War of Fortune: 18 Years and Counting

The author with CNN crew in Kabul, Afghanistan, June 2011.

The tattoos were a tell-tale sign. So were the black t-shirts, baseball caps, Oakley shades and bird-nest beards. But it was those dark jags of ink splayed over tanned forearms that really screamed soldiers of fortune. This group of hired guns had strapped in beside me aboard a Lockheed C-130 transport plane, en route to southern Afghanistan's restive Helmand province. The men were mostly silent as the plane took off, with occasional head bobs to adjust the keffiyehs neatly tucked under their chins. On their laps rested German-engineered MP-5 long guns. On mine, a grey notebook and a small camera.

It was the summer of 2011, one of the deadliest years for Americans in a long war brought on the attacks nearly 7,000 miles away in Manhattan, Washington DC, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. After nearly a decade of fighting, the Taliban was steadily gaining ground. More than 400 coalition soldiers had already died in a rash of ambush assaults and roadside bombs. And so we had all chosen to fly rather than drive to our destination: Camp Leatherneck, then the largest US Marine Corps base in the world.

At Leatherneck, I ate with newly deployed Marines, slept in their tents, and traveled out to their forward operating bases. "Where were you on September 11th?" I'd ask, the 10-year anniversary of that day approaching. "I was 10-years-old," said a young Marylander, who declined to give his name on account of what seemed a natural skittishness. "I was in the 5th grade… it was first period."

Shy, almost innocent-looking, he was nothing like the motley crew I had flown in with. There was a nervousness that enveloped him, as well as the others his age. No tattoos. No bravado. And no real conception of the world into which he had stepped.

Though the violence in Afghanistan had gotten worse, many of us back in the States seemed to think the war was winding down, particularly after US forces killed Osama Bin Laden in the spring of 2011, and President Obama announced a major drawdown of troops a month later. CNN, my employer, no longer kept a full-time bureau operating in country. Coverage was coordinated from across the border, in Islamabad, Pakistan's capital. Afghanistan already seemed to have become America's latest forgotten war.

For several months, I reported on the NATO drawdown and hand-over of power to local forces, who were clearly incapable of maintaining control by themselves. A hydra of insurgent groups, from the Afghan Taliban to the Haqqani network and other local warlords, had emerged from the shadows to fill the void. Meanwhile, though the Americans said they planned to leave, tens of billions of US dollars were still flowing into the country, often with little oversight.

That was eight years ago. American troops are still in Afghanistan. Kids born after 9/11 are fighting there now. The US-backed government barely holds half the country, and the Taliban controls more territory than at any point since 2001. Peace talks between the US and the Taliban that were meant to have a dramatic conclusion this week have fallen apart, throwing the future of Afghanistan into a fresh, if familiar, uncertainty.

As we mark the 18th anniversary of the attacks that led to the US invasion in the first place, I think about those young US Marines I met back at Leatherneck, across from those dusty barracks in Helmand province. Did they survive? Roughly 2,400 Americans didn't. Did they return home? Or are they plying the lucrative, dangerous trade of private security contractors over there? By now they could well be battle-hardened fighters themselves, in black t-shirts, keffiyehs, arms all inked up too.

I had met them while covering the supposed end of a war that still has not ended.

More from GZERO Media

U.S. President Donald Trump holds an executive order about tariffs increase, flanked by U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 13, 2025.
REUTERS

T-Day has arrived. On Wednesday afternoon, Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs on US trade partners will take effect immediately after a Rose Garden announcement.

A giant screen in Beijing shows news footage about the People's Liberation Army (PLA) joint army, navy, air and rocket forces drills around Taiwan on April 1, 2025.
REUTERS/Florence Lo

Beijing conducted one of the largest and most provocative military drills ever around the island -- but why now?

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks during a briefing, Kyiv, Ukraine, on March 28, 2025.
  • Ukrinform/ABACA via Reuters Connect

Vladimir Putin insists that Volodymyr Zelensky is no longer Ukraine’s legitimate president because his government has imposed martial law and delayed elections that were due in 2024.

President Donald Trump speaks from the Oval Office flanked by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on the day he signed executive orders for reciprocal tariffs, Feb. 13, 2025.
REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Details of a group chat between senior administration officials that leaked last week – the so-called Houthi PC small group – provide allies, adversaries, and watchers with revealing insights into the administration’s foreign policy blueprint. Lindsay Newman explores the takeaways.

Proud Source became a Walmart supplier in 2021. Today, its team has grown by 50%, and it's the largest employer in Mackay, ID. Walmart supports small businesses across the country, and nearly two-thirds of Walmart's product spend is on products made, grown, or assembled in America. It’s all a part of Walmart’s $350 billion investment in US manufacturing, which helps small businesses grow and supports US jobs. Learn more about Walmart’s commitment to US manufacturing.

As Microsoft celebrates its 50th anniversary, Vice Chair and President Brad Smith sits down with company cofounder Bill Gates for a special episode of Tools and Weapons. They discuss Gates’ new memoir, "Source Code: My Beginnings," reflect on Microsoft’s impact over the past five decades, and explore why the next phase of the digital revolution is shaping up to be the most exciting yet. Subscribe and find new episodes monthly, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Courtesy of ChatGPT

OpenAI recently released its GPT-4o image-generation model, which is billed as more responsive to prompts, more capable of accurately rendering text, and better at producing higher-fidelity images than previous AI image generators. Within hours, ChatGPT users flooded social media with cartoons they made using the model in the style of the Japanese film house Studio Ghibli. The ordeal became an internet spectacle, but as the memes flowed, they also raised important technological, copyright, and even political questions, which Scott Nover explores this week in GZERO AI.

The flag of China is displayed on a smartphone with a NVIDIA chip in the background in this photo illustration.
Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Reuters

H3C, one of China’s biggest server makers, has warned about running out of Nvidia H20 chips, the most powerful AI chips Chinese companies can legally purchase under US export controls.