by Ben Anderson
Even if the Taliban had been vanquished, there were few signs that the government would be embraced and plenty that it was hated and feared. People approached marines in the bazaar, saying: ‘Please don’t leave us alone with those guys’, referring to the police. The same thing had happened in every town I’d seen cleared.
The fact that the people being liberated were asking for protection from those we were fighting to introduce ought to have raised obvious questions. But it was too late in the day to admit such a terminal flaw in policy. A perma-smiling lieutenant colonel told me that ‘spreading GIROA’ (pronounced ‘ji-row-ah’ – the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan) was going fantastically well and being embraced by the people.
* * * * *
Bravo had to clear their area of IEDs and drugs, so that people could return to their homes and the bazaar could re-open. The ANCOP (Afghan National Civil Order Police) appeared in the bazaar. ANCOP were supposed to be an elite unit, trained and blooded in Kabul, where they had been taught how to work with communities, rather than against them, as local forces had done. They wore ballooning light blue trousers made of what looked like felt, smoked a lot, carried machine-guns and looked unhappy. One carried a rocket launcher on his shoulder.
I asked Captain Sparks how he knew the police wouldn’t be as bad as, or worse, than the Taliban. ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘I just have faith that somebody has vetted these guys, that they have good leadership, they’ve been mentored properly and that they want peace and security in Afghanistan as much as we do. They have been deployed in other places successfully, so that adds a little confidence. But I don’t know that for sure and that’s definitely something I’ll keep my eye on. I’ll leave marines behind to make sure they’re doing things the right way.’
The ANCOP commander saw two men approaching the bazaar. He shouted to them to put their hands in the air, turn round and walk backwards towards him. He sent two of his men to meet them half-way. One knelt by the side of the road and pointed a machine-gun at them, while the other patted them down. The two men were Abdel Baki and his father Abdel Kareem – the men who had just lost four members of their family to a stray rocket. No one had told the Afghan police.
In the bazaar, the marines greeted Abdel Baki and Abdel Kareem warmly. ‘Did you have a good night?’ asked Gunny D. ‘Did the Mullah stay with you?’ The two men, who looked genuinely pleased to see the marines, said the Mullah had stayed with them until ten o’clock. ‘I’m working on the family names’, continued Gunny D, ‘and as soon as I hear word back, I’ll tell you. I won’t forget them.’ Still, no one knew which hospital the injured had been taken to.
Gunny D was the face of the marines for this stage of the operation. He was a weapons platoon sergeant; his real name was Brandon Dickinson. Dickinson’s thinning hair and round, friendly face made him look as affable as Sparks looked lethal but his ability to put anyone in the mood to talk was described as ‘almost magical’. Accompanying him on this first important day was Lieutenant Mark Greenlief, Bravo’s executive officer and Captain Sparks’s right-hand man, who had similar people skills. He and Sparks shared an almost telepathic connection, communicating with a word or two, a look or a nod. Having such trust, without actually being the boss, meant he was more relaxed than most marines; at briefings, he’d often do camp little dances and voices, or creep up on people and slip sweets into their hands. I’d bought a badge at Kandahar Air Base, an American flag that said, ‘We’re gonna freedom the fuck out of you’. Greenlief wrote an entire song with that line as the chorus.
A few people had complained about damage to their homes; the marines helped them fill in compensation forms, then handed over money from their piles of cash. A man approached with his tiny son, whose face was covered in dirt and whose thick head of hair was red in patches, often a sign of malnutrition. The man said he’d been hiding in a field for two days and needed to buy some cream for his son’s skin from the bazaar. The marines gave him some halal food and took him to see the medic. An older man, a tailor, and his two sons appeared, complaining that someone had broken into their store and damaged their property. Marines from Charlie Company were sleeping in the surrounding stores; it looked like they had moved in for a few nights. They had stolen some biscuits, slashed a shalwar kameez hanging on the wall and written ‘I ♥ USA’ on the breast pocket of another. ‘You must have a bad name to do this’, said the tailor.
