by Ben Anderson
‘That house was full of stuff’, said the other, pointing to another building that had been flattened.
‘No problem’, said Rock, ‘when the owner comes he can speak with this man. OK?’
‘OK’, said the man. He knew there was nothing they could do.
An ANA soldier with a long dark beard, green woolly hat, and thick lines on his face stretching from the corners of his eyes all the way down the sides of his cheeks, approached. ‘Were there mines in these houses?’ he asked.
‘No’, said both of the men.
They looked at the bulldozers and held spare cloth from their turbans over their mouths and noses to keep away the dust that filled the air.
‘Was this was a mosque?’ asked the soldier, pointing to a single storey building across the road. Its speakers were still there but the windows and doors were badly damaged, as if someone had attacked every straight edge with a hammer.
‘Yes, it was our mosque.’
The Civil Affairs Officer asked who the mullah was. The men said there was no mullah, just them and an old man. Between themselves, they looked after the place and prayed inside. As the men talked to Rock and the Civil Affairs Officer prepared compensation forms on his little notepad, Rock sighed with frustration and said, ‘Bullshit.’
‘What’s he saying?’ asked the Civil Affairs Officer.
‘He’s saying “when they give me money?” I said, “tomorrow, tomorrow”.’
‘Tell them tomorrow they can come up here but until then they have to go back to their compounds for their safety’, said the Civil Affairs Officer.
The ANA soldier spoke to the mosque owners again. ‘It is because of the divisions between us, Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek and so on, that we are seeing this and it could even get worse.’ The soldier said he was a Pashtun but had moved to Herat many years ago and only spoke Dari: ‘If today a mosque here is being demolished, maybe tomorrow a mosque in Herat will be demolished.’
One of the men approached the mosque. The pole holding the speakers that sent the call to prayer was bent and only just upright. The man looked nervously at the rubble in the doorway, then cautiously stepped forward. Without going in, he pulled out a Calor Gas heater and a prayer mat; he snapped the mat in the air and slapped it to get some of the dust off. He told Rock there were Qur’ans inside but he didn’t dare go in and retrieve them.
The other mosque owner watched, his arm around the home owner we had spoken to, gently rubbing his back. The men had been told to go back to their compounds but they stayed, squatting outside the old British patrol base, watching everything around them being effortlessly turned into dust.
Fifteen minutes later, the mosque was dust too. As the bulldozer turned to flatten the piles of bricks and cement, two explosions went off beyond the next wall due for demolition but no one seemed to notice.
I asked Captain Peterson how demolishing homes, and even a mosque, was supposed to win over the local people. It didn’t seem like good COIN. ‘I know that most people in the world probably wouldn’t understand. You’re trying to build a country up by destroying it and it seems like a paradox but those are people who have not been to Afghanistan. They don’t understand that the nature of conflict inevitably includes destruction before you can start to build it the way it should be, in a way that’s secure and provides a better economy for the people in the future.’
He thought the Afghan people would be more pragmatic: ‘I think they understand, after nearly four decades of war, that damage is unavoidable. For a long time, we’ve been going about piecemeal destruction of things to open up new avenues of approach or provide freedom of movement. It’s the same thing we’re doing here, we’re just doing it on a much higher scale and we’re doing it all up front. Short term, there is a sacrifice of convenience to an extreme degree and that’s not something that’s lost on us. But I think what people understand is that to increase security on that route and to prevent the enemy from putting any IEDs there, these types of drastic steps are necessary.’
But the people of Wishtan hadn’t been given a choice. The destruction had happened without notice, suggesting that the security of the marines was more important than the welfare of the local people. It felt like the era of ‘courageous restraint’, where foreign forces were supposed to be prepared to take more risks and more casualties, to protect the homes and lives of the people (‘the people are the prize’), was over.
Everyone flinched and looked over their shoulders as another MIC-LIC exploded nearby. In the old patrol base, a marine screamed, ‘Yee-ha.’
