Rudyard Kipling"
“When you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier”
General Douglas MacArthur"
“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.” “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
After America Will civil war hit Afghanistan when the U.S. leaves? By Dexter Filkins
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
In the eleven years since the
American invasion of Afghanistan, Abdul Nasir has become a modern and
prosperous professional. A worldly man in his late thirties, he smokes
Marlboros, drives a Toyota, and follows Spanish soccer, rooting for
Barcelona. He works in Kabul as a producer for Khurshid TV, one of the
many private channels that have sprung up since 2004. He makes news and
entertainment shows and sometimes recruiting commercials for the Afghan
National Army, one of the country’s biggest advertisers. On weekends, he
leaves the dust of the city and tends an apple orchard that he bought
in his family’s village. We met for tea recently in a restaurant called
Afghan International Pizza Express. Nasir wore jeans and a black T-shirt
and blazer. His beard is closely trimmed, in the contemporary style.
Nasir
recalled that when Afghanistan’s civil war broke out, in April, 1992,
he was an agricultural student at Kabul University. He was from the sort
of secular family that had flourished under the regime of Mohammad
Najibullah, the country’s last Communist President. The Soviet Army had
left in 1989, after ten years of fighting the American- and Saudi-backed
guerrillas known as the mujahideen. Najibullah was a charismatic and
ruthless leader, but, as the last of the Soviet troops departed, no one
gave him much of a chance to remain in power. The Soviet Minister of
Defense figured that Najibullah would last only a few months. The
regime, sustained by a flow of food and ammunition from the Soviet
Union, held firm. The Afghan Army fought well, routing the mujahideen in
a decisive battle for the city of Jalalabad. But in late 1991 the
Soviet Union fell apart, leaving Najibullah and his fellow-Communists to
fend for themselves. With their supplies running out, soldiers began to
desert the Afghan Army. On April 17, 1992, Najibullah sought refuge in
the United Nations compound in Kabul. The mujahideen poured into the
capital, wild and hollow-eyed after years in the countryside.
“At
first, the city was calm, there was hardly any fighting,” Nasir
recalled. “It took me some time to realize that the city was calm
because the militias were busy looting the government buildings. It took
them a few days to get everything. When they finished, they came after
everyone else.” Kabul imploded: electricity disappeared from the
city, police vanished, government services ceased, Kabul University
closed. The mujahideen started grabbing pieces of the city. Karta Seh,
the neighborhood in western Kabul where Nasir grew up, became a no man’s
land poised amid three armed groups: Hezb-e-Wahdat, the militia of the
Hazara minority, led by Abdul Ali Mazari; Hezb-e-Islami, led by
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a commander famous for his bloodlust; and
Jamiat-e-Islami, the army of Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was ostensibly part
of a new government but who in fact controlled only a handful of
Kabul’s neighborhoods. The border of Hezb-e-Wahdat’s turf, Nasir said,
was Darulaman Road, just outside the window of Afghan International
Pizza Express. As an ethnic Pashtun, Nasir had to stay away from the far
side of Darulaman Road, where Hezb-e-Wahdat’s territory began. Some of
his Pashtun friends had crossed over and never returned. “Hazaras were
killing any Pashtun they could find,” Nasir said.
The
militias fought each other continuously, and it was too dangerous to
leave the house. “Hezb-e-Wahdat was right here, on the side of this
road, and Massoud was just across the street, a hundred metres away,”
Nasir said, twisting around in his chair and pointing to a hill
overlooking Karta Seh. “Hekmatyar was down the road.” He twisted around
again, pointing to the west. “The mujahideen were stealing
everything—jewelry, cars, bikes. They were raping girls, raping boys.”
Some of the Hezb-e-Wahdat fighters crossed into Karta Seh, bursting into
Nasir’s family’s house and punching holes through the walls in the
neighborhood to create an aboveground tunnel network. The family had no
access to food, and Nasir ached from hunger. He could venture out only
when the militiamen called an occasional ceasefire.
The family
held on for a year in Karta Seh, and then, during a lull in the
fighting, moved to Nasir’s uncle’s apartment, in a Soviet-built complex
called Macroyan, about a mile away. Macroyan was largely under the
control of a fourth group, an Uzbek militia called Junbish-e-Milli, led
by a warlord of exceptional brutality named Abdul Rashid Dostum, who had
fought for the Soviets. Massoud’s forces were close by, but the two
groups were separated by the Kabul River.
Over the next three
years, tens of thousands of Afghans died in the civil war. From
Hekmatyar’s base, outside the city, he rained Scud missiles on Kabul.
The various militias, in a frenzy to mark their territory, carpeted the
city with mines. There were so many mines in Kabul that, in the
mid-nineteen-nineties, according to United Nations figures, an average
of fifty people per week stepped on them, risking death and terrible
injury. The city’s monuments, great and banal—the Darulaman Palace, the
mausoleum of King Nadir Shah, a socialist-realist relic called the
Soviet Cultural Center—were blasted and burnt.
In the autumn of
1996, the Taliban, armed and backed by the Pakistani military, reached
the outskirts of Kabul. On its march across the country, the Taliban had
vanquished every militia in its path. All that remained was Massoud’s
army, which was still in Kabul. Around this time, Nasir travelled
to his ancestral village, Deh Afghanan, about twenty-five miles west of
Kabul, for his wedding day. The morning of the ceremony, he went to his
mother’s grave to pray, and to tell her of his marriage. Nasir could
see the Taliban forces a few hundred yards away. That day, fighting
broke out between the Taliban and Massoud’s forces, and an artillery
shell landed in the village, killing five of Nasir’s relatives. The
wedding proceeded, and so did the funerals. Nasir shared his wedding
feast with the grieving family. “It was the saddest and the happiest day
of my life,” he said.