Remembering Why Afghanistan Matters

“If it bleeds, it leads.”

This mantra has defined international press coverage of Afghanistan for decades. Those of us working in the information space tasked with bringing stability to the country found this frustrating — often maddeningly so. The Afghanistan we saw was a colorful tapestry of tribes, ethnicities, languages and cultures.

Our friends and relatives back home, however, saw a starkly different Afghanistan.

I first deployed to Afghanistan in 2006 as a U.S. Army major specializing in Psychological Operations. I would make nine more trips to the country over the next five years working in the Netherlands for the NATO headquarters overseeing the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission in Afghanistan.

ISAF’s mission was to enable the Afghan government to develop a military that could effectively secure its own country, preventing it from ever again becoming a safe haven for terrorists. At its height, the force was more than 130,000 strong, with troops from 51 NATO and partner nations.

In 2006, however, ISAF’s troop strength hovered around 35,000. My job was to work cooperatively with the Afghan government to improve perceptions among ordinary Afghans of ISAF, the Afghan government, and Afghan security forces. The thinking was that “winning hearts and minds” was the key to building the trust that would allow the Afghan government to strengthen the institutions necessary for the country’s long-term stability.

Unfortunately, ISAF’s mission was hampered from the start by a lack of resources. Initially, it was because many of these resources were being diverted to Iraq; but as time dragged on, perceptions of Afghanistan in countries able to provide troops and resources limited the risks their politicians were willing to assume.

After decades of Soviet occupation, civil war, and struggling day by day to survive, the vast majority of Afghans my colleagues and I knew just wanted to raise their families, earn a decent living, educate their children, and fulfill their hopes for a brighter future.

And those early post-Taliban years–2003, 2004 were full of hope. Though more than half the population was too young to remember anything besides occupation and conflict, many older Afghans recalled the 1950s and 1960s, when a growing middle class and developing infrastructure — admittedly fueled by Cold War competition between the superpowers — suggested a more hopeful future than the one which ultimately came to pass.

But by 2005, so-called “foreign fighters”–many of them veterans of the Iraq conflict–were increasingly influencing the nature of the insurgency. Suicide bombings, once rare in Afghanistan, became a growing concern that year. Over time, improvised explosive devices proliferated, grew more sophisticated, and often leapfrogged military efforts to defeat them.

The Taliban actively competed with ISAF in the information space and bombings were good for business. In response to a bombing, ISAF forces would withdraw from the streets, be restricted to their bunkers, camps and bases and only venture out cloaked in“battle rattle” — pounds of kevlar plates, wrap-around sunglasses, and weapons slung at the ready.

The early post-Taliban optimism, both in Afghanistan and in the countries supporting ISAF with troops and resources, began a slow decline. Press coverage was increasingly dominated by images of death, violence, and shadowy, bearded fighters. Ordinary Afghans caught up in the fighting became nameless, faceless “civilian casualties.”

In 2006, Kabul’s operating environment was still relatively permissive. Many of us lived in leased civilian townhouses behind the American embassy devoid of any security fencing.

A handful of Afghan police guarded the streets and we could take a civilian minibus to work or walk, as long as we were in pairs, wore our protective vests and helmets, and carried our weapons. We went to meetings and interacted with the local population on foot, and were free to drive our unarmored vehicles to nearby Bagram, Jalalabad, or into the countryside surrounding Kabul’s urban center.

When we drove out of Kabul, children would sometimes run alongside our vehicles pretending to write on their hands, so we gave them pencils and notebooks for school. A donation of medical equipment here, the opening of a new school or bridge there–frequently village elders would honor our contribution by slaughtering one of their sheep, insisting we join them in an impromptu barbecue.

I witnessed the gradual devolution of the security situation each time I returned to Afghanistan. In 2009, we could still walk the 300 or so heavily-guarded meters between the ISAF headquarters and the American embassy. By 2014, the security environment had become so tenuous, the same 300-meter gap could only be crossed by helicopter.

Tightening security restrictions to prevent loss of life is a key command responsibility. Every allied death also risked undermining domestic support for ISAF’s mission. But in the minds of Afghans wary of supporting a lost cause, the increasing withdrawal of ISAF troops from the streets and villages looked a lot like retreat. Risk aversion and political considerations essentially forced us to cede the perception battlespace to the Taliban.

