The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan

by Graeme Smith

  I even paused for some tourism on my final day in the city, slipping off my boots and padding around in my socks on the marble floor of a mausoleum for Mirwais Khan Hotak, one the ancient rulers of Afghanistan. Shafts of sunlight came through the pointed windows, playing on the intricate designs in blue, green, orange and gold. Later in the afternoon, I lounged on a terrace of trim grass near a bridge over the Arghandab River. My translator took me up the Forty Steps, an ancient stairway carved into a small mountain west of the city. The steps seemed built for giants, and I clambered on all fours like a child on a staircase, up the spine of the rocky outcrop. At the top we found a cave hacked into an open-sided cube, the walls chiselled with ancient Persian script, apparently a tribute to Mughal conquests. On that day, two Afghan soldiers sat near the precipice and poured each other tiny glasses of tea from a brass pot. They had a couple of Kalashnikov rifles, but the weapons were nestled among cardboard boxes at the back of the cave. Their job was to watch for signs of trouble, but they hadn’t bothered to turn on their military radio, a bulky device in a canvas knapsack. Instead, they seemed content to sip their tea as afternoon sun slanted over the expanse of green fields. Kandahar looked peaceful.

  Still, I wondered if the foreign presence was useful. That evening, back in my guesthouse, I flipped on my voice recorder and made a note. “I’ve had a song stuck in my head for the last week or so,” I said. “It’s by Laurie Anderson, the New York performance artist. She pauses for a moment in the song, then says, ‘And what I really want to know is: Are things getting better, or are they getting worse?’ ” Before leaving, I put that question to one of my new Afghan friends. In those days, 2005, it was a relevant topic of debate: some people still seriously argued in favour of the new government, while others felt nostalgia for the Taliban. I asked my friend to collect his thoughts for an audio recording. He stopped to think, then gestured at me to turn on the machine. “By the name of God,” he started, and gave his full name, identifying himself as a doctor at the city hospital. “Now I’m going to tell you some advantages and disadvantages of the Taliban leaving Afghanistan.” Speaking in a well-organized essay format, he listed the benefits of the foreigners’ presence: cellular telephone networks; education for boys and girls; new paved roads; freedom to watch television and movies; and economic prosperity. He took a breath and continued with the disadvantages of the current system: inflation, corruption and drug addiction. He went on at length about how violence had recently increased, along with blackmail, robbery and extortion. Such problems were rare during the Taliban regime, he said, but he concluded that the balance was positive. “It will be good,” he said. “I think it’s getting a little better.”

  My heart aches, now, listening to his careful optimism. There was a twinkle in his eyes in those days. He looked good, his hair neatly trimmed, and he spent his evenings at a local gym to slim the belly that he considered an embarrassing sign of middle age. He had a wife and two children, a small family by Afghan standards. He was proud of his wife’s literacy. He had an opportunity to take a second wife, an attractive nurse at the hospital, but he preferred Western-style monogamy. (“It is better to have peace in the family,” he said.) The fact that he discussed his domestic life with somebody outside his family, much less an infidel foreigner, was a sign of his willingness to break with tradition. He represented a fresh generation of professionals that prospered in the new Afghanistan. He could name every bone in the human body in five languages and still hungered for knowledge, asking me to bring medical books on my next visit. He opened a pharmacy in the city, and his brother set up an engineering firm. I spent happy afternoons with his nephews as they practised English and discussed the fighting styles of Jackie Chan and Spider-Man.

  But later, as the killings increased, his brother the engineer shut his office on the edge of Kandahar city and moved toward the safer heart of downtown. Over the following years he moved again, and again, and finally ended up in a high-walled compound near a US special forces base. Even there, in the shadow of the foreign troops, the engineer wasn’t safe from the rising chaos. One of his nephews was kidnapped, and his family had to pay a heavy ransom—hundreds of thousands of US dollars, a sum that impoverished his clan. My friend the doctor carried the ransom money himself, handing over the cash to a masked man and receiving in return a hand-drawn symbol in a corner of a crumpled note—which he later traded for his nephew at a different location. Another of his relatives was shot by unknown assailants, but survived. The engineer had already retreated from projects in the rural districts, limiting his work to the safer confines of the city, but the kidnapping and shooting drained his energy. Finally he shuttered his Kandahar business and moved to Kabul. The doctor pulled back, too, slowly becoming less visible on the streets, and the last time I saw him in Kandahar, in early 2009, he looked like an old man. His hair was greasy and unkempt, and his eyes suggested he hadn’t had a proper sleep in weeks. He spoke urgently about moving away. The simple prediction he gave me four years earlier—“It will be good”—turned out to be false.

