In July 2001, a group of retired diplomats from the United States, Iran, Pakistan and Russia gathered in Berlin to discuss the future of Afghanistan. It was one of several brainstorming sessions about that troubled country sponsored by the United Nations last year. During the days, the men met in tony hotel conference rooms. At night, they shared drinks or dinner. And during every discussion, the diplomats focused on the Taliban — how to make the radical Muslim group form a broad-based government and give up Osama bin Laden, who was suspected of masterminding several terrorist attacks.
These facts about the Berlin meeting are not in dispute. Everything else is. The question of exactly what was said in Berlin and how it was translated to the Taliban has become the centerpiece of a vast dispute about the Bush administration, Osama bin Laden and the buildup to the Sept. 11 attacks. On the left, it has become an article of faith for many that the U.N.-sponsored meetings were part of a concerted Bush administration effort to push for an oil-and-gas pipeline through Afghanistan. When the talks fell apart, it’s been alleged, the administration used the diplomats to issue a military threat, which was carried back to the Taliban. Bin Laden, the theory goes, then decided to strike first, making the Sept. 11 attacks not a random act of terrorist violence, but rather a preemptive strike — a calculated response to the Bush administration’s love of oil, and its irresponsible saber-rattling in pursuit of it.
That tangled theory mostly hinges on one source: Niaz Naik,a member of the Pakistani delegation to the U.N. talks, who told the British press two weeks after Sept. 11 that the United States had issued a military threat at the meetings. He told the same story to several French reporters in the following months. In Naik’s early telling, Tom Simons — a U.S. delegate at the meetings and former ambassador to Pakistan — issued a noteworthy ultimatum: “Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.”
The quote and Naik’s account of the Berlin meeting took on lives of their own — especially after a pair of French authors, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, made Naik a key figure in their international bestseller, “Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden.” According to the book, Naik confirmed what the authors had been told by legendary FBI anti-terror czar John O’Neill before he died Sept. 11 — that oil interests had hampered the investigation into Osama bin Laden’s terror network, and provoked the U.S. into making a military threat that triggered Sept. 11. The Berlin threat Naik described, they argued, was the result of President Bush’s attempt to access central Asian oil. “The suicide attacks of Sept. 11 were the outcome of this initiative — an outcome that was as forseeable as it was tragic,” the authors wrote in the French edition of their book, published earlier this year.
More than a year after the Berlin meeting, the theory is everywhere. One Web site calls “Forbidden Truth” “a major bombshell about the true origins of this conflict.” Another, Democrats.org, tells readers how to buy “the book that Bush doesn’t want you to read this summer.” Customer reviews at Amazon.com lavish high praise on Brisard, Dasquie and their book. Even high-profile left-wing intellectuals like Gore Vidal continue to spread Naik’s basic theory — that Sept. 11 occurred because, in Vidal’s words, “they knew we were coming.”
Not every lefty has fallen for this line of thinking. David Corn has written several blistering condemnations of Brisard and Dasquie’s efforts in the Nation, alleging that they’ve played fast and loose with the facts while making “an utterly illogical case.” Ken Silverstein, writing in the American Prospect, has also punctured the idea that the Bush administration only invaded Afghanistan to access oil. Even Brisard and Dasquie have softened their rhetoric; the English version of the book that hit stores in July contains several new paragraphs that attempt to qualify earlier assertions. The line quoted above has been rewritten to say that the attacks were the “possible outcome” of Bush policies.
So who’s right, Vidal and the French authors or their critics? Was oil a key motive behind Bush administration overtures to the Taliban last year? What were the U.N.’s so-called “Track 2″ discussions, and what were they supposed to yield? Did the Americans, intentionally or unintentionally, issue a threat? Who is Niaz Naik anyway, and can he be believed?
There’s an aura of mystery to most of the writing about these questions, as though getting to the truth requires penetrating a conspiracy wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma. Brisard and Dasquie, like much of the European press, treat the Track 2 meetings as cloak-and-dagger affairs. In “Forbidden Truth,” they’re characterized as “private and risky discussions,” and the American delegates are part of a “secretive ‘sub-group” that President Bush apparently sent on a very private mission. The French authors quote Naik directly, but never interviewed the Americans. In an e-mail, Brisard says he and Dasquie “didn’t interview directly the U.S. delegation simply because there was enough evidence to prove that a threat was effectively stated in July in Berlin.” Their absence from the book leaves the impression, however unintentional, that these shadowy figures have chosen to stay in the shadows.
That part of the story, at least, turned out not to be true. I tracked down the American participants in the July Berlin meeting, as well as Naik himself, and asked them what went on. All were eager to talk. Their answers don’t necessarily add up to the truth, forbidden or otherwise, about their abortive diplomatic project, but they dispel some of the myths that have grown up around it.
The July meetings were the third in a series of U.N.-sponsored discussions about Afghanistan; the other two took place in November and March. According to Brisard and Dasquie, their objective was “to convince the Taliban that once a broad-based government of national unity was installed and the pipeline project was in the works, there would be billions of dollars in commission — of which the Taliban, with their own resources, would get a cut.”
But all the participants in the meetings that I was able to reach, including Naik, insist the long-discussed Afghanistan oil pipeline project had nothing to do with their agenda. Yes, throughout much of the 1990s Unocal had worked with various Afghan governments and officials to try to build a pipeline. And yes, former Unocal consultants and oil experts were party to the U.N. meetings. All of them insist, however, that the pipeline project was dead when their U.N. discussions began — Unocal had abandoned it when the U.S. began making its case that the Taliban was harboring bin Laden after the August 1998 embassy bombings — and never came up there.
Robert Oakley, a former Unocal consultant who was also the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan under the first President Bush, has been cast as the central figure in many accounts of the discussions, largely because of his ties to Unocal. But Oakley, who teaches at the Institute for National Strategic Studies in Washington, insists he only attended the first U.N. meeting, and that the pipeline was never discussed.
“I didn’t go to the other meetings because I didn’t think it was worthwhile,” says Oakley. “The first meeting produced nothing; I knew the others wouldn’t either.” Oakley, who served as the State Department’s coordinator for counter-terrorism during the 1980s, and as an ambassador to Somalia and Zaire as well as Pakistan, insists the pipeline project was dead before the discussions, and no one at the meeting he attended was trying to revive it.
The three Americans at the July meeting — former ambassador Tom Simons, Karl “Rick” Inderfurth, former assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs, and Lee Coldren, a former State Department official in charge of Afghanistan — all back Oakley. After Unocal stopped pushing for the pipeline project in 1998, no other energy firm stepped forward to invest, they insist. And even if another company expressed interest, says Inderfurth, who admits to pushing for the pipeline in the early ’90s, no bank would back them. “They [Unocal] pulled out entirely after Clinton launched missiles into those camps,” he says. “Pipelines and proposals for pipelines were dead as a doornail during that period — and the Taliban never raised the issue in meetings I had with them.”
