Afghanistan Will Be What It Always Was

 Afghanistan Will Be What It Always Was

by KIT PARKER Harvard Magazine

SATURDAY MORNING I awoke to hear that Qalat, the capital of Zabul Province, had fallen to the Taliban. It surprised me, only because I would have expected Qalat to just declare Taliban rule. It was in Qalat, the nastiest place I have ever been in my life, in December 2002, that I first questioned whether Afghanistan's destiny could actually be changed in our lifetime.

I was part of a unit that was helicoptered into Qalat early one morning to look for Al Qaeda, Taliban, and surface-to-air missiles. As we searched through the governor's compound, we found hordes of humanitarian aid—donations of clothes and blankets that could have been put to good use in the mountain villages to shield Afghans against the winter cold—being repackaged for profit in the Pakistani markets across the border. My interpreter and I found the governor and took him to his office for an interrogation. He was a weak, cowardly man sacrificing his own people for profit with little remorse, and I left the interrogation sickened.

The next day, as we swept through the villages of Zabul Province searching for Al Qaeda and Taliban, the people we spoke with complained about how the governor would send his men to the villages to photograph the young boys. The governor would pick the photos he liked, and his men would return to the villages the following day to retrieve his human selections. As I heard village leader after village leader tell the same story over days of our operation, I felt a mounting rage, thinking maybe the governor should be assigned to the other side of the war's ledger of the living and dying.

During recent days, my phone has buzzed with calls and texts from civilian friends, surprised that the wheels could come off the bus so fast in Afghanistan.

I reply the same way:

It's not surprising. It was always going to be this way.

Any American soldier who spent significant time in the villages knows this. By “significant,” I mean time spent talking to village elders, trying to secure them against Taliban terror, feed their hungry children, evangelize the advantages of education for all, and explain the rule of law. I mean those of us who spent time in those villages sorting through feudal fighting that for generations has focused Afghans not on their future but the wrongs of the past. At Harvard, I have watched a parade of generals visit the Kennedy School, detailing the need for more troops to stabilize the nation. From my own time on the ground, I’ve come away with another view.

 

AFGHANISTAN MAY NOT BE A NATION to be stabilized. It is a diverse and difficult space with little sense of collective or shared fate. Illiteracy is still endemic, even after our intervention—as is the ceaseless violence. And the idea of a centralized executive leadership on the Western model, with its hierarchical architectures and responsibilities, with occasional exceptions, is just antithetical to Afghans. At least that is the history.

And yet despite being at war for centuries, Afghans are neither defeated by nor do they defeat their invaders. Rather, Afghanistan has been abandoned by invaders dating back to Genghis Khan. No matter the magnitude and duration of the invasion, Afghanistan remained unchanged in key ways.

When I got to Afghanistan in 2002, the most high-tech widget I saw in the rural villages of Kandahar Province was an AK-47. The second most? The wheel. The villages were roughly out of the twelfth century. When I returned for subsequent deployments in 2009 and 2011, I saw that there had been an infusion of cell phones, internet cafes, paved roads, media, and more that we, the Coalition, had facilitated through aid and commerce. But the Afghans had no organic capacity to develop or sustain these trappings of twenty-first-century society, and the powers-that-be in the Coalition continued to largely ignore this fact. Watching the deployment of sophisticated helicopters and other equipment to the Afghan National Army left me with a sense of dread and anger—at our miscalculation that our modern “toys” would somehow “fix” Afghanistan.

One afternoon in 2009, I sat in a briefing at Forward Operating Base Shank in Logar Province. Eager 30-somethings sent by the State Department were visiting from the U.S. embassy in Kabul to present their plan for Logar and Wardak Provinces, just south of the nation’s capital. Outfitted in brightly colored Patagonia and North Face gear, these fashionably coiffed, well-intentioned young people walked through a PowerPoint presentation of a vision of the region, one of the most violent in Afghanistan, as a modern-day Nirvana. I watched the slide presentation in disbelief, as nothing in it registered with the realities of the Afghanistan I was seeing. As I looked around the meeting table, many of the officers and senior noncommissioned officers, soldiers with multiple combat tours, shaved heads, cups of tobacco spit, sunflower seed shells and coffee on the plywood table in front of them, were incredulous. The brigade operations officer held his head in both hands, unable to look at the slides or the self-assured presenters. Others stared between their fingers as they pressed their hands against their faces. The brigade sergeant major looked angry. The brigade civil affairs officer stared in disbelief of the naivete the presentation communicated.

But I knew what this was. I was, at the time, straddling two worlds. Deployed in Afghanistan, but an engineering professor at Harvard, I felt acutely the pull between two worlds—one that was on the ground, and one in the clouds. Immediately after their presentation, I invited the half dozen or so speakers back to my shared office in the shack. Behind the closed door, I asked how many had graduated from the Harvard Kennedy School. Most had. One was from Princeton. I thanked them for their time before gently escorting this ultraviolet good-idea choir to the helicopter that would take them back to the embassy.

 

THAT SINGULAR EPISODE has had a greater impact on my teaching at Harvard than any other in my life.

Did we, as a nation, misunderstand Afghanistan? Yes. For those of us on the ground, we understood exactly how this would end from almost the beginning. It wasn’t so much the poverty, lack of education, or societal values. It was simpler than that. For the largest portion of the Afghan population, there was no buy-in to the concept of “Live free or die.” As we’ve done elsewhere, we tried to force a cultural narrative on a people with their own narrative and their own culture.

But our greatest failure was not understanding and challenging ourselves. Not asking the hard questions about why democracy works, nor choosing to serve the nation in a sustained effort that would endow us with a deeper understanding of our culture and values. We didn’t appreciate what it takes to build and support a law enforcement officer, what it takes to support commerce, or get electricity into your house. Finally, we failed to appreciate what it takes to build a citizen of democracy, a citizen who may need to be developed into a leader. In the end, our effort at nation-building in Afghanistan was flawed by an arrogance and lack of understanding of both ourselves and the Afghans.

What is the lesson going forward? Challenge the cultural narrative we hold in such high esteem and ask questions about it—especially for the military which is so often sent out into the world armed with the American Narrative. Specifically, the military must reconsider the careerist model of building generals who, seemingly disconnected from the pulse of the American populace, built a warring pyramid scheme over two decades based on a fantasy where money was a weapon system. And for us in academia, the burden is to recognize that our special, rarified place should be a battlefield of its own, where ideas should do battle and hard, uncomfortable questions should be asked.

We may be soon out of Afghanistan, but our best course of action going forward is to keep the running tab open. If terror should again leak from its borders, the terrorists can bet that our response will be something other than nation-building.

 

 

Today’s Bombing In Kabul: Islamic State Khorasan’s Objectives

 Facts not Bullshit. Read it and understand the cruel truth: America in other peoples wars.

Today’s Bombing In Kabul: Islamic State Khorasan’s Objectives In Today’s Attack In Regard To the US Are the Same as Those of ISIS Overall

by Adam L Silverman|  Balloon Juice

This post is in: America, Foreign Affairs, Military, Open Threads, Silverman on Security, War

Today’s suicide bombing in Kabul has been claimed by Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K).

ISIS in Khorasan, known as ISIS-K, claimed that an ISIS militant carried out the suicide attack, but provided no evidence to support the claim

President Biden confirmed this in his remarks earlier this afternoon.

At the remarks at the White House later in the day, the president said the bombings were the work of fighters from the ISIS affiliate in Afghanistan, known as ISIS Khorasan, or ISIS-K. The attacks marked one of the single deadliest days for U.S. forces in Afghanistan in the 20 years since the allied invasion.

