Peter Eichstaedt - Above the Din of War. Afghans Speak About Their Lives, Their Country, and Their Future - and Why...

Copyright 2013 by Peter Eichstaedt

All rights reserved

Published by Lawrence Hill Books

An imprint of Chicago Review Press, Incorporated

814 North Franklin Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

ISBN 978-1-61374-515-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Eichstaedt, Peter H., 1947

Above the din of war : Afghans speak about their lives, their country, and their futureand why America should listen / Peter Eichstaedt.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-61374-515-1

1. Postwar reconstructionAfghanistanPublic opinion. 2. AfghanistanPolitics and government2001Public opinion. 3. AfghanistanSocial conditions21st centuryPublic opinion. 4. Public opinionAfghanistan.

I. Title.

DS371.4.E37 2013

958.10471dc23

2012045820

Interior design: Jonathan Hahn

Map design: Chris Erichsen

Photos: Peter Eichstaedt

Printed in the United States of America

5 4 3 2 1

What is life, but to drink of the blood of the heart?

What is death, but a wall of wishes falling upon us?

FROM WHAT Is L IFE? BY A HMED Z AHIR, A FGHAN SINGER

A FTER A SIX-YEAR ABSENCE, I was back in Kabul, Afghanistan. The streets were crowded and chaotic as ever, and the dust lay like fog, obscuring the barren mountains at citys edge. Concrete barriers channeled traffic through intersections manned by police who casually checked cars. It was the ring of steel, which served as scant protection against occasional suicide bombers. You could still find a drink in the restaurants, but only after negotiating the gauntlet of armed guards and sandbagged entrances. Helicopters pounded the air, reminders of the war that sporadically exploded in the city, shredding Kabuls illusory calm.

I had spent most of 2004 in Afghanistan working for a British-based nonprofit, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, and had helped build an independent news agency, the countrys first. I was in Kabul again with the same organization, once more helping Afghan journalists tell their countrymens stories, helping them document their tortured history, shattered lives, and collective struggles to create a future.

The Kabul I found in 2010 was largely cleaned up and crisscrossed by many newly paved boulevards, but the Afghan psyche had faded since 2004. The heady optimism of a liberated capital had been replaced by wary looks, sideways glances, and the unnerving knowledge that insurgents could strike at will and often did. On any given day, violence exploded. A fuel truck would be attacked on the road between Kabul and Jalalabad, Afghanistans big city near the Pakistan border, the vital supply route from the east. A car laden with explosives would ram a convoy of Scandinavian troops in the once-peaceful northern province of Balkh. Suicide bombers would assault United Nations offices in the western provincial capital of Herat. Motorcycle bombers would be gunned down in the streets of Kandahar.

None of these acts was decisive, and taken alone, each was meaningless. But collectively they were significant, indicative of the chaos that was creeping across a country that was crumbling at the edges and collapsing at its core. The chaos was cultivated by the Taliban masters known as the Quetta Shura, the Taliban council headed by the elusive one-eyed leader Mullah Mohammad Omar. Said to live in the Pakistan city of Quetta and in full view of the Pakistan intelligence agency, the Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), Mullah Omar operated as a general in absentia, seemingly untouchable. Any Afghan would tell you that the ISI supported the Talibanalways had. Only reluctantly was this discussed openly by US policymakers, who had put billions of dollars into Pakistani pockets to buy their cooperation. It hadnt worked.

The growing insurgency was the reality of Afghanistan. The Taliban had a shadow government in each district and province in the country, including their own police, judiciary, governor, and department heads. As I traveled throughout Afghanistan over the course of the year, I would encounter this dark force at every turn. Afghans were turning to the Taliban out of necessity, not choice. The shadow Taliban leaders and commanders were the targets of routine night raids by US Special Forces, but like the mythological multiheaded Hydra, where one shadow commander was eliminated, more surfaced.

It was a war run amok. After the blitzkrieg defeat of the Afghan Taliban in late 2001, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the target of post-9/11 American wrath, eluded US captors in the forbidding terrain of Afghanistans eastern White Mountains and the caves of Tora Bora. So Americas leaders turned to Iraq, claiming Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which was an illusion at best and a venal deception at worst, and they launched a war that continued for eight years.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan festered.

In mid-October 2010, I sat on cushions in the front room of an old mud-brick house occupied by a soft-spoken mullah in the western city of Herat. Months before Afghanistans parliamentary election in September 2010, he had declared himself a candidate. What followed was a tale of horrorhis kidnapping and beating at the hands of Taliban militants, his enduring mock executions, and his eventual release in exchange for Taliban prisoners.

Why did you stay? I wondered aloud.

Why not? he said, lifting his eyes to heaven. Inshallah [God willing], we should never submit to these animals.

Illusions can be more powerful than reality. Illusions help people sort through the fragments of reality that crackle like glass beneath their feet as they step into the darkness of a confused and uncertain future. Illusions drive people to drape themselves in explosives and crash their bomb-filled cars into convoys, obliterating themselves in a blinding, terrifying flash. Illusions convince people they are losing when they are winning and winning when they are losing. Like everything else, illusion and reality were at war in Afghanistan.

There was a hidden reality to Afghanistan that lay far beyond the headlines that told of troop surges and withdrawals, forward-operating bases, and special operations. It was a truth buried beneath the calculated quotes of generals, diplomats, presidents, and policymakers. It was a story of survival, tenacity, and inner strength that had allowed Afghans to carry on through three decades of calamity. I went to find this reality.

Following nearly ten years of inconclusive war in Afghanistan waged by American forces, and having surpassed Russias bloody occupation of a decade earlier, President Barack Obama announced a three-year drawdown of the United States nearly one hundred thousand soldiers. It would begin in July 2011. The rest of the world would follow. But the drawdown came as the Afghan Taliban insurgency was growing, not weakening. The pullout announcement had emboldened the Taliban and its allies, and Afghans were feeling the tide begin to change in late 2010 just as I arrived in the country. Afghans knew they would once again face choices most did not want to make: succumb to the Taliban or leave.

What would happen when international forces finally vacated Afghanistan? The answer was unknown, but if there was any hope for Afghanistan, it lay with the Afghan people. And that is what this book is about. Its about the people of Afghanistan and about how they have lived, and will continue to live, in a country that has been at war for as long as most people living there can remember. It is about people who have become extraordinary by the simple act of survival. It is about an ancient land called the graveyard of empires, a rugged and often desolate terrain that most will never see and few can understand. It is a land of illusion and reality, hope and despair, love and hate. And if America is to salvage its dignity abroad and avoid yet another disaster such as occurred the last time it abandoned Afghanistan, then we must not forsake this country and its people.