After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan - Hardcover

ONE: THE BEGINNING OF THE END

We took our eye off the ball. And not to mention that we are still spending $10 billion a month when [the Iraqis] have a $79 billion surplus, at a time when we are in great distress here at home … We took our eye off Afghanistan. We took our eye off the folks who perpetrated 9/11. They are still sending out videotapes.

—Barack Obama, during a presidential debate against John McCain on September 27, 2008

The more troops you bring the more troubles you will have here.

—Zamir Kabulov, Soviet ambassador to Afghanistan and press attaché in Kabul from 1983 to 1987, September 13, 2009

It should have come as little surprise, when Barack Obama took office in January 2009, that he would expand and prolong the war against Afghanistan.

Throughout the 2008 campaign, Obama echoed John Kerry’s 2004 formulation of the Iraq War as “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Afghanistan, both by implication and declaration, was the war the United States ought to have been fighting after the September 11, 2001, attacks: “Let me be clear,” Obama said two months into his presidency: “Al Qaeda and its allies—the terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks—are in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Multiple intelligence estimates have warned that Al Qaeda is actively planning attacks on the U.S. homeland from its safe haven in Pakistan. And if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban—or allows Al Qaeda to go unchallenged—that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.”

In 2002, George W. Bush transferred tens of thousands of troops and attendant military support personnel and materiel from Afghanistan—then considered largely in the mopping-up stage—to Iraq. In 2009, Obama reversed Bush, transferring forty thousand soldiers back to Afghanistan. Afghanistan became “Obama’s War,” as the headlines called it.

But the mood of the public had changed. Americans were tired of perpetual war. They were worried about rising unemployment and falling wages. They saw their new president turning away from the problems they cared about—no jobs—in order to focus on the war in Afghanistan, a war that would soon become the longest in American history. And they didn’t like what they saw. Seven out of ten Americans had favored the war in 2001. By 2009, a third of the public had changed their minds.

So Obama set a deadline. U.S. troops would begin leaving Afghanistan in July 2011. Paradoxically it was part of his Afghan “surge” strategy. Go in fast, go in hard, “degrade” the Taliban resistance, gain time to train the Afghan national army and police so they could take over after the Americans leave.

America’s war against Afghanistan had been declared “over soon” before. Several times. In early 2002, after Karzai assumed the presidency. In 2003, when Iraq became the Pentagon’s Job One. In 2005, after parliamentary elections (never mind the widespread fraud). In 2009, after Karzai was sort-of-reelected (same note re: fraud).

This time, however, I believed it. Not because Obama was saying it and not Bush, but because Obama didn’t have a reasonable alternative. The post-2008 depression was costing half a million American jobs a month. Largely because of the “global war on terror” (i.e., Iraq and Afghanistan), the federal budget was stretched close to its breaking point, with the deficit soaring to a shocking 13 percent of gross domestic product. (This was the highest level since 1943, the peak of World War II production.) The war was an expensive, unpopular distraction. It had to be wound down.

The “surge”? I assumed that that was for propaganda purposes, for Obama to give himself political coverage when critics accused him and the Democrats of “cutting and running” in the face of radical Islam.

As the Obama administration began its second year, I wondered how things had changed in Afghanistan since my ill-fated trip there in 2001. Media reports had become sporadic, sketchy, and unreliable, so frequently failing to jibe with verifiable facts that I eventually stopped believing any of them. They were also few and far between. Newspapers and broadcast outlets, devastated by the Internet revolution as well as a general economic downturn that had reduced ad dollars throughout the 2000s, sent their war correspondents to Iraq if they didn’t fire them outright.

I made friends in 2001 who, in other situations, would have proven useful contacts during my return. But Afghanistan’s communications infrastructure, nonexistent at the time, had not allowed for the usual exchange of street addresses, much less phone numbers or email. “I’d like to keep in touch,” I told my fixer as we’d said goodbye. He shrugged. I said it out loud: “No mail … no phone … how?” The cast of characters that had defined my life during those crazy three weeks in 2001 faded from my life. Afghanistan went dark.

After 2001 the publication of my books about the region had prompted many Westerners and Afghans to get in touch with me in order to discuss the state of the nation. Their reports had the feel of that hoary story about blind people feeling an elephant. They were often conflicting: some U.S. soldiers told me Afghanistan was a disaster, that nothing but nothing had been rebuilt and that the Afghans hated “us” (i.e., Americans), while others claimed that lots of “good things” were getting done that the liberal media weren’t bothering to report due to its partisan agenda.

Mainstream sources, limited as they were, reported that Afghanistan was relatively stable in 2002, 2003, and 2004. Security was far from assured, but it wasn’t a “hot” war. But the people I talked to—Afghan refugees who emailed me from the West, NGO workers, U.S. and foreign occupation soldiers—told a different story. They said Afghans were appalled at the utter lack of public infrastructure reconstruction: roads, schools, hospitals, homeless shelters. They were disgusted by the fact that the United States had reinstalled the hated warlords whose depravity and corruption had fueled the rise of the Taliban in the mid-1990s. They were frightened at the complete lack of central government control outside the major cities of Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat, and Kandahar. Afghanistan, they said, was a war that was rapidly becoming “Arabized.” Tactics such as suicide bombings and IEDs, previously unknown there, were being adapted and imported by the Taliban, their neo-Taliban successors, and other anti-Karzai groups.

By 2005, NGO workers, American soldiers, and Afghan contacts were telling me that insufficient—actually, a total lack of—reconstruction was the secondmost complaint about the American troop presence. (The foremost gripe was the presence itself. As far as I can tell, there has never been a military occupation that was welcomed by the majority of the population of any country, at least not for long.) As I had written in a 2001 report forThe Village Voice, you only get one chance to make a good first impression—and the United States had blown it. Assuming it had been possible to get Afghans to forget about the devastating, callous air campaign that had blown up so many wedding parties that the tragedies became a sick joke of a cliché, the one thing “we” could have done to have improved “our” popularity with the Afghans would have been to have fulfilled Bush’s promise of a Marshall Plan for...