Pipe Hitters

The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces by Seth Harp. Viking, 368 pages. 2025.

To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban by Jon Lee Anderson. Penguin Press, 400 pages. 2025.

General Austin Miller had a meeting. In two days, Afghanistan was set to hold its first parliamentary elections since 2010, and the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan was at the Kandahar governor’s compound to figure out how to keep the country’s people alive long enough to count the ballots. At least ten candidates had been assassinated since campaigning began. Seventy thousand soldiers and police officers were deployed across the country in anticipation of further violence. The Taliban, founded in Kandahar in 1994, had declared that they weren’t going to let the elections happen; these were the first organized and overseen by the Afghan government, and were intended to be a demonstration of America’s success in nation-building.

Miller was perhaps the war on terror’s perfect soldier. Most of his nearly forty-year career had been spent in Delta Force, the nation’s most selective combat unit. Until assuming command a month before the 2018 meeting in Kandahar, Miller had been in charge of thousands of U.S. special operators as the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, called JSOC. This included units like Delta, but also the SEALs, Rangers, and other less familiar but equally lethal formations. Forty years after Delta was founded, there were thousands of operators like Miller in 149 countries, and his elevation was proof of the dominance that the special forces had achieved in the American military.

From their meeting, Miller and the most important military and civilian leaders in southern Afghanistan walked to the compound’s helipad, surrounded by an elite guard detail. One of its members, a teenager who had joined three months earlier, put down the box of pomegranates in his arms, raised his rifle, and fired four shots.

The man lying dead as Miller ran for cover was Kandahar’s police chief, General Abdul Raziq. His assassin was a Taliban member who had infiltrated the Afghan special security detail; continuing to fire, the teenager also wounded the province’s governor and killed its intelligence chief. Miller, according to American officials, wasn’t even a target. A gleeful Taliban leader said assassinating Abdul Raziq was as good as killing five hundred Americans.

After his death, Miller said Abdul Raziq was “a patriot” and “a great friend.” Six years later, the New York Times called him “America’s monster.” Their article accused Abdul Raziq of thousands of murders and disappearances (he called them “sand picnics”), as well as countless instances of torture, kidnapping, and illegal detention. The United Nations said he tortured nine out of every ten detainees, crushing their testicles with clamps and electrocuting them. Abdul Raziq’s allies in the American government had known about all of this for years. The American public had known it too. In 2009, a piece in Harper’s described how he made millions from opium trafficking and defended his profiteering with assassinations and massacres of women and children. Fifteen years later, the Times investigators could write that Abdul Raziq helps “explain why the United States lost the war.” For the rest of the story about why the Afghanistan occupation failed, one has to look at the kind of man Abdul Raziq was standing next to when he died: the American special operator.

Afghanistan started falling to the Taliban a second time, days before the planes even hit the towers. On September 9, 2001, two cameramen and their translator stood across Ahmed Shah Massoud, waiting to start an interview. The most powerful warlord in the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance and its de facto leader, Massoud, had been at war for almost thirty years, five of those against the Taliban. He’d just heard that more than fifteen thousand Afghan and foreign fighters from the Taliban and al-Qaeda were massing along his 180-mile front line. He looked to his translator and said, “Let’s just get through with it.” The journalists pointed a camera at Massoud and exploded.

Massoud became the first Afghan to be killed in a suicide attack. Ten years later, there would be nearly one hundred suicide bombings a year. Unusual among media about the occupation, Jon Lee Anderson’s new collection, To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban, has a memory long enough to include Massoud. Anderson, probably better known for his center-brow biography Che, reported on the war from October of 2001 regularly through the first years of the war and intermittently until 2021.

When Anderson parachutes in for a story, he tends to land in a rich guy’s backyard. At the opening of his book The Fall of Baghdad, another series of essays written in-country before and during an occupation, he makes sure to tell us exactly how the exiled Sunni sheikh he is talking to is related to the prophet Muhammad. He loves hanging out with Saddam’s plastic surgeon, even after he acknowledged that the man has started avoiding him for his own safety in the last days of Baathism. (It had become inadvisable for Saddam’s associates to advertise their whereabouts, even to American reporters.) In Afghanistan, he interviews President Hamid Karzai, and even minor warlords like Daoud Khan and Mullah Naquib qualify as celebrities. If success in journalism is a question of access, then Anderson deserves this third payday (most of these essays were originally written for The New Yorker; many of those gathered here are also collected in a 2002 book called The Lion’s Grave).

