People Who Fought In Afghanistan Know Why Nation-Building Was Never Going To Work
The following is an excerpt from If It Takes a Thousand Years: From Al-Qaeda to Hamas, How the Jihadists Think & How to Defeat Them.
I entered the cell of the Taliban commander. He had just been captured from the battlefield. I was aghast at the sight of him. Half his face was missing, his skull partially blown away in some battle. His wounds appeared to be old, so I asked him when this happened. “Fighting the Russians,” he said through the translator. Yet there he was, 23 years after the Afghan-Soviet War ended, still fighting the jihad against the infidels.
Most of the Taliban could not read or write, and couldn’t even sign their own name, but in lieu of his signature, I needed his thumbprint on a document for the interrogation, or “interview” as we called it. I reached down to take his hand and press it on the ink pad, only to find out he had no thumb. What would drive someone in such shape to keep fighting us? This is the question I had spent the previous decade searching out answers for leading up to that moment in Afghanistan.
I was serving in the U.S. Army as a Liaison Officer to the Afghan secret police, and facilitated the interrogations of over 400 captured Taliban and Al-Qa’eda members while there. A Taliban leader once told me “You have me in a cage, my fight is over for now, but my children will fight you, and if they don’t win, their children will fight you. If It Takes a Thousand Years, we will win.” Although it didn’t take the Taliban a thousand years to win the battle of Afghanistan, it demonstrates the drive that our jihadist enemies have. They fight generational wars against the West as a whole.
When analyzing our Islamic extremist enemies, it is important for the American people to understand the tribal mindset that so many of our enemies come from. Islam developed from tribal cultures, and many tribal cultures over the past 1,400 years developed under Islam. The Islamic world itself is divided into what I would describe as tribes; you have the Sunni tribe, the Shia tribe, and within that are thousands of other tribes, one of the most recent being the “Palestinian” tribe which has become somewhat of a self-appointed identity by various lost members of other tribes. But in Afghanistan, tribalism is at a level that is virtually unparalleled in the world.
It is human nature to coalesce together into groups, but when you add Islam to the mix, it fuels different dynamics that are completely alien to Westerners. The tribal mindset is so vastly different than our own that it often makes it impossible to reason with them, and they will not respond logically or rationally as you might assume an American or other Westerner would. To Westerners, the tribal mindset may contain many elements that are quite shocking and deeply disturbing.
Part of our training upon arrival in Afghanistan included multiple briefings on Islamic and Afghan culture, since we would be working with locals on a daily basis. In one such briefing, the Afghan-American man leading the discussion began by stating; “You must understand that everything about your way of life in America, is completely different in this planet.” He quickly corrected himself to say “in this country,” but his misspeaking was not too far from the truth. From the way people say hello to the way they go to the bathroom, everything is different, and it is like another world to a Westerner.
In Pashtun tribal law, the largest tribe in Afghanistan comprising almost half the nation, there is something known as khun, or blood money. It can be paid to make amends for various transgressions such as murder, property damage, theft, kidnapping, etcetera. In addition to khun, women can be given to become sex slaves as well as female babies to eventually turn into sex slaves. Women and female babies count as two-thirds of the khun.
Just as in every other part of the Islamic world, Pashtun women have far less status than men. To divorce a woman, the man only needs to declare “I divorce thee” three times publicly. Many Pashtuns also believe that women have something called the “evil eye,” that they have special powers and the ability to cause bad things to happen.
In Pashtun tribal law, if a woman is kidnapped by force, and coerced to consent to marry her kidnapper, but she does not get her father’s permission, the father has the right to kill her. Any inclination of a woman having dishonored the family is rapidly met by her murder. In one of the detainee interrogations, I was truly shocked and saddened when the detainee was describing his family, and nonchalantly said “I have eight children, I had nine but one of my daughters dishonored the family and so I killed her,” a story I unfortunately would hear similar versions of on more than one occasion from multiple detainees.
At one point during my tour, there was a recently captured Taliban detainee who had just been interrogated. The interrogator was laughing and told me while he was taking notes during questioning, the detainee stopped him and asked through the translator what that stick was he was holding. He had never seen a pen before in his life. These are the people we were trying to teach the Western democratic republican style of governance.
To almost everyone who spent time in Afghanistan, aside from an idealistic few, it was little surprise when the Taliban so rapidly overtook the Afghan government in 2021, in what would be such an unnecessarily chaotic withdrawal of American forces.
I recall one instance where we were ordered to turn over a shipping container of captured Taliban weapons to the Afghan government, and I told the Major in charge of the mission “You know these are going right back to the Taliban as soon as we leave, right?” Without hesitation, he responded, “Oh yes, I know.” I unsuccessfully lobbied the Colonel in charge of our unit to send the container to Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) and have the entire thing destroyed, but he was adamant that they be given to the Afghans, and now every one of those weapons belongs once again to the Taliban.
Most people there got it. But back in Washington, and among so many in the higher ranks in the military trying to please those in Washington, there was a complete disconnect from the reality on the ground, and a complete misunderstanding of just who our enemy is, how they think, and how ferociously determined they are.
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