What the Taliban Told Me, page 24
Fuck you and your newfound, if not completely artificial then at least conveniently timed anxiety for a country of 40 million people, except oh wait, for you they aren’t people, they’re “those poor people” or “all those Afghanis” (an Afghani is a currency, not a person, by the by), or, best of all, “those women,” said with every bit of emphasis you can muster on the plight of those poor creatures who will return to being if not beasts of burden then at least subhuman under the Taliban’s rule, a predestination that you have a Calvinist fervor for because you already consider these women so much Lesser Than. You aren’t asking “What will the women in Afghanistan do?” You are asking “What will happen to the women in Afghanistan?” Your conceptualization of these vibrant, exceptional humans who are part of a culture millennia older than almost any you could claim completely denies them agency. They are not women, they are Other, and you are a sanctimonious fuckwit for deigning to think of them in your moments of outrage that only come into being when directly confronted with the consequences of your particular brand of American exceptionalism.
If you want to care about women’s rights, buy a bicycle. Or at least an electric car. Stop buying oil and supporting the world’s most fervent exporter of regressive, subjugating, militant, violent Islam. (Hint: It’s a place that, unlike Afghanistan, is actually mostly desert.) At least stop to consider the number of things you purchase that were made in a country that is currently, actively, sterilizing women of a certain ethnic minority. (Hint: It’s a place where most things are made.) Or, maybe, I don’t know, fucking vote, and not just when it’s a convenient way to virtue signal once you finally realize that oh, women’s rights in this country are at risk too.
If you want to know what Afghanistan will look like, it isn’t that hard. Look at any picture of it from the last ten years. Look at all the blown-up buildings, the walls that are more bullet hole than concrete, the miles and miles of burned poppy fields. Watch a video of the aftermath of the suicide bomb that killed at least 170 people when we withdrew from Afghanistan, dozens of their bodies floating in a blood-tinged canal. Note how the person filming’s hand doesn’t shake, their voice doesn’t crack, there are no screams of surprise or fear. They’ve seen worse, and they’ve seen it more times than you can, quite literally, imagine. (You could also look at pictures from Iraq. Or Syria. Or Libya. Or Yemen. Or any of the other places we like to drop bombs on. Dealer’s choice.)
Once I’m done screaming at you in all of my inarticulate rage, you may say, “Whoa, whoa, but like, what about what the Taliban will do now that they’re back in power?”
Fuck you. What about it?
Less than a week after our nation’s ill-fated flight, Anand Gopal published a piece in the New Yorker entitled “The Other Afghan Women.” In it, he detailed the state of affairs in the countryside of Afghanistan, where more than 70 percent of the population lives. He was there in the early summer of 2021, before all of Afghanistan had been officially reclaimed by the Taliban. But most of it was under their rule, including the areas he was traveling through. The people he talked to, more specifically the women he talked to, were significantly more at ease now that the Taliban was back in control. Without Americans fighting them, and without the monstrously corrupt Afghan National Army being backed by American forces, violence was at its lowest point in years.
A week and a half after that the New York Times published a separate piece that further detailed the new quiet that pervaded the countryside. There were no air strikes. Firefights, once a daily occurrence, were few and far between. There were fewer checkpoints, Talib or otherwise. Afghanistan was, in fact, safer with the Taliban in charge.
What is it that you’re so afraid of the Taliban doing? Enforcing their own moral code on those who don’t wish to live by that code? Drive to Texas. Or California. Same thing’s happening there. It’s called government.
Enacting retribution without courts? I refer you to the time we used a drone to kill a sixteen-year-old American citizen because his dad—another American citizen who we killed without due process—had been deemed a terrorist.
Killing people for no reason other than their ancestry? We got lynchings aplenty here.
The argument implicit in this question of what the Taliban will do is that we were somehow doing better. I suspect this argument is unavoidable; most people or institutions are the hero in their own story. Or at the very least what they’re doing is “worth it.” Ends and means, etc. But the United States isn’t interested in being in the story. They want to write it. Because if they don’t, it gets a lot harder to see their actions as valorous.
There aren’t too many people who would say the guys blowing up a hospital in one of the poorest parts of the world—a hospital staffed by international volunteers, all civilians—are particularly good. The guys who shoot up weddings because someone fired a gun in the air at one, maybe aren’t so upright. The guys who invade a country with the pretext of rooting out a movement, who, when that very movement offers to surrender, say no, sorry, not unless we get to kill most, if not all of you and remove any of the power you once had; guess we’ll just have to stick around and make sure you don’t come back, but oh, shit, you mean to say bombing the random citizens of this country will encourage them to join, or at least accept you? You don’t say.
Afghanistan is, by no means, better off with the Taliban in charge. Sharia, as interpreted by the Taliban and their Wahabbist ilk, is a stain on humanity. The subjugation of women, ethnic minorities, and, in short, anyone who disagrees with them, relies on a combination of cruelty, ignorance, and violence that has no place in the modern world. Unless they really do change, which seems unlikely, human rights will continue to be violated under their rule. The Taliban are, in fact, fear- throwers.
