The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan (29 page)

The simple answer, the answer that usually came up during such moments, when the fragility of the whole effort in Afghanistan became obvious, was that the international community needed to work harder, to build a better system of government and local
security. This usually fell under the heading of “capacity-building,” the idea that if only the Afghans were better equipped, then maybe all problems could be solved. Afghan officials encouraged this kind of maximalist thinking because they profited from it. A review of the jailbreak by the local intelligence service focused on the prison’s physical defences. An official from the National Directorate for Security presented his agency’s findings this way, according to an internal report:

That’s the entire analysis. It does not mention how a raiding party of insurgents sneaked into the city without anybody noticing, or how the signs of unrest—the hunger strike, the poisoning, the radical committee of inmates—failed to arouse suspicion. Nor does it mention the breakdown of trust that allowed the Taliban to warn people in the neighbourhood of an impending attack, confident that nobody would tip off the authorities. A more scholarly review of the incident, published in the
Canadian Army Journal
, did examine some of those contextual factors but still reached the same conclusion: spend more money. It blamed a “shortage of resources” and called for new funding to “improve the security of such facilities through more competent manning and increased funding for construction and maintenance,” among other things.

This preference for a narrow interpretation of events became almost pathological at Kandahar Air Field. A media staffer for the
Canadian government visited the journalists’ tent to suggest that we should write about how the attack was, in fact, a “blessing in disguise” because it opened an opportunity to refurbish the facility and install new front gates. Canada’s top diplomat in Kandahar repeated this message in an on-the-record briefing. I assumed that the officials understood this was industrial-grade propaganda, but sometimes their statements raised a more frightening possibility: maybe they inhabited a different mental universe. Maybe their devotion to the mission made it hard to contemplate the broader implications.

The jailbreak should have raised the question of whether the sum total of the screw-ups might be greater than the individual failures. Corruption, poor intelligence and the weakness of Afghan forces were well-known problems, and each could theoretically get fixed. None of those improvements would matter, however, if the ideas behind the mission proved incorrect. The foreigners assumed that the Taliban were unpopular, that most ordinary Afghans wanted to live in a country allied with Western powers. Over and over, military leaders repeated some version of the mantra “clear, hold, build,” implying that money spent to improve a community should earn its loyalty. By that measure, Sarpoza prison should have been a roaring success. The institution fell squarely into the zone around the city where international donors concentrated most of their efforts; even within that zone, few places had enjoyed such largesse. In the year before the prison break, the Canadian government spent millions overhauling the facility with new septic systems, solar-powered lighting, a staff training room, metal doors for the cells, bars on the windows, concertina wire, an infirmary, landscaping, new guard towers and upgraded washroom facilities. Painted walls replaced the rough stone surfaces; where chunks of masonry used to fall on prisoners as they slept, the ceiling now arched smoothly overhead. Piles of garbage and scrap metal, previously alive with the scurrying sounds of rats, were cleared out and replaced with expanses of fresh gravel. Workers filled in a creek running through the compound. New buildings were
constructed: a place for conjugal visits, a separate room for security checks of female visitors, an armoury and a carpentry workshop. The foreigners paid for truckloads of new mattresses, and gave the guards new uniforms and new vehicles. They supplied medicine and hygiene kits. More projects were underway at the time of the attack, as well, requiring frequent visits by Canadian officials, but they failed to smell the trouble brewing under their noses.

It’s hard to fault the foreigners for this: they cleared, they held, they built—but it fell apart in an instant. None of the international community’s efforts at Sarpoza were inadequate in themselves, but they didn’t add up to something useful. This point would get proven over and over, across Afghanistan. There would be an illusion of progress, a new institution or outpost, but everything could crumble in a few minutes.

For those who interpreted the Sarpoza incident in a narrow way, seeing only the technical challenge of improving prison security, the following years offered another chance to test their ideas. Sarpoza was rebuilt, and the Canadian government donated cash for the repair of houses and shops damaged by the truck bomb. More foreign money paid for the tripling of the guards’ meagre salaries. The new version of the prison was better guarded, with higher walls and more professional staff. Female guards received a twelve-day “security self-awareness” training program, and Canadian foreign affairs minister Lawrence Cannon visited in 2009 to showcase the model facility. New front gates were installed with impressive blast walls, designed to resist truck bombs—and the new fortifications did, in fact, withstand a similar blast the following year, in 2009, when the Taliban reportedly detonated a truck packed with explosives near the front entrance. An American officer boasted that the prison gates were now so strong that insurgents would need a nuclear bomb to breach the perimeter.

