The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan

by Graeme Smith

  Or, so we thought. Like so many other hopeful signs in Afghanistan, the violence numbers turned out to be less than clear. In early 2013, NATO said that a clerical error had flawed the previous year’s statistics, incorrectly showing a decline in violence. In fact, NATO said, the violence remained about the same in 2012 as in 2011. Another analysis of the seemingly positive 2012 data suggested that any hints of the war cooling down might have been a result of an unusually cold winter, and not a dénouement in the conflict. This suspicion was confirmed in the spring of 2013, when a respected security group, the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (ANSO), concluded that insurgent attacks grew 47 per cent in the first quarter, as compared with the same period a year earlier. The first sentence of the ANSO report noted that these numbers undermined the “linear logic” that fewer troops would mean less activity by the insurgents. In other words, the theory that I’d been floating—that withdrawals would drain the insurgency’s momentum—was being challenged by ugly facts.

  Despite the vicious war in the countryside, some officials in Kabul allowed themselves to feel confident. Their national army and police forces were stronger than ever in the last decade, making it seem unlikely that the Taliban could take the capital. In an interview with British media, President Karzai claimed that Afghan security forces would be better able to bring peace than the NATO troops. He also observed that, on the whole, the situation in the south deteriorated when international soldiers arrived in large numbers. “In 2002 through 2006, Afghanistan had a lot better security,” Karzai said. “When we had our own presence there, with very little foreign troops, schools were open in Helmand and life was more secure.” The president emphasized that he wasn’t blaming the NATO forces, and he spoke without apparent animosity toward the international community—which, after all, had provided about 90 per cent of his national budget in recent years.

  Karzai suffered criticism for his statement, but he was correct. The NATO surges into the south will almost certainly be remembered as a spectacular mistake. Many of the aims were noble: peace, democracy, rule of law. We thought that a sweeping program of armed nation-building might improve the lives of people in southern Afghanistan and simultaneously eliminate a haven for terrorism. Both of these guesses proved incorrect. Flooding the south with troops did not have a pacifying effect. The villagers were not, despite the assurances from experts, clamouring for the arrival of international forces. Many of them now hate the outside world more than ever. As the troops withdraw, they leave behind pockets of territory not controlled by the government of Afghanistan, and few guarantees that these will never again serve as incubators for international jihadists.

  But how much guarantee did we need, that southern Afghanistan will not revert to a hideout for terrorists? I was never convinced that any military, no matter how large or capable, could roll into a swath of terrain and make sure that conspirators would never again use that location as a base for nefarious plots. I sometimes sensed frustration about the daunting task among the scribbles on the bathroom walls of Kandahar Air Field. Perhaps the only topic that united the men who wrote on the walls, besides their desire for sex, was their hatred of Afghanistan. They marked their days like prisoners. “Welcome to Shitnistan,” somebody wrote. But the thing that really caught my attention was the bathroom door on which somebody took a knife or a razor and cut the words NUKE AFGHANISTAN, in capital letters. A maintenance worker tried to paint over the phrase, but somebody re-traced the letters in black ink. I had seen the same thing on other walls, sometimes accompanied by diagrams of how mass killing could be achieved: dotted lines indicating bomb arcs, sketches of mushroom clouds, little stick figures of Afghans frying in the nuclear blast. This was not an isolated idea, but something I kept seeing in military washrooms over the years. Maybe it expressed pure frustration. Maybe the soldiers wanted this long war settled, finally, and reached in their imaginations for the biggest weapon. But maybe it was a more sophisticated commentary on the absurd logic of the war, a Swiftian modest proposal that revealed the only way Western countries could feel absolutely certain that Afghanistan would never serve as a terrorist haven. Given that no sane person wanted to turn the country into a sheet of radioactive glass, perhaps this was the soldiers’ way of saying the civilians at home had better get used to accepting risk in their lives, because there was a limit to how many people you can kill as a preventative measure. The phrase “never again,” so often heard after 9/11, represented an impossible task for any military force.

