The Wrong Enemy

by Carlotta Gall

  It began one day when the Taliban came knocking at Wudood’s door. They were not just ordinary Taliban. It was the shadow district governor, Mullah Noor Mohammad, a thirty-five-year-old commander who was in charge of the insurgency for the entire district of Panjwayi. He posted two men behind the house to catch anyone trying to escape and came to the front door with an armed guard. The man they were looking for, Wudood, was a veteran guerrilla fighter, a sixty-year-old farmer with eight grown sons. He had fought the Soviets in the 1980s from his village, resisting repeated Russian assaults. He was proud that he had never been driven from his home—not by the Soviets, not by the chaos of mujahideen rule, not by the seven years of Taliban government, and not through ten years on the frontline between Taliban insurgents and American and NATO forces.

  Alerted that the Taliban were at his door, Wudood sent his eldest son to the gate to talk to them while he slipped through a side door, into the inner family compound, with Abdul Hanan, his twenty-one-year-old second youngest son. At the gate, the Taliban commander announced that he was looking for two of Wudood’s sons. One of them was Abdul Hanan. “They are spies for the government,” the Talib said. Everyone knew the Taliban’s punishment for spying for the government was death.

  “They wanted to slaughter my sons,” Wudood told me. “They wanted to take them to the desert where they had a court and a base. They wanted to kill them there.”1

  His eldest son told them no one was at home, and the Taliban left empty-handed. But Wudood knew they would return soon. He told me his sons had not had any contact with the government, but there was talk that Hanan had joined a local police force. Talk was enough, and once accused by the Taliban, Wudood knew their fate was sealed and the whole family would be in trouble. Just refusing to give Taliban fighters food could lead to being branded a traitor and government spy, so he knew his sons were in mortal danger. He made a call to the district governor and set off later that night for the district center to seek help.

  Few villagers in Zangabad would have turned to the government for help in past years. This was the heart of Panjwayi, the birthplace of the Taliban, where the movement had held sway almost without interruption for eighteen years since its formation in 1994. It was in Zangabad that the old judge Maulavi Pasanai had run his Islamic court and first worked with Mullah Omar to curb the criminal gangs in western Kandahar. Even after the fall of their government in 2001, members of the Taliban were only gone from the area for two years. Zangabad was one of the first places to which they returned in 2003 to start their insurgency.

  The group of villages lies close to Registan, the red-sand desert that stretches south to the border with Pakistan. It provided infiltration routes into Afghanistan and a springboard for insurgents into Kandahar city and regions beyond. There were enough people in the community who had prospered under the Taliban to form a base of support. The others in the community had to tolerate them. “They came by force. We could not say anything to them,” Wudood told me. “We did not have weapons. They were living on our rooftops.” Zangabad became the rear base of the Taliban through seven years of the insurgency against Canadian and coalition forces. As the Russians had before them, NATO forces made forays into the densely cultivated patchwork of vineyards and orchards, and then pulled back to their bases. The Taliban moved with the flow. Even when thousands of extra U.S. and Afghan troops were brought in in 2010 as part of the surge, the insurgents never fully relinquished Zangabad. U.S. special forces established a base in the nearby village of Belambai and began recruiting local police, but progress was slow in gaining the trust of the population.

  More than two years had passed since the surge, and Zangabad had remained stubbornly resistant to efforts by the government and U.S. forces to encourage them to cooperate. Then, on the night of March 11, 2012, an American staff sergeant, Robert Bales, committed the single worst atrocity of the war. Stalking from house to house, he killed sixteen civilians as they slept. Three of the victims were women, nine of them children. If anything more was needed to alienate the population of Zangabad, that senseless crime was it. The massacre seemed to encapsulate everything that was wrong with the U.S. presence in Afghanistan: For Afghans, it was yet another example of American soldiers killing innocent Afghans instead of the real culprits of the war, the Taliban. At home in the United States, the massacre rammed home the futility of pursuing such a damaging, long, drawn-out war. It reminded some of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, when American soldiers, strung out by the relentless battle against an elusive guerrilla force, took revenge on innocent villagers. The specter of Vietnam hung over Afghanistan in the months after.

