The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan (10 page)

“My wife, she doesn’t watch the news,” a soldier said. “She stopped six or seven years ago. She’s like, there’s nothing good on the news. Especially for a military wife, right? She’d prefer not to know. She works at a call centre, and there’s a shitload of girls who have military husbands. And they’re all like, ‘Oh my God, you know who died today?’ She’s like, ‘I don’t want to know.’ ”

Another man chimed in: “Yeah, it’s always, ‘Ahhh, my baby’s coming home in a box!’ I’m like, no, no, no.”

This got some rueful laughter. It’s easy to forget how much soldiers laugh. Years later, listening to my audio recordings of firefights, I’d be amazed at how the sound of gunfire was interspersed with gruff merriment. “Blood trail leads into the marijuana,” I observed at one point, noticing a bleeding insurgent had staggered into a field of cannabis. “Well, if you were dying, wouldn’t you want to go happy?” said a laughing soldier. Maybe we were all giddy from sleep deprivation, or dehydrated by the sun.

Some of the humour also had a darker edge.

“Let’s commence with the killing,” said a beefy corporal.

“What do you know about killing, fatboy? We ain’t killing no burgers here,” said another.

Shortly afterward, a soldier sat down heavily and wiped sweat from the lenses of his protective goggles. “Fuck me, I want to shoot somebody. I’m serious. This pisses me off,” he said.

“You’ll get your chance,” I said.

“I already had a chance the other day, and I want more,” he said. “I’m in the infantry. I didn’t join this to make fucking changes in the world, other than population depreciation.”

I laughed at this, too, but I also felt a measure of sadness. These young soldiers might as well have been exploring a distant planet. The Panjwai valley was an alien landscape to these troops, and I started to feel that the sheer magnitude of this dislocation was somehow a part of the conflict. That night as the troops slept, I opened my laptop and tried to understand these feelings by tapping out a few paragraphs. I probably looked like a strange intruder myself as I sat with my computer in a pile of straw, under the arched roof of an Afghan farmer’s empty house. Swarms of moths fluttered against my screen, the brightest light in the valley.

This war is tribal
, I wrote.
That’s the heartbeat of the battle
. Down beneath the layers of ideas and politics, across the world from the leaders who sent the soldiers into battle, in this ancient land of wars, the ceremony of conflict followed old ways. The soldiers who knew the history, the ones who read books when not carrying guns, said they could feel the presence of the Greeks, the British, the Russians, and all the great powers that trampled the same fields. The other soldiers only felt something shiver through them, something that made them fall silent, put away their dirty magazines and stare across the Stone Age landscape, rubbing the plastic stocks of their assault rifles in the same reassuring way that Alexander’s men would have handled their spears. Out there, somewhere in the foliage, in soil worked by hands with the same methods for a hundred generations, was a hostile tribe. These enemies behaved differently from us, in a manner so outlandish that it was easy to believe anything about them. They attacked and disappeared. They died and disappeared,
too, dragged away by their comrades. Every soldier had heard stories about Russian troops in the 1980s who were captured by insurgents, about the rape of prisoners. Some of the older soldiers laughed scornfully at these tales, but younger ones repeated them with wide eyes. Most of them said they would save their last bullet for suicide. The rest of the bullets were for killing, and the soldiers did want to kill. Of course they also wanted to build Afghanistan into a country, they wanted peace and security and all the nice things they were told to fight for, but the real motivation was more primal. Many of them had friends who died in Taliban ambushes or bombings. The rest of them talked about September 2001, about the challenge to the Western way of life by religious fanatics. Their commanders avoided using words like “revenge” and “payback,” but in the ranks they were not so cautious. A dangerous tribe inhabited these fields, and the troops wanted to fight.

