Anja Niedringhaus/AP Photo
Afghan men peer through the former window of their destroyed school, March 19, 2013, in the village of Budyali, Nangarhar province, Afghanistan.
When the United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan 20 years ago, many Western media outlets broadcast jubilant scenes of Kabul. In the footage, Afghans shaved their beards and flung off their burqas, dancing to music once banned under the Taliban regime. This was, however, just one side to the story. While many, especially those in urban areas, were indeed happy about the fall of the Taliban, a lot of Afghans in the country’s rural heartland did not have the luxury of celebration. They soon experienced the suffocating embrace of war, hunted down by B-52s, drones, and American-backed death squads.
In the country’s south, in Kandahar province, on October 7, 2001, there was a more important scene that journalists scarcely covered at the time. It’s where the first drone strike in mankind’s history took place. The alleged target, Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, however, eluded the strike. He only died more than a decade later of natural causes. On that October day in Kandahar when the American war in Afghanistan started, an unknown group of people was droned. And it has happened again and again in many parts of the country.
For two decades, we did not hear very much about these developments. Overall, many media outlets painted a positive picture of the “good war.” They portrayed U.S. actions as “just” and “legitimate” while, mostly, they showed the world a very tiny part of Afghan reality, mostly consisting of urban elites who benefited from the U.S. occupation. Few reporters and investigative journalists focused on the dark side of the war on terror in Afghanistan.
Suddenly last month, Western audiences were overwhelmed by these largely ignored realities on the ground as the Taliban, within a few weeks, captured most parts of Afghanistan, including its provincial capitals. Though the CIA predicted that Kabul might fall within the next 30 to 90 days, it took the insurgents just 24 hours to enter the nation’s capital as conquerors.
While Western media outlets were focusing on their governments’ “democracy mission” in Afghanistan, the victims of drone strikes remained largely invisible.
There were many reasons for Afghanistan’s collapse to the Taliban. The Western-installed and -backed government of Ashraf Ghani, and that of his predecessor Hamid Karzai, was flimsy; its pillars were brittle and lacked a strong foundation within Afghan society at large. Many of its dominant figures were notorious warlords, drug barons, and other deeply corrupt individuals who were not interested in creating a functioning state. Instead, they did everything to undermine the newly created state apparatus, especially through the generous siphoning of aid money that they wasted no time in reinvesting in luxury properties abroad and other similar dirty business, which happened in front of the eyes of international donors who preferred to ignore such developments for the sake of fighting the greater evil, the Taliban.
Inevitably, Afghan security forces were hampered by corruption, too. The last time I met Afghan soldiers on the front lines, it was spring in the picturesque northeastern province of Kunar. They had neither enough ammunition nor proper nutrition and water. Many did not receive their salaries regularly. At the same time, their corrupt superiors had enriched themselves over two decades. For example, thousands of so-called “ghost soldiers” existed solely on paper; high-ranking officials pocketed the salaries of these imaginary troops. The very same officials were also highly engaged in intense warmongering to keep milking the cow of war that had fed their corruption for years. These developments played a significant role in the collapse of the Afghan government.
More important perhaps is the war itself, which killed tens of thousands of Afghans within the last 20 years. A war that was often not in the focus of international media since it did not take place in the country’s urban areas but out of the spotlight, in Afghan villages, which were haunted by Predator drones in the sky and death squads on the ground.
Too often, the operations conducted by the U.S. and its partners did not kill high-ranking militants or known extremists but rather innocent civilians. Many in the West failed to notice this because of their biased perception of the “good war,” perpetuated by an entire “war on terror” industry that stretched from the media to academia and continued justifying the war. Considering recent events in Afghanistan, it should be clear that most of their analysis was fundamentally wrong.
After the Taliban took over Kabul in August, a man named Khalil ur-Rahman Haqqani appeared in the city. He visited different political factions and even spoke at a well-known mosque during Friday prayers. Khalil ur-Rahman is not just anybody. He is a senior Taliban leader and part of the infamous so-called Haqqani Network, which has been prominent in the insurgents’ military wing for years. Multiple times, the U.S. has declared several of its top members—like Khalil ur-Rahman or his nephew Sirajuddin (the Taliban’s deputy leader)—dead after American drones allegedly killed them. They became known as “ghosts,” as they often reappeared alive and well.
Now, even with a $5 million bounty on Khalil ur-Rahman’s head, he roams Kabul freely. Almost nobody asks the most obvious question: Who were the people being killed instead of him?
While Western media outlets were focusing on their governments’ “democracy mission” in Afghanistan, the victims of drone strikes largely remained invisible, nameless, and faceless. In 2014, the British human rights group Reprieve revealed that between 2002 and 2014 in Pakistan and Yemen, attempts to kill 41 men through armed drones resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people.
Researchers know well that drone strikes cause massive civilian casualties. Rather than stemming militants, they actually have further fueled radicalization and extremism within targeted areas. Taliban commanders often repeated that they benefited from the war on terror in many ways, including finding new recruits after drone strike massacres. During my own research in Afghanistan’s rural areas, I came to the conclusion that many Taliban fighters were capable of hiding themselves successfully from drone attacks while average Afghan civilians, such as farmers, shopkeepers, or cab drivers, were not.
These operations were just one prong of the war on terror in Afghanistan. Other brutal developments such as night raids, conducted by Western soldiers and their Afghan allies, or mass torture in CIA black sites in the country—or in Guantanamo Bay—also led to the blowback we are now witnessing. After the Taliban conquered the presidential palace and talked to the press, one of their commanders even highlighted his own detention in Guantanamo. Taliban fighters I met in the past regularly claimed that their families were bombed. One young militant, just a teenager, told me that his relatives were “drone-murdered by the hands of those who promised peace and freedom.” Such realities were largely ignored by policymakers, analysts, and journalists. Like Kabul itself, their narrative collapsed rapidly.
