The war on terror took an unsettling turn last week with the resurfacing of Osama bin Laden and the FBI’s announcement that al-Qaida is planning “spectacular attacks … [with] high symbolic value, mass casualties, severe damage to the U.S. economy, and maximum psychological trauma.” The FBI identified the U.S. aviation industry as a prime target for al-Qaida, and although critics have complained the bulletin was vague, Salon has learned that in the days before it was issued, national security executives met secretly with top airline officials to discuss the risk that high-tech portable missiles might be used against commercial jets.
According to sources who attended it, the meeting was convened by the year-old Transportation Security Administration on the afternoon of Election Day, Nov. 5. It included Adm. James Loy, chief of the agency; President Bush’s secretary of transportation, Norman Mineta; representatives of the Office of Homeland Security; and a group of 25 airline CEOs. Gathered in a secure conference room in the Department of Transportation Building in Washington, they heard evidence of the growing and intractable threat that shoulder-fired infrared-homing missiles pose to crowded commercial jets taking off and landing at U.S. airports.
Sources within the White House Office of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told Salon the conference was prompted in part by a recent Senior Executive Intelligence Brief prepared by the CIA, which alerted top Bush administration officials and selected military leaders that terrorists have likely smuggled shoulder-launched missiles into the United States in recent months.
The news was ominous for the millions of people who fly on American jets each year: Every commercial flight is susceptible to an attack from terrorists armed with launchers that are small, relatively easy to obtain and surgically accurate. And even after a decade of research at the federal Aviation Research Laboratory in New Jersey, neither the government nor the aviation industry can do much to mitigate the danger.
Gary Stubblefield, who heads the security firm Vantage Systems in Scottsdale, Ariz., describes the shoulder-fired missiles as “aviation’s dirty little secret.” Todd Curtis, the creator of AirSafe.com and a former Air Force officer and Boeing safety analyst, adds this caution: If a “dedicated person wanted to shoot down a plane, there’s nothing to stop them.”
The weapons “are a serious threat, [and] not enough is being done to deal with it,” retired Adm. Thomas Moorer, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for President Reagan, told Salon in an interview. “It’s a simple thing to do. Airplanes have a schedule. They are at the same spot every day, [and] it’s simple to fire [a shoulder-launched missile] from a boat or big truck.”
Intelligence and security officials have long known of the danger posed by these missiles, but alarms began to sound after the recent discovery of al-Qaida training videos instructing terrorists how to fire the portable antiaircraft missiles and the capture of thousands of such missiles in al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan.
The FBI issued a detailed bulletin on May 22, which was delivered to state and local police agencies via the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System. In it, the FBI warned that al-Qaida might be planning to use shoulder-fired missiles — formally called MANPADS, for man-portable air defense systems — against commercial aircraft within the United States.
“A Stinger, an American-made second-generation MANPAD system, was used by anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan during the 1979-1988 Soviet occupation of that country,” the advisory said. “Al Qaeda operatives and Taliban militia members are believed to possess a number of functioning Stinger missiles ship [sic] to Afghanistan during the 1980s.
“Given al-Qaida’s demonstrated objective to target the U.S. airline industry, its access to U.S. and Russian made MANPAD systems, and recent apparent targeting of U.S.-led military forces in Saudi Arabia, law enforcement agencies in the United States should remain alert to potential use of MANPADS against U.S. aircraft.”
The FBI’s concern is well-founded. Shoulder-fired missiles have already been used to shoot down commercial aircraft outside the U.S., and the respected Jane’s Intelligence Review reported last year that they are now in the hands of up to 27 terrorist groups. Reports from the CIA, State Department and other government agencies show that shoulder-fired missiles have already hit at least 42 civil aircraft since the 1970s. Of these, 29 aircraft — 69 percent of the total — were shot down. These attacks have killed well over 900 air travelers — more than all the victims of notorious Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal. Shoulder-fired missile attacks on civil aircraft have been launched from land and from water, upon takeoff and landing, and at altitudes reaching to 11,000 feet. While most of these attacks have occurred outside North America proper, the weapons have been used in Central America. The prospect of a shoulder-launched missile attack was a major concern of the FAA during the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta.
During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union freely distributed the portable missiles to allies and client states around the world. Introduced during the Vietnam War, these weapons first gained widespread fame in the war between Afghanistan and the former Soviet Union, where U.S.-supplied Stingers are credited with turning the tide against the Soviets. Of the more than 900 Stingers supplied to the Afghan rebels, many were never fired and remained available for use or trade. Unfortunately, these leftover missiles are not the only source that supplies the black market. In recent years, sophisticated new shoulder-launched missiles have been flowing into the world’s arms markets.
