But however the defense secretary describes what’s happening in Afghanistan publicly, every other independent assessment—by the Red Cross, the United Nations, an independent group of experts—says violence is at its worst.
In February, Gates makes one of his final trips to West Point. He is speaking to an audience of cadets, many who will be deploying to finish off the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Gates the Sovietologist spent days and nights in the seventies and eighties analyzing the Soviet leaders’ speeches, looking for clues, for signs—to divine the true mind-set of the leadership by reading between the lines. And what does Gates say in this speech? Gates, the man who has designed and overseen the last four years of the military fighting machine, the man who calls himself Secretary of War? “Any future secretary of defense who advises the president to again send a big American land army into the Middle East or Africa,” he tells the cadets, “should have their head examined.”
45 ONCE UPON A TIME
IN KANDAHAR
DECEMBER 2010, KANDAHAR
The motel in Kandahar was like a foreign language version of a Days Inn. It was called the Continental Guest House, its courtyard hidden behind a white and blue wall along one of the city’s busiest streets. I had a small room with one single bed, an old IBM desktop computer that didn’t work, and two space heaters. The shower and bathroom drain and toilet melded into one small porcelain cube. The motel provided rubber slippers to bathe in.
I felt like I was stuck in a limited release David Lynch movie—an atmosphere too strange and surreal for audiences to comprehend. A few doors down, three Filipino construction workers passed the days hanging laundry, waiting for work to start on the new American base they’d been hired to build outside the city. My Afghan bodyguard, Razzi, stayed in the room next to mine. He didn’t speak much English, but had a range of facial expressions to indicate who I shouldn’t trust. We ate each meal in a large dining room. The lighting was poor. I could barely see the food on the plate—bread, stew, rice, and cans of Diet Coke. At the meals, none of the guests talked much, all staring down at their plates, except for an older Afghan man, an engineer.
The old man never gave me his name or his e-mail. He’d survived in Afghanistan since 1985 by giving his name to as few people as possible. In the early seventies, he’d attended a university in Florida. He hid the fact that he spoke English from most of his friends. He was in Kandahar to advise on another American construction project. He knew the score, and outlined the network of corruption during our first dinner. It all led to the local gangster in chief, Ahmed Wali Karzai—Hamid Karzai’s half brother—who lorded over Kandahar from his position as head of the provincial council.
Ahmed Wali, he explained, was a key player in the provinces’ booming drug network. Afghanistan was producing about four billion dollars of opium a year, and the industry was increasingly concentrated in the south of the country. There were all sorts of allegations, ranging from black tar heroin to hashish to opium to targeted assassinations. American military and diplomatic officials were well aware of Karzai’s business activities. They gave him a three-letter acronym, an honor given to foreigners who end up in lots of government reports. (OBL for Osama Bin Laden, AMZ for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, AWK for Ahmed Wali Karzai.) AWK was also on the CIA’s payroll. “My friend’s fourteen-year-old son was kidnapped,” the old man told me. “He went to see Ahmed Wali to get his son released. Ahmed Wali told him, I can’t help, but I can get the ransom lowered.”
Afghans I’d spoken to in Kabul believed Ahmed Wali had a hand in a string of assassinations. Finding evidence of that was difficult. However, Ahmed Wali was so blatantly corrupt that for a few months beginning in 2010, the Americans were actually thinking of arresting him or killing him. When AWK visited General Mike Flynn at ISAF headquarters, AWK “was really nervous, he thought he was going to get arrested,” Flynn told me. U.S. officials convened a series of meetings to figure out what to do with AWK and a few others like him. Arrest them? Bring charges against him? Give him a slap on the wrist?
In the end, the Americans did nothing. Actually, that’s not quite accurate. They did do something—they fully embraced AWK and his cronies. After Petraeus took charge, he turned to a network of warlords, drug runners, and thieves known as the Afghan government to implement his strategy. Within weeks of assuming command, Petraeus had pushed through an ambitious program to create hundreds of local militias—essentially a neighborhood watch armed with AK-47s. Petraeus expanded the militia program from eighteen districts to more than sixty, and planned to ramp it up from ten thousand men to thirty thousand.
In Afghanistan, however, arming local militias meant, by definition, placing guns in the hands of some of the country’s most ruthless thugs, who ruled their territories with impunity. In the north, Petraeus relied on Atta Mohammed Noor, a notorious warlord-turned-governor considered to be one of the most powerful men in Afghanistan, to prepare militias for a long fight with the Taliban. Smaller militias in the region—which had been likened to an L.A. “gang” by their own American advisors—were also getting U.S. training. In the east, where violence had significantly increased, efforts to back local strongmen had already resulted in intertribal violence. And in Kandahar, Petraeus had given near-unconditional support to Ahmed Wali Karzai.
“The Americans have backed so many warlords in so many ways, it’s very hard to see how you unscramble the egg now,” John Matisonn, a former top UN official who left Kabul in June 2010, told me. “There has never been a strategy to get rid of the warlords, who are the key problem. The average Afghan hates them, whether they’re backed by the Taliban or the Americans. They see them as criminals. They know that the warlords are fundamentally undermining the rule of law.”
