John F. Burns: Into Kandahar, Yesterday and Tomorrow
[John F. Burns is currently the London bureau chief for the New York Times.]
In the postcards of the mind, it is the starkest of all the images of Kandahar, dating back more than 20 years to the period immediately after Soviet troops withdrew from the city, and standing ever since as a grim warning of the folly of foreign military adventures in Afghanistan: hundreds of acres of rubble, whole quarters of the city reduced to fields of blasted concrete and steel, and further out, in the poorer districts, a shattered chocolate-box of a landscape formed by ragged mud walls that had once been home to tens of thousands of people seeking refuge from the war raging in the Afghan hinterland.
Outfought by the mujahedeen fighters of the 1980s, and desperate to hang on in the city that more than any other symbolizes Afghanistan’s history of national resistance, Soviet forces had resorted, like the Americans in Vietnam, to obliteration by bombing. That was as good as an admission that they had lost, and when they finally pulled back across the Hindu Kush, they left behind little by way of a memorial to the 14,000 Soviet troops who lost their lives, or to the Kremlin’s tens of billions of wasted rubles, beyond the scrap of blasted helicopters, tanks and armored vehicles that litter
Afghanistan to this day.
The images of that dismal time came rushing back last week when the Taliban, legatees of the mujahedeen, sent a suicide bomber in a vehicle loaded with nearly a ton of high explosives to attack a NATO convoy in western Kabul, killing at least 18 people, among them five NATO soldiers, four of them officers. In the grisly calculus of the current conflict, the attack was a Taliban triumph, and photographs from the scene pressed the message home. Behind the carnage, like a forbidding sentinel, stood the artillery-blasted ruins of the old royal palace at Darulaman, another monument to the Soviet disaster.
When I walked through the Kandahar rubble in the spring of 1989, the Soviet Union’s collapse, hastened by the imperial overreach in Afghanistan, was barely three years away. Now, like others with experience of that time, I find recollections of the Soviet debacle sounding like a tocsin in the mind, warning of the miseries that await America if the war’s trajectory remains as it is, toward expanding influence for the Taliban and their Al Qaeda cohorts, and mounting signs, for the corrupt Kabul government and its frustrated allies, that the war against the Islamic militants may ultimately be unwinnable....
At that moment, I understood what remains so hard for many in the West to grasp, as our troops fight to secure freedoms for Afghans that we have long enjoyed at home: that for many in Afghanistan, if not the more cosmopolitan, secular class we have chosen as our principal allies, our world and theirs are, indeed, centuries apart, separated by the ancient verities of the Koran, the rhythms of Afghan traditional life, and the absence, in Afghan experience, of anything like the Enlightenment that broadened the liberties of our forebears in the 18th Century. For American commanders seeking an ending in Afghanistan that spares the United States the humiliation visited on the Soviet Union, that could yet prove an impossible divide to cross.
Read entire article at NYT
In the postcards of the mind, it is the starkest of all the images of Kandahar, dating back more than 20 years to the period immediately after Soviet troops withdrew from the city, and standing ever since as a grim warning of the folly of foreign military adventures in Afghanistan: hundreds of acres of rubble, whole quarters of the city reduced to fields of blasted concrete and steel, and further out, in the poorer districts, a shattered chocolate-box of a landscape formed by ragged mud walls that had once been home to tens of thousands of people seeking refuge from the war raging in the Afghan hinterland.
Outfought by the mujahedeen fighters of the 1980s, and desperate to hang on in the city that more than any other symbolizes Afghanistan’s history of national resistance, Soviet forces had resorted, like the Americans in Vietnam, to obliteration by bombing. That was as good as an admission that they had lost, and when they finally pulled back across the Hindu Kush, they left behind little by way of a memorial to the 14,000 Soviet troops who lost their lives, or to the Kremlin’s tens of billions of wasted rubles, beyond the scrap of blasted helicopters, tanks and armored vehicles that litter
Afghanistan to this day.
The images of that dismal time came rushing back last week when the Taliban, legatees of the mujahedeen, sent a suicide bomber in a vehicle loaded with nearly a ton of high explosives to attack a NATO convoy in western Kabul, killing at least 18 people, among them five NATO soldiers, four of them officers. In the grisly calculus of the current conflict, the attack was a Taliban triumph, and photographs from the scene pressed the message home. Behind the carnage, like a forbidding sentinel, stood the artillery-blasted ruins of the old royal palace at Darulaman, another monument to the Soviet disaster.
When I walked through the Kandahar rubble in the spring of 1989, the Soviet Union’s collapse, hastened by the imperial overreach in Afghanistan, was barely three years away. Now, like others with experience of that time, I find recollections of the Soviet debacle sounding like a tocsin in the mind, warning of the miseries that await America if the war’s trajectory remains as it is, toward expanding influence for the Taliban and their Al Qaeda cohorts, and mounting signs, for the corrupt Kabul government and its frustrated allies, that the war against the Islamic militants may ultimately be unwinnable....
At that moment, I understood what remains so hard for many in the West to grasp, as our troops fight to secure freedoms for Afghans that we have long enjoyed at home: that for many in Afghanistan, if not the more cosmopolitan, secular class we have chosen as our principal allies, our world and theirs are, indeed, centuries apart, separated by the ancient verities of the Koran, the rhythms of Afghan traditional life, and the absence, in Afghan experience, of anything like the Enlightenment that broadened the liberties of our forebears in the 18th Century. For American commanders seeking an ending in Afghanistan that spares the United States the humiliation visited on the Soviet Union, that could yet prove an impossible divide to cross.