In the mid-1990s, the international concern over the proliferation of shoulder-fired missiles led to the Wassenaar Agreement, an arms-control “honor system.” Wassenaar does not prevent the sale of these weapons but instead promotes the “transparency” of arms sales to curb improper weapons transfers. Although well-intentioned, Wassenaar has failed to thwart black-market sales. Even when they’re sold to legitimate governments for self-defense, there is no guarantee that such missiles will remain secure. In 1998, soldiers in the former Soviet republic of Georgia staged an uprising and seized a cache of the shoulder-launched missiles. Likewise, Chechen rebels obtained their initial supply of shoulder-fired missiles by overrunning Russian arsenals.
Even U.S. stockpiles are not completely safe. After completing an inspection of U.S. military storage depots, the General Accounting Office concluded that inventory control of domestic shoulder-fired missile stockpiles has been so poor that the military could not account for hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of its portable missiles. One Army official quoted by the GAO said that it would be “pure luck” if none of the missiles were lost. Regardless of their source, shoulder-fired missiles are small enough to easily smuggle into any country, including the United States, and they’re available on the black market for under $100,000 each. That’s well within the reach of deep-pocketed terrorist groups, many of which earn hundreds of millions of dollars a year by dealing drugs and engaging in other illegal activities.
During a classified briefing at the annual Aircraft Survivability conference in Monterey, Calif., in 1999, an FAA official described the threat from shoulder-launched missile systems and the difficulty in getting airlines to address the threat. A subsequent report from the National Defense Industrial Association, which sponsors the conference, described this presentation as “sobering” and noted “a definite need to reduce vulnerability” of commercial aircraft to the missiles.
“The small size and portability of these missiles make them a lethal threat, especially in takeoff and landing corridors,” the authors warned. “Since there have been no confirmed incidents in the U.S., it is difficult to convince aircraft manufacturers and airline companies of the potential cost benefits to making the aircraft less susceptible and less vulnerable to MANPADS through implementation of warning systems and [infrared countermeasures].”
What worries federal officials is that shoulder-fired missiles are so easily obtained, so easy to smuggle, so small and accurate — and that that the government can currently do little to defend commercial jets against them. By comparison, detecting bombs and knives in luggage is child’s play.
Shoulder-fired missiles are self-contained weapons systems, typically 5 feet long and weighing less than 35 pounds. These sophisticated “fire and forget” missiles are easily concealed in shipping containers, aboard a small boat, even in the trunk of a car. A lone terrorist armed with a shoulder-fired missile can destroy an aircraft within seconds after launching the attack. If a plane survives the initial attack, the attacker can attach a new missile tube to his “grip stock” launcher and fire again while the target aircraft is still within range.
Traveling at more than 1,500 miles per hour, a typical shoulder-launched missile can destroy an aircraft from up to four miles away. Early models of these weapons systems had a maximum altitude of around 10,000 feet. The latest generation of shoulder-fired missiles can travel 15,000 feet or higher. Under existing FAA flight rules, aircraft approaching U.S. airports are within range of a shoulder-launched missile attack once they get within 40 to 50 miles of the runway. Put in simpler terms, jets are most vulnerable to attack right about the time flight attendants instruct passengers to turn off their electronic devices.
Even for experienced military pilots flying military aircraft, the first hint that an attack is underway often comes only from the explosion of a missile slamming into an engine, air-conditioning unit or other infrared-radiation-producing device on the aircraft. Even navigation lights emit radiation in the wavelength attractive to these missiles. When equipped with a proximity fuse, the missiles can bring down an aircraft without even making a direct hit.
Dozens of countries have produced hundreds of thousands of these missiles, and many of them have found their way to the black market. Despite international agreements to stop the “improper” sale of shoulder-fired missiles and a CIA operation to purchase them on the black market, these weapon systems remain available to those intent on obtaining them. Despite Afghanistan’s status as a pariah nation in the years leading up to the U.S. invasion, the Taliban and al-Qaida were able to secure immense quantities of these deadly weapons systems. Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, estimated in October 2001 that enemy forces in Afghanistan possessed between 200 and 300 Stinger missiles, the best-known of the shoulder-fired missiles on the market. On Aug. 6, Pentagon spokesman David Lapan told Salon that U.S. forces in Afghanistan had captured 5,592 shoulder-fired missiles during operations to destroy al-Qaida.
