America’s Monster
October 17, 2024 at 06:30PMFor war correspondent Matthieu Aikins, uncovering the brutal career of a crucial US ally meant wrestling with the ugly truths of the conflict in Afghanistan. With colleagues at The New York Times, Aikins documented the disappearances of more than 300 Afghans during the reign of General Abdul Raziq. The actual toll is likely far higher:
With the fighting over, I was able to visit people and places nearly impossible to access before. Here was a chance to reckon with Raziq’s legacy. I met with survivors of torture inside his prisons and visited morgues where skeletons had been unearthed from desert graves. Like a great tree in a storm, the republic had toppled and exposed the hidden places among its roots. The American war was far more brutal than we had known.
…
The scale of Raziq’s abuses, carried out with American support, was shocking. But the fact that they seem to have brought security to Kandahar has even more disturbing implications. Raziq’s story complicates the comforting belief that brutality always backfires and undermines the U.S. military’s claim to have fought according to international law. Raziq’s violence was effective because it had a logic particular to the kind of civil war that the United States found in Afghanistan, one where the people, and not the terrain, were the battlefield. The reasons for this are well documented by scholars of civil war and counterinsurgency but glossed over by our generals and politicians and obscured by the myths of American exceptionalism and our righteous war on terror.
But Raziq saw those reasons clearly. He murdered and tortured because he believed it was the only way to win against the Taliban. And America helped him do it.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/10/17/americas-monster/
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