The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan

by Graeme Smith

  She was right; the warlord deserved better. Mullah Naqib’s influence may not have been welcomed by the Canadians in that particular episode, but in reality the government’s justice system was far less trustworthy, overall, than he was. He may have gained fame and power by shooting rockets at Soviet aircraft, but in his middle years he had played a stabilizing role in Kandahar that few people fully appreciated—until his death.

  The warlord’s territory had been fairly calm as the rest of the south erupted into insurgency in 2006, which led to rumours that Naqib must have cut a deal of some kind with the Taliban. The insurgents themselves spread those whispers: one Taliban operative tried to persuade me that Mullah Naqib had endorsed an insurgent attack because he was disappointed with the government. Any doubts about his loyalty to Kabul were erased in March 2007, however, when a bomb exploded near his armoured sport-utility vehicle, injuring him badly. The Taliban wanted him out of the way, but the bearish old man did not give up. He returned to Kandahar after several months of treatment in India, limping and leaning on a crutch. He looked tired, with white streaks in his beard. His long-time friend Sarah Chayes said he seemed disconsolate about the worsening situation. When he finally died of a heart attack in October 2007, she claimed that his death was not related to the bombing. She sat with him on the veranda of his home the night before he died, looking at his gardens and talking about the Taliban’s growing strength. “He died of a broken heart,” she said.

  Insurgents had been trickling into Arghandab district in the previous months, but the warlord’s death unleashed a flood of trouble in his home territory. At the time of Mullah Naqib’s funeral, no regular troops were posted in his district. Military bases had been unnecessary in the valley, even though the terrain offered plenty of hiding places for insurgents and could have served as a pathway to the edge of Kandahar city from the Taliban enclaves in the north. In the days after Mullah Naqib’s death, however, many people wondered if the Alokozai tribe would continue serving as guardians of those northern approaches. Feuds emerged among tribal figures who wanted to succeed him as leader, and President Hamid Karzai, who rarely risked a trip to Kandahar, arrived by helicopter to resolve the leadership question. As hundreds of tribesmen gathered in Mullah Naqib’s front garden to mourn his passing, the president stood before them and placed a silver turban on the head of Kalimullah Naqibi, a chubby twenty-six-year-old whose main qualification for the job was being Mullah Naqib’s son. The president obviously hoped that the young man would maintain his father’s loyalty to the government, although some in attendance grumbled that the Karzai might also have wanted an inexperienced leader for the tribe as a way of ensuring the Karzai family’s dominance of Kandahar city politics. The official line was that the president’s gesture merely recognized a selection already made by Alokozai tribal elders, but most people in the city understood the central government had interfered with tribal traditions. I felt sorry for the new leader, sitting in his father’s house, carrying his father’s cellphone, trying to live up to his father’s legend. He claimed to be happy about his new role, but then he paused, and his face clouded. Speaking more quietly, he invoked a Pashto saying—“When the turban falls from the head, it lands on the shoulders”—meaning that the burdens of the father are passed to the sons.

  The weight of those burdens soon became clear. Arghandab’s police chief received threatening phone calls a week after Mullah Naqib’s death, warning him to allow safe passage through the district for Taliban fighters. He refused, and two weeks later hundreds of insurgents poured into the valley in a coordinated assault from three sides. They swarmed the north bank of the river, seizing about half the district and storming into Mullah Naqib’s hometown. They danced on the roof of the warlord’s house and dug holes around his property in an apparent search for a weapons stash. Mullah Naqib had surrendered many of the arms he used during his fight against the Soviets, but he had been rumoured to keep a supply of leftovers, perhaps even shoulder-mounted missiles capable of shooting down NATO aircraft. It wasn’t clear whether the Taliban found anything on their treasure hunt, but the raid sent a message about the insurgents’ power. Foreign troops scrambled to muster a counterattack, and soon pushed the Taliban away.

