Are you interested in politics and foreign affairs? Would you love to embark on a great adventure, but don’t have the time to spend or the gumption to stroll into who-knows-what? Then join Brian on his amazing escapade. Read this book and you can be right there with him as he makes his way around the world and through modern history, interviewing those in the know about the effects of some of the decisions our leaders have made, hopefully with the effect of pushing us to do better in our present circumstances. Brian provides helpful information along the way, but generally lets you come to your own conclusions — high-level analysis is for the most part reserved for the Afterword. There are no easy answers to questions of how and when the US should inject itself into difficult situations in far-flung places. But understanding what’s gone wrong in the past is a good place to start.
This book puts our foreign policy mis-adventures in a completely new light. Amazing chutzpah from a journeyman journalist who managed to get himself around the world and back — including two active war zones. From taking one of the most powerful Imams in Afghanastan over his appalling incitement of violence that lead to a woman’s death by stoning, to a face-off with a leader of the Nicaraguan Contras, Gruber teases out what happens after the cameras, troops and attention move on — or don’t. This is a must-read for anyone who wonders about our foreign policy How did we get here? Gruber has a few answers.
Brian’s book is in the great tradition of true detectives on the beat investigating a case and chasing down the witnesses. Working the leads. Sometimes the beat is as interesting as the clues. The streets. Brian has lots to say about that as well as a brilliant analysis of his case– that is, what war and clandestine operations have done to the global population. This journey is filled with interviews with major figures in those wars and Brian stares into the heart of darkness with the eyes of Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and a clear minded Hunter S. Thompson.
War: The Afterparty is silently passionate and immensely satisfying to read. A brilliant and thoughtful new-work— Gruber glides from one country to the next, each more fascinating than the one before. He travels to several countries and interviews the most ordinary citizens about the conflicts and the wars we left behind – nuanced, yet simple to understand.
War: The Afterparty is about the true human meaning and consequences of our wars. This is not another war or political book, but of the few truly great and enduring.
The proper question Gruber ask for the readers to contemplate is “… do we accomplish in war what we say we will and were the benefits of our interventions worth the costs? After the party is over, what are the war’s real effects”?
The paperback version of the book is now available for $19.95 on Amazon. It launched during the TriBeCa Film Festival in New York on April 23, 2016. As I update the site, I will post pictures from the panel discussion on war, colonialism, George Orwell and Myanmar.
The Kindle version launched two weeks later. It is $9.95 and contains some updates.
You order either or both on Amazon. Visit the author’s page and read the reviews. To review the Amazon page and to order, click here:
“WAR: The Afterparty is a round-the-world tour through countries that have received American military forces in the pursuit of freedom, democracy, justice, and the free flow of commerce. In Southeast Asia, the Greater Middle East, the Balkans and Central America, author Brian Gruber records oral histories from political and religious leaders, writers, teachers, mothers and combatants who witnessed history from the other end of the gun barrel. Do we accomplish in war what we say we will? After the party is over, what are war’s real effects? This is the story of the Afterparty, in the words of those uniquely able to make an assessment.”
The “War: The Afterparty” travel blog tracks my travels through Central America, Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Now that the project moves from the travel and interview phase to the book writing and editing phase, we will be using Tumblr as our social media publishing platform. It allows for a new, more social form of distribution, as well as seamless sharing to Facebook, Twitter and Patreon.
The Archives will stay here permanently. Check out the months of stories, interviews and travel adventures anytime. When we get closer to publication, we will likely post unedited copies of our voluminous interviews. Come visit us on Tumblr at www.tumblr.com/blog/briangruber and support the project at www.patreon.com/briangruber.
“War: The Afterparty” is now on Patreon. From the Patreon.com site, “Founded in May 2013 and based in San Francisco, California, Patreon was created to enable fans to support and engage with the artists and creators they love. Empowering a new generation of creators, Patreon is bringing patronage back to the 21st century.” The video below tells the story. The Afterparty round the world tour of the scenes of U.S. military and covert interventions was funded by a Kickstarter campaign. We raised over $10,000 via 62 backers. It was the most popular print journalism project during its campaign, the second most popular journalism project and the second most popular U.S. journalism project. Patreon will allow us to invest in editorial, production and design, as well as promotion when the book comes out later this year. You can check out the Afterparty Patreon page, and Patreon in general, at www.patreon.com/briangruber.
A useful set of charts from the National Priorities Project. 54% of discretionary spending is military. That doesn’t include numerous spending areas from homeland security to veteran’s benefits which, by some estimates bring total spending close to one trillion dollars. Veteran’s benefits account for $10 billion per year more than all discretionary medicare and health spending. A question that can’t be answered might be what costs would be saved, putting aside unfathomable human pain and suffering, if the wars necessitating the often lifetime treatment were not waged.”
As 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.
“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.
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]
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.
