The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan (6 page)

The convoy halted. Soldiers walked up the road, their guns at the ready. In the brown haze they found scattered ordnance—an artillery shell, a hand grenade with a rusty pin—and fragments of metal. We stepped carefully over chunks of human flesh: foot, leg, charred torso. The blast site became visible, with flames dancing in the remnants of the bomber’s car. We saw a man with a bloody face shuffling aimlessly. Medics pulled him behind a truck, away from the wind, and treated his wounds. His uniform, spattered with blood, was standard issue for Afghan police, but he identified himself as a private security contractor for US Protection and Investigations (USPI), an American firm that hired local mercenaries to guard convoys, among other duties. His red sport-utility vehicle was riddled with shrapnel holes. The soldiers guessed that the suicide bomber had chosen his victim at random, and our convoy might have been targeted if we had ventured down the road a few seconds earlier. Soon the local USPI boss, Jack Savant, appeared out of the storm, yelling at the Canadians to say he had the situation under control. Mr. Savant was a storybook character, a balding American in running shoes with a bulletproof plate flapping over his belly and a Kalashnikov in his meaty fist. He claimed to be a retired US special forces sergeant, and he disliked the media—the last time we’d met, his men held me at gunpoint while he examined my press credentials. (He seemed popular with the Canadian soldiers, however, and they wrote tributes to him after he died in another suicide bombing that year.) Soldiers doused the flames with fire extinguishers and
Mr. Savant waved goodbye. The whole thing was over so quickly that I didn’t even find out how many men died in the blast. The wreckage disappeared in the rear-view mirror, and we plunged forward into the storm.

I was still new to war, but I’d later realize that this happens a lot in conflict zones: something appears, and disappears, and you rarely get a chance to go back and figure out what happened. Usually it’s not that storms obscure the view in any literal sense, it’s just that chaos makes the facts hazy. Even when returning to the scene of an incident, as I was about to discover in the coming hours, it’s often impossible to piece together any semblance of truth.

The storm passed as we continued along the highway, and an Afghan interpreter pointed at a line of trees near the road. “We were here last week,” he said. This unit of soldiers had been down the same road seven days earlier, arriving late to a firefight between insurgents and members of the Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP). I was familiar with the battle, because senior commanders had touted it as a victory. We’d heard that the Canadians arrived to help the ANA and ANP, and together they killed forty-one insurgents. We’d heard rumours that troops mistakenly fired at Afghan forces, but a military commander had flatly denied it. I described these denials to the interpreter, who shook his head sadly. “We didn’t realize they were ANA or ANP so we started firing at them,” he said. The Canadians had accidentally shot at their own allies as they hunkered under thick foliage along a canal, but it wasn’t clear whether any deaths or injuries had resulted from friendly fire.

Now the same unit had the unpleasant task of visiting an Afghan police outpost to repair the soldiers’ relationship with the local forces they had inadvertently shot up. The Canadians stayed on alert as they rolled up to the gates of Maywand District Centre, and our convoy was welcomed with hard stares from the Afghans as they opened the metal doors. Soon after pulling into the police compound, the
Canadians’ senior officer, Major Nick Grimshaw, strode into a disgruntled crowd. I joined them, and heard the Canadian officer speaking slowly and clearly for the sake of his interpreter. “Hopefully we can coordinate much better, next time we show up,” he said.

The district leader refused to be placated.

“We’ve been fighting twenty-five years, and we never lost so many men in one battle,” he said. “Seven men! This is because of bad coordination with the Canadians and Americans.”

Major Grimshaw nodded gravely. “There was bad coordination,” he agreed.

“My sub-commanders were brave!” the Afghan official shouted.

“Yes, I’m sorry we lost them,” Major Grimshaw said. “You have no problems in this area now?”

“No,” the Afghan said. “If they come, we will fight them. For now, we are not so fortunate that they would face us.”

“Yeah, that would make it too easy,” said the Canadian, with a wry smile.

Dusk was falling as they spoke, and the soldiers decided to camp inside the Afghan police compound. We set up canvas cots under the cedars and pines. A warning circulated among the soldiers: The Afghan police are angry, the soldiers whispered; Don’t take off your body armour. The outpost had high walls topped with barbed wire, but the Canadians took more precautions than they did when sleeping in Taliban territory. Extra patrols crunched along the gravel driveway and sentries manned the gun turrets. The Afghan leader invited some soldiers into his makeshift command centre, a modest room furnished with cushions and a television that played a grainy version of the movie
Gladiator
. Policemen with automatic rifles crowded around the screen, watching swordfights. The district chief ignored the movie and needled his guests with complaints. His men didn’t have any radios, he said, and only three cellphones. The phone networks were weak, so the signal died when his officers took cover in the fields. But his biggest problem appeared to be a shortage of
ammunition; he was reduced to buying bullets in the market with his own money. Maybe this was true, or not; I heard stories about district chiefs selling ammunition to the Taliban and faking battles to explain their dwindling stockpiles. The notoriously corrupt Ministry of Interior might also have sold off the supplies before they reached the district.

“I tell our problems to the governor. I list them, one-two-three. But he just bows his head,” the Afghan leader said.

“The governor has aged in the last ten months, I think,” said the US officer.

The Afghan chuckled. “This is Kandahar. It will kill you.”

Then he reached into the folds of a dirty blanket and pulled out a small diary. He opened it, revealing a cracked mirror on the inside cover and pages full of handwritten names and telephone numbers. The diary was discovered on the body of a dead Taliban fighter, he said, and contained contact information for insurgent leaders. Most of the numbers started with the prefix 0300, used by Pakistani phones, a clear indication that insurgent leaders were taking shelter across the border. The soldiers thanked the Afghan for the intelligence and wished him a good night. One of the military interpreters stayed behind to help me continue talking, even after the generator quit for the evening and the room fell into darkness. I strapped on a headlamp so I could keep taking notes.