Despite all his important friends, Anderson still missed the biggest story of the war, though this isn’t to say he didn’t have the material for forming the right answers in front of him from the occupation’s earliest days. In an essay from January of 2002, Anderson turns to his translator and asks, “What it would take for me to set myself up as a warlord in Afghanistan.” The Afghan replies, “It would be easy. You hire a hundred gunmen for a month, get a few Toyota pickups, and you’re in business.” He estimated that it would cost about $10,000. Anderson then comments, “Most of the mujahideen commanders in the Northern Alliance, for instance, were also involved in the opium and heroin trade.” This discussion and its commentary were occasioned by an offer made by an Afghan, mistaking Anderson for a special operator, to sell him an al-Qaeda prisoner. The observations Anderson makes in these handful of paragraphs—that the American-backed leadership was corrupt and unpopular, and that anyone with money could join them—were made three months after the invasion began.

Two themes of Anderson’s conversation with his translator were then already threatening the occupation’s long-term stability. The first was the explosion in poppy production. The amount of land used to grow poppies would increase forty times its preoccupation level during the war. (Poppies are easy to grow, require no irrigation or fertilizers, and can share a field with other crops with no loss of productivity; they are the perfect commodity for a destitute country enduring its third or fourth decade of war.) The second development was the movement of warfighting, by means of increased reliance on special operators and military contractors, out of the sight of the American public. These two developments were interdependent: the special operators needed some Afghan allies, and those allies needed money. Even after hundreds of billions of dollars, Afghanistan was still not a functional country with an economy; the reason being that Afghanistan was controlled by corrupt, opium-smuggling warlords backed by clandestine American special forces.

Charles Beckwith, the man who in 1977 founded Delta, conceived of it this way: “A single factor that sold the future Delta Force more than any other was terrorism. The unit was dedicated to coming to grips with it.” Reflecting its times, it was originally intended as a hostage-rescue unit (its first mission was the failed rescue of American hostages in Tehran). With time, the American military’s response to terrorism became less interested in the mitigation of its effects and more interested in the refinement of its means. Special forces became a way for extreme, targeted violence to be applied without having to explain why to the Americans in whose names it was done or to the foreign citizens who were its victims. From the earliest days of the war in Afghanistan, Beckwith’s “mature professionals” had already established a pattern of conduct. The first civilian massacre in Afghanistan not accomplished by aerial bombardment was committed by special operators; in January 2002, when Anderson was joking about warlords with his translator, special forces murdered sixteen civilians in a nighttime raid on a madrassa.

To Lose a War includes “The Americans’ Opium War,” the narration of a farcically doomed anti-poppy operation conducted jointly by Afghan police, coalition soldiers, and a forty-man detachment of contractors from DynCorp, an American private military contractor. The essay was published in 2007; over the previous year, Afghanistan had become the supplier for all but 7 percent of the world’s opium, using more of its land for cultivating poppies than Latin America did for coca. The essay has Anderson’s first acknowledgement in the book that Afghans may have a reason to protest the escalating civilian death toll in their country—something to do with watching the ineptitude and cruelty of the occupation when it interacted with ordinary Afghan people, maybe—but he stopped short of writing that the occupation should end.

Anderson rides along as police and mercenaries roll into a village to destroy one man’s poppies and most of his wheat with militarized dune buggies. (The special forces provide air cover with a drone.) As they depart, leaving the rest of the poppies around the village untouched, an old Afghan man looks at the soldier’s translator and tells him, “You will be afraid when the time comes.” The operation collapses, with over a dozen wounded, including a DynCorp soldier, and eight Afghans killed.

After the rout, Anderson quotes a former DEA agent named Wankel who was then employed by the United States to “organize its counternarcotics effort” in Afghanistan. After the poppy operation, Anderson listens to a DynCorp contractor reference My Lai and Operation Phoenix, a clandestine campaign of terror that killed tens of thousands in Vietnam, as examples of the kind of effective work he could be doing without reporters hanging around. Anderson gives this guy, a prison guard named Hook, the last word: “I’m just here for the money.” But they all recognize the same thing is true of their allies. Wankel admits to Anderson that “the guys we’re involved with are up to some stuff,” meaning the poppy farmers in the village they hit bribed the Afghan police to spare their fields.  

