Adventures in Correspondentland (23 page)

Sometimes, Apache helicopters would hover overhead on the lookout for insurgents waiting in ambush, and the Americans have since developed jamming technology and detection devices to combat improvised devices, along with stronger vehicles to withstand explosions, and better battlefield first-aid techniques. But in those days the Humvees in which we travelled were not
particularly well protected, and our body armour did not offer much of a shield. Designed to cover the vital organs rather than the whole body, the bullet-proof plates in flak jackets felt fig-leaf small, and there was always a feeling that it made more sense to sit on them than wear them, since the explosion from an IED would generally rip through the vehicle from underneath.

Always, we wore our combat helmets – an indicator of maximum danger – and made sure to buy high-strength wraparound sunglasses with cushioning between the frames and skin, because so many soldiers were blinded by the intense flash at the moment of detonation. Then we would rumble into the mountains along roads that could almost have been designed with ambushes in mind, hoping they had not been booby-trapped and that the Taliban had not sketched out a kill zone.

One evening, I recall returning from a patrol to hear that an American convoy on a parallel road had been hit by an IED, which underscored the crapshoot effect of leaving the base. On the first trip that Nik took to Afghanistan after I had left the region, a Canadian convoy in which he was travelling came under suicide attack in downtown Kandahar. In a vehicle splattered with human flesh and the fragments of body parts, the only thing that had saved him and the correspondent sitting alongside him was ten inches of Canadian armour.

In these situations, the simple fact that our hosts doubled as our protectors exposed one of the main flaws of the embed system. If pinned down in a gun battle, our only hope was that US soldiers would get us out of trouble. If wounded by an IED, US medivac teams would hopefully save our lives. Truth was no longer necessarily the first casualty of war. Indeed, the embed greatly increased our access to the battlefield and our ability to decide for
ourselves what was happening. Instead, it was our objectivity that was arguably at greater risk.

Fear was not the only compromising impulse. Be it the firepower, the hardware or the thrill of skimming over the countryside in Black Hawks, there was a risk of succumbing to ‘embed fever', a variant of Stockholm syndrome. Journalists always ran the risk of going a little weak-kneed in the company of warriors. Still more impairing was the instant camaraderie that combat zones tend to nurture, and the congeniality of many Defence Department media-handlers, most of whom were white-collar reservists dragooned into service because of the manpower shortages in the US military. Jovial men, seemingly happier in the company of journalists than that of professional soldiers, often they lapsed into that battlefield habit of immediately surrendering their innermost secrets, which again had an endearing effect.

One Pentagon PR man, a middle-manager from Connecticut, dropped into dinnertime conversation, in a disarmingly unemotional way, that his wife had declared herself to be a lesbian and run off with another woman at work. Another, a square-jawed 50-something, still with good looks, told us he had been a jobbing actor in Hollywood and dropped heavy hints that he had enjoyed success in the porn industry. His frequent use of the word ‘wood' appeared to say it all. Alcohol may possess powerful properties as a conversational lubricant, but it doesn't have anything on being cooped up on a military base confronting outside the daily possibility of death, and these kinds of conversations heightened the sense of allegiance.

There was sharing and, occasionally, there was over-sharing. On an embed in northern Afghanistan, we ended up in a billet for the weekend with a group of British soldiers, one of whom had an
unhealthy fixation with how frequently we masturbated. ‘Have you banged one out yet?' he asked in a thick Welsh accent before every meal, nodding eagerly as he waited for our answers. ‘Have you? Have you banged one out?' What else could we call him but Onan the Barbarian?

There were other undoubted benefits to the embed system. Had we not been with the US military, the Bermel Valley would have remained little more than a place on a map. Had we not been given such free access to the medivac choppers, we would never have encountered Kamila and been able to bring much-needed attention to the problem of unexploded mines (many of which had been manufactured in America and Britain, as well as the former Soviet Union).

Granted such unfettered access, we also inevitably ended up with a much more nuanced view of the American military. Inevitably, we spent time with the buzz-haired grunts and jarheads who fitted the stereotype of the trigger-happy gunslinger with more bravado than brains. ‘We should reduce this country to glass,' I recall one of them telling me.

But often the behaviour of troops was far from stereotypical. We saw how young and frightened many of the GIs could be. How, when out on foot patrols in the oppressive heat of the Afghan summer, they would wilt under the weight of their weapons. How, in the computer rooms back at base, they would stare lovingly at wives and children, whose bleary and stuttering images appeared on the screens via sluggish broadband. We had access to the top brass on the ground – the colonels and commanders with all the ‘chest candy', as their multicoloured rows of medals were called. It meant we could press them on why US military operations so often ended up killing civilians, which, arguably more so than
anything else, severely undercut the war effort. Certainly, the embed system never stopped us from making critical judgements, and I would like to think we were self-conscious enough not to fall prey to any subconscious feelings of alignment.

Unquestionably, embeds came with annoyances and frustrations. It was notoriously difficult to get access to the Special Forces soldiers trying to hunt down Osama bin Laden, who avoided the chow halls, slept in separate quarters and operated outside the normal military hierarchies. Sharing helicopter rides on occasions, they would rarely speak or engage in any way, other than to make doubly sure we were not filming their faces. Clearly, they hated us being there. They maintained this strict code of anonymity, one sensed, not only to protect their identity but also to guard their elite status. Similarly, their gruffness – like the long beards they were allowed to grow to blend in more with local tribesmen – was worn almost as a status symbol.

