The Taliban had nevertheless left behind a horrendous offering. Threaded throughout the lanes, orchards, and homesteads were hundreds of mines and improvised explosive devices, which the military called IEDs. They planted yellow plastic jugs full of fertilizer linked up to antipersonnel mines or homemade detonators. They rigged them with long-life batteries or even sponges to lie in wait until a soldier or villager came walking along and stepped on the trigger. They booby-trapped houses, doors, and gateways, outhouses, and even overhanging trees. Patrolling on foot, the daily business of a counterinsurgency campaign, was a grim and dangerous job. Soldiers would cut across country to avoid obvious routes, climbing twelve-foot mud walls rather than going through gateways, and wading through irrigation channels and newly dug fields to avoid walking on the well-trodden paths the insurgents expected them to take.
I went on patrol with a unit in Arghandab with photographer Joao Silva. We scaled fifteen walls in less than two hours to avoid paths and gateways that could be booby-trapped. I shredded my hands, wedging fingers and toes into footholds in the walls to haul myself up. I realized why most soldiers were wearing gloves even in the sweltering Kandahar heat. Joao was always ahead, taking photos, making light of the work despite his heavy camera gear. The toll from IEDs was heavy. The 101st’s 2nd Brigade lost fifty-nine men in seven months in Kandahar, an officer told me. To save lives and time, units fired dozens of mine-clearing line charges, a rope loaded with explosives that is fired into a minefield to blow the mines for a one-hundred-yard stretch. In Arghandab, one commander called in airstrikes to level three villages, rather than risk his men’s lives clearing them on foot. The villages were empty of civilians but sewn with mines and booby traps. The strain the mines were taking on the troops was evident. “From this door to that you might find four to five IEDs,” one commander told me. “It’s been scouts, infantry, cooks, everyone, walking to try and find mines with our feet.” Added to that, they had the strain of not doing anything to hurt the local Afghans. “We walk around on eggshells, in case we might do something and get investigated,” he said.
We too were walking on dangerous ground. A few days after climbing all those walls, Joao stepped on a mine during a patrol. I was on the road just outside the compound when I heard the explosion and shouts for a medic. Then they shouted that it was the photographer that was down, and I cursed. They carried him out to the road. His legs were mangled but he was still conscious. He grabbed the satellite phone from me and called his wife. Joao survived but lost both legs and spent the next two and a half years going through multiple operations alongside American soldiers at the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., an ordeal that taught us all firsthand the horrific legacy of IEDs.
To bolster the surge operations, NATO commanders drew from old mujahideen and tribal networks in Arghandab with local knowledge of the Taliban in their area. General Khan Mohammad, an uneducated Alokozai tribesman from Arghandab who had become the most powerful mujahideen commander in Kandahar in the 1990s, was brought back from Kabul, where he had been sidelined in an obscure police job, and made Kandahar’s provincial police chief. His thirty-two-year-old younger brother, Niaz Mohammad, was made police chief of Arghandab district. Another Alokozai mujahideen chief was tasked with raising a local police force of tribesmen to defend the villages. It represented a 180-degree turnaround from the years under the Karzai government during which mujahideen commanders had been made redundant and Kandahar’s most powerful tribes sidelined.
The president’s brother had concentrated on removing all challengers to his power in the south in the years after 2001. He had divided and weakened Kandahar’s strongest tribes. He had had repeated clashes with the most powerful commanders of the Alokozai tribe, and had two of them, serving police commanders, Khan Mohammad and General Akram Khakrezwal, removed and posted elsewhere in the country. Khakrezwal and a number of other influential Alokozai commanders were later assassinated. Their supporters pointed the finger at Ahmed Wali Karzai. One commander, Haji Granai, survived long enough to tell friends who rushed to his side that his attackers had been Ahmed Wali’s men. One of those friends, who gave me his account, was later gunned down himself. Supporters of Ahmed Wali blamed the Taliban, pointing out that the Taliban, al Qaeda, and the ISI were skilled at exploiting divisions within the government and the tribes to weaken their opponents. That was true, and the Alokozai men were the Taliban’s greatest opponents, but somehow Ahmed Wali survived and his rivals were conveniently removed.
The combination of the international community’s demands for changes in government appointments and Ahmed Wali Karzai’s machinations in the years after 2001 had been disastrous for Kandahar and much of the south. Many of the appointed officials had been too weak to perform their jobs, and the manipulation and fracturing of the tribes and society opened the way for the Taliban to exploit public grievances and make a comeback.
An effective counterinsurgency campaign demanded good and effective government alongside the military campaign. The first recommendation of General Stanley McChrystal’s review was to remove the worst offenders among local officials, including Ahmed Wali Karzai. But the British commander in southern Afghanistan, Major General Nick Carter, wanted to work with Ahmed Wali rather than fight to get rid of him. “We agreed to hang out some red lines and sought to co-opt him into the framework,” he said later.3 General Carter also saw that former mujahideen commanders, such as Khan Mohammad and Abdul Razziq, however unsavory, were needed for the bravery and leadership they possessed. Bringing them in brought their tribes—and some of the most formidable fighting men in the province—with them. “It is about trying to be more inclusive because so much of what breeds insurgency is the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’ So you need to have people in the tent if you can,” Carter told me in an interview at his headquarters in the middle of the campaign. “By this stage of this insurgency you cannot afford not to get the help of everybody. Where the Taliban of course have been very clever over the last four or five years is to kill and intimidate the elders to such a degree that you do not have that glue that holds it together at the village level. And some of these guys have probably got the clout to be able to encourage elders to be braver, and we need to do that.”
