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Cambodia•War: The Afterparty

This Is Where It Ends

February 3, 2015 by briangruber No Comments

imageAs I started research on the countries visited, collating background material and transcribing past interviews, I happened on this advice from Graham Greene, in John Perkins’ “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.”

He looked at me intensely. “The important thing is to write about things that matter.”

Well then. The purpose of “War: The Afterparty” is to write about things that matter. Specifically, the real outcomes of our interventions, whether we achieve our desired outcomes, and an assessment of the human and financials costs versus benefits of war.

Now that the travel is done, I am planning the when, where, how (and why) of posting interviews and essays and social media, of how to use the Patreon platform, of how to deliver value for my Kickstarter backers. Thank you for coming along for the ride. Expect a lot of provocative, timely material, culminating in the publication and distribution of the book this year. For those who read this after its initial distribution to Patreon patrons, you can support the project by pledging at www.patreon.com/briangruber.

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I didn’t cry at the ‘killing fields’ memorial on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, but I did at Prison S-21, now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Perhaps because the villagers at the Choeung Ek memorial tore the place down, enraged, once the Khmer Rouge were in full flight, destroying the buildings, the torture spaces, the detritus of mass murder.

I write this at the end of the “War: The Afterparty” world tour, having talked to the witnesses of a half century of U.S. military incursions. Most astonishing to me is how people want to move on, to forgive, to focus on the future. It’s fitting to end the trip here in Cambodia, the endgame of human cruelty. Because forgetting is not the antidote, lest the cycle of violence continue.

A day after arriving in Cambodia, I watched the movie most widely associated with the genocide, “The Killing Fields,” with Sam Waterston, Haing Ngor, John Malkovich, Julian Sands and the late, great Spalding Gray. Phnom Penh has three guesthouse/ theatre/ cafes called Flicks 1, 2 and 3. The seats are the equivalent of couches, it’s very cozy, though I’m not sure the films are licensed. “The Killing Fields” plays once each day, without end.  I liked Phnom Penh. A step or two behind highly developed Ho Chi Minh City, but a vibrant, historic city. The palace complex, where the great Khmer royals lived post-Angkor, was the most visually stunning highlight of the trip. The Khmer Rouge plotted Year Zero after their takeover in the sacred Silver Pagoda, camped out like schoolboys away on holiday. Pol Pot, the nom de guerre of Saloth Sar, Brother Number One, chose to sleep inside the pagoda in a makeshift bed, in an area usually reserved for statues of Buddha.

 

The most chilling images to me were not the mass graves but the fierce look on the faces of the Khmer Rouge fighters. Young, uneducated country boys with no other personal prospects, gleefully murdering and tormenting strangers. True believers to a purist ideology, like the rural hillbillies of ISIS, only sporting differently-styled red kerchiefs.

It’s hard to find interviews with witnesses of the four-year Khmer Rouge killing spree. So many are dead. The numbers are staggering and it is an obscenity to give ranges. 1.5 million, coulda been 3. From a quarter to a third of the country, dead. The most definitive estimates?  20,000 mass graves. Between 1.4 million and 2.2 million killed, half due to executions, the rest from starvation and disease. An additional 650,000 Cambodians starved to death in 1979 and 1980 due to the after effects of Khmer Rouge policy.

Cambodians, by the way, pronounce Khmer as ‘ke-my,’ as opposed to ‘ke-mare.’

 

At the Opera Cafe, a tony little bistro near my Phnom Penh hotel, I chatted up the waiter. There was no else in the shop, a few patrons sitting outside. He was handsome, educated, thirtyish. I had just visited the S-21 prison. He told me, well, the Khmer Rouge had both bad and good points. They fought the Vietnamese, after all. I had to restrain myself, besides being in the uncomfortable position of lecturing a Cambodian on his national nightmare.

President Richard M. Nixon approved bombing sorties in Cambodia to disrupt North Vietnamese supply lines to South Vietnam. The Cambodian incursion was illegal, and secret for a while. The four students shot by Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent State University on May 4th, 1970, were walking to class or participating in demonstrations against the war in Cambodia. Late that year, Nixon expressed his dissatisfaction with the effect of B-52 raids.”They have got to go in there and I mean really go in,” he told National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. “I want them to hit everything. I want them to use the big planes, the small planes, everything they can that will help out there, and let’s start giving them a little shock.” Operation Freedom Deal alone delivered a quarter million tons of bombs on Cambodia, eighty thousand tons released in the last month and a half of the campaign ending in August of 1973.

