The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan (15 page)

Regardless of who raided my office, however, the attack made it clear that I needed better security. I considered renting a compound in a more expensive, better-protected neighbourhood near the heart of the city. Rents were vastly higher in those areas, because anybody with a connection to the foreign presence wanted police checkpoints between their front doors and the Taliban villages outside the city. Shopping for real estate turned into a surreal experience, however, because the acquaintances who toured me around their empty compounds assumed that I’d be hiring a small army of guards, so their selling points usually came down to tactical considerations. I climbed onto the rooftop patio of one compound and the guy showing me around patted a low concrete wall and said, “Good construction, solid materials, could take an RPG hit. No problem.” He paused to admire the view of nomads herding sheep in a nearby field, and suggested that the property would be especially comfortable in summer, when I could sleep on the roof. Presuming there weren’t any rocket-propelled grenade attacks, of course. I didn’t rent the place.

We also considered buying a gun for my translator, who was eager to get himself armed after the office raid. He even discussed handgun models with an Afghan security official who offered to sell him a Russian-made Makarov pistol. Kandahar’s police chief took me aside and tried to persuade me about the importance of armed bodyguards, and for a fleeting moment it seemed like a good idea. I was frightened, and still inexperienced. Fortunately, my editor nixed the plan. He was right: journalists should avoid becoming part of the wars they cover, and a small pistol would not have provided much safety in a place where most thugs carry automatic rifles.

I went back to work cautiously. The incident had shaken me, and for the first time I sat down and typed out a security briefing for my boss in Canada. It’s an absurd document, in some ways—my editor probably did not care about details such as my hair care routine—but
it gave me comfort. It’s also a picture of my daily life at the time, so I’ve edited some of the sections for publication here. They offer a sense of how I tried to blend in, how I travelled, and my struggle to find a safe place to sit down for interviews.

Every day as I’m leaving the military base, I change into my Afghan outfit. This consists of a
shalwar kameez
, Kandahari cap, scarf and beat-up shoes with the heels mashed down. I also keep my beard and moustache very long, and I use moisturizing soap instead of shampoo in my hair to give myself a slightly unwashed appearance. I have a wardrobe of about seven
shalwar kameez
, and a few different scarves, so my appearance changes on a daily basis. My camera and notebooks are carried in a locally obtained plastic shopping bag. Sometimes I carry prayer beads, slinging them around my elbow in the customary way. My gait changes as I leave the base: I slouch, take smaller steps, walk more slowly and don’t swing my arms. I’ve learned to greet passersby with a reasonable facsimile of a Pashtun greeting. Over time, I’ve had some indications that this does help me blend in. I’m most commonly mistaken for an Achakzai tribesman from the northern border areas. I once sat quietly in a Kandahar restaurant for half an hour without being noticed as a foreigner. Another time, I met a military translator who shook my hand, sat down next to me and talked for five minutes in Pashto before his amused friends pointed out that I didn’t understand a word.

We vary our timings for everything, partly because of security and partly because of the random nature of arrangements in this country. I leave the gates of Kandahar Air Field sometime between 6 a.m. and twelve noon, most days. Recently I’ve been varying my patterns
further by basing myself at another military camp in the city for a few days at a time. The advantage of KAF is that our vehicle blends into the busy traffic of contractors, translators, and Afghan army soldiers and their families. The benefit of the other camp is that we avoid the twenty-five-minute run down Highway 4, which is notorious for roadside bombs. The other camp does have a nasty choke point a few hundred metres outside the gate, however, where the road and nearby walls are heavily scarred by bombs. Neither location is completely safe.

My driver usually watches for me through a piece of chain-link fence that he knows I’ll pass as I’m walking to the gate at KAF. By the time I’m leaving the perimeter, he’s already driving out of the parking lot and we meet just outside the gate. He served in the Afghan army before quitting to become a driver, and he’s from the same village in Wardak province as one of my translators. We give him plenty of vacation time and a generous salary, on top of which I often give him small gifts of phone cards so he can call his new wife and family back home in Wardak. We’ve been working with him for more than a year, and he seems to have a strong sense of duty.