Occasionally, we would be aboard the Black Hawks that dropped them into the remote US outposts right on the mountainous border, from where we assumed they launched covert incursions into Pakistan. The official line from Washington was that US forces refrained from mounting such operations because they violated Pakistani sovereignty. But that just sounded like another post-9/11 falsehood. The working assumption was that bin Laden was hiding out in Pakistan's lawless tribal regions not far over the border – the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, to give them their official name. The diplomatic niceties of respecting another country's sovereign soil surely offered him little in the way of protection.

What those helicopter rides along the border also rammed home was the vastness and inhospitableness of the terrain, where
mountain ranges seemed almost to be superimposed on each other, one after the other, as if reflected in some giant hall of mirrors. Combined with Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, FATA covered some 40,000 square miles, which was the size of New England. It also harboured a population the size of Australia's, providing useful human camouflage. Whenever I was asked by friends about the hunt for bin Laden, I started by trying to describe this most unyielding of landscapes. Once, it had served as the perfect staging post for the CIA-backed mujahideen in their fight against Soviet occupation. Now, it offered a haven for al-Qaeda.

When it came to discussing the whereabouts of bin Laden, the reticence of the Special Forces was shared by their senior commanding officers. Nobody wanted to speak about him, and instead they pursued a deliberate policy of downplaying his significance. They had taken their lead from the US commander-in-chief, George W. Bush, who strongly implied that the famed Wild West poster ‘DEAD or ALIVE' no longer loomed so large in his mind. ‘Who knows if he's hiding in some cave or not?' the president said from the lectern of the White House briefing room in March 2002. ‘I truly am not that concerned about him.' Thereafter, bin Laden became a taboo, since his name reeked of mission failure. In any case, the suspicion always was that the Americans preferred him dead or dead.

Just about the only thing US commanders would tell us was that they thought bin Laden was somewhere in Pakistan and that the trail had gone cold. It became their default response. In the end, I heard that answer from so many officers over so many years that I believed it to be true.

If a corrective were ever needed after an embed with the Americans or the British, normally all it took was a dinner party back in Kabul. Over cheap Australian wine and meals prepared by Afghan chefs using recipes from Delia Smith cookbooks, the conversation among off-duty diplomats, UN officials, NGO workers and other journalists invariably came round to how a good war had gone bad.

Rarely was there much debate over the failure of the Americans to devote more forces at the start of the conflict. It was a given. From the outset, Donald Rumsfeld was determined to fight a small-scale conflict with the fairly narrow aims of toppling the Taliban and rooting out bin Laden. As a matter of principle, he showed no interest in remedying over a decade of international neglect that had started in 1989 with the withdrawal of Soviet forces.

The defence secretary was also determined to prove that the Powell Doctrine, which relied on overwhelming force, was a relic of twentieth-century warfare. He therefore committed just 316 Special Forces personnel to overthrowing the Taliban, with the CIA providing an additional 110 field officers. Rigid and doctrinaire, Rumsfeld continued to insist thereafter that a small force could maintain the peace, and that Kabul should be the main focus of its operations.

Although Colin Powell argued for a repeat of the Panama Model, where American troops fanned out across the country after ousting the Noriega government in 1989, Rumsfeld remained determinedly Kabul-centric in his thinking. Not until September 2003, almost two years after the fall of the Taliban, did he allow the UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to expand its remit beyond the capital,
thus preventing it from establishing much-needed bridgeheads in regional centres earlier on.

He also placed strict limits on the size of the troop presence, and, as a result, the multinational force was just 8000-strong. In Bosnia, by comparison, there were 40,000 peacekeepers. In terms of international donor money, Afghanistan also received significantly less assistance per capita than Bosnia or Kosovo, even though the challenges were arguably much greater. Four months after the liberation of Kabul, in a set-piece speech at the Virginia Military Institute, George W. Bush spoke boldly of a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan modelled on the US-financed reconstruction program that rebuilt post-war Europe. However, Rumsfeld blocked it.

His insistence on ‘light footprint' military missions was also widely blamed for Osama bin Laden's escape in December 2001 from Tora Bora, the network of caves adjacent to the Pakistan border – another great juncture of the post-9/11 years. Believing he was surrounded and fearing he was about to be killed, the al-Qaeda leader had even written his own will, in which he enjoined his wives never to remarry and apologised to his sons for pursuing a life of jihad.

On the express wishes of Donald Rumsfeld, however, fewer than a hundred US commandos were deployed in the operation, despite calls for reinforcements. Instead, the Pentagon relied primarily on air strikes – at one point a massive 15,000 lb bomb that had to be rolled out of the back of a C-130 transport plane was dropped on the caves complex – and untrained local militiamen. Had the Americans performed a classic sweep and block manoeuvre, involving the marine units and sniper teams that remained on the sidelines, bin Laden might not have escaped. As it was, he slipped
through the mountains into Pakistan completely unimpeded.

Just as there was general consensus that Washington had not committed anywhere near enough troops or reconstruction money, diplomats and aid workers rued the diversion of resources and attention to Iraq. In December 2001, even as the siege of Tora Bora continued, President Bush had ordered General Tommy Franks, the commander of the US Central Command and the soldier tasked with liberating Kabul, to draw up war plans for Iraq. Soon after, Special Forces units and the CIA's most experienced field agents were ordered to concentrate on overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Much of the US military's heavy airlift capability, along with the new Predator spy planes rolling off the production lines in America, were sent to the Gulf. Even the Afghan-born US ambassador in Kabul, Zalmay Khalilzad, who was uniquely well qualified to deal with the problems of his homeland and often called ‘the second president', was reassigned to Baghdad.