No invading nation has ever conquered Afghanistan — not even the United States, which boasts a military budget of $721.5 billion for 2020 alone. On April 13, President Biden announced the nation would withdraw troops by the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, bringing to an end the country’s longest war on foreign soil. Despite the fact that Afghanistan ranks 169 out of 189 on the United Nations Human Development Index, the rugged mountainous nation has held its own against the U.S., which deployed almost 800,000 troops in a war that cost an estimated $2 trillion. “We have won the war and America has lost,” Taliban’s shadow mayor in the Baikh district told the BBC.
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The money, military, and manpower of global empires are simply no match for the people of Afghanistan, a grim truth the British Empire and the Soviet Union discovered for themselves in the 19th and 20th centuries respectvely. Rudyard Kipling recognized as much, penning the poem “The Young British Soldier” in 1895, advising in the final verse: “When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, / And the women come out to cut up what remains, / Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains / An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.”
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But what of the cost of defending oneself from attack, of standing up to trespass and maintaining sovereignty of the land? This is a history of trauma and survival rarely given its proper due in the West. But American photographer Edward Grazda, who has documented Afghanistan since 1980, understands those who lived to tell the tale must be heard. With the publication of the new book, Disasters of War (Fraglich), Grazda brings together the portraits Afghan photographer Khalid Hadi made between 1992-1994 documenting the wounded fighters, civilians, and orphans who survived the Soviet-Afghan War.
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