The United States had troops in Afghanistan for twenty years. We spent billions of dollars fighting our ‘war on terror’ and attempting to install democracy in a patriarchal country dominated by Islamic sentiments. We wanted revenge on Osama bin Laden for the September 11th attacks on our soil in addition to wiping out Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. With these statistics and goals in mind, the question remains: What actually happened in Afghanistan as a result of our occupation?
In order to answer this question, we need to understand the recent history of the country. Like so many areas of the world, Afghanistan first found its feet in the modern age after defeating its European oppressors. In this case it was the British who finally resigned the fight in 1921, with The United States officially recognizing the country of Afghanistan in 1934. After the Second World War, Afghan King Muhammad Zahir Shah embraced Soviet communism and established friendly ties with the Union to his country’s north. Then, in the 1970’s, he was assassinated, and the country was thrown into turmoil, with the Soviets eventually invading on a mission to help aid the floundering communist government. This of course led the United States to fund and equip the resisting forces and Afghanistan became a proxy war zone in the global Cold War dispute between East and West. When the Soviets eventually left a decade later, the country descended into a horrific civil war with rival warlords fighting for scarce resources. Afghanistan was devastated from decades of war, and it was a religious band of students—the Taliban—that emerged in the mid 1990’s to end the warring factions and establish law and order. This they did, bringing nearly 90 percent of the country under their control, while simultaneously instituting a “draconian purity the likes of which the world had never witnessed.” Then, September 11th, 2001 saw terrorists attack the United States, and war was soon back.
In his book, Gopal follows the lives of three different Afghans directly affected by US involvement in the country: There is the ‘pro-American’ warlord Jan Muhammad Khan, the Taliban commander Akbar Gul, and a rural housewife named Heela Achekzai. Each story is powerful and instructive in its own way, and each reflects the devastation wrought by the superpower that is the United States military.
As American forces began to operate in the Afghan countryside, they needed a way to identify the Taliban. Their solution was to enlist the local leaders, and Jan Muhammad was one such collaborator, a man able to serve them up a multitude of Taliban party members. What Gopal’s reporting reveals, however, is that Jan Muhammad played the American’s for fools, simply branding his ethnic and economic rivals as Taliban and letting the American special forces do his dirty work for him, subtly increasing his power with every American strike on his personal enemies. He was not the only local warlord who figured out this simple game: Washington wanted tangible enemies, and leaders like Jan Muhammad were happy to oblige.
Akbar Gul’s story is also a revealing one. Previously a Taliban fighter, he had turned his back on the organization and been attempting to live a quiet life. After a few years stuck between American raids on anyone fingered as a Taliban sympathizer on one side, and a corrupt and dangerous Afghan police force on the other, his only option was to once again pick up a gun and fight for his survival. His story is mirrored by many: people who simply wanted to live in peace were given no choice but to fight back against both foreign and domestic governments destroying their homeland.
Most women in the Taliban’s Afghanistan are not permitted to leave the four walls of their home without a man. They have no rights, no personal property, and no decision making power within their own family: everything belongs to the men. While many women accept this way of life without protest, Heela’s story highlights the courage a woman put in impossible situations can find within herself. Believed to be a terrorist, her husband was murdered as a result of the American occupation. In addition, two of her sons sustained serious and life-altering injuries as mere toddlers. With nowhere to turn, she picked up a Kalashnikov and dragged her children with her to the American compound, where she was saved by the very nation that caused her family to be torn apart in the first place. She went on to become a Senator in the capital city of Kabul, one of the only women in the country involved in politics.
While these three characters are the main focus of the book, the wider world of Afghan culture shines through its pages. It is a country of long-standing political corruption, one that seems to take two steps back for every one taken forward. “Of the $557 billion that Washington spent in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2011, only 5.4 percent went to development or governance,” Gopal reports, “the rest was mostly military expenditure, a significant chunk of which ended up in the coffers of regional strongmen like Jan Muhammad.” Most Afghans live beyond the reach of any central government and are at the mercy of their local leaders, men like Jan Muhammad, whose only real goal is increasing their own power. In this venture, the United States was a pawn (or, more accurately, an attack dog).
The one truth that seems certain is that the US military’s involvement in Afghanistan made the Taliban into what it is today. Every innocent man that was killed, or taken to Guantanamo Bay and tortured, left broken family members behind, people who were ripe to join the anti-American cause. “With Afghan schools destroyed, millions of boys were instead educated across the border in Pakistani madrassas, or religious seminaries, where they were fed an extreme, violence-laden version of Islam,” Gopal writes. “Looking to keep the war fueled, Washington financed textbooks for schoolchildren in refugee camps that were festooned with illustrations of Kalashnikovs, swords, and overturned tanks.”
We wanted to fight terror, but in a twisted fate of irony we became that very terror, dropping bombs from the sky on rural villagers herding goats. We are directly responsible for creating the terror that we professed wanting to root out and eliminate. The Taliban are now stronger than ever, and we only have ourselves and our incompetence to thank for it.
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