No Worse Enemy (36 page)

He said the Taliban were very good at guerrilla warfare. ‘We have way more guys than them, much better weapons, supplies, all that stuff, and they still manage to make it a good fight. So
they’re good at sneaking around, they’re good at ambushes, they’re good at IEDs.’ I asked the question I’d often asked: have you actually seen the Taliban?
‘Actually seen them, no. Most of the time you’ll just see muzzle flashes or the dust signature from where they fired but I haven’t actually personally seen any. There’s only
a couple of guys in my squad that have actually seen them.’

I asked how he kept on going out, when so many of his friends and colleagues had been maimed or killed. ‘It’s just ingrained in the marines or in any military: you just keep going,
you have to get the job done. It’s scary. But it makes you want to go out and get the guys that have hurt your friends or tried to hurt you, so it’s a mix of things.’ I told him
that things had got worse every year when the Brits were here and that by the end of their time someone was blown up every few days. Giles said he hoped the marines could win in Sangin. ‘If
we give them [the people] a better option than the Taliban, then hopefully they’ll choose us.’

Back at the old British patrol base, I climbed on to the roof. The bulldozers went back and forth on either side of Pharmacy Road, flattening every wall and building in sight.
Sergeant Giles was on the roof next to me. I asked if what we were watching made him feel bad. ‘Er ... not really’, he replied, without elaborating. The marines had several arguments
for anyone who did feel bad. The people here probably didn’t own the shitty houses they were living in, they’d be given far more money than they were worth and some of them would be
rebuilt by the marines much better than they were before.

The rest of the marines were inside, eating, resting, enjoying having reached their objective in one piece.

‘This is our shitty new patrol base’, said one with a smile.

‘We’ve still got ninety days though. Ninety days to keep our legs’, said another, smiling. ‘Three days of hard fighting and now we can masturbate in privacy.’

‘This is where we jerk off and shit’, said Zeimus, as he disappeared into a tiny room with a camouflage sheet for a door, the closest thing they had to a private space.

‘This is our new place. It’s great, a lot of concrete’, said another, stamping his foot on the floor. ‘We like concrete, so it’s mission accomplished.’
‘Yeah!’ screamed another marine and the two embraced. It was indeed a massive relief to step on concrete; the only surface in Sangin which couldn’t conceal an IED. The physical
sensation of hard and flat ground under my boots was so soothing. It was difficult to understand how we’d walked on soft earth for so long without breaking down.

Back on the roof, I could see the house the marines had mistakenly blown their way into the day before. The three boys and the little girl who had emerged from the basement in shock were there.
The wall that separated their field from Pharmacy Road had been demolished; their house, and their family, was exposed, probably for the first time in their lives. Seeing Afghan houses without
their high and impenetrable walls is like seeing western houses without windows, doors, curtains or blinds. But much worse, because a lot of Afghan family life happens within the compound walls but
outside the main rooms. Without the essential privacy the outer walls had given them, the children looked naked and pathetic, afraid even to move while so many people could see them.

One of the older boys was walking slowly and nervously towards the building where we were. I jogged down the stairs and grabbed Rock, telling him that the boy was outside and needed to talk to
someone. The bulldozers were getting closer, destroying everything on either side of Pharmacy Road. It looked like the boy’s house was next and I wasn’t sure the marines had told their
CO – or the men in the bulldozers – that there were at least four children inside. That was one of the few times when I felt sure the tiny role I played in the world was important; that
I was in a unique position to report something essential. Suddenly, I had the courage and conviction that I assumed other journalists always had and that many others thought I had. We met the boy
at the edge of the field, about twenty metres from the old patrol base. Curiously, the boy had a broad smile on his face, something I’d often seen local people often do in Helmand –
look as unthreatening as possible to anyone strong and potentially violent. For most people, it was all they could do.

‘They will destroy the whole house?’ he said, still smiling. ‘There are children in these houses and they are scared, it’s cold outside.’

‘No, no they will cause no destruction’, said Rock, ‘they will just destroy that wall.’