  This marked a change in the military landscape. For years, the primary threats to Kandahar city had come from the southwest, the same places where Operation Medusa had been fought. Now the international troops found themselves opening a new front, defending from the north. Arghandab grew steadily more violent after Naqib’s death, eventually requiring entire battalions of US troops to keep the insurgents at bay. The valley became notorious as one of the most dangerous places in the country.

  Mullah Naqib was the biggest of the fallen warlords, but not the last. The Taliban’s assassination campaign gathered pace after his loss. One of the failed candidates to replace him, and a powerful warlord in his own right, was Abdul Hakim Jan, an uneducated fighter whose trademark was a habit of wearing blue clothes. He had been fighting the Taliban since the movement’s birth, and according to legend even armed his wives with automatic rifles. He reinvented himself as a police commander under the new government, becoming a fierce opponent of the insurgents. That probably explains why the Taliban went after him with such spectacular blood lust, sending a suicide bomber who caught him as he was sitting down to watch a dogfight and enjoy a picnic with tea and oranges. The blast killed him, along with perhaps a hundred fellow spectators who had gathered in a field to see the match. In the aftermath of that assassination, one of the first people I called for information was Malim Akbar Khan Khakrezwal, a former intelligence chief and an ex-mujahedeen leader himself, who said the warlord had been receiving threats from the Taliban but refused to stay away from public gatherings. Such advice didn’t help Mr. Khakrezwal himself, as gunmen found him outside his house four months later and shot him dead. His brother, a former police chief, had already been assassinated in another bombing. The next month it was Habibullah Jan, the chain-smoking warlord whose cellphone numbers I had given to the Canadian commander, who was gunned down near his house. Men on motorcycles sprayed him with bullets as he was taking a short evening walk from his office to his wife’s quarters.

  It went on and on, like a panicked pulse. The assassination squads behaved with terrible efficiency, and usually without attracting much notice. We never heard of any arrests. The killers often struck in daylight with plenty of witnesses, and they usually followed a routine: two insurgents on a small Honda motorbike drive up, the man on the back of the bike pulls a Kalashnikov from under his shawl and unleashes a short burst. The hits that gained attention were the big warlords or major government officials, but more often the targets were petty. The death of an aid worker, or a translator, or just the unlucky relative of somebody suspected of collaborating with the foreigners, did little to help the insurgents on the battlefield. But the killings communicated the Taliban’s power, and sapped the will of those trying to help the government. When my acquaintances started dying, at first I posted short obituaries like this on Facebook:

  My former landlord

  by Graeme Smith on Friday, September 12, 2008, at 3:46 p.m.

  I set up an office in Kandahar city in late 2006, a lovely compound on the south side of the city shared with my translator’s brother. My landlord was Nazar Mohammed Aga, a tall, big-bearded man who lived nearby. He had worked for a long time at Kandahar’s electricity department. The Taliban hired him into the department during their regime, and when they fled the city in 2001 he stayed to work for the new government, eventually becoming the department’s deputy chief. His office was a stone building near the main road through the city, where the stone stairs were dangerously smoothed by the years. The furniture looked as though it had been purchased at a second-hand store and given a rigorous beating. Even in the electricity office, there was no electricity. Mohammed Aga and his staff had no computers. They scribbled their notes in old books that looked like ancient tomes. Not that the de
puty chief could read any of it—he was illiterate. Still, he was respected. His department’s fortunes have been looking up recently, as NATO has finally transported a new turbine to a hydro-electric dam in the mountains north of Kandahar, meaning that within a couple of years the electricity department might have some electricity to administer.

  I’d almost forgotten about Mohammed Aga, until today. We closed up the office in February 2007, after three gunmen kicked in the metal doors and searched the compound. Nobody was seriously hurt, but it scared us and I never went back to the office. That location, on a dirt road beside the city’s main Roshan cell phone office, near the soccer stadium where the Taliban government once staged executions, had once been considered close enough to the city centre that it would be relatively safe. Apparently the bearded old office administrator had never stopped feeling relatively safe on that road, because he didn’t stop his habit of walking down the street to pray at a nearby mosque and returning home on foot by the same route every evening. He didn’t have any bodyguards, didn’t carry any weapons. The Taliban ambushed him as he was walking home tonight, around 8:15 p.m., shooting him dead.