President Biden also made it clear that the US will continue the Non-combatant Evacuation Operation (NEO) until it achieves the delineated objective of getting all the Americans who wish to get out of Afghanistan out of Afghanistan, as well as to get out as many of the Afghans who have assisted the US over the past twenty years and those whose work over the past twenty years might put them at risk as possible. President Biden also made it clear that the US would not forgive nor forget about today’s attack and that an appropriate response would be forthcoming.

On Monday I wrote:

The real outstanding concerns right now need to be the ability of spoilers, such as Islamic State in Khorasan (IS-K), which is a serious enemy of the Taliban, attacking Kabul airport to derail the NEO and cause problems for the Taliban as a result of the US responding to such an attack.

The window of opportunity for today’s attack has two roots. The first is that large numbers of Afghans are constantly approaching Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul attempting to get into the airport in order that the US can get them out. The second is that Islamic State Khorasan’s leadership, like that of Islamic State proper, the Taliban, al Qaeda, and all of our non-state and state adversaries actually watch our broadcast and cable news and read our newspapers. They’ve seen the slanted reporting in every major US newspaper and on every US news channel about what President Biden is or is not doing and should or should not be doing. They’ve seen every tweet and quote from every Republican elected official, think tank denizen, and pundit delineating everything the Biden administration is doing wrong and calling for more US military personnel to be sent to Afghanistan, an indefinite extension to the Non-Combatant Evacuation Operation, and in some cases a complete repudiation and abrogation of the deal the Trump administration negotiated with the Taliban. Today’s attack was directly intended to take advantage of both of these realities. The physical one – all the Afghans attempting to get to the airport in Kabul – and the informational/psychological ones resulting from the execrable and irresponsible news media reporting and the politicization of the withdrawal by both Republican officials and an entire ecosystem of people who have gained fame and fortune solely by commenting about the war.

IS-K is violently opposed to the Taliban. The reason for this is that the extreme, politicized version of Islam that the Taliban follow is rooted in Deobandi Islam with a much later added overlay of Saudi tawheed as a result of contact with the Saudi mujahideen who flocked to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. Deobandism is an austere, anti-colonial focused version of Islam that originated in British controlled India in the late 1860s. The Saudi concept of tawheed, the radical unity of the Deity, is the central teaching and foundation of Adbul Wahhab’s theology that provided the doctrinal focus for ibn Saud’s conquest of the Arabian peninsula and formation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. For all that we see the Taliban as being extreme and unyielding, the Islamic State perceives them as not being pure enough in their understanding and application of tawheed.

In December 2015, in the wake of the Islamic State attack in St. Michael, France, I completed a strategic assessment of ISIS’s doctrine, its strategic objectives, and what the US needed to do to adapt its own strategies to counter the threat from ISIS. I had already been working on the research when the attack in St. Michael happened and the first draft of the assessment, if you will, was actually a post here. The formal assessment was prepared for the then Director of Force Protection at Headquarters Department of the Army. It was also briefed directly by me to the Commanding Generals of I Corps (in full) and XVIII Airborne Corps (as part of a larger strategic assessment for the Command Group, Senior Staff, and Multinational Coalition Senior Staff) between January and May 2016 and a copy was sent to the Commanding General of III Corps who was already deployed forward as the Commander of Combined Joint Task Force Inherent Resolve. Most of what follows is directly from that assessment.

The Islamic State, whether the original movement, the Islamic State in Iraq and al Shams (ISIS), or its offshoots like Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K), is simply the most extreme, hardcore, politicized evolution of tawheed as an organizing doctrine and driver for violent extremist Islamic movements that we have yet see emerge. They are far more extreme than al Qaeda, who they are also in competition with and violently opposed to. For ISIS, IS-K, and the other IS offshoots, their doctrine is built around the teachings of Abdul Wahhab. Wahhab asserted that not only was the Deity one, which is not in and of itself a particularly a radical idea in Islam, but that any innovation that took away from this glorious reality counted as shirk or polytheism. As a result he inveighed against the building of shrines and monuments, as well as the tradition of subordinate, intercessory prayers in addition to the mandated salat or Islamic understanding of prayer. Those who engage in such innovations are, at best, engaged in kufr and ridda – unbelief in the G-d and apostasy. Moreover, tawheed teaches that unbelief and apostasy must be stamped out, through violence if necessary. It also teaches that one can only be a real Muslim, a muwaheedun, if one lives where tawheed has been established as the rule for the ummah/community of the faithful. As Moussalli interestingly asserts*, the Wahhabi muwaheedun have been arguing for over 200 years that they are the true defenders of Sunni Islam, while at the same time being in direct and active opposition to 90% of Sunni Islam.

What makes tawheed, as the core doctrine, theology, and ideology of the Islamic State, so dangerous is its unwillingness to tolerate non-muwaheedun Muslims and its ability to travel. Unlike bin Laden’s underlying doctrine for al Qaeda, which was partially rooted in bin Laden’s personal adherence to and understanding of tawheed, the Islamic State’s application of tawheed and its theological component calls for targeting non- muwaheedun Muslims. While bin Laden did call for the removal, by violence if necessary, of the leaders of Muslims states and societies who were themselves unbelievers and/or apostates, he also made it clear that non-muwaheedun populations were off limits for targeting. The Islamic State makes no such distinction.

The second danger within the concept of tawheed at the heart of the Islamic State doctrine is capable of traveling throughout the Muslim world in a way that other forms of Islamic extremism are not. The popular conception of Wahhabiya or tawheed is that it is an offshoot of the Hanbali school of Islamic jurisprudence. However, as Commins describes, tawheed is not a concept of Islamic jurisprudence. Rather it is a doctrinal and theological system. As such it can travel throughout the Sunni Muslim world and subvert any of the four Sunni schools of Islamic Jurisprudence. Tawheed, precisely because it is doctrine and theology, but not jurisprudence and legal application, has the ability to take root throughout the Sunni Muslim world.

ISIS has two strategic objectives. The Islamic State, organized around the doctrine of tawheed, seeks to destroy the grey zone in which Muslims live their day to day lives as the citizens and residents of Muslim and non-Muslim states and societies alike. The grey zone refers to the civic space, especially in Western liberal states and societies that allows people from different religious and ethnic background to have membership in the state and society despite not necessarily belonging to the majority ethnic or religious group. tawheed obliterates the grey zone. It tells Muslims, specifically Sunni Muslims, that they cannot separate their religious lives from their civic ones and promotes this idea to non-Muslims. Moreover, its focus on being unable to be a good Muslim, a muwaheedun, unless one lives where tawheed has been established as the governing concept reinforces the argument that proper Muslims must relocate to the Islamic State and its self declared caliphate. It is also the Islamic State’s argument for expanding the caliphate. Additionally, it supports the assertion that Muslim communities in the West cannot assimilate, are susceptible to ISIS’s information operations, and are a threat to the domestic security of the states in which they reside.

The application of tawheed to destroy the grey zone also seeks to set Muslims against Muslims. One of the hallmarks of Sunni Islam is ijma. Ijma, or consensus, is the belief that each community of Muslims determines how to organize themselves as Muslims. It is very similar to the five point Calvinist inheritance of the Evangelical denominations that developed within the US that each congregation determines how to organize its religious life for worship and adherence to the Gospels. Applying tawheed to Sunni Muslim life destroys the localism that is its hallmark. Additionally, it seems to pit the adopters of tawheed against their friends and families. Any Sunni Muslim who does not accept and practice tawheed is engaged in kufr and ridda and their apostasy and unbelief/incorrect belief must be corrected or they must be eradicated. Concepts of inclusion, tolerance, and multi-culturalism are anathema to tawheed and the Islamic State.