It’s true that the Americans who were party to the Track 2 Afghanistan discussions backed the pipeline project — but so did most Clinton administration officials in the region. In June, Salon ran an article by Brisard documenting al-Qaida’s interest in the Unocal pipeline project, and tracing the ties between the Bush administration’s Afghanistan advisors and Unocal through to today. Clearly oil interests continue to play a role in the administration’s diplomatic relationship with Hamid Karzai’s government: President Bush’s special envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, was, like Oakley, a member of Unocal’s pipeline advisory board. But Oakley insists none of the parties to last year’s meetings had any illusions that overtures to the Taliban, or even a reconstituted Afghan government, could revive the pipeline project. “You couldn’t do business with the Taliban for political and economic reasons,” he says, and even a post-Taliban Afghanistan would prove too risky an environment to invest in massively.
“These companies do not have the money, the billions of dollars that are needed to put in a pipeline,” Coldren said. “They have to borrow that money. And no one in their right mind is going to loan them that money when you have a state of eternal warfare.”
On that point, Niaz Naik backs his American counterparts. Speaking from his home in Islamabad, Naik says the pipeline was never discussed during the July meetings. When asked if the pipeline came up at any point in the Track 2 discussions, his answer was quick and clear: “No, absolutely not.”
But on the question of whether the American diplomats issued threats to the Taliban, there’s no such accord.
Naik stands by his initial account of the July meeting. The Americans “felt that the time had come that the Taliban government should be ousted by any means which is feasible,” he says. “The various threats were being tied down into a concept of how to proceed further. I think the major objective was to oust the Taliban, and the means was a military action followed by a local rebellion and after that to have some kind of U.N. intervention” — much like what has happened since last October’s military initiative began, Naik points out.
The Americans who attended the July meeting dispute Naik’s account. Though Brisard and Dasquie chose not to look for them, all were easy to track down. They’re all retired, often at home, and keen to talk. Stanford University passed on an e-mail address for Simons, who taught there last year. George Washington University’s directory held the contact information for Inderfurth. Coldren is listed in the phone book.
They all insist no military threat was issued to the Taliban. And then they go on to qualify that, a little. They note that the U.S. had long maintained that a military response was likely if bin Laden was found to have masterminded the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole — but there was no escalation of that existing threat. “The military threat, as I recall it, was absolutely confined to statements by people on our side that the U.S. government was still examining evidence with regard to the Cole and that if the government satisfied itself that Osama bin Laden was responsible, you could predict a military response almost with certainty,” Simons says. “Nothing more was said in the meetings, and I was in all the meetings.”
In the interviews he did last year, Naik argued that he knew the threat was a significant change in policy for the U.S. because the Americans offered specific details. A Sept. 22 story in the London-based Guardian, for instance, quoted Naik as saying that the attack would be launched “from very close proximity to Afghanistan.” Brisard and Dasquie also quote a Sept. 18 BBC story in which Naik says that the Americans mentioned Tajikistan as the likely source of an attack.
Today Naik offers a few more specifics. He says that the discussion in question occurred on July 21; that the talk first occurred in the general meetings, but then continued after the group took a break, when Simons issued the “carpet of bombs” threat. He also argues that the discussion went on long enough to discuss not just the place where the attack would come from, but also the time.
“We asked them, when do you think you will attack Afghanistan?” Naik says, looking back. “And they said, before the snow falls in Kabul. That means September, October, something like that.”
Simons opened a loophole for conspiracy theorists in November, when he conceded that a threat might have been issued outside the official meeting rooms, in an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde.
“It’s possible that a mischievous American participant, after several drinks, may have thought it smart to evoke gold carpets and carpet bombs. Even Americans can’t resist the temptation to be mischievous.”
These days, Simons still concedes that alcohol may have played a role in the misunderstanding, noting that “it was possible that someone over-drank at night and said something more alarming.”
When I note that “over-drinking” seems an odd way of conducting diplomacy, especially with the country that was harboring bin Laden, Simons insists he’s been misunderstood.
“No, no, no,” says Simons. “We were there for three nights; [drinking went on] before dinner, during informal talks before dinner. It’s not carousing around Berlin. Pakistanis don’t drink very much and we’re old people. I’m in my 60s. We don’t honk around town anymore.”
In fact, Simons and the other Americans argue, the very fact that they are old, retired and out of the diplomatic loop makes them an unlikely choice for the transmission of a specific military threat like the one Naik describes. Since they didn’t come in with Bush — Inderfurth, a Clinton appointee, actually quit the day before Bush took office — they lacked direct access to the decision makers who would put forth such an idea. Plus, Bush had other options. Administration officials were already planning to meet with Taliban representatives when the Berlin meetings occurred, and on Aug. 2, 2001, assistant secretary of state Christina Rocca did just that. Rocca did not return repeated calls for comment.
And with official channels already in use, Coldren argues, why would the White House bother using a bunch or retirees to announce an imminent military strike?
I keep pushing: Since the diplomats admit they discussed the possibility of a U.S. military reprisal for the Cole bombing, couldn’t that, in some quarters, be construed as a threat? Simons says no, there was no mention of when the Cole investigation would finish, and thus no talk of when the military response would come. “There was not an escalation in the U.S. stance,” Inderfurth insists. “There was no discussion about a strike plan. None of us would have been privy to such a plan.”
Asked if there was any mention of a military threat, Coldren responded with gusto. “I was at that session and heard nothing along those lines,” he says. “Nothing about when, nothing about where. Nothing about a threat. I would think it would have made our former Soviet officials stand up and pound the table — that is, staging a military raid from Uzbekistan or Tajikistan.” Coldren added in an e-mail: “I have not caveated my statements by saying ‘nothing like that was said to my recollection .’ I have a very good memory for what people say, even at such meetings. To have missed such a discussion I would have had to be totally dead to the world — and I wasn’t.”
And yet Niaz Naik, even when confronted with all of these denials, refuses to budge. Could he have misinterpreted the extent of the threat? Could the Americans have been speaking without Bush approval? Naik dismisses all of these possibilities. He still insists that the Americans threatened the Taliban, per Bush’s orders.
Brisard and Dasquie have a lot of faith in Naik’s story. “Whether we rely on Naik’s testimony or the former U.S. ambassador’s [Simons], which doesn’t necessarily contradict Naik’s, one has to focus on the Pakistani representatives’ knowledge regarding the statement,” they write in “Forbidden Truth.” “It is clear that in July 2001, a U.S. representative, speaking in an informal meeting, but mandated by their government to do so, in specific or general terms, whether mischievous or not, whether drunk or not, evoked the option of a military threat against Afghanistan.”
Even now, Brisard believes that there’s more than enough evidence to justify the assertion that a threat was made. While he and Dasquie admit to making several changes to the book — largely downplaying their previous claim that there was a direct link between the July threat and the Sept. 11 attacks — Brisard harbors no doubt about the threat. “We have material proofs, direct quotes from the participants [saying] that it happened, and that economic considerations were discussed,” he says.
But other analysts insist Naik’s comments must be seen in context. His agenda has to be understood within the shadowy world of Pakistani politics — which no one seems entirely able to understand. Was he close to Pakistan Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI)? Was he exaggerating the U.S. threat to push his government away from supporting the Taliban? Or did he simply want attention?
