The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan

by Graeme Smith

  The insurgents were celebrated for expelling the police from part of the Panjwai valley in the months before Operation Medusa. The Taliban enforced a harsh order, punishing thieves by chopping off their hands. But the insurgents also relaxed some of the rules enforced by their previous government, which had forbidden any music except Taliban chants. “My brother-in-law had a wedding this summer,” a farmer said. “We didn’t have any music or drumming. Some Taliban arrived at the wedding, and they said, ‘Why no music?’ We said, ‘Because you have forbidden these things.’ They told us, ‘No, no, no. Now the Taliban behave like common people.’ ” He seemed disappointed that foreign troops had driven the insurgents away. After the government regained control of the area, he said, its officers resumed their predations.

  I found myself wondering whether Operation Medusa had changed anything. You can hear me searching for a little optimism in the conversation I recorded with Talatbek Masadykov, then serving as head of the United Nations mission in southern Afghanistan. My first question to him was a rambling effort to string together the events of the previous month into a hopeful narrative. I told him about my friends in Kandahar who kept their suitcases packed before Operation Medusa because they expected a Taliban rampage into the city. I talked about how frightened the local residents seemed during the final weeks before the battle, and asked whether the NATO offensive had eased any of those fears. The veteran UN official shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “The security situation has not improved.” Probably no foreigner was better qualified to make such a judgment. With his fresh haircut, lime-green golf shirt and pressed khaki pants, Mr. Masadykov looked too clean to have expertise about the war; a casual visitor might wonder if he ever left the walled gardens of his compound. His appearance was misleading, however; Mr. Masadykov had decades of experience in the region, and was among the rare foreigners who could speak fluent Pashto. During the initial years of his UN job, in 2002 and 2003, he had visited every district of the nine southern provinces, travelling without armed escorts in white UN-marked vehicles, even camping for two nights in the notorious Baghran valley, a Taliban stronghold in northern Helmand province. Such travel was daring, but not suicidal, in the period of relative peace after the collapse of the Taliban government in 2001. But in the years that followed, Mr. Masadykov had watched the situation deteriorate. His security teams began to draw up maps to identify the roads that were still acceptable for travel by UN vehicles. By the time of our conversation in 2006, only two roads in Kandahar remained open. “Slowly, slowly our movement was restricted,” he said, his English slightly accented by his native roots in Kyrgyzstan. “Slowly, slowly, every time, we were going to less number of districts, less number of villages.” He seemed cynical about whether the deterioration could be halted with operations such as Medusa. In the days before the battle, NATO commanders had promised this attack would be different from previous sweeps into rural Kandahar because they would follow up by holding the Panjwai valley with the assistance of local forces and bring aid to the villagers. But those local Afghan security forces were themselves often the source of trouble, Mr. Masadykov said: “They are misbehaving sometimes, looting, going to search and at the same time stealing everything in the houses. We are receiving a lot of complaints about it.” Although he was reluctant to accuse individual police commanders of abuses, he eventually confirmed the story of Abdul Razik, and how the police commander became embroiled in tribal conflict. “The elders said, ‘No. Enough is enough. We will take a stand, we will take power.’ They were not exactly real Taliban. But in this one moment, these few days, they joined the anti-government elements and started fighting. The cleanup operations in those days killed a lot of people who were Noorzais, who were not really against the government but who were against this commander.”

  I told the UN chief about my recent conversations with disgruntled tribesmen, and their complaints about the Afghan police behaving like robbers.

  “Yes, this a case of bad governance,” Mr. Masadykov replied. “I can say now, when we’re talking about Taliban, maybe half of these so-called anti-government elements acting here in this area of the south, they had to join this Taliban movement or anti-government movement because of the misbehaviour of these bad guys.” He paused for effect, looking intently at me, and then looking at my digital recorder on the table between us. He probably understood that this wasn’t good for his career, describing NATO’s triumph as the killing of farmers with legitimate grievances. But he continued anyway: “I recently saw the report where they listed the names of the so-called Taliban commanders. Among them, knowing this area more or less—not all of them, of course, but some of them—I saw they are not Taliban. They were listed by internationals because internationals were informed by the local [Afghan] administration. And still we have the people who are trying to play games, using the Canadians and Brits against their own personal tribal enemies. I saw people who were never Taliban, they’re now fighting against some certain tribal elders or certain groups.”

