To accompany today’s episodes of Inside Afghanistan with Ben Anderson, we asked Ben what he thought about the media’s portrayal of all soldiers as miserable, unwilling dupes and the reason we keep bombing so many weddings. Here’s what he had to say. 

You often get these stories about our poor soldiers, and these harsh conditions. Yeah, they haven’t got enough equipment, and yeah, their food could be a bit better, and yeah, they could get a bit more time at home between tours–but one thing you miss out on is a lot of these guys love to fight, and they want to do it. They walk into situations where they know the Taliban think they are leading them into a trap and are going to surround them. Sometimes they even annoy the Taliban enough to provoke a fight. It’s an aspect of war which is often forgotten or ignored. Soldiers go out looking for “contact,” as they call it, and a good contact is one that lasts a while.

Quite a few times in the course of covering the war I likened it to a sport. You’ve got two groups of men who are agreeing to meet in a designated area and compete. The Taliban and the British and Americans clearly do want to have a good fight. The Taliban, even when they’re outnumbered something like 50 to 1 and are up against planes and helicopters, still carry on fighting. The problem with the whole thing is they’re doing this on land and in buildings which are home to Afghan families, most of whom wish the Taliban had just ended and their country wasn’t filled with soldiers. You can tell all these boys’ stories about what amazing, lengthy firefights they’ve had, but civilian casualties are at an all-time high and despite all the promises of precision-guided attacks, and checking for civilians first, those figures are still on the rise.

Part of the issue, as I point out in the video, is the layout of these families’ homes. Even the Afghans call them “compounds”; they are basically just a set of rooms inside four huge, thick walls. The idea that you can check these places for civilians before you attack a building is ludicrous. Sometimes the planes and helicopters can check them as they fly over, but of course people are going to be hiding in their rooms. They’re not going to be out in the courtyard waving.

Another thing I think gets missed in the news is the Green Zone, this one fertile strip of land that goes through Helmand Province, it’s like Vietnam. It’s just full of ditches and caves and holes and trees. The Taliban have come up with some ingenious methods, like cutting tiny little slits in a wall with a tree in front of it so they can fire out, but no one can see where the fire is coming from. They’ve also got this incredible network of tunnels running through the walls of compounds, so they can attack the soldiers from the compound, escape through the tunnels, and the soldiers will attack that compound long after the Taliban have gone.

BEN ANDERSON as told to Vice Staff

Continued tomorrow…