by Anand Gopal
Then they received news from the village. The air strike had flattened the house whose wall Akbar Gul had used for cover and ravaged the apple orchards through which they had escaped. Akbar Gul felt deeply ashamed. He wondered how he could possibly face the villagers. But was it his fault? The Americans had chosen to come to Wardak, he reasoned. He’d never asked for it. They had placed themselves in the middle of the village and he was doing the best he could, the best anyone could, under such conditions.
Much later, I asked him if he felt remorse. He gave me a surprised look and said with a touch of rancor, “You can’t ask me that. Americans won’t ever feel what we feel. Your problems have solutions.” We both fell silent and he looked hard at the floor. Finally, he said, “Yes, it was a terrible thing. But we were scared. When death appears in front of you, no one hugs it. This is war.”
Still, he felt that the mission had been a success. Days after the attack, he had trekked up the hill and found blood splattered on the rocks. That evening, he called Mufti Latif and reported that four Americans had been killed.
Later, trying to verify his account, I came across the US military log for the skirmish, released by WikiLeaks in 2010. No one, it turned out, had been killed in the incident.
Back in Chak, though, that mattered not. The death of four American soldiers at the hands of Akbar Gul’s fighters became truth itself, and soon he was awarded more money by the leadership. His group now numbered nearly forty strong, and Akbar Gul’s name was catching attention in Taliban ranks across Wardak Province. Fresh off his success, he set to devising even more daring assaults. As with any great ambition, however, war has a stubborn way of becoming an end in itself. Like the Americans, Akbar Gul would learn this the hard way.
12
No-Man’s-Land
On the old rutted gravel road by the grassy bank the young men squeezed aboard the buses, carrying only their knapsacks and their hopes for a better year. The buses followed the road as it crossed a rolling country covered with soft yellowing grass, dotted here and there with the occasional banyan or sissoo. There were creeks bluer than any sky, their waters braided over gravel bars. There were also fruit farms, but after a hard and dry summer here in Laghman Province, the trees stood bare. For the farmers on the bus, there had been no work to be found here.
They rode on through the Hindu Kush, following the rapids of the Kabul River alongside sheer cliffs dropping almost a thousand feet, and on to the shallow hills of Kabul. Looking through the window, the men could see low-slung concrete buildings and glimmering wedding halls. But without access, there was no hope of work here either. So they switched buses and headed south, into the bare country of Wardak. With the roadside craters and unpredictable checkpoints, each trip through Wardak was a perverse lottery. The men said their prayers.
It was past dawn when they pulled into Kandahar city and switched buses again. From here it would be a good fifteen hours to the Iranian border, to the traffickers who would arrange their crossing and help them find work. The two new buses took the highway west into the deserts of Maiwand District. It was open country for miles around, not a building or shack in sight.
Then some armed men ran onto the road ahead. Thinking fast, the driver of the first bus accelerated. Before the gunmen could close ranks, he had sped past them. But the trailing bus was forced to stop. When the gunmen boarded and the passengers saw them, their hearts sank: it was the Taliban.
The captives were brought to Band-i-Timor, to the same clutch of villages that, when I’d visited earlier that year, had held only children or no one at all. For three days, the men were kept in a series of small houses as the Taliban decided their fate. Years later, I obtained an account of what happened as told by Rahim, a Taliban fighter. “When I went there,” he said, “it was late evening and all the passengers were there. They were yellow with worry.” As he recalled it, Mullah Adaam, the local commander, addressed the group. “When you were coming from Kabul to Kandahar, we received a credible report that you were coming to join the National Army. We have good sources.”
“What did you say we came for?” a captive asked. They could not believe it. They were simply in search of jobs in Iran, of a better life.
“Sons of Gulab Mangal!” he shouted, referring to the Karzai-appointed governor of Helmand, the next province on the bus’s route. “You’ve come here to join the National Army and start fighting against us!”
The young men pleaded with Adaam, swearing that they had never laid eyes upon Gulab Mangal and would never join the Afghan army. But he appeared unmoved.