Once again, it depends on whom you believe.
Shaheen Sehbai, former editor of The News, a large newspaper in Pakistan, says that Naik “was known to be a career diplomat, a professional from a family full of brilliant people who rose to the top of their careers.”
Ahmed Rashid, author of “The Taliban,” calls him a “sober diplomat with a sound record who does not speak out much to the press.”
Even the Americans generally agree that Naik is an unlikely liar. Coldren describes him as “a quintessential diplomat” and “a milquetoast.” In September, Simons told the British Guardian: “I’ve known Naik and considered him a friend for years. He’s an honorable diplomat.”
Still, even many of those who respect Naik believe he somehow botched the message he was supposed to have received from the Americans. “Naik exaggerated the threat that was given to him in Berlin,” says Ahmed Rashid, who believes Naik had his own unofficial, unsanctioned agenda: convincing his government of the danger of continuing to support the Taliban. Pakistan was one of the few countries to officially recognize the Taliban, which Naik felt was hurting his nation. So he exaggerated the U.S. military threat, the theory goes, because he wanted Pakistan to cut ties with the radical Muslim group. “He used it to try and frighten the army into changing policy,” Rashid says. “The army had been favoring the Taliban; Naik wanted to emphasize that support could hurt the country.”
This theory seems to be the most popular explanation for why Naik might have inflated the American threat. Simons says that when he asked friends and former colleagues why Naik would utter “an untruth,” as he calls it, most offered the same response. “The supposition is that he was saying it in a good cause,” Simons says. “In other words, he was trying to get his government to change policy.”
Yet some observers of Pakistani politics insist that Naik speaks for the ISI, the Pakistani security agency whose leaders were close to the Taliban. “I have no reason to believe that he would make the wrong statement, but I have reason to believe that he would say what the government or ISI wanted him to say,” says Sehbai, who recently launched a news Web site, the South Asia Tribune. There are problems with this theory; Rashid points out that Naik worked for Nawaz Sharif, a prime minister generally loathed by the intelligence services for his attempts to make peace with India.
Others say Naik has a history of exaggerating his role. “Naik is a typical Pakistani thrown to exaggeration and duplicity,” says Mansour Ijaz, a Pakistani-American businessman and freelance diplomat.
Ijaz says he crossed paths with Naik when discussions of the 2000 cease-fire were being discussed. “He carried some messages back and forth between Islamabad and Delhi and got himself into quite a bit of trouble for misrepresenting what both sides were saying at that time.”
But Ijaz’s critics say he’s the one prone to exaggeration. Last fall, he made headlines with his claim that he’d brokered a deal with Sudan that would have delivered bin Laden to U.S. hands in 1996, if the Clinton administration hadn’t rejected it. But the Clinton administration says there was no deal and that Ijaz never had a role in diplomatic discussions. Ijaz’s claims, according to Clinton’s National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, are “ludicrous and irresponsible.”
Nonetheless, Oakley and other sources confirm that Naik ran into trouble for the way he characterized the ongoing talks between India and Pakistan in 1999 and 2000. At the time, he claimed that a deal between the longstanding enemies was imminent; Naik only had to show the right maps to Indian officials, who would then sign an agreement that would end to war over Kashmir. But soon after these claims hit the Pakistani press, critics refuted Naik’s assertion. And of course, no such deal was ever inked. “He played up his role as an unofficial intermediary between Sharif and [Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari] Vajpayee,” Oakley says. “He claimed they almost reached this agreement. But again, I think there was a lot of exaggeration. The Indians were nowhere close to reaching an agreement.” Oakley believes Naik is no more believable now.
Ultimately, it may be impossible to know who is telling the truth about what happened in the July meetings. There were at least five other diplomats in Berlin, but they’ve all stayed silent. Attempts to contact them, through the U.N. and other means, have failed. Unless there is some kind of formal investigation, which Brisard and Dasquie call for in one of their revised paragraphs, the silent players will likely stay out of the fray. The battle between the Naik defenders and debunkers seems destined to continue.
Certainly the casual nature of the U.N. talks provides some fodder for those who’ve argued that the Bush administration failed to reckon adequately with Afghanistan and al-Qaida before Sept. 11. The country was harboring bin Laden, the world’s most wanted terrorist, and yet the second-tier nature of the discussion participants — self-described “retired old farts” who may or may not have gotten a little “mischievous” after a few drinks — would seem to show that Afghanistan wasn’t a front-burner issue for the Bush administration. (Last week’s Time magazine story about how Bush passed up Clinton administration plans to take out bin Laden last year provides more evidence of that). Hindsight certainly indicates that it should have been a much higher priority.
But the left-wing conspiracy theories about the Berlin meeting at this point don’t stand up under scrutiny. Most damning of that view is the fact that even Naik says the oil-and-gas pipeline — the supposed motive for the Bush administration’s renewed interest in the country — never came up. Certainly there’s plenty of reason to charge that Bush is beholden to big business, particularly big oil. And in many areas of policy, from energy to global warming, critics have more than enough evidence to prove their case. Not so with Afghanistan in the months before Sept. 11. The facts point to quite the opposite — an acknowledgement by everyone involved that a pipeline through Afghanistan was a dead issue. There was never enough oil in the Caspian region to make it work, some observers say. Others, like Rashid, insist there was too much chaos to justify the installation of a pipeline that would be vulnerable to attack.
Conspiracy theorists may be heartened by the fact that in May, the government of Hamid Karzai inked a deal with the governments of Pakistan and Turkmenistan to build a pipeline between those two countries through Afghanistan. But as Ken Silverstein points out in the American Prospect, no company is clamoring for the right to build it, given the instability of the region as well as changes in the regional oil market.
And while it’s possible that Naik is sincere, and that he heard talk of reprisals for the Cole bombing that he took as a military threat to the Taliban, it’s still a huge leap to say that Sept. 11 was a preemptive strike triggered by such threats. Although Brisard has tried to soften that allegation, first in an interview with Salon, andthen in the revised English edition of “Forbidden Truth” — his earlier assertion that the attacks were not just tragic but also “foreseeable” in light of the diplomats’ alleged threats is the one that’s gained widest circulation. Yet it fails to stand up under examination. Government officials have too much evidence showing that the Sept. 11 plot had been hatched and put in place before Naik and the other diplomats began meeting in Berlin. Vague threats from retired Track 2 diplomats, passed on through a Pakistani intermediary, wouldn’t likely inspire such a colossal response, anyway. The fact that this theory hinges on only Naik’s story, and a booze-related loophole left open by Simons, casts further doubt on its veracity.
It’s possible the American diplomats are lying, of course. But for now no one has marshaled sufficient evidence to justify doubting their word. The “forbidden truth” about Bush, bin Laden and Afghanistan appears to be more obvious than conspiracy theorists claim: inattention to the Taliban-al-Qaida menace, not calculated threats, led to Sept. 11. This point alone should be enough to inspire outrage. But some on the left, like many on the right, seem unable to accept it.