“The Canadians say, let’s sit down and plan the next battle,” the district leader said. “They talk and talk, but I’m not sure. I have a lot more information I could give them, but I don’t know if I can trust them.” Apparently the feeling was mutual: a Canadian soldier appeared in the doorway to insist that I say goodnight—“Right now, for your own safety.”

A couple of weeks later, I assembled the photos and audio from that trip into a multimedia presentation, describing the dust storm, the suicide bomber and the allegations of friendly fire. At the end of the narration, I added this comment:

This was technically correct, but wrong in spirit, like telling an obese person with an eating disorder that they will die if they stop consuming food: a biological fact, but misleading. Doubling the number of foreign troops in southern Afghanistan in the early spring of 2006 had only served to highlight self-defeating policies that would continue to plague the rest of the mission: the absurd war against poppy fields; NATO’s troubled relationship with Pakistan; and the difficulty of working shoulder to shoulder with untrustworthy Afghan forces, among many others. None of these challenges were ignored by the international troops. The British officer who tried to explain the narcotics policy always seemed on the verge of breaking into laughter at the insanity of his own words. The troops understood much of this, but somehow the understanding on the ground never percolated up the chain of command, or the information never got digested into an effective change in direction, or all of the negative signals were drowned out by the noise of the soldiers’ habitually positive thinking. Once set in motion, NATO pressed forward with a sense of inevitability. My next trip would be a case study in the resilience of that military brand of optimism.

Canadian soldier in a sandstorm

The first bang rocked our troop carrier and bounced my helmet off the metal interior. I fumbled in the pocket of my flak jacket for an audio recorder, and switched it on just in time to register the screeching crash of a second jolt as everybody inside the vehicle tumbled sideways. People were shouting in the dark cabin—“Are you okay?” and “We’re okay!”—as the diesel engine cranked up to a high pitch and our driver raced us away from Kandahar’s latest suicide bombing. Only when the motor whine died down did the Canadian soldiers pause to check for damage. I heard somebody say: “He’s bleeding from the mouth a little, but it’s nothing too serious, no teeth lost.” After a few minutes we kept moving, pressing toward the objective for the day.

The mission was to transport journalists to a victory ceremony (of all things) in the Panjwai valley, where international troops believed they had defeated a major Taliban offensive. Recent fighting had been surprisingly intense, with an estimated nine hundred killed in the first six months of 2006—half of them in the month of May—the first of many record-breaking heights of violence. Several of the most serious battles happened in Panjwai district, the region southwest of Kandahar city where I had been drinking tea with local elders on my previous visit—the district that a US military officer
had described as a model for the rest of southern Afghanistan. Now it was erupting into violence. As the back hatch of our vehicle creaked open and we stumbled into the sunlight, I could see that things had changed: the town of Bazaar-e-Panjwai now had extra roadblocks on the main street, and Afghan security forces had new firing positions among piles of sandbags on the roofs of government buildings. Our convoy was blackened and scarred by the explosion. Charred pieces of human flesh stuck to the armour. A television reporter wrinkled her nose at the sight, and I asked her: “Can you believe they were trying to sell me a story about how things have gotten better in Panjwai?”

The human remains spattered on the vehicles probably belonged to the suicide attacker, but may also have been remnants of the four civilians who died in the blast. The bomber had been lurking in an alleyway before ramming his black sport-utility vehicle into our convoy near a major intersection in Kandahar city. Many of the journalists were angry about the incident, feeling that civilians would not have died if the military hadn’t been dragging us around the battlefield for a photo op. We figured the announcement would be cancelled anyway, because it would look ridiculous to declare victory against such a gruesome backdrop. Surprisingly, the event went ahead. “We beat them,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Hope, describing a series of recent battles in the Panjwai valley. “Four successive strikes against the Taliban broke the back of their insurgency here.”

He was speaking on June 4, 2006. If you chart the violence in southern Afghanistan, the line graph resembles mountains, soaring peaks growing higher and higher. Military commanders boldly predicted that each brutal ascent was the final push before reaching Shangri-La. This always led to disappointment, but the idea of success hidden just beyond the next peak of violence proved an enduring feature of military thinking. The same weekend of the surreal press conference in Panjwai, I sat down with NATO’s top southern commander, Canadian Brigadier-General David Fraser. I asked
him what he expected to happen as the number of foreign troops almost doubled in the coming month. “We’ve got more firepower,” Brigadier-General Fraser said. “In the short term, it might appear as if it’s getting worse. But in the mid-term and long run, I think it actually will make things better.” (One of my colleagues asked me to summarize the general’s outlook, and I answered only half-jokingly: “Rivers of blood, rivers of blood … but it’s a good thing.”) That kind of optimism went straight down through the ranks, for the most part. A few days earlier, I had visited an outpost where Canadians troops were recovering from a Taliban ambush. Insurgents had opened fire on their convoy in the middle of the night, injuring five soldiers. I talked to a young man who had saved his friend’s life by applying a tourniquet below his bleeding hand. “I shined my light on his hand and it was like a red pulp,” he said. “He had two fingers but the rest was mashed, like it was squished by something.” The soldiers fought all night, but were preparing to resume patrols the same afternoon without sleep. A charismatic sergeant, Patrick Tower, told me the troops could sense the insurgents growing desperate. “I think they’re feeling the breaking point coming,” he said. “It’s just around the bend.”