Noah Coburn, an anthropologist at Bennington College, Vermont, writes a timely and accessible overview of the international intervention in Afghanistan, now in its sixteenth year, from the point of view of civilian organizations’ and the military's efforts at aid and development. The book is organized into eleven chapters, in which Coburn tackles many of the problems that emerged in the management of funds and delivery of services during the ongoing intervention. Coburn often shifts focus and unit of analysis from one issue to another. However, the narrative does maintain two main anchors that serve as the backbone for the whole book: the area of Afghanistan around Bagram Air Base (the major foreign-run military complex in the country), and four characters who represent case studies that help Coburn articulate and corroborate his general discourse.
Bagram base (and the local community that sprawls around it) lies within Shomali, a vast, fertile, and densely populated plain about one hour north of Kabul, that has been for a long time a prime military post in the history of Afghanistan. In the mid-2000s, Coburn conducted his doctoral fieldwork research in a village on the hills overlooking the Shomali plain, and he worked several more years as a consultant for various projects in Afghanistan related to the U.S. government, before going back to Shomali to study the dynamics of the intervention in that specific area. The experience that Coburn gained, both of the complex phenomenon of development and aid work in general, and of the social processes proper to the Shomali area, is undoubtedly extensive. The book takes advantage not only of the time he spent in Shomali, but also of years spent in other areas of Afghanistan as a consultant. Coburn manages successfully to bring all this background to use in his narrative.
The four characters that he focuses on throughout the book are ex-U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ronald Neumann, independent NGO worker William Locke, ex-Navy SEAL Captain Owen Berger, and Afghan entrepreneur Omar Rassoul. By interweaving the personal experiences of these four figures, as recounted to him in extensive interviews, with the more general conclusions that he drew from his own interactions with the development world in Afghanistan, Coburn constructs an overarching view of the intervention.
As can be inferred by the subtitle to the book (“An Obituary to the Intervention”), the author's ultimate opinion on the international effort is not overall positive. He sets out to answer some of the questions that do undeniably present themselves even to the most sympathetic observer: How could it be that Afghanistan (and particularly the average Afghan individual) is still in such economic and infrastructural dire straits, after more than a decade of heavy foreign activity in the country, aimed (officially, at least) at reconstruction and the betterment of people's lives? Where did all the enormous amount of money officially spent on the country go? Where did successful delivery of services and effective implementation of projects go awry? In the end, Coburn is adamant in realizing that “those who benefited the most from the intervention [were] not ordinary Afghans” (38), and that “in Afghanistan, during the surge the winners tended to be international firms, and the losers were smaller firms and the Afghan communities they serviced” (99).
The book describes several aspects of a structure and chain of events that contributed to many unfulfilled hopes and wishes. The author describes how most civilian aid, development, and contracting workers ended up cut off from the very Afghan people for whom they were supposed to work. The insularity of this community was caused only in part by the difficult security situation. There was also “a confining language and a system of belief [that] made it difficult to think outside certain narrowing pathways” (96). The contracting system for allocation of resources by U.S. agencies linked to the U.S. government was an exacerbating problem. USAID's job, for example (similar to many other institutional large donors) “was not to actually do any sort of development work but to monitor and evaluate the work being done by contractors” (100). Sometimes it was even up to other contracting companies to monitor the proceeds of these works. Each of these companies, obviously, had every interest in making it appear as though everything was in good order and well-functioning, while the truth might have been otherwise. Oversight was virtually non-existent.
The military did not, apparently, have a better approach to the problem. The chronic inability of officers and soldiers (including Owen Berger) to effectively relinquish a focus on “kinetic” operations (fighting proper, in other words), and open themselves to a better, culturally informed interaction with the local population, as well as with the civilian development workers, meant that their intervention in areas other than purely military activities was often inconsequential, if not deleterious.
Coburn effectively describes the means by which money was dispersed before it trickled down to solve real people's problems, the reasons why even well-meaning individuals, like William Locke, found their avenues for operations blocked by a myopic system, and the way in which the United States, by politically and militarily relying on disgraced civil war-era warlords, lost the race for the “hearts and minds.”
Although written by an anthropologist, the reader should not expect in Losing Afghanistan an ethnography in the true sense of the term. Coburn counted on breadth more than depth for his book. The focus on the Bagram community recurs throughout the book, but is not really analyzed and detailed consistently. The attention to how the broader phenomena entailed by the intervention applied also to the rest of the country, and the history of the intervention country-wide, often makes Bagram fade in the background of the narrative. Also, the four characters with whom he interacts in all chapters appear more as interlocutors than real case studies (particularly so Ron Neumann and Owen Berger). Their reflections on their past experiences add “meat” to the recipe (as do the entrepreneurial vicissitudes of William Locke and Omar Rassoul), but do not constitute a deeper, subjective elaboration on the personal predicaments of these individuals, and what it all might have meant for other individuals in their same position.
Finally, the reader should understand that Losing Afghanistan is a book mostly written from the point of view of the primary actors of the intervention, the Westerners who worked in the country in many capacities (especially for U.S. government-linked donor organizations). Three out of four of the book's protagonists are American, and Coburn's narrative is largely based on his own experiences as a member of this community of foreign development and aid workers. This is obviously a plus because it puts the author in the privileged position of someone who has worked on these issues as insider (while being also a trained anthropologist). The downside to it is that we receive only a bird's eye view of the situation at the receiving end of this structure—the Afghan individuals who are the recipients of the development efforts. Granted, by examining how and why the development machine malfunctioned, we perforce get a broad picture of its repercussions on the average Afghan citizen (and Coburn did conduct interviews with some of them in Bagram to get a pulse of the situation). Yet the dynamics truly closer to the Afghan people who lived through the intervention mostly escape the reader.
All that said, Coburn's book is an important testimony to the failures (in good and bad faith) of the international intervention, written with a breadth that gives the reader the possibility to put together pieces of a complex puzzle that often remain otherwise disconnected. Losing Afghanistan is a book for all those who want to understand better what went wrong in Afghanistan, and represents an important repository of “lessons-to-learn,” to keep in mind for all those who study and/or work in the field of development and aid, everywhere in the world.
