The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan

by Graeme Smith

  The letters were discovered by CNPA officers on June 19, 2005, during what must have been a really confusing narcotics bust. The takedown went smoothly at first, as the anti-drug team set an ambush on a road east of Kabul for a notorious dealer named Sayyed Jan. He refused to stop, and officers raked the tires of his new Lexus with gunfire. He tried to run away with two bodyguards, but the team captured them and found heroin in his vehicle. Accounts varied about the quantity of drugs; General Daud himself claimed it was 230 kilograms, but other counter-narcotics sources said it was somewhat less. (A British official joked, “Maybe some fell off the lorry.”) More perplexingly for the CNPA team, the drug dealer was carrying letters of protection from their own boss. A letter from General Daud to a southern governor, dated three months earlier, introduced the drug dealer in respectful terms and urged the provincial leader to help him with unspecified duties. Two other letters show that the governor and local police chief obeyed the CNPA boss, writing their own guarantees of safe passage for the dealer. Reading those letters must have felt uncomfortable for the CNPA men, as they realized they had caught somebody with powerful connections.

  It would have been convenient for General Daud to claim that the drug dealer had been operating as a double agent, secretly working on anti-narcotics operations—that could have explained why the anti-drug czar scrawled his signature on behalf of somebody caught with millions of dollars’ worth of heroin. But the general did not offer that defence when a court convicted Mr. Jan. (He later escaped, under mysterious circumstances.) Nor did the general give any legitimate reason for helping Mr. Jan. When my translator confronted him, he touted his record of accomplishments and denied taking money from Mr. Jan—or any other drug dealer. I did not believe him. One of the trafficker’s relatives sat down with me and explained how the payoffs worked, with bribes of $50,000 to $100,000 required for each major shipment. The most expensive payment, an additional $50,000 per shipment, went to the man Mr. Jan referred to using a Pashto word that sounds like masher, meaning boss. During my conversation with Mr. Jan’s relative on a chilly day in November, he huddled deeper into his woolen shawl when I asked him to name the boss. “Who was his boss?” he said, looking at me seriously through the smoke of his cigarette. “His boss was the chief of CNPA.”

  Drug profits made government jobs worth serious money. Mr. Jan’s relative estimated that officers would need to pay at least $200,000 per year for the privilege of holding some CNPA postings. A former provincial police chief told me the same thing, confirming that bribes worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars changed hands before authorities in Kabul appointed people to key postings. It seemed that among the government officials who controlled the gateways of the south, few cared about collecting a salary from Kabul. The money flowed in the opposite direction, as employees rented their positions and hoped to extract enough bribe money to make the investment pay off.

  I showed my notes on drug corruption to an experienced United Nations official in Kabul. He told me not to mistake the government mafias for a seamless conspiracy, suggesting that the networks within the regime functioned more like interlinked, overlapping, competing factions. The United Nations estimated that the number of farm hectares devoted to opium cultivation during the first decade of the Karzai regime was, on average, more than double the number of hectares used for opium during the Taliban regime. For the sake of argument, I suggested that a cold-blooded observer might not see the corruption as entirely bad because it funnelled money into the impoverished government and created incentives for the regime to win territory. On an individual level, I suggested, couldn’t the drugs serve as a motivator for Afghan police officers to assume dangerous posts that might otherwise get abandoned? My source from the United Nations didn’t take this well. He responded: “You’re assuming it’s a two-way relationship between the drug dealers and the government, but it’s more like a triangle. It includes the Taliban.” He explained that roughly two hundred light weapons were smuggled into Afghanistan every day during the peak of the recent fighting season. The insurgents used ammunition in industrial quantities, littering tonnes of bullets on the battlefields with their “spray-and-pray” marksmanship. Taliban were usually portrayed in the media as rugged frontiersmen, hauling guns and bullets through snowy mountain passes, but in reality the shipment routes were more efficient: just like the drug dealers, weapons smugglers took advantage of the roads paved by the international donors. The United Nations official quoted a statistic that nearly made me choke: about 50 to 70 per cent of the insurgents’ weapons arrived by road, with help from corrupt figures in the Afghan government itself. (An intelligence source later confirmed this number, saying the percentages were even higher for ammunition.) The United Nations officials sketched out one drug route that took raw opium from Kandahar to a processing lab in the eastern provinces, then north to the border with Tajikistan. The same network of crooked officials, using the same trucks, smuggled guns back down the same roads for the insurgents in the south. A Kalashnikov rifle purchased for $100 or $150 in Tajikistan would be sold for $400 in Kandahar, a profit margin that made guns almost as lucrative as drugs. The fact that the rifles might be used to kill foreign soldiers—or even the corrupt Afghan official who sold them—did nothing to stem the trade.