Despite the widespread knowledge of this threat, government officials and airline executives are loath to publicize the danger from infrared-homing missiles. When asked to comment on the efforts by the Transportation Security Administration to protect commercial aircraft from shoulder-fired missile attack, agency spokesman Robert Johnson offered only a terse reply: “We are unable to discuss classified and sensitive information.” Despite repeated calls, none of the major airlines contacted by Salon would comment on the threat. Nor would the Air Transport Association, an industry group representing many of the commercial carriers.
The reticence is not surprising. A safe and efficient airline industry is vital to the functioning of the nation’s business; the aviation industry employs 1 million people and annually contributes $300 billion to the U.S. economy. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, the airline industry has been reeling. According to the Air Transport Association, the attacks and the economic downturn combined cost the airlines $7 billion last year, even after an infusion of federal cash. And the losses are expected to continue this year. If passengers knew about the danger posed by missiles, they might be less willing to fly, and an actual attack could prove catastrophic to the airline industry.
A terrorist missile strike on a commercial airliner “would have a devastating impact on air travel demand, and an increase in airline insurance and security costs, at a moment in time when they can least afford it,” says professor Paul Stephen Dempsey, an air-transportation expert at McGill University in Montreal. Unfortunately for travelers, none of the newly implemented and highly touted security procedures are capable of addressing this threat.
Unlike some of the other threats that emerged with the 9/11 attacks, the government has known about the threat posed by shoulder-fired missiles since at least 1973, when Palestinian terrorists armed with such missiles were arrested in Rome as they waited to shoot down a jet. The first successful use of these weapons to “kill” a commercial aircraft outside a war zone came in 1978, in the skies over Chad. Since then, many government agencies have grown increasingly alarmed by the threat that shoulder-fired missiles pose. While not an everyday occurrence, such attacks are a large enough concern that the FAA’s annual Criminal Acts Against Civil Aviation report contains a section that tracks missile attacks.
When asked to describe the likelihood of a shoulder-fired missile attack against commercial aircraft within the continental United States, one official within the intelligence community, who asked not to be named, said that it is an absolute certainty that an attack will occur. The only question is when, he said. “Some of us are surprised that it hasn’t already happened.”
Because of the increased threat to its commercial-size aircraft due to the proliferation of sophisticated shoulder-fired missiles, the Air Force is starting to replace its standard missile-detection and countermeasures systems with LAIRCMs (large aircraft infrared countermeasures), which use laser jammers to disorient an attacking infrared-homing missile. In contrast to military aircraft, most civilian aircraft lack the countermeasures systems necessary to ward off a missile attack. There are two exceptions: Israel’s El-Al Airlines, and some of the private jets owned by corporations and wealthy individuals.
The likelihood that any aircraft will be lost in a missile attack is dependent on a multitude of design factors. Nonetheless, analyses of man-portable missile attacks show that as a group, commercial aircraft (as opposed to small jet fighters that are specifically designed to detect, evade and withstand such missiles) have as much as a 70 percent chance of being lost if hit by a single missile. If an attacker succeeds at striking twice, the likelihood of downing an aircraft approaches 100 percent.
Even though small commercial aircraft are more likely to be lost in a shoulder-fired missile attack, two of the jet aircraft most familiar to American travelers have proven surprisingly vulnerable: Of the five Boeing 727s and 737s that have been hit by shoulder-launched missiles, three have been shot down, and in one of them 130 people died just after takeoff in Angola.
Despite the demonstrated risk that these missiles pose, no meaningful changes have been made to commercial aircraft design or flight operations to reduce it. While the president and other officials travel on aircraft equipped with countermeasures systems that protect them against a missile attack, most Americans do not. “The threats are real and the countermeasures exist,” a retired government anti-terrorism expert told Salon, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Some of us are perplexed as to why a greater sense of urgency hasn’t been demonstrated in securing our airspace.”
The low priority placed on protecting commercial jets from shoulder-fired missile attack is eerily similar to the debate over the need to strengthen cockpit doors before 9/11. For decades government officials and the airlines knew that the cockpit doors were vulnerable to being broken down by a determined terrorist or a rowdy drunk. Still, nothing was done to fix the problem until thousands had died. Airlines may be reluctant to respond to the threat, one federal source told Salon, because “it would signify to the insurance companies that the airlines believe that it was a significant threat to their daily operations, allowing them to increase the premiums.”
