The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan (2 page)

Military planners knew the difficulty of such wars and did not repeat history out of ignorance. Many of them could recite the lines written a century ago by Rudyard Kipling, about the lopsided math of guerilla war: “Two thousands pounds of education drops to a ten-rupee
jezail
.” When a soldier heaved a rocket onto his shoulder and sent the device thundering down by remote control, he muttered, “There goes a Porsche,” because the rocket cost about as much as a luxury car. Meanwhile, forensic teams catalogued the cheap ingredients of insurgent bombs: plastic pails, crop fertilizer, old mortar shells, a pressure switch made from a rusty carpenter’s saw. It cost almost nothing to make a bomb that could throw a multi-ton vehicle like a child’s toy, a marvel of engineering sailing into the empty sky. When fallen soldiers flew home to graveyards far away, their replacements needed years of expensive training, vastly more than the “two thousand pounds of education” required in Kipling’s day. But insurgents buried their dead quickly, in shallow trenches; sons and brothers replaced them immediately.

The costs were high—but we had money to burn, or to make something burn. The United States had enjoyed the longest economic boom in its history during the 1990s, and its allies had likewise flourished. It’s easy now to forget the fear that pervaded the Western world—but in September 2001, I stopped at a gas station in rural Pennsylvania on my way toward the field where the fourth hijacked plane had plowed into the earth, and the guy who filled my tank made a prediction: “We gonna kill some ragheads.” He was right, and a lot of the killing would happen in Afghanistan.

The war may have felt justified in our guts, but it played out in southern Afghanistan like a farce. The foreign troops seized control of the former hideouts used by Osama bin Laden and his followers, and yes, it felt satisfying to clamber around the rubble of the al-Qaeda camp that we all recognized from grainy images of jihadi training videos on the evening news. We posed for pictures on the crumbling ruins of Tarnak Farms and wondered if the stories about
bin Laden plotting the attacks within those very walls were true. But the al-Qaeda camps had long since disappeared by the time I arrived in the south, following a massive influx of NATO troops. The world’s great armies were not gathering in southern Afghanistan to chase a bunch of terrorists. They set themselves a more sweeping agenda: to bring a measure of calm, to improve lives, to establish law and order. Sometimes they succeeded: child mortality declined, more women survived childbirth. A new generation of Afghans now enjoys much greater access to education than its predecessor, despite the fact that many of the new schools have been burned down or converted into livestock sheds. A cascade of foreign aid brought some of the trappings of modernity to parts of the country that had never seen television, cellphones and the Internet.

Not much of the progress feels enduring, however. The Afghan economy is a bubble created with war money. It’s impossible to drive the streets without seeing advertisements for quixotic development projects, long forgotten, the flaking paint on the misspelled placards having outlasted any local memory of what the foreigners were trying to achieve. I met a brave American farmer who accepted a US government contract to plant pomegranate trees in dangerous areas, an operation he nicknamed “combat farming.” Each sapling was duly counted as progress toward the goal of promoting legal agriculture instead of opium cultivation, but the farmer was under no illusions about whether his little trees would survive long enough to bear fruit. The slightest disturbance churned the dirt into dust, like feathery plumes of talcum powder, and most disturbances in Kandahar were not minor. Aircraft dropped bombs; the Taliban planted crude explosives underground; military convoys broke across the fields to avoid the mined roads. War erases progress, leaves no trace of improvement.

As the violence climbed, a military spokesman or general would often try to explain by saying, “We’re kicking the hornet’s nest.” Yet another metaphor, in a land of storytellers, and the logic of it always bothered me. At one point I interrupted a senior general and asked,
“Sir, is there any time in real life when it would make sense to kick a hornet’s nest?” The general laughed. “Clearly you’ve never owned a cottage,” he said, and I went away wondering how many owners of vacation properties actually make this mistake. It was amazing how often the military repeated this message: after the death of a soldier, his superiors would solemnly face the television cameras and explain that his unit had been involved in urgent work to clear a path for peace and democracy, and that sometimes kicking the hornet’s nest gets you stung. I’m always reminded of this whenever I hear the latest news about faltering peace talks with the Taliban. We’re trying to negotiate a graceful exit, and the key phrase has become “political solution.” But how do you negotiate with an angry swarm, after the nest is kicked?

