The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan

by Graeme Smith

  Many observers picked up on this parochialism when reading the transcripts of our videos. “Key among these observations and messages is the general Taliban lack of interest in global jihad,” wrote Richard H. Smyth, a professor of international relations at the US Army War College. This lesson proved unpalatable for others, however, because it undermined the whole argument for war. If the troops were not fighting global terrorists, if they were battling rural bumpkins with no greater ambition than shutting down the cinemas of Kabul, what exactly was at stake? Would killing these farmers really make the world safer? The oft-repeated phrase “If we don’t fight them over there, we’ll fight them over here” sounded hollow in this light.

  Politicians did not stop repeating that idea, however. It gave a sense of purpose to every gunfight, this notion that the troops confronted evil men who wanted to bring down the entire structure of Western civilization. In 2010, the military historian Max Boot wrote in a column: “… [I]t’s silly to disassociate the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan, as so many critics of the war effort do, from the broader struggle against jihadist groups bent on inflicting serious harm on America and on our allies.” My hunch is that Boot is wrong, but he’s not the only one who thinks this way. I’ve had long arguments with Afghan officials who tell me the insurgents are using their avowed nationalism as a Trojan Horse to hide their sinister global ambitions. They fear the Taliban will grab power and become more extreme, making the country into a cesspool of terrorism. They remind me that the desire for revenge will not stop when the troops withdraw, that the men whose families died in air strikes or ground offensives will continue trying to hit back at the foreigners in their home countries.

  One certainty is that either way, we will find out. Troop withdrawals will probably leave zones of the country without a significant presence of security forces. Will these enclaves turn into training camps for the next big attack on the West? I’m skeptical. Insurgents have already carved out sanctuaries in rural Afghanistan, and no reports have emerged since 9/11 of major international terrorism traced back to those hideouts. I doubt that waves of Taliban attacking foreign cities will become the stuff of future headlines. Some analysts will think I’m crazy, but maybe we should listen to the twenty-five-year-old former driver who took up arms against the government but promised to lay down his weapons when the foreigners leave.

  “Why are you fighting against this government?” our researcher asked him. “Because they are with the non-Muslims,” he replied. “If there were no non-Muslims we would not fight with them, because one Muslim does not fight with another Muslim. But when we are fighting an Afghan soldier, it is because they are in an American convoy.”

  There was an almost childish naïveté to the idea that Muslims would never fight each other, given the history of conflict across the region, but the insurgent was making an important point: he labelled his enemies in the Afghan government as “Muslim.” Official statements from the Taliban often refused to recognize the Kabul regime as an Islamic government, saying the regime had betrayed the religion, but this front-line insurgent seemed to disagree. He expressed reluctance to battle with fellow Afghans.

  “If they weren’t in a convoy with Americans, you wouldn’t fight with them?”

  “No,” he said. “Then we wouldn’t fight.”

  Sleepy guards at Sarpoza prison

  CHAPTER 13

  JAILBREAK JUNE 2008

  In the middle of the night I walked onto the Dubai tarmac, its surfaces radiating summer heat, and met the rusting old lady who would return me to war. Her name was Ludmilla, or at least that’s what somebody had stencilled on her fuselage. I would not normally climb into an aircraft that looked so hazardous, but the old cargo plane was my only option for getting back to Kandahar. I needed to fly quickly, because the Taliban were pulling off the biggest coup they had ever achieved, a massive jailbreak. It was a story that couldn’t wait for the next regular flight. A colleague had passed me the name of an airline official who could get me on board a cargo run, and somebody who spoke poor English directed me to bring cash to a nondescript building near the airport. I had kept the taxi waiting, wary of the bleak industrial zone, and climbed the stairs to an office where I got a handwritten receipt and a promise that my name would be placed on a manifest as a “cargo handler.” A clerk reassured me that no actual handling of cargo would be necessary, except my own. Later that night I was heaving my bags up through the nose hatch of the old Antonov and shaking hands with a crew of tipsy Russians. It seemed like a reasonable travel option at the time, although when I later tried to recommend this route to the renowned magazine writer Elizabeth Rubin she replied with an incredulous e-mail: “i have three words for you. you are crazy!!!!!!!!”

