HED: Afghanistan, Changing Room of Empires

Abstract

HEDAfghanistan, Changing Room of Empires Adrian Bonenberger (bio) First they fell slowly, fort by besieged fort, province by province, then all at once. When Kabul collapsed it happened with the speed and fury of a thunderclap. Alongside the video of desperate Afghans chasing and falling from planes were photos and videos of the Taliban, dressed like US special operators. They emulated the iconic photo of Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima and strutted into an air hangar, M4 rifles pointed toward the ceiling, massed at a checkpoint with night-vision devices perched paradoxically above the wraparound "operator" sunglasses popularized by special operations forces and CIA paramilitaries. While visually arresting, these scenes didn't come as a surprise. We've seen this happen repeatedly throughout history, the conquered rising to conquer in their turn. Before its fall over the course of the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., Western Rome's military and those of its neighbors had come to mirror each other in important ways, both in terms of tactics and aesthetic preferences. Drawing heavily on Germanic tribes (Goths, Vandals, Alans, Burgundians), Western Rome's military (and, given the role its military played in culture and politics, Rome itself) came to resemble the tribes it fought. Romans lived alongside their Germanic neighbors for nearly four centuries and progressively intermingled until in some places little meaningful distinction existed (and none, in the end, worth fighting for—the ultimate measure of a culture's durability). The Afghans have spent much of the last four decades living side by side with the militaries of the USSR and the US. Culture shifted more slowly back when it moved at the speed of a horse-drawn wagon or sail. Now, culture moves at the speed it takes to upload a video to TikTok or Instagram. It seems beyond question that Afghans have been observing and internalizing the violence they experienced at Soviet and American hands. Watching the History Channel, playing Call of Duty, reading accounts of SEALs, Afghans have come to understand power the way Americans have applied it. Many of them received tactical training from American and other Western militaries. Too, ISIS and the Taliban received extensive training from [End Page 14] Western forces, with those members who survived battles gaining firsthand experience of American, Russian, and European military capabilities and adapting to counter them. Literature on or in Afghanistan over the past forty years has tended to focus on the experience of the country that's deployed there. The Soviet Afghansi with their various permutations (Soviet Baltic, Ukrainian, Russian, and other ethnicities from within the USSR) are the protagonists (or, occasionally, antagonists, if one's watching or reading from the perspective of the US), as are British colonial troops described by writers like Rudyard Kipling, as are Americans and those allied countries deployed alongside the US. The closest one gets to the Afghans or Iraqis is through their cuisine, to which soldiers escape for variety, or their clothing—especially the distinctive pakol cap and shemagh headwrap, which make appearances in (almost every?) novels and short fiction collections about Afghanistan or Iraq published in the last two decades. The food, caps, and scarves do little to change how Western militaries operate in the countries to which they have deployed, and have made a consequently superficial impact on those militaries. One place where the Afghans especially have made a more lasting impact on the US and British militaries is in the tendency of Western special operations units to adopt beards. Originally, this was made out of diplomatic expediency—special forces units embedded with locals claimed that they needed the beards to "fit in" and develop rapport with their counterparts—but the beards quickly became a signifier, a way to demonstrate that one's unit was elite and didn't need to obey the same rules as more conventional units. Some writers exploring Afghanistan refer to this phenomenon through the voice of the Afghans, who refer to special operations units as "the men with beards." In my own short fiction collection, The Disappointed Soldier and Other Stories from War, I write satirically about a conventional unit that contracts beards and the equipment of special...