Nobody who deals with these questions does so without looking tired or angry, and some of the greatest minds on Afghanistan policy are also the most depressed. I met a former US Marine recently, with his wife and daughter, three months old, burbling in her mother’s arms. We talked about how our experiences of war had opened our eyes, and I repeated something I had read about Plato’s ideal education, that young men must see the battlefield as part of their grooming for adulthood. The Marine looked at me skeptically. There’s something about Afghanistan that requires colourful figures of speech, so I offered this one: “It was like living in a kindergarten and toddling out into the hallway and down the stairs and into the boiler room, leaving the nice pretty world and seeing all of the dark scary machines underneath.” The soldier nodded and said: “Yeah, but here’s a better way of saying it. The whole thing was like eating at McDonald’s, and then going and visiting a slaughterhouse.” He added: “Because it was a meat grinder.” By coincidence, I had ordered a hamburger at the restaurant where we were sitting, which arrived moments later. I ate with difficulty.

Writing this book tears me apart sometimes. I keep typing curses into the text, streams of invective that I go back and delete, feeling
ashamed of my failure to find better words than
fuck fuck fuck
. But I also need you to feel the profanity, because there is something profane about the errors we committed in Afghanistan. The Pennsylvania gas jockey was probably right: a certain amount of killing was inevitable after 9/11. Al-Qaeda started a fight, and anybody who lives in Afghanistan would understand the logic of punishing misdeeds. Southern tribes limit the scale of their revenge, however; similar to that ancient law, “an eye for an eye,” tribal rules usually keep the retribution to a crude ratio of one-to-one. We have more complicated rules of war these days, with legal definitions of “proportionality,” or “excessiveness,” and we can argue endlessly about international law—but it was impossible to live at the throbbing heart of the war, falling asleep to the sound of helicopters and woken by explosions, without feeling like the whole thing was too much. It did not seem like an effective way to achieve our goals, but merely a recipe for fighting and fighting, and more fighting. Over a decade of war in Afghanistan has settled nothing, and that in itself is profoundly unsettling.

It’s impossible to grasp the sheer stupidity of the war with detached analysis. I have laughed out loud at charts listing the number of Taliban forces arrayed against Afghan troops and international forces; so many of those numbers are wild guesses. I’ve even had a look at some of the US Central Intelligence Agency’s district-by-district assessments of the situation, containing only somewhat more educated guesses. Nor can you get much of a picture by thinking about these things on the level of theory, or metaphors—dragons, hornets or surgeons. When friends and family asked about Afghanistan, I often found myself with my mouth open, not making a sound, caught on the edge of speech.

My usual excuse is that I’m not qualified to talk about the whole country, only the troubled south. I visited southern Afghanistan seventeen times from 2005 to 2011, working independently of the international forces and also spending time with US, Canadian, British and Dutch troops. None of that experience gives me the right to
summarize the broader situation in the country, but the southern region does serve as a useful case study. It’s where the war became most intense; it’s where policymakers focused much of their attention; it’s where the policy most obviously went wrong. The world needs to understand what happened and draw lessons from this debacle—and the only way of reaching those conclusions is by visceral immersion. You must get down in the dust and shit. I spent a lot of days smelling the death, getting sunburns. The charred flesh of suicide bombers got stuck in the treads of my shoes. I was shot at, bombed, rocketed, mortared, chased through narrow streets. I took photographs, recorded audio, filled a suitcase with leather-bound notebooks. I filed the material into folders on my computer, and later took a leave of absence from my job so I could sit quietly and let the echoes settle. I tried to pick out scenes and bits of dialogue that might help you understand. This was a healthy process. The nightmares faded, and I stopped obsessing about the tactical properties of every room. Eventually I could attend a fireworks show without feeling nauseous. My anxiety eased, not only because I spent time away from the battlefields but also because this writing project left me feeling less burdened. I could stop giving angry speeches about the war as I distilled my experience into these pages.