It’s the saddest reading around: the little announcements that dribble out of the Pentagon every day or two — those terse, relatively uninformative death notices: rank; name; age; small town, suburb, or second-level city of origin; means of death (“small arms fire,” “improvised explosive device,” “the result of gunshot wounds inflicted by an individual wearing an Afghan National Army uniform,” or sometimes something vaguer like “while conducting combat operations,” “supporting Operation Enduring Freedom,” or simply no explanation at all); and the unit the dead soldier belonged to. They are seldom 100 words, even with the usual opening line: “The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.” Sometimes they include more than one death.
They are essentially bureaucratic notices designed to draw little attention to themselves. Yet cumulatively, in their hundreds over the last decade, they represent a grim archive of America’s still ongoing, already largely forgotten second Afghan War, and I’ve read them obsessively for years.
Into the Memory Hole
May is the official month of remembrance when it comes to our war dead, ending as it does on the long Memorial Day weekend when Americans typically take to the road and kill themselves and each other in far greater numbers than will die in Afghanistan. It’s a weekend for which the police tend to predict rising fatalities and news reports tend to celebrate any declines in deaths on our roads and highways.
Quiz Americans and a surprising number undoubtedly won’t have thought about the “memorial” in Memorial Day at all — especially now that it’s largely a marker of the start of summer and an excuse for cookouts.
How many today are aware that, as Decoration Day, it began in 1865 in a nation still torn by grief over the loss of — we now know – up to 750,000 dead in the first modern war, a wrenching civil catastrophe in a then-smaller and still under-populated country? How many know that the first Decoration Day was held in 1865 with 10,000 freed slaves and some Union soldiers parading on a Charleston, South Carolina, race track previously frequented by planters and transformed in wartime into a grim outdoor prison? The former slaves were honoring Union prisoners who had died there and been hastily buried in unmarked graves, but as historian Kenneth Jackson has written, they were also offering “a declaration of the meaning of the war and of their own freedom.”
Those ceremonies migrated north in 1866, became official at national cemeteries in 1868, and grew into ever more elaborate civic remembrances over the years. Even the South, which had previously marked its grief separately, began to take part after World War I as the ceremonies were extended to the remembrance of all American war dead. Only in 1968, in the midst of another deeply unpopular war, did Congress make it official as Memorial Day, creating the now traditional long holiday weekend.
And yet, when it comes to the major war the United States is still fighting, now in its 11th year, the word remembrance is surely inappropriate, as is the “Memorial” in Memorial Day. It’s not just that the dead of the Afghan War have largely been tossed down the memory hole of history (even if they do get official attention on Memorial Day itself). Even the fact that Americans are still dying in Afghanistan seems largely to have been forgotten, along with the war itself.
As the endlessly plummeting opinion polls indicate, the Afghan War is one Americans would clearly prefer to forget — yesterday, not tomorrow. It was, in fact, regularly classified as “the forgotten war” almost from the moment that the Bush administration turned its attention to the invasion of Iraq in 2002 and so declared its urge to create a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East. Despite the massive “surge” of troops, special operations forces, CIA agents, and civilian personnel sent to Afghanistan by President Obama in 2009-2010, and the ending of the military part of the Iraq debacle in 2011, the Afghan War has never made it out of the grave of forgetfulness to which it was so early consigned.
Count on one thing: there will be no Afghan version of Maya Lin, no Afghan Wall on the National Mall. Unlike the Vietnam conflict, tens of thousands of books won’t be pouring out for decades to come arguing passionately about the conflict. There may not even be a “who lost Afghanistan” debate in its aftermath.
Few Afghan veterans are likely to return from the war to infuse with new energy an antiwar movement that remains small indeed, nor will they worry about being “spit upon.” There will be little controversy. They — their traumas and their wounds — will, like so many bureaucratic notices, disappear into the American ether, leaving behind only an emptiness and misery, here and in Afghanistan, as perhaps befits a bankrupting, never-ending imperial war on the global frontiers.
Whistling Past the Graveyard of Empires
If nothing else, the path to American amnesia is worth recalling on this Memorial Day.
Though few here remember it that way, the invasion of Afghanistan was launched on a cult of the dead. These were the dead civilians from the Twin Towers in New York City. It was to their memory that the only “Wall” of this era — the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan — has been built. Theirs are the biographies that are still remembered in annual rites nationwide. They are, and remain, the dead of the Afghan War, even though they died before it began.
On the other hand, from the moment the invasion of Afghanistan was launched, how to deal with the actual American war dead was always considered a problematic matter. The Bush administration and the military high command, with the Vietnam War still etched in their collective memories, feared those uniformed bodies coming home (as they feared and banishedthe “body count” of enemy dead in the field). They remembered the return of the “body bags” of the Vietnam era as a kind of nightmare, stoking a fierce antiwar movement, which they were determined not to see repeated.
As a result, in the early years of the Afghan and then Iraq wars, the Bush administration took relatively draconian steps to cut the media off from any images of the returning war dead. They strictly enforced a Pentagon ban, in existence since the first Gulf War, on media coverage and images of the coffins arriving from the war fronts at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. At the same time, much publicity was given to the way President Bush met privately and emotionally — theoretically beyond the view of the media — with the families of the dead.
And yet, banned or not, for a period the war dead proliferated. In those early years of Washington’s two increasingly catastrophic wars on the Eurasian mainland, newspapers regularly produced full-page or double-page “walls of heroes” with tiny images of the faces of the American dead, while their names were repeatedly read in somber tones on television. In a similar fashion, the antiwar movement toured the country with little “cemeteries” or displays of combat boots representing the war dead.
The Pentagon ban ended with the arrival of the Obama administration. In October 2009, six months after the Pentagon rescinded it, in an obvious rebuke to his predecessor, President Obama traveled to Dover Air Base. There, inside a plane bringing the bodies of the dead home, he reportedly prayed over the coffins and was later photographed offering a salute as one of them was carried off the plane. But by the time the arrival of the dead could be covered, few seemed to care.
The Bush administration, it turns out, needn’t have worried. In an America largely detached from war, the Iraq War would end without fanfare or anyone here visibly giving much of a damn. Similarly, the Afghan War would continue to limp from one disaster to the next, from an American “kill team” murdering Afghan civilians “for sport” to troops urinating on Afghan corpses (and videotaping the event), or mugging for the camera with enemy body parts, or an American sergeant running amok, or the burning of Korans, or the raising of an SS banner. And, of course, ever more regularly, ever more unnervingly, Afghan “allies” would turn their guns on American and NATO troops and blow them away. It’s a phenomenon almost unheard of in such wars, but so common in Afghanistan these days that it’s gotten its own label: “green-on-blue violence.”
This has been the road to oblivion and it’s paved with forgotten bodies. Forgetfulness, of course, comes at a price, which includes the escalating long-term costs of paying for the American war-wounded and war-traumatized. On this Memorial Day, there will undoubtedly be much cant in the form of tributes to “our heroes” and then, Tuesday morning, when the mangled cars have been towed away, the barbeque grills cleaned, and the “heroes” set aside, the forgetting will continue. If the Obama administration has its way and American special operations forces, trainers, and advisors in reduced but still significant numbers remain in Afghanistan until perhaps 2024, we have more than another decade of forgetting ahead of us in a tragedy that will, by then, be beyond all comprehension.
