by Graeme Smith
“The Canadians say, let’s sit down and plan the next battle,” the district leader said. “They talk and talk, but I’m not sure. I have a lot more information I could give them, but I don’t know if I can trust them.” Apparently the feeling was mutual: a Canadian soldier appeared in the doorway to insist that I say goodnight—“Right now, for your own safety.”
A couple of weeks later, I assembled the photos and audio from that trip into a multimedia presentation, describing the dust storm, the suicide bomber and the allegations of friendly fire. At the end of the narration, I added this comment:
It’s important for people in Canada to understand the broader picture, which is that Afghanistan will descend into chaos if the foreign troops leave now. Everybody I speak with—diplomats, journalists, soldiers, ordinary Afghans—seem to agree on that point. Many of them say Afghanistan actually needs much more help.
This was technically correct, but wrong in spirit, like telling an obese person with an eating disorder that they will die if they stop consuming food: a biological fact, but misleading. Doubling the number of foreign troops in southern Afghanistan in the early spring of 2006 had only served to highlight self-defeating policies that would continue to plague the rest of the mission: the absurd war against poppy fields; NATO’s troubled relationship with Pakistan; and the difficulty of working shoulder to shoulder with untrustworthy Afghan forces, among many others. None of these challenges were ignored by the international troops. The British officer who tried to explain the narcotics policy always seemed on the verge of breaking into laughter at the insanity of his own words. The troops understood much of this, but somehow the understanding on the ground never percolated up the chain of command, or the information never got digested into an effective change in direction, or all of the negative signals were drowned out by the noise of the soldiers’ habitually positive thinking. Once set in motion, NATO pressed forward with a sense of inevitability. My next trip would be a case study in the resilience of that military brand of optimism.
Canadian soldier in a sandstorm
CHAPTER 3
OPTIMISM JUNE 2006
The first bang rocked our troop carrier and bounced my helmet off the metal interior. I fumbled in the pocket of my flak jacket for an audio recorder, and switched it on just in time to register the screeching crash of a second jolt as everybody inside the vehicle tumbled sideways. People were shouting in the dark cabin—“Are you okay?” and “We’re okay!”—as the diesel engine cranked up to a high pitch and our driver raced us away from Kandahar’s latest suicide bombing. Only when the motor whine died down did the Canadian soldiers pause to check for damage. I heard somebody say: “He’s bleeding from the mouth a little, but it’s nothing too serious, no teeth lost.” After a few minutes we kept moving, pressing toward the objective for the day.
The mission was to transport journalists to a victory ceremony (of all things) in the Panjwai valley, where international troops believed they had defeated a major Taliban offensive. Recent fighting had been surprisingly intense, with an estimated nine hundred killed in the first six months of 2006—half of them in the month of May—the first of many record-breaking heights of violence. Several of the most serious battles happened in Panjwai district, the region southwest of Kandahar city where I had been drinking tea with local elders on my previous visit—the district that a US military officer had described as a model for the rest of southern Afghanistan. Now it was erupting into violence. As the back hatch of our vehicle creaked open and we stumbled into the sunlight, I could see that things had changed: the town of Bazaar-e-Panjwai now had extra roadblocks on the main street, and Afghan security forces had new firing positions among piles of sandbags on the roofs of government buildings. Our convoy was blackened and scarred by the explosion. Charred pieces of human flesh stuck to the armour. A television reporter wrinkled her nose at the sight, and I asked her: “Can you believe they were trying to sell me a story about how things have gotten better in Panjwai?”
The human remains spattered on the vehicles probably belonged to the suicide attacker, but may also have been remnants of the four civilians who died in the blast. The bomber had been lurking in an alleyway before ramming his black sport-utility vehicle into our convoy near a major intersection in Kandahar city. Many of the journalists were angry about the incident, feeling that civilians would not have died if the military hadn’t been dragging us around the battlefield for a photo op. We figured the announcement would be cancelled anyway, because it would look ridiculous to declare victory against such a gruesome backdrop. Surprisingly, the event went ahead. “We beat them,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Hope, describing a series of recent battles in the Panjwai valley. “Four successive strikes against the Taliban broke the back of their insurgency here.”