‘My father is coming. He is very upset.’

‘I know this must make you angry. If Americans came to my house and did this, I would be angry and I know you are.’

A stocky, bearded man walked towards us. He looked scared as he watched the bulldozer flatten a wall on the opposite side of Pharmacy Road. He was sweating; his movements were jittery and
panicked but as he approached, he also smiled broadly, and shook our hands. He wore a long, light blue
shalwar kameez
, with a small label stitched to the chest pocket that read
‘Lucky’.

‘What is happening here?’ he asked, so terrified that the words came out somewhere between a chuckle and a whimper.

‘Sorry, but this is how it is. They will compensate you’, said Rock. He made it sound as if the bulldozers would indeed flatten everything we could see, as they feared.

‘All our belongings are there in that house, are you destroying it?’ the man asked. Rock didn’t know what to say. Buildings with people in them were supposed to be safe but no
one was checking. And the man’s house was right next to the old patrol base. ‘Tell them that our stuff is there, we are poor people, what should we do? Tell him that our children are
there!’

The Marines’ Civil Affairs Officer arrived. Rock began explaining to him that the man owned the house we were looking at.

‘All our stuff and our children are in there’, the man said again, his panic increasing. He struggled to remain calm. His smile had gone and his expression was desperate. ‘Do
you want to destroy my compound?’ he pleaded.

‘No, we’re not going to destroy your compound’, said the Civil Affairs Officer. ‘Tell him it’s just the walls. It’s for the security for everybody because
this whole road has been laced with explosives and we’re getting rid of it so we can keep security down this whole road, so his family can feel safer.’

‘At the back of my compound there’s another with a family ...’, the man said.

‘As long as there’s people in it it’s not going to get destroyed.’

Behind him, as he spoke, bulldozers flattened walls. When they reversed they bleeped loudly and repeatedly, an absurd warning, far too little and far too late.

The man was asked his father’s name and his tribe. No one made an effort to address his obvious fears, no one apologised for the destruction or for the terror his children felt. As the
Civil Affairs Officer made notes, Rock tried to reassure the man.

‘You are a poor man, you mind your own business. It is good for you to have a base here.’

‘But we are worried that if there is a base and someone takes a shot at it that we will be held responsible.’

‘Our presence is good for you, you live in this area, so no one can shoot at you.’

Rock told the Civil Affairs Officer what had been said. ‘Tell him I’m sorry for the inconvenience but it’s going to be safer for everyone and he’s going to get reimbursed
at the end of this’, was the reply. Two more men approached from the other side of Pharmacy Road. Both wore dark green
shalwar kameez
and turbans. One wore a brown waistcoat, the other
a brown blazer. They were ordered to stop and show that they weren’t carrying weapons or wearing explosives belts.

‘Nothing! There is nothing!’ they said, lifting up their tops to reveal bare chests and stomachs, then pulling up their loose-fitting trousers to reveal bare legs. They gestured
towards an electricity pole that had almost been pushed over as a wall was flattened. ‘It didn’t knock down the line, just the pole’, said the Civil Affairs Officer, smiling.

‘This is our house, this is our area’, the men said, pointing to several buildings just off Pharmacy Road. It looked like they were next for the bulldozers; the walls surrounding the
first house had already gone and large white crosses had been sprayed on the other buildings.

‘The engineers will come and rebuild it’, said Rock. ‘You will be compensated for all of this. Come here tomorrow, we will talk and we will assess the damage and they will pay
you accordingly. Come tomorrow, every problem will be solved.’

‘Give us the compensation and we will rebuild it’, said one of the men.

‘That house was full of stuff’, said the other, pointing to another building that had been flattened.

‘No problem’, said Rock, ‘when the owner comes he can speak with this man. OK?’

‘OK’, said the man. He knew there was nothing they could do.

An ANA soldier with a long dark beard, green woolly hat, and thick lines on his face stretching from the corners of his eyes all the way down the sides of his cheeks, approached. ‘Were
there mines in these houses?’ he asked.

‘No’, said both of the men.

