by masked
squads with ropes or Kalashnikovs. These killings have gone on year after
year, the names of the dead women remembered and their numbers tallied by
Human Rights Watch, while the Afghan government and the Bush or Obama
administrations uttered scarcely a word of protest or condolence, and Afghan
police failed to arrest a single assassin. George W. Bush famously claimed
to have liberated Afghan women. Fourteen years later, with the Taliban
again rising, with Washington having sunk tens of billions of dollars into
the training and arming of hundreds of thousands of Afghan men to defend
their country, its now time to offer Afghan women a course in how to defend
themselves?
The New York Times recently reprinted maps from the Long War Journal
illustrating the enclaves the Taliban now occupy not just in Kunduz city,
but throughout the land. They added up to about one-fifth of Afghan
territory, and the movement was said to probably either control or heavily
influence about half of the country. According to the United Nations, the
Taliban insurgency has spread through more of Afghanistan than at any point
since 2001, when it was driven from power.
As if to dramatize the circumstances depicted on the map, the Times also
reported that reinforcements from the Afghan National Army (ANA) could not
immediately travel from their headquarters in the capital, Kabul, to Kunduz
because in between lay Baghlan Province, and it, too, was largely in the
hands of the Taliban.
For months, the Taliban had been capturing bits and pieces of Kunduz
Province, yet their attack apparently took the citys defenders by surprise.
Afghan security forces numbering 7,000 scattered or retreated before the
advance of a few hundred Taliban fighters. While its commanders tried to
figure out what to do in response, American Major General Todd Semonite
wrapped up his stint as head of the American mission training the Afghan
National Army by congratulating ANA officers at a ceremony at Resolute
Support headquarters in Kabul.
You have made phenomenal progress, he told them, in budgetary
programming, pay, personnel, and force structure systems... improving
accountability while finding savings in the budget. We know what the major
general said because the U.S. military itself proudly released his statement
to the press, as if it were something other than one more incandescent
example of American obliviousness to the condition of the country U.S.
forces have occupied for 14 years.
Withdrawing Withdrawal
Worried, I wrote to Mahbouba Seraj, an old friend in Kabul, with whom I had
worked for many years, to ask how she was. She replied at once:
I believe you were reading my mind, feeling my desperation. The situation
here is going from bad to worse. No one knows how a group of 500 men can
enter a province that is protected with a full military garrison -- top
generals in command of more than 7,000 police and army troops -- and do what
they did in Kunduz. They burned, looted, raped, and killed people, and
there was no one to put a stop to it. This attack, which nobody saw coming,
is yet another mystery of mismanagement, miscommunication, or something much
bigger and more sinister than that.
Such dark imaginings spring to mind easily when you live with Afghan
uncertainty, reassured by the good intentions of strangers while bad stuff
goes on all around you. Worse yet, often enough such seemingly paranoid
unease proves to be dead on.
After the taking of Kunduz, President Obama was said to be rethinking the
situation. Within days, he announced that the U.S. force of 9,800 still in
Afghanistan -- the force he had planned to cut by half this year and reduce
to 1,000 by the end of 2016 -- would remain in place, perhaps until 2017,
until, that is, he has left office and the fallout of this American war in
Afghanistan has landed on another presidents shoulders. What happens in
the aftermath of Obamas officially concluded but never ended good war
will be up to the second lucky winner in a row to inherit one or more
leftover, unjustifiable wars.
By the time Obama made this second announcement, the Taliban had finally
slipped out of Kunduz. They might have withdrawn right away, having made
their point -- that they are now capable of taking a major provincial
capital garrisoned by the Afghan National Army.
Yet they chose to stay on for 15 days, long enough to terrify and murder
enough citizens to make an indelible impression. Afghans of a certain age
remembered in vivid flashbacks what they endured under Taliban rule before
the American invasion of 2001. They could see for themselves that the men
former President Hamid Karzai referred to as his angry brothers are still
angry, and in all the long years they have waited for the inevitable
departure of the Americans, they have not grown more tolerant. One woman
who narrowly escaped from Kunduz summed it up simply: They havent changed
one bit.
In an Afghan State of Mind
A few days later, my friend Mahbouba wrote me again. "For now," she said,
"the light at the end of the tunnel is President Obamas speech supporting
Afghans and his decision to keep troops in Afghanistan."