Within weeks of operations in Arghandab, the mujahideen police chief Niaz Mohammad was confident that the tide had turned against the Taliban. “We have broken their neck,” he told me. Only small remnants remained in the district, and he said he did not expect them to regroup. The Taliban were tired from the fighting. They had also lost the support of the people. In previous months, their fighters had been preying on the farming population, demanding food twice a day and taxing all produce. When the tide turned against them, the local people supported the clearing operation.
Afghans were telling me all over the province that the Taliban had been dealt a debilitating blow, that their intimidating hold over the people was broken. It was still too dangerous for us to drive around the province and for Afghan reporters to be seen working with foreign journalists so I traveled mostly with the military, as an embedded reporter, traveling to the districts by helicopter or on armored convoys. I would go independently into Kandahar city and stay in a hotel for a few days to do interviews there. For the local Afghans, the province was suddenly open again, and they were able to move around. Haji Agha Kaka, a village elder and former mujahideen commander who lived at Kukaran, a village a couple of miles west of the city, had not even been able to attend his village mosque or walk to the end of the street for the last two years because of the threat of assassination by the Taliban. They had been using the area as a staging post to make attacks in the city. Now he had a base of Afghan and American soldiers on his doorstep, and tables had turned. “If the Taliban come to our village now they come like thieves. We saw one the other day and he ran away,” he said.
For those of us who had been reporting in Kandahar since 2001, the surge represented a major shift. The Taliban had been thoroughly routed, a
nd this time there was a plan to build and maintain strong security. Military commanders were cautious. The job of consolidating the Afghan forces and persuading people to support the government was going to be a long, slow process, they warned. Not everyone welcomed the new forces. When we went on a patrol through Kukaran, a local youth jeered at the Afghan soldiers, asking them why they had joined an infidel army. Haji Agha Kaka acknowledged the difficulties. Families were divided and took sides to settle scores. “These days you have to be careful of even having an argument with your own son, because he can just go off and join the Taliban,” he said.
Nevertheless, the Taliban had taken heavy losses. The U.S. soldiers had intercepted radio calls from insurgents on the battlefield refusing help to each other, and complaining that the local population were no longer cooperating and were refusing to give them food and bury their dead.
U.S. troops had also received intelligence that Taliban commanders were resisting orders to return from their sanctuaries in Pakistan to fight. Some of the Taliban were even talking of joining the government’s reconciliation program. With NATO’s backing, President Karzai had revamped the program, creating a High Peace Council to encourage high- and low-level Taliban to give up the fight with offers of amnesty and jobs. It never secured significant defections from the Taliban, but the peace commission did successfully disseminate the message of a peaceful solution across Afghanistan, which helped undermine the Taliban cause.
By November, American commanders in Zhare were finding further signs that the insurgents were feeling insecure. The Taliban were no longer threatening with night letters but using them to beg for help from the community instead. “They became pleas to not cooperate in the cash-for-work programs, and pleas to give them food and a place to sleep,” Captain Crawford told me. He knew local loyalties were not easily won. The people had told him they would wait to see if the Americans still controlled the area in two months. “That was four months ago.” By January, the commander of the troops in Zhare, Lieutenant Colonel Tom McFadyen, said he sensed the fear in the community was beginning to subside, and people were starting to cooperate with his forces. Hundreds of laborers had come forward to work on community projects, and a fledgling local government was starting to function.
January 2011. In the wake of the surge, townspeople in Kandahar were saying that a lot of Taliban had slunk into the city and gone underground. Taliban fighters often moved into the cities for the winter, when the mountains were too cold and valleys devoid of green cover made it too difficult for fighting. They would stay with old friends and pick up daily laboring work. Some would carry out bombings and assassinations. This winter they did the same, but their mood was low. They were badly depleted and feeling hunted. They turned to old contacts for protection. An Afghan colleague came across an old acquaintance this way. The man was a mid-level Taliban commander and had sought shelter with trusted friends. It was never easy to meet or interview members of the Taliban, since for a long time the movement had had a policy of kidnapping or killing journalists either for political or financial gain. But in the changed circumstances in Kandahar after the surge, it seemed feasible. When I asked if the Talib would give an interview, the answer came back yes, since it was an old friend asking. I agreed not to publish his name or take his photo. He asked that I report his words truthfully.
