Is This Your First War? (24 page)

I joined a foot patrol that set out one day from a forward operating base deep in the Horn of Panjwaii to a smaller patrol base in what was once the Taliban's backyard. As always, the soldiers carried seventy or eighty pounds of kit, including a ballistic vest, weapons, and ammunition. The sun baked. The few Afghans passing on the road were searched. One soldier told me she was no longer allowed to give pens to local children lest they end up in roadside bombs. Lieutenant-General Peter Devlin, Canada's chief of the land staff, was accompanying the patrol and stopped to chat with two Afghan teenagers. An army photographer positioned herself to capture the moment.

“Are you going to school?” he asked.

“No,” they told him, speaking through one of the military's translators.

“Oh. Well, do you work?”

“Yes. In the fields.”

“What do you farm?”

“Poppies and opium.”

The patrol base consisted of a tiny compound with scattered razor wire strung on some of its walls. There was a mulberry tree in the centre of the compound, a generator-run freezer, a makeshift barbecue, camouflage netting for shade, and a couple of dark mud-walled rooms where soldiers slept when they weren't sleeping outside. On the roof were the flags of Canada and the Royal 22e Régiment and a .50 calibre machine gun. Behind the gun was an easy chair with its stuffing poking out the seams where anyone firing the weapon might sit comfortably.

Soldiers at the patrol base stayed there for two or three weeks at a time. They patrolled constantly, often with Afghan soldiers who lived in a neighbouring compound. Private Tommy Quiron said he would rather live at the outpost than on a bigger base because “we're free to do what we want.” He had a tattoo on his shoulder: “In peace, vigilance. In war, victory. In death, sacrifice.”

Soldiers forming the patrol stepped through the dark, arched brick doorway of the compound, blinked when they re-emerged under the blazing sun inside, shook hands with those living there, and began cracking jokes in French and English. They leaned assault rifles against nearby walls. Some stripped off their body armour, revealing sweat-soaked uniforms beneath. Michel-Henri St-Louis, commander of the battle group, stood in the centre of the base, guzzling warm water from a plastic bottle. Powdery dust kicked up by marching soldiers had stuck to the sweat on his face, forming smears of white on his sunburned cheeks. They looked like sunblock or war paint. He was smiling.

“It has to be brought down to small victories,” he said when I asked him what the Canadians had accomplished that will outlast them. “It has to be brought down to a ten-year-old going to school. When he was born he couldn't listen to music or study anything other than the Quran. Now that ten-year-old has a choice.

“So what's our legacy? That ten-year-old was born in a very different world. It was a radical extremist government that allowed its country to be used for terrorism. That ten-year-old today has more choices. He has a school. He's learning reading and writing — and the Quran. And he has a spark of what he can do with his life that wasn't there ten years ago.”

From Kandahar, I booked an Afghan civilian flight north to Kabul. A young soldier from Newfoundland waited with me at the airport until the plane left. He groused, politely, about spending his tour stuck at Kandahar Airfield rather than in the field. His patriotism was unabashed. He said he wanted to fight so others wouldn't have to. “My hometown and my province and my country are worth every drop of blood that I can give.” He wasn't happy about Canada leaving Kandahar with the war there not won. “We've been in this fight so long, we'd like to see this through,” he said. “To just pack up and leave would be unforgivable. Everybody in the battle group knows somebody who has died. We've paid a heavy price. If we can leave an Afghanistan that's at peace, that's something we can put on their graves.”

A Canadian soldier on a foot patrol in Kandahar province.

I landed in Kabul and turned on my BlackBerry. It used to take a satellite phone to reach home or anyone else in Afghanistan. Now all the emails that had been sent to me while I was flying started stacking on the phone's display screen. One was from an acquaintance at the Canadian embassy in Kabul. I was a little surprised to see the government email address. I wasn't planning on meeting any Canadian diplomats in Kabul, and my professional relationship with the Department of Foreign Affairs is usually strained. A request I had made weeks earlier to interview the Canadian ambassador in Kabul was ignored. I opened the email. It included a forwarded message from an allied embassy, which I later learned was the British one: “As of 11 May 2011, we have been made aware of an increased threat of kidnap to an unidentified international journalist within Kabul. Please pass this information to any journalist contacts you may have, so that their security providers can mitigate against the threat.”

I looked at my plane ticket to be sure of the date. It was May 11. As for “security providers,” I didn't have any, banking instead on looking vaguely Afghan and keeping a low profile. It was an unnerving way to begin my visit. I shouldered my duffle bag and hiked to the parking lot, where Shuja, the Afghan friend of a friend whom I had hired to drive me around, was waiting. I threw my bag in the back seat of his beat-up sedan and shook his hand. He told me he came in third place in a Mr. Kabul bodybuilding contest. At least that was something.

We pulled out of the parking lot and immediately into a snarl of traffic. Pickup trucks in Afghanistan, the last time I was in the country, usually had a heavy machine gun mounted on the cab, or a cargo bed full of men with assault rifles, or both. It was strange, then, to see one carrying raucous teenaged members of a soccer team. They stood swaying in their uniforms, holding on to the truck with one hand and waving the other in the air. It was stranger still to see the cheering teenaged girls in the car that followed. Schoolgirls with simple blue uniforms and white headscarves picked and scampered along the broken sidewalk beside us.

