Considering Afghanistan

 

The US presence in Afghanistan belongs to the media now—to books and documentaries and  op eds—but what was it? An undeclared war, a country, a defeat? I think we’ll be collecting shards of our hollowed out and broken national values for a long time to come as dozens of answers are considered.

Afghanistan became the focus of retaliation for the attack of 9/11 twenty years ago, but it had already been a major staging ground for the US-USSR proxy wars. In fact, ironically, the CIA took credit for defeating the USSR in the Cold War by making it too impossibly costly in blood, treasure, and reputation to keep Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

This is not about the time before the US invaded, but about what happened afterward. At this point, consensus is that Washington took its attention on to Iraq and put Afghanistan on the back burner, and that’s where it stayed for the next twenty years. No one protested Afghanistan or marched against it or wrote protest songs about it. Still, how could we forget? Was it like parts of underserved cities in America where so many struggle to live and survive while the others continue in relative comfort and security? And yet American service people were fighting and dying there, approximately 2,300 over 20 years, and over 47,000 Afghan civilians.

The war wasn’t entirely invisible. It made great dramatic back-stories for TV characters like some doctors on “Grey’s Anatomy” and “The Resident.” A number of movies featured manly men doing manly things in camouflage or shirtlessly, usually undisturbed by local civilians unless they were being killed by snipers and drones. Afghanistan made for great seminars on how PTSD works, but it rarely showed up in news stories or presidential State-of-the-Union addresses. When the war was cited, it was always getting better, turning a corner, getting a new military boss. Congress people got their pictures taken there but never said much later at home—oh, but the Afghan women who folded away their burqas were always used to prove that what the US was doing there was great.

One aspect of the US role in Afghanistan cannot be overlooked: the oft-cited notion of nation building. Most people who brought it up sadly decried the possibility of success with various excuses about how the country was not ready for democracy, or it was too tribal. Occasionally, a more honest reason was given: the endemic corruption of a kleptocracy that grew more rooted every year as the US paid off, or tried to ignore, or winked at Afghan government behavior. If you’re unclear how that works, think of the schools that the US gave money to Afghan officials to build who gave some of it to contractors and pocketed the rest. Then the contractors pocketed their share, and so on down the line. By the way, that’s what so-called Afghan tribalism is about: the people you share your dollars out to. Anyone who wants more stories can go to the online reports of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan (SIGAR) that warned clearly and repeatedly for years how ineffectively progress was being made and analyzed why.

Did none of the senators, congress people, generals, or whoever was supposed to be overseeing US work in Afghanistan ever read the quarterly SIGAR reports? Isn’t that their job? Twenty years and no one noticed how badly things were going? It wasn’t that mysterious, not really. 

Of course the US public has some responsibility but we did think the people in charge were doing their jobs. Especially someone like the current president who got his job on the grounds that he had lots of experience. Wasn’t he in government the entire two decades? Still, as US troops left and the country was taken over by the Taliban, he barely had time to wail, “But we spent trillions of dollars.” Maybe he can get some of the money back from the US companies who were paid to train the Afghan defense forces.

Or maybe the US government wasn’t that surprised. Maybe now that we have had twenty years to gain battle-tested forces and state-of-the art new weaponry, we don’t need a country to practice in. And we still have troops in over 100 countries. What was it Biden said about “over-the-horizon” capabilities making it unnecessary to stay in Afghanistan? I wager we won’t hear much more about that, especially after learning that the drone strike that was supposed to kill a terrorist in Kabul actually killed a family with children. The public has already been trained not to worry about what US drones and special forces do out there; our in-country dramas are far too distracting. Maybe the government has been doing its job and lots of us just don’t exactly know what that job is.

 

Gemstone: Aquamarine

 

CODA

 

 

To my knowledge, Seasons 4 and 5 of The Tunnel were not written or filmed. Coda takes place perhaps in Season 6.

 

 

Karl closed the file, set it in the box to his right meant for finished work, and considered the box to his left. He yawned. The prospect of his empty apartment was unappealing enough that he was tempted to open a new file, but then he decided a drink would do instead. He made sure he heard the click of the lock engage the office door before stepping out into the London night.

