No Worse Enemy (27 page)

Marines wandered around the base or sat on the verandah, looking despondent and lost. ‘Did we win?’ asked Nascar, finally able to leave his laptop because the air surveillance now
flew somewhere else. ‘Is there a white flag flying somewhere? I don’t actually know what I’m supposed to be doing right now.’ He wasn’t the only member of Bravo
Company who found doing nothing very hard. ‘The captain said we need to aggressively find something to do, otherwise it’s going to become
Lord of the Flies
around here’,
said another. Even the captain himself seemed uneasy. He told me that one of the major potential pitfalls was if ‘the government doesn’t come in and establish control and fill a vacuum
that we can’t really fill’.

Three weeks into the operation, the chances of that happening looked low. There was still no sign of a ‘government in a box’.

General McChrystal’s claim that Mushtaraq was Afghan-led, a claim repeated by President Obama, a claim widely-spread and never seriously challenged, a claim backed by a massive media
campaign, was the biggest fallacy of the entire operation. The Afghans were nowhere near ready to lead any military operation, leave alone in the Pashtun south. Certainly not one as big as
Mushtaraq. Sadly, facing a public that had lost both interest and hope, it was too easy to say the Afghans had led and would soon be leading completely. That meant that the troops could come
home.

I returned to Marjah just after McChrystal’s visit, roughly four months since the marines had first landed there. Bravo Company was in the last month of its tour. The new district
governor, Abdul Zahir, was revealed to have spent time in a German prison; he’d allegedly stabbed his son as he tried to prevent his mother being beaten. There were regular battles and IED
strikes, and there were many reports of local people who co-operated with the marines being intimidated, beaten, or even murdered.

Captain Sparks couldn’t wait to show me what Bravo Company had achieved in the bazaar. Without helmets, we walked out of the base, past a refurbished mosque, complete
with fancy minarets, a long ablutions block, a well and a little fenced area the marines wanted to call ‘Freedom Park’.

The local people had re-opened many of their stores. Fresh fruit, meat, vegetables, cold drinks and even ice cream were available. The residents, I was told, were coming forward with reliable
information about the Taliban. Children greeted us with high-fives and requests for more radios. The radios were still on their way, so they were given footballs instead. People were happy to be
photographed laughing and joking with members of Bravo Company, with no apparent fear of reprisals. These things would have been unthinkable a few months earlier. I felt like I was on the set of an
advert for counter-insurgency.

Gunny D created a ‘Princess Diana’ effect wherever he went. Kids followed him, chanting his name (‘Ganna D’, ‘Gunna D’, and even ‘Kenna D’). Men
embraced him, pressing letters into his hand and exchanging phrases in Pashtu.

‘Gunny D is the Mayor, he knows everyone in town’, said Captain Sparks.

Gunny D’s popularity, which embarrassed him, was due to the fact he had spent roughly $675,000 on salaries for three thousand local people, for cleaning, repairing and rebuilding the
bazaar.

‘From the beginning we were always out there, always interacting with the locals’, said Gunny D. ‘We spend twelve to fourteen hours a day with them. We take off our sunglasses,
the helmets, all the gear and it shocks them. But they feel very relaxed; they know who they are talking to. The Captain told them he wanted them to know who was in charge, who was taking care of
them and who was here to kill the Taliban. Four months on, we’ve got genuine friends here. We regularly have breakfast, lunch and dinner with them.’ A group of tailors, who had only
re-opened their store five days earlier, complained that they didn’t have enough work for their staff to do. ‘Well, we’re hiring’, Gunny D told them.

‘Yeah, they can make some new suits for the sanitation department’, said Captain Sparks. A group of shopkeepers was told that anybody with a skill could use the marines, and their
money, to set up apprenticeship schemes. Hard-working rubbish collectors could become apprentices, then receive micro-grants to start their own business. A man asked if he could be paid to train an
apprentice moneychanger. ‘I don’t know if that’s a skill’, said Sparks, ‘it should be for somebody that builds something or fixes something.’

Bravo had established two security ‘bubbles’: the bazaar, where Captain Sparks said there hadn’t been a serious attack for three months; and a wider bubble around it, about
eight kilometres across, where IEDs were still being laid and snipers and gun teams roamed. But although Marjah was one of hundreds of districts and sub-districts that needed to be secured, and it
had taken roughly a tenth of the available resources to do it, Captain Sparks thought it showed that the policy could work. ‘If you’re just going through some checklist, you’re
never going to get anywhere’, he said. ‘You see Gunny D right there, he knows these guys, they’re his friends. We establish relationships and figure out what they really need and
want. That’s really the key to this.’

Their goal was to create a self-sufficient economy, so that the people would choose to turn away from the Taliban. ‘When we came in, the Taliban had a grip on the people; checkpoints,
taxes,
sharia
law, forcing them to grow opium’, said Captain Sparks. If the marines did the exact opposite, he added, the Taliban would lose influence. ‘The people are the
objective. Eventually the Taliban will become irrelevant, because the people don’t want them here and they’ll push them out on their own.’

