The Taliban Shuffle (16 page)

“Why did you keep shooting?” he asked the Afghan. “And why did you use all the bullets?”

“The Taliban killed my brother,” the Afghan replied, grinning. “I really hate them.”

And that showed just how impossible everything was out here. This was a war in which an Afghan militant thought his best option was to attack an American base alone on a motorcycle. And an Afghan soldier thought he was equally wise to unleash all his precious ammunition on a dead man, while Afghan soldiers in other parts of Afghanistan complained of having no weapons and no bullets and were even being killed for lack of ammunition. Figuring out the bigger idiot was tough.

Other Afghans trekked out to the base—but they were all elders, complaining that they did not want the U.S. soldiers to come to their villages anymore because everyone was scared of them and afraid of Taliban retaliation. It was a tough crowd. Hearts and minds were not on offer. A medical convoy tried to give free medical help to the village of Sarbesa. But the elders said the U.S. soldiers scared the women and children and asked the medics to hold their clinic somewhere else.

Unlike on other embeds, the officers here were so strapped, spread so thin, they had no time to worry about what I was doing or writing. They sent me on patrols with guys who had seen their friends die in Afghanistan, into a place that was by no means secure. The soldiers were nervous, which made me nervous. Any car, any person, major panic. Nobody waved. Children did not crowd around the Humvees, asking for pens and candy, as they did in the rest of
Afghanistan. When we drove through a village, the women and children ran away. This was never a good sign.

On one patrol, we visited a clinic built through the U.S. schools-and-clinics program, the pet project of Zal, the former U.S. ambassador. The program was largely considered a debacle. The new buildings came in shoddy, late, and over budget. The lead USAID contractor, the Louis Berger Group of New Jersey, reportedly charged U.S. taxpayers an average of $226,000 for each building—almost five times as much as Afghans and European nonprofit groups had paid for similar buildings. Louis Berger officials told journalists that their buildings took longer to build because they were required to train Afghan contractors to do the work; the buildings cost more because they were earthquake resistant. In reality, most of the money probably got chewed up along the way. USAID contractors like Louis Berger spent a lot of money on highly paid U.S. staff and couldn’t supervise projects in difficult areas, increasing the likelihood of fraud. And even though Louis Berger hired Afghan contractors, those companies often subcontracted to someone else, who sometimes subcontracted to someone else. Corners were cut. Many buildings were already falling apart. Some roofs had caved in from heavy snow.

We sat with the elders at their new clinic.

“Do you use it?” an American staff sergeant asked.

“Well … we have no medicine,” an Afghan answered, then added, almost as an afterthought, “And we have no doctor.”

In other words, no, they did not. I went on these missions when the soldiers did them, but sometimes they didn’t, and sometimes they didn’t invite me, like when it seemed too dangerous. Their mood was the opposite of the mood on my embed the year before, when I wrote primarily about the forgotten war. The men still felt like no one was paying attention to Afghanistan, but here they knew that their enemy was serious, and that someone should have maybe figured that out earlier.

On the base, conditions were so backpacking basic, we were all
reduced to the same sexless, miserable, dust-covered robots, amused by fights between camel spiders and scorpions held in cardboard boxes. The soldiers filmed the fights and replayed the highlights, much like they watched videos of their recent firefights. The winner in Ultimate Fighter Afghanistan was a particularly large camel spider, which practically ripped the head off any scorpion found to challenge it.

I was occasionally bored, yet constantly exhausted. I rested in my cot and read my neighbor’s bad spy novels involving heroic Americans with names like Jimmy and Ace. I couldn’t watch videos or write. I couldn’t risk taking my computer out of my backpack, because of the omniscient and omnipresent wind, which carried the dust with it. The wind was always in the room, a participant in every conversation. The dust coated soldiers when they napped for an hour, and by the time the morning came around, all of us looked gray and dead. Not that we could sleep, for the heat, for the wind. Putting in contact lenses every morning was like scraping my corneas with a bunion remover.

One night I escaped to the only dustless place in the whole base, the TOC, to talk to the man in charge about everything that had happened. He was interrupted by a whisper about a TIC in the TOC—in other words, troops in contact that could be monitored in the tactical operations center.