  I stopped writing these laments after a while. The deaths were small tragedies in the midst of a much bigger sadness, the unravelling of an entire region. But the sheer comprehensiveness of the assassinations eventually made them a major factor. The Taliban were systematically removing any powerful figures in the south that had any connection with the government. Unlike the foreign troops, who struggled to distinguish friends from enemies, the Taliban knew precisely who qualified for their target lists. Two of the best news outlets in southern Afghanistan, the newspaper Surgar Daily and the website Benawa.com, counted more than five hundred major assassinations from 2002 to mid-2010 in the province of Kandahar. Their lists of the dead are missing many names, however, and the true numbers will never be known.

  The victims we did track closely were the old warlords. For a journalist, they were often the people you called when you wanted to find a specific person, or confirm a fact, or when you needed an armed escort into the districts. They knew the gossip, and never missed a chance to badmouth rivals. Slowly, however, my contact list became riddled with annotations beside their names: “DEAD.” I’d still call those numbers sometimes, because former mujahedeen commanders would often bequeath their fiefdoms—and their cellphones—to relatives, but the replacements were disappointing. The young Naqibi never led his tribe the way his father did; the sons of Habibullah Jan showed little enthusiasm for the family business of controlling a stretch of territory west of the city. Foreign observers of the war had spent years trying to decide if these characters were helpful or not, wrestling with questions about how to neutralize or exploit their influence, but perhaps we only learned to appreciate them after they had disappeared. Most of them had blood on their hands and still posed a serious danger to anybody who crossed them—but they stood as an alternative to the Taliban. Without them, the south belonged to the insurgents.

  The last of these big mujahedeen figures was Ustad Abdul Halim. He had been a minor character during the war against the communists, but emerged as a player during the factional warfare after the Soviet withdrawal. By the time I met him in 2007, he was serving as a security advisor to the governor. It was always a relief to dig my toes into the thick grass in his courtyard after plodding through the city’s dirty lanes. His power had faded since the days when his militias controlled a broad swath of farmland southwest of Kandahar city, but he kept himself well informed about the progress of the war. His bodyguards’ new M-16 rifles, a status symbol in a place where everybody else carried Kalashnikovs, also suggested that he retained some stake in the business of violence. One day we sat in canvas chairs among his rose bushes as he worked his way through a pack of Marlboros and lectured me about how the NATO countries should have anticipated the scale of the problem that awaited them in the south. “It was a trap,” he said, with a chuckle. “You stepped on a landmine.” He had a trick of saying these things in a way that seemed amusing, delivering the worst news with a twinkle in his eyes. One of my colleagues called him “a campy version of Saddam Hussein.”

  Once, on vacation in Toronto, I went gift shopping for the old warrior. I wandered for hours, wondering what I could give a guy who already has his own personal army. I found myself in a store that sells wristwatches, trying to explain to the woman behind the counter that I needed something huge that could belong to a gangster. “Your friend is like a rapper?” she asked. “Well no, he’s a warlord,” I said. “Close enough. Almost the same thing.” As it turned out, the warlord was delighted by the gift. I didn’t expect him to enjoy it for very long, however. His house was located on the west side of Kandahar city, an area increasingly permeated by insurgents, and the Taliban threatened him on a regular basis. I figured he was next on the assassination list, but he endured a few more years in Kandahar before finally declaring his retirement in 2010 and moving north to Kabul. As of this writing, the leathery warrior remains alive. When Ustad Halim moved away from the south, my friend Alex Strick van Linschoten, a well-respected academic who lived in Kandahar, marked the occasion with an e-mail to a few journalists. He reported that the influence of former anti-Soviet commanders had all but disappeared, leaving the local government more vulnerable. “I think this is the last of the giant dinosaur mujahedeen commanders to leave the city,” he wrote. “There is nobody else left. If the beginning of the end needed a starting date, I’d plant it somewhere in this week.”