But there will probably be fewer casualties of war. Definitely less collateral damage. Fewer blown apart—literally—families. This isn’t because the Taliban will be kind or good or just. It’s because we weren’t any of those things either.
All of that said, many, many people are likely going to die as a result of the Taliban’s incompetency. They do not know how to govern. They don’t care about helping the people, just ensuring that their worldview is fulfilled, their pockets lined. But for those in the gallery ready to comment on how corrupt this is, how inhumane, before you open your fucking yap, let me remind you of specks and planks.
As for what we get out of it, it depends on which “we” you feel a part of. We the hawks made a hefty profit. We the bloodthirsty got some delicious retribution against all those brown, Allah-loving heathens. We the politicians got our re-elections. We America got yet another hysterically funny loss added to our war record. We the people got an extra trillion dollars added to our deficit. (I’m no economist, and I don’t care if one of them tries to explain to me that the production of bombs and planes and tanks and all the other apparatuses of war contribute to our GDP or some other ridiculous metric of growth, none of these things added any benefit, any surplus, to any American citizen’s life. If you are inclined to argue that they keep American soldiers alive, then I’m inclined to remind you that you’re just a tautology-loving moron who can’t see that these weapons wouldn’t be necessary to keep said soldiers alive if we didn’t create and use them in the first place.) We the fighters got prosthetics. And lifelong meds. And coffins.
Doesn’t really matter which “we” you belong to. My answer is the same.
Fuck you.
Because the thing is, you don’t care. Everyone wanted to talk about “Afghanistan” when we were withdrawing, but that was only because it was an excuse to talk about ourselves. Now that we’re out, and millions of Afghans are starving, unable to afford food because we, in all of our pride, refuse to give aid to the country that we helped demolish over multiple decades, there’s a lot less chatter. All because we lost. This is the actual reason, no matter what anyone says. It isn’t because the Taliban are “bad.” We give Pakistan billions of dollars every year. The ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) doesn’t exist in the same universe as good. Israel, Mossad? Same. Am I cherry-picking and just choosing the worst arms of these governments? Yes. Are the worst parts of a government representative of what that government stands for on the whole? Also, yes.
So, you see, fuck you.
Fuck me too.
More than anyone or anything, fuck me for not just moving on. For not finding new stories to tell. Fuck me for not being able to hear the other stories.
And fuck me for not screaming this shit from the rooftops a decade ago. It’s not like it wasn’t just as evident then. We all knew. I don’t know a single Pashto linguist who didn’t call the Taliban’s return to power. It was so obvious that it became unspoken; only idiots point out what everyone else should already be able to see.
Fuck me for worrying about the potential social consequences that come with considering the Taliban’s side of things. Fuck me for giving a single flying fuck about what anyone else thought, or thinks, about my trying to understand why the Taliban, or really anyone, might find it worthwhile to shoot at the people who came into their country, subverted their constitution, and installed a new government, despite the fact that not a single Afghan was involved in the attack that was supposed to justify these actions.
If these thoughts sound repetitive, just a different rehashing of what I was thinking and saying when I pissed off Ed with my validation of OBL, it’s because they’re related, though not the same. Thinking about bin Laden had been academic more than anything else, his mythical status allowing comparisons to all the other villains of days gone by. But these men, the ones I killed, were so many pawns (this is not derogatory, for what was I other than a slightly better trained tool), only allowing comparison to other humans, real and painfully unimagined.
And if, at this point, you’re still on the side of the Taliban being evil, or at least cowardly, I get it. Ambushing people is some chicken-shit nonsense. Killing men when they’re just trying to do their job, trying to make the world a better place, trying to make sure that the right ideals are spread throughout the land, while maybe not fundamentally wrong, is at the very least base, and ignoble. Blowing somebody up when they’re standing in the middle of a field, because you are certain that they’re going to try and kill you later, is unjustifiable. I should know. I’ve done it.
The difference between what I did, launching a missile from a plane flying many thousands of feet above Afghanistan—so high, in fact, that an average observer on the ground might not even take notice of it until they heard the sound of the air above them breaking—and placing an IED in the culvert of a well-traveled road is a matter of degree, not kind. They are both forms of guerilla, or at least atypical, warfare. They are both simply attempts at a surprise attack that are meant to give the attacker some sense of advantage and control, while also creating distance, both physical and metaphorical, between the attacker and the enemy. They both intend to target certain people, but often wind up hurting myriad others. They both malfunction, sometimes with almost comic results (the suicide bomber gets a spam text and blows himself up, the drone operator loses the satellite connection and the drone nearly flies into a nearby plane).
To hear us tell it, IEDs are used only by spineless, sneaky, yellow-bellied cowards. Weaklings who aren’t willing to fight head-on, like men. Drone strikes, though, those are just good, superior technology. We only think IEDs are cowardly because they’re so good at killing us. And maybe they really are just the paraphernalia of the pusillanimous. But they’re also efficient. And they’re no more evil than any other method of killing.
And lest you think I am a traitor or peacenik hippie, FUCK the Taliban. Fuck those stone-aged, misogynistic, pederastic, tyrannical, extremist, violent, ignorant fucks. Fuck them for their dedication to living in the past, for using religion to justify their bullshit, for being utterly unwilling to approach living in this century, or fuck, this fucking millennium. Fuck them for not listening.