Like so many Afghans, one day shes desperate, the next she finds a glimmer
of light in the gloom. That schizoid zigzag has become a way of life for
embattled Afghans like her in this peculiar period after Americas war
that couldnt be won and will not end. In this darkening time, they face the
growing strength of the Taliban, the intrusion of followers of the Islamic
State of Iraq and Syria, the emergence of new splinter groups of Afghan ISIS
supporters, and even the resurgence of remnants of Al Qaeda. Yes, the
very same bunch that President Obama assured us in 2013 could never again
establish a safe haven in Afghanistan.
All these forces, along with the Afghan National Army, are now contesting
control of parts of the country. That army, trained largely by U.S. forces
for that staggering price of at least $65 billion dollars (such costs have
now been classified), is not exactly the stunning force thats been
advertised. John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan,
reported to Congress last March that the U.S. military had overestimated
the size of the Afghan police and army by a significant margin. Factor in
U.S. military accounting errors and plenty of ghost personnel, and the
actual size of the Afghan force is anybodys guess. In addition, that
force, under pressure since last spring from a fierce, unrelenting Taliban
offensive, has been losing an unsustainable average of 330 killed and
wounded a week (and hemorrhaging a disastrous 4,000 deserters a month). It
still needs the support of U.S. forces, especially Special Operations troops
like those who, on October 3rd, mistakenly called in deliberate multiple
air assaults on a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital at Kunduz, resulting in
the largest loss of life (30 dead in addition to many more wounded) the
humanitarian organization has suffered in its 35 years in that country.
Nothing stays steady in Afghanistan. Even promising developments have a way
of turning dark. Yet my friend Mahbouba, tossed between hope and despair,
always tries to take in the big picture, even as it shifts its shape before
her eyes. A member of the Afghan royal family, she was imprisoned in 1978
as a young university graduate, together with her family, by Soviet-inspired
Afghan communists who helped to overthrow the country's first president.
Eventually released, she and her family fled to the United States just
before the Soviet army invaded in 1979. She became an American citizen,
devoted to American-style democracy as she found it at that time.
After American bombs brought down the Taliban government in 2001, she
returned to Kabul to work with civil society and international aid
organizations for democracy and for women. She coached female members of
parliament. She headed the Afghan Womens Network. She ran for parliament
herself and failed to be elected only because, in the Afghan version of
democracy, autocracy often intervenes. In her case, election officials
mistakenly did not deliver the ballots that would have allowed her
constituents to vote.
Such was the new Afghan democracy run by Washingtons handpicked warlords.
(Lesson still not learned: Its a mistake to think that Americas old combat
cronies in its distant wars will behave in high office like George
Washington.) In this surreal context, where nothing is quite what it is said
to be, Mahbouba has worked through the long, long years of war and setbacks
of every sort.
Now she writes of the catastrophic taking of Kunduz, It has already become
just another bureaucratic problem: yet another indicator of something or
other slightly amiss. The government again has put in place a fact-finding
committee with two men in charge, one representing the president [Ashraf
Ghani], and the other the countrys Chief Executive Officer [Abdullah
Abdullah]. Such bureaucratic duplication is the result of what Mahbouba
calls the two-headed legacy: this divided government with its disparate
policies coming to nothing, crippling the country. That contentious,
unequal power-sharing deal was cobbled together just a year ago when
Secretary of State John Kerry resolved a bitter presidential campaign
between the two men by inventing a new entity, the National Unity
Government, unknown in the Afghan constitution.
Now, like so many think-tankers and politicos in Washington, the two top
officials of this American-made, semi-functional two-headed administration
are trying to sort out what happened in Kunduz, or assigning others to do
so. Then they may appoint another committee to discover what, if anything,
should or could be done. But as many Afghans observe, such weighty matters
sent to committee regularly fail to reemerge.
In the meantime, Afghans like Mahbouba Seraj continue to do their best in
terrible circumstances, while worrying about where the next catastrophe may
come from. In the last four decades, theyve been through a coup détat that
overthrew the last king; three presidential assassinations (one republican,
two Communists); a Soviet invasion that launched a 10-year CIA proxy war (in
conjunction with the Saudis and the Pakistanis) to give the Soviet Union its
own Vietnam; a ruinous, murderous three-year civil war among multiple
factions of Americas old allies, the mujahidin, after the Soviets left in
defeat; the torture, castration, execution, and public hanging (by the
Taliban) of Najibullah, the president the Russians had left in place (and
who is now regaining post-mortem popularity); the suffocating five-year rule
of the Taliban; an American-led invasion that returned a rogues gallery of
war criminals to power and started a 14-year war now ended officially, but
not where it counts -- in Afghanistan. No wonder people in that country are
always waiting for the next combat boot to drop.
