The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan

by Graeme Smith

  Perhaps the best example of the NATO forces’ breezy approach came during a briefing on narcotics policy. The troops needed to win favour with the local population and didn’t want to upset farmers by destroying their opium poppies, the largest source of cash income in the region. At the same time, the international community wanted to fight a war on drugs in Afghanistan—so eradication teams would slip into areas secured by NATO troops and raze the fields, without telling anybody they were sent by the foreigners.

  “So from the point of view of the poppy farmer, they won’t know that we’re paying for the poppy fields to be ripped up and burned?” I asked one British officer (whom I can’t name due to the conditions of the briefing).

  “No, they won’t know that,” the officer said. “I mean, the level of sophistication? They can hardly read.”

  This caused some skepticism among the journalists. Sitting around a boardroom in the NATO command centre, a modest one-storey structure with plywood walls and concrete blast barriers, it wasn’t possible to know Afghan farmers’ reaction to this policy. But we could guess they weren’t stupid; they would probably understand that eradication was the foreigners’ idea. The troops were trying to make the villagers believe that the poppy eradication was an Afghan government program, with no connection to the foreign troops, the British officer said. “The soldiers on the ground, the first message, when they go into a shura [village council], one of the things they’re saying is we’re not here as part of the eradication. Because the Afghans elders will often say, ‘Are you here to do it?’ And we say, ‘No we’re not.’ ”

  “And you’re not worried they will figure that out?” I said.

  “No.”

  There was a brief silence.

  “Is it duplicitous for us to say that we have nothing to do with that?” a Canadian officer asked, rhetorically.

  After another pause, somebody offered: “Yes.”

  “Hey, duplicity is a reality,” said the British officer, provoking laughter. “We’re not on some libertarian lovely sort of thing here,” he said, before reminding us that this was a background briefing, in which journalists would not be allowed to name the participants. Then he added: “This is realpolitik.… If you want to play in the big league, get into some realpolitik.”

  A tall man with bright blue eyes, the British officer seemed to have quick answers for everything. But he fell quiet when asked: “Does anybody have a grand vision for what could be Afghanistan’s largest industry instead of poppy?”

  A Canadian military officer said, “Saffron is big.”

  “USAID is taking the lead on this,” said a Canadian diplomat, referring to the US Agency for International Development.

  “The other thing is roses,” a military official said.

  “Roses grow quite well here, yes,” the British official said. “Okay, moving on.”

  The journalists asked hard questions, but for the most part we accepted the soft answers. These officers were talking about Afghans as if they were clay to be molded, but we all failed to understand how profoundly the people would resist. Even when I sat down with a poppy farmer a few days later, I didn’t grasp the seriousness of the reaction. He was an ordinary man in his thirties, wearing a blue turban, from a village outside of Kandahar city. The farmer told me that Afghans would take up arms against foreign soldiers who interfered with the opium trade. I asked him whether he himself had weapons, and my translator looked at me like I was stupid: “In your country, you have a car in every driveway,” the translator interjected. “Here, everybody has an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade].” But the farmer seemed so gentle and soft-spoken that I had trouble picturing him dusting off an old grenade launcher and fomenting rebellion. I wrote a brief item about drug policy and moved on to other issues without quoting the poppy farmer; I was one of the many visitors to Afghanistan who failed to see the coming uprising.

  If anything, the streets seemed calm during that trip into Kandahar city, and I told my translator that I was enjoying the light traffic and mild April breezes. His response was that the empty roads were a bad sign. The arrival of new foreign troops, and the rising violence, were encouraging people to stay home. Business was slow, he said. This turned out to be a perennial complaint in the following years as people fled the war, but at the time it was newsworthy. I walked into the central market, which looked like an old souk except for the modern items on display, from the latest cellphones to boxes of military rations gone missing from US storehouses. We ducked into a low alcove and met a twenty-three-year-old shopkeeper. He looked affluent, wearing crisp white clothes and heavy gold rings—but his sales had dried up. Leaning back against cases of Winston cigarettes and Pepsi, he explained that his family distributed dry goods, but this was becoming difficult as the roads grew dangerous. Sales were down 50 per cent in recent months. Other merchants had similar stories. Landlords told me rents had fallen, and properties lost value. Kandahar has been a crossroads for centuries, a stop along the silk route between Europe and China, so it made sense that businessmen were fixated on the issue of moving trucks along the highways. Driving north to Kabul was not yet a serious problem, but truckers said things were getting worse on the road west into Helmand province, as British troops started construction on a vast military base in the desert, Camp Bastion. Threats from insurgents and police shakedowns were becoming commonplace.

