Anna Badkhen's collation of dispatches from the background to the war in Afghanistan were originally published in Foreign Policy and span a period of three weeks in country that she spent looking for friends she had made at the beginning of the war. They reappear in this week's read, Waiting for the Taliban: A Journey Through Northern Afghanistan. She leaves little doubt that after nine years the Taliban are reclaiming the northern part of the country because the US and NATO forces turned their backs on it during the surge effort to quiet southern Afghanistan, the former Taliban stronghold. Something, she wants us to know, has gone terribly wrong in Afghanistan in terms of the war we're prosecuting there.
In her words:
After the invasion, the north--where ethnic Pashtuns, who form the core of the Taliban, are a small minority--was universally considered to be virtually Taliban-proof. NATO forces and most international donors focused their attention on southern Afghanistan, where the Taliban had retained a stronghold. The notion that the Taliban posed no threat in Northern Afghanistan spelled the region’s undoing: While the world was distracted, the Taliban quietly returned to the north, capitalizing on the disillusionment of the local population both with the UN-backed kleptocracy that governs in Kabul, and with the West, which, in their eyes, had broken its promise to improve the way people live in the region. Amazon.com
Badkhen covered the "fratricidal war between Taliban government troops and the US-backed Northern Alliance" for three years between October 2001 and 2004. During that time she made personal friends of several Afghans who hosted her, hid her, drove her, translated for her, and protected her life. Three of them are Mahbubullah, the vodka smuggler and artifact fencer. Also, his wife, Nargiz, then pregnant. Her driver, Gulham Sahib, who knew the minefields like a taxi driver knows back streets. Three individuals who personify the toughness, tenacity, and inexplicable resilience of a people who occupy some of the most contentious real estate in the world, living in the 21st C. ACE much as they did in the 1st C. BCE.
The three years she lived there, Badkhen describes as "happy times for Northern Afghanistan." She claims it was safe, that there was no kidnapping; that the trouble was all in the south. That there were no Taliban in a region not traditionally home to the Pashtun ethnic group from whence the Taliban come. In fact, in 2001 it was the hotbed of anti-Taliban sentiment.
That is no longer the case. Where once the Taliban was loathed, it now holds sway, setting up checkpoints, administering Shariah justice, and conducting terrorist bombing campaigns in Mazur-e-Sharif, taking control of Balkh Province.
At the end of the short e-book she describes Mazur-e-Sharif and Mahbubullah's villlage being virtually surrounded by Taliban, with little hope since there is no real defense being mounted to prevent them working their will. It appears they've effectively been over-run. In a July, 2011 article for Foreign Policy, Badkhen reports on a bombing in downtown Mazar-e-Sharif.
The bomber was Ainuddin, a sharecropper in his 20s from a district in western Balkh that has been under Taliban control since last year. He had tied the bomb to the rear rack of his Chinese-made bicycle, the kind hundreds of men and boys ride along the city's potholed streets. The bomb detonated at 11:45 in the morning, wounding 14 people and killing four. The bomber was still alive when the police arrived, but unconscious. The explosion had torn a giant gash in the right side of his torso. He died in the police car.
Beginning in July of this year the US began
initiating a gradual transition that, according to the Obama administration's plans, should somehow wind down America's war in Afghanistan by 2014, NATO troops transferred responsibility over security of Mazar-e-Sharif and six other provinces and cities to Afghan forces. NATO officials have picked Mazar-e-Sharif because they consider it safe.
A consideration that flies in the face of what Badkhen reported in her book written a year ago, and what she reports a year later.
In the introduction to her book, Badkhen raises the key question that will tell us if the US-led war there can ever be described as "successful," or "won." "Is it possible to actually secure any territory in Afghanistan, even the seemingly most peaceable, for a significant length of time?" By the time you finish her book, after reading her most recent dispatches, the answer is inescapably, "No."
As a book, I didn't think it was very good. It was what she frankly admits, little more than a collection of dispatches that could be repetitive, and that were woven together with somewhat overwrought descriptive passages in which she strains her vocabulary for obscure Latinate words for color and light. Words like "glaucous," "crepuscular," phrases like "Tangerine sun," and longer descriptions of "copper mountains touched with a patina of tender spring grass." Yet, each dispatch is like a white-hot snapshot of intimate moments in the real lives of individuals caught during an interlude in the swirling and obscuring blowing sand that surrounds them.
