After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan

By Ted Rall

An unflinching account—in words and pictures—of America's longest war by our most outspoken graphic journalist

Ted Rall traveled deep into Afghanistan—without embedding himself with U.S. soldiers, without insulating himself with flak jackets and armored SUVs—where no one else would go (except, of course, Afghans).

He made two long trips: the first in the wake of 9/11, and the next ten years later to see what a decade of U.S. occupation had wrought. On the first trip, he shouted his dispatches into a satellite phone provided by a Los Angeles radio station, attempting to explain that the booming in the background—and sometimes the foreground—were the sounds of an all-out war that no one at home would entirely own up to. Ten years later, the alternative newspapers and radio station that had financed his first trip could no longer afford to send him into harm's way, so he turned to Kickstarter to fund a groundbreaking effort to publish online a real-time blog of graphic journalism (essentially, a nonfiction comic) documenting what was really happening on the ground, filed daily by satellite.

The result of this intrepid reporting is After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests—a singular account of one determined journalist's effort to bring the realities of life in twenty-first-century Afghanistan to the world in the best way he knows how: a mix of travelogue, photography, and award-winning comics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Sep 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781429955584

Ted Rall

Ted Rall is the author and illustrator of many graphic novels and books of political criticism and travel writing, including The Year of Loving Dangerously, Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?, and The Book of Obama: How We Went from Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt. He lives in East Hampton, New York.

Book preview

PROLOGUE: THE END OF THE BEGINNING

Afghanistan in 2001: there was nothing.

There were forty-five of us reporters. Eight Americans. Three in our car. We had no idea what we were in for.

Which is why we came. To see things for ourselves.

Not to get the truth. You can’t get the truth.

But you can get an impression.

We huddled inside my fixer Sadoullo’s car, furiously rubbing our legs, futilely trying to warm up. In late afternoon, when we’d arrived at the border crossing, it must have been in the high fifties or low sixties. It was nine o’clock now and well below freezing, and the breath of my wife and my agent and Sadoullo’s driver and my own was all that was keeping us warm, spreading frost up the cracks on the windshield of Sadoullo’s Volga, a conveyance that couldn’t have been more poorly insulated had it been made of Saran Wrap. Time crawled. There was no telling how long the Russian guards would make us wait.

I got out of the car, found my backpack, and pulled out a string of silk underwear through a hole in the seam. Icy sand crunched beneath my boots. I found a spot behind a shipping container to pee and change. It wasn’t colder outside than in the car.

I watched the guard shack as I shuffled out of my jeans. Along with smoke, tinny Russian disco and singing wafted out the flue and through coils of concertina wire. Drunken singing. The men of the Russian Army’s 201st Motorized Rifle Division weren’t going to skip their liquid dinner to cater to a convoy of trucks and jeeps carrying a bunch of self-important reporters who wanted to cross the Tajik-Afghan border. There was no rush. Afghanistan had been blowing itself up forever. As far as the Russians were concerned, we could just as easily get ourselves killed tomorrow.

A Soviet flag, crisp and bright and nowhere near ten years old, waved above an unmanned watchtower. You’d think the hammer and sickle would look incongruous, what with the country it symbolized having ceased to exist ten years earlier. But here, at the ass end of the world, things that didn’t make sense were run of the mill. It was the twenty-first century. Yet the Tajik SSR was still hanging on.

As far as these soldiers were concerned, the Soviet Union was an idea that remained very much alive. Things might have changed in Moscow. The big bosses in Dushanbe, where Soviet governmental institutions had met into the mid-1990s, might have given up on the socialist dream. But not here. Here at the southern tip of the so-called Special Security Zone, the men of the 201st were assigned to protect the buffer between Tajikistan and Afghanistan. They were holding the line against the Islamist hordes across the river. These Russians would die before they allowed murderous Afghans to infiltrate what they still called (and, more important, thought of as) the

Reviews for After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests

[susan.macura · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have become a huge fan of Ted Rall's work now that I have read several books. This one is probably one of his best and most important. He describes his experiences as a reporter in Afghanistan in which he visited and traveled with two other cartoonists but not with the protection of U.S. armed forces. He did this so he could see what is really going on there and how people felt about American intervention without any interpretive influence by the U.S. government. I found his results eye opening and extremely valuable.

[brucecoulson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The first third of the book is a rehashing of Rall's 'To Afghanistan and Back', which is why I downrated rated 'After we...' a bit. But this is still one of the few accounts of what's happening to ordinary Afghans during America's longest war, and what the Afghan people actually think, feel, and want. (Mostly, for the U.S. to leave.) Rall toured Afghanistan 11 years after his first trip, mostly to see what had really happened in that time. The book is quite openly political; Rall refers to the war ON Afghanistan, not 'in', and explains why he's chosen that phrasing. There are several surprises (Afghanistan now has paved roads...which aren't used very much, because of bandits, the Taliban, and American attacks; the Taliban uses bike gang attacks ala 'Mad Max') and some expected findings. (The famous pipeline for natural gas and oil? Doesn't exist, and there are no signs anyone is even trying to build it.) Overall, informative and funny in a 'you have to laugh because otherwise you'd scream' way.