Afghanistan has often enough been called “the graveyard of empires.” Americans have made it a habit to whistle past that graveyard, looking the other way — a form of obliviousness much aided by the fact that the American war dead conveniently come from the less well known or forgotten places in our country. They are so much easier to ignore thanks to that.
Except in their hometowns, how easy the war dead are to forget in an era when corporations go to war but Americans largely don’t. So far, 1,980 American military personnel (and significant but largely unacknowledged numbers of private contractors) have died in Afghanistan, as have 1,028 NATO and allied troops, and (despite U.N. efforts to count them) unknown but staggering numbers of Afghans.
So far in the month of May, 22 American dead have been listed in those Pentagon announcements. If you want a little memorial to a war that shouldn’t be, check out their hometowns and you’ll experience a kind of modern graveyard poetry. Consider it an elegy to the dead of second- or third-tier cities, suburbs, and small towns whose names are resonant exactly because they are part of your country, but seldom or never heard by you.
Here, then, on this Memorial Day, are not the names of the May dead, but of their hometowns, announcement by announcement, placed at the graveside of a war that we can’t bear to remember and that simply won’t go away. If it’s the undead of wars, the deaths from it remain a quiet crime against American humanity:
Spencerport, New York
Wichita, Kansas
Warren, Arkansas
West Chester, Ohio
Alameda, California
Charlotte, North Carolina
Stow, Ohio
Clarksville, Tennessee
Chico, California
Jeffersonville, Kentucky
Yuma, Arizona
Normangee, Texas
Round Rock, Texas
Rolla, Missouri
Lucerne Valley, California
Las Cruses, New Mexico
Fort Wayne, Indiana
Overland Park, Kansas
Wheaton, Illinois
Lawton, Oklahoma
Prince George, Virginia
Terre Haute, Indiana.
As long as the hometowns pile up, no one should rest in peace.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of ”The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s“ as well as ”The End of Victory Culture,” runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book is ”The United States of Fear“ (Haymarket Books). To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which he discusses what Americans should consider remembering on Memorial Day, click here or download it to your iPod here.
[Note on Further Reading: For those interested in exploring the history of Memorial Day, there’s no better place to visit than the always fascinating website History News Network. For carefully put together records on American and NATO deaths in Afghanistan, visiticasualties.org. Simply to keep up on American war news, not always the easiest thing in the mainstream media these days, make sure to visit Antiwar.com (as I do daily).]
The weather’s getting warmer in Afghanistan and the war there is heating up again. That means – as it has meant every year for more than a decade — that the pace will quicken at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. More casualties will be brought to this largest American military hospital outside the United States. The Critical Care Air Transport teams and their C-17 Globemasters will fly in from “downrange,” as they call the Afghan battleground, and the injured will be brought by ambulance bus from nearby Ramstein Air Force Base to the hospital front door.
I spent a few days at Landstuhl recently, one of a group of writers from the Writers Guild Initiative, part of the Writers Guild of America, East Foundation (Full disclosure and just to add to the confusion: I’m president of the Writers Guild, East, the union with which the foundation’s affiliated).
For the last four years, the foundation has been conducting writing workshops. The project began with professional writers from stage, TV and movies mentoring veterans from the Iraq and Afghan wars, working with them on writing exercises and projects ranging from memoirs and blogs to children’s books, screenplays and sci-fi novels. Recently, in collaboration with the Wounded Warrior Project, the foundation started similar workshops with caregivers, the loved ones of veterans helping them through the aftermath of catastrophic injuries.
Now, Wounded Warrior had asked some of us to come to Landstuhl to meet with the medical staff there. Some 3,000 strong, military and civilian, they work ceaselessly in what has become one of the busiest trauma centers in the world, helping between 20,000 and 30,000 patients a year (not just from the battlefield, but also military and their dependents from all over Europe, Africa and much of Asia).
Landstuhl is where the victims of the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marines Corps barracks in Beirut were brought; Bosnian refugees from the Sarajevo marketplace bombing in 1994, too, wounded from the American embassy bombing in Kenya in 1998 and the 2000 attack on USS Cole. During the first Gulf War, more than 4,000 service members were treated at Landstuhl, as have been men and women fighting in the Balkans and Somalia. Since 9/11, the hospital has treated coalition troops from 44 different countries.
They compare this hospital to the center of an hourglass; it’s the midpoint between a combat injury and treatment in the field and then subsequent care back in the States or other home country. Or it’s where a service member is treated and then sent back into battle.
The staff at Landstuhl sees the wounded at their worst. Many who arrive suffer from multiple injuries – “polytrauma” so extensive that several teams of surgeons with different specialties – neurological, thoracic, ear and eye, facial reconstruction and orthopedic, among others — may work on an individual patient, often simultaneously. Bodies are blown apart or crushed by IEDs, grenades and suicide bombs, but so skillful are the medical teams there, so advanced the techniques and technology, Landstuhl’s survival rate runs as high as 99.5 percent. (The survival rate among American wounded in World War II was 70 percent.)
But all that success takes a toll. One of the little discussed but potent side effects of war is what’s called combat and occupational stress Rreaction or secondary traumatic stress disorder. Compassion fatigue.
After all the years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of the doctors, nurses and other staff at Landstuhl are exhausted or worse. Given what they’ve seen — the horrific wounds and amputations, the infection, agony and grief – some walk around “like zombies,” one therapist said. Feelings of empathy and kindness yield to loneliness, despair and burnout.
Many of the compassion fatigue symptoms are similar to post-traumatic stress disorder – physical effects like headaches, gastrointestinal problems, reproductive troubles, as well as mental — nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety, emotional distance, isolation and more.
Working with physically damaged men and women who are so deeply traumatized rubs off. The emotional rawness is contagious. A hospital handout on PTSD understatedly reads, “When life-changing events occur, perceptions about the world may change. For example, before soldiers experience combat trauma, they may think the world is safe. Following combat, a soldier’s perceptions may change — a majority of the world may now seem unsafe.”
That’s why returning vets may reflexively search alongside a U.S. interstate highway for roadside bombs, only shop at Walmart at 3 in the morning, or worry to excess that their children’s school will be attacked by terrorists. And it’s why after hearing the stories of their patients, reliving the horrors of war, watching them endure pain and sometimes countless operations, medical practitioners can suffer from the same fears — whether it’s the surgeon who heals the wounds, the psychiatrist who probes the mind for the source of anguish or even the clean-up staff decontaminating and removing the blood from surgical tools.
Combine that with homesickness, the high operational tempo of Landstuhl, the low tolerance for mistakes, the downtime when the mind takes over and remembers every awful experience. It’s a dangerous, often unhealthy mix.
And so, on a Saturday morning, we writers sat down with a bunch of men and women who work at Landstuhl and other nearby medical facilities. There were 14 of us and t32 or so of them. We broke into small groups – two writers working with a group of two to four hospital staff.
