More Sad Afghanistan Anniversaries
April 4 was the 10-year anniversary of the murder of AP photographer Anja Niedringhaus, who was killed by an Afghan police officer while covering the preparations for the 2014 presidential election. AP reporter Kathy Gannon was seriously wounded but survived the shooting. Here is one of the news spots I filed for NPR from Kabul that day:
Anja Niedringhaus was a veteran war photographer who had covered Afghanistan for years. According to the AP, she and correspondent Kathy Gannon, who’s also covered Afghanistan for years, were traveling with a convoy of election workers and Afghan security forces. The convoy stopped at a district center in eastern Khost Province, and a police commander there approached their car. He then fired his AK-47 only at the two women. The shooter surrendered at the scene. There is still no indication of a motive or any claim of credit. The Taliban have been conducting high-profile attacks against foreigners and Afghans in recent weeks to disrupt tomorrow’s presidential election.
Anja was one of some 20 foreign civilians killed in Afghanistan during the first four months of 2014. Others included UN officials, teachers, medical workers, and election monitors. It was a brutal period and was a turning point for the international civilians in Afghanistan who had become direct targets of attacks. Conditions for the international community there only deteriorated over the following years.
I wrote about the growing danger to foreigners in early 2014 in my book Passport Stamps. NPR photographer David Gilkey—who was killed in Afghanistan in 2016—was with me in Kabul in March and early April 2014, and we had been traveling around doing some fun stories about Buzkashi, security improvements in a violent part of Kandahar, and the Nowzad animal shelter/charity, along with tough stories about displaced Afghans and election violence.
David had been covering Afghanistan since 2001 and had seen just about everything, but what was going on then had him unnerved—which was unnerving to me. If he was starting to feel that things were getting dark and dangerous in Kabul, then it must be bad.
I was grateful to have him there. It was a tough period having to cover all the violence and report on the deaths of friends and people I knew, and it was also stressful to figure out how to react to the increasing danger in the city. Having a guy in the house who had lived through the worst of Iraq and Afghanistan helped keep me somewhat grounded. Squeak, whiskey, Ambien, and Xanax also helped.
We talked about friends and colleagues we had lost over the years. We talked about why we did the work. We questioned whether Afghanistan was worth our lives. We joked about how it would be OK for NPR if either he or I got killed in Afghanistan, but if something happened to Renee it would be a tragedy of epic proportions. “Imagine the shit show if a host bites it,” he said.
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We discussed PTS and self-medication (and prescription meds too—David was on some heavy stuff to battle the ravages brought on by a life of covering the shit and near-death experiences). There wasn’t anything we couldn’t discuss candidly and without judgment. David became my tribe within the tribe.
We realized that no matter how bad it got, we had to stick it out, for the sake of the story. David had been there from the beginning. He rode in with U.S. Special Forces in 2001. He had spent more time in the country, mostly with the U.S. military, than a lot of troops did. He had seen more shit in Afghanistan than anyone I knew.
He said he had to see the story through for the Afghan people and the members of the military and their families. It wasn’t about him, and he sure as shit wasn’t in it for the glory and awards. He was committed to making sure the world never forgot about the plight of everyone on the ground in Afghanistan.
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In mid-April, David departed. I soldiered on until the completion of my eight-week rotation at the end of April. The day before I left on my break, an Afghan police officer shot and killed three American medical workers as they entered a hospital in Kabul.
That was the most intense and emotionally draining of my rotations in Kabul. During that break I considered quitting. Why should I go back to Kabul again and risk life and limb for an organization that was going to cut me loose? Friends, and some coworkers, advised me to bail. I thought about it.
I didn’t. I stayed until the end of 2014 when NPR closed the bureau. While that decision had been made in 2012, I disagreed with it and felt NPR should have kept someone in Kabul after 2014 to keep full-time attention on the story and the declining conditions. I don’t think it would have changed the outcome, but the American people and policymakers needed more reporting from Afghanistan in 2015 through 2021 showing that conditions were getting worse as international support dialed back.
There were abundant signs that years of efforts that cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars—trillions when factoring direct and indirect costs—were not transforming Afghanistan into a peaceful democracy. Policymakers needed to see that the Taliban was gaining ground and leverage and that it was heading toward a bad outcome.
Had policymakers spent more time working on a political deal when the Afghan government and international community had greater leverage in the 2010-2011 timeframe—and less time crowing about ephemeral progress and turning corners—there was a chance to end up with something better than the Afghanistan of today. But it was never going to be the Afghanistan the United States in particular was promising to the people of Afghanistan and the United States.
This is something I recently discussed with Beth Bailey on The Afghanistan Project Podcast. We talked about my time on the ground as a journalist and my work at the Defense Department Office of Inspector General on Afghanistan oversight reports.
