Armed Humanitarians (43 page)

Most important, McChrystal imposed serious restrictions on the use of force. He curtailed the use of artillery and close air support (CAS), military tools that had the most potential to kill innocent civilians: “Commanders must weigh the gain of using CAS against the cost of civilian casualties, which in the long run make mission success more difficult and turn the Afghan people against us.”

McChrystal also made clear that U.S. and coalition forces would not conduct searches in Afghan homes unaccompanied by Afghan national security forces; they would not fire on mosques or religious sites; and they would respect the unique cultural sensitivities concerning Afghan women. A few weeks after issuing this initial guidance, McChrystal and his advisors took things even further, introducing guidelines that would discourage “tactical driving”—aggressive, “guns-up” convoys—by coalition security forces, especially in Kabul. McChrystal distributed additional counterinsurgency guidance that would govern day-to-day interactions with Afghans. As he traveled around the field, McChrystal also tried to set a different tone: He was almost never seen wearing a helmet or body armor. It telegraphed an image of trust to Afghans, and sent the U.S. military a message as well. They would have to adopt a less aggressive posture. More than eight years after arriving in Afghanistan, it seemed that the United States was finally starting to get a grip on the situation.

By mid-2009, the U.S. presence in Afghanistan had taken on a new kind of permanence, and Bagram Air Base, the logistics hub for the war effort, had been transformed in the process. When I first visited the airfield in the spring of 2002, Bagram was a temporary outpost for a temporary mission, a primitive tent city on the edge of a minefield. By 2009, the main road through the center of camp, once a rutted dirt track, had been paved over with smooth asphalt. Renamed Disney Drive, after the Army specialist killed in early 2002 while clearing scrap metal from the aircraft hangar, the street had strict speed limits, and pedestrians on the sidewalk were required to wear reflective safety belts after dark.

Bagram, now known by the acronym BAF (the military referred to the base as Bagram Airfield), had infrastructure. It also had rules. “Seatbelts are mandatory for all vehicle occupants,” flashed an electronic sign parked across from the main dining facility. The sign also offered other safety tips: “Use of headphones while walking or running on BAF is prohibited”; “Smoke detectors save lives—be sure to check yours.”

Living standards had improved dramatically since the United States first occupied Bagram. Soldiers no longer lined up for trays of powdered eggs and creamed chipped beef; the troops could eat three meals a day in a gleaming, all-you-can-eat dining facility, courtesy of the Army logistics contractor KBR.
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For variety, they could also visit a Burger King, a Pizza Hut, or a Popeye's chicken franchise. In their spare time they could sip shakes and smoothies from Orange Julius or linger over a latté from Green Beans Coffee. For a touch of the exotic, they could visit a row of souvenir shops and carpet vendors run by the Army & Air Force Exchange Service. Bagram even featured a day spa run by a Korean company where efficient Kyrgyz women worked as hairdressers, manicurists, and masseuses. Signs inside the massage booths warned sternly against attempting any sexual contact. A piece of strip-mall America had been transplanted to the Shomali Plain.

BAF was the nerve center of the new U.S. mission in Afghanistan. By midsummer of 2009, the population of Bagram Air Base hovered at around twenty thousand troops and contractors, and the base that had been on the frontlines between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance was now the main logistics and support hub for a fresh influx of U.S. troops into Afghanistan.

The rural communities around Bagram had been a focal point of the U.S. government's first hesitant steps toward nation-building since 2002, when Civil Affairs teams and USAID launched their quick-impact projects on the Shomali Plain. The region had been on the receiving end of U.S. largesse for nearly eight years, and it had come a long way. The highway from Kabul to Bagram, once a narrow, cratered road, was now a busy thoroughfare lined with shops and filling stations. New electrical transmission lines ran parallel to the road, and construction seemed everywhere in evidence, with rebar springing up from the unfinished second floors of new concrete buildings.