Best academic estimates indicate that, in all, 2.7 million tons of bombs were dropped on Cambodia, in 230,000 sorties on 113,000 targets, resulting in between 50,000 and 150,000 civilian deaths. Opinions are mixed on the causal relationship between the bombing campaigns and the growth in support for the Khmer Rouge insurgency. In the end, blame for the killing spree lies firmly in the hands of Cambodia’s indigenous murderers. Next in line come Stalin and Mao, the KR’s primary ideological parents. But it’s clear that the country was destabilized by the Vietnam/ American war, and without those years of conflict, the chain of events leading to the KR takeover doesn’t happen.

S-21 prison is a half hour walk from my hotel. Phnom Penh hotel standards are about two decades behind other Asian capitals. While I’m used to all manner of amenity deficits in my travels, my first hotel choice is just a bit rough. My new place won’t win any awards, but at least it’s perched along the Mekong River. Walking, the native human exercise, is my primary fitness program, and I walk the riverfront often. The ubiquitous motorbike and tuk-tuk touts demand I let them take me to the prison. It’s creepy that the genocide monuments are the most popular tourist destinations. “You want I take you killing fields, you want girl, what you want?”

I walk past the prison and have to backtrack. Apple’s map app is mostly useless in Cambodia, and the signage is discrete. First moment of horror: the prison is a converted high school, consistent with the regime’s suspicion of bourgeois education. Schooling ended in Cambodia, renamed Kampuchea, the day the communists rolled into the capital. There are signposts explaining the prison’s history throughout. The cells are visible from the entrance. I buy my ticket, inexpensive but, as in Vietnam, significantly more expensive for foreigners, which I can accept.

I don’t know why, but as I walk into the prison yard, I start weeping uncontrollably. I’m crying again as I write this. I’ll take a short break.

The cells are tiny. They must be unimaginably hot much of the year. There are torture implements throughout. The school exercise facilities are repurposed to torture machines. If you survive the torture, you are trucked off to Choeung Ek, like cattle for slaughter.

There is a sign over a pub on Monivong Boulevard visible from one of the cell blocks. I took a picture but was too disturbed to keep it, an invitation for tourists to come enjoy drink specials after their visit. Prison workers living on the boulevard reported that they heard the shrieks of tortured prisoners at night.
The Khmer Rouge were a relatively insignificant force of 20,000 in the sixties. As the violence of the Vietnam War spilled over the border, and the Ho Chi Minh Trail supplied southern forces through Laos and Cambodia, American B-52 bombers and special forces expanded the scope of the fight. Prince/ King-Father/ Prime Minister Norodom Sihanouk played a deadly game, condemning the bombing publicly while allowing American access privately Finally,  in a state car on the way to Moscow airport, Alexei Kosygin turned to Sihanouk on the 18th of March, 1970, breaking the news that General Lon Nol and the National Assembly deposed him. After choosing to join forces with the Khmer Rouge with the hope of a return to power, the historic love of  the Khmer people for their god-king kicked in, and the KR ranks swelled to 100,000. Those young farm boys  had never heard of Das Kapital much less Josef Stalin or Mao Tse-Tung.
The S-21 cells come in three varieties, brick, wood or larger rooms, which were crammed wall-to-wall with prisoners. You arrived bewildered, accused of imaginary crimes. Much of the torture process is to get you to come up with something, anything, to stop the pain. And if you’re not convincing enough, more torture. Until your dearest hope is to be carted away to Choeung Ek, cattle awaiting slaughter. Then, there, some final indignity and torment, then brutal murder.  There were more than 150 Khmer Rouge execution centers. S-21 housed 1,000-1,500 at a time and an estimated 17-000 to  20,000 of its prisoners died, mostly at Choeung Ek.
The site of the prison is Toul Sleng. The Phnom Penh Post described the etymology in its May 2, 1997 edition.
According to the Khmer dictionary published by the Khmer Buddhist Institute in 1967, the word ‘Toul’ is a noun. It means the ground which is higher in level than that around it. The word ‘Sleng’ can be a noun and also an adjective. When the word ‘Sleng’ functions as an adjective, it means “supplying guilt” (del oye tos) or “bearing of guilt” (del noum oye mean tos) or “enemy of disease” (del chea sat-troy neng rok). As a noun, ‘Sleng’ means the two kinds of indigenous Khmer poisonous trees. The first kind is ‘Sleng Thom’ or ‘Big Sleng’ which have big trunks, leaves, and fruits. The second type is ‘Sleng Vine’ which is shaped almost like vine with small fruits. They are both poisonous. Therefore, from the above translation we can derive the definition that Toul Sleng literally means: a poisonous hill or a place on a mound to keep those who bear or supply guilt toward Angkar. 

