Why Ending the Afghan War Won’t End the Killing
I’ve never
been to Afghanistan, but I am the mother of two young children. So when I
imagine what life must be like there after 18 years of war, my mind conjures up
the children most vividly -- the ones who have been affected by the conflict --
and their parents. I think of the 12-year-old boywho was carrying
water to a military checkpoint in a remote part of that country, earning
pennies to help sustain his family, whose legs were blown off by a landmine. Or
the group of children at a
wedding party, playing behind the house where the ceremony was taking place.
One of them picked up an unexploded shell, fired from a helicopter, that hadn’t
detonated in battle. It blew up, killing two children, Basit and Haroon, and
wounding 12 others. What must it be like to care for a five year old -- the age
of my oldest child -- who is maimed and who needs to learn how to walk, play,
and live again with ill-fitting prosthetics?
A major
legacy of the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan, which began in October 2001
and shows little sign of actually ending anytime soon, will be the “explosive
remnants of war” -- a term for all the landmines and unexploded bombs and other
weaponry that have been left behind in the earth. This debris of America’s
endless war, still piling up, is devastating in many ways. It makes it so much
harder for an agricultural population to sustain itself on the land. It wreaks
havoc on Afghans’ emotional wellbeing and sense of security. And it poses
special hazards for children, who are regularly injured and killed by the
left-behind explosives of an already devastating war as they play, herd
livestock, or collect water and firewood.
Given the
expected drawdown of American troops in Afghanistan -- despite the recent
breakdown in peace negotiations with the Taliban, President Trump continues
to indicate that he
may pursue such a path -- and the possibility of an official end to the U.S.
war there, this topic is both pressing and relevant to public debate in
America. Offering aid and reparations for the horrific ongoing costs of
explosive military waste should be a priority on Washington’s future
agenda.
“The Human and Financial Costs of the Explosive Remnants
of War in Afghanistan,” a new report issued
today by the Costs of War project, which I co-direct,
at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs,
offers a sense of the scale of the damage in Afghanistan. According to the
report’s authors, Suzanne Fiederlein and SaraJane Rzegocki of
James Madison University, at least 5,442 people have been killed and 14,693
people have been injured by devices embedded in or left on the ground since the
start of the US-led war in 2001.
Of those
victims, the great majority are boys and men. A casualty analysis by the Danish
Demining Group in 2017 suggested that boys are particularly
vulnerable because of their day-to-day activities and chores, but women and
girls, too, are increasingly becoming casualties of unexploded ordnance,
particularly when traveling. In 2017, the United Nations Mission in
Afghanistan expressed concern
about a “65% jump in the number of children killed or wounded by explosive
remnants as fighting has spread to heavily populated civilian areas.”
The U.S.
has provided significant financial support for humanitarian mine-clearing
programs in Afghanistan. In recent years, however, that funding has been
dropping. According to the United Nations Mine Action Service,
Afghanistan has made some genuine progress toward its goal of freeing itself of
landmines and other unexploded debris by 2023. Yet international financial
support for such activities has dropped to 41% of what it was in 2011. Even if
the Afghan War truly ended tomorrow, a sustained commitment of financial aid
over many years would be necessary to clear that country of all the ordnance
sewn into its soil as a result of the last 18 years of America's war.
A
Legacy of War
The new
Costs of War report reveals that the leading weapons causing such damage have
changed over time. Even before 2001, when the U.S.-led coalition invaded
Afghanistan, that country stood near the top of the list of those afflicted by
abandoned landmines. The devices remained from the 1980s conflict between the
Soviet Union and extremist Islamist rebels, the mujahedeen,
backed by Washington and funded and supported by the CIA.
In the
wake of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, international and
Afghan clearance groups worked hard to clean up those minefields. Their efforts
were, however, often thwarted by brutal new conflicts, including an Afghan
civil war from 1992 to 1996 and the period from 1996 to 2001 in which the
Taliban largely controlled the country. Still, over the past few decades, such
groups managed to remove two million pieces of
unexploded ordnance.