He was speaking on June 4, 2006. If you chart the violence in southern Afghanistan, the line graph resembles mountains, soaring peaks growing higher and higher. Military commanders boldly predicted that each brutal ascent was the final push before reaching Shangri-La. This always led to disappointment, but the idea of success hidden just beyond the next peak of violence proved an enduring feature of military thinking. The same weekend of the surreal press conference in Panjwai, I sat down with NATO’s top southern commander, Canadian Brigadier-General David Fraser. I asked him what he expected to happen as the number of foreign troops almost doubled in the coming month. “We’ve got more firepower,” Brigadier-General Fraser said. “In the short term, it might appear as if it’s getting worse. But in the mid-term and long run, I think it actually will make things better.” (One of my colleagues asked me to summarize the general’s outlook, and I answered only half-jokingly: “Rivers of blood, rivers of blood … but it’s a good thing.”) That kind of optimism went straight down through the ranks, for the most part. A few days earlier, I had visited an outpost where Canadians troops were recovering from a Taliban ambush. Insurgents had opened fire on their convoy in the middle of the night, injuring five soldiers. I talked to a young man who had saved his friend’s life by applying a tourniquet below his bleeding hand. “I shined my light on his hand and it was like a red pulp,” he said. “He had two fingers but the rest was mashed, like it was squished by something.” The soldiers fought all night, but were preparing to resume patrols the same afternoon without sleep. A charismatic sergeant, Patrick Tower, told me the troops could sense the insurgents growing desperate. “I think they’re feeling the breaking point coming,” he said. “It’s just around the bend.”
His friend, a master corporal from New Zealand, nodded in agreement. “No matter how many extra fighters they’ve thrown into this fight in the last two weeks, I mean, they throw in a hundred and we’ve destroyed more than that.”
“Yeah,” Sergeant Tower said. “No matter how many they bring in, they cannot pile on the numbers we can pile on, and they don’t have the resources we have to sustain a fight.”
I asked: “So you think they just can’t keep this up?”
“No,” the Canadian said, without hesitation.
“There’s no way they can,” added the New Zealander. “They’re running scared, they’re falling apart, their leadership is collapsing. People are sick of them. I think they’re in their last final effort.”
That summer of battle killed nine soldiers from their rotation. Patrick Tower would endure such heavy fire, and perform so bravely, that he was later awarded the Star of Military Valour, the highest decoration earned by a Canadian soldier in half a century. He wasn’t the only soldier who underestimated the Taliban, however. Almost everybody I met at the filthy patrol bases in Kandahar seemed to think they were about to defeat their opponents. They were equally convinced that average Afghans supported their cause: “The Taliban represents such a minute percentage of the population here,” Sergeant Tower said. “I think the average Afghan wants nothing to do with the Taliban.” Villagers were reporting insurgent weapons caches and offering other useful tips, he added, suggesting that I mig
ht witness this spirit of co-operation when we visited tribal elders that afternoon.
Hours later, after trudging past a field of marijuana, I found myself sitting with several grey-bearded old men in traditional Afghan clothes. They perched in bare feet under the shade of a mud wall and looked with bemusement at a balding Canadian commander who took off his helmet, dropped his weapon, and squatted down in front of them.
“I see you’re quite prosperous with your fields here,” the commander said. “Everything is working nicely? Yeah? Good.” Then he got down to business, telling the elders that his soldiers had been ambushed nearby on the previous night, when five troops were injured. His men had also been attacked the night before in the same area, and the night before that. The commander made it clear that his patience was wearing thin. “We’ve seen a lot of Taliban activity,” he said.
The elders murmured their disagreement.
