In the article Sepp also called for population control measures, but there are too few troops to control the majority of the Afghan population, who live in remote rural areas. He called on counterinsurgents to "convince insurgents they can best meet their personal interests and avoid the risk of imprisonment or death by reintegrating themselves into the population through amnesty, rehabilitation, or by simply not fighting." This has been a total failure in Afghanistan. And why would the Taliban, who have all the momentum and are winning, contemplate an amnesty or rehabilitation program?
Ironically, what Sepp describes as the American experience in Vietnam and the Soviet one in Afghanistan, in which military staff rather than civil governments guided operations, resembles Afghanistan under American occupation today. "Indigenous regular armies, although fighting in their own country and more numerous than foreign forces, were subordinate to them. Conventional forces trained indigenous units in their image-with historically poor results. Special operations forces committed most of their units to raids and reconnaissance missions, with successful but narrow results. The Americans further marginalized their Special Forces by economy-of-force a.s.signments to spa.r.s.ely populated hinterlands. Later, Spetzn.a.z.iki [Russian Special Forces] roamed the Afghan mountains at will but with little effect. . . . The Soviet command in Afghanistan was unified but wholly militarized, and the Afghan government they established was perfunctory."
COIN was a ma.s.sive endeavor, I was told by retired Col. Pat Lang, who had conducted COIN operations in Vietnam, Latin America, and elsewhere. There were insufficient resources committed to doing it in Afghanistan, but if the Americans didn"t plan on owning Afghanistan, he argued, why waste time on it? It was worth the expenditure of resources only if you were the local government seeking to establish authority, or an imperialist power that wanted to hang around for a while. There were thirty million people in Afghanistan, and they were widely dispersed in small towns. "You have to provide security for the whole country," he said, "because if you move around they just move in behind you and undo what you did. So you need to have effective security and a ma.s.sive multifaceted development organization that covers the whole place. COIN advisers have to stay in place all the time; they can"t commute to work. If you"re going to do COIN, it really amounts to nation building, and troops are there to provide protection for the nation builders. Afghanistan doesn"t matter. The Taliban is not part of the worldwide jihadi community at war with U.S. We need to disaggregate Taliban from Al Qaeda. The idea that Al Qaeda is an existential threat to the U.S., it"s so absurd that you don"t know how to deal with it."
Ariel David Adesnik, a defense a.n.a.lyst who works as a consultant for the U.S. government, has been critical of attempts to turn COIN into a science. "One of the hardest parts of COIN operations is measuring progress," he says. "There is a strong temptation to measure progress with statistics, since numerical data imply a measure of objectivity. The counterinsurgency manual says you need twenty pairs of boots on the ground for every thousand inhabitants in the area of operations. This ratio has become an article of faith across the political spectrum. Yet the twenty-per-thousand rule is little more than a plausible guess based on a handful of historical examples, such as the British operations in Malaya and Northern Ireland. No one is exactly sure how to count either soldiers or inhabitants. Does a logistics officer at headquarters count the same as an infantryman on patrol? Does a rookie Afghan cop count the same as a battle-hardened Marine? What about contractors?
"The population isn"t much easier to count. The population of an Iraqi or Afghan district is often a matter of guesswork. Should peaceful districts be included in the area of operations, or only those with a certain amount of violence? If you change the rules for counting, the ratio of troops to inhabitants can go up or down by a factor of two, three, or more. Using historical data, my research team tried to figure out the actual ratios employed in around forty COIN operations over the past sixty-five years. We found a rough correlation between higher ratios and better outcomes, especially at ratios of thirty to fifty troops per thousand inhabitants. Other researchers found no correlation at all."
In theory, success to McChrystal would result in a handover to the Afghan security forces. But there weren"t enough of them, they were hopelessly incompetent or corrupt, and the few good ones were too often killed. The Provincial Reserve police were not paid until they completed their training and took a urine test for drugs. Then they got their back pay. But out of the eighty men scheduled to take the test in July 2009, only fifty-three showed up, some refused to take it, and twenty tested positive. Meanwhile, of twenty-five new police recruits in Helmand, twenty tested positive for marijuana, opium, or both. An Air Force major conducting drug tests on police throughout the country told me that in some districts 60 percent of the police force tested positive. The south was the worst. Some police had tried to give him water instead of urine. Sergeant Kilaki thought the Provincial Reserve needed more training in tactics, techniques, and procedures as well as scenarios. "It sounded like they just dragged the eight-week curriculum to fourteen weeks," Captain Westby said.
The Taliban Is Everywhere.