In addition to Musa Qala, a satellite U.S. base had been set up in the north. That evening, the Taliban had attacked a U.S. patrol near there. The troops retaliated, backed by a B-1 bomber. Soldiers then spotted fourteen Afghans fleeing to an alleged known Taliban safe house. A Predator filmed the men running into the house, which was surrounded by mud walls. In the well-lit control room, we all watched the grainy Predator feed of the safe house on a large screen on the wall. The captain I had been interviewing verified the target with the men on the ground. He called his superiors; he was approved. So he told the B-1 bomber to drop a five-hundred-pound bomb. Yes, a five-hundred-pound bomb seemed a bit of overkill
for a mud hut, but that was the only ammunition the B-1 had, and the Predator had nothing. On the screen, we watched the bomb hit, sending up a giant plume of smoke. The men cheered briefly. Then the smoke cleared.

The bomb had missed the house by about two hundred and twenty yards, a large gap that no one was able to explain, destroying a patch of trees, perhaps some animals, and hopefully no human beings.

“He missed,” the officers in the room said softly, incredulously, almost in unison. A few men put their heads in their hands. Then, slowly, everyone turned their heads toward me, the reporter standing in the room like an elephant. I held up my hands.

“What can you do?” I asked. It was a rhetorical question.

“Somebody’s messed up,” the captain muttered. Now he had to get approval to drop another bomb, which took hours.

The insurgents stayed in the safe house, allegedly, and this time, when the bomb was dropped, it hit the right target, setting off secondary explosions, likely from ammunition inside.

The Taliban had started seizing on such mistakes, especially in a hostile zone like Helmand Province, where people were more than willing to believe the worst of the U.S. military. It didn’t matter that much of Afghanistan was backward, occasionally primitive. Most Afghans seemed to have an almost religious faith in American technology, talking about how U.S. troops could drop a bomb on a two-inch target, and how if they missed, they missed on purpose.

The next day a patrol was sent to the site to inspect the rubble and talk to nearby villagers. The story was the same as elsewhere: No Taliban here. Security is fine. Please leave.

After four days, during which I bathed with gritty wet wipes and figured out the long odds, I got out of Camp Hell. I had seen no real government and little aid that mattered. The United States had set up a tiny base in the middle of Taliban territory and started firing off howitzers every night, a move that probably terrified any Afghans who might have wanted them around. The base wasn’t protecting
anyone or able to win any hearts or minds. Instead, it stirred up a hornet’s nest, with no conceivable way to calm it down, no real alternatives to poppies, no government authority. The United States did not bear all the blame. The lack of resources and troops here was the product of years of outrageous neglect by the entire international coalition.

Soon after I left the Musa Qala outpost, set up at considerable expense by the Americans to pave the way for the British, the British arrived. Almost immediately, the British closed the base, deeming that they needed to actually be with the people in the town of Musa Qala to do an effective counterinsurgency. So the base was moved, but that didn’t really work, either. The Taliban constantly fired at the new outpost’s landing zone. Worried about being shot down, many helicopters simply turned back to the main British base, Camp Bastion.

With obvious supply problems and no reinforcements, British troops had little hope of dealing with the Musa Qala threat. The Taliban fought hard and dirty. The Brits spread out, fighting in the districts of Garmsir, Sangin, and Gereshk. The Danes relieved the Brits in Musa Qala, but were quickly replaced by the Brits again. So the British commander made a controversial decision in the fall of 2006—again, a few months after I was there—to respect a truce between the weak Afghan government and the tribal elders of Musa Qala, who swore up and down and promised a hundred times over that they would keep the Taliban away. The Taliban allegedly agreed. After the deal held for a month, the British moved out their troops, much to the consternation of the United States. These truces had been tried repeatedly in the tribal areas of Pakistan, had been criticized repeatedly by NATO and Afghan officials, and had failed repeatedly. Nonetheless, this time it would be different, the British maintained.

Months later, in February 2007, the Taliban took over Musa Qala and jailed all tribal leaders who had agreed to the truce. It would be another ten months before NATO could reclaim Taliban Town.