This frustrated me, because it felt like we were losing the confidence of ordinary Afghans–both in us and in their own government. So I penned an article in Military Review about this phenomenon and our inappropriate response to insurgent violence. One quote from that article sums up how our years-long strategic retreat into our bases and compounds affected public perception:

Sir Robert Thompson’s observation about Malaya applies: “What the peas­ant wants to know is: does the government mean to win the war? Because if not, he will have to support the insurgent.”

To make matters worse, with the possible exception of General McChrystal, one ISAF commander after another (I worked under five of them) would direct his staffers to amplify acts of violence committed by the Taliban — as if Afghans didn’t already know who the bad guys were. This, paradoxically, undermined the notion that ISAF and/or the Afghan government were capable of providing the security they had been promising.

To make matters worse, airstrikes on wedding parties, funeral processions, or peaceful community meetings were regular occurrences. Initially, a well-intentioned colonel or brigadier would come to us asking to develop “messaging” to mitigate the effects of these errant attacks.

Initially, apologies and reparations payments to families softened the impact of these tragic missteps; but eventually, I became emboldened enough to bluntly tell them, “Sir, this is not a ‘perception’ issue. You need to stop killing innocent civilians.”

In this environment, there was little we could do to counter the perception among Afghans that the Taliban would eventually prevail. A common saying at the time was, “The Americans have all the watches. But we [the Taliban] have all the time.” The Taliban knew they only had to wait out ISAF.

Domestic audiences among troop contributing nations were losing patience as well. Given the imagery and reporting that had dominated the media since the start of the conflict, few had any real understanding of the positive impact ISAF was having on the lives of ordinary Afghans.

Military officials were afraid to use social media, wary of their inability to control the discussion. Instead, NATO officials would simply churn out more and more press releases listing statistics and accomplishments. In early 2009, one NATO headquarters estimated that the press were picking up on 3 to 5 percent of these releases.

It was only a matter of time before political pressures at home would persuade troop contributors to begin withdrawing their forces. This process began in 2010.

I became an outspoken advocate of the use of social media. I recognized there were over 100,000 potential strategic communicators in Afghanistan–our own troops–but that they needed to be empowered and given a little guidance on the types of images and stories that would help home audiences understand what was really going on in Afghanistan.

But several major troop contributors had strict rules that forbade deployed military members from sharing images on social media. So instead, I focused on the military headquarters themselves. I successfully persuaded ISAF’s headquarters to go live with their Twitter feed and–somewhat unsuccessfully–encouraged my own headquarters to move beyond the canned, sterile messaging they were putting on their own social media channels.

But military units led by generals born in the 1940s and 1950s are like aircraft carriers — it takes a long time to make drastic changes in course.

Woefully frustrated, I eventually convinced my superiors to allow me to try something new to encourage folks currently serving, or who previously served in Afghanistan to share their own imagery and thus provide a more complete picture of what was going on in the country. The idea was to have deployed service members explain why Afghanistan mattered.

I bought the (now defunct) afghanistanmatters.com domain using my personal credit card, created a Wordpress website, designed the photo contest and rules, created an accompanying Flickr website and Twitter account to promote the contest. In the three months the contest ran, the newly-created website had more than 100,000 unique visitors–at the time far beyond the scope of most, if not all, other NATO websites.

Admittedly, “Why Afghanistan Matters” was not going to change the direction of the conflict, but there were numerous requests to use the images we gathered, which were vastly different from virtually all other images coming out of the country in the media. My hope was that it might encourage others to follow suit, however. But as the war dragged on, little changed. Gradually the media seemed to lose interest in Afghanistan altogether.

Fast forward to August 2021, when Afghanistan once again captured the attention of the media. As the United States and other major allies worked frantically to bring home their citizens and provide refuge to Afghans whose association with ISAF put them in immediate danger, American media focused more on how the operation would affect President Biden’s ability to push forward on his agenda than on the fate of those who would suffer most from the decision to withdraw.

And government officials and media alike spoke of the need to protect vulnerable Afghans, but appeared to lose sight of the fact that many of the “Afghans” trying to gain access to the airport were actually American citizens, referring only to “U.S. forces” and “Afghans” when ISIS-K killed nearly 200 people in an effort to undermine the tenuous understanding between the Taliban and military forces at the airport.

Tragically, after 20 years of conflict, more than 6,000 American and 100,000 Afghan deaths, and a trillion dollars spent, the average American, it seems, still has no idea why Afghanistan matters. And I worry that the next generation of Americans, who will still be paying for this conflict, will at some point end up having to revisit Afghanistan–starting from scratch.