Possessing many noble and natural qualities, such as individual courage, hospitality, and generosity, of fine and commanding appearance and presence, good horsemen, capable of enduring, without complaint, much exposure and fatigue, fond of all manly sports, and frank and social in their bearing and manners, there was much calculated to prepossess us in favour of the Affghans as a people on first acquaintance. Further experience, however, proved them to be destitute of all regard to truth, treacherous, revengeful, and bloodthirsty, sensual and avaricious, to a degree not to be comprehended by those who have not lived among them, and thus become intimately acquainted with their character.
—Lt. General George Lawrence, Reminiscences, 1875
Ten years after the Americans invaded Afghanistan and ousted the Taliban, the life of an average Afghan had changed in countless ways. More than eight million children attend school, millions of them girls.1 The bazaars bustle, and a woman can give birth to her baby in the local health clinic. Villagers drive down smooth roads where before they navigated potholed tracks.
Despite this type of progress, much of Afghanistan remains stubbornly and overwhelmingly unchanged. It is a rural land where millions of small farmers eke out a living on two or three acres of thin soil and often give more than half of their harvest to their landlord. Even in 2011 it remained desperately poor, ranking 172 out of 187 in the United Nations’ world rankings for human development. With a per capita GDP in 2011 of only $528, Afghanistan remains one of the ten poorest countries in the world. Average life expectancy is 48.1 years, and infant mortality is the highest in the world. Over a third of Afghans live below the poverty line.2 On top of this, Afghans remain threatened by continuing insecurity. More than twenty-six thousand Afghans have died since the U.S. intervention, and the death toll keeps rising as the Taliban insurgency continues to grow.3
Before the current war began Afghanistan was already a shattered country, broken by the Soviet invasion and the subsequent decade of fighting. It is hard to imagine the scale of suffering. By the time that war ended more than a million had died, or roughly one in fifteen Afghans. Seven hundred thousand became widows or orphans. Millions lived as refugees in Pakistan and Iran. Five million to seven million land mines were buried on precious farmland. Fragile irrigation channels that poor farmers had relied upon for centuries lay in ruins.4
Into this land came the United States, with high hopes of improving the lot of the Afghans. The U.S. government wanted to build a new and democratic Afghanistan. The logic was simple. To keep out al Qaeda we needed to keep out the Taliban. To keep out the Taliban we needed a strong country capable of defending itself. To defend itself the country needed a government that worked well enough to entice people to support it. To ensure the government was sufficiently effective we needed to help the Afghans create institutions that could help people in urban and rural areas, providing health care, education, roads, electricity, and irrigation. In essence, to accomplish our goals we needed to help build up the nation. That is what we tried to do.
But over time, distracted by Iraq, underresourced, working with allies who routinely broke their promises, using development plans that continually overreached, and having a poor understanding of the society that we endeavored to change, our nation-building efforts faltered. The Taliban used this opportunity to filter back in, and the war started again as a widespread insurgency, helped by corruption, popular disenchantment with the government and its foreign allies, and the missteps of the United States and the international community.
Despite advances in education and health care, what could go wrong did go wrong. Many districts had one medical clinic for fifty thousand people, or none at all. Many of the teachers the government hired were ghost teachers, who taught in ghost schools under trees or who didn’t show up at work. Eight million kids were in school, but how many were actually being taught? No one really knew.5 The Taliban also influenced our progress. They burned down scores of schools and killed thousands of people who supported the government.
Slowly the United States turned away from nation-building. In a speech in late 2009 at West Point President Obama told the cadets that nation-building in Afghanistan was too difficult to achieve. He said, “Indeed, some call for a more dramatic and open-ended escalation of our war effort—one that would commit us to a nation-building project of up to a decade. I reject this course, because it sets goals that are beyond what can be achieved at a reasonable cost, and what we need to achieve to secure our interests.”6 Instead he said America would stay in Afghanistan to clear out al Qaeda and put in place the security forces that would keep them out. (At this time al Qaeda had roughly 150 men in Afghanistan.)
But just saying something doesn’t make it true. The original strategic calculus—arrived at by walking the dog backward—still ended with the need for the United States to help the Afghans build their nation to prevent the Taliban from getting back in. So U.S. assistance for nation-building continued after 2009, up from $748 million in fiscal year 2007 to more than $2 billion in FY 2011.7 Military assistance was vastly higher. The United States pretended to give aid for new and different causes and enterprises. In reality the United States still pursued the same nation-building idea. Simultaneously the surge in military forces ramped up to as many as one hundred thousand fighting men in 2010, when troop strength peaked. We simply doubled down on our effort.
To accompany the military surge the civilian agencies “surged” their people on the ground. Far fewer than the military cohort, the number of these civilians never even approached two thousand. I was one of them, hired by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2011 as a field program officer to help bring projects to villages in rural Afghanistan and to improve health, education, roads, irrigation, and the capabilities of the local Afghan government.
To be truly effective this field position called for paradoxical qualities in its officers. They needed to possess the humility to put the wishes of the Afghans first, paired with the obstinacy to push back against the bureaucracy when it erred.
The U.S. involvement had built in its own limitations. There was inflexibility in the U.S. approach, despite the need to be flexible in an insurgency that was always changing. There existed a willingness to label the Afghans as quarrelsome troublemakers and as the root of many of our problems, even as we expended billions of dollars and hundreds of lives every year to help them take the initiative. Above all a deep-seated distrust toward our Afghan partners prevailed, when only they could win the war and allow us to go home with honor.
This book is the result of the two years I spent in rural Afghanistan, where these paradoxes and limitations came fully into play. It is a tale of hope and success, and of anger and failure.
The story begins at a small coalition military base a short helicopter ride to the south of Kandahar City, the largest city of southern Afghanistan and the heart of the region. There lies a point where four roads radiate out in a crooked cross, surrounded by a patchwork of green wheatfields and brown patches of dirt baked hard by the sun. The landscape is dotted with villages. On either side of this broad stretch of land rise jagged hills, like the teeth of a gigantic dog.
This place named Dand District was where we would work with poor villagers who tilled emerald green fields irrigated by centuries-old canals under blue skies. This story explains how our little group of Afghans, Americans, and Canadians tried to keep out the Taliban and bring hope to the poor farm families who resided in the villages.
Above all it is the tale of the Afghans—of what they tried to do, how we outsiders supported them, and what held them back. It is their story, and I am grateful to have worked among them for two years of my life.