[update below] [2nd update below] [3rd update below]
Afghanistan was supposed to be the “good war.” Just about everyone outside the far left—in the US and France, at least—supported the US intervention after 9/11, to smash Al Qaida and eject the Taliban; and, personally speaking, I didn’t waver on this over the years. When it comes to Afghanistan, I have long deferred to the views of two specialists. One is NYU political scientist Barnett Rubin, who quite simply knows Afghanistan better than anyone in the academic world anywhere—and who, in addition, had an Af-Pak policy position in the Obama administration. Whatever Barney Rubin says about Afghanistan, I’ll go with that. The other specialist is the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, whom I started to follow when the Taliban was in power, as he was reporting from Kabul at the time. In his book Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (Penguin Books, 2008), Rashid emphatically argued that a fully-funded US/Western/United Nations et al-led “nation building” project could have worked—that the Afghan people in their majority were willing to accept a foreign military presence during the time necessary to rebuild the country—but that the Bush-Cheney administration quickly turned its attention to Iraq and away from Afghanistan. There was a short window of opportunity to make positive things happen in Afghanistan but the US, as is its wont, blew it.
N.B. Barnett Rubin’s latest book: Afghanistan: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2020),
On President Biden’s announcement that the US will entirely withdraw its troops in September, I naturally follow Rubin on this (see, e.g., his United States Institute for Peace Afghan Peace Process Issues Paper of March 2021), as well as Fareed Zakaria—whose analyses are as level-headed and well-considered as they come—in his April 16th Washington Post column, “Biden is right. It’s time to end the forever war in Afghanistan.” (N.B. Zakaria, to his credit, does not speak of “forever wars” in the text of his column, an expression that the sharp MENA specialist Steven A. Cook calls a “cliché” in his latest piece in Foreign Policy). But the smart, erudite, never boring Adam Garfinkle is not so approving of Biden’s announcement, as he spells out in a commentary in The Bulwark (April 16th) on “Leaving Afghanistan: Lessons from Vietnam and Iraq.” The lede: “Spoiler alert: This never ends well.” Pessimism over the outcome in Afghanistan after the US departure may indeed be warranted, though it’s hard to see how a prolonged US military presence—and an indefinite Taliban insurgency—could somehow yield a more positive outcome. And particularly as a majority of Afghans, including secular women, are willing to give peace with the Taliban a chance.
And let’s face it: the United States simply lacks the competence and intelligence (in the opposite-of-stupidity sense) to successfully stabilize a country like Afghanistan, as Jason Dempsey—Afghan war veteran and adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security—makes clear in a must-read essay (April 25th) in Politico, “We got Afghanistan wrong [and] what our military misread over the past 20 years.”
On this broad subject, I watched on ARTE last month an excellent multinational/mainly German produced four-part documentary series (which first aired in April 2020) on the past sixty years of Afghan history, Afghanistan: Pays meurtri par la guerre (English title: ‘Afghanistan: The Wounded Land’), with exceptional film footage and interviews. Despite some gaps in the historical narrative it is, from a pedagogical standpoint, the best documentary treatment of that country one will find. Here is a description from a French website (fed through Google Translate and edited à ma guise), with links to the episodes from YouTube (a number of the interviews are in English but the narration is in French):
In four 53-minute episodes, the documentary deciphers Afghanistan’s relentless downward spiral into war and ruin. By way of numerous archives and exceptional testimonies (including Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the rival of Commander Massoud; Sima Samar, Afghan Minister for the Status of Women from 2001 to 2003; but also a Taliban, a former CIA officer, and major of the ex-Red Army), it shows how the population found itself entrapped, with hopes and disillusion, by the conflict between the two superpowers of the Cold War and the subsequent civil war involving the Mujahideen and Taliban fundamentalism.