Looking back on my time in Kandahar, trying to make sense of it, I often think about a meandering conversation I had while researching the holiest object in the south: the Prophet’s Cloak. Outsiders often wondered why the insurgents fought so fiercely for Kandahar, why a ramshackle city of maybe half a million people was considered the spiritual heart of the country. Part of the answer is locked in a silver box, itself nested inside two wooden chests, hidden from public view inside a sealed shrine in the middle of the city. It’s a cloak, reputedly presented by God to the Prophet Mohammed. The founder of Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Durrani, took the cloak during one of his sweeps through Central Asia and brought it back to what was then his capital city, Kandahar, in 1768.

The cloak played a central role in Afghanistan’s history, and continues to hold symbolic power, but getting a clear description of the cloth itself proved incredibly hard. Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, is among the few politicians who has removed the cloak from its box, brandishing the cloth in front of his followers in 1996, but few people involved in that ceremony remained in Kandahar, or wanted to talk about it. The only person I could find who had touched the cloak was Mullah Masood Akhundzada, who inherited the duty of protecting the sacred object from a line of ancestors who have guarded the ornate blue-tiled shrine for more than two centuries. Known officially as Keeper of the Cloak, the solemn young man was only in his thirties but already had grey in his beard. I asked him: How big is the cloak? “Large,” he said. Bigger than your outstretched arms? “It changes shape.” He claimed that the cloak was woven from the hair of the “Camels of Paradise,” and did not have any seams. “It’s hard to describe,” he said. “It’s very soft, like silk. You cannot say what colour it is, because many people see different colours.”

By the time of my conversation with the Keeper of the Cloak, I’d spent enough years in Kandahar to feel that his answers were appropriate for such an inscrutable part of the world. Of course the holiest object in this land would be described to an outsider as shapeless, seamless and colourless. It was something that must be witnessed first-hand, like so much of Kandahar. The same thing applies to the war itself. I have no clear policy recommendations, no succinct lessons about the conduct of foreign interventions. I have only these memories, shapeless and seamless. It’s something you must see for yourself.

Highway 1 to Kandahar

A grim lineup waited for the flight to Kabul. The passengers were short, dark men with fake leather jackets and broken noses, and many could have used a shower. I’d never seen such a bedraggled crowd in an airport; the plane itself looked like a survivor, too, as if the aircraft had been roughed up by thugs. My seat cushion slipped from its frame, and something dripped from the air vents. I would later recognize this as typical scenery aboard Ariana, the national airline of Afghanistan. I tried to ignore it, and focus on my reading.

My editors at
The Globe and Mail
had assigned me to cover the 2005 parliamentary elections, and like many correspondents who drop into the country for quick visits, I clutched a stack of printouts in hopes of cramming the story into my brain. My reading materials from that day reveal the naïveté of the international community in the early years of the war. Nobody wrote much about the Taliban at that point, dismissing them as a broken movement, reduced to small bands of gunmen scattered in the mountains. Instead, my sheaf of reports focused on the foreigners’ optimistic vision of a new Afghanistan. The lead sentence of a
Washington Post
feature declared that “the country is gearing up enthusiastically for a massive exercise in postwar democracy.” A United Nations map showed how millions of refugees were streaming back across the border, returning home
after decades of civil war. I’d even found a paper titled “Safeguarding Afghanistan’s Audio-Visual Heritage,” in which the Ministry of Information and Culture declared an “urgent” need to scan digital copies of government archives as part of the effort to build a new, efficient, modern bureaucracy in Kabul.