by Ben Anderson
‘What a nice Christmas Eve, huh’, he said. ‘What’s this guy’s name?’
‘Er .... Mullah Shithead’, said Sergeant Giles, a tall, thin and quiet platoon leader who did yoga every morning. In many ways, he was Zeimus’s opposite.
‘He’s gone by now I bet. If he’s smart he’s walking right now.’
‘Those motherfuckers have got tunnels.’
‘Please’, said Zeimus, waiting for instructions, aching to be told he could go after the commander on foot, ‘we got the A-team out here, know what I’m saying?’
‘Can we go snatch his ass up?’ said another marine into his radio.
‘Negative. We’re on op minimise’, said the voice on the radio. ‘Come back inside.’
‘Roger’, said the marine, ‘request permission to enter friendly lines.’
‘Horseshit’, said another. They trudged back through the gates.
* * * * *
The marines weren’t doing much mentoring of the ANA. Reluctantly dragging a few soldiers with them on patrols was as much as they would do. Even then, they barely tolerated them. Whereas the British OMLT involved a complete company of Brits living with a complete company of Afghans, the Marines just sent a couple of officers to the ANA base next door for basic training. I joined the ANA’s first patrol. The two marines went out with them but the ANA were supposed to do everything.
Patrol Base Jamil was at the bottom of a low hill, which sat in front of a second, much bigger, hill. The marines had found almost twenty IEDs in the buildings on top of the bigger hill and been shot at whenever they were close enough to be visible from the other side. The ANA planned to walk in a small loop around the back of the base, going no further than the small hill. In other words, they wouldn’t be going where anything was likely to happen.
The two marines clearly hated their job. They looked suicidal with boredom as they slowly explained the basic instructions over and over again. They told the ANA officer to give a briefing in front of a map, so that everyone would know the route. The ANA map hung next to an old British mural. That first OMLT must have gone through exactly the same process four years ago, although the goal of their mission – an Afghan Army capable of securing the country on its own – looked as distant as ever.
‘We come out from here and walk this way’, said the ANA soldier who eventually conducted the briefing. ‘We go into this alley this way’, he moved his finger across the map, ‘and speak to the people in that house. Understand?’
That was just a translation of a script. They were supposed to pick it up from there and complete the briefing on their own. After suffering a few attempts, the marines gave up and delivered the essentials of the briefing: stay on the line of blue bottle tops or you’ll lose your legs (the marines had supplied the bottle tops); stay at least ten or fifteen metres behind the guy in front of you; don’t be lazy; don’t leave your weapon on the floor, you need to be ready to fire; if you have to fire, don’t spray, take your time, aim and don’t waste your shots.
The ANA Executive Officer gave a speech before they left. ‘Today, our own army is in command. When there is shooting, you should not move one step from your location.’ He had authority and thought deeply between each sentence. ‘Treat people properly’, he demanded, ‘and don’t enter their homes for searches’ – something the marines did constantly. I told one of the marines that the speech was impressive. ‘He just did that because you were here with a camera’, he said, wearily.
The ANA soldiers were handed tourniquets. They put them into the pockets below the knees of their trousers, still in their plastic wraps. One of the marines approached a soldier, took his tourniquet, unwrapped it and put it in the soldier’s shoulder pocket. If they were hit by an IED, he explained, and lost their legs, they would also lose their tourniquet. The soldiers took out their tourniquets, unwrapped them and half-heartedly tried to clip them to their chests. Then quickly put them back in their trouser pockets when the marine turned his back.
One ANA soldier took off his backpack, complaining that the rockets in it would explode if he were shot. That thought had occurred to him exactly as he lifted the backpack and realised how heavy it was. ‘These are mines’, he said in protest and dumped the bag on the floor, with an expression of pain on his face, as if he’d been carrying it for hours. One of the marines lunged towards him, leaning his face forward in perfect position for a head butt. He stopped, took off his sunglasses, managed to contain himself and said, ‘This is the world that you live in. Marines carry this stuff every single day, you have to accept the risk to do your job outside the wire.’ The ANA soldier wouldn’t look at him; instead, he looked at the terp, waiting for him to interpret.