Maddeningly, the fights were hard to find. Soldiers waited for days, listening to their radios crackle with rumours and reports of skirmishes. They lolled in the shade of their troop carriers, dazed by the heat and deprived of sleep by their regular shifts to keep watch. They rigged up sound systems inside the armoured shell of their vehicles and hip-hop echoed over the emptiness. Others passed the time watching DVDs, or clipping photos of women from magazines. Their vehicles offered more than protection from bullets, more than powerful weapons; they were life itself, a source of food and electricity and comfort. Soldiers did not even call them vehicles; instead, they were “boats,” sailing through desolation. Inside the metal armour was civilization. Outside was terror.

In the end, the operation settled into a search of recently abandoned Taliban bases. The soldiers’ trophies were mostly junk: flares, tripwires, ammunition holders, bullets, rocket-propelled grenades, timing devices, gun parts and a mobile phone rewired to serve as a remote trigger for explosives. Most of the insurgents seemed to have been living in Afghan homes, but some excavated tunnels in
the hard-baked earth. One of these fortifications started as a trench in a streambed and curved away into a small entrance. I ducked low and scrambled inside on my hands and knees, waiting for a moment inside to adjust to the cool darkness. The trench continued underground, covered by layers of sticks and corrugated metal sheeting, buried under layers of dirt. I groped my way through the tunnel’s zigzags, holding out my cellphone to cast light on the rough walls. Eventually the crawlspace opened up into a cavern, lit by shafts of light from chinks in the mud. The floor was covered with garbage, including the sort of water bottles imported to Afghanistan by the international troops. Some of the empty wrappers also suggested that the insurgents had been eating packaged food distributed by well-meaning foreigners. A soldier shouted down, asking what I’d found in the Taliban tunnels.

“Nothing,” I said. “Dead end.”

Canadian soldier rests during Operation Medusa

“The war’s over, dude.” That was my wildly incorrect assessment in an e-mail to a friend on September 12, as international forces settled into their freshly conquered swath of farmland in the Panjwai valley. Operation Medusa had been a defining moment for NATO, the largest battle Afghanistan had witnessed since the fall of the Taliban regime. It wasn’t officially finished, but it was cooling down. I caught a ride on a supply convoy to a small outpost, where one officer compared the happy atmosphere to that of a classroom near the end of a school year. That evening, I sat with Canada’s battle group commander and watched the sun setting over the valley from the same rooftop where I had witnessed a hail of air strikes several days earlier. Leaning back in his metal folding chair, Lieutenant-Colonel Lavoie expressed pride that the combined NATO forces had successfully beaten a major gathering of insurgents. But he still seemed taken aback that so many Taliban had surfaced in the first place. He looked tired.

“After fighting one of the biggest engagements we’ve seen here in the last four or five years,” he said, “I’ll be honest, the numbers that came at us surprised me. I’d say their tenacity surprised me as well.” The commander tried to explain the Taliban resurgence as a sign of their desperation: as thousands of NATO troops arrived in
the south, the insurgents were forced to choose between retreating or attacking, he said. “They’re caught between a rock and a hard place.” That’s how the military leadership viewed their opponents at the time, as hapless mercenaries who were bullied into throwing themselves into the fight, believing they would face punishment from ringleaders in Pakistan if they didn’t sacrifice themselves on the battlefield. At the same time, the military also appeared to think the Taliban had global ambitions, and the reach necessary to export terrorism around the world: “I don’t look at this purely from the perspective that I’m here to help the Afghans fight an enemy,” the colonel said. “Because, yeah, clearly the Taliban are the enemy of the Afghan people. But on a much broader scale, they’re also the enemy of most democratic countries and the Western world.”

