Sword of the Caliphate

by Clay Martin

  Speaking through Daoud, Kyle asked the farmer what the poppy harvest was worth. The farmer looked at him with glistening dark eyes and barked out a number. About $5,000, Daoud said, the family’s annual income.

  “Why do you grow the poppies?” Kyle asked.

  The farmer shrugged. “Why does anyone grow anything?”

  “Why don’t you grow wheat?” Kyle asked, which was what the Afghan government said it wanted the poppy farmers to do, mostly at the insistence of the US and other foreign militaries occupying Afghanistan.

  “Wheat takes too much water,” the farmer said, shaking his head slowly. “And, there is no money in it.”

  They turned back to the tractor, which had lowered a steel frame fitted with multiple plow heads onto the ground at the edge of the field. The engine revved and the knobby back tires of the tractor rolled forward, the plows biting deep into the damp soil, uprooting the green and flowering poppies, turning them under.

  Kennard had trotted ahead of the tractor to photograph it, capturing shots of the oncoming tractor with from within the midst of the poppy stalks. He’d then held up his hand for the tractor driver to stop. Kennard climbed behind the driver and motioned for him to continue as he grabbed his Nikon D-5 for video. The tractor driver shifted gears, the engine revved, and the tractor resumed its slow grind through the field.

  Sounding like rocks striking the hard mud plaster, bullets smacked the farmhouse walls, followed by a staccato crackle of automatic gunfire. Kyle instinctively ducked and turned to find the source of the shots: an irrigation ditch skirting this and other poppy fields.

  The Afghan farmer flinched, and with his sons disappeared through the blue painted doorway and into the mudbrick house. The lethargic Afghan soldiers and remaining police leapt from their trucks and knelt near the house, returning fire.

  Kyle shouted at Kennard, who’d not heard the shots over the growling tractor engine, his eyes mashed against the viewfinder, his left hand gripping the lens. Kyle and Daoud scrambled to take cover behind a green pickup.

  Moments later, a half dozen of the Afghan police humped along the edge of the field toward the source of the shooting, clutching their weapons. At the edge of the field, some paused to shoot, laying down a barrage of protective fire, and were followed by a cluster of other policemen, who advanced keeping low, then crouched and fired, holding the attackers at bay.

  The movement had drawn Kennard’s attention. He flicked off his video camera, stuffed it into his camera bag, and leapt from the tractor to the freshly plowed earth, tumbling to the ground. Kennard scrambled to his feet and stumbled from the field to join Kyle behind the pickup truck.

  Kennard was panting. “What the fuck?”

  “Someone doesn’t like the government tearing up poppy fields,” Kyle said.

  “Taliban,” Daoud said, then pointed over the bed of the truck to where figures with dark turbans near the river were shooting at the on-coming police and soldiers.

  “I’m going after them,” Kennard said, his eyes wide.

  “You got what you need,” Kyle said. “This story isn’t worth taking a bullet, Nate.”

  But Kennard was already gone, sprinting after the assaulting force, bent low, his camera in hand, the strap wrapped around his forearm. “Shit,” Kyle muttered, and drew a deep breath. He turned to Daoud, nodded, and said, “let’s go.” They humped along the edge of the field, following Kennard.

  Flashes sparked from the barrels of AK-47s at the far edge of the poppy field, forcing Kyle, Daoud, and Kennard to dive to the dirt. Breathing heavily, sweat dripping down Kyle’s forehead, he waited until the firing paused. Then nodding to each other, the three scrambled to their feet and joined the police, who’d taken cover behind the remains of a washed away mudbrick wall that paralleled the irrigation ditch.

  The shooting stopped. After a few moments, Kyle lifted his head. What looked to be Taliban fighters, men dressed much like the farmer and wearing turbans, were beating a retreat, the Afghan police firing after them. But the attackers weren’t done yet. They scrambled into the weathered ruins of another old farmhouse, nothing more than a square of low and weathered mudbrick walls, and returned fire, forcing Kyle, Daoud, and Kennard again behind the wall.

  The air popped and snapped with automatic fire from the police AKs, then stopped again, leaving Kyle’s ears ringing. He was tempted to glimpse over the wall again, but didn’t, knowing his skull would be a target.