‘If something happens to me, will you take the responsibility? They will explode if I’m hit by a bullet!’ he said. The ANA discussed whether or not the rockets would explode; eventually, he was persuaded to put the bag back on, reluctantly. As he clipped the shoulder straps together across his chest, he looked back at the marine and said, ‘Fuck your mother’, in Pashtu. That wasn’t translated. ‘You’re gonna be fine, it’s not gonna blow up’, said the marine.
Eventually, the ANA lined up and walked out of the front gate. An ANA sergeant, Samad, led the patrol. He waved a metal detector over every inch of ground as he walked slowly forward. Two children were so bewildered as he walked by, followed by a US marine laying a trail of blue bottle tops, that one only just avoided falling off his bike. The other froze, his right hand on his hip and his mouth hanging open.
As the ANA swept through an alleyway, two more boys approached, ignoring the bottle top trail. They crouched and helped scrape the surface earth away from where a trace of metal had been detected. Further down the alley, the boys’ father came out. One of the marines, Second Lieutenant Martin Lindig spoke to him. ‘These guys’, he said, pointing to the ANA, ‘are having a shura on Friday and they’d really like you to come.’ The man expressed interest and the marine nodded to the ANA sergeant, asking him, ‘Do you have anything you want to say?’ The sergeant shifted shyly, looked at his feet and said, ‘You told all of the things.’ Lindig sighed and shook the father’s hand: ‘have a good day.’ He told the ANA to walk on.
We walked halfway up the first slope and waited for Sergeant Samad to clear a path ahead. An ANA soldier with a long bullet belt wrapped three times around his body approached me and posed for a picture. He was wearing strange, World War II-style, flying goggles but had pulled the head strap underneath his ears and across the bottom of his neck, so that the lenses pointed up into the sky, making him look demented. We waited a long time. We could see down into several families’ compounds, effectively depriving them of their privacy. They looked up at us with contempt as they broke thin twigs for firewood.
As we walked back down the slope and towards the main road we passed a small, well-built mosque, with smooth, flat plastered walls and a new metal gate. The marines sent the ANA to knock on the gate and ask to speak to the mullah. A man emerged, wearing a bright white turban and with a huge white cloak slung over his shoulder. His sideburns were also white but his long, thick beard was black. The marines told the ANA sergeant to start a conversation but he just shuffled nervously and looked at his feet.
The man had no patience for training exercises but plenty he wanted to say. He started the conversation by saying his daughter had been shot in the shoulder by a stray bullet the day before and was now in hospital in Lashkar Gar. The family had taken her there themselves, with no help either from the marines or the ANA. This should have focused the marines’ attention but the terp translated only a fraction of what the man said, saying only that everyone was scared of the fighting and the bullets, especially the women and children.
‘Abduleem, why don’t you talk to him about some of those things’, said Lindig, nodding to the ANA sergeant, who still stared at his feet. He looked away, mumbling that he didn’t speak Pashtu and the man didn’t speak Dari.
A car pulled up. The
man said it was his uncle, the mullah, who should be allowed through. The mullah approached, shaking everyone’s hands, sizing them up as he went. He also wore a white turban and a long white cloak but with a dark green army jacket on top. The mullah looked unsympathetic as the conversation continued. Lindig said that civilian casualties were the Taliban’s fault, because they used civilians for cover. He added that this was a good sign, because it meant they were losing control in Sangin and becoming desperate. It also meant that the marines and ANA were improving security.
The mullah smiled contemptuously, as if his suspicions had been confirmed, then spoke directly to the ANA sergeant. ‘There is no security beyond the road. They are just saying this to make themselves happy. The Russians did the same. God willing they will suffer the same fate as the Russians.’ The ANA sergeant started to look really uncomfortable. ‘The Taliban are laying mines here and there’, he said, without conviction.