  My article about drug corruption appeared in early 2009, using the phrase “toxic triangle” to summarize the three-way relationship between the traffickers, insurgents and government figures. Within days of publication it became clear that I should stay away from the country for awhile. General Daud visited Kandahar soon afterward and seemed suspiciously curious about my whereabouts, as well as the identity of my translators, but fortunately he failed to discover their names. By then I had already departed. A US military intelligence analyst sent a message saying that Afghanistan “isn’t healthy for you to come back to for at least a good, long while.… I don’t want to be attending a funeral.” I had expected that kind of backlash, in fact. My editors had approved a temporary leave from my job at the newspaper, so I would not need to go back to Afghanistan that year. I had already said goodbye to my local friends, who organized a farewell picnic at the last minute, throwing down a few woven mats in a parking lot near the airport. It had been a strange celebration, sitting cross-legged under a lone tree with barren branches, a little beyond the barbed-wire perimeter. Soldiers in a nearby watchtower paced back and forth as we enjoyed a final meal together. I promised to return someday.

  Stray dogs at Tarnak Farms

  CHAPTER 16

  ANOTHER SURGE JUNE 2011

  I stayed away from Afghanistan for two years, wary of the threat from General Daud. He probably forgot about me—just one of many annoying foreigners—but I’ll never know whether he nursed a grudge: a bomb killed him in May 2011. His supporters wailed in the streets, and analysts lamented his death as a sign of instability. This was accurate; General Daud had been a dangerous man, especially for critics like me, but he ranked among the biggest of the pro-government figures who enforced a sort of order. The assassination was an indication of things going badly, of cracks in whatever structure existed in Kabul. His death allowed me back into the country, however, and I quickly made arrangements for a trip to Kandahar. I wanted to see old friends, and get a sense of how things had changed. News reports suggested that a radical transformation was underway: the United States had tripled the overall troop strength in southern Afghanistan. The surge of reinforcements was matched by a surge of violence, with insurgent attacks doubling in the province over two years. When I closed my eyes and imagined the war-ravaged place I had known, it was hard to picture Kandahar with dramatically more bombings, ambushes and assassinations. The city I left behind was a place where conversations often ended with a bang, as people rushed outside to gawk at smoke rising from the latest explosion. Now what? Smoke from several bombings hanging over the rooftops at any given time?

  Not according to my translator, someone I’ve known and trusted for years. I ca
lled him before booking my flights, and I felt relieved, as always, to hear his voice crackling over the rough mobile networks. He confirmed that many types of attack had increased, especially the targeted killings; the Taliban had become so precise in their selection of victims that they released biographies of the dead within hours after hit teams gunned them down, explaining why the insurgency had passed a death sentence upon some government staffer or aid worker. Still, my translator advised that downtown Kandahar was now less dangerous for journalists. Bombings and firefights on the main avenues were less frequent, making it unlikely that I’d get caught in the crossfire unless I went beyond the city limits. New guesthouses had been equipped with blast walls and reinforced guard posts to accommodate foreign visitors. Convoys of armoured vehicles no longer raced madly through the streets: the troops had learned how to drive more cautiously, drifting slowly through the city with their hatches sealed to avoid trouble. Afghan forces in the province were no longer a joke, my translator added, suggesting that a disciplined system of searching cars at every gateway to Kandahar city was helping to make the place safer.

  These were practical updates from a friend who wanted to keep me alive during my stay, not the rhetoric of commanders. I had dismissed the claims of “fragile progress” in the south as more of the misplaced optimism we heard for years, but here was my closest friend in the city telling me that something positive was happening—at least in some neighbourhoods. This rekindled a theory I’d been thinking about for years, a hopeful idea about how the conflict might eventually simmer down. It seemed reasonable, after spending billions of dollars on the local government, to expect that the Afghan regime would become strong enough to survive on its own. The best historical precedent for this was the way the communist government under Mohammad Najibullah Ahmadzai—better known as “Doctor Najib” because of his medical studies—showed resilience after the Soviet troops withdrew in 1989. That period of history is often misunderstood, because many people assume that the administration set up by the Russians fell apart immediately after its sponsors retreated. But I’ve spoken with dozens of Afghans who remember those times, and they describe a situation that sounds remarkably stable. Kabul maintained control of the capital and key cities, offering bribes and territory for peace with rebel leaders. Moscow continued supplying hundreds of millions of dollars in cash, arms and equipment. Insurgents mustered a major attack on the eastern city of Jalalabad in the spring of 1989, throwing maybe ten thousand rebels at a government stronghold, but the offensive turned into a debacle and the rebel factions never showed that kind of unity again. Scholars who reviewed that period of history concluded that the insurgents weren’t very good at the kind of organized warfare necessary to seize a country—and, without a common enemy, the rebel groups started fighting each other. Those factors might have allowed Dr. Najib to survive if the Soviet Union had not collapsed. His regime lasted only four months after aid was formally cut off in 1992, and by that point his citizens were starving without food deliveries. That kind of collapse seems unlikely to happen again, however, because the Karzai government does not depend on a crumbling empire; despite the economic troubles of the West, the regime in Kabul can still rely on sponsorship from many of the world’s richest countries. My personal theory was that the foreigners would eventually withdraw their troops and the violence would slowly ebb, the way it happened during the Soviet pullout. I guessed that the withdrawals would sap the energy and unity of insurgents whose rallying cry has been the removal of foreign soldiers. I also figured that the Kabul elites, who had been reluctant to offer serious concessions in their long-running negotiations with the insurgents, would feel more willing to talk peace without protection from the troops.

