The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan (33 page)

Not according to my translator, someone I’ve known and trusted for years. I called him before booking my flights, and I felt relieved, as always, to hear his voice crackling over the rough mobile networks. He confirmed that many types of attack had increased, especially the targeted killings; the Taliban had become so precise in their selection of victims that they released biographies of the dead within hours after hit teams gunned them down, explaining why the insurgency had passed a death sentence upon some government staffer or aid worker. Still, my translator advised that downtown Kandahar was now less dangerous for journalists. Bombings and firefights on the main avenues were less frequent, making it unlikely that I’d get caught in the crossfire unless I went beyond the city limits. New guesthouses had been equipped with blast walls and reinforced guard posts to accommodate foreign visitors. Convoys of armoured vehicles no longer raced madly through the streets: the troops had learned how to drive more cautiously, drifting slowly through the city with their hatches sealed to avoid trouble. Afghan forces in the province were no longer a joke, my translator added, suggesting that a disciplined system of searching cars at every gateway to Kandahar city was helping to make the place safer.

These were practical updates from a friend who wanted to keep me alive during my stay, not the rhetoric of commanders. I had dismissed the claims of “fragile progress” in the south as more of the misplaced optimism we heard for years, but here was my closest friend in the city telling me that something positive was happening—at least in some neighbourhoods. This rekindled a theory I’d been thinking about for years, a hopeful idea about how the conflict might eventually simmer down. It seemed reasonable, after spending billions of dollars on the local government, to expect that the Afghan regime would become strong enough to survive on its own. The best historical precedent for this was the way the communist government
under Mohammad Najibullah Ahmadzai—better known as “Doctor Najib” because of his medical studies—showed resilience after the Soviet troops withdrew in 1989. That period of history is often misunderstood, because many people assume that the administration set up by the Russians fell apart immediately after its sponsors retreated. But I’ve spoken with dozens of Afghans who remember those times, and they describe a situation that sounds remarkably stable. Kabul maintained control of the capital and key cities, offering bribes and territory for peace with rebel leaders. Moscow continued supplying hundreds of millions of dollars in cash, arms and equipment. Insurgents mustered a major attack on the eastern city of Jalalabad in the spring of 1989, throwing maybe ten thousand rebels at a government stronghold, but the offensive turned into a debacle and the rebel factions never showed that kind of unity again. Scholars who reviewed that period of history concluded that the insurgents weren’t very good at the kind of organized warfare necessary to seize a country—and, without a common enemy, the rebel groups started fighting each other. Those factors might have allowed Dr. Najib to survive if the Soviet Union had not collapsed. His regime lasted only four months after aid was formally cut off in 1992, and by that point his citizens were starving without food deliveries. That kind of collapse seems unlikely to happen again, however, because the Karzai government does not depend on a crumbling empire; despite the economic troubles of the West, the regime in Kabul can still rely on sponsorship from many of the world’s richest countries. My personal theory was that the foreigners would eventually withdraw their troops and the violence would slowly ebb, the way it happened during the Soviet pullout. I guessed that the withdrawals would sap the energy and unity of insurgents whose rallying cry has been the removal of foreign soldiers. I also figured that the Kabul elites, who had been reluctant to offer serious concessions in their long-running negotiations with the insurgents, would feel more willing to talk peace without protection from the troops.

That theory was about to get tested. Canada was pulling its troops from the south that summer, and the Netherlands had already withdrawn. Their numbers were small but symbolic, and reminded everybody about the bigger withdrawals in the coming months if the United States, France, Britain and other NATO countries went ahead with troop reductions. The declared goal of pulling “most” troops by 2014 was a vague target, but as I prepared for a return visit to Kandahar, the focus of all conversations was that the foreigners were actually leaving. That simple fact amazed people in the south. For years, many Afghans had suspected that the United States and its allies would keep their military foothold indefinitely; even the illiterate farmers understood why the US wanted bases near the borders of Iran and China. But it was difficult for my friends inside Afghanistan to pick up on the mood of war fatigue in the West, and hard for them to understand the depth of the recent economic troubles in the rich countries. Withdrawals had been discussed for years, but the reality did not hit people in Kandahar until the summer of 2011 as locals watched Canada’s armoured vehicles pulling out, and listened to President Obama’s televised speech promising to bring home thirty-three thousand soldiers within a year. All of a sudden, it didn’t seem abstract to wonder if the local government could survive without them.

