by Ray Wiss
For my part, I had been enjoying a quiet day at the FOB and looking forward to the return of the combat team when we came under rocket attack. What was unusual was that I heard four distinct explosions: two at a distance, a pause, then two more, only much closer. I recognized that this was the sound of two rockets launching, followed a second later by the sound of their impact on the FOB. This was the first time I had heard both the launch and the impact. It meant the launchers were closer to me than they had ever been before. The rockets had sailed right over the UMS and crashed into the opposite side of the FOB.
I came outside to see if there was any obvious damage. A number of soldiers on the far side of the FOB were running for cover. A few others came out of the building adjacent to mine, asking what had happened. I ordered them back under cover and reported to the command post. This is just a few steps from the UMS and any news about wounded would come there first. Fortunately, there were none.
Just another day on the FOB.
AUGUST 16, EVENING | Perception Shift
It is easy to dislike people who are not like us. “The others” frighten us, sometimes for reasons we cannot even articulate. We usually respond with rejection and anger. The others do not even have to do anything overt for us to reject them. This all has to do with perception: if someone is sufficiently different, we will feel uncomfortable around them. In the August 13 entry, I described the natural tendency of young Canadian soldiers, abroad for the first time, to look upon the Afghans as “the others” and to have difficulty relating to them. I have come to an important realization about the otherness of the local Afghans, one that I will share with my fellow soldiers.
When discussing the situation in Afghanistan with ordinary Canadians, the concept of the “others” often comes up. Many of our countrymen perceive Afghans through the prism of our mission here in rural Kandahar. I have often heard statements that characterize all Afghans as being backwards rural folk with antediluvian attitudes towards women. These Canadians are stunned when you tell them that, before the Taliban, there were women in skirts going to medical school in Kabul and Herat.
Most of our troopers fall into the same trap. They arrive via Hercules aircraft at KAF. A few days later, they travel in a convoy of armoured vehicles to a FOB in Taliban territory. They venture out from the FOB only in large groups, armed to the teeth. The people they interact with are among the most rural, economically depressed and socially conservative in the country. Many of them actively support our enemies. Most of our troops extrapolate what they are seeing to the rest of the country. I wish they could see what I saw last night.
I had gone back to see Captain Ghioz and First Lieutenant Noor-agha. When I got there, they were playing a card game that I soon determined was a variant of bridge. My incompetence at poker notwithstanding, I play a number of other card games quite well. They invited me to sit in, and I eagerly did so. I am happy to report that my partner and I cleaned up, winning a dozen hands in a row before our adversaries threw in the towel and gave up. Afterwards, they invited me for yet another fantastic meal of mutton and potato soup along with a gigantic piece of naan.
Chowing down with the ANA
Although I had a lot of fun playing cards and eating with these men, it would take more than that to get a young Canadian to relate to them. But what was on TV would force all but the most jaded racist to recognize the sameness and the basic humanity of the Afghans. Lieutenant Nooragha engaged in a bit of channel surfing, but three programs stand out in my mind.
The first was an Indian soap opera, in which matriarchs berated idiot men, sexy guys chased after even sexier women and tough guys got into fights with each other. You did not need to understand a word of Pashto to be able to follow the plot. The emotions on display were all too human.
The second was an election ad for Hamid Karzai. The Taliban may have destroyed any chance of a normal election taking place in Zhari-Panjwayi, but they have had little effect in Kabul. This ad showed Karzai addressing a crowd of several thousand men and women, many of the latter uncovered, who were behaving like Canadians do at a large political rally. They were cheering and waving banners, and they seemed enthusiastic about their candidate.
Ads for two other presidential candidates also appeared. The officers in the room were evenly divided between Karzai and one of the other two. Far more importantly, they are all emphatic that, no matter who wins the election, they will remain loyal to the government of the day. The seed of democracy may have fallen on stony ground here in Zhari-Panjwayi, but it seems to be taking root elsewhere in this country.
