by Nir Rosen
He was from the Nurzai tribe, like Colonel Shirzad and most police in Helmand, he told me. His father and grandfather had fought the Soviets with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami, the most radical faction of the mujahideen. When the Taliban seized Helmand and pushed out Hizb-e-Islami, Torabas’s family fled to Pakistan. He said Taliban had seized their lands.
“I’m living in Lashkar Gah, but my fields are still in the hands of the Taliban,” he said. “When the Taliban were defeated, they didn’t have any power. Then we were living in our compound, but now the Taliban are back.” It seemed his motive was to regain his land. “When the Russians attacked Afghanistan they were trying to destroy our country. The Taliban didn’t like the mujahideen. When the Americans start oppressing or disrespecting our culture—touching our women, disrespecting our elders—then we will fight jihad against them.”
That night Kilaki caught one of the police commanders smoking hashish in a car. “It looked like a Cheech and Chong movie,” he said. Westby gave the PR money to buy cooking supplies. “Their logistics process doesn’t work, and I can’t have them going hungry,” he said. Only one of the PR’s senior men showed any initiative and wanted to set up his own ambushes. Colonel Shirzad didn’t want to fight, Dyer told me, and without a charismatic leader like Farid the PR were content to just patrol Highway 601.
ONE AFTERNOON while I was marooned with Team Prowler and the PR in the small mud police outpost along Highway 601, languishing in the oppressive heat, surrounded by a moonscape of bleached rocks, hoping for some action to relieve my boredom, Sergeant Ahmadullah radioed to the young Afghan translator working with the Americans, called Mansur, and told him, “We found a Taliban, we have him here. What should we do, kill him or what?” Mansur told Ahmadullah he could not kill the prisoner, and instructed him to bring the man to the Americans.
The prisoner was a young man with a purple salwar kameez. He had long hair down to his neck and a cap atop his head. He looked bewildered. His eyes were wide with apprehension as he squatted on the dirt with his hands cuffed in front of him. He wore two different sandals. He had been a passenger in a taxi; the police had also brought the driver and the other passengers.
Ahmadullah said his prisoner’s cellphone had a Taliban song on it. This was his evidence. Ahmadullah was by the roadside, while I was standing with his men, at the police outpost, out of his earshot. His men were privately angry about their commander’s decision to arrest the man and wanted him released. Zahir, another translator working with the Americans, was outraged. “This is why people hate the fucking police and support the Taliban,” he said. I asked Captain Westby, Team Prowler’s commander, why the man was being held. “He had an anti-American ring tone,” Westby said, “and he has some relatives that Ahmadullah says are in the Taliban.”
Zahir explained to the Americans that the prisoner wanted to pray. The police were eager to uncuff him so he could, and the skeptical Americans relented. Zahir insisted the prisoner wouldn’t attempt an escape.
Sergeant Gustafson took one of the passengers by the wall to enter his biometric data into a handheld device. He took the man’s picture and another of his eyes, along with his fingerprints, name, father’s name, and tribe’s name. The man seemed amused. But he was now in the American system. Westby and a sergeant interrogated the prisoner, who was called Zeibullah Agha. He was a student in a famous religious school in the Pakistani city of Peshawar and was on his way back to Babaji, where the British were engaged in heavy combat with the Taliban, in order to help his family flee to safety because his father was an old man. The Americans asked him for the names of his brothers, father, and uncle, but they had trouble with the names and confused the Pakistani town he was studying in for another one, Quetta, more famous for being a Taliban safe haven. I told the Americans that the school in Pakistan he named practiced a moderate form of Islam anathema to the Taliban.
“People with a similar surname are known Taliban,” Westby said.
“I am a poor man. I don’t know why they arrested me,” Zeibullah said.
The American sergeant asked him why he had this music on his cellphone. “One of my friends put it on my cellphone,” Zeibullah said.
The sergeant smiled. “Bullshit,” he said, looking at Zahir. “How do you say bullshit in Pashtu?”
Zahir looked at the prisoner and said, “Kus eh shir,” meaning “a pussy’s poem.”
Zahir and the police told me that Zeibullah’s cellphone had some videos of battles and one of a graduation from a religious school to be a mullah. “Everybody has them on their phones—even I have them,” Zahir said. Sergeant Ahmadullah told the Americans that he knew Zeibullah’s father, who was a good man. “But I don’t know him,” he said, “and his uncle is Taliban.”
Mansur the other translator scoffed: how could he know the man’s father but not know him? “He’s fucked up,” Mansur said of Ahmadullah. “Maybe it’s a personal vendetta. We also use Taliban songs,” Mansur added. Other policemen complained Ahmadullah had killed many people in “personal hostility.” One policeman told me that Ahmadullah told him he had killed seven or eight men in personal feuds in Babaji. Another policeman originally from Babaji also insisted the prisoner was innocent. But Zeibullah was taken away to be sent to the prison in Lashkar Gah. He might be released for money, the American sergeant told me. Or he might be in prison for years.