I respected this commander, but his views didn’t make sense. It seemed unlikely that villagers in the Panjwai valley would allow their homes to be used as Taliban outposts entirely against their will; in a place where farmers often stashed automatic weapons in their houses for self-defence, I couldn’t believe that the locals would be easily intimidated into co-operating. (They were not so easily persuaded to help the NATO forces, for example.) How could the Taliban multiply so astonishingly? And, more broadly, was NATO really fighting—as advertised—the enemies of the Western world, or just a bunch of rebellious farmers? As soon as I’d returned from the battlefield, had a shower and a cheeseburger and a full night of sleep in an air-conditioned tent, I left my body armour in a heap on the floor of the media tent. I changed into more comfortable clothing, and went in search of answers.

In the meantime, Western politicians and military leaders were busy claiming victory. “The Taliban is on the run,” proclaimed Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper in a nationally televised address, in which he surrounded himself with families of victims from the 9/11 attacks. US Marine general James Jones, then serving as NATO’s most senior commander, told a Senate committee that
the Taliban had given international forces a difficult test, and “they passed brilliantly and successfully.” In a speech on September 29, President George W. Bush elaborated on the same message, and gave his own summary of Operation Medusa:

President Bush waited for applause from his audience, a group of reserve officers, and continued:

The number of Taliban killed in the operation seemed to climb higher as the triumphant speeches continued. Some military officials bragged that US Spectre gunships had hunted fleeing Taliban into the desert and slaughtered them by the hundreds. The lumbering warplanes killed so many insurgents that they ran short of ammunition, the officers said, speaking in awed tones about how
the Spectre’s smoky flares make the aircraft look like a shining angel of death. Some officials claimed that fifteen hundred or more insurgents died in the operation, prompting breathless media reports that the battle killed off a major portion of the estimated three to four thousand committed fighters in the entire country. I told my boss to remain skeptical about these claims: “For anybody to suggest anything about a certain number of Taliban killed as ‘a large chunk of the entire force’ tells me that person knows absolutely nothing about this battlefield,” I wrote in an e-mail to the newsroom. “The Taliban are a movement, not a discrete number of fighters.”

Kandahar’s politicians also declared victory. On September 17, Governor Asadullah Khalid summoned journalists to his palace garden, an oasis of manicured grass and rose bushes hidden behind high walls in the heart of the city. “The enemy has been completely eliminated,” Mr. Khalid announced. The governor had made his entrance through a trellised archway covered with flowers, flanked by senior Afghan security commanders and NATO’s Brigadier-General Fraser. It was all very picturesque, if you ignored the fact that a suicide bomber had rammed a minivan full of explosives into a NATO convoy earlier that morning, suggesting that the Taliban had not, in fact, vanished. All the same, the government’s supporters in Kandahar seemed satisfied. The Taliban were no longer camped on the outskirts of their urban enclave, and the threat of major battles in the city streets had faded. The fighting season was coming to an end as autumn approached, and cold rain turned the former battlefields into rivers of mud that literally stopped insurgents in their tracks.

I picked my way through the muddy streets one afternoon, and went to see Haji Mohammed Qassam, a provincial council member. The politician represented a branch of the Barakzai tribe, a group that generally aligned itself with the foreign troops in Kandahar. He lived in a compound on the south side of the city, at the end of a narrow alley. A teenager with a Kalashnikov guarded the mouth of
the alley, but he smiled when he recognized me from previous visits. Inside, Mr. Qassam was hosting a group of bearded elders. I slipped out of my sandals at the doorway and gave the ritual greetings as I stepped onto the carpet:
Salam aleikum, tsanga ye?
Peace be upon you, how are you? I only understood a few of the words; the rest was a stream of syllables repeated from memory, part of an elaborate dance required to enter a room politely. I shook hands with every man in the circle before Mr. Qassam waved to a seat beside him on a red velveteen cushion. Sitting cross-legged, I made eye contact with each man in the room and repeated the greetings. I’ve always appreciated the gentility of these customs; it also gives you plenty of time to assess your companions and decide if they’re dangerous. I was grateful to Mr. Qassam for inviting me to sit beside him, because if a busy man banishes you to a low-prestige seat near the doorway you may find yourself waiting for hours as he finishes his business.