A Rope and a Prayer (34 page)

In 2004, I was with Grader when he toured a USAID-funded demonstration farm bursting with cotton, pomegranates, and other crops designed to show farmers they could make a legal living. Grader asked the Afghans who ran the farm what would persuade others to stop growing poppy. Their responses had little to do with agriculture. They said the biggest problem was poverty and corruption. Farmers, they said, no longer believed the government would punish them for growing poppy.

“There is an inverse relationship between security and poppy growing,” said a local engineer trained in Lashkar Gah by the Americans in the 1970s.

A local farmer was more blunt. “We don’t have law. This is a warlord kingdom.”

Grader discussed creating public works projects that would repair the province’s irrigation system and employ large numbers of farmers. But four months later, he resigned after clashing with USAID officials over the direction of the program. He was not alone. High turnover rates among aid agency officials, contractors, and the military were common. Americans generally arrived in Helmand on twelve- to eighteen-month tours. Determined to make a mark, they announced new projects or revamped existing ones. The result was a constantly shifting array of Americans and projects that to Afghans produced few tangible results.

Some American projects did get under way in Helmand. And an alternative-livelihoods program put 37,000 Afghans to work cleaning hundreds of irrigation canals. By 2006, a dozen new or refurbished health clinics were opened, more than a hundred wells dug or deepened, and ninety miles of highway paved. Overall, USAID spent about $180 million in Helmand between 2001 and 2006.

Over time, though, the American-funded development projects did not provide enough jobs for Helmand’s 100,000 farmers to counter the lure of growing opium or joining the Taliban. In addition, a popular perception took hold that after foreign contractors and subcontractors took their cut of aid money, little cash was left for average Afghans. Locals grew suspicious of the foreigners who lived in heavily guarded compounds with electric generators and satellite televisions while local people lacked regular running water and electricity. Afghan government officials were seen as corrupt as well.

One Afghan working on an American agricultural development program declared both Americans and Afghans corrupt. Americans made their money through high overhead and expense rates, he said. Afghans made their money through old-fashioned kickbacks and bribes.

“For you, it’s white-collar crime,” he told me. “For us, it’s blue-collar crime.”

Along with the stepped-up reconstruction effort, the United States deployed one of eight new military units known as Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Helmand in 2004. The units tried to integrate efforts to provide security, mount small reconstruction projects, and help Afghan government offices deliver schools, health clinics, and jobs. The units were recognition that the various efforts were interconnected. Over the next two years, the team spent $9.5 million to build, refurbish, or equip twenty-eight schools, two police stations, two orphanages, a prison, a hospital ward, and twenty miles of roads.

A few hundred yards from the Provincial Reconstruction Team base on the edge of town, the United States built a women’s job-training center for Fowzea Olomi, the Afghan woman educated by American teachers in the 1970s who was one of the people I was following for my book. The Americans provided dozens of computers and sewing machines and even set up a mock beauty salon so women could learn marketable skills.

In May 2006, Taliban gunmen on a motorcycle shot dead Fowzea’s driver as he drove through Lashkar Gah. False rumors had been spread that the center’s female students were being taken to the nearby American military base and forced to have sex with soldiers. The center was closed for security reasons. The attack was one of several by the Taliban that shut down American projects across the province, including the canal-cleaning project that employed 37,000 men—perhaps the Americans’ most successful undertaking in Helmand to date.

Security quickly emerged as the single most important factor in developing Helmand, but the country’s nascent army and police force were unable to deliver it. The first units from the new, American-trained Afghan National Army arrived in Helmand in 2005, but they comprised only several hundred soldiers and carried out few operations. A new provincial antinarcotics force was created that year, but it consisted of just thirty officers.

