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Overview
The U.S.-led intervention in Afghanistan mobilized troops, funds, and people on an international level not seen since World War II. Hundreds of thousands of individuals and tens of billions of dollars flowed into the country. But what was gained for Afghanistan—or for the international community that footed the bill? Why did development money not lead to more development? Why did a military presence make things more dangerous?
Through the stories of four individuals—an ambassador, a Navy SEAL, a young Afghan businessman, and a wind energy engineer—Noah Coburn weaves a vivid account of the challenges and contradictions of life during the intervention. Looking particularly at the communities around Bagram Airbase, this ethnography considers how Afghans viewed and attempted to use the intervention and how those at the base tried to understand the communities around them. These compelling stories step outside the tired paradigms of 'unruly' Afghan tribes, an effective Taliban resistance, and a corrupt Karzai government to show how the intervention became an entity unto itself, one doomed to collapse under the weight of its own bureaucracy and contradictory intentions.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804797801 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/25/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Losing Afghanistan
An Obituary for the Intervention
By Noah Coburn
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9777-1
CHAPTER 1
Surveying the Intervention from Above
The mountains surround Bagram like the walls of a castle.
Café owner near Bagram
Above
If one had been looking down from above the Shomali Plain just north of Kabul during the late 2000s, the most noticeable thing would first have been the way the plain seems to pour out from the Hindu Kush Mountains, a shocking fan of green amid the gray hills. From the streams and larger waterways that eventually merge to form the Kabul River, countless irrigation channels split off. Powered by gravity, these channels hug the sides of hills, naturally highlighting the area's more gentle topography, in contrast with the surrounding sharp mountains. In the spring and summer, neat green fields and orchards spread out alongside these water sources; where water is abundant, grapes, figs, and other fruits are grown and, in drier, less fertile areas, wheat. Mud walls divide the fields, turning the landscape seen from above into puzzle pieces. Narrow, zigzagging boundary lines tell the stories of land feuds and generations of inheritance as the land has been divided and redivided among sons and grandsons.
Settlements in the plain have a similar logic to them. Most spread out from hilltops above the fields, slight rises where the land is less easily cultivated. As in much of Afghanistan, large walled compounds with a central courtyard are favored. Over time, as a family grows, often extensions are added as sons marry, and many of the settlements seem to sprawl out like thick bushes, linked by narrow pathways that also mark property boundaries. Except for the occasional small town, usually just a slightly larger cluster of houses, this pattern of fields and settlements repeats itself across the plain for over fifty miles.
Floating above here, the viewer's eye is drawn to the southern part of this fertile plain, where an odd slash runs southwest to northeast, breaking up the rhythm of fields and houses. As one looks closer, two distinct dark lines become visible — two roads to nowhere.
The slashes are two asphalt runways, 3,500 meters long, straighter and wider than any of the roads in the area. Although these are striking in and of themselves, the topography around the runways raises even more questions. The organically spreading compounds, whose mud walls sometimes blur into the fields next door, are replaced by dozens of neat rectangles, laid out in a well-organized grid pattern that appears almost stamped on the landscape like a strange crop circle. The greens and soft browns are exchanged for grays and blacks.
The area is Bagram Airfield, one of the key centers for international military operations in Afghanistan. The airfield contains several connected bases and houses military personnel from the various countries making up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO's) International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). As with much of ISAF's presence in the late 2000s, however, most of the soldiers are American. This airfield was at one point the busiest American Department of Defense airport in the world with an average of 1,200 people moving through its terminal daily.
The smaller rectangles, primarily to the west of the runway, are living quarters for the troops, packed tightly together; the larger ones are hangars, administrative buildings, a hospital, a prison, and other facilities. Closer to the runway there is a group of larger rectangles and other odd shapes at regular intervals. These are large cargo planes, smaller helicopters, and other aircraft, including strange hybrids like Ospreys, which take off like helicopters but fly like planes and look almost insectile. They are parked near the runway with blast walls between them to ensure that if one is hit with a stray rocket the explosion will not set off a chain reaction. These concerns about protecting aircraft are not overcautious; in 2012 a small group of lightly armed insurgents destroyed six Harrier jets causing more than US$200 million in damage at Camp Bastion, a similar base in the southwest of the country.
As odd as these vehicles are, for the observer from above, most remarkable are perhaps the edges of this area. In nice crisp lines, the neat outer walls of the base, occasionally punctuated by a guard tower, outline the perimeter and then stop; almost immediately on the other side the fields and flowing compounds typical of the Shomali begin again. In some cases, the fields come right up to the walls of the base. To the southwest of the base there is a much larger cluster of buildings and a traffic circle: the central bazaar for the town of Bagram. To the more rural east of the base wall are the faint traces of compounds that have been razed by the international troops, concerned that insurgents might use them to launch attacks. From above, it is as if an alien city has been simply dropped into the otherwise green, fertile plain.