When Britain colonized Southeast Asia, as much as 40 percent of imperial revenues there came from opium. In Afghanistan, the United States developed a different kind of extractive regime, which allowed its allies, the warlords, to keep their drug money. That payoff made them powerful enough to hold onto control through a combination of corruption networks and terror. The relative safety this arrangement provided made it possible for the United States to try out a new division of imperial spoils, enriching thousands of Americans through an innovation on the traditional redistribution from taxpayers upward to the Big Five of the defense industry: contracting. Some contractors were mercenaries, getting paid several times the salary of American soldiers and dying at nearly twice their rate for billion-dollar companies like DynCorp or Erik Prince’s Constellis. Others took part in the occupation through logistical support. Contracts for building schools and hospitals in Afghanistan or feeding and cleaning up after American soldiers went to companies in America. The United States spent $36 billion on development aid to Afghanistan but spent three times as much on contractors for work in the country, who regularly gave kickbacks, got paid for work that wasn’t finished, and received contracts from well-connected friends and business partners. The upshot was that many more Americans, outside of the fraction of a percent who enlisted, became direct beneficiaries of the war on terror.

The virtue of reading Anderson today is that he misunderstood things in the same way as the rest of the American elite did. In 2011, Anderson concludes an essay named “Force and Futility” by informing his reader that “it is not ground troops or ANA [Afghan National Army] soldiers who are proving most effective in fighting insurgents. . . . Some of the most successful work in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, and against al-Qaeda is being done covertly, by the CIA, the Special Forces, and the Navy SEALs.” He concludes: “It seems, regrettably, that whatever we can accomplish in Afghanistan will be achieved by force, not by making friends.” Anderson seems to have forgotten what many of his sources did tell him and any Afghan could have told him over the last decade. America’s friends were stealing from them and murdering their countrymen, often under the tutelage of the very special operators Anderson praised for their “successful work”: a man named Hikmatullah Shadman made $160 million contracting for the U.S. military, all the time collecting bribes, paying kickbacks, and defrauding the government while under the protection of his supporters (and likely coconspirators) in the Special Forces.

After the “surge” of its first year of power, the Obama administration began drawing down troop levels in 2011 as it prepared to shift responsibility for security to Afghans in 2013. This meant that, as regular soldiers returned to America, special operators could continue raids, assassinations, and cross-border operations in Pakistan: they weren’t counted in official reports numbering American troops still in Afghanistan. In 2011, targeted killings increased sixfold from the year before. Anderson wasn’t alone in seeing this move toward covert ops as an improvement: nation-building was plainly a failure. Its achievements were mainly in diverting American payments for aid, security, and infrastructure into the pockets of corrupt Afghans, who then followed Anderson’s translator’s advice, if they hadn’t already, and set themselves up as warlords. (Their American counterparts mirrored this move stateside.) The assassination of Osama bin Laden in May of 2011 gave Obama a win, with special operators to thank.

Two months before, after ten years in which he was unable to condemn the war, Anderson finally wrote that America had “outlived” its welcome and become “toxic” to the Afghan people. It was time to go. His change in opinion was caused by the news that a soldier named Robert Bales had walked off his post in Kandahar and murdered sixteen Afghan civilians. In a detail Anderson failed to mention in his report on the massacre, Bales was an ordinary infantryman who was at the time providing security for a special operations base under the command of special operators. A military investigation later found that those operators were getting trashed on drugs and alcohol at the time of Bales’s massacre, with Bales drinking before starting his rampage.

Ten years in, with violence escalating and New Yorker journalists denouncing the war, the occupation’s decline was irreversible. But the American mission was probably fucked from the beginning. (If this review were coming out four years ago, on August 14, 2021, we would be in the middle of its collapse: after defeating the Taliban in a month and ruling for twenty years, the regime collapsed in three weeks, with the Taliban walking into Kabul for the second time on August 15.) The president of Afghanistan before the Taliban came to power in 1996, Mohammad Najibullah, explained shortly before Talibs hanged and castrated him what he foresaw happening to his country after the Soviet withdrawal. “Afghanistan will turn into a center of world smuggling for narcotic drugs. Afghanistan will be turned into a center for terrorism.”