  That theory was about to get tested. Canada was pulling its troops from the south that summer, and the Netherlands had already withdrawn. Their numbers were small but symbolic, and reminded everybody about the bigger withdrawals in the coming months if the United States, France, Britain and other NATO countries went ahead with troop reductions. The declared goal of pulling “most” troops by 2014 was a vague target, but as I prepared for a return visit to Kandahar, the focus of all conversations was that the foreigners were actually leaving. That simple fact amazed people in the south. For years, many Afghans had suspected that the United States and its allies would keep their military foothold indefinitely; even the illiterate farmers understood why the US wanted bases near the borders of Iran and China. But it was difficult for my friends inside Afghanistan to pick up on the mood of war fatigue in the West, and hard for them to understand the depth of the recent economic troubles in the rich countries. Withdrawals had been discussed for years, but the reality did not hit people in Kandahar until the summer of 2011 as locals watched Canada’s armoured vehicles pulling out, and listened to President Obama’s televised speech promising to bring home thirty-three thousand soldiers within a year. All of a sudden, it didn’t seem abstract to wonder if the local government could survive without them.

  My first impression, after years away, was that the Afghan government looked a whole lot stronger. On my first visit, in 2005, I had to crawl along the baggage carousel and duck through the plastic curtain to find my bags at the Kabul airport, wrestling with dirty children who tried to slip their fingers in my pockets. By 2011, the local police had cleared away the beggars and porters, and the place felt more like a military airstrip than a civilian facility. Standing in the astonishingly straight line for a flight to Kandahar—no pushing, no jostling—I was surprised to meet a British journalist headed south for an embed with the Afghan National Army. This was the first time I’d heard of a reporter risking his life by going on patrol with a purely Afghan unit, without supervision by foreign troops, and we agreed it was a good sign. Even the airport itself looks better, I told him, gesturing at the clean marble, carved wood and freshly painted surfaces of the terminal.

  “This place is beautiful now,” I said.

  An Afghan standing behind me overheard the comment. “Are you kidding?” he said. “It was much better during Najib’s time.” A muscular man with hooded eyes, he sat beside me on the plane and introduced himself as a Pashto-language interpreter for “OGA,” an acronym that means “other government agencies,” a shorthand for the US Central Intelligence Agency. He looked exhausted and did not harbour any great hopes for his own government, which he considered weaker than the communist regime. I asked him why the foreigners’ good intentions amounted to so little, in his opinion. “Because they’re idiots,” he said, with his accent drawing out the first vowel of the word, idiots, into a long “eeeeee” sound. Then he cranked up something called “party mix” on his iPod and ignored me for the rest of the flight.

  The final approach to Kandahar was choppy, with hot wind coming off the desert around the airfield. Even from the air, I could see progress: new roads, new buildings, new communication towers. Kandahar Air Field had expanded dramatically, like a sprawling dust-coloured city. An experimental farm greened a wasteland near the base, an arid tract previously littered with garbage. The expanded military airport now included a fleet of Mi-17s, part of the recently established Kandahar Air Wing, an Afghan air command that had started running basic transport and medical evacuation missions. Unlike their communist predecessors, the Afghans were not flying attack aircraft, however; the helicopter gunships that had helped Dr. Najib defend his regime were still considered too risky a weapon in local hands.

  On my first day in the city, I woke early and drove south to the village of Deh-e-Bagh, a small settlement that was deemed safe enough to become a “model village,” a showcase of development. The last time I’d driven that road it was a muddy track leading into dangerous territory; now my driver seemed relaxed, rolling down the freshly paved blacktop and easing to a halt at new checkpoints that loomed over the road like medieval fortresses. The town looked deserted, with no traffic and police standing guard every few hundred metres.

  “No people, no problems,” I said, h
alf-unconsciously, and then noticed that my translator looked puzzled. I explained that I’d learned this phrase while living in Russia, that Stalin reputedly used those words to explain his brutal way of quelling unrest. I mildly regretted teaching him this expression shortly thereafter. We parked our car and started ambling through checkpoints, finally meeting a nervous American soldier who scrutinized my passport and seemed skeptical about allowing me inside; he became even less co-operative when my translator said, “No people, no problems,” and laughed. I could see how the dark phrase would be unnerving, coming from a long-bearded Afghan who cackled wildly.