Because even if I tried to tell it to them, the Taliban could never hear this story. I could broadcast it to them for hours and days and weeks and months and years, and no matter how long and how clearly I spoke, the Taliban could not, and would not, ever hear my story. Or your story. Or any story that doesn’t involve them winning, taking back their country, and remaking the world in their image. The Taliban cannot feel anything other than what they have always felt. This is a broad, sweeping, overgeneralized statement about a group comprised of many individual persons with their own life stories, thoughts, and feelings about the future, thereby making it reductive and likely untrue, or at least lacking insight into all of the various truths that could exist for each person that is part of the greater Taliban.
I stand by it.
Ten years after my last deployment, and after twenty years of combat with the world’s richest, most advanced military, the Taliban reclaimed Afghanistan. Whatever delusions existed about whether this would happen or how long it might take were dispatched as efficiently as the Afghan security forces were by the Taliban over a single week. What little gains had been achieved in women’s rights, education, and poverty were systematically eradicated. Any semblance of democracy was lost. And while there might be “peace,” it will come only after any remaining forces of opposition are overwhelmed or dead. The Taliban told us this would happen. Or at least they told me.
They told me about their plans, their hopes and dreams. They told me exactly how they would accomplish these goals, and how nothing could stop them. They told me that even if they died, they were confident that these goals would be achieved by their brothers in arms. And I’m sure, because they fucking told me, that they would have kept doing this forever.
I stand by my simplistic assessment of all these men precisely because of what they told me. Because they told me how they planned to keep killing Americans. They told me the details of these plans: what weapons they would use, where they would do it, how many they hoped to murder. Often, they told me these things while doing the killing. They told me that, God willing, the world would be made in their image. And they told me what so many others refused to hear, but what I finally understood: Afghanistan is ours.
AFTER, OR YOU CAN’T UNKILL THEM
IF I THINK OF MYSELF now, with my desire to experience things and understand my experience of those things, with the strange penchant for nostalgia that showed up sometime around my thirty-first birthday, I can envision myself taking one last walk around a gunship before I got out. Going out to the flight line, walking around inside the plane, taking stock of this wondrous machine. But I didn’t do that. Not for the gunship, not for the Whiskeys. Since November 29, 2011, I haven’t set foot in a C-130. For a long time, I simply didn’t have it in me. And then, after that time had passed, I no longer belonged in them. I spent many years unthinking about them, not trying to forget, but not trying to remember either. So when I began writing this, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to visualize them anymore. I thought I would need to watch videos, or look at blueprints, something to remind me of what it was like inside them. But I didn’t. I can see the insides of these planes as vividly as I can see the double-wide trailer I grew up in.
On the U-boats, I can instantly see the 105 in all its splendor, the gunners standing all around it, worshipping. The ammo, so organized, so exactingly stacked, ready to be used as quickly and efficiently as possible. The 40, and the 25, all scrunched up next to each other. Here’s the booth, my seat and my equipment, the EWO’s seat with all of his weird-ass sensors. Here’s the FCO and Nav, the TV and IR. Here are the stairs to the cockpit, narrow and steep, almost like moving up some sort of crevasse, the distance of those steps always feeling so much greater than the three feet they actually traversed. And here’s the cockpit, which somehow always surprised me with how small and cramped it was, and how much of the world it let me see.
The Whiskeys aren’t all that different in size, though the lack of a booth makes the layout so much more open. With that openness came the glorious urinals, no piddle-packs on a Whiskey, they’ll always have that over the U-boats (and with the urinals the memory of the time I almost passed out in one, thinking that I’d be fine walking the thirty feet over to take a leak without using any supplemental oxygen when we were flying unpressurized at around twenty thousand feet, which, of course, I wasn’t. Thankfully it wasn’t a long piss, or I definitely would have wound up flat on my back covered in my own urine). I can feel the cargo ramp below me, cool and vibratory, as I catnapped during transit, the loadmasters watching, waiting till I was unconscious so they could hog my hat (read: draw a dick on the inside lining). I can see my strange middle seat, so much closer to the action of the sensors than on a U-boat. I can feel how close to me the two CSOs were, one at each hand, but off in their universe of sight, so far from mine of sound. And there’s the new 30mm, almost sparkling in its newness, so modern, somehow so different from the U-boat guns.
This seems like an incredible amount of detail, given that, on the high end, I spent maybe a thousand hours split between the Whiskeys and the gunships (there’s time spent onboard an aircraft pre- and post-mission that doesn’t count as flight hours, and during my training in Florida I spent a good amount of time just walking around the U-boats, getting familiarized with them). Generously, I spent a total of 41.666667 days in these planes, or .3 percent of my life to date.
I thought about making that the title, or at least subtitle of this book: 42 days, or 1,000 hours, or .3 percent, or something like that. They’re interesting numbers; 42 with its fun Adamsonian coincidence, 1,000 with its sense of nice, even largeness, .003 with its feeling of rarity or specialness. They’re hooky and intriguing, these numbers, which is useful for me, an author, wanting to grab the attention (and money) of you, the reader.