For pure social connection, however, it was the third program that floored me. It was an episode of Gags from the Just for Laughs organization in Montreal. For those who have not seen this, it is reminiscent of Candid Camera: the comedians set up an outlandish situation on a city street or in a mall and capture people’s reactions. The Afghans got the jokes and laughed as hard as I did.
Yes, these people are different from us. But they are far less different than many would believe.
AUGUST 17 | Men of God
The CF employs “padres” of various denominations. These individuals serve as spiritual advisers to the troops in the broadest possible sense. They are all “cross-trained” in the other major faiths and can bring comfort to any believer. One of these men has followed me around the war zone, arriving at each FOB a little after me and staying a week or so in each one. He has roomed with the medical crew on two occasions, so I have gotten to know him fairly well and quite enjoyed his company.
Forty-six-year-old Captain Normand Cholette is the quintessential combat padre. He is calm and perpetually cheerful, and he has a unique way of connecting with the younger troopers: he plays rock-and-roll on the electric guitar better than anyone in the battle group. At FOB Wilson, he would be in the “Rock House” till well past midnight most evenings. We have had some fascinating conversations, usually about the way he reconciles his role here—to improve morale, thereby making us a more effective fighting force—with the fact that he rejects war as a political option and never carries a weapon.
Captain Normand Cholette, combat padre
(Photo courtesy Master Corporal Julien Ricard)
Another man fulfills the same function for the Afghan infantry company posted here. He is Faisal Hak, the company mullah (the Islamic equivalent of a Catholic priest, Protestant minister or Jewish rabbi). I had the opportunity to sit down and speak to him at length today, with the help of an excellent interpreter.
First, let me give you some basic demographics. Although he looks older, he is only twenty-four years old. He is from the city of Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan. His wife and three children live there, in a family compound with his parents and two younger sisters.
He finished his religious training a year ago and volunteered for army service. This is the first time I have had a conversation with an Islamic religious authority of any description since arriving in Afghanistan. My first priority was not to give offence in any way (how Canadian!), so I began by asking “safe” questions about his family, his motivation for joining the army and the places he had served. I should not have worried. Faisal Hak may be a devout Muslim, but he is not afraid to engage in a serious theological debate.
He was the one who kicked things off by asking me to describe my concept of heaven and hell. I told him that I was an agnostic and that, although I believed there was a supreme being, I was not sure about much else. I told him the main reason for my uncertainty was the perfect certainty shown by so many who held diametrically opposed beliefs. We batted that back and forth for a while. He said it would be better to believe in one faith, to have a chance of getting into heaven if it was the right one. I countered with the argument that perhaps an absence of belief would be less offensive to God than the wrong one. Call that one a draw.
Faisal Hak, the company mullah
Faisal Hak had been sent to some isolated outposts. Just getting to these outposts, much les
s fighting from there, is dangerous. I asked him whether his faith made him somewhat nihilistic. If he believed that God was all-powerful, did he also believe that the time and manner of his death had been preordained? And if the answer was yes, did that make it easier to go forward into danger?
The response I got was carefully nuanced. Faisal Hak said that while the time and place of his death were immutably determined by God, it was his responsibility as a sentient human being to avoid being wounded. He was therefore not to take unreasonable risks to accomplish missions.
I then asked him what he thought of the Taliban and whether they were good Muslims. He replied emphatically that they were not Muslims at all. He buttressed this argument by pointing out all the things they did that are forbidden in the Quran. These included suicide bombing, the killing of innocents, the subjugation of women and the rejection of education.
With the opening he had given me, I asked him about the situation in his own household. He answered that both his mother and his wife had received a high school education (which is more than most women get in this country) and that his two sisters were currently pursuing the same thing. His three daughters are one, two and four years old. When he stated that they would all go to school, I asked him if he would have any objections to one of them becoming a doctor. He replied that he would not.
