The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan (11 page)

Mr. Qassam switched from his own language to a rapid-fire patter of barely intelligible English, hard for me to understand and impossible for the others in the room. “Most people are happy about this fighting,” he said. If the Taliban weren’t stopped in Panjwai, he said, they would have spilled over into the neighbouring district of Dand, where his own farms were located. He seemed to recognize that his opinion might appear self-serving. “But we have some people in Kandahar with sympathy for the Taliban,” he acknowledged, “and they did not like this fight.” Either way, nobody thought the fighting in the Panjwai valley was finished, he said. Tens of thousands of local residents who fled their homes now refused to go back, despite NATO’s promise to rebuild their villages.

The politician paused for breath, and I slipped in the two questions that were preoccupying me: Why so many Taliban? And, are they really international terrorists, or disgruntled locals? Mr. Qassam started with the second question, saying that some of the insurgents did arrive from religious schools in Pakistan, so in that sense they were operating internationally—but everybody in the
south views the Pakistan border as an illegitimate line dividing the Pashtun people, so nobody would see the Taliban as foreigners. The only group of insurgents from far-flung places were probably the members of Hizb-i-Islami, a militia that operates semi-independently in eastern Afghanistan. But those were a tiny minority of the fighters, he said; the heart of the problem was that villagers rebelled against the government. This caught my attention, because it reminded me of Lieutenant Edwards, the US officer who had described the rebellious villagers in Zabul. But why would any villager reject a government that is bringing an avalanche of foreign aid? Mr. Qassam himself was involved with distributing the riches, spending hours sitting with planners who dished out money for bridges, schools and irrigation projects. The politician poked buttons on a few cellphones, stalling for a moment. Finally he said, “We make big mistakes.”

He offered several examples of blunders in the months before Operation Medusa, but one event stood out as the biggest: in the summer of 2006, the Afghan government sent a commander named Abdul Razik to stop the Taliban from gaining strength in the Panjwai valley. Mr. Razik had official status as a commander of the Afghan Border Police in a district near the Pakistani border, and sometimes described himself as a “Colonel Razik” (or, later, “General Razik”), but in those days his force resembled an informal militia drawn from members of the Achakzai tribe. Unfortunately, the Achakzai had been feuding for centuries with another major tribe that inhabits the borderland, the Noorzai. The Noorzai are also populous in the river valley southwest of Kandahar city, so when the government dispatched Mr. Razik there in August, the locals did not view the action as an exercise of authority by the central government; instead, they saw an incursion by their tribal enemy. Rumours spread through the valley that the police commander intended to kill not only Taliban but any member of the Noorzai tribe. The issue must have been further confused by the fact that the Panjwai valley was
among the Taliban’s first strongholds during their sweep to power in 1994, which came with help from powerful backers among the Noorzai. Any campaign to kill off people with Taliban links must have been viewed by the locals as indiscriminate slaughter, because of the sheer density of people with such connections in the area. In any case, Mr. Razik’s band of men soon found themselves facing an armed uprising. Locals ambushed them southwest of the district’s biggest town, forcing Mr. Razik to retreat, with the bodies of policemen abandoned to rot in the middle of the road. Humiliatingly, the government had to negotiate with local tribesmen for permission to give the officers a proper burial. “This was a bad idea, to bring Abdul Razik,” Mr. Qassam said. “One village had ten or twenty fighters against the government before he came—and the next day, maybe two hundred.”

