The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan (7 page)

His friend, a master corporal from New Zealand, nodded in agreement. “No matter how many extra fighters they’ve thrown into this fight in the last two weeks, I mean, they throw in a hundred and we’ve destroyed more than that.”

“Yeah,” Sergeant Tower said. “No matter how many they bring in, they cannot pile on the numbers we can pile on, and they don’t have the resources we have to sustain a fight.”

I asked: “So you think they just can’t keep this up?”

“No,” the Canadian said, without hesitation.

“There’s no way they can,” added the New Zealander. “They’re running scared, they’re falling apart, their leadership is collapsing. People are sick of them. I think they’re in their last final effort.”

That summer of battle killed nine soldiers from their rotation. Patrick Tower would endure such heavy fire, and perform so bravely,
that he was later awarded the Star of Military Valour, the highest decoration earned by a Canadian soldier in half a century. He wasn’t the only soldier who underestimated the Taliban, however. Almost everybody I met at the filthy patrol bases in Kandahar seemed to think they were about to defeat their opponents. They were equally convinced that average Afghans supported their cause: “The Taliban represents such a minute percentage of the population here,” Sergeant Tower said. “I think the average Afghan wants nothing to do with the Taliban.” Villagers were reporting insurgent weapons caches and offering other useful tips, he added, suggesting that I might witness this spirit of co-operation when we visited tribal elders that afternoon.

Hours later, after trudging past a field of marijuana, I found myself sitting with several grey-bearded old men in traditional Afghan clothes. They perched in bare feet under the shade of a mud wall and looked with bemusement at a balding Canadian commander who took off his helmet, dropped his weapon, and squatted down in front of them.

“I see you’re quite prosperous with your fields here,” the commander said. “Everything is working nicely? Yeah? Good.” Then he got down to business, telling the elders that his soldiers had been ambushed nearby on the previous night, when five troops were injured. His men had also been attacked the night before in the same area, and the night before that. The commander made it clear that his patience was wearing thin. “We’ve seen a lot of Taliban activity,” he said.

The elders murmured their disagreement.

“We know there are Taliban in this area but we don’t see them,” said the villagers through an interpreter, a teenager with the slightest fuzz of moustache on his upper lip.

“So there’s no criminal activity here, no interfering with your lives?”

“No.”

“So as village elders you know not only your own village but also nearby villages, correct?”

“They know people from those villages, sir.”

“So you know there are Taliban, then. When was the last time you saw Taliban in this area?”

“Since the government of Taliban changed they haven’t seen any,” the interpreter said, referring to the collapse of the previous regime in 2001. The commander put a hand on his hip and stared at them, incredulous that anybody could have missed the armed insurgents swarming through the valley. He continued in the same vein for several minutes, getting the same denials, then broke into a monologue:

“The best option for everybody here is for Taliban to give themselves up to coalition forces, so we can get rid of that menace,” he said, more loudly than necessary. “The second option, if they don’t give up? They will die an early death,” he continued. “We will find them, will hunt them down, and will kill them like the cowards they are. Because they are cowards. We know they’re cowards. They hide behind women and children. They use your young men to go fight for them for personal gain while they hide off in the mountains, while they hide off in these houses here, behind your own families.”

The interpreter struggled to keep up. Many of the young men hired as field translators were unmotivated, poorly paid considering the risks, and weren’t familiar with local dialects of Pashto. It often seemed that only a small fraction of the words spoken in any of these meetings were understood by both parties. In this case, the interpreter gamely tried to convey the gist of the commander’s words, but gave up when the villagers broke into a chorus of complaints. After a few minutes, he managed to summarize the elders’ message: air strikes had killed women and children during recent fighting, and some people were abandoning the village out of fear.

“What’s this?” asked a soldier who was scribbling notes.

“They’re saying the bombing affects their families,” the commander said. “And I imagine it would,” he continued, turning back to the elders. “But the more the villagers get onside, those attacks will stop.”

“In our village there is no Taliban, nothing,” they replied.

“If there are no Taliban here we won’t shoot your village, it’s as simple as that,” the commander said. He continued threatening and cajoling, reminding them that he was willing to pay for information. They gave him nothing, only complained and spat in the dust. Flies buzzed around the tiny puddles of spittle, competing for drops of moisture. The afternoon light was fading. After another fruitless half hour, the troops returned to their outpost.