 

Bullets were not to be wasted on you. You were killed with blunt instruments. The audio tour of the ‘killing fields’  includes an interview with one of the executioners, Him Huy, who gives an account of the methods he used to kill arrivals from S-21. Prisoners were led in small groups to ditches that were dug in advance by a team stationed permanently at the site. From the Museum records:
They were told to kneel down and then they were clubbed on the neck with tools such as cart axle, hoe, stick, wooden club or whatever else served as a weapon of death. They were sometimes stabbed with knives or swords to save using bullets, which were deemed to be too expensive. Duch said: “We had instructions from the party on how to kill them, but we didn’t use bullets and usually, we slit their throats. We killed them like chickens.” Him Huy, who took the prisoners to be killed at Choeung Ek recalled,”They were ordered to kneel down at the edge of the hole. Their hands were tied behind them. They were beaten on the neck with an iron ox-cart axle, sometimes with one blow, sometimes with two… ”

Fortunately, as with the Taliban, the Khmer Rouge were so incompetent that their control of the country deteriorated. And, being the hopelessly over-confident and deluded morons that they were, they picked a fight with the more militarized, well-provisioned and seasoned Vietnamese Army. The current leader of Cambodia, Hun Sen, rode into Cambodia on a Vietnamese tank in 1979. He became head of state at 32, youngest in the world at the time, and, now, one of the world’s longest serving leaders.
He is a former Khmer Rouge officer, serving as Eastern Region Battalion Commander.
Still smarting from its humiliating departure from Saigon in 1975, the United States refused to recognize the Vietnamese-controlled Cambodian government in 1979. It recognized the Khmer Rouge as the only legitimate representative of the Cambodian people until a UN peace accord was signed over a decade later.
I’ve been in Cambodia for three weeks. No one wants to talk about the past. I talk to young people and they claim limited knowledge of those years from their school days. Trials for the Khmer Rouge leaders have taken decades, resulting in the guilty verdicts of only two or three just last year.  
Pol Pot, the monster who devised the reinvention of Cambodian society, eliminating currency, schooling and most anyone with an education or knowledge of a foreign language, died shortly after hearing over Voice of America radio that his KR comrades were going to hand him over in April of 1998. His wife said he died in his sleep. Others are convinced it was suicide, or murder by the Ta Mok faction that was keeping him under house arrest in the jungle. 
His body was burned on a funeral pyre consisting of old tires and trash.
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Reading time: 11 min
Afghanistan•War: The Afterparty

Part Two of Interview With Kabul’s ‘White Hat Hacker’ On the Future of Afghanistan

by briangruber No Comments

Read Part One of the interview at http://briangruber.tumblr.com/post/109933161004/kabuls-white-hat-hacker-on-afghan-cybersecurity

“X” is a cybersecurity and programming staffer in the Afghan government. We agreed to meet for pizza near Shar-e-Naw Park and to keep his identity anonymous in the interview. He is known in Kabul IT circles as a ‘White Hat Hacker.’ This interview was transcribed by Afterparty editor Anaka Allen.

Brian: So what about your personal stance as an Afghan and patriot and and educated smart guy who could probably find great opportunity elsewhere. US forces leaving, Taliban wants to take control again. What do you see for 2015, how worried are you about your own security and the security of the country? Putting network stuff aside.

WHH: Well as I told you the other day, in Kabul everyday something is happening. And the day after that something else happens. (A teenager blew himself up at a school play at Kabul’s Lycee Esqetlal school).

BG: A few days before the suicide bombing, I went by there and took pictures. It’s very centrally located.

WHH: Security is our every worry.