In July 2009 a police checkpoint on Highway 601 had observed the Taliban destroying the road and constructing a four-foot barrier on it. Team Prowler and the Provincial Reserve went back on the road and clashed with twelve to fifteen Taliban, killing at least one. The team had no engineer a.s.sets, so they couldn"t take down the barrier. The Taliban cleverly diverted traffic through the village to shake people down and control who pa.s.sed. Colonel Shirzad sent the Provincial Reserve, with Lieutenant Farid in command, without their American mentors to Highway 601.
Lieutenant Farid"s Ford Ranger drove over an IED or was. .h.i.t by an RPG and was blown to pieces. Farid was killed along with two other cops. Five PR men were killed and five wounded in action in seven days. "601 is the most insecure road in Afghanistan," said Sergeant First Cla.s.s Clark. "There"s nothing but Taliban out there. That road is the lifeline to Lashkar Gah. We"re being asked to deal with it with fifty-five men, and we lost five last night and five in the last fight." Team Prowler was supposed to have eighty police with them, but the British had taken some for themselves. There weren"t enough police to go around.
I had met Lieutenant Farid when I first arrived in Lashkar Gah. I had hoped to interview him at length. He was jovial and chubby and had a short beard, and he looked older than his twenty-eight years. Farid was Colonel Shirzad"s cousin from Helmand. Before he set off on his mission, his kids came to see him at the base. He was good-humored and an advocate for his men, apparently. At first he had a hard time delegating responsibility. NCOs were weak in the Afghan security forces, so he was a dominant figure and his loss was even bigger. The Americans took Farid"s loss heavily. "He was going to be a good commander," said Westby. "It"s frustrating." Staff Sergeant Enriquez had worked with Farid for seven months. "He"s one of the only noncorrupt officers there were," he said. "I was p.i.s.sed. He worked his a.s.s off for his men. It felt like losing one of our own."
"We"re asking a lot from these men," Westby said worriedly about the police. Westby was also frustrated by the British army, who controlled security in the Helmand province and who he had to report to, as well as his American masters in Kandahar. "The British att.i.tude is "Go now, get your men out there and go." These are cops, not soldiers, but we"re treating them like soldiers." Clark sympathized with them too. "We come out here for a year and we"re done. These ANP come out here until they get killed."
Despite the loss, the police were told to go on a mission the next night by the British to relieve four checkpoints of highway police. The highway police were supposed to have been disbanded because they were committing highway robbery, but they still existed. The police would set up three checkpoints while the highway patrolmen were sent to training. "These ANP are mentored by the British," I was told, "even the British say they"re s.h.i.t." One American added, "But all the cops mentored by the British are s.h.i.t."
The British warned Team Prowler that Highway 601 was blown in three places and that there were IEDs all over, on and off the road. I wondered why eight thousand British soldiers in Helmand had such difficulty controlling one fifty-kilometer stretch of road. "601 is impa.s.sable," a British officer had admitted to Clark. Many officers I spoke to complained about how imperious the British were to them and the Afghans.
The British were commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Jasper de Quincy Adams, who worked closely with Colonel Shirzad. The mission was to clear Popalzai, a Taliban-dominated village along the highway. Prowler and the police would take one side, while the British and the Afghan army would take the other side and deny the Taliban an escape route. "There"s n.o.body good left in Balochan and Popalzai," Dyer told me. "They sent all the women and children away. There"s n.o.body good left. They"re really bad." The police also said there was n.o.body good left in those towns. The Americans told me how odd it was that they never received a brief on the rules of engagement, which varied depending on what province they were in. It was as if there were no rules for Helmand. One American called it "an open-fire zone."
Clark was unhappy that Team Prowler was going in their more vulnerable Humvees and not in the Cougars, larger vehicles suspended higher above the ground. But the Humvees were necessary if they went off-road in villages. "We"re not a f.u.c.kin" route clearance package," said Dyer. "Who are we gonna send out to blow "em?" "We can say we"re not going," Westby said with frustration. But even if he didn"t go, his police would, and it was Prowler"s job as the mentor team to go with them. "I"m p.i.s.sed at [Lieutenant Colonel] Jasper too," he said. "I see people getting hurt or killed if we do route clearance with the police," Dyer said. "The police should be given a.s.sets. If you"re not going to give us the a.s.sets, don"t f.u.c.king ask us to do it."
A stout, bearded sergeant called Ahmadullah was placed in command until a replacement for Farid could be found. Ahmadullah, a former schoolteacher, had joined the police after he was threatened by the Taliban, the Americans told me. He and his senior men gathered around Westby and Dyer along with many of the police, who were on the verge of a mutiny after hearing that they had to go back to Highway 601. The mood was tense; the policemen had only hours earlier been collecting Farid"s body parts off the road. "Today they lost their commander who they really respected," Westby texted to Jasper on the Blue Force Tracker (BFT), a computer in his vehicle that allowed him to communicate with other forces in the area.