That was the reason I decided to go back to Kandahar: to try to get a sense of who those militia leaders were. What kind of men were we cutting deals with here? In Iraq, Petraeus had found weakened Sunni insurgent leaders, gave them hundreds of millions of dollars, and pretended they were allies. What type of allies would he find in Afghanistan?
Before leaving Kabul a few days earlier, my security advisors warned me that whatever I did in Kandahar, I should stay within the city limits. I should certainly stay out of Arghandab, a district bordering the city where there was heavy fighting. After spending twenty-four hours in Kandahar, however, my translator, Fareed Ahmad, told me he’d arranged an interview with a militia in Arghandab.
Did I want to go?
“Yes,” I said. “If it’s safe.”
“It’s safe, it’s no problem. It is on the main road.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it then.”
My Afghan bodyguard, Razzi, didn’t like the plan.
“Mike,” he said, taking me aside. “Do you know this translator?”
“No,” I said. “But he’s highly recommended from a friend.”
“You trust him?”
“Trust is a strong word.”
My translator shook his head.
“He say it is safe,” Razzi told me. “It is very danger. He’s doing this for—” and Razzi made the international symbol for money, rubbing his thumb and middle finger together. (Ahmad would get twice as much per day if he traveled with me outside the city.)
“Fuck it, man, I know what you’re saying, but this is what I’m here for.”
I had reservations about going. I knew my security advisors wouldn’t be happy that within one day I was already ignoring their advice. I knew that the risks weren’t worth the payoff. But I felt the pressure to get a good story and I’d traveled down to this shithole of a city. I wasn’t just going to stay in my hotel, self-aware enough to know I was behaving in the classic war junkie fashion.
And so I found myself driving along a road from Kandahar to Herat in a white Toyota Corolla, thinking, You never put yourself in these situations, but you always seem to find yourself in them. Thinking of it as something out of my control decreased the blame—and there is plenty of blame if things
go wrong, and it’s all blame on me. I know it’s a risk, I know it’s a rush, I know it’s not a healthy lifestyle. I know it’s an addiction; I know it’s the wrong week to quit sniffing glue. As the old Afghan contractor had said—and I knew this without his saying it—if something goes wrong, if I get kidnapped, it’s my Afghan driver, translator, and bodyguard who will be immediately killed. They’re not worth the trouble of a ransom. As an American journalist, however, I was more or less a walking dollar sign.
I dressed up like a native, with a salwar kameez—which look to Westerners like pajamas—and a small cap on my head. I purchased a messenger bag from a local store to carry my notebook and recorder in. I didn’t carry any identification with me. I’d fail any close inspection, but there were enough mixed bloodlines in Afghanistan that even with blue eyes and brown hair, I didn’t necessarily scream American. More likely Turkish, or perhaps from another part of Central Asia.
“There are the most suicide bombers and IEDs around here,” Ahmad told me as we passed a stretch of road about ten minutes outside the city. These were the kinds of details Ahmad regularly provided, like the narration of a tour guide whose ass-backwards goal was to get the visitor to call off the tour and flee the country for his life. An IED went off there, a targeted killing here, a particularly corrupt checkpoint up ahead.
Two American convoys passed us, ten giant MRAPs in total, lumbering along the other way. A series of new checkpoints had been set up to provide security, around thirty in all around the city, manned by Afghans lounging about on concrete barriers. The checkpoints were part of the massive U.S. offensive that had been under way since the summer.
The meeting is with a militia leader named Mohammed Nabi, a man the mayor of Kandahar would later describe to me as a “warlord.” Nabi was officially part of Petraeus’s new program to start arming and training Afghan Local Police, or ALP.
We took a right off the main road, entering a quiet countryside, dust and stone paths between brown and dried-up grape fields. Without the hectic activity of the main road to give us a false sense of safety in numbers, it dawned on us—me, my driver, my translator, and my Afghan bodyguard—that we were out there now on our own, beyond the narrow bounds of government or Coalition control. I realized that I might have made a horrible fucking mistake.
It was one thing to hear the president of the United States proclaim there was progress in Kandahar; it was another to be putting that progress to the test sitting in a shitty white Toyota waiting for a stranger to arrive to take us to a warlord’s hangout.
A boy about sixteen years old drove up to us on a motorcycle. He was our contact. It immediately became clear to everyone else in the car that we might be walking into a kidnapping. Things might or might not soon go terribly wrong. I should have heeded the warnings from our security company, I thought—whatever you do, do not go to Arghandab, they had told me. I had made the decision to go, and once you start this kind of thing, it becomes almost impossible to stop. The truly important decision is to go or not to go—once you go, you’re gone, no backing out, no turning back. We’ve come this far, we’re almost there, I’ve spent $400 dollars on a car and bodyguard for the day. Dice rolled, fates tempted. Two possible outcomes: You’re fucked or not fucked. Scrape by, I’m a hero. Don’t scrape by, I’m a beheaded fuckup.
