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Tag Archives: Afghanistan

Killing Saddam, Resurrecting al-Qaeda

19 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Interview, Politics

≈ Comments Off on Killing Saddam, Resurrecting al-Qaeda

Tags

Afghanistan, Afghanistan war, al-Qaeda, Bush Doctrine, foreign policy, George W. Bush, Harry Kreisler, Imperialism, Iraq, Iraq War, Lawrence Wright, Red Army, September 11th, Shia, Sunni, Taliban, USSR

ISIS

Harry Kreisler: From the start, Jihadists came to believe that it would be ideal if American troops would be drawn back into the middle east. The idea was that if they attacked [on 9/11] and we came back at them in Afghanistan, the US would be destroyed in Afghanistan like the USSR had been.

They were wrong about that. But then… the invasion in Iraq.

Lawrence Wright: Iraq looks a lot like what bin Laden had in mind for us in Afghanistan.

If you read the memoirs of the inner-circle and ideologues of al-Qaeda, they confess that al-Qaeda was essentially dead after November, December 2001, when American and coalition forces swept aside the Taliban and pummeled al-Qaeda, accomplishing in a few weeks what the Red Army had failed to do in 10 years.

Eighty-percent of al-Qaeda membership was captured or killed, according to their own figures. And although we didn’t get the leaders, the survivors were scattered, unable to communicate with each other, destitute, and repudiated all over the world.

So this was a movement that was in a kind of zombie-like state.

It was Iraq that set the prairie on fire, that gave them another chance. Ironically, Iraq was never on bin Laden’s list of a likely candidate for Jihad because he knew it was a largely Shia nation, and al-Qaeda of course is an Sunni organization.

So it wasn’t high on his list. But we gave him an opportunity. And he took it.

__________

Messrs. Wright and Kreisler, chatting about Wright’s fantastic chronicle of the origins of the war on terror The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

Keep going:

  • The story of how Christopher Hitchens was almost killed in a lynch mob in Pakistan
  • In 1907, Joseph Conrad already realized the psychology of terrorists
  • From Wright’s book — inside the mind of Muhammad Atta

Lawrence Wright

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How to Survive a Roadside Bomb: Sebastian Junger Escapes Death in Afghanistan

11 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in War

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Afghanistan, Afghanistan war, Battle Company, combat, Fiction, foreign policy, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, Restrepo, Sebastian Junger, Taliban, violence, War, warfare

Sebastian Junger

Later this week I’m going to type up a short review of Sebastian Junger’s remarkable book WAR. Before then, however, I want to introduce those of you unfamiliar with the text to a disturbing (and particularly telling) section of it.

In this scene, which happened midway into Junger’s 15-month stint in Afghanistan, the men of Battle Company have crammed into four Humvees and set off on a routine patrol of the sparsely inhabited surrounding countryside. The Taliban have recently added a new weapon to their arsenal, makeshift roadside bombs (usually consisting of pressure cookers filled with fertilizer and diesel), “because they were losing too many men in firefights” against the vastly superior American force. Through this twisted new tactic, “the enemy now had a weapon that unnerved the Americans more than small-arms fire ever could: random luck.”

And luck isn’t on the American’s side this day. As the Humvees cruise through a neighboring village, a bomb detonates under Junger’s vehicle. The explosion is triggered about a second too early, missing the main cabin by about ten feet and blasting up through the engine block. Junger is one of the only contemporary Western journalists to witness first-hand such a scene, which has now played out countless time over the course of the Allied occupation. Here is a slice of the ensuing half minute:

The explosion looks like a sheet of flame and then a sudden darkening. The darkening is from dirt that lands on the windshield and blocks the sun… “GET ON THAT GUN!” Thyng starts yelling at the gunner. “GET ON THAT GUN AND START FIRING INTO THAT FUCKIN’ DRAW!”… Big, hot .50 cal shells clatter into the interior of the Humvee…

There’s a lot of shooting out there and I’m not looking forward to running through it, but the cabin is filling with toxic gray smoke and I know we’re going to have to bail out eventually. I keep waiting for something like fear to take hold of me but it never does, I have a kind of flatlined functionality that barely raises my heart rate. I could do math problems in my head. It occurs to me that maybe I’ve been injured — often you don’t know right away — and I pat my way down both legs until I reach my feet, but everything is there. I get my gear in order and find the door lever with my hand and wait. There is a small black skeleton hanging from the rearview mirror and I notice that it’s still rocking from the force of the blast. I just sit there watching it. Finally Thyng gives the order and we all throw ourselves into the fresh cool morning air and start to run.