  Not long after my story was published, under the headline “Inspiring tale of triumph over Taliban not all it seems,” the UN chief was transferred away from Kandahar. Mr. Masadykov’s boss downplayed his comments, saying they did not reflect the official view of the United Nations.

  Whatever official words were used to describe the effects of Operation Medusa, events on the ground conveyed their own message. A steady drumbeat of violence filled the following weeks, unabated by the operation. For the Canadian soldiers who led the charge into the Panjwai valley, the month after their glorious victory would prove more deadly than Medusa itself, with ten soldiers killed by insurgent attacks. The unit of soldiers I had followed into the Panjwai valley, the Nomads, suffered their first death at the end of September, when a twenty-three-year-old private named Josh Klukie stepped on a booby trap. It was probably an anti-personnel landmine stacked on top of a tank mine, because the explosion was big enough to destroy a vehicle. I remembered Private Klukie as a man in peak physical shape, like a guy in a recruiting poster. He’d been walking through the same cluster of villages that we had swept into during Medusa. His unit had avoided the roads during their foot patrol because they knew insurgents buried explosives along the well-travelled routes, but in the early afternoon they started following a makeshift track that I’d watched them bulldozing two weeks earlier. The dust was deep and powdery: a good place to hide a bomb. “We went on the road, and it was that dust, that fine dust, you know?” said one of his friends two days later, when we met beside the runway at Kandahar Air Field. His unit had just loaded Private Klukie’s flag-draped casket onto a transport plane, and many of the soldiers had tears in their eyes, but the young corporal was steady enough to give me an account of the death.

  The soldiers had been walking in single file. The explosion kicked up so much debris that everybody was blinded in the first moments, and the soldiers called out each others’ names until it was clear that Private Klukie wasn’t answering. His friend was among the first to discover him, about fifty metres off the path.

  “He landed in the vineyard,” he said. “He was laying on his back when the American medic and I found him. We immediately started working, without saying anything to each other. He put a tourniquet on his right leg, which was almost completely gone. I put tourniquets on his arm and his other leg. You could tell he couldn’t hear anything, but he could recognize me, you know. I was looking right at him. He couldn’t say anything. I was just telling him to keep fighting, you know, keep fighting, keep fighting. I had that last tourniquet on him, I grabbed him by the shoulder, I’m like, ‘This is nothing, Josh, this is nothing.’ He just looked at me, smiled, and that was it.”

  The corporal paused to reflect on those final moments before his friend’s death. “I was just looking at him. I was trying to encourage him as best I could, because there was really nothing else we could do. He fought it for as long as he could, but you know. It was maybe three minutes. He didn’t su
ffer. He didn’t feel anything. He wasn’t crying out in pain. He was just there, and in shock.”

  The young soldier had done so many chest compressions that he cracked all the ribs in his friend’s ruined body. He continued until the American medic hauled him away. The US soldiers also gathered up some of the scattered body parts—“things that were missing, the messier work”—and then the Canadians lifted the body bag and carried their comrade home. Back at the airbase, Klukie’s friend didn’t sleep at all on the first night after the explosion. “I thought a lot about it. Initially I was like, ‘I’ve kind of had enough of this. Shooting, rockets, mortars, people trying to kill you.’ ” But when we talked, after the farewell ceremony, the soldier had changed his mind: “I want to get back out there, and I definitely want to get a grip and get revenge.”

  There was the word again: revenge. Commanders talked about the war in abstract terms, but the fight became personal for anybody who picked up the charred remnants of a dead friend.