Over three hundred thousand hectares of Afghanistan were under poppy at the peak of production. In 2009, then nearing the height of America’s military presence, nearly half of the country was living on less than a dollar a day; that same year, one hectare of poppies could bring in as much as $3,500. Nearly 10 percent of Afghans were using opium. Future President Ashraf Ghani, who had gotten his PhD from Columbia with a thesis on state failure, conceded that “the whole country is criminalized.” (In 2021, President Ghani fled Kabul in a helicopter filled with bags of cash.) The interior ministry was openly selling contracts to smuggle opium out of the country. In Helmand, which produced as much as half the country’s opium, the director of education was illiterate. (In his defense, so was the governor.) Police chiefs and generals were bulldozing whole neighborhoods to build mansions, called “poppy palaces,” with their drug money. During the occupation, opium sales matched and often outperformed legal goods and services as a share of Afghanistan’s domestic product; during Ghani’s first term, Afghanistan was producing 90 percent of the world’s opium. For comparison, the last time a failing American occupation made entire countries dependent on making and selling drugs, the Golden Triangle (Burma, Thailand, Laos) cultivated one thousand pounds of opium annually. That record was one-fifth of Afghanistan’s least productive year during the occupation.

Afghanistan made the war on terror also a war on drugs, and the operators behind the war on terror made war on drugs. In Afghanistan, the highest compliment an operator could get from his teammates was being called a “pipe hitter.”

The hectares, tons, and percentages give the view from the spreadsheet. Master Sergeant William Lavigne had the view from the dirt. Wearing his dress uniform in the picture that comes up when you google him, Lavigne looks like he has left at least one victim stateside with a final image of AND1 basketball shorts. He has a chapped, surfactant complexion. His hairline looks like it is in the Aryan Nation. He looks really, really strung out—seriously, badly fucked up. He also looks like he has every decoration and ribbon the Army awards in his huge, glowing stack of war medals. He looks like one of history’s highest-speed operators. He looks like a pipe hitter. Seth Harp’s new book, The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and the Special Forces, opens with Lavigne and his best friend, Sergeant First Class Mark Leshikar, on a trip to Disney World.

The two were driving their two daughters back to Fayetteville, North Carolina, the town surrounding Fort Bragg, where both men work. The date was March 21, 2018, which means General Miller was on this day Lavigne’s boss: Lavigne was an operator in Delta Force. “By the age of thirty-four,” Harp tells us, “Lavigne had spent a total of forty-one months and twenty-two days in combat,” across fourteen deployments. Leshikar, in the passenger seat, was part of the unclassified “white” special forces, a National Guard Green Beret. He was also freaking the fuck out. Leshikar left the happiest place on Earth on “alcohol, cocaine, MDMA, tramadol, and Xanax,” plus “the unregulated Russian pharmaceutical phenazepam” and bath salts.

Out the same day as Anderson’s, Harp’s new book tells the story that the older journalist missed. The two men have a lot in common: Harp also spent time in Iraq, doing a tour there in the Army Reserve from 2004 to 2005. Harp likewise mostly writes about war, publishing stories about two National Guard soldiers who were abandoned by their unit when their convoy was ambushed, foreign volunteers in Ukraine and Syria, and cartels in Mexico. The Fort Bragg Cartel is Harp’s effort to unify several pieces he’s written about a series of arrests, deaths, and murders connected to the base and the special operators who work there, beginning with what was about to happen between Leshikar and Lavigne.

Leshikar had started hallucinating as he was driving, convinced he was the target of a government plot to assassinate him for his failure to get into Delta. Lavigne tried to calm him down, but when they made it back to Leshikar’s house, Leshikar grabbed a screwdriver and started to disassemble his truck’s engine, looking for the transponder he suspected was being used to track him. When Lavigne tried to take the screwdriver from his friend, the men struggled, with Lavigne managing to subdue Leshikar. Lavigne sent the girls inside—his own young daughter, Ava, and Leshikar’s, a six-year-old named Melanie—and locked Leshikar out. At some point, Lavigne was preoccupied, leaving Melanie able to go downstairs and let her father in. It is unlikely it will ever be possible to know what actually happened, but Leshikar was suddenly inside and heading straight for Lavigne. As she later told her mother, Melanie “looked up and saw Billy pointing the gun at her daddy. And she looked at her daddy and it was like he was dancing.” Lavigne shot the unarmed Leshikar at least three times, from multiple angles, then stood over him and fired what Harp calls a “kill shot” into his chest at point-blank range.