  I met him again in 2011, after he escaped to Dubai with his family. We strolled through a shopping mall and he seemed to enjoy the stretches of polished marble, the giant aquariums, the coloured fountains that danced to music. He showed me his favourite ride at the mall’s amusement park, a flight simulator, but refused to join the children who screamed past on roller coasters, which he considered “too dangerous.” Kandahar had exhausted his appetite for risk. Having saved himself from Afghanistan, he looked back at the foreigners’ intervention with none of the equivocation he felt in 2005. He concluded that the benefits were outweighed by drawbacks: violence, instability, corruption and the dangerously fragile nature of the new regime. On a recent trip home, he had noticed Afghan soldiers cruising the roads in new air-conditioned vehicles with the windows rolled up, something he saw as a metaphor for the security forces’ lack of concern for anything except their own comfort. “The army men should have the windows open, looking at the city and seeing what is happening,” he said. “Instead they are enjoying themselves.” The same attitude permeated the Kabul government, he said, noting that many of the top officials had visas and passports that would allow them to leave Afghanistan. “If something bad happens they will run away,” he said. With only a hint of self-reproach, he added: “They will run away, like me.”

  The young translator who first welcomed me in 2005 and took me on that road trip to Kandahar has also escaped the country. (He now lives in Canada.) The astonishing freedom we enjoyed on that initial journey can only be understood in contrast with the way conditions deteriorated on the Kabul–Kandahar highway in subsequent years. By the spring of 2006, my translator looked at me like I was joking when I suggested a road trip. No, he explained, the Taliban have started running checkpoints on the main highway. Gunmen stop cars and frisk passengers, looking for evidence of collaboration with the so-called infidel occupation; you would be kidnapped or killed. But he reluctantly agreed that it might be possible to travel by bus, because in those days the Taliban did not have a strong grip on the highway and didn’t want the hassle of searching bus passengers, most of whom would be ordinary Afghans. This time I couldn’t wear Western clothing because he was worried that our fellow passengers might use their cellphones to tip off the Taliban. So I shambled up to the bus station without looking anybody in the eye or speaking a word, fully disguised in local clothing. My translator shepherded me onto the old coach like a mentally impaired child and tucked me away in a window seat near the back. We sat tense and silent for several hours, watching the beige emptiness of the south give way to rolling hills as we drove into the central region. When my translator recognized the landscape of Wardak province he visibly relaxed and informed me that Taliban were no longer a threat. We started chatting in English, which caused a sensation among the other passengers. People turned around in their seats to stare at the strange presence of a Westerner who had passed himself off as an Afghan. Some of t
he looks weren’t welcoming, but my translator assured me that we had emerged from the danger zone, having escaped Taliban territory and entered the security bubble around Kabul. The final hour of the drive passed easily.

  That was my last road trip between Afghanistan’s two main cities. By the following year, 2007, I didn’t need to ask my staff about security on the highway. Wardak province was no longer a place where people relaxed, as the growing violence littered the road with burned hulks of military vehicles and fuel tankers. That province became such a Taliban stronghold that an insurgent later bragged to me that his men had burrowed tunnels into Wardak’s mountains and lined them with fresh concrete to hold all their weapons and ammunition. Foreigners travelled by plane when going to southern Afghanistan.