We met on a construction site on the edge of Kandahar. The commander looked like any other poor Afghan laborer from the countryside, tall, thin, and bearded, a strong, bony face beneath a black turban, a cotton shawl wrapped around his upper body. He wore leather shoes with no socks, despite the near-freezing temperature, and sat down without hesitation on the cold concrete floor of the half-built house where we met for the interview. He was forty-five, a native of Kandahar province. He had been a fighter all his life. He joined the mujahideen at seventeen to fight the Russians, and joined the Taliban at its inception in 1994. He had been disgusted at the mujahideen leaders who were fighting each other for power, and blamed them bitterly for causing years of war, including the rise of the Taliban. He had been badly wounded in northern Afghanistan on the frontline in 2001 before 9/11, and convalesced for several years in Pakistan.
He rejoined the insurgency around 2004 or 2005 in a command and logistics role, drawn in by his brothers who were already fighting. Since the latest fighting around Kandahar, he was living in the city but moving all the time, not staying more than one day in the same place. He said he passed through military and police checkpoints without difficulty.
The commander conceded that the Taliban had taken a battering and forfeited virtually all of the territory they had held in Kandahar province. The loss of bases in Panjwayi, their provincial headquarters, and of positions in Mahalajat so close to the city, were the worst blows. They had also ceded control of their main staging post at Bandi-Temur on the edge of the Registan Desert, which had been a base for the last eight or nine years. But he made light of the territorial losses. The Taliban would return in time, he said. “This is our country, these are our people, and we have only to retreat and wait and use other tactics.” His words reminded me of Mullah Omar’s comments on the Taliban’s fall in 2001, when he said they would pull back and fight in a different way. They had done as he said.
Yet this commander admitted that some of the Taliban forces were losing heart, not only because of their heavy losses but because the mood of the people had changed. Some commanders now in Pakistan were reluctant to return to Afghanistan to fight. There were disagreements between the leadership and the field commanders about that. “Compared to two years ago when people were willingly going to fight, that mood is reduced,” he said. “We are tired of fighting and we say this among ourselves.” Taliban commanders were even discussing the option of peace talks and a power-sharing deal, but, he said, they would only negotiate with the Afghan government after foreign forces leave. “This is our vow, not to leave our country to foreigners,” he told me.
He gave some stock answers that were nevertheless revealing. The Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, kept in touch with his followers through audiotapes passed from hand to hand, and recently exhorted his men to keep fighting. He encouraged them with an unlikely story, swearing that he had been searched three times at checkpoints in Afghanistan by Americans who did not know who he was. He promised to take revenge on those who had betrayed the Taliban in the heat of the battle. “This is an emergency situation and we will remember those who do ill to us,” the commander quoted his leader as saying. The sound of his voice on tape had a very powerful effect on them all. “A lot of us have never seen Mullah Omar, but his order is everything,” the commander said. “We obey his orders, every Talib does, and we believe in him.”
Taliban casualties had been lower than claimed by NATO forces, he also noted. He had had two groups of twenty to thirty men under his command and had only lost four men in the last year with six wounded. Most of them had pulled out to Pakistan. He said they were ready to return, but he had advised them to wait and prepare for an offensive in the spring, when the weather would be warmer and the trees provide cover. “It will not be difficult,” he said. “We have a lot of brave fighters.” He added, “We do not bring in tanks and heavy equipment. What we bring is very light and simple.”
U.S. forces were set on preventing their return by building up a strong Afghan security force that would then in turn persuade the people to reject the Taliban. But people would take some convincing. They knew U.S. forces would not stay forever, and they doubted that the Afghan government could protect them from the Taliban when the fighters returned.
One farmer and landowner who lived near Mullah Omar’s home village told me as much. “We don’t trust foreigners. Last time they came and then left, and left us to the Taliban. So we are careful. Their friendship lasts only until the end of the afternoon,” he said. “The Russians were the same.”
The Taliban commander voiced the same undeniable logic. “The Americans have promised a lot to the Afghan
people, but they have not fulfilled their promises. They have forgotten what they said last year. They promised a good administration, and we have seen they empowered the people who we opposed: Gul Agha Shirzai; the ethnic groups; Abdul Rashid Dostum—they brought him specially back and everyone knows what he did to us. They have empowered those who were against us, and the people were against them. That is why we started the movement against them. We will never stop fighting them,” he continued. “The whole administration, and the bad American system, is driving us.”
By pulling out, the Taliban were counting on the Americans to alienate most Afghans, as they had done repeatedly over the last decade. “We are benefiting from this whole operation. Go to the districts, the Americans have destroyed the farms, they are killing innocent people, putting bags over people’s heads, the troops with them are stealing from the people. This operation will show the people how bad they are,” he said. “That’s why we left, to show the people what it will be like under the Americans, and that it was better with us.”
The commander looked at me directly with his black eyes. He was a man of flint. He never fidgeted from the cold or the hard floor. He barely moved at all. He said the loss of popular support was not as serious as in 2002 and 2003, when the Taliban were at their lowest ebb. “In the early days, when there was a drought and poverty, and the foreigners were promising a lot, that was when we did not have support of the people.” Some of that was occurring in the days after this operation. “People are tired and are thinking like that. It was a big operation,” he said of the surge. Yet there remained a base of support. “Some people are still helping us because they are scared, but some are doing it for religious reasons, and some because they hate this government.” And, he added, Afghans would never let go of their desire for revenge.
The Wrong Enemy Page 28
