A few words about war and the power of determination

Apartment struck by Russian missiles in Odessa, Ukraine: AFP via Getty Images

Traveling in the back of a pickup along the road between Jalalabad and Asadabad in Afghanistan in 2004, we passed through one village after another that was thriving from growing poppy, the plants whose expired flower buds produce the gummy white substance that is refined first into opium, then into heroin. All the villages that were doing well were close to Jalalabad, near the south end of the road, which was pock-marked by potholes and craters and littered with boulders that had rolled down from the hillsides. It was a five-mile-an-hour road. It took us nearly seven hours to travel the 30 miles between the two towns, and when we arrived in Asadabad, we had to take the truck to a mud-hut auto repair shop to have our shock absorbers replaced, because they had broken and had leaked all over our brakes, making them practically useless.

As we got closer to Asadabad, a notorious outlaw town with a long history as a center for smugglers of all sorts – cattle, sheep, cheap goods from China, drugs, weapons, you name it – we started to see villages that had been destroyed during Afghanistan’s various wars – against the Russians, against the Taliban, and now against the United States Army that had moved a battalion into a base camp near Asadabad from which they launched patrols against Taliban fighters who controlled the land west, north, and east of the Kunar River, which ran through the town, its icy waters gathered from smaller rivers and streams in the Hindu Kush to the north.

The villages close to Jalalabad had houses and compounds made from mud bricks, but further north, the nearer you got to Asadabad, homes and compounds were made from stones gathered from the hillsides and mountains. We passed one village that had been destroyed in a Taliban attack during the last war. All that was left was rubble – a few partial stone walls that had been the sides of a home, jumbles of logs that had held up roofs, piles of more stones from houses that had been destroyed by a direct hit from a Taliban mortar. Further along, there was another stone village. This one was intact. You could tell most of the structures had been built only a year or so ago – the end-faces of the ceiling logs showed signs of being freshly cut, and you could still see the hammer-strikes in the stones that had been used to raise the walls.

My translator, Esos, said it was indeed a new village, built by the survivors of the attack on the destroyed village we had passed a half mile or so down the road. The Taliban controlled much of the surrounding area. One shopkeeper we talked to, in answer to my question about the strength of the Taliban in the area, stepped out of his lean-to shop and pointed across the street at a compound: “Taliban,” he said. He pointed further down the street at a clutch of small houses: “Taliban.” Up the hillside was a large mudbrick compound. “Taliban,” he said. Then he spoke to Esos in Pashto for a moment. When we got back to the truck, Esos told me the shopkeeper had said the compound on the hillside was a Taliban poppy warehouse and heroin factory.

Even still, with Taliban all around, the people whose homes had been destroyed by the mortar attack had rebuilt their village close by. Esos and I spoke to a man working his plot of ground near the new stone village. I asked why they had rebuilt their homes so close to where they had lived before, when they knew the Taliban still controlled much of the area. He said they didn’t have a choice. Their families had been in the Kunar River valley for hundreds of years, maybe longer. It was their place, where they worshipped and farmed and raised their children.

I never spoke to the American soldiers in their basecamp near Asadabad. The army had taken my press pass after I had pissed off a colonel in Kandahar by asking questions of soldiers when I didn’t have my PR handler present, violating their press rules. Some of the American military passed us along the Asadabad road in a convoy of about ten Humvees, but that was as close as I got to the U.S. Army that had moved into the Kunar River valley thinking they would fight the Taliban and gain control of the area around Asadabad. I did ask each of the local men we spoke to – they were all men, the women being inside the the homes and compounds, cooking and taking care of children – if they had talked to any soldiers. Every one of them said no. I was the first American any of them had ever met.

After I returned from Afghanistan, I continued to pay attention to the war the U.S. was fighting there against the Taliban, a war which ended in 2021. Twenty years spent fighting over there. Nearly 2,500 American soldiers were killed during that time. More than 20,000 were wounded. Tens of thousands of Afghans died, and countless more were wounded. And one day, the last U.S. Air Force cargo jet lifted off from the airport in Kabul, and it was over. The Taliban took control of Kabul almost immediately. They were already in control of much of the rest of the country, including the Kunar River valley.

