FOR AFGHANS IT’S TRULY BEEN A ‘FOREVER WAR’
By ROBERT H. REID
Seen from the skies through bleary eyes after an overnight flight from Germany, Kabul offered a wondrous vista — thousands of squat brown structures sprawled across a narrow valley flanked by snow-covered peaks.
On the ground, the view wasn’t quite so enchanting.
It was December 30, 1979 only six days after the Soviet Army had swooped into Kabul and seized power to prop up a shaky Marxist regime. In the first of many missteps, the Soviets killed the very Afghan leader who had pleaded for them to intervene.
Apart from a few brief breathing spells, that same conflict has raged on for nearly 42 years.
Forty-two years. That hardly seems possible.
I thought about the events of December 1979 when President Joe Biden announced that all U.S. troops would leave Afghanistan by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the event that sent them there.
From the Afghan perspective, the “American War” is just the latest chapter in a conflict that began in the late 1970s when a Marxist government seized power and tried to impose values anathema to Afghan traditions.
Outside powers come and go like a guest who enters your house, sets fire to the furniture but leaves you to cope with the flames. Whether Sept. 11 brings peace remains in doubt.
The Associated Press had sent me to Kabul not because I knew anything about Afghanistan but because I was available. The first international flight to Kabul since the Soviet attack departed from Germany where I was based.
AP had no Kabul bureau. The AP in-house expert, Barry Shlachter, flew in from Delhi a few hours after me but was stopped at the airport. The flight from Germany landed before the Afghans got their security act together. A handful of journalists on the early flight slipped in without incident.
We found a ramshackle city that was relatively calm but where armed Soviet soldiers were still on the streets, alongside unarmed Afghan troops. Tanks with Afghan markings but with ethnic European Soviets standing in the turrets lumbered down the streets.
Soviet convoys of five-ton trucks, caked in dust and mud, rumbled down the streets bringing reinforcements from Central Asia. After sundown, Soviet motorized patrols fired bursts of automatic fire in the air to intimidate the populace and keep Afghans in their homes.
The Soviets threw in the towel after eight years at the cost of more than 14,400 dead. The United States is calling it quits after more than 2,400 dead and an estimated $2 trillion.
For Afghans the cost has been incalculable.
On that crisp, sunny morning so long ago, no one could foresee how events would unfold. One American diplomat told me not to expect any more out of Washington than a few hand-wringing statements condemning the attack.
After all, only seven years had elapsed since President Richard Nixon had double-crossed the South Vietnamese and less than a year since the Carter administration had cut loose the Shah of Iran.
Boycotting the Moscow Olympics and arming the Afghan resistance didn’t seem possible.
My time in Kabul didn’t last long. At sundown on Day One, the authorities took me in custody at my hotel but couldn’t get me to the airport in time for the last flight out of the country.
About a half dozen others joined me in comfortable “hotel arrest,” which lasted until Jan. 2, 1980 because an overnight snowstorm closed the airport and kept us in town.
I returned to Kabul briefly in 2007 and for a longer stint as AP news director in 2009. Much had changed. The city seemed more modern, private vehicles clogged the streets, women had joined the workforce and girls were in school.
The war, however, dragged on, especially in the rural and east where little had changed.
Much has been written about the lessons of Afghanistan, including the limits of military power, the folly of Russian and American hubris and the futility of nation-building.
For Americans one lesson is worth remembering: Afghanistan is what a nation looks like when social cohesion dissolves.
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