Reflection on No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes by Anand Gopal

               No Good Men Among the Living is primarily a story of Afghans trying to make it through the American invasion, though the book really covers all the time since the end of the Soviet invasion from 1979-89. It is really good at conveying personal stories, though I would have liked a more ordered analysis about the major events and turning points of the war. But that is not what this book is. This book is primarily about people and telling the story of the war through their eyes.

               It is pretty astounding to think that by December of 2001 the Taliban was defeated by American forces. Eighteen years on, with our troops still in Afghanistan, it is hard to understand how we could have achieved victory against the enemy so quickly and still be there. I think at a fundamental level, the problem is that our invasion was not that crazy of a turning point for Afghanistan, it was really just our entry into what is now a forty-year war. It began with the Soviet invasion to prop up a Communist government from 1979-89. The U.S. backed the mujahedeen resistance, but then those same mujahedeen started fighting against each other in a civil war from 1992 to 1996. The Taliban (meaning the students) emerged as the victor, ruling over the country for four years until they made the mistake of sheltering Osama Bin Laden, bringing upon them the wrath of the United States.

               When the USA invaded, we destroyed the Taliban quickly and the author asserts that US forces were looking for something to do. Due to a lack of a clear enemy, the allies that the USA had made to fight the Taliban started using US forces to pick each other off, especially in the south of the country. People knew that the USA wanted to destroy the Taliban, so they just told the USA that whoever they wanted out of the picture was Taliban. The entirety of chapter 7 in the book is examples of the US forces being used as different warlord’s private hit squads. This is definitely a lesson in occupation strategies. The locals know the environment better and the United States needs to be ready to disregard bad intelligence. People know how to use these situations to their advantage. Big turning points occurred in 2006, when the Taliban resurged after a low point in 2003 and then in 2008, when the Taliban was weakened again after executing a bus full of economic migrants to Iran that they suspected were enemy fighters.

               The USA spent way too much time and money with these warlords, funneling tons of money to them outside the state. For example, the US paid one guy’s “private security contractor” to “escort” our forces along a highway $1-2000 dollars per trip. That basically made him the feudal lord of the highway. He became very rich, and since he was not the new Afghan state that US forces were trying to build, there was now more money (which equals power) outside the state. This happened over and over again all over the country. Gopal writes that, “Of the $557 billion that Washington spent in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2011, only 5.4 percent went to development or governance. The rest was mostly military expenditure, a significant chunk of which ended up in the coffers of regional strongmen like Jan Muhammad. In other words, while the United States paid nominal amounts to build the Afghan state, it fostered a stronger and more influential network of power outside the state.” The US government contracted out the war, leading to a lack of control over what was going on. Contractors also contracted out to sub-contractors and local warlords. All of this created power outside the state at a time when the new Afghan state needed to get control of its territory.

               In conclusion, I learned two major lessons from this book. The first is that the US forces should not have held on so tightly to allies in the region. This is a place where there are no good guys who truly believe in our values, and as a result, we should not get sentimental about our relationships. We often ended up in partnerships where our intelligence services were manipulated by our “allies.” Second, when trying to build up a state, you need to actually put the money into the state. All of this cash going into security contractors just hurts the state because power is a zero-sum game. Every dollar you give to some security company that is not the state you are trying to build is a dollar spent against yourself.

Miscellaneous facts:

• Only 12% of Afghan soil is arable and only half of that is used due to water scarcity.