My first impression, after years away, was that the Afghan government looked a whole lot stronger. On my first visit, in 2005, I had to crawl along the baggage carousel and duck through the plastic curtain to find my bags at the Kabul airport, wrestling with dirty children who tried to slip their fingers in my pockets. By 2011, the local police had cleared away the beggars and porters, and the place felt more like a military airstrip than a civilian facility. Standing in the astonishingly straight line for a flight to Kandahar—no pushing, no jostling—I was surprised to meet a British journalist headed south for an embed with the Afghan National Army. This was the
first time I’d heard of a reporter risking his life by going on patrol with a purely Afghan unit, without supervision by foreign troops, and we agreed it was a good sign. Even the airport itself looks better, I told him, gesturing at the clean marble, carved wood and freshly painted surfaces of the terminal.

“This place is beautiful now,” I said.

An Afghan standing behind me overheard the comment. “Are you kidding?” he said. “It was much better during Najib’s time.” A muscular man with hooded eyes, he sat beside me on the plane and introduced himself as a Pashto-language interpreter for “OGA,” an acronym that means “other government agencies,” a shorthand for the US Central Intelligence Agency. He looked exhausted and did not harbour any great hopes for his own government, which he considered weaker than the communist regime. I asked him why the foreigners’ good intentions amounted to so little, in his opinion. “Because they’re idiots,” he said, with his accent drawing out the first vowel of the word,
idiots
, into a long “eeeeee” sound. Then he cranked up something called “party mix” on his iPod and ignored me for the rest of the flight.

The final approach to Kandahar was choppy, with hot wind coming off the desert around the airfield. Even from the air, I could see progress: new roads, new buildings, new communication towers. Kandahar Air Field had expanded dramatically, like a sprawling dust-coloured city. An experimental farm greened a wasteland near the base, an arid tract previously littered with garbage. The expanded military airport now included a fleet of Mi-17s, part of the recently established Kandahar Air Wing, an Afghan air command that had started running basic transport and medical evacuation missions. Unlike their communist predecessors, the Afghans were not flying attack aircraft, however; the helicopter gunships that had helped Dr. Najib defend his regime were still considered too risky a weapon in local hands.

On my first day in the city, I woke early and drove south to the village of Deh-e-Bagh, a small settlement that was deemed safe enough
to become a “model village,” a showcase of development. The last time I’d driven that road it was a muddy track leading into dangerous territory; now my driver seemed relaxed, rolling down the freshly paved blacktop and easing to a halt at new checkpoints that loomed over the road like medieval fortresses. The town looked deserted, with no traffic and police standing guard every few hundred metres.

“No people, no problems,” I said, half-unconsciously, and then noticed that my translator looked puzzled. I explained that I’d learned this phrase while living in Russia, that Stalin reputedly used those words to explain his brutal way of quelling unrest. I mildly regretted teaching him this expression shortly thereafter. We parked our car and started ambling through checkpoints, finally meeting a nervous American soldier who scrutinized my passport and seemed skeptical about allowing me inside; he became even less co-operative when my translator said, “No people, no problems,” and laughed. I could see how the dark phrase would be unnerving, coming from a long-bearded Afghan who cackled wildly.

