The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan (25 page)

I stopped writing these laments after a while. The deaths were small tragedies in the midst of a much bigger sadness, the unravelling of an entire region. But the sheer comprehensiveness of the assassinations eventually made them a major factor. The Taliban were systematically removing any powerful figures in the south that had any connection with the government. Unlike the foreign troops, who struggled to distinguish friends from enemies, the Taliban knew precisely who qualified for their target lists. Two of the best news outlets in southern Afghanistan, the newspaper
Surgar Daily
and the website
Benawa.com
, counted more than five hundred major assassinations from 2002 to mid-2010 in the province of Kandahar. Their lists of the dead are missing many names, however, and the true numbers will never be known.

The victims we did track closely were the old warlords. For a journalist, they were often the people you called when you wanted to find a specific person, or confirm a fact, or when you needed an armed escort into the districts. They knew the gossip, and never missed a chance to badmouth rivals. Slowly, however, my contact list became riddled with annotations beside their names: “DEAD.” I’d still call those numbers sometimes, because former mujahedeen commanders would often bequeath their fiefdoms—and their cellphones—to relatives, but the replacements were disappointing. The young Naqibi never led his tribe the way his father did; the sons of Habibullah Jan showed little enthusiasm for the family business of controlling a stretch of territory west of the city. Foreign observers of the war had spent years trying to decide if these characters were helpful or not, wrestling with questions about how to neutralize or exploit their influence, but perhaps we only learned to appreciate them after they had disappeared. Most of them had blood on their hands and still posed a serious danger to anybody who crossed them—but they stood as an alternative to the Taliban. Without them, the south belonged to the insurgents.

The last of these big mujahedeen figures was Ustad Abdul Halim. He had been a minor character during the war against the
communists, but emerged as a player during the factional warfare after the Soviet withdrawal. By the time I met him in 2007, he was serving as a security advisor to the governor. It was always a relief to dig my toes into the thick grass in his courtyard after plodding through the city’s dirty lanes. His power had faded since the days when his militias controlled a broad swath of farmland southwest of Kandahar city, but he kept himself well informed about the progress of the war. His bodyguards’ new M-16 rifles, a status symbol in a place where everybody else carried Kalashnikovs, also suggested that he retained some stake in the business of violence. One day we sat in canvas chairs among his rose bushes as he worked his way through a pack of Marlboros and lectured me about how the NATO countries should have anticipated the scale of the problem that awaited them in the south. “It was a trap,” he said, with a chuckle. “You stepped on a landmine.” He had a trick of saying these things in a way that seemed amusing, delivering the worst news with a twinkle in his eyes. One of my colleagues called him “a campy version of Saddam Hussein.”

Once, on vacation in Toronto, I went gift shopping for the old warrior. I wandered for hours, wondering what I could give a guy who already has his own personal army. I found myself in a store that sells wristwatches, trying to explain to the woman behind the counter that I needed something huge that could belong to a gangster. “Your friend is like a rapper?” she asked. “Well no, he’s a warlord,” I said. “Close enough. Almost the same thing.” As it turned out, the warlord was delighted by the gift. I didn’t expect him to enjoy it for very long, however. His house was located on the west side of Kandahar city, an area increasingly permeated by insurgents, and the Taliban threatened him on a regular basis. I figured he was next on the assassination list, but he endured a few more years in Kandahar before finally declaring his retirement in 2010 and moving north to Kabul. As of this writing, the leathery warrior remains alive. When Ustad Halim moved away from the south, my friend Alex Strick van Linschoten, a well-respected academic who lived in Kandahar,
marked the occasion with an e-mail to a few journalists. He reported that the influence of former anti-Soviet commanders had all but disappeared, leaving the local government more vulnerable. “I think this is the last of the giant dinosaur mujahedeen commanders to leave the city,” he wrote. “There is nobody else left. If the beginning of the end needed a starting date, I’d plant it somewhere in this week.”

Child victim of a night raid by international forces

Endless prattle about the war filled the media. Square-jawed international troops stood on sandbag parapets at sunset so that television crews could record their thoughts as they squinted at the badlands. Soldiers attached cameras to their helmets and released the footage. Their daily lives became whole seasons of reality television. Even the insurgent leaders had their say, in grainy videos and audio statements. Local journalists lived with the regular chime of text messages sent to their phones from the Taliban’s official spokesmen. The only participants in the conflict who rarely spoke to the world were the Taliban foot soldiers. Despite all the chatter about them, the fighters themselves were mostly silent.