However, Rahim noticed doubt in his commander’s eyes. Sure enough, Adaam soon phoned Taliban leaders in Quetta, Pakistan, for advice, pointing out that some of the captives were clean-shaven “like Americans.” He listened and then replied, “Don’t worry, we’ll do our thing to them and then you’ll say ‘well done’ to us.”
Adaam turned to his fighters. “Only one phone call remains. After that, we’ll send these guys to hell.”
In the meantime, the captives were kept in a series of huts, one of which Rahim was assigned to guard. Sometime after midnight, he heard a commotion behind the door. He opened it and saw men crying.
“What are you doing?”
“For God’s sake, we are going to Iran for work. We’ve even paid money to traffickers. They are going to take us there.”
“Keep quiet,” Rahim said. If his commander heard them talking, they’d all be in trouble.
Another, heaving, cried out, “My brother! I’ve got a little brother and three sisters. My mother and father are old. If something happens to me, what will they do?”
Doubt began to gnaw at Rahim.
The next day, the crowd of Talibs had doubled. Rahim suggested to Adaam that the men might indeed be innocent. Adaam called a Taliban cleric in Pakistan and put the phone on speaker. High-ranking clerics typically decided matters of law and order of significant magnitude—and a busload of captives was one of the biggest abductions of the war so far.
“I’m sure the other scholars have informed you of their decision, but I wanted to hear it from you with my own ears,” Adaam said.
“I was with the others when they made their decision,” the voice said. “Just go on and behead them.”
Adaam hung up and looked at Rahim. “This isn’t my decision. It’s the decision of all the scholars. Now do you agree?”
Rahim asked how scholars sitting in Pakistan could possibly decide on issues here in Maiwand, but Adaam waved him off.
The next morning the captives were brought out in groups to a canal at the edge of the village. On their motorbikes, armed Taliban had gathered across the way. At once, the prisoners realized their fate. Some began wailing, some pleading for mercy. The young man to whom Rahim had spoken earlier was sobbing, calling out his parents’ and siblings’ names.
Shots rang out. The cries grew louder. The Taliban kept firing. The bodies kept falling.
Rahim couldn’t bring himself to squeeze the trigger. Adaam pulled up on his motorcycle. “What are you looking at? Shoot!”
Rahim fired a shot haphazardly and Adaam cried, “No, Talib! You can do it.” He grabbed the gun and started firing himself, hitting one captive in the foot. The man lay moaning until Adaam walked over and aimed two bullets at his head.
After a while, there was no longer any noise, no wailing, no gunshots. Rahim crossed the canal. Lying there were the bodies of some of the captives. And, nearby, four severed heads.
Twenty-five civilians in total died in the massacre, but incredibly enough two managed to escape. One of them, Bashir, recounted his ordeal afterward to a reporter: “They tied our hands behind our backs. When they began firing at us, I ran.” The four others in his group were gunned down, but he escaped with a bullet in his leg. “I ran and hid,” he said. “When God Almighty wants to rescue a person, he can rescue them anywhere, under any circumstances.”
News of the slaughter sparked a public outcry. The Taliban insiste
d they had received reliable reports that the victims were Afghan army recruits. Even when it became clear that there had not been a single enlistee among them, they held fast to this fiction. It was autumn 2008, and for the first time anti-Taliban protests erupted countrywide. In villages that had rebelled against American and government abuses, the dark realization was setting that the Taliban were, in fact, no different from all the rest.
* * *
Not far from the homes of the victims’ families, on the grassy banks of the Alingar River, you can find a simple tarpaulin lash-up that serves as the home of a one-eyed man named Hazrat.
“Nothing you see here in this country belongs to us,” he told me when we first met. “You see that road out there? That’s not ours. Everything is borrowed and everything can be taken back.” Hazrat was the malek of a village that no longer existed. Some twenty miles off to the west, Garloch had been a hamlet of poplar trees and irregular patches of wheat and barley, its few hundred straw and mud homes there since the time of Hazrat’s grandfathers and his grandfathers’ grandfathers.
