We tell ourselves the stories we need to hear. This is excerpt details American involvement in Afghanistan, but from a non-embedded reporters point of view and analysis.
“The central thesis of the American failure in Afghanistan — the one you’ll hear from politicians and pundits and even scholars — was succinctly propounded by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage: “The war in Iraq drained resources from Afghanistan before things were under control.” In this view, the American invasion of Iraq became a crucial distraction from stabilization efforts in Afghanistan, and in the resulting security vacuum the Taliban reasserted themselves.
At its core, the argument rests upon a key premise: that jihadi terrorism could be defeated through the military occupation of a country. That formulation seemed natural enough to many of us in the wake of 9/11. But travel through the southern Afghan countryside, and you will hear quite a different interpretation of what happened. It comes in snippets and flashes, in the stories people tell and their memories of the time, and it points to a contradiction buried deep in the war’s basic premise.
You can find this contradiction embodied in a sprawling jumble of dust-blown hangars, barracks, and Burger Kings, a facility of barbed wire, gunmen, and internment cages: Kandahar Airfield, or KAF, as it came to be called, the nerve center for American operations in southern Afghanistan, home to elite units like the Navy SEALs and the Green Berets. A military base in a country like Afghanistan is also a web of relationships, a hub for the local economy, and a key player in the political ecosystem. Unravel how this base came to be, and you’ll begin to understand how war returned to the fields of Maiwand.
In December 2001, an American Special Operations Forces unit pulled into an old Soviet airbase on the outskirts of Kandahar city. They were accompanied by a team of Afghan militiamen and their commander, a gregarious, grizzly bear of a man named Gul Agha Sherzai. An anti-Taliban warlord, Sherzai had shot to notoriety in the 1990s following the death of his illustrious father, Hajji Latif, a onetime bandit turned mujahed known as “the Lion of Kandahar.” (Upon assuming his father’s mantle, Gul Agha had rechristened himself Sherzai, Son of the Lion. His first name, incidentally, roughly translates as “Respected Mr. Flower.”) With American backing, Sherzai seized the airfield, then in ruins, and subsequently installed himself in the local governor’s mansion — a move that incensed many, Hamid Karzai among them. Nonetheless, Sherzai brought a certain flair to the office, quickly catching notice for his fist-pounding speeches, tearful soliloquies, and outbursts of uncontrollable laughter, sometimes all in a single conversation.
Sherzai may not have had much experience in government, except a brief tenure as Kandahar’s “governor” during the anarchic mid-1990s, but he knew a good business opportunity when he saw one. The airbase where the Americans were encamped was derelict and weedy, strewn with smashed furniture and seeded with land mines from the Soviet era. Early on, one of Sherzai’s lieutenants met Master Sergeant Perry Toomer, a U.S. officer in charge of logistics and contracting. “I started talking to him,” Toomer said, “and found out that they had a knowledge of how to get this place started.” After touring the facilities, the Americans placed their first order: $325 in cash for a pair of Honda water pumps.
It would mark the beginning of a long and fruitful partnership. With Sherzai’s services, the cracked and cratered airstrip blossomed into a massive, sprawling military base, home to one of the world’s busiest airports. Kandahar Airfield would grow into a key hub in Washington’s global war on terror, housing top-secret black-ops command rooms and large wire-mesh cages for terror suspects en route to the American prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
For Sherzai, KAF would be only the beginning. In a few swift strokes, he made the desert bloom with American installations — and turned an extravagant profit in the process. He swiped land and rented it to U.S. forces to the tune of millions of dollars. Amid the ensuing construction boom, he seized gravel quarries, charging as much as $100 a load for what would normally have been an $8-a-load job. He furnished American troops with fuel for their trucks and workers for their projects, raking in commissions while functioning as an informal temp agency for his tribesmen.
With this windfall, he diversified into gasoline and water distribution, real estate, taxi services, mining, and, most lucrative of all, opium. No longer a mere governor, he was now one of the most powerful men in Afghanistan. Every morning, lines of supplicants would curl out of the governor’s mansion.
As his web of patronage grew, he began providing the Americans with hired guns, usually from his own Barakzai tribe — making him, in essence, a private security contractor, an Afghan Blackwater. And like the employees of that notorious American firm, Sherzai’s gunmen lived largely outside the jurisdiction of any government. Even as Washington pumped in funds to create a national Afghan army and police, the U.S. military subsidized Sherzai’s mercenaries, who owed their loyalty to the governor and the special forces alone. Some of his units could even be seen garbed in U.S. uniforms, driving heavily armed flatbed trucks through the streets of Kandahar.
How to Fight the War on Terror Without an Adversary
Of course, even in the new Afghanistan there was no such thing as a free lunch. In return for privileged access to American dollars, Sherzai delivered the one thing U.S. forces felt they needed most: intelligence. His men became the Americans’ eyes and ears in their drive to eradicate the Taliban and al-Qaeda from Kandahar.