On February 29, 2020, the Americans and the Taliban reached a historic agreement. Can hope for peace finally emerge? What if it came from the oppressed half of the country: women. At the end of the documentary, two speak about this:
Nilofar Ibrahimi, re-elected to parliament in 2018: “I sat at the negotiating table with the Taliban, the Afghan woman is not the same as 20 years ago, they know they can no longer reduce us to silence, this country needs me and hundreds of women like me.”
Shukria Barazkai, also remained in Kabul: “We will solve this problem through discussion and negotiation. Through tolerance and mutual respect. We have the right to disagree but not to kill each other. I learned enormously from this war. We can hit rock bottom, be totally broken, but get up to rebuild our country and ourselves. That’s the beauty of Afghanistan.”
Episode 1 [“The Kingdom”] takes us back to the 1960s, under King Mohammed Zahir Shah, whose reign began in 1933 and during which Afghanistan witnessed its longest period of stability. But there is a big gap between Kabul, where the Westernized elite lives, and the countryside, which has 80% of the population. A severe drought destabilizes the king, who is overthrown in 1973. There is a Communist coup in 1978 and instability begins. On December 27, 1979, the USSR sends its troops to Afghanistan to rescue the Communist regime.
Episode 2 [“The Soviet army”] traces the ten years of war between the Soviet army and the Afghan rebellion, ten years which bled the country dry. Over a million civilians were killed and up to five million crossed the border to seek refuge in Pakistan and Iran.
Episode 3 [“Mujahideen and Taliban”] sees the commanders Ahmed Shah Massoud, an Islamic moderate, and Hekmatyar the fundamentalist engage in internecine warfare, which causes the arrival of a new force in 1996: the Taliban. Al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden, develops its murderous ideology there. On September 11, 2001, despite Commander Massoud’s warning to the Americans, Al-Qaeda succeeded in carrying out its plan: to strike at the heart of the United States.
Episode 4 [“The NATO troops”] tells about the American and NATO reaction, the collapse in November 2001 of the fundamentalist regime, the hunt for Bin Laden… Democracy emerges, wearing the burqa is no longer compulsory but the extreme poverty and widespread corruption are slowly undermining the country. The Taliban, who had managed to blend into society after their debacle, are regaining ground. And we arrive at today’s deal filled with uncertainties with a thin thread of hope.
A few random comments. First, the images of Kabul in the 1960s and ’70s—of unveiled women pursuing higher education and in the workforce—are a striking reminder of how Afghanistan was modernizing during those decades, without the heavy hand of dictatorship (cf. Iran and Arab states of the era), and what could have been had the country not gone off the rails from 1978 on. Second, it is manifest that the responsible party in triggering the country’s descente aux enfers was Afghanistan’s Communists and the coup d’État they staged in April 1978—their first act being the physical liquidation of President Daoud Khan (who had not been a nasty dictator) and his entire family, including the children. Not an auspicious beginning for a new political order. The Communists were Jacobins on steroids, who, armed with bayonets, were determined to bring modernity to the very conservative rural population whether they liked it or not, thus provoking the inevitable, religiously-inspired reaction. As the Communists’ social base was too narrow, the Soviet Union thus made the fateful decision to rescue their client regime from inevitable collapse. Third, the Soviet intervention accelerated Afghanistan’s downward spiral. The US military has killed its share of civilians in its many wars but the Soviet army—which has never paid even lip service to winning hearts and minds—was on another level altogether in Afghanistan. Fourth, the open-ended NATO counter-insurgency was destined to be an unwinnable quagmire—when the short window of opportunity mentioned above passed—in the same way as it was for the Soviets—and for every foreign intervention in Afghanistan’s history. Fifth, the Afghan interviewees in the documentary love their country and profess optimism for its future, however incongruous such sentiments may seem to outsiders. And the women, insisting that Afghanistan has changed over the past two decades, seem not to fear peace with the Taliban, who, they contend, will not try to lock them up as during the 1996-2001 period. Inshallah.