The war had slipped into Garloch like a thief. One summer night in 2008, a Taliban commander from a nearby village showed up with his men and established a checkpoint. Before anyone realized it they had become a fixture, though the people of Garloch had no vote in this. Not long thereafter, in a valley ten miles away, insurgents ambushed a French patrol, killing ten soldiers and wounding almost two dozen—France’s biggest battlefield loss in a quarter century. American intelligence came to believe that one of the commanders involved, a man named Qadir, hailed from Garloch.
Two weeks passed. Then, early one morning, Hazrat awoke to a vibrating sky. Shelving shook in its place. Lights flashed outside. A friend arrived with news that the Americans had cordoned off the village. They were going house to house, blowing off gates and searching every room. Men and boys were being thrown to the ground, their hands tied behind their backs.
The operation lasted six hours, after which the villagers watched soldiers board helicopters and fly off. Then an aircraft swooped in, dropping its payload on a house.
Afterward, the government announced that the Americans had hit the house of Commander Qadir. When I suggested this to Hazrat as an explanation for the raid, he snorted, “You want to meet Qadir? I’ll bring him right now.” He stepped outside and headed over to a row of tents, their blue UN-issued tarpaulins flapping in the breeze. He returned with a pole-thin old man—Hajji Qadir, a village elder. Qadir explained that he had been hosting a wedding party at his home the night of the raid. The bomb had split his house in two, killing sixteen guests, including twelve members of his family. Dozens were wounded. He walked me to his tent to show me his mementos from that day. A chalky white chunk of ceiling; a mangled sliver of metal railing; a smiling toddler, his eyes daubed with kohl, his foot missing.
The air strike had targeted the wrong Qadir, though the Taliban commander did indeed live in the village and survived unscathed. Afterward, Hazrat, the village malek, went to the governor of Laghman Province and demanded an explanation. He was told that as long as the Taliban Qadir made Garloch his home, residents would not be able to allay American suspicions. Hazrat returned to his village and confronted Commander Qadir.
“Don’t be a coward and hide among civilians,” he told him. “If you want to fight Americans, go down south and leave us alone.”
Eventually, Commander Qadir and a fellow insurgent departed. The troubles, Malek Hazrat told his grieving neighbors, were over.
A month later, however, just after dawn, residents awoke to the same pulsating sky. Some farmers, already in their fields, watched as American helicopters alighted on the wheat farms abutting the village. The choppers fired at something unseen and, in a panic, villagers fled from their homes into the fields. What they did not know was that the US forces were locked in a battle with Taliban insurgents in a nearby valley, and the fighting had spilled over to Garloch. In the havoc, two shepherds and a woman were gunned down. Warplanes then appeared overhead and bombed the village, destroying many homes.
From then on, the whirling chop-chop of rotary blades in the middle of the night brought cold sweats and prayers. To some, the copters seemed almost magical. “They wait in the sky, up there, behind those clouds,” a boy told me. “When they want to attack, they drop like this.” He held his hand parallel to the ground, bringing it down in a rapid glide. “There’s nothing you can do.”
Two months after the assault, the Americans returned yet again, acting on a tip that there were 100 antigovernment militants in the area. Afterward, however, it was found that the only casualties were two hundred dead sheep. Laghman police chief Abdul Karim Omaryar chalked up the incident to a NATO-led drive against terrorism, and a local news outlet ran the headline: “This Time Sheep Mistaken as Enemy Combatants.” The humor was lost on the inhabitants of Garloch, however, many of whom were herdsmen and saw their livelihoods vanish in a single night. They carried the eviscerated carcasses to the governor’s house and deposited them in front of his gate in protest.
Malek Hazrat also protested, to the media, to lawmakers, even to the president’s office, and Karzai himself called to assure him that he had spoken to the Americans and that such tragedies would not be repeated. Hazrat returned home and once again promised his villagers they would be safe.
