The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan

by Graeme Smith

  After a few of those parties, I stumbled back through the streets of Kabul toward my hotel. The streets looked peaceful in darkness, not crowded with cars and beggars. Stray dogs ran in packs. Guards slept in tiny huts, or stayed awake smoking with automatic rifles resting across their knees. The only shops still open were bakeries, with boys kneading lumps of dough and the fragrance of bread pushing away the gutter stench. The guards at my hotel would be surprised to see a foreigner walking at night, undisguised in jeans and a T-shirt, but they didn’t seem to mind in the early years. That changed during my visit in September 2008. A manager knocked at my door after a late evening and reminded me that things were getting worse. He recommended against evening strolls, and suggested one of the car services that catered to foreigners. At least three companies ran fleets of sedans day and night; their rates had climbed, but five or six dollars would still get you across the downtown. Spotting these cars used to be easy, as they printed company logos on their doors, but then security concerns forced them to peel off the decals and hide among the traffic. They also removed the radio dispatch system from the vehicles’ interiors, making them and their drivers less conspicuous. By 2008, the dispatchers had started giving security numbers to every customer, something you could mutter to the driver to ensure you were climbing into the right vehicle. Even those precautions did not meet the standards of the United Nations, which preferred to keep drivers sitting outside in armoured UN vehicles—which, perversely, made the parties more conspicuous.

  Guards often barred Afghans from such gatherings, partly because alcohol is illegal in Afghanistan and police tolerance for boozing usually extended only to expats. Unfortunately, this had the effect of keeping Afghans away from some of the most important conversations about the future of their country. An ambassador once told me that his best work happened at social gatherings in Kabul, not during his official duties, and journalists would say the same thing: you needed to drink with the right people to understand the capital. I sometimes forgot those unwritten rules forbidding Afghans from certain parts of their own city; during one visit in 2008, when I tried to walk into a hotel with my translator, the manager hesitated before allowing my colleague into the establishment. I’d known the manager for a long time, but it was hard for him to accept the fact that my friend was wearing traditional clothes and a sparkly cap that marked him as a resident of Kandahar, the heartland of the Taliban. The hotel had recently purchased barbed wire, mesh screens to prevent hand grenades from landing on the tennis courts, and a cage-like structure for the main entrance. We stepped into the cage, and a guard bolted the door behind us before another unlocked the door ahead. Like most guards in Kabul, the security men were Tajiks, from the northern ethnic group, veterans of wars against the Taliban in the 1990s. They harboured deep suspicions of Pashtuns—and especially southern Pashtuns, like my translator. The guards stared hard at him, and word spread about the unusual visitor. An elderly security officer visited him for a long conversation; the officer turned out to be the local informant for the National Directorate for Security (the secret police) and a former member of the feared communist intelligence service. But my translator got along with him, surprisingly, and became so comfortable in the hotel that he eventually decided it was the safest place for a meeting with a Taliban operative.

  I had not intended to meet any more Taliban because it seemed unnecessarily risky, but my translator described this man as a close friend he had known for years—and besides, he explained, this guy wasn’t actually a fighter. He worked a respectable job in Kabul, and his relatives included drivers for the United Nations. He just happened to have friends in the mountains who fought against the foreign troops, and he might be able to explain the situation around Kabul. I could not resist the offer, because my initial impressions of the capital that September left me with a sense of paranoia. Each year brought more locks, thicker blast walls and higher barricades. I wanted to know why the city residents were digging in.

  We waited for our friend outside the walls of the guesthouse, because the guards wouldn’t have allowed him near the gates by himself. They gave him a rigorous frisking and scrutinized his identity card, but eventually let him inside, scowling at his enormous beard and the loop of prayer beads on his forearm. We went up to my fixer’s room and laid out bedding and pillows on the floor to make traditional seating; we looked like boys on a sleepover. We chatted casually for the next four hours. At times, our new friend pulled out a cellphone and called up Taliban commanders, putting them on speakerphone so we could interview them. It soon became clear that he had stronger connections to the insurgency than we had assumed, and that he profited from those links. He offered, for a fee, to take us outside the city and introduce us to a prominent insurgent leader. (“Nooo,” my translator said, with a frightened laugh.) He tried to sell us US military equipment and weaponry seized by the Taliban from raided convoys. For a price, he offered training pamphlets for Hizb-e-Islami, an insurgent group linked with the Taliban. However, none of these propositions could match the revenues from his usual line of business: serving as a middleman for Taliban who controlled patches of terrain outside of Kabul.