“We know there are Taliban in this area but we don’t see them,” said the villagers through an interpreter, a teenager with the slightest fuzz of moustache on his upper lip.
“So there’s no criminal activity here, no interfering with your lives?”
“No.”
“So as village elders you know not only your own village but also nearby villages, correct?”
“They know people from those villages, sir.”
“So you know there are Taliban, then. When was the last time you saw Taliban in this area?”
“Since the government of Taliban changed they haven’t seen any,” the interpreter said, referring to the collapse of the previous regime in 2001. The commander put a hand on his hip and stared at them, incredulous that anybody could have missed the armed insurgents swarming through the valley. He continued in the same vein for several minutes, getting the same denials, then broke into a monologue:
“The best option for everybody here is for Taliban to give themselves up to coalition forces, so we can get rid of that menace,” he said, more loudly than necessary. “The second option, if they don’t give up? They will die an early death,” he continued. “We will find them, will hunt them down, and will kill them like the cowards they are. Because they are cowards. We know they’re cowards. They hide behind women and children. They use your young men to go fight for them for personal gain while they hide off in the mountains, while they hide off in these houses here, behind your own families.”
The interpreter struggled to keep up. Many of the young men hired as field translators were unmotivated, poorly paid considering the risks, and weren’t familiar with local dialects of Pashto. It often seemed that only a small fraction of the words spoken in any of these meetings were understood by both parties. In this case, the interpreter gamely tried to convey the gist of the commander’s words, but gave up when the villagers broke into a chorus of complaints. After a few minutes, he managed to summarize the elders’ message: air strikes had killed women and children during recent fighting, and some people were abandoning the village out of fear.
“What’s this?” asked a soldier who was scribbling notes.
“They’re saying the bombing affects their families,” the commander said. “And I imagine it would,” he continued, turning back to the elders. “But the more the villagers get onside, those attacks will stop.”
“In our village there is no Taliban, nothing,” they replied.
“If there are no Taliban here we won’t shoot your village, it’s as simple as that,” the commander said. He continued threatening and cajoling, reminding them that he was willing to pay for information. They gave him nothing, only complained and spat in the dust. Flies buzzed around the tiny puddles of spittle, competing for drops of moisture. The afternoon light was fading. After another fruitless half hour, the troops returned to their outpost.
I was disappointed by that excursion, and wrote nothing about the trip in the newspaper. In an e-mail, I told a friend:
We were supposed to be on a combat mission but the Taliban didn’t show up to fight, so I literally spent two days playing rummy, eating rations, listening to BBC podcasts and challenging the guys to rock-throwing contests where we tried to hit a cardboard box from thirty metres away. I got pretty good after, oh, five or six hours of practice. One thing I’ve learned about soldiers is they make boredom into an art.
This was the first battle group of Canadian soldiers to arrive in southern Afghanistan, and most of the soldiers remained upbeat even as they realized their task was going to be harder than expected. It was only as we drove back to Kandahar Air Field that I heard the first whispers of skepticism. I was riding in a G Wagon jeep for the first time since I visited in April; commanders had declared the jeeps too dangerous for civilians but we were breaking the rules because the soldiers were tired and battle-jaded. I was chatting with the driver, talking about how the fighting seemed to be unrelenting. He compared the situation to a Bugs Bunny cartoon: “You know, the ones with the coyote and the sheep dog, and it’s always the same thing in the end: ‘See you tomorrow, Sam.’ ” We both stared out into the night, watching mud compounds flash past, driving at maximum speed in hopes that whoever was watching our vehicle wouldn’t recognize us as a convoy, and wouldn’t have time to attack until we’d already passed. I couldn’t see the driver’s eyes but his voice sounded far away. “See you tomorrow, Sam,” he said.
