The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan (5 page)

The surge also brought an influx of special forces, who appeared to operate with even more blithe confidence. One evening at Kandahar Air Field (KAF), a female contractor told me she had a stash of Singaporean beer in her compound and would be drinking with some US commandos who had been helping her build a wooden deck for her living quarters. It wasn’t typical for America’s elite forces to volunteer for handyman jobs in remote corners of the camp, but they seemed eager to please a good-looking woman. The commandoes were not supposed to speak with reporters, but after a few beers they started to talk about a set of military orders known as the Rules of Engagement, or ROEs, which describe when a soldier may attack. The commandoes’ stories indicated that they saw the ROEs as
suggestions
, not laws. They described an Apache helicopter flying near a mountain, where a special-forces team had spotted an armed man lurking in the crags. The team on the ground got there first, shooting him in the face and chest. The Apache gunner felt cheated of a kill, however, and as he watched the man tumbling down the mountain, his rifle still strapped to his body and flopping randomly, the gunner declared over the radio that the corpse had aimed a weapon at the aircraft—allowing him, under his rules of engagement, to blast it. Bullets sawed the body in half. The special forces guys thought this was hilarious. I had to ask for an explanation of the joke: If a soldier could shoot an Afghan for being in the wrong place, why did the Apache gunner need to worry about
identifying a pointed gun? A heavily muscled commando cracked a beer and replied: “Different rules for us. We basically shoot a guy if we don’t like the way he’s scratching his face.”

That kind of swagger was also displayed in background briefings. A senior British officer at the multinational brigade headquarters clicked through slides showing the military analysis of every district in the south, dotted with multicoloured symbols indicating the strength of the Afghan government in six categories: politics, military, economy, information, infrastructure and social issues. Many of the dots were coloured green or orange, showing a positive assessment of the situation, with some outlying areas shaded grey to acknowledge that the military didn’t know their status. “Broadly, it’s not a bad picture,” the officer said. NATO’s analysis at the time was not particularly different from the broad consensus, because most sources agreed that the security environment was not terribly dangerous at the start of 2006. That was the last time journalists were shown the military’s assessment of those metrics in the south, as the situation began deteriorating and NATO started to carefully ration information about its analysis of the war, but during that initial period we got a clear view of the military’s hubris. The NATO troops radiated a missionary zeal for bringing the modern world to backward villagers. Officers described Afghans as so ignorant that they reacted to NATO’s armoured vehicles by mistaking them for new Russian equipment—implying the locals had not heard about the withdrawal of the Soviet occupation almost two decades earlier.

Perhaps the best example of the NATO forces’ breezy approach came during a briefing on narcotics policy. The troops needed to win favour with the local population and didn’t want to upset farmers by destroying their opium poppies, the largest source of cash income in the region. At the same time, the international community wanted to fight a war on drugs in Afghanistan—so eradication teams would slip into areas secured by NATO troops and raze the fields, without telling anybody they were sent by the foreigners.

“So from the point of view of the poppy farmer, they won’t know that we’re paying for the poppy fields to be ripped up and burned?” I asked one British officer (whom I can’t name due to the conditions of the briefing).

“No, they won’t know that,” the officer said. “I mean, the level of sophistication? They can hardly read.”

This caused some skepticism among the journalists. Sitting around a boardroom in the NATO command centre, a modest one-storey structure with plywood walls and concrete blast barriers, it wasn’t possible to know Afghan farmers’ reaction to this policy. But we could guess they weren’t stupid; they would probably understand that eradication was the foreigners’ idea. The troops were trying to make the villagers believe that the poppy eradication was an Afghan government program, with no connection to the foreign troops, the British officer said. “The soldiers on the ground, the first message, when they go into a shura [village council], one of the things they’re saying is we’re not here as part of the eradication. Because the Afghans elders will often say, ‘Are you here to do it?’ And we say, ‘No we’re not.’ ”

“And you’re not worried they will figure that out?” I said.