As the
latest data indicates, landmines from the Soviet conflict have still been
causing 7% of remnant-related casualties since 2010. Most of those hurt by
explosive ordnance, however, are victims of the ongoing, complex armed conflict
that emerged from the U.S.-led invasion -- that is, a range of weapons used and
left behind by American forces, Taliban fighters, and Islamic State-affiliated
groups. These include grenades, projectile weapons, mortars, cluster munitions,
and large bombs that failed to explode as intended, but are still live and
prone to going off if touched or moved at a later date. Taliban and ISIS
militants are also increasingly relying on improvised explosive devices (IEDs)
set off by someone stepping on them or otherwise unwittingly activating them.
If not triggered at the time of battle, they can kill or injure civilians long
after, even in areas in which there is no longer active fighting.
Since
2015, casualties from explosive remnants of war and abandoned IEDs have been
rising rapidly. One reason is an increase in fighting between the U.S.-backed
Afghan National Security Forces and both the Taliban and ISIS, as well as
intensifying conflict between
these extremist groups themselves. According to report author Suzanne
Fiederlein, improvised explosive devices are growing more common in Afghanistan
and other conflicts across the Middle East, partly thanks to the Internet,
which has spread knowledge of how to build them. Such information, she writes,
is “commonly available now, not just on dark-web sites. Such knowledge is also
linked to the manufacture of more sophisticated and complex devices, such as
anti-handling devices (booby traps).”
In
addition, since 2017, the U.S. has dramatically increased its airstrikes
against the Taliban and other militant groups in Afghanistan, while the Taliban
itself, as it gains ever more
territory, has expanded its attacks on government targets as well as
on Afghan and international security forces. In the past year, as U.S. and Taliban
officials have engaged in peace talks, both sides have only ramped up their
aggression further, assumedly in order to strengthen their hands in the
negotiatons.
Finally,
in recent years, as the American-led coalition has closed down bases in advance
of a prospective U.S. military withdrawal, more and more Afghans have died or
been injured by military waste exploding in abandoned areas once used by
international security forces as firing ranges. From 2009 to 2015, the United
Nations recorded 138 casualties from
explosions in or around such former training facilities. Seventy-five percent
of those victims were children.
Living
with Explosive Military Waste
It’s
important to grasp just how long explosive remnants of war can remain active in
a landscape after a conflict ends. If uncleared, they pose a danger to people
living nearby or passing through for generations. In Belgium, for instance,
more than a century later, significant numbers of explosive shells are still
being removed from former World War I battlefields. Many countries struggle
with this problem, including Bosnia-Herzegovina, Colombia, Korea, Laos, and
Vietnam, but Afghanistan has been one of the hardest hit.
As of
2018, roughly 1,780 square kilometers of that country are considered
contaminated by military waste. As the Costs of War report points out, this is
“roughly ten times the area of Washington, D.C., but spread across a country
almost as large as Texas.” Danger zones include farms and grazing land, roads
that people regularly use to get to markets, schools, and hospitals, and lands
surrounding militant strongholds, allied military bases, and those former
firing ranges.
From the
research I’ve done, it’s clear why people continue to use such contaminated
lands. At the most basic level, it’s a story of inequality. Many Afghans
undoubtedly know which areas pose a threat. In addition, risk education programs have made
progress in getting teachers, midwives, and police officers to spread awareness
of how to recognize and avoid such dangers. However, poverty often forces
Afghans to make terrible and terrifying decisions about the risk of injury and
death.
Dilemmas
of this sort are commonly faced in places marked by such legacies of conflict.
Anthropologist David Henig, for
instance, describes how rural villagers in the Bosnia-Herzegovina highlands
still knowingly enter contaminated forest areas to gather firewood. For them,
living with the danger of landmines left over from the Bosnian War of the 1990s
is a matter of economic survival. Many Afghans face a similar plight. I can
only suppose that the boy who stepped on a landmine while carrying water for
soldiers would not have been earning money in that fashion if his family had
any other way to scrape together an existence.
While
people learn to live with the presence of explosive waste in their landscapes,
doing so exacts a grim toll. Imagine the fear and emotional distress you might
feel at merely passing through places where a misstep could kill you, no less
your children. Henig recounts how one Bosnian woman, returning from a mined
part of the forest where she had filled her wagon with wood, broke down and
cried, yelling feverishly, “Why, why do we have to do this?”
