The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2013 Graeme Smith

  Photos copyright ©2013 Graeme Smith

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2013 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Some material for this book first appeared in a different form in The Globe and Mail, and has been adapted with permission from The Globe and Mail Inc.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Smith, Graeme, 1979–

  The dogs are eating them now : our war in Afghanistan / Graeme Smith.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36689-4

  1. Afghan War, 2001– —Social aspects. 2. Taliban. 3. Insurgency—Afghanistan—History—21st century. 4. Afghanistan—Social conditions—21st century. 5. Afghan War, 2001– —Personal narratives, Canadian. 6. War correspondents—Afghanistan—Biography. 7. War correspondents—Canada—Biography. I. Title.

  DS371.413.S65 2013 958.104’7 C2013-901677-5

  Maps by Sean Tai

  Cover design by Andrew Roberts

  Cover, text, and endpaper images: Courtesy of the author

  v3.1

  FOR MY SISTER

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Maps

  INTRODUCTION: The Prophet’s Cloak

  CHAPTER 1: The Road to Kandahar SEPTEMBER 2005

  CHAPTER 2: The Surge APRIL 2006

  CHAPTER 3: Optimism JUNE 2006

  CHAPTER 4: Medusa AUGUST 2006

  CHAPTER 5: Medusa’s Aftermath SEPTEMBER 2006

  CHAPTER 6: Quetta NOVEMBER 2006

  CHAPTER 7: Masked Men FEBRUARY 2007

  CHAPTER 8: Detainees APRIL 2007

  CHAPTER 9: Fighting Season MAY 2007

  CHAPTER 10: The Karzai Regime SEPTEMBER 2007

  CHAPTER 11: Death of a Warlord OCTOBER 2007

  CHAPTER 12: Lessons from the Taliban Survey MARCH 2008

  CHAPTER 13: Jailbreak JUNE 2008

  CHAPTER 14: At the Gates of Kabul SEPTEMBER 2008

  CHAPTER 15: A Toxic Triangle FEBRUARY 2009

  CHAPTER 16: Another Surge JUNE 2011

  AFTERWORD: JANUARY 2013

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  THE PROPHET’S CLOAK

  We lost the war in southern Afghanistan and it broke my heart. When I started following the surges of troops into Kandahar and surrounding provinces in 2005, I felt excited by the idea that the international community could bring the whole basket of civilization to the south: peace, democracy, rule of law, all those things. Now the foreign troops are withdrawing. We have abandoned our lofty goals. Now it’s all about damage control, about exercising options that limit embarrassment. The years when our armies pounded their way into the south will be remembered for heights of violence that exceeded the gruesome body count of the Taliban wars in the 1990s. Every wave of foreign troops coincided with more skirmishes, more assassinations, more bloodshed. Our attempts to set up a moderate Afghan administration gave birth to a regime that resembled neither a fully democratic government nor a group capable of ruling its entire territory. It failed the basic test of statehood: monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Ordinary people turned to Taliban courts in search of justice less corrupt than the system imposed by outsiders. The insurgents were not defeated. We killed thousands of them, but their movement would not die.

  It’s not just that the foreigners gave up on dreams of a better future for southern Afghanistan, but that we’re leaving a dangerous mess. Like the old bombs and landmines buried all over the stricken landscape, the south is now waiting to explode. Many expect another civil war; others fear anarchy.

  This moment when we hold our breath, watching anxiously as the foreign troops pull back, should serve as a time of reflection about our mistakes. Far away from the air-conditioned headquarters where the foreigners made their plans, all of the good intentions collided with reality. The result was tragic, and comic, and should be studied carefully. As this phase of the war lurches to a bitter conclusion, we might also pause to lament.

  That kind of self-reflection is not likely to happen inside the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, because NATO claims victory. The greatest military alliance in human history will probably fail to think clearly about the biggest action it has ever attempted outside its own territory. It will say, accurately, that its soldiers fought bravely. Glossy brochures will get filled with images of aid projects. Photographs of smiling children in the green valleys of the north will misrepresent NATO’s legacy, however, as long as violence rages in the dusty south. The historical fact is that nobody has ever ruled Afghanistan without holding Kandahar, the largest city in the southern region. This vital part of the country remains an open wound, needing somehow to get stitched up.

