This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.
The crisis has come suddenly, almost without warning. At the far edge of American power in Asia, things are going from bad to much worse than anyone could have imagined. The insurgents are spreading fast across the countryside. Corruption is rampant. Local military forces, recipients of countless millions of dollars in U.S. aid, shirk combat and are despised by local villagers. American casualties are rising. Our soldiers seem to move in a fog through a hostile, unfamiliar terrain, with no idea of who is friend and who is foe.
After years of lavishing American aid on him, the leader of this country, our close ally, has isolated himself inside the presidential palace, becoming an inadequate partner for a failing war effort. His brother is reportedly a genuine prince of darkness, dealing in drugs, covert intrigues, and electoral manipulation. The U.S. Embassy demands reform, the ouster of his brother, the appointment of honest local officials, something, anything that will demonstrate even a scintilla of progress.
After all, nine years earlier U.S. envoys had taken a huge gamble: rescuing this president from exile and political obscurity, installing him in the palace, and ousting a legitimate monarch whose family had ruled the country for centuries. Now, he repays this political debt by taunting America. He insists on untrammeled sovereignty and threatens to ally with our enemies if we continue to demand reforms of him. Yet Washington is so deeply identified with the counterinsurgency campaign in his country that walking away no longer seems like an option.
This scenario is obviously a description of the Obama administration’s devolving relations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul this April. It is also an eerie summary of relations between the Kennedy administration and South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon nearly half a century earlier, in August 1963. If these parallels are troubling, they reveal the central paradox of American power over the past half-century in its dealings with embattled autocrats like Karzai and Diem across that vast, impoverished swath of the globe once known as the Third World.
Our Man in Kabul
With his volatile mix of dependence and independence, Hamid Karzai seems the archetype of all the autocrats Washington has backed in Asia, Africa, and Latin America since European empires began disintegrating after World War II. When the CIA mobilized Afghan warlords to topple the Taliban in October 2001, the country’s capital, Kabul, was ours for the taking — and the giving. In the midst of this chaos, Hamid Karzai, an obscure exile living in Pakistan, gathered a handful of followers and plunged into Afghanistan on a doomed CIA-supported mission to rally the tribes for revolt. It proved a quixotic effort that required rescue by Navy SEALs who snatched him back to safety in Pakistan.
Desperate for a reliable post-invasion ally, the Bush administration engaged in what one expert has called “bribes, secret deals, and arm twisting” to install Karzai in power. This process took place not through a democratic election in Kabul, but by lobbying foreign diplomats at a donors’ conference in Bonn, Germany, to appoint him interim president. When King Zahir Shah, a respected figure whose family had ruled Afghanistan for more than 200 years, returned to offer his services as acting head of state, the U.S. ambassador had a “showdown” with the monarch, forcing him back into exile. In this way, Karzai’s “authority,” which came directly and almost solely from the Bush administration, remained unchecked. For his first months in office, the president had so little trust in his nominal Afghan allies that he was guarded by American security.
In the years that followed, the Karzai regime slid into an ever deepening state of corruption and incompetence, while NATO allies rushed to fill the void with their manpower and material, a de facto endorsement of the president’s low road to power. As billions in international development aid poured into Kabul, a mere trickle escaped the capital’s bottomless bureaucracy to reach impoverished villages in the countryside. In 2009, Transparency International ranked Afghanistan as the world’s second most corrupt nation, just a notch below Somalia.
As opium production soared from 185 tons in 2001 to 8,200 tons just six years later — a remarkable 53% of the country’s entire economy — drug corruption metastasized, reaching provincial governors, the police, cabinet ministers, and the president’s own brother, also his close adviser. Indeed, as a senior U.S. antinarcotics official assigned to Afghanistan described the situation in 2006, “Narco corruption went to the very top of the Afghan government.” Earlier this year, the U.N. estimated that ordinary Afghans spend $2.5 billion annually, a quarter of the country’s gross domestic product, simply to bribe the police and government officials.