Of that prospect, Mahbouba writes: "The West lost Afghanistan and they know
it. Right now, what is happening is a policy of containment, an effort to
keep all the problems, failures, crises, and internal fighting within the
borders of this country because the world cannot afford to have them spill
out."
Take the panic building right now in Uzbekistan, for example, a country
that has no army of its own and is very anxious, perhaps afraid, because of
what is happening right across its border with Afghanistan. Everyone knows
which one of the worlds egomaniacal Strongmen may decide to help and
protect the Uzbeks.
Given recent events in Syria, its once again eerily possible to imagine the
specter of Russian forces materializing, as in 1979, just across the Amu
Darya River on Afghanistans northern border. To think of it is to be lost
in dark memories of that invasion and the terrible proxy war that followed:
the Red Army meets the ragtag mujahidin, Ronald Reagans devoutly religious
freedom fighters, armed and directed by the United States, Saudi Arabia,
and Pakistans CIA equivalent, the ISI. Sadly enough, so many decades later,
we still live with the sequel to that war, and thanks to Americas hapless,
misbegotten nation building of the post-9/11 years, Afghans have never
been able to shake off the military and political leadership of
Washingtons aging warlord cronies, still clinging close to the money tree.
A Patrick Chapatte cartoon catches the ultimate nightmare of Americas
second Afghan War in what should be, but cant yet be, called its waning
days: following road signs pointing the way to Afghan Pullout, U.S.
soldiers in an armored vehicle drive in a circle, round and round and round
and round.
Fear of the Future
At the moment, as Mahbouba reports from Kabul, There is a heavy cloud of
mistrust and doubt hanging over this country. No one believes anyone
anymore. Rumors and conspiracy theories are flying everywhere, joined by a
fear of the future and the unknown. Young Afghan men, mostly educated, full
of energy and ambition, are leaving the country in droves every day. There
is no work for them here. No future. The poorer ones dont find the makings
of a single meal to feed their families.
Afghan boys and men have long gone to Pakistan or Iran in search of work,
but now they set out on a trek thousands of miles long with Europe as their
ultimate goal, joining untold numbers of Syrians and Iraqis in a desperate
migration the likes of which we have not seen before. Last year, 58,500
Afghans successfully sought asylum in Europe. In the first seven months of
this year, 77,700 made their way to Turkey or Europe and applied for asylum.
By October, the number had risen to a staggering 120,000. Today, tens of
thousands more risk their lives to leave the land that Washington built.
As yet another generation of potential Afghan leaders flees the once lovely
city (the third brain-draining mass migration since the 1980s), the older
Kabul disappears from view, dwarfed by mammoth new construction projects:
glass-faced office towers, block after block of ornate palatial homes,
enormous wedding palaces aglow in multicolored neon. Here is evidence that,
in the course of an endless war, some well-connected men have grown
extremely wealthy very fast. And the already immense gap between rich and
poor, noted in the Karzai years, continues to widen, as does the distrust of
the people in their democratically elected government. In these matters,
if no others, canny Afghans closely follow the example of their American 1%
counterparts.
The two-headed government seems unconcerned. In fact, Afghans now claim that
it has completely set aside its pre-election promises to fight the countrys
rampant corruption. People joke that President Ghani, who once co-wrote a
book called Fixing Failed States, should get to work on his memoir, to be
titled, so the quipsters say, Failed Government. Afghans who once viewed
former president Hamid Karzai as no more than the mayor of Kabul, playing
second fiddle to U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, now fear that President
Ghani stands in a similar relation to the commander of American and
coalition forces, U.S. Army General John Campbell.
They say, too, that Ghani has gathered around him a group of men who work
for their own ends and give no thought to their country. That, of course,
is nothing new in Afghan political life, but after the great hope the new
government engendered only one year ago, the letdown feels like a plunge
into some abyss. Its clear that where self-interest and corruption
flourish, righteous and angry men will rise up. As every Afghan knows,
thats how the Taliban first got its start.
