The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan

by Graeme Smith

  The old woman whose information led to the ill-fated patrol showed up in the afternoon. She wore a black scarf that framed her leathery face, and carried herself with rigid poise. She was unapologetic about the ambush, and scolded the troops for failing to call ahead so she could guide them safely. She urged the soldiers to try again with a bigger force, because her village north of Sangin had been overrun with insurgents who demanded food and shelter at gunpoint. The Taliban had exiled her family and many others to a nearby desert, she said. The Afghan commander assured her that his men had killed at least one Taliban fighter during the ambush, but the old woman looked at the floor and cocked her head sadly. No, she said, all of the insurgents escaped. She did bring a bit of good news, however: the girl in the purple dress arrived home safely. The woman’s face crinkled into a smile. “Her injury was a small wound on her finger.”

  Captain Shaw later admitted that he misjudged the situation, saying it was a poor idea to drive north of Sangin with such a small patrol. The official predictions about the fighting season also proved incorrect; that summer’s violence was the worst since the beginning of the insurgency. Every time the soldiers suffered a setback, such as Captain Shaw’s disastrous patrol, the prescription was “more troops.” The officers were schooled in counter-insurgency theories that claimed restive zones could be pacified with a saturation of forces. Whatever magic number of troops would have settled down places such as Sangin, however, the actual strength of the units on the ground never seemed like enough. On the day when we drove into an ambush, slightly more than ten thousand international forces were deployed in southern Afghanistan. That number peaked around seventy thousand soldiers in the following years, and the small British squads in open-topped jeeps were replaced with double-sized patrols of US Marines, equipped with armoured vehicles that weigh fourteen tons each. The influx of firepower did not bring peace, however; it’s now well known that every increase in troop numbers in southern Afghanistan brought a corresponding increase in violence.

  When military officials talk about their legacy, when they try to explain why the bloodletting was necessary, they usually point to a small number of infrastructure projects—but most importantly, they argue, NATO is leaving behind a strengthened Afghan administration. They describe this as a key indicator of progress, but I sometimes wondered what was so great about spreading Kabul’s influence into the remote districts. Terrified of both sides, civilians were caught in the crossfire, like the little girl in the purple dress. Why, precisely, was it important to push the Afghan government’s reach into such valleys? I asked that question of everybody I met—including, eventually, President Karzai himself.

  Afghan police in training, reluctantly

  CHAPTER 10

  THE KARZAI REGIME SEPTEMBER 2007

  The government in southern Afghanistan resembled the dust devils that flitted into empty quarters, appearing and disappearing, taking form only long enough to make you wonder if they had shape. The illusion of governance was stronger in Kabul, where you might encounter young Afghan officials wearing the latest fashion—hair slicked back, a polyester suit, fake alligator-skin shoes—who slipped enough acronyms into their carefully enunciated English that they could almost pass for technocrats. Such young men were eager to sell foreigners the dream of government. In the rest of the country, the influence of Kabul was a gust of wind that stormed into town and vanished. One day the police showed up at a checkpoint, stopping cars and peering into their backseats in a half-hearted search for suicide bombers, but the next day their post sat empty, nothing left of their presence but a bullet-riddled shipping container once used as a guard house. Had the Taliban chased them away? Or were they lounging in the fields, smoking hashish? Nobody asked, because you did not want to get involved. The regime was something that inflicted itself upon you. All the better if you could escape its reach.

  Western commentators often lamented this as “weak government,” but if you asked somebody in Kandahar whether the government was too weak, he might tell you, “Not weak enough.” Tribesmen fondly remembered the royal family, which ruled until the 1970s in a style that now seems cunningly feeble. The former king, Zahir Shah, did not have many police in the rural areas, but this wasn’t a problem because he did not make many demands. When a policeman had some reason to visit a remote village, the officer could travel by himself with only a pistol for protection. Villagers understood that the government posed little threat, so they did not threaten the government’s envoys. A tribal elder described one officer’s journey from Kandahar city to a distant spot in the mountains; during the return trip, he realized he had lost his hat. A delegation of villagers showed up the next morning at police headquarters, having carefully transported the policeman’s cap back to the city. That was a golden age in the memory of local residents, a time of respect between the villagers who ruled themselves, and the central government that pretended to control the territory.

  President Hamid Karzai painted himself as a successor to the royals, with murals and billboards juxtaposing his face against images of former kings. It was an unflattering comparison for the president, however. Unlike the previous monarchs, Karzai could not send his officials into distant villages by themselves. Law enforcement required, at minimum, convoys of pickup trucks brimming with men and weapons. These patrols frequently ran into trouble and found themselves calling for help. The international troops mistook this for weakness; they assumed that the Afghans needed more combat training and equipment, but this was a side issue. The bigger problem was how the Afghans misused their modest strength.