  The foolhardy ones who risked the roads quickly became examples of the rising danger, as happened in July 2007 when the Taliban captured a busload of Korean missionaries on the highway to Kandahar and held them for ransom. Two were killed and twenty-one released, with the Taliban reportedly getting about a million dollars for each of them. The highway also became risky for Afghans whose jobs brought them into contact with foreigners, and they started taking extraordinary precautions to avoid getting caught at insurgent checkpoints. An Afghan who managed a professional office in Kandahar once pointed to a wicker basket on his desk that contained nothing but three cellphones. Before travelling, he explained, his employees stripped themselves of any item that could identify them and put on shabby wristwatches and shoes. They removed the memory chips from their cellphones and replaced them with new ones whose contact lists contained only three names, and each number rang one of the phones in the basket. His employees introduced themselves as religious students, and the manager said he was accustomed to taking calls from Taliban checkpoints, responding with a gruff impersonation of a mullah who doesn’t like being bothered to confirm the bona fides of his followers. He chuckled at his own cleverness, but he looked tired every time I saw him. Despite the precautions, his employees were still getting killed on a regular basis.

  For those of us who survived Afghanistan, the bright shine of the early years remains haunting. All of the old hands have stories about the freedoms they enjoyed in that golden period, roughly 2002 to 2005, and many have regrets about how events later unfolded. At a dinner party a few years ago, I sat across from Francesc Vendrell, who served as the European Union’s special representative to Afghanistan after the collapse of the Taliban regime. He ranked among the most senior diplomats in the country by the time of his departure in 2008, with access to the inner workings of Kabul. By all accounts he was a voice of conscience, but I was still curious about whether he felt sadness about his role in the machinery of war. Our dinner companions grew quieter as Mr. Vendrell fingered the stem of his wineglass. “Not sadness,” he said. “Anger.” Many people around the table, all of them with years of experience in Afghanistan, nodded their heads. It wasn’t only the war hawks who called for a large-scale invasion of the south and other areas beyond Kabul; many big-hearted humanitarians had pushed for intervention. But whose dreams were we chasing in southern Afghanistan? Ordinary people in the country did not care about projects such as safeguarding their “audio-visual heritage,” and most importantly, Afghans outside of the capital were not clamouring for “the benefits of international security assistance.” The road to Kandahar was paved with the best intentions, but the foreigners had no idea what Afghans wanted. That disconnect was about to have horrendous consequences for the south.

  Afghan security contractor injured in a suicide bombing

  CHAPTER 2

  THE SURGE APRIL 2006

  Kandahar felt menacing when I returned in spring. Police checkpoints appeared on the streets I had wandered so casually on my previous visit, and military vehicles chugged past with soldiers yelling at people to keep their distance. Thousands of troops from NATO countries were arriving to reinforce the Americans, and the whole city vibrated with their energy. I was sleeping in a tent at Camp Nathan Smith in Kandahar, in quarters then located right beside a helicopter pad, and my earplugs did nothing against the sound of rotors that was more like a body massage than something audible. The caffeine was keeping me awake, too. I had started what would become my standard routine in Kandahar, visiting local businessmen, elders and other notables, and the ritual was usually the same: take off your sandals, sit down on the floor and drink something caffeinated. I got suspicious looks when I asked for sweet milk tea, which I enjoyed in northern Pakistan; it turned out that people in Kandahar prefer green tea, and they also felt certain that Pakistani agents were lurking around, stirring up trouble—so I stopped asking for milky tea. Usually I didn’t need to ask for anything, because they assumed a foreigner would drink Pepsi. Either way, it was a steady chemical buzz. There was also an adrenaline buzz, from my first real taste of war. It would later seem normal to hear explosions in the city, but the first time it happened I slammed my laptop shut and rushed out of my tent. Brown smoke was rising in the hot air, several storeys high. This was still such a novelty for the foreign troops that a Canadian soldier was standing on the roof of a concrete bunker nearby, shading his eyes and peering over the barricades for a better view, and I scrambled up to join him. We couldn’t see much, so I jumped down, called my driver and rushed toward the column of smoke. Only two minutes’ drive from the base, the blast had left a giant hole in a mud wall and mangled a police car. Nobody survived. Firemen had just finished soaking the wreck, and it steamed in the harsh light of early afternoon. I would see a long parade of similar scenes in the years that followed, but at the time the drama of the bombing provoked a gush of words in my diary about the sense of urgency that comes with working so close to danger:

  Everybody is risking their lives, and everybody believes they’re saving Afghanistan—and, frankly, saving the world from the kind of Afghanistan that has proven to be so dangerous in the past. At the moment, it’s unclear whether they’re winning the war. But the stakes are high, the battle is on, and the whole camp seems to vibrate with an energy like the thudding rotors of a helicopter. There’s no time for sleep.