The car we’re using for KAF runs at the moment is a dark blue Toyota Corolla, an entirely average vehicle on the roads around Kandahar. In town, we sometimes use a white Corolla. Both vehicles are shabby but not remarkably beat-up. Our deal with the vehicles’ owner is that he must change them every three months, but he tends to be sluggish with that—it’s more like every six months. In the car I’m usually sitting in front, not wearing a seatbelt. I’d rather buckle up, because the roads are insane and I’ve witnessed a dozen accidents myself, but wearing a seatbelt would mark me as a foreigner. We often encounter Afghan police and military checkpoints, where they ask for our driver’s ID, search the car and look in the trunk. Sometimes they frisk us. During these encounters I usually try to avoid revealing that I’m a foreigner. Luckily, most Afghans treat these cops with surly disdain so I don’t stick out by keeping my mouth shut. Sometimes,
especially if we’re stuck in a traffic jam downtown, I throw my scarf over my face and pretend to sleep. This hides my light-coloured eyes, the most un-Afghan part of my appearance.

We typically meet with one of my two translators at different locations in the city. Usually one of them will be walking down a road, and my driver will signal him with a phone call that we’re approaching. The car pulls up, he hops inside and we head toward our interview. The translators take turns: whichever one is not working will stay at home and call me a couple of times a day to check in. The driver is told everything on a need-to-know basis, sometimes to the point where he gets instructions like, “turn right here,” and “straight ahead one hundred metres.” Interview subjects are usually given a vague idea about when we will arrive; fortunately, “I might see you tomorrow afternoon” is an ordinary way of setting up a business meeting in Kandahar.

We follow the same protocols going home. I usually arrive back at KAF between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. The guards get nervous when they see a man with Afghan clothes carrying a bag at night, but yelling in English makes them lower their weapons.
(The guards relaxed most quickly, it seemed, when I hollered the names of fast-food outlets on the base: “BURGER KING!” “PIZZA HUT
!”)

This is a problem right now. If we’re visiting somebody it’s not a problem; that person has extended an invitation and we’re his guests, which means the interview subject provides security. The person we’re meeting will send an armed guard to watch for us as we’re pulling into his road, or just get ready to open the gate when we arrive. Usually, the person we’re visiting gets alerted by cellphone a few minutes before we arrive, which is especially important if the person has heavy security and needs to instruct his guards to relax.

The problems arise when we’re inviting an interview subject to a meeting. A few months ago, we had a great system: people we trusted
were invited for tea at our office. People we didn’t trust were met at a popular guesthouse in a well-guarded compound downtown. People we really, really didn’t trust were hosted at a more obscure guesthouse that is mostly empty except for the owner, an Afghan-Canadian, and his armed guards. Sadly, the Afghan-Canadian gave up his failed business and moved back to Canada. We also grew nervous about surveillance at the popular guesthouse. So recently we’ve been picking people up and interviewing them in the car, driving around Kandahar or parking in a huge field near a mosque.

Another reason for needing an office space is the uneven pace of work in the city. We often do an early interview and then we’re forced to wait three or four hours until our next appointment. Not only is that interval unproductive without a workspace, it’s dangerous—because, really, where do you go? Sometimes I nip over to a military base for lunch, but that exposes me to another pair of entry/exit passages near a military gate, which is the most risky part of my day. Sometimes I hang out at a guesthouse, but that’s not safe either. Recently I’ve been resting at a friend’s engineering office—but it’s uncomfortable, because we’re not exactly welcome (foreigner = trouble) and sometimes my fixer pokes his head through the gate and decides there are too many visitors, so we have to turn around and drive away. I would probably be welcome at some of the NGO compounds downtown, but my fixers feel less comfortable in those places and I certainly can’t invite interview subjects. The NGOs are also a magnet for unwanted attention. Our solution, when the risks are so great, is to simply stack up as many back-to-back interviews as possible, and sometimes linger for an extra hour at the site of interview #1 before we’re ready for #2.

