Prologue From Killing The Cranes
Prologue From Killing The Cranes
Prologue From Killing The Cranes
Edward Girardet has a unique story to tell. . . . He has been a consistent and keen
observer of political events. He has come to know all the major characters. . . .
His is a very personal tale as well as being one of great historical importance.
Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban, Jihad, and Descent into Chaos
Killing the Cranes provides unparalleled insights into the immense challenges
presented by the war in Afghanistan. Mark Schapiro, senior correspondent,
Center for Investigative Reporting, and author of Exposed
Killing
the
Cranes
A Reporters Journey Through
Three Decades of War in
Afghanistan
Girardet
Edward Girardet puts all of his thirty years experience to use in this vivid, enlightening,
humane, yet alarming book. Few other observers have had the determination to
cover Afghan events from before the Soviet invasion to the preparations for American
withdrawal. Girardet describes that whole saga, points out why and whether
things could have gone differently, and explains the realistic prospects ahead.
This is a lifes-work testimony in the best sense. James Fallows, author of
Blind into Baghdad and Postcards from Tomorrow Square
Edward Girardet
Chelsea
Green
Edward Girardet
$27.95 USD
prol ogue
It was a warm Thursday afternoon on August 5, 2010, in a remote woodland of the Hindu Kush mountains when a band of men with full beards
and ankle-length white gowns appeared out of nowhere. Brandishing
Kalashnikovs, they walked up to a team of mostly foreign aid volunteers who had just picnicked near their Land Rovers following a medical mission in Afghanistans northeastern Nuristan province. The eight
men and three women had been bringing eye care, dental treatment,
and other forms of medical relief to an isolated highland valley. For two
weeks, unarmed and unprotected, they had trekked with packhorses
from village to village offering medical assistance to some fifty thousand
subsistence farmers and shepherds living in this rugged high-mountain
region.
The gunmen forced the workerssix Americans, three Afghans, a
German, and a Britonto sit on the ground. They ransacked the vehicles and demanded that everyone empty their pockets. Then they lined
them up against a craggy rock face and executed them, one by one. Only
the Afghan driver was spared. He had pleaded for his life by reciting
verses of the Koran and screaming: I am Muslim. Dont kill me!
The bullet-riddled bodies of the medical team were found the next
day, and news of their assassination traveled swiftly. Theories abounded
as to who murdered them and why. The Taliban and Hezb-e-Islami, both
insurgent groups fighting the Western Coalition forces in Afghanistan,
each claimed responsibility. Yet as with so many such attacks against
civilians, the perpetrators were never found and never brought to justice.
Two of the executed Americans, Tom Little and Dan Terry, were
long-standing members of the International Assistance Mission, a
Christian non-governmental organization (or NGO) that has been
working in Afghanistan since 1966. Dr. Tom, as he was known, was
a low-key sixty-two-year-old optometrist from Delmar, New York, who
had been working with his wife, Libby, in Afghanistan since the late
1970s. They had first started out helping wayward hippies stranded in
Kabul. Running a series of eye clinics, they had remained throughout
the Soviet-Afghan war and during the Battle for Kabul of the mid-1990s
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until the Taliban drove them out. The Littles came straight back after
the collapse of the Talib regime.
Dan was a cheerful and dogged aid worker with a dry sense of
humor who first visited the country in 1971. During the latter days of
the Taliban, when they were destroying villages and killing civilians in
central and northern Afghanistan, Dan had mounted a humanitarian
relief effort in midwinter to bring food across the front lines.
Both were my friends.
For those familiar with Afghanistan, the killing of the IAM team
underscored the brutal reality that much of this mountain and desert
country at the cusp of Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent had
become a perilous, no-go zone. Whereas parts of the country, including Nuristan and the neighboring province of Badakshan where the
murders took place, had been considered relatively safe for aid workers,
the Afghan traditions of hospitality and protection of guests had finally
and irretrievably been shattered. Decades of conflict, competing worldviews, and outside interests had turned Afghanistan into a land where
neither the Western-backed Kabul government nor the insurgents are in
controland basic humanity seems to have vanished.
For me, the deaths of Dr. Tom and Dan marked the end of an era.
They were old Afghan hands who, like me, had first ventured into
Afghanistan in the 1970s and found themselves inexplicably drawn to
this utterly romantic country of cultural contrasts and staggering topographic beauty, but also human tragedy. They kept returning despite
being threatened, and despite the personal risk their work entailed.
