Deconstructing Afghanistan

 

          I’ve come home to Oxburg, Maryland for the weekend. Last night, I talked with J.D. Hunsaker who has just finished a stint as a contractor in Afghanistan. He’s a man on a mission, spreading the word. We’re neighbors. He has pale, angry blue eyes. Possessing both manual and organizational skills, he’ll never be out of work. He can lay pipe or dismantle a military base. He’s as gnarly as a troll. Ginger hair, bushy eyebrows, a hundred creases in his face. No charmer, the same qualities that make J.D. popular also make him difficult. You don’t tell fairy tales to J.D. Hunsaker. When I start to tell him how great everything is going in Afghanistan, he cuts me off.

J D: “You know the nine circles of Hell described by Dante in his Inferno? I’m sick of U.S. government spokesmen telling us in the newspapers and on talk shows that ‘We’re only in the fourth circle of Hell, everything is progressing admirably!’ Kevin! Wake up, you peckerhead!”

Me: “Your mom says that, due to the drawdown, your firm’s contract was terminated.”

J D: “What is this, an ambush interview? Sure. In the end, it comes down to money. But that’s not why we failed to get extended. There’s more work to be done during the drawdown than ever before. We got tired of playing games, deluding ourselves.”

Me: “Karzai— ”

J D: “Forget Karzai! What do you know, shit head? The entire country is a kleptocracy. We’re trying to ship home war materiel that the Pentagon deems valuable. Vehicles that can be used in other theaters of war. Technology. The Afghans let us bring all the shit into the country without batting an eyelash. Now that we want to take some home, they want us to pay export fees. To bring home our own shit. Our own equipment. Keep your mouth shut!”

Me: “But— ”

J D: “Shut up! You don’t know anything, so put a cork in it.”

Me:

J D: “Better! The only reason we went to Afghanistan was to find Osama bin Laden. He was hiding in the foothills of Tora Bora. We went looking for him. Period. We had help from the Northern Alliance, which was nice, but our U.S. ground forces moved too slowly. One night, Osama and his crew slipped away using flashlights. At that point, we should have left. It was cold up in the mountains. The Afghans knew the terrain and hid in their caves, making fools of us. Once Osama left for Pakistan, we should have hightailed it out of Afghanistan. Isn’t hindsight wonderful?

“Instead, we put Hamid Karzai in the presidential palace, dithering for twelve years in delusional nation building.

“What a waste in blood and treasure! The Afghans are all right without our help. It’s a primitive, tribal society. People don’t even like one another from one valley to the next! Kabul has no support in the countryside. None. Kabul has never had the support of the villagers! That doesn’t matter as long as you are running a Third World country of patchwork allegiances. Subsistence agriculture, poppy production, Afghanistan is a very poor country that scrapes by.

“They are NOT democrats. They are NOT democratic. They have no traditions in that direction. A strongman gathers tribes around himself and forms an alliance. We’re talking fiefdoms, nothing more. Who’s in charge of this valley? Who’s the warlord? Who do you see here? Who do we need to talk to? HIM! He’s the warlord.

“The villagers don’t get democratic elections. Elected leaders, what’s that?! Karzai sees elections as a plot to unseat him, his family and his friends. To the victor go the spoils. Like Yasser Arafat, Karzai and his brothers Ahmed and Mahmud see nothing wrong with enriching themselves at the public trough. Oink, oink!

“The Pashtuns are pederasts. They kidnap young boys and practice bacha bazi, sex with pubescent boys. Orphans have nobody around to protect them. The boys get turned into male prostitutes, the girls become ‘house servants.’ Otherwise known as slaves.

“Stop making faces, peckerhead! It’s their system and it’s functioned perfectly well for hundreds of years! We’re the naive lamebrains, coming into Afghanistan and thinking we can change their society. Foster democratic principles! We wanted to get them off poppy and drug production, so we set up a program to cultivate wheat. Sure! Only they cultivate both, wheat to satisfy the government program and poppy to sell as a cash opium crop. The villagers find nothing wrong with that. As long as we want to pay them, they’ll participate. For money!

“As long as it wasn’t dangerous, young men were willing to don the uniform of allied troops and play soldier. For money. Now that the Taliban has totally infiltrated the Afghan Army, a few young men still sign up, but they are much more fatalistic. Makes sense, you could get blown to bits any day now.”

Me: “You sound bitter. You put such a putrid slant on things.”

J D: “Hello! What world are you living in? Grow up! People don’t automatically share your agenda. Things go well because you make them go well. So don’t try to do the impossible. The Afghans will never be like us in a thousand years!

            “The TALIBAN. Who the fuck are these people? The Obama administration, the Afghan Army and Karzai all pretend they came from outer space. THE VILLAGERS ARE THE TALIBAN! The Taliban are Afghans, radicalized Afghan nationals. The madrassa religious schools are across the border in Pakistan, but the Taliban themselves are Afghans. The Pakistani security service has long used the Taliban insurgency as a means to destabilize Afghanistan.

“Sure, the insurgents don’t agree with the other villagers who haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid and declared jihadi holy war. But this idea that we’re clearing the Taliban out of some specific geographic area and they won’t come back—that’s just stupid. IT’S THEIR COUNTRY! They are the local, indigenous population! When we leave, they’ll come creeping out of the woodwork again!

“If Obama had any balls, he’d come clean to the American people, declare Karzai a nonentity and pull our goddam troops out NOW. Instead, we’re playing this charade about democratic elections and hocus-pocus progress. We Americans! Always the blue-eyed optimists! We’re busy with a drawdown and a timetable and teaching our Afghan allies how to fight. Nation building!  Desperately shoring up a totally corrupt regime in Kabul while the countryside quietly goes into convulsions.

“Remember Vietnam? We went looking everywhere for the Viet Cong. They were the Joes standing right next to us! The ‘enemy’ was the same people we were trying to ‘save.’ The last American troops got scraped off the embassy roof by helicopter. The next morning, POW! The North Vietnamese Army came rolling into Saigon with tanks. The friendly, pro-Western, puppet government totally collapsed.

“You’d better brush up on your history, bro’, because it’s about to happen again! Another tribal society with an indigenous population totally foreign to western thought, artificially adopting democratic principles. While the villagers wait for the white imperialists to leave and then TAKE BACK THEIR COUNTRY.

“We’re fucked. Get used to it.”

*

            Sounds to me like a wake-up call.