‘So Monday, OK?’ said the Civil Affairs Officer. Everyone whose compounds had been demolished was asked to go to the District Centre on Monday to claim compensation. There was a loud explosion in the middle of Rock’s translation. Everyone flinched again. ‘Tell ’em to get there early in the morning because a lot of people are gonna be coming to get payments’, added the Civil Affairs Officer. ‘Tell them also that tomorrow we’ve got a medical initiative going on, where they’re going to be giving classes on how to use certain medications that they’re gonna be giving y’all.’
Further away, some houses had been bulldozed along with their surrounding walls. I could just about see the house belonging to the man who’d helped us on the first day. To my relief, it was still standing.
We walked past the mangled shell of a British truck, so badly burned that it looked as if it were ready to blow away, like the ashes of burnt paper. A group of twelve kids, seven boys and five girls, approached and almost at once, said ‘choc-a-let, choc-a-let.’ ‘Their fucking lives revolve around chocolate’, said Hancock, not stopping.
‘Me one dollar!’ shouted one of the boys, as we walked back to the patrol base where we had started. Almost everything on either side of Pharmacy Road had been flattened.
* * * * *
The next morning, New Year’s Day, 2011 (New Year’s Eve had passed without a mention), I joined Captain Peterson on a walk through Wishtan. He wanted to see his platoon commanders, chart progress and give them a morale boost. But before we reached the first group of marines on the hill, the vicious crack of a sniper’s bullet sent everyone to the floor. That snapping sound meant he had only just missed his target: probably Captain Peterson. People with long radio antennas were often ‘bullet magnets’, as they were assumed to be important. I was sure I heard the bullet hit the wall next to us. But within a few minutes, three other people, at three different points along the patrol, said they thought it hit close to them.
There was a brief discussion about where the sniper might be and what might be the best way to kill him. But soon, everyone was up on their feet and walking again, paying him no more attention. Someone had attacked a large group of highly-trained, heavily-armed foreign troops, while drones, jets, surveillance blimps and helicopters flew in the skies above. It should have been suicidal. But he had escaped with ease, without being spotted, shot at or chased.
Once he’d spoken to his men, Captain Peterson paused on the high ground and looked across Wishtan. ‘We’re denying the enemy any freedom of movement whatsoever. Now we’re in the south and the north and they’ve got nowhere to run. It’s a tactical victory but also an emotional one, because of the casualties we’ve taken. It feels good, personally, and it’s going to make a big difference.’ He explained why it had been so important to take Wishtan from the Taliban. ‘As the noose tightened, this became his last refuge. We had to come here, as part of clear, hold, build. You have to clear effectively and completely otherwise you’re holding areas and not holding other areas and it just becomes unmanageable.’
I mentioned that Wishtan had been cleared by the British. Was giving up the patrol bases they’d established a mistake? ‘I don’t know what the criteria behind the thought process was that went into that, I’m not sure what the reason for abandoning them was. You could spend a lot of time talking about what could have been done better and everything is clearer in retrospect. But I can tell you it’s definitely the
right decision to hold them now so I’m glad that we are.’
We walked to the old British patrol base. The marines were working in a long line, like a chain gang, filling sand bags. The Afghan soldiers sat in an outbuilding, three feet away from the marines, smoking and watching, not caring what anyone thought about them not helping. Someone had managed to light a small fire in a dustbin and cook a tray of powdered eggs. Squares cut from a cardboard box became the plates. Captain Peterson quietly served the marines this special breakfast treat, wishing them ‘Happy New Year’.
Sergeant Zeimus appeared again, the inevitable Rip-it® in his hand. ‘Hey, get all the snipers from the roof and downstairs. Hey, did you eat yet? Come on, let’s go.’ He sounded angry even when he was making sure that everyone got their breakfast. ‘Hey, Reyes, let’s go, dog.’ Someone asked if the ANA got eggs too. ‘They don’t need to eat this shit, they got their own stuff.’ He screamed at everyone not to throw the plates away but to pass them on. As early in the morning as it was, he was already high on caffeine and anger. ‘Let’s go, come on, hey, Lance Corporals, let’s go, get the fuck over here, Jesus Christ.’ He spoke so fast that seven words became two: getthefuckoverhere, JesusChrist.
