The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan

by Graeme Smith

  We typically meet with one of my two translators at different locations in the city. Usually one of them will be walking down a road, and my driver will signal him with a phone call that we’re approaching. The car pulls up, he hops inside and we head toward our interview. The translators take turns: whichever one is not working will stay at home and call me a couple of times a day to check in. The driver is told everything on a need-to-know basis, sometimes to the point where he gets instructions like, “turn right here,” and “straight ahead one hundred metres.” Interview subjects are usually given a vague idea about when we will arrive; fortunately, “I might see you tomorrow afternoon” is an ordinary way of setting up a business meeting in Kandahar.

  We follow the same protocols going home. I usually arrive back at KAF between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. The guards get nervous when they see a man with Afghan clothes carrying a bag at night, but yelling in English makes them lower their weapons. (The guards relaxed most quickly, it seemed, when I hollered the names of fast-food outlets on the base: “BURGER KING!” “PIZZA HUT!”)

  3. INTERVIEW LOCATIONS

  This is a problem right now. If we’re visiting somebody it’s not a problem; that person has extended an invitation and we’re his guests, which means the interview subject provides security. The person we’re meeting will send an armed guard to watch for us as we’re pulling into his road, or just get ready to open the gate when we arrive. Usually, the person we’re visiting gets alerted by cellphone a few minutes before we arrive, which is especially important if the person has heavy security and needs to instruct his guards to relax.

  The problems arise when we’re inviting an interview subject to a meeting. A few months ago, we had a great system: people we trusted were invited for tea at our office. People we didn’t trust were met at a popular guesthouse in a well-guarded compound downtown. People we really, really didn’t trust were hosted at a more obscure guesthouse that is mostly empty except for the owner, an Afghan-Canadian, and his armed guards. Sadly, the Afghan-Canadian gave up his failed business and moved back to Canada. We also grew nervous about surveillance at the popular guesthouse. So recently we’ve been picking people up and interviewing them in the car, driving around Kandahar or parking in a huge field near a mosque.

  Another reason for needing an office space is the uneven pace of work in the city. We often do an early interview and then we’re forced to wait three or four hours until our next appointment. Not only is that interval unproductive without a workspace, it’s dangerous—because, really, where do you go? Sometimes I nip over to a military base for lunch, but that exposes me to another pair of entry/exit passages near a military gate, which is the most risky part of my day. Sometimes I hang out at a guesthouse, but that’s not safe either. Recently I’ve been resting at a friend’s engineering office—but it’s uncomfortable, because we’re not exactly welcome (foreigner = trouble) and sometimes my fixer pokes his head through the gate and decides there are too many visitors, so we have to turn around and drive away. I would probably be welcome at some of the NGO compounds downtown, but my fixers feel less comfortable in those places and I certainly can’t invite interview subjects. The NGOs are also a magnet for unwanted attention. Our solution, when the risks are so great, is to simply stack up as many back-to-back interviews as possible, and sometimes linger for an extra hour at the site of interview #1 before we’re ready for #2.

  4. COMMUNICATIONS

  We try to make arrangements using a combination of phone calls and text messages, to foil intercepts. But frankly I’m a little skeptical about the insurgents’ ability to pass a message to a bomber quickly enough to catch me if I’m making plans for the next morning, and the sheer inconvenience of the alternatives—using secret codes, for example—means we’re sloppy about this. We do have “dirty” SIM chips installed in spare phones exclusively for sensitive calls, mostly to Taliban. I sometimes get phone calls from people speaking Pashto, but I always answer with a Pashtun greeting and then hang up. They’re probably just wrong numbers, and not somebody testing to see whether the person on the other end speaks English. Some journalists travelling on rural highways will wipe any numbers from their phones that might get them into trouble at checkpoints, but I haven’t bothered.