The only thing that hadn’t re-opened was the opium bazaar, although massive amounts of opium, heroin and methamphetamine had recently been found. I asked how so much could be hidden in
such an obvious place; the police had been paid to keep quiet, I was told. The marines talked about turning this area into a park or a school but the local people were too afraid of the owners
– drug smugglers, who had not yet come back – to go anywhere near the buildings. This was a reminder not only of how easily nefarious interests could intimidate the local people but
also how the invasion of Marjah had severely damaged the opium trade, the people’s main livelihood. This alone could have decided the outcome of Operation Mushtaraq before the first shot was
fired.

Gunny D spotted Mohammad, the dwarf, picked him up and carried him over to us. Mohammed smiled but he looked awful. A poor opium harvest, caused by a mystery virus (nothing to do with the
counter-narcotics policy) had forced him to go cold turkey.

I drifted away from the marines, to get a better view. Just a step or two away from the handshakes and the high-fives, I noticed that many of the men, especially the ones not directly engaging
with the marines, eyed them with suspicion and sometimes malice. As we headed back to the base, news of another casualty came in over the radio. A helicopter swooped low towards a field just beyond
the bazaar, sending the groups of kids sprinting away.

The situation was still precarious: ‘fragile and reversible’ in military euphemism. In just a few weeks’ time, Bravo Company were to be replaced, the close relationships
they’d established would come to an abrupt end and the residents would meet an entirely new set of faces.

The remarkable progress made in Kuru Charai was entirely due to the marines; the ‘government in a box’ still hadn’t appeared. But the changes had not yet spread to neighbouring
areas. I was shown video of a riot that had occurred in April. Three hundred men on motorbikes and in the back of trucks, waving the white flag of the Taliban, stormed towards the bazaar from a
nearby village, Sistani. The protest had been organised after rumour had spread that the marines had burned a Qur’an. Only after considerable diplomatic effort, including the donation of ten
new Qur’ans, and the presentation of a marine who had recently converted to Islam to hundreds of ecstatic Marjah residents, did the crowds disperse. (The marine reverted a few weeks after
returning home.) The marines said it could easily have gone the other way. Boulders were thrown and one demonstrator carried a hand grenade.

I saw footage of one of the ANCOP approaching a driver at a checkpoint and casually punching him in the face. I heard two ANA soldiers had collapsed from a heroin overdose, one in the corridor
of the building where the senior marines slept. They were saved by the marine medics. And Captain Sparks had been involved in a stand-off with the ANA, when Captain Saed refused to make his men
pick up their rubbish before they left. Saed said he wouldn’t want to see his men firing on marines. Captain Sparks snapped, ‘I’ll back one of my men against any five of your
clowns any day’, and marched the ANA out without their weapons. Sparks said it had just been a clash of personalities.

The campaign to recruit residents of Marjah to the Afghan National Police was being re-designed; it hadn’t pulled in a single volunteer. A local elder had been put on the payroll after he
and twelve of his men had prevented the Taliban from entering their village, which was fewer than two kilometres from Bravo’s base. They had captured some of the fighters and handed them over
to the police. The elder, Commander Bosgul, a veteran fighter, was described to me as having been a ‘Mujahadeen commander during the
jihad
and had serious co-operation with
every
government since then’. The emphasis on ‘every’ begged an obvious question, which was answered before I’d finished asking it: ‘... including the
Taliban’.

‘I’m sure that six months ago some of these guys were Taliban’, said Captain Sparks. ‘Now they’re not. Now they want to protect their village and protect their
family. The key to this whole thing has been proving to them that we’re the winning side. Ninety-nine per cent of the population here, they’re not really hard-core Taliban extremists.
They don’t like the foreign preachers that are coming in and influencing things any more than we do. Like anybody would, they side with the most powerful people to protect their family. The
goal is to show them that
they
are the most powerful people.’

Bosgul had so impressed the Marines that they suggested he set up his own force, the ISCI (Interim Security of Critical Infrastructure). They announced a recruitment day when men recommended by
Bosgul could sign up. They had to pass a health check: a marine corpsman asked, ‘Are you in good health?’ and they all replied, ‘Yes’. Over sixty men turned up; the marines
ran out of registration forms. Some recruits were elderly, others looked barely teenagers. But they all seemed willing. The $90 a month salary might have had a lot to do with it. ‘It will be
huge’, said Captain Sparks. ‘This turns into the police. Then we go to the next village, turn them into the police. And then we go home.’

The policy of creating local militias –
arbaki
, Afghan Local Police (ALP) – as they were known, soon became national policy. It was hoped that 30,000 local fighters would be
recruited. There was a training programme, to teach basic policing and ethics and to discourage corruption, but it only lasted eighteen days. However, the plans had to be cut back after reports
surfaced of robbery, warlordism, and even rape. Some of the militiamen attacked each other, the ANA and the Marines. Just outside Marjah, an alleged motorbike thief was beaten by militia members.
In the subsequent brawl, a fifteen-year-old boy was shot in the head. Two militiamen argued over a woman; one was stabbed with a bayonet and another shot dead.