Granted, her too frequent remarks of color may be her attempt to find some signs of life and hope in the overwhelming drab environment of blowing dust and decomposing sandstone, chalk, and granite.
Still, too often the descriptive passages are over-written, as when she tells of a flood in the village of Wuima Ut.
Soon, the turbid water could no longer fit inside the narrow waterway. It pulsated and throbbed, like the heart of an enormous, adrenalized beast.
That surpasses the stretch of my imagination. It's times like these when I wish she had been more cold reporter and less 19th C. travel writer. However, the picture she paints of the Wuima Ut villagers' unceasingly miserable lives is vivid in its hopelessness.
It is here that she introduces the white pigeons that will alight in various chapters. In one, flying into her room, cooing on the edge of her sink. And with which she symbolically close her book with the image of the crippled bird she is given by the old man on the sidewalk of Dasht-e-Shor Street in Mazar-e-Sharif. "Take her," he says, thrusting the bird in her hands. Both the birds' legs were broken.
Hoplessness, far more common than the rare white pigeons of Mazar-e-Sharif, pervades the book. Take the lesson in wretched excess when she talks about the playground, empty school building, and shell of an unmanned and un-supplied clinic built by a US NGO for the refugees of Camp Shahraqi Mawjirin, who need food, blankets, clothing, electricity, toilets, and running water if they are even to survive, much less engage in normal activities of a full life. The statistics of infant and early childhood mortality among them are staggering. Fourteen Afghan children die every half hour.
The problems of Afghanistan extend beyond the landscape to the people. I remember feeling hit between the eyes when she nonchalantly inserts a factoid while narrating her search for Hanon, a Northern Alliance fighter "with whom I shared many front-line cigarettes and rivers of weak murky tea in 2001. . ." She shows his photo around, but everyone shakes his head no. It's no wonder.
With his bushy black beard, his soiled shalwar kameez, his brown paqual hat, he is more ideogram than a real man. There are millions of Hanons in this country -- bearded, illiterate men. . .
Afghanistan's poverty is rooted in the saltiness of her soil and the illiteracy of her population. How can you pacify a people who know little but subsistence goat herding and warfare as their only means of honest employment? Afghanistan grows 75% of the world's opium crop destined to reach the streets of the first world as heroin. How can you unite a country that persists in identifying itself by clan, tribe, and ethnic divisions? Warlords and the feudal organization of society are all that have ever provided Afghans in the countryside with protection. Will any of that change when the US declares "victory" and withdraws?
After reading Waiting for the Taliban I am left feeling empty of hope that there is enough aid in the world to throw in the direction of this country with any chance that it will stick longer than a season's snow remains in the high valley of the Hindu Kush. It is a land of barren but wild beauty in places, of stunningly persistent people who have dreams for a normal life that is "normal" like nothing we imagine, and of a government so corrupt and ineffective that none at all would probably be better for the country and its people. The tradition of feuding is so ingrained and embedded that even when the warring parties can't remember why they are enemies, they must remain enemies. If it weren't for bad blood in Afghanistan, there would be no blood at all. How can it be other than inevitable that the Taliban will return?
Billions of dollars have flowed into Afghanistan, but no real change has come to the rural populations, to the millions of children under 14 who work, to the women who toil at hand looms for 6 months to weave a rug that will sell for thousands of dollars in the US, and for which they will be paid a total of $75, or $0.40 a day, to the infants dying of cold, starvation, and shamefully treatable, even preventable, diseases before they reach 5 years of age at the rate of 257/1000.
The people of Afghanistan will not look at the back of the last departing American or NATO soldier with any fondness. We will not be missed. Our expenditure of treasure, material, and human lives will not be remembered, much less revered. No, we will only be displaced and replaced by another gang of force that will impose its will on the Afghans, washing against their mountain ranges like another wave upon a cliff lined shore. Badkhen leaves no room to doubt they will continue to behead people for punishment and goats for buzkashi between bouts of ethnic cleansing. And that is the hard truth.
Make a Selection
What to read next? No doubt, a change of pace is called for. How about a classic?
We will meet in two weeks (THU, Nov. 17 th at 2 PM ET) to begin talking about our next selection. Please vote for your choice below, and I'll announce the decision in a special post. Thanks!