  This reminded me of a speech I’d heard years ago by the late American writer Kurt Vonnegut, in which he dissected Cold War logic by asking: “What fate is worse than death?” He argued that nothing could explain why countries need weapons capable of making the planet unfit for humans, because no scenario exists in which the best thing for humanity would be nuclear cataclysm. He was saying that the medicine was worse than the disease, in other words, and I wondered if the same applied to the fight against terrorism. Modern terrorists have rarely killed more than a few thousand people in any given year. Many times in Afghanistan, when my boots were stained with human gristle, I asked myself if the bloody effort could be justified by the hunt for small bands of madmen.

  Defeating terrorism was never described as NATO’s main goal in southern Afghanistan, however. Military interpreters sometimes heard Arabic on the Taliban communications intercepts, but for the most part the international jihadists had disappeared by the time NATO pushed into the south. Instead, the soldiers were assigned to improve the lives of ordinary Afghans. This wasn’t entirely altruistic—military planners believed that the region would become more resistant to extremist ideology with a healthy dose of development—but it wasn’t all cold calculation. Many prominent humanitarians were among those who called for a large contingent of foreign soldiers in the south. In July 2003, more than eighty non-governmental organizations declared a need for a bigger, tougher NATO presence in the provinces. “If Afghanistan is to have any hope for peace and stabilization, now is the time to expand international peacekeepers to key cities and transport routes outside of Kabul,” the statement said. I’m biased in favour of one of the signatories—the International Crisis Group, which later became my employer—but it’s fair to say that the organizations that signed the call to arms were some of the most respected voices in conflict zones around the world. Seasoned policy professionals genuinely felt that an influx of firepower would help the situation. Many of them still feel shortchanged, that if only a larger NATO contingent had been rushed into southern Afghanistan, with greater haste, then perhaps things would not have gone badly.

  I’ve had dinner party arguments about this, with people who know far more about Afghanistan and the conduct of foreign interventions, and I usually end up deferring to their claim that a bigger initial surge of troops might have resulted in success. But I can’t help feeling that the right combination of tools and goals never existed for southern Afghanistan. Even with an imaginary contingent of perfect soldiers and development experts, with sufficient funding, deployed at the right moment, it’s possible that we still would have been thwarted by our inability to understand the needs and desires of the local people. Our ideas for improving Afghanistan had ballooned into a utopian vision, an unrealistic and loosely organized set of goals. I keep a thick sheaf of papers that reminds me about those incredible ambitions. The grandiosely titled “Kandahar City Five-Year Municipality Strategic Action & Development Projects Planning” describes what the city leaders wanted to achieve from 2006 to 2011. Several months of discussion among Afghan officials and foreign donors had culminated in a two-day meeting at a palatial guesthouse; after welcoming remarks from the mayor and governor, policy experts presented the details. Public employees would wake up in the morning in houses built by the government, and ride to work in electric trolley buses or walk on paved footpaths because “people should not walk on the road.” They would breathe easily during their commute, because of an air-quality program that fitted di
esel cars and generators with smoke filters, and set up an engine-test workshop to check vehicle emissions. Beautiful scents would fill the air, too, thanks to the gardens and trees lining the streets, and the breezes coming through the new public parks. Workers would arrive each day at libraries, daycare centres, urban farm projects, new diagnostic laboratories, or one of the three hundred new factories. They could spend leisurely evenings in new gymnasiums, stadiums, playgrounds, cinemas, theatres, fitness centres and musical clubs. Or, perhaps they would spend their idle hours at one of the eighty public Internet kiosks around the city.

  The mayor who spoke at that planning meeting was later assassinated, and the Kandahar governor narrowly survived several attempts on his life. The version of the city described on that day will probably never exist, partly because it was not rooted in the daily concerns of the people who struggle to survive in Kandahar and the surrounding districts. When I speak to local friends, they never mention Internet kiosks as their top priority. Usually, our conversations focus on the basics of survival.

  There is still hope for southern Afghanistan. Electric trolleys seem unlikely, and it’s unclear whether the local authorities will continue building girls’ schools—or respect basic human rights. But violence declined in a few central districts of Kandahar province in early 2013, which suggests that the Afghan forces successfully kept the Taliban away from the provincial capital. If the Afghan government gets sufficient help from foreign donors, then I will remain skeptical about the insurgents’ ability to overrun targets such as the major cities and airports. President Karzai could still be proven correct: Afghan forces could still win the war, after the terrible blunders of the international community.

