The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan

by Graeme Smith

  Either way, it’s hard to see how the Afghan forces could have done anything about the well-coordinated assault. In the hours beforehand, Taliban messengers circulated a warning in the neighbourhood, telling residents to evacuate, and the stretch of highway leading west from the city grew quiet as people slipped away. Nobody told the eight policemen who lived in a bunker only six hundred metres east of the prison, and nobody passed word to the large police barracks about twenty-two hundred metres to the west. Officers at both of those positions said they were caught by surprise when insurgents started shooting bullets and rocket-propelled grenades at their outposts around 9:10 p.m. Policemen initially considered it a routine, if unusually intense, bit of harassment; the insurgents often hit government outposts at night, killing or wounding a few officers and disappearing. The officers nearest to Sarpoza prison responded with sensible caution, hunkering behind their sandbags and firing back. With the local security forces pinned down, the insurgents drove a fuel tanker up to the prison gates. The driver hopped down from the cab and ran away: insurgents later suggested that a suicide switch in the truck had failed, so the tanker did not immediately detonate, but it was more likely that the driver just wanted to save himself. The Taliban quickly improvised a solution, firing rocket-propelled grenades at the tanker. The first shot whistled high and missed, but the second ignited a huge explosion. Windows and mirrors shattered a kilometre away, and a ball of white light rose over the prison. One of my acquaintances, a Western security official, felt the tremor running through the city and looked at his watch; he later climbed to a spot overlooking the scene and noted the timeline:

  9:10 p.m.: Small explosions near the prison. Small-arms fire.

  9:18 or 9:19 p.m.: Large explosion. Shooting heard from at least six different directions around the downtown core.

  10 p.m.: Fighting slows.

  10:50 p.m.: Relatively quiet.

  11 p.m.: Canadian vehicles arrive at the scene.

  The aftermath of the blast was a time for prayers in the rattled city. At a business across the street from the jail, damaged by the explosion, a seventy-year-old watchman with a long grey beard and a shaved head took up his green plastic prayer beads and started reciting holy words as he listened to the gunfire. Inside the jail, a guard climbed into a cupboard and silently appealed to Allah. A short scuffle in the Taliban wing ended as the prisoners overwhelmed a few guards and waited for their comrades to save them, calling friends on their cellphones and holding the handsets into the air as they shouted to the sky, “Allahu Akbar!” Their rescuers arrived a few minutes later, shooting their way down the central corridor that runs toward the national-security wing and blasting the locks with belt-fed machine guns. They timed the raid with unnerving precision, arriving before the prisoners returned to their cells for the evening, but late enough to enjoy the advantage of darkness. They seemed anxious to get away quickly, yelling at prisoners to hurry.

  Hundreds of inmates streamed across the smoking rubble where the front gate once stood. Most escaped gleefully, but a few lingered behind—including a beautiful twenty-year-old woman named Rukiya. She had served two months in prison for running away from her husband, a crime under Afghanistan’s version of sharia law. Her husband was jailed in a separate wing on charges of beating her, and during the chaos of the jailbreak he ran through the smoke calling her name. A witness said he forced Rukiya to run barefoot across the jagged rubble of the gateway and into the street. She struggled, trying to escape, and her husband appealed for help from a nearby Taliban commander. The insurgent leader, his identity concealed by a scarf wrapped around his head, instructed the woman to obey her husband. She refused. The insurgent gave her husband his Kalashnikov rifle and permission to execute the unruly woman. “He put many bullets in her; I watched her die,” a witness told me. “She lay on the road until the next morning. I don’t know what happened to the body.”