In some ways the view from the ground was even more disorienting at the height of the intervention. As one walked through the town of Bagram there were few vantage points in the area, the military having secured any spot from which insurgents could fire rockets into the base. This was a trick learned from the mistakes of the British in the first Anglo–Afghan war in 1842; they faced constant sniping from compounds near their cantonment, which similarly abutted local communities. The lack of vantage points meant that I and the others in the bazaar were always forced to look upward at the base walls, never sure of what was happening within. High walls with the occasional guard tower loomed over the bazaar, and yet people seemed to have become accustomed to the international military presence. There was an occasional sonic boom as a jet took off, but this did not halt conversations.
On a typical day, traffic in the bazaar would come to a brief pause when a patrol came through. Chatting with a local store owner, four patrol vehicles, or MRAPs as they are usually called (because they are Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected), and an armored vehicle that appeared to be a cross between a Humvee, a pickup truck, and a giant tow truck came rolling through. The MRAPs were close to twenty feet tall and looked like khaki dinosaurs, with long hornlike guns sticking out of the turrets on top. Atop the first, a young man in dark wraparound sunglasses swept his gun across the crowd, which had paused to let them through. The other vehicles had guns but no men; instead the guns were attached to video cameras. The guns swiveled eerily as the camera peered out unblinkingly at the pedestrians.
Despite the presence of the latest military technology, the history of occupation here runs deep. Just north of the base, the road descends toward the river, drawing close to the ancient field where Alexander the Great camped. Here, in the first half of the twentieth century, French archaeologists excavated a treasure trove of gold and Silk Road wealth, ranging from Chinese porcelain to Roman statues. Many of these artifacts toured Paris, New York, and other Western capitals as a part of the National Geographic–sponsored Bactrian Gold exhibition. As we drive down this track, a nineteenth-century citadel built adjacent to the site suddenly towers above. It has been transformed to a small, impenetrable, but oddly quiet, military base. This is one of several satellite bases that surround the main airfield at Bagram. HESCO barriers and sandbags stand twenty feet high on top of the ancient walls at this smaller outpost. Rolls of razor wire are wrapped lackadaisically around the slopes below. Just inside the tangle of wire, on the slope of the hill leading up to the smaller base, a charred building sits, long abandoned, with DAFA, the name of the French Archeological Alliance, spray painted on its side.
The base stands over the river and another smaller, quiet bazaar that has been built up alongside it. From the small cluster of shops, it is impossible for the Afghans walking through the market to tell whether there are Afghan or America soldiers within — or no one at all.
Tilting at Windmills in Kabul
Not all the building associated with the international intervention in Afghanistan was so menacing and disruptive of the local landscape. In 2009, Alliance Wind Power (AWP) sat under a broad corrugated roof on a small side street in western Kabul. Filled with tools and half-finished projects, it looked like many of the other workshops in the area and not unlike one that you might find in a small town in America. This neighborhood, one of the more planned areas of Kabul, was shaded by trees and cleaner than the haphazard settlements that had grown up on the hills around it. The crush of Kabul traffic, however, was still ubiquitous, and snarls could spring up unexpectedly when young nomads moved their flocks through town.
Set up in part by William Locke, who owned a 23 percent stake, AWP was remarkable for several reasons. In a country where power was unreliable and often produced by smoky diesel generators, AWP and its dream of providing wind energy offered the promise of clean, sustainable, and, most important to local communities, cheap and easily accessed power. Owned primarily by a group of young, dynamic Afghans, who for the most part came of age after the most brutal fighting in Afghanistan, working with Will's support and relying initially on international grants, the business also offered a model for wider economic growth in Afghanistan and a way for independent Afghan businesses, with a helping shove from the international community, to stimulate real internal growth.
AWP was in many ways the perfect development project for the later 2000s in Afghanistan: It was Afghan led, with international assistance on technical aspects and in funding start-up costs but still privately owned. It produced a product, energy, that was in economic demand, that Afghans were willing to pay for, and that would seriously improve quality of life. More reliable electricity allowed students to study at night and families to watch news on the television and to connect with a wider world after charging their cell phones. For the security oriented, energy in more rural areas would give communities light at night and hopefully increase the ability of local Afghans to call security forces when threatened by insurgents. AWP had something to offer every aspect of the intervention: hearts and minds won for those counterinsurgency practitioners, business growth and investment for neoliberal development experts, increased access to educational opportunities for human rights advocates.
