No Worse Enemy (37 page)

Further away, some houses had been bulldozed along with their surrounding walls. I could just about see the house belonging to the man who’d helped us on the first day. To my relief, it
was still standing.

We walked past the mangled shell of a British truck, so badly burned that it looked as if it were ready to blow away, like the ashes of burnt paper. A group of twelve kids, seven boys and five
girls, approached and almost at once, said ‘choc-a-let, choc-a-let.’ ‘Their fucking lives revolve around chocolate’, said Hancock, not stopping.

‘Me one dollar!’ shouted one of the boys, as we walked back to the patrol base where we had started. Almost everything on either side of Pharmacy Road had been flattened.

The next morning, New Year’s Day, 2011 (New Year’s Eve had passed without a mention), I joined Captain Peterson on a walk through Wishtan. He wanted to see his
platoon commanders, chart progress and give them a morale boost. But before we reached the first group of marines on the hill, the vicious crack of a sniper’s bullet sent everyone to the
floor. That snapping sound meant he had only just missed his target: probably Captain Peterson. People with long radio antennas were often ‘bullet magnets’, as they were assumed to be
important. I was sure I heard the bullet hit the wall next to us. But within a few minutes, three other people, at three different points along the patrol, said they thought it hit close to
them.

There was a brief discussion about where the sniper might be and what might be the best way to kill him. But soon, everyone was up on their feet and walking again, paying him no more attention.
Someone had attacked a large group of highly-trained, heavily-armed foreign troops, while drones, jets, surveillance blimps and helicopters flew in the skies above. It should have been suicidal.
But he had escaped with ease, without being spotted, shot at or chased.

Once he’d spoken to his men, Captain Peterson paused on the high ground and looked across Wishtan. ‘We’re denying the enemy any freedom of movement whatsoever. Now we’re
in the south and the north and they’ve got nowhere to run. It’s a tactical victory but also an emotional one, because of the casualties we’ve taken. It feels good, personally, and
it’s going to make a big difference.’ He explained why it had been so important to take Wishtan from the Taliban. ‘As the noose tightened, this became his last refuge. We had to
come here, as part of clear, hold, build. You have to clear effectively and completely otherwise you’re holding areas and not holding other areas and it just becomes unmanageable.’

I mentioned that Wishtan had been cleared by the British. Was giving up the patrol bases they’d established a mistake? ‘I don’t know what the criteria behind the thought
process was that went into that, I’m not sure what the reason for abandoning them was. You could spend a lot of time talking about what could have been done better and everything is clearer
in retrospect. But I can tell you it’s definitely the right decision to hold them now so I’m glad that we are.’

We walked to the old British patrol base. The marines were working in a long line, like a chain gang, filling sand bags. The Afghan soldiers sat in an outbuilding, three feet away from the
marines, smoking and watching, not caring what anyone thought about them not helping. Someone had managed to light a small fire in a dustbin and cook a tray of powdered eggs. Squares cut from a
cardboard box became the plates. Captain Peterson quietly served the marines this special breakfast treat, wishing them ‘Happy New Year’.

Sergeant Zeimus appeared again, the inevitable Rip-it
^®
in his hand. ‘Hey, get all the snipers from the roof and downstairs. Hey, did you eat yet? Come on, let’s
go.’ He sounded angry even when he was making sure that everyone got their breakfast. ‘Hey, Reyes, let’s go, dog.’ Someone asked if the ANA got eggs too. ‘They
don’t need to eat this shit, they got their own stuff.’ He screamed at everyone not to throw the plates away but to pass them on. As early in the morning as it was, he was already high
on caffeine and anger. ‘Let’s go, come on, hey, Lance Corporals, let’s go, get the fuck over here, Jesus Christ.’ He spoke so fast that seven words became two:
getthefuckoverhere, JesusChrist.