In
Afghanistan, the Costs of War report points to the “deep psychological impact”
of such long-lasting contamination: “For Afghans, the fear of being harmed by
these weapons is magnified by knowing or seeing someone injured or killed.”
People are terrorized and traumatized by the threat of explosions, and this
continuous sense of foreboding must create an undertone of anxious melancholy
that runs through every minute of the day.
Then there
are the thousands of Afghans who live not only with the fear of such
explosions, but also with the need to rebuild their lives after being
maimed by one. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) physical
rehabilitation program in Afghanistan manufactures over 19,000artificial legs,
arms, and other orthopedic devices each year. Groups like the ICRC and Handicap
International post photos of children on their websites as they
are being fitted with and trained to use prosthetic legs. In one, a boy of no more
than five looks bleakly at the camera, his hands resting on two parallel bars
at his sides, the stumps of his legs settled uncomfortably in new plastic
devices. In another, Nilofar, a
young woman in a wheelchair, prepares to shoot a basketball; hers is a
remarkable story of recovery, of moving from complete paralysis, after a back
injury due to an explosion, to partial mobility. Today she works for the ICRC’s
Kabul Orthopedic Center as a data entry operator, a job that has given her an
income, a sense of purpose, and renewed hope.
The United
Nations Mine Action Service has called for more long-term support for survivors of such
wounds. They need such care to learn to walk on and use prosthetic limbs, as
well as to deal with the depression and other psychological effects that
accompany such injuries. According to the ICRC, they also require
“a role in society and to recover dignity and self-respect.” All of the more
than 800 staff at the seven ICRC orthopedic centers across Afghanistan are
former patients. But there are thousands of others and no one can doubt that,
in a war seemingly without end, there will be thousands more.
Imperial
Debris and U.S. Responsibility
Scholars
have called landmines and other explosive remnants of war “imperial debris” -- the
detritus, in particular, of imperial America and its expansive global military
footprint, including its forever wars around this planet. Even if U.S. troops
are finally withdrawn, as Afghans encounter such debris from the war on terror
and find their lives eternally shaped by it, the association with the American
project in their country will remain alive for years into the future, as such
weaponry keeps right on killing. In the process, it will undoubtedly seed
hatred of the United States for generations to come.
Sadly,
American funding for the humanitarian mine-clearing program in Afghanistan has
been in decline since 2012. Afghanistan today has some of the best-trained
demining technicians on the planet, but the scale of the problem is massive and
the money available for it far too modest. The very goal of achieving mine-free
status by 2023, a project once expected to cost $647.5 million, is likely
unattainable, even if the fighting ends, because funding targets have fallen so
far short of being fulfilled.
The U.S.
has been the single largest donor to that program, making $452 million in
contributions since 2002. Since 2012, however, it’s been another story, as
Washington has dispatched much of its funding and resources for such programs
to Iraq and Syria instead. In fiscal year 2018, the Mine Action Programme of
Afghanistan raised just $51 million of its $99 million funding goal and only an
estimated $20 million of that came from Washington, less than half what it gave
between 2010 and 2012.
Americans
have an obligation to clear explosive hazards in that country, a large portion
of which are of U.S. origin. Given the taxpayer dollars Washington has already
spent on or committed to the war on terror through fiscal year 2019 -- $5.9 trillion, according
to the estimate of the Costs of War project -- what it’s donated to deal with
imperial debris in Afghanistan is scarcely more than a drop in the bucket. A
multiyear funding commitment to clear the explosive remnants of the war on
terror there would be one small way to carry out a tiny portion of America’s
responsibility to the Afghan people after so many years of destruction.
Someday,
Afghanistan stands every chance of becoming America’s forgotten war. The
conflict will be anything but forgotten in that country, however, and therein
lies one of the saddest stories of all.
Stephanie
Savell, a TomDispatch regular,
is co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s
Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. An anthropologist, she
conducts research on security and activism in the U.S. and in Brazil. She
co-authored The Civic Imagination: Making a
Difference in American Political Life.
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Copyright
2019 Stephanie Savell