Bagram was what front-line soldiers referred to disparagingly as “FOBistan,” the comfortable rear-echelon life of the forward operating base, and the culture of petty rules that came with it. It was a “hat and salute” zone, meaning troops had to comply with strict uniform standards and salute their superiors, just as they would when garrisoned at home. And the “safety culture” was smothering. In addition to posted speed limits and constant reminders about the dangers of negligent weapons discharges, residents of Bagram could be reprimanded for the pettiest of infractions, such as jogging with sunglasses on or wearing sleeveless shirts in the dining facility. Even the short-order cooks making omelets at breakfast labored in front of a sign:
NO EGGS OVER LIGHT
. For final official touch, a laminated copy of the memorandum from a food safety officer was taped to the sneeze guard.

The safety culture of Bagram had a curious side effect: It made the world “outside the wire,” beyond the floodlit confines of the base, seem all the more dangerous and forbidding. Bagram could look like a warped military version of a United Colors of Benetton ad, with cafeteria workers from Bangladesh and the Philippines, construction managers from Bosnia, helicopter pilots from Poland, masseuses and manicurists from Kyrgyzstan. But for most people based on Bagram, interactions with Afghans were rare. The Afghans were there, but they were almost invisible, working as manual laborers on construction gangs, set apart by the red “escort required” badges, and watched over by escorts or armed guards. They looked like prison road crews. Of course, there was “Afghan music night,” featuring a traditional musician, Bismullah Jan. This was perhaps the closest some on BAF would come to an encounter with Afghan culture.

Despite the progress, the U.S. military still seemed to be struggling to win friends and build goodwill, even in this relatively secure, prosperous part of Afghanistan. When the world outside the base was seen as the Red Zone, it was not surprising that relations with the local community would often be fraught with tension. In late July 2005, a demonstration outside Bagram turned into a riot after six villagers were detained by U.S. forces during operations in surrounding Parwan Province (the arrested men were reportedly in possession of a rocket-propelled grenade, a rocket launcher, a Kalashnikov assault rifle, and a selection of bomb-making materials). First, local residents threw stones at a passing U.S. convoy; then, as the SUVs sped into the base, the crowd rushed a checkpoint gate guarded by Afghan troops, who reportedly dispersed protesters with sticks and shots fired in the air.
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The trust built with the communities around Bagram was fragile. The base housed a major detention facility, and in early 2005, revelations surfaced about prisoner abuse there, including the deaths of two detainees.
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The goodwill earned by digging wells and building schools could be easily undermined.

More troublesome were the occasional rocket and mortar attacks on the base. Insurgents were still infiltrating villages in the area. Some of them were thought to be aligned with Hizb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, the militant party of the mujahideen commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a recipient of U.S. weapons and funding during the Soviet-Afghan war. Occasionally, the insurgents managed to fire off a 107mm rocket or a mortar in the direction of the base. Usually the rockets were propped up on rocks or rails in the surrounding hills and set off by timer, and they often fell short of their target. But the attacks were still an annoyance, and once in a while the insurgents did hit the mark. In July 2009 a rocket attack claimed the lives of two soldiers.

In the summer of 2009, the job of policing the villages in the surrounding area fell to Task Force Gladius, manned by soldiers from the Army's Eighty-second Airborne Division Special Troops Battalion. The task force took a very practical approach to securing the region: They promised jobs and reconstruction dollars in return for information and intelligence in the local communities. This “Bagram outreach program” was a classic example of the quasi-development mission the Army had taken on in Afghanistan. The village of Qaleh Dewana, an ethnic Pashtun settlement not far from Bagram, was one of the places where insurgents could find safe haven and also stash rockets or bomb-making materials. On a late July morning, I tagged along with Captain Derek Henson, the commander of Headquarters Company, on a KLE (“key leader engagement”), a meeting with village elders in Qaleh Dewana. The village had been overlooked in the past by coalition patrols, and military intelligence wanted Henson to “target” the village: By building some rapport in Qaleh Dewana, the theory went, the military would make locals more willing to feed intel tips to the coalition.
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“Usually if we give them a little help, they're more willing to help,” Henson said. “In this village, the issue is that they don't have a lot of work; they have to go to Pakistan for work, and we are concerned that people may be infiltrating back to the village with them, or may be recruited while in Pakistan.”

