Dispatches from FOBistan: The Unreality of Kabul

FOB MORALES-FRAZIER, AFGHANISTAN — It is interesting to hear what Kabulis think of the way their country is going. Here in Kapisa, just north and east (but a universe apart), things are rather different. Indeed, a common complaint locals raise when we suggest bad security might be why we can’t start many projects is, “oh c’mon — the Taliban are everywhere. That’s no excuse.”

Such a blasé attitude toward the prospect of random death is not easy to understand… at least from our vantage point. Indeed, I will venture a guess that a lot of the tragedy in what David is reporting is that the same choices and environment now facing Kabulis is really what far too many regular Afghans face on a regular basis. From my perspective, behind the concertina wire and hesco barricades, the contrast between mostly Pashtun and mostly Tajik areas cannot be any more stark: Nijrab Valley is glorious, lush, prosperous, and filled with well-maintained buildings. Afghaniya and Tagab Valleys have more obvious problems—there, the fields are browner, there is a noticeable lack of relative development, and driving through the people express far more fear of us.

There is a lesson in there. And it’s not that this is largely a Pashtun war, even if that may be true.

It bears repeating, no matter how monotonous it gets: Afghans are not Taliban. Even when they side with the Taliban, my sense is they do so because they marginally benefit from that alliance, not because they love watching their daughters be brutalized and their sons turned into human bombs. This is the insidious danger of unthinking men like Ralph Peters: by dehumanizing a fundamentally human problem, you leave yourself with no option aside from mass death; by viewing these decisions as rational, even predictable human behavior, a vastly larger, more humane, and ultimately more effective means of turning the war is made available.

The challenge is that most Americans, when they come to Afghanistan to report on it or to do research for their think tank, rarely leave Kabul. Hell, a depressing number don’t even leave Camp Eggers, where the COIN academy is located, and that is even more insulated from Kabul than Kabul is from the rest of Afghanistan. But the attitude change in place, as the reality of the countryside war slowly filters its way down Chicken Street, will certainly be interesting to see. Even during the Soviet War, Kabul was something of a refuge; it is no longer.

Out here in the bush, relatively speaking, things are different. A depressing number of people seem to have accepted that they just might die a random, meaningless death; but far from letting this thought overpower their emotions and coping skills, it seems to have focused their attentions onto the most immediate concerns: will we eat tomorrow, can I increase my stature within the community, will my son get married and have enough children, and so on. One of my new friends here laments that attitude, complaining that the adults, especially the spinghiri, or “white beards,” are unbelievably selfish because they only care about money and power. I hope it’s not condescending to disagree, and see that thought process as a rational response to severe deprivation.

That belief in fundamental rationality—that in fact people here really do make rational choices, even if we don’t understand all the factors that go into them—is one of the critical missing pieces from the war effort. I’ve met far too many soldiers—American, French, Infantry, PRT—who view the Afghans we encounter as quasi-human… or even (dare I say it) alien. They are not alien in the slightest. They are just a tiny bit different. But that basic core of humanity, the part that lets me sit down with a man I’ve never met and laugh about my unmarried beard, that core is what will win us the fight. If we want to.

Alas, I’m becoming more and more convinced that the big cultural battle is not in Afghanistan, but in the Army itself. Army guys love to talk counterinsurgency (it’s trendy!), but a depressing number couldn’t begin to tell you what it is or what it would look like. Instead you see the same old missions—cordon and searches, door-kicking, HVT strikes—being shoved into a COIN framework. The result is a mess, with no one understanding their ultimate mission. That issue, I feel, is the bigger mountain to move, than the ones greeting us outside the MRAP windows.