  The murdering husband escaped with the rest of the mob, which broke into smaller groups under Taliban guard and scattered among the houses to the south of the prison. They ran down alleys, through vineyards and wheat fields. Their Taliban guides told them to hit the ground when they heard aircraft overhead, but this precaution was futile because it was impossible to hide the teeming mass of escapees from NATO surveillance. Some prisoners kept running all night, but many flopped down in the fields one or two kilometres from the jailbreak, half-expecting to get rounded up again. To their surprise, security forces captured almost none of the fugitives. Hundreds of Afghan police, reserve units and intelligence officers approached from the east, but they moved slowly toward the insurgents who continued covering the retreat. When they did reach the jail, some Afghan security forces contented themselves with looting instead of searching for escapees; guards told me that the worst ransacking of Sarpoza was not committed by insurgents, but rather by the police who first arrived at the scene. Stepping over the bodies of their colleagues, Afghan policemen spirited away whatever valuables remained in the jail: money, clothes and weapons. The police stopped thieving when the foreign troops arrived, the so-called Quick Reaction Force, stationed only six kilometres away but so late to reach the scene that the shooting had already died down when the troop carriers rolled up. The Canadian commander responsible for the province, a thoughtful officer named Brigadier-General Denis Thompson, later explained why he did not send his soldiers there more quickly.

  You can’t go charging around, especially if you think you’re about to enter a situation where it’s a well-orchestrated attack. You can’t be rash; you’ve got to be, I won’t use the word cautious, I guess the word is prudent.… You can ask yourself the rhetorical question, what if we find one hundred fugitives in the fields? What is ISAF’s [International Security Assistance Force’s] duty in that circumstance? Is it to go arrest people who are a combination of people, who are criminals and potential insurgents?

  More to the point, the Canadian commander expressed doubts about whether it would have done any good to send NATO soldiers into dense terrain in the middle of the night. He worried that a bad situation could have become far bloodier.

  How would you determine who to zap strap? They’re not wearing orange jumpsuits. That’s what people need to appreciate: we don’t do civil order, because we can’t tell Frank from Joe.… Why aren’t you out there rounding up fugitives? Because, remember, they’re not insurgents, they’re fugitives. It’s a whole different ballgame—they’re unarmed. You’re not going to sweep down there. It’s not a legitimate military target.

  He was right: the tools at his disposal, soldiers trained to kill, were not the correct implements for the task. What would have happened if a platoon of US or Canadian soldiers had chased down a bunch of dirty men in a field? How would they have figured out the difference between fugitives, insurgents and villagers? It could have gotten messy, especially because international forces later disarmed five bombs planted as traps for pursuers. That didn’t prevent Afghan officials from complaining about the lack of backup from their foreign allies, however. Two days after the attack, the provincial council held a private session that criticized the international troops, saying the jailbreak had revealed their weakness. Kabul fired the three top security officials in Kandahar afterward; I later ate dinner with one of them, the former police chief, who expressed amazement that blame for the incident fell on the Afghan forces. Between bites of lamb and chicken, the stubble-bearded veteran said NATO soldiers should have unleashed their firepower on the jail-breakers. “Who came to release the prisoners?” he said. “It was the Taliban. What is NATO doing here in Afghanistan? They are fighting the Taliban.” He paused to look at me, as if waiting for an explanation. Afghan forces don’t have the foreign troops’ night-vision goggles and modern weapons, he said, so how could the international forces expect his men to charge into the fray that night?

  The simple answer, the answer that usually came up during such moments, when the fragility of the whole effort in Afghanistan became obvious, was t
hat the international community needed to work harder, to build a better system of government and local security. This usually fell under the heading of “capacity-building,” the idea that if only the Afghans were better equipped, then maybe all problems could be solved. Afghan officials encouraged this kind of maximalist thinking because they profited from it. A review of the jailbreak by the local intelligence service focused on the prison’s physical defences. An official from the National Directorate for Security presented his agency’s findings this way, according to an internal report:

  Col. —— stated that the problems at the prison were the result of too few and incapable guards and too few weapons. Furthermore the walls of the prison were not adequate; they required concertina wire and towers on all four corners. The delegation provided a list of items they feel are required to improve the security of the prison. Which are: a sufficient amount of weapons and ammunition, a new CP [command post] at each of the outside corners of the prison, radio equipment, vehicles for prisoners’ transport, repairs of electricity and plumbing and roadblocks to restrict entry to the prison.

  That’s the entire analysis. It does not mention how a raiding party of insurgents sneaked into the city without anybody noticing, or how the signs of unrest—the hunger strike, the poisoning, the radical committee of inmates—failed to arouse suspicion. Nor does it mention the breakdown of trust that allowed the Taliban to warn people in the neighbourhood of an impending attack, confident that nobody would tip off the authorities. A more scholarly review of the incident, published in the Canadian Army Journal, did examine some of those contextual factors but still reached the same conclusion: spend more money. It blamed a “shortage of resources” and called for new funding to “improve the security of such facilities through more competent manning and increased funding for construction and maintenance,” among other things.