The Islamic State’s internal, or near geographic goals, are to consolidate their control over the territory they currently control and establish tawheed within it. They then seek to expand their geographic holdings – the self declared Islamic State and caliphate – and enforce tawheed wherever they expand. They also seek to expand tawheed throughout the Sunni Muslim world by destroying the grey zone for Muslims that live in Western states, as well as for those living throughout the Islamic world outside of ISIS’s control.

ISIS’s external, or far geographic, goals are to engage the far enemy and destroy it. The far enemy, as was the case with bin Laden, is the US and its allies. The Islamic State, however, has introduced an apocalyptic twist. Grame, reporting in The Atlantic, indicates that a central portion of the Islamic State’s theology is a belief in the Dabiq Prophecy. The Dabiq Prophecy is an apocalyptic prophecy found in Kitab Al-Fitan wa Ashrat As- Sa`ah/The Book Pertaining to the Turmoil and Portents of the Last Hour. The Dabiq Prophecy is specifically found in Chapter 9: Pertaining to the Conquest of Constantinople and the Appearance of the Dajjal and Descent of Jesus Son of Mary (Jesus Christ). These sections follow on from earlier hadith that retell more familiar end times prophecy, such as of Gog and Magog. The Islamic State’s leaders seem to equate the US with the antagonist described in the prophecy and place the location of the final battle in Dabiq, Syria.

The Islamic State does not have the ways and means to fully achieve their ends unless they can get the US and its allies and partners to provide the ways and means for them. ISIS cannot make Muslim citizens or residents of the US, France, or other EU states feel unwelcome. Only the citizens of the US, France, other EU states, and other states can do so. Moreover, the Islamic State cannot make the US, its allies, and its partners commit to a significant enough application of Landpower to allow them to claim that the Dabiq Prophecy is actually coming to pass.

The ways and means that the Islamic State does have at its disposal are to entice the US, its partners, and its allies into providing the ways and means to ISIS’s ends of destroying the grey zone, convincing Muslim citizens and residents of the US and other states that they are unwanted so that they relocate or undertake terrorist acts where they live, and to draw the US into a significant ground war in locations of ISIS’s choosing. Originally this was Syria because of the Dabiq Prophecy, but in the case of IS-K, it is Afghanistan. Engaging in terrorism as Psychological Operations is the Islamic State’s principal way of achieving the end of getting the US to provide it with the ways and means it does not have.

Psychological Operations are defined as: planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals. The purpose of Psychological Operations is to induce or reinforce foreign attitudes and behavior favorable to the originator’s objectives.

The Islamic State has developed an extensive and highly professional Information Operations and Psychological Operations capability. Part of this was no doubt learned from the former Ba’athist Iraqi Sunni military and intelligence personnel who aligned themselves with the Islamic State as part of the ongoing Iraqi sectarian conflict. This could be clearly seen in the immediate aftermath of the recent Paris attacks. Within ten days the History Channel cable network was airing a documentary dealing with the Islamic State and the Paris attacks that included footage from embedded personnel reporting from within the portions of Syria and Iraq controlled by the Islamic State. The documentary included footage of fully stocked markets, police in uniform with clearly identified Islamic State markings, and people going about their daily lives. Exposing anyone in the US to these images would have been impossible without the attacks in Paris.

Today’s attacks seek to advance Islamic State Khorasan’s goals against both their near (the Taliban) and far enemies (the US). By successfully attacking Afghans attempting to reach and get into Hamid Karzai International airport (HKIA) and the US Marines conducting the security operation on site, IS-K makes the Taliban look weak and ineffectual. It both challenges the Taliban’s legitimacy in regard to governing Afghanistan and attacks their honor by making them look ineffectual in providing security. IS-K also seeks to draw the US back in to Afghanistan to prolong the conflict as part of engaging the far enemy/the US. The purpose here is to increase political pressure on President Biden to surge more US military personnel into Kabul in order to reinforce and extend the US’s security footprint. This would both abrogate the Biden administration’s adherence to the Trump administration negotiated withdrawal, putting the US and the Taliban back into conflict, while increasing the number of American targets for IS-K to attack.

Part of the reason IS-K undertook this attack is because like ISIS, like al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other extremist Islamic movements, they read and watch the American news. They’ve seen the reporting bias about what the Biden administration is doing. They’ve seen the calls by reporters, pundits, the think tank denizens, former Trump administration officials, and Republican members of Congress for the Biden administration to send more military personnel back in, to retake Bagram and move operations there (this would be strategically irresponsible and tactically stupid!), and to create an open ended commitment to stay until every single US citizen and Afghan who wants to leave is out.

The leaders of Islamic State-Khorasan saw an opportunity to undertake a low risk to themselves – two suicide bombers – high reward operation to leverage the current information environment in the US to increase the pressure on the Biden administration. I expect there will be further attacks to both further capitalize on the news media and political feeding frenzy in the US right now in order to try to force the Biden administration to giving IS-K what it wants: more American military boots on the ground to both attack and to also become targets for the Taliban. I do not think this is going to work. I think that IS-K, like the American news media and Republican members of Congress, as well as other Republicans with presidential ambitions, have seriously misjudged President Biden. He is not going to budge. He will order and authorize exactly what he feels is necessary to complete the Non-combatant Evacuation Operation and when he has decided that this strategic objective has been met, he will end it. That may be on schedule for 31 August. It may be a week later. But it is not going to entail a surge of American military personnel to expand the operation. Finally, I do expect that US Special Operations Command has already been tasked with undertaking a focused, targeted mission against IS-K as an appropriate response to their attacks today.

* Ahmad Moussalli, Wahhabism, Salafism, and Islamism: Who is the Enemy, A Conflicts Forum Monograph, Spring 2015

 

The Gospel According to Mark; A short story by Jorge Luis Borges

 

The Gospel According to Mark

By Jorge Luis Borges The New Yorker

These events took place at La Colorada ranch, in the southern part of the township of Junín, during the last days of March, 1928. The protagonist was a medical student named Baltasar Espinosa. We may describe him, for now, as one of the common run of young men from Buenos Aires, with nothing more noteworthy about him than an almost unlimited kindness and a capacity for public speaking that had earned him several prizes at the English school in Ramos Mejía. He did not like arguing, and preferred having his listener rather than himself in the right. Although he was fascinated by the probabilities of chance in any game he played, he was a bad player because it gave him no pleasure to win. His wide intelligence was undirected; at the age of thirty-three, he still lacked credit for graduation by one course—the course to which he was most drawn. His father, who was a freethinker (like all the gentlemen of his day), had introduced him to the lessons of Herbert Spencer, but his mother, before leaving on a trip to Montevideo, once asked him to say the Lord’s Prayer and make the sign of the cross every night. Through the years, he had never gone back on that promise.

Espinosa was not lacking in spirit; one day, with more indifference than anger, he had exchanged two or three punches with a group of fellow-students who were trying to force him to take part in a university demonstration. Owing to an acquiescent nature, he was full of opinions, or habits of mind, that were questionable: Argentina mattered less to him than a fear that in other parts of the world people might think of us as Indians; he worshipped France but despised the French; he thought little of Americans but approved the fact that there were tall buildings, like theirs, in Buenos Aires; he believed the gauchos of the plains to be better riders than those of hill or mountain country. When his cousin Daniel invited him to spend the summer months out at La Colorada, he said yes at once—not because he was really fond of the country but more out of his natural complacency and also because it was easier to say yes than to dream up reasons for saying no.

The ranch’s main house was big and slightly run down; the quarters of the foreman, whose name was Gutre, were close by. The Gutres were three: the father, an unusually uncouth son, and a daughter of uncertain paternity. They were tall, strong, and bony, and had hair that was on the reddish side and faces that showed traces of Indian blood. They were barely articulate. The foreman’s wife had died years before.