Mahbouba ended her latest missive to me this way: Nothing is certain here.
But one thing I can tell you is this: Afghanistan needs leaders worthy of
the people. Our soldiers, who are losing their lives all over this country,
would never abandon their duties if they had good commanders and honest
leaders. Our young men would not leave the country if these old men made way
for them. It is our misfortune to be cursed with bad leaders whom we did
not choose for ourselves. There are not that many of them in number, but
they thrive like cancer in this land.
Ann Jones has worked with womens organizations in Afghanistan periodically
since 2002. A TomDispatch regular, she is the author of Kabul in Winter:
Life Without Peace in Afghanistan and most recently They Were Soldiers: How
the Wounded Return from Americas Wars -- the Untold Story, a Dispatch Books
original. She is currently an associate of the Charles Warren Center for
Studies in American History at Harvard University.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Tomorrows Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Ann Jones
© 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176065
Tomgram: Ann Jones, The Never-Ending War
By Ann Jones
Posted on November 5, 2015, Printed on November 5, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176065/
In an effort to attack Taliban fighters, an air strike by a U.S. plane
killed dozens of civilians in Kunduz, Afghanistan. In the wake of the
attack, an American general responded in unequivocal fashion. I take this
possible loss of life or injury to innocent Afghans very seriously, he
said. I have ordered a complete investigation into the reasons and results
of this attack, which I will share with the Afghan people.
In an effort to attack Taliban fighters, an air strike by a U.S. plane
killed dozens of civilians in Kunduz, Afghanistan. In the wake of the
attack, an American general responded in unequivocal fashion. I want to
offer my deepest condolences to those innocent civilians who were harmed and
killed on Saturday, he said. I've ordered a thorough investigation into
this tragic incident... we will share the results of the investigation once
it is complete.
The first of those air strikes took place in 2009 and targeted fuel tankers
hijacked by the Taliban. The second took place last month and targeted a
hospital that Afghan officials say was used as a safe haven by the Taliban.
The striking similarities between the two attacks are rooted not in uncanny
coincidence but in the law of averages. Bomb a country long enough and such
echoes are bound to occur.
Of course, U.S. planes have been carrying out attacks and terrorizing
innocent Afghans in and around Kunduz (and elsewhere in the country) since
2001. This is, after all, Americas war in Afghanistan, which has produced
eerily repetitive tragedies; a war thats also seen almost endless
announcements of achievements, improvements, and progress; a war that seems
to regularly circle back on itself.
"The Taliban is gone," Army General Tommy Franks, the chief of U.S. Central
Command, announced in 2002. Afghanistan is rising from the oppression of
the Taliban into an independent, democratic nation. Six years later, the
Taliban was, oddly enough, still around. But things were still going well.
Were clearly not done
But I do know that were making good progress, and
each and every day were making a difference in the Afghan peoples lives,
said Army Major General Jeffrey Schloesser. In 2010, Army General David
Petraeus offered his unique assessment of the war. We're making progress,
and progress is winning, if you will, he insisted. This summer, another
five years having passed, Army General John Campbell weighed in: We have
done a great job, both from both a conventional perspective and our special
operating forces, and from the Afghan security forces
I see [the Afghans]
continue to progress and continue to be very resilient.
There have been so many claims of progress these last 14 years (and so
many air strike apologies as well) and yet each announcement of further
success seems to signal the very opposite. Days after Campbell spoke, for
instance, Brigadier General Wilson Shoffner, the U.S. deputy chief of staff
for communications in Afghanistan, told reporters, Kunduz is -- is not now,
and has not been in danger of being overrun by the Taliban
that's sort of
how we see it. Just over a month later, Kunduz fell to the Taliban.
This is the war that TomDispatch regular Ann Jones has monitored, analyzed,
and covered since its opening stages, first as a humanitarian worker and
then as a reporter. While the military was spinning tales of progress, Jones
had a far more realistic assessment. The story of success in Afghanistan
was always more fairy tale than fact -- one scam used to sell another, she
wrote at this site in 2006, drawing attention to a threefold failure: no
peace, no democracy, and no reconstruction. After embedding with U.S.
troops in 2010 she said all the things America's generals never did. Id
been on the front of this war for less than two weeks, and I already
needed a vacation, she wrote. Being outside the wire had filled me with
sorrow as I watched earnest, heavily armed and armored boys try to win over
white-bearded Afghans -- men of extraordinary dignity -- who have seen all
this before and know the outcome.