We try to make arrangements using a combination of phone calls and text messages, to foil intercepts. But frankly I’m a little skeptical about the insurgents’ ability to pass a message to a bomber quickly
enough to catch me if I’m making plans for the next morning, and the sheer inconvenience of the alternatives—using secret codes, for example—means we’re sloppy about this. We do have “dirty” SIM chips installed in spare phones exclusively for sensitive calls, mostly to Taliban. I sometimes get phone calls from people speaking Pashto, but I always answer with a Pashtun greeting and then hang up. They’re probably just wrong numbers, and not somebody testing to see whether the person on the other end speaks English. Some journalists travelling on rural highways will wipe any numbers from their phones that might get them into trouble at checkpoints, but I haven’t bothered.

I spent fewer nights in the city after the raid. Despite the noise of aircraft, and the narrow canvas cots, I slept better at the military base. Evenings in Kandahar left me feeling exposed, always worried that the front gate of a guesthouse or friend’s compound could be breached as easily as the metal door of my office. I also worried that my local friends behaved with too little regard for their own safety; one winter night, I sat with a group of Afghans around an oil heater, eyeing the rickety contraption as we bedded down. Flames danced near the sleeping pads we unrolled on the floor, fuelled by the regular drip, drip, drip from an antique brass valve that regulated the oil. We needed the warmth because the heavy concrete walls of my host’s compounds in Kandahar city were damp and cool in winter, but I slept uneasily next to the flickering flame, worrying I would burn to death. I was also unsettled because one of my hosts put a Kalashnikov beside his pillow as we settled down for the night, and the barrel was aimed straight at me. Maybe I wouldn’t have stayed awake worrying about this—he had been a fighter against the Soviets and handled weapons with confidence—if it weren’t for a story he told us before we slept, about how one of his guards shot himself in the head. He ran a construction business, fixing roads and culverts,
and like most people associated with the international mission he hired gunmen to protect his workers. A guard on the night shift had been sitting in a plastic lawn chair near the gate, struggling to stay awake. He propped the butt of his rifle on the ground and folded his palms over the barrel, leaning his forehead against the backs of his hands, and dozed off. His hands slid down the weapon so that his head rested directly against the muzzle. His fingers drifted lower, to the trigger. The safety wasn’t latched, and the sound of the shot brought everybody running with guns in their hands. They found him bleeding from the head, and, after realizing that the compound wasn’t under attack, they tried to revive him by splashing water on his face. A few bucketfuls failed to save him, so they threw him in the back of a pickup truck and drove to the morgue.

Kandahar’s morgue consisted of a white trailer hidden in the trees behind Mirwais hospital, the largest medical facility in southern Afghanistan. Most people who died in the war were pulled from the battlefields by their own families and buried quickly, as required by custom, but thousands ended up at the morgue before relatives collected them. Many were never picked up, and attendants packed them into plain coffins and buried them in shallow graves near the northern slums. Wire shelves in the trailer had room for only twenty bodies, and the air conditioning often didn’t work, so the place got crowded and reeked of death. It was the kind of smell that gets into your lungs and thickens, choking you. Nobody wanted to go inside and drop off the dead themselves: even in the middle of the night, they would search for a morgue worker to handle that unpleasant task. The handover itself required no paperwork, and people drove around the hospital and dumped bodies from their trucks, family sedans and donkey carts. Hospital staff tried to keep records of the dead, intercepting people on the way to the morgue and scribbling a few details into a battered notebook with the words
book of corpses
handwritten on the cover, but they documented only a minority of the incoming bodies.

Therefore it was a small miracle that a doctor was on duty that night and stopped the contractor’s pickup truck before it reached the morgue. He pulled open the carpet that swaddled the body and checked for a pulse, astonishing the contractor and his men by announcing that their guard wasn’t dead after all. They hauled him into the hospital, where a quick examination revealed that the man’s injury was not even serious. The bullet had split his scalp and opened a gash on his forehead, but didn’t break the skull. The doctor put smelling salts under the man’s nose and he woke with a gasp. He went home that evening with a line of stitches and a good story. He could have regained consciousness among a pile of bodies in the morgue, or been buried alive in a plywood box—but death does not inspire the kind of seriousness in Kandahar that it does in rich countries. You’re more likely to hear such stories told as jokes, not cautionary tales. I wanted to meet the guard and hear his version of the story, but his boss fired him for incompetence—you need guards who stay awake, especially in Kandahar.