The soldier eventually let us pass, and I found myself sitting on a plastic lawn chair in the main hall of Deh-e-Bagh’s administrative centre, a room decorated with the tasteless flair common to many Afghan government buildings: fake flowers, frosted glass lighting fixtures and a five-foot-high portrait of President Hamid Karzai. The district chief was holding court with a high-level delegation that included the governor and top NATO military commanders. I had seen previous such meetings play out like farces because of faulty translation, but this time the foreign troops had two interpreters mumbling into mobile transmitters that broadcast to small receivers worn by all foreign personnel in the room, with the Pashto-language proceedings smoothly recorded into a digital archive as if we were sitting in a United Nations conference hall. Other aspects of the meetings were surprisingly organized, too: Afghan officials for education, agriculture, public works and other departments stood up in turn and gave updates about their recent accomplishments. All of the
local dignitaries appeared to have memorized some statistics about the number of schools opened, or kilometres of road constructed, which they stood and delivered with great flourishes. Public-affairs officers from the foreign delegations hunched over their notebooks and scribbled it all down. Their pens only paused during awkward moments, such as when the district chief announced that he planned to set up a website and Facebook page to inform locals about his good works—a strategy undermined, he acknowledged, by the fact that his own offices had the only Internet connection in the district. The district chief had been targeted by eleven bombings during the few years of his tenure, and one bomb had badly damaged his compound. Now rebuilt, the place looked more like a military camp than any kind of public facility. It was hard to picture the villagers dropping by to check their Facebook accounts.

After the meeting finished, I sat with the district leader as he chain-smoked Dunhills. The thirty-three-year-old was among the slickest of a new generation of Afghan leaders, capable of speaking in detail about the demographics and development profile of his area. He seemed intent on lobbying the foreigners for long-term project funding before the coming troop withdrawals, eloquently making a case that the modest industry of his district—growing crops and baking mud bricks—could be expanded to include fabric factories, wheat mills and processing plants for grapes, pomegranates, watermelon and other fruit.

As he spoke, the air conditioners died. The building lost power for perhaps the fifth time that afternoon. In the distance, we could hear his staff struggling to revive the diesel generator. He got irritated when I asked the obvious question, about how he would find electricity for his planned factories. He suggested that the foreign donors had wasted millions of dollars on modest upgrades to the nearby Dahla Dam that did not include power generation.

“You should ask the donors, why do they give their money to thieves?” he said, stubbing a Dunhill and lighting another.

“The big danger is withdrawal,” he added. “They should wait for some time before starting this, maybe three years.”

“What if they cannot wait?”

“If they leave, and the insurgency continues, will the Taliban come over these walls? Is that what you are asking? Yes, of course. Everybody knows this.”

The walls had grown higher, but the officials who inhabited the government facilities had also become more paranoid. Over and over, in places where you might expect to find ardent supporters of the government, people expressed fear and anxiety. There was a sense of looming disaster, a fear that the foreigners built a system that would soon collapse. Nobody trusted that the Afghan government would be strong enough to stand by itself. I repeated my theory about two dozen times, asking everybody I met if the 1989 Soviet withdrawal scenario might happen again. None of the people I asked—governor, police chief, Taliban commander, hairdresser, farmer, people from all over the city—thought my historical parallel had much relevance. Many spoke about the tradition of revenge, the way conflicts can burn for generations in Afghanistan. A senior general from the Interior Ministry, whom I’ve known for years, invited me to his house for dinner and warned of an impending civil war. “This is just the beginning,” he said. “It’s only the trailer for the movie.”

Other local officials said they sensed the movie unfolding like something they had seen before. I spent an evening sitting on cushions in the courtyard of Sarpoza prison with the facility’s warden, a fifty-two-year-old who got the job after the tunnelling jailbreak a few months earlier. His prisoners now included his predecessor, the former warden, locked up on suspicion of helping the escape. The prison had been showered with international money, and looked stronger than ever. Huge concrete slabs protected the approaches to the main gates, and nearby roads were blocked off to prevent
another jailbreak. Despite these improvements, the warden said, the ground underneath the prison remained soft and easy for tunnelling; another jailbreak could happen. When I suggested that the physical upgrades to his prison—costly, elaborate and futile—served as a metaphor for the whole international mission in his country, he said that many others had made the same observation. He waved off my idea that the history of Soviet withdrawal in 1989 might repeat itself. Having previously served in the communist regime and watched the Soviet troops depart, he remembered how the communists bought themselves a little breathing room in those days by making deals with their enemies. He predicted no such agreements with the Taliban. “It will be like Vietnam,” he said, making a gesture with his hand to indicate a helicopter lifting off from a rooftop. I wasn’t sure if he was referring to the iconic photograph from the fall of Saigon, of CIA personnel scrambling to escape, but he kept repeating the word:
Vietnam
.