The Afghans insisted they lacked ammunition, and the men of Prowler were confounded by the number of machine-gun and RPG rounds that were unaccounted for. The Afghans told them that twenty-seven RPG heads had been destroyed in Lieutenant Farid"s vehicle as well thousands of rounds of machine-gun ammo. The Americans were skeptical that Farid had been carrying such a huge number of rounds; he was coming back to get more supplies, so his truck should have been empty. "They"re claiming a suspicious amount of ammo is missing," Enriquez said. The police didn"t want to go because it was a British operation, and they felt like the Americans didn"t care about Farid"s death. "To restore their confidence, they have to go wipe out some Taliban location," Sergeant Kilaki said.
The Americans weren"t happy about going on the mission either. "This is a bulls.h.i.t British mission," said Dyer. "It"s obvious the Brits don"t give a f.u.c.k about the men," Enriquez said. Westby persuaded the British to postpone the operation until the following day. "Sir, it"s almost a mutiny right now," Westby told Jasper, who agreed to postpone. "He doesn"t want a mutiny," said Westby. "They"ve lost nine guys in seven days, and they need to do weapons maintenance."
Because British clinics were full with their wounded, and the British media were focusing on the numerous British casualties, including a dead lieutenant colonel, the British decided to cancel their clearing operation in Popalzai. The Afghan army didn"t feel like going on the mission anyway.
Instead, Westby focused on replacing the highway patrol checkpoints. He spread a blanket on the floor and split open a watermelon, sitting with four senior policemen to discuss the next day"s mission. They thanked him for postponing until the morning and they discussed where they might set up their new checkpoint. The Afghans couldn"t read the map even to tell that the blue undulating line was a river. One of the checkpoints on 601 had recently been attacked, with eleven Afghan policemen killed. Sergeant Abdulahad-an Afghan police officer from the Provincial Reserve-expected heavy Taliban attacks when we arrived. He worried that they wouldn"t have enough supplies. Westby, meanwhile, tried to figure out how to get them money so they could buy food and fuel. Westby explained to the policemen that they had to depart at 7 a.m. so the highway policemen could be relieved in time to make it to their flight for training.
"When we get to the area where the diversion through the villages is, that"s where we will definitely have contact with the Taliban," Abdulahad said. "It"s all dirt roads there, and the Taliban put many IEDs on the roads, and it will be hard to see them." He was unenthusiastic about the mission and came up with numerous reasons not to do it. He suggested a different route through the desert along the river, which would take an entire day.
Westby was baffled but maintained his aplomb. "I think we are strong and we can attack them back," he said. "We have enough firepower with our trucks, and I can radio for helicopters."
Abdulahad explained that they were not scared of the Taliban but of IEDs. His men did not have armored vehicles like the Americans, and he worried that the sandy and rocky roads would be perfect cover for IEDs. Westby finally persuaded them to go, but then they raised more objections. There were many Taliban checkpoints, Abdulahad objected, and his men didn"t have enough ammunition. There were only thirty-three Provincial Reserve men on the base that night, Westby said, so when the remaining twenty returned the following day they could solve the supply problems and join the rest of the team. The Afghans reluctantly agreed, having run out of objections. Westby painstakingly made sure each one of them knew his task and would do it.
BUT THE POLICE were not ready at 7 a.m. "New leadership and lack of motivation are making the PR slow this morning," Westby texted to his headquarters on the BFT. "I"m sure some of these dudes are scared s.h.i.tless," one soldier from Team Prowler said as the PR slowly lined up. "Before Farid got killed, the men were usually on time," Enriquez told me. "I"m sick and f.u.c.king tired of waiting," Westby told his men, hiding his frustration from the Afghans. "Not getting paid, the high-op tempo, the casualties, are taking a huge toll on their morale," Westby texted to Jasper. Thirty-six Afghans from the PR finally got into seven Ford Rangers, and the fifteen men from Prowler along with their two interpreters joined the convoy in four Humvees.
We left, eventually, at 8:13 a.m. Highway 601 was a new road and the driving was smooth, with the PR hopping out every few minutes to look inside culverts for IEDs. At 8:40 Sergeant Gus radioed from the front of the convoy to announce that the Taliban had blown up a new part of the road. "There"s pretty significant damage," he said of the culvert that had been blown up. "It"s pretty f.u.c.ked up here. It looks like we"re gonna have to take a bypa.s.s." It took fifteen minutes to figure out how to bypa.s.s the road. Sergeant Dyer wanted to clear the compounds in the area to see if there was any sign of the Taliban and to look for command wires that could detonate an IED.
"I like Sergeant Dyer"s enthusiasm, but we don"t have time to clear every compound that"s two hundred meters from the road," Westby said.