  For the Afghan government to gain the upper hand, however, the foreign money needs to continue flowing. If salaries aren’t paid, local police could turn into insurgents or bandits. Problems with the pay structure would also threaten the integrity of the Afghan military, possibly breaking a key national institution into feuding factions. Donors have promised to continue supporting the cost of Afghan security forces until 2017, but even the most optimistic projections show the donations shrinking in the coming years. The Afghan forces will also require help with air support and logistics, making sure that enough diesel, bullets and other supplies reach the front lines. Just as importantly, they need to refrain from beating people, stealing money and fighting each other. They need to behave in a way that inspires trust.

  These are tall orders, but not impossible. Afghan security forces with a healthy budget from foreign donors may succeed in keeping the Taliban at bay. There’s also a risk that parts of the country could fall into anarchy, or break into civil war. I keep thinking about the hairdresser in Kandahar city and the cracked ceiling of his shop, always threatening to collapse. I hope that the United States and its allies feel a sense of responsibility about leaving southern Afghanistan in that kind of peril. In his State of the Union address in early 2013, President Barack Obama predicted “by the end of next year, our war in Afghanistan will be over.” Perhaps the war will be finished for many US troops, but the fight is far from settled. Afghanistan was an unsuccessful laboratory for ideas about how to fix a ruined country. It’s morally unacceptable to claim success in a few limited areas—child mortality, access to education—and walk away. At best, we are leaving behind an ongoing war. At worst, it’s a looming disaster. This is not an argument in favour of keeping battalions of foreign soldiers in the south, but a plea for continued engagement. Troop surges didn’t work; the mission was a debacle. That should not discourage us. Rather, it should spur our work to repair and mitigate the damage in southern Afghanistan, and inspire a more careful approach to the next international crisis. The soldier who told me that modern civilization cannot tolerate empty spots on the map was probably right: we cannot write “Here be dragons” in the blank spaces, cannot turn away and ignore countries that become dangerous. That kind of neglect always bites us in the ass.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  If you’ve read this book, you know that the narrative has few heroes—except the translators. Several brave men risked their lives to collect the information in these pages. With their skills, they could have made a lot of money during the post-2001 gold rush in Afghanistan. Instead they chose a modest salary, and the difficult work of finding facts. They followed roads that nobody should have travelled, and dared to investigate figures who were powerful, corrupt and dangerous. In the spring of 2013, one of my former translators revealed how concerned he’d been about security. As described in Chapter 7, when our office was raided and I debated with my editors about buying a gun, we concluded that arming the local staff wasn’t a good idea. But it turns out that one translator secretly went ahead and purchased weapons, stashing two Kalashnikovs in his house and a pistol under a seat cushion of our car. That wasn’t much of an arsenal, by local standards, but it was a sign of his nervousness. I will always be grateful that our Afghan staff did not quit in the face of rising danger, and continued to tackle hard assignments. They cannot be named today, but hopefully in future they will get the recognition they deserve.

  I started work on a book proposal in 2007 with encouragement from Dave Bidini and Dinah Forbes. Several friends recommended Jackie Kaiser at Westwood Creative Artists, and Stephanie Nolen kindly introduced me to her. Jackie has been the guiding force behind this project, going far beyond the job description of “literary agent” and becoming both mentor and fairy godmother. Humble thanks to Diane Martin, Louise Dennys, Anne Collins and Brad Martin at Knopf Canada for putting their faith in this book. It’s been a special privilege to work with Louise, a literary legend. Paul Taunton handled the toughest part of the edit with such finesse that I found it hard not to add “Yes!” beside all of his marginalia. Thanks as well to others at the publishing house who contributed to this project, including Linda Pruessen, Shona Cook, Michelle MacAleese, Deirdre Molina, Brittany Larkin, Andrew Roberts, Sean Tai and Liba Berry. I’m grateful to Peter Jacobsen, yet again, for legal advice.

  Many of the people who helped in Afghanistan must remain anonymous. That makes these acknowledgements rather lopsided; Afghan sources were my key interview subjects but naming them could put them at risk. Even my Afghan friends who have escaped often have families in the country that remain terribly exposed. For different reasons, most military and diplomatic sources also cannot be included.

