New York Times, 12 December 2024
A story of mass blunder, reported by Azam Ahmed, a former Kabul bureau chief, who made repeated trips to the Waygal Valley after the withdrawal: How US troops went to Nuristan to fight an enemy that did not really exist there then.
The United States dropped more than 1,000 bombs in a place it never needed to be. (…) By all accounts, the Americans virtually ensured their own defeat: They repeatedly bombed their closest supporters here, showing just how little the United States understood about the war it was fighting.
That’s how it went in much of Afghanistan. (And this story has been told before, under an almost similar title, by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, in their 2010(!) book ‘An Enemy We Created’. An AAN review of an earlier paper by them, from which the book emerged, here.)
The interesting hook at the end:
Today, in an odd echo of history, the Taliban appear to be making some of the same mistakes. They are threatening the valley’s independence and risk squandering the good will of its people…
By (over-)taxing them.
That’s also what happened in much of Afghanistan before 2021: Also the rulers in Kabul did not understand much of their own country, while blaming the West for the same. A hopeless coalition.
Revisions:
This article was last updated on 19 Jan 2025