"Look for freshly dug ant trails" on the dirt road, Westby ordered. They would be signs of command wires leading to an IED. "That culvert was 1,100 meters from an ANP checkpoint, and they couldn"t keep it protected," Westby said in wonder of the blown road, and there was another ANP checkpoint 1,500 meters after it. The diversion exposed traffic to the nearby compounds, he wrote in his BFT. "Textbook setup for pressure plate IED and command wire IED from those compounds."
Kilaki asked Westby if they should stop at a nearby ANP checkpoint. "I"ve got a feeling he"ll say what he always says," said Westby. "There"s Taliban all around us! They"re all over!" We stopped at a schoolhouse that had been converted to a checkpoint. It was surrounded by concertina wire and sandbagged positions. The night before, it had been attacked by the Taliban. We reached another blown-up part of the road, and the vehicles rolled down into the desert, driving through a moonscape, pa.s.sing sheep and their herdsmen and the mud compounds they shared.
We stopped at a checkpoint with mud walls. Outside were the charred carca.s.ses of destroyed vehicles, including a police Ranger. It too had been attacked the previous night and early that morning by Taliban who shot machine-gun fire and RPGs from motorcycles and Toyota Corollas. "North of us the Taliban have a checkpoint," one of the highway patrolmen told me. Originally from the north, he had been in the police for a year and a half and had lost nearly a hundred comrades. "We have a graveyard for the police not far away," he said. Many police were not wearing uniforms or boots. They warned that if any of the checkpoints were abandoned, then the next day the road would be full of IEDs. The men left two Rangers and their occupants behind with only half a can of water and no food. "These motherf.u.c.king idiots, like G.o.dd.a.m.n children," Westby complained, exasperated that their commanders gave them no supplies. Ahmadullah and many of his men were not wearing their body armor.
We pa.s.sed another blown-up culvert only a few hundred meters away from the police checkpoint. Westby wondered how the police hadn"t seen it happen. "They were sleeping," said Kilaki. Westby conceded that they didn"t have night vision. The bypa.s.s took us over a ca.n.a.l. We leaned to the right and nearly tipped over. Locals struggling with their vehicles warned that the alternative bypa.s.s went through a Taliban-controlled area where they had their own checkpoint. "The village you go through just 800 meters away is Taliban territory," Westby wrote on the BFT. We pa.s.sed another destroyed piece of road and then another IED crater. Westby decided to keep all the checkpoints open. Colonels Shirzad and Jasper had ordered one police commander to stay at a different checkpoint with the British army. He didn"t trust the British, so he refused. He finally agreed but then went to town instead. "It wears on you, these guys," Westby sighed.
"The PR have no radios to communicate from checkpoint to checkpoint," Westby texted to Jasper. "Vehicle radios don"t have enough range, food water fuel ammo resupply still an issue. PR not equipped to be self-sustaining here, no cooking equipment, only one CP has a well." Westby was still hoping the remaining PR would come that day, but he doubted it. "They"ll come up with some excuse," he said. Westby gave the PR additional jugs of water so at least they wouldn"t die in the heat. Most of the PR had not been paid for months, he told me. They didn"t have radios, so they would have no way of notifying the Americans if they were attacked. He hoped their vehicle radios worked and tried to explain to the PR squad leader that communication was essential. Westby didn"t expect his own position to be attacked because the Taliban probably saw that there were Americans there.
Lieut. Col. Jasper De Quincy Adams showed up. He was young, handsome, and full of energy. He complained about the highway police commander. "When locals interact with him, they think the Taliban are better," he said, worrying that the commander delegitimized the government. "We"ll turn this around by aggressive patrolling," he told Westby. "Your mission is all about deterring and disrupting." He wanted Westby to lay ambushes and take the fight to the enemy. "I think that Popalzai needs to be patrolled very aggressively," he said. "Have large numbers of patrol and ambush." Jasper"s men followed us and fixed the holes in the road, filling them with dirt. Jasper complained that about twenty of the twenty-five recruits had tested positive for opiates. "That"s why the road is full of IEDs," Westby told me. "They"re high all the time."
The men of Team Prowler broke the mud walls with sledgehammers so that they could fit their Humvees inside. Then they parked on all sides so that they could have 360 degrees of coverage. They broke the tops of walls so they could fire better. Garbage littered the compound, including sheeps" hooves and bones, the remnants of previous meals. The Americans tried to clean it all up and set it on fire. Westby told me he didn"t think everybody in the villages around Highway 601 was Taliban; some were just normal civilians.
The commander of one of the checkpoints got on the radio to announce that his men had seen a Corolla full of Taliban with weapons. The commander met with local villagers by his checkpoint and explained that they were a different police unit replacing the old one to establish security. "It"s good initiative," said Westby. That night the men drove up and down the road and found a suspected IED. It was too dark to do anything about it. They did a recon by fire, meaning they shot at the house where they suspected the trigger man might be hiding, but nothing happened. If anything detonated, they would have annihilated the suspected firing point.
