NO REGRETS ~ An American Adventure in Afghanistan (11 page)

Colonel Zahir and me surveying the new bread oven funded by ISAF.

PART II

The Nights of Kabul

On a dark winter night early in the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the people of Kabul gathered on their rooftops. The men shouted the ages-old Islamic battle cry
, “Allahu Akhbar,”
and fired their Kalashnikov rifles into the air. Women stood on their rooftops ululating in the time-honored manner of Muslim women sending their men off to war. This eruption of frustration, agony, and rage against the atheist Soviet infidel that had invaded their homeland was the beginning of the end of the Soviet occupation. It was the shot in the night that signaled the beginning of the Mujahideen insurgency against Soviet rule. Nearly a decade later, Soviet Lieutenant General Boris Gromov walked across the Amu Darya River as the last Soviet soldier to depart Afghanistan.

Almost immediately after the Soviets departed, various Mujahideen factions fought for control of the country and in their wake unleashed a civil war. Kabul had been largely untouched by the Mujahideen insurgency during the Soviet occupation. The city was not so fortunate at the hands of the warring Afghan factions. Rashid Dostum, Ahmad Shah Massoud, Burhanuddin Rabbani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and other Mujahideen commanders carved up the city into personal fiefdoms. They bombarded each other with captured Soviet artillery and armor. Whole neighborhoods were flattened. Their minions wantonly raped women, pillaged property, and unleashed a destructive force so complete that Kabul has yet to recover two decades later. What the Soviets had left untouched, the Mujahideen virtually destroyed. The residents of Kabul, who had earlier greeted the Mujahideen as liberators from the Soviets and their puppet government under Mohammad Najibullah, now fled the city to refugee camps in Pakistan, Iran, and out to Europe via Central Asia.

Warlords belonging to various Islamic factions and sometimes only loosely associated with one of the major Mujahideen figures carved out territories of lawlessness and banditry. Anarchy ruled the country from Herat in the east to Kabul in the center to Qandahar in the south. The Taliban rose from the angst and chaos created by the destabilizing fighting of the Mujahideen commanders. Mullah Omar established a small band of holy warriors who wished to impose Islamic sharia as a means of combating the violence in and around Qandahar. He successfully led his men against minor bandit kings in the vicinity of that city. With the assistance of Pakistan’s army and intelligence services, Mullah Omar built a group of followers recruited mainly from madrassahs and refugee camps, and seized the southern portion of the country.

After a series of defeats and setbacks at the hands of Ahmad Shah Massoud and the Northern Alliance, the Taliban entered Kabul. They were hailed as conquering heroes and restorers of law and order. They wasted little time in declaring a new Islamic caliphate of Afghanistan. They made sharia the law of the land and replaced Radio Kabul with Radio Sharia. Television, music, and dancing were outlawed immediately. Girls’ schools were closed. Women were confined to the home or forced to wear the burqa in public. Men were made to grow beards and shave their heads on pain of public beatings. Religious police brutalized Afghans for the slightest infractions. There were beard patrols that checked to ensure men’s beards were at least fist-length, meaning that if they grabbed a man’s beard and it did not protrude from the bottom of their fist, he was given seven lashes. The five daily prayers were made mandatory. Any Muslim who was late or not in attendance was beaten mercilessly. Public executions and medieval punishments became the norm in Kabul’s Olympic Stadium.

A few years after the Taliban took Kabul, Osama bin Laden sought political refuge in Afghanistan. At the urging of the United States, the Saudis had stripped him of his citizenship, and later Sudan expelled bin Laden from his safe haven in Khartoum. Osama contacted Mullah Omar and was given permission to fly with his family and entourage into the country. He took up residence in the south at Karnak Farms but had other places of refuge throughout the south and east.

It was from Afghanistan that Osama reportedly planned his 9/11 attacks. Once those plans were carried out and the Twin Towers fell, President George W. Bush demanded that Mullah Omar surrender bin Laden and al Qaeda or suffer the consequences. Mullah Omar refused to bow to Washington’s pressure. The Americans invaded. Kabul fell in short order. The remainder of the country fell within a few weeks.