Greenlief immediately offered to buy all the vandalised shirts. He and Gunny D also asked to be measured for bespoke ‘man dresses’ of their own. They negotiated hard but playfully, eventually agreeing $60 for two shirts. The tailor corrected them about the length, saying only women wore them that long, and told them not to have black, because it was too hot. The tailor asked for $70, to which Greenlief said, ‘We’ll send more marines down here. People will see me with my “man dress” on and they’ll want to know where I got it.’ The tailor had gone from being angry at the marines to being charmed, even if his goodwill was partly bought. A relationship had begun: Greenlief would have to come back to collect the ‘man dresses’ and a box could be ticked on the counter-insurgency checklist.
The marines had lots of ideas about building relationships and improving the bazaar but mostly they asked one simple question: ‘What would you like us to do for you?’ But the question proved very hard for people to understand. Most were convinced they would be thrown out of their homes, arrested, hooded and beaten. They were wary of co-operating with the marines, sure they would be gone in a few days. But even when they realised that the question was genuine, they didn’t believe it was to do with the next few years, or even the next few months. So they asked for money, compensation for things that had happened over the last few days. The marines were willing to pay for any damage they’d done but many of the claims were far-fetched, which annoyed them. They wanted to work with the local people, even to become friends with them, not just offer hand-outs.
‘Gentlemen. Good morning’, said Captain Sparks in the first shura, to the twenty-three men who were there. ‘I’m in charge of the Marines in Karu Charai village. We’re very happy, it’s a great day. The Taliban is gone and we can finally start to open your bazaar.’ The Captain promised to repair any damage and get all the stores opened. What he didn’t say – but everyone knew – was that the arrival of the Marines meant the end of the lucrative opium and heroin production business, which everyone in Marjah depended on in some way. If it did continue, as it surely would, it would have to be carried out away from the marines’ eyes and probably needed the continued involvement of the Taliban. Yet another reason the people wouldn’t pick sides.
Captain Sparks introduced everyone but, as he hadn’t met him, he didn’t know the name of the new ANCOP chief, who’d arrived and was quietly sitting in on the shura. One of the men in the crowd interrupted: ‘Are we allowed to open the stores?’
‘Of course you are’, said Sparks, ‘you can do whatever you want.’ Gunny D appealed to everyone to work with the marines and report any suspicious behaviour or the arrival of anyone from out of town.
Abdel Baki said that the marines needed to push the Taliban right out before that could happen. ‘We can’t announce anything’, he said, ‘or they’ll hear and come back and hit us again.’ In one of the very first exchanges, at the very first shura, the challenge had been presented. The people couldn’t co-operate until the Taliban were absolutely gone for good. And that hadn’t been achieved in a single province or district in Afghanistan. Captain Sparks set out to reassure everyone.
‘We and the ANA and ANP are not going anywhere. And we’re watching the Taliban all the time. They can’t hide from us. It’s my dream for this to be the place that everyone wants to be in Marjah. The jewel of Marjah.’
Another man stood up, one of the sons of La Mirage. ‘Since the war started we haven’t been able to go to work. Are you going to pay us compensation?’ The marines said they couldn’t do that but they would pay men to clean
up the bazaar. Gunny D said he’d give the money for this to the malik (community leader), pointing to an old man he’d met earlier. There was uproar. He used to be the malik, now this man was the malik. And more than one man was responsible for the bazaar; there were three or four. Gunny D sighed.
Mohammad, the twenty-year-old dwarf, arrived. He stood in the middle of the rectangle where everyone sat. An old man stole a dollar bill from Mohammad’s back pocket, in full view of three other old men, all with long white beards and toothless mouths. They could barely contain themselves, writhing, trying not to laugh out loud. The pickpocket tapped Mohammad’s back pocket and handed the dollar bill back. He snatched it, frowned and put his chin on his chest, as angry as he’d been when the ANA put him in the hanging basket.
After the shura, some of the men opened their stores. Marines and ANA soldiers bought cigarettes by the carton. Everyone smiled and shook hands. Afterwards Gunny D walked back into the base, threw his arms in the air and shouted, ‘First store open, baby.’ Another marine high-fived and hugged him.