My colleague Susanna and I mentored four – a male Army nurse and a female Navy nurse, a physical therapist and a developmental pediatric psychiatrist. We weren’t there to interview or pry; they would tell us what they wanted us to know when they wished, their stories slowly emerging from conversation and the brief writing exercises we gave them.
The male nurse had been in Special Ops, the Navy, Marines and Army; he was reluctant to talk of what he had experienced but wanted to examine themes of good and evil in an epic novel. The physical therapist told us she wanted to explore the mind-body connection, perhaps with a blog; the Navy nurse spoke of her feelings for the soldiers she took care of from the Republic of Georgia, the former Soviet state, now independent. (By the end of the year, Georgia, aiming at membership in NATO, will have some 1,500 troops in Afghanistan.) She had learned how to bake for them the Georgian national dish, khachapuri, a cheese-filled bread; now she wants to write a cookbook.
For two days, we talked and they wrote, we recommended books and movies, they told us about the ones they loved. Tears were shed as stories and memories came to the surface, many too private to relate here. Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll stay in touch via email and meet again; trying to be of assistance as they write to express their thoughts and feelings, to tell their stories.
Do the workshops help? Hard to measure, but intuitively it feels as if they do, that in the talking and writing comes self-awareness and some measure of equanimity. And selfishly, for those of us who serve as writer-mentors, the benefits are enormous and fulfilling.
But the statistics are alarming. According to NBC News, “The Pentagon counts more than 6,300 American dead and 33,000 wounded in action in Iraq and Afghanistan. A Rand Corp study estimates that as many as 300,000 post-9/11 veterans suffer from PTSD or major depression, and about 320,000 may have experienced traumatic brain injuries, mainly from bombs.” The number of civilian fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan remains uncertain but a Brown University study last year reported at least 132,000.
Meanwhile, there are still nearly 90,000 American troops in Afghanistan. More will die and be wounded. President Obama has pledged their complete departure in 2014.
But even after that, the work at Landstuhl will go on. There are still nearly 300,000 American military personnel overseas, plus family members. Landstuhl will take care of many of them. And, says one of the hospital’s surgeons, with a sigh of resignation, “There will always be the Middle East.”
The heat. That’s what I remember most. Shimmery and bright. Blinding. Stifling. Heeee-eeaat.
The kind that’s not just on you, wrapped around you, but balled up and pulsing inside you — a desert blanket with teeth. It’s a type of heat that makes your skin cry and your eyeballs sweat, even in the shade; heat like a predator you can’t run away from.
I notice it right as I get off the plane — not just the degrees but also the dust. Dust you can smell, kicked up by a thousand years of struggle. In a region this old, I’m sure each breath carries a dose of unintended history: Inhale, Alexander the Great; exhale, the Ottoman Empire; inhale, the USSR; exhale, the Taliban.
And now, at 90,000 troops, it’s America’s turn.
I have my own history.
A week from now, it’ll be a year since my mother passed. Horrific car accident, traumatic brain injury. It wasn’t the first TBI I’d seen, but I hope it’s the last.
She’s the reason I and my brothers joined the Marines.
The last time I was in a war zone, though, it was Iraq. Anbar. Operation Iraqi Freedom. I was also a journalist — Marine combat correspondent, a Private Joker, like Full Metal Jacket.
“Get rid of that peace pin and get with the winning team, kid,” the Colonel says to Joker.
Yeah that was me, Raptor Man and Joker rolled into one person, hopping around the combat zone with a camera. By the end, I could tell you the type of helicopter approaching just from the sound alone.
I remember we were all terrified of roadside bombs. Nothing could rip the life out of you as quick as an improvised explosive device. Practically invisible. Pressure plates. Propane tanks. Shaped charges and command det. Incendiary bombs frying the flesh right off your bones, and tank mines turning tons of Humvee steel into an indistinguishable mess, quick as a red-light-running SUV.
Mom’s car was like that, nearly indistinguishable. Her crimson “Marine Mom” plate was bent and hanging from the front. In the backseat, purchased moments before impact, was a mangled case of Rolling Rock, the beer we all loved to drink together when the boys and I were home. When it happened, Mom was getting ready for us to come home again. The green glass from the bottles spread around the demolished Ford at a scarred Pennsylvania crossroad.
She told me once that she had cried every night during my first deployment in 2006. I deployed again in 2008. Long before I even went to bootcamp, though, she had told me she always pictured me living out of a backpack in some foreign country, carrying around a camera and a notepad.
I land in Kabul with a bit more than that. I have a pelican case of camera gear, a backpack, a duffel bag and an old Corps Alice pack. Double of everything; redundancy is key.
The big difference here is that I don’t have the Marine Corps to back me up. I’m alone in my own zone, no Conex box full of extra camera bodies, batteries and lenses. What I have is what I got.
I’m used to freedom. During deployments as a combat correspondent, or “CC,” I had an almost insane amount of freedom. I could be in Baghdad on Sunday, Ramadi on Wednesday, and Mosul by the weekend. I was one of a very select group of “non-rate” entry level Marines who could justifiably look in a colonel’s eye and ask, “Why?”
Also, I had a top-down, bottom-up view of the battlefield. I was included in high-viz command briefs as well as presence patrols.
The only problem was the multilevel public affairs web, a dicey bureaucracy hell-bent on “happy glad” editing and stories that reflect rosily on the command staff. It’s like the scene in “Full Metal Jacket,” written by a former combat correspondent in a short story called “Short Times”:
“So you didn’t see any enemy bodies, no casualties?” says the public affairs officer.
“They must have carried them all away,” says Joker.
“No blood trails?”
“It was raining.”
“Well, throw in one casualty, say, a dead officer; grunts love to read about dead officers,” says the PAO.
“How ’bout a General?”
Yes, I’ll admit, Military Public Affairs was a spin machine I desperately wanted to be free of. Full of “command messages,” clever omissions and helpful little edits.
Criticism at all was out of the question. I guess the idea was that we got enough of that from the civilian side of coverage. But to even call what we did “coverage” would be a bit of a misnomer. It was more like public relations with a journalism arm.
It’s like this. Ribbon cuttings: The General stands there smiling in front of a new clinic, and I take the standard big-scissor picture — snap. He and some Iraqi leader shake hands then — snap snap — and everyone’s happy right? But there are no details about how much we paid and how long it took to finish the project. I can’t even mention that there’s no electricity or acknowledge the smell of shit in the air, wafting from a waterless outhouse just meters from the building.
I saw a little boy come running out of it, smiling, excited the Americans came to visit, and I walk over to take a look inside. A huge pile of human shit intermixed with, strangely enough, pages from prominent American magazines. A smeared Vogue cover; I think I see Esquire, too, and then Johnny Depp peers at me from between turds, flies kissing his face like teenage girls probably do to their posters back home.
It was all so very strange, ignoring details like this, simply because “civilian journalists” don’t want to reflect harshly on command or the military, in general.
Don’t get me wrong, though, I’m not here to pull the rug out from anyone’s feet. I’m not looking for a runaway general, or a hard-hitting expose.