Last August’s presidential elections were an apt index of the country’s progress. Karzai’s campaign team, the so-called warlord ticket, included Abdul Dostum, an Uzbek warlord who slaughtered countless prisoners in 2001; vice presidential candidate Muhammed Fahim, a former defense minister linked to drugs and human rights abuses; Sher Muhammed Akhundzada, the former governor of Helmand Province, who was caught with nine tons of drugs in his compound back in 2005; and the president’s brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, reputedly the reigning drug lord and family fixer in Kandahar. “The Karzai family has opium and blood on their hands,” one Western intelligence official told the New York Times during the campaign.
Desperate to capture an outright 50% majority in the first round of balloting, Karzai’s warlord coalition made use of an extraordinary array of electoral chicanery. After two months of counting and checking, the U.N.’s Electoral Complaints Commission announced in October 2009 that more than a million of his votes, 28% of his total, were fraudulent, pushing the president’s tally well below the winning margin. Calling the election a “foreseeable train wreck,” the deputy U.N. envoy Peter Galbraith said, “The fraud has handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners.”
Galbraith, however, was sacked and silenced as U.S. pressure extinguished the simmering flames of electoral protest. The runner-up soon withdrew from the run-off election that Washington had favored as a face-saving, post-fraud compromise, and Karzai was declared the outright winner by default. In the wake of the farcical election, Karzai not surprisingly tried to stack the five-man Electoral Complaints Commission, an independent body meant to vet electoral complaints, replacing the three foreign experts with his own Afghan appointees. When the parliament rejected his proposal, Karzai lashed out with bizarre charges, accusing the U.N. of wanting a “puppet government” and blaming all the electoral fraud on “massive interference from foreigners.” In a meeting with members of parliament, he reportedly told them: “If you and the international community pressure me more, I swear that I am going to join the Taliban.”
Amid this tempest in an electoral teapot, as American reinforcements poured into Afghanistan, Washington’s escalating pressure for “reform” only served to inflame Karzai. As Air Force One headed for Kabul on March 28th, National Security Adviser James Jones bluntly told reporters aboard that, in his meeting with Karzai, President Obama would insist that he prioritize “battling corruption, taking the fight to the narco-traffickers.” It was time for the new administration in Washington, ever more deeply committed to its escalating counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, to bring our man in Kabul back into line.
A week filled with inflammatory, angry outbursts from Karzai followed before the White House changed tack, concluding that it had no alternative to Karzai and began to retreat. Jones now began telling reporters soothingly that, during his visit to Kabul, President Obama had been “generally impressed with the quality of the [Afghan] ministers and the seriousness with which they’re approaching their job.”
All of this might have seemed so new and bewildering in the American experience, if it weren’t actually so old.
Our Man in Saigon
The sorry history of the autocratic regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon (1954-1963) offers an earlier cautionary roadmap that helps explain why Washington has so often found itself in such an impossibly contradictory position with its authoritarian allies.
Landing in Saigon in mid-1954 after years of exile in the United States and Europe, Diem had no real political base. He could, however, count on powerful patrons in Washington, notably Democratic senators Mike Mansfield and John F. Kennedy. One of the few people to greet Diem at the airport that day was the legendary CIA operative Edward Lansdale, Washington’s master of political manipulation in Southeast Asia. Amid the chaos accompanying France’s defeat in its long, bloody Indochina War, Lansdale maneuvered brilliantly to secure Diem’s tenuous hold on power in the southern part of Vietnam. In the meantime, U.S. diplomats sent his rival, the Emperor Bao Dai, packing for Paris. Within months, thanks to Washington’s backing, Diem won an absurd 98.2% of a rigged vote for the presidency and promptly promulgated a new constitution that ended the Vietnamese monarchy after a millennium.
Channeling all aid payments through Diem, Washington managed to destroy the last vestiges of French colonial support for any of his potential rivals in the south, while winning the president a narrow political base within the army, among civil servants, and in the minority Catholic community. Backed by a seeming cornucopia of American support, Diem proceeded to deal harshly with South Vietnam’s Buddhist sects, harassed the Viet Minh veterans of the war against the French, and resisted the implementation of rural reforms that might have won him broader support among the country’s peasant population.
