The 9/11 Wars (75 page)

There were other reasons to fear that the more pessimistic scenarios for the future of Iraq might be realized. A close analysis of voting patterns in January’s provincial elections also showed that the divisions of Iraqi society remained very deep indeed. Though sectarian parties had suffered major losses at polls – in Baghdad the coalition led by the Shia Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq took just 5.4 per cent of the vote, compared to 39 per cent in 2005 and lost heavily in the Shia religious heartlands of Najaf and Karbala – they had been punished more for their failure to deliver basic governance and services than for their chauvinist rhetoric or their championing of one particular community’s interests.
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Most Iraqis continued to be deeply sectarian in their political and social lives. The taxis that plied Baghdad streets might have given the impression of a bustling, cosmopolitan city, but Shia drivers kept to Shia areas and Shia clients, and their Sunni counterparts did the same. Sect and ethnicity were the primary determinants of political allegiance. The evident nationalism of many Iraqis did not imply any enthusiasm for genuine pluralism.

Nor did the new stability mean a new tolerance or moderation. By 2009, a new social conservatism – a parallel of that elsewhere in the Islamic world and among Muslim communities in Europe – was also evident in Iraq. Few women in Baghdad and none in Basra or in conservative places like Anbar or Diyala ever went unveiled. The degree to which this was enforced or voluntary was very difficult to determine, but those out drinking on Abu Nawas Street, despite the attention they attracted from Western reporters, were a small minority. Those patronizing the new nightclubs were even less representative. ‘I do not go to the [cafés on the] banks of the Tigris, I go to mosques,’ said Alyaa Ali, a sixty-five-year-old housewife from Shia Shu’laa in north-west Baghdad. Many looked more to their own cultural traditions and a newly assertive religious identity than to values and ideologies that had been tainted by association with occupiers or those who had profited from the invasion and deposition of Saddam. ‘To relax I visit the holy shrines in Najaf and Karbala,’ said Qahtan Ali Hussein, the al-Mahdi Army fighter. Posters of Shia heroes plastered over streets and government offices, religious music played from police radios, religious flags flying over government buildings and massive attendance at religious festivals gave the impression of a full-scale cultural revival, at least among the country’s Shia. In Basra, the number of ‘honour killings’ almost doubled in the single year of 2008.
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So the apparent normality of the daily routine was deceptive. Life for most in Baghdad remained extremely tough. In a city where a bit of bad luck, an illness, an accident, the wrong word spoken in anger to the wrong person was enough to send a household spiralling downwards into poverty, those living in deep deprivation did not constitute a static population but a shifting and mobile one. The rate of inflation – a litre of petrol that once cost 20 dinars was now 500 dinars (about 25p or 35 American cents), a bottle of cooking gas was 20,000 dinars – was enough by itself to strip millions of a decent standard of living. Nearly 80 per cent of households depended on the monthly food ration from the government for their basic needs, but nearly half received the supplies only intermittently. Malnutrition, in a country with vast oil reserves, was rife. Millions who had been forced to flee their homes during the civil war remained in over-crowded temporary accommodation, often without any but the most basic facilities. By 2009, Iraq was generating more than 6,000 megawatts of electricity as against a pre-war maximum of around 4,000, but this still meant a third of households across the country still only had power for three hours or less per day.
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No electricity meant no refrigeration, no fans and often no water because there was no power for pumps. In rural areas it often meant no irrigation either. For the poorest, a lack of electricity made little difference. Between a quarter and a third of the population were without any access to drinking water whatever, and nearly two-thirds of the population simply dumped untreated solid waste on open land.
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‘We do not have a sewage system so we discharge our wastewater into a pit beside the house and then into the street once it is full. We do this with our own hands,’ Jameela, a fifty-year-old widow from Najaf who sold incense and candles to mourners in a local cemetery to support her mentally disturbed son, told researchers from Oxfam, the British NGO.
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Healthcare was at best rudimentary. The streets of every city were still full of checkpoints, barricades, barbed wire, blast walls, for, though it had dropped, the overall level of violence was still appallingly high.
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Iraq was in the paradoxical position of suffering more deaths from terrorist attacks than any other country in the world while no longer being seen as a major theatre of conflict.
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One worrying trend was that the violence, having dropped to around half of that in 2008 by the late spring of 2009, then stayed at the same level.
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Ramadan in 2009 brought little celebration. August alone – the holy month started on the 21st – saw between 400 and 500 dead and at least 2,000 injured in more than 40 bombings. In September, the American vice president, Joe Biden, made his second visit to Baghdad in as many months, greeted by insurgents firing mortars and rockets into the Green Zone. A few days earlier, bombs near Mosul had killed dozens in a Kurdish village. Biden pledged that the US would keep to the schedule of ending the US ‘combat mission’ in Iraq by the end of August 2010 and withdrawing all US forces by the end of 2011. His comments attracted little attention. Many Iraqis had other concerns. ‘Life in Baghdad is miserable. It is thirty-nine degrees centigrade and we get electricity one or two hours per day. When we get any water, it is not fit for human consumption. The children get sick,’ said Amal Kamel, the twenty-year-old economy and administration student. ‘I am not proud of my country.’
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16
‘AfPak’ 2009–10