The conversation was largely about how there were so many clear indicators for years that U.S.-led efforts to remake Afghanistan as a democracy with liberty and justice for all were not working and yet policymakers, the military, and Congress kept investing in failing strategies. I’ve written and talked extensively over the years about how frustrating it was to hear the talking points in Kabul and Washington about “progress” and the “young generation of educated Afghans who were going to lead the country forward” and then see the realities on the ground in rural Afghanistan where there was little change in customs and attitudes and little appetite for democracy and women’s rights.
One of the disconnects I tried to expose in my journalism and IG work (particularly in this IG report, pages 12 through 20) was between the metrics being used to show progress and success and the actual change that was or wasn’t happening on the ground. There was a lot of emphasis on how many Afghans were going to school, particularly how many women and girls, and how that was an indicator of how much Afghanistan was transforming.
Similarly, there was a lot of emphasis on how infant and maternal mortality rates were declining and life expectancy was increasing. Those were also signs of great progress, officials said.
But all the metrics were misleading because they were counting and measuring quantitative outputs and not qualitative outcomes. In other words, it sounded great that more kids were enrolled in school, but the amount of quality education being delivered was a fraction of what was being touted in talking points.
I did a story about this for NPR in 2013. Here are some snippets of that report.
But the numbers tell only part of the story: While 10 million students might be enrolled in all levels of education, they aren't all attending classes, and there are questions about how many of those attending are actually learning.
One Afghan official told me that on most days attendance across the country was maybe 50 percent.
Although some 4,000 schools have been built since the fall of the Taliban, some provinces are desperately in need of more. At the same time, there are other provinces where large numbers of schools are closed because of a lack of security or of teachers, or simply because not enough families want to send their children to school.
Classroom space isn't the only thing in short supply, says teacher Roshan Rasooli.
"We have a shortage of books," she says. "Seventeen of 55 students are present today, and we still don't have enough books."
Officials like Bashir Ahmad Abed, headmaster of the Sadeqi school, says even if a student has a book, there's no guarantee he or she can read it: Many books are too complicated for the students.
An Afghan official said that half of the teachers at the time did not meet the minimum qualifications, and many did not understand the material they were teaching.
Furthermore, some schools lacked space and teachers, so students attended in shifts, meaning in some schools, students would only attend class two-to-three hours a day.
So, even though maybe 10 million children were enrolled in school, at most five million showed up each day. Half of them were taught by unqualified teachers. Many did not have books. And many attended class for only a couple of hours a day.
Thus, the difference between the impressive sounding, quantitative talking point that since the fall of the Taliban nine million more children were enrolled in school and the qualitative outcome of how much education was being delivered and received by children and how much it was changing their life prospects was orders of magnitude.
That was the case with everything in Afghanistan. While some of the health statistics sounded like big improvements, how much was it translating to healthier lives for poor Afghans? Monthly per capita income grew substantially, but how much was that skewed by the big salaries educated Afghans were receiving from Western governments, contractors, and non-governmental organizations that was not trickling down to the average Afghan outside the cities?
Tens of thousands of Afghan women were participating in empowerment programs, but how many were returning to villages and families where the men still held traditional values and didn’t want women working outside the house?
And then there were all the security metrics that might have been measurable but gave false impressions. There were never as many security forces as claimed, but of the 280-something-ish-thousand actual Afghan military and police forces, how many were effectively trained and equipped and showing up on a regular basis?
Even some of the things that could be measured did not tell a good story. In the years leading up to the withdrawal and collapse, the number of districts controlled by government forces was in decline, as was the percentage of the population living in areas under government control or influence.
Bottom line, it was abundantly clear as the Obama surge wound down that the so-called positive indicators were winding down as well and continued to until the end. The efforts were not changing the fabric of Afghanistan and its society outside of some elite bubbles in Kabul and a few other major cities.
And this is the unanswered question today: why with all the clear evidence from journalists, academics, and inspector general offices that programs and policies were not leading to fundamental, lasting change in Afghanistan did policymakers not change course and focus on what was achievable in the Afghan context and would be better than where things are now?
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Two quick promotional things to note. First, I did an author Q&A with Deborah Kalb recently about why I wrote Passport Stamps, where the name came from, what it meant to me to write the book, and what I hope readers will take away from it. You can read the Q&A here.
Second, the 2024 Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride is coming up in May. It’s the annual global motorcycle ride and fundraiser for Movember, which supports men’s health, particularly prostate cancer and mental health. It’s a great and important cause, and I hope you will go to my DGR page and donate all the money you have left after buying my book if you haven’t already!