The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan

by Graeme Smith

  The soldier eventually let us pass, and I found myself sitting on a plastic lawn chair in the main hall of Deh-e-Bagh’s administrative centre, a room decorated with the tasteless flair common to many Afghan government buildings: fake flowers, frosted glass lighting fixtures and a five-foot-high portrait of President Hamid Karzai. The district chief was holding court with a high-level delegation that included the governor and top NATO military commanders. I had seen previous such meetings play out like farces because of faulty translation, but this time the foreign troops had two interpreters mumbling into mobile transmitters that broadcast to small receivers worn by all foreign personnel in the room, with the Pashto-language proceedings smoothly recorded into a digital archive as if we were sitting in a United Nations conference hall. Other aspects of the meetings were surprisingly organized, too: Afghan officials for education, agriculture, public works and other departments stood up in turn and gave updates about their recent accomplishments. All of the local dignitaries appeared to have memorized some statistics about the number of schools opened, or kilometres of road constructed, which they stood and delivered with great flourishes. Public-affairs officers from the foreign delegations hunched over their notebooks and scribbled it all down. Their pens only paused during awkward moments, such as when the district chief announced that he planned to set up a website and Facebook page to inform locals about his good works—a strategy undermined, he acknowledged, by the fact that his own offices had the only Internet connection in the district. The district chief had been targeted by eleven bombings during the few years of his tenure, and one bomb had badly damaged his compound. Now rebuilt, the place looked more like a military camp than any kind of public facility. It was hard to picture the villagers dropping by to check their Facebook accounts.

  After the meeting finished, I sat with the district leader as he chain-smoked Dunhills. The thirty-three-year-old was among the slickest of a new generation of Afghan leaders, capable of speaking in detail about the demographics and development profile of his area. He seemed intent on lobbying the foreigners for long-term project funding before the coming troop withdrawals, eloquently making a case that the modest industry of his district—growing crops and baking mud bricks—could be expanded to include fabric factories, wheat mills and processing plants for grapes, pomegranates, watermelon and other fruit.

  As he spoke, the air conditioners died. The building lost power for perhaps the fifth time that afternoon. In the distance, we could hear his staff struggling to revive the diesel generator. He got irritated when I asked the obvious question, about how he would find electricity for his planned factories. He suggested that the foreign donors had wasted millions of dollars on modest upgrades to the nearby Dahla Dam that did not include power generation.

  “You should ask the donors, why do they give their money to thieves?” he said, stubbing a Dunhill and lighting another.

  “The big danger is withdrawal,” he added. “They should wait for some time before starting this, maybe three years.”

  “What if they cannot wait?”

  “If they leave, and the insurgency continues, will the Taliban come over these walls? Is that what you are asking? Yes, of course. Everybody knows this.”

  The walls had grown higher, but the officials who inhabited the government facilities had also become more paranoid. Over and over, in places where you might expect to find ardent supporters of the government, people expressed fear and anxiety. There was a sense of looming disaster, a fear that the foreigners built a system that would soon collapse. Nobody trusted that the Afghan government would be strong enough to stand by itself. I repeated my theory about two dozen times, asking everybody I met if the 1989 Soviet withdrawal scenario might happen again. None of the people I asked—governor, police chief, Taliban commander, hairdresser, farmer, people from all over the city—thought my historical parallel had much relevance. Many spoke about the tradition of revenge, the way conflicts can burn for generations in Afghanistan. A senior general from the Interior Ministry, whom I’ve known for years, invited me to his house for dinner and warned of an impending civil war. “This is just the beginning,” he said. “It’s only the trailer for the movie.”