I was disappointed by that excursion, and wrote nothing about the trip in the newspaper. In an e-mail, I told a friend:

This was the first battle group of Canadian soldiers to arrive in southern Afghanistan, and most of the soldiers remained upbeat even as they realized their task was going to be harder than expected. It was only as we drove back to Kandahar Air Field that I heard the first whispers of skepticism. I was riding in a G Wagon jeep for the first time since I visited in April; commanders had declared the jeeps too dangerous for civilians but we were breaking the rules because the soldiers were tired and battle-jaded. I was chatting with the driver, talking about how the fighting seemed to be unrelenting. He compared the situation to a Bugs Bunny cartoon: “You know, the ones with the coyote and the sheep dog, and it’s always the same thing in the end: ‘See you tomorrow, Sam.’ ” We both stared out into the night, watching mud compounds flash past, driving at maximum speed in hopes that whoever was watching our vehicle wouldn’t
recognize us as a convoy, and wouldn’t have time to attack until we’d already passed. I couldn’t see the driver’s eyes but his voice sounded far away. “See you tomorrow, Sam,” he said.

Panjwai district lost its status as a success story, but many officers still pointed to the nearby province of Zabul as a sign of hope. It had been considered a Taliban stronghold just two years earlier, and was the first province where insurgents felt confident enough to formally declare a shadow government. (Shadow administrations would later emerge across the country, as the Taliban influence grew.) By the time I arrived in 2006, the Americans believed they had rolled back the insurgents. Diplomats talked about the province as a place that had clearly benefitted from the presence of US troops, and military intelligence considered it the most secure province in southern Afghanistan. Some NATO officers pushed the idea of Zabul as a model because the American operations involved putting millions of dollars in the hands of military units in the field to spend on development and aid projects. This was different from the British and Canadian approach, which funnelled most aid money through notoriously slow-moving civilian agencies. The military was eager to show off its prized accomplishment; days after I mentioned an interest, the press officers arranged a US helicopter to whisk me off to Zabul. I almost got stranded in the desert when the big aircraft dumped a load of supplies at a remote outpost, but I scrambled back aboard in time to catch the second leg of the journey to the capital city, Qalat. Soon after arriving at the small Provincial Reconstruction Team headquarters, I bumped into an energetic man named Lieutenant-Colonel Kevin McGlaughlin, who insisted I call him “Beev.” He was commander of the PRT, but seemed to treat everybody like a drinking buddy. “Throw your stuff in a corner and jump in,” he yelled, and I found myself being chauffeured around in a Humvee by the man most responsible for Qalat’s recent make-over. It’s an ancient city near a crumbling fortress, but the recent American presence had graced the settlement with modern updates: roads, wells, schools,
bridges, and buildings. Beev was a whirlwind, jogging through half-finished structures and construction sites while keeping up a patter of commentary. He cheerfully admitted that he was trained as a B-52 bomber pilot—more qualified to destroy cities than build them—but he had embraced the urban planning aspect of his new job with the charming can-do attitude of military officers. He was the sort of character who horrified those versed in development studies, who were concerned about military commanders becoming temporary kings of these outposts, splashing money around without plans for the long term, and making public works susceptible to the officers’ foibles and inevitable departure. Beev himself seemed to invite this kind of criticism, driving up to a plateau above the city to show off what he described as his biggest mistake. At first I couldn’t see anything wrong as Beev led me onto a swath of scrubland, where tracks in the dirt made it look flattened by machinery. He trotted across the empty landscape, kicking up dust that made me cough. Beev finally stopped and asked me what I saw. I wheezed, wiped my eyes and shook my head. “This is a runway for my new airport,” he said, gesturing at the open expanse. “And this is my new road. It goes straight through the runway. We got a problem, obviously.” He posed for a photo at the intersection of his half-finished runway and his half-finished road. Behind his ballistic sunglasses it was hard to read his expression, and at first I was puzzled about why a soldier would be so eager to show a reporter an embarrassing error. But he seemed to be making a point about the pace of reconstruction in Zabul. So many projects were underway simultaneously that it was hard to keep track of all the activity.