  Many of the abuses of government power cannot be discussed openly, even now. But consider one example from the summer of 2007, when two police factions were squabbling over a highway west of Kandahar city. Both sides wanted to control the road, which meant a share in the drug trade. Many checkpoints on that route were manned by a militia loyal to Habibullah Jan, a chain-smoking old warlord who had become an elected parliamentarian. His rival was Ahmed Wali Karzai, the provincial council chairman and younger half-brother of the president. These men were theoretically on the same side, working with the US and NATO forces against the Taliban, but they fought each other fiercely. So it wasn’t clear who to blame for the bomb that exploded in the road one summer day, killing five of Ahmed Wali’s men in a pickup truck. Most people in the vicinity of the blast ran away in fear, except for two farm labourers tending grapevines. Police arrested them on suspicion of triggering the bomb—possibly because they belonged to the tribe of Ahmed Wali’s rival. Rather than taking the captives to jail, the officers drove them to a slum and dumped them in the basement of a mud house. It seems they were imprisoned in a family residence that also served as a private jail: the prisoners occasionally saw men in police uniforms, but also had visits from children who wandered into their makeshift cell and looked at them curiously. One of the captives had well-connected relatives who managed to get him free, although he was tortured for weeks beforehand. The other prisoner’s mutilated body was discovered later, floating in a canal on the north side of Kandahar city. A man who saw the corpse told me the skin dangled from the body in narrow strips, as if he’d been sliced with knives before he was executed with a cut throat. His relatives complained to the authorities, but always got the same answer: It was Ahmed Wali’s men. There’s nothing you can do. Nor was there anything I could do, as a journalist who did not want to run afoul of Kandahar’s rulers. I never did prove that the younger Karzai brother had any connection to that death, and perhaps he did not. He was so influential that his name got tangled up in many stories, good and bad, until he was assassinated in 2011. Even his death was a mystery: one of his henchmen shot him at point-blank range in his house, but nobody got a chance to interrogate the assassin about his motives. Ahmed Wali’s supporters killed the attacker, dragged the body through the streets, and strung it up in a central square as a warning about the consequences of betrayal.

  The NATO forces tried to curb the excess
es of local authorities. Foreign troops had enjoyed some modest success with programs euphemistically called “mentoring” or “training” for the Afghan military, which involved international forces supervising the daily work of local soldiers, often herding their trainees across the battlefield like errant children. As problems with the Kandahar police became more embarrassing in the summer of 2007, the Canadians hastily decided to extend their mentorship to the local force. Troops preparing for deployment were told at the last minute that they would be teaching skills to law enforcement officers, not soldiers.

  I happened to be visiting an outpost west of Kandahar city when the police mentorship concept was first tested. A young Canadian officer had been assigned to teach ten Afghan policemen how to defend their new checkpoint, recently constructed with wooden beams that still smelled of fresh lumber. The night before the program officially launched, the Canadian captain picked his way through the darkness toward his students. Burning remnants of a recent mortar attack smoldered nearby, the orange embers casting the only light in the surrounding farmland. The captain brushed open the curtain in the doorway of the Afghan police station, which consisted of only a metal shipping container crowded with men and rifles, silhouetted in the glow from a penlight. The Afghans ushered him to a place of honour, on a cushion beside the police commander, and poured him a cup of tea. The captain sipped hesitantly. He struggled to cross his legs like the other men in the room, his combat boots making him clumsy.

  “We will start tomorrow morning,” the captain said. “What do you want to learn?”

  He had to repeat the question a couple of times because the translator had trouble with the soldier’s French-Canadian accent. Even after the police commander understood the question, there was a long silence as he paused to think. Finally, the hard-faced policeman declared that he had more battlefield experience than any of the Canadians. He served in a militia for a tribal warlord who ruled part of the district before the Taliban rose to power, and for a short period after their defeat. The international community poured millions of dollars into disarming such warlords, then re-armed many of the same gunmen during the rushed creation of new police units. “I don’t know what you could teach us,” the policeman said.

  The Canadian tried to persuade his reluctant pupil that the foreign troops could help him stay alive by drilling his men in basic infantry techniques.

  “Will this program involve running?” the policeman asked, skeptically. He reminded the Canadian that his officers were observing fasts for the holy month of Ramadan, which meant they lacked energy. Eventually he agreed that the training could be limited to two hours, starting at 6 a.m., when the soldiers were still digesting their pre-dawn meals. The Canadian captain did his best to encourage the Afghans, suggesting they could learn how to ration their bullets, how to move under covering fire and how to pin down their enemies with machine guns.

  The policeman was nonplussed by the offer. He launched into a tirade about how his men had not received their salary in months, a common problem as superior officers embezzled money from the pay system. In this case, the policeman specifically accused his district police chief, who had been fired under mysterious circumstances earlier in the day. (I found the chief preparing to leave his headquarters a few days later: filthy, unshaven, looting his own office and stealing gasoline from government trucks.)

  The next morning, at six o’clock, the Canadian captain stood in a field near the outpost and waited for his students. They straggled in half an hour late, and showed little enthusiasm for his description of hand signals they could use to communicate in battle. The Canadian gamely tried to continue with the lessons, until his interpreter decided it was silly to continue playing along.

  “Sir, I don’t think they care about these things,” said the interpreter, a skinny kid in a blue baseball cap.

  “It will come,” the Canadian said.

