10 - From Kabul to Kosovo
This past weekend I traveled to Prizren for the biggest festival in Kosovo, ‘Dokufest’. Dokufest specializes in showing short films and small or upcoming documentaries covering a variety of subjects.
The most striking was, by far, the first film shown, “Hollywood Gate”. Set to be released in the United States on July 19th of this year, it follows the daily life of the Taliban’s Air Force Commander and one of his lieutenants following the U.S. withdrawal. Naturally, he was only allowed to film what the Taliban wanted him to film because, as one soldier explained, they did not want him to dishonor the Taliban in front of China. Despite these restrictions, he was able to show the sheer scale of equipment and supplies left behind by the U.S. The film captured images of dozens of aircraft, hundreds of rifles and scopes, uniforms, equipment, medical supplies, food, armored vehicles, machine parts, and even gym equipment abandoned during the pullout.
One soldier commented that before the pullout, they did not understand U.S. technology and that the capabilities of the U.S. military were more akin to magic. He said they were shocked to finally understand the sheer amount of resources that the U.S. had at its fingertips. “If we had the resources of the CIA, the Taliban would conquer the world,” he said.
They filmed Taliban mechanics fixing aircraft and swapping parts to bring black hawks back into operation. They rebuilt jet fighters and bombers left by NATO. They distributed military supplies to special forces and filmed several training exercises.
The whole film elicited feelings of a great collapse, a post-apocalyptic scenario, or some tragic aftermath. Many scenes showed the Taliban struggle to operate modern components most Americans take for granted. For instance, the doors in the Kabul Airbase generally had key-coded locks; the Taliban have no conception of how to operate these, much less the entire security grid of the airbase, so they prop open the doors with rocks or sticks. One commented, “Don’t close the door or it will take us forever to get it open again.”
In another scene, they managed to get the electrical system in the gym working, finally activating the treadmills and other equipment that had sat in the base, which had been unused since the Americans left. They marveled at the speeds the treadmills could achieve and experimented with cable pull machines and dumbbells, trying to figure out exactly what everything was for. In another, they found a warehouse full of medical supplies and dug through the crates, looking for the expiration dates of various medicines.
In another scene, the Air Force chief mentioned that his wife was a doctor. He said that as a condition of their marriage she had to stop working, that he “forbid her to work” if she still wanted to get married. Another scene shows him altering women’s pay structure because they were not wearing the required head coverings, commenting that he hopes the legislature will soon bar women from working at all. The Air Force chief even threatened the Tajikistan Defense Minister with an invasion from Afghanistan. He expressed clearly his desire to begin conquering nearby territory.
Watching the Taliban walk the halls and corridors of a U.S. military base reminded me, eerily, of walking through Roman ruins in Europe. It felt like we were witnessing the remnants of a mighty civilization. The whole film felt like witnessing the Visigoths walk the streets of Rome after its first sacking in over 800 years.
The Taliban clearly want to expand; they said as much in the film with their threats to Tajikistan and their desire to “conquer” and expand their territory. Most of us understand that the way we left Afghanistan was an extreme blunder. Leaving over $7 billion in equipment to get lost in time is one thing; leaving over $7 billion in equipment to fall into the hands of some of the most dangerous and radical people on the planet is another. I hope we can learn from these mistakes so that our withdrawal is marked in history as our “Teutoburg Forrest”, as just a really bad mess up, and not the beginning of letting the ‘barbarians inside the gates,’ so to speak.