Captain Peterson laughed quietly. But he punched Zeimus on the shoulder when he started impersonating a Vietnamese marine, Nguyen. ‘The camera’s on’, Peterson whispered.
‘Oh shit, sorry’, said Zeimus. Then, not wanting to let even the captain have the last word, added, ‘You just hit me and the camera’s on.’

‘That’s not rated R material’, said Peterson.

‘That’s not rated R material’, Zeimus repeated. He walked away; he’d had the last word.

Captain Peterson went on ladling steaming powdered eggs on to dusty squares of cardboard. ‘The beginning of a new year, you got hot chow, company objective three is secured, Operation Dark
Horse II is almost over, there’s only one or no casualties. Whatever you eat for the next New Year’s breakfast is not going to be as good as this, I guarantee you.’

Zeimus ate last, putting his drink on to his piece of cardboard, so it looked like a breakfast tray. He simply lifted it right up to his mouth, shovelling every piece of powdered egg straight
in. It was gone in seconds.

After breakfast, Captain Peterson and Lieutenant Grell made plans to erect a few tents, for families whose homes had been destroyed and who had nowhere to sleep in the freezing cold. Others
finished fortifying the old patrol base or went on patrols to set up checkpoints or observation posts.

Captain Peterson was happy with the way the operation had gone, that the Taliban had nowhere left to hide and that the lower levels of insurgents had picked up on the
marines’ ‘tenacity and determination’. ‘People who were once thought of as irreconcilables are, as we speak right now, waiting to talk with American commanders to negotiate
some deal where they’re willing to bring in IEDs and identify higher leaders.’

The company’s losses had been staggering. Peterson almost broke down when he told me about a marine who’d been killed the day before his son was born. But despite so many killed and
injured men, he remained determined. ‘We’re never going to quit, we’re never going to stop patrolling. There’s not enough IEDs to keep us from patrolling. Not enough bullets
to keep us from accomplishing our mission. We’re not leaving, we’re going to stay. When the enemy saw that, at the lowest level, it demoralised him and he said, “We can’t
continue to fight them, because they’re better than us. We can’t outlast him because he’s not leaving. So we’d better figure out a way to carve our way into the future of
Afghanistan or we’re going to get left out in the cold”. And if that’s his analysis he’s exactly right.’

I asked what he would say to people who were angered, scared or confused by the fact that Afghanistan had become America’s longest war. ‘If we put a timeline on it, well, then
we’ve started to say that the time we spend is more important than the cause itself. And if that’s the case we never should have gotten in in the first place. I don’t think that
is the case, I think the cause is justified and I would say to them: so what? This is America’s longest war, so what? So it’s taken us ten years to get where we are. If it takes another
five, if it takes another ten, if that’s the price of success, then who cares how long it lasts?’

It is now seven months since I was last in Helmand province. For now, I wake up each morning, switch on my laptop and read news from Afghanistan that cancels out the effects
of my coffee. This weekend marks the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The big story was that NATO troops have been ordered to stop transferring prisoners into Afghan custody because they were
being tortured, mostly in prisons run by the NDS. Methods included electric shocks from car batteries and the use of a ‘medieval-style rack’.

On Saturday, a massive truck-bomb killed five Afghans and injured seventy-seven American troops. One of the Afghans killed was a five-year-old girl hit by shrapnel almost half a mile away from
the US outpost that had been targeted. She was somewhere around the 17,000th civilian victim of the war.

Yesterday, the Afghan Local Police (the
arbaki
militias, like the one I saw being set up in Marjah, with no vetting) stole the headlines, accused of gang rape, murder, torture and
extortion. That news will not have surprised anyone who’s been paying attention. There are currently seven thousand ALP, and funding has been approved for another twenty-three thousand.

As I write, groups of gunmen with rockets, and suicide bombers are taking part in an attack in Kabul. Fifty metres from a police checkpoint – part of a ‘ring of steel’
supposedly in place around the city’s diplomatic centre – the attackers are occupying a tall building, still under construction, offering perfect views into the US embassy, ISAF
headquarters, the presidential palace and the Ministry of Defence. The attackers had posed as labourers, stockpiling their weapons for two weeks. (The attack, which killed eleven civilians and at
least four policemen, lasted for almost twenty-four hours.)