Panjwai district lost its status as a success story, but many officers still pointed to the nearby province of Zabul as a sign of hope. It had been considered a Taliban stronghold just two years earlier, and was the first province where insurgents felt confident enough to formally declare a shadow government. (Shadow administrations would later emerge across the country, as the Taliban influence grew.) By the time I arrived in 2006, the Americans believed they had rolled back the insurgents. Diplomats talked about the province as a place that had clearly benefitted from the presence of US troops, and military intelligence considered it the most secure province in southern Afghanistan. Some NATO officers pushed the idea of Zabul as a model because the American operations involved putting millions of dollars in the hands of military units in the field to spend on development and aid projects. This was different from the British and Canadian approach, which funnelled most aid money through notoriously slow-moving civilian agencies. The military was eager to show off its prized accomplishment; days after I mentioned an interest, the press officers arranged a US helicopter to whisk me off to Zabul. I almost got stranded in the desert when the big aircraft dumped a load of supplies at a remote outpost, but I scrambled back aboard in time to catch the second leg of the journey to the capital city, Qalat. Soon after arriving at the small Provincial Reconstruction Team headquarters, I bumped into an energetic man named Lieutenant-Colonel Kevin McGlaughlin, who insisted I call him “Beev.” He was commander of the PRT, but seemed to treat everybody like a drinking buddy. “Throw your stuff in a corner and jump in,” he yelled, and I found myself being chauffeured around in a Humvee by the man most responsible for Qalat’s recent make-over. It’s an ancient city near a crumbling fortress, but the recent American presence had graced the settlement with modern updates: roads, wells, schools, bridges, and buildings. Beev was a whirlwind, jogging through half-finished structures and construction sites while keeping up a patter of commentary. He cheerfully admitted that he was trained as a B-52 bomber pilot—more qualified to destroy cities than build them—but he had embraced the urban planning aspect of his new job with the charming can-do attitude of military officers. He was the sort of character who horrified those versed in development studies, who were concerned about military commanders becoming temporary kings of these outposts, splashing money around without plans for the long term, and making public works susceptible to the officers’ foibles and inevitable departure. Beev himself seemed to invite this kind of criticism, driving up to a plateau above the city to show off what he described as his biggest mistake. At first I couldn’t see anything wrong as Beev led me onto a swath of scrubland, where tracks in the dirt made it loo
k flattened by machinery. He trotted across the empty landscape, kicking up dust that made me cough. Beev finally stopped and asked me what I saw. I wheezed, wiped my eyes and shook my head. “This is a runway for my new airport,” he said, gesturing at the open expanse. “And this is my new road. It goes straight through the runway. We got a problem, obviously.” He posed for a photo at the intersection of his half-finished runway and his half-finished road. Behind his ballistic sunglasses it was hard to read his expression, and at first I was puzzled about why a soldier would be so eager to show a reporter an embarrassing error. But he seemed to be making a point about the pace of reconstruction in Zabul. So many projects were underway simultaneously that it was hard to keep track of all the activity.
All the US money pouring into Zabul appeared to have purchased a bit of calm. I went for a walk with the provincial governor and was surprised when he stepped out the gates of a US military base and into a main street of the city without pausing his conversation or even checking for traffic. Two police officers trailing along behind his entourage seemed bored, their Kalashnikov rifles hanging at their sides. Other politicians in southern Afghanistan travelled in armoured convoys or helicopters because assassins tried to kill them on a regular basis. I’d never seen a government leader wander so casually in the south, but the governor’s aides told me he regularly made excursions on foot. “When I first arrived, we didn’t have much control over some districts,” he said, referring to his appointment in early 2005. “People told me, ‘The Taliban is too strong. Stay inside your offices.’ ”
He chuckled at the memory. “Now, we are a success,” he said.
Foreshadows of what would happen next could be heard in a few corners of the military camps, if you looked hard for the skeptics. A Canadian diplomat told me it was a mistake to rely on the military for reconstruction programs. “We could buy a temporary peace,” he said. “But that would be based on bribery, and supporting a mafia-like state. The second you walk away and the funds stop flowing, everything falls apart.”