  Other local officials said they sensed the movie unfolding like something they had seen before. I spent an evening sitting on cushions in the courtyard of Sarpoza prison with the facility’s warden, a fifty-two-year-old who got the job after the tunnelling jailbreak a few months earlier. His prisoners now included his predecessor, the former warden, locked up on suspicion of helping the escape. The prison had been showered with international money, and looked stronger than ever. Huge concrete slabs protected the approaches to the main gates, and nearby roads were blocked off to prevent another jailbreak. Despite these improvements, the warden said, the ground underneath the prison remained soft and easy for tunnelling; another jailbreak could happen. When I suggested that the physical upgrades to his prison—costly, elaborate and futile—served as a metaphor for the whole international mission in his country, he said that many others had made the same observation. He waved off my idea that the history of Soviet withdrawal in 1989 might repeat itself. Having previously served in the communist regime and watched the Soviet troops depart, he remembered how the communists bought themselves a little breathing room in those days by making deals with their enemies. He predicted no such agreements with the Taliban. “It will be like Vietnam,” he said, making a gesture with his hand to indicate a helicopter lifting off from a rooftop. I wasn’t sure if he was referring to the iconic photograph from the fall of Saigon, of CIA personnel scrambling to escape, but he kept repeating the word: Vietnam.

  The new Kandahar governor, Tooryalai Wesa, also served in the communist administration at the time of the Soviet withdrawal. His experience of those years stands as a testament to the surprising level of stability that followed the Russian pullout; in 1991, years after US diplomats cabled home their predictions that the communist regime would collapse in a matter of months, Mr. Wesa became the founding president of Kandahar University. By the time I met him at his office in the summer of 2011, he was feeling wistful about those days and anxious about the future. He remembered how the rebels used to fire rockets at the city twice a day in the early 1990s, but he still felt safer back then because he trusted his own men. Communist soldiers were not paid, but had better morale than the new generation of troops, he said, who are prone to running away from the battlefield. “They had belief, commitment,” Mr. Wesa said. “At that time, communist political parties had real support.” If the governor lacked faith in the rank-and-file, his men also seemed disenchanted. I ate lunch with one of the governor’s bodyguards, and between mouthfuls of chicken the young man complained that he had not been paid in three months. When I asked if the government was as strong as Dr. Najib’s regime, the bodyguard laughed so hard that he spit out his food. “No,” he said, wiping up. “When the foreign soldiers leave, the Taliban will come back the next evening.”

  “Will this be a problem for you?” I asked.

  “I will work for whoever pays me,” he said. “Even the Taliban.”

  Other security men were less sanguine about the prospect of an insurgent victory. A few days later, as I was walking out of the police chief’s headquarters, an officer flagged me down and demanded that I interview him. This was unusual; people associated with the government were regularly hunted and killed, so they did not stop journalists in the street and ask for publicity. Abdul Wali, twenty-one, gave his name, posed for a photo and declared that the foreigners should not give up. “They should continue,” he said. “We’re not able to stand without them. If all the foreign troops leave, Afghans will take revenge on each other. I will be killed.” The young man was near the bottom of the pecking order in the police force, the first of eight security men who frisked visitors before they were allowed near the chief. Like many others, he alluded to the fact that senior officials could escape Afghanistan if necessary. “I don’t have a ‘
Plan B,’ ” he said. “I can’t move to Dubai.” His fear of revenge killings was sensible: he served with a unit of the Afghan Border Police that had become notorious for alleged torture and extra-judicial killings, and it’s likely that he had enemies.