AFGHAN ENDGAME

Captain José Vasquez, the commanding officer of Cherokee Company of the 371st Cavalry Squadron, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, stowed the bottle of water in his backpack, checked his map, looked up at the dusty road and waved his men forward. To his right ten Americans and twenty soldiers from the Afghan National Army left the trees where they had been resting and rose to their feet and moved out across the empty fields. To his left another similar group, a few moments earlier lying prone beside the bank of an irrigation channel, also moved on. A radio crackled, a soldier swore as he filled his boots with water by slipping into a stream, two crows croaked loudly before flying off, beating heavy wings, black against the blue sky.

Baghdad, where Vasquez had done two tours, had been hotter in every sense of the word, the twenty-nine-year-old from El Paso, Texas, said. The ambushes had involved more attackers, and the temperatures had been higher. ‘There were just a whole lot more people wanting to fight you,’ he said. ‘And we just cooked in the summer.’ His unit, now attached to the 10th Mountain Division, had been scheduled to return to the Iraqi capital in January 2009. Just before their deployment, however, the orders had been changed, and instead of patrolling the streets of Sadr City Vasquez and 5,000 others were now spread out over the mountains and plains of Afghanistan’s Logar and Wardak provinces. For years international forces had maintained a minimal presence in both, despite their critical location to the south and south-east of Kabul. Vasquez was part of a new belated effort, ordered in the last weeks of the Bush presidency, to change the tide of the war in Afghanistan.

On this last day of a three-day operation, though, there had still been no contact with the insurgents. The American-led force – 116 strong in all, with Mrap semi-armoured anti-IED trucks, planes and drones overhead, the ability to call in artillery bombardments from the main base a dozen miles away, biometric testing kits, road accident hazard signs, an embedded military intelligence unit – had met no one but local farmers, villagers on bicycles, school children and the occasional elder. ‘When we come out in force they don’t like to play. They are ballsy … but not stupid,’ Vasquez explained. The reception from local people to the soldiers had been determinedly neutral: desultory
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in response to slightly tired greetings, a nod from a shepherd, a brief conversation with a local mullah. An effusive invitation to tea, politely declined, came from a wealthier local merchant suspected of being part of the support structure for a village’s insurgents. ‘We know when the bad guys are here because, when they’re around, everyone kind of stays away from us,’ said Vasquez. Over three days he and his men crossed from neutral to hostile territory and back a hundred times, he added. There was little friendly terrain. ‘This side of the creek is OK, they don’t like getting involved. On the other side they love getting involved, just not on our side unfortunately. And they have a lot of RPGs.’

Vasquez was, for 2009, the very model of a modern infantry officer. Laconic, calm, experienced and better equipped, fed, based and supported than possibly any fighting soldier for decades, he stopped his men from walking through the overgrown cemetery grounds outside villages, refused to take on Taliban targets when they appeared at the edge of an inhabited compound for fear of civilian casualties despite the gung-ho enthusiasm of his tobacco-chewing rooky lieutenant, tried to convince the Afghan troops that you shouldn’t get the people whose houses you were searching to make you tea. In the village of Yusuf Khel, a typical jumble of narrow passages and low mud walls between compounds, Vasquez listened patiently to local elders complain about local police confiscating their mobile phones and motorbikes. Asked what the community needed, the elders conferred and requested grain, a useful compromise between something big like a road or a well which would have caused problems with local insurgents and nothing at all. ‘I am looking forward to helping this town and coming back,’ Vasquez told them and tapped the fingers of his right hand against his left chest in the traditional sign of respect before turning and walking out of the village to join his men in the fields beyond. ‘This tribe extends all the way to behind the mountains,’ he said as the whole force moved off again, the sun now dipping towards a horizon of dry hills to the west. ‘We’ve met a few of them. The whole tribe seem to be fence sitters. We’ll see. Maybe we can do something for them. Maybe they will start helping us. Who knows?’
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In the spring of 2009, there were hundreds of officers like Vasquez across much of eastern and southern Afghanistan, all hiking through villages, all listening to elders, many – if not most – displaying the same mix of awareness and weariness that the veteran twenty-nine-year-old had done. The operations in Iraq’s Anbar province and the subsequent success of the Surge in Baghdad, the promotion of key senior officers, the simple learned ground experience of more junior servicemen who had spent years fighting in different theatres coupled with the distribution of the 2006 COIN field manual and the broader public debate it had sparked meant that the new language of counter-insurgency was now being spoken everywhere in Afghanistan. The commanding officer of Vasquez, Colonel David Haight, also fresh from Baghdad, said his aim was ‘to separate the people from the enemy’. ‘I can become someone’s worst enemy in a second, but that is a short-term solution. We need to bring governance, security, sustainability,’ he explained. At headquarters in Kabul senior NATO staff officers displayed impressively detailed slides showing the tribal dynamics of Afghanistan, exploring historic urban–rural tensions and explaining their strategy of ‘Shape, Clear, Hold, Build’. General David McKiernan, commander of NATO-ISAF since June the previous year, stressed the importance of respecting local cultural traditions, protecting the population, reducing civilian casualties and good driving.
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‘We have learned a lot over the last few years and need to put that into practice on the ground,’ McKiernan told the author, pointing out, with evident professional pique, that General David Petraeus was not the only senior American soldier involved in the evolution of the new COIN strategy and tactics.