  Child victim of a night raid by international forces

  CHAPTER 12

  LESSONS FROM THE TALIBAN SURVEY MARCH 2008

  Endless prattle about the war filled the media. Square-jawed international troops stood on sandbag parapets at sunset so that television crews could record their thoughts as they squinted at the badlands. Soldiers attached cameras to their helmets and released the footage. Their daily lives became whole seasons of reality television. Even the insurgent leaders had their say, in grainy videos and audio statements. Local journalists lived with the regular chime of text messages sent to their phones from the Taliban’s official spokesmen. The only participants in the conflict who rarely spoke to the world were the Taliban foot soldiers. Despite all the chatter about them, the fighters themselves were mostly silent.

  On the rare occasions when a journalist made contact with insurgent fighters, the story usually turned into a tale of adventure for the journalist. I was guilty of this myself. My frightening brushes with the Taliban had not given me profound insights into the insurgency, but had instead supplied anecdotes that I could repeat with breathless drama: the car chase through Kandahar’s slums in 2006, or the journey across the border to Quetta’s back alleys in 2007. Some of my colleagues were kidnapped or even killed doing this work. Those who survived got away with amazing stories, book deals or footage that earned good prices from television networks. At its best, this material gave glimpses of everyday life in Taliban camps, but more often we saw shaky images of men brandishing Kalashnikovs and predicting the demise of America. It was usually the same story, that of a brave reporter who goes into Taliban territory, witnesses scary things and emerges with vague conclusions about the warrior spirit.

  Frustrated by this formula, I decided to try something else: a Taliban survey. My editor approved a budget, and we hired a freelance researcher in 2007. I had known “Hafiz” for almost a year, but I avoided learning his real name because I didn’t want to make his life more dangerous. I did not write down his cellphone number on the assumption that US forces would find it tempting to track my calls and hunt down my Taliban contacts. When I wanted to meet him, I drove to the western outskirts of Kandahar city and climbed the steps of a half-empty apartment block. He lived in a tiny room, furnished with only a bedroll. His window gave him a view of a vacant lot and a ruined grain elevator. Hafiz worked as a policeman for the Taliban regime; after 2001 he helped out at a relative’s cellphone shop, but did not make enough
money and fell into debt. One of the people who loaned him money was my translator in Kandahar, which gave us an advantage when it came to persuading him to make risky trips into the villages. Month by month, he proved himself a more capable journalist. His formal education consisted mostly of memorizing the Koran (which gave him the honorific “Hafiz”), but he quickly learned new skills: finding interview subjects, asking questions from a list, recording the answers and, most challengingly, thinking of follow-up questions.

  We offered Hafiz the equivalent of about twenty-five dollars per interview and sent him into five districts outside of Kandahar city to meet insurgent fighters. At first I equipped him with pocket-sized cameras, but these kept disappearing—sometimes he blamed police checkpoints, other times the Taliban—and eventually we settled on cellphones that recorded video. The phone contained a memory chip half the size of his thumbnail, making it easy to slip into folds of his clothing. In total, he smuggled back forty-two interviews with Taliban fighters. The recordings were short and almost useless at first, but their quality improved as he learned the art of prodding his subjects and grew more comfortable asking hard questions. Eight months later, after we double- and triple-checked the material, we ended up with 512 pages of transcript. You can still watch all of the interviews at www.globeandmail.com/talkingtothetaliban, and decide for yourself what to make of them. Others churned through the mountain of stuff and found their own insights; some academics have footnoted our survey to support their claim that the Taliban are a bunch of crazy extremists who won’t negotiate, while other experts cited the material to make exactly the opposite argument. Teachers have used the survey as part of their lessons for classes ranging from grade seven to graduate seminars. An artist captured still images from the Taliban videos and used them as the inspiration for a series of drawings, and a curator displayed snippets of them in a gallery installation.