T
he night was not one of those blind-drunk ones at L’Atmosphère, not one when couples kissed sloppily in the bushes or the bathroom, or when people kept drinking until the sameness seemed fun, or when someone fell asleep leaning against a tree, or when a security guy tried to convince women, some successfully, that he was researching
Real World Kabul
for MTV. About midnight, with the crowd winding down, we called a taxi from the leading taxi company that catered to foreigners in Kabul and charged only $5 per stop. These taxis were safe, and they knew every place that foreigners went. Kabul had no addresses, just bad roads and neighborhoods and directions like “the first house on the road with a bunch of sunflowers out front,” so every house had a nickname. We piled into the cab.

“Fun House,” my housemate said.

I’m not sure who named the house, maybe a driver from the taxi company. A cast of about ten people shifted in and out of the five bedrooms of the Fun House, a low-slung poorly laid out building where one bedroom spilled into another, severely limiting privacy. Lawyers, journalists, UN workers, a human-rights worker, a vague consultant, almost everyone had been in and out of Afghanistan for a long time, since the rockets on the rooftop of the Mustafa,
Jack Idema, the toga party. And everyone else knew the Fun House. I rented a room and charged it to my company, which was much cheaper than staying at the Gandamack and, obviously, much more fun. The friendships we forged here, through adversity, curfews, and lack of power, were the quickest and most intense I had ever made. All of us were on the same acid trip, regardless of whether we grew up in London or Johannesburg or Billings, Montana. We were instant family—just add war.

How fun was the Fun House? So fun that the housemates bet on who would be the first to have sex outside on the daybed, so fun that grown men had been known to wear wigs and perform drunken somersaults in the living room, so fun that my housemate Tom and I procrastinated one afternoon by holding target practice on a melon with a battery-powered BB gun bought at the World of Child toy store down the road.

“I know you can shoot because you’re from Montana,” said Tom, the British freelance journalist I had traveled with to Kandahar.

I aimed at the melon. I shot Tom in the shin.

In other words, the fun at the Fun House was the kind that interrupted the monotony of life in Afghanistan like a sharp kick to the kneecap. (Tom was fine.) Even as the Taliban gathered strength in the south and the Afghans increasingly seethed against the foreigners, the foreigners in the capital pushed back. Restaurants like L’Atmosphère were in full swing. Thursday-night theme parties and Friday-afternoon barbecues were regular. There was a salsa night, a trivia night, and a fledgling poker night on which contractors would soon shrug off losses of thousands of dollars. It was junior year at Kabul High—a time when we knew all the different players and were no longer gawky freshmen in the wrong clothes but weren’t as jaded as we’d eventually become. It was party time, and this was the party summer, the summer of 2006, the Summer of the Fun House. Kabul was an oasis.

Adding to the fun, Sean had also just returned to Kabul from one
of his earliest forays to meet Tango, a crapshoot that involved actual Taliban insurgents pointing guns at him and Sami, his fixer. While in Helmand, Sean had called me every few days. At one point, he complained that Sami had abandoned him in his hotel after announcing he just couldn’t work with Sean anymore. But Sami returned to Sean like the bad habit he was. Sometimes Sean wouldn’t answer his phone when I called, and once, he disappeared for a week. He spoke in whispers. He wouldn’t talk about what he was doing, convinced his calls were being monitored, so our conversations were perfunctory and laced with Tango.

“People are listening,” he said.

“Oh, like you’re so important.”

Out for his first Thursday night since coming back, Sean told us his story of meeting Tango. Even though I had heard the story a dozen times, it continued to be entertaining. He knew how to massage a tale. He’d tell it once, watch his audience’s reaction, and modify the story the next time, always perfecting his delivery.

None of us wanted the night to end, so we piled out of various taxis, walked into the Fun House garden, and collapsed on cushions on the daybed, a freestanding wooden deck covered in stained brown-and-cream Afghan carpets the texture of burlap. The power was out, as usual, but we lit gas lanterns, poured drinks, and put on music, a mix that featured the song “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley. Tom and I occasionally shot his BB gun at various targets. At one point, I walked through the darkness of the house, using my phone screen as a flashlight, hunting for the bathroom. The door was open—I walked inside. But Sean was already there, washing his hands.