  I spent fewer nights in the city after the raid. Despite the noise of aircraft, and the narrow canvas cots, I slept better at the military base. Evenings in Kandahar left me feeling exposed, always worried that the front gate of a guesthouse or friend’s compound could be breached as easily as the metal door of my office. I also worried that my local friends behaved with too little regard for their own safety; one winter night, I sat with a group of Afghans around an oil heater, eyeing the rickety contraption as we bedded down. Flames danced near the sleeping pads we unrolled on the floor, fuelled by the regular drip, drip, drip from an antique brass valve that regulated the oil. We needed the warmth because the heavy concrete walls of my host’s compounds in Kandahar city were damp and cool in winter, but I slept uneasily next to the flickering flame, worrying I would burn to death. I was also unsettled because one of my hosts put a Kalashnikov beside his pillow as we settled down for the night, and the barrel was aimed straight at me. Maybe I wouldn’t have stayed awake worrying about this—he had been a fighter against the Soviets and handled weapons with confidence—if it weren’t for a story he told us before we slept, about how one of his guards shot himself in the head. He ran a construction business, fixing roads and culverts, and like most people associated with the international mission he hired gunmen to protect his workers. A guard on the night shift had been sitting in a plastic lawn chair near the gate, struggling to stay awake. He propped the butt of his rifle on the ground and folded his palms over the barrel, leaning his forehead against the backs of his hands, and dozed off. His hands slid down the weapon so that his head rested directly against the muzzle. His fingers drifted lower, to the trigger. The safety wasn’t latched, and the sound of the shot brought everybody running with guns in their hands. They found him bleeding from the head, and, after realizing that the compound wasn’t under attack, they tried to revive him by splashing water on his face. A few bucketfuls failed to save him, so they threw him in the back of a pickup truck and drove to the morgue.

  Kandahar’s morgue consisted of a white trailer hidden in the trees behind Mirwais hospital, the largest medical facility in southern Afghanistan. Most people who died in the war were pulled from the battlefields by their own families and buried quickly, as required by custom, but thousands ended up at the morgue before relatives collected them. Many were never picked up, and attendants packed them into plain coffins and buried them in shallow graves near the northern slums. Wire shelves in the trailer had room for only twenty bodies, and the air conditioning often didn’t work, so the place got crowded and reeked of death. It was the kind of smell that gets into your lungs and thickens, choking you. Nobody wanted to go inside and drop off the dead themselves: even in the middle of the night, they would search for a morgue worker to handle that unpleasant task. The handover itself required no paperwork, and people drove around the hospital and dumped bodies from their trucks, family sedans and donkey carts. Hospital staff tried to keep records of the dead, intercepting people on the way to the morgue and scribbling a few details into a battered notebook with the words book of corpses handwritten on the cover, but they documented only a minority of the incoming bodies.

  Therefore it was a small miracle that a doctor was on duty that night and stopped the contractor’s pickup truck before it reached the morgue. He pulled open the carpet that swaddled the body and checked for a pulse, astonishing the contractor and his men by announcing that their guard wasn’t dead after all. They hauled him into the hospital, where a quick examination revealed that the man’s injury was not even serious. The bullet had split his scalp and opened a gash on his forehead, but didn’t break the skull. The doctor put smelling salts under the man’s nose and he woke with a gasp. He went home that evening with a
line of stitches and a good story. He could have regained consciousness among a pile of bodies in the morgue, or been buried alive in a plywood box—but death does not inspire the kind of seriousness in Kandahar that it does in rich countries. You’re more likely to hear such stories told as jokes, not cautionary tales. I wanted to meet the guard and hear his version of the story, but his boss fired him for incompetence—you need guards who stay awake, especially in Kandahar.