All this is to say Jones has been remarkably, consistently, undeniably ahead
of the curve on the conflict, a reality reflected in her revelatory look at
the deeply personal costs of Americas second Afghan War in her now-classic
book, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars -- The
Untold Story. Shes done what billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars, 17 U.S.
intelligence agencies, the finest officers produced by Americas premier
military academies, and untold numbers of analysts with access to highly
classified information, have failed to do: accurately assess the situation
in a country the U.S. has been intimately enmeshed in, on and off now, for
the better part of four decades. With that in mind, let Jones give you the
lowdown on the current state of progress there. When youre through,
chances are -- even if you lack a top-secret clearance and have never set
foot in the Greater Middle East -- youll have a better grasp of the reality
of the war than either the Pentagon or the president has ever had. Nick
Turse
Afghanistan After the American War
Once More Down the Rabbit Hole
By Ann Jones
Ten months ago, on December 28, 2014, a ceremony in Kabul officially marked
the conclusion of Americas very long war in Afghanistan. President Obama
called that day a milestone for our country. After more than 13 years, he
said, our combat mission in Afghanistan is ending, and the longest war in
American history is coming to a responsible conclusion.
That was then. This is now. In between, on September 28, 2015, came another
milestone: the Taliban takeover of Kunduz, the capital of the province of
the same name in northern Afghanistan, and with a population of about
270,000, the countrys fifth-largest city.
A few invaders strolled unopposed to the city center to raise the white flag
of the Taliban. Others went door to door, searching for Afghan women who
worked for womens organizations or the government. They looted homes,
offices, and schools, stealing cars and smashing computers. They destroyed
three radio stations run by women. They attacked the offices of the
American-led organization Women for Afghan Women and burned its womens
shelter to the ground. They denied reports on Kabul TV stations that they
had raped women in the university dormitory and the womens prison, then
threatened to kill the reporters who broadcast the stories.
They called the mobile phones of targeted women who had escaped the city and
warned them they would be killed if they returned. No longer safe in Kunduz,
those women found that they were not safe in the places to which they had
fled either. Londons Telegraph reported that the lasting legacy of [the
Talibans] invasion may ultimately prove to be the dismantlement of the
citys womens rights network.
The next day I got an email from a woman newly assigned to the American
Embassy in Afghanistan. Security rules keep her confined behind the walls of
the embassy grounds, she said. Still, knowing that Afghan women are not
secure, she is determined to help them. Her plan, admittedly still in the
brainstorming stage, calls for programs that will teach women how to defend
themselves in some form or another, because the best way for women to be
safe is for them to know how to keep themselves safe.
I think of all my brave Afghan colleagues who go to work in womens
organizations, like those in Kunduz, every day under threat of death. I
think of fearless Afghan women across the country -- activists,
parliamentarians, doctors, teachers, organizers, policewomen, actresses, TV
presenters, singers, radio broadcasters, journalists, government ministers,
provincial officials, candidates for public office -- who over the last 10
years have been assassinated one by one, by teams of armed men on
motorcycles, or by a bomb attached to the underside of a car, or by masked
squads with ropes or Kalashnikovs. These killings have gone on year after
year, the names of the dead women remembered and their numbers tallied by
Human Rights Watch, while the Afghan government and the Bush or Obama
administrations uttered scarcely a word of protest or condolence, and Afghan
police failed to arrest a single assassin. George W. Bush famously claimed
to have liberated Afghan women. Fourteen years later, with the Taliban
again rising, with Washington having sunk tens of billions of dollars into
the training and arming of hundreds of thousands of Afghan men to defend
their country, its now time to offer Afghan women a course in how to defend
themselves?
The New York Times recently reprinted maps from the Long War Journal
illustrating the enclaves the Taliban now occupy not just in Kunduz city,
but throughout the land. They added up to about one-fifth of Afghan
territory, and the movement was said to probably either control or heavily
influence about half of the country. According to the United Nations, the
Taliban insurgency has spread through more of Afghanistan than at any point
since 2001, when it was driven from power.