See, I understand that despite what the news media, pundits and commanding generals say, the reality of war is wall-to-wall gray. It may look cut and dry, good and evil, right and wrong, but on the ground, the moral abyss that stretches between weapon sights and targets contextualizes even the most distilled aspect of human struggle: Kill or be killed.
Death, like a black hole, distorts everything around it.
Speaking of death, once I arrive in Kabul city, what I’m wishing for is a little more security. As an independent operator, I’m not as comfortable as I once was rolling around with 50 well-armed 19-year-old Marines.
My travel isn’t so structured. Sit. Stand. Sleep. Get the bags off the truck, Private. Move the bags over here. Now over there. Eat. Form up. Go away. Get together. Load up. Strap in. I said: Strap. In. A C130 from Kuwait, and then you’re in the shit.
Not so now. I land in Kabul a disoriented mess. I’m not with DynCorp or Raytheon. I’m not a former SEAL with Blackwater. There’s no burly white guy waiting at the gate with a sign bearing my name.
I’m a freelance journalist. I have to rely on some tiny, jumpy Afghan who’s looking to make a quick buck to help me get my bags, fill out forms and register with the government. Then my “fixer,” a journalist facilitator, shows up with his driver and car.
Still, they are Afghans, it is not a Humvee and I am not surrounded by armed service members who are eager to dispatch my enemies.
I’ve come a long way from being that aimless college grad living in his mom’s basement. I remember I had recently become a Teach for America reject. She called me upstairs not long after I got the rejection letter. It was the afternoon. I probably still had bed hair, my breath a mixture of cold pizza and coffee.
I’ll never forget her ultimatum: “Either you go back to school …”
With my habit for whiskey? No. No more school.
“you get your teaching credentials and teach down by your father …”
In South Carolina, nah, I’ll pass. What’s the last one?
“or you enlist in the Marines.”
What? Really?
“I know a recruiter …” — undoubtedly from her days as a high school front desk secretary — “Gunnery Sergeant Fannel. You can call him right now if you want.”
Hmmm … “What’s the number?”
Years later, seeing me as a success, my two brothers would follow suit.
When I do finally meet a service member in Kabul to pick up my media credentials from the local base, he drives out of the entry control point in a lumbering “hard skin” vehicle (one that looks like a regular SUV except it’s armored).
He gets no farther than about 50 feet from the ECP, parks and gets out. He’s totally covered in protective equipment.
I see now how ridiculous we Americans sometimes look to the locals. Obsessed with protection to the point that the protection itself actually makes us slower and more apt to trip, stumble, or get caught up — in a lot of ways more vulnerable.
Also, it acts as a very ostentatious barrier between us and the Afghans.
This is not the first time I get the perspective of the locals. Another big difference this time is that I’ve given myself a week in the mix before I have to meet up for my flight out to Camp Leatherneck and the Marine units with whom I’ll embed.
So I have a week to tool around Afghanistan, free as a bird flapping in the breeze, and my perspective is not solely limited to that of the military. It’s important, I believe, to talk to the people and get to know them. I think the Marines would agree that talking to the people was no small part of their success in Anbar during the “Awakening” in ’07 and ’08. I hope it will be a part of my success as a reporter, this time on the civilian side.
The first time I was in Iraq, I’ll admit that I hated all of them. A deep, scornful hatred, like black syrup pumping thick through my heart. A hawk that eats foreign policy hawks for breakfast, I wanted to glass the whole country.
Second time around, tasked with transition teams, I got to know a lot of Iraqis. Picked up a little Arabic. I began to understand them as a people, their generational struggle to exist beneath the iron arm of Saddam’s royal tyranny.
You can Monday-morning-quarterback the shit out of our operation — whether it was legal or not, how it was handled, etc. But in between the lines of the opinion sections of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, it’s prudent to understand that real people with families, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, dreams and nightmares — actual human beings — are trying to exist and cope with a never-ending cycle of trauma.
The Iraqis used to laugh at the American concept of post-traumatic stress disorder. Actually laugh. They’d say, “PTSD? Look at our children; they’ve grown up with PTSD.”
The Afghans are no different. In fact, they’re worse.
I cruise out west, to Kunduz, to the farms and the bazaars. I talk to farmers, fishermen and kids. Inside the city, I talk to prominent businessmen and city officials. In the park, I talk to regular citizens and even senior citizens as they play chess.
I go up into the mountain slums and give bubblegum to the children. I ask them what they want to be when they grow up, what they learn at school, and who their heroes are.
“John Cena!” Yells one kid, scrunching into a wrestler pose and smiling.
What amazes me is the amount of hope. It’s understandable when a kid in New Jersey tells you he wants to be a firefighter or a doctor. Every kid here either wants to be a doctor or an engineer. It strums a chord of sorrow in me so deep that it takes all I can to ignore it; as I watch a toddler paw through an open sewer, it takes all I have to keep a straight face while I carry on a conversation with children who have lived nothing but war.
The city scene is what we would think of as post-apocalyptic. So is most of the countryside and suburbs, all the bazaars and farms. There is tinge of post-apocalypse everywhere. Not like Iraq, though. In Iraq, in Baghdad, they remembered once that their city was beautiful.
Here it is not so much post-, but also during, maybe even pre-. Even the parents of those children grew up in war. The Russians held ground in the ’80s. The Taliban ran a regime of fire in the ’90s. Now unfinished, unoccupied buildings dot the landscape as proof (alongside the looming U.S. withdrawal deadline) that the crooked fingers of 2008′s economic apocalypse reach even into the darkest depths of war.
And once we go, where does that leave them? Most of them think Pakistan or Iran will take over. The optimists hope Russia or China will gain influence. Either way, the vast majority want the U.S. to stay.
It’s funny, they refer to their country as the football field where armies come to compete for global dominance.
Regardless, I find they are a proud, strong and courteous people. They are also willing to fight for their country, which I find out once I get to Delaram II, a Marine base in Helmand.
After spending a week in Kabul and the surrounding area, I meet up with my military liaison and catch a flight south, to Camp Leatherneck and then down to Delaram II, to embed with a Marine Advisory Team.
I realize things are really different once a Marine — one who would have drastically outranked me –calls me “sir.”
“You don’t have to call me sir, dude. Geoff will do just fine.”
I realize I’ve just called a Gunnery Sergeant “dude.” Yes, as opposed to being a guy in uniform with a camera, now I’m just a guy with a camera. The distance, regardless of my history, is palpable, typified by an intelligence lieutenant who stammers through an interview, unsure exactly of what to divulge.
Finally, for me, it begins to sink in that the phrase, “Once a Marine, always a Marine,” is literally just that: a phrase.
The unit here is “advising” a brigade of the Afghan National Army. My first day there, the Afghan army simultaneously repels an enemy assault and finds some IEDs. They do both to a degree satisfactory to Marine standards, except they bring the IEDs back on the base, sending the Marines into a tizzy.
Marine explosive ordinance disposal appears to take care of the bombs (it turns out, they were inert anyway), and I find myself an interpreter so that I can talk to the Afghan chain of command. I think I’m going to focus on them more than the Marines, who are due to leave in the next two years anyway.