When the U.S. Embassy pressed for reforms, he simply stalled, convinced that Washington, having already invested so much of its prestige in his regime, would be unable to withhold support. Like Karzai in Kabul, Diem’s ultimate weapon was his weakness — the threat that his government, shaky as it was, might simply collapse if pushed too hard.
In the end, the Americans invariably backed down, sacrificing any hope of real change in order to maintain the ongoing war effort against the local Viet Cong rebels and their North Vietnamese backers. As rebellion and dissent rose in the south, Washington ratcheted up its military aid to battle the communists, inadvertently giving Diem more weapons to wield against his own people, communist and non-communist alike.
Working through his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu — and this should have an eerie resonance today — the Diems took control of Saigon’s drug racket, pocketing significant profits as they built up a nexus of secret police, prisons, and concentration camps to deal with suspected dissidents. At the time of Diem’s downfall in 1963, there were some 50,000 prisoners in his gulag.
Nonetheless, from 1960 to 1963, the regime only weakened as resistance sparked repression and repression redoubled resistance. Soon South Vietnam was wracked by Buddhist riots in the cities and a spreading Communist revolution in the countryside. Moving after dark, Viet Cong guerrillas slowly began to encircle Saigon, assassinating Diem’s unpopular village headmen by the thousands.
In this three-year period, the US military mission in Saigon tried every conceivable counterinsurgency strategy. They brought in helicopters and armored vehicles to improve conventional mobility, deployed the Green Berets for unconventional combat, built up regional militias for localized security, constructed “strategic hamlets” in order to isolate eight million peasants inside supposedly secure fortified compounds, and ratcheted up CIA assassinations of suspected Viet Cong leaders. Nothing worked. Even the best military strategy could not fix the underlying political problem. By 1963, the Viet Cong had grown from a handful of fighters into a guerrilla army that controlled more than half the countryside.
When protesting Buddhist monk Quang Duc assumed the lotus position on a Saigon street in June 1963 and held the posture while followers lit his gasoline-soaked robes which erupted in fatal flames, the Kennedy administration could no longer ignore the crisis. As Diem’s batons cracked the heads of Buddhist demonstrators and Nhu’s wife applauded what she called “monk barbecues,” Washington began to officially protest the ruthless repression. Instead of responding, Diem (shades of Karzai) began working through his brother Nhu to open negotiations with the communists in Hanoi, signaling Washington that he was perfectly willing to betray the U.S. war effort and possibly form a coalition with North Vietnam.
In the midst of this crisis, a newly appointed American ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, arrived in Saigon and within days approved a plan for a CIA-backed coup to overthrow Diem. For the next few months, Lansdale’s CIA understudy Lucien Conein met regularly with Saigon’s generals to hatch an elaborate plot that was unleashed with devastating effect on November 1, 1963.
As rebel troops stormed the palace, Diem and his brother Nhu fled to a safe house in Saigon’s Chinatown. Flushed from hiding by promises of safe conduct into exile, Diem climbed aboard a military convoy for what he thought was a ride to the airport. But CIA operative Conein had vetoed the flight plans. A military assassin intercepted the convoy, spraying Diem’s body with bullets and stabbing his bleeding corpse in a coup de grâce.
Although Ambassador Lodge hosted an embassy celebration for the rebel officers and cabled President Kennedy that Diem’s death would mean a “shorter war,” the country soon collapsed into a series of military coups and counter-coups that crippled army operations. Over the next 32 months, Saigon had nine new governments and a change of cabinet every 15 weeks — all incompetent, corrupt, and ineffective.
After spending a decade building up Diem’s regime and a day destroying it, the U.S. had seemingly irrevocably linked its own power and prestige to the Saigon government — any government. The “best and brightest” in Washington were convinced that they could not just withdraw from South Vietnam without striking a devastating blow against American “credibility.” As South Vietnam slid toward defeat in the two years following Diem’s death, the first of 540,000 U.S. combat troops began arriving, ensuring that Vietnam would be transformed from an American-backed war into an American war.