  I never worried about whether the guards stayed awake at Kandahar Air Field, in their high towers, and it wasn’t a bad place to spend the evening if you learned to embrace its charms and eccentricities. Most of the nightlife was tame, considering the pressures that build with thousands of men and a small number of women sleeping inside a high-security perimeter. Some soldiers limited themselves to small indulgences like Cuban cigars, an embargo-flaunting pleasure for American troops. Shops on the base also carried a bewildering number of magazines devoted to guns, motorcycles and semi-naked girls. Kiosks sold shirts emblazoned with a red-and-blue image that resembled the Major League Baseball logo, except with a soldier aiming a rifle and the slogan “Major League Infidel.” If those shirts suggested some kind of relationship between sport and killing, the impression was reinforced by the video games most popular among the soldiers. They preferred noisy shooting games, and sometimes I would pause near the rows of big-screen televisions, marvelling at the strangeness of men with automatic rifles at their sides, absorbed in computer simulations of their actual jobs. Perhaps it was relaxing to spend time in a virtual world where death was not permanent, and victory required only a certain number of kills.

  The food at military bases was unspectacular, a basic calorie-delivery system, but one Thanksgiving the usual deep-fried stuff in the cafeteria was replaced with a spread of turkey, stuffing and other festive fare decorated with ice sculptures and fountains lit with coloured lamps. Soldiers shuffled into the cafeteria past a glowing replica of a bonfire, through the door of a fake wigwam, and sat down to dinner under the unsettling gaze of Native Americans made with paper mache. A huge Jesus stretched his arms in blessing over a gingerbread model of the airfield. It was a scene so rich with echoes of other invasions, other holy wars, that it seemed like a parody.

  Many people on the base, including journalists, were required to sign a document promising to avoid what the military called “fraternization,” a rule the senior brass took seriously. They expelled several people for having sex—including, famously, a top Canadian general. But as the months stretched on, the war settling into a tailspin, the sense of purpose that once drove the soldiers faded into the background and the personnel seemed to focus a little more on pleasure. One soldier told me that everybody wanted the keys to the armoured personnel carriers, because their air conditioning and soundproofing made them useful for trysts. A rumour circulated that somebody had smuggled a Filipina prostitute onto the camp, which would explain the leggy woman I had seen lounging in the sunshine with no apparent duties, wearing rhinestone sunglasses and reading pulp novels, but I could never confirm it. Nor could I ever confirm the widespread rumour that a soldier from one of the smaller countries, perhaps Estonia, had consumed too much moonshine and accepted a bet to swim across Emerald Lake, a large sewage pond filled with chemicals that turned the sludge a bright emerald colour. The soldier apparently made it across, but ended up in hospital with skin problems. I’m not sure about that story—especially the part about the moonshine, because bootleggers sold enough hard liquor that amateur brewing wasn’t strictly necessary. One night I rode in a contractor’s sport-utility vehicle as he made his rounds of the base to deliver bottles, his cellphone ringing constantly because a US military captain kept demanding to know when his illicit booze would arrive. Bottles clinked in the storage compartment and rolled under the seats as the smuggler crawled slowly along the gravel roads of the base, carefully observing the speed limit to avoid the military police.

  Life settled into a new routine in the aftermath of the raid on my office. I spent most nights at the military base, often venturing into the city for research in the daytime. But passing between those two worlds on a regular basis sometimes felt jarring, as if crossing between parallel universes, and my sense of discomfort would only grow in the following months. I was about to investigate a dark side of the military presence in the south.

  Inside Sarpoza prison

  CHAPTER 8

  DETAINEES APRIL 2007

  I keep a souvenir that reminds me of my worst days in Afghanistan. It’s a ballpoint pen, decorated with copper wire threaded into a pattern of beads. Somebody spent many hours making the cheap writing instrument into a work of art, and there’s something pathetic about the scuffed plastic and its glittering enclosure. You cannot touch this object without feeling the poverty of the craftsman. A prisoner gave me this pen during our investigation of conditions in Afghan detention facilities in the spring of 2007. That was the season when I began to seriously doubt the nobility of the war.