It’s no exaggeration to say that every morning starts with similarly jaw-dropping news. A few recent examples: three senior government officials killed in one day; a third mass prison
escape in Kandahar; a credible estimate that Afghans spent $2.5 million on bribes in 2010, the equivalent of twenty-five per cent of GDP; slightly-wounded soldiers dying because doctors and nurses
at the military hospital in Kabul, who are mentored by American officers, only give food and treatment if bribed; and $910 million disappearing from the Kabul Bank in ‘mysterious insider
loans’. At the end of 2010, it was revealed that the senior Taliban leader, whom NATO had been flying into Kabul and showering with cash for peace negotiations, was just a shopkeeper from
Quetta. I only wish I were making this stuff up.

This year, 2011, has also seen a string of high-profile assassinations. In May, the police commander for northern Afghanistan, General Mohammad Daud Daud, was killed. In April, it was Ahmad Wali
Karzai, the President’s half-brother, and a power broker in southern Afghanistan. In July, Ghulam Haider Hamidi, mayor of Kandahar, was killed. He and his daughter had returned to Afghanistan
from the USA, believing they could help their homeland. A few months later, his daughter left Afghanistan again, saying it was in ‘360 degrees of chaos’ and she had lost all hope:
‘America came to Afghanistan and aligned itself with the very people who destroyed Afghanistan and who continue to destroy Afghanistan: warlords, drug lords, gun lords.’ In September,
Burhanuddin Rabbani, former president and head of the Afghan High Peace Council, was killed when a man entered his home with a bomb hidden in his turban. The assassin was offered a welcome because
he pretended to be a Taliban commander who wanted to talk peace.

Despite this, the plan, for the time being at least, is to transfer every province in Afghanistan to the Afghan national security forces by 2014, when all foreign combat troops will return home.
Several districts have already been handed over, almost immediately becoming the target of symbolic, but none the less lethal, Taliban attacks.

2012 marks the beginning of the decline in our commitment to Afghanistan, as the thirty-three thousand surge troops leave. The peak of our efforts will pass, with little to show for it. Violence
in 2011 was greater than the previous year, as it has been every year since 2006. There have been gains, for example in education and health, but only in some parts of the country and where foreign
troops have little or no presence. Life remains grim for far too many Afghans, often in the provinces that have been flooded with troops and money. In lists of the world’s most corrupt,
violent, poor and illiterate countries, Afghanistan continues to come first, or very close to first; a situation that looks unlikely to change any time soon.

These basic facts, and what they say about the future, are so obvious they are barely discussed among those who live and work in Afghanistan. It would be unnecessary, gratuitous even, to point
them out, were it not for the fact that, officially, the policy is working. ‘We are meeting our goals’, said President Obama. ‘We have basically thrown the Taliban out of their
home turf in Kandahar and Helmand provinces’, said the US Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates. This last claim was jaw-dropping several times over, because it was repeated by many journalists
I had once admired and respected. And plans are ‘on track’ for Afghan national forces to take charge of security by 2014.

These, and many other dreamily upbeat claims, sometimes make me wonder if I ever saw the Afghan war at all.

In the war I did see, nowhere has been cleared of the Taliban. Armed men are no longer seen in the (literally) few square kilometres around the urban district centres that were focussed on but
that is all. Even within those areas, the Taliban attend, unannounced, most of the
shuras
held by foreign troops. They have access to the population, often because they are the population,
and they can still plant IEDs within a short walking distance of most bases, which they do with barely-believable frequency. They also allow the people to take whatever foreign forces offer them,
as long as they also give the Taliban free passage, cover and food whenever they need it, ensuring a stalemate at best. Such a state of uneasy coexistence can hardly be described as
‘holding’, much less winning.