Under the circumstances, Washington searched desperately for anyone who could provide sufficient stability to prosecute the war against the communists and eventually, with palpable relief, embraced a military junta headed by General Nguyen Van Thieu. Installed and sustained in power by American aid, Thieu had no popular following and ruled through military repression, repeating the same mistakes that led to Diem’s downfall. But chastened by its experience after the assassination of Diem, the U.S. Embassy decided to ignore Thieu’s unpopularity and continue to build his army. Once Washington began to reduce its aid after 1973, Thieu found that his troops simply would not fight to defend his unpopular government. In April 1975, he carried a hoard of stolen gold into exile while his army collapsed with stunning speed, suffering one of the most devastating collapses in military history.
In pursuit of its Vietnam War effort, Washington required a Saigon government responsive to its demands, yet popular with its own peasantry, strong enough to wage a war in the villages, yet sensitive to the needs of the country’s poor villagers. These were hopelessly contradictory political requisites. Finding that civilian regimes engaged in impossible-to-control intrigues, the U.S. ultimately settled for authoritarian military rule which, acceptable as it proved in Washington, was disdained by the Vietnamese peasantry.
Death or Exile?
So is President Karzai, like Diem, doomed to die on the streets of Kabul or will he, one day, find himself like Thieu boarding a midnight flight into exile?
History, or at least our awareness of its lessons, does change things, albeit in complex, unpredictable ways. Today, senior U.S. envoys have Diem’s cautionary tale encoded in their diplomatic DNA, which undoubtedly precludes any literal replay of his fate. After sanctioning Diem’s assassination, Washington watched in dismay as South Vietnam plunged into chaos. So chastened was the U.S. Embassy by this dismal outcome that it backed the subsequent military regime to a fault.
A decade later, the Senate’s Church Committee uncovered other U.S. attempts at assassination-cum-regime-change in the Congo, Chile, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic that further stigmatized this option. In effect, antibodies from the disastrous CIA coup against Diem, still in Washington’s political bloodstream, reduce the possibility of any similar move against Karzai today.
Ironically, those who seek to avoid the past may be doomed to repeat it. By accepting Karzai’s massive electoral fraud and refusing to consider alternatives last August, Washington has, like it or not, put its stamp of approval on his spreading corruption and the political instability that accompanies it. In this way, the Obama administration in its early days invited a sad denouement to its Afghan adventure, one potentially akin to Vietnam after Diem’s death. America’s representatives in Kabul are once again hurtling down history’s highway, eyes fixed on the rear-view mirror, not the precipice that lies dead ahead.
In the experiences of both Ngo Dinh Diem and Hamid Karzai lurks a self-defeating pattern common to Washington’s alliances with dictators throughout the Third World, then and now. Selected and often installed in office by Washington, or at least backed by massive American military aid, these client figures become desperately dependent, even as they fail to implement the sorts of reforms that might enable them to build an independent political base. Torn between pleasing their foreign patrons or their own people, they wind up pleasing neither. As opposition to their rule grows, a downward spiral of repression and corruption often ends in collapse; while, for all its power, Washington descends into frustration and despair, unable to force its allies to adopt reforms which might allow them to survive. Such a collapse is a major crisis for the White House, but often — Diem’s case is obviously an exception — little more than an airplane ride into exile for the local autocrat or dictator.
There was — and is — a fundamental structural flaw in any American alliance with these autocrats. Inherent in these unequal alliances is a peculiar dynamic that makes the eventual collapse of such American-anointed leaders almost inevitable. At the outset, Washington selects a client who seems pliant enough to do its bidding. Such a client, in turn, opts for Washington’s support not because he is strong, but precisely because he needs foreign patronage to gain and hold office.
