Human Terrain

Today is the last time I will be posting from Kabul– I think this may obviate the necessity of this blog, but keep checking for the next few weeks as I have time to put up more posts. THANK YOU to everyone for reading. And for giving me really supportive comments that helped keep me focused.

I have 10-12 hours of footage which I think is just barely enough to produce a short 15-25 minute film. A meditation. I am leaving Afghanistan a lot sooner than I would really like, but actually my feelings are a little mixed about this. I will not miss the paranoia and tension. While it provides a needed dose of adrenaline to counterbalance the altitude-induced deficiencies in my osmotic pressure, I don’t like feeling like every moment has to be worth the risk I’m taking to live it– it’s tiresome. I hate fearing my own countrymen as they rumble through the streets in armored convoys sighting bystanders with their 50-calibers… though last time I said fuck it and tried to film them anyway. But I didn’t come here to observe the war, opium production, or Taliban extremism. Those phenomena are vitally important but covered by very talented journalists already. I neither have the skills nor the logistics to make a dent where they tread. And for my part I knew a lot about those things from reading the news at home. But there is a lot I didn’t know– hadn’t seen– about Afghanistan “beyond the conflict.” That phrase from Michael Bhatia was my lodestar for this trip. I know I didn’t leave the Kabul bubble but I hope I at least got a start understanding the dizzying vastness of this country and this culture. And I know that I’ve started something that I will have to return to finish at some point.

The destinies of America and Afghanistan are intertwined. I came here very much as an American. I feel a measure of responsibility that it is my nation fielding its lethal powers here on the other side of the earth. That so many have bled here and died in this conflict– young Americans like the people I went to high school with. Michael Bhatia. Just last week, 60 children near Herat in a mistaken American airstrike.

There is a serious fight happening here, and none of the international actors currently on the scene are devoting the energies and resources that are necessary to face the challenge. This is a generational struggle. In the past thirty years outsiders have not been innocent in the internecine war that has caused such vast damage here. First the Russians and their capital crime of invasion and a million killed. The Americans and their happy proxies– religious zealots with C.I.A. financed SAM’s downing Russian choppers so the cold war could be won. But when the Russians withdrew those men and the arms and powers we provided them remained. The Afghan people were abandoned to the carnage that ensued, far from our concerns. But blowback was a bitch; Osama Bin Laden found his helpmeets here and America was attacked.

America returned to Afghanistan on a mission of imperial vindication. As we blew away the Taliban regime, and took the international community with us on the adventure, we once again have failed to really concern ourselves with the Afghan people. There has been a criminal level of unseriousness– as always, not among the professional military men whose real work is wiping out the enemies they face with unsparing force– but among the planners and the polity. Iraq was a distraction. But this war never stopped, and nowadays looks trickier than ever.

Afghanistan is at a crossroads again. Signs of progress are everywhere, and I’ve been documenting them. But the Taliban believe themselves to be the rightful rulers here, and are gaining in ferocity as the Afghan people are drawn to their strength in the face of international weakness and Afghan government inadequacy.

My basic thrust here is, this place is important. It deserves the effort and the money. We can’t abandon it again.

More later.