Daniel Benjamin, the former director for counter-terrorism for the Clinton White House’s National Security Council, acknowledged in an e-mail interview that the threat might also have implications for the airlines’ legal liability in the event of a missile attack. “No shortage of studies have been done,” Benjamin said, “and up till now, the industry has been unwilling to consider paying for the defensive measures. In the post-9/11 environment, with Washington dictating more in the way of security improvements, there needs to be another look at the issue. With many airlines facing huge financial problems and some staring at insolvency, the problem of paying for the improvements — which is considerable — is not going away.”
There are a variety of ways to reduce the likelihood that an aircraft will be hit by an infrared-homing missile and to prevent the loss of an aircraft that suffers a hit. One of the basic techniques is to reduce the ability of the missile “seeker” — the electronic component that homes in on the targeted aircraft — to “acquire,” or lock on to, the intended target. Most shoulder-fired missile seekers use an infrared guidance system that detects the radiation that aircraft emit in the form of light and heat. Navigation lights, air-conditioning units, and aircraft engines all emit infrared radiation that a seeker can detect and lock on to.
Over the years, the military has developed a number of techniques for deflecting shoulder-fired missiles from its aircraft. One is for low-flying aircraft to disperse red-hot flares. Unfortunately, newer shoulder-fired missiles are able to distinguish an aircraft from a flare. Flares also have the drawback of triggering fires when they land on combustible materials. The military has also experimented with using “obscurants,” fine metallic or chemical particles dispersed from an aircraft to prevent the missile seeker from locking on to it, and it is investigating the feasibility having an aircraft tow infrared decoys behind it. The military has also used “thermal management” — suppressing the amount of emitted infrared radiation and thereby presenting a smaller infrared “signature” — to reduce the likelihood that the infrared seeker will lock on to its intended victim. This in turn reduces the effective operating range of the missile.
Unfortunately, these techniques are not of practical use for commercial aircraft. One could imagine the outcry from people whose businesses or homes lie in airport approach and departure corridors if each of the thousands of daily commercial flights dropped dozens of flares upon takeoff and landing, or spewed fine metallic or chemical particles into the air along those same routes. Thermal management is also of minimal use in protecting commercial aircraft. In contrast to military aircraft, designed from the beginning to present small infrared signatures, commercial aircraft have huge signatures. Additionally, modern shoulder-fired missiles are programmed with sophisticated guidance systems that nullify aircraft designers’ attempts to guide infrared-homing missiles to less deadly impact points.
Aircraft are highly sophisticated machines in which the loss of certain critical components eliminates a pilot’s ability to control the aircraft. Aviation engineers have designed modern aircraft with redundant critical components to protect planes from crashing due to the failure of one of those components, from a missile warhead detonation or simple mechanical failure. According to Air Force publications on aircraft “survivability,” one protective strategy that aircraft manufacturers can implement is to disperse these redundant critical components around the aircraft, while simultaneously keeping them away from likely missile-hit locations. Having a backup component does little good if both the primary component and its backup get destroyed in a missile attack.
Other engineering modifications can improve the survivability of an aircraft struck by a missile. Among the design modifications that airlines could make:
Keeping flight control hydraulics away from locations likely to be hit.
Separating fuel systems from locations likely to be hit.
Using self-sealing fuel-feed lines.
Incorporating fluid-shutoff mechanisms in the rear portions of engines.
Hardening or shielding critical components around infrared sources.
For larger aircraft, moving engines to the rear of aircraft and away from the wing fuel tanks.
Because of the threat posed to its large aircraft, the ones most similar to commercial jets, the Air Force is embarking on an ambitious plan to install LAIRCM on its transport aircraft. Standard countermeasures systems combine a missile-launch detector, a warning system, and flashlamps to confuse an attacking missile. But the state-of-the-art LAIRCM replaces the flashlamps with one or more lasers, which emit energy pulses to disorient an attacking infrared missile. The new system is also smaller and uses less energy. For a cost of just over $3 million for each of the first 20 aircraft to receive the system, the Air Force is obtaining the best available protection.
With the proper design or retrofitting of aircraft, not every missile attack must end in a catastrophic loss of the airliner and all those aboard. Unfortunately, each airline and each manufacturer has an economic disincentive to expend the money necessary to improve their aircraft’s survivability. Given the economics of the industry, unless the federal government forces manufacturers to build more survivable aircraft and mandates that airlines modify their existing aircraft, every flight within the United States is at risk.