Will also seemed to have started the company at an opportune moment: Between 2002 and 2008 the U.S. government spent an average of $25.1 billion per year in Afghanistan. In 2010–2011 that average jumped to $106.2 billion. AWP was founded in 2008, after Barack Obama had made winning this "just war" a centerpiece of his campaign strategy and as the resulting international funds really began flowing into the country. Yet, although an ideal project, like so many others, AWP's story is unique and, despite being set up with some of the "best practices" from the development world, the company struggled.
Too Good to Succeed?
Will started the company with Amir, a young Hazara student with an entrepreneurial spirit. While looking for someone to help them make fiberglass blades, they met Farouq and Abdul, both Tajiks who had experience welding. All of them became partners in the project. Symbolic of the growth of business in the 2000s, this group represented two of the major ethnic groups that had caused severe damage to the neighborhood they were now working in during the Civil War of the 1990s. But this was a new era, and such young men were looking forward, not back.
Originally the group wanted to name the company Afghan Modern Power, which would have given it the apt acronym of AMP, because it was always important in Kabul's nongovernmental organization (NGO) scene to have a catchy acronym as a name. For unclear reasons, however, the official at the government licensing office told them their name was unacceptable, a typically vague answer from the Afghan bureaucracy. Needing to come up with a new name on the spot, they ended up with Alliance Wind Power, or AWP, which was slightly less catchy but close enough, Will supposed.
For the outside viewer, the AWP had a distinctly Afghan–international hybrid feel. Its workshop looked like many of the others found crammed onto the rough streets outside the center of Kabul, and, as with almost everything in Kabul, a thin layer of dust covered the equipment and half-finished projects. At the same time, AWP maintained an international feel that most other Afghan businesses did not have.
The company, for example, had a website entirely in English, with action photos of their various projects. On the "Contact" page of the website they gave the typical if somewhat cryptic address of "Across from Architects Union of Afghanistan, Darulaman Road." Such an address seems strange only to those who are not familiar with the way in which Kabul's building boom, combined with the chronic refusal to label streets or assign house numbers, made people consider addresses such as "Behind the Old British Embassy" — one of my first addresses in Kabul — completely appropriate.
Similarly, navigating Afghanistan's ethnic and linguistic diversity was a challenge for the few businesses that were truly trying to cater to both an international and a domestic audience in the 2000s. As a result, the website contact lists told English speakers to contact Will (and included both his email address and cell phone), Dari speakers to contact Farouq with his details, and Pashto speakers to contact Amir. Along with the contact list, next to a group photo of the AWP crew, a caption helpfully pointed out that Will was on the far right, Abdul was second from the right, and Amir was on the far left. In the photo, the crew stands outside their workshop, looking sternly at the camera. To understand, however, how Will ended up in this picture working with this ethnically diverse wind company on a dirt street in one of the most booming parts of Kabul, one must step back several decades.
Although for many American twenty-somethings the thought of relocating in the mid-2000s to Afghanistan may have seemed daunting as security deteriorated, Will's move to Afghanistan in 2006, he says, "did not feel abnormal in the slightest." His parents had worked there in the 1960s and 1970s, living in Jalalabad; one of his older brothers was born in Kabul. Will's family left the country before the chaos that spread across the country in the 1980s and the 1990s began but stayed in close contact with many of their friends from the country, and Will grew up eating kebab and hearing stories about the country.
In 2004 the senior Lockes returned to Afghanistan with many other foreigners during what was essentially the first wave of relief workers returning to the country, many of whom had worked in the country before or among Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Will's father, a doctor, began working at a prominent Kabul hospital. They moved to a quieter area west of the center, away from the embassies and government buildings, which was popular among many of the longer-term expats. Shortly afterward, Will's older brother, wife, and young daughters joined the family in Kabul. Will, in the meantime, was in college in Pennsylvania, where he majored in engineering and minored in philosophy. After graduation, he spent some time working for an NGO in Dhaka and then went traveling in Australia.
Lacking much of a plan, Will decided to visit his parents, as many twenty-six-year-olds do when at a loss for what their next step in life should be. And so, Will "moved back home" to Kabul.
Luckily for him, however, this was also a time of growth in development spending, particularly on construction projects. Government and NGO programs were all growing, and qualified workers were in short supply. Many relief workers seemed to have degrees in international affairs or management, but few had studied engineering. Will discovered that his technical background was in high demand, and he was much more employable than he would have been back in America. As a result, he quickly found a volunteer position with International Assistance Mission, or IAM.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Losing Afghanistan by Noah Coburn. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
1. Surveying the Intervention from Above2. Intervening
3. The Exotic Tribes of the Intervention
4. Before the Invasion
5. A New Era?
6. Contracting the Intervention
7. Climbing over the Wall
8. The Merchant-Warlord Alternative
9. Warlord Density and its Discontents
10. How to Host Your Own Shura
11. The Pieces Left Behind