The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan (23 page)

Canada should not withdraw its soldiers as scheduled in 2009, he told us, because his government was not yet capable of defending itself. Famous for his dramatic flourishes, the president made his arguments in stark terms. “Afghanistan will fall back into anarchy, anarchy will bring back safe havens to terrorists, among other things, and terrorists will then hurt you back there in Canada and the United States,” Karzai said. “Simple as that.” He avoided the word
insurgents
, and railed against
terrorists
. He was, in effect, portraying his country as a bulwark against evil.

Karzai’s plea for extra troop commitments would reverse itself in the following years, as he started to argue that the Afghan security
forces were ready to assume responsibility for the country when foreign troops depart. But one part of his speech remained consistent: the president did not significantly change his position on negotiations. Then, as now, he says that he’s willing to negotiate with the Taliban, but only if the insurgents accept the existing constitution and rules of the political game. When asked if he would consider sharing power with insurgent factions, he scowled:

Simple. Why did he keep using that word? Because he wanted the foreigners to see a polarized conflict: democracy versus terrorism, good versus evil. It smelled wrong. Karzai’s stand in favour of the constitution sounded noble, except that the constitution concentrated power in the hands of the president. His invitation to his enemies to join elections rang hollow, given the allegations of massive fraud in the electoral process. His claim that Afghanistan “belongs to all” overlooked the fact that his relatively modern views often rankled the conservative villagers. Most people in the country lived outside the cities, and many village men did not allow their wives and daughters to show their faces outside the house, which made the 2004 constitution that enshrined the female right to vote a radically progressive document. That same constitution also mandated a higher percentage of female parliamentarians in Kabul than existed in the equivalent assemblies of Britain, Canada and the United States. It’s hard
to imagine that the villagers saw the government as something that “belongs to us all.” It’s also difficult to see how this model of government could be imposed on Afghanistan with anything less than crushing force.

Karzai’s opponents were not so inflexible. Shortly before our interview with the president, a Pakistani journalist who worked with me as a translator had submitted a list of questions to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of an insurgent faction in eastern Afghanistan. Three days after receiving the questions, the warlord sent back a computer disc with his video-recorded answers. His staff showed off their technical capabilities by offering the video in low- and high-resolution formats, even including a transcript for easy reference. The old militia commander wore a neatly pressed suit jacket, looking rather professional for a leader whose gunmen beheaded their enemies. The substance of his reply was also surprisingly nuanced, as he offered his suggestion for ending the war:

There were plenty of reasons to be skeptical about Hekmatyar. He did not speak for the Taliban leadership, as he ran his own insurgent group, and he was probably toning down his language for the sake of
appealing to a foreign audience. But his statement fit with the general trend of Taliban demands, which usually focused on political aims inside Afghanistan, without straying into the realm of global jihad. Their central demand, a troop withdrawal, could have plunged the country into civil war if implemented too abruptly, but in the long term it was a goal shared by the international forces. Perhaps most importantly, the insurgents seemed ready to talk about everything, including the basic rules of political engagement in Kabul. By refusing to discuss the constitution, Karzai was taking a strong position on negotiations. This did not help to quell the conflict, however; it was another case of the government being “too strong.”

Not that it mattered, at the time. Neither the insurgents nor Kabul seemed genuinely enthusiastic about peace talks, and sometimes it was hard to tell which side was being more stubborn about the process. Cynicism pervaded the talk about negotiations: on a flight from Kandahar to Kabul I sat beside an officer from Afghanistan’s intelligence service, and from the moment we buckled up to the time we stepped off the plane, he grilled me about the foreigners’ true intentions. He wondered if the US–NATO strategy was to prolong the war as a means of cementing positions at Afghan airfields within range of Iran and China. The insurgents had similar conspiracy theories, worrying that the international troops wanted to stay forever.

Even the smallest efforts at détente ran into problems. In December 2006, a delegation of elders from villages southwest of Kandahar city visited the palace of the provincial governor. They were a group of serious men with an offer that seemed sincere: withdraw the military outpost from Sperwan Ghar, the hill overlooking their houses, and they would keep the Taliban away themselves. They felt capable of delivering on this promise because they had already raised the idea with Mullah Mohammed Mansoor, a former minister in the Taliban regime who had since become a major insurgent commander. It’s easy to see why the NATO forces would have been reluctant to give up their hilltop outpost, a commanding piece of high ground from
which an artillery gun could hit almost any part of the rebellious Panjwai valley. But the foreign troops might also have been tempted by the idea of bringing some calm to a district that has suffered so much. As it turned out, NATO never got a chance to talk with the elders about their proposal: Kandahar’s provincial council rejected the idea, in another misplaced show of strength.