  This preference for a narrow interpretation of events became almost pathological at Kandahar Air Field. A media staffer for the Canadian government visited the journalists’ tent to suggest that we should write about how the attack was, in fact, a “blessing in disguise” because it opened an opportunity to refurbish the facility and install new front gates. Canada’s top diplomat in Kandahar repeated this message in an on-the-record briefing. I assumed that the officials understood this was industrial-grade propaganda, but sometimes their statements raised a more frightening possibility: maybe they inhabited a different mental universe. Maybe their devotion to the mission made it hard to contemplate the broader implications.

  The jailbreak should have raised the question of whether the sum total of the screw-ups might be greater than the individual failures. Corruption, poor intelligence and the weakness of Afghan forces were well-known problems, and each could theoretically get fixed. None of those improvements would matter, however, if the ideas behind the mission proved incorrect. The foreigners assumed that the Taliban were unpopular, that most ordinary Afghans wanted to live in a country allied with Western powers. Over and over, military leaders repeated some version of the mantra “clear, hold, build,” implying that money spent to improve a community should earn its loyalty. By that measure, Sarpoza prison should have been a roaring success. The institution fell squarely into the zone around the city where international donors concentrated most of their efforts; even within that zone, few places had enjoyed such largesse. In the year before the prison break, the Canadian government spent millions overhauling the facility with new septic systems, solar-powered lighting, a staff training room, metal doors for the cells, bars on the windows, concertina wire, an infirmary, landscaping, new guard towers and upgraded washroom facilities. Painted walls replaced the rough stone surfaces; where chunks of masonry used to fall on prisoners as they slept, the ceiling now arched smoothly overhead. Piles of garbage and scrap metal, previously alive with the scurrying sounds of rats, were cleared out and replaced with expanses of fresh gravel. Workers filled in a creek running through the compound. New buildings were constructed: a place for conjugal visits, a separate room for security checks of female visitors, an armoury and a carpentry workshop. The foreigners paid for truckloads of new mattresses, and gave the guards new uniforms and new vehicles. They supplied medicine and hygiene kits. More projects were underway at the time of the attack, as well, requiring frequent visits by Canadian officials, but they failed to smell the trouble brewing under their noses.

  It’s hard to fault the foreigners for this: they cleared, they held, they built—but it fell apart in an instant. None of the international community’s efforts at Sarpoza were inadequate in themselves, but they didn’t add up to something useful. This point would get proven over and over, across Afghanistan. There would be an illusion of progress, a new institution or outpost, but everything could crumble in a few minutes.

  For those who interpreted the Sarpoza incident in a narrow way, seeing only the technical challenge of improving prison security, the following years offered another chance to test their ideas. Sarpoza was rebuilt, and the Canadian government donated cash for the repair of houses and shops damaged by the truck bomb. More foreign money paid for the tripling of the guards’ meagre salaries. The new version of the prison was better guarded, with higher walls and more professional staff. Female guards received a twelve-day “security self-awareness” training program, and Canadian foreign affairs minister Lawrence Cannon visited in 2009 to showcase the model facility. New front gates were installed with impressive blast walls, designed to resist truck bombs—and the new fortifications did, in fact, withstand a similar blast the following year, in 2009, when the Taliban reportedly detonated a truck packed with explosives near the front entrance. An American officer boasted that the prison gates were now so strong that insurgents would need a nuclear bomb to breach the perimeter.