The next morning the team drove to a compound they suspected had been used by the men who placed the IED. They dismounted with the PR, walking past green fields into the first mud compound. On one corner by the road was a spy hole and another hole at the bottom with two ant trails coming out of it. Inside was a cornfield, a marijuana field, and harvested poppy plants. Several of the police on patrol didn"t wear their body armor and stood casually in fields of fire. Team Prowler kept pushing ahead. We pa.s.sed by large poppy fields. The plants were dry and harvested. The police came across three small brothers who pointed to a narrow path between two mud walls and said five armed Taliban had just moved north of the compound. But Dyer didn"t pursue the Taliban because he didn"t want to be channeled through the narrow path.
The men found a mosque with mattresses and a room with corn kernels, bags of nitrogen, and a car battery. The nitrogen could have easily been used for fertilizer or explosives. While the Americans were poking around inside the mosque, the police sat in the shade beneath nearby trees. Some of them filmed the patrol with their camera phones. "I need those men from Lashkar Gah to get in some Rangers and drive their sorry a.s.ses out here," Westby complained, and asked Mansur, the translator, to radio them. Back at the mud checkpoint Westby briefed his men. Their mission was to "deter and disrupt enemy forces burying IEDs," and the "center of gravity is Popalzai."
That night Dyer led an ambush by the mosque, where the team suspected the Taliban were sleeping. They hoped that when the Taliban tried to leave, the ambush team blocking the narrow path between the mud walls would kill them. They drove without lights in blackout. Dyer told the men to make sure the ANP had no cigarettes, didn"t play music, and didn"t talk. "Enforce light and noise discipline," he said. "Throw some f.u.c.king grenades. We"re not there to arrest people, just f.u.c.king kill people."
"The Hazara fighters are better than these lazy bones sleeping all day," said Westby, referring to the Pashtun police. "And they"re better shots," Dyer added. Westby estimated there would be five to ten Taliban in the mosque. Somehow I doubted the Taliban would be there. They weren"t stupid: they did not sleep in the same place every night, and they would know that the Americans had found their hideout.
At 3 a.m. they started getting ready. "I hope we catch these sons of b.i.t.c.hes with their pants down," Kilaki said. "I"ll be so p.i.s.sed if there"s n.o.body f.u.c.king there," said Campos. There were supposed to be only six police dismounts on the ambush, but twice as many got out of their vehicles to join the five Americans who went on the ambush. Westby got out of his Humvee to resolve the problem. "It just goes to show that no matter how many times you prep "em . . ." said Kilaki. "They all thought they were going on patrol," Westby said with a laugh. "I just explained it to their commander, and they nodded north and south." An unmanned Predator drone was flying overhead, but Team Prowler had no way of talking to those controlling it.
As it happened, the mosque was empty. Several Afghans walking by on the way to their fields or morning prayers were taken down the alleyway. "They can f.u.c.kin" sit and shut up," Dyer said. "I wish I was the dismount watching the people come out all spooked," Campos said. "On the Fourth we had the women crying," said Kilaki. "Yeah, I know," said Campos. "I saw the women coming out, tears all down their faces. Shut the f.u.c.k up! We"re doing you a favor."
When the rest of Team Prowler joined the ambush team, I found the Afghan men sitting and waiting to be let go. They were middle-aged and elderly. They asked to pray several times, and finally Dyer let them conduct their ablutions and pray on the gra.s.s. One of the old men told me that they were all very bothered by the Taliban. "They come here to shoot," he said. "They don"t let us irrigate our fields. When the Taliban shoot from this area, the Americans and police come and we have to run away. Our neighbors were bothered by the Taliban, and they fled. We have to take our women and children away when the police respond to Taliban ambushes." Another old man chimed in. "Three months ago the Taliban set up an ambush on the road," he said. "The police entered our houses, they stole our sheep and everything from our houses. We complained to Lashkar Gah police headquarters, and they gave us back two motorcycles and one sheep but not the rest of our things. We had a shop, and they took all the merchandise from it."
"I"m very sorry to hear that. You can rest a.s.sured that this is a different police," said Westby. "Tell him we apologize for the disturbance, but we"re adamant about keeping these people out."
"I am an old man," one of them said. "If we talk to them, the Taliban will slap us. The Taliban sometimes come here and demand money. If we refuse, they"re going to kill us."
The old men asked if they could go take their vegetables to the market. The Americans agreed. Westby told them that if they gave information on the Taliban that led to arrests, they would receive money. "If the Taliban see us talking to you, they will slaughter us tonight," one of the men said. "The Taliban don"t tell us when they are coming. We"re sitting in our homes, and all of a sudden they come and we hear shots. The Taliban don"t sleep here. They come here like thieves."