There in the country, Espinosa began learning things he had never known, or even suspected—for example, that you do not gallop a horse when approaching settlements, and that you never go out riding except for some special purpose. In time, he was to come to tell the birds apart by their calls.

After a few days, Daniel had to leave for Buenos Aires to close a deal on some cattle. At most, this bit of business might take him a week. Espinosa, who was already somewhat weary of hearing about his cousin’s incessant luck with women and his tireless interest in the minute details of men’s fashion, preferred staying on at the ranch with his textbooks. But the heat was unbearable, and even the night brought no relief. One morning at daybreak, thunder woke him. Outside, the wind was rocking the Australian pines. Listening to the first heavy drops of rain, Espinosa thanked God. All at once, cold air rolled in. That afternoon, the Salado overflowed its banks.

The next day, looking out over the flooded fields from the gallery of the main house, Baltasar Espinosa thought that the stock metaphor comparing the pampa to the sea was not altogether false—at least, not that morning—though W. H. Hudson had remarked that the sea seems wider because we view it from a ship’s deck and not from a horse or from eye level.

The rain did not let up. The Gutres, helped or hindered by Espinosa, the town dweller, rescued a good part of the livestock, but many animals were drowned. There were four roads leading to La Colorada; all of them were under water. On the third day, when a leak threatened the foreman’s house, Espinosa gave the Gutres a room near the tool shed, at the back of the main house. This drew them all closer; they ate together in the big dining room. Conversation turned out to be difficult. The Gutres, who knew so much about country things, were hard put to it to explain them. One night, Espinosa asked them if people still remembered the Indian raids from back when the frontier command was located there in Junín. They told him yes, but they would have given the same answer to a question about the beheading of Charles I. Espinosa recalled his father’s saying that almost every case of longevity that was cited in the country was really a case of bad memory or of a dim notion of dates. Gauchos are apt to be ignorant of the year of their birth or of the name of the man who begot them.

In the whole house, there was apparently no other reading matter than a set of the Farm Journal, a handbook of veterinary medicine, a de-luxe edition of the Uruguayan epic “Tabaré,” a “History of Shorthorn Cattle in Argentina,” a number of erotic or detective stories, and a recent novel called “Don Segundo Sombra.” Espinosa, trying in some way to bridge the inevitable after-dinner gap, read a couple of chapters of this novel to the Gutres, none of whom could read or write. Unfortunately, the foreman had been a cattle drover, and the doings of the hero, another cattle drover, failed to whet his interest. He said that the work was light, that drovers always travelled with a packhorse that carried everything they needed, and that, had he not been a drover, he would never have seen such far-flung places as the Laguna de Gómez, the town of Bragado, and the spread of the Núñez family in Chacabuco. There was a guitar in the kitchen; the ranch hands, before the time of the events I am describing, used to sit around in a circle. Someone would tune the instrument without ever getting around to playing it. This was known as a guitarfest.

Espinosa, who had grown a beard, began dallying in front of the mirror to study his new face, and he smiled to think how, back in Buenos Aires, he would bore his friends by telling them the story of the Salado flood. Strangely enough, he missed places he had never frequented and never would: a corner of Cabrera Street on which there was a mailbox; one of the cement lions of a gateway on Jujuy Street, a few blocks from the Plaza del Once; an old barroom with a tiled floor, whose exact whereabouts he was unsure of. As for his brothers and his father, they would already have learned from Daniel that he was isolated—etymologically, the word was perfect—by the floodwaters.

Exploring the house, still hemmed in by the watery waste, Espinosa came across an English Bible. Among the blank pages at the end, the Guthries—such was their original name—had left a handwritten record of their lineage. They were natives of Inverness; had reached the New World, no doubt as common laborers, in the early part of the nineteenth century; and had intermarried with Indians. The chronicle broke off sometime during the eighteen-seventies, when they no longer knew how to write. After a few generations, they had forgotten English; their Spanish, at the time Espinosa knew them, gave them trouble. They lacked any religious faith, but there survived in their blood, like faint tracks, the rigid fanaticism of the Calvinist and the superstitions of the pampa Indian. Espinosa later told them of his find, but they barely took notice.

Leafing through the volume, his fingers opened it at the beginning of the Gospel according to St. Mark. As an exercise in translation, and maybe to find out whether the Gutres understood any of it, Espinosa decided to begin reading them that text after their evening meal. It surprised him that they listened attentively, absorbed. Maybe the gold letters on the cover lent the book authority. It’s still there in their blood, Espinosa thought. It also occurred to him that the generations of men, throughout recorded time, have always told and retold two stories—that of a lost ship which searches the Mediterranean seas for a dearly loved island, and that of a god who is crucified on Golgotha. Remembering his lessons in elocution from his school days in Ramos Mejía, Espinosa got to his feet when he came to the parables.

The Gutres took to bolting their barbecued meat and their sardines so as not to delay the Gospel. A pet lamb that the girl adorned with a small blue ribbon had injured itself on a strand of barbed wire. To stop the bleeding, the three had wanted to apply a cobweb to the wound, but Espinosa treated the animal with some pills. The gratitude that this treatment awakened in them took him aback. (Not trusting the Gutres at first, he’d hidden away in one of his books the two hundred and forty pesos he had brought with him.) Now, the owner of the place away, Espinosa took over and gave timid orders, which were immediately obeyed. The Gutres, as if lost without him, liked following him from room to room and along the gallery that ran around the house. While he read to them, he noticed that they were secretly stealing the crumbs he had dropped on the table. One evening, he caught them unawares talking about him respectfully, in very few words.

Having finished the Gospel according to St. Mark, he wanted to read another of the three Gospels that remained, but the father asked him to repeat the one he had just read, so that they could understand it better. Espinosa felt that they were like children, to whom repetition is more pleasing than variations or novelty. That night—this is not to be wondered at—he dreamed of the Flood; the hammer blows of the building of the Ark woke him up, and he thought that perhaps they were thunder. In fact, the rain, which had let up, started again. The cold was bitter. The Gutres had told him that the storm had damaged the roof of the tool shed, and that they would show it to him when the beams were fixed. No longer a stranger now, he was treated by them with special attention, almost to the point of spoiling him. None of them liked coffee, but for him there was always a small cup into which they heaped sugar.

The new storm had broken out on a Tuesday. Thursday night, Espinosa was awakened by a soft knock at his door, which—just in case—he always kept locked. He got out of bed and opened it; there was the girl. In the dark he could hardly make her out, but by her footsteps he could tell she was barefoot, and moments later, in bed, that she must have come all the way from the other end of the house naked. She did not embrace him or speak a single word; she lay beside him, trembling. It was the first time she had known a man. When she left, she did not kiss him; Espinosa realized that he didn’t even know her name. For some reason that he did not want to pry into, he made up his mind that upon returning to Buenos Aires he would tell no one about what had taken place.

The next day began like the previous ones, except that the father spoke to Espinosa and asked him if Christ had let Himself be killed so as to save all other men on earth. Espinosa, who was a freethinker but who felt committed to what he had read to the Gutres, answered, “Yes, to save everyone from Hell.”

Gutre then asked, “What’s Hell?”

“A place under the ground where souls burn and burn.”

“And the Roman soldiers who hammered in the nails—were they saved, too?”

“Yes,” said Espinosa, whose theology was rather dim.

All along, he was afraid that the foreman might ask him about what had gone on the night before with his daughter. After lunch, they asked him to read the last chapters over again.

Espinosa slept a long nap that afternoon. It was a light sleep, disturbed by persistent hammering and by vague premonitions. Toward evening, he got up and went out onto the gallery. He said, as if thinking aloud, “The waters have dropped. It won’t be long now.”

