by Nir Rosen
Zainullah told me of a bus that was robbed by thieves in Ghazni and then in Khushkabad. “This bus was robbed two times in one night,” he said. “The whole station knows this story. Taliban do not harm people. The Taliban deal with the people that they need to deal with. Taliban harms no one. The danger always comes from Americans and thieves. The danger from the Americans on the highway is that they check each and every bridge for their security, and we have to wait. Even if you have sick passengers or children, the Americans don’t care at all. The road will be blocked by Americans. If something happens to them, then Americans indiscriminately shoot and arrest anyone. They don’t care about anyone. The problems are because of American troops. This is certainly the job of government. They should stop it, and we don’t have that power. My demand from the government is that the government should punish these people. If the government is not able to do so, then Afghans should be allowed to make a national movement. It is not going to work like this.”
As we were speaking, several policemen showed up and made us leave, asking us to come to the police station because they hadn’t been informed that we were in the area.
In Meidan Shah I attended a training session in basic science for several dozen village teachers from throughout Wardak (all of whom were men). When I showed up they were being taught the science behind basic hygiene.
The Taliban had a reputation for attacking state teachers, so I asked the men if they had been threatened. “There is no threat to education in this province,” one man told me. “Education is neutral here,” said another. “It neither supports the resistance nor the government.” The Taliban did not harm schools and clinics, he said. “Most of the security problems are created by Americans. The Taliban do not make problems.” I asked him what problems the Americans made. “Our hours start here at 8:00 or 8:30 a.m. We are not allowed to come here before American troops come to the provincial center. When we go to school, we experience the same problems. There is no alternative way. If we use another route, there is fear of thieves. There are many problems. This year somebody fired on the Americans, so the Americans entered the school and fired—which terrorized children so much that one boy wet himself. They were so scared that they did not come to school for five or six days, and finally the children were convinced and brought by their parents to school. The Americans first shot at the school, then they surrounded the school, then they entered and started firing inside it.”
Outside the school the men pointed to villages only one kilometer away. Everything outside the provincial capital was in Taliban hands, they said. In the same town I attended a meeting of the National Solidarity Program, an Afghan-run, foreign-funded development program that gave grants to communities to develop local projects. I spoke to Muhamad Nasir Farida, the local government official in charge of the program in Wardak. “Many problems are created by the Americans,” he said. “The Americans raid homes at nights, land helicopters, and whoever they see they kill them or arrest them.”
Fazel Rabie Haqbeen was a former mujahid who worked as a senior official for the Asia Foundation, an American development NGO, in Kabul. He had twenty years of experience as an aid worker. He too wanted to talk about the deaths in Qarabagh. “Two hundred villagers are protesting with the dead bodies in Qarabagh,” he said. “Villagers are crying and blocking the road for two days. Where are the hearts and minds of these villagers? The two hundred villagers are a casualty. It’s not just the physical dead. Let me walk you through Kabul and ask a little child what he thinks of Americans. They are not winning hearts and minds.”
Fazel was originally from the village of Miakhel in southern Kabul’s Musahi district. In 2006 American Special Forces raided his village. “They killed a sleeping farmer,” he said. “They dragged women and held them, they beat four villagers and detained four villagers. From that day Musahi district is not secure. The villagers don’t care if the Taliban intrude into villages. After the raid the local Italian commander was killed, two district council members were killed. I am also a council member, but I don’t go back much. The district police chief was killed, a local road construction company had its machines burned, and since then every day there is something.”
The gap between the people and government was enormous, Fazel said. “Between the people and the international presence it’s much more huge, and between the people and the Americans even more, and with the Special Forces much, much more.”
When people compared the two evils of the Americans and the Taliban, they chose the lesser evil. “At least people can communicate with the Taliban,” he said. “The elders can have influence; they are from the same culture. People are not progovernment or pro-Taliban, but they prefer the Taliban. The government isn’t in a position to deliver any services.”
