Indigenous Improvisation in Afghanistan

I just listened to a radio news report by Tom Gjelten on the NPR news program “All Things Considered". Marines in Afghanistan, according to Tom’s report, are being demoralized by the incessant threat of IEDs – “improvised explosive devices”. I got to thinkin’ …

“Improvised weapons” are invented by desperate and determined people. “IEDs” are small, powerful bombs made out of whatever is available. A trash can, a rock, or the body of a dead dog – anything that is hollow, or can be hollowed out – is crammed with scrounged nails, scrap metal and toxic residues, and buried in the ground next to a road. Then a potent mix of unstable chemicals is packed into a plastic bag and stuffed into the container. Then an igniter – a blasting cap or something similar – is connected to the explosive. A wire is run to a trigger hidden in the ground where “coalition” vehicles are expected to roll. A tire or a boot hits the trigger, and … boom!

IEDs are essentially crudely made landmines. A landmine, in military and naval operations, is usually a stationary explosive device that is designed to destroy personnel, ships, or vehicles when the latter come in contact with it. There are dozens of styles of manufactured landmines. Every military campaign in the 20th century saw the use of mines. Undetonated landmines are strewn across vacated battlefields everywhere on the planet, and unsuspecting farmers and children still stumbles on them. Decades from now, IEDs will be waiting to maim unfortunate people in Afghanistan.

IEDs are not issued to combatants by governmental authorities, the way weapons are issued to national armies. They are “field expedient” weapons used by desperate and determined people to protect themselves from invading armies. In Afghanistan, IEDs are effectively frustrating coalition progress toward … well, whatever the objective really is.

I wonder what tactics I’d be willing to employ if foreign armies were marching through Connecticut cities and towns on a military mission to win over my heart and mind?

When U.S. soldiers were chasing the indigenous Viet Cong “insurgents” in South Vietnam forty five years ago, they encountered lots of improvised weapons. One of the veterans I know watched a couple squad members fall into a Punji pit full of sharpened bamboo stakes. Bamboo can be sharpened to a surgical edge. Both men were wounded, and had to be removed to the infirmary. The stakes had been smeared with human feces, and the Punji stakes drove bacteria deep into the soldiers’ systems. No way to protect against this kind of weapon. Eventually soldiers learned to send animals or prisoners ahead along the path.

One marine’s voice in Gjelten’s report is heard to say, “There was poop in that bomb”. Got me thinkin’ … is Afghanistan to Obama as Vietnam was to Kennedy?

Historians generally agree that U.S. military intervention in Vietnam was an error in foreign policy, and that President Kennedy was wrong to act on the advice of his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara to enter the conflict between North and South Vietnam in 1961. “Insanity”, explained Albert Einstein, “is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”

The indigenous Pashtun people (president Hamid Karzai is Pashtun), are, like the Viet Cong, fighting to retain their land and their indigenous ways of life. Those ways have served the people for thousands of years. We hear these people mostly referred to as “tribal” or “insurgent”, labels intended to de-emphasize their full humanity. The Pashtun live on land they have lived on for thousands of years, land they know, land they love. It has always been coveted by imperial powers. Even Genghis Khan couldn’t dominate these folks for very long. Why? Because they are resourceful, inventive, scrappy and willing to risk and lose their lives on behalf of their land. IEDs are just the most recent weapon they’ve devised to repel invaders.

Living, as we do, on land that only a few centuries ago was stolen from an indigenous population, why aren’t we more sensitive to the evils of empire? It’s this sensitivity that I intend to amplify among us through this blog in the next days and weeks.