  I got a sense of how patiently some locals wait to take revenge when I met a farmer from Zangabad, a cluster of villages southwest of Kandahar city, nestled in the notoriously violent Panjwai valley. The forty-five-year-old said he owned about a hectare of vineyards. He claimed to have seen the bodies of women and children killed by NATO bombs on two occasions over the years; once he saw a charred half of a woman’s corpse lodged inside a water well, tossed there by the force of an explosion. He also remembered the sparkly plastic rings on the fingers of children who died in another blast, heartbreaking little details that stick in the memory. But he spoke with the greatest emotion about the tragedy of his ruined vineyard, a piece of land that had been feeding his family for generations. Somebody called him during lunch on a cold winter’s day and informed him that a Canadian-funded road crew had demolished his farm. The news shook him so badly that his wife mistook the phone call for news of a relative’s death. He rushed to the scene but could not stop the armoured bulldozer. He could see the benefit of the road, in theory; it took over an hour to reach the city during the Taliban regime, and the new construction had reduced that time to only thirty minutes. He also understood the motivation of the foreign troops, who wanted to drive into the Panjwai valley without triggering bombs hidden in the dust of the rough roads. But the farmer became even more upset when he applied for compensation: he claimed that the damage would cost him $1,200 to $3,500 per year, depending on the harvest, but he received only a single payment of $350. He planned to quit farming and open a small dry-goods store in the city. After the blunders of the foreign troops, I wanted to know if he felt any relief at their departure. Would things settle down a bit? I spelled out my ideas about the 1989 withdrawal: fewer troops, less intrusion, diminishing violence, perhaps a surprising level of resilience by the government. He listened carefully, and shook his head.

  “It will be more like 1992,” he said. This was a sad prediction; he was naming the worst year in recent Afghan history, a time when rival factions carved up the landscape into a patchwork of fiefdoms, some no bigger than a few city blocks. The atrocities during that lawless period made the brutal Taliban regime look good by comparison. “I am an example of this,” the farmer continued. “I will take revenge against the people who guided the foreigners.” A Canadian officer told him that the local district chief had selected the route for the new road that smashed through his vineyard. The explanation was probably intended as a lecture about how things normally work in a democracy, but instead, the farmer emerged from the meeting with a belief that he’d been personally wronged by the local politician. Now retired, the politician still had enough influential friends that an immediate attack on his home would be foolish, so the farmer said he planned to strike when the troops leave and the government weakens. He talked about his murder plot with the kind of calm deliberation he might have used for planning the next harvest.

  The optimists I met during that visit to Afghanistan fell into two categories: those in denial about the coming withdrawals, and those who still had hope for negotiations. A fair number of Afghans still refused to believe that the international forces could do anything except keep on escalating the war, after watching successive seasons of rising troop levels. Those who saw withdrawals on the horizon, but managed to stay optimistic, usually clung to the idea that their government would make peace with the insurgents. Depending on their opinions about the origins of the armed resistance, some emphasized that talks should involve cutting a deal with Pakistan—and, to a lesser extent, Iran. Most of the international community appears to have pinned its hopes on a ceasefire as well; but though talks continued in various ways during most of the years I spent in Afghanistan, they never produced solid results. The government and insurgent positions remained stubbornly far apart, with Kabul insisting that its enemies put down their weapons and accept the new constitutional order—and the Taliban, for their part, calling for a departure of the foreign troops before considering any other points.

  If I had expected that the looming spectre of withdrawals would somehow bring the two sides closer together, there was no sign of it happening in Kandahar during the summer of 2011. I met the new police chief, Brigadier-General Abdul Razik, and reminded him that his own relative, a prominent anti-Soviet commander, had been among the rebels lured to the government side in the late 1980s. At that time, the communists had not bothered to make sure the rebels disarmed; if they were willing to keep order in their patch of territory, and avoid attacking the central government, then the Kabul authorities were ready to make peace. Maybe it was time to consider using the same tactic again, trading land and cash for a ceasefire? The young general was scowling and shaking his head before I finished the question. “The mujahedeen loved their country, just wanted the Russians to leave,” Brigadier-General Razik said. “Now the insurgents want other things.”