“It won’t be long now,” Gutre repeated, like an echo.

The three had been following him. Bowing their knees to the stone pavement, they asked his blessing. Then they mocked at him, spat on him, and shoved him toward the back part of the house. The girl wept. Espinosa understood what awaited him on the other side of the door. When they opened it, he saw a patch of sky. A bird sang out. A goldfinch, he thought. The shed was without a roof; they had pulled down the beams to make the cross. ?

(Translated, from the Spanish, by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, in collaboration with the author.)

 

Only action against corruption can solve the world’s biggest problems

Alexei Navalny London Guardian

In a message from his prison cell, the jailed Russian opposition activist calls for the west to take sanctions against oligarchs 

Exactly one year ago, I did not die from poisoning by a chemical weapon, and it would seem that corruption played no small part in my survival. Having contaminated Russia’s state system, corruption has also contaminated the intelligence services. When a country’s senior management is preoccupied with protection rackets and extortion from businesses, the quality of covert operations inevitably suffers. A group of FSB agents applied the nerve agent to my underwear just as shoddily as they incompetently dogged my footsteps for three and a half years – in violation of all instructions from above – allowing civil investigating activists to expose them at every turn.

To be fair, a regime based on corruption can perform more elementary tasks to perfection. The judicial system – the first thing autocrats intent on robbing their nation take control of – functions perfectly on a quid pro quo basis. That is why, when I went back to Russia after medical treatment, I was taken straight from the plane to prison. There is not much to celebrate in that, but at least I now have time to read the memoirs of world leaders.

In those books, the world’s leaders write terribly interestingly about how they solved the main problems facing humankind: wars, poverty, migration, the climate crisis, weapons of mass destruction. These are the issues on the “big agenda”. The fight against corruption, on the other hand, rarely figures as part of what they hope will be their legacy. This is not surprising; it is a “secondary agenda” item.

Amazingly enough, though, corruption nearly always merits a mention when the world’s leaders are describing failures – whether their own or, more commonly, those of their predecessors.

“We spent years, hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of human lives in Iraq [or Afghanistan, you name it] – but the corrupt government of al-Maliki [or Karzai, you name them] alienated the people with its thieving, opening the path to victory to radicals armed with slogans about honest, fair government and RPGs.”

This leads to an obvious question. Guys, if corruption is preventing us from finding solutions to the problems of the “big agenda”, has the time perhaps come to raise it to a priority on that agenda?

It is not difficult to see why that has not already been done. Corruption is a tricky issue to discuss at global summits. Suppose you are discussing Syria and cyber-attacks with Vladimir Putin. Everyone finds that interesting, everyone knows where they are. At the concluding news conference everyone will have something to say.

Now imagine a meeting with Putin on the issue of corruption. The very fact it has been raised represents a move to personalities. The whole thing, from start to finish, is awkward. The richest leader in the world, who has fleeced his own country, is being invited to discuss how to deal with the problem of himself. Very tricky, very awkward.

Now turn on the news. It is precisely the fact that the west “failed to notice” the total corruption in Afghanistan – that western leaders preferred not to talk about a topic they found embarrassing – which was the most crucial factor in the victory of the Taliban (with the support of the population). The west did not want to discuss the plundering of the budget; it was much better to focus on people being stoned to death or execution by beheading.

After the implosion of the USSR and the end of the global ideological confrontation, it was corruption – in its classical definition, “the exploitation of an official position for personal gain” – that became the universal, ideology-free basis for the flourishing of a new Authoritarian International, from Russia to Eritrea, Myanmar to Venezuela. And corruption has long ceased to be merely an internal problem of those countries. It is almost invariably one of the main causes of the global challenges that face the west. 

A new “hot” war in Europe with the use of airstrikes and artillery? That is Putin taking revenge on Ukraine for the anti-corruption revolution that deposed his protege, Viktor Yanukovych. Religious extremists of all stripes find it easier to conduct propaganda when their opponents are driving Rolls-Royces through the streets of penniless countries. Migration crises are caused by poverty, and poverty is almost always caused by corruption.

“It’s just as well climate change is unrelated to corruption!” you may ironically reflect. I invite you to say that in the face of the millions of hectares of Siberian forest that burn every year because of barbaric total clearance, violating the fire regulations for forest management. I am reluctant to make this prediction, but fear the next big terrorist attack will not be just another bomb blast by religious fanatics but, for example, a chemical weapon in the water supply network of a major city or a devastating attack on the IT infrastructure of an entire country, and that those commissioning the terrorism will be one or other of the people in possession of a golden palace. The reason for perpetrating it will be to divert the world’s attention from golden palaces to global security issues.

So it is not we who should feel awkward about confronting corrupt authoritarians with tough questions and getting personal but, on the contrary, they who should know that their shady dealings will invariably be the main focus of discussion at world summits. That would be a crucial step towards eliminating the root cause of many “big” issues.

OK, but what are we supposed to do? Surely there isn’t much that people in Washington or Berlin can do to combat the corruption of officials in Minsk or Caracas?

True, but it is also the case that an important aspect of corruption in authoritarian countries is the use it makes of the west’s financial infrastructure – and in 90% of cases, what has been stolen is stored in the west. An official working for an autocrat knows better than anyone how important it is to keep his capital well away from his colleagues and boss.

All it takes to get started is for western leaders to show determination and political will. The first step is for corruption to be transformed from a source of limitless opportunities into an onerous burden for at least some of the elites surrounding autocrats. That will split them, and increase the voices in favour of modernisation and scaling back corruption – who will be strengthened and provided with new arguments to put forward in elite circles.

The following five steps are entirely realistic, easy to implement, and can make a highly effective start to combating global corruption.

First, the west should formulate and recognise a special category of “countries that encourage corruption”, which will enable the taking of uniform measures against groups of countries, rather than imposing sanctions on particular states.

Second, the main sanction – the main tax on corruption, if you will – for this group of countries should be “enforced transparency”. All documentation relating to contracts concluded between western companies and partners from countries representing corruption risks should be published if the contracts are to the slightest degree connected with the state, its officials, or their relatives.

You work for a state-owned company in a country at high risk of corruption and want to buy a villa on the French Riviera? Fine, go ahead, but you should know that all the information about the deal will be publicly available. You want to have dealings with an official in Minsk or the aunt of a Russian governor? No problem, but you will have to publish the entire paper trail of the transaction, and will no longer be able to conceal the bribe you pay through that “regional representative” or “local partner”.

Third, combating corruption without combating corrupt individuals is the merest hypocrisy and undermines voters’ trust. Until personal sanctions are imposed on oligarchs, primarily those in the entourage of Putin – the role model for all the world’s corrupt officials and businessmen – any anti-corruption rhetoric from the west will be perceived as game-playing and hot air.

There is nothing more frustrating than reading the latest sanctions list, replete with the names of intelligence service colonels and generals nobody has ever heard of, but meticulously cleared of the people in whose interests these colonels act. The west needs to free itself of a semantic mindset where the label “businessman” acts as an indulgence, making it very difficult for them to figure on sanctions lists. Putin’s oligarchs, those heading “state-owned” companies and companies that are formally private but whose prosperity is linked to Putin’s group, are not businessmen but leaders of organised crime groups. At present, alas, the western establishment acts like Pavlov’s dog: you show them a colonel of the intelligence services and they yell, “Sanction him!”; you show them the oligarch paying the colonel, and they yell, “Invite him to Davos!”

Fourth, the US, UK and Germany already have excellent tools for combating foreign corruption, such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the Bribery Act, and so on. Guess how many cases have been brought following reports by our Anti-Corruption Foundation, now categorised as an extremist organisation by Putin’s government?