Behind the bazaar, other marines, accompanied by Tim Coderre, slowly cleared every building in the pork chop. Tim’s job was to treat every sniper hole, drug lab, or IED as a crime scene, collecting any evidence before it was contaminated. The first building where I saw him work was a small two-roomed outhouse that had been hit with an air grenade through the roof. Tim took a photo of the building’s red metal doors, then pushed one open with his right foot. He rocked back slightly, and pushed the other door open. I saw the hairy lower half of a severed human leg, with shoe.
‘Has a dog been in here?’ asked Tim.
‘There was a dog right out here’, said one of the marines. Then, I saw a man’s body, its left side blown open. Several yellow and red organs, swollen with fluid, hung out of the hole. The man had been killed by the grenade; the dog was eating his exposed muscle and fatty tissue. Tim put on his gloves and walked in. The man lay on his right side, his face buried in a blanket. Rigor mortis had set in, so as Tim pushed the left arm, the whole body went with it and the man was flipped on to his back. The right side of his face and head had been blown off. Tim searched him, pulling prayer beads from his shirt: ‘Those didn’t work, did they, motherfucker?’ A rifle that looked about seventy years old was propped against the wall. ‘It’s very powerful, well-maintained and very accurate’, said Tim. ‘It’s a 7.62 mm, .303 Enfield.’
He searched the man’s pockets. ‘Oh wow. Here’s your prick’, he said, pulling a string of shiny new bullets from the dead man’s clothing. ‘Get the fuck out of here’, said a marine standing in the door. ‘556?’ he asked.
‘Oh yeah’, said Tim. The bullets were NATO rounds; the bullets that Americans and Brits used and the ones that were issued to the ANA. They were also the bullets that had been fired at the marines, so the dead man was either one of the snipers or one of the marksmen covering the snipers.
‘What are you gonna do with him?’ asked one of the marines. ‘Him?’ said Tim. ‘I don’t believe we’re gonna do anything with him, we’ll just leave him there.’
Three people approached; two old men and a woman. They said the building was their house and they wanted to move the body. Lieutenant Greenlief asked if they were related to the dead man. One of the men said he was his nephew and his sister – the dead man’s mother, who was blind – wanted her son to be buried near the family home, on the other side of the pork chop.
‘Ask him if any more of his relatives are Taliban’, said Greenlief.
‘No one’, they said.
‘So the guy that’s dead is the only Taliban in their family?’ asked Greenlief.
‘He was not Taliban’, said the family, all together. ‘But they forced him to carry a gun’, said his aunt. ‘If they give you an order, you don’t say no’, said his uncle.
* * * * *
Charlie Company had also started work in Karu Charai. Their area included the opium bazaar, where one of them noticed a wire coming out of a wall and disappearing into the ground. The wire linked eighteen military-grade rockets and a fragmentation device (‘like a home-made Claymore [a type of mine]’) in a daisy chain, that zigzagged for a hundred and fifty metres. It was the most complex IED they’d found in Afghanistan.
‘If a marine patrol had walked through [the opium bazaar] it was designed to kill the whole patrol, all at once’, said Lieutenant Aaron McLean, the marine I’d met at the condolence payment meeting. ‘Walking round here’, he said, ‘is a bit like swimming in the ocean. You’d never do it if you knew how many sharks there really were. The number of IEDs we find, the number of IEDs that malfunction or that we miss entirely, in this country, is tremendous.’ They’d detonated every IED they’d come across so far. ‘We’re twelve for twelve right now’, said Ski.
Elsewhere in the pork chop and bazaar, the marines found so many bags of heroin and opium that they hadn’t enough space to store them. One house alone had somewhere between forty and fifty kilograms of heroin in a few old sacks. The EOD team found toolboxes full of IED-detonating devices, mortars and recoil-less rifle rounds. ‘These are the best-looking pieces of ordnance I’ve found in this country. Some of them are brand new’, said Tom Williams, examining some shiny Chinese rockets. They also found a hideous device, a DFC (Directional Fragment Charge). This was a metal barrel, three-quarters full of explosive powder, the rest packed with nuts, bolts, broken china and ball-bearings. It worked like a cannon, firing the junk into whoever was in front of it when it went off.