  The interpreter gamely made another pitch to the policemen, but only started a babble of argument.

  “They’re saying we’ve been doing this for years,” the interpreter said. “I try to tell them, you suffer so many casualties, you must learn so you do not die.”

  “Good, good,” the captain said. “Did they understand?”

  “I think so,” the interpreter said. But he looked uncertain.

  Afghan politicians could only imagine those absurd scenes. The men fighting, and dying in large numbers, almost never saw their leaders. It was different for the NATO forces, whose generals made a point of travelling to the battlefields, often picking up rifles and replacing sentries on armoured vehicles, proud to face the same perils as infantrymen. By contrast, risk-taking was not fashionable in the Afghan government. If you wanted to find an Afghan police chief or brigade commander, you usually had to make an appointment to visit a heavily guarded office. You could expect to find hospitality in their offices, perhaps a tasty snack, but you did not usually expect to get much insight into the world beyond their walls.

  That was a main reason why I never bothered to request an interview with President Karzai. If the problem of insulated officials was bad in Kandahar city, I figured it could only be worse in the presidential palace in Kabul. Others weren’t so skeptical of him; a United Nations official who spoke with him on a weekly basis told me that he considered Karzai a “flawed jewel” whose failures could be blamed on those who surrounded him.

  In any case, Karzai was not too insulated to make a canny move in the summer of 2007, as the war became increasingly controversial in NATO countries, and Canada faced a politically sensitive decision about whether to withdraw troops. Karzai took the unusual step of summoning every Canadian journalist in the country to see him. We had only half a day’s warning before climbing onto a transport plane in Kandahar and roaring north to Kabul, where a convoy of armoured luxury vehicles took us to the finest hotel in the capital. The Serena Hotel did not serve alcohol, but a Canadian embassy staffer smuggled cans of Heineken into each of our rooms. By the time of our appointment with the president, the media pack was relaxed and smelled faintly of beer and herbal soap. Another convoy whisked us through the darkened city, the streets empty because of curfew. The president’s security men stripped us of our gear, searched us and made us stand in the road while guard dogs sniffed for explosives. These checks were repeated several times with rigour that seemed almost theatrical. Presidential bodyguards with black suits and black shirts muttered into their walkie-talkies as they ushered us through the palace gates, into a courtyard of tall evergreens and up the stone steps into the royal offices. Formally dressed waiters served tea on silver trays. Finally we arrived in a ballroom lined with pink marble and wood panels, decorated with garish gold-painted furniture that resembled leftovers from a Bollywood movie set. After all the pomp leading up to our meeting, Karzai made his entrance with a show of modesty. He clutched his wool cap to his chest while shaking hands with everybody in the room, greeting them warmly and joking with the cameramen as they clipped a microphone to his lapel. Then he turned serious, launching into a sales pitch for war.

  Canada should not withdraw its soldiers as scheduled in 2009, he told us, because his government was not yet capable of defending itself. Famous for his dramatic flourishes, the president made his arguments in stark terms. “Afghanistan will fall back into anarchy, anarchy will bring back safe havens to terrorists, among other things, and terrorists will then hurt you back there in Canada and the United States,” Karzai said. “Simple as that.” He avoided the word insurgents, and railed against terrorists. He was, in effect, portraying his country as a bulwark against evil.

  Karzai’s plea for extra troop commitments would reverse itself in the following years, as he started to argue that the Afghan security forces were ready to assume responsibility for the country when foreign troops depart. But one part of his speech remained consistent: the president did not significantly change his position on negotiations. Then, as now, he says that he’s willing to negotiate with the Taliban, but on
ly if the insurgents accept the existing constitution and rules of the political game. When asked if he would consider sharing power with insurgent factions, he scowled:

  No, nothing like that. This country belongs to all. There is a constitution; there is a way of life. Let’s come and participate and win [elections]. It’s a country for all of us. The Taliban and everybody else should remember President Kennedy’s words, when he said to the American people, “Ask not what America can give you, ask what you can give to America.” That’s our position. We’re telling all Afghans, who are for one reason or another carrying out attacks against their own country, that they should not ask what Afghanistan can do for them, but ask what is it they can do for their country and their people. Simple.

  Simple. Why did he keep using that word? Because he wanted the foreigners to see a polarized conflict: democracy versus terrorism, good versus evil. It smelled wrong. Karzai’s stand in favour of the constitution sounded noble, except that the constitution concentrated power in the hands of the president. His invitation to his enemies to join elections rang hollow, given the allegations of massive fraud in the electoral process. His claim that Afghanistan “belongs to all” overlooked the fact that his relatively modern views often rankled the conservative villagers. Most people in the country lived outside the cities, and many village men did not allow their wives and daughters to show their faces outside the house, which made the 2004 constitution that enshrined the female right to vote a radically progressive document. That same constitution also mandated a higher percentage of female parliamentarians in Kabul than existed in the equivalent assemblies of Britain, Canada and the United States. It’s hard to imagine that the villagers saw the government as something that “belongs to us all.” It’s also difficult to see how this model of government could be imposed on Afghanistan with anything less than crushing force.