BG: How worried are you that it will get much worse and that the Taliban can take over the country again?

WHH: Well if the system goes like this, like now, definitely there may be some side effects. But, they are not powerful so much that they would take over Afghanistan.

BG: Cause a lot of people are sick of what they saw when they took over. My sense is that there was civil war, fighting and finally here’s these nice Islamic fellows who just want to teach the Quran and create peace, so there was some maybe suspicion but people said, hey, give them a chance. And then they saw these guys are fucking the worst.

WHH: It’s not about Islam. In America we have Muslims, in India we have Muslims, in France we have Muslims. They are living peacefully. It’s a political game. It’s not Islam. They are Pakistani far-side groups. They have support of other countries. It’s not about Islam, they’re just using Islam.

image

BG: What percentage of Taliban fighters, activists, genuinely believe they are conducting a holy jihad, they are God’s chosen force.

WHH: The people who are on the lower level. Uneducated. The ones who bomb these things, they’re injected with some kind of material. They don’t know what they’re doing.

BG: I mean come on, 16 years old.

WHH: If you check his blood, in a lab, check it out, there might be some kind of chemical.

BG: Some kind of methamphetamine, something, drugs.

WHH: I don’t know, something.

BG: Someone said to me yesterday, the guy has got to be Pakistani or educated at the madrassas there, because an Afghan would not do that.

WHH: Might be true. But our intelligence is not quite good.

BG: Why do you think the United States allows an ally to work against its interests that aggressively over many years? Is it fear of nuclear weapons control? Is it that we need Pakistan for an ally? I’m reading one book by Steve Coll called Ghost Wars. He’s writing about the Pakistan covert involvement with the Taliban 15 years ago. With the United States pushing all this money through ISI, through Pakistan. So why do you think the U.S. puts up with that?

WHH: In the first, there were Russians in Afghanistan. I guess the US created this project.

BG: Cold War.

WHH: Cold War. Created Al Qaeda to fight the Russians.

BG: Created a monster.

WHH: But then this monster went rogue. America wasn’t able to control it anymore. Because they were uneducated people. Suddenly they changed their decision and said I’m not following your orders anymore.

BG: So what you said is what I hear uniformly, which is that Taliban are too weak and too despised by too many people to take over all of Afghanistan again. Having said that, is the threat that they will simply destabilize and create misery for a long time?

WHH: The big problem in Afghanistan is that it’s a house that doesn’t have walls around it. So they can destabilize sometimes, create some kind of incident which would show that Afghanistan is destabilized, but it won’t be critical.

BG: Among your friends, people your age, level of education, professionals, what’s the attitude towards this 13 year occupation? I mean certainly no one wants to be occupied, no one wants foreign military in their country, historically Afghans don’t like foreign military. Occasionally, there is a civilian killing, there’s frustrations with not enough money going to poor people, and to average Afghans. So in your community, your social network, what’s peoples’ attitudes towards these 13 years of occupation or intervention? Good things? Stay longer? Americans go home? Thank you very much for what you’ve done, now go home?

WHH: I would say like we have some improvements. We’re thankful now. We still need some support. I’m not saying only Afghans are dying, Americans are also dying here. They have parents, they have family.  I will just tell you a small answer. NSA is able to create like a (unclear). There are some other agencies behind these people, the Islamic radical people, that America cannot fight that country directly. Like Pakistan…it will create like an international mess. So it is like chess, it’s like an international game. That’s not part of Islam.

If you’re the guy leading the Islamic groups, you are everyday sending e-mail…you can find his router in like a millisecond. You don’t need to send a force to him, you can get him with a drone. But, you cannot do it because there are some kind of supports behind him.

BG: You’re saying, if the United States NSA is so strong and so smart, that they can get through.

WHH: I believe the NSA can crack anything in the world. Why? You didn’t ask me why.

BG: Why?

WHH: If you’re creating something, you are the owner, you know everything about it. The internet was created by DARPA…defense project right? They can crack anything.

BG: Yea, that’s a nice advantage to have. From a hypothetical point of view, what you say makes sense to me. Now I’m trying to drill down to the specifics. So you think the United States can’t go to Pakistan and say, “Hey motherfucker, our soldiers are dying, you’re destabilizing the world, we’re giving you all this money, time to come to some agreement…”

WHH: I believe they can. America can do that. But something bigger will happen if they go there and tell them, “Hey motherfucker, don’t do that.”…but some powerful countries…they would start by saying, “Don’t touch our friends,” then at the end what would happen? World War III would happen. That’s why I guess America is avoiding to make this bigger.