Captain Peterson laughed quietly. But he punched Zeimus on the shoulder when he started impersonating a Vietnamese marine, Nguyen. ‘The camera’s on’, Peterson whispered. ‘Oh shit, sorry’, said Zeimus. Then, not wanting to let even the captain have the last word, added, ‘You just hit me and the camera’s on.’
‘That’s not rated R material’, said Peterson.
‘That’s not rated R material’, Zeimus repeated. He walked away; he’d had the last word.
Captain Peterson went on ladling steaming powdered eggs on to dusty squares of cardboard. ‘The beginning of a new year, you got hot chow, company objective three is secured, Operation Dark Horse II is almost over, there’s only one or no casualties. Whatever you eat for the next New Year’s breakfast is not going to be as good as this, I guarantee you.’
Zeimus ate last, putting his drink on to his piece of cardboard, so it looked like a breakfast tray. He simply lifted it right up to his mouth, shovelling every piece of powdered egg straight in. It was gone in seconds.
After breakfast, Captain Peterson and Lieutenant Grell made plans to erect a few tents, for families whose homes had been destroyed and who had nowhere to sleep in the freezing cold. Others finished fortifying the old patrol base or went on patrols to set up checkpoints or observation posts.
* * * * *
Captain Peterson was happy with the way the operation had gone, that the Taliban had nowhere left to hide and that the lower levels of insurgents had picked up on the marines’ ‘tenacity and determination’. ‘People who were once thought of as irreconcilables are, as we speak right now, waiting to talk with American commanders to negotiate some deal where they’re willing to bring in IEDs and identify higher leaders.’
The company’s losses had been staggering. Peterson almost broke down when he told me about a marine who’d been killed the day before his son was born. But despite so many killed and injured men, he remained determined. ‘We’re never going to quit, we’re never going to stop patrolling. There’s not enough IEDs to keep us from patrolling. Not enough bullets to keep us from accomplishing our mission. We’re not leaving, we’re going to stay. When the enemy saw that, at the lowest level, it demoralised him and he said, “We can’t continue to fight them, because they’re better than us. We can’t outlast him because he’s not leaving. So we’d better figure out a way to carve our way into the future of Afghanistan or we’re going to get left out in the cold”. And if that’s his analysis he’s exactly right.’
I asked what he would say to people who were angered, scared or confused by the fact that Afghanistan had become America’s longest war. ‘If we put a timeline on it, well, then we’ve started to say that the time we spend is more important than the cause itself. And if that’s the case we never should have gotten in in the first place. I don’t think that is the case, I think the cause is justified and I would say to them: so what? This is America’s longest war, so what? So it’s taken us ten years to get where we are. If it takes another five, if it takes another ten, if that’s the price of success, then who cares how long it lasts?’
It is now seven months since I was last in Helmand province. For now, I wake up each morning, switch on my laptop and read news from Afghanistan that cancels out the effects of my coffee. This weekend marks the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The big story was that NATO troops have been ordered to stop transferring prisoners into Afghan custody because they were being tortured, mostly in prisons run by the NDS. Methods included electric shocks from car batteries and the use of a ‘medieval-style rack’.
On Saturday, a massive truck-bomb killed five Afghans and injured seventy-seven American troops. One of the Afghans killed was a five-year-old girl hit by shrapnel almost half a mile away from the US outpost that had been targeted. She was somewhere around the 17,000th civilian victim of the war.
Yesterday, the Afghan Local Police (the arbaki militias, like the one I saw being set up in Marjah, with no vetting) stole the headlines, accused of gang rape, murder, torture and extortion. That news will not have surprised anyone who’s been paying attention. There are currently seven thousand ALP, and funding has been approved for another twenty-three thousand.
