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 for The 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 Afghanistan.

Afghans view the United States as something between man and god: incomprehensively rich, organizationally sophisticated, and capable of building a new country from the ground up with one hand tied behind its back. Afghans expected instant results—if not instant, close to it. What they got instead was jack shit. By 2005, The New York Times was reporting that the United States had not so much as slapped two bricks together in four years. It hadn’t paved an inch of roadway. There were explanations for this, some reasonable, most not, all involving bureaucracy and unfamiliarity with culture and politics in Afghanistan, the security situation, and so on; the Afghans weren’t interested in anything other than results.

In 2007 I had gone to Tajikistan to research a feature story about Lake Sarez. Lake Sarez was formed a century ago when an earthquake triggered a landslide that blocked the Murgab River in the high Pamir mountains in central Tajikistan. Glacier melt caused by global warming has caused the water level to rise, imperiling the natural dam. If and when the dam breaks, computer models predict, a wall of water eight hundred feet high will cascade down the Murgab River valley and through a succession of other canyons and rivers until it peters out a thousand miles away in the deserts of Uzbekistan, leaving one to five million people dead and 90 percent of the arable land in Central Asia silted and barren.

My 2007 journey took me along the Pyanj River, which separates Tajikistan and Afghanistan. There were a few signs of development on the Afghan side: a special trade zone where Tajiks could shop for Afghan goods and a four-star hotel booked up by NGO workers, mostly Doctors Without Borders (but never without reservations, evidently). For the most part, however, it didn’t seem like much had changed. At night there were still lights only on the Tajik side. Women, when they appeared in public, told the story: on the Tajik side, they wore traditional dresses with floral prints or tight Western miniskirts and white blouses; Afghans were still in their burqas.

*   *   *

I wanted to go back. I wanted to find out what had changed, what was better, worse, how Afghans were faring under the occupation. More than anything, I wanted to shed light on the Big Question No One Ever Wants to Think About, at least not in the United States: Why do “we” (the U.S. government and military, and by extension people) keep getting into this sort of thing? Why are we mired in an economy based on endless war and a culture of mindless militarism? Whether you view the quagmires of Vietnam and Afghanistan as messes we somehow got stuck in, or you consider them essential elements of an aggressive neocolonialist foreign policy, why do we do it? We never win. We pay a terrible price. Yet we keep sending tens of thousands of men and women to fight and kill and die or come back wrecked. We keep spending insane portions of national treasure on these military misadventures. Why? At this writing we spend 54 percent of the federal budget on “defense.” Seventeen percent is debt service on old wars. One out of six tax dollars goes to paying debt for wars we’ve already lost!

Perhaps by examining the history of and situation in one of America’s little wars, its most recent, it is possible to dissect not only what went wrong there but what is wrong with our way of looking at the world, our way of life … ourselves.

I wanted to see the places American and other Western reporters rarely if ever go. Everyone flew in and out of Kabul. A few intrepid souls covered the fighting along the eastern border with Pakistan, and in the south, especially in Helmand province, where U.S. forces had been fighting Taliban forces for several years. But no one ever went to the north, center, or west of the country. Surely there was a story there. Even if nothing much was going on, I still wanted to find out how the American occupation had impacted the lives of ordinary people.

I also wanted to file reports in a way that no one had ever done before: in real-time cartoon blogs.

Comics journalism, also called “comix journalism,” has been around since even before Bill Mauldin’s Willie and Joe cartoons from World War II. Comics journalism in its modern form was created by Joe Sacco. A Maltese American cartoonist, Sacco went to the Balkans in the mid-1990s, came back home, and drew slice-of-life narrative comics about what he saw. In 2000 he published his first collection of war comics, Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992–1995. His Palestine, about his time on the occupied West Bank, came out a year later. When I did To Afghanistan and Back, I followed the same template: go, take notes and photos, come home, compile, draw comics. Later notables in the field, such as David Axe and Guy Delisle, do it the same way.

There are practical reasons for the see-it-draw-it-later approach, not the least of which is the fact that most cartoonists prefer a comfortable, quiet place to draw and that a little hindsight helps them figure out what is most interesting to readers. On the other hand, this approach sacrifices immediacy. Whether they work in prose or on camera, most war correspondents file within hours of researching a story. Why not a cartoonist?

The blogging explosion inspired me to try to file a blog in comics form every single day from Afghanistan. I solved one impediment right away: time. When you’re traveling vast distances every day in a place that’s dangerous, hot, and uncomfortable, it’s hard to find the time or energy to spend four to six hours drawing and coloring cartoons every day. The solution, I decided, was simplicity. One of my favorite cartoonists is Jeffrey Smith. He bangs out his cartoons in a no-nonsense sketch style. I would do the same. No fussy lines, not even a ruler. I’d use the same stripped-down drawing style I usually use on the rough drawings I send to editors for approval before I draw the final product. To keep myself focused mentally on the idea rather than the form, I would leave my usual Bristol board at home and draw on plain old photocopy paper. No customized Rapidograph pens; they jam and leak and explode. Just a black ballpoint pen would be fine. I should be able to draw a page or two an hour.

Delivery would be difficult. From what I could gather from news accounts, the communications infrastructure in Afghanistan was still terrible to nonexistent. There might be a few cybercafés in Kabul, but I planned to spend most of my time in rural areas. There’d be no power or phones. I’d have to take a portable flatbed scanner as well as a laptop. Since my MacBook Pro held a charge for at most two hours, I’d need extra batteries. But those were one hundred twenty dollars each. And they’re heavy. So I’d also need solar panels and a battery cell, which I could use to recharge the laptop.

Once a cartoon was loaded onto the laptop and processed into an emailable format, it would need to be sent to a friend in the States who would then post it to my blog and any client newspapers I managed to scare up. Fortunately things had improved since ’01, when I was forced to use dial-up service at 2400 bps on an ancient Iridium satellite phone that dropped most of the calls halfway through. A company in Tennessee agreed to rent me a satellite modem called a BGAN that promised direct Internet connection speeds comparable to digital cable.

But how would I get there? Afghanistan was an expensive destination. Airfare was the least of the challenge; as I’d learned in 2001, Afghan rates for transport and housing are nothing short of extortion. They’re not bluffing. Afghans will turn you away rather than take fifty bucks for a day of driving. This in a country with one hundred percent unemployment and an average wage (for the few who get one) of twenty dollars a month.

The route I wanted to take would add to the problems and thus the costs: across the north via Mazar and Maimana to Herat, then south to the western desert along the border with Iran, exiting via Iran. (The northern route would allow me to cover areas rarely seen by Western journalists.) Although Iran and the United States still don’t have diplomatic re...