The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  A U.S. military spokesman would claim later that American soldiers had “come under fire” in the village and had killed one man and wounded two “suspected Taliban or al-Qaeda members.” The implication—that eighty-five-year-old Haji Birgit Khan was the gunman—is clearly preposterous. The two wounded were presumably Khan’s son and Abdullah, the taxi-driver. The U.S. claim that they were Taliban or al-Qaeda members was a palpable lie, since both of them were subsequently released. “Some of the Afghans whom the Americans brought with them were shouting ‘Shut up!’ to the children who were crying,” Faqir Mohamedin remembers. “They made us lie down and put cuffs on our wrists, sort of plastic cuffs. The more we pulled on them, the tighter they got and the more they hurt. Then they blindfolded us. Then they started pushing us towards the planes, punching us as we tried to walk.” In all, the Americans herded fifty-five of the village men, blindfolded and with their hands tied, on to their helicopters. Mohamedin was among them. So was Abdul-Shakour, still unaware that his daughter was dying in the well. The fifty-sixth Afghan prisoner to be loaded on to a helicopter was already dead: the Americans had decided to take the body of eighty-five-year-old Haji Birgit Khan with them.

  When the helicopters landed at Kandahar airport—headquarters to the 101st Airborne—the villagers were, by their own accounts, herded together into a container. Their legs were tied and then their handcuffs and the manacle of one leg of each prisoner were separately attached to stakes driven into the floor of the container. Thick sacks were put over their heads. Abdul Satar was among the first to be taken from this hot little prison. “Two Americans walked in and tore my clothes off,” he said. “If the clothes would not tear, they cut them off with scissors. They took me out naked to have my beard shaved and to have my photograph taken. Why did they shave off my beard? I had my beard all my life.”

  Mohamedin was led naked from his own beard-shaving into an interrogation tent, where his blindfold was removed. “There was an Afghan translator, a Pashtun man with a Kandahar accent, in the room, along with American soldiers, both men and women soldiers,” he says. “I was standing there naked in front of them with my hands tied. Some of them were standing, some were sitting at desks. They asked me: ‘What do you do?’ I told them: ‘I am a shepherd—why don’t you ask your soldiers what I was doing?’ They said: ‘Tell us yourself.’ Then they asked: ‘What kind of weapons have you used?’ I told them I hadn’t used any weapon. One of them asked: ‘Did you use a weapon during the Russian [occupation] period, the civil war period or the Taliban period?’ I told them that for a lot of the time I was a refugee.”

  From the villagers’ testimony, it is impossible to identify which American units were engaged in the interrogations. Some U.S. soldiers were wearing berets with yellow or brown badges, others were in civilian clothes but apparently wearing bush hats. The Afghan interpreter was dressed in his traditional shalwar khameez. Hakim underwent a slightly longer period of questioning; like Mohamedin, he says he was naked before his interrogators. “They wanted my age and my job. I said I was sixty, that I was a farmer. They asked: ‘Are there any Arabs or Talibans or Iranians or foreigners in your village?’ I said ‘No.’ They asked: ‘How many rooms are there in your house, and do you have a satellite phone?’ I told them: ‘I don’t have a phone. I don’t even have electricity.’ They asked: ‘Were the Taliban good or bad?’ I replied that the Taliban never came to our village so I had no information about them. Then they asked: ‘What about Americans? What kind of people are Americans?’ I replied: ‘We heard that they liberated us with [President Hamid] Karzai and helped us—but we don’t know our crime that we should be treated like this.’ What was I supposed to say?”

  A few hours later, the villagers of Hajibirgit were issued with bright-yellow clothes and taken to a series of wire cages laid out over the sand of the airbase—a miniature version of Guantanamo Bay—where they were given bread, biscuits, rice, beans and bottled water. The younger boys were kept in separate cages from the older men. There was no more questioning, but they were held in the cages for another five days. All the while, the Americans were trying to discover the identity of the eighty-five-year-old man. They did not ask their prisoners—who could have identified him at once—although the U.S. interrogators may not have wished them to know he was dead. In the end, the Americans gave a photograph of the face of the corpse to the International Red Cross. The organisation was immediately told by Kandahar officials that the elderly man was perhaps the most important tribal leader west of the city.