  The problem was not the strength of the walls, however, but the fact that they stood on shaky foundations—figuratively and literally. The Taliban had taken advantage of this weakness in 2003 by tunnelling into the soft dirt under the walls and rescuing dozens of their comrades. Despite the upgrades to the prison defences, this subterranean problem remained unsolved in the fall of 2010, when a Taliban supporter rented a small building across the road from the prison. The insurgents pretended to set up a workshop, manufacturing concrete building supplies in the daytime while at night the place served as a headquarters for another rescue operation. Painstakingly, over several months, a man with a pickaxe dug a tunnel under the road and beneath the political section in the northeast corner of the jail. Taliban statements later claimed that his tunnelling was guided by his own memory of incarceration at Sarpoza, where he once served three months, with help from Google Maps. Prison guards said they did not notice the sound of digging underfoot, and nobody reported the loads of dirt trucked away from the workshop across from the prison. None of the guards reported hearing a hydraulic jack breaking the concrete floor of the prison. Perhaps the riskiest moment for the diggers happened a couple of weeks before the jailbreak, and was later revealed by the writer Luke Mogelson in an article for GQ magazine: a neighbour, the owner of an electronics store next door, got suspicious and tried to sneak a look inside the fake workshop. Witnesses told Mr. Mogelson that a man emerged and hit the shop owner on the head with a metal pipe, leaving him with injuries that would later kill him. Such a brazen murder next door to a security facility naturally brought some attention, and staff from the Afghan police, intelligence, and prison services all visited the scene to ask questions. Their inquiries apparently did not reveal the fact that the incident took place in front of a sham business, which concealed the mouth of an escape tunnel.

  So, for a second time, in April 2011, hundreds of men captured as insurgents walked free from the biggest jail in southern Afghanistan. “We had good weapons, and many police, and foreign troops were nearby every night,” a senior prison official told me on the morning after the second jailbreak. “Last night all these things were present, all our forces, we had enough preparation for fightin
g. But we did not fight. Why? That is a big question.” He was paraphrasing what I had concluded about the previous jailbreak—that the sum total of the foreign assistance did not add up to security. His simple phrase, “We had enough preparation for fighting,” pointed to the fact that the Afghans’ challenges went beyond military prowess. The international community and its local allies had learned how to fix the technical problems with the prison facility—shoddy gates, poor lighting, insufficient guards—but there was nothing they could do about the bigger problem, that few people in the south seemed enthusiastic about resisting the Taliban. When insurgents feel comfortable setting up shop across the street from your prison, it doesn’t matter if your walls are thick. You will always be undermined.

  Attack helicopter in Uruzgan province

  CHAPTER 14

  AT THE GATES OF KABUL SEPTEMBER 2008

  No matter what happened in the rest of the country, we always had Kabul. Foreigners returned there after long months in the provinces, after lonely nights on military bases or isolated compounds, sleeping in the metal hulls of modified shipping containers or guesthouses without guests. Men straggled into the city with dirty beards and a craving for beer. Women shrugged off their burkas, the blue veils that kept them anonymous, and went back to their standard expat outfits: jeans, headscarves, hiking shoes and long shirts. They continued stripping their layers after arriving inside the high-walled compounds that served as the foreigners’ private world. Past the heavy doors of a restaurant, past the identity checks and metal-detecting wands of the guards, through the secure bombproof passageways, I would step into a poolside garden where uniformed waiters served chilled drinks. Sitting with my laptop and a gin and tonic one afternoon, I saw a blonde woman stagger out of the security gate with an expression of profound gratitude to be back in the relative luxury of the capital. She removed her headscarf like she was casting off a yoke, and later changed into a bikini. After a swim, she reclined on a lounger and explained the basics of Kabul’s party circuit. Festivities kicked off on Thursday nights, before the traditional day of rest on Friday, and continued into the weekend. Often they were tame affairs, just friends sitting on carpets spread out on the grass of a back garden, but sometimes they assumed a frenzied energy. The expat community always seemed to be toasting somebody’s arrival or departure, she said. The war attracted young professionals who saw themselves in a heroic role, saving locals from misery, or fighting the evil darkness of terrorism, or perhaps both at the same time. Somehow, those glamorous pursuits also required lots of alcohol: I’ve seen more drunk people cram into a house in Kabul than in any other city in the world. There was often a grimness to the drinking, a deliberate grinding down of consciousness, but occasionally women would show up in something shimmery, or sparkly, or wearing a tiara. This added a frisson to the dancing, and gave momentum to the evenings beyond the need to blur awareness. By the end of the night you could see disappointment on the faces of people who realized they could not drink themselves out of Afghanistan.