“No.”

There was a brief silence.

“Is it duplicitous for us to say that we have nothing to do with that?” a Canadian officer asked, rhetorically.

After another pause, somebody offered: “Yes.”

“Hey, duplicity is a reality,” said the British officer, provoking laughter. “We’re not on some libertarian lovely sort of thing here,” he said, before reminding us that this was a background briefing, in which journalists would not be allowed to name the participants. Then he added: “This is realpolitik.… If you want to play in the big league, get into some realpolitik.”

A tall man with bright blue eyes, the British officer seemed to have quick answers for everything. But he fell quiet when asked: “Does
anybody have a grand vision for what could be Afghanistan’s largest industry instead of poppy?”

A Canadian military officer said, “Saffron is big.”

“USAID is taking the lead on this,” said a Canadian diplomat, referring to the US Agency for International Development.

“The other thing is roses,” a military official said.

“Roses grow quite well here, yes,” the British official said. “Okay, moving on.”

The journalists asked hard questions, but for the most part we accepted the soft answers. These officers were talking about Afghans as if they were clay to be molded, but we all failed to understand how profoundly the people would resist. Even when I sat down with a poppy farmer a few days later, I didn’t grasp the seriousness of the reaction. He was an ordinary man in his thirties, wearing a blue turban, from a village outside of Kandahar city. The farmer told me that Afghans would take up arms against foreign soldiers who interfered with the opium trade. I asked him whether he himself had weapons, and my translator looked at me like I was stupid: “In your country, you have a car in every driveway,” the translator interjected. “Here, everybody has an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade].” But the farmer seemed so gentle and soft-spoken that I had trouble picturing him dusting off an old grenade launcher and fomenting rebellion. I wrote a brief item about drug policy and moved on to other issues without quoting the poppy farmer; I was one of the many visitors to Afghanistan who failed to see the coming uprising.

If anything, the streets seemed calm during that trip into Kandahar city, and I told my translator that I was enjoying the light traffic and mild April breezes. His response was that the empty roads were a bad sign. The arrival of new foreign troops, and the rising violence, were encouraging people to stay home. Business was slow, he said. This turned out to be a perennial complaint in the following years as people fled the war, but at the time it was newsworthy. I walked into the central market, which looked like an old souk except for
the modern items on display, from the latest cellphones to boxes of military rations gone missing from US storehouses. We ducked into a low alcove and met a twenty-three-year-old shopkeeper. He looked affluent, wearing crisp white clothes and heavy gold rings—but his sales had dried up. Leaning back against cases of Winston cigarettes and Pepsi, he explained that his family distributed dry goods, but this was becoming difficult as the roads grew dangerous. Sales were down 50 per cent in recent months. Other merchants had similar stories. Landlords told me rents had fallen, and properties lost value. Kandahar has been a crossroads for centuries, a stop along the silk route between Europe and China, so it made sense that businessmen were fixated on the issue of moving trucks along the highways. Driving north to Kabul was not yet a serious problem, but truckers said things were getting worse on the road west into Helmand province, as British troops started construction on a vast military base in the desert, Camp Bastion. Threats from insurgents and police shakedowns were becoming commonplace.