  Those were heady days for the NATO surge. The Canadians went first, sending twenty-three hundred soldiers to Kandahar, while Britain was preparing thirty-three hundred troops for neighbouring Helmand province. NATO had not yet assumed formal responsibility for southern Afghanistan, so the planeloads of troops fell under the command of US Operation Enduring Freedom. (Standard joke: “How are you?” “Enduring freedom.”) This first wave started with something called “shaping operations,” trying to clear a path for other European troops who would arrive in the coming months. American commanders worried that NATO would take a soft approach, so they picked fights with Taliban in every corner of southern Afghanistan before the handover from US to NATO leadership of the mission. Canadian and US troops roamed hundreds of kilometres in search of enemies, and after one such hunting expedition, the commander of the Canadian battle group sounded disappointed when his forces came back without meeting resistance. “We actually were very surprised so far that they have not shot at us,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Hope. The colonel then suggested that the insurgents ran away when they saw the “professional bearing” of his heavily armed troops.

  The surge also brought an influx of special forces, who appeared to operate with even more blithe confidence. One evening at Kandahar Air Field (KAF), a female contractor told me she had a stash of Singaporean beer in her compound and would be drinking with some US commandos who had been helping her build a wooden deck for her living quarters. It wasn’t typical for America’s elite forces to volunteer for handyman jobs in remote corners of the camp, but they seemed eager to please a good-looking woman. The commandoes were not supposed to speak with reporters, but after a few beers they started to talk about a set of military orders known as the Rules of Engagement, or ROEs, which describe when a soldier may attack. The commandoes’ stories indicated that they saw the ROEs as suggestions,
not laws. They described an Apache helicopter flying near a mountain, where a special-forces team had spotted an armed man lurking in the crags. The team on the ground got there first, shooting him in the face and chest. The Apache gunner felt cheated of a kill, however, and as he watched the man tumbling down the mountain, his rifle still strapped to his body and flopping randomly, the gunner declared over the radio that the corpse had aimed a weapon at the aircraft—allowing him, under his rules of engagement, to blast it. Bullets sawed the body in half. The special forces guys thought this was hilarious. I had to ask for an explanation of the joke: If a soldier could shoot an Afghan for being in the wrong place, why did the Apache gunner need to worry about identifying a pointed gun? A heavily muscled commando cracked a beer and replied: “Different rules for us. We basically shoot a guy if we don’t like the way he’s scratching his face.”

  That kind of swagger was also displayed in background briefings. A senior British officer at the multinational brigade headquarters clicked through slides showing the military analysis of every district in the south, dotted with multicoloured symbols indicating the strength of the Afghan government in six categories: politics, military, economy, information, infrastructure and social issues. Many of the dots were coloured green or orange, showing a positive assessment of the situation, with some outlying areas shaded grey to acknowledge that the military didn’t know their status. “Broadly, it’s not a bad picture,” the officer said. NATO’s analysis at the time was not particularly different from the broad consensus, because most sources agreed that the security environment was not terribly dangerous at the start of 2006. That was the last time journalists were shown the military’s assessment of those metrics in the south, as the situation began deteriorating and NATO started to carefully ration information about its analysis of the war, but during that initial period we got a clear view of the military’s hubris. The NATO troops radiated a missionary zeal for bringing the modern world to backward villagers. Officers described Afghans as so ignorant that they reacted to NATO’s armoured vehicles by mistaking them for new Russian equipment—implying the locals had not heard about the withdrawal of the Soviet occupation almost two decades earlier.