He then asked me about my profession and about my role here. After I had finished my reply, he told me that the Quran itself could be used to cure various ailments. I fell silent, and my body language was no doubt expressive. He asked me what I thought about what he had said, and I decided to reply honestly. I told him I was not happy to hear such things because it gave people false hope.
When he remonstrated, insisting that the Quran did heal, I asked him if he had ever seen it heal a bullet wound. He allowed that that was different, but then he seized the interpreter’s hand and insisted he could cure him of his warts. I took a look and saw that the interpreter had three warts on his index finger, one on his thumb and one on his middle finger. I suggested we compete: I would treat the warts on the index finger with my methods; he would treat the rest of the hand with the Quran.
Before continuing, I should mention that he had already asked me a couple of times if I wanted to become a Muslim. Both times I answered his question with another question and avoided the subject. But faced with an expression of belief that I consider dangerous—faith healing—I decided to challenge him. I offered him a bet: if by the time I left here (in a month) the index finger was healed, he would become a Christian; if the other two warts were healed and mine were not, I would become a Muslim. He readily agreed. After more discussion, I found out why: he explained to me that it was up to God to heal the warts. If the warts did not heal, it did not prove his method had failed. It only proved that God had not wanted the warts to heal. Ergo, his method had not failed. Indeed, it could not fail. This made it a bet that I could, at best, tie.
I was going to keep arguing about that, but then I remembered that it is a serious crime in Afghanistan to proselytize for any faith other than Islam. What I had done could be construed as attempting to convert a Muslim to Christianity. I began to backpedal furiously. I explained that since I was not a Christian, I had no desire to see him become one either. I suggested we change the terms of the bet. He agreed: if my warts do better than his, one of his daughters must become a doctor. As for me, I am off the hook if I lose.
Addendum, September 10: The index finger looks great, the other warts are unchanged. Paging Dr. Hak!
AUGUST 18 | Strategy and Tactics
When Task Force Orion arrived in Kandahar in early 2006, it was given an area of operations that, in retrospect, seems unimaginably large. The combat teams ranged all the way to the Pakistani border in the south, to the Arghandab and Shah Wali Khot districts in the north and as far west as Helmand province. This is more than ten times the surface area of Zhari-Panjwayi.
Since late 2006, we have focused on Zhari-Panjwayi. Half of this, Zhari district, has now been turned over to the Americans. This was already good news, because it meant we would be concentrating far more firepower in an area the Taliban want to contest.
The battle group commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jocelyn Paul, stopped by the FOB last night to describe our campaign plan for the next year or more. What he had to say was both reassuring and disappointing.
Take another look at the map in the June 4 entry that shows our FOBs dividing Zhari-Panjwayi on a north-south axis. It is to the east that the majority of the population resides.
From here on, we will deploy our forces mainly in the eastern part of the Panjwayi. The line of FOBs, which for so long served as springboards for operations into the Taliban heartland to the west, will now serve as a shield behind which we will operate in a different manner than we have until now.
The plan is to apply the principles of counterinsurgency in the way they were meant to be applied. For the first time, Canadians have the resources to accomplish this. Our troops are going to live right in the villages with the Afghan civilians. They will patrol intensively. In other words, there will be Coalition eyes and ears everywhere between our two remaining FOBs (Ma’Sum Ghar and Sperwan Ghar) and Kandahar City.
Militarily, I think this is a wise move. We are concentrating our forces into a region that represents less than a third of the area for which we were previously responsible. The impact this will have on combat operations can be easily imagined. As for the increased contact with Afghan civilians, I can only applaud this.
Emotionally, it is pretty tough to take. It was the soldiers of my first tour, Roto 4, who fought their way into western Zhari-Panjwayi and established outposts in the far reaches of those districts. On Roto 7, the current tour, we started off with a major operation to dismantle those outposts. Some soldiers were on both operations. You can imagine how they felt.