Yet here lay the contradiction. Following the Taliban’s collapse, al-Qaeda had fled the country, resettling in the tribal regions of Pakistan and in Iran. By April 2002, the group could no longer be found in Kandahar — or anywhere else in Afghanistan. The Taliban, meanwhile, had ceased to exist, its members having retired to their homes and surrendered their weapons. Save for a few lone wolf attacks, U.S. forces in Kandahar in 2002 faced no resistance at all. The terrorists had all decamped or abandoned the cause, yet U.S. special forces were on Afghan soil with a clear political mandate: defeat terrorism.
How do you fight a war without an adversary? Enter Gul Agha Sherzai — and men like him around the country. Eager to survive and prosper, he and his commanders followed the logic of the American presence to its obvious conclusion. They would create enemies where there were none, exploiting the perverse incentive mechanism that the Americans — without even realizing it — had put in place.
Sherzai’s enemies became America’s enemies, his battles its battles. His personal feuds and jealousies were repackaged as “counterterrorism,” his business interests as Washington’s. And where rivalries did not do the trick, the prospect of further profits did. (One American leaflet dropped by plane in the area read: “Get Wealth and Power Beyond Your Dreams. Help Anti-Taliban Forces Rid Afghanistan of Murderers and Terrorists.”)
-Excerpted from No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes by Anand Gopal, published by Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.Copyright 2015 Anand Gopal
11 comments
April 14, 2015 at 8:51 am
robert browning
This piece is more evidence that greed is the root force behind aggression and violence locally and internationally. Truly representative governments would be the antidote to keep the basic instinct of self preservation from escalating to the behavior we have today, imho.
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April 14, 2015 at 10:29 am
The Arbourist
@Robert Browning
I’m not sure how representative government would fix the problem. The foreign policies of representative democracies as of late are tell tales of a imperialistic, greed focused narrative.
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April 14, 2015 at 1:44 pm
robert browning
Substitute “socialistic” for “truly”. It will be a long time coming since the capitalists, as you say, have such control of the narrative.
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April 14, 2015 at 8:29 pm
VR Kaine
Even as a capitalist I’m against how much of it drives or is involved in a war. Business is business and a fight is a fight and in principle I never think the two should be mixed.
Anyways, a great opinion on the money pit that Afghanistan has been courtesy of Shane Smith’s VICE on HBO (sorry to sound like such a VICE fanboy on here, but I think their reporting is fearless).
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April 15, 2015 at 4:23 am
rautakyy
What is the significant difference between Soviet occupation and the Western occupation of Afghanishtan? That businesmen like our lovely “Mr Flower” here may make money from the pockets of taxpayers of US and Afghanishtan and several other countries and call it business instead of calling it corruption as it is and was when the likes of him worked for the Soviets?
In both cases there has been this multimillion military operation going on to satisfy a certain feeling of safety of the citizenry of these empires. With the fraction of the money poured onto these military operations a number of poor countries could have risen from the economical distress they are in.
These sorts of operations are done in the name of spreading an ideology to a country in wich most people have no grasp of said ideolgoies. Those importing their own ideals are sure, that once people there get the hang of it, it must be what they would have chosen for themselves, if they ever had the opportunity to make any choises.
When the Soviets were building schools for girl children in Afghanishtan the US mounted a giant operation to build religious guerilla armies to oppose such, now the US is paying for the building of the very same schools and even more just to fight the very same guerilla organizations they themselves organized in the first place. All the while most of the money is shifted into private accounts in tax-paradises.
Empires act as they do and exist to serve the richest of men, but only as long as they can frighten their populations with outside threats. No matter what their ideologies say…
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April 15, 2015 at 2:07 pm
VR Kaine
“What is the significant difference between Soviet occupation and the Western occupation of Afghanishtan?”
I agree with a lot of your points in your comment (particularly in regards to spreading ideology), but let’s not gloss over the fact that the ROE’s for both armies (US and Soviet) were vastly (ghastly) different. It takes little to find out what tactics beyond “building schools” the Soviets were using to wipe out the Afghanis, so much so that it made Bin Laden and Al Qaeda the “good guys”.
Imperialism on a political scale is one thing, ROE’s of the actual armies going in is another. America had its bad apples, but entire Soviet batallions were sick. Rolling a tank over women to make the local males talk is just one tactic that comes to mind. Their use of cluster munitions and letting them be allowed to be confused by kids as toys is another.
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April 15, 2015 at 7:21 pm
robert browning
To VR, Too much MSM has you speculating the way you should on who’s the biggest bad guy. The CIA, Mussad, KGB- whats the difference? Your local media’s PR has you focused for the home team bc, ya know, capitalists are good.