Police training also lagged. Police from Helmand attended a two- to four-week training course in Kandahar run by contractors from DynCorp International, an Irving, Texas, company, hired by the State Department. European officials derided the classes as “conveyor-belt courses.” In 2006, two retired American sheriff’s deputies arrived in Lashkar Gah to serve as advisers to roughly 2,000 police in Helmand. One was from Santa Cruz, California, and had trained police in Bosnia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The other was from a small town in Wyoming and before arriving in Helmand had never been east of Wisconsin. Security was so bad that the two advisers could not leave Lashkar Gah to visit any of the province’s thirteen districts.

The Bush administration, meanwhile, declared success in Afghanistan and handed over responsibility for security and development in Helmand to the British. One of the foreign occupiers most hated by Pashtuns, the British were still despised for dividing the Pashtuns between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Their arrival appeared to boost Taliban recruitment.

More than 3,600 British troops arrived in Helmand in 2006, ten times the number the United States had deployed there, and set up bases across the province. In response, the Taliban launched their largest offensive since 2001, killing twenty-nine British and dozens of Afghan police. Scores of schools and courts were also shuttered.

As a condition of their arrival, the British demanded that Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, the province’s young governor, and the local police chief, Abdul Rahman Jan, be removed from power. Both were reported to have links with the narcotics trade. Karzai agreed to the move but it added to growing suspicions he held that the British—and later the Americans—planned to weaken the Afghan leader and remove him.

Muhammad Hussein Andiwal, the other moderate Afghan from “Little America” who I was following for my book, became Helmand’s new police chief in 2007. Educated by American teachers in Lashkar Gah High School in the early 1970s, he represented the kind of moderate, educated Afghan that Western officials hoped could do an effective job running the province. At first, he did. Lashkar Gah residents lauded Andiwal—whose name means “friend” in Pashto—for arresting a 13-member kidnap gang that had been abducting local children. He and his men intercepted 11 suicide bombers before they carried out their attacks. Most important, he arrested 117 police on corruption charges, displaying the rule of law that Afghans craved.

British advisers hailed Andiwal as well, but they said he was “in command but not in control” of Helmand’s roughly 2,000 police. Outside Lashkar Gah, police were loyal to their local tribe. Worst of all, the former governor and police chief tried to win back their jobs by sowing chaos and undermining their successors.

In September 2008, the Taliban took two strategic districts outside Lashkar Gah—Marja and Nad Ali—and panic spread among Afghans that Lashkar Gah itself would fall. Police who were members of the former police chief’s tribal militia reportedly handed over the districts without firing a shot. Officials in Kabul blamed Andiwal for the loss of the two districts and fired him after fourteen months on the job. An ally of the former police chief replaced him.

On the night before going to my Taliban interview, I met with a frustrated Andiwal in Kabul. He said officials in Kabul were not interested in fighting corruption and the British were not aggressively confronting the Taliban in Helmand. Disgusted by the level of Afghan government corruption and angered by British and American raids that killed civilians, most of the people in Helmand were beginning to support the Taliban.

“They are completely dissatisfied with the government,” Andiwal said. “In my lifetime, I have never seen such a corrupted government.”

The Taliban, meanwhile, stopped some of their harshest practices from the past and promised to create law and order. In the two districts they seized outside Lashkar Gah, residents reported that the Taliban were not enforcing unpopular, pre-2001 edicts against television, radio, kite flying, shaving beards, or growing poppy. They also reported a major improvement in security under strict Taliban rule.

In October 2008, in my last interview with her before the kidnapping Fowzea told me she feared that the Taliban would take “Little America” itself. Two years after her driver was shot, the American-built women’s center remained closed due to poor security. Eight years after the fall of the Taliban, Lashkar Gah still lacked regular power.

“The situation that I see now, it’s not ‘Little America,’ it’s a village,” Fowzea lamented. “‘Little America’ had schools and roads and electricity.”

Americans, meanwhile, expressed frustration with corruption among Afghans. One American aid worker who had served in Iraq and several other countries told me that the corruption in Afghanistan was the worst he had ever seen. Police and government officials demanded bribes for the most basic of services.

“It just seems to be endemic in the whole society,” he said. “They just don’t seem to have any compunction about it.”