That’s right, none. The sad fact is that even western law enforcement agencies treat corrupt foreign officials with kid gloves. With a little political will on the part of the government (and pressure from public opinion) that situation can be put right.

Fifth, obstructing the export of political corruption clearly deserves the establishment of an international body or commission. Take a look at what is going on right now. By investing relatively small sums of money, the redoubtable Putin is buying up extreme-right and extreme-left movements throughout Europe – turning their politicians into oligarchs and agents of his own. Legalised bribery is flourishing, often in the form of board memberships at state-owned companies. A former German chancellor, or a former Italian prime minister, or a former Austrian foreign minister, can act as background dancers for the Russian dictator, normalising corrupt practices. All contracts linking former or current western politicians with business partners from corrupt authoritarian countries should also have to be open to public scrutiny.

These are first steps, but even they will have a significant impact, creating elite groups within authoritarian countries for whom campaigning to reduce levels of corruption will become a rational choice.

No money, no soldiers, no reconfiguration of industry or world politics are needed in order to start taking action. Only political will – which, unfortunately, is often in short supply. Public opinion and the wishes of voters are what can finally get things moving. Then some day world leaders will be able to write in their memoirs that they solved many major problems on the “big agenda” simply by eliminating their root cause – without troops, without billions of dollars, and without wasted decades.

Translated by Arch Tait

Alexei Navalny is a Russian lawyer and political and financial activist

 

Writing came naturally to me after several thousand practice runs.

Writing came naturally to me after several thousand practice runs.

Lucian K. Truscott IV

Everything I wrote for the first 10 years came out of this machine.

The words you’re reading right now don’t belong to me. 

What does belong to me is this sentence, and the one above, and every one I’ll write today and every other one I’ve written in my lifetime.

Writers use words the way a carpenter uses nails, because without nails there wouldn’t be a wall or a floor or a window frame or anything else the carpenter builds.  Same with writers:  without words, the writer couldn’t build whatever is being written, whether it’s a book or a screenplay or a short story or a poem or a column.

But words don’t turn into the walls or windows or floors of a piece without being nailed together into sentences.  I think of sentences as what I use to build what I write.  You can find words in a dictionary or a  thesaurus or a rhyming dictionary or even an old fashioned phone book, but you can’t find sentences in any of those places.  Sentences are what I do.

For some mysterious reason, I’ve never been able to do word games like crossword puzzles or Scrabble or the word games they play with callers on NPR every weekend.  When I say I can’t do them, I mean it.  I look at the clues in a crossword puzzle, but unless they nearly spell out the word, I don’t get it.  I think it must be because words don’t gain meaning for me until they’re used, and what they’re used in is sentences. 

I think I’ve told this story elsewhere, but as you will see, it’s worth telling again.  I learned to write sentences, and to love them, from my 7th grade English teacher at George S. Patton Jr. Junior High School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas in 1959 and 1960, Mr. Lockhardt.  To say that he was one of a kind doesn’t come close to doing him justice.  He had a tangle of curls on the top of his head that somehow managed to look neither messy or attended to and came to school every day in a white long sleeved shirt and tie, and he took his place behind his desk in a classroom, and he taught 7th graders how to write sentences for almost 50 years, the last ten or so as a substitute teacher because he didn’t want to quit after he had reached mandatory retirement age.

Mr. Lockhardt had a deceptively simple teaching method.  He began each day by going to the blackboard and writing a sentence.  As I recall, he started with the simple declarative sentence:  Jim threw a ball.  Then he diagrammed the sentence, showing the noun, verb, and object and told us to take out our notebooks and write 20 declarative sentences. 

When the sentences were simple, he sat down at his desk and waited until we were finished and then he took our notebook pages and graded them right there in front of us.  When he was finished, he handed them back to us.  As the sentences became more complex, we would begin writing them in the classroom and finish them as homework and hand them in the next day.  I know that he was teaching us grammar and usage, and as the year wore on, we would be required to write sentences with prepositional phrases, like The boy caught the bus on time.  And then we were required to write with a prepositional phrases that modified nouns and verbs and prepositional phrases that act as nouns and verbs and eventually prepositional phrases that act as adjectives and adverbs.      

And onward through the sticky wicket that is the English language as it is used in sentences. 

But here’s the thing:  Mr. Lockhardt never required us to memorize the names of the rules we were following.  I had to look up “pluperfect” tense to remind myself what it is, and I stole the example of the prepositional phrase above from a website called “PrepScholar” that is supposed to get you ready to take the SAT’s or ACT’s.  All Mr. Lockhardt wanted us to learn was how to write those sentences, not memorize the grammatical terms of what they were.  To this day, I couldn’t tell you what the future perfect verb tense is.  I had to look it up, so here’s an example I found on another grammar website:  The parade will have ended by the time Chester gets out of bed, “will have ended” being the future prefect tense of the verb describing the “action” of the parade.

Well, let me tell you:  the more complicated the sentences got, the more I loved puzzling them out.  The other thing Mr. Lockhardt insisted was that that the sentences say something, that they make sense.  It wasn’t good enough to write “The thing will have ended…”  You had to use the pluperfect tense in a way that you could understand what the sentence was saying, so “the parade” was okay, as was “the game,” and so on.  It made the sentences that much harder to require them to actually say something, rather than just slapping whatever it was we were learning to use in between some random words.

The other thing Mr. Lockhardt didn’t require you to learn was to diagram the sentences.  He just wanted to see that you could write using the particular grammatic construction properly.  But as you will see by the following, being able to diagram sentences I wrote became more and more necessary as the year wore on.

That’s because the first thing Mr. Lockhardt did every day was hand out the homework we had done from two days ago complete with our grades, so we were graded every single day.  If you got a sentence wrong, he might mark it with some red ink indicating what you had done wrong.  If the sentence was really wrong, he would just draw a red line through it, and if you got a lot of sentences wrong, you would be required to do the homework over again until you got a passing grade. 

Here’s the thing:  once we got our papers, he gave us a few moments to check our grades and if there were mistakes, see what we had gotten wrong.  If you thought that he had marked something in a sentence as a mistake for a wrong reason, you could raise your hand and challenge his grading of your sentence.  If you were right, and the mistake he’d made in grading you was clearly wrong, he would up your grade automatically to an “A”.  But if your challenge didn’t hold up, he gave you an “F”.  It was all or nothing, and that’s where having to learn to diagram my sentences came in, because when he had gotten something wrong and continued to dispute it, you were allowed to go to the board and write the offending sentence and diagram it to show you had the grammatic construction right.

I didn’t get many sentences wrong, I got used to getting an “A” every day, so when I thought Mr. Lockhardt had made a mistake, I challenged it.  Sometimes I won the challenge and got my “A,” but when I didn’t, Mr. Lockhardt would reach into the bottom drawer of his desk and pull out one of those maddeningly small gym towels and wad it up and throw it and hit me in the chest.

“The crying towel for you, Mr. Truscott!” he would call out loudly. “F.”

As you can imagine, I worked hard on that list of sentences every night, and glory be!  I discovered over the coming years that I had learned to write.

As it happened, being an Army brat, I did a lot of writing other than English grammar assignments.  We moved practically every year, so I was always writing letters to friends…including girlfriends…I had left behind at the last duty station.  I ended up going to three high schools in three states in three years.  I wrote many, many letters, and after I learned to type Sophomore year, I typed every one of them. 