"Let them understand that we"re not the bad guys," Westby told his translator. "We"re trying to stop them from doing what they are doing. The best way to accomplish that is by a partnership. We can"t keep coming here every day."
"We can"t notify the police, but we"ll send some small child to tell the police," one of the old men said.
The sun rose, golden over the shrubs, as we made our way back to the checkpoint. The police had mentioned seeing a Taliban car. "What was that about a Taliban car?" asked Kilaki. "The ANP think everything is Taliban," Westby replied. "I don"t think they f.u.c.kin" know. They"re so eager to impress that sometimes they call everything Taliban."
The police at the next checkpoint radioed to say there were Taliban around. "They"re over there, and they"re over there, and they"re over there, but we can"t go on that road because it"s all IEDs, but the road is full of civilian traffic," Westby said, mocking the useless information he got from the cops.
A highway patrol commander called Torabas came by with his men. He and his men had just seen two Corollas full of Taliban in the distance. I asked him how he knew. He had been living here for two years, he said, and he recognized their faces. All the hills north of our position were said to be controlled by the Taliban, but the police were too scared to go there. I asked Torabas why the Taliban were so popular in Helmand. "The Taliban are supported by the British," he said, insisting that he had seen the British military drop fuel supplies to the Taliban. "n.o.body likes the Taliban here," he said. "It"s only out of fear. When the Taliban see people talking to the police, they kill them. They are here only by force, and many people dislike the police. Some police steal from houses. Before we recruited uneducated people who had no training." About fifty of his men had been killed by the Taliban since he took command.
He was from the Nurzai tribe, like Colonel Shirzad and most police in Helmand, he told me. His father and grandfather had fought the Soviets with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar"s Hizb-e-Islami, the most radical faction of the mujahideen. When the Taliban seized Helmand and pushed out Hizb-e-Islami, Torabas"s family fled to Pakistan. He said Taliban had seized their lands.
"I"m living in Lashkar Gah, but my fields are still in the hands of the Taliban," he said. "When the Taliban were defeated, they didn"t have any power. Then we were living in our compound, but now the Taliban are back." It seemed his motive was to regain his land. "When the Russians attacked Afghanistan they were trying to destroy our country. The Taliban didn"t like the mujahideen. When the Americans start oppressing or disrespecting our culture-touching our women, disrespecting our elders-then we will fight jihad against them."
That night Kilaki caught one of the police commanders smoking hashish in a car. "It looked like a Cheech and Chong movie," he said. Westby gave the PR money to buy cooking supplies. "Their logistics process doesn"t work, and I can"t have them going hungry," he said. Only one of the PR"s senior men showed any initiative and wanted to set up his own ambushes. Colonel Shirzad didn"t want to fight, Dyer told me, and without a charismatic leader like Farid the PR were content to just patrol Highway 601.
ONE AFTERNOON while I was marooned with Team Prowler and the PR in the small mud police outpost along Highway 601, languishing in the oppressive heat, surrounded by a moonscape of bleached rocks, hoping for some action to relieve my boredom, Sergeant Ahmadullah radioed to the young Afghan translator working with the Americans, called Mansur, and told him, "We found a Taliban, we have him here. What should we do, kill him or what?" Mansur told Ahmadullah he could not kill the prisoner, and instructed him to bring the man to the Americans.
The prisoner was a young man with a purple salwar kameez. He had long hair down to his neck and a cap atop his head. He looked bewildered. His eyes were wide with apprehension as he squatted on the dirt with his hands cuffed in front of him. He wore two different sandals. He had been a pa.s.senger in a taxi; the police had also brought the driver and the other pa.s.sengers.
Ahmadullah said his prisoner"s cellphone had a Taliban song on it. This was his evidence. Ahmadullah was by the roadside, while I was standing with his men, at the police outpost, out of his earshot. His men were privately angry about their commander"s decision to arrest the man and wanted him released. Zahir, another translator working with the Americans, was outraged. "This is why people hate the f.u.c.king police and support the Taliban," he said. I asked Captain Westby, Team Prowler"s commander, why the man was being held. "He had an anti-American ring tone," Westby said, "and he has some relatives that Ahmadullah says are in the Taliban."
Zahir explained to the Americans that the prisoner wanted to pray. The police were eager to uncuff him so he could, and the skeptical Americans relented. Zahir insisted the prisoner wouldn"t attempt an escape.
Sergeant Gustafson took one of the pa.s.sengers by the wall to enter his biometric data into a handheld device. He took the man"s picture and another of his eyes, along with his fingerprints, name, father"s name, and tribe"s name. The man seemed amused. But he was now in the American system. Westby and a sergeant interrogated the prisoner, who was called Zeibullah Agha. He was a student in a famous religious school in the Pakistani city of Peshawar and was on his way back to Babaji, where the British were engaged in heavy combat with the Taliban, in order to help his family flee to safety because his father was an old man. The Americans asked him for the names of his brothers, father, and uncle, but they had trouble with the names and confused the Pakistani town he was studying in for another one, Quetta, more famous for being a Taliban safe haven. I told the Americans that the school in Pakistan he named practiced a moderate form of Islam anathema to the Taliban.