The new doctrine required more troops, however. After successive reviews of American strategy in Afghanistan, one ordered in the last months of the Bush administration, another by Obama shortly after taking office, these had flowed in through early 2009. Vasquez had been part of the 12,000 ordered in by Bush in one of his last acts as president. Obama agreed to send another 21,000 after the second review in the late spring. In May 2009 a third review was launched when General Stanley McChrystal, the lean, intense former commander of special forces operations in Iraq, replaced McKiernan. Perhaps predictably, it too recommended a very significant increase in men, money and other resources.

Many of those forces arriving through the first six months of the year had been sent with the specific aim of securing the presidential elections in Afghanistan, scheduled for the late summer. Western strategists had anticipated a variety of potential problems with the polls. These largely revolved around potential insurgent action to disrupt the vote, the assassination of one of the principal candidates or logistic issues. In the end it was the actions of President Karzai himself, the man placed in power by Western forces in 2001 with the Bonn agreement and the favourite to win the polls, which damaged the whole exercise in the most drastic way.
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Karzai’s close supporters organized a massive fraud to avoid their candidate facing a second-round run-off with Abdullah Abdullah, the former foreign minister.
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Over a quarter of votes, the vast bulk in Karzai’s favour, had to be rejected. Each of the three American strategy reviews had stressed the critical importance of having a central Afghan government that had political legitimacy, the lack of which was felt to be undermining the whole Western project in the country.
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Everyone, generals, politicians, diplomats, aid workers, Obama, had repeatedly insisted through the spring and early summer that successful elections were absolutely necessary to ‘reinvigorate the whole project’ in Afghanistan. In this, the polls abjectly failed. The massive voter registration drive hailed as such an achievement by Western governments undoubtedly reached large numbers of ordinary Afghans but also allowed somewhere around 5 million fake, duplicate or otherwise fraudulent voting cards into the system. The turnout was, despite official claims to the contrary, lower than in the previous elections even if the vast and systematic cheating made knowing the exact number of those who voted impossible. Violence, despite the deployment of all the new troops sent to secure the vote, was higher than on any other single day since the invasion. The aftermath of the poll brought little cheer either. When Karzai was eventually found to have won 49 per cent of the vote, a percentage point lower than necessary to avoid a run-off, the incumbent president refused to go to a second round and successfully retained power by default when his disgusted rival pulled out of the contest. The president’s behaviour might have appeared baffling to angry and frustrated Western interlocutors but was explained relatively easily. In March, Bill Wood, the American ambassador in Kabul, had assured the author that he was certain America would remain deeply committed to Afghanistan for, if perhaps not ‘the natural lifespan of the sun’, then certainly for the long term. In fact, as Humayun Hamidzada, Karzai’s press secretary, pointed out, no state can make even a plausible ten-year pledge unless it is a monarchy or a military dictatorship.
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Western nations are democracies and respond to public opinion expressed at frequent elections and, as most people prefer their wars short and victorious, long-term overseas commitments win few votes. It was clear that the Western publics were increasingly unhappy about the international effort in Afghanistan. Pledges that the mistakes of the early 1990s would not be repeated and the country would not once more be abandoned by the West and Arab powers as after the war against the Soviets could thus not be trusted. Karzai was not going to sacrifice his personal interest – and that of his family, close associates and allies – to ease the task of foreign backers whose desire to leave the country and its increasingly bloody mountains, deserts and villages was more obvious with every passing day.