Although both were indeed Christians, they were not missionaries. They
were in Afghanistan because of their own convictions and because they
simply wanted to help a beleaguered people.
By the time of the IAM murders, the outlook for the future of
Afghanistan was already bleak. One senior United Nations official in
Kabul with years of Afghan experience was blunt: Its become an absolute disaster. While NATO by early 2011 had largely accepted that there
could be no military solution, Western governments were still placing too
much emphasisand fundingon their generals for leadership rather
than investing in more imaginative out-of-the-box initiatives and longerterm civilian-led approaches, including talking with the insurgents.
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States spending one hundred million dollars a day on its military effort
given that such funds might be far better spent on recovery itself. If US
troops were to pull out tomorrow, what would they have left behind? The
Soviets spent nearly a decade fighting their war in Afghanistan. Little
tangible remains of their past involvement today.
NATO forces have now occupied Afghanistan longer than the
Soviets. In a war with objectives difficult, if not impossible, to define,
Western military casualties have been swelling steadily since 2004, when
the Taliban began to reemerge as a formidable force. By mid 2011, over
twenty-five hundred American, British, French, German, Canadian,
Italian, and other soldiers had been killed. More than half the injuries
and deaths were not the result of direct combat. The insurgents have
been inflicting increasing casualties by roadside bombs, booby traps, and
other improvised explosive devices (or IEDs). In contrast, over eighteen
thousand Afghans had lost their lives in less than a decade, at least half of
them civilian. A further forty thousand, both military and civilian, have
been wounded. While NATO analysts argue that current Afghan casualties are modest compared with the 1.5 million believed to have died
during the Soviet-Afghan war, others point out that the current conflict
could have been avoided had the West adopted a more realistic approach
to Afghanistan during the early 2000s and not been obsessed by terrorism, narcotics, and other distracting factorsnotably the war in Iraq.
The reality is that overall security, particularly in the countryside, is
worsening. Former mujahideen whom I knew in the 1980s and 90s, and
who had contacts with the insurgents, apologized for not being able to
take me into parts of eastern Afghanistan. We cannot guarantee your
safety, they told me. Even friends whom I know are involved with the
insurgents, but still respect traditional Afghan hospitality, are reluctant to take me through their zones of control. Traveling has become a
highly hazardous undertaking. I had felt far safer trekking clandestinely
through the mountains during the Soviet era than today.
But Afghanistans problems are not just a lack of security. Too much
money, combined with expectations too high and unrealistic, has been
thrown at Afghanistan, propping up an ineffectual and corrupt regime.
The overall economy is highly artificial and largely dependent on international development aid, military expenditure, and narcotics traffick-
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ing. In addition to the foreign aid contractors, the bulk of the revenue
has gone to a small but powerful privileged elite of Afghans, notably
senior government officials, warlords, and businesspeople with the right
connections. In 2010, Transparency International ranked Afghanistan as
the worlds most corrupt country, with graft permeating all levels of the
administration, including President Hamid Karzais own family, who
have benefited overwhelmingly from the recovery process.
Certainly, there are areas where significant progress has been made.
These include education, health, freedom of the media, and some highly
imaginative employment initiatives based on local entrepreneurship.
Impressively, the number of boys and girls attending school has leapt
by over 500 percent to seven millionalthough seven million more still
have no access to education. However, militant threats since 2007 against
female pupils and teachers have been forcing the closures of hundreds of
schools. And while the number of health care facilities has improved
dramatically, many rural populations still lack access to even the most
rudimentary medical services.
This is not surprising. Although rural Afghanistan has nearly 80
percent of the population, it has been seriously neglected in the recovery process, leading Afghans to wonder who is benefiting from the huge
amounts of aid they keep hearing about. The bulk of international funding has remained focused on Kabul and other urban centers. Too much
emphasis has been placed on quick fixes that do not necessarily improve
the lives of ordinary Afghans, but that play well back in Washington,
London, and Bonn.
Although billions of dollars in aid and military support are being
given to Afghanistan by the United States and other Western countries,
it remains difficult to comprehend the strategy behind either the war or
the recovery plan. There appears to be no long-term vision nor any real
sustainable commitment beyond the NATO endgame of 2014, the
deadline set to pull out troops in order to satisfy increasingly dissatisfied electorates back home. Many Afghans, including government ministers, are hedging their bets, making as much money as they can from the
system before the game is up. Property purchases by Afghans in Dubai,
Abu Dhabi, and elsewhere have shot up since mid-2005. Visa applications
in 2011 to leave Afghanistan are the highest since the Soviet-Afghan war.