  Even the streets of downtown Kandahar were getting more risky. I still felt comfortable shuffling around the dusty laneways in my Afghan clothes and sandals, but my conversations with shopkeepers were routinely cut short by the need to keep moving. My translator worried that news of a foreigner in the market would reach Taliban sympathizers, so we never stayed in any public spot longer than an hour. (By the following year, it was standard practice for television crews to spend no longer than ten minutes in any public location.) The same fears were starting to infect ordinary people, too. At a hairdresser’s salon in the heart of the city, across the street from police headquarters, a stylist told me that his business had suffered because nobody wanted to sit near his windows, exposed to the street. Suicide bombings were becoming more frequent, and the police station was a well-known target. Like so much else in Kandahar, the haircutter’s shop had flourished in the initial years after the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001: after years of boring haircuts and long beards required by the Taliban, there was a rush of customers looking for new styles. Many young men wanted their hair cut to resemble Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie Titanic, which became wildly popular when bootleg video discs finally appeared in Kandahar’s bazaars, years after the film’s release. The stylist decorated his shop with a poster of DiCaprio, along with inflatable beach balls and plastic flowers. His walls also contained the most salacious images I’d seen in Kandahar: a series of posters showing beautiful women, with headscarves demurely knotted under their chins, their faces not veiled by the traditional burkas. But by 2006 his decorations looked as worn as the ripped linoleum that covered only half the floor of the salon. After the initial enthusiasm, he said, foreign styles were going out of fashion, and customers who had shaved their beards in 2001 were now growing them back. Elsewhere in the market, a turban vendor described a similar trend: some people took off their turbans after the Taliban government was chased out of Kandahar, but the turban business had recovered in recent months as the insurgency grew. The old vendor saw it as a sign of things returning to normal: “Now, more people are buying turbans, because this is the original culture of this area,” he said. “We accept the laws of the government but we will never change our culture.”

  Shortly afterward, I climbed aboard a military convoy headed southwest of Kandahar city. Most of the soldiers were Canadians, except for a US civil-affairs officer whose task was to teach the new arrivals what he had learned as he wrapped up a tour of duty. Our first stop was Panjwai District Centre, which at the time was a lightly guarded fort in the heart of Bazaar-e-Panjwai, the biggest town in the districts west of the city. In
side the outpost, the American officer pushed his dark sunglasses up onto his brush cut and hugged a grey-bearded man in a turban. This was the master of the fort, the district chief, a representative of the Kabul government. The Americans had showered the district with aid money, and the Afghan officials welcomed us like high rollers in a casino. “I feel like the Godfather,” said one Canadian soldier as we sat down for tea with a group of elders. After some conversation, the district leader started complaining that NATO should put more pressure on Pakistan, claiming that troublemakers were coming over the border. An elder tried to interject—“The fighters who come from Pakistan, they get their weapons here in Afghanistan, the problem is here”—but he was ignored by the district leader, who continued pressing the foreign troops as to why they did not hunt down Taliban across the border. When asked about local problems in his own district, the leader conceded that a few clerics were preaching against the international troops, instructing their followers to avoid collaborating with the occupation. But he emphasized that local government officials supported the foreigners. “We tell people, NATO is not like the Russians,” the Afghan official said. “They’re not here to occupy.”

  We thanked him for his hospitality and returned to the military vehicles. As we strapped on our helmets, the American officer explained that this was a relatively safe district. “Panjwai is a success story because it’s got the strongest district council in the province of Kandahar.” He advised us to travel cautiously as we continued west, however, because Taliban had started infiltrating neighbouring areas. Panjwai would later become the most violent region of the south, but for the moment the soldiers were visibly relaxed. Even as we travelled further afield, I was considered lucky to get a spot in the Canadians’ most lightly armoured vehicle, because it had comfortable seats and big windows. The flat roof of the jeep also served as a bed as we spent the night camping in the open desert, and a soldier kindly loaned me his waterproof bivvy bag when a thunderstorm swept in across the dunes of the desert to the south. I went to sleep with the sound of raindrops on the nylon sheet wrapped around my head, the warm air moist and electric. It cleared by morning, but a haze loomed on the horizon. We drove northwest, straight into the wind, and soon the world disappeared. I’d never experienced an Afghan dust storm, and it was astonishing to see the universe reduced to a sandy void. The only reminder that we weren’t alone in the howling oblivion was the crackle of the radio.

  Then we heard a boom, and the radio chatter became more urgent.

  “It looks like one vehicle is absolutely decimated, with another one pretty screwed up as well,” said a soldier from a lead vehicle. We were reassured to hear his voice because his radio call from the front of the convoy meant that the Canadians were not hit. “Looks to me like a suicide car bomb,” he said.

  The convoy halted. Soldiers walked up the road, their guns at the ready. In the brown haze they found scattered ordnance—an artillery shell, a hand grenade with a rusty pin—and fragments of metal. We stepped carefully over chunks of human flesh: foot, leg, charred torso. The blast site became visible, with flames dancing in the remnants of the bomber’s car. We saw a man with a bloody face shuffling aimlessly. Medics pulled him behind a truck, away from the wind, and treated his wounds. His uniform, spattered with blood, was standard issue for Afghan police, but he identified himself as a private security contractor for US Protection and Investigations (USPI), an American firm that hired local mercenaries to guard convoys, among other duties. His red sport-utility vehicle was riddled with shrapnel holes. The soldiers guessed that the suicide bomber had chosen his victim at random, and our convoy might have been targeted if we had ventured down the road a few seconds earlier. Soon the local USPI boss, Jack Savant, appeared out of the storm, yelling at the Canadians to say he had the situation under control. Mr. Savant was a storybook character, a balding American in running shoes with a bulletproof plate flapping over his belly and a Kalashnikov in his meaty fist. He claimed to be a retired US special forces sergeant, and he disliked the media—the last time we’d met, his men held me at gunpoint while he examined my press credentials. (He seemed popular with the Canadian soldiers, however, and they wrote tributes to him after he died in another suicide bombing that year.) Soldiers doused the flames with fire extinguishers and Mr. Savant waved goodbye. The whole thing was over so quickly that I didn’t even find out how many men died in the blast. The wreckage disappeared in the rear-view mirror, and we plunged forward into the storm.