Once installed, the client, no matter how reluctant, has little choice but to make Washington’s demands his top priority, investing his slender political resources in placating foreign envoys. Responding to an American political agenda on civil and military matters, these autocrats often fail to devote sufficient energy, attention, and resources to cultivating a following; Diem found himself isolated in his Saigon palace, while Karzai has become a “president” justly, if derisively, nicknamed “the mayor of Kabul.” Caught between the demands of a powerful foreign patron and countervailing local needs and desires, both leaders let guerrillas capture the countryside, while struggling uncomfortably, and in the end angrily, as well as resentfully, in the foreign embrace.
Nor are such parallels limited to Afghanistan today or Vietnam almost half a century ago. Since the end of World War II, many of the sharpest crises in U.S. foreign policy have arisen from just such problematic relationships with authoritarian client regimes. As a start, it was a similarly close relationship with General Fulgencio Batista of Cuba in the 1950s which inspired the Cuban revolution. That culminated, of course, in Fidel Castro’s rebels capturing the Cuban capital, Havana, in 1959, which in turn led the Kennedy administration into the catastrophic Bay of Pigs invasion and then the Cuban Missile Crisis.
For a full quarter-century, the U.S. played international patron to the Shah of Iran, intervening to save his regime from the threat of democracy in the early 1950s and later massively arming his police and military while making him Washington’s proxy power in the Persian Gulf. His fall in the Islamic revolution of 1979 not only removed the cornerstone of American power in this strategic region, but plunged Washington into a succession of foreign policy confrontations with Iran that have yet to end.
After a half-century as a similarly loyal client in Central America, the regime of Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza fell in the Sandinista revolution of 1979, creating a foreign policy problem marked by the CIA’s contra operation against the new Sandinista government and the seamy Iran-Contra scandal that roiled President Reagan’s second term.
Just last week, Washington’s anointed autocrat in Kyrgyzstan, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, fled the presidential palace when his riot police, despite firing live ammunition and killing more than 80 of his citizens, failed to stop opposition protesters from taking control of the capital, Bishkek. Although his rule was brutal and corrupt, last year the Obama administration courted Bakiyev sedulously and successfully to preserve U.S. use of the old Soviet air base at Manas critical for supply flights into Afghanistan. Even as riot police were beating the opposition into submission to prepare for Bakiyev’s “landslide victory” in last July’s elections, President Obama sent him a personal letter praising his support for the Afghan war. With Washington’s imprimatur, there was nothing to stop Bakiyev’s political slide into murderous repression and his ultimate fall from power.
Why have so many American alliances with Third World dictators collapsed in such a spectacular fashion, producing divisive recriminations at home and policy disasters abroad?
During Britain’s century of dominion, its self-confident servants of empire, from viceroys in plumed hats to district officers in khaki shorts, ruled much of Africa and Asia through an imperial system of protectorates, indirect rule, and direct colonial rule. In the succeeding American “half century” of hegemony, Washington carried the burden of global power without a formal colonial system, substituting its military advisers for imperial viceroys.
In this new landscape of sovereign states that emerged after World War II, Washington has had to pursue a contradictory policy as it dealt with the leaders of nominally independent nations that were also deeply dependent on foreign economic and military aid. After identifying its own prestige with these fragile regimes, Washington usually tries to coax, chide, or threaten its allies into embracing what it considers needed reforms. Even when this counsel fails and prudence might dictate the start of a staged withdrawal, as in Saigon in 1963 and Kabul today, American envoys simply cannot let go of their unrepentant, resentful allies, as the long slide into disaster gains momentum.
With few choices between diplomatic niceties and a destabilizing coup, Washington invariably ends up defaulting to an inflexible foreign policy at the edge of paralysis that often ends with the collapse of our authoritarian allies, whether Diem in Saigon, the Shah in Tehran, or on some dismal day yet to come, Hamid Karzai in Kabul. To avoid this impending debacle, our only realistic option in Afghanistan today may well be the one we wish we had taken in Saigon back in August 1963 — a staged withdrawal of U.S. forces.
Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, which probes the conjuncture of illicit narcotics and covert operations over the past 50 years. His latest book, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, explores the influence of overseas counterinsurgency operations on the spread of internal security measures here at home.
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) 
