"Last month," he said, "some American officers called us to a hotel in Jalalabad for a meeting. One of them asked me, 'Why do you hate us?' I replied, 'Because you blow down our doors, enter our houses, pull our women by the hair and kick our children. We cannot accept this. We will fight back, and we will break your teeth, and when your teeth are broken you will leave, just as the British left before you. It is just a matter of time.'"Years ago I remember it being said that Afghanistan was a better place since the American invasion. Insofar as what I cared most about -- the liberation of women living there -- progress was being made. Schools were being built, girls were getting to learn there and a country that had long been ruined by the violent tug-of-war between foreign interests was allowed to breathe its own beauty again. Then, when attention and resources were moved to Iraq, the crude fragility of peace was made apparent.
What did he say to that? “He turned to his friend and said, 'If the old men are like this, what will the younger ones be like?' In truth, all the Americans here know that their game is over. It is just their politicians who deny this."
Today, another month into what has now become the longest officially waged conflict in American history, our attitude is one of exhaustion. Just as in Singapore at the turn of the century, then in Vietnam, the estrangement of American and NATO coalition soldiers has left them alienated from whatever purpose they might have once had. The end of war for the people involved is a game of waiting. Our longest war has become that insufferable longing for the horizon, the only hopeful tomorrow the day which we can finally leave. Or for those left in the rubble of another unfinished war game, the day when they are gone, again.
What once might have been a global dedication towards eliminating the terrorist regime we were responsible for creating once again became merely another opportunity for the capitalist beast -- maybe it had never been anything else. The clear enemy to humanity that is the Taliban would become much less threatening in the shadow of the modern war machine, its collateral damage more disturbing than all the suicide bombers in Eurasia, the image of the American action hero willing to burn down the village to get the bad guy made real. Except in reality he burns the villagers, too.
Here in our own country, those who even followed the war (its entertainment value only so novel) were given the same justifications of the greater good, the bigger picture, liberation, democracy, freedom, and allowed to maintain the same poisoned notions in the end: it's their fault, they can't even have peace in their own country, let them deal with it. Never once that Afghanistan was our war because the Taliban was our creation, that the women attempting suicide by lighting kerosene to themselves were our victims, or that the reason why there is so-called terrorism in the West is because there is terrorism in the world, our borders no more tangible than lines superimposed on the fields of televised sporting events.
The cold frustration is that when American troops 'leave' they won't have actually gone anywhere, their notion of being away a remnant of a world where the crudeness of transportation made the passage of time an obstacle. Now again, it is the only thing that separates people from going home or having one, an impedance overcome only by waiting. And with a world so shrunken it is only this barrier of time that separates us from the day when we will face the Afghan people again, their difference from us only in name, the crimes committed against them crimes just as effectively crimes against our own people.