  I knew the insurgents were strengthening their positions around the capital, but did not understand what that meant in practical terms. The middleman spelled it out: the real money, he said, came from kidnappings and extortion. He had expertise in both. Recently, he said, he held a Chinese engineer hostage for almost two weeks. The kidnap victim served as local director of a Chinese construction firm with a major road contract in the nearby province of Wardak. The company had not purchased any protection from the insurgents, he said, so the foreigner became fair game for kidnapping. Taliban grabbed him, received a ransom of $500,000, and set him free. The Chinese firm arranged to pay a monthly protection fee to the local Taliban in that district, and an identical amount to the Hizb-e-Islami militia operating nearby. This insurance proved useful two days later, when bandits kidnapped the same Chinese engineer. Hizb-e-Islami gunmen tracked down the kidnappers and forced them to hand over the hostage, unharmed, and set him free a second time. At that point, he said, the Kabul government issued public statements crowing about how Afghan security forces had pressured the insurgents into giving up the kidnap victim. “This offended the Taliban,” he said. “So they captured him again, and told the government, ‘Do what you can. We will keep this engineer.’ ” The Chinese man spent another month in captivity, including thirteen days with the man sitting in front of me. The kidnapper seemed proud of his hospitality, describing how he gave the hostage proper food and exercise. Eventually they released the captive for a third and final time, and the construction work continued. Insurgents took a substantial fee.

  I’d heard similar stories. At parties in Kabul, you could hear contractors cursing about the percentage they were forced to pay the Taliban. I told my new Taliban friend about widespread rumours that $10 million in US government funding for a road in eastern Afghanistan had been siphoned off by America’s arch-enemy, a Taliban ally named Jalaluddin Haqqani, who granted protection for the workers.

  “Yes, I heard this also,” he said, and named the agent who brokered the deal.

  “That ten million covers one year? Two years?”

  “It’s until the completion of the project.”

  I described another story from an acquaintance, about an engineer who worked for the insurgents in Kabul, offering professional assessments of bid documents to make sure their extortion targets weren’t lying to the Taliban about the value of their work. The whole concept of a “Taliban engineer” working in the capital seemed incredible to me, but I’d heard that he was a qualified professional who would show up at contractors’ offices to examine their plans and assess the Taliban’s cut. My new friend nodded with a matter-of-fact expression, confirming that this was routine. Sometimes it’s a percentage of the project’s value, he said, and sometimes the insurgents demand a fixed amount of cash per kilometre of road construction. Bu
t these negotiations are fraught with uncertainty, he added, because some Taliban commanders disliked corruption, or were mercurial in their business deals. He described problems he was encountering with a project in the southeastern province of Paktika, where local insurgents had refused a bribe of $500,000 for a road survey.

  “I wanted to get part of this project, so I went to the Taliban commander in that area to discuss it with him. The Taliban commander there was my friend, he had good behaviour with me. When I mentioned the project, told him I want to bring two engineers to survey for the road, he said, ‘No, I will not allow the road. When they make a road, every day they will come, investigate our homes, see our women, kill our children, kill our young people. Nowadays we are quiet. In these five years, no Americans came to our village because we don’t have a road. If they make this project, they will build it for themselves, not for us.’ He rejected it, even the survey.”

  “But maybe if they pay him $10 million?” I suggested.

  “He is very tough. I think he will not accept it. He was detained twice by the Americans. The first time, he said to the people of the bazaar, do not tell the Americans I am a big commander. Tell them I’m a shepherd. So the first time he was arrested by the Americans, he called to the people: ‘Am I a Taliban commander? Or am I a shepherd?’ And the people said no, he’s a shepherd. The military translators told this to the Americans, and they released him. He told a translator, give me your phone number. When I see the Taliban commander, I will call you. When he got back to his home, he called them. He said, I am the commander, and you didn’t recognize me.”

  The bearded man laughed, and continued: “Later he was arrested again. He told the Americans, ‘I’m a shepherd, I have a lot of sheep in the desert. You can go with me and see them.’ He called again to the people in the bazaar. Again, they said he’s a shepherd. And they released him again.”

  “Do they need permission from this commander to make the road?” I asked, steering him back to the question of how the Taliban profit from construction projects. “Maybe they can get permission from other Taliban.”

  “No, he’s very powerful because the road goes through his area. There are no schools, no hospitals in his area. Only madrassas [religious schools]. It’s a very poor area. When there is any sick man, they bring him to a hospital in Ghazni on a donkey or a motorbike, because there is no good road.”

  We paused our conversation, cracking open cans of soda. Outside in the tennis courts, we could hear the squeak of shoes and the rhythms of serve and volley. I never did amass enough confirmed detail to write about the Taliban extortion rackets and the recycling of international aid money into the insurgency, although the journalist Jean MacKenzie later published an excellent investigation in GlobalPost. For the moment, I was concerned mostly about what this implied about the situation in the rural areas. An intelligence source had recently given me a look at the CIA’s classified district assessments that showed a worrying degree of insurgent control in the countryside. At the beginning of 2008, the agency used labels such as “insurgent controlled” or “insurgent contested” to describe Taliban presence in over 130 of the 398 districts assessed, mostly in the south and east. The CIA analysts also invented a category to describe control by local warlords and strongmen, powerbrokers who owed no allegiance to either the government or the Taliban. Langley devised a charmingly utilitarian definition of control, as well: “the relative capability of the government, local leaders, or insurgents to mobilize resources in a defined geographic area to impose security, carry out organized violence, or credibly threaten violence to influence the population.” It might have been tempting to give those studies a hopeful interpretation, arguing that the insurgents controlled or contested less than a third of the districts. But I was starting to understand that the insurgents did not consider all districts equal. The Taliban middleman seemed preoccupied with the roads and highways, always referring to a commander’s power on the basis of his ability to regulate traffic.