Junger then yanks his reader from combat to the classroom, where he digresses on a vital but overlooked lesson any student of war should assimilate – namely, that combat is one of the most thrilling activities a human being can experience:

War is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them. It’s insanely exciting. The machinery of war and the sound it makes and the urgency of its use and the consequences of almost everything about it are the most exciting things anyone engaged in war will ever know. Soldiers discuss that fact with each other and eventually with their chaplains and their shrinks and maybe even their spouses, but the public will never hear about it. It’s just not something that many people want acknowledged.

Junger elaborates:

War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen in it, but for a nineteen-year-old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of. In some ways twenty minutes of combat is more life than you could scrape together in a lifetime of doing something else. Combat isn’t where you might die — though that does happen — it’s where you find out whether you get to keep on living. Don’t underestimate the power of that revelation. Don’t underestimate the things young men will wager in order to play that game one more time.

This thought is shaped by a closing sentence which could also function as the book’s thesis:

The core psychological experiences of war are so primal and unadulterated, however, that they eclipse subtler feelings, like sorrow or remorse, that can gut you quietly for years…

Junger is still helplessly strapped into this high-low psychosomatic roller coaster as the men tow their wrecked Humvee back to outpost Restrepo that afternoon. In the still of the Afghan sundown, Junger eventually finds a quiet moment to reflect on the day’s events, and in the process offers a glimpse into how this singular experience of combat-at-full-throttle can disfigure a soldier’s understanding of war.

I’ve been on some kind of high-amplitude ride all day since the bomb went off, peaks where I can’t sit still and valleys that make me want to catch the next resupply out of here. Not because I’m scared but because I’m used to war being exciting and suddenly it’s not. Suddenly it seems weak and sad, a collective moral failure that has tricked me — tricked us all — into falling for the sheer drama of it. Young men in their terrible new roles with their terrible new machinery arrayed against equally strong young men on the other side of the valley, all dedicated to a kind of canceling out of each other until replacements arrive. Then it starts all over again. There’s so much human energy involved — so much courage, so much honor, so much blood — you could easily go a year here without questioning whether any of this needs to be happening in the first place. Nothing could convince this many people to work this hard at something that wasn’t necessary — right? — you’d catch yourself thinking.

Junger then returns to the immediate psychological experience of combat, only now it is his subconscious mind, not his front brain, that is processing the day’s traumas.

That night I rewind the videotape of the explosion and try to watch it. My pulse gets so weird in the moments before we get hit that I almost have to look away. I can’t stop thinking about the ten feet or so that put that bomb beneath the engine block rather than beneath us. That night I have a dream. I’m watching a titanic battle between my older brother and the monsters of the underworld, and my brother is killing one after another with a huge shotgun. The monsters are cartoonlike and murderous and it doesn’t matter how many he kills because there’s an endless supply of them.

Eventually he’ll just run out of ammo, I realize. Eventually the monsters will win.

Whether consciously or not, Junger tinges this paragraph with the unfortunate residuals of warfare, including survivor’s guilt, isolation from family, and dreams charred with post-traumatic terror. That final coda is perhaps the most lacerating moment of the text: a simultaneous recognition of evil and a resignation to its eventual triumph. Junger is too restrained a writer to paint this conclusion in too bold of strokes, but nevertheless it is latent in the text for some if not most readers. This subtlety is the true achievement of the text, as Junger manages to forge a clear-eyed and wholly human narrative out of a conflict that has been so politicized and depersonalized over the past decade.

Restrepo

__________

As I said, be on the lookout for a short review of WAR in the coming week.

Both of the above photos were taken at outpost Restrepo by one of the my heroes, the late photographer Tim Hetherington.

Read on:

  • Vietnam veteran, Catholic, and scholar Andrew Bacevich reflects on war and original sin
  • Sebastian Junger describes how combat changed him for the better
  • I relate how the professional structure of our military is partially to blame for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

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Something Noble about Human Beings

11 Saturday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Journalism, War

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Afghanistan, Afghanistan war, combat, Sebastian Junger, War

__________

You said earlier that your experiences in Afghanistan changed you — how?