The motorcycle took off down a one-lane road, with a drainage ditch to the left, an eight-foot-high mud wall to the right. It was a road where we could be easily ambushed, with no way to turn around or escape. Were we about to meet the Taliban or the militia? Or was the militia Taliban? How greedy were they? How desperate for cash? Would they risk snatching me? It felt funny, a tight spot, a jolt of fear and adrenaline—and I thought, If this ends in a kidnapping, which I’m putting at about a 20 percent probability at that moment, I’m going to feel, among other things, pretty stupid.
We pulled into a dirt lot next to a grape field behind another small wall. A group of ten men sat cradling their AK-47s. There were about eight motorcycles and a green Ford Ranger truck parked there as well. My translator introduced me to the leader, Mohammed Nabi.
Nabi was sitting cross-legged on a carpet spread out over the dirt. His silver AK-47, decorated with green and silver on the grip, was resting up against the wall. It didn’t take much prompting before he started bitching about the Afghan government, the Canadians, and the Taliban.
First, the Taliban tried to kill him, he said, by blowing up a suicide bomber at his cousin’s wedding. It was in retaliation for the militia he had formed with U.S. backing. Over a thousand members of Mohammed Nabi’s tribe had gathered in a field to celebrate the event last summer. Mohammed said he saw the bomber slip past the guards, pull the pin on the suicide vest, and detonate. “Blood everywhere,” he said, the bomber killing eighty and injuring three hundred. On a late September evening, the Taliban tried again—this time Nabi heard the shooting, called up one of his guards on his cell phone, then rushed over to join the fight. He claimed a victory that night: thirteen Talibs dead, while only losing three of his own.
Nabi wanted to go on the offensive against the Taliban, but he was, at least temporarily, prevented from doing so. That was why he was so pissed at the Canadians.
“The Canadians stopped us when we would try to go on operations in other villages,” he told me. “Two or three times they stopped us, and we could have made this entire area secure.” The outpost where we were sitting was one of twelve checkpoints he commanded over seven villages. Tribal elders from other villages also didn’t appreciate his incursions and claimed he was overstepping his bounds. Nabi had ninety members in his militia and said with the proper funding he could easily increase that number to three or four hundred. He’d been paying his men out of his own pocket, seven thousand afghani a man, and wished the Afghan government would soon start chipping in. The youngest member was a fourteen-year-old, who I watched walk around the outpost, cleaning up and serving tea.
Thankfully, Nabi said, two months ago the U.S. Special Forces came to offer him more support. His advisors—who go by the names Chip and Rob, he said—gave him eight new AK-47s. They provided his militiamen with government identification for the ALP—the ID has an Afghan flag and an American flag with a picture and serial number on it. The Special Forces soldiers have promised to pay him regular visits. He also received the new Ford Ranger, because the new police chief of Kandahar is from his tribe.
Razzi paced back and forth around the perimeter, making chitchat with the militiamen. He gave me a thumbs-up and a smile—his sign saying that it was all clear, for now. I would have liked to have stayed longer, but after twenty minutes, I figured it was time to go. I took pictures with the militia members, made sure I hadn’t dropped my cigarettes or recorder, and as casually as possible got back in the car.
We pulled out on the dirt road. Everyone in the car was quiet. We took a left on the other dirt road. We arrived back at the main road.
Everyone in the car started laughing hysterically.
Ahmad turned around in his seat.
“I admit, after I saw that motorcycle, I thought we were in trouble,” he said.
“On the main fucking road my ass,” I said.
“We are not doing that again,” Razzi said definitively. I agreed.
“Those are not good people,” my translator explained. “They are not people who good Afghans want their children and teenagers to be around.” The militias, Ahmad explained, have a reputation for having teenage boys around to have sex with. Like the fourteen-year-old who was hanging out there, Ahmad said.
“Glad to see we’re putting our faith in these guys,” I said.
46 KING DAVID’S WAR
JULY 2010 TO JANUARY 2011, KABUL
Dave Petraeus takes over the morning briefings. It’s his war now. He asks more questions than McChrystal, according to a senior military official who sits in on over a dozen briefings that summer. McChrystal was quieter—Petraeus interrupts, peppers the briefer with questions.
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Almost every morning he lasers in on one of his favorite topic: information operations. How to spin the Afghans and how to spin the Taliban. How to convince them that we’re actually winning this thing—that they can trust us, that we’re on their side. It worked in Iraq, he has said: “We amplified [the insurgents’] atrocities and broadcast them and saturated the media throughout Baghdad, using TV, radio, billboards, Internet, you name it.”
In August, he gets a briefing that “makes him almost giggly,” according to a senior military official who attended the briefing. The Taliban have written a book about how to treat the local population—a book whose principles they violate pretty regularly. It’s the Taliban who kill the majority of Afghan civilians—usually a breakdown of about 20 percent killed by NATO, 80 percent killed by the Taliban. Sure, the Taliban are doing operations in areas because NATO is there, but the theory still holds—the Taliban are abusing their own worse than the international community, which may or may not matter.
The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan Page 32