I wouldn’t say that I “covered” the war in Afghanistan. I never wrote the story that I had traveled over there to write, because I didn’t understand what I had seen there. Even though people were getting killed – Americans and Afghans alike – it wasn’t a war as much as it was a contested occupation. I have asked myself over the years what I had learned from that war, and today, reading Shankar Narayan’s Substack column, “The Consis,” I realized what it was.

The people who lived in that stone village in Afghanistan had taught me about determination. That is a word I never heard in my four years of studying war at West Point, but it is the word that best describes the outcome of wars, who wins, and who loses. It isn’t the number of dead on either side of a violent conflict that measures victory. The villagers in Afghanistan won their wars against the Russians and the Taliban and the Americans because they were determined to stay there and raise their families and live their lives.

The same thing is going on in Ukraine at right this very minute. Vladimir Putin has been sending hundreds of rockets and thousands of armed drones into Ukraine, most of them aimed at cities and towns and their civilian populations. Lately, the Russian targets have been towns in Ukraine’s west that have rarely been hit during the three-plus years of the war. Last week, Russia continued its attacks on the capital city of Kyiv and the Black Sea port of Odessa, firing more than 300 Shaheed drones and seven missiles, destroying civilian apartments and a maternity hospital in Odessa. Another maternity hospital, this one in Kharkiv, was hit by rockets last Friday. Russia is using powerful glide bombs, ballistic and cruise missiles as well as armed drones in its recent attacks. The government in Ukraine announced last week that the month of June was the deadliest month of the entire war for civilians, with 232 killed and 1,343 wounded. According to the Associated Press, “Russia launched 10 times more drones and missiles in June than in the same month last year.”

The big news this week is Trump’s alleged turn-around on Ukraine. He has agreed to sell Patriot missile batteries and artillery ammunition to NATO countries, who will pass them along to Ukraine, some of the Patriots arriving there as early as later this month. Ukraine needs the American-made anti-missile batteries to counter the attacks on its cities and civilian populations by Putin’s Russia.

In other news, Germany is building factories to produce its own Patriot missiles, which will come on line in 2027, reports say, and Germany is also helping Ukraine to produce its own long-range missiles, some of which will be ready for use by the end of this month. Narayan reports in his Substack column that Major General Christian Freuding, who is in charge of Germany’s military assistance to Ukraine, has said that “Germany has bankrolled the production of a significant number of long-range systems for Ukraine, with the first batch expected to arrive by the end of July. These weapons, he said, are designed to strike deep inside Russian territory—command centers, airfields, parked aircraft, fuel depots, logistics hubs. The very arteries keeping the Russian war machine alive.”

I don’t know what “bankrolled” means in this context, but I suspect that Germany is supplying Ukraine with what amount to kits that can be assembled inside Ukraine into long range missiles ready to fire into Russian territory. Trump said this week that he had asked Ukrainian President Zelenskyy if “they can hit Moscow,” and Zelenskyy told him if Ukraine is supplied with the right missiles, they certainly can.

This sounds to me like NATO and even the U.S. are lifting the restraints they have put on supplying Ukraine with long-range missiles. Whether this is because Trump has lost the hold his romance with Putin has had on him is not known, but Germany has been moving in the direction of supplying Ukraine with more powerful missiles for some time, as has Great Britain, which is already supplying Ukraine with medium range “Storm Shadow” missiles.

Look at the photograph at the top of this column. It shows an apartment building destroyed by a missile strike on Odessa. That missile attack was the functional equivalent of the Taliban mortar attack on the stone village in the Kunar River valley. The villagers in Afghanistan moved just up the road and gathered new stones and felled trees and fashioned them into new logs and rebuilt their village. The city of Odessa will choose a spot a few blocks away and build a new apartment building to replace the destroyed one in the photo.

Ukraine will use artillery and drones and missiles to fight the Russian army, and one day, Ukrainians will use heavy equipment and their hands to build new homes with new kitchens and bathrooms and bedrooms to house the people displaced by Russian drone and missile attacks.

Russia is fighting a force greater than guns and missiles and drones. The wars in Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan have proven that you cannot win a war against the determination of a proud people fighting for their land and their lives.