  The Taliban usually disagree, saying their biggest aim is troop withdrawals, but Brigadier-General Razik was correct that the Taliban also want “other things” that do not sit well with the government: a new constitution, a new president. I hired the same researcher who had helped me with the Talking to the Taliban project, and he travelled into the Panjwai valley for meetings with insurgent leaders. The Taliban commanders had become more skittish than in previous years because US drones now whined overhead more regularly, picking up phone chatter and raining down Hellfire missiles. So my researcher brought his own phone to the Taliban leaders, meeting two mid-level commanders and calling my translator in Kandahar city so I could chat with them. One of them claimed to lead all insurgent forces in two districts southwest of the city. They were both full of triumphant rhetoric about the Canadian pullout and the coming US withdrawals. Somewhat chillingly, they were the only people I spoke with in Kandahar who predicted that violence would decrease after the foreign troops leave. They did not appear to think that the stability of 1989, or the chaos of 1992, were likely scenarios; instead, they expected to sweep back into power as they did from 1994 to 1996, leaving Dr. Najib hanging in a public square, imposing their brutal order. “When anyone doesn’t want to accept the Koran as our constitution, we want to cut their necks,” said the more senior commander. “The northern Afghanistan people, the Kabul people, they don’t want our constitution and that’s why we were fighting against them before.” In the eyes of these insurgents, they have been waging a single continuous war for much of the last two decades; they did well in the 1990s, pushing the northerners out of the capital, and suffered losses in the following decade as the foreigners invaded, but looked forward to better odds in the coming years. My translator rolled his eyes at some of their fierce words, suggesting that they amped up their propaganda when speaking with foreign journalists. Still, most of it was standard fare for the Taliban. They did not sound ready to put down their guns, and neither did their opponents. It was hard to see them making peace.

  The sense of impending ruin, of looming threat, was best captured by my return visit to an old acquaintance, the hairdresser whose small shop I had visited in 2006. Almost everything in his salon looked better than during my previous visit five years ago: the ripped grey linoleum had been replaced with blue tile, and waiting customers relaxed on a plush sofa instead of plastic lawn chairs. A television has been installed, tuned to news of the war. But the hairdresser pointed out a flaw that I’d initially overlooked: a deep crack in the arched ceiling, structural damage left by a suicide bombing a couple of years ago in the street near his shop. The hairdresser complained to his landlord that the jagged lines made him worried that chunks of concrete might break off. The landlord put masking tape over the cracks; when the tape breaks, he said, run away. The yellowed tape broke a long time ago, but Mr. Khoshbakht tried to ignore the warning sign. He av
oided looking at the ceiling, and continued snipping, buzzing and trimming for the few customers willing to brave the dangerous streets for a haircut. He nodded enthusiastically at the idea that his damaged shop mirrored the way Kandahar emerged from the last five years: scarred by violence, with visible signs of improvement, but every day a little closer to the whole thing crashing down on everybody’s head.

  It’s hard to live with that kind of fear hanging over you. The improvements to Kandahar city had spread all the way to the hairdresser’s doorstep, as new blacktop replaced the dirt road outside his shop. When I asked him to talk about the legacy of the foreign presence, however, he focused on the violence. “They promised to bring security and stop the fighting,” he said. “They did not keep their promises.”

  Graffiti at Kandahar Air Field

  AFTERWORD JANUARY 2013

  Many feelings propelled me back to war, but the strongest was curiosity. Or perhaps curiosity is too analytical a word to describe my desire to know. Imagine you’re reading a novel and you misplace the book: the incomplete narrative becomes an ache. I quit my job, packed my bags and took a research posting in Afghanistan. “You came back … voluntarily?” asked a British diplomat. Yes, emphatically. My years in the south were marked by escalation: each surge of NATO forces, from 2006 to 2012, seemed to bring more trouble. What would happen as the troops withdrew? The early signs were difficult to read. We had rare inklings of positive trends in 2012, as civilian casualties declined for the first time in a decade. American military intelligence counted one or two attacks against civilians per day in the months before the first wave of NATO troops hit the south in early 2006; that number rose to an average of more than forty attacks per day in the summer of 2012. But then, like a minor miracle, in the last six months of 2012, the number of slain civilians started to taper off: each of the final months of the year were modestly better than the same period one year earlier.