  I was still new to war, but I’d later realize that this happens a lot in conflict zones: something appears, and disappears, and you rarely get a chance to go back and figure out what happened. Usually it’s not that storms obscure the view in any literal sense, it’s just that chaos makes the facts hazy. Even when returning to the scene of an incident, as I was about to discover in the coming hours, it’s often impossible to piece together any semblance of truth.

  The storm passed as we continued along the highway, and an Afghan interpreter pointed at a line of trees near the road. “We were here last week,” he said. This unit of soldiers had been down the same road seven days earlier, arriving late to a firefight between insurgents and members of the Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP). I was familiar with the battle, because senior commanders had touted it as a victory. We’d heard that the Canadians arrived to help the ANA and ANP, and together they killed forty-one insurgents. We’d heard rumours that troops mistakenly fired at Afghan forces, but a military commander had flatly denied it. I described these denials to the interpreter, who shook his head sadly. “We didn’t realize they were ANA or ANP so we started firing at them,” he said. The Canadians had accidentally shot at their own allies as they hunkered under thick foliage along a canal, but it wasn’t clear whether any deaths or injuries had resulted from friendly fire.

  Now the same unit had the unpleasant task of visiting an Afghan police outpost to repair the soldiers’ relationship with the local forces they had inadvertently shot up. The Canadians stayed on alert as they rolled up to the gates of Maywand District Centre, and our convoy was welcomed with hard stares from the Afghans as they opened the metal doors. Soon after pulling into the police compound, the Canadians’ senior officer, Major Nick Grimshaw, strode into a disgruntled crowd. I joined them, and heard the Canadian officer speaking slowly and clearly for the sake of his interpreter. “Hopefully we can coordinate much better, next time we show up,” he said.

  The district leader refused to be placated.

  “We’ve been fighting twenty-five years, and we never lost so many men in one battle,” he said. “Seven men! This is because of bad coordination with the Canadians and Americans.”

  Major Grimshaw nodded gravely. “There was bad coordination,” he agreed.

  “My sub-commanders were brave!” the Afghan official shouted.

  “Yes, I’m sorry we lost them,” Major Grimshaw said. “You have no problems in this area now?”

  “No,” the Afghan said. “If they come, we will fight them. For now, we are not so fortunate that they would face us.”

  “Yeah, that would make it too easy,” said the Canadian, with a wry smile.

  Dusk was falling as they spoke, and the soldiers decided to camp inside the Afghan police compound. We set up canvas cots under the cedars and pines. A warning circulated among the soldiers: The Afghan police are angry, the soldiers whispered; Don’t take off your body armour. The outpost had high walls topped with barbed wire, but the Canadians took more precautions than they did when sleeping in Taliban territory. Extra patrols crunched along the gravel driveway and sentries manned the gun turrets. The Afghan leader invited some soldiers into his makeshift command centre, a modest room furnished with cushions and a television that played a grainy version of the movie Gladiator. Policemen with automatic rifles crowded around the screen, watching swordfights. The district chief ignored the movie and needled his guests with complaints. His men didn’t have any radios, he said, and only
three cellphones. The phone networks were weak, so the signal died when his officers took cover in the fields. But his biggest problem appeared to be a shortage of ammunition; he was reduced to buying bullets in the market with his own money. Maybe this was true, or not; I heard stories about district chiefs selling ammunition to the Taliban and faking battles to explain their dwindling stockpiles. The notoriously corrupt Ministry of Interior might also have sold off the supplies before they reached the district.

  “I tell our problems to the governor. I list them, one-two-three. But he just bows his head,” the Afghan leader said.

  “The governor has aged in the last ten months, I think,” said the US officer.

  The Afghan chuckled. “This is Kandahar. It will kill you.”

  Then he reached into the folds of a dirty blanket and pulled out a small diary. He opened it, revealing a cracked mirror on the inside cover and pages full of handwritten names and telephone numbers. The diary was discovered on the body of a dead Taliban fighter, he said, and contained contact information for insurgent leaders. Most of the numbers started with the prefix 0300, used by Pakistani phones, a clear indication that insurgent leaders were taking shelter across the border. The soldiers thanked the Afghan for the intelligence and wished him a good night. One of the military interpreters stayed behind to help me continue talking, even after the generator quit for the evening and the room fell into darkness. I strapped on a headlamp so I could keep taking notes.