LITTLE ROCK — We were putting up the tents when Pakistani police pulled up and told us we might get killed if we camped there.
Four guys in a British lump of a car, they’d driven out from Peshawar to warn us. No “fees” or “permits” were demanded, though doubtless they worried about the political implications of a dozen or so British and American corpses showing up between Peshawar and the Khyber Pass, where we were headed in our decrepit little Mercedes bus.
“Very dangerous to camp here,” one said.
“Why?” I asked. It looked okay to me-farmland and trees, green in April but turning dusty as the rains got further behind us. A lovely evening in 1969, a peaceful year in that part of Asia.
“This area is not under government control,” he said.
What an amazing notion, I thought-not under government control.
“Tribal territory. Very dangerous. Much fighting.”
What were they fighting about?
“They fight.”
I paid attention. In Vietnam I’d learned how easy it was to get killed in some of the most beautiful landscape on Earth.
The Brits on the bus did not pay attention. With the confidence-defiant naivete, really-that had once conquered the world, they began muttering: Preposterous . . . rubbish . . . to think we’d strike the tents on the basis of some rumor. . . .
So we stayed. That night, I woke to the venerable music of a firefight-rifles, machine guns, grenades-maybe 500 yards away. It went on for a while but came no closer. It ended. I went back to sleep.
The next evening we arrived at the Khyber Pass, where a sign warned in English: “Do Not Enter the Pass After Sundown-Bandits.”
Clearly, not under government control.
It was sundown, and in a teahouse by the road weathered men in robes were on the floor saying their evening prayers, but not before taking their rifles off their shoulders.
Our British companions insisted we enter the pass. We got through. In Kabul the next day I noticed rifles on pedestrians, as common as briefcases on K Street in D.C., old bolt-action .303 Enfields the British had carried before they lost their dominion over palm and pine.
I concluded that the Afghans got into a lot of firefights and suspected it was a way of life, much like lack of government control. When the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979 I predicted they would get their balalaikas handed to them. They did.
Aha! you say. But the Russians never tried a counterinsurgency strategy like America’s, winning hearts and minds, building bridges, building what smart guys in Washington-the ones in charge of losing our wars-call “infrastructure.”
I’d done some counterinsurgency work as a corporal in the Marine Corps.
This was in 1966. I was at Chu Lai, south of Danang. We gave away truckloads of flour, cement and roofing tin. The Vietnamese were cool with their thanks, but that was understandable. We’d gotten a warm response from one village chief we worked with until the Viet Cong worked with him too, by cutting off his head. I think of him when I read of Taliban reprisals against Afghans who work with Americans.
One day our 105mm howitzer battery was particularly noisy, taking out a Viet Cong hamlet. Then came a cease-fire order. It seemed it wasn’t a Viet Cong but a friendly hamlet. We’d leveled it.
Sorry ’bout that, as we’d say when things got especially ugly.
The colonel asked us to smooth it over, get those hearts and minds back. Cement? Flour?Roofing tin? Never happen, colonel.
I think of that day every time I hear about a drone lighting up a number of Afghan women and children, about our fighter planes taking out a wedding party.
Try counter insurging that one, I say.
When I went back to Chu Lai as a journalist in 1999, my guide told me that the coolness I’d noticed might have been more than fear of reprisal or resentment at the leveling of a friendly village.
In this area during the war, he said, “very high revolutionary spirit, very high.”
His face seemed to imply there was a joke, and he pitied me because I was the butt of it.
Indeed, local legend had it that the Viet Cong used our cement and roofing tin to build not houses but underground launchers for the rockets they fired back at us. Even so, it was nice when two women thanked me for our longago generosity with our medical care. Hearts, minds, rockets.
We paid off one village chief with an old French sedan, a Panhard. We had to deliver it by ship because the village had no roads. The chief couldn’t drive it anywhere, of course, but we were there to oblige.
I think of that Panhard when I read about the money and goods we use to buy the Afghans-the crane and gasoline we gave, for instance, so they wouldn’t attack us while we were evacuating the Korengal Valley after spending years there winning no hearts or minds. How many suicide bombs could Taliban cars deliver with that gasoline?
Sorry ’bout that.
Every day the news from Afghanistan suggests that our empire, dominion, infrastructure and counterinsurgency are having another hard time, along the lines of Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia and Iraq. Having been in both Vietnam and Afghanistan, I’m not surprised.
Those Pakistani policemen knew what they were talking about.
Henry Allen, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2000, was a Post editor and reporter for 39 years.
Editorial, Pages 12 on 06/22/2010