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.
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