Lavigne was picked up by the cops, told a series of contradictory stories and outright lies about why he killed his friend, and was “absolved of criminal responsibility” “and released into the custody of his teammates,” who were waiting outside the police station in a convoy of lifted pickups. He went back to work as a Delta operator in good standing, the military investigation finding he killed Leshikar in self-defense. It wouldn’t be publicly acknowledged or reported that Lavigne was Leshikar’s killer until two years later, when Lavigne himself was shot, stripped of most of his clothes, wrapped in a tarp, and thrown in the bed of his truck.

Steps away was the body of Chief Warrant Officer Timothy Dumas Sr., a special forces quartermaster with a hole in his forehead. Dumas thought he had insurance, in the form of a secret letter on a flash drive exposing a special operations drug ring trafficking opiates from Afghanistan to sell at Bragg, but this vanished during the murder investigation. As Harp reports, Dumas was part of a cartel moving as much as fifty kilos of cocaine into Fort Bragg each week.

“Many people think of Fayetteville,” writes the anthropologist Catherine Lutz in her study of the town, “as a place to get a dozen beers and a sexual disease.” The town is also known as Fayettenam, or Fatalburg, and has been associated with dissipation going back to World War II, when it was notorious for drinking, visible drug use, and prostitution (male and female). It’s been notorious for racist violence pretty much since it became a major base in World War II. In 1941, a black private in the Jim Crow army named Ned Turman killed a white military policeman after the base police provoked a race riot, before another MP shot Turman. The Klan enforced a 9 p.m. curfew as late as the fifties. In 1995, Jackie Burden and Michael James, a black couple, were murdered by a skinhead from the 82nd Airborne in a racist attack. The killing drew attention to a white supremacist magazine called The Resister, founded by Army operator Stephen Barry, which was discovered to be circulating widely among Bragg’s Special Forces.

Harp calls Fayetteville “the moody military town.” With Bragg’s suicide rate triple the national average, this is a coy understatement. Civilians in Fayetteville are still poor, compared to others in cities of similar size and demography that don’t have army bases. In this, they resemble their Cumberland County forebears of a century ago, who were dying of starvation and getting pellagra into the 1930s. They also can resemble the people of modern-day Afghanistan: poor, starving, and vulnerable. From the invasion to the Taliban takeover in 2021, poverty increased from 80 percent to virtually the entire population. The proportion of children under five experiencing acute malnutrition rose from 9 to 50 percent, and the percentage of people without enough to eat increased from 62 to 92 percent. During the war on terror, Fayetteville saw an astonishing number of child deaths from malnutrition, a drastic rise in hunger, and cascading deaths from overdoses and shootings. In both places, the suffering was caused by the same people.

Early in Harp’s book, a soldier describes Leshikar and Lavigne as “complete fucking derelicts, constantly doing nefarious shit.” There is nothing unexpected about their deaths; after all, they are soldiers, soldiers die violently, and nowhere so often as in Fayettenam. But the pair’s story gets much weirder, in a way that can’t be explained by exigencies of Bragg or the war. Before he was murdered steps away from Billy Lavigne, Timothy Dumas introduced a drug trafficker named Freddy Wayne Huff II to a drug cartel inside the Army. According to Huff, Dumas told him that this drug network at Bragg was “basically a gang,” with Lavigne at its center.

Formerly a cop in Lexington, Huff’s decline began when he pulled over a friend of the governor for drunk driving, who threatened to shitcan and blacklist him if he didn’t let him off. Huff wrote the ticket and got kicked off the force. Huff’s marketable skills then amounted to a freak ability, honed while deputized to the DEA, to successfully select traffickers for traffic stops in the absence of observable indicators of smuggling (apart from, presumably, their race). Unemployed, Huff did what anyone would do: start moving enormous amounts of cocaine with Los Zetas, a Mexican crime syndicate that started as a special forces anti-narcotics unit whose leaders underwent some of their training at Bragg. At the peak of his career, the Zetas’ “main man,” Harp says, was “moving fifty to a hundred kilos of cocaine” every ten days. Half of this was going to Bragg.

Huff concealed all this powder by hiding it in an appliance refurbishment and resale business, renting a warehouse to receive the shipments, and hiring cops and soldiers as security. (One of those employees was Robert Seward, a black man from Fayetteville who had gone to Syria a few years earlier and joined, then left, the Islamic State.) Dumas and Lavigne, according to Huff, had been dealing together. Huff tells Harp all of this from prison after getting rolled up with $3.7 million worth of drugs in his house, including sixty kilos of meth in the basement.

