Adventures in Correspondentland (22 page)

After making our bookings at the military-liaison office, and filling out the necessary disclaimers, we would drive out of the capital to Bagram Air Base, the Americans' main base in Afghanistan and also its busiest transportation hub. Bagram is to war nerds what Clapham Junction is to trainspotters, and the airfield was a constantly shifting swarm of warplanes: C-130 Hercules, which provided much of the Pentagon's rapid airlift capability; A-10 Thunderbolts, or Warthogs, with engines mounted on either side at the rear and noses customised with shark's teeth; Chinooks and Black Hawks, which ferried troops to the front; Apache attack helicopters, war machines with a chain gun configured to track the movements of the pilot or gunner's head.

Usually, we would be billeted in dormitories for a night or so, until space opened up on an aircraft carrying soldiers to the further reaches of the combat zone. Then we would wait in what looked and functioned like a commercial departure lounge, with vending machines packed with Mountain Dew, rows of cushioned chrome seats and banks of plasma screens tuned to the American Forces Network, a round-the-clock melange of ‘touch of home' programming that included Hollywood action movies, NFL football, major-league baseball, and bulletins from Fox News and other US networks that were not so slavishly loyal.

The Pentagon produced its own five-minute daily in-house newscast called ‘Freedom Watch Afghanistan', which
was uniformly upbeat in tone, along with a batch of morbid advertisements warning soldiers about the hazards of smoking and letting their car insurance expire – lesser apprehensions, one would have thought, for men and women about to confront the Taliban.

In the lottery of seat allocation, first prize was to hitch a ride with a four-star general, since it meant zipping over the mountains and terraced canyons in speedy Black Hawks. The runners-up flew on Chinooks or military-transport planes, which belched out plumes of ballooning chaff as they flew out of Bagram to thwart attacks from the ground. Then, as Kabul disappeared into the distance, we prepared ourselves mentally for the conflict down below.

The last time the Afghan Government had tried to establish a foothold in the Bermel Valley, a lawless expanse of terrain adjacent to the Pakistan border, the local police chief had his head hacked off by the Taliban. Now, as it tried again midway through 2005, the newly hoisted Afghan flag shared the same airspace as an American B-52 bomber that flew in a sweeping arc high in the cloudless sky, and a tank-busting A-10 Thunderbolt ground-attack plane that screamed past not much above ground level, with an underbelly packed full of weaponry.

In recent weeks, the Americans had established a remote outpost, a scruffy bastion surrounded by blast walls and gun emplacements, strewn with tents and metal containers that doubled as toilet blocks and barracks. With Old Glory fluttering over the battlements, the Americans preferred to liken them to cavalry forts from the Wild West, but they looked more like
gang redoubts from some dystopian fantasy – a kind of Pashtun
Mad Max
. In a boast that doubled as a warning, the local US commanders told us they inhabited the most dangerous corner of the country. But that was the point. They were ‘bringing the battle to the front door of insurgents'.

It was midsummer, at the height of the Afghan fighting season, and we had been flown into the Bermel Valley to view a coming-out ceremony of sorts. The latest batch of newly trained regulars from the Afghan National Army was about to be deployed and had been handed the unenviable introductory mission of patrolling the Bermel Valley. Baptisms rarely come with more fire, and that week Afghanistan was even more volatile than normal. Reports had come from Guantanamo Bay, first published in
Newsweek
and later retracted, that US interrogators had flushed a copy of the Koran down the toilet. Across Afghanistan, anti-American demonstrations broke loose with a scalding fury, the most angry since the fall of the Taliban in late-2001. Jalalabad was already aflame, and at least 17 people had been killed in rioting nationwide.

For the US commanders on the ground in the Bermel Valley, the reports from Gitmo could hardly have been more ill-timed. During weeks of negotiations with local Pashtun elders, they had offered the usual carrots of new roads and schools. However, in a region of continually switching tribal allegiances, it was the stick that normally held sway: did the tribesmen want to side with the coalition forces against the Taliban or risk America's wrath? Confronted with so stark a choice, and with so much US firepower, local chiefs had agreed to line up behind the Kabul government. The question that morning was whether the pact would survive the wave of anti-Americanism sweeping the country.

The answer came outside the gates of the American base in a colourful welcome ceremony for the newly commissioned Afghan troops. As the warthog completed another howling fly-past, elders sat cross-legged on the stony ground in their finest
longis
– lavish turbans fashioned out of shimmering gold and silver fabric. To the clatter of drums, young men with wispy beards performed dance moves that were swirling and seductive, a long-time favourite of Pashtun tribesmen. There was also something deliciously camp about the Afghan soldiers, clasping their US-made weapons diagonally across their chests and running, frenetically, on the spot to the same fast-paced drumbeat, as if performing the show-stopper in a Berlin cabaret.

The brief ceremony over, we jumped aboard a convoy of Humvees and edged into the centre of town, where hundreds more tribesmen had congregated in the bazaar. Given the anger unleashed by the Koran-desecration allegations, the mood was harder to predict, and the fear was that they might lash out against the blasphemy. To calm the crowd, the US commanders had the good sense to allow a State Department official to speak first, and the man from Foggy Bottom rose magnificently to the challenge.

Wearing his own golden turban, made up of enough material to cover a tennis court, he gestured towards his white beard, which he said attested to his age if not his wisdom – a line that, when relayed by his translator, got a gentle ripple of laughter. A promising start.