The Americans relied on their own analysts, who didn’t have in-depth knowledge of the Afghan context, he told me. “Our culture varies from village to village, tribe to tribe, region to region. As an Afghan I am not in a position to have in-depth knowledge; my knowledge will be superficial. Afghans don’t trust you, so they won’t tell you what’s in their hearts and minds. They will say you are doing a great job.”
He mocked the notion that the Americans could use Pashtunwali to their advantage. “The Americans are against Pashtunwali,” he said. “They are carrying out house raids. Are you Pashtun so that you can do Pashtunwali with Pashtun? Before the war, if you were a foreigner or American, you could go everywhere safely. Today that is not the case. The whole situation is stirred into chaos, and everyone is provoking mistrust. The McChrystal plan is more troops, more casualties, more victims, more civilian dead. The wrong policies, the wrong approaches. If you come at 2 a.m. and kill my father, how will you expect me not to go mad?”
In late June a Rolling Stone magazine profile of General McChrystal revealed the contempt he and his men felt for their civilian counterparts and leadership. President Obama seized the opportunity to dismiss McChrystal and replace him with General Petraeus. McChrystal had opposed Obama’s eighteen-month deadline. He had wanted “to win.” Obama merely wanted to “halt the Taliban’s momentum.” COIN was a long-term strategy and a stable extremist-free Afghanistan was an open-ended commitment, but the president seemed determined to leave as soon as he could. McChrystal and Obama had always been mismatched. Afghanistan policy seemed subordinate to domestic political considerations. The Democrats did not want to appear weak and reinforce the belief that Republicans were stronger on defense, especially as the November elections approached. Petraeus promised to reconsider the restrictions placed on the military meant to reduce civilian casualties. He announced a plan for “local police forces” or local militias. Just before Petraeus made his announcement Afghan President Karzai met with leaders from Kandahar and promised them that he would never agree to the American plan to create more militias.
Local militias had been created before and given different names. Previous attempts to use militias led to cooptation by the Taliban and other abuses. The new militias would not receive any training. The plan risked further destabilizing Afghanistan for the sake of expedience. Unlike the Awakening groups that began in the Iraqi Anbar and spread throughout that country, the militias in Afghanistan are not the result of a strategic shift in the insurgency and are not composed of former insurgents. Afghanistan dose not have anything resembling the Sunni-Shiite divide and inter-Sunni conflict with al Qaeda that led insurgents in Iraq to temporarily ally with the Americans. In Afghanistan the creation of more militias can lead to a return to the chaos of the post-Soviet withdrawal. Decentralization is a good idea on the political level but not when it comes to security and the state’s monopoly on violence. Creating militias means choosing sides in local tribal and inter-ethnic conflicts. According to one Afghan Army brigade commander in Helmand: “A militia empowers a man, an Army and Police force protect a people and empower a nation.” Senior Afghan security officials worried that so-called local defense forces were the first step towards the
return of the regionalism and warlordism that tore the country a part in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal. After 1989 small, local militias continued to fight against the central government. After the government was overthrown larger militias fought between themselves for control of Kabul. In a country torn by fighting, the Americans thought that more fighting was the solution. Meanwhile as Petraeus settled in the governor of Marja in Helmand was fired only months after the Americans helped install him.
With Petraeus, Obama had appointed the one general with the clout to ask for more troops and more time, but also the one sufficiently respected by all parties to be able to declare Afghanistan a lost cause. The Americans had won in Afghanistan when it was merely a punishment campaign. Once they lingered following the flight of bin Laden they began to flounder. And when they turned it into a war against the Taliban, an indigenous movement, they lost.
EPILOGUE
The New Iraq?
