America’s exit finally brings peace in war-torn countryside
FOR MANY, THE LEGACY OF THE AMERICAN PRESENCE WAS DESTRUCTION
I thank God that the Americans left Afghanistan. Since they left, we don’t see ambulances every day. We don’t see fighting or people injured. It’s very good now. There is peace and we are happy.” Mohammad Farooq | Attendant
At a tiny, two-pump gas station off the two-lane highway running through Afghanistan’s Logar province, Mohammad Farooq, the attendant, was unequivocal in his view of the United States.
“Thank God the Americans went away,” Farooq said smiling. “Since they left, we don’t see ambulances every day. We don’t see fighting or people injured. It’s very good now.”
Over in a dilapidated shack on the opposite side of the highway, Nasratullah Raihan said much the same as he watched a repairman fiddle with the rear sprocket of his bicycle. “For the 20 years that America was here, it was problems,” Raihan said, to the nods of others. “Planes, missiles, rockets — all of it was here. Every day you had people killed.”
In the countryside, where the Taliban has long held sway and where almost three-quarters of Afghanistan’s 38 million people live, America’s exit and the lightning-fast collapse of the Afghan security forces have brought something precious: peace.
For the 20 years that America was here, it was full of problems. Planes, missiles, rockets. Every day you had people killed ... My two brothers (7 and 8) were hit by a mortar. One lost his arm and another’s face is damaged.” Nasratullah Raihan | Kulangar resident
No security issues
Here in Kulangar, a village that’s little more than a sprinkling of mud houses amid fields of wheat, tomatoes, beans and onions, that peace came Aug. 8, a week before Afghan forces disintegrated as the Taliban encircled and then entered Kabul. “The government soldiers, they just ran off,” said Nazeerullah Ahmad, 35, who had worked odd jobs around Pul-e-Alam, Logar’s capital. “Everyone who lives here has been happy since then. We’ve had no security problems at all.”
As the US closed the chapter on its longest war, with the last troops departing August 30, both allies and critics excoriated the Biden administration for not maintaining a presence in Afghanistan to try to safeguard some of the fledgling gains of the last two decades.
Most of those strides had come in the cities, especially Kabul, where tens of billions of dollars in aid transformed the
Afghan capital into a relatively developed metropolis.
But for the people of Kulangar, many of them subsistence farmers for whom Kabul — a mere two hours away — might as well have been another planet, there had never been much of that Western largesse.
Instead, the legacy of the American presence was destruction, Ahmad said.
On a walk through the village, he and his fellow residents pointed out walls pocked by gunfire and by shrapnel from an errant mortar shell falling near a gate. The wall of another compound had a jagged maw left behind by a tank round. No house seemed free of damage.
And in each of those attacks, villagers said, someone had either been hurt or killed. “It’s impossible to write all names of the dead. … There were too many,” Ahmad said.
Bearing the brunt
The violence in rural Afghanistan, which bore the brunt of the last 20 years’ fighting, intensified in the months leading up to the Taliban takeover. The UN monitoring mission in Afghanistan reported a 47 per cent increase in civilian casualties — almost 5,200 — in the first half of 2021 compared with the same period last year; much of that increase happened after May 1, when the US and its North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allies began their troop drawdown and the Taliban launched the spring offensive that led to its nationwide triumph.
The fighting over the years was sometimes so intense that sending children to school was a daily gamble.
Raihan, the man who was getting his bike fixed, recalled the morning in April 2018 when his two brothers, ages 7 and 8, and their 2-year-old cousin, Mustafa, were hit by a mortar shell while cutting across a field to get to school. “One of them, his arm was cut, another the leg. Mustafa, his face was so damaged I couldn’t even recognise him,” Raihan said, holding up a picture of the three dead children.
Ahmad, the Kulangar resident, said he was unconcerned with who was in charge in Kabul, so long as peace would last and there was some work. “We are poor people and don’t think about these things,” he said.