Emboldened, he then waged a war for hearts and minds with disarming honesty. The reports from Gitmo may be true, he admitted. He simply had no way of knowing. But this was not how America should be judged, nor its mission in Afghanistan. It was not a religious crusade. ‘If there was a Koran on this stand
today, and the devil came to set fire to it,' he shouted, ‘I would throw my own body on the Koran to protect it from the devil's fire.' Then, in an even louder voice, like a Pentecostalist preacher reaching the climax of his sermon, he exhorted, ‘With my last drop of blood, I would stop this thing from happening.'

The elders looked stunned but impressed nonetheless by this bravura performance. In the most unpromising of situations, where the fury of Muslims could easily have been expressed violently, he had somehow turned a negative into an undoubted positive.

Then, as the convoy moved further up into the valley, he delivered, word for word, an identical speech with the same show-stopping panache. With representatives of this calibre, America at least stood a chance. Alas, our State Department whitebeard was on his last tour of duty and just on the verge of retirement.

This small episode showed how the unrivalled masters of mechanised and computerised warfare had started to become much more adept at counter-insurgency strategies. A greater number of patrols were conducted on foot, with Afghan translators always in attendance. The cannier commanders had come to appreciate the benefits of getting out of their Humvees, sitting down with tribal elders and doing something as banal as sharing some freshly brewed tea. Even the grunts could now greet locals with a cheery
As-Salamu‘Alaykum
.

The incursion into the Bermel Valley also attested to the benefits of the Pentagon working in tandem with the State Department. Back in Washington, where institutional rivalries and an ongoing feud between Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell had bedevilled the reconstruction effort in Afghanistan and completely hobbled it in Iraq, this was still not happening.

As opposed to their uniformed cohorts, State Department
officials had the advantage of often being older, wiser, and more emotionally intelligent and culturally sensitive. By definition, they were more diplomatic, and they grasped the value in projecting American soft power rather than its armour-plated alternative. Though marginalised still in Washington, they were becoming increasingly central players on the ground in Afghanistan.

Also striking in these far-flung corners was the extent to which local US military commanders fought their own wars, relying on their own strategies, tactics and instincts. Back at headquarters in Kabul, the military top brass remained faithful to the doctrinal strictures coming from the Pentagon, which prohibited nation-building and a more ambitious reconstruction effort. Yet that was precisely what was happening in the very areas of Afghanistan where the Americans were making inroads, even if the colonels and majors responsible performed verbal contortions to come up with more Rumsfeld-friendly euphemisms to describe the rebuilding process. Here, they were architects of genuine landmarks to progress.

The town of Khost, the one-time stronghold of Osama bin Laden, could now boast a newly renovated technical college, where young Afghans were taught mathematics and geometry in classrooms that had blackboards, desks and textbooks. Before 9/11, the same building had been a training school for al-Qaeda. The governor's mansion nearby had also been refurbished, and a team of gardeners tended to the gubernatorial flower beds outside. Its first occupant was a newly returned Afghan-American, who only a few months before had been running a weightlifting gym in Arlington, Virginia – admittedly not an ideal job swap, but at least he was hard-working and incorruptible.

In a safe house in a quiet side street in Khost, we also
encountered a one-time comrade of bin Laden's, who had recently become the most senior Taliban commander to switch sides under a new amnesty program. Still wearing the scars of conflict – the top of one of his fingers had been blown off – Malanjam sounded drawn and battle-weary, as he sat in a leather armchair in the late-afternoon sun on a veranda decorated with small pot plants. ‘I used to enjoy fighting in the past. I was a battlefield commander for twenty years,' he said, with two of his former henchmen looking on. ‘If someone like me can give up fighting, then I'm sure others based in Pakistan will soon come home.'

At that point of the Afghan war, US commanders in the troubled eastern provinces claimed to have the upper hand, and they flew us low over the border with Pakistan to underscore how incursions from Taliban fighters had slowed to a trickle. Only the previous year, insurgents had flooded over the border in groups of 60 to 100. Now, purportedly, they arrived in fives and sixes. Tellingly, however, even the most optimistic commanders stopped short of predicting a definitive military victory. Most had read enough Afghan history to know that war was the status quo, and fighting was the national pastime.

Even a weakened Taliban continued to pose a threat. From the mountains and hills, insurgents were still capable of launching regular attacks on Camp Salerno, the forward operating base within artillery range of Waziristan, which served as our temporary home on visits to the border region. Salerno so regularly came under assault from incoming mortar and rocket fire that it became known as ‘Rocket City'.

Friday was ‘Surf and Turf' night, an end-of-week feast of lobster and steak imported from home, and GIs came dressed in helmets and full body armour. The Taliban had learnt the mess
hall was crowded on Fridays and thus a perfect time to strike. However many times the Apache attack helicopters pounded the nearby hills in drills that also served as a deterrent, and however often artillery units fired ordnance into the nearby mountains to ward off attacks, the insurgents kept on returning.

Venturing out of the base in military convoys was far more dangerous, because of the threat of improvised explosive devices, the dreaded IEDs. In the past, Taliban fighters had tended to engage the Americans in gun battles using rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles, considering it a more honourable and righteous form of combat. Now, however, they had learnt from the insurgency in Iraq that the best way to cripple an American patrol was to plant IEDs in the path of a convoy.

In face-to-face combat, the Taliban were thought to lose 15–20 men for every foreign soldier killed – a casualty rate that was unsustainable. Even though it generally took six IEDs to kill a single soldier, they were ideal for asymmetrical warfare. Their use had increased by 400 per cent, and the Taliban hoped they would have the same morale-sapping effect on the coalition forces as the mujahideen's use of Stinger missiles against Soviet helicopter gunships. With the invisibility of the enemy making excursions all the more terrifying, there was a lottery-like feel to going out on patrols with the Americans. Whether or not your convoy was hit by an IED was largely a matter of luck.