Scholars will for many years debate what led the United States to fight the longest war in its history in Afghanistan and theorize why it ended in the way it did. Some very good histories have already been written. Carter Malkasian’s The American War in Afghanistan and Craig Whitlock’s A Secret History of the War are two excellent books that provide an overview of the conflict and some good analysis of what wrong for the Americans. In processing the American experience in Afghanistan, it is critically important to listen to the stories of the participants on all sides. Ian Fritz in his compelling memoir What the Taliban Told Me provides a key perspective to understand America’s involvement in Afghanistan.

Ian Fritz has written both a coming-of-age memoir and a compelling account of his time with the US Air Force in Afghanistan. Fritz grew up as he puts it in a trailer-dwelling family in Lakeland, Florida where his paycheck delivering Chinese take-out food was often needed to pay the family’s electric bill. College seemed like an impossibility, so Fritz picked the Air Force as the best way to get out of Lakeland.

The Air Force recognized Fritz’s intelligence and interest in languages and sent him to the prestigious Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, to learn Dari and Pashto, the main languages of Afghanistan. After finishing his language training, Fritz is deployed to Afghanistan as an airborne cryptologic linguist. His job is to fly on a low-flying gunship and literally eavesdrop on conversations of people on the ground and determine whether they were Taliban fighters or just everyday Afghan civilians trying to survive in the midst of a combat zone.

Fritz’s job was to translate what he heard and then share it with his team who would then take the appropriate military actions. In theory, Fritz was just a technician transcribing what he heard and passing it up the chain of command.  However, in reality he literally had the power of life and death over his fellow soldiers, Taliban fighters and Afghan civilians. If he failed to interpret what he heard correctly his comrades in arms or innocent civilians could killed. This is an overwhelming burden, and it clearly weighed heavily on Fritz.

Over his two tours of duty in Afghanistan, Fritz listens to hundreds of hours of conversations both intense combat related and everyday mundane chatter among friends, family, and acquaintances. Fritz was well-trained militarily and his language background was outstanding. What the military did not prepare Fritz for was to deal with the emotional burden his job entailed.  After listening to hours of Taliban related conversations, Fritz comes to see the Taliban in all their complexity.

At no point does Fritz empathize with the political and social goals of the Taliban.  However, after hearing hours and hours of mundane, normal, and even funny conversations, Fritz comes to this realization that the Taliban are fellow humans and are more than the sum of their worst attributes. One of the best things about What the Taliban Told Me is that it is that it reflects on the mechanical and remote nature of warfare today. Unlike his compatriots, who simply anonymously push buttons to kill Taliban, Fritz can relate to the people on the ground. He gets to know them as people.  This fact causes an emotional conflict that eventually drives Fritz out of the US Air Force.

Most reviewers of Fritz’s book have focused on his evolving views of the Taliban. This is quite understandable as it is a major takeaway from the book. However, many critics are missing a key point. What is clearly missing in What the Taliban Told Me is an understanding of why the United States and thus Fritz is in Afghanistan.  In a broad sense, Fritz understands that the United States is in Afghanistan because the Taliban are the bad guys. He has no real knowledge or understanding of what strategic objectives the United States is looking to advance. The longer Fritz is in Afghanistan the more he wonders why the United States is in Afghanistan and begins to ponder how Americans might feel had their country been invaded.

One needs to be very careful about drawing generalizations about a twenty-year conflict in a place as complex as Afghanistan from a single memoir by a rank-and-file American soldier. However, in some ways Fritz symbolizes America’s experience with Afghanistan.  The United States went into Afghanistan with the best of intentions but only the vaguest sense of what success looked like and realized too late that the situation was far more complex than had been imagined. 

 

Martin Burns

Martin recently graduated from the Masters degree programme: Conflict Transformation and Social Justice.  His dissertation was on The Politics of Persuasion: How the Irish Republican Leadership Sold the 1998 Good Friday Agreement to their Constituency.