One wet morning in January 2008, I drove to the one village in southern Afghanistan where the government’s strength should have been most appreciated. It was a short trip, five kilometres south of Kandahar, but the situation had grown so bad that it was a considerable risk. In better times, after the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001 and 2002, many journalists had visited this particular village. It was only a cluster of mud huts, but the name on the map indicated its importance in the new regime: Karz. The president’s hometown is where correspondents stopped, in the early years, for a quick story about ordinary people cheering the new leader. In those initial stories, Karzai’s tribesmen crowded around the television cameras and described their wish lists for their village: a school, paved roads, maybe a soccer team. In fact, some of those things had been achieved by the time I arrived. The new regime had paved the main road and re-opened a school that had been closed by the Taliban. Children scrambled over new playground equipment as workers carried bricks for classrooms under construction. It was a hopeful scene, nothing like the neglected places I had visited in the rest of the province. But the people themselves did not speak optimistically about their country. The school’s deputy director decorated his office wall with two large portraits of Karzai, whom he described fondly as a former classmate. Despite that personal connection, he couldn’t bring himself to say anything nice about the president. The economy had improved in recent years, he said, “but the economy is mostly for rich people.”

His biggest concern, though, was security. The fighting that ripped through the south rarely touched Karz directly, but the villagers were
now outnumbered by families that had fled the violence west of the city and sought refuge in relatives’ homes and temporary camps. Many of the displaced people had lived in makeshift shelters for more than a year, refusing to go home as the bombing and artillery strikes increased. “The fighting gets worse and worse,” the schoolmaster said. “Under the Taliban we had better security, no corruption, no stealing, no murders.” He tried to make apologies for the president he knew in boyhood, saying these failures were not all the fault of Karzai, but a teacher who had been listening to our conversation interjected with a sharp contradiction. The schoolmaster’s bare office echoed with their argument; my translator whispered that the teacher was asking his boss to tell the truth. Finally the school director slumped back in his chair, defeated, and allowed his teacher the last word. The white-haired instructor faced me and picked a few words to summarize the Karzai regime.

“It’s corrupt,” he said. “Morally and economically.”

On rare occasions, the foreign troops managed to protect people in the south from their own government. In the Panjwai valley, the gunner of an armoured vehicle became a local hero for using cannon fire to scare off a group of police who had been harassing villagers. For the most part, however, people took affairs into their own hands. The assassination of Ahmed Wali Karzai was the most prominent example of a trend that grew every year during my time in the south, a rising tide of killings among prominent citizens. Sometimes the deaths were private matters, old feuds settled violently. More often, the killings fit a pattern. The Taliban’s enemies, and potential enemies, were being eliminated one at a time. We were about to feel the heavy significance of those assassinations.

Flare in a downward spiral

A Canadian battle group commander walked into the media tent at Kandahar Air Field one morning. It was unusual for a high-ranking officer to step into our den, which stank of unwashed flak jackets. I tried to get up and shake his hand, but it turned into a clumsy spectacle as I struggled out of my canvas recliner and got tangled in a headphone cord. The grey-haired commander waited until I composed myself, then asked: “Do you have a phone number for Habibullah Jan?” Of course I had his number, and numbers for two of his sons; staying in touch with the old warlord was essential for any journalist covering the districts west of Kandahar city. Habibullah Jan was part of a generation of hard-bitten former mujahedeen commanders, men who rose to power as brave warriors against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s and then squandered their reputations in a civil war amongst themselves. The Taliban drove them away in 1994, but they returned and flourished under the new regime, reincarnated as police chiefs, security contractors or implementing partners for development aid. In the case of Habibullah Jan, he had gotten himself elected to parliament in Kabul, a job he subsequently ignored in favour of supervising his private army in Kandahar. He also assisted foreign troops with the planning of Operation Medusa, and collected tokens of appreciation like certificates and plaques from senior
military leaders. I was a little surprised that the Canadian commander didn’t already have his contact details. The officer noticed my confusion as he was scribbling down the numbers, and explained: “This guy is a pain in the ass. I’m thinking about killing him.” He snapped shut his notebook and walked out, leaving me wondering if he was joking or if I’d just inadvertently put the old warlord’s life in danger.

As it turned out, international forces did not kill Habibullah Jan. He died much later in a Taliban-style ambush. The uncertainty over his allegiances, however, as well as the larger ambiguity about who qualified as NATO’s friend or enemy, reflected the strange relationship between the foreigners and the warlords. The military labelled many of them as “white”: a third category on the battlefield, neither “red” enemies nor “blue” allies. One intelligence officer told me this category was often ignored by his colleagues, who did not see the relevance of studying figures who weren’t directly taking sides. Foreign diplomats also tended to dismiss the ex-mujahedeen as a bunch of rogues who needed to be shepherded into the new government system. Fear of their local fiefdoms had encouraged the post-2001 planners to give Afghanistan one of the most centralized systems of government in the world. You were either “with us, or against us.” Politics was not so binary in the south, however, making it hard to define who was “with us.” A thug who executes contracts for the military in the daytime and executes prisoners at night: Is he an ally? What about the drug dealer who keeps the peace in his district, but quietly does business with the Taliban?