Folk poetry throughout Pashtun areas of Afghanistan is now often anti-occupation. Below is one recent
Americans lacked the political will for a long-term commitment, regardless of whether it was right or wrong. The Americans would bail on Afghanistan sooner or later. It would be tragic if it happened within Obama’s eighteen-month deadline or after five years. There was no way to “fix” Afghanistan. According to Andrew Wilder, a longtime aid worker in the country, “It may be more realistic to look for ways to slow down the descent into anarchy.” The Soviets never lost the war in Afghanistan. In fact, the puppet regime they installed had pretty much crushed the mujahideen until the Soviets withdrew support. The Soviets won their last battle in Afghanistan in Khost’s Operation Magistral. But it made no difference. Only the rusting ruins of tanks and a few Russian-speaking Afghans remained in Afghanistan. The Americans too weren’t losing, stressed a retired American military officer working on security in Afghanistan. “Every time our boys face them, they win,” he said. “We’re winning every day. Are we going to keep winning for twenty years?”
Postscript
I returned to Afghanistan in January 2010. In what was a routine incident, the Americans had just killed four Afghans in Ghazni’s Qarabagh district: one of the men worked for the Basim phone company, one was a cobbler, and two were students. Locals took the bodies and protested on the highway between Kabul and Kandahar.
On the way to Maidan Shahr, the capital of Wardak province, I stopped to talk to bus drivers about the conditions on the road. “There are a lot of roadblocks because of the Americans,” a bus driver called Mir Ali told me. “They oppress people a lot.” A passenger chimed in. “Tell him the problem of the people,” he said. “There are certainly attacks. The Americans attack and raid homes every night. They indiscriminately and continuously arrest people and take people out of their homes.” Mir Ali told the man that we were only talking about security on the road. “Who cares about the road?” the man asked. “They are indiscriminately raiding and searching homes in places where there is no Taliban or enemy. People have personal conflicts, and the Americans come and arrest them and drag them and imprison them.”
Gul Rahman was also a driver on the same route. “The road security is fine, but people are oppressed by the Americans,” he told me. “They are raiding during the nights. Some people have hostility from the time of the factions [the 1990s], from the revolution in the past, some people have enmity with each other. Now some people report to the government or tribal militias, so the Americans continuously raid, arrest, and imprison people. They have done this in Andar and Badam. They have killed more innocent people than you can imagine.” He told me to go see for myself. “You will see people tortured, arrested, and imprisoned for no reason,” he said. Even at the bus station, he complained, the police beat people without reason.
Zainullah was a driver on the road between Kabul and Helmand. For the past two days the road past Qarabagh in Ghazni had been closed, he said. “The Americans have killed people there, women and children. That is why people are protesting, and they have blocked the highway. The Taliban do not harm us, but there is a danger of thieves, and people are bothered by Americans. When American forces come, then the road is blocked for hours, and then we have to wait for hours, sometimes the whole day. Sick passengers and women also have to wait. The road is 70 percent damaged and 30 percent built. There are no bridges, and most of the road is not paved.”
The local travel agent at the bus stop agreed. “The situation was good before, but now it is worse,” he said. “People cannot travel in these buses anymore because there is no security. About thirty or forty buses would leave from here before, but now the number is about ten to fifteen. During the evening and nighttime, it is not possible to leave.” I asked if people were pleased with the work of the government or the Americans. “Nobody likes them,” he said. “How can we be happy when travels are delayed by the national army, American troops, or the police? How can they be happy?”
Zainullah told me of a bus that was robbed by thieves in Ghazni and then in Khushkabad. “This bus was robbed two times in one night,” he said. “The whole station knows this story. Taliban do not harm people. The Taliban deal with the people that they need to deal with. Taliban harms no one. The danger always comes from Americans and thieves. The danger from the Americans on the highway is that they check each and every bridge for their security, and we have to wait. Even if you have sick passengers or children, the Americans don’t care at all. The road will be blocked by Americans. If something happens to them, then Americans indiscriminately shoot and arrest anyone. They don’t care about anyone. The problems are because of American troops. This is certainly the job of government. They should stop it, and we don’t have that power. My demand from the government is that the government should punish these people. If the government is not able to do so, then Afghans should be allowed to make a national movement. It is not going to work like this.”
As we were speaking, several policemen showed up and made us leave, asking us to come to the police station because they hadn’t been informed that we were in the area.
In Meidan Shah I attended a training session in basic science for several dozen village teachers from throughout Wardak (all of whom were men). When I showed up they were being taught the science behind basic hygiene.
The Taliban had a reputation for attacking state teachers, so I asked the men if they had been threatened. “There is no threat to education in this province,” one man told me. “Education is neutral here,” said another. “It neither supports the resistance nor the government.” The Taliban did not harm schools and clinics, he said. “Most of the security problems are created by Americans. The Taliban do not make problems.” I asked him what problems the Americans made. “Our hours start here at 8:00 or 8:30 a.m. We are not allowed to come here before American troops come to the provincial center. When we go to school, we experience the same problems. There is no alternative way. If we use another route, there is fear of thieves. There are many problems. This year somebody fired on the Americans, so the Americans entered the school and fired—which terrorized children so much that one boy wet himself. They were so scared that they did not come to school for five or six days, and finally the children were convinced and brought by their parents to school. The Americans first shot at the school, then they surrounded the school, then they entered and started firing inside it.”
Outside the school the men pointed to villages only one kilometer away. Everything outside the provincial capital was in Taliban hands, they said. In the same town I attended a meeting of the National Solidarity Program, an Afghan-run, foreign-funded development program that gave grants to communities to develop local projects. I spoke to Muhamad Nasir Farida, the local government official in charge of the program in Wardak. “Many problems are created by the Americans,” he said. “The Americans raid homes at nights, land helicopters, and whoever they see they kill them or arrest them.”
Fazel Rabie Haqbeen was a former mujahid who worked as a senior official for the Asia Foundation, an American development NGO, in Kabul. He had twenty years of experience as an aid worker. He too wanted to talk about the deaths in Qarabagh. “Two hundred villagers are protesting with the dead bodies in Qarabagh,” he said. “Villagers are crying and blocking the road for two days. Where are the hearts and minds of these villagers? The two hundred villagers are a casualty. It’s not just the physical dead. Let me walk you through Kabul and ask a little child what he thinks of Americans. They are not winning hearts and minds.”
Fazel was originally from the village of Miakhel in southern Kabul’s Musahi district. In 2006 American Special