  But in January 2013, a new police chief transferred into Panjwayi district. He was a tough, thickset former mujahideen commander named Sultan Mohammad, a native of Zangabad. His men were also from the area. For the last ten years, they had been working in the border police and had not been able to visit home because of the Taliban presence there. Sultan Mohammad’s predecessor had made little headway in this conservative, rural district where no one liked or trusted the government and people were in thrall to the Taliban. But tribal ties made all the difference. Everyone knew Sultan Mohammad since the days of the jihad against the Soviets, and in keeping with tradition, hundreds of elders and villagers from Zangabad called on the new police chief to congratulate him on his posting and to welcome him home.

  In those first meetings, they told the police chief they were tired of the Taliban. They wanted security and they wanted police in their villages. For Wudood, the ties were even closer. Sultan Mohammad was family. The two men were from the same tribe, the Achakzai, and they were related by marriage. He knew he could count on the police chief.

  Everyone in the district also knew that the police chief had strong backing. Sultan Mohammad had been drafted in by Abdul Razziq, the hard-hitting chief of the Border Guards who had spearheaded much of the fighting during the surge, and had since been promoted to brigadier general and made police chief of Kandahar province. Razziq was also from the Achakzai tribe. For the men of Zangabad, the government for once was represented by men they could trust.

  Resentment of the Taliban was already brewing in the village of Pishin Gan Sayedan. When villagers had begun their yearly collective task of cleaning the irrigation canal, digging out the silt and clearing the undergrowth along the sloping banks, the Taliban commander Mullah Noor Mohammad turned up with a group of fighters and ordered them to stop. The undergrowth provided the Taliban with good cover for ambushes, he told them. The villagers answered back that they needed the water to flow for their crops. They continued working. These Taliban were outsiders, and the villagers were fed up with them. The Taliban caused trouble by laying mines everywhere and staging ambushes in the village. Now they were threatening the villagers’ livelihood by disrupting the irrigation supply. “The Taliban were saying we don’t care if your fields die, or if you die, so the people said: ‘Then you can die,’” one resident told me.

  The Taliban resorted to force. They waded in with their rifle butts, cracking several people on the head and breaking the arms of two of the farmers. They detained the village elder in charge of the canal cleaning and took him off to their base in the desert.

  Just a few days later, the Taliban returned, looking for Wudood and his sons. By now the mood in the village was boiling. Villagers who had lost relatives to the Taliban offered their support to Wudood. When he met with the police chief, they hatched a plan. Sultan Mohammad immediately sent a posse of fifteen men to guard Wudood’s house in case the Taliban came back. After three days of waiting, they decided to spring an attack on Taliban positions in the nearby village of Kakaran. The place was an operational base where the Taliban were making bombs and explosives, and where they believed the Taliban commander stayed since the approaches were heavily mined. The police gathered a force of local and national police and intelligence officers, and attacked from two sides. Thirty to forty unarmed villagers accompanied the police, guiding them thro
ugh the land mines and acting as lookouts. In a short firefight, they shot three members of the Taliban and seized control of the village. The Taliban commander, Mullah Noor Mohammad, escaped with ten others. The police knew his radio code name, Rahmani, and were able to follow his movements on the radio. The three wounded Talibs died as they retreated south.

  Villagers from all around, delighted that the Taliban had been sent packing, now came forward to give their support to Wudood. They thronged his courtyard and pledged to stand with him. His group of thirty supporters grew to hundreds, from thirty different villages. Overnight the whole of Zangabad turned against the Taliban. Four days later, the police and army mounted an operation against the Taliban’s hideouts near the desert, routing the remaining insurgents and seizing their bases. In Kakaran, the police recovered mounds of explosives and bomb-making materials, and dug up forty mines sown around the base.