BG: Because Afghanistan’s important, but World War III is more important. Afghanistan security at this restaurant is important, but avoiding Pakistani nuclear weapons hitting New York is more important….

WHH: But I hope there would be politicals talking with them so they could solve it by talking with each other.

BG: Well, they’ve been talking a long time. How long do you need to talk? [Laughs]

What do you think is the state of the Afghan army and police force? Do you think that they are going to do a credible job next year of keeping security in the country?

WHH: Well, you don’t only need troops to do the job. You need to have some accessories like you need good guns and good armor. You need good surveillance. Surveillance first to find out what the enemy is doing.

BG: Which I think the general sense is, the United States is not going to stop providing that, so I think surveillance, hardware…

WHH: United States has given them everything, but there is not capacity. I’m telling you for 13 years America is trying to make us something, but the middleware is trying to kill it.

BG: And by middleware, you mean middle people.

WHH: So Americans try and America is giving money.

BG: Do you have friends or people you know who have a really different attitude than you, and they’re saying, “American imperialists, infidels occupying our country, get them out of here, we want them gone completely, we can do fine on our own?” Do you have any friends who have that point of view?

WHH: No, because my friends that I talk to are educated.

BG: So educated professional people do not have that point of view? Like I told you this guy from Herat, 65 years old, former mujaheddin, really wonderful smart guy, but probably uneducated, certainly doesn’t have the modern education that you do. He says that it’s time for Americans to go, we can actually do better with security without the United States, and he says the United States is behind the Taliban. The first part you probably wouldn’t agree with, the second part is, he said, “America is behind the Taliban,” which I found too strong a statement without context, because, he said, “If America really wanted to find the Taliban, really wanted to shut down the Taliban they could do it overnight. They’re providing them with funding.” And I thought, really? The United States is directly funding the Taliban? I can’t imagine any strategy that would make sense to drive that.

WHH: I wouldn’t exactly agree with him. I guess the other parties put in Taliban, but because America cannot fight with them directly, that’s why these guys are not fighting with them.

BG: What was your impression of Massoud? Do you think Massoud would have been a good leader?

WHH: He was a great leader.

BG: Heroic guy.

WHH: He was not corrupted…he was a good leader.

BG: I stayed up one night studying Massoud. It’s an incredible story, of course, tragic. Incredible personality, and I don’t know if it’s true, but the things he wrote about his vision for Afghan culture…about women’s rights, freedom of speech, open culture…he was a bright guy.

WHH: They killed him.

BG: Two days before 9/11.

WHH: Everything is a plan.

BG: My understanding is, because Bin Laden knew that he needed Mullah Omar’s protection, then he’s going to say, “I’m going to do this for you, and then you protect me.” Do you think that was the quid pro quo, or no?

WHH: I don’t know. I’m not going to say directly. [laughs]

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Reading time: 9 min
Afghanistan•War: The Afterparty

Interview with Pakistani American Marketer Shahid Butt on the Taliban, Islam, Afghanistan and The Real Pakistan Brand

by briangruber No Comments

Shaid ButtI worked with Shahid Butt at Charter Cable years ago, a smart, congenial fellow and accomplished marketer. As I posted interviews from my swing through the Islamic world, and pointed remarks about Pakistan’s role in the emergence of the Taliban, he offered some unique insights. I talked with Shahid over Skype one night from my guesthouse room in Kabul. We began by talking about Pakistan’s role in supporting the mujeheddin jihad against the Soviet invasion in the 1980’s. The interview was transcribed by “War: The Afterparty” book project editor and intern Anaka Allen.

Shahid: In Pakistan right around that time, you could rent AK47s by the hour, there were just so many weapons. There was a military parade in one of the Arab countries; I think it may have been Qatar. As part of that military parade there was these weapons that were on display and as the U.S. was there, you know they were invited.

Brian: Sure. And they were like, those are our fucking weapons. [laughs]

S: And they were trying to figure out where did these come from? And they realized, oh shit, this is stuff that was supposed to go to Pakistan to go over next door to fight the Soviets. And when they found that trail, all of a sudden in Rawalpindi, there was a huge explosion where the munitions dump, in the garrison where people were living. This had to be, Brian, in 1981, yeah. And so people were just syphoning off weapons and selling them to anybody else.

