Anyone who has read Joseph Conrad’s HEART OF DARKNESS or seen APOCALYPSE NOW, the film adaptation of Conrad’s story, is struck by the words “the horror, the horror” that are spoken by the AWOL US Commander and mass murderer played in the movie by Marlon Brando. Many do not understand – but a veteran who has to recover from the shattering experience of war and cope with what he or she has been through – UNDERSTANDS.
The “HORROR” refers to the concept of waging war using the most hideous forms of torture and murder that the human mind can conceive of. Only by employing the most ruthless brutality can a war be won. Unfortunately there is much truth to this grim concept.
In Afghanistan, we witnessed nearly every chapter in the string of wars since 1985 – the Soviet invasion, the Civil War, the takeover by the Taliban and al Qaeda, and now the US-NATO military effort against a re-surging Taliban.
As a documentary journalist one sees and learns that whatever side you may travel with, one thing is always the same – when a soldier faces an enemy day after day in fierce combat, he or she becomes increasingly numb to the horror, and little by little begins to pray for the numbness.
The enemy may have blown the legs off your buddy, tortured him to death or butchered an Afghan civilian, perhaps even a child – so you don’t want to think of your enemy as a human being. Better to think of him as little more than a vicious animal that wants to kill you and your friends any way it can.
When the Soviets found that “standard” war tactics were not working well against the Afghan civilians who supported the Mujahidin, they quickly adopted the tactics of horror. Sowing land mines, dropping explosive toys for children, running over civilians – slowly - with their tank treads, and dropping people from helicopters at great heights so that the villagers could see and hear the victims scream as they fell. The rank and file Soviet soldier – who had been told he would be fighting American, Israeli and Egyptian soldiers - grew more and more disturbed by the horrors that their special Speznaz’ units were inflicting on these poor civilians.
The Afghan resistance, the Mujahidin, fought back in their traditional well proven guerilla fashion - slipping silently into Soviet camps at night and slitting throats or ambushing Soviet convoys, only to disappear immediately into the rocks and crevices of this harsh land. The Soviets soldiers grew despondent as their own dead mounted to nearly 40,000 and they continued to witness the atrocities inflicted on Afghan civilians. They began drinking heavily and taking narcotics to numb themselves. The Soviet military was in Afghanistan for ten years and by the end of the war their tour of duty had been cut to three months.
When the American military arrived after 9/11 and destroyed the Taliban regime, the Afghan people – who hated the Taliban - received them warmly. Perhaps, they thought, the US was finally going to live up to its promises of rebuilding their destroyed country in appreciation for helping the US win the Cold War.
But the US had come to wage war against America’s enemies, not particularly to help the Afghan people rise up from the ashes. As the years have continued and the Afghan people have seen little improvement in their lot, they’ve begun to view the American military effort as another occupation, different - but not completely different - from the Soviet occupation.
Ernest Hemingway once wrote that "war itself, no matter what the justification, is a crime."
Are events such as urinating on dead enemies a war crime, as some startled Americans have suggested? Or are they just another way of a soldier’s attempt to de-humanize that enemy? In an age that has seen the birth of the world-wide web and the cell-phone camera, behavior that we would ordinarily never be aware of is now available to everyone – everything from small, disgusting acts to real war crimes such as Abu Ghraib and the filmed Taliban de-capitation of Daniel Pearl.
In Pul-I-Charki prison outside Kabul, the Soviets and the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul and then the Taliban tortured and killed thousands upon thousands of innocent Afghans. I managed to grab shots of the prison during the brief time it was not being used. But in 2005 the US took it over.
How does one equate something such as urinating on a dead enemy with water board torturing of a living enemy? The first is simply an ugly and sad event – the other, according to the Geneva Convention, is a war crime. In the final analysis, as Hemingway wrote, war itself, no matter what justification, is THE crime. Sadly, The HORROR is alive and well.
- Jim Burroughs
Co-filmmaker of Shadow of Afghanistan