Afghanistan after Twenty

I don't talk about Afghanistan much.

If you look at the news today you would be forgiven for thinking that our failure there is Biden’s fault.

Or Trumps.

This story didn’t start in 2021 however, or 2016.

It didn’t even start in 2001.

It started just before I was born, and I’m 42 this year.

In the seventies (78, or 79, I believe), there was a coup in Afghanistan, and a group of political dissidents arose. A series of assassinations took place, and a communist party took over. The USSR backed it, whom we were in a cold war with. Without getting into a lot of details, we boycotted the 1980 Olympics which were being held in the USSR at the time over Soviet involvement in Afghanistan.

Prior to that, the Soviets had a long history in Afghanistan, and a friendly relation with Pakistan, who has seaports in that portion of the world. Afghanistan is mineral-rich, and a victory in there would have allowed the Soviets (now the Russians) a clear path to Pakistan and thus the ocean. Making shipping simpler, and giving them an edge in the deployment of weapons in the cold-war.

Many people backed local “freedom fighters,” called the mujahedeen that fought against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. One of their mujahedeen’s supporters (fiscally and spiritually) was the son of a local construction and shipping magnate in Afghanistan, named Osama Bin Laden, though he resided in Pakistan at the time.

Bin Laden reportedly did no fighting himself, but used resources and money to back the fighters in their Jihad against the Russians. Much of the money and weapons that Bin Laden received came from international sources. Including from us, though reportedly indirectly. I know it was from us, because we seized Stinger missiles from them.  

The mujahedeen drove the Russians out, but the bottom line is that they were radical Muslims in a country that had lost all central governing ability. The expense of the Soviet-Afghan war is one of the key reasons why Russia lost the cold-war.

The Soviets were unwilling to commit to the long term in Afghanistan, and the mujahedeen wore no uniforms. Anyone could be an enemy. Their only solution would have been colonization, and they lacked the resources to maintain a presence there for decades.

After the Soviets were driven out, bin Laden and associates began recruiting for pan-Islamism. They had offices (according to history.com) in Brooklyn, and Tucson among other places. Recruitment happened for years, hiring migrant soldiers, and reinforcing the ideas of radical Islam.

Near the end of the soviet-afghan war, Bin Laden formed Al-Qaeda. At the same time, we were tied up fighting with various factions of Muslims in the middle east (Afghanistan is in Southwest Asia, by the way, not the Middle East).

Al-Qaeda went to Saudi-Arabia for fundraising, and offered to have Al-Qaeda guard the border after Iraq invaded Kuwait. The Saudis rebuffed him, and turned to the United States for aid instead. Bin Laden considers the United States to be infidels, and vowed that Al-Qaeda would one day rule the world, and not the United States.

Terrorist acts from Al-Qaeda began in earnest in the nineties. Bin Laden came on to the FBI’s most wanted list. Car bombs, and the sinking of the USS Cole were attributed to Al Qaeda.

All of this happened under Carter, Reagan, and Bush Sr.

All of this happened before the Trade Centers were hit.

Carter and Reagan funded the mujahedeen so they could end the expensive cold war and establish the United States as the dominant military power in the Northern Hemisphere. We dealt with the consequences twenty years later.

In 2001, the trade center was hit, and the United States went into Uzbekistan (Karshi Khanabad, specifically, which we used for staging in 2001) and Afghanistan with no set plan. Even were there a plan, Bush Jr. invaded Iraq without probable cause, pulling troops away from Afghanistan in its opening year.

We were caught in the same trap we set for the Russians, against the same fighters that we funded to fight against our former adversaries.

Fast forward to 2016, and Obama changes tactics and begins prioritizing drone strikes to save servicemen lives over increasing deployments. Civilians are frequent casualties.

Fast forward again to 2018, and Trump requests the release of Abdul Ghani Barador from a Pakistani jail. He is now the ruler of Afghanistan under the Taliban. In 2020 Trump drew American presence in Afghanistan to 2,500 people. In the whole country.

Fast forward to 2021, and Biden pulls the last 2,500 troops out, and it’s somehow his fault that the country fell.

Had he increased troop presence, he would have been blamed for endless war. But if he pulls out, then Afghanistan is somehow his failure.

Given the decades of bipartisan failure, the result is much more complicated than that.

I went over there 3 times. I spent a total of 35 months in Afghanistan.

I was on the initial push in 2001, I returned in 2003, and then was there from 2005-2007

I have caried and fired my rifle, held wounded Afghani, and had grenades thrown in my vehicle while driving. I have guarded temporary internment facilities, led prisoners with hoods on the head into and out of cells, helped put down riots, and taken fire while we went to deliver food and medical supplies to children.

I have called for artillery on enemy positions, and carried bodies off of flight lines for operation Anaconda.

We somehow managed to give out blankets and bombs in that country and expected them not to find a mixed message.

What I saw that bothers me more than anything else however was the fact that we worked alongside an ever-growing number of contractors from Brown and Root, BlackWater, and other security and support companies. It was an open secret that congressmen, vice presidents, and state representatives held stock in these companies, while their presence grew and American troops were frequently performing jobs they were untrained for (cooks holding rifles on the wire, or going on patrol, for instance, or laundry and bath specialists putting down riots) while the jobs they were trained for went filled by civilians.

I watched our country’s leadership get richer over two decades while the body count rose.

I watched as we went into towns where we were unwanted and never knew who was on our side or not.

I watched as our fuel cell was blown up.

I have been mortared, rocketed, and shot at.

I came back whole when many did not.

And I did it again and again.

I was lucky. I am grateful.

I’m glad we’re out, because our country’s leaders can no longer profit off the war. I’m glad that we’re no longer mired in a twenty-year debacle where we somehow attempt to nation build and impose unwanted democracy on a country with a theocratic government.

I’m sad, however. We knew Bin Laden was in Pakistan, and we invaded Afghanistan anyway. Even after we killed him, we stayed. We stayed, ostensibly to hold the Taliban at bay, whole local government officials and Afghan soldiers were clearly already members.

I know they were members the same way everyone else involved knew; because the Taliban doesn’t wear a uniform. It’s power is that of the religious zealot and idealist, who wants exactly what Christian dominionists want: Religious authority over schools and laws.

Those people look like anyone, and you can’t separate them by uniform. You can’t root out ideas. At least not without colonization, and we don’t do that (officially).

I’m sad that we never learned the lesson that we paid the mujahedeen to teach the Soviets.

I’m sad that they taught it to us.

I’m sad that it took us twenty years to learn it.

I’m sad that we could have taken all that money and solved out country’s homelessness, or our healthcare crisis, and instead we mixed it with blood and used it to feed the military industrial complex.

I’m sad we were told we couldn’t afford those things in America while we wasted trillions on a war where we tried using firepower to counter ideals.

I’m sad because the people who send us to war never have to suffer the consequences of it unless their stock dips.

And I’m sad because I work in a place where I see the effects of this war on those who were sent over there for no real reason.

We’re going to go back to Afghanistan soon. Likely in my lifetime.

And I’m glad that I can teach my children not to make the same mistake their father did.