"People with a similar surname are known Taliban," Westby said.
"I am a poor man. I don"t know why they arrested me," Zeibullah said.
The American sergeant asked him why he had this music on his cellphone. "One of my friends put it on my cellphone," Zeibullah said.
The sergeant smiled. "Bulls.h.i.t," he said, looking at Zahir. "How do you say bulls.h.i.t in Pashtu?"
Zahir looked at the prisoner and said, "Kus eh shir," meaning "a p.u.s.s.y"s poem."
Zahir and the police told me that Zeibullah"s cellphone had some videos of battles and one of a graduation from a religious school to be a mullah. "Everybody has them on their phones-even I have them," Zahir said. Sergeant Ahmadullah told the Americans that he knew Zeibullah"s father, who was a good man. "But I don"t know him," he said, "and his uncle is Taliban."
Mansur the other translator scoffed: how could he know the man"s father but not know him? "He"s f.u.c.ked up," Mansur said of Ahmadullah. "Maybe it"s a personal vendetta. We also use Taliban songs," Mansur added. Other policemen complained Ahmadullah had killed many people in "personal hostility." One policeman told me that Ahmadullah told him he had killed seven or eight men in personal feuds in Babaji. Another policeman originally from Babaji also insisted the prisoner was innocent. But Zeibullah was taken away to be sent to the prison in Lashkar Gah. He might be released for money, the American sergeant told me. Or he might be in prison for years.
Westby and his men had been sent to patrol Highway 601 because the Taliban had blown up culverts along it, blocking traffic and forcing trucks to go through Taliban-controlled towns. It took Team Prowler about half a day to secure the road, while the British filled up broken culverts with earth so that vehicles could pa.s.s. Westby, a soft-spoken and taciturn soldier, was confronted with a Sisyphean task, but he never showed frustration in front of Afghans he worked with. On another afternoon, a few days later, while Westby and his men were recovering from an overnight mission, a soldier woke him up to tell him that two village elders were complaining that the British had blocked their water supply when they filled the craters with dirt. Westby was sleeping, groggy. "Well, I"m not here to solve all the world"s f.u.c.king problems," he muttered.
He got up anyway and went to talk to the two old men. They wore white turbans and had long white beards and wrinkled leathery skin. They squatted, their tunics covering their bodies, and spoke in raspy voices. The British had blocked the water supply to thirty farming families when they filled in the craters on Highway 601, they said. The British ignored their complaints. They asked Westby to put a pipe through so they could water their crops. Westby promised to talk to local Afghan and American officials. They asked how long it would take. Westby guessed maybe a week. The two men seemed relieved. "We all have to work together to stop the Taliban," Westby told them. The two apologized for bothering him. To them he was probably just another in a long string of foreign officers and local warlords who had come and gone.
The next day we drove by the first compound they had searched. The sandbag they had stuffed into the spy hole was gone. Dyer wanted to destroy that part of the wall, but Jasper said the new orders issued by General McChrystal stated a compound could be destroyed only if the soldiers were in imminent danger. The men were baffled. With their tour in Afghanistan coming to an end, Westby was reluctant to let his men enter compounds. It was militarily useless, he said, and he didn"t want any of his men killed a couple of weeks before they went home. When we got to town, one of the sergeants driving was ebullient. He started playing chicken with oncoming vehicles and laughing. As we left the ANCOP base to drive to the main base in Lashkar Gah, a kid picked up a rock to throw at the Humvee and a cop kicked him hard in the chest. The men of Ironhorse and Prowler returned to their lives in Illinois. Five men from Ironhorse went back to Afghanistan to work as private security contractors in Kandahar.
"That"s why all the children are dying for you, Afghanistan."
Supporters of McChrystal said "he gets it," as if there was a magic COIN formula they discovered in 2009. But Afghans have a memory. They remember, for example, that the American-backed mujahideen killed thousands of Afghan teachers and bombed schools in the name of their anti-Soviet jihad. The Taliban atrocities had not arisen in a vacuum. Similarly, past American actions have consequences. Opinions were already formed. The Taliban were gaining power thanks to American actions and alliances. Warlords were empowered by the Americans. No justice was sought for victims. The government and police were corrupt. The president stole the elections. The message was that there was no justice, and a pervasive sense of lawlessness and impunity had set in. Afghans who had been humiliated or victimized by the Americans and their allies were unlikely to become smitten by them merely because of some aid they received. And the aid was relatively small compared with other international projects, like Bosnia, Haiti, Rwanda, and East Timor. The Americans thought that by building roads they could win over opinion. But roads are just as useful for insurgents as they are for occupiers. The Americans had failed to convince Afghans that they should like them or want them to stay, and they certainly had not been convinced that Karzai"s government has legitimacy. You can"t win hearts and minds with aid work when you are an occupying force.
