Thread on r/AskReddit on preconceptions American soldiers had about Afghanistan

[jhungary]

@jhungary was there

I was there in 2005. Yes....

Let me tell you a story, as a battalion S2, I went outside the wire a lot to talk to the local imam and elder, that's my job, I try to build an intelligence profile for the region I incharged in.

There were this village, located South East of Kabul near the Pakistani border to the FATA area. It take 6 days and a serious operation with intense fighting just to get there and clean the village. Then we got in there, and meet the elder. While he is very hospitable, at the same time he is also quite hostile to our present. When I talk to him, he said that there were no Taliban until the soldier (us) come to the village. Taliban only interest on their village because they want to kill the soldier, and he don't understand why we come here in the first place.

On a strategic level, I understand what he said, it's basically an endless cycle, Taliban want to kill us, so they follow us everywhere, but at the same time, we want to find out where Taliban was, so we went out and get intel, so wherever we go, we will meet Taliban.

But on a tactical level, I need to secure my objective, and to do that we are going to need to clean the village, and while the village would be untouch if we were never there. and we have to went in there to find them.

About the civilian issue, they don't have TVs, they don't have radio, they don't have newspaper. Whatever you imagine it will not be like that, they don't know, nor care what happening to their country, they only have their own life in mind, trying to live their life whatever way they could. They don't really care if they have to live under Afghan central government or Taliban, as long as they can go on with their daily farming. They are fine.

The problem is, civilian is innocent, and they are almost always the first one that got screw in the first place, it's almost always a damn if you do and damn if you don't kind of situation, but the question is, while civilian are mostly innocents, that does not mean the war to the fraction is not justified, every country, every conflict have civilian involvement, I wish the world can run on this naïvetés where war should not be fought because there are civilian involve. The ground fact is, we are declaring a war to the fraction, not the civilian.

For us, we can only try to stay out of their way and bring the fighting as far to them as possible, but things can't always turn out that way.