Laid out like this, the cinematics might undermine the point Harp is making, which is that the United States military increasingly resembles and behaves like a successful criminal enterprise. Harp’s definition of Delta is “a high-tech death squad dedicated to covertly liquidating the male population base of recalcitrant ethnic and tribal groups that resist U.S. military occupation.” An operator’s wife Harp interviews is more succinct: “Running guns. Selling drugs. Fucking Afghan women. Where do you want me to start?” The characters in his book are middle-class American men, often fathers and usually white, massacring families while high on drugs they bought with money they stole while defending a regime of pedophile warlords, who were themselves extorting a country in which about one-third of people knew how to read. (American soldiers, many of them in JSOC, ripped off literal tons of money from the military: Harp writes that “whole pallets of shrink-wrapped cash simply disappeared—billions of dollars’ worth.”)

That these were the real achievements of the war was obvious to ordinary Americans in the military. One soldier interviewed at a combat outpost in 2013 described his relationship to his colleagues in the Afghan army and police like this: “Try doing that day in and day out: working with child molesters, working with people who are robbing people and murdering them. It wears on you.” The corruption and ghoulishness of the national police and military were so dire that it became a tactical liability. It’s been alleged that the Taliban recruited young boys as “honey pots,” or sleeper cells in insider attacks: the only survivor of one such attack told reporters that, late at night, his commander’s child sex slave “went on a shooting spree, killing seven policemen including the commander as they slept.” Another time, a child was killed when rival police departments went to war over him.

American operators acted the same way back home. When it came out that the FBI was investigating Lavigne’s unit after his murder, a special forces soldier explained to a reporter working on a story about drug use, alleged trafficking, and rape of underage girls, that it was all happening because the shooters were bored. “Dudes are fucking around with young kids and the craziest drugs.”

The most affecting parts of The Fort Bragg Cartel are the vignettes Harp collects showing the devastation soldiers inflict on their families: an operator named Keith Lewis beat his wife, then pointed a gun at the cops who showed up when she called. No charges were filed, and soon thereafter he was promoted. A couple of years later, Lewis murdered his wife, who was pregnant, with a gun in one hand and their daughter in the other. Another operator stomped to death his tiny dog, named Greta Bean, then shot his wife in the head before killing himself. This didn’t start recently. In July 2002, the Times was reporting a “growing problem” at Bragg: soldiers murdering their wives. The report notes that of the four women killed in the six weeks before the article was published, three of the victims were married to men in the special forces. One, another who killed his wife and then shot himself, was a member of Delta.

The cutting edge of grisly violence against innocent people might belong to operators, but their innovations filter down. A study from a few years ago found that over the previous thirty years, 25 percent of the people who attempted or carried out mass casualty attacks in the United States were veterans. More surprisingly, it concluded that veterans who had seen combat or had deployment-related trauma were no more likely to try and kill lots of people than those who didn’t have those experiences. It was enough just being in the military.

Harp places the operator in a “mythic figure” tradition that animates American life, alongside the cowboy and the frontiersman, all of whom are responsible for bringing “law and order to the gritty fringes of empire.” One thinks Anderson might have noticed some of these classically American types, carving through the hills of Kandahar in ATVs. In his afterword, Anderson begins with the remark that “every country is a never-ending story.” He describes how Afghanistan has become a “twilight zone” outside of time, where nothing newsworthy happens but terrorist attacks—committed by a group he calls ISIS-Khorasan, described as a Taliban “offshoot.” (Islamic State Khorasan Province, as it’s generally known, has been at war with the Taliban for a decade, descended from that group’s Pakistani branch, and has a separate religious identity.) Researcher Rob Ashlar has credibly alleged that some parts of the American-backed Afghan government supported ISKP as a backstop against the Taliban. For Anderson, plus ça change. The story passes by again.

The United States is also stuck in history. At this year’s annual special forces conference, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told his audience, “Special operations has never been more important for our country.” The role the operator came into in Afghanistan did change things: operators made it possible for the United States to impose and maintain an unpopular narco-comprador government that made corruption the only possible bond between occupier and occupied. This altered, likely permanently, the means and ends to which our wars are waged. It also produced an American original. As the special operators’ country turned its endless wars into job programs for the dumbest sons of the middle class, its methods of super-violent extraction became personalized, inhering in the men who carried them out and refined them. When the operators got home, why shouldn’t they sell drugs, rape, and kill? It’s what they did all day at work.