Shuja wove in and out of traffic and told me his story. It wasn't unusual. He was in school when the Taliban took Kabul in 1996. The next day several Talibs burst into his classroom and arrested thirty-five Tajik students they accused of coming from the Panjshir Valley, where Massoud and many of the anti-Taliban fighters made their home. Shuja is not Panjshiri, but they took him anyway because he looked like he might be. The Taliban held him for four days before letting him go. “I ran five hours to get to my aunt's house,” he said. “The next day we left for Pakistan.”

He dropped me off at my guesthouse, a place with no sign out front and a bar in the basement where Afghans were forbidden from drinking. It attracted a steady stream of NGO workers, foreign businessmen, and “security contractors” still sporting the rangy, muscular frames they had acquired in previous military lives. “An airborne unit,” was all an otherwise forthcoming Brit said when asked with what regiment he had served. Elsewhere, male NGO workers drunkenly circled one of the few women there like children around a campfire. “You're watching a pathetic display of my desperate attempt to get laid,” one confided loudly. The only Afghan in the place, the barman, looked on impassively.

My guesthouse wasn't the only isolated bubble in the capital. NATO bases were another. They were enormous affairs, ringed with multiple layers of concrete, roadblocks, and razor wire. On occasion a contact inside could not even greet me at the farthest gate. I'd pass one checkpoint, walk several hundred metres, and meet her halfway. Some bases required fingerprints and iris scans. Staff at one wanted to know my religion.

“I'm not going to tell you that,” I said to the young American army clerk who had just taken my second round of iris scans in about ten minutes.

“You have to.”

“I'm a Jedi Knight,” I responded unfairly. She hadn't made the rules.

“That's not on here,” the clerk said. “You can say Jewish, atheist, Chinese …”

“Chinese is a religion?”

She shrugged.

Talk in Kabul was of President Hamid Karzai's efforts to strike a peace deal with the Taliban. Western nations, groping for an exit, backed the process and did their best to ignore the many Afghans who did not. Some 10,000 rallied in Kabul before I arrived, to protest a deal and the prospect that Karzai might make fundamental concessions to the Taliban in an effort to reach one. “Death to the Taliban,” they shouted. “Death to suicide bombers. Death to Punjabis” — a reference to the Pakistanis many Afghans feel control the Taliban.

The rally was organized by Amrullah Saleh, Karzai's former intelligence chief and once an aide to Massoud. Forced by Karzai to resign in 2010, he began building a political movement opposed to reconciliation with the Taliban. Beside him at the rally was Abdullah Abdullah, whom Ahmed Shah Massoud sent to Washington in August 2001 in a futile effort to warn America of the danger posed by the Taliban. I saw him once or twice that autumn in Khodja Bahuddin. He was later Afghanistan's foreign minister under Hamid Karzai from 2001 to 2005, and then ran against him in the fraud-ridden 2009 presidential election. Saleh derided Karzai for his habit of referring to Taliban as “brothers.” “They are not my brothers. They are not your brothers. They are our enemies,” he told the crowd.

I met with Saleh soon after. There was heavy security at his office and a long wait in a small reception room where aides brought glasses of sweet juice before I was ushered into his office upstairs. Another half dozen of his aides sat on chairs against the wall there. We sat and waited some more, and then Saleh strode into the room — clean-shaven and wearing a stylish suit. He moved quickly and looked directly at the person he was speaking with. He seemed full of energy and confidence. He spoke fluent English and avoided utterly the circumlocution that afflicts many public officials. Afghan politicians often speak euphemistically about their “neighbours” or “outside countries” when criticizing Pakistan. Saleh hates the place and doesn't bother hiding it. Islamabad, he said, wants to use the Taliban to control Afghanistan the way Iran does with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Afghans must resist this, he said, since they must fight for a pluralistic and democratic society.

“What I call the anti-Taliban constituency, it's not ethnic, it's not south−north. It's a constituency that wants justice. Without implementing justice, you bow to a group that only knows beheadings, intimidation, suicide bombings, marginalization of society, crushing of civil society. That will not bring stability…. I do see the argument to have peace. I am not saying we should continue fighting. I say at what price? The current approach will not lead to peace. It will create a different crisis, far worse than what you see.”

That Afghanistan's international allies were backing Karzai's reconciliation efforts did not faze Saleh. He had fought the Taliban long before most people in the West had heard of them. “We were not fighting for Americans and we are not fighting for America,” he said. “Yesterday we were fighting for the protection of our dignity, and today we have raised our voices for the same purpose.”

The far worse crisis to which Saleh alluded was the prospect of renewed civil war. He suggested Afghans would fight rather than accept any reconciliation with the Taliban that compromised on the freedoms they had gained since 2001. It seemed appropriate to visit the part of Afghanistan that had most resisted the Taliban the last time the movement took control of the capital.

The road that snakes through the Panjshir Valley 100 kilometres north of Kabul is lined with the rusted hulls of Soviet tanks. Beside them, in mid-spring, are fields of new wheat dotted with bright red tulips. Cliffs rise on either side of the valley, and through its centre a silt-darkened river rushes with melt water from the higher peaks of the Hindu Kush to the north. Massoud's tomb is here, set atop a hill overlooking the valley. A ragged man with a milky eye swept dust from the dirt path leading up to it in exchange for handouts. “Whenever I get the chance, I come to remember and give peace to my soul,” Abdul Razaq Malin, a judge who once fought with Massoud, told me when I asked why he was there.

Ruins of destroyed Soviet tanks litter the Panjshir Valley.