  An Afghan policeman trotted up from behind carrying an old Russian-style rocket propelled grenade launcher, generating a burst of excitement among the Afghans, who shouted and pointed to the mudbrick walls about fifty yards away where the Taliban fighters hid. Kneeling behind the protective wall, the policeman lifted the RPG to his shoulder, took aim, and with a ferocious whoosh, the missile-shaped grenade shot out, trailed by a spiral of white smoke, then exploded into the low mud wall protecting the Taliban, reducing it to dust and dirt.

  The policemen cheered, thinking it was a direct hit. For a long moment, silence. Kyle waited as a warm breeze blew and looked at what remained of the waving, chest-high stalks of flowering poppies in the adjacent fields. Poppies were tough and resilient, he mused, like the people who cultivated and harvested them. Gunfire suddenly erupted from the Taliban position, the air popping once more, forcing the Afghan police and army to hunker down.

  After a couple of minutes of silence, Kyle peeked over the wall. The Taliban shooters were fleeing, having made their statement against the Afghan national forces.

  As Kennard followed the Afghan forces firing at the fleeing Taliban, Kyle looked back at the poppy field. The tractor had continued to plow the field, undeterred by the shooting, where the dark, freshly turned soil contrasted with the pale dirt and dust of the sun-dried land surrounding it. With just a few stalks still standing, waving defiantly in the breeze, destruction of the poppies was over. Ten minutes later the soldiers and police returned and stated the obvious: Taliban had fled.

  Back at the house, the farmer wrung his hands, his eyes wet with tears as he viewed his mangled poppy crop, his livelihood and life destroyed. The plows now raised, the tractor chugged out of the field and back onto the low trailer.

  Kyle tugged on Daoud’s sleeve and nodded toward the police chief, a man with stripped epaulettes on his shoulders. Daoud called out to the chief, a thick-bodied man with no neck, shaved and rounded cheeks, and a thick, black mustache. Hands on hips, the chief narrowed his dark eyes.

  “Why was this field targeted and not the others we passed?” Kyle asked.

  The chief lifted his gray cap from his head and ran a meaty hand over his thick black hair. “I am not the one who makes that decision. You need to talk to the governor’s office.”

  Eradication was supposed to push the farmers away from the poppies. Instead, it drove them into the arms of the Taliban, who controlled much of the opium trade. Farmers like the one whose field had been destroyed, Daoud explained on the return trip, got loans from the Taliban to grow the poppies and were obligated to sell the raw opium paste to the Taliban. In return, the Taliban protected them. Opium was their financial lifeblood.

  “What will happen to this farmer if he’s obligated to sell his opium to the Taliban?” Kyle asked. “Won’t they kill him?”

  The chief shrugged. “It is a risk that farmers must take if they make deals with the Taliban.”

  Later, back at the hotel inside the governor’s compound, Kyle, Kennard, and Daoud sat on the stone steps in the cool of the evening. Daoud said the farmer’s field had been selected because he was being punished. He was probably a relative of the local Taliban commander. Plowing the poppies sent a message to the Taliban: we know who you are and where you and your relatives live.

  “The police know who’s growing and buying the opium?” Kyle asked.

  Daoud smiled and nodded, embarrassed at the truth. “Everyone makes
money from the opium. The government, the police, the army. And, of course, the Taliban.”

  “So everyone is in on the opium trade?”

  Daoud nodded. “It’s the only export Afghanistan has.” He took a pack of cigarettes from the folds of his shalwar chamise, tapped out a cigarette, and lit it with a gas lighter. “A few years ago, the former governor was removed because he had three hundred pounds of raw opium in the basement of his office, right over there.” He pointed to a plastered and painted office building in the middle of the compound.

  “The whole eradication program is joke,” Kyle said.

  Daoud nodded again. “Poppies can never be eliminated.”

  “A field here and a field there are destroyed each year,” Kyle said, “but only to appease the foreigners?”

  Daoud drew on his cigarette and stared silently.

  A few days later, Kyle’s story was on front page of the

  Washington Herald along with Kennard’s color photo of the tractor ripping through the field of pink and green poppies.

  Kennard had lived a full life, but it had been cut short. Kyle swallowed hard and sucked in a halting breath.

  http://wbp.bz/eotpa