Watch This Is What Winning Looks Like, our new documentary about chaos, corruption, sexual abuse, and the war in Afghanistan.
Then head to Reddit and ask Ben Anderson, the filmmaker behind the doc, a question.
(Source: Vice Magazine)
What does “winning” the war in Afghanistan look like? It’s not good.
This Is What Winning Looks Like
This Is What Winning Looks Like
Our new documentary about the end of the war in Afghanistan premieres Monday. Watch the trailer
VICE Podcast 004: Have We Won in Afghanistan?
The VICE Podcast is a weekly unedited discussion that delves inside the minds of some of the most interesting, creative, and bizarre people in the VICE universe. This week we spoke with author and filmmaker Ben Anderson, who has just returned from Helmand, the most violent province in Afghanistan. With US forces withdrawing, most of the country is now controlled by the Afghan government and its security forces. This, it was officially claimed, is victory. Ben’s disturbing new documentary, This Is What Winning Looks Like (premiering Monday on VICE.com), would suggest otherwise.
This Is What Winning Looks Like: Ben Anderson’s Afghanistan War Diary
above: US Specialist Christopher Saenz looks out over the landscape during a patrol outside the village of Musa Qala, Helmand province. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)
Ididn’t plan on spending six years covering the war in Afghanistan. I went there in 2007 to make a film about the vicious fighting between undermanned, underequipped British forces and the Taliban in Helmand, Afghanistan’s most violent province. But I became obsessed with what I witnessed there—how different it was from the conflict’s portrayal in the media and in official government statements.
All I had to do was trek out to one of the many tiny, isolated patrol bases that dot the barren, sunbaked landscape and hang out with British infantry troops to see the chaotic reality of the war firsthand: firefights that lasted entire days, suicide bombers who leaped onto unarmored jeeps from behind market stalls, IEDs buried everywhere, and bombs dropped onto Afghans’ homes, sometimes with whole families of innocent civilians inside.
In 2006, when troops were sent into Helmand, British command didn’t think there’d be much fighting at all. The mission was simple: “Facilitate reconstruction and development.” The UK Defense Secretary John Reid even said he hoped the army could complete their mission “without a single shot being fired.”
But with each year that followed, casualties and deaths rose as steadily as the local opium crop. Thousands more British troops were deployed, then tens of thousands of US soldiers, at the request of General Stanley McChrystal, following a six-month review of the war after President Obama took office. Still, the carnage and confusion continued unabated. Suicide bombings increased sevenfold. Every step you took might reveal yet another IED.
In February 2013, on his last day at the helm of NATO forces in Afghanistan, General John R. Allen described what he thought the war’s legacy will be: ‘‘Afghan forces defending Afghan people and enabling the government of this country to serve its citizens. This is victory, this is what winning looks like, and we should not shrink from using these words.’’
The US and British forces are preparing to leave Afghanistan for good (officially, by the end of 2014), and my time in the country over the last six years has convinced me that our legacy will be the exact opposite of what Allen posits—not a stable Afghanistan, but one at war with itself yet again. Here are a few encapsulated snapshots of what I’ve seen and what we’re leaving behind.
Coal miner smoking a cigarette, Pol-e-Khomri, Afghanistan, 2002
“They hid the guns when they saw an army helicopter,” the interpreter says. “They say they need the guns to protect the remaining tower. They knew we’d take their guns if they told us they had them. They are sorry for this. They want to know if they can keep the IED and show it to their employer.”
“What the fuck kind of question is that?” the lieutenant says. “No they fucking can’t keep it.”
Dodging Bombs to Capture Afghanistan’s Media Success Story
I re-watched Taxi to the Darkside a few nights ago, preparing myself for a chat with Eva Orner, one of the producers of that Academy Award-winning film. If you missed it, the film takes account of the US military’s brutal tactics during the peak of the war on terror, framed around an Afghan taxi driver who is suddenly hauled off to the United States’ Parwan Detention Facility and beaten to death //
MB: I heard about 10 percent of Afghanistan has internet access, I saw …
EO: No, I don’t think that’s accurate, I actually don’t have the figures, I don’t address them in the movie. I think the mobile phone capabilities are super high. A lot of people have Internet, they don’t have it at home so much; they have it at work. Facebook is huge there. Twitter is not because a lot of them have phones, but they’re not connected to the Internet, because it’s really expensive to have mobile internet, but that will change very quickly.
From a country that 12 years ago was about 300 years back in time and had no interest in anything but water, was wanton to get to where it is now, which you’ll see in the film is the change. It’s been extraordinary. Just the change in life expectancy has gone up from about 46 to 64 in the last 10 years. The illiteracy rate, which is between 60 and 70 percent is falling rapidly. The average age of the population is 24. That’s a really young country. They want to be connected, they want to be tech-savvy and they want to know what’s going on in the rest of the world. They never want to go back to where they were 12 years ago.
CONTINUE
- by Daniel Stuckey
Bradley Manning’s Court Testimony—Leaked
When Army Pfc. Bradley Manning spoke before a military judge at length for only the second time ever last month, the media gallery next to the Fort Meade, Maryland, courtroom was arguably the most crowded it has been since the 25-year-old army private was arraigned one year earlier. Clearly, I was not the only one in attendance that morning weighing whether or not it was worth risking my career, my reputation, and a possible military reprimand by recording the soldier’s testimony: this morning, audio of his guilty plea was leaked to the web by an anonymous source.
The significance of Pfc. Manning’s statement doesn’t begin and end with what he said last month. Yes, the army-intelligence officer admitted for the first time ever during the roughly hour-long reading that he did, in fact, cause the biggest intelligence leak in the US history. And, yes, as many assumed, he did supply the whistleblower website WikiLeaks with a trove of sensitive documents that he thought would embarrass the very country he swore to protect. His words weren’t the only ones that mattered, though.
By finally admitting to sharing war logs, State Department cables, and hundreds of thousands of protected files, Pfc. Manning was no longer the “accused” WikiLeaks source or the “alleged supplier” of some of the rawest evidence of American misdeeds in the Iraq and Afghan wars. He owned up. Yes, he did it, and a few dozen members of the press were hearing with their own ears why. Those members of the press have painstakingly referred to Pfc. Manning as, largely, anything but the proven WikiLeaks source since his military detainment began over 1,000 days ago. Now, however, he can be properly credited. And he should be.
Pfc. Manning said he leaked video footage of Iraqi civilians being murdered by Americans to spark debate. And sharing State Department cables, he said, was to show the world what the United States was really doing abroad. It was the first time I ever heard his voice, and it was a moment I don’t think I’ll ever forget.
← Older
Page 1 of 2