IT WAS IN THE SPRING OF 2009 THAT I BEGAN TO REALIZE THAT THINGS were changing in Iraq. The civil war was over. There was no group that could overthrow the government. The Iraqi Security Forces had monopolized power, even if it wasn’t pretty. I felt this most intensely one day when I was driving down Baghdad’s Saadun Street with Captain Salim from Washash and a couple of friends. Salim was dressed in civilian clothes, with a pistol tucked under his shirt. A man in a black sedan tried to cut us off, but my friend behind the wheel aggressively sped up and prevented him from doing so. A war of angry faces and waving hands ensued until we were stopped in traffic just before Tahrir circle, at a checkpoint manned by armed men. The driver of the sedan emerged and blocked our path. He was tall, with thick shoulders, a big belly, and a mustache—the Iraqi security look. He had a shaved head and a pistol on his waist. He demanded that we get out of the car. Salim told him to leave us alone, that he was an officer. Where was he an officer? the bald man insisted.
“I’m with a very dangerous ministry,” warned Salim, “you don’t want to know.”
As armed guards looked on, they stood shouting at each other—each demanding to see the other’s ID cards and each refusing, not knowing who was, in fact, more powerful. As I sat in the car, I was getting more and more nervous. But after ten tense minutes they embraced and kissed. It turned out they knew each other. This was fortunate, because the bald man was an officer with the puissant Office of the Prime Minister, and he trumped Salim, who was a mere army officer. A friend later commented that the standoff reminded him of Iraq under Saddam, when a plethora of security agencies competed with one another.
Six years after the fall of Baghdad, it felt as if the Iraqis were occupying Iraq. Roads were no longer blocked by aggressive American troops but by aggressive Iraqi Security Forces in military, police, or civilian attire, waving their weapons, shouting. They were just as intimidating as their U.S. counterparts. They manned ubiquitous checkpoints throughout the city, stopping cars, searching them. They had brought a measure of security to the war-torn capital, but the price was a heavily militarized society. Even if the overt sectarianism of the security forces had been tempered—they no longer slaughtered Sunnis—their Shiite identity was apparent and made Sunnis who were stopped at checkpoints nervous.
On a different day I was driving with a friend in a car that belonged to a third friend of ours. We were stopped at an Iraqi National Police checkpoint. The policeman asked for the car’s registration. When my friend told him that it was not in his name, the policeman became hostile. He demanded my friend’s ID. He read his name out loud, “Hassanein,” an obviously Shiite name, and his demeanor changed. He smiled and waved us on our way. When I visited government buildings and police stations, the walls were often festooned with posters of Hussein, a clear sign that they were dominated by Shiites. On the concrete barriers outside the National Assembly, there was a large mural of Shiite pilgrims marching to Karbala. These displays created a sense among Sunnis that the state and its security forces were Shiite, that they did not belong.
Not that the Americans had withdrawn. One friend working with the American military in Baghdad’s Yarmuk and Qadisiya districts told me he knew of twenty or twenty-five innocent Iraqis who had been killed by U.S. Special Forces. One old man approached his door when he heard American soldiers coming so that he could open it for them. He was shot in the head. Shots to the head or shots to the chest were common at the slightest provocation, my friend complained.
According to the Baghdad morgue, every day there were ten to fifteen political murders in Baghdad alone, but this was far lower than the hundreds it received every day in 2006, when Iraqi women had to search through disfigured corpses to find their husbands and sons. But if the levels of violence had gone down, many still had not recovered. “During the last years we faced death many times,” a doctor from Sadr City told me. “We became numb. We don’t have feelings anymore.”
But now it was possible to talk about post-American Iraq. And there were many worrying signs. “It will be like the Republican Guard,” one American official told me. “[Maliki] has an extralegal counterterrorism force that answers to him.” Maliki had empowered the Office of the Prime Minister and placed under its command thousands of elite soldiers capable of operating without American military or logistical support. Trained by American special operators, they were dominated by Shiites but loyal to Maliki, not the institution. Like their American trainers, they justified their above-the-law status with the mantra of counterterrorism; when they operated, the Iraqi Defense and Interior ministries were never informed. Sunnis and Kurds complained to the Americans that Maliki had become the new Saddam of the Shiites.