  “When we were eventually taken out of the cages, there were five American advisers waiting to talk to us,” Mohamedin says. “They used an interpreter and told us they wanted us to accept their apologies for being mistreated. They said they were sorry. What could we say? We were prisoners. One of the advisers said: ‘We will help you.’ What does that mean?” A fleet of U.S. helicopters flew the fifty-five men to the Kandahar football stadium—once the scene of Taliban executions—where all were freed, still dressed in prison clothes and each with a plastic ID bracelet round the wrist bearing a number. “Ident-A-Band Bracelet made by Hollister” was written on each one. Only then did the men learn that old Haji Birgit Khan had been killed during the raid a week earlier. And only then did Abdul-Shakour learn that his daughter Zarguna was dead.

  The Pentagon initially said that it found it “difficult to believe” that the village women had their hands tied. But given identical descriptions of the treatment of Afghan women after the U.S. bombing of an Uruzgan wedding party, which followed the Hajibirgit raid, it seems that the Americans—or their Afghan allies— did just that. A U.S. military spokesman claimed that American forces had found “items of intelligence value,” weapons and a large amount of cash in the village. What the “items” were was never clarified. The guns were almost certainly for personal protection against robbers. The cash remains a sore point for the villagers. Abdul Satar said that he had 10,000 Pakistani rupees taken from him—about $167 (£114). Hakim says he lost his savings of 150,000 rupees—$2,500 (£1,700). “When they freed us, the Americans gave us two thousand rupees each,” Mohamedin says. “That’s just forty dollars [£27]. We’d like the rest of our money.”

  But there was a far greater tragedy to confront the men when they reached Hajibirgit. In their absence—without guns to defend the homes, and with the village elder dead and many of the menfolk prisoners of the Americans—thieves had descended on Hajibirgit. A group of men from Helmand province, whose leader was once a brutal and rapacious mujahedin fighter against the Russians, raided the village once the Americans had taken away so many of the men. Ninety-five of the 105 families had fled into the hills, leaving their mud homes to be pillaged.

  The disturbing, frightful questions that creep into the mind of anyone driving across the desert to Hajibirgit today are obvious. Who told the United States to raid the village? Who told them that the Taliban leadership and the al-Qaeda leadership were there? For today, Hajibirgit is a virtual ghost town, most of its houses abandoned. The U.S. raid was worthless. There are scarcely forty villagers left. They all gathered at the stone grave of Zarguna some days later, to pay their respects to the memory of the little girl. “We are poor people—what can we do?” Mohamedin asked me. I had no reply. President Bush’s “war on terror,” his struggle of “good against evil,” descended on the innocent village of Hajibirgit.

  And now Hajibirgit is dead.

  I SPENT PART OF THE VAPID hot summer of 2002 in Afghanistan, trying to learn what “liberation” meant. If the experience of Hajibirgit was typical—and it quickly turned out that it was—then what would happen to the people of Iraq if we decided to “liberate” them from Saddam Hussein? And how would Iraqis react to the same treatment?

  I was at my small hotel in Kandahar when the U.S. Special Forces boys barged into it one day. One of them wore kitty-litter camouflage fatigues and a bush hat, another was in civilian clothes, paunchy with jeans. The interiors of their four-wheel-drives g
littered with guns. They wanted to know if a man called Hazrat was staying at the guest house. They didn’t say why, didn’t say who Hazrat was. The concierge had never heard the name. The five men left, unsmiling, driving at speed back on to the main road. “Why did they talk to me like that?” the concierge asked me. “Who do they think they are?” It was best not to reply.

  “The Afghan people will wait a little longer for all the help they have been promised,” the local district officer in Maiwand muttered to me a few hours later. “We believe the Americans want to help us. They promised us help. They have a little longer to prove they mean this. After that . . .” He didn’t need to say more. Out at Maiwand, in the ovenlike grey desert west of Kandahar where the teenage heroine Malalai charged the British guns in the Second Afghan War, the Americans were doing raids, not aid.

  But even when the U.S. military tried to turn its hand to humanitarian work, the Western NGOs—the non-governmental organisations working with the UN— preferred to keep their distance. As a British NGO worker put it with devastating frankness in Kandahar: “When there is a backlash against the Americans, we want a clear definition between us and them.” I heard that phrase all the time in Afghanistan. “When the backlash comes . . .” It was coming already. The Americans were being attacked almost every night. There had been three shootings in Kandahar, with an American officer wounded in the neck near the airport in mid-July of 2002. American troops could no longer dine out in Kandahar’s cafés. Now U.S. forces were under attack in Khost province. Two Afghan auxiliaries were killed and five American soldiers wounded near the Pakistan border at the end of July.

  For the NGOs in Kabul, the danger lay in the grey area—a deliberate grey area, they said—which the Americans created between military operations and humanitarian aid. “Up in Kunduz, they’ve got what they call a ‘humanitarian liaison team’ that has repaired a ward in a local hospital and been involved in rebuilding destroyed bridges,” the Briton said. “Some of the men with them have been in civilian clothes but carrying guns. We took this up with them, because Afghans began to think that our aid organisation also carried guns. The U.S. told us their men didn’t carry weapons openly or wear full uniforms out of deference to the feelings of local tribal leaders. Eventually, we all had to raise this matter in Washington.”

  It wasn’t hard to see the dangers. In Kabul, the Americans were operating an organisation called the CJCMOTF, the Coalition Joint Civil–Military Operations Task Force, whose mission, an official U.S. document said, included “expertise in supply, transportation, medical, legal, engineering and civil affairs.” Headquartered in Kabul, it had “daily contact with [the] U.S. embassy.” Their personnel definitions included “physician, veterinarian, attorney, civil engineer, teacher, firefighter, construction, management,” but their military experience was listed as “Desert Storm, Operation Provide Comfort, Panama, Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo.” Then there’s the CHLC, the Coalition Humanitarian Liaison Center, at Mazar-e-Sharif, whose objective was liaison between “assistance [sic] community and military coalition” and which was “rebuilding public facilities, 14 schools, providing a generator for the airport terminal and providing a medical clinic, a veterinarian clinic and a library.” But its tasks also included “security information,” a “channel of communication to coalition commanders, U.S. embassy and USAID” and—an interesting one, this—“miscellaneous supplies, e.g. concertina wire.” Somehow, rebuilding schools had got mixed up with the provision of barbed wire.

  It made the aid agencies shudder. “I have banned all coalition forces from my compound and will not meet with them in public,” an Australian humanitarian official told me in Kabul. “If they want to contact me, I tell them to send me emails. I will meet them only in certain public authority offices. Yes, of course we are worried that people will mistake us for the military . . . They simply have no idea how to deal with the social, cultural, political complex of life here. They are really not interested. They just want to fight a ‘war on terror.’ I don’t think they care.”

  This was no minor official but a Western coordinator handling millions of dollars of international aid. He knew, as did his staff, how angry Afghans were becoming at the growing U.S. presence in their country. As long as Washington went on paying the private salaries of local warlords, including some who opposed President Hamid Karzai, a kind of truce would continue to exist, but Afghans took a shrewd interest in America’s activities in their country and their anger was only stoked by U.S. bombing raids that left hundreds of innocent Afghans dead.

  After the Americans bombed a wedding party in Uruzgan on 30 June 2002— the death toll eventually came to fifty-five—Pashtuns were outraged at eyewitness accounts of U.S. troops preventing survivors helping the wounded. They were especially infuriated by a report that the Americans had taken photographs of the naked bodies of dead Afghan women. An explanation was not difficult to find. For their own investigation, U.S. forces might well have taken pictures of the dead after the Uruzgan raid and, since bombs generally blast the clothes off their victims, dead female Afghans would be naked. But the story had become legend. Americans took pictures of naked Afghan women. It was easy to see how this could turn potential Afghan friends into enemies. Now guerrilla attacks were increasingly targeting Afghan forces loyal to the government, or to local drug-dealers who were friendly with the Americans. Just as the first mujahedin assaults on the Russians after the 1980 Soviet invasion tended to focus on Moscow’s Afghan Communist allies, so the new attacks were being directed at America’s Afghan allies. If America invaded Iraq, who would the insurgents there attack?

  An Australian Special Forces man had his own thoughts on the subject. The Kandahar garden in which we met was overgrown, the roses scrawny after a day of heat, the dust in our eyes, noses, mouth, fingernails. But the message was straightforward. “This is a secret war,” the Special Forces man told me. “And this is a dirty war. You don’t know what is happening.” And of course, we were not supposed to know. In a “war against terror,” journalists are supposed to keep silent and rely on the good guys to sort out the bad guys without worrying too much about human rights.

  How many human rights did the mass killers of September 11 allow their victims? You are either with us or against us. Whose side are you on? But the man in the Kandahar garden was worried. He was one of the “coalition allies,” as the Americans liked to call the patsies who have trotted after them into the Afghan midden. “The Americans don’t know what to do here now,” he went on. “Even their interrogations went wrong.” Brutally so, it seems. In the early weeks of 2002, the Americans raided two Afghan villages, killed ten policemen belonging to the U.S.-supported government of Hamid Karzai and started mistreating the survivors. American reporters—in a rare show of mouselike courage amid the self-censorship of their usual reporting—quoted the prisoners as saying they had been beaten by U.S. troops. According to Western officials in Kandahar, the U.S. troops “gave the prisoners a thrashing.”

  On 17 March U.S. soldiers arrested at least thirty Northern Alliance gunmen at Hauzimated in Kandahar province: according to eighteen of the prisoners, the Americans refused to listen to their explanation that they were allies and—believing they were Taliban members—punched, kicked and kneed their captives before holding them in cages for four days. They then released them with an apology.

  Now things had changed. The American forces were leaving the beatings to their Afghan allies, especially members of the so-called Afghan Special Forces, the Washington-supported thugs at the former Khad torture centre in Kabul. “It’s the Afghan Special Forces who beat the Pashtun prisoners for information now— not the Americans,” the Australian Special Forces man said. “But the CIA are there during the beatings, so the Americans are culpable, they let it happen.”

  This is just how the Americans began in Vietnam. They went in squeaky-clean with advisers, there were some incidents of “termination with extreme prejudice,” after which it was the Vietnamese
intelligence boys who did the torture. The same with the Russians. When their soldiers poured across the border in 1979, they quickly left it to their Afghan allies in the Parcham and Khad secret police to carry out the “serious” interrogations. And if this was what the Americans were now up to in Afghanistan, what was happening to their prisoners at Guantanamo? Or, for that matter, at Bagram, the airbase north of Kabul to which all prisoners in Kandahar were now sent for investigation if local interrogators believed their captives had more to say? And what about civilian casualties of the Americans” increasingly promiscuous air raids? If so many hundreds of civilians were dying in these bombing attacks across Afghanistan, how many would die in Iraq if Washington redirected its forces to Mesopotamia?193 Of course, it was possible to take a step back from this frightening corner of America’s Afghan adventure. In the aftermath of the Taliban’s defeat, humanitarian workers achieved some miracles. UNICEF reported 486 female teachers at work in the five south-western provinces of the country, with 16,674 girls now at school. Only in Uruzgan, where the Taliban were strongest, had not a single female teacher been employed. UN officials could boast that in these same poverty-belt provinces, polio had now been almost eradicated. But the UN was fighting polio before the Taliban collapsed, and the drugs whose production the Taliban banned were now back on the market. The poppy fields were growing in Helmand province again, and in Uruzgan local warlords were trying to avoid government control in order to cultivate their own new poppy production centres. In Kabul, where two government ministers had been murdered in seven months, President Karzai was now protected—at his own request—by American bodyguards. And you didn’t have to be a political analyst to know what kind of message this sent to Afghans.