  My interest in the prisoners started a year earlier, as the fighting escalated. A translator for a Canadian television network brought a videotape to Kandahar Air Field, purported to show the confession of a Taliban commander. The video showed an exhausted man, with shackles on his bare feet, mumbling a brief description of a bombing. The translator had previously worked for US special forces, and he said the videotape came from his friends in Afghan intelligence. My colleagues weren’t sure what to make of the video because it contained little information, and the prisoner appeared to be taking cues from somebody off-camera. We asked the translator, “Was he tortured?” Yes, he replied, the man was beaten.

  That story never went public because we couldn’t get enough details, but other troubling hints of prisoner mistreatment continued to emerge in the following months. Twice that spring, journalists travelling with troops in Kandahar heard about Afghan forces planning to kill a captive on the battlefield. After the second incident, a few reporters visited the Kandahar offices of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) and asked the local director, a gentle old man, whether prisoners were mistreated in Afghan custody. The director answered yes, about 30 per cent of them are abused. He was probably understating the problem, but at the time the figure seemed shockingly large. It implied that NATO forces were capturing detainees and handing them over to local authorities who regularly abused them: a war crime, forbidden by the Geneva Conventions. A few days later, I sat down with the top NATO commander in the south, Brigadier-General Fraser, and asked him whether his soldiers respected the Conventions. The national forces under his command—British, Canadian, Dutch—had separate agreements with the Afghan government, but most of them stipulated that any prisoners taken by NATO soldiers should be quickly transferred to local custody. The Americans set up long-term detention facilities, but this merely delayed the problem until the US forces eventually transferred inmates to the Afghans down the line. Sooner or later, the NATO countries would rely on the Afghan government to accept prisoners and treat them humanely. The commander assured me the system was working. He hunched toward the voice recorder on the table between us, looked me in the eye, and spoke with deliberate slowness: “We respect the laws and the rights of individuals,” he said. “We will make sure those rights are maintained and nothing bad happens to those people.” The commander ignored a press officer who made nervous gestures. While in charge of all NATO forces in the region, Brigadier-General Fraser wore the uniform of the Canadian military, and the subject of detainees was politically radioactive in Canada—a country that prided itself as a champion of human rights—so the commander showed courage by speaking about the topic. But it’s worth remembering what he told me that day, June 2, 2006, because it was a prelude to the scandal that erupted a year later. The general’s denial—“Nothing bad happens to those people”—could not have been more emphatic. He reacted angrily to my suggestion that Canadian forces were handing over prisoners into a system that was infamous for tor
ture, though earlier that spring, the US State Department had published reports that Afghan authorities routinely mistreat detainees, noting that “torture and abuse consisted of pulling out fingernails and toenails, burning with hot oil, beatings, sexual humiliation, and sodomy.” But the brigadier-general told me those things were not happening in the south. When I asked how he could be certain, he replied curtly: “The ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] follows up on those issues.”

  A few days before the commander gave me those assurances, in fact, a Canadian diplomat wrote to his superiors about serious complaints from the International Committee of the Red Cross concerning a lack of co-operation from the military in Kandahar. An e-mail marked “secret,” which leaked out years later, warned Ottawa that the local ICRC representative was having difficulty getting his phone calls answered.

  Meanwhile, in my conversation with the brigadier-general, I kept trying to understand his personal feelings about the issue. “I’m just asking you about the morality of it,” I said. “I mean, you’re not ignorant of these things. You know where these guys end up. And you know that where these guys end up isn’t up to international standards, by any means.”

  “Well, I guess I’d ask you, what would you do? You’re asking me to say …” The commander trailed off. “I’m not sure what you’re asking me.”

  “I’m asking, is it moral?”

  “Is what moral? To hand Afghans over to Afghans?”

  “Well, okay, maybe even better: Is it legal for Canadians to be putting Afghans in a system where we know they face a high percentage chance of abuse or torture?”

  The military commander paused. My recording shows fourteen seconds of silence in the room. He continued: “We have procedures that are prepared to hand over potential detainees to legitimate authorities that we are comfortable with, that will do the right thing.”