Westby and his men had been sent to patrol Highway 601 because the Taliban had blown up culverts along it, blocking traffic and forcing trucks to go through Taliban-controlled towns. It took Team Prowler about half a day to secure the road, while the British filled up broken culverts with earth so that vehicles could pass. Westby, a soft-spoken and taciturn soldier, was confronted with a Sisyphean task, but he never showed frustration in front of Afghans he worked with. On another afternoon, a few days later, while Westby and his men were recovering from an overnight mission, a soldier woke him up to tell him that two village elders were complaining that the British had blocked their water supply when they filled the craters with dirt. Westby was sleeping, groggy. “Well, I’m not here to solve all the world’s fucking problems,” he muttered.
He got up anyway and went to talk to the two old men. They wore white turbans and had long white beards and wrinkled leathery skin. They squatted, their tunics covering their bodies, and spoke in raspy voices. The British had blocked the water supply to thirty farming families when they filled in the craters on Highway 601, they said. The British ignored their complaints. They asked Westby to put a pipe through so they could water their crops. Westby promised to talk to local Afghan and American officials. They asked how long it would take. Westby guessed maybe a week. The two men seemed relieved. “We all have to work together to stop the Taliban,” Westby told them. The two apologized for bothering him. To them he was probably just another in a long string of foreign officers and local warlords who had come and gone.
The next day we drove by the first compound they had searched. The sandbag they had stuffed into the spy hole was gone. Dyer wanted to destroy that part of the wall, but Jasper said the new orders issued by General McChrystal stated a compound could be destroyed only if the soldiers were in imminent danger. The men were baffled. With their tour in Afghanistan coming to an end, Westby was reluctant to let his men enter compounds. It was militarily useless, he said, and he didn’t want any of his men killed a couple of weeks before they went home. When we got to town, one of the sergeants driving was ebullient. He started playing chicken with oncoming vehicles and laughing. As we left the ANCOP base to drive to the main base in Lashkar Gah, a kid picked up a rock to throw at the Humvee and a cop kicked him hard in the chest. The men of Ironhorse and Prowler returned to their lives in Illinois. Five men from Ironhorse went back to Afghanistan to work as private security contractors in Kandahar.
“That’s why all the children are dying for you, Afghanistan.”
Supporters of McChrystal said “he gets it,” as if there was a magic COIN formula
they discovered in 2009. But Afghans have a memory. They remember, for example, that the American-backed mujahideen killed thousands of Afghan teachers and bombed schools in the name of their anti-Soviet jihad. The Taliban atrocities had not arisen in a vacuum. Similarly, past American actions have consequences. Opinions were already formed. The Taliban were gaining power thanks to American actions and alliances. Warlords were empowered by the Americans. No justice was sought for victims. The government and police were corrupt. The president stole the elections. The message was that there was no justice, and a pervasive sense of lawlessness and impunity had set in. Afghans who had been humiliated or victimized by the Americans and their allies were unlikely to become smitten by them merely because of some aid they received. And the aid was relatively small compared with other international projects, like Bosnia, Haiti, Rwanda, and East Timor. The Americans thought that by building roads they could win over opinion. But roads are just as useful for insurgents as they are for occupiers. The Americans had failed to convince Afghans that they should like them or want them to stay, and they certainly had not been convinced that Karzai’s government has legitimacy. You can’t win hearts and minds with aid work when you are an occupying force.
The Taliban was the most obscurantist, backward, traditional, and despised government on earth. The fact that the Taliban was making a comeback was a testimony to the regime that the U.S. set up there, and to the atrocities that have been committed in Afghanistan by occupation troops and their Afghan allies. It was sheer arrogance to think that adding another thirty thousand or fifty thousand troops would change the situation so much that the occupation would become an attractive alternative.
There was little evidence that aid money in COIN had an impact. There was not a strong correlation between poverty and insecurity or between aid money and security. The more insecure you were, the more development money you got. The safer provinces felt as if they were being penalized for not having Taliban or poppy cultivation. The aid system raised expectations but didn’t satisfy them. Life remained nasty, brutish, and short for most Afghans.
Aid and force do not go well together. The Americans assumed that material goods superseded all other values. This was not true in Iraq or Afghanistan. Positive as the aid was, it did not outweigh the civilian casualties or the offensive and humiliating behavior of the past eight years. In Iraq it took the trauma of the civil war to make the Americans look good. There might have been a new administration in Washington, but for Afghans it was the same America: the America of civilian casualties, night raids, foreign occupation, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib—the America seemingly at war with Islam.
The Pentagon propaganda machine, for instance, turned Marja from a backwater to a key strategic city, and the American media accepted it. But in fact there were only a few thousand people living in Marja. It took months and thousands of troops for the Americans to seize Marja, only to learn that the Taliban were popular there. And there were up to twenty thousand similar Marjas throughout the country. In Marja the ANCOP too proved a failure, incompetent and dependent on the Americans. Fighting remained frequent. The Americans were not effective in evaluating Afghan police units. Although hailed as elite, the ANCOP annual attrition due to all causes ranged from seventy to one hundred and forty percent. Even by local standards they weren’t elite.