The random and indiscriminate violence had subsided. This was most evident in the conspicuous displays of wealth. Baghdad’s roads were full of H3 Hummers and other expensive and large vehicles that cost tens of thousands of dollars in cash. New expensive restaurants catered to a new elite, or one that was in hiding. The girls in Baghdad’s universities were dressing more fashionably than ever before, and young men were adopting the fashion trends of Lebanon. For years this would have been impossible to see. Anybody with any money would have been a target for kidnappers. Women immodestly dressed could have been killed. Men in clear Western fashions could have been beaten. Bars were back open, which was at least a sign that vigilante extremists had stopped blowing them up. Playgrounds were full of children, young men played soccer in new fields, people were no longer afraid to leave their houses. But none of it felt completely real.
One night I strolled along Abu Nawas Street with my friend Hussein. Couples walked by the river, children played. Nothing special there, no great achievement in returning normalcy and stability to a place that had both before America took them away, but still hard to get used to after the past few years of occupation, civil war, and terror. Hussein told me his children played games where they lay improvised explosive devices against each other, to blow each other up. He pointed to the security patrols that went by in the park. “All this is a lie,” he gestured at the people. “If it was safe they wouldn’t need a security patrol.” Al Qaeda and other Sunni militias were just lying dormant, he said, as was the Mahdi Army. I expressed skepticism. He stopped a couple walking by. “Excuse me,” he said. “My friend is a journalist. Do you feel safe now?” The young man did not hesitate: he said no and kept on walking.
The Americans rated the Iraqi National Police “the most improved security force,” according to a U.S. diplomat in Baghdad. “It used to be a death squad,” he said. “Now the worst officers have been fired or transferred to where they can do no harm.” But even if the overt sectarianism had receded, it was still there. I met up with Captain Adil from the INPs in Dora. After Adil refused to arrest Sunnis without warrants, Brig. Gen. Abdel Karim had transferred him north to Mosul, a much more dangerous assignment. Adil was then accused of stealing cars and held in a secret prison on the second floor of the Interior Ministry’s Internal Affairs Committee office. He told me he had been framed and that his accuser wa
s a Mahdi Army commander in Abu Dshir.
Twenty-seven people were held in a small cell he described as three meters by two meters in size. They slept standing up. All the other men were Sunni. The torture started at midnight. “I was handcuffed and blindfolded and beaten like in movies,” he told me. He was placed under a cold shower for many hours. A policeman named Gafar, who worked with the Mahdi Army in Dora and knew Adil, beat him so badly he urinated blood. “When Americans came they would make us shut up or threaten us,” he said. “When they beat me they said, ‘Why do you hate the Mahdi Army?’ I said, ‘Why are you asking me this? It’s not about cars.’ ‘You are a collaborator,’ they said. ‘You worked with the Americans against the Mahdi Army, you know why you are here.’” Adil’s fellow prisoners were there without their families’ knowledge. They cried and wailed at night, he said, and the prisoners could hear Shiite religious songs on their jailers’ cellphones. After twenty-two days, his captors demanded twenty thousand dollars for his release, but he negotiated it down to seven thousand, which his brother-in-law handed to a police captain outside a restaurant.
Adil resigned after he was released. “I served my country,” he told me, but now he felt betrayed. He still supported Maliki, though. “He is a real nationalist,” he told me. “Everybody likes him.” He was very pleased with Maliki’s moves to include former Baathists in the government. “Nuri al-Maliki is the best leader I saw in my life,” he said. “He doesn’t know about this prison. The Americans don’t know.”
Adil wasn’t the only person I knew who was feeling punished by the new order. In late 2008, two weeks after the Americans handed authority over Dora’s Awakening groups to the Iraqi National Police, Osama’s comrade Abu Yasser was arrested by the INPs. Osama told me that Abu Yasser was taken to General Karim’s headquarters, hung from his arms, and tortured. To end the torture he confessed to murders he hadn’t committed but wisely confessed to killing people who were still alive. Then he was moved to the INP prison in Kadhimiya. He had already paid twenty thousand dollars, Osama told me. “They can’t release him without money—everything costs money.” Abu Yasser was worried that Al Qaeda men in prison with him would find out that he was an Awakening group member and kill him.