An Afghan friend told me that he sat atop Antenna Hill in the center of Kabul as the rockets fell on the city. Sitting under the cover of a rocky out-cropping, he watched as Coalition Forces entered the city from the north and east, and the Taliban fled to the south. I visited Antenna Hill on a cold, wet winter day. The whole of the city is visible from that vantage. As I looked down from the summit, I could imagine events unfolding as they had in 2001. The Taliban fleeing in disarray. Coalition and Afghan forces triumphantly entering the city. Six years later in 2007, I was returning to Kabul again. This time, I would spend eight weeks preparing to train Afghan police in western Afghanistan before journeying to the city of Herat.

White Collar Mercenaries R Us

April–May 2007

Katalina called me up while I was visiting my brother in Albuquerque. She and I had worked together in Bagram back in ’04 and ’05. She knew of a job that was opening up and had offered my name. Now she was calling to tell me to follow up. Two weeks later, I was on my way back to Bagram. The job was decent but I wanted to join the training and mentoring teams that were working to build the Afghan National Security Forces—the Afghan army and police. I saw these mentoring positions as a way of leaving a more lasting mark in the world. I could actually be a part of the real world effort of teaching Afghans how to be a viable democracy. I wanted to help the Afghans build a professional and capable national security force. To be sure, I would be a small cog in the wheel of Afghan progress, but in my naïve idealism I felt that I could touch lives and influence people for the better.

MPRI had a major stake in the training and mentoring contracts in Afghanistan. They had a reputation for exclusively hiring retired military officers but I’d heard that they were expanding their candidate pool along with their burgeoning contract mission. At the time, MPRI was unique in their hiring methodology. They listed positions on their website complete with the name of the human resources specialist responsible for each position group. To apply for a job, you simply e-mailed the HR specialist whose name was listed with the position in which you were interested. I sent my resume and waited.

To my surprise, I received an immediate reply and arranged to interview the next day. It went great. Todd, the MPRI recruiter, recommended me for hire. Two days later, I received an offer letter from MPRI. I told the recruiter that I owed the guys in Bagram two weeks’ notice. After that, I was ready to move on. The morning after I signed the offer letter, I wrote out my resignation letter and sent it to my supervisors. I’d been with the company for a total of twenty-eight days. One of my supervisors wasn’t happy that I was leaving but he congratulated me on getting the position that I’d wanted. My other supervisor, however, was bitter. She replied via e-mail within the hour: “Two weeks’ notice is not necessary. Prepare to depart immediately.” Nothing could have made me happier.

As I was preparing to leave, I got a note from Katalina. Tragedy had struck. Jake, a friend of ours, had died at Bagram. Jake was one of the first KBR contractors on the ground in Afghanistan. He’d been in Bagram for the past five years working as the property administrator for the LOGCAP contract. He had finally decided to hang it up and head home. He’d boarded the KBR charter flight bound for Dubai. As the aircraft taxied down the runway, Jake suffered massive cardiac arrest. He died immediately.

Contractor deaths in Afghanistan go mostly unnoticed. The military cares only about military deaths—soldiers, seamen, marines. When contractors die or are killed, their bodies are unceremoniously shipped home in a silver coffin or a body bag. The media doesn’t attempt to take photos of them. There are no flag-draped coffins, no fallen comrade ceremonies, no honor guard. The military wipes their hands immediately of these men and women who died in service to their nation. “They were being paid.” “They knew the risks.” “Fuckin’ contractors.” “Fuck that dirty rotten contractor.” I have heard it all from privates to colonels. Too many military personnel harbor ill-feelings towards contractors. That disregard manifests itself most obviously in the treatment of wounded and killed contractors in war zones.