B: You put that many weapons out in the world over so many years, and so many conflicts and the world just becomes a much more violent place.

S: WWII was the only war after which the factories that were converted to make wartime stuff, didn’t go back to making what they were making before. So, now you have this huge production capacity making stuff and if you want to keep people employed you have to sell the stuff and then they have to use the stuff; that’s why we will have wars, otherwise it’s jobs.

Here’s what so bizarre for someone like me, and you know, being a marketing guy, I try to break it down, I try to re-orient the issue. As I see it, we have a branding problem. Because if you look at the brand of Pakistan, the white part of the flag was put there on purpose, I think it’s two-fifths of the flag, to represent that there are minorities in the country who are equal citizens. And what we have basically done is, we fuck with all kinds of — pick a minority, we fuck with it now. So that’s off-brand. If you look at our version of the declaration of independence, I think there’s 230 words in there, and 40% of the words talk about protecting minorities and, again, we’re fucking that up. So, you got that issue off-brand. Second, if you say that the country was created to help the Muslims of India achieve economic prosperity, it was an economic need for a group of people, it wasn’t a religious need. And we’ve moved off of that and become this Islamic state, which is not what we’re supposed to have been. We were supposed to have been a place where the Muslims of India could have economic equality and prosperity and get access to jobs and bank loans and all that kind of stuff, education, so we fuck that up. The third thing is, if you even do convert their thinking to, hey, we’re an Islamic state, the concepts of Islam, you know we’re supposed to, let’s say, follow the teachings of the prophet. The prophet married a business woman, right? An educated, working woman, and if that’s supposed to be who we’re emulating then what the fuck? [laughs] Why do more women not have opportunity to go to school, to work in the workplace? So, we’re off target there.

B: Is that a more of a cultural, national thing than a theological thing?

S: You look at Saudi Arabia, they’re the worse at it. Because at least we’ve had a prime minister who is a woman, at least we’ve had women in parliament. Part of it is cultural, pre-Islam, and part of it is another way to keep minorities down. Women are minorities, let’s keep them down. Number two, if you look at the religion, the first interaction, according to tradition, that the prophet had with Gabriel; the first words that were said to the prophet were, “Read.” And the prophet said, “I can’t read.” The angel Gabriel again said, “Read.” And the prophet said, “I can’t.” So this went back and forth a couple of times and then he was inspired with the ability to read. And again the tradition is supposed to reinforce how important education is and if you look at our federal budget, and the amount of money we put towards education, it’s totally contradictory to the concept of how important education should be in the religion. So, on so many different levels we have missed our brand, we’re just off-brand, and that’s what’s causing some of these problems. And now, this blasphemy law that we have, where if I have a beef with my neighbor, I can go down to the police station, and say, “I heard him say something bad about the prophet,” and the cops have to come up and arrest me.

B: I heard a lot of stories of NATO and coalition troops in Afghanistan selecting certain people as partners, and those people would accuse neighbors or friends as a way to revenge or a competitive business advantage.

S: Exactly! And so the correlation to what you’re writing about, even though the U.S. didn’t directly attack Pakistan, the impact of the Soviet-era U.S. involvement and then how right away, right after the Soviets pulled back, all the funding stopped. Right, Charlie Wilson couldn’t even get a billion dollars anymore, or even 100 million dollars. It just stopped. So you have this country now, completely decimated, no money, the only infrastructure, the only crop that they have is poppy. And then the Afghans, I love those people, but they are brutal to each other as well. They just massacred each other. And then what happened in Pakistan is the blowback of the mujaheddin, the weapons, the drug trade. We may as well have been attacked.

B: Don’t you also acknowledge that there was some opportunism there, where, both at the time of the mujaheddin and then during the rise of the Taliban, there were people in the ISI and the Pakistani military and one or two of your leaders, who saw it as an opportunity to not only make some money, but to dominate Afghan politics and to use that conflict to their own advantage?