Four years after I first visited it, “Little America” highlighted the worst of Afghanistan and the United States. After thirty years of chaos, Afghans took whatever they could whenever they could for their families. With no strong institutions and a weakened Pashtun tribal structure, they had no guarantee how long they would hold their posts or that merit would be rewarded.

Helmand acted as a mirror for the United States as well. It showed how the American government’s ability to devise and carry out complex political and development projects had atrophied. Since the cold war USAID had shrunk and the American public’s desire for quick solutions had grown.

With the Taliban on the doorstep of “Little America,” the United States deployed 2,200 marines to the province in 2008 to aid the British. I embedded with an American marine company dispatched to the town of Naw Zad in northern Helmand to train police. Instead, the marines found themselves engaged in heavy combat, short on helicopters, and suffering heavier casualties than they did in Iraq.

While most of the Taliban they fought were local Afghans, they heard militants they battled in one corner of Naw Zad speak a foreign language. It was Urdu, the national language of Pakistan. The marines nicknamed the area “Pakistani alley.” Like American soldiers I had occasionally embedded with since 2001, they expressed frustration at the Taliban safe havens in Pakistan.

The final blow to the troubled American and British effort in Helmand was the ability of the Taliban to carry out a ruthless insurgent campaign. More than anything else, relentless Taliban attacks derailed the American effort to re-create “Little America.” With their safe havens in Pakistan, the Taliban could not be stopped.

 

 

Our afternoon drive in Pakistan’s tribal areas continues. At one point, I see furtive figures clad in burqas crossing a distant field. It is the first time I have seen a woman since arriving in Waziristan four months earlier. Women are virtually invisible in public.

Like so much else, they are surrounded by contradictions. According to the introduction to my English-language Koran, Muhammad expanded the rights of women. He urged his followers in seventh-century Arabia to stop the widespread practice of burying baby girls at birth. He increased women’s inheritance rights.

Yet the Taliban are accused of reducing women’s freedoms. In our conversations Abu Tayyeb argued that the Taliban protect women from dishonor, sexual exploitation, and other harm. Women in the United States are forced to wear revealing clothes, he said, and define themselves solely as sex objects. To him, the Taliban treat women better than Americans do. I realize that I do not fully understand his views, but this core difference between us seems irreconcilable.

On the ride home, I see groups of teenage boys and young men playing cricket and volleyball. They appear to meet at dusk and celebrate the end of the day with a game at a local park. In some small ways, life inside the emirate is no different than life outside it.

We stop and watch a local soccer game. Several dozen men sit around a dirt field with virtually no grass. Young male soccer players battle furiously on the field for the ball, like young men in any corner of the globe. Pakistani and Afghan jihadists dot the crowd of spectators. They have long hair and beards, wear camouflage jackets, and relax as they watch the game.

For me, the drive cements my belief that the Haqqanis run a Taliban ministate in North Waziristan. Taliban policemen patrol the streets, Taliban road crews carry out construction projects, and Taliban religious teachers indoctrinate young boys in local schools. Haqqani commanders and foreign militants stroll the streets, comfortable and confident in their sanctuary.

 

 

We return to the house at dusk and are greeted with horrible news. Sharif announces that the negotiations have failed. Tahir, Asad, and I will be moved to South Waziristan, he says, the stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban that lies roughly fifty miles south of Miran Shah.

South Waziristan is a worst case scenario. We will be under the control of Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, the man blamed for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and the mastermind of suicide attacks that have killed hundreds of civilians. For months, Tahir has heard rumors of an underground prison there where other hostages are being held in caves. Now we will join them.

Our departure from Miran Shah is deeply depressing, the clearest sign yet that the negotiations for our release have failed. Our captors, I assume, refuse to lower their demands. I walk in the yard and let my mind yet again come up with rationales for why the situation is not, in fact, hopeless. I have none. I think of Kristen, who is likely just now rising in New York, where it is her birthday morning. Our chances of surviving will be much lower in South Waziristan.