It was a dozen years into the war when I visited Camp Shorabak, an Afghan military base attached, like a kind of lean-to shack, to the perimeter fence of the American and British bases in northern Helmand. It was autumn 2013 and I was on a Nato-organised trip that had just visited the town of Lashkar Gah, from which the British Provincial Reconstruction Team was preparing to withdraw (or “lift off,” in their rather sickening official phrase). There, assurances of the success in securing Lashkar Gah were accompanied by a categorical refusal to allow us one foot outside the British wire.
At Camp Shorabak, we were taken to see Nato’s mission to train Afghan soldiers in the use of the new and alien US weaponry that Congress had compelled them to adopt under the influence of the US military-industrial complex. The Afghan officers, unarmed, sat on the ground. The British instructor, with a pistol at his side, stood at the whiteboard, entirely reliant on an unarmed Afghan translator. In each doorway stood a Georgian soldier in full body armour, holding an automatic rifle poised with the safety catch off, the Caucasian nation displaying its eagerness to join Nato through its readiness to shoot our Afghan allies on the spot if they made a move to attack their teacher. If I didn’t know already that the Afghan campaign was doomed, I knew it then.