The problem was not the strength of the walls, however, but the fact that they stood on shaky foundations—figuratively and literally.
The Taliban had taken advantage of this weakness in 2003 by tunnelling into the soft dirt under the walls and rescuing dozens of their comrades. Despite the upgrades to the prison defences, this subterranean problem remained unsolved in the fall of 2010, when a Taliban supporter rented a small building across the road from the prison. The insurgents pretended to set up a workshop, manufacturing concrete building supplies in the daytime while at night the place served as a headquarters for another rescue operation. Painstakingly, over several months, a man with a pickaxe dug a tunnel under the road and beneath the political section in the northeast corner of the jail. Taliban statements later claimed that his tunnelling was guided by his own memory of incarceration at Sarpoza, where he once served three months, with help from Google Maps. Prison guards said they did not notice the sound of digging underfoot, and nobody reported the loads of dirt trucked away from the workshop across from the prison. None of the guards reported hearing a hydraulic jack breaking the concrete floor of the prison. Perhaps the riskiest moment for the diggers happened a couple of weeks before the jailbreak, and was later revealed by the writer Luke Mogelson in an article for
GQ
magazine: a neighbour, the owner of an electronics store next door, got suspicious and tried to sneak a look inside the fake workshop. Witnesses told Mr. Mogelson that a man emerged and hit the shop owner on the head with a metal pipe, leaving him with injuries that would later kill him. Such a brazen murder next door to a security facility naturally brought some attention, and staff from the Afghan police, intelligence, and prison services all visited the scene to ask questions. Their inquiries apparently did not reveal the fact that the incident took place in front of a sham business, which concealed the mouth of an escape tunnel.

So, for a second time, in April 2011, hundreds of men captured as insurgents walked free from the biggest jail in southern Afghanistan. “We had good weapons, and many police, and foreign troops were nearby every night,” a senior prison official told me on the morning
after the second jailbreak. “Last night all these things were present, all our forces, we had enough preparation for fighting. But we did not fight. Why? That is a big question.” He was paraphrasing what I had concluded about the previous jailbreak—that the sum total of the foreign assistance did not add up to security. His simple phrase, “We had enough preparation for fighting,” pointed to the fact that the Afghans’ challenges went beyond military prowess. The international community and its local allies had learned how to fix the technical problems with the prison facility—shoddy gates, poor lighting, insufficient guards—but there was nothing they could do about the bigger problem, that few people in the south seemed enthusiastic about resisting the Taliban. When insurgents feel comfortable setting up shop across the street from your prison, it doesn’t matter if your walls are thick. You will always be undermined.

Attack helicopter in Uruzgan province

No matter what happened in the rest of the country, we always had Kabul. Foreigners returned there after long months in the provinces, after lonely nights on military bases or isolated compounds, sleeping in the metal hulls of modified shipping containers or guesthouses without guests. Men straggled into the city with dirty beards and a craving for beer. Women shrugged off their burkas, the blue veils that kept them anonymous, and went back to their standard expat outfits: jeans, headscarves, hiking shoes and long shirts. They continued stripping their layers after arriving inside the high-walled compounds that served as the foreigners’ private world. Past the heavy doors of a restaurant, past the identity checks and metal-detecting wands of the guards, through the secure bombproof passageways, I would step into a poolside garden where uniformed waiters served chilled drinks. Sitting with my laptop and a gin and tonic one afternoon, I saw a blonde woman stagger out of the security gate with an expression of profound gratitude to be back in the relative luxury of the capital. She removed her headscarf like she was casting off a yoke, and later changed into a bikini. After a swim, she reclined on a lounger and explained the basics of Kabul’s party circuit. Festivities kicked off on Thursday nights, before the traditional day of rest on Friday, and continued into the weekend. Often
they were tame affairs, just friends sitting on carpets spread out on the grass of a back garden, but sometimes they assumed a frenzied energy. The expat community always seemed to be toasting somebody’s arrival or departure, she said. The war attracted young professionals who saw themselves in a heroic role, saving locals from misery, or fighting the evil darkness of terrorism, or perhaps both at the same time. Somehow, those glamorous pursuits also required lots of alcohol: I’ve seen more drunk people cram into a house in Kabul than in any other city in the world. There was often a grimness to the drinking, a deliberate grinding down of consciousness, but occasionally women would show up in something shimmery, or sparkly, or wearing a tiara. This added a frisson to the dancing, and gave momentum to the evenings beyond the need to blur awareness. By the end of the night you could see disappointment on the faces of people who realized they could not drink themselves out of Afghanistan.

After a few of those parties, I stumbled back through the streets of Kabul toward my hotel. The streets looked peaceful in darkness, not crowded with cars and beggars. Stray dogs ran in packs. Guards slept in tiny huts, or stayed awake smoking with automatic rifles resting across their knees. The only shops still open were bakeries, with boys kneading lumps of dough and the fragrance of bread pushing away the gutter stench. The guards at my hotel would be surprised to see a foreigner walking at night, undisguised in jeans and a T-shirt, but they didn’t seem to mind in the early years. That changed during my visit in September 2008. A manager knocked at my door after a late evening and reminded me that things were getting worse. He recommended against evening strolls, and suggested one of the car services that catered to foreigners. At least three companies ran fleets of sedans day and night; their rates had climbed, but five or six dollars would still get you across the downtown. Spotting these cars used to be easy, as they printed company logos on their doors, but then security concerns forced them to peel off the decals and hide
among the traffic. They also removed the radio dispatch system from the vehicles’ interiors, making them and their drivers less conspicuous. By 2008, the dispatchers had started giving security numbers to every customer, something you could mutter to the driver to ensure you were climbing into the right vehicle. Even those precautions did not meet the standards of the United Nations, which preferred to keep drivers sitting outside in armoured UN vehicles—which, perversely, made the parties more conspicuous.