The convoy rolled out, once again in heavy Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles. The Pentagon had spent billions on the hulking trucks, which were purpose-built to protect troops from roadside bombs. Built with higher suspensions and v-shaped hulls that would direct blast away from the passengers, the MRAP saved lives, but they were massive, intimidating vehicles. As the giant trucks trundled through the narrow alleys of the mud-walled village, the troopers in my vehicle opened hatches in the top and scanned the crowd, rifles at the ready. They were being pursued by a small mob of dust-caked Afghan boys, curious to catch a glimpse of the soldiers riding around in the high-tech trucks. The hydraulic doors of the trucks noisily opened like a mechanical drawbridge, and the troopers dismounted. Swathed in body armor, wearing wraparound shades, they looked almost like visitors from another planet.

Accompanied by his interpreter, a thin, unhappy-looking Afghan nicknamed Arnold, the company commander and his security team trudged off to the house of Sayed Mohammad, the village elder. At the house they sent an older man to look for Sayed Mohammad; for security reasons, the troopers could not give notice of their visit. The elder arrived a few minutes later, accompanied by Commander Bashir, a former
mujahid
who lived in the village. Henson had mastered the Afghan custom of inquiring after the health of his host; now, after exchanging a few pleasantries and sipping some tea, the men got down to business. Bashir, the former commander, did most of the talking. He was not happy with the assistance the coalition had offered his village so far. “Our people need jobs,” he said. “And you're supposed to help everyone. You guys help the Dari [ethnic Tajik] people working inside the base. But you don't help the Pashtun people.”

The biggest complaint seemed to be the way the military was doling out its aid money. “All the dollars are going to Kandahar, that's why I'm angry,” he said, referring to the money and military resources the United States had poured on the restless southern province. “If we grew opium you would help us!”

“Stop complaining,” Henson replied through his interpreter. “And let me help you.”

Henson explained that he could help some of the men in the village get coveted red badges to work as day laborers on the base, but he added that he could not guarantee any jobs. “I can't hire them, and I can't make anyone hire them,” he said. “I'll do my best to assist … You know there are hundreds of villages around here and we'll try to assist everyone as best we can.”

Bashir was not satisfied. He ostentatiously waved a slip of paper that was scrawled with the phone number of a Lieutenant Delage, from the French army. “The French gave me a number but they never pick up the phone,” he complained.

Henson responded by giving them his local cell phone number. “Give 'em your number too, Arnold.”

Arnold—a young man from the Bagram area—did not look very pleased with that command. At one point during the conversation, Bashir pointed directly at Arnold and whispered something in Sayed Mohammad's ear. Arnold turned to me and said, with a pleading look, “They know me, all of them. This is the problem.”

It was frustrating to watch the exchange. Half of the dialogue was lost in translation, and Arnold was more than a bit preoccupied by the fact that he had been identified as working for the Americans. It could potentially put him or his family in danger. In any case, building local relationships was a Sisyphean task. In another six or eight months, a new unit would rotate in, and another young officer would replace Henson. He would have to introduce himself to Sayed Mohammad and Commander Bashir, and they might have the same conversation. The approach of Task Force Gladius was in line with counterinsurgency theory, to a point. They rolled in occasionally to a village, handed out some humanitarian aid, made some contacts. But they did not establish any lasting presence in these villages. At night, insurgents would be free to return to Qaleh Dewana.

Things were not rosy in Charikar, Parwan's provincial capital, either. On another morning, I went along with a Police Mentoring Team on a visit to the Afghan National Police Headquarters, where the team was helping supervise the creation of an emergency-response center being set up in advance of the presidential elections. On the way into town, the convoy of MRAPs was pelted with stones. Charikar, a market town, was a stronghold of Abdul Bashir Salangi, a Northern Alliance warlord who had fought the Taliban, and was a nominally friendly city, so it was surprising to get such a hostile reception. Major Steve Olson, the head of the team, mentioned the stone-throwing incident over tea and cookies with the deputy police chief of the province, General Faqir Ahmad: “Sir, I wanted to ask you. This morning, as we were coming into the city, people were throwing some rocks at us. Are people upset at us?”