All the US money pouring into Zabul appeared to have purchased a bit of calm. I went for a walk with the provincial governor and was surprised when he stepped out the gates of a US military base and into a main street of the city without pausing his conversation or even checking for traffic. Two police officers trailing along behind his entourage seemed bored, their Kalashnikov rifles hanging at their
sides. Other politicians in southern Afghanistan travelled in armoured convoys or helicopters because assassins tried to kill them on a regular basis. I’d never seen a government leader wander so casually in the south, but the governor’s aides told me he regularly made excursions on foot. “When I first arrived, we didn’t have much control over some districts,” he said, referring to his appointment in early 2005. “People told me, ‘The Taliban is too strong. Stay inside your offices.’ ”

He chuckled at the memory. “Now, we are a success,” he said.

Foreshadows of what would happen next could be heard in a few corners of the military camps, if you looked hard for the skeptics. A Canadian diplomat told me it was a mistake to rely on the military for reconstruction programs. “We could buy a temporary peace,” he said. “But that would be based on bribery, and supporting a mafia-like state. The second you walk away and the funds stop flowing, everything falls apart.”

The situation did fall apart in Zabul during the following years. Violence in that province grew exponentially, and much of it became off limits for aid workers. But the same kind of deterioration swept over all provinces in the south, so it’s impossible to know whose strategy was better. The commanders who implemented these strategies were literate men, well versed in the history of other insurgencies. Stacks of non-fiction in their offices made them seem like warrior-professors who could spend hours talking about Roman methods of subduing rebellious tribes. Of course, Roman legions never faced roadside bombs. The history books also failed, apparently, to teach the modern officers any lessons about the dangers of convenient hope. Most personnel in the NATO mission seemed to genuinely believe that the insurgents were growing desperate, on the verge of breaking. It was such a stubbornly optimistic atmosphere that a bright young commander could stand near a troop carrier spattered with human remains and declare victory. This same blinkered view of the situation would soon lead the NATO troops, stumbling, into their biggest battle ever.

Canadian soldier in Operation Medusa

A sense of anticipation hung over Kandahar city in late summer, something heavy in the terrible heat. The violence had continued rising through the hottest months of the year, and now all eyes looked nervously west, toward the Panjwai river valley, where hundreds of armed Taliban camped among the lush orchards and grape fields. The gunmen weren’t far from downtown, maybe ten kilometres beyond the bridge that marked the city limits, and fears were spreading about a military confrontation in the city streets. Most residents had memories of urban warfare in past decades, and nobody wanted to see that kind of fighting again. My translator kept his car filled with gasoline and his suitcases packed, ready to escape. Others had already fled. The smog of diesel and smoke from cooking fires had thinned; cresting a hill on my way into the city, I enjoyed an unusually clear view of the Eid Gah mosque on the opposite side of town, its dome like a blue egg among the mud buildings. Beyond that, I could see the jagged rock that rises almost vertically to the west and north of the city, small mountains that had made Kandahar a natural fortress for centuries. Now those mountains seemed to offer little defence against insurgents who slipped easily across the landscape. Along the highway, rows of vendors’ stalls had lost their bustle. We passed the wreckage of a taxi, with scattered shoes and human gristle
in the dust, the remnants of an explosion. Drivers did not pause to gawk, slowing only to avoid holes carved by the blasts. Insurgents attacked so many times with so-called improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that the airport road was nicknamed “IED alley.” My driver somehow believed we could avoid the bombs if we drove quickly, making the trip from the airport a terrifying dash through traffic, past herds of goats and the occasional camel. Inside the city, many storefronts were shuttered with locked metal blinds; these were usually businesses marked by the taint of Western influence—medical clinics, computer stores, sellers of audio cassettes and compact discs—whose owners worried the Taliban might not tolerate them. In the years since President Hamid Karzai and his Popalzai tribe had assumed control of Kandahar, merchants had started advertising their connection to the ruling clan by adding the tribal name to their shop signs, and it sometimes seemed as if every bakery and auto mechanic was owned by somebody ostensibly named Popal. But during the sweltering final weeks of summer, the hand-painted “Popal” signs had disappeared. It was better to hide your loyalties in a city on the brink of invasion.