‘Yes, the Taliban are here but who are the Taliban? They are Afghans’, said the mullah, waving his hand at the marines. ‘Who are they? We two have to come together! Because my orphans will be left to you, yours to me. They ...’, he waved at the marines again, ‘will be leaving.’ ‘Whatever God wills’, said the ANA sergeant, looking at the ground. The terp interpreted none of this conversation for the marines.
‘God will cause them such problems that they will forget about here’, said the mullah, talking directly to Lindig. But instead of translating the mullah’s words, the terp said: ‘We used to live in the Green Zone but it was dangerous, so now we live here and it’s very good, the children can play.’ ‘That’s good’, said Lindig. His words and tone sounded patronising; he was unaware how badly he was being misled. ‘We are trying to increase security and I’m happy that you feel safer.’ It was painful when the British or Americans talked to Afghan people as if they were idiots but this was especially excruciating.
The terp spoke directly to the mullah, explaining why he’d received such an odd response to his complaints. ‘It’s because I told him you said it was very secure here. I didn’t tell him what you said, I told him the security was good here.’
The mullah argued that the three of them, the ANA sergeant, the terp and he, should unite against the foreigners. ‘Yesterday they killed six people in a house, only two babies were spared. It was beyond the marketplace. Six metres beyond the bazaar there is no security. Can democracy be created by a cannon? Is that the meaning of democracy? We don’t want this democracy. We don’t want this law of the infidel. We want the rule of Islam. We don’t want this government. We don’t want the Americans. We don’t want the British. It’s because of them we have been fighting each other for thirty years.’
The ANA sergeant simply nodded in agreement, occasionally saying ‘yes’ under his breath. Lindig had given up being part of the conversation and was speaking into his radio. Everyone stopped talking and waited patiently for him to finish. The mullah was clearly annoyed. Lindig finished and asked what had been said. He got a brief translation about the six recent fatalities: ‘Nothing special, the aeroplane come and explode lots of IEDs and three women, two child and one man is killed yesterday in the bazaar’, said the terp.
‘He’s saying the airplane did that?’ asked Lindig. ‘Where did you hear this information?’ he asked, sceptically. ‘I saw it myself, the whole bazaar saw it’, said the mullah. ‘They dropped a bomb on the house, they killed all the adults, only two children survived. One was breast-fed, the other was three years old. It was yesterday at eleven o’clock.’
‘Well, we do drop a lot of bombs’, said Lindig, ‘but when we do we are very careful where we drop those bombs and who we are dropping them on.’
‘If you don’t get upset I will tell you something’, said the mullah. ‘Sure’, said Lindig, in a tone that suggested he was willing to endure the mullah’s words, rather than seriously consider them.
‘Whatever you have brought into Afghanistan, your people are here for killing. Your tanks are here for killing. Your cannons are here for killing. Your planes are here for killing. You haven’t brought anything that we like. All you have brought are the things for death.’ He motioned towards the ANA sergeant: ‘This man here is my brother and you’ve trained him. He kills me and I kill him. This doesn’t do any good for us.’
‘Nobody’s here to kill you right now’, Lindig replied. ‘The majority of this patrol is made up of ANA and the reason they’re on patrol right now is to provide security for you and your family and to come here and to talk to you and see how your day’s going and see what you need and if there’s anything they can do to make your life a little better.’
‘We want nothing’, the mullah snapped back, ‘we have Allah. Is this security that a girl was shot in this house? Can security be established by a gun or by negotiation?’
For Lindig, this was the first he’d heard of the girl being shot. He said that at the marines’ base, just two hundred metres away, there were medics who could have treated her. ‘That’s something that the Taliban can’t do for you that we can’, he said. ‘I understand that you don’t like us here because we attract bullets and we make a lot of noise and sometimes people get hurt because of us. But these things are going to have to happen before your country can become peaceful and if you help us and help the ANA and we win, we’re not going to have to be here in your lives.’