  It was crazy. Ludmilla seemed like such an antique model that she lacked electronics in the cockpit, just dials and knobs, like something from a black-and-white film. Exhausted, I curled into a fetal ball and tried to catch some rest before tackling the major work that awaited when I landed in Kandahar. On the previous Friday, June 13, the Taliban had broken into Sarpoza prison, the main jail for southern Afghanistan, and set free a huge number of inmates. I ended up using the phrase “at least eight hundred,” a cautious guess that ranked the incident among the biggest jailbreaks in modern history. Nobody had explained how a band of ragged gunmen managed to pull it off in a city protected by two foreign military bases and thousands of local and international security forces. Immediately after the escape, the Taliban also invaded the Arghandab valley north of Kandahar city, sending waves of villagers fleeing south. When I jumped out of Ludmilla’s nose and walked into the darkened military base in Kandahar, I found it throbbing with activity. Everybody was wide awake, wondering what the hell had happened.

  Most attention initially focused on the insurgents’ attack in Arghandab, and the counter-offensive against them. The Taliban had repeated the ground sweep they conducted the previous autumn after the death of Mullah Naqib, rampaging into the district from three sides and capturing most of the territory north of the river. The allies—French, American, Canadian and Afghan—flew in reinforcements and massed a large army on the river’s south bank. It looked like it would be another Medusa-style confrontation. The insurgents disappeared a few days later, however, just as the battle was getting underway. By the time I arrived, I found Canadian and French commanders looking at a map together, puzzling through the logic of their opponents’ retreat.

  “They’re gone,” the Canadian general said.

  “But why did they come?” asked the French officer, sitting in the shade.

  The Canadian estimated that the attack consisted of perhaps a hundred to 150 fighters, a display of insurgent force but not a serious effort to hold terrain. His Afghan allies disagreed, putting the number at something like six hundred, claiming they had thwarted a major Taliban offensive. Kandahar governor Asadullah Khalid confronted the Canadian general at a meeting in a small outpost, pointing to a sweat-drenched Afghan army officer and declaring that he had reported killing two hundred insurgents in recent days.

  “So, why is NATO saying only a few Taliban were there?” Mr. Khalid said.

  Hearing no answer, the governor took a mobile phone from an assistant and flashed pictures of dead bodies on the tiny screen: “Look, we have photos,” he said.

  The Canadian general laughed. “One, two,” he said, pointing at the images. “That’s not two hundred.”

  The governor seemed intent on proving his point. He invited me to join his entourage and see the bodies myself. It was typical of the governor’s almost disconcerting bravery that he would lead a convoy of sport-utility vehicles into a maze of dirt roads where the international forces refused to go without an armoured company. A monitor in the dashboard showed the outside temperature at forty-one degrees Celsius, but the governor seemed relaxed in the air-conditioned interior. He enjoyed warfare, and gave his enemies credit for the recent jailbreak with the same good humour of a sportsman talking
about the opposing team.

  “It was a great victory for the Taliban,” the governor said as the vehicle bucked and jolted. He added that the local insurgents must have invited outside help to accomplish such a big operation. “I know the Taliban in this province, and they are not so smart.”

  Our convoy halted outside a village on the north bank; we could not drive further because bombs remained buried in the road. A sapper had removed the trigger mechanism from one of them, leaving the green plastic tub of explosives barely visible in the dust, marked with red spray paint. Mr. Khalid gestured at the hazard casually, the way somebody might warn a friend to avoid dog poop on a sidewalk, and walked toward a shady grove of trees along an irrigation ditch. The governor explained that a wounded Taliban commander had retreated to this spot during the recent battle, and a large group of insurgent fighters rushed to help him. Aerial surveillance tracked their movements and summoned an air strike.

