Nederland en Afghanistan 239

The Fog of War

By Arun Gupta
From the December 11, 2009 issue | Posted in Arun Gupta , International , war | Email this article

GROUNDED: Soldiers land in Kabul, Afghanistan. PHOTO: FLICKR.COM/STARTLEDRABBIT III. This photo was published under creative commons licensing.

Edited by Arun Gupta

Anand Gopal has gone where few others reporters have been.

Currently correspondent for The Wall Street Journalbased in Kabul, Afghanistan, Gopal embedded with the Taliban in 2008, giving him unique insight into a force that was swept away by the U.S. invasion after the 9/11 attacks but still rules much of the countryside and has battled Western forces to a stalemate.

In his writings, Gopal explains that while every “suicide attack and kidnapping is usually attributed to ‘the Taliban’ … the insurgency is far from monolithic.” The United States is battling a diverse group of fighters, Gopal says. “There are the shadowy, kohl-eyed mullahs and head-bobbing religious students, of course, but there are also erudite university students; poor, illiterate farmers, and veteran anti-Soviet commanders. The movement is a mélange of nationalists, Islamists and bandits that fall uneasily into three or four main factions. The factions themselves are made up of competing commanders with differing ideologies and strategies who nonetheless agree on one essential goal: kicking out the foreigners.”

Gopal notes the Taliban are drawn from the Pashtun ethnic group. “They are motivated by joblessness, bad government and U.S. military violence. They have a good deal of support from the locals and they are a different breed of Taliban from the ones that were there in the 1990s.”

This past June, at the Socialism 2009 conference in Chicago, Gopal spoke about what motivates the Taliban to fight, how the U.S. reconstruction effort has failed, why neither side can prevail, the role of Pakistan and what further U. S. escalation portends.

He began by describing a group of Taliban he embedded with while reporting for The Christian Science Monitor. Apart from the commander of the group, who had been “a low level government functionary” during the Taliban regime, there were three “very young Muslims guys, too young to even remember the Soviet experience, who joined the Taliban because they didn’t have any jobs. They had a small plot of land; nothing grew because of the drought. The Taliban pays their fighters up to $200 or $300 a month to fight so they picked up a gun and started fighting against the Americans.”

The following text is adapted from that talk and various articles by, and interviews with, Anand Gopal.

Two Taliban fighters I met directly experienced American military violence, which is why they joined the insurgent movement. One person, he went home one day and found his house split in two and six family members killed and promptly picked up a weapon and joined the insurgents. The other person also had his family members killed.

When I was with the Taliban, we would sit up in the mountains and they would sleep all day and come out at night with their Kalashnikovs and RPGs. They would come down to the roadside and wait for Afghan police or soldiers to drive by, and then they would shoot them with the RPGs and run back up into the mountains. This is what they would do every single day. It’s a typical guerilla strategy.

When the Americans invaded in 2001 most Afghans welcomed the United States with open arms. Even among people who are in the Taliban now, they tell me that when the Americans first came they wanted them there because the Americans made a series of promises.

The Americans promised jobs. This is in a country where after nearly 25 years of war there’s no economy to speak of. They promised development and reconstruction, an accountable and responsible government and security.

The reason the situation has completely deteriorated is that the Americans have utterly failed in meeting every single one of their promises.

Today, more than half the country is unemployed. In many places the actual unemployment rate is much higher. There are villages I’ve gone to where no one has a job.

All the men are sitting outside and passing their time doing nothing. Forty percent of the country earns less than $14 a month and nearly 50 percent is unable to procure enough food to meet their minimum daily requirements.

In the mountains that surround the capital of Kabul live hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom don’t have any jobs. A lot of these people are crippled from the various wars — the Russian war, the current war — and the women are prevented from working.

Usually they’ll send their children down from the mountains into the city to either beg or work some small job. In these streets near the mountains you’ll see hundreds of children hawking trinkets, selling gum or outright begging. Many of these children are three or four years old, and they’re the main breadwinners of the family.

You’ll occasionally see men trying to sell their daughters. In one case there was a large refugee settlement outside of Kabul with a lot of people who are victims of U.S. airstrikes. One day, I saw a father standing there crying his eyes out. With him was a young girl. Some other refugees came up and asked him why are you crying? He said I have to sell my daughter because things have just gotten that desperate.

These other Afghans, who have no money, found whatever money they could and gave it to him and said don’t sell your daughter. But most people aren’t that lucky. Young girls are often sold as a way either to meet debts or just to earn money in any way.

NO DEVELOPMENT, BUT PLENTY OF CORRUPTION

To bring jobs, of course, you need development. The United States is spending $100 million a day in Afghanistan but 95 percent goes toward the military. Only 5 percent is earmarked for aid or development. Even that would be a reasonable amount, 5 percent of $100 million for aid.

But the problem is, of the 5 percent, 86 cents out of every dollar that the U.S. spends on aid comes back into the United States through contracts to U.S. corporations, through salaries to contractors and so on.

With all that money, the United Nations ranks Afghanistan as the fifth-least developed country in the world, and that’s a drop from 2004. If you move even 10 miles outside of Kabul, moving south, you enter a time warp. There’s no paved roads, no electricity, no running water. Some of the villages are so disconnected that people are living like they’ve lived for hundreds of years with very little change.

When I was with the U.S. troops earlier this year, we entered a village and the villagers thought that we were the Russians. They didn’t even know that the Russians have left.

The Americans promised to bring in democracy and an accountable government. In reality you have one of the most corrupt governments in the world. The minister of counternarcotics is reputed to be one of the biggest drug traffickers in the country.

On top of that the Americans are killing lots of people, many of them civilians. I was out with the 10th Mountain Division out of Fort Drum, N.Y., in the spring of 2009. At one point we were caught in a firefight. On one side were the troops, and on the other side the Taliban were there, firing back and forth. In the middle of that a car sped away, so the soldiers turned and started firing at the car and sprayed it full of bullets. And the car sat there mangled. All of a sudden the door swung open and an old man came out holding a baby and the baby had been killed.

This wasn’t reported; this is a daily occurrence. It’s important not to underestimate the effect these killings have in eroding support for the United States and building support for the Taliban.

http://www.indypendent.org/2009/12/11/fog-of-war/