‘The Taliban will be here half an hour after you leave’, said the mullah, smiling. ‘They don’t kill us. You have brought the things for killing. With them, we don’t worry about going outside. They don’t touch us. We don’t touch them. Wherever you go you never leave us alone, whether we are inside our home or outside our home.’
It was difficult to tell if the mullah was on the verge of laughter or rage. ‘Thousands of people have died in this area. As you can see, it’s empty. All you have done is build one and half kilometres of road in the bazaar but against that, more than five thousand people have lost their lives: men, women and children. Now you can compare these two things against each other, which one of these do you say is better?’
The terp translated this as five to ten thousand people over the last ten years killed by marines. ‘The marines have only been in Sangin since last August’, said Lindig, suddenly buoyed by what he thought was an open goal: ‘We’re the first Americans that have been here. It was Europeans. The Taliban tell you these things and they’re not even true. They’re not even based on facts.’
‘It makes no difference’, said the mullah, barely pausing for breath, ‘if it’s Pakistanis, Iranians, Americans or Japanese. Any foreigner is our enemy. They have destroyed us.’
Lindig was incredulous. Only someone insane, or brainwashed, could suggest that he’d come to Helmand with anything but the noblest of intentions. He was a modern-day Paladin. And yet here was an intelligent, articulate man, living in the shadow of an American base, expressing ingratitude. It pained him that anyone, especially one of the people being helped, could hold that view. Lindig seemed to shrink as the argument went on. ‘We’re not here to murder your people or to harm your family. We’re here to make security and peace. If that wasn’t true, I wouldn’t be standing here today, talking to you, with a bunch of ANA soldiers providing security around your compound while I do it.’
‘Do you have binoculars?’ asked the mullah, equally disbelieving. ‘Look at this area, where are the inhabitants? They have been killed, imprisoned or have fled. This revolution has brought no good for Afghans, it has just caused death.’ Lindig tried to invite him to the Friday shura but the mullah continued regardless.
‘I’m angry because if you look at my heart it’s bleeding. The dangers I have faced during this revolution have not been seen by many. The truth is, as long as this government is there, I would never go to any of their events under my will, unless they force me.’
Lindig tried again. He said there were fifty people at the last shura and they needed men like him to come and share information and help them
build a better community.
‘But as soon I come outside the gate there is no security’, said the mullah.
‘That’s why the shura is inside the gates’, replied Lindig, accidentally confirming what the mullah had said about the lack of security everywhere else. The mullah laughed.
The ANA sergeant finally stepped in and spoke to the mullah in Dari. ‘Even if you’re not going, tell him you’ll come.’ The mullah stroked the long hair under his jaw and smiled derisively. ‘I’m never going to tell a lie with this beard. Even if it meant getting killed I’d be the same. I just rely on God.’
While Lindig wrote down everyone’s names, the mullah spoke again. ‘I have lost two of my sons. One was killed inside his shop in the bazaar by the British, the other was killed by the NDS [Afghan intelligence]. Will I go to this shura? Even if my brother stands for this government, I will see him as an enemy.’ The debate over, the mullah softened slightly. He said there was a small guesthouse inside the mosque and he invited everyone in for a cup of tea. Lindig looked at his watch: ‘I would love to drink tea with you today but unfortunately I’m all out of time and I need to continue my patrol. But the next time we come down here I would be more than happy to sit down with you and drink tea and discuss things.’
If counter-insurgency (and Afghan hospitality) were reduced to a short list of pithy mottos, one of them would absolutely be ‘never say no to a cup of tea’.
The mullah’s smile turned back to a snarl. He gave up on whatever he thought talking could achieve. He shook my hand and asked where I was from. When I said ‘Englestan’, he was surprised. He’d thought I was with the marines. I told him I worked for the BBC; he smiled, gave me a little wink, turned and walked away.
The next day, I followed Sergeant Giles and his platoon on patrol along the same route. There was no sign of the mullah but as we waited for the sweeper to clear a stretch of path, Giles motioned towards the mosque. According to what he’d been told, the guys inside ‘were all Talibs’.