As if to dramatize the circumstances depicted on the map, the Times also
reported that reinforcements from the Afghan National Army (ANA) could not
immediately travel from their headquarters in the capital, Kabul, to Kunduz
because in between lay Baghlan Province, and it, too, was largely in the
hands of the Taliban.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463710/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463710/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20For months,
the Taliban had been capturing bits and pieces of Kunduz Province, yet their
attack apparently took the citys defenders by surprise. Afghan security
forces numbering 7,000 scattered or retreated before the advance of a few
hundred Taliban fighters. While its commanders tried to figure out what to
do in response, American Major General Todd Semonite wrapped up his stint as
head of the American mission training the Afghan National Army by
congratulating ANA officers at a ceremony at Resolute Support headquarters
in Kabul.
You have made phenomenal progress, he told them, in budgetary
programming, pay, personnel, and force structure systems... improving
accountability while finding savings in the budget. We know what the major
general said because the U.S. military itself proudly released his statement
to the press, as if it were something other than one more incandescent
example of American obliviousness to the condition of the country U.S.
forces have occupied for 14 years.
Withdrawing Withdrawal
Worried, I wrote to Mahbouba Seraj, an old friend in Kabul, with whom I had
worked for many years, to ask how she was. She replied at once:
I believe you were reading my mind, feeling my desperation. The situation
here is going from bad to worse. No one knows how a group of 500 men can
enter a province that is protected with a full military garrison -- top
generals in command of more than 7,000 police and army troops -- and do what
they did in Kunduz. They burned, looted, raped, and killed people, and there
was no one to put a stop to it. This attack, which nobody saw coming, is yet
another mystery of mismanagement, miscommunication, or something much bigger
and more sinister than that.
Such dark imaginings spring to mind easily when you live with Afghan
uncertainty, reassured by the good intentions of strangers while bad stuff
goes on all around you. Worse yet, often enough such seemingly paranoid
unease proves to be dead on.
After the taking of Kunduz, President Obama was said to be rethinking the
situation. Within days, he announced that the U.S. force of 9,800 still in
Afghanistan -- the force he had planned to cut by half this year and reduce
to 1,000 by the end of 2016 -- would remain in place, perhaps until 2017,
until, that is, he has left office and the fallout of this American war in
Afghanistan has landed on another presidents shoulders. What happens in the
aftermath of Obamas officially concluded but never ended good war will be
up to the second lucky winner in a row to inherit one or more leftover,
unjustifiable wars.
By the time Obama made this second announcement, the Taliban had finally
slipped out of Kunduz. They might have withdrawn right away, having made
their point -- that they are now capable of taking a major provincial
capital garrisoned by the Afghan National Army.
Yet they chose to stay on for 15 days, long enough to terrify and murder
enough citizens to make an indelible impression. Afghans of a certain age
remembered in vivid flashbacks what they endured under Taliban rule before
the American invasion of 2001. They could see for themselves that the men
former President Hamid Karzai referred to as his angry brothers are still
angry, and in all the long years they have waited for the inevitable
departure of the Americans, they have not grown more tolerant. One woman who
narrowly escaped from Kunduz summed it up simply: They havent changed one
bit.
In an Afghan State of Mind
A few days later, my friend Mahbouba wrote me again. "For now," she said,
"the light at the end of the tunnel is President Obamas speech supporting
Afghans and his decision to keep troops in Afghanistan."
Like so many Afghans, one day shes desperate, the next she finds a glimmer
of light in the gloom. That schizoid zigzag has become a way of life for
embattled Afghans like her in this peculiar period after Americas war
that couldnt be won and will not end. In this darkening time, they face the
growing strength of the Taliban, the intrusion of followers of the Islamic
State of Iraq and Syria, the emergence of new splinter groups of Afghan ISIS
supporters, and even the resurgence of remnants of Al Qaeda. Yes, the very
same bunch that President Obama assured us in 2013 could never again
establish a safe haven in Afghanistan.
