Opinion: A rather ominous way to mark the 16th anniversary of Afghanistan War

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October 7 marks the 16th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan.

But there was an ominous way to mark the anniversary of the United States’ longest war: Five US troops were injured in an apparent suicide bomb attack outside the US military base in Bagram on September 11, about 50 kilometers north of Kabul.

I have made more flights in and out of Kabul than I care to count. The first time, was more than 15 years ago. It was one year after the US sent its troops in after the 9/11 attacks.

Back then, the US was welcomed with open arms. Kabul was relatively safe after the Taliban had been driven out, or at least driven underground.

Afghans often came up to me in the street, saying they believed this would be the first time in well over two decades that they would have peace.

Man on a hillside wearing body armor was taken in Logar Province in April of 2014. His dangerous job is to locate land mines laid by the Taliban and where there are mines, to paint rocks white. Logar is the site of a large deposit of copper, purchased by a Chinese conglomerate. However, the company has had little success mining due to the constant violence in the Taliban stronghold. /CGTN Photo‍

It didn’t work out that way.

The US shifted its focus to a war against Saddam Hussein; and the Taliban regrouped.

I went back to Afghanistan in 2011 for a year, but not as a journalist – as a diplomat working to rebuild the TV, radio, and film industries.

The US State Department had a plan, a sort of civilian-surge to help the nation rebuild from the ground up. The focus was on the rule of law, cracking down on corruption, getting the nation to accept the belief that girls needed to be in school to receive an education.

As much as anything my boss at the time told me it was a way to finally give Afghans hope.

Smoke rises from the site of a blast and gunfire between Taliban and Afghan forces in Kabul, Afghanistan on March 1, 2017. /CFP Photo

Anything working?

It was a noble idea – but years later, I can find few if any of my colleagues who were in Afghanistan who believed the costly measures provided any significant progress.

I vividly remember talking to a long time State Department employee at a July 4th gathering (the US Independence Day). I told him I was proud of some of the things we had been able to achieve.

He looked wide-eyed at me and said, “You can’t believe any of this is working, can you?”

To many working to rebuild the nation, corruption among Afghan officials was a problem just as big as the Taliban. I no longer felt that over-riding goodwill that welcomed me back in 2002.

In fact, September 11 was always a tense day. Routinely the US bases, the Embassy and its satellite offices would receive cautionary emails, warning the Taliban would probably use the anniversary as a chance to launch some kinds of attack to make a statement.

They usually did, with varying degrees of success.

I left Kabul and the State Department in early February 2012 returning home less optimistic than when I arrived a year earlier. I was able to go back and cover the Presidential Election, the first peaceful transfer of power in Afghanistan that anyone can remember.

Afghans literally risked their lives to go to the polls.

We spent time with the growing Afghan army. Training was no longer being run by Americans: It was Afghans training Afghans.

The election went off peacefully.

But later, Afghanistan lost a key province in the north to the Taliban, and the phrase no one wanted to utter – civil war – was being openly discussed.

Sean Callebs (the author) was in the back of an armored vehicle in the late summer of 2011. He was working with the US Army in an effort to locate areas where the US government could build 80-meter broadcast towers. The goal was to build a number of towers and put tv, and radio transmitters on them, so Afghans could compete with harsh rhetoric coming from the Taliban. The last he heard, the program to build the towers was abandoned. / CGTN Photo

A grim future

Afghanistan was a decade and a half old problem that didn’t seem to have a solution during the most recent US Presidential Election.

At the time, Donald Trump said “it was time to get US troops out of the country.”

But the quagmire won’t release its grip on US military, troops, and money.

I still have friends who have had numerous rotations into Afghanistan.

They believe the Afghan army has or is losing the will to fight for itself, and that sending in a few thousand more US troops will do little more than add to the list of American casualties.

China and Pakistan have been trying to find a way through political and economic means to find a peaceful way to move forward in Afghanistan, but you would never know that by following most Western news outlets.

October 2018 will mark one more trip around the sun while fighting rages on in Afghanistan – and at this point, the outcome is no more clear than it was back the first time I stepped on Kabul soil in 2002.

(The author is a senior reporter with CGTN America based in Washington, DC. The opinion here is his, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.)