As I write, groups of gunmen with rockets, and suicide bombers are taking part in an attack in Kabul. Fifty metres from a police checkpoint – part of a ‘ring of steel’ supposedly in place around the city’s diplomatic centre – the attackers are occupying a tall building, still under construction, offering perfect views into the US embassy, ISAF headquarters, the presidential palace and the Ministry of Defence. The attackers had posed as labourers, stockpiling their weapons for two weeks. (The attack, which killed eleven civilians and at least four policemen, lasted for almost twenty-four hours.)
It’s no exaggeration to say that every morning starts with similarly jaw-dropping news. A few recent examples: three senior government officials killed in one day; a third mass prison escape in Kandahar; a credible estimate that Afghans spent $2.5 million on bribes in 2010, the equivalent of twenty-five per cent of GDP; slightly-wounded soldiers dying because doctors and nurses at the military hospital in Kabul, who are mentored by American officers, only give food and treatment if bribed; and $910 million disappearing from the Kabul Bank in ‘mysterious insider loans’. At the end of 2010, it was revealed that the senior Taliban leader, whom NATO had been flying into Kabul and showering with cash for peace negotiations, was just a shopkeeper from Quetta. I only wish I were making this stuff up.
This year, 2011, has also seen a string of high-profile assassinations. In May, the police commander for northern Afghanistan, General Mohammad Daud Daud, was killed. In April, it was Ahmad Wali Karzai, the President’s half-brother, and a power broker in southern Afghanistan. In July, Ghulam Haider Hamidi, mayor of Kandahar, was killed. He and his daughter had returned to Afghanistan from the USA, believing they could help their homeland. A few months later, his daughter left Afghanistan again, saying it was in ‘360 degrees of chaos’ and she had lost all hope: ‘America came to Afghanistan and aligned itself with the very people who destroyed Afghanistan and who continue to destroy Afghanistan: warlords, drug lords, gun lords.’ In September, Burhanuddin Rabbani, former president and head of the Afghan High Peace Council, was killed when a man entered his home with a bomb hidden in his turban. The assassin was offered a welcome because he pretended to be a Taliban commander who wanted to talk peace.
Despite this, the plan, for the time being at least, is to transfer every province in Afghanistan to the Afghan national security forces by 2014, when all foreign combat troops will return home. Several districts have already been handed over, almost immediately becoming the target of symbolic, but none the less lethal, Taliban attacks.
2012 marks the beginning of the decline in our commi
tment to Afghanistan, as the thirty-three thousand surge troops leave. The peak of our efforts will pass, with little to show for it. Violence in 2011 was greater than the previous year, as it has been every year since 2006. There have been gains, for example in education and health, but only in some parts of the country and where foreign troops have little or no presence. Life remains grim for far too many Afghans, often in the provinces that have been flooded with troops and money. In lists of the world’s most corrupt, violent, poor and illiterate countries, Afghanistan continues to come first, or very close to first; a situation that looks unlikely to change any time soon.
These basic facts, and what they say about the future, are so obvious they are barely discussed among those who live and work in Afghanistan. It would be unnecessary, gratuitous even, to point them out, were it not for the fact that, officially, the policy is working. ‘We are meeting our goals’, said President Obama. ‘We have basically thrown the Taliban out of their home turf in Kandahar and Helmand provinces’, said the US Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates. This last claim was jaw-dropping several times over, because it was repeated by many journalists I had once admired and respected. And plans are ‘on track’ for Afghan national forces to take charge of security by 2014.
These, and many other dreamily upbeat claims, sometimes make me wonder if I ever saw the Afghan war at all.
In the war I did see, nowhere has been cleared of the Taliban. Armed men are no longer seen in the (literally) few square kilometres around the urban district centres that were focussed on but that is all. Even within those areas, the Taliban attend, unannounced, most of the shuras held by foreign troops. They have access to the population, often because they are the population, and they can still plant IEDs within a short walking distance of most bases, which they do with barely-believable frequency. They also allow the people to take whatever foreign forces offer them, as long as they also give the Taliban free passage, cover and food whenever they need it, ensuring a stalemate at best. Such a state of uneasy coexistence can hardly be described as ‘holding’, much less winning.