The storming of Marja was meant to be the first sally in a larger campaign to expel the Taliban from their southern heartland, especially Kandahar. The Americans thought if they could wrest it from Taliban hands, then it would turn the tide against the Taliban. But Kandahar meant little to anybody who wasn’t a Kandahari. It was part of the same focus on population centers that were overwhelmingly urban.
Violence was getting worse. How long would the Afghan people accept the presence of armed foreigners in their country? Even a message of help can be humiliating, more so when it is backed by a gun. The Americans underestimated the importance of dignity and the extent to which their very presence in Afghanistan was deeply offensive.
In May 2006 riots erupted in Kabul after a road accident with American forces, and the Americans shot at the crowd. The episode revealed an underlying anger that could explode at any moment. In September 2009 a British plane dropped a box of leaflets that failed to open, landing on a girl and killing her. Given that most Afghans are illiterate, it would not have been any more persuasive had it opened. Despite the lip service given to “protecting the population,” in 2010 the American-led coalition killed far more civilians than previous years. In February a night raid by American special forces killed two pregnant women; the Americans attempted to cover it up. “Son of an American” has become an insult among Pashtuns the way “Son of a Russian” once was.
Folk poetry throughout Pashtun areas of Afghanistan is now often anti-occupation. Below is one recent ghazal (poem), by a woman called Zerlakhta Hafeez:
Oh Afghanistan, you are my love
You are my soul, you are my body
They want peace while having guns in their hands
That’s why all the children are dying for you, Afghanistan
Your children are dying for you because they want you
To be sovereign, to be independent like they did before
Pashtuns from both parts of the black line [the border with Pakistan]
Call you their home, oh Afghanistan, so they fight for it.
Americans lacked the political will for a long-term commitment, regardless of whether it was right or wrong. The Americans would bail on Afghanistan sooner or later. It would be tragic if it happened within Obama’s eighteen-month deadline or after five years. There was no way to “fix” Afghanistan. According to Andrew Wilder, a longtime aid worker in the country, “It may be more realistic to look for ways to slow down the descent into anarchy.” The Soviets never lost the war in Afghanistan. In fact, the puppet regime they installed had pretty much crushed the mujahideen until the Soviets withdrew support. The Soviets won their last battle in Afghanistan in Khost’s Operation Magistral. But it made no difference. Only the rusting ruins of tanks and a few Russian-speaking Afghans remained in Afghanistan. The Americans too weren’t losing, stressed a retired American military officer working on security in Afghanistan. “Every time our boys face them, they win,” he said. “We’re winning every day. Are we going to keep winning for twenty years?”
Postscript
I returned to Afghanistan in January 2010. In what was a routine incident, the Americans had just killed four Afghans in Ghazni’s Qarabagh district: one of the men worked for the Basim phone company, one was a cobbler, and two were students. Locals took the bodies and protested on the highway between Kabul and Kandahar.
On the way to Maidan Shahr, the capital of Wardak province, I stopped to talk to bus drivers about the conditions on the road. “There are a lot of roadblocks because of the Americans,” a bus driver called Mir Ali told me. “They oppress people a lot.” A passenger chimed in. “Tell him the problem of the people,” he said. “There are certainly attacks. The Americans attack and raid homes every night. They indiscriminately and continuously arrest people and take people out of their homes.” Mir Ali told the man that we were only talking about security on the road. “Who cares about the road?” the man asked. “They are indiscriminately raiding and searching homes in places where there is no Taliban or enemy. People have personal conflicts, and the Americans come and arrest them and drag them and imprison them.”
Gul Rahman was also a driver on the same route. “The road security is fine, but people are oppressed by the Americans,” he told me. “They are raiding during the nights. Some people have hostility from the time of the factions [the 1990s], from the revolution in the past, some people have enmity with each other. Now some people report to the government or tribal militias, so the Americans continuously raid, arrest, and imprison people. They have done this in Andar and Badam. They have killed more innocent people than you can imagine.” He told me to go see for myself. “You will see peo
ple tortured, arrested, and imprisoned for no reason,” he said. Even at the bus station, he complained, the police beat people without reason.
Zainullah was a driver on the road between Kabul and Helmand. For the past two days the road past Qarabagh in Ghazni had been closed, he said. “The Americans have killed people there, women and children. That is why people are protesting, and they have blocked the highway. The Taliban do not harm us, but there is a danger of thieves, and people are bothered by Americans. When American forces come, then the road is blocked for hours, and then we have to wait for hours, sometimes the whole day. Sick passengers and women also have to wait. The road is 70 percent damaged and 30 percent built. There are no bridges, and most of the road is not paved.”
The local travel agent at the bus stop agreed. “The situation was good before, but now it is worse,” he said. “People cannot travel in these buses anymore because there is no security. About thirty or forty buses would leave from here before, but now the number is about ten to fifteen. During the evening and nighttime, it is not possible to leave.” I asked if people were pleased with the work of the government or the Americans. “Nobody likes them,” he said. “How can we be happy when travels are delayed by the national army, American troops, or the police? How can they be happy?”