  After his departure, I rifled through my papers and stared for a long time at a more optimistic assessment of the districts, a map drawn up by Afghan intelligence and security services in August 2008. It was an absurd document, downplaying problems and touting success in places where none existed. But even that assessment showed red threat zones creeping up toward the capital. My eyes traced the four major highways that connected Kabul with the rest of the country: Shomali road, Jalalabad road, Logar road and Kandahar road. Only one of them, the Shomali, did not run through a red zone. The Taliban had not fully encircled the capital, but they appeared to be squeezing the supply routes.

  This reminded me of the little message cards I’d noticed that summer on the cafeteria tables at Kandahar Air Field, announcing that supply interruptions meant some snacks were unavailable. The military base appeared to be running short of more critical supplies as well; aircraft landing at KAF in the previous months had been warned several times that they could not refuel there, forcing the United Nations to cancel flights to Kandahar. Entire buildings at the airfield shut down at the peak of fighting season to conserve diesel. The rubber bladders that served as fuel storage, which usually looked like giant water balloons, started resembling flat pancakes. The reasons for these so-called “supply interruptions” were obvious to anybody who saw the burned hulks of tanker trucks abandoned along the southern highways. The insurgents targeted aid shipments, too, stealing hundreds of tonnes of grain trucked into the south. But it astonished me that such problems reached all the way up to Kabul.

  A few nights later as I drove around the darkened city with a police colonel, he complained that highway raids had reduced the fuel ration for his own vehicle issued to him by the Ministry of Interior. He also confirmed that only one highway into Kabul was not patrolled by insurgents. Glancing at my NATO press accreditation card, he said the small rectangle of laminated paper would become a death warrant if I travelled outside the city. “You’re a foreigner travelling with this,” he said, pointing at my badge, “and you can travel the Shomali road okay, but any other road they will capture you after one kilometre.” He estimated that insurgent attacks on supply convoys in the ten central provinces around Kabul had quadrupled from the previous year. A Western security official called that a conservative guess. “They’re cutting the arterial roads and choking the capital,” he said.

  It wasn’t a siege in the traditional sense; traffic flowed on every highway. I visited all of the major gateways into the city and saw routes that still looked busy, sometimes jammed with lines of cars and trucks. What had changed, however, were the rules they followed. Truck drivers left doors open at the back of their tractor-trailers, securing their cargo with ropes, so that Taliban could easily look inside and check the shipment for anything forbidden. The insurgents even scrutinized customs papers to certify that the goods were destined for non-military customers, and gave receipts for the bribes paid at Taliban checkpoints. (The Taliban’s bureaucratic approach to extorting the road-building business also extended, it seemed, to their methods of profiting from the traffic.) Truckers told me that the price for shipments to NATO military bases had climbed sharply, because nobody wanted to get caught helping the foreigners. At a gas station on the outskirts, a driver twisted his beard nervously as he described how a contractor had tried to persuade him to carry a load of diesel to a military base; he had refused, but his friend accepted—and got beheaded. The insurgents executed so many truckers, in fact, that the drivers had organized a noisy demonstration at a border crossing earlier in the summer to call for better protection from government forces. Some of that anger still simmered among the truckers in Kabul. One driver complained that his friend had been kidnapped for driving a truckload of chickens. How, he asked, could the Taliban consider chickens a forbidden cargo? He clearly thought I was a military spy, because he pointed his finger at me and asked: “Why are you not taking action?” Others seemed more sanguine. The next trucker I met described the local police as the
real bandits, and said the Taliban territory gave him comparatively little trouble. Another driver said he stopped travelling at night in one district because of frequent robberies, but felt safer when the Taliban seized control and drove the brigands away.

  A man in a white cap, selling bus tickets, said the insurgents also posed a cosmetic problem for frequent travellers between Kabul and the Iranian border: in Iran, men usually shave their beards or cut them short, but travelling there meant crossing Taliban territory, where too little beard could arouse suspicion. It was easy enough to get shaved before entering Iran, he said, but the beardless return journey could be hazardous. This threat hurt his business at a small ticket kiosk on the roadside, because anybody who could afford a plane ticket now avoided his busses. All the same, he sympathized with the insurgents: “The Taliban are not the problem,” he said. “When people saw the bad behaviour of the foreigners and government, the Taliban stood up to protect them.” A forty-year-old bus driver agreed, saying the police robbed him more frequently than bandits or insurgents. Another driver suggested that the cops in fact colluded with the robbers, ignoring them for a cut of the proceeds. He had fourteen years of experience driving busses on Afghan highways, and claimed he had never seen a worse situation on the roads than at the present. At a bustling ticket agency inside the city, a veteran salesman excused himself from the throng of passengers and sat with me inside a sweltering car, preferring the windows rolled up so nobody would overhear him talking with a foreigner. The core of the problem, he said, is that no single force controls the countryside. “During the Taliban government there was only one system, but now there are many opposing forces, so it’s very dangerous.”