  Operation Medusa would later prove to be the biggest gathering of Taliban to directly confront US and NATO forces. But nothing was resolved; this was only the beginning of a bloodier phase in the war. The international community failed to learn the most important lesson of Operation Medusa: the tensions that built up in the summer of 2006 were mostly the fault of the predatory local government. There were widespread complaints about Mr. Razik’s militia; instead of scuttling his career, however, his enthusiasm for battle helped him rise to prominence in the following years. Brigadier-General Razik is now the most powerful police officer in southern Afghanistan. Some of his NATO allies have misgivings about his reputation for brutality, but that same reputation is viewed as an asset by military planners looking for Afghan leaders tough enough to survive after the withdrawal of troops in 2014. Western strategists are gambling that everybody I spoke with after Medusa was wrong, essentially, that the rebellion wasn’t provoked by harsh policing—or, at least, they are betting that strongmen such as Mr. Razik can stamp out such rebellions.

  It’s impossible to know who will be proven correct. I hope my instincts are wrong. None of what I learned about the Taliban in the next few months, however, gave me any comfort that the insurgency could be so easily tamed.

  A member of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam pretends to light an American flag on fire

  CHAPTER 6

  QUETTA NOVEMBER 2006

  The Taliban were mysterious. You never knew whether the villager who offered you tea secretly worked for the insurgents. Even when shooting at you, they rarely showed more than a muzzle flash. Every day brought new warnings: two suicide bombers planning to hit military convoys; no, scratch that, five bombers going after UN installations; no, forget it, today you should watch for jihadists posing as taxi drivers. Many of these warnings mentioned Kandahar’s most common vehicle, the white Toyota Corolla, so every car on the road seemed like a threat. Military officials took me aside and revealed under the strictest confidence that I should be careful of men whose traditional long shirts were cut square at the bottom, or those with exceptionally large white turbans, or even black turbans. They confided that the insurgents were brainwashed religious students who had been sexually abused by their teachers—emotionally stunted orphans desperate for paradise. Propaganda images posted in the washrooms at Kandahar Air Field warned soldiers about Taliban eavesdropping, with a cartoon version of the insurgent portrayed as a leering devil with green skin and yellow eyes. The foreign troops believed they were fighting monsters.

  These images coloured my first meeting with a Taliban gunman, in 2006, at the offices of an Afghan government program called Peace Through Strength (PTS). In theory, PTS was supposed to broker reconciliation talks with Taliban factions, but its officials were incapable of offering much except surrender; naturally, this made the reconciliation office a quiet place. A few Taliban occasionally straggled into the PTS system, however, and one day my translator got a call from a friend saying we could visit a Taliban fighter if we hurried over. Soon I was shaking hands with a man wearing, contrary to expectations, a small grey turban and a shirt tailored with a rounded cut. My first impression was of a caged animal, a man built like a wrestler who leapt off a couch, shook my hand, and then stalked the room as if hunting for an exit. At one point he reached into his pocket and my translator lurched forward, preparing to throw himself at the fighter—this translator was useful in such situations, heavily muscled and trained in martial arts—but the insurgent only smiled and pulled out a metal box, not a weapon. He twisted the box open and wadded his mouth full of green gunk called naswar, a popular kind of chewing tobacco mixed with ash and lime. He chewed with his mouth open, spitting in a metal cuspidor.