  We smelled the blast crater before seeing it. Bodies sprawled together in heaps, crawling with flies, hard to distinguish from each other. Some of the corpses looked small and fragile; the insurgents were known for employing young fighters, perhaps even children. Several leaked blood from every orifice, making them look as if they were crying red tears. The stench overwhelmed us. Hardened members of the governor’s elite bodyguard turned away, covering their faces with cloth. Mr. Khalid, however, did not flinch, staring at the bodies with mild disappointment. He had clearly expected to see more carnage, and halved his earlier casualty estimate. Then he sighed and clapped his hands: “Lunchtime!”

  There was no way to explain to him that heaps of charred human flesh putrefying under the blazing sun had not inspired my appetite. Nor was there any chance to wash my hands before we sat down in a thatch hut that served as a guest dining room for a warlord who lived nearby. Politeness demanded that I scoop up the rice and beans with my dirty fingers and shovel down at least a few mouthfuls.

  Diarrhea slowed me down for a few days, and then I went into the city to check out the jail. The Taliban offensive north of town had been smaller than advertised, and in fact seemed like a diversion to help their comrades get away from the scene of the jailbreak. It still boggled my mind: the idea that the Taliban could just smash their way into the huge stone-walled institution. My translator and I drove over to the west side of town, hoping that our contacts at the jail had survived—and if they had, that they might welcome us inside.

  As we pulled up, I wasn’t sure we had arrived at the right place. The front entrance of the prison was almost unrecognizable, like a junkyard strewn with broken masonry. The remains of two vehicles stood beside the road, their metal skins crumpled and melted. The black gates that had once seemed so imposing were simply missing, blown away by an explosion. The only remnant of those gates, a chunk of steel the size of a picnic table, had landed in a courtyard 125 metres away. The deputy warden greeted us warmly, taking us into an office with jagged remnants of glass in the window frames. I knew this man from our detainee investigation a year earlier; he knew that I trusted him, but he still seemed anxious to show me evidence that his men had not colluded with the escapers. He pulled a padlock from his desk drawer and handed it to me. The heavy lock remained closed, still attached to a broken hasp, and felt roughened up. The jailer made a gesture with his hands to indicate a machine gun firing at the lock. He was trying to show me that the guards on duty had not surrendered the keys to the Taliban; the insurgents broke inside with sheer force. His own son, a guard, had died during the assault, he said, pointing to the shallow ditch under a water tower where an insurgent’s rocket-propelled grenade had blasted the young man to pieces.

  Although the deputy warden defended the honour of the men who stood guard that day, he harboured suspicions about his own boss. He had warned the warden several times about strange activity in the jail beforehand, he said, but his superior showed a curious lack of interest about his reports. In fairness, we had all heard rumours of a possible jailbreak; the story circulating two years earlier had been that the Taliban planned to slip through the gates with an ambulance full of gunmen. That was the summer of 2006, before Operation Medusa, when the Taliban dug trenches in the fields near the western outskirts of the city and such rumours seemed plausible. Now, in 2008, the insurgents had again established strongholds near the city—this time just south of the prison. The international forces knew about those Taliban hideouts but lacked the numbers to solve the problem. Nor did the prison staff seem ready to deal with the growing unrest inside their walls; as the deputy warden toured me around the ghostly halls, and we met the few staff and prisoners who remained, their stories made it sound like the inmates had been running the place in the weeks before the jailbreak.