All these forces, along with the Afghan National Army, are now contesting
control of parts of the country. That army, trained largely by U.S. forces
for that staggering price of at least $65 billion dollars (such costs have
now been classified), is not exactly the stunning force thats been
advertised. John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan,
reported to Congress last March that the U.S. military had overestimated
the size of the Afghan police and army by a significant margin. Factor in
U.S. military accounting errors and plenty of ghost personnel, and the
actual size of the Afghan force is anybodys guess. In addition, that force,
under pressure since last spring from a fierce, unrelenting Taliban
offensive, has been losing an unsustainable average of 330 killed and
wounded a week (and hemorrhaging a disastrous 4,000 deserters a month). It
still needs the support of U.S. forces, especially Special Operations troops
like those who, on October 3rd, mistakenly called in deliberate multiple
air assaults on a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital at Kunduz, resulting in
the largest loss of life (30 dead in addition to many more wounded) the
humanitarian organization has suffered in its 35 years in that country.
Nothing stays steady in Afghanistan. Even promising developments have a way
of turning dark. Yet my friend Mahbouba, tossed between hope and despair,
always tries to take in the big picture, even as it shifts its shape before
her eyes. A member of the Afghan royal family, she was imprisoned in 1978 as
a young university graduate, together with her family, by Soviet-inspired
Afghan communists who helped to overthrow the country's first president.
Eventually released, she and her family fled to the United States just
before the Soviet army invaded in 1979. She became an American citizen,
devoted to American-style democracy as she found it at that time.
After American bombs brought down the Taliban government in 2001, she
returned to Kabul to work with civil society and international aid
organizations for democracy and for women. She coached female members of
parliament. She headed the Afghan Womens Network. She ran for parliament
herself and failed to be elected only because, in the Afghan version of
democracy, autocracy often intervenes. In her case, election officials
mistakenly did not deliver the ballots that would have allowed her
constituents to vote.
Such was the new Afghan democracy run by Washingtons handpicked warlords.
(Lesson still not learned: Its a mistake to think that Americas old combat
cronies in its distant wars will behave in high office like George
Washington.) In this surreal context, where nothing is quite what it is said
to be, Mahbouba has worked through the long, long years of war and setbacks
of every sort.
Now she writes of the catastrophic taking of Kunduz, It has already become
just another bureaucratic problem: yet another indicator of something or
other slightly amiss. The government again has put in place a fact-finding
committee with two men in charge, one representing the president [Ashraf
Ghani], and the other the countrys Chief Executive Officer [Abdullah
Abdullah]. Such bureaucratic duplication is the result of what Mahbouba
calls the two-headed legacy: this divided government with its disparate
policies coming to nothing, crippling the country. That contentious,
unequal power-sharing deal was cobbled together just a year ago when
Secretary of State John Kerry resolved a bitter presidential campaign
between the two men by inventing a new entity, the National Unity
Government, unknown in the Afghan constitution.
Now, like so many think-tankers and politicos in Washington, the two top
officials of this American-made, semi-functional two-headed administration
are trying to sort out what happened in Kunduz, or assigning others to do
so. Then they may appoint another committee to discover what, if anything,
should or could be done. But as many Afghans observe, such weighty matters
sent to committee regularly fail to reemerge.
In the meantime, Afghans like Mahbouba Seraj continue to do their best in
terrible circumstances, while worrying about where the next catastrophe may
come from. In the last four decades, theyve been through a coup détat that
overthrew the last king; three presidential assassinations (one republican,
two Communists); a Soviet invasion that launched a 10-year CIA proxy war (in
conjunction with the Saudis and the Pakistanis) to give the Soviet Union its
own Vietnam; a ruinous, murderous three-year civil war among multiple
factions of Americas old allies, the mujahidin, after the Soviets left in
defeat; the torture, castration, execution, and public hanging (by the
Taliban) of Najibullah, the president the Russians had left in place (and
who is now regaining post-mortem popularity); the suffocating five-year rule
of the Taliban; an American-led invasion that returned a rogues gallery of
war criminals to power and started a 14-year war now ended officially, but
not where it counts -- in Afghanistan. No wonder people in that country are
always waiting for the next combat boot to drop.
Of that prospect, Mahbouba writes: "The West lost Afghanistan and they know
it. Right now, what is happening is a policy of containment, an effort to
keep all the problems, failures, crises, and internal fighting within the
borders of this country because the world cannot afford to have them spill
out."
Take the panic building right now in Uzbekistan, for example, a country
that has no army of its own and is very anxious, perhaps afraid, because of
what is happening right across its border with Afghanistan. Everyone knows
which one of the worlds egomaniacal Strongmen may decide to help and
protect the Uzbeks.