  He introduced himself as the cousin of a Taliban leader and asked me to call him Malik, a pseudonym. He had surrendered to the reconciliation program in hopes of trading his co-operation for the freedom of his younger brother, who was held captive in a government jail. But the deal fell apart, leaving Malik in limbo, and he had been living for six months under guard himself in a government house—not entirely free but not officially a prisoner. We talked in a comfortable room with an air conditioner and a television playing National Geographic programs. He seemed tired of interrogations, telling me right away that he wouldn’t reveal where any Taliban were hiding, and wouldn’t give any estimates of insurgent strength. He also cautioned that he would not reveal how the insurgents get weapons or training. I hadn’t asked him any of those things, and started with easy questions about his hometown north of the city. I tried to slip a recording device onto the table between us, which most Afghans mistook for a cellphone, but Malik was too savvy. He recognized the recorder and told me to switch it off. We talked for hours, a circular conversation that revealed little, and even after several meetings over a period of weeks, I never gained any valuable insight. He spoke in generalities, repeating the Taliban’s usual complaints about civilian casualties and the torture of prisoners. “If the coalition treated prisoners well, if they didn’t bombard people and kill civilians, we would never be successful,” he said. “We would never have so many recruits.”

  At times he was friendly, apparently believing that telling his story would help release his brother from prison—but he could also turn nasty. My translator left me alone with him for five minutes, and he started questioning me in rudimentary English: “Jesus or Moses?” He repeated the question over and over, with puzzling intensity, until my translator returned and assured him that I’m a Christian (“Jesus”) and not Jewish (“Moses”). The answer satisfied him, and I decided not to attempt a nuanced discussion of spirituality with a hot-tempered killer. We left that meeting with a sense that Malik was a little too curious about me. The office guards checked the road outside for threats, as usual, before signalling that it was safe to drive away—but that precaution didn’t stop a white Toyota Corolla from following us. My driver indicated something was wrong by staring in the rear-view mirror and hissing through his teeth. He swerved down side streets, into a jumble of garbage-strewn slums. The tail stayed on us, and we accelerated. The slum roads were narrow, edged by high mud walls and riddled with ruts and hillocks. A group of children watched solemnly as we raced past. I called a friend who lived nearby, and he opened his gates as we approached his well-guarded compound. Our car skidded to a stop in his courtyard and his guards shut the door immediately behind us. We spent a tense afternoon in hiding, but it seemed whoever was following hadn’t noticed us slip away.

  I never visited Malik again, and stayed away from the Taliban reconciliation office for several months. My next meeting with an insurgent was arranged more informally. It was the autumn of 2006, in the aftermath of Operation Medusa, and one of my translators scheduled a chat with a relative who had participated in the fighting. Like many Afghans, my translator’s extended family included both government workers and insurgents. Not all of them disagreed with each other ideologically; sometimes they followed the pragmatic tradition in which Afghan famili
es hedge their bets, sending their sons to serve in a variety of factions in a conflict. We had tea at a friend’s compound, but the fighter seemed wary. As with my previous encounter, I found this Talib hard to read. The weathered creases around his eyes seemed permanently crinkled in amusement, even when he was spewing hatred. “No Muslim wants the human garbage of foreign soldiers in beautiful Afghanistan,” he said cheerfully, as if this was obvious. He told me several things I didn’t find credible, such as his claim that the massed army of Taliban fighters southwest of the city had been a diversionary tactic; I had crawled through the insurgents’ trenches, and couldn’t believe that anybody would dig those bunkers without intending to defend them. Some of his battle stories also seemed intended to exaggerate his fervour: “I saw eleven Taliban hit by a bomb. Two survived, and they were crying out: ‘Why did we survive? Our friends have left us behind! We pray for our chance of martyrdom.’ ” His voice remained light-hearted as he described his comrades blown to pieces. After an hour of conversation, he thanked us for tea and slipped out the door.

  These encounters always left me feeling even more curious. I wanted to go deeper, wanted a better sense of the insurgents’ origins. I had seen the Pakistani phone numbers in the diary of a fighter killed earlier that year, and heard complaints from military officials about the insurgents’ safe havens across the border. Some insurgent militias that fought alongside the Taliban were believed to operate from bases in the northern parts of Pakistan’s borderlands, but I was interested in the main Taliban leadership council, or rahbari shura, sometimes called the “Quetta Council,” named after the provincial capital of Balochistan, just inside the Pakistani border. I wanted to see the place that reputedly served as the Taliban’s headquarters.