S: So, two things. What happens is, so you have a leader like, let’s say Zia with the Soviet problem, and then Musharraf with the 9/11 problem, who, both unpopular, both overthrowing a civilian government, now have lucked into the fact that the U.S. needs Pakistan’s help to go into Afghanistan. And so, these two leaders and their top-level ISI staff or generals, they all did whatever they could to stay in power. It’s all a matter of a few people staying in power. So if that means we fuck up the country with all these weapons, so be it, but we will stay in power. So that clearly happened, there was opportunism there. And then I read somewhere recently that the reason why the Pakistanis are so pro-Taliban in Afghanistan, or the ISI has been, is because they’re Pashto-speaking, we are Pashto-speaking, and the Indians were supporting the Uzbeks and Tajiks from the north. And since they were funding those guys, we felt we had to counterbalance that, who knows what came first, but there was a counterbalance to the support of the other ethnic groups to the north that the Indians were supporting. So to keep India’s control out of the western border, we needed to have the Taliban on our side.

B: Right, it’s a messy situation. What’s your sense of that whole border area with Waziristan and the whole Pashtun area? Is this another situation where Western powers like the British carved up things illicitly and illogically, and you basically have a nation or a tribe of people that, as I understand it, are ⅔ in Pakistan and ⅓ in Afghanistan, and that ultimately, those borders are so porous and the rule of law there is so thin, that you have this perpetual political issue that has been going on for a long time?

S: You have to go find the exact data point, but I think that the British guy who helped create the borders of Pakistan and India, for the new countries, I think he got there, he created the borders, never having been there before, and within 6 weeks he created these borders, and this is without Google. He did not know what he was doing. And so that is exactly why you have these tribes split by a line created by England. That’s exactly what happened.

B: And by the way, why would he know what he was doing? How in the world can any Brit understand 500 years of history and what’s happening in tribes where no Brit has ever walked the earth?

S: There were British folks there for a couple hundred years, right. So, there could be some people who knew, or provided input, but, I don’t think they were used.

B: I’m asking a lot of questions certain provocative passages in the Quran and certain provocative behaviors on the part of groups that are claiming them to be true believers, from the Islamic State to the Taliban, etc. Every Afghan I meet says Islam is a religion of peace, here is the way it teaches me, I don’t want to hurt a fly, here’s all the specific ways that our religion respects other religions and people and forbids bad behavior.

S: I think you have to put a lot of this stuff, in the Quran, into some kind of historical context. Yeah, there were some brutal, bloody battles, but if you look at it in context of what else is going on during those times, this was pretty mild. And, I think you can read the bible, and come up with how violent it is. You can read the Quran and come up with how violent it is. But at the end of the day, that’s not really the teaching, they’re just some stories that happened along the way. The teachings are very similar: peace, don’t hurt your neighbor, that kind of stuff. So the teachings are all really really similar. My father always used to joke, Do you ever wonder why Judaism, Christianity, Islam all came to that little strip of land in the Middle East? And I said, “No Pops, why?” He goes, “They’re the ones that need the most help.” [laughs] But the teachings are all so similar. People, throughout history I’m sure, have taken religion out of context to kill other people and to create fear. It’s just humans being humans.

Another interesting thing that I always try to struggle with is, when the prophet was dying, and he was trying to choose his successor, he could have chosen someone who was his relative, but he did not. He chose someone who was well-experienced, was older, and the learning from there is, leadership is not hereditary. Leadership is based on ability. But, when you look at all of these kingdoms, they are totally repugnant to that teaching. And even when you look at Pakistani politics, the political parties are not really parties. They are family club mafias, really. They keep on passing down from one to the other…it’s a mafia. Again, totally repugnant to that example that we were supposed to follow.

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Reading time: 10 min
Afghanistan•War: The Afterparty

Kabul’s White Hat Hacker on Afghan Cybersecurity, Corruption and Faulty Human Middleware

by briangruber No Comments

While in Kabul doing research for “War: The Afterparty,” I was approached via Facebook by “X,” a cybersecurity expert and programming staffer in the Afghan government. We agreed to meet for pizza near Shar-e-Naw Park and to keep his identity anonymous in the interview. When I mentioned our meeting to the head of a prominent national IT company, he said, “Oh, the white hat hacker?” The name stuck. This interview was transcribed by Afterparty editor Anaka Allen.

WHH: I am a computer forensics guy. I do computer investigation for the government.

BG: Who would be the main targets for cyber crime here?