I mean, you know, I had the classic jumping at loud noises and stuff like that. Anyone who’s been in combat has a sort of startle response, as it’s called. I had some nightmares. But then the nightmares changed into just dreams about the Korengal. So when I was writing my book, every night… every night, I was back there in my dreams. They weren’t all bad dreams either, I was just back there. And in the end, the negative reactions were transitory. But there was a kind of permanent reaction, which was positive, and it was this: I became more emotional. I just found myself being moved by things, emotionally moved, and not at sad things. Just at the human drama around me. And not on a battlefield. Just the human drama at home. People’s weddings, people’s birthdays. People’s… whatever. I just got emotional.

Did you cry?

Sure. Absolutely. Oh my god, amazing. And, I mean, every guy in the platoon had that happen to him. And they were all amazed, they were like, Oh my god, we’re turning into girls. What’s going on? But they were crying about stuff — I mean they get plenty of crying in over the bad stuff, like their friends that they lost. But then they’d ask What are we doing crying about the good stuff? They didn’t understand. And the same thing happened to me. It just turned me into an emotionally connected person.

What do you think it is? Crying about the good stuff…

I don’t know. I don’t know. It just opened me up, and those guys up. Maybe not all of them, but some of them said that to me. And, so, for me — I’m 48 — better late than never. My wife definitely remarked on it. I mean, I just became a fuller person.

The orthodoxy would be to say you value life when you’re in a situation like that, where life is so precarious, in the hills of death.

You know I saw plenty of precariousness of life in Africa, and it didn’t do that. It just made me shut down. There was something about the connection between these guys.

Look: the decision that you’d rather die, or risk dying, to save someone else is a profound decision for a human being to make. I mean, maybe for your kid, maybe for your spouse — but for a peer? That’s an amazing decision, and I was in that environment, with guys who felt that way about each other, off and on for a year. And I think it sort of opened the door for me on something that’s really, deeply noble about human beings and their willingness for self-sacrifice. No other animal does that, and it really was a very profound experience.

__________

From an interview with Sebastian Junger about combat and its psychological impact.

Sebastian Junger

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The Insane Amount of Firepower

06 Monday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Journalism, War

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Afghanistan, Afghanistan war, army, battle, firefight, Military, Sebastian Junger, Terrorism, War

Sebastian Junger

“I don’t leave the valley, I stay, and after a few days the war becomes normal again. We go on patrol and I focus on the fact that one foot goes in front of the other. We get ambushed and the only thing I’m interested in is what kind of cover we’ve got. It’s all very simple and straightforward, and it’s around this time that killing begins to make a kind of sense to me. It’s tempting to view killing as a political act because that’s where the repercussions play out, but that misses the point: a man behind a rock touched two wires to a battery and tried to kill me — to kill us. There are other ways to understand what he did, but none of them overrides the raw fact that this man wanted to negate everything I’d ever done in my life or might ever do. It felt malicious and personal in a way that combat didn’t. Combat theoretically gives you the chance to react well and survive; bombs don’t allow for anything. The pressure cooker was probably bought in Kandigal, the market town we passed through half an hour earlier. The bomber built a campfire in the draw to keep himself warm that night while waiting for us. We could see his footprints in the sand. The relationship between him and me couldn’t be clearer, and if I’d somehow had a chance to kill him before he touched the wires together I’m sure I would have. As a civilian, that’s not a pretty thought to have in your head. That’s not a thought that just sits there quietly and reassures you about things.

It was the ten feet that got me; I kept thinking about Murphee and then looking down at my legs. The idea that so much could be determined by so little was sort of intolerable. It made all of life look terrifying; it made the walk to the chow hall potentially as bad as a night patrol to Karingal. (The American contract worker who got shot at the KOP took a bullet to the leg instead of the head only because he happened to change directions on his cot that day.) The only way to calm your nerves in that environment was to marvel at the insane amount of firepower available to the Americans and hope that that changed the equation somehow. They have a huge shoulder-fired rocket called a Javelin, for example, that can be steered into the window of a speeding car half a mile away. Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it’s fired by a guy who doesn’t make that in a year at a guy who doesn’t make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable. And the roar of a full-on firefight could be so reassuring that you wanted to run around hugging people afterward. That roar was what was keeping you alive, and it created an appreciation for firepower so profound that it bordered on the perverse.”

__________

From Sebastian Junger’s book on the conflict in Afghanistan WAR.

Below is a picture of American soldiers firing a Javelin missile.

Javelin Missile: The art of anti-armor warfare: 3/3 ‘Missile Marines’ prepare for enemy by shooting TOW, Javelin missiles

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