“I have to get back to the office for a teleconference with my president,” he said. “He will not be happy if I am late.” I wondered why Americans always spoke to grown men in foreign countries as if they were children; why in fact the Americans behaved like children.
We filed outside for food and drinks and business card trading, but many Afghans hung back, quietly standing in line to speak to the USAID folks one-on-one. The foreigners in that room controlled the Afghans’ livelihood. This was their chance. On my way out, an elderly American man exclaimed upon recognizing a friend, “Hey! Yeah, you know. Just another event at the Serena!”
I found Arif wolfing down some snacks in the foyer.
“What did you think?” I asked.
“They are just wasting our money.” He flicked his hand at the hotel and the food. “All this waste.”
*
AMERICA HAD a much longer history in Afghanistan than most Americans knew. Saadat Manto’s prediction in the 1950s that the Americans would resort to using the mullahs and the mujahideen to defeat the Soviet empire in Afghanistan came true. As early as the 1970s, even before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA, the Pakistanis, and the Iranians began funding religious fighters to subvert the Socialist regime in Kabul. Islam, they believed—as they would in Turkey—was the only force strong enough to defeat communism.
The effect of this American policy was felt strongly in Pakistan, where it helped bring to power that country’s Islamic military dictator, Zia-ul-Haq. When the Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie expressed outrage that American novelists never wrote about America’s actions abroad, she was in part thinking of America’s support for Zia. Then, the first time Americans were championing the “Afghan people’s right to freedom and self-determination,” they cared little that Pakistan’s dictator Zia was staging “public floggings and hangings, or when he passed a law which made it possible for a woman who had been raped to be stoned to death for adultery.” Karachi, the city where Shamsie grew up, was overcome by what she calls Kalashnikov culture. The Karachi port was the main conduit through which the United States sent arms to the Afghan mujahideen, and many of those weapons ended up in the hands of criminal groups and others throughout Karachi. “By the mid-eighties,” she says, “Karachi, my city, a once-peaceful seaside metropolis, had turned into a battleground for criminal gangs, drug dealers, ethnic groups, religious sects, and political parties—all armed. Street kids sold paper masks of Sylvester Stallone as Rambo; East met West in its adulation of the gun and its hatred of the godless Soviets.” There was so much trouble in her city that schools were regularly closed, and kids had to go through drills meant to protect them in case of bombs or riots. Security concerns even stopped cricket matches for almost two years.
For Shamsie, the face of “Islamicization” was Zia, the ally of Saudi Arabia and America. The weapons came with the building of more “Wahhabi mosques and madrasas.” Zia placed Shamsie’s uncle, a pro-democracy politician, under house arrest. The future of Pakistan was changed forever by this American intervention, not only the political landscape and the possibilities of violence, but the way individuals related to God. As she notes: What was once devotion became fundamentalism. When American pundits and politicians lashed out after September 11 about the dangers of Islam, Shamsie thought such emotions terrifying in their reckless hypocrisy. During the Soviet-Afghan war, the United States and Pakistan together, in a supremely cynical alliance, had created a generation of Islamic fundamentalists—designing jihadi textbooks and sending MANPADS into Afghanistan. Many of these fundamentalists also stayed behind in Pakistan, destabilizing the country, and eventually attracting hundreds of American drones to Pakistani skies.
“Please explain,” Shamsie asks, “why you are in our stories but we are not in yours.” She generously assumes that Americans want to fuse their own national stories with those of others, that they aspire to a greater complexity and understanding of their own motivations and actions. But as would become clear in Afghanistan, that was not at all what the Americans were trying to do.
*
IN 2009, GENERAL MCCHRYSTAL had promised a new counterinsurgency doctrine, which purportedly focused more on protecting Afghans and less on air strikes. At that time, many policy makers suggested that America was failing in Afghanistan in part because it was distracted by the war in Iraq, which was as comforting an argument as the one that explained away the loss in Iraq by invoking the Bush administration’s unpreparedness. Both arguments implied that Americans can and should win wars.
They served to distract from the more awful truth: America’s killing, in the stale military language of the time, “eliminated” no “enemies”—it killed people and created more enemies. According to the journalist Anand Gopal, military language obscured the realities of death and injury in Afghanistan, not just “errant bomb strikes” or the “mishandling” of “detainees,” but the intentional killing and torture of suspects and civilians. The Americans’ mandate was to track down any member of the Taliban, but since they did not know the country, they relied on the only people with the status, knowledge, and firepower to help them: violent Afghan warlords who fingered their own rivals so they would be persecuted by the United States. Across the country, the Americans, not unlike what they had done throughout Latin American countries during the Cold War, “carried out raids against a phantom enemy, happily fulfilling their mandate from Washington,” and in the process became a sort of warlord corporation in their own right. One American leaflet dropped by a plane in Kandahar read, “Get Wealth and Power Beyond Your Dreams. Help Anti-Taliban Forces Rid Afghanistan of Murderers and Terrorists.” Many of these Afghans—bread bakers, politicians, teenagers—were sent to the Americans’ jails at Bagram and Kandahar airfields, and at Guantánamo Bay. They were innocent. Many had even supported the American invasion.
Gopal reports that some Afghans believed the Americans were colonizing them like the British, but even that characterization is kind. Here is one typical example of how these Americans conducted their night raids on innocent Afghan villages: