The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan Read online

  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

  CHAPTER 1

  THE ROAD TO KANDAHAR SEPTEMBER 2005

  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.

  It’s painful to read those papers now, years later. They capture a moment in history when foreigners and Afghan-born expatriates crowded into Kabul to build a democracy. In those initial years after the United States and its allies expelled the Taliban from the capital in 2001, a dream blossomed. It was the fervent hope that one of the world’s poorest countries, savaged by a generation of war, might flourish with a heavy dose of foreign assistance. Once upon a time in Afghanistan, it wasn’t crazy to say that one of Kabul’s top priorities should be digital recordkeeping.

  At the time, most critics said the international effort should be bigger and tougher. There was a widespread feeling that the Iraq War had distracted the United States, leaving Afghanistan without enough troops to enforce the central government’s rule. Nobody believed that remnants of the former Taliban regime could fill the power vacuum in the countryside; instead, most attention focused on the warlords who had helped US forces defeat the Taliban. “Warlords, militias, and brigands dominate the entire country,” declared the most sharply written paper in my stack of readings, a report by Human Rights Watch. Like many others, the advocacy group claimed that the lawless zones needed to be filled with foreign troops. Under the heading, “Wanted: Peacekeepers,” the report said that villagers would welcome a major deployment of forces in the rural countryside. “Afghans outside Kabul have been clamoring for two years to share in the benefits of international security assistance.” That statement seemed logical. Why wouldn’t villagers want the same advantages enjoyed in the capital?

  I paused my reading to squint out a window for my first look at Afghanistan. The descent into Kabul was steep because of concerns about surface-to-air missiles, and while no passenger aircraft had been shot down in recent history, the pilots were taking no chances. We stayed low over the mountains, close enough to see the texture of the white snowcaps, then swept across a rocky landscape rich with colours: rust, grey, orange, pink, sage green and endless shades of brown. I had pictured Afghanistan as a moonscape of rocks and dust, so it was surprising to see that farmers had carved terraces into the mountain slopes and that trees dotted the crests. Lush fields surrounded the rivers. There was a beautiful moment as we hurtled toward the runway, when I could see an expanse of farmland on the outskirts of Kabul and mountains rising into the hazy distance. I climbed down from the plane feeling confident that my in-flight readings had given me a handle on the story. Th
is was a country recovering from war. Foreigners were helping, but they needed more troops. It was wonderfully simple.

  A soft-spoken young man, the cousin of a colleague’s acquaintance, met me at the airport and took me to the Mustafa Hotel, a busy place in those days before suicide bombs scared off most of the customers. The bartender showed me the tattoo on his neck, a dotted line with the words Cut Here, a reference to the videos of beheadings we had all seen on the Internet. He proudly pointed to the bullet holes that decorated his establishment. Kabul seemed like a Wild West outpost from a boy’s imagination, a chaotic town at the edge of the world. A flak jacket was waiting for me at the hotel, and after I tore open the courier package I snapped a photo of myself—looking like a real war correspondent, I thought—standing in a snowdrift of foam packing. I seem excessively clean in that photograph: other journalists had advised me to get scruffy, grow a beard so I could blend in among Afghans, but on that first visit I wasn’t fooling anybody. My translator told me not to worry: foreigners in Kabul didn’t require disguises in those days, and certainly no flak jackets. It was safe to walk around in jeans and a T-shirt.

  Not that the city was entirely calm. The next day, I visited the headquarters of the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC), which had responsibility for the most controversial part of the upcoming vote: deciding which candidates to disqualify because they refused to give up their private armies. This was a difficult task, because many of the candidates were notoriously violent characters, and the United Nations established the ECC only four months before voting day. The staff looked at thousands of complaints and disqualified a small number of low-profile candidates, but didn’t touch the big players. The head of the commission, a veteran United Nations consultant named Grant Kippen, cheerfully admitted that he didn’t have enough resources, but said the electoral process was going ahead smoothly under the circumstances. He invited me into his courtyard for a lunch of rice, chicken and diet soda. Relaxing under parasols beside flowering bushes, it was easy to think that this white-haired diplomat had the situation under control. Mr. Kippen, a dignified man in a pressed shirt and dress pants, described the election as part of the broader effort to make the Kabul government the only legitimate authority in the country. Yes, he said, many of the candidates stood accused of horrible crimes—election posters and billboards advertised newly minted politicians who had killed hundreds of people in civil wars—but the international community seemed ready to accept these militia leaders into government in hopes of disarming them and making them part of the system. Afghanistan was making a transition from a patchwork of fiefdoms where strongmen hold sway, Mr. Kippen said, into a country where rule of law applies in the whole territory.

  As he spoke, however, the rule of law appeared to be fraying in the streets, and his words were drowned out by shouts as somebody screamed into a loudspeaker. A crowd was chanting Allahu Akbar, God is great, and uniformed Afghan police clomped around the metal roofs of the ECC buildings. The officers yelled from the rooftops and pointed their guns down at the crowd, while Mr. Kippen squinted up at the wall bristling with barbed wire that separated him from the protesters, as if calculating the odds of a protester—or maybe a hand grenade—coming over the top. A well-muscled security advisor with a flat-topped haircut approached our table.

  “So how many unhappy candidates do we have outside?” Mr. Kippen asked. “Two?”

  “No, three,” said the advisor with a German accent, adding: “I’m just glad I know where the American military rations are hidden in the basement.”

  The commission staff was kept inside for their own safety, but I went outside to see the protesters. They were supporters of disqualified candidates, minor figures but still capable of raising a ruckus. Pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles jammed the downtown street, honking. A throng of men pushed down the dirt alley that led to the ECC’s entry gate, resisted by a swarm of police and plainclothes Afghan security agents. Officers formed a human chain across the alley, linking arms and trying to hold the mob, as women and children peeked from behind the curtains of nearby houses. I wriggled my way toward a man who was obviously leading the protest, a big guy with a salt-and-pepper beard who was sweating and screaming at police officers. The argument grew more heated until they were physically tussling, with officers grabbing the man’s white robes and holding his arms. I thought he was being arrested until they abruptly released him and he retreated to the main road, still shouting, and his supporters dispersed.

  Walking away from the fracas, he mopped his brow with a handkerchief and introduced himself to me. He said that he was trying to make the authorities understand that election officials had wrongly disqualified his brother. Like so many other candidates, the man’s brother had been a militia leader who fought against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, but claimed to have given up his weapons to comply with the election rules. That probably wasn’t true, as most strongmen kept their gun stashes, but his brother complained with justification that bigger militia leaders were allowed to remain on the ballot. “They robbed people’s homes, they killed lots of people. And they’re still on the lists. How can that be?” he said, before climbing into a pickup truck and roaring away.

  Mr. Kippen’s local Afghan staff was reluctant to translate what the protesters had been chanting, until they finally admitted that one of the slogans was “Death to Grant Kippen.” But he saw the protest as proof that the ECC was doing its job, removing disruptive figures from the election. For me, the lesson was more visceral. Inside the walls of Kabul’s institutions, among the rose bushes and trim lawns, it was easy to imagine a functioning state. Outside, where the police sweated through their uniforms and struggled to keep control, state-building looked more difficult.

  I wanted to get out of Kabul and see the country. Nobody knows what percentage of Afghans live in cities because the last census, in 1979, was never finished, but it’s a fair guess that most of the population is rural. The capital city did not represent Afghanistan, with foreigners crammed into the downtown, blocking traffic with their sport-utility vehicles, doing business inside sandbag fortifications and drinking at bars with no admittance for Afghans. There was talk about an upcoming surge of NATO forces into the south, so I planned to go that way. I stayed up late writing a story, and fell asleep in my clothes for a couple of hours before my translator woke me in the dimness before dawn. He wanted to get an early start because Highway 1 was considered safe in the daylight but he worried about robbers after sunset. I struggled to the car in the same blue linen shirt I’d been wearing for two days. That shirt clearly marked me as a foreigner, and is a detail of the story that surprises people working in Afghanistan these days. In the following years it became unthinkably dangerous for a foreigner to drive from Kabul to Kandahar, much less wearing Western clothing and taking snapshots with a big Nikon.

  A wave of nostalgia hits me now, looking at my photographs from that road trip. We sailed along fresh asphalt, one of the foreigners’ biggest gifts to the country, an artery between major cities paved smooth at a cost of hundreds of millions. The road stretched down out of the jagged foothills of the Hindu Kush and into the scrublands of the south. As the land became flatter, and the air hotter, my translator turned around in the front seat with a big grin. “Now you are seeing the real Afghanistan,” he said, gesturing at a vast tract of nothing. He wasn’t talking about the landscape, of course; he was expressing the feelings of many Pashtuns, that their homelands in the south and east somehow represent a more authentic side of Afghanistan. Members of the biggest ethnic group in the country sometimes even refer to this zone with a different name—Pashtunistan—and many feel patriotic about this country that does not exist. Our driver said the journey to Kandahar had previously required twice as much time, a bruising ordeal along rutted tracks, and he seemed pleased that international aid had cut the drive to an easy five or six hours. (In the following years, blast craters and checkpoints pushed the travel time back up, to ten or eleven hou
rs.)

  My translator didn’t seem worried about drawing attention to ourselves as I dangled my camera out the window, although as we reached the outskirts of Kandahar city he suggested that I slip into local clothing. My clumsy fingers made a mess of the traditional cloth belt, so my pants kept falling down. I insisted on wearing my leather hiking boots, which spoiled the disguise, but nobody seemed to mind the presence of such a strange foreigner. My photo archive from those days show I was free to roam around the south without fear, pausing to watch grinning boys leap into a canal, and spray each other with water hoses at a gas station. Further southeast, in the border district of Spin Boldak, I spent a full two hours walking the streets and taking pictures for a story about the disputed border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Wandering that town without protection would later become a serious risk for foreigners, but in 2005 what drove me onward was not fear but, surprisingly, boredom.

  In fact, most of the stories I researched on that trip seem unimportant in retrospect. I wrote about the struggles of an aspiring local filmmaker, photographed soldiers giving plastic jewelry to girls and earnestly reported the pronouncement of a top Canadian commander who claimed the insurgency could be defeated within two years. Nobody talked about the armed opponents of the government as a serious obstacle. Military officials preferred to discuss their plans for boys’ soccer camps, or girls’ essay contests. I initially slept within the secure confines of a military base on the northeast side of Kandahar city but eventually moved into a guesthouse. It was the sort of place where I could stroll out the front gates and bump into colleagues at a nearby restaurant, or browse the carpets for sale at a downtown shop. Catering to foreign visitors, the shops displayed carpets with American flags and woven scenes of planes hitting the twin towers. The only security advice from my translator was, “Mr. Graeme, please do not walk the streets at night.”