It is even harder to accept that, while we may be protecting 90 per cent or more of the population by following this new course, we are abandoning a small number of people to Taliban domination for the foreseeable future. Knowing that many of these people are staunch Taliban supporters only slightly lessens my regret.
AUGUST 19 | Anticipation and Anxiety
The elections will be held tomorrow.
Twice in the past three days, Taliban suicide bombers have struck in the capital, Kabul, killing a dozen people and wounding well over one hundred in total. Kabul has multiple medical resources to deal with such disasters. The same is not true in my little corner of the Panjwayi.
It appears there will be a polling station at an ANA observation post a kilometre north of here. No other situation since my arrival in Afghanistan has had so much potential for disaster. If a suicide bomber attacks a polling station while a large number of civilians are gathered, I could be faced with an overwhelming number of casualties. To make things worse, two-thirds of the combat team (and almost all the combat medics) as well as my Bison ambulance crew have been posted away from the FOB on security operations for the elections. The only soldiers with medical training currently on the FOB are a medic and a handful of TCCCs.
I have called a meeting with all of them for 1645. We will review triage concepts, how we will use the various spaces available to us near the UMS and who will be assigned to specific versus general tasks.
But my worries over whatever medical catastrophe may befall us tomorrow is nothing compared with my anxiety over the fate of the Afghan nation. The Coalition countries will be watching this election very closely. Support for the mission is lukewarm in many of these states. If the election is a fiasco, opinion polls could drift even further away from staying the course.
There are any number of ways things could go badly. Taliban intimidation could produce such a low voter turnout that the winner would lack legitimacy. Reports of widespread fraud would do the same even if voter turnout was high. Finally, even a well-attended, reasonably clean election could be fatally undermined in the eyes of the West if it comes at th
e cost of large numbers of civilian casualties.
To top it all off, incumbent president Hamid Karzai has chosen this week to curry favour with a small group of traditionalists by enacting a law that seems to enshrine a man’s right to deny his wife food if she refuses to have sex with him every four days. Proving himself every bit the able politician and insincere democrat, Karzai snuck the law through the parliamentary process while the legislators were in recess.* The law applies only to the Shia minority and it is unlikely to survive on the books for long, but the damage has been done. Even some people who are staunch supporters of the mission have e-mailed me asking if this country is worth saving.
AUGUST 20 | Election Day in Afghanada†
0630—Go to the command post to see how things are going in the district. There has been a lot of Taliban activity over the last several hours, about ten separate attacks on various Coalition outposts. So far, these have been nothing more than minor harassment attacks, including a couple of sniper rounds fired at us from the cemetery about eight hundred metres north of here.‡ I tell the duty officer I am going to go for my morning run up and down the hill anyway. Even if the shooter is still in place, which is doubtful, I will be a moving target nearly a kilometre away at a different elevation. Only the best snipers in the world can make such a shot. If the Taliban had anybody in that class, we would know about it—the men in the guard towers would be dropping like flies.
0730—I ran to the top of the hill five times instead of my usual four. A quick shower and another stop at the command post. The bad guys put one in their own net: someone planting a bomb in Bazaar-e-Panjwayi blew himself up.
0800—I am at my desk in the UMS. I hear incoming automatic weapons fire, from much closer than I have ever heard it before. I run back to my room to get my gear. First, enhance my survivability: frag vest, ballistic glasses, helmet. Then, get ready to fight. Tactical vest with ten extra magazines for my rifle (my pistol and its extra mags are already on my belt), gun gloves. My hands shake for a moment as I pull my gloves on, then the moment passes. Outside the door, I hear one of the senior NCOs yell, in that inimitable Québécois frenglish: “Let’s go, les boys! La FOB*se fait attaquer!” I grab my rifle, chamber a round, put the weapon on safe and run outside. I am the first one out of the building. I scan the immediate surroundings. The firing sounded so close, I was afraid a Taliban might have infiltrated the FOB. If so, we would be in a close-quarters gun battle. I surprise myself by remaining calm and controlled.