The Taliban was the most obscurantist, backward, traditional, and despised government on earth. The fact that the Taliban was making a comeback was a testimony to the regime that the U.S. set up there, and to the atrocities that have been committed in Afghanistan by occupation troops and their Afghan allies. It was sheer arrogance to think that adding another thirty thousand or fifty thousand troops would change the situation so much that the occupation would become an attractive alternative.
There was little evidence that aid money in COIN had an impact. There was not a strong correlation between poverty and insecurity or between aid money and security. The more insecure you were, the more development money you got. The safer provinces felt as if they were being penalized for not having Taliban or poppy cultivation. The aid system raised expectations but didn"t satisfy them. Life remained nasty, brutish, and short for most Afghans.
Aid and force do not go well together. The Americans a.s.sumed that material goods superseded all other values. This was not true in Iraq or Afghanistan. Positive as the aid was, it did not outweigh the civilian casualties or the offensive and humiliating behavior of the past eight years. In Iraq it took the trauma of the civil war to make the Americans look good. There might have been a new administration in Washington, but for Afghans it was the same America: the America of civilian casualties, night raids, foreign occupation, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib-the America seemingly at war with Islam.
The Pentagon propaganda machine, for instance, turned Marja from a backwater to a key strategic city, and the American media accepted it. But in fact there were only a few thousand people living in Marja. It took months and thousands of troops for the Americans to seize Marja, only to learn that the Taliban were popular there. And there were up to twenty thousand similar Marjas throughout the country. In Marja the ANCOP too proved a failure, incompetent and dependent on the Americans. Fighting remained frequent. The Americans were not effective in evaluating Afghan police units. Although hailed as elite, the ANCOP annual attrition due to all causes ranged from seventy to one hundred and forty percent. Even by local standards they weren"t elite.
The storming of Marja was meant to be the first sally in a larger campaign to expel the Taliban from their southern heartland, especially Kandahar. The Americans thought if they could wrest it from Taliban hands, then it would turn the tide against the Taliban. But Kandahar meant little to anybody who wasn"t a Kandahari. It was part of the same focus on population centers that were overwhelmingly urban.
Violence was getting worse. How long would the Afghan people accept the presence of armed foreigners in their country? Even a message of help can be humiliating, more so when it is backed by a gun. The Americans underestimated the importance of dignity and the extent to which their very presence in Afghanistan was deeply offensive.
In May 2006 riots erupted in Kabul after a road accident with American forces, and the Americans shot at the crowd. The episode revealed an underlying anger that could explode at any moment. In September 2009 a British plane dropped a box of leaflets that failed to open, landing on a girl and killing her. Given that most Afghans are illiterate, it would not have been any more persuasive had it opened. Despite the lip service given to "protecting the population," in 2010 the American-led coalition killed far more civilians than previous years. In February a night raid by American special forces killed two pregnant women; the Americans attempted to cover it up. "Son of an American" has become an insult among Pashtuns the way "Son of a Russian" once was.
Folk poetry throughout Pashtun areas of Afghanistan is now often anti-occupation. Below is one recent ghazal (poem), by a woman called Zerlakhta Hafeez:Oh Afghanistan, you are my love
You are my soul, you are my body
They want peace while having guns in their hands
That"s why all the children are dying for you, Afghanistan
Your children are dying for you because they want you
To be sovereign, to be independent like they did before
Pashtuns from both parts of the black line [the border with Pakistan]
Call you their home, oh Afghanistan, so they fight for it.
Americans lacked the political will for a long-term commitment, regardless of whether it was right or wrong. The Americans would bail on Afghanistan sooner or later. It would be tragic if it happened within Obama"s eighteen-month deadline or after five years. There was no way to "fix" Afghanistan. According to Andrew Wilder, a longtime aid worker in the country, "It may be more realistic to look for ways to slow down the descent into anarchy." The Soviets never lost the war in Afghanistan. In fact, the puppet regime they installed had pretty much crushed the mujahideen until the Soviets withdrew support. The Soviets won their last battle in Afghanistan in Khost"s Operation Magistral. But it made no difference. Only the rusting ruins of tanks and a few Russian-speaking Afghans remained in Afghanistan. The Americans too weren"t losing, stressed a retired American military officer working on security in Afghanistan. "Every time our boys face them, they win," he said. "We"re winning every day. Are we going to keep winning for twenty years?"
Postscript.