This poignant documentary by Saeed Taji Faoruky and Micheal McEvoy, shines a light on the state Afghanistan is in after being
abandoned by the US and NATO. It is also the first time filmmakers have been allowed to embed with the Afghan National Army (ANA), following one unit over the course of their first year of fighting in Helmand without NATO support, making for a significant and unique insider’s view of Afghanistan told entirely from the soldier’s perspective.
What’s clear is that Western powers as one commander says angrily to his army they “have left them alone in this mess”, spending billions of dollars to capture some hills as one soldier puts it (the same solider also describes how arrogantly they told people to leave in regions they captured with no forethought), and not coming just to “help” as Afghans first optimistically thought, but to conquer and assert their power. And one remembers that there are key oil pipelines in the region which may have just been a factor.
Memorable scenes show the remnants of the occupation, close up’s on patriotic books on ‘Bush at War’ stickers declaring “God protect our soldiers, especially our snipers”, whilst buildings are stripped bare down to electrical wires pulled out, leaving nothing for the soldiers to use. Whole areas look like ghost towns as the soldiers survey the abandoned bunkers.
The army themselves are under-resourced, under-staffed, and underpaid entering the army only because they could get no other work as one solider eventually admits, after pretending he did it for the sense of “action”. In one scene where the sympathetic Commander struggling to make a bad situation look less worse than it is as they are about to embark on a mission to potential Taliban stronghold Sangin, tells the soldiers not to be afraid, that “there’s nothing to be afraid of” and that being afraid will only cause their death, gets the remark back that they are not afraid but that they haven’t been paid for nine months. To which he can only reply that they are looking into it. Such moments gives you a reals sense of the desperation of this army. Whilst a poetic moment towards the end when a soldier relates how they played with a domesticated mynah bird and it would relieve them of their sadness, suggests the fragile nature of the things they have to hold onto (aside from their partners and families) in order to survive.
In moments of action too there is a good sense of the chaos and inability of the army to really take control of a situation. There is little sense, when surrounded in Sagin by Taliban snipers and holed up in a compound (with the local police also having abandoned a checkpoint full of guns and rockets to the Taliban), that anyone is able to come and help them. And we see the Commander as he tries to convey the hopelessness of the situation, and witness a soldier slowly bleeding to death.
We also see the desperate situation of the locals as they are stuck between a rock and a hard place getting extorted by the Taliban, and whether supporting the army or Taliban getting punished or killed by either side. And we see how little the army is able to trust anyone as they question defensive and sometimes angry locals about their associations with the Taliban, whilst scene in which an elderly mother begs the soldiers not to to takeaway her only son (suspected of being Taliban) as she’ll have “nothing left” conveys the tricky moral conundrum in which the soldiers daily find themselves.
This documentary is a searing look then at the aftermath of war, at a time when Afghanistan has been neglected by the media, and is an affecting reminder that no military intervention ever turns out that simple as people would hope.