Even the streets of downtown Kandahar were getting more risky. I still felt comfortable shuffling around the dusty laneways in my Afghan clothes and sandals, but my conversations with shopkeepers were routinely cut short by the need to keep moving. My translator worried that news of a foreigner in the market would reach Taliban sympathizers, so we never stayed in any public spot longer than an hour. (By the following year, it was standard practice for television crews to spend no longer than ten minutes in any public location.) The same fears were starting to infect ordinary people, too. At a hairdresser’s salon in the heart of the city, across the street from police headquarters, a stylist told me that his business had suffered because nobody wanted to sit near his windows, exposed to the street. Suicide bombings were becoming more frequent, and the police station was a well-known target. Like so much else in Kandahar, the haircutter’s shop had flourished in the initial years after the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001: after years of boring haircuts and long
beards required by the Taliban, there was a rush of customers looking for new styles. Many young men wanted their hair cut to resemble Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie
Titanic
, which became wildly popular when bootleg video discs finally appeared in Kandahar’s bazaars, years after the film’s release. The stylist decorated his shop with a poster of DiCaprio, along with inflatable beach balls and plastic flowers. His walls also contained the most salacious images I’d seen in Kandahar: a series of posters showing beautiful women, with headscarves demurely knotted under their chins, their faces not veiled by the traditional burkas. But by 2006 his decorations looked as worn as the ripped linoleum that covered only half the floor of the salon. After the initial enthusiasm, he said, foreign styles were going out of fashion, and customers who had shaved their beards in 2001 were now growing them back. Elsewhere in the market, a turban vendor described a similar trend: some people took off their turbans after the Taliban government was chased out of Kandahar, but the turban business had recovered in recent months as the insurgency grew. The old vendor saw it as a sign of things returning to normal: “Now, more people are buying turbans, because this is the original culture of this area,” he said. “We accept the laws of the government but we will never change our culture.”

Shortly afterward, I climbed aboard a military convoy headed southwest of Kandahar city. Most of the soldiers were Canadians, except for a US civil-affairs officer whose task was to teach the new arrivals what he had learned as he wrapped up a tour of duty. Our first stop was Panjwai District Centre, which at the time was a lightly guarded fort in the heart of Bazaar-e-Panjwai, the biggest town in the districts west of the city. Inside the outpost, the American officer pushed his dark sunglasses up onto his brush cut and hugged a grey-bearded man in a turban. This was the master of the fort, the district chief, a representative of the Kabul government. The Americans had showered the district with aid money, and the Afghan officials welcomed us like high rollers in a casino. “I feel like the Godfather,”
said one Canadian soldier as we sat down for tea with a group of elders. After some conversation, the district leader started complaining that NATO should put more pressure on Pakistan, claiming that troublemakers were coming over the border. An elder tried to interject—“The fighters who come from Pakistan, they get their weapons here in Afghanistan, the problem is here”—but he was ignored by the district leader, who continued pressing the foreign troops as to why they did not hunt down Taliban across the border. When asked about local problems in his own district, the leader conceded that a few clerics were preaching against the international troops, instructing their followers to avoid collaborating with the occupation. But he emphasized that local government officials supported the foreigners. “We tell people, NATO is not like the Russians,” the Afghan official said. “They’re not here to occupy.”

We thanked him for his hospitality and returned to the military vehicles. As we strapped on our helmets, the American officer explained that this was a relatively safe district. “Panjwai is a success story because it’s got the strongest district council in the province of Kandahar.” He advised us to travel cautiously as we continued west, however, because Taliban had started infiltrating neighbouring areas. Panjwai would later become the most violent region of the south, but for the moment the soldiers were visibly relaxed. Even as we travelled further afield, I was considered lucky to get a spot in the Canadians’ most lightly armoured vehicle, because it had comfortable seats and big windows. The flat roof of the jeep also served as a bed as we spent the night camping in the open desert, and a soldier kindly loaned me his waterproof bivvy bag when a thunderstorm swept in across the dunes of the desert to the south. I went to sleep with the sound of raindrops on the nylon sheet wrapped around my head, the warm air moist and electric. It cleared by morning, but a haze loomed on the horizon. We drove northwest, straight into the wind, and soon the world disappeared. I’d never experienced an Afghan dust storm, and it was astonishing to see the universe
reduced to a sandy void. The only reminder that we weren’t alone in the howling oblivion was the crackle of the radio.

Then we heard a boom, and the radio chatter became more urgent.

“It looks like one vehicle is absolutely decimated, with another one pretty screwed up as well,” said a soldier from a lead vehicle. We were reassured to hear his voice because his radio call from the front of the convoy meant that the Canadians were not hit. “Looks to me like a suicide car bomb,” he said.