When Dick Cheney visited Bagram in February of 2007, the airfield was attacked. A contractor was killed. This woman had been in Bagram over two years and was an integral part of the mission. She had died no less in the line of duty than any soldier on Bagram. The military packed her up in a box and were preparing to ship her out without so much as a “Thanks for your service, ma’am.” She’d been a valued member of the support battalion that oversaw the logistical support of BAF. The battalion commander fought the local Army command with the result that this lone contractor was given full honors as her body was sent home. He performed the ceremony himself and walked beside the vehicle carrying her body as she was being conveyed from the Bagram morgue to the airfield. To my knowledge, that is the only time a civilian left the Afghan theatre in such a manner.

* * *

I flew into Alexandria on a Sunday afternoon. Monday morning, I was told to be in the lobby of my hotel the next day at 0830hrs to in-process with MPRI headquarters. When I got there, I met Ian, a retired Army sergeant first class. He’d been a “spoon”—an Army cook. “So, Ian, you’ll be training Afghans how to run a mess hall?”

“Nah, I’m going to be mentoring logistics.”

“Really? That’s what I’m heading out to do. You worked property book or were an S4 NCOIC
¹³
in the Army?”

“No, I was a dining facility manager.”

“Really …” I let it go and thought to myself, “They hired this guy to mentor property book and logistics officers?”

I didn’t know it at the time but this was my first run in with the FOLP, or Friends of Larry Parker. Larry Parker was a retired Army colonel. I heard that he was Quartermaster Branch. When Army officers are commissioned they are assigned to a branch. There are Infantry, Armor, Signal, and Quartermaster branches. The Quartermaster Branch is all of your logistics officers—transportation, supply, etc. Larry Parker influenced MPRI’s hiring and promotion processes in Afghanistan, which brings us back to Ian.

I found out later that Ian was Larry Parker’s next door neighbor. Larry’s wife and Ian’s wife were friends. Ian’s wife interceded on Ian’s behalf to get Larry’s wife to talk to her husband about bringing Ian onto the MPRI team. The only job for which Ian was remotely qualified (and he was not) was on one of the Regional Property Assistance Teams (RPATs).

I had worked Army accountability and logistics for the better part of twenty years. Ian had been a spoon for twenty years. A mentor or trainer should be a subject-matter expert. He or she should be able to speak from experience. How the hell was Ian going to speak from experience when he had none?

At exactly 0830hrs Ian and I were picked up by an MPRI toady. We spent a couple of hours filling in forms for insurance, personnel data, and pay. Afterwards, we were taken to Fort Meyer for CACs (common access cards). That was it. We were then issued brand new laptops and given an advance pay of 1,400 U.S. dollars for our trip to Dubai the next day.

At the time, Dubai was where MPRI processed Afghan visas for its employees. We would be flying into Afghanistan on commercial aircraft. That was a first for me. I’d always flown into the ‘Stan via military aircraft. MPRI had a different contract that stipulated civilian travel arrangements for its employees. Ian and I would fly into Kabul International Airport or KAIA (pronounced KEE-UH) from Dubai.

We spent two days in Dubai waiting on our Afghan visa. I’d been to Dubai before. KBR had started using Dubai as the transit hub in 2005. Dubai is an Islamic nation. It was also the prostitution and drug capital of the Emirates and Arabia. If it was illegal, you could snort it, fuck it, drive it, shoot it, and drink it in Dubai. The prostitutes were from everywhere but mostly you’d find Chinese, Central Asian, and Russian as well as northeastern African (Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Kenya).

On that first night, Ian and I met for drinks at the hotel sports bar. It had a decent band so we sat there and listened to the band sing old R&B songs. After that we checked out the Indian bar down the hall. There were hundreds of these Indian bars in Dubai, where customers drank and smoked
shisha
(flavored tobacco water pipes). There was always a large stage area with Indian women sitting to the rear. They were like strip clubs where no one got naked. The DJ played Bollywood-style tunes, and the ladies walked out one by one and danced Bollywood-style spinning and gyrating. If you liked one of the ladies, you threw little white cards at her. It cost 100 U.S. dollars for a stack of two-hundred cards. The woman got a commission on each card flung her way. She pranced to center stage. She danced. She kept her clothes on. Cards started flying. The prettier the gal, the more cards flew at her. For the really hot babes, the stage became a blizzard of white cardboard.