  But what kind of surgery can repair a country? Our modern techniques resemble the early days of medicine, when the human body was poorly understood and doctors prescribed bloodletting, or drilled into skulls to treat madness. With the same ignorant faith in our methods, we now invade a country with crushing force and try to drain away ideas that we find dangerous, as if bombs and bullets could cure the illness of extremism. Not all intervention is misguided, of course; I was standing in Benghazi when the tanks of Colonel Moammar Gadhafi rolled toward us in the spring of 2011, and I’ve never felt so relieved to hear that NATO decided to take action. The Libyan war may yet emerge as a success story for the nascent science of healing sick countries with military force. Afghanistan looks like the opposite case: the patient may survive, but the doctor wasn’t much help.

  I wasn’t always so skeptical about the effort. A different metaphor lured me into war: an idea that gave me real enthusiasm about the Afghan mission. Somebody told me a story of ancient mapmakers who struggled with the blank spaces on their vellum charts, the emptiness of places never visited by cartographers. They drew monsters at the edges of the known world, inventing fables about lions, serpents and basilisks that might devour an unwary traveller. “Here be dragons” read the most famous inscription. I can’t remember the name of the soldier who told me this, but his words remain clear: “The thing about modern civilization,” he said, “is that we can’t stand those empty spots. The dragons fly out and bite you in the ass.”

  These blank spaces were what attracted me to southern Afghanistan. Once upon a time, the theory goes, it didn’t matter if a state failed. Whole empires collapsed without affecting countries on the other side of the planet. Now the world is looped and threaded with shipping routes, flight paths, optical fibres across the sea floor. The fabric of civilization cannot tolerate frayed edges. You cannot leave a blank space like Afghanistan of the 1990s, ruled by zealots and neglected by the international community. You cannot scribble “Here be dragons” and walk away. The country gets infested by terrorists. Hijacked planes come streaking out of the sky. The dragons bite you in the ass.

  I was vulnerable to that kind of grand vision, only twenty-six years old when I started covering Afghanistan as a newspaper correspondent, part of a generation of journalists whose car
eers started after September 11, 2001. I had visited many countries but always felt disappointed that none of them seemed foreign; there was always a Starbucks or a McDonald’s around the corner. Afghanistan was excitingly different, a place where credit cards and calendars meant almost nothing. In the years after 2001, the country became a bustling hub for spies, aid workers and other ambitious expats. They appeared to be involved in something important, and during my first swoon of interest in the country I started to believe they were mending the tapestry of our globalized society; I hoped that their projects would draw the world toward a basic system of law and order. After the fourth or fifth round at a bar in Kabul, foreigners would make bets on which trouble spots we would tackle next. We took it for granted that modern ideas about health, education and agriculture could lift any society out of poverty. We assumed that those efforts could be protected against any threat by our glorious armies, the most sophisticated forces ever fielded. Any foreign journalist who claimed to be a dispassionate observer was kidding himself. The project involved “us,” in the broadest sense. As reporters, we may have used the third person in our text, but in conversation we slipped easily into a collective “we” that included the whole panoply of foreigners.

  More than forty countries contributed forces, and people from dozens of other countries were part of the civilian reconstruction effort. They talked enthusiastically about the latest theories on counter-insurgency and social development. This was not Vietnam; these were not grunts thrashing in the jungle. We had professionals. They mapped every inch of terrain with satellite guidance, turning badlands into databases with the precise location of battles, rumours, the names of leaders today and a thousand years ago. The officers read all the important books about Afghanistan and took notes in ruggedized laptops. When they squinted out at the mountains and valleys, they looked with electronic eyes. They watched feeds from robot planes drifting overhead, whose cameras panned smoothly even as the landscape below erupted with explosions. They swore constantly. They shit in bags and drank water the temperature of warm urine. But for all the hardships they rarely had reason to question their own supremacy. They smashed Taliban bases every day, while the opposite almost never happened. Most of the time, our guys went out and kicked ass, ticking the boxes on their mission objectives.

  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.