The Soviet army in Afghanistan—specifically, the experience of a Soviet soldier who was captured by the mujahideen—was the theme of a good French film that came out in 2006, L’Étoile du soldat, directed by the prolific filmmaker-journalist Christophe de Ponfilly, who had made a number of reporting trips to Afghanistan (Ahmed Shah Massoud was the subject of at least three of his documentaries). The film, which was shot in Afghanistan and Russia and adapted from the late de Ponfilly’s eponymous novel—itself based on an actual experience of his—is worth seeing (if one can find it).
There have been a dozen or so feature-length films on Afghanistan under the Taliban or post-2001 that have come out over the past two decades (that I’ve seen at least; there are no doubt more but that didn’t make it to France or I somehow missed). The one Hollywood production is German director Marc Forster’s 2007 The Kite Runner, adapted from the best-selling novel by the Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini. (As for Mike Nichols’ 2007 Charlie Wilson’s War, which is entertaining and fun, this doesn’t count).
Four films focus on women and their status in that hyper-patriarchal society: Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s 2001 Kandahar, which was shot in Iran and clandestinely in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan; the 2003 Osama, directed by Siddiq Barmak, based on a real life story during the Taliban era about an 11-year-old girl in Kabul who passes for a boy in order to go to school but, with the onset of puberty, has her true gender revealed and with not nice things then happening to her; Atiq Rahimi’s 2013 Syngue Sabour: The Patience Stone, which I reviewed here; and the 2013 Wajma, an Afghan Love Story, by Barmak Akram, set among the post-Taliban Kabul middle class and which presents such a bleak picture of the female condition that I tweeted this after seeing it.
These films are all worthwhile, particularly ‘Syngue Sabour’ and ‘Osama’. When the latter came out, we saw it en famille, which provided a pedagogical moment for our then 10-year-old daughter. As it happens, the protagonist—the girl who disguises as a boy—named Nadia Ghulam in real life, is one of the interviewees in the documentary series discussed above, now in her mid-30s and speaking in Spanish, as one learns that, sponsored by a Spanish NGO, she relocated in 2006 to Spain, where she pursued higher education and now lives.
As for war-related films on the NATO intervention, there have been six by my count over the past decade, with, interestingly enough, only one being American, the very good 2010 Restrepo, but which was a documentary. The others have been European, on the participation of soldiers from other contingents of the NATO coalition, which Americans have only been dimly aware of (if at all). When Trump would go on about the NATO allies not pulling their weight or for freeloading off the US—and whose casualties sustained in this US-initiated war he was certainly ignorant of—I wanted to spit in his face (among the countless times I dreamt of doing such).
Probably the best of these war films is the 2014 German Inbetween Worlds (French title: Entre deux mondes), by Austrian director Feo Aladag—whose excellent 2011 When We Leave, on the subject of honor killings among Turks in Germany, I reviewed here—and that was shot on location in northern Afghanistan, which was kind of a daring thing to do. The reviews in Variety, IndieWire, and The Hollywood Reporter describe the plot better than I can (as it’s been 6½ years since I saw the pic). The beginning of the latter review merits quoting:
Anyone who believes Western military intervention in Afghanistan is a huge waste of time and lives will probably have their opinion confirmed by Inbetween Worlds, a beautifully shot art house film that takes the audience behind the scenes of a German Army unit defending a village from Taliban attacks. Another viewer could argue that director Feo Aladag shows precisely the opposite: the urgent need for Western and Afghani cooperation to win the conflict, at a time when German troops are preparing to withdraw from the country after more than a decade.
The depiction of the interaction between the Western soldiers and the Afghan villagers, who are supposed to be collaborating with the foreigners against the Taliban but who knows?—there is a manifest failure to communicate, and with the Afghan translator endangering his and family’s lives by the mere fact of having his job—led me, at least, to the first sentiment, of sensing the futility of the NATO engagement
Here are brief descriptions of the other films.