  The uprising had in fact been building for months. Life in Zangabad under the Taliban had become unbearable. The Taliban had enforced a nightly curfew, only allowing villagers to emerge from their homes in the morning when the Taliban gave the order, often because they had laid mines and booby traps right in gateways and doorways. They restricted which fields farmers could work and when, and prevented them from visiting other villages and congregating with fellow tribesmen. The mines and improvised explosive devices took a terrible toll on the population. Sixty villagers, including many children, had died because of mines and improvised bombs in the last six months in Zangabad.

  The same pattern was seen across Panjwayi, the district governor, Haji Fazel Mohammad, told me. He sat cross-legged on the floor of his office with neat handwritten notes laid out on the rug before him. There had been up to four hundred civilian casualties in the district from mines and bombs laid by the Taliban in the last six months. “A lot of people died and a lot were amputated.” The men planting the mines would often get killed or arrested, and then no one knew where the mines were and villagers would step on them. “They were laying mines in farms and pathways, in the orchards, everywhere,” he said. “They cannot come up to the main road, but they put them wherever they spent the previous night.”

  As the 2010 surge increased the pressure on the Taliban, the more senior commanders had withdrawn to Pakistan, leaving younger, less experienced commanders in charge. They were often vicious and unpredictable, and their grip over the community began to fray.

  The Taliban were losing the moral high ground. “The reputation and power that the Taliban once had is gone, and so the people don’t like them. People hate them,” Fazel Mohammad told me. “The most difficult thing was we were trapped with the Taliban on one side and the foreigners and the government forces on the other,” said Haji Mohammad Ibrahim, an elder in a black silk turban, in Pishin Gan Sayedan.

  “We just want to have a safe place to live and a good life,” Mohammad Gul, a farmer in gray working clothes, added. “My feeling is that no one is listening to us, they are deciding things elsewhere.” I had heard these complaints so many times before. I had known for a long time that people were fed up with the Taliban—yet they had not acted until now.

  What had changed in Panjwayi was the shift in the balance of power. The surge had routed the Taliban in much of Kandahar province in 2010, and it had taken another two years for the secondary and tertiary phases of the counterinsurgency strategy, the “hold and build” stages to keep the Taliban out and build a security and administrative system in the area, to take effect. A watershed moment came in 2012 in neighboring Zhare district, according to the American commander in southern Afghanistan in that period, Major General Robert B. Abrams.2 The Taliban had declared their intention to regain lost territory in Zhare in 2012 but failed to do so. Instead, they had steadily ceded ground and by 2013, had fallen back across the river, making southern Panjwayi their last stronghold.

  They were forced to retreat because of the newfound strength of the Afghan security forces, people told me. The surge had not only flooded the southern provinces with thousands of American troops, but also with twice their number of Afghan soldiers and police. By 2013, there were 17,000 American and coalition troops in the four provinces of Regional Command South, as well as 52,000 Afghans across various agencies of police, army, and intelligence. Kandahar had two Afghan army brigades and 10,000 police manning checkpoints on virtually every road in the province, and another 2,000 local police in the villages. When I heard those numbers, I remembered with pain how provincial governors had pleaded with President Karzai for two hundred police for each district in 2006. Their request had never been met. It had just been a fraction—roughly a fifth—of the forces that were ultimately needed to do the job six years later. Concerted action to strengthen security forces in 2006 could have saved much of the hardship of the six years that followed.

  So long disliked for their ill-disciplined and predatory ways, the police were slowly shaping into a better-trained, more responsible force, the district governor, the governor, and others told me. Stories abounded of Abdul Razziq’s ruthless leadership, but people were glad to see a firm hand even if the justice was rough. Villagers even spoke approvingly of how he had executed one of his own men for murdering a villager and stealing a motorbike. More important, Razziq represented an Afghan force, one that could conceivably remain in charge after the departure of the American forces in 2014.

