Book Journal: The Afghanistan Papers II: Chapter 2 - Nation-Building.
Chapter 2 - Nation-Building, Destroying Nations
Hello, friends,
I have decided that I wanted to create a journal of exploration, summary, and reflections while reading The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War (2021), by Craig Whitlock. At the end of the multi-part series—there will at least be 6 parts to correspond with the sections that the book itself is divided into—I’ll probably also publish a review. By the time I was half-way through the first chapter, I knew I wanted to do more with this book than just write one review. I will also consult other literature on Afghanistan when necessary, such as The American War in Afghanistan: A History by Carter Malkasian which won the 2022 Lionel Gelber Prize, my favorite non-academic non-fiction prize in the arena of international relations, and Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (2010), by the award-winning the anthropologist Thomas Barfield; he is also the president of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies.
You can think of this as similar to all of the types of columns I write; grab bag meets marginalia, most similarly.
Thoughts and Reflections while reading The Afghanistan Papers (2021)
Pt. II: The Nation-Building Project
In chapter 3, Whitlock writes about how the biggest lie at the outset of the Afghanistan War was that we would not be attempting to “nation-build.” By 2020, we spent $143 billion to do so. But, of course, it would be immoral to just go to war, and leave Afghani’s without real infrastucture, institutions, or a stable currency. Conflicting goals—take out Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, crossed with forming governmental institutions, and civil society institutions—and lack of local knowledge proved disastrous. In the end, as the former state department’s spokesperson Richard Boucher admitted, “we did now know what we were doing.”
This brings me to a feeling I can’t shake: how very little we discuss that we also didn’t know (or, worse, care) what we were doing to what would become the veterans of the Afghanistan War. The more we study the brain, the more we know that it is extremely fragile. Soundwaves can cause CTE, for example. Even the term “Minor concussion” is a terrible misnomer, in terms of consequences. Military training physically wrecks brains before they are even on any battlefield:
A just released Defense Health Agency medical serveillance monthly report (MSMR) finds that “diagnoses of mental health disorders among active-duty service members increased by nearly 40% over the last five years.” Just in the last 5 years, 541,672 active-duty service members were diagnosed with at least one mental health disorder and nearly half of them were diagnosed with more than one. Every time a state sends it’s citizens to war, regardless of the reasons, their future is robbed. And the pain rarely stays at home.
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Early on January 1, 2025, just hours apart, two veterans of Afghanistan took their own lives and/or the lives of others. The first, in Las Vegas, saw a Green Beret veteran, Sergeant Matthew Livelsberger, 37, whom, according to a former Army nurse who became his girlfriend, and then stayed friends after breaking up, suffered from PTSD, likely C.T.E. or other physical brain diseases that are degenerative, which produced in him and almost always produces debilitating symptoms, such as depression, insomnia, paranoia, delusions, inability to concentrate, intrusive thoughts, etc. commit suicide in an act that was meant to draw attention.
According to reporting by Dave Philipps:
“In notes left on his phone, released Friday by the Las Vegas police, he said he wanted to create a spectacle. ‘Why did I personally do it now?’ he wrote. ‘I needed to cleanse my mind of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.’”
Seventeen hundred miles away, in New Orleans, just hours earlier, another Afghanistan veteran committed an act of terrorism. Staff sargeant Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, 42, used vehicle ramming to commit an act of terrorism. Jabbar, twice divorced, had a history of domestic strife and abuse. In self-recorded videos, he claimed he joined ISIS after being convinced, in part, in “dreams” to do so. This act killed at least 15 people, and injured 30 others.
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More U.S. veterans of post-9/11 conflicts have died from suicide than those who died in combat. The most credible estimate from the Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs has this ratio at 4 times the amount, with 30,177 (we can now add a +1 here) suicides compared to 7,057 combat deaths. Both of these veterans received awards for their combat experience. Livelsberger served multiple deployements spanning a decade. Jabbar was active in the Army from 2007-2015, and later was in the Army Reserves until 2020. Both, as I already mentioned, served in Afghanistan in 2009-2010.
The subtitle of The Afghanistan Papers is “A Secret History of the War.” One of the biggest secrets of any and all wars is that wars destroy soldiers hearts and minds. Wars rob them of their futures because people are treated like machines when we are not machines. We are human beings.
Soldiers come home and they face quiet lives of desperation and alienation. Less than 2% of the country knows what they go through; and they endlessly struggle finding solace and honor. Honor, seen as a dirty word among contemporaries, is actually a build-in psychological need. And propaganda, awards and medals, for those with a developed moral sense, like Airforce Captain Ian Fishback, know that true honor requires ethics, and not blind fealty or loyalty. Perhaps that is what Sergeant Matthew Livelsberger’s suicide/self-immolation note attests: our country lies in shame and disgrace, and until we really understand what war is and does, we can’t truly grasp the urgent need to bring wars, all wars, to an end.
Thanks for reading,
Patrick M. Foran