  Other important sources can be named, but with the understanding that they’re not to blame for—and may not endorse—my view of the war. I had frequent assistance from the brightest young minds now writing about the south: Alex Strick van Linschoten, Felix Kuehn, Anand Gopal and Matthieu Aikins. Our group of observers was enhanced by Joshua Foust, Jean MacKenzie, Ben Anderson and Naheed Mustafa, among others, who contributed to e-mail chains that were enlightening and, often, sadly funny. A similar thread of conversation went on for years with Thomas Johnson, Chris Mason and a third person; all offered useful insights. Sami Kovanen was generous with his conflict data.

  The camaraderie of journalists in a war zone usually defies the stereotype of reporters with sharp elbows. Murray Brewster took me under his wing, and I will always feel kinship with the temporary residents of the media tents at Kandahar Air Field. These included Al “Big Daddy” Stephens, Stephanie Levitz, Michael Heenan, Stephen Puddicombe, Francis Silvaggio, Tim Lee, Sat Nandlall, Mellissa Fung, Paul Workman, Richard Johnson, Tom Blackwell, Sarah Galashan, Jonathan Fowlie, Peter Armstrong, Piya Chattopadhyay, Kelly Cryderman, Steve Chao, Lee Greenberg, Tom Parry, Peter Harris, Adam Day, Derek Stoffel, Jas Johal, Jeffrey Stephen, Colin Perkel, Tobi Cohen, Jonathan Montpetit, Sue Bailey, Martin Ouellet, Bob Weber, Dene Moore, Andrew Mayeda, Pascal Leblonde, Susan Ormiston, David Common, Laurie Graham, Susan Lunn, Brian Hutchinson, Mitch Potter, Matthew Fisher, Ben O’Hara-Byrne, Michael Heenan, Don Martin, Louie Palu, Mike Drolet, Paul Johnson, Lauren McNabb, Steve Rennie, Finbarr O’Reilly, Terry Pedwell, James McCarten, Bill Graveland, Fabrice de Pierrebourg, A
gnès Gruda, Michèle Ouimet, Hugo Meunier, Bruce Campion-Smith, Rick Madonik, Rosie DiManno, Lisa LaFlamme, Tom Clark, Seamus O’Regan, Michelle Lang and many others.

  Beyond the Canadian media, I was also lucky to meet intrepid journalists such as Kathy Gannon, Lyse Doucet, Carlotta Gall, James Bays, Tom Coghlan, Gretchen Peters, Yaroslav Trofimov, Tim Albone, Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Jason Burke, Anders Somme Hammer and Philip Poupin. Kathy, in particular, guided me through complicated issues.

  Some of the greatest experts in the region were generous with their time and patience. Sarah Chayes welcomed me into Kandahar city and taught me the basics; Ahmed Rashid hosted me at his beautiful home and explained the region; Talatbek Masadykov, Eckart Schiewek, Michael Semple, Mervyn Patterson, Paul Fishstein, Barbara Stapleton and Barnett Rubin taught me Afghan politics. David Mansfield explained narcotics; Grant Kippen described elections. My wonderful friends, Georgette Gagnon and Nikolaus Grubeck, helped me understand human-rights issues. Antonio Giustozzi gave me my first taste of book-writing; Christine Fair showed me that it’s possible to be a serious thinker but keep a sense of humour. John Duncan, Mark Sedra, Amir Attaran, Roland Paris, Stephen Saideman and Kamran Bokhari offered expert perspectives from Canada. I also benefitted from the wisdom of Martine Van Bijlert, Peter Bergen, Anatol Lieven and Matt Waldman. More recently, I’ve also started to depend on Kate Clark, Fabrizio Foschini, Bette Dam, Megan Minnion, Heather Barr, Rachel Reid, Susanne Schmeidl and Riona Nicholls.

  I gained profound respect for Joanna Nathan and Candace Rondeaux during, and after, their stints with the International Crisis Group, and feel grateful that they introduced me to the organization. I’m lucky to work under an illustrious group of bosses: Louise Arbour, Jonathan Prentice, Joost Hiltermann, Paul Quinn-Judge, Mark Schneider, Jim Della-Giacoma and, especially, Samina Ahmed.