I wanted to meet some of those angry Noorzai tribesmen. One of my translators was a member of the Noorzai himself, but that actually made the task more difficult. Only a few members of his family were aware that he worked for the foreign media, and it would have been dangerous to be branded as a collaborator with the infidels. Our interview subjects were also nervous about being observed talking with a foreigner, which made our encounters clandestine. We found one subject squatting at an arranged location in an alleyway, and he led us around the back of his house so he could usher me into his guest room without being noticed. A middle-aged man with a bushy beard, he settled into the cushions while his son poured water from a steel pitcher to wash his father’s hands, then ours. He had returned the previous day from the Panjwai valley, where he owned a large farm. His grape vines were dying, he said, because the diesel generator that ran his water pump had broken and no repairman wanted to risk the trip. Insurgents had mined the road to his homestead. One of his field hands had recently noticed two wires sticking out of the dirt; innocently fiddling with the unusual objects, he touched the wires together—and was knocked flat on his back by
an explosion as a nearby bridge disappeared in a shower of rubble. “The Taliban were angry with him,” the farmer said, chuckling. “He wasted an expensive mine.” Still, the insurgents did not punish the worker for ruining their booby trap. The Taliban appeared to be wooing the locals with careful behaviour, forbidding their fighters from looting homes or robbing travellers. “When they came to my farm, they did not eat my grapes without permission,” the farmer said approvingly. Not that the Taliban presence meant no risks. He pulled a black leather diary from his breast pocket and showed me where he had scribbled a few phone numbers for government officials. Those numbers could have gotten him killed if the Taliban had found the diary during their regular searches at checkpoints, because the fighters would have assumed he was working with the government. Still, he considered the Afghan police far more predatory. Like other local people, he never used the Pashto word for “police” when discussing law enforcement: instead, he described the security forces as
topakan
, which translates loosely as “gun lord” or warlord. He spit the word like an epithet. The
topakan
had originally been proud mujahedeen, holy warriors who expelled the Soviet forces, but they fell upon each other in a frenzy of civil war from 1992 to 1994, a period of internecine warfare that became the darkest days anybody could remember. Rebels who had defended the country turned into petty marauders—
topakan
—squabbling with each other for territory. For local police to be tarred with the label
topakan
meant they had become the worst sort of brigands in the eyes of the people. These grievances were exploited by the Taliban, who had presented themselves as a way of removing the
topakan
during the establishment of their original regime in 1994. (Taliban is the plural form of
talib
, or student, and the movement has always drawn support from the idea of virtue associated with religious study.) Although wealthy, the landowner I was interviewing dressed shabbily for the sake of paying smaller bribes at checkpoints. His clothes were stained and dirty, his cheap wristwatch losing its gold patina. “You know why the Taliban
are increasing day by day?” he said. “The local forces beat people and steal their money.”

I heard similar stories in the days after Operation Medusa, as I tried to puzzle through how the battle started. Villagers described police stealing from shops, ransacking storehouses and seizing caches of opium that would never be reported. Some committed arson to cover up their looting and blamed the insurgents for the fires. Shakedowns cost the locals their wristwatches, cellphones, even their vehicles. The police confiscated so many motorcycles that one young man took a novel approach to avoiding the problem. Driving up to a checkpoint one summer evening, he yanked the keys from the ignition of his motorcycle and threw them into the bushes. He rolled gently to a stop at the police roadblock and parked his bike. The officers demanded his keys, but he explained that he’d tossed them away. “They beat him, took his money and his watch. But he kept his bike,” said the young man’s friend, laughing. It was unclear how the youth later managed to collect his bike, but the stunt turned him into a local hero for outwitting the cops.

The insurgents were celebrated for expelling the police from part of the Panjwai valley in the months before Operation Medusa. The Taliban enforced a harsh order, punishing thieves by chopping off their hands. But the insurgents also relaxed some of the rules enforced by their previous government, which had forbidden any music except Taliban chants. “My brother-in-law had a wedding this summer,” a farmer said. “We didn’t have any music or drumming. Some Taliban arrived at the wedding, and they said, ‘Why no music?’ We said, ‘Because you have forbidden these things.’ They told us, ‘No, no, no. Now the Taliban behave like common people.’ ” He seemed disappointed that foreign troops had driven the insurgents away. After the government regained control of the area, he said, its officers resumed their predations.