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April 15, 2015 at 11:12 pm
VR Kaine
If you can’t see or care to know the differences between the ROE’s of different militaries then that’s just an ignorance chosen on your part that you can decide for yourself if you can be comfortable living in. Fact is there are armies out there with very few if any ROE’s towards civilians and there are armies with very many, and taking even the recent Russian action towards the Ukraine that difference is pretty obvious.
It’s the same with your ilk wanting to see ANY uniformed person as a “bad guy”. Reality is some are warmongers, some aren’t, some are worse, some are better – it just takes less generalizing than most peacenicks are capable of, and not just concerning that but concerning anything regardling leadership – they just don’t have a clue.
As for the intelligence services, they all play a nasty game that is probably not much different from one country to the next, that’s probably true.
If one does assume they’re all the same, though, then the only difference would boil down to what country you live in since that’s the country your intelligence service is most likely going to be catering to. On that note I’d simply say that if you’d rather see your country’s intelligence service catering to a country other than the one you live in, then either go live in that other country and try life there for awhile or move to a country that doesn’t have an intelligence service at all. Grenada or Malta, perhaps?
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April 16, 2015 at 5:10 am
rautakyy
@VR Kaine,I have served in uniform and do agree with you, that there are differences in the methods and ethics of different armies. Some imperialist armies do all the crap on their own accord, some use private contractors, like for example Mr. Flower mentioned in the article. Some cause more havoc than others. Some armies are more efficient than others and so forth. Some choose to bomb from orbit and some just try to condition their soldiers to yearn for a kill. Some choose to set up mock trials (like the Soviets used to), or simply use the collective punishment (like Israel and Nazi-Germany), some might decide not to call P.O.W.s what they are, but instead call them “illegal fighters”, torture them and imprison them for unforseeable time without even a hope of a trial.
I see the differences, you refer to and others, but they are all too often either cosmetic, or about scale, not about the ethics of what is being done. The excuses are similar and so are the end results of the methods.
It greatly depends on the level of authoritarianism of the culture of the empire itself, what can be asked of the common soldier. Like for example when the Iraqi caretaker government director Mr. Bremer told the US forces to gun down some thieves in order to stop the general robbery in Baghdad he was explained, that the soldiers can not act as judge, jury and executioners on the street for the random crime of theft. I bet a Soviet general would not have had the same problem, but is the evil done by some a justification for the lesser evil done by others?
No, doubt the Al-Kaida is to it’s members an organization of “freedom fighters” and any freedom fighters are “terrorists” to the empires they oppose.
We here in Finland have a proverb, that a Ruskie is a Ruskie even if you bake him in butter. Shure, looking at what they did in Afghanishtan and are doing even today makes one wonder if it is true. That the red army is as much the mallet the Russian army has been for centuries. On the other hand, I have several Russian intellectual, sincere and very humane friends. And imperialism is a sickeness, that is contagious even to the most minute nations. During WWII, my people, the Finns dreamed of an empire stretching all the way to the Urals. Imagine that! And suddenly the ethics of deeds were all about who did and to achieve what, not about what exactly was done. Even German newspapers wrote about how badly the Finns treated their P.O.W.s when they were marched on to a minefield and it was all justified by the terror of Stalin – a very real and existing evil. Does the greater evil of others justify evil from us?
In Russia, the opposition to what their army is doing is snuffed out or shouted down. No “peacenicks” are tolerated and people in general seem to think, that the actions taken by the Russian “covert operations” units are totally justified to protect the “Russians” in eastern Ukraine. That is the face of imperialism hiding behind patriotism.
The red army commanders could have fared the war in Afghanishtan as their personal sand box for ages on, or simply nuked it out of existance, but it was the common opinion of the Soviet citizens and their “peacenicks”, that forced them to withdraw from there. A bit like the US from a number of countries it has occupied during the last century.
It is all too easy to form a hegemony of either you are against, or for us, to kill all critique and that rarely ever leads to anywhere, but into dark places. I can remember a number of leading politicians even in modern day empires who have had the audacity to appeal to such underhanded tribal moralism openly in public.
It is not about any uniformed person being the bad guy, but that a society that has the “peacenicks” also has the conscience to take at least some responsibility on what action is excused by war being an ethically challenging social situation in the first place. Do you see what I mean?
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April 16, 2015 at 9:38 am
robert browning
Hip hip, agreement on the covert being a nasty business. Invading and occupying forces aren’t really different. Someday, hopefully, the worlds resources will be shared properly and not be possessions of the biggest guns. Western empire builders are not angels– we probably started the Ukraine bullshit, if history is any clue.
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April 16, 2015 at 1:23 pm
VR Kaine
We certainly aren’t angels, and capitalism is no saint. I loved the movie Charlie Wilson’s War, and how on the one hand we did some good there yet on the other hand left such a mess. A long way to go to where you speak of – a more equitable sharing of resources worldwide and a much more desirable world to be in, I fully agree and you’ll never get argument from me there.
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