Afghanistan
17 Aug 2021
I was in Kabul December 1979, during a curfew with the Soviet invasion was imminent. I was reaching Swat Valley, Pakistan on Christmas Eve when they attacked, claiming to be upholding the Soviet-Afghan Friendship Treaty of the year before. I was passing through the country, a simpleton/ optimist, knowing much less than I thought I did. I was beginning to write poetry but was never able to sneak a peek at the future and ask, what would Carolyn Forché write here?
Downtown Kabul in the 1970s. Mo Qayoumi [i]
In his poem ‘I Do Not Believe’, Elyas Alavi, an Afghan poet wrote:
With my own eyes I ought to
Witness your death, your final breath.
My fingers should touch your eyelids to close.
Otherwise, no one will believe it, forever
I myself will not believe it.[ii]
The amount of unnatural deaths in Afghanistan since I was there is unnatural. The subsequent civil war lasted ten years and killed more than two million Afghans, with many more as refugees. The war cost the Soviets 15,000 dead soldiers and an estimated US$50 billion.
Alexander the Great invaded the region in 330 BC as part of war against Persia. Many others followed. In the late 19th C, it was the turn of the British who invaded three times. The first retreat from Kabul occurred in January 1842. Under the command of Major-General Elphinstone, 4,500 military personnel and 12,000 civilian camp followers, including wives and children, set out for Jalalabad on 6 January 1842, on the understanding that they had been offered safe passage. Afghan tribesmen intercepted them and proceeded to massacre them during the next seven days.
An old poem of mine:
The US commander of Operation Swift Freedom, General Mattis, said: The marines have landed, and now we own a piece of Afghanistan. The New York School of Ballet could not have orchestrated a more intricate movement more flawlessly. [iii]
On the edge of town, emerald fields flatten the river valley
fighting bare vertical mountains. We leave as the curfew lifts
it’s still that early liquid cold, passing a tent beside the road
noises hook our curiosity, look through the canvas flap on a sawdust ring,
iron bars, a boy, younger man and older man (from Fellini’s La Strada),
muscles pumped – acrobats at morning practice
swinging on a low trapeze, loop elliptically like mortar shells
landing with a thud on shoulders just feet away.
somersaults impacting intimately, film of sweat, muscles
twitching an acoustic of breath – argument for style I concede,
muscle’s rhetoric not the eyes concentrated, typically ignoring us.
Technique reconciles left hand with right, heaven with earth.
Have they all landed safely? The dust motes spinning the sharp
winter light shafting through a gap in the canvas, gnostic bosons
unique as grains of sand, angled to hit the ground.
The American invasion lasted double the Soviets, twenty years. About 241,000 people have been killed in the Afghanistan and Pakistan war zone since 2001. More than 71,000 of those killed have been civilians.[iv]
Official estimates suggest the war cost US$1trn but unofficial figures suggest the real figure was more than double that.’[v] US$88.32bn was spent on building up Afghan security forces, including the Afghan National Army and police force. That was a dark hole.[vi]
Since 2014 the Taliban have been slowly making gains, there was no easy way out for foreign forces. They could not stay forever, and when they left there were only two scenarios: increased fighting and a bloody civil war, or swift capitulation, which is what happened (with ridiculous speed considering the military hardware each side possessed). Let’s hope this swift resolution, despite being a debacle, results in a much better humanitarian outcome than a drawn-out civil war would have done. And let’s hope that the Taliban keep to their initial promises, announcing in the last two days that women’s rights will be respected and no retaliation will be carried out. Though the Taliban are hardly a centrally disciplined fighting force, in tight control of their regional militias which tend to be organised along ethnic lines.
War is a mess, currently there is trial going on. It seems to be about alleged war crimes against the only Australian soldier to be awarded the Victoria Cross in this war, for actions in 2010. He denies kicking an unarmed Afghan shepherd off a cliff. In fact, Ben Roberts-Smith is suing the media for defamation. Unsavoury truths are coming out as the trial progresses. And today, ‘New book reveals detailed accounts of alleged war crimes by Australian forces in Afghanistan: The ABC’s Mark Willacy has pieced together eyewitness accounts and alleged cover-up efforts’. [vii]
[i] https://www.pri.org/stories/2013-08-09/historical-photos-bygone-age-afghanistan
[ii] Elyas Alavi, Afghan poet now in Australia. His poem wants a natural death for his beloved, not from a suicide bombing. https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2020/spring
[iii] Sydney Morning Herald, 28 Nov 2001.
[iv] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/afghan (as of April 2021).
[v] Aisha Mjid, ‘How much did the Afghanistan war cost the US?’, New Statesman, 16 Aug 2021.
[vi] ‘Afghanistan: What has the conflict cost the US and its allies?’, BBC News, 16 Aug 2021.
[vii] Daniel Hurst, The Guardian, 17 Aug, 2021. ‘The long-running Brereton inquiry found ‘credible’ evidence to implicate 25 current or former Australian Defence Force personnel in the alleged unlawful killing of 39 individuals and the cruel treatment of two others.’