They looked at the bulldozers and held spare cloth from their turbans over their mouths and noses to keep away the dust that filled the air.

‘Was this was a mosque?’ asked the soldier, pointing to a single storey building across the road. Its speakers were still there but the windows and doors were badly damaged, as if
someone had attacked every straight edge with a hammer.

‘Yes, it was our mosque.’

The Civil Affairs Officer asked who the mullah was. The men said there was no mullah, just them and an old man. Between themselves, they looked after the place and prayed inside. As the men
talked to Rock and the Civil Affairs Officer prepared compensation forms on his little notepad, Rock sighed with frustration and said, ‘Bullshit.’

‘What’s he saying?’ asked the Civil Affairs Officer.

‘He’s saying “when they give me money?” I said, “tomorrow, tomorrow”.’

‘Tell them tomorrow they can come up here but until then they have to go back to their compounds for their safety’, said the Civil Affairs Officer.

The ANA soldier spoke to the mosque owners again. ‘It is because of the divisions between us, Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek and so on, that we are seeing this and it could even get worse.’
The soldier said he was a Pashtun but had moved to Herat many years ago and only spoke Dari: ‘If today a mosque here is being demolished, maybe tomorrow a mosque in Herat will be
demolished.’

One of the men approached the mosque. The pole holding the speakers that sent the call to prayer was bent and only just upright. The man looked nervously at the rubble in the doorway, then
cautiously stepped forward. Without going in, he pulled out a Calor Gas heater and a prayer mat; he snapped the mat in the air and slapped it to get some of the dust off. He told Rock there were
Qur’ans inside but he didn’t dare go in and retrieve them.

The other mosque owner watched, his arm around the home owner we had spoken to, gently rubbing his back. The men had been told to go back to their compounds but they stayed, squatting outside
the old British patrol base, watching everything around them being effortlessly turned into dust.

Fifteen minutes later, the mosque was dust too. As the bulldozer turned to flatten the piles of bricks and cement, two explosions went off beyond the next wall due for demolition but no one
seemed to notice.

I asked Captain Peterson how demolishing homes, and even a mosque, was supposed to win over the local people. It didn’t seem like good COIN. ‘I know that most people in the world
probably wouldn’t understand. You’re trying to build a country up by destroying it and it seems like a paradox but those are people who have not been to Afghanistan. They don’t
understand that the nature of conflict inevitably includes destruction before you can start to build it the way it should be, in a way that’s secure and provides a better economy for the
people in the future.’

He thought the Afghan people would be more pragmatic: ‘I think they understand, after nearly four decades of war, that damage is unavoidable. For a long time, we’ve been going about
piecemeal destruction of things to open up new avenues of approach or provide freedom of movement. It’s the same thing we’re doing here, we’re just doing it on a much higher scale
and we’re doing it all up front. Short term, there is a sacrifice of convenience to an extreme degree and that’s not something that’s lost on us. But I think what people
understand is that to increase security on that route and to prevent the enemy from putting any IEDs there, these types of drastic steps are necessary.’

But the people of Wishtan hadn’t been given a choice. The destruction had happened without notice, suggesting that the security of the marines was more important than the welfare of the
local people. It felt like the era of ‘courageous restraint’, where foreign forces were supposed to be prepared to take more risks and more casualties, to protect the homes and lives of
the people (‘the people are the prize’), was over.

Everyone flinched and looked over their shoulders as another MIC-LIC exploded nearby. In the old patrol base, a marine screamed, ‘Yee-ha.’

‘So Monday, OK?’ said the Civil Affairs Officer. Everyone whose compounds had been demolished was asked to go to the District Centre on Monday to claim compensation. There was a loud
explosion in the middle of Rock’s translation. Everyone flinched again. ‘Tell ’em to get there early in the morning because a lot of people are gonna be coming to get
payments’, added the Civil Affairs Officer. ‘Tell them also that tomorrow we’ve got a medical initiative going on, where they’re going to be giving classes on how to use
certain medications that they’re gonna be giving y’all.’