I've found it very helpful to listen to the voices of troops who were there. Here are some voices:
What Americans never understood or were never told about Afghanistan
I once upon a time was a member of the IC long since removed. I assist veterans like myself in navigating the VA for benefits many from Afghanistan.
The lie that has been and is still being told is there is a difference between the Taliban, ISIS and Al Queda. To put it in perspective that’s like saying there is a difference between the Proud Boys, KKK and 3%ers. The goals by all of them is the same to establish a Caliphate.
When we pushed the active fighters to Pakistan we see lines on a map and thought we were accomplishing something. We see distinctions between the groups that fundamentally don’t exist. We trained and gave arms to men that had/have no problem deceiving those that were intentionally ignorant about allegiances. The Afghan Army was always a paper army as long as we kept paying them. Were there some that had our interests in mind sure but never the majority and those tended to die in the fighting.
The Taliban and AQ/ISIS never really left they just changed uniform to appease us and wait knowing we would eventually leave. Our leaders never understood who they were dealing with. The reason everything seemed to fall so fast was it was never real in the first place. Once we “left” and stopped paying a huge chunk of the army just switched back into their old uniform now armed with all the guns and equipment we trained them with.
Afghanistan wasn’t lost it was never real to begin with and once you understand that everything else makes sense.
Boy howdy am I having a lot of feelings about Afghanistan today
I deployed there twice--once in 2008 and once in 2009-10
It was already obvious that the Taliban would sweep through the very instant we left
And here we are today
I know how bad the Taliban is. I know what they do to women and little boys. I know what they’re going to do to the interpreters and the people who cooperated with us, it’s awful, it’s bad, but we are leaving, and all I feel is grim relief.
This is what I remember:
I remember Afghanistan as a dusty beige nightmare of a place full of proud, brave people who did not ******* want us there. We called them Hajjis and worse and they were better than we were, braver and stronger and smarter.
I remember going through the phones of the people we detained and finding clip after clip of Bollywood musicals, women singing in fields of flowers. Rarely did I find anything incriminating.
I remember finding propaganda footage cut together from the Soviet invasion and our own Operation Enduring Whatever. I remember laughing about how stupid the Afghans were to not know we aren’t the Russians and then, eventually, realizing that I was the stupid one.
I remember how every year the US would have to decide how to deal with the opium fields. There were a few options. You could leave the fields alone, and then the Taliban would shake the farmers down and use the money to buy weapons. Or, you could carpet bomb the fields, and then the farmers would join the Taliban for reasons that, to me, seem obvious.
The third option, and the one we went for while I was there, was to give the farmers fertilizer as an incentive to grow wheat instead of opium poppy. The farmers then sold the fertilizer to the Taliban, who used it to make explosives for IEDs that could destroy a million dollar MRAP and maim everyone inside.
I remember we weren’t allowed to throw batteries away because people who worked on base would go through the trash and collect hundreds of dead batteries, wire them together so they had just enough juice for one charge, and use that charge to detonate an IED.
I remember the look on my roommate’s face after she got back from cutting the dead bodies of two soldiers out of an HMMWV that got blown up by an IED that I have always imagined was made with fertilizer from an opium farmer and detonated with a hundred thrown-out batteries.
I remember an Afghan kid who worked in the DFAC (cafeteria) who we called Cowboy. He always wore this cowboy hat and an “I’m with stupid” t-shirt someone had given him, always with a big smile, high school age.
Cowboy was a good student. His family, who all worked on base, was incredibly proud of him. He wanted to go to college in America. But there weren’t colleges that took Afghans, the education system was too ****. No program to help kids like him. I looked.
I wonder if he’s dead now, for serving us food and dreaming of something different.
But if Cowboy is dead then he died a long time ago, and if Cowboy is dead it’s our fault for going there in the first place, giving his family the option of trusting us when we are the least trustworthy people on the planet.
We use people up and throw them away like it’s nothing.
And now, finally, we are leaving and the predictable thing is happening. The Taliban is surging in and taking it all back. They were always going to do this, because they have a thing you cannot buy or train, they have patience and a bloody-mindedness that warrants more respect than we ever gave them.
I am Team Get The **** Out Of Afghanistan which, as a friend pointed out to me today, has always been Team Taliban. It’s Team Taliban or Team Stay Forever.
There is no third team.
And so I sit here, reading these sad ******* articles and these horrified social media posts about the suffering in Afghanistan and the horror of the encroaching Taliban and how awful it is that this is happening but I can’t stop feeling this grim happiness, like, finally, you *******, finally you have to face the thing Afghanistan has always been. You can’t keep lying to yourself about what you sent us into.
No more blown up soldiers. No more Bollywood videos on phones whose owners are getting shipped god knows where. No more hypocrisy.
No more pretending it meant anything. It didn’t.
It didn’t mean a ******* thing.
Afghanistan: The Taliban Victory in a Global Context
An Anti-Imperial Perspective from a Veteran of the US Occupation
Based on what I saw, US counterterrorism operations are chiefly about creating markets for US military technologies and products and securing resources for the US empire. For 20 years, we propped up local and regional warlords, giving them weapons, money, and arms so they wouldn’t attack our forces. We green-lit their death squads and called them the Afghan Local Police. Working at senior-echelon levels, I watched both ranking officers and junior soldiers scramble to pad their résumés in hopes of becoming mercenaries for the companies and agencies that were actually running the show. Generals made careers and went on to be employed by those companies or the Department of Defense/Intelligence Community. From Syria and Iraq to Yemen and all across Africa, throughout our 800 military bases, I do not know of a single military mission that is chiefly focused on creating peace and stability. . . .
Now that the occupation has ended, an entire generation of US military veterans will be forced to question what it was all for. All I can do is ask why it took them so long to arrive at that question. It was always evident, all around us.
Throughout my time in Afghanistan, we never controlled territory outside of our bases and outposts—and we often found the enemy inside of our own walls. The Taliban ran a successful counter-insurgency for twenty years. They maintained a shadow government, collected taxes, settled social, cultural, and economic disputes, and maneuvered and captured territory, biding their time all the while.
Why was the Taliban able to wait out the occupation and recapture power so easily?
The Taliban benefitted from the tribal and ethnic structures of Afghanistan, a complex web of allegiances and social and cultural bonds that US/NATO forces were never entirely able to understand. Afghanistan, like other nation-states of the former British Empire, was created without consideration of ethnic and religious demographics. . . .
Much more at the link. This has been 100 years in the making, the West did this, we have to be accountable.