  It started with a mysterious committee of seven prisoners, in the wing that held people accused of murder, kidnapping and terrorism. This cabal somehow seized control of the best rooms, the more comfortable cells on the north side of the wing. Those cells looked untouched when I arrived: half-eaten plates of food and forgotten sandals remained strewn across the straw mats on the floor, suggesting a hasty exit. Somebody had posted a sign on the door of the biggest room: “No interruptions from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.” The committee apparently met during those hours every afternoon. After emerging from their conclave in the evenings, they preached to their fellow prisoners, scolding anybody who insulted the Taliban or its leadership, and again when they failed to wake up for morning prayers. Somebody painted an Arabic slogan on the wall of their meeting room: “Jihad is mandatory.” The committee also enjoyed an unusual degree of luxury: their rooms had televisions, weightlifting equipment, even an improvised knife with a handle fashioned from masking tape, darkened with opium tar, suggesting that the Taliban prisoners were getting high. An empty gin bottle contained fragrant spices. Smuggled cellphones were apparently common in the cells, and these prisoners had obtained a more dangerous kind of contraband, too; near a window with a view of the central guard tower, small brass casings lay scattered on the floor, showing that somebody fired a handgun during the escape. This explained the false reports, initially, that the insurgents broke through the jail perimeter in two places. No guards had died in the central tower that night, but the shots coming from an unexpected direction likely added to the confusion among prison staff.

  It seemed notable that the guards had taken no action as the most dangerous captives in the prison sat around, smoked drugs, chatted on their phones, enforced religious rules—and prepared an escape. It’s possible, however, that they felt cowed by the insurgents. Prison guards ranked among the lowest-paid Afghan security forces, below even the police, and the Taliban had been growing stronger in the rural areas within view of the prison watchtowers. The inmates had appeared docile on my other visits, but they had grown restless before the jailbreak. They had organized a hunger strike in the previous month, refusing to eat solid food. Many of them had languished for months or years without a conviction from the special judge who heard political cases, and the prisoners claimed this lack of due process meant they could be jailed indefinitely. The protest ended when local authorities promised to send a judge to the prison to rule on their cases, but that never happened. Instead, the problems escalated. A week before the jailbreak, guards sat down together for their evening meal of stewed mutton and some of them noticed a bitter taste in the food, like tobacco. Dozens started vomiting, bleeding from the nose and mouth, falling unconscious. Several went to hospital, where doctors said they were victims of poisoning. None of them died, and no prisoners escaped during the confusion, but it was a sign of trouble ahead.

  The director, a colonel in the prison service, responded to the rising tensions by holding regular meetings with three members of the prisoners’ committee. He described these meetings to the rest of the staff as a way of mediating problems, but he conducted them in secret. I never did find out what happened during those sessions; one of the prison officials who helped arrange the meetings was shot in the head, execut
ion-style, during the jailbreak, and the colonel himself was jailed soon afterward. A female officer who oversaw the women’s section of the prison said she happened to see the colonel in front of his office on the day of the attack. He smiled at her and said: “Something might happen tonight. If any of the prisoners owes you money, collect it. If you owe them money, pay it.” She wasn’t sure if he was joking, because he seemed untroubled by his warning. When mayhem erupted later that evening, the colonel was safely at home; he got a flurry of calls from security officials when the truck bomb blew open the prison gates, but he apparently told them that the tanker exploded by accident and didn’t affect the prison. This could have been an innocent mistake, but probably wasn’t. My translator later spoke with an insurgent who escaped, a twenty-eight-year-old fighter who bragged about how the escapees got help from insiders. “Important officials from the jail helped us bring in pistols and mobile phones, and we also bought some explosives for the bombing,” the fugitive said. I heard something similar from a nineteen-year-old inmate who escaped but then returned to jail because he had only a short time remaining on his sentence and didn’t want to live as a fugitive. The Taliban fighters who broke him free and shepherded his group of prisoners into the darkness had explained that jail staff had assisted with the operation. “The Taliban had a secret meeting with the prison director, one week before the attack,” the prisoner said. “Maybe they paid him money, I don’t know.” (The colonel eventually got out of jail; in 2011, he was serving as a police commander for a small neighbourhood in the city.)