Their ingenuity amazed me. Most houses I’d seen in Marjah didn’t have toilets, beds, chairs, tables, cookers or a source of clean water. But if you wanted to make IEDs or turn opium into heroin, it was like being in Toys‘R’Us.
However, after a few days, Tom and Ski, the most experienced of the EOD team, began to mock the bomb-makers. ‘I thought this would be a hub for seasoned Taliban fighters but the IEDs we’ve found are simple’, said Tom. ‘Words can’t express how Bush League these devices are. The daisy chain we found was command-detonated [detonated by wire] and the guy who set it off would have been ...’, he pointed to the roof of a single-storey building across the street, ‘less than twenty metres away. It was shady. You think we’d not see a guy on the roof with a wire in his hand?’
It was surreal sitting in the sun, laughing at Tom and Ski insulting the Marjah bomb-makers. They chuckled slightly when I reminded them that barely a week ago, the streets where we sat had been described as among the most dangerous on earth. Staff Sergeantt Robert Dawson, from 1st Platoon arrived. In his thick, Long Island accent, he complained that getting here had been ‘serious and hectic’ (together with ‘stoopid’, these were the most dramatic phrases he ever used) but the Taliban had now ‘punked out. We drove them right out. And now it’s quiet and boring.’ He was as dismissive as Tom of the enemy’s actions. ‘One dude with an RPG didn’t have enough space. It bounced back and blew him up.’
The unsophisticated IEDs found in Marjah suggested that the Taliban here weren’t part of an international network of criminal masterminds or even a pan-Afghan network that shared bomb-making expertise and equipment. The seasoned fighters and snipers may well have come just for the battle. There certainly was a criminal network in Marjah but its chief concern seemed to be the manufacture and export of heroin, not jihad.
* * * * *
Back at the base, Nascar and Picc were glued to the surveillance laptop, talking to some marines two kilometres away from the base, who thought they might have spotted four men placing an IED.
‘You have PID?’ asked Picc over the radio. PID – positive identification – is required before anyone can be targeted. There was silence.
‘It’s as close as we could be to an IED being placed. We’ve been watching them for a while’, said the voice on the radio. Picc was annoyed at their vagueness. Nascar smiled knowingly. ‘It looks like it would be an IED to me’, said the voice.
‘So ... based on pattern of life and their actions rig
ht now ...’, said Greenlief, watching at one side. Picc repeated his words to the marines on the radio, encouraging them to say they had PID.
‘PID is theirs’, said Nascar, ‘they have to say they have PID.’
But the marines wouldn’t say they were sure. Everyone was afraid of making the wrong call but not because of a horror of killing civilians. Most of the marines and soldiers I’d met, who spent their days at the sharp end, accepted the fact that civilians died in wars. They were scared of making the wrong call because everyone thought that the lawyers now decided how wars were fought. They were afraid they’d end up as the subjects of lengthy investigations, and could even face prison.
Greenlief and Picc shared a cigarette. They offered it to Nascar, who looked at it guiltily, then said ‘one drag’. He was the only marine I’d ever seen who looked wrong smoking. He looked like a schoolboy trying to pretend he smoked.
‘Scarface 6-4. It looks like we do have something going on here. Lots of individuals are coming up to it, walking away, looking at it like “oh wow what’s this, check it out” so it is definitely not normal. I would say we do have PID on a possible IED’, said the voice on the radio.
‘He needs to have PID on an IED emplacer’, said Nascar.
Picc spoke into the radio. ‘Do you have PID on the IED emplacer. Do you have PID on the guys that are emplacing?’ He put the radio down. ‘FUCK.’
‘Wait, wait, wait’, said Nascar. ‘You know, we don’t want to put too much on them, I mean, they’re telling us what they see. PID is ours. They’ve just got to build the picture.’