A few weeks later, in the pre-morning dark, the Americans returned. As the soldiers approached a home, a dog growled and they shot it. A villager ran out, thinking a thief was on the premises, and they shot him too. His younger brother emerged with a gun and fired into the darkness, yelling for his neighbors. The soldiers shot him as well, and the barrage of bullets also hit his mother as she peered out a window. The soldiers then tied the three bodies together, dragged them into a room, and set off explosives. A pair of children stood watching, and they would later report the scene.
An old man stepped out of the neighboring house holding an oil lamp. He was shot. His son ran out to help, and he, too, was shot. By night’s end, seventeen residents lay dead. When people came out of their houses to collect their loved ones, they found a body swinging from a tree. Some believed that the Americans were behind the hanging, while others guessed that it was a result of neighborhood retribution against whoever may have provided false intelligence, but no one could say for sure.
US officials announced that the dead were “mostly militants,” but villagers showed me photos of bloodied, lifeless women and old men. This time, Hazrat and his people had had enough. They descended upon the governor’s house, burning President Obama in effigy. When the governor attempted to calm the crowd, protesters hurled stones at him. In the wake of the uproar, American authorities backtracked on their earlier claims. “I would say there was some potential that some of those killed were civilians,” Colonel Greg Julian, a spokesman for US forces, told a reporter, “because some of those men shooting at our troops may have been civilians.” Subsequently, the United States paid $2,000 in compensation to each of the victims’ families.
Sitting with me in his tent, Hazrat railed, “That’s what our lives are worth to you Americans—two thousand dollars? You want to kill us and then pay to keep us quiet?” An old man nearby leaned forward and shouted, “My daughter is buried in the ground! You can give me every dollar on Earth, but I won’t touch it. It won’t bring her back.”
Hazrat’s eyes were burning. “When you go back to America, give Obama a message. You say you’ll give us roads and schools? I don’t give a shit about your roads and schools! I want safety for my family.”
After four deadly raids in the space of five months, Garloch residents faced a choice. They could take up arms in resistance, join the Taliban, and fight as their fathers had against a foreign occupation. But in this section of Laghman, haunted by the ghosts of Taliban brutality, resistance did not seem a viable option. Neither was neutrality, not in a war that had rendered the notion obsolete. So they took the only course remaining: they left. On foot, by car, by
motorcycle, across an open country of crabgrass and gravel, they left. Across long harsh miles, taking their clothes and their bedding and their animals, they left. Some did not quit until reaching Pakistan. But most, like Hazrat, stopped by the grassy riverbank near Laghman’s main highway, far enough from trouble but close enough to the world they knew, and erected a new village of tarpaulin and plastic. They called this canvas hamlet “New Garloch,” although it didn’t feel much like home. Occasionally, someone felt the urge to return to the ghost-town Garloch. Matiullah, a young farmer, once made the trip, but upon arriving he spotted a dog with its teeth clamped around the bones of a human hand. He promptly turned back.
Life in New Garloch was hard going. Men and boys scavenged for food or cadged for UN handouts. Women were restricted to their tiny tents all day long. Every winter, a few children were buried. Quitting entirely and heading for Pakistan seemed more appealing by the season. But Malek Hazrat refused to leave. “I’ll stay here until I can go home,” he told me, “or until they bury me, too.”
* * *
Mullah Manan and I were in a cramped hotel room in downtown Kandahar city. A queen-size bed occupied most of the room, but Manan insisted on sitting on the floor. Photographs of the Swiss Alps and Indian cricketers hung on the wall. A small white refrigerator hummed in one corner, and Manan stared at it for some time, as it was new to him. The air conditioner blasted frigid air and the television silently played scenes of a Bollywood starlet frolicking in a flower bed.
I asked him to describe his home village, and as he did I used Google Earth to pull up its overhead image on my computer.
“My God!” he said, smiling. He shook his head in amazement. “I don’t know how you’re able to see that.” He could not read or write, nor had he ever seen a map of any kind, but he grasped the picture’s value at once. “America must be glorious,” he said, not taking his eyes off the screen. “Maybe one day Afghanistan will become like that.”