My mother found some of the letters I wrote home when I got to West Point and showed them to me.  I was amazed.  They weren’t “how are you, I’m fine” or “I hate this place” or even “I can’t wait for Christmas,” although one of those notions might sneak into letters every once in a while.  I wrote letters that said something, that told stories about what had happened on a particularly difficult field exercise, or about the excitement of going to see Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot in New York City (rather than watching West Point play basketball in the NIT tournament, which is what I was supposed to be doing.)  I found one letter that told of walking out of the Five Spot at midnight one time and looking down the street and watching Andy Warhol and Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgewick as they exited The Dom, where the Velvet Underground (managed at that time by Warhol) was playing with a lightshow called “The Plastic Exploding Inevitable.”  I can still see the letter the image I captured of Edie Sedgewick, in a sparkling silver mini-dress and heels with her platinum hair, twirling down the middle of St. Marks Place with her hands above her head like a ballerina singing the chorus of “Run Run Run:”

You gotta run, run, run, run, run

Take a drag or two

Run, run, run, run, run

Gypsy Death and you

Tell you whatcha do

All my trips to the city and a subscription to The Village Voice led to me writing letters to the editor of the Voice, which they were only too happy to publish with the byline, Lucian K. Truscott IV, West Point. I spent my Christmas leave in 1968 in the city at a girlfriend’s apartment and on Christmas day walked over to The Dom which had just become the Electric Circus to see a Christmas “be in” by Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm.  I thought it a bogus exercise in hippie fascism, with Wavy ordering all these stoned kids around and yelling at them to “have fun” like he was a stoned drill sergeant.  So I sat down and wrote another letter to the editor of the Voice and shoved it under the door on Christopher Street that night.  Amazingly, on the following Wednesday, the Voice ran my letter as an article on the front page with the title, “Pocketful of love but no readmission,” and sent me a check at West Point for $80, and just like that, I was a writer.

In the summer of 1974 I was driving across the country writing stories for the Voice and when I saw that I was approaching Kansas City, I took a turn and drove up to Leavenworth with the mission of telling Mr. Lockhardt thank you for teaching me how to write sentences.  By that time, I had been a published writer for 5 years.

I found him living in a little garage “back-house,” and as I walked up, I could see him through the screen door lying on a sofa with a big fluffy cat on his stomach watching a baseball game on a small black and white TV.  I remember that when I knocked on the door it was hung loosely, so each time I knocked it made two sounds:  the knock, and the sound of the screen door banging against the door jamb.  Mr. Lockhardt had the volume on the TV up loud, so it took a few knocks, but finally he turned his head and called out, “Who’s there?”

I replied through the screen, “It’s me, Mr. Lockhardt, Lucian Truscott.  I’ve come to thank you for teaching me how to write.”

As he sat up on the sofa and moved the cat off his stomach to the floor, he smiled widely and said, “Well, it’s about goddamned time, Lucian.”

His small place had back issues of the Voice with my stories on the front page and copies of magazines like Esquire with articles I’d written.  We sat for a few hours and talked about the days when I was in his 7th grade English class, and he asked me about stuff I’d written, and of course, he remembered a few grammatical errors in my sentences.  I remember telling him that after I took his class, I never learned another thing in junior high, high school or West Point about writing.  I knew how to do it without even thinking about what I was doing.  I told him when I sat down to write, I never thought about the construction of my sentences or whether they were correct or not, because I knew nearly every one of them was.  All I had to concentrate on was what I wanted to say.  That was the gift he gave me.  To this day, I’ve never “thought about” how I’m writing what I write, all I do is do it.  The sentences that Mr. Lockhardt taught me to write just appear on the page, good bad or indifferent, because the act of making them is so instinctive. 

Writing is not “easy” for me in the conventional sense of the word mainly because what I spend a lot of time thinking about is what I’m going to say.  But I don’t have to think about how to say it.  Mr. Lockhardt took care of that.

 

 

The Return of the Taliban

 The Return of the Taliban

Their comeback has taken twenty years, but it is a classic example of a successful guerrilla war of attrition. 

By Jon Lee Anderson The New Yorker

Watching Afghanistan’s cities fall to the Taliban in rapid succession, as the United States completes a hasty withdrawal from the country, is a surreal experience, laced with a sense of déjà vu. Twenty years ago, I reported from Afghanistan as the Taliban’s enemies took these same cities from them, in the short but decisive U.S.-backed military offensive that followed the 9/11 attacks. The war on terror had just been declared, and the unfolding American military action was cloaked in purposeful determinism in the name of freedom and against tyranny. For a brief moment, the war was blessed by that rare thing: public support, both at home and abroad.

In the wake of the horror of Al Qaeda’s attacks on the United States, most Americans polled believed that the country was doing the “right thing” in going to war in Afghanistan. That level of support didn’t last long, but the war on terror did, and so did the military expedition to Afghanistan, which stretched on inconclusively for two decades and now ends in ignominy. Donald Trump set this fiasco in motion, by announcing his intention to pull out the remaining American troops in Afghanistan and begin negotiations with the Taliban. In February, 2020, an agreement was signed that promised to withdraw all U.S. military forces in return for, among other things, peace talks with the U.S.-backed Afghan government. The American troops were duly drawn down, but, instead of engaging in real discussions, the Taliban stepped up their attacks. In April, President Joe Biden announced his intention to carry on with the withdrawal, and pull out forces by September 11th. However much he says that he does “not regret” his decision, his Presidency will be held responsible for whatever happens in Afghanistan now, and the key words that will forever be associated with the long American sojourn there will include hubris, ignorance, inevitability, betrayal, and failure.

In that regard, the United States joins a line of notable predecessors, including Great Britain, in the nineteenth century, and the Soviet Union, in the twentieth. Those historic precedents don’t make the American experience any more palatable. In Afghanistan—and, for that matter, in Iraq, as well—the Americans did not merely not learn from the mistakes of others; they did not learn from their own mistakes, committed a generation earlier, in Vietnam.

The main errors were, first, to underestimate the adversaries and to presume that American technological superiority necessarily translated into mastery of the battlefield, and, second, to be culturally disdainful, rarely learning the languages or the customs of the local people. By the end of the first American decade in Afghanistan, it seemed evident that the Western counterinsurgency enterprise was doomed to fail, and not only because of the return of the Taliban in many rural parts of the country: the Americans and their nato allies closed themselves off from Afghans in large regional bases, from which they operated in smaller units out of combat outposts, and distrust reined between them and their putative Afghan comrades. “Green-on-blue attacks,” in which Afghan security forces opened fire on their American and European counterparts, became alarmingly frequent. The Taliban, meanwhile, grew inexorably stronger.

During a visit to the tense, embattled, eastern province of Khost, in the winter of 2010, a senior American military commander there, Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Lutsky, acknowledged to me the lack of trust with his Afghan counterparts, several of whom he suspected of working with the Taliban. “The cultural complexity of the environment is just so huge that it’s hard for us to understand it,” he said. “For Americans, it’s black or white—it’s either good guys or bad guys. For Afghans, it’s not. There are good Taliban and bad Taliban, and some of them are willing to do deals with each other. It’s just beyond us.”

Ten years on, as Afghanistan’s provincial capitals are falling to the Taliban and Kabul itself becomes encircled, the litany of exotic place names—Sheberghan, Taloqan, Kunduz, Kandahar, Herat—must mean little to most Americans, except for those who were once deployed in them. But a generation ago, as Afghan mujahideen, or holy warriors, of the so-called Northern Alliance, an anti-Taliban coalition commanded by warlords, battled alongside American Special Forces to free these same towns from the Taliban, they were in the news constantly, as commonplace to Americans then as Benghazi or Raqqa became in later years. (In war, as in life, perhaps, people and places can become briefly and often intensely familiar, only to be discarded from memory when their apparent relevance has ceased. Who today remembers Hamid Karzai? Or Mullah Omar?)

