{"id":28692,"date":"2017-04-05T05:37:41","date_gmt":"2017-04-05T13:37:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=28692"},"modified":"2017-04-05T10:07:54","modified_gmt":"2017-04-05T18:07:54","slug":"hopeless-but-optimistic-journeying-through-americas-endless-war-in-afghanistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2017\/04\/05\/hopeless-but-optimistic-journeying-through-americas-endless-war-in-afghanistan\/","title":{"rendered":"Hopeless But Optimistic: Journeying Through America’s Endless War in Afghanistan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s an excerpt from a new book,<\/i> Hopeless but Optimistic: Journeying through America\u2019s Endless War in Afghanistan<\/a>, by Douglas Wissing. The passage deals with the unnecessary death of State Department diplomat Anne Smedinghoff at age 25. Anne gave her life for a needless PR stunt as part of America\u2019s failed reconstruction project in Afghanistan. It could have been any of us.<\/i><\/p>\n

Anne Smedinghoff is a rising 25-year-old diplomat, an assistant information officer in the Kabul embassy. She\u2019s my minder, assigned to escort me to an interview with a Justice Department official who is heading up the Afghan Threat Finance Cell (ATFC) that is charged with finding and disrupting sources of Taliban funding.<\/p>\n

In many ways, Smedinghoff is representative of many young American women working in Afghanistan, where they can combine adventure with a career-enhancing posting and hefty paychecks plumped with danger pay. As we walk to the meeting room, Smedinghoff quizzes me about life outside the embassy compound, as the staff is trapped inside.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

When I mention some of the Kabul restaurants, she tells me the State Department banned dining at most places outside the embassy. She longs for a good pizza. I ask about her path from her home in the Chicago suburbs to this Kabul powder keg. Catholic high school, Johns Hopkins international studies, then the State Department. An interesting post in Venezuela. Then on to Afghanistan. Anne Smedinghoff is lively, bright, educated and funny; poised and gracious in a natural way. Brimming with youthful vitality, accomplishments and promise, she is the daughter any parent would be proud to have.<\/p>\n

We talk about my embeds in Zabul and Helmand, and she tells me in Venezuela she could explore the hinterlands when not working. But here in Afghanistan, she\u2019s penned up like most foreign service officers. She tells me she wants to \u201cbreak the wire\u201d in the worst way. \u201cOn a good day, this is a like a small liberal arts college,\u201d she laughs. \u201cOn a bad day it\u2019s like a maximum security prison.\u201d<\/p>\n

Smedinghoff\u2019s career continued to go well after I left Kabul. She was a comer. Her colleagues started calling her Ambassador Anne. When Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Kabul in late March for an official visit, the embassy assigned Smedinghoff the plum job of escorting him. She was his control officer. As with other people, she made an impression on her big boss.<\/p>\n

Anne Smedinghoff did eventually get to break the wire \u2013 and in the worst way.<\/p>\n

A few weeks after the successful Kerry visit, she escorted a group of Afghan journalists on a media day down to Qalat City, the capital of Zabul, the Taliban-controlled province that so interested her when we met. It was one of those winning-hearts-and-minds missions, in this case to distribute school books that the US corporation, Scholastic, Inc., had donated to My Afghan Library, an aid program jointly run by the State Department and the Afghan Ministry of Education. Scholastic, Inc. wanted some good press for their donation.<\/p>\n

An email from the embassy public relations office stated, \u201cScholastic would like to see more media reporting.\u201d So the mission was a WHAM photo op to get some press for an American corporation, while pretending Zabul was secure and still receiving U.S. aid. \u201cA media extravaganza,\u201d a military briefing called it. \u201cHappy snaps,\u201d the security grunts derisively termed these PR events that they hated to guard.<\/p>\n

In my experience there, Qalat City was a wild and wooly ambush-prone place, where the military units took extraordinary security precautions before venturing from the tightly guarded US compounds. To travel two miles across Qalat City, we had to drive in a convoy of five armored MRAPs accompanied by a heavily armed security platoon.<\/p>\n

So I was stunned to later learn that Anne Smedinghoff and a group of journalists were walking around Qalat City \u2013 lost. That seemed insane. Taliban suicide bombers detonated their explosives near them, killing her and four other Americans, including three soldiers and an interpreter. Other Americans were grievously wounded. It was an egregious breakdown in operational security. An Army report stated the mission \u201cwas plagued by poor planning that failed at all levels.\u201d And it was a great loss.<\/p>\n

I exchanged emails of condolences with the embassy public relations officer, who was a great friend of hers. I saw heart-wrenching tributes to Anne Smedinghoff posted on-line. Secretary Kerry eulogized Anne Smedinghoff, praising her idealistic commitment to \u201cchanging people\u2019s lives.\u201d He noted the \u201cextraordinary harsh contradiction\u201d of her being killed while carrying books to a school. He described the Zabul media event was \u201ca confrontation with modernity,\u201d and said Smedinghoff embodied \u201ceverything that our country stands for.\u201d It did little to salve my dismay that yet another promising American had been lost for such a dubious, failed cause. I thought of the remarks Kerry made on Capitol Hill in 1971, when he was a young, anti-war Vietnam vet.<\/p>\n

The then 27-year-old John Kerry poignantly asked America, \u201cHow do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s Anne:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The State Department tried to cover-up Anne\u2019s death. Read more<\/a>, and more<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during Iraqi reconstruction in his first book, <\/i>We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People<\/a>. His latest book is <\/i>Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent<\/a>. Reprinted from the his blog<\/a> with permission.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s an excerpt from a new book, Hopeless but Optimistic: Journeying through America\u2019s Endless War in Afghanistan, by Douglas Wissing. The passage deals with the unnecessary death of State Department diplomat Anne Smedinghoff at age 25. Anne gave her life for a needless PR stunt as part of America\u2019s failed reconstruction project in Afghanistan. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":212,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-28692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/212"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28692"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28700,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28692\/revisions\/28700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28692"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=28692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}