On the rare occasions when a journalist made contact with insurgent fighters, the story usually turned into a tale of adventure for the journalist. I was guilty of this myself. My frightening brushes with the Taliban had not given me profound insights into the insurgency, but had instead supplied anecdotes that I could repeat with breathless drama: the car chase through Kandahar’s slums in 2006, or the journey across the border to Quetta’s back alleys in 2007. Some of my colleagues were kidnapped or even killed doing this work. Those who survived got away with amazing stories, book deals or footage that earned good prices from television networks. At its best, this
material gave glimpses of everyday life in Taliban camps, but more often we saw shaky images of men brandishing Kalashnikovs and predicting the demise of America. It was usually the same story, that of a brave reporter who goes into Taliban territory, witnesses scary things and emerges with vague conclusions about the warrior spirit.

Frustrated by this formula, I decided to try something else: a Taliban survey. My editor approved a budget, and we hired a freelance researcher in 2007. I had known “Hafiz” for almost a year, but I avoided learning his real name because I didn’t want to make his life more dangerous. I did not write down his cellphone number on the assumption that US forces would find it tempting to track my calls and hunt down my Taliban contacts. When I wanted to meet him, I drove to the western outskirts of Kandahar city and climbed the steps of a half-empty apartment block. He lived in a tiny room, furnished with only a bedroll. His window gave him a view of a vacant lot and a ruined grain elevator. Hafiz worked as a policeman for the Taliban regime; after 2001 he helped out at a relative’s cellphone shop, but did not make enough money and fell into debt. One of the people who loaned him money was my translator in Kandahar, which gave us an advantage when it came to persuading him to make risky trips into the villages. Month by month, he proved himself a more capable journalist. His formal education consisted mostly of memorizing the Koran (which gave him the honorific “Hafiz”), but he quickly learned new skills: finding interview subjects, asking questions from a list, recording the answers and, most challengingly, thinking of follow-up questions.

We offered Hafiz the equivalent of about twenty-five dollars per interview and sent him into five districts outside of Kandahar city to meet insurgent fighters. At first I equipped him with pocket-sized cameras, but these kept disappearing—sometimes he blamed police checkpoints, other times the Taliban—and eventually we settled on cellphones that recorded video. The phone contained a memory chip half the size of his thumbnail, making it easy to slip into folds
of his clothing. In total, he smuggled back forty-two interviews with Taliban fighters. The recordings were short and almost useless at first, but their quality improved as he learned the art of prodding his subjects and grew more comfortable asking hard questions. Eight months later, after we double- and triple-checked the material, we ended up with 512 pages of transcript. You can still watch all of the interviews at
www.globeandmail.com/talkingtothetaliban
, and decide for yourself what to make of them. Others churned through the mountain of stuff and found their own insights; some academics have footnoted our survey to support their claim that the Taliban are a bunch of crazy extremists who won’t negotiate, while other experts cited the material to make exactly the opposite argument. Teachers have used the survey as part of their lessons for classes ranging from grade seven to graduate seminars. An artist captured still images from the Taliban videos and used them as the inspiration for a series of drawings, and a curator displayed snippets of them in a gallery installation.

It was an interesting chunk of data, but in some ways it did not prove much; short statements by masked men do not lend themselves to firm conclusions. The Taliban cheated a little as we asked them questions, too, because they eavesdropped on each other’s answers. This made the exercise more like a series of focus groups and not a scientific survey. By the time we published the results in March 2008, I worried that the few strong points to emerge from the project would seem too obvious. Some of my colleagues said the same thing; a leading expert on the Taliban listened to the interviews in their original Pashto and told me that it gave him nothing but a headache and a reminder that the insurgents are, in his words, “village idiots.” What still surprises me, however, is how many of these basic truths about the Taliban are not widely understood. Things that seemed obvious to my friends and acquaintances in Kandahar took years to reach the desks of generals and politicians, and some never did at all. Even now, years later, these four lessons remain important.

Intelligence analysts spend years learning the Pashtun tribal structures, and locals will tell you a whole lifetime isn’t enough to master all the branches and sub-branches, the family trees whose fingers reach into every corner of local politics. But anybody can watch our Taliban videos and notice a pattern in the way the fighters introduce themselves. After the customary throat-clearing (“In the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate …”) they identify their tribal affiliation. Most of the tribes’ names end with the suffix “-
zai
,” meaning “son,” tracing bloodlines that go back centuries. Walking the streets of Kandahar city, you would bump into a lot of people who identified with the big tribes that hold power in the government: Popalzai, Alokozai and Barakzai. Out in the villages, however, our researcher found very few of those tribesmen in the insurgent ranks. Only five of forty-two named themselves as members of those three tribes. (Among those, the two who belonged to the president’s tribe, Popalzai, appeared to have bitter personal reasons for joining the armed opposition: one said his family was bombed by foreign aircraft, and the other said the government repeatedly eradicated his opium fields.) The rest of the Taliban in our survey belonged to tribes that weren’t handsomely profiting from the foreign presence, and felt a sense of victimhood. Those connected to the rich foreigners showered patronage on their own clans, while the excluded groups jealously fought for their share. It wasn’t so different from
The Sopranos
, or any other stories of a family squabble that turns violent.