When Kunduz and Sheberghan, adjacent cities in northern Afghanistan, fell within a day of each other, last weekend, I wondered how many Americans recalled that these were the sites of some of the bloodiest early episodes of the war, in 2001. In the desert outside Kunduz, hundreds and possibly thousands of Taliban and suspected Al Qaeda prisoners of war, who had surrendered to the Northern Alliance after the fall of the city that November, were locked in shipping containers and shot or left to die by forces led by the Afghan warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, who was working with the C.I.A. and with Special Forces commandos. Some of the survivors of that ordeal were selected for rendition by American agents on the ground, and ended up as prisoners in Guantánamo, beginning a controversial new chapter in American judicial history.

At the same time, an uprising by captured Taliban and foreign jihadis, at a nearby fortress named Qala-i-Jangi, resulted in the killing of Johnny Micheal Spann, an American C.I.A. officer—the first American to die in combat in Afghanistan. After days of fighting, during which at least three hundred prisoners died, the “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, a twenty-year-old Muslim convert from California who had become a volunteer with the Taliban forces and had been questioned by Spann, was recaptured, after Dostum flooded the compound’s underground chambers. Lindh was returned to the U.S., tried in federal court for providing support to the Taliban, and sentenced to twenty years in a high-security federal prison. His presence at the fortress, though there is no evidence that he participated in the revolt, provoked strong feelings in the United States and led to an ongoing debate about national identity and loyalty in the modern age. In 2019, Lindh was released three years early, for good behavior, and he is on probation for the remainder of his sentence.

I was on the scene for the fall of Kunduz, in 2001, and was part of a small group of foreign journalists ambushed by Taliban fighters who had remained in hiding and attacked, even as most of their comrades were in the process of surrendering. Fortunately, none of us was killed, but the following night, after we returned to the nearby provincial capital, Taloqan, which had already been retaken by the Northern Alliance—and which also fell to the Taliban last weekend—a Swedish journalist was shot and killed by gunmen at the house where he was staying. After his death, and considering the lingering presence of numerous Taliban in Taloqan—along with that of allied Uzbek fighters, a group of whom we had seen engaged in last-minute deals with the Northern Alliance—the foreign journalists soon fled the city. I joined an armed convoy headed for Kabul, a four-day journey through the Hindu Kush mountains. Along the way, we were accosted by Afghan gunmen—perhaps Taliban, perhaps merely highwaymen—but, again, we were lucky, and arrived without loss of life.

Kabul had already fallen, supposedly. At least, the Taliban were visibly gone and, with them, their Al Qaeda friends. But, on subsequent days, as I moved around the devastated city, I had reason to wonder how genuine the Western-assisted Northern Alliance victory had been. One morning, a group of four women concealed in blue burqas approached me on the street, and one asked if I knew of any work opportunities. I was accosted by a furious shopkeeper for daring to communicate across the gender divide. The women scattered. It was as if a malady lingered in the Afghan air, despite the Taliban’s retreat.

Most of the Afghan men whom I met and who led battles against the Taliban two decades ago are now dead. Almost all were killed, in separate assassinations, as part of the Taliban’s plan to return to action. Their comeback has taken twenty years, but it is a classic example of a successful guerrilla war of attrition, and has involved all the usual elements of guerrilla strategy: a stealth campaign of hit-and-run military attacks, selective assassinations to demoralize their adversaries, and acts of terror that both weakened the government and created an atmosphere of abject compliance from local populations. A public campaign of hearts and minds followed, accompanied by decoy negotiations with the government and its allies in order to promote the idea that, as a force, the Taliban are not really extremist and are, in fact, open to dialogue, even to internal change. But the Taliban, by their very nature, are fundamentalists, believers in a strict Quranic credo.

In the pre-Taliban days of the late eighties, when I spent time with the mujahideen of Kandahar, who were then fighting the Soviets, a pair of local Islamic scholars banned music after consulting their sacred texts; this rule was added to their list of severe prohibitions, which included death for adulterers and the amputation of hands for thieves. In a court, set up in the middle of a battlefield, the two judges explained their sentencing system and told me how many murderers and adulterers they had put to death, after which one of them said, “We adhere to the Sharia in all cases.” Patting a pile of holy tracts next to him, he added, “All the answers are here.”

It was this same kind of earnest devotion to Islamic law that earned early popularity for the Taliban, when they emerged in the same area a few years later, after the Soviet retreat, under the leadership of Mullah Omar, a particularly devout mujahideen commander. Various mujahideen warlords who had emerged ascendant were fighting one another for power, and some were abusive toward civilians in the areas that they controlled. Mullah Omar’s Taliban presented themselves as a moralizing force and made swift headway against the warlords. Within a couple years, they controlled most of Afghanistan, and Kabul fell to them in 1996.

With no opposition except for a rump group of Northern Alliance warlords, who held out in the northern mountains for the next few years (until the Americans came along to assist them, in 2001), the Taliban imposed their strict version of Sharia law. Afghan women were all but excluded from public life, with many girls prohibited from attending school; the freedom to work for female teachers, doctors, and nurses was drastically circumscribed. The Taliban zealotry grew so great that children were forbidden to play with dolls or to fly kites, in favor of prayer sessions, while ethnic minorities and members of religious sects other than the extreme Sunni version of Islam that the Taliban espoused were persecuted. In one incident, it is estimated that the Taliban killed at least two thousand ethnic Hazaras, who are Shiite. Public executions became a norm, as well, often of women accused of various moral offenses. The killings were often carried out on sports fields or in stadiums, with the condemned sometimes stoned to death, or summarily shot in the head, or hanged, or, in the case of homosexuals, crushed and suffocated by mud walls toppled onto them by tanks. Before isis, in other words, there was the Taliban, showing how to do things.

In March, 2001—a few months before their Al Qaeda comrades carried out the 9/11 attacks—the Taliban, as a testament to their supposed iconoclastic purity, destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas. These were a pair of giant, fifteen-hundred-year-old sandstone statues, regarded as one of the man-made wonders of the ancient world. Taliban officials also took sledgehammers and axes to priceless artifacts in the Kabul Museum, destroying anything that predated Islamic civilization. The outside world did little to prevent any of these crimes.

The list of atrocities that the Taliban committed while they were in power goes on and on, and in the two decades since their ouster they have murdered again and again, in a war aimed at anyone who opposes them or even represents a potential challenge to them. The other day, a Taliban spokesman took credit for the murder, in Kabul, of his government counterpart, in what he called “a special attack.” Women have also been among the Taliban’s most consistent victims, from schoolteachers and television presenters to female parliamentarians and judges. In March, in the eastern city of Jalalabad, the Taliban killed three young female media workers; a female journalist was killed in June, in Kabul, by a car bomb. If the Taliban do sweep back into power in Kabul in the coming weeks, which seems a strong possibility, women will again be among their foremost targets.

There is a conceit that today’s Taliban is different from the Taliban of 2001. This is certainly an idea that some senior Taliban officials have sought to propagate in recent years. Facts on the ground suggest otherwise. They claim to have moved on from their old alliance with Al Qaeda, for instance, but over the years they have partnered with other jihadist groups operating, as they have done, out of sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan, such as the Haqqani network, which is responsible for scores of suicide bombings and so-called complex attacks—involving gunmen and suicide bombers acting in tandem—and for causing hundreds of civilian deaths.

The Taliban have rendered Afghanistan unworkable as a country; unworkable, that is, without them. And the truth is that they were never really beaten. They merely did what guerrillas do in order to survive: they melted away in the face of overwhelming force, regrouped and restored themselves to fighting strength, and returned to battle. Here they are.