I found myself wondering whether Operation Medusa had changed anything. You can hear me searching for a little optimism
in the conversation I recorded with Talatbek Masadykov, then serving as head of the United Nations mission in southern Afghanistan. My first question to him was a rambling effort to string together the events of the previous month into a hopeful narrative. I told him about my friends in Kandahar who kept their suitcases packed before Operation Medusa because they expected a Taliban rampage into the city. I talked about how frightened the local residents seemed during the final weeks before the battle, and asked whether the NATO offensive had eased any of those fears. The veteran UN official shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “The security situation has not improved.” Probably no foreigner was better qualified to make such a judgment. With his fresh haircut, lime-green golf shirt and pressed khaki pants, Mr. Masadykov looked too clean to have expertise about the war; a casual visitor might wonder if he ever left the walled gardens of his compound. His appearance was misleading, however; Mr. Masadykov had decades of experience in the region, and was among the rare foreigners who could speak fluent Pashto. During the initial years of his UN job, in 2002 and 2003, he had visited every district of the nine southern provinces, travelling without armed escorts in white UN-marked vehicles, even camping for two nights in the notorious Baghran valley, a Taliban stronghold in northern Helmand province. Such travel was daring, but not suicidal, in the period of relative peace after the collapse of the Taliban government in 2001. But in the years that followed, Mr. Masadykov had watched the situation deteriorate. His security teams began to draw up maps to identify the roads that were still acceptable for travel by UN vehicles. By the time of our conversation in 2006, only two roads in Kandahar remained open. “Slowly, slowly our movement was restricted,” he said, his English slightly accented by his native roots in Kyrgyzstan. “Slowly, slowly, every time, we were going to less number of districts, less number of villages.” He seemed cynical about whether the deterioration could be halted with operations such as Medusa. In the days before the battle, NATO
commanders had promised this attack would be different from previous sweeps into rural Kandahar because they would follow up by holding the Panjwai valley with the assistance of local forces and bring aid to the villagers. But those local Afghan security forces were themselves often the source of trouble, Mr. Masadykov said: “They are misbehaving sometimes, looting, going to search and at the same time stealing everything in the houses. We are receiving a lot of complaints about it.” Although he was reluctant to accuse individual police commanders of abuses, he eventually confirmed the story of Abdul Razik, and how the police commander became embroiled in tribal conflict. “The elders said, ‘No. Enough is enough. We will take a stand, we will take power.’ They were not exactly real Taliban. But in this one moment, these few days, they joined the anti-government elements and started fighting. The cleanup operations in those days killed a lot of people who were Noorzais, who were not really against the government but who were against this commander.”

I told the UN chief about my recent conversations with disgruntled tribesmen, and their complaints about the Afghan police behaving like robbers.

“Yes, this a case of bad governance,” Mr. Masadykov replied. “I can say now, when we’re talking about Taliban, maybe half of these so-called anti-government elements acting here in this area of the south, they had to join this Taliban movement or anti-government movement because of the misbehaviour of these bad guys.” He paused for effect, looking intently at me, and then looking at my digital recorder on the table between us. He probably understood that this wasn’t good for his career, describing NATO’s triumph as the killing of farmers with legitimate grievances. But he continued anyway: “I recently saw the report where they listed the names of the so-called Taliban commanders. Among them, knowing this area more or less—not all of them, of course, but some of them—I saw they are not Taliban. They were listed by internationals because internationals were informed by the local [Afghan] administration.
And still we have the people who are trying to play games, using the Canadians and Brits against their own personal tribal enemies. I saw people who were never Taliban, they’re now fighting against some certain tribal elders or certain groups.”

Not long after my story was published, under the headline “Inspiring tale of triumph over Taliban not all it seems,” the UN chief was transferred away from Kandahar. Mr. Masadykov’s boss downplayed his comments, saying they did not reflect the official view of the United Nations.

Whatever official words were used to describe the effects of Operation Medusa, events on the ground conveyed their own message. A steady drumbeat of violence filled the following weeks, unabated by the operation. For the Canadian soldiers who led the charge into the Panjwai valley, the month after their glorious victory would prove more deadly than Medusa itself, with ten soldiers killed by insurgent attacks. The unit of soldiers I had followed into the Panjwai valley, the Nomads, suffered their first death at the end of September, when a twenty-three-year-old private named Josh Klukie stepped on a booby trap. It was probably an anti-personnel landmine stacked on top of a tank mine, because the explosion was big enough to destroy a vehicle. I remembered Private Klukie as a man in peak physical shape, like a guy in a recruiting poster. He’d been walking through the same cluster of villages that we had swept into during Medusa. His unit had avoided the roads during their foot patrol because they knew insurgents buried explosives along the well-travelled routes, but in the early afternoon they started following a makeshift track that I’d watched them bulldozing two weeks earlier. The dust was deep and powdery: a good place to hide a bomb. “We went on the road, and it was that dust, that fine dust, you know?” said one of his friends two days later, when we met beside the runway at Kandahar Air Field. His unit had just loaded Private Klukie’s flag-draped
casket onto a transport plane, and many of the soldiers had tears in their eyes, but the young corporal was steady enough to give me an account of the death.