As the soldiers approached a home, a dog growled and they shot it. A villager ran out, thinking a thief was on the premises, and they shot him too. His younger brother emerged with a gun and fired into the darkness, yelling for his neighbors. The soldiers shot him as well, and the barrage of bullets also hit his mother as she peered out a window. The soldiers then tied the three bodies together, dragged them into a room, and set off explosives. A pair of children stood watching, and they would later report the scene. An old man stepped out of the neighboring house holding an oil lamp. He was shot. His son ran out to help, and he, too, was shot.
McChrystal wanted to rectify some of this unpleasantness. “All ISAF personnel must show respect for local cultures and customs and demonstrate intellectual curiosity about the people of Afghanistan,” he said. The Americans developed a program called the Human Terrain System (HTS), the brainchild of idealistic anthropologists and disillusioned military veterans who believed that sending social scientists out with soldiers would help America win wars and kill fewer people. HTS drew on an argument of Marine General Anthony Zinni: “What we need is cultural intelligence. What makes them tick? Who makes the decisions? What is it about their society that’s so remarkably different in their values, in the way they think, compared to my values and the way I think in my western, white man mentality?” Out in the field, the HTS research scientists discovered that U.S. soldiers did not know not to smile when Afghans read from the Koran, did not know not to crowd disrespectfully into an Afghan house, did not know that rural Afghans didn’t have mailboxes. They could not connect with the people.
But even after the American anthropologists went through the multimillion-dollar HTS training program in a military basement in Kansas, the same problems of cultural ignorance and indifference and purposelessness persisted, as did the most obvious truth—the most elusive one for Americans in denial—which was that Afghans would never accept Americans as their overlords.
The HTS began to suffer from the typical flaws of the corporate occupation: cost cutting, rushing to get the job done, the overweening priority of profit. More than one HTS expedition ended in death, both Afghan and American. “If you could have found a way to project on a big screen the nation’s mixed feelings about its role as the sole superpower in a post–Cold War world, this was what it would have looked like,” the journalist Vanessa Gezari writes in The Tender Soldier. “American exceptionalism tempered by the political correctness of a postcolonial, globalized age and driven by a ravenous hunger for profit. The Human Terrain System was a cosmic expression of the national zeitgeist, neatly encapsulating both a justification for the war and the intoxicating belief that war could be less lethal, more anthropological. We claimed we want to understand the Afghans. What we wanted was to understand ourselves.”
What Gezari was characterizing was the particular trajectory of American liberalism, which for people from minority races and cultures had become only superficially inclusive, and which was further undermined by an economic system so corrupt that it could not sustain all livelihoods. Acceptance to this system was always dependent on imitating the modern ways of the rulers. As usual, the Americans—after September 11, after Iraq, after the financial crisis—had sought in the delusions of empire proof of their own exceptional traits and strength. Why couldn’t we manage this occupation? If we can’t do this, does it mean everything we believed about ourselves is false? Why don’t they want to be like us?
*
THE LARGEST EXISTENTIAL threat to Americans might have been admitting the Afghans would be better off without them. In western Kabul, not far from the city center and across from a narrow riverbed filled with trash, a historic park called Bagh-e Babur, or Babur Gardens, extended from the road up to the top of a steep hill. From the crest you could see the entire city of Kabul. Babur, the first Mughal emperor, had ordered the gardens built in the mid-sixteenth century. The ongoing late-twentieth-century violence in Kabul destroyed the gardens as well as its palace. In 2003, the Aga Khan Foundation, one of the largest private employers in Afghanistan, began reconstruction of the park. It was one of the most beautiful places I had seen in Kabul.
I visited the gardens with its development director, a South African architect named Jolyon Leslie, one late Friday afternoon, when thousands of Kabul Afghans had gone there to enjoy their day off. The lines to get into the garden were long. Afghan guards gave Afghans a once-over before letting them pass. No body patting, no bag X-rays, no closet where women were dispatched to be felt up by other women. I realized what had made the difference in security: as many as seventy thousand foreigners lived in Kabul, but that Friday at Babur Gardens, I was the only foreigner in sight.
The entryway spit us out into the lovely courtyard of a caravansary. Women, in varying degrees of concealing dress, held tight to their daughters’ hands, little girls in miniskirts. Inside, the steppes of the park rose before us, and beautiful paths lined with trees shaded us from the brutal sun. The Aga Khan Foundation had set aside areas for women and areas for men. The marble palace and a tiny, ornate mosque hung above the city like magic orbs.
The garden was not without its problems; people did drugs and got into fights. Leslie, who had lived in Afghanistan for twenty years, ticked off these issues as if Kabul were just any other city. It didn’t make sense; this was a war zone! Wasn’t this a great place to smuggle in a bomb? Yet here a segment of the population of Kabul lived a normal day: kids ran around a jungle gym, men danced, women picnicked under trees. Up near Babur’s tomb, an elderly tour guide spoke to a rapt group of boys. He was teaching them their history.
“This was built by an all-Afghan team,” Leslie said.
“Really?”
“I’m sick of people saying Afghans can’t manage anything,” he said. “I’m from South Africa, and we call that racism.”
Everyone looked so happy. Inside the palace, Afghans were setting up for a film festival. In one of the palace rooms, the U.S. embassy had installed a new exhibition called Picturing America: reproductions of Joseph Stella’s Brooklyn Bridge and N. C. Wyeth’s The Last of the Mohicans; images of Selma, Alabama, in 1965; Abraham Lincoln; Yosemite Valley. To me, too, they looked like postcards from a foreign country. None of the park goers frolicking on the grass were inside at the exhibit puzzling out images from America’s history. It was only me, the American.
On the way home, passengers who were stuck in traffic, their cars squeezed together in the narrow streets, smiled at one another and waved. I watched a man and a woman chat as they waited to cross the street. I could not stop staring at them, and since I was in typical Kabul traffic, I could have stared at them for the next half hour. Just a man and a woman chatting on the street in Kabul before they crossed to the other side, where men twinkled their bicycle bells, and a girl in a sequin tutu chased after her mother. Whenever we got stuck in traffic in the days prior, I’d grow anxious that this would be the moment a bomb would go off. That day I was mesmerized by the casual banter of the Afghan man and the Western-looking Afghan woman, their hand gestures and smiles, and also by the fact that while I was watching them live their normal, unfettered lives, nothing terrible happened at all.