Given recent events in Syria, its once again eerily possible to imagine the
specter of Russian forces materializing, as in 1979, just across the Amu
Darya River on Afghanistans northern border. To think of it is to be lost
in dark memories of that invasion and the terrible proxy war that followed:
the Red Army meets the ragtag mujahidin, Ronald Reagans devoutly religious
freedom fighters, armed and directed by the United States, Saudi Arabia,
and Pakistans CIA equivalent, the ISI. Sadly enough, so many decades later,
we still live with the sequel to that war, and thanks to Americas hapless,
misbegotten nation building of the post-9/11 years, Afghans have never
been able to shake off the military and political leadership of
Washingtons aging warlord cronies, still clinging close to the money tree.
A Patrick Chapatte cartoon catches the ultimate nightmare of Americas
second Afghan War in what should be, but cant yet be, called its waning
days: following road signs pointing the way to Afghan Pullout, U.S.
soldiers in an armored vehicle drive in a circle, round and round and round
and round.
Fear of the Future
At the moment, as Mahbouba reports from Kabul, There is a heavy cloud of
mistrust and doubt hanging over this country. No one believes anyone
anymore. Rumors and conspiracy theories are flying everywhere, joined by a
fear of the future and the unknown. Young Afghan men, mostly educated, full
of energy and ambition, are leaving the country in droves every day. There
is no work for them here. No future. The poorer ones dont find the makings
of a single meal to feed their families.
Afghan boys and men have long gone to Pakistan or Iran in search of work,
but now they set out on a trek thousands of miles long with Europe as their
ultimate goal, joining untold numbers of Syrians and Iraqis in a desperate
migration the likes of which we have not seen before. Last year, 58,500
Afghans successfully sought asylum in Europe. In the first seven months of
this year, 77,700 made their way to Turkey or Europe and applied for asylum.
By October, the number had risen to a staggering 120,000. Today, tens of
thousands more risk their lives to leave the land that Washington built.
As yet another generation of potential Afghan leaders flees the once lovely
city (the third brain-draining mass migration since the 1980s), the older
Kabul disappears from view, dwarfed by mammoth new construction projects:
glass-faced office towers, block after block of ornate palatial homes,
enormous wedding palaces aglow in multicolored neon. Here is evidence that,
in the course of an endless war, some well-connected men have grown
extremely wealthy very fast. And the already immense gap between rich and
poor, noted in the Karzai years, continues to widen, as does the distrust of
the people in their democratically elected government. In these matters,
if no others, canny Afghans closely follow the example of their American 1%
counterparts.
The two-headed government seems unconcerned. In fact, Afghans now claim that
it has completely set aside its pre-election promises to fight the countrys
rampant corruption. People joke that President Ghani, who once co-wrote a
book called Fixing Failed States, should get to work on his memoir, to be
titled, so the quipsters say, Failed Government. Afghans who once viewed
former president Hamid Karzai as no more than the mayor of Kabul, playing
second fiddle to U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, now fear that President
Ghani stands in a similar relation to the commander of American and
coalition forces, U.S. Army General John Campbell.
They say, too, that Ghani has gathered around him a group of men who work
for their own ends and give no thought to their country. That, of course, is
nothing new in Afghan political life, but after the great hope the new
government engendered only one year ago, the letdown feels like a plunge
into some abyss. Its clear that where self-interest and corruption
flourish, righteous and angry men will rise up. As every Afghan knows,
thats how the Taliban first got its start.
Mahbouba ended her latest missive to me this way: Nothing is certain here.
But one thing I can tell you is this: Afghanistan needs leaders worthy of
the people. Our soldiers, who are losing their lives all over this country,
would never abandon their duties if they had good commanders and honest
leaders. Our young men would not leave the country if these old men made way
for them. It is our misfortune to be cursed with bad leaders whom we did not
choose for ourselves. There are not that many of them in number, but they
thrive like cancer in this land.
Ann Jones has worked with womens organizations in Afghanistan periodically
since 2002. A TomDispatch regular, she is the author of Kabul in Winter:
Life Without Peace in Afghanistan and most recently They Were Soldiers: How
the Wounded Return from Americas Wars -- the Untold Story, a Dispatch Books
original. She is currently an associate of the Charles Warren Center for
Studies in American History at Harvard University.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
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Copyright 2015 Ann Jones
© 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
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