This is Afghanistan

Tim Hetherington’s articulate photograph of an exhausted American soldier in a Korengal Valley outpost was named 2008 World Press Photo of the Year. But it was another, by Balazs Gardi, of an Afghan man cradling a boy injured in a US airstrike in the same valley, which moved me more. I didn’t understand it at the time, but Gardi’s photo resonated because it was among a minority of remarkable images from the war in Afghanistan that portrayed innocence.

To me, it was the experience of Afghan non-combatants, those upon whom the war was imposed rather than the professional soldiers who chose to participate, whose stories most deserved to be told. And images like Gardi’s brought viewers as close to the war experience of Afghans as they were ever likely to get.

I’d never imagined taking photographs like Gardi’s myself. Until that point I’d struggled to define the kind of themes to which I felt a genuine connection and often compensated by prioritising more aesthetic considerations. Even when the opportunity to accompany a friend and journalist to Afghanistan arose in 2013 my motivation wasn’t anything as noble as storytelling. It was far more ego-driven. I wanted to tick a box that would elevate me into the pantheon of journalists who had worked in ‘conflict zones’. With time and experience, however, the somewhat cynical reasons for which I’d come to Afghanistan became insignificant and were not those for which I decided to stay.

By then, with the will for war against the Taliban waning, access to the dwindling number of US soldiers and those of their allies almost completely ceased. The few journalists who were granted semi-regular access to the American combat forces who remained after 2014 reported in a way that ensured they maintained their favoured status. It was this shrinking access that forced me and many other journalists to report from the point of view of those living on the war’s fringe, many of whom ended up victims. (More than 70,000 civilians were killed and hundreds of thousands injured as a result of the war in the Afghanistan–Pakistan conflict zone between 2001 and 2021.)

Moreover, it was witnessing the experience of Afghans for whom neither innocence nor neutrality were enough to protect them from the war – in my first two years in Afghanistan – that compelled me to stay, and guided my focus for the six years that followed, like watching a father covering the ears of his four-year-old son after being caught in an ambush while walking home from a bazaar one morning; and meeting the grief-stricken family of Baynazar Mohammad Nazar, killed when the hospital in which he was being treated was destroyed by a US warplane.

Once the shrinking international military footprint exposed the Afghan forces’ over-reliance on their allies’ support, the return of the Taliban seemed inevitable – even if, before the signing of the Doha Agreement in 2021, I never imagined it would come before I had left Afghanistan. The photographs in This is Afghanistan represent vignettes of the hundreds of stories that led to that inevitability. No single image can possibly represent the array of Afghans’ experiences in the period covered here. Still, taking into account my own proclivities, the limits of the medium, and cultural, political and security impediments, combined, these photographs do make up a patchwork that represents a broad, imperfect portrait of time and place.

This is an edited extract from Andrew Quilty’s This is Afghanistan: 2014–2021, published by The Miegunyah Press in 2023. Images and text © Andrew Quilty.