The question is, will corrective action be taken before flights are shot down or will it happen only after American air travelers die in a missile attack?
Even if airlines were to install the state-of-the-art countermeasures system on each aircraft, the expense, about $3 million per aircraft, would not be excessive given the cost of new commercial jets. It would add 1.5 percent to the cost of a $200 million Boeing 747-400, or 5 percent to the cost of a $60 million Boeing 737. On the negative side for airlines, the cost of properly maintaining this system is high, which would put a strain on the cash-strapped airlines. Additionally, it is unlikely that the military would support such wide distribution of this sensitive technology.
An alternative to installing countermeasures systems on every aircraft is to protect the airspace above airports and in airport approach and departure routes. The Air Force has recently developed a plan to do just that.
Known as escort-directed infrared countermeasures, or E-DIRCM, this proposal would use “buddy” aircraft equipped with the latest countermeasures technology to rendezvous with airliners as they approach airports and then escort them to the ground; similarly, departing aircraft would be escorted until they reached an altitude out of range of portable missiles. Should a terrorist unleash a missile attack, the escort aircraft would detect the launch and use its laser jammers to disable the attacking missile or missiles.
This approach would remove the responsibility for installing and maintaining infrared missile countermeasures equipment from the airlines. On the negative side, E-DIRCM would require an enormous number of government-operated buddy aircraft, would greatly increase airport noise and congestion, would strain an already burdened air-traffic control system, and would significantly increase the likelihood of midair collisions in the areas surrounding airports.
When al-Qaida exploited weak airport security and seized control of four aircraft, the government was able to step in and make immediate, if not convenient, changes to reduce the likelihood of terrorists smuggling weapons onto aircraft. The portable-missile problem will not be so easily solved.
The alarming new CIA report that provoked the high-level conference between White House officials and airline CEOs offered no specific evidence to back the claim that portable missiles had been smuggled by terrorists into the United States. But certainly the nation’s borders are porous, and some smugglers have already tried to bring the missile-launchers in. Security experts believe it is just a matter of time — and the time may already have come.
Two recent cases occurred near Miami. In 1997, two smugglers from the former Soviet Union arranged to ship Bulgarian-manufactured shoulder-launched missiles into the U.S. in a complex plan that involved using falsified Ministry of Defense documents from a former Soviet republic and a Cypriot-owned merchant vessel that was registered in yet another country. When federal agents arrested the arms dealers in Florida, the missiles were on the docks in Bulgaria. The two arms smugglers have already served their sentences and have been released from prison.
In June 2001, federal officials arrested two men in a sting operation in West Palm Beach, Fla. The two were attempting to purchase a variety of sophisticated weaponry, including American-made Stinger missiles. These men are scheduled for release next September.
Although law enforcement officials have prevented the importation of these portable missiles into the U.S., there is no way of guaranteeing that they can detect every missile. “Hundreds of thousands of people cross the U.S. border illegally every year,” a recent RAND study noted, “and individual drug shipments into the country are often as large as tens of tons. There is no reason to believe that a sufficiently motivated adversary could not duplicate the accomplishments of immigrants and drug smugglers. Indeed, a nation or terrorist group might hire smugglers for their expertise.”
U.S. Customs Service spokesman Kevin Bell echoes those concerns. “More [drugs] get in than we can guess, and I would think that would be the same situation [with shoulder-fired missiles],” he said. More than 200,000 merchant and passenger ships enter U.S. ports each year and over 45,000 shipping containers and trucks enter the United States daily, but the Customs Service physically opens and inspects only 2 or 3 percent of the shipping containers entering the U.S. each year, according to Bell.
In August, federal agents arrested a Canadian man in New Mexico who smuggled into the U.S. 49 wooden crates filled with high-explosive NATO weapons meant to destroy light-armored vehicles and military bunkers. Each of those crates was large enough to transport a shoulder-fired missile system. In November, authorities arrested three people plotting to send American-made Stinger missiles to al-Qaida.
Up until now, we have been lucky. But at some point, our luck is likely to run out and terrorists will use shoulder-fired missiles against American commercial aircraft. When that happens, the shock will ripple from the downed plane and the families of the victims to the airline industry and to all of the people and industries dependent on it. Clearly, the threat is not abating.
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) 