The Cock and Bull, on the ground floor of a well-appointed hotel, was too familiar to him for Karl to find its name either noticeable or amusing. Few other people were inside the darkened room. Most after-work patrons had gone and it was still early for the late-night clientele. Karl thought this time of the evening particularly favored solitary people.

The bartender appeared like a shadow. Behind him rows of bottles were lined like soldiers with uniforms of glittering gold labels on sparkling glass.

“The usual, Otto.”

Otto turned, disappeared, and then returned with a large bottle of ale.

The first taste was always the best. The rest were indistinguishable from thousands that had gone before but they were the rent paid to occupy a comfortable seat at the bar. They also kept company with his usual ruminations considering whether it was time to claim his pension and retire. The main obstacle to retirement was that he wasn’t that good at discovering amusing forms of activity.

“Cognac, please.”

Someone, a woman, had taken the seat beside him. She had an accent that he couldn’t identify but still sounded familiar. In principle, he wasn’t averse to having an encounter, but he was not in the mood to make an effort for whatever would be required. Perhaps he could save himself the trouble by resorting to grunts, throat clearing, and rude snorts.

“Hello, Karl.”

For a second – and only a second – he did not know who she was. Then he did. Of course he had known she would come to him some day, some year.

“Erika. What a coincidence. Of all the gin joints.”

“I was waiting for you.”

“I should probably arrest you. I’m still with the police.”

Since the idea was too absurd to acknowledge, she didn’t reply.

“I never got the chance to thank you for saving my life.”

“You needn’t,” she replied. “Call it collateral salvage.”

“I know, but I still appreciated it.”

He looked at her then. She continued to look at her drink, but a slight smile hovered at the corner of her mouth. Time had not ignored her, and the lighting in the room was an advantage, but she was still a very attractive woman. She had cultivated a younger woman’s face the last time he saw her, whereas now she had the look of someone whose authority needed little assistance from appearance.

“Do you want to know where – ”

“I’ve been.”

He could think of nothing to say, so he waited for her.

“I always meant to come back. Sometime. I hoped if the interval were long enough, she would forget the betrayal, or the memory would diminish.”

“I think you would have been welcomed.”

Now the silence had another quality, so Karl continued.

“I would have thought it a good idea. I know she loved you, and being Elise she had a difficult time accepting that. But every so often she would bring up something about poetry, or Pablo Neruda, and I would know she had been thinking of you.”

“She told me she didn’t read poetry.”

“I believe you changed that.”

“Thank you. Sometimes I would read a poem and if I liked it, I would imagine reading it to her and explaining why it was beautiful and why it had made me think of her.”

A group entered the Cock and Bull, and although they were not particularly noisy, they changed the atmosphere. The night crowd was arriving. Karl knew that soon Erika would leave and that made him very sad.

“What happened, Karl? What happened?”

He started to say, honestly he started, but then stopped. “I can’t. I’m sorry, Erika, I just can’t. Please. But she didn’t suffer. I wouldn’t lie about that.”

“Good. She said you were her best friend. I was a little jealous.”

“I think we were both surprised. I valued her clarity.” He paused. “In return I was teaching her the difference between sarcasm and irony.”

“She could have used more lessons.” For a while they were companionably quiet.

“I quit when I heard. When it no longer made a difference, I quit.”

“Clearly you needed no lessons.”

She laid a large bill on the bar. “I have to go now, Karl.”

“I wish – ”

“Yes?”

“I wish you could have come back, and taken her to some mountain covered in spring flowers.”

“Thank you. That is most generous. I console myself by remembering how impossible we were. My life – you know some of my story and what you don’t you can guess – my life has not been one in which love was expected. It should not have happened. Yet there she was, with astonishing innocence. Gratitude might be more becoming than complaint, but even so, my soul is not at peace with losing her.”

Then she was gone.

Karl recognized her final words as a reference to Neruda. Elise had shared them but he couldn’t remember the occasion. He added to the tip for Otto and left.

Gemstone: Rhodochrosite