A Hidden War: The Lingering Effects of American Airstrikes in Afghanistan

“This is the first time in memory that our children can run around outside,” says Noural Haik, a 53-year-old man from the village of Gul Norkhil, in the Maidan Wardak province of central Afghanistan.  He smiles and adds that he has never seen a foreigner without a weapon, despite his decades. 

The wreckage of war in this region displays the history of this country like dinosaur bones caught in layers of black sediment. The abandoned bases of the Afghan National Army, complete with skeletal vehicles, scatter the land. The mark of war lies everywhere.  

War is not a fossil, though. Here it is a way of life. Struggling against foreign invaders is a family tradition; Mustafah, a 24-year-old young fighter from neighbouring Logar province joined the Taliban because “my father and grandfather fought against the Russian occupation so, of course, I went to fight against the Americans”.

On a nearby hill lies the carcass of a Red Army tank, a relic from the Soviet Union’s doomed attempt to occupy. A white flag with black writing, the symbol of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, flutters in the wind. One hangs from the handlebars of a child’s bike, the wheels are decorated with multi-coloured hearts and stars. The boy could be no more than eight.

Something, though, has changed here. The air is silent: the bombs have stopped falling.

In both 2020 and 2021, Afghanistan was the country most affected by explosive violence in the world, overtaking other bloody conflicts such as Syria, Yemen and Somalia.

“Before we won the war, two men could not walk down the street next to each other or they would think we were a Taliban group; we could be shot by drones. Now you see us all walking down the streets and living our lives,” Hail says.

Despite being less than two hours from Kabul, this ethnically Pashtun agricultural area of the country has been under the effective control of the Taliban since around 2008. Even by Afghan standards, it is underdeveloped. Barely a quarter of people here can read and write.  It is also deeply conservative; women here are barely seen or spoken to by those outside their close family. 

The small village is nestled in a valley and Haik points to the foothills. “The Taliban used to use that way there. They hid up in the mountains so they would come down and attack the Afghan army base a few kilometres down the road. The ANA would use artillery to shell their approach in and around the town.” And their civilian dead, locals frequently caught in the crossfire, all too often went uncounted.

It was in areas like Wardak, Zabul, and Sangin that were the heartlands of the Taliban, and they saw devastation and destruction that is only now being revealed. For two decades, a hidden war was carried out in rural Afghanistan, in provinces like Maidan Wardak or Helmand. A war unwitnessed by the outside world, fiercely waged between Taliban insurgents and the Afghan National Army, in partnership with NATO forces. And while the United States and the United Kingdom were the leading contributors of troops, men from all around the world were to fight here. Forces came from as far abroad as Germany, Canada, Poland and New Zealand. In the midst of it all Afghanistan’s civilians suffered extraordinary levels of death and destruction.