WHH: For now, as I see it, our government doesn’t care about cyber crime.

BG: ’Cause they have other things to worry about.

WHH: No. They don’t know the importance of cybercrime. They say we need physical security first, but our physical security depends on cyber security. For example, our cabinet is doing planning, strategy. If your cyber is not secure, someone can get that data and give it to your enemies. An enemy that knows your plan, you cannot defeat him.

BG: Are you hopeful for Afghanistan’s security next year, with most Western security gone?

WHH: Well, I have good friends in ISAF that are cyber security specialist guys. They are really trying to help us build something. So I am hopeful.

BG: So, having the United States/ coalition expertise over the last 13 years, did that create some window of opportunity to develop certain things for the country?

WHH: Well, since the beginning, I saw them trying to do something for Afghanistan, there are people who don’t want to work, they don’t want to improve.

For example, your guys provide an advisor to a government guy at a senior management level. And I’m the guy who works at the lower level but I have a supervisor above me. You are giving me some standard materials, and I’m making a framework. But once this framework reaches to my management level, they’re saying, “You’re wasting your time.” See, there are people in the middle level who don’t want to work for their country. So, ISAF is trying, I am trying, but in the middle there are people who don’t want to work.

BG: So we gotta get rid of the old people [laughter]. Or the generation that doesn’t get it.

WHH: The generation that’s corrupted. Do you know how much money is coming every year to Afghanistan? That’s like uncountable.

BG: Uncountable. At one point, more than the national GDP, right?

WHH: That’s too much. Where does it go?

BG: You tell me, where does it go?

WHH: I’m telling you the middleware people are corrupted. They’re taking bribes, they’re not honest.

In a network, there are PCs connected to each other, then these PCs are infected by a virus. If you want to control the situation, you need to reinstall the PCs, you need to install the firewall for them. You need to monitor them continuously. You have to make the system clean. For example, we went to audit, the minister of finance has a system that collects taxes from the people. The problem is sometimes the people who are responsible for the entry in the system, they’re not registering these to the system. So the system will not work. You have to do some background check on the guy, if you’re hiring him for the job. So my idea, if someone wants to make Afghanistan a better place, you have to first make the system.

BG: And how do you do that?

WHH: For example, we have in Afghanistan, 26 ministries. You design everything for them, a single system. You give them their part. We have a system, one database, one part belongs to the minister of finance, another part to MOI, MOD and you’re doing a bit of specification for everyone. This ministry has rights to do this, this ministry has rights to this. And then they have to put their entries, and this whole system should be monitored by another agency which is like a national security agency, like NSA in America. So, if anyone is corrupting things, illegal things here, they will know this.

BG: So how much of what you’re describing is being built now? Nothing?

WHH: Nothing.

BG: Do you think Ghani and Abdullah, of course they’re not IT people, do you think they get the need for these kinds of controls?

WHH: Well maybe they want to, but as I told you…

BG: There’s mid-level people who are either incompetent or corrupt. Is that what you are saying?

WHH: The middleware people will not allow us to give the information to Ghani.

BG: ‘Will not allow us,’ that’s a strong statement. But is it because of incompetence or corruption?

WHH: I think that it’s some kind of politics, because maybe these middleware guys working for another country and doesn’t want our government to improve.

BG: So you think they are, in effect, treasonous…

WHH: Exactly.

BG: Another strong statement. Because they have either some philosophical and cultural allegiance to Iran, Pakistan, Russia or wherever, or they are actually being paid?

WHH: Being paid.

BG: That’s a serious problem. And you better be careful how aggressive you are…

WHH: Well I’m not telling these things to everyone. I’m just telling you because you would be conveying this message to the outside world. People need to hear, all the Americans are not here, but they need to know what’s going on here. We are using their money, but we are not getting their money, it’s middleware.

BG: When you say “middleware” is that sort of like a metaphor for the middle management people?

WHH: Yeah. Well what I’m trying to tell you, in conclusion, if the system is computerized, there would be less corruption.

BG: So technology is the answer at some level. One of the answers.

WHH: Yes. You have to use technology to make it right.

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Reading time: 5 min

Brian Gruber is an author, writing coach, and marketing consultant living on the Thai island of Koh Phangan. He has spent 40 years studying, leading, and founding new media companies and projects.

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