Kajaki (a.k.a. Kilo Two Bravo; in France: En terrain miné), directed by Paul Katis. This one, which came out in 2015, tells the true story of British paratroopers, in 2006, who found themselves trapped in a Soviet-era minefield and with the Taliban lurking in the vicinity. It’s a tense film, well-analyzed in this review in The Guardian by historian and screenwriter Alex von Tunzelmann, “Kajaki – an impressive war movie with questions and ballistic grit.”
A War (same title in France), by the well-known Danish filmmaker Tobias Lindholm, who has directed and/or written the screenplays for a number of first-rate Danish films and series (including the excellent ‘Borgen’) over the past decade. This one, which was an Academy Award nominee in 2016 for best foreign language film, is similar to ‘Inbetween Worlds’ (though was shot in Turkey and Spain) in depicting the Western soldiers (here, Danes—though it doesn’t matter where they’re from—in Helmand province) fighting an impossible war in a country they don’t understand and whose rural population could not be more culturally alien. And with the inevitable killing of civilians—accidental or deliberate—which happens here. A very good film.
This is actually the second Danish film with an Afghan war theme, the first being Susanne Bier’s 2004 Brothers (Brødre), which I saw when it opened in France and remember thinking good.
Two French films, one Ni le ciel ni la terre (English title: The Wakhan Front), directed by Clément Cogitore, which premiered at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. Here, French soldiers patrol a sector in the Wakhan Corridor, near Pakistan, which is relatively peaceful (the pic is shot in Morocco), but one night weird things start to happen and with soldiers vanishing, though not from engagement with the Taliban. The film, which was engaging enough up to this point, albeit somewhat low octane, descends into the supernatural, which, not being a fan of the fantasy genre, I didn’t care for too much. But others may think differently. The cast is good (Jérémie Renier, Kévin Azaïs, Swann Arlaud), as are US reviews, e.g., in Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Screen Daily.
The other film is Voir du pays (English title: The Stopover), directed by the sister tandem Delphine and Muriel Coulin, and which premiered at Cannes in 2016. This one I liked more. It’s entirely set in Cyprus, where French soldiers freshly arrived from Afghanistan are “decompressing” at an upscale seaside resort hotel, while attending sessions organized by their superior officers to deal with PTSD and review their recent action in Afghanistan, in which one of their comrades was killed. The protags are two female soldiers—the fine actress Ariane Labed and singer-actress Soko—with one of the film’s themes the uneasy role of women in the army, with its macho, hyper-masculine culture. The thumbs up reviews in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter get it right.
For the record, an Afghanistan war veteran’s PTSD figured in the 2015 Franco-Belgian film Maryland (English title: Disorder), directed by Alice Winocour and which also premiered at Cannes. It’s a slick thriller starring Matthias Schoenaerts (who suffers from the PTSD) and Diane Kruger, though is set entirely on the French Riviera (and mainly in a villa called Maryland), not at all in Afghanistan.
UPDATE: Gilles Dorronsoro of the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, who is France’s leading political science specialist of Afghanistan, has an informative, not-too-optimistic article (April 29th) in the high-quality webzine AOC, “Qui sont les Taliban?” While the Taliban has evolved in certain respects over the past two decades, he observes, notably in attitudes toward technology, it remains rigidly fundamentalist, particularly when it comes to women. And the relationship with Al-Qaida remains largely intact.
2nd UPDATE: Journalist and lawyer Jill Filipovic, who specializes in women’s issues, has a post (April 22nd) on her Substack site, “In the country of men: What does the US owe the Afghan women we’re leaving behind?” In it, she links to what she says is “a really excellent report from the Crisis Group” dated April 6, 2020, “What will peace talks bode for Afghan women?”
3rd UPDATE: Excellent tribune in Le Monde dated May 2-3, by Adam Baczko (CNRS, CERI-Sciences Po) and Gilles Dorronsoro, “La guerre en Afghanistan, première défaite historique pour l’OTAN.”