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and head off in different directions to continue their struggle against the
outside infidels. This unity of cause is a factor that cannot be ignored in
the current NATO counterinsurgency.
Understanding the lessons of the past is critical for the Western
intervention to have any long-lasting positive impact on Afghanistan.
Yet experience has convinced me that whether out of political expedience, arrogance, or plain ignorance, too many Western policy makers
continually fail to examine the history of this defiant country. They
refuse to learn the lessons from the previous two hundred years, starting
with the rise of strategic rivalry between the British and Russian empires
in Central Asia followed by the disastrous First Anglo-Afghan War of
1842. All of this was part of the Great Game, as British writer Rudyard
Kipling dubbed Britains involvement with Afghanistan in its confrontation with tzarist Russia during the nineteenth century. This same game
is still being played today, but with a cast of new players.
One cannot help but be overwhelmed by Afghanistans past. While
Paleolithic humans probably lived in what is now northern Afghanistan
fifty thousand years ago, the country has provided a backdrop to two of
the worlds great religions, Gandhara Buddhism and Islam. Historically,
Afghanistan has repelled, absorbed, or simply let pass through all those
who have invaded, rampaged, or marched across its borders. As many as
twenty-five ruling dynasties have swept through Afghanistan over the
past three millennia. Alexander the Great, Cyrus the Great, Genghis
Khan, Tamerlane, and Babur all had preceded the Russians in attempting to gain a foothold in Afghanistan, mostly with disastrous results.
Few if any of these invaders stayedalbeit some left behind traces of
their passage. Some blue-eyed, fair-haired Nuristanis claim descent from
Alexanders soldiers, while the Mongolian-featured Hazaras (hazara
means one thousand) suggest ancestry among the hordes of Genghis
Khan, who is reputed to have left behind detachments of troops one
thousand strong to protect the far-flung southern outposts of his empire.
Throughout much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
British military strategists considered Afghanistan a buffer zone against
tzarist Russias forward thrust, with various isolated Afghan fortresses
such as Herat, Kandahar, and Ghazni serving as the key to India. They
also perceived insurgent Afghan tribes, who often led raids deep into
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for their suspected role in the attacks on American soil. But it seemed
unaware that it was reentering a civil war that the United States had
largely abandoned shortly after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in
1989. The diverse conflicts that followed had left an indelible and painful
stain on the country and its people. It wasnt long before the Americans
were treated with suspicion over their motives. For many Afghans, the
post-9/11 war was simply another episode in a country whose people were
tired of invasions, betrayal, and international grandstanding.
At the same time, it was hard to fathom the full intent of renewed
American military interest in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda operatives could be
more easily ousted through good intelligence than bombings. Were there
justifiable strategic or economic interests, such as mineral resources,
that needed to be defended? Had the West determined that peace in
Afghanistan is the key to regional security with regard to Central Asia,
the Gulf, Pakistan, Iran, India, and China? Could the world afford to
ignore Afghanistan?
Whatever the reasons, history has shown repeatedly that there are no
military solutions in Afghanistan. The Great Game of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries has become the Great Pretend Game of the
twenty-first. It is a pretense to believe that military intervention, even
with responsibility now being shunted onto the Afghan security forces,
can bring about peace after more than three decades of war. There is
broad skepticism that the West will be able to train a capable security
force of army and police by 2014, as NATO has promised. Nor is simply
pouring in more aid going to make a difference. The Taliban and other
insurgents are not succeeding out of military prowess, or because they are
popular, but rather because the vast bulk of the international community
has failed to understand how to deal with Afghans in an effective and
pragmatic way.
Nor does the West understand the nature of the Taliban and their
insurgent allies, including ongoing support by elements of Pakistanis
military Interservices Intelligence Agency (or ISI). While groups close to
Mullah Omar, the spiritual leader of the Islamic movement, may regard
themselves as Taliban, the current anti-Western insurgency is really a loose
formation of guerrilla fronts, all with their own motivation. These include
groups such as neo-Taliban, the Haqqani Network, Hezb-e-Islami,
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