Inside the Afghan command center, I am alone, aside from the interpreter. No Marine Gunny. No PAO.
So there is freedom, and there is also more of a degree of objectivity, but objectivity is a relative concept. I know I have more latitude, but I also have more time. There’s no quota. I can focus on whatever I want (there’s a motorcycle-riding General here whom I’ve pretty much pegged for my next piece).
I guess that just leaves the question: Why? Why did I come back?
I’ve wondered that myself quite often. I remember on that last plane ride out, after my second deployment, there was a soul-deep sigh when the bird finally left the ground. Thank God, I thought, I have all my fingers and all my toes, all my limbs, all my skin, and I’m out. I don’t ever have to come back.
But here I am. Again.
Maybe I want action. Or maybe it’s that writers write what they know. It could even be that I miss the Corps. But that’s not quite right.
I know that I want to offer a voice to voiceless people. I know that I want to see the truth — report the truth — in depth. And I know that, if not for anyone but my little brothers, I want to tell the stories of 19-year-old Marines — Americans who were as old as those Afghan children when the planes took down our towers.
The truth is I don’t really know why. It could be many things.
It could even be my mother, whom I still see in my dreams, and the drive to be the man she dreamed me to be. I wish the nearest Rolling Rock wasn’t 4,000 miles away.
MAHMUD RAQI, Afghanistan — The office of Kapisa’s governor sits high on a hilltop overlooking the provincial capital, Mahmud Raqi. It has a beautiful view of the river below and the mountains, trees and fields that stretch into the distance.
Beneath the tranquil surface, however, lies a grim truth. Just outside town roadside bombs are planted to target NATO convoys.
This is one of Afghanistan’s forgotten battlegrounds, a place quietly unraveling as Washington debates the future of the war. Behind the calm facade is a strategically vital part of the country with a fragile security situation that shows every sign of worsening.
Kapisa is barely an hour’s drive north of Kabul, yet two of its seven districts have been in insurgent hands for years, according to local residents, politicians and officials. One is Tagab, where the Taliban stop and search vehicles, run a shadow judicial system and stage regular attacks on foreign and Afghan troops.
“The government does not have control there. I am the representative of the people and I cannot go without employing very heavy security,” said Al Haj Khoja Ghulam Mohammed Zamaray, deputy leader of the provincial council.
Conditions are arguably even more extreme in Alasay. A June 2009 U.S. embassy cable published by WikiLeaks described the militants as having “relative freedom of movement well inside putative secure areas” there. With NATO having since left the district, that has not changed. Elders and members of parliament all insist the Taliban walk openly in the local bazaar.
Similar situations can be found across rural Afghanistan, but history shows events in Kapisa are of particular concern. Guerrillas resisting the Soviet occupation in the 1980s traveled here from safe havens in Pakistan, via the provinces of Kunar and Laghman. It put them within striking distance of the Afghan capital and Bagram air base — then an important Russian facility and now a huge U.S. installation — as well as the main highways connecting Kabul to the north and east of the country.
Speaking to GlobalPost, Abdul Jabar Farhad, a former mujahideen commander serving in the security forces, said “it’s the same story today” and the insurgents are now establishing crucial forward positions in Kapisa in preparation for a wider war.
Attempts to stop them have proved ineffective so far. In September 2010 the government launched the High Peace Council nationwide to help negotiate with rebel groups and persuade their men to lay down arms in exchange for financial aid and vocational training. It finally opened an office in Kapisa earlier this year. The man hired as the local head was Mawlawi Abdul Momin Muslim, who once fought against the Taliban regime. He must now convince his old enemies to accept the constitution.
He admitted people here often have more faith in the rebels than the corrupt government. “The Taliban will sit with them, issue serious orders and solve their problems,” Muslim said.
Initial efforts to win over local residents have also backfired. When NATO delivered leaflets to villages announcing his appointment, insurgents called him to complain that the propaganda was written like a military decree, rather than an offer of reconciliation.
It is a common grievance among Afghans that foreign soldiers have never understood their culture. In a spectacular example, U.S. troops stationed at Bagram in February burned copies of the Quran. Despite a swift apology from NATO, the incident caused nationwide protests and less than a fortnight later the anger in Kapisa was still palpable, neither forgiven nor forgotten.
Haji Mohammed Ibrahim, aged 84 and from Tagab, summed up the mood when he said, “If someone has disrespected your religion, your holy book and your women, they are not your friends anymore.”
In contrast, the Taliban have long possessed the ability to tap into the innate piety of life here. One elder recalled watching an insurgent deliver a sermon at a mosque in Alasay. Members of the audience were so moved by his speech, they cried.
This is not to say the Taliban are supported everywhere in Kapisa. The province is split along faultlines that date from the Soviet era. Tensions between two rival mujahideen parties are contributing to the violence. Fighters linked to Hizb-e-Islami are now swelling the Taliban’s ranks, while members of Jamiat-e-Islami hold key official posts, allying themselves to the government and by extension the occupation.
Ethnicity also plays a role in the unrest. Pashtuns and some Pashayi make up the bulk of the resistance. Tajik areas remain predominantly safe. The worry is that these divisions will grow when NATO leaves.
A small American military reconstruction team is based locally but the majority of foreign troops here are French. They are due to depart in 2013. The forces that remain may not be enough to prevent conditions from deteriorating.
Kapisa’s governor, Mehrabuddin Safi, said he has only 900 to 1,000 police and roughly 1,200 Afghan soldiers to protect a population of 700,000. Pro-government militias have been set up to boost the numbers. He was confident that with greater manpower, and improved training and equipment, he would be able to maintain security.
“This is our country, this is our province,” he said. “We have to look after it.”
Only time will tell if such optimism is misplaced, but the omens are not good. A combination of afflictions has left people struggling to survive. The foreign troops are increasingly mistrusted and opinion of the local authorities is little better, giving the insurgents free reign at the gates of Kabul.
Mohammed Farouq, a villager from Tagab, suggested what may be the future for Kapisa when he described a commander in the Afghan army verbally abusing women and deliberately firing mortars at civilians.
“If he is captured by us does he hope for mercy? There is no hope for mercy then,” he said. “But if we can’t do anything, then one day, if he is going somewhere, we will inform the Taliban.”
(Credit: Carly Rose Hennigan via Shutterstock) 
A soldier is prepared for an operation at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. (Credit: Reuters/Kai Pfaffenbach) 
Oil tankers, which were used to transport NATO fuel supplies to Afghanistan, are parked at a compound in Karachi, Pakistan, Tuesday, May 15, 2012. NATO on Tuesday invited Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari to the alliance's summit in Chicago, after signs that the country could be moving to reopen its Afghan border to NATO military supplies. (AP Photo/Shakil Adil)(Credit: AP) 
A child flies a kite in Kabul on Tuesday Mar. 27, 2012. (Credit: Geoffrey Ingersoll) 
President Barack Obama addresses troops at Bagram Air Field, Afghanistan, Wednesday, May 2, 2012. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)(Credit: AP) 
