Counter-Insurgency in Afghanistan was code for spending money and recycling contracts, a euphemism for politicians taking care of their clients both within and without the Department of Defense. As a young infantry officer, I focused elsewhere: I had soldiers to bring home and bad guys to kill. Noble actions I hoped would serve the official goals of our decades-long occupation. If we were to successfully “set conditions for a peaceful transition to civil governance”, there couldn’t be firefights every day. I played the role of a grime-covered diplomat, sharing meals with the Pashtun (the historically dominant ethnic and linguistic people of “modern” Afghanistan), deferring to their planning, and directing medics to staunch their blood. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Now at the end, our international coup de grâce stirs Americans to ask what we were doing in the first place.
In 2008, the war was a bright-eyed youth of 7. American rifle companies scoured that alien waste for violence. Our endlessly discussed attempts at building “capacity” in our Afghan allies remained nebulous at best and comedic at worst. They couldn’t respond to attacks because they stole all the gas we provided for their trucks. They couldn’t build rapport with a village elder because they insulted the very soil they stood on by having non-Pashtun officers. We were trying to forge a modern “nation” out of nationless-ness. Our illusions were at the same time unconvincing and violent. There were excesses. Collateral damages. Coils of nameless viscera on roadways and mountain trails, forgotten but desperate engagements, blank stares of shattered men in ditches.
By 2010, the war was a homicidal berserker with a taxpayer credit card. Shipping containers stuffed with equipment we couldn’t possibly train to use, let alone employ effectively, sat unopened. Generals flew in on helicopters, consumed powerpoint briefings, spun webs of acronyms designed to make an hour pass before their helicopter returned. We gazed at an uncertain future of being relieved and going home. On the big bases, post-graduate civilians promoted upcoming elections and complimented us on the security we provided to district level voting centers. There were no district level voting centers. They existed only on a slide.
What existed were the tribes. There was no “Taliban,” considered as a common enemy of a mythical, unified Afghan people. The Taliban were Pashtun militia, men fighting Infidels as their fathers did against the Soviets and their great-grandfathers the British. The line between friend and enemy was not drawn between the Taliban and the Afghan people, but between Muslims who had the connections to grift the American puppets in Kabul, and Muslims who did not, which is why Kabul fell to the Taliban without effort. Without American money crafting the distinction, the distinction disappeared. All that was left were the tribes. No one was really fighting for “Afghanistan.”
It took any man with basic cognition all of 10 minutes outside the wire to know we were wasting our time and bullets and blood. We could kill all the people we wanted. We were aliens pouring out of high clearance vehicles, laden in costumes of largesse, chattering in tongues, tossing coins to our executioners. We had honor amongst ourselves, of course, and courage in bountiful clusters; but it was wasted pursuing a mirage. “Insurgents” were phantoms on the ridgelines. They didn’t really exist. We fought men with Russian rifles, masters of mud-walled fortresses, in the valleys of their birth. The enemy wasn’t resisting progress or agitating for chaos, they were ambushing non-believers on their soil. Our abstract classifications simply didn’t translate.
Osama died, but that didn’t involve the war. His destruction was an art piece of surgical force that had likely been planned and cancelled and planned again. He deserved to die, don’t misread me. But the years of night patrols to avoid bombs, the run-away machine guns, the screaming canyons filled with smoke; they weren’t part of that.
At 20 years, the war body has finally succumbed to the cancer of foolishness. 2,300 killed in action. 23,000+ wounded. We arrived to punish the staging area of 9/11 and watched 18 year olds from Kansas blown to pieces decades later. In 2007, a Sergeant Major from American Samoa endured his 19 year old son being shot through while both humping rucks in the same outfit. In what demented exercise of military tragedy is that even possible? Yet our methods shambled on through the blinding glare of a reality unknown at home. We stumbled out there in the dust for years. Now, the country has cut the umbilical cord of the Dollar and its sucklings. The papers call the power replacing it “the Taliban.” In truth, the Taliban is nothing else than Afghans who have rejected our money. Now, they have our weapons, our technology, and our training.
We lost. It seems impossible to imagine what a victory would even have looked like, besides violently placing one tribe in power over every other, forsaking the project of building a democratic nation, accepting Afghanistan’s divisions and utilizing them to ensure our dominance.
The question, now, is how to spin the loss. As the world is, we could say anything. We could implicate a notable celebrity as responsible and likely get a show trial apology. But the things that happened actually happened. Counter Insurgency wasn’t a policy that could be made tangible and real at the banks of an icy creek, past a fallow orchard, at the edge of the world. It was a cynical misreading of a real, divisive place; one that spent an unspeakable amount of money, time, and blood, and profited no one but the contractors.
My platoon sergeant told me that well done is better than well said.
That’s very well said.
We host this brutal analysis of the failure in Afghanistan, both for its own sake, and because it points out something we hadn’t thought of before, that liberalism’s attempt to form national unities in and through the destruction of real, social difference is not simply an ideology that forms our own nations: it also guides our foreign policy. Convinced, as we are, in the real existence of the homogenous nation states as ideal political forms, we see them where none can be found, and lose wars because we act as if the entire earth fits into our abstract schemes. The pursuit of justice, which is unlike the pursuit of national self-interest, would not fight to establish a nation that does not exist.
Kirby Jones served in the Army Infantry for 10 years between 2001-2012, with combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. He holds a B.A. in History from Hillsdale College and is now a Sheriff’s Deputy in Washington State.