I’ve been watching the news out of Afg—I like it spelled that way, “Afg”; kinda gets the spirit of the thing. The Afg news is simple: those Pashtun boys are keeping a hand in, having a good time, while they wait for a better offer.
A few weeks ago I read a story about a Stryker brigade leaving the Pashtun zone of Afghanistan. The funniest bit was this quote by a staff sergeant: “We set the tone there, and the biggest worry that my guys have is that what we did there will be forgotten. One thing is certain. If you ask the Taliban, they know who we are.” In my day they had a name for that kind of talk: selling woof tickets. It’s just plain sad when you leave a combat zone and the best you can say is that they won’t forget me, like some Summer Bible Study girl making the guy she held hands with in the pew swear he won’t forget her back home in Camarillo.
I’ll go one better, Sarge: they not only won’t remember you, they don’t even know who you are. They barely remember the British, even though the Brits were scary fuckers back then and most countries unlucky enough to get a visit from the Redcoats never forget it, if they’re lucky enough to still exist. It’s the Brits who remember Afg, not the other way around, because they left two armies chopped up on the road to Kabul, cut to pieces by the Pashtun.
Us? Not in the Brits’ league when it comes to Empire. I guarantee they won’t remember us ten years from now. They’ve forgotten the Russians already, 20 years after they slunk home, broke and beaten. It’s the Russians who remember Afg; the war in Afg was one of the bigger nails in the USSR’s coffin, and they left a good chunk of their total tank and APC production lying in the dust there. Barely made an impression on the Pashtun. Just another day at the office.
With us, they’re not even playing their A team. Seriously, they’re funning with us. You can see that if you read these stories carefully, with a cold eye. Here’s a classic example from that Stryker story, a little story about this local Pashtun kid whose heart’n’mind they won over, supposedly:
“A young boy came up to Outpost Outlaw with news of a buried bomb. Stick in hand, he took the soldiers to a trail a short distance away, but then seemed uncertain about just where to point. Finally, he gestured to a spot directly underneath the feet of Cpl. Wes Pfeil.
“Everybody kind of freaked out,” Pfeil recalled.
“The boy smiled and pulled a battery out of his pocket. He had already defused the bomb.”
The comedy here is so obvious I can’t believe the dipshit who wrote this thing even tried to pass it off as proof that the locals are coming around, warming up to us at last. This is open mike nite Pashtun style, the kid’s big debut. I bet the whole district was pissing itself laughing that night, the kid doing impressions: “Look, look, this is the Aliens’ faces when I show them the battery!” And the whole mud hut cracks up. Even the goats were laughing.
“We set the tone…” makes me sick. That’s not what Timur said after destroying Tokhtamysh’s empire. Timur was a man who didn’t worry too much about tone, just keeping the vultures fed. They still remember Timur in Herat, but they won’t remember us. Not even all the money we spent, because Afghans are not future software billionaires. They’ll spend it on guns or pretty little dancing boys, and it’ll all end up in the form of Muhajir merchant families, or the 32-foot Bayliners sitting in the driveway of some merc’s house in Tracy