  I visited Razziq in his new base on the edge of town, a large, barricaded American-style compound with prefabricated offices set behind Hesco barriers, the huge, dirt-filled gabions that fronted virtually every office in Afghanistan to protect against bombs. We passed through security checks and tramped across acres of gravel to reach his office. American minders and an Afghan-American translator joined us for the interview. I noticed Razziq’s hands were red from the burns he received when his car had been blown up by a massive roadside bomb six months earlier. Yet he still had his boyish vigor. He answered questions peremptorily and then gave a big grin when I asked him about the uprising in Panjwayi. Having security forces strong enough to protect them had encouraged the people to turn against the Taliban, General Razziq said.

  “The people in the villages were under the hands of the Taliban and the Taliban were merciless, but now the people realize the government is with them. They have enough forces, they have police, they have the army, and so that is why they are rising up, they trust the government,” he told me. “This is not only in Zangabad, we are expecting more places to rise up. In Kandahar and other provinces,” he continued. “We are encouraging the people to protect their own villages by themselves. We are telling them: ‘Give your sons to protect the village and guard reconstruction sites, and let the schools be opened. We will secure the areas outside the villages and you can secure your own villages,’” he concluded.

  By the end of February, fifty men from Zangabad had joined the local police program. Villages further along the horn of Panjwayi had come over to the government and were asking for local police, Sultan Mohammad, the police chief, told me. “It is not thirty, not fifty, it is hundreds of villages.”

  The Afghan Local Police program, begun by Generals McChrystal and Petraeus two years earlier, was a game changer in Kandahar. Compared to the Sons of Iraq program, which brought the Sunni tribes in Iraq together to stand against al Qaeda, the Afghan Local Police program in the same way aimed to use young, unemployed men in the districts to mobilize communities against the Taliban and serve as force multipliers for the coalition and Afghan government.

  In Afghanistan, the program took off slowly. It had many detractors, especially those who remembered the lawlessness of the 1990s. Opponents feared the local militias would abuse their power, and cases of criminal behavior by the new forces or other rival militias started emerging. Karzai also mistrusted the program, fearing it would create warlords or militia bosses who would grow powerful enough to challenge his power. U.S. forces tried several ad hoc substitutes of local police to speed up the program, but Karzai shut do
wn most of those efforts in 2012.

  Other critics, including experienced administrators and analysts, advised that Afghan society was too divided, the tribal structures too weak, and government too mistrusted for the local police or local uprisings to take hold. The people could not and would not stand against the Taliban, they said. General Petraeus patiently reworked the program so that the local police would come under Interior Ministry control, and increased the number of special forces soldiers to mentor them. It took a year to recruit, train, and mentor a local police force, but in the south, tribal elders and aid workers started telling me that they liked the program because it provided a local solution to security. There was every sign that the Taliban felt threatened by the local police. An Afghan elder who lived in Quetta and knew many members of the Taliban in his neighborhood told me that the insurgent fighters were more scared of the local police than the NATO forces and all their firepower. “Forty-two countries have come here with all their high-tech equipment, but the Taliban are not as scared of their technology as they are of the local police.”

  In Zhare, the local police turned the tables on the Taliban. Drawn from the villages, trained and mentored by U.S. special forces, they were largely responsible for preventing the Taliban from regaining a foothold in the district in 2012, and the population swung behind them, residents told us. The local police were rough, and were demanding money from the population, but they were doing the job since, more than anyone, they knew who were Taliban and how they operated, a landowner from Sangesar told us. “Most of them were working with the Taliban, or they have the attitude of the Taliban, but I hope with interaction with the government they will improve,” he said.

  By the spring of 2013, the program was taking hold in Kandahar, with 2,000 villagers under arms and approval for police to sign up another 1,200. By the summer, Panjwayi district had 400. Countrywide, the program was reaching 20,000 men with plans for it to expand to 30,000. Petraeus’s original plan for 45,000 was put aside.