hoped that when the Taliban tried to leave, the ambush team blocking the narrow path between the mud walls would kill them. They drove without lights in blackout. Dyer told the men to make sure the ANP had no cigarettes, didn’t play music, and didn’t talk. “Enforce light and noise discipline,” he said. “Throw some fucking grenades. We’re not there to arrest people, just fucking kill people.”
“The Hazara fighters are better than these lazy bones sleeping all day,” said Westby, referring to the Pashtun police. “And they’re better shots,” Dyer added. Westby estimated there would be five to ten Taliban in the mosque. Somehow I doubted the Taliban would be there. They weren’t stupid: they did not sleep in the same place every night, and they would know that the Americans had found their hideout.
At 3 a.m. they started getting ready. “I hope we catch these sons of bitches with their pants down,” Kilaki said. “I’ll be so pissed if there’s nobody fucking there,” said Campos. There were supposed to be only six police dismounts on the ambush, but twice as many got out of their vehicles to join the five Americans who went on the ambush. Westby got out of his Humvee to resolve the problem. “It just goes to show that no matter how many times you prep ’em . . .” said Kilaki. “They all thought they were going on patrol,” Westby said with a laugh. “I just explained it to their commander, and they nodded north and south.” An unmanned Predator drone was flying overhead, but Team Prowler had no way of talking to those controlling it.
As it happened, the mosque was empty. Several Afghans walking by on the way to their fields or morning prayers were taken down the alleyway. “They can fuckin’ sit and shut up,” Dyer said. “I wish I was the dismount watching the people come out all spooked,” Campos said. “On the Fourth we had the women crying,” said Kilaki. “Yeah, I know,” said Campos. “I saw the women coming out, tears all down their faces. Shut the fuck up! We’re doing you a favor.”
When the rest of Team Prowler joined the ambush team, I found the Afghan men sitting and waiting to be let go. They were middle-aged and elderly. They asked to pray several times, and finally Dyer let them conduct their ablutions and pray on the grass. One of the old men told me that they were all very bothered by the Taliban. “They come here to shoot,” he said. “They don’t let us irrigate our fields. When the Taliban shoot from this area, the Americans and police come and we have to run away. Our neighbors were bothered by the Taliban, and they fled. We have to take our women and children away when the police respond to Taliban ambushes.” Another old man chimed in. “Three months ago the Taliban set up an ambush on the road,” he said. “The police entered our houses, they stole our sheep and everything from our houses. We complained to Lashkar Gah police headquarters, and they gave us back two motorcycles and one sheep but not the rest of our things. We had a shop, and they took all the merchandise from it.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that. You can rest assured that this is a different police,” said Westby. “Tell him we apologize for the disturbance, but we’re adamant about keeping these people out.”
“I am an old man,” one of them said. “If we talk to them, the Taliban will slap us. The Taliban sometimes come here and demand money. If we refuse, they’re going to kill us.”
The old men asked if they could go take their vegetables to the market. The Americans agreed. Westby told them that if they gave information on the Taliban that led to arrests, they would receive money. “If the Taliban see us talking to you, they will slaughter us tonight,” one of the men said. “The Taliban don’t tell us when they are coming. We’re sitting in our homes, and all of a sudden they come and we hear shots. The Taliban don’t sleep here. They come here like thieves.”
“Let them understand that we’re not the bad guys,” Westby told his translator. “We’re trying to stop them from doing what they are doing. The best way to accomplish that is by a partnership. We can’t keep coming here every day.”
“We can’t notify the police, but we’ll send some small child to tell the police,” one of the old men said.
The sun rose, golden over the shrubs, as we made our way back to the checkpoint. The police had mentioned seeing a Taliban car. “What was that about a Taliban car?” asked Kilaki. “The ANP think everything is Taliban,” Westby replied. “I don’t think they fuckin’ know. They’re so eager to impress that sometimes they call everything Taliban.”
The police at the next checkpoint radioed to say there were Taliban around. “They’re over there, and they’re over there, and they’re over there, but we can’t go on that road because it’s all IEDs, but the road is full of civilian traffic,” Westby said, mocking the useless information he got from the cops.
A highway patrol commander called Torabas came by with his men. He and his men had just seen two Corollas full of Taliban in the distance. I asked him how he knew. He had been living here for two years, he said, and he recognized their faces. All the hills north of our position were said to be controlled by the Taliban, but the police were too scared to go there. I asked Torabas why the Taliban were so popular in Helmand. “The Taliban are supported by the British,” he said, insisting that he had seen the British military drop fuel supplies to the Taliban. “Nobody likes the Taliban here,” he said. “It’s only out of fear. When the Taliban see people talking to the police, they kill them. They are here only by force, and many people dislike the police. Some police steal from houses. Before we recruited uneducated people who had no training.” About fifty of his men had been killed by the Taliban since he took command.
He was from the Nurzai tribe, like Colonel Shirzad and most police in Helmand, he told me. His father and grandfather had fought the Soviets with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami, the most radical faction of the mujahideen. When the Taliban seized Helmand and pushed out Hizb-e-Islami, Torabas’s family fled to Pakistan. He said Taliban had seized their lands.
“I’m living in Lashkar Gah, but my fields are still in the hands of the Taliban,” he said. “When the Taliban were defeated, they didn’t have any power. Then we were living in our compound, but now the Taliban are back.” It seemed his motive was to regain his land. “When the Russians attacked Afghanistan they were trying to destroy our country. The Taliban didn’t like the mujahideen. When the Americans start oppressing or disrespecting our culture—touching our women, disrespecting our elders—then we will fight jihad against them.”
That night Kilaki caught one of the police commanders smoking hashish in a car. “It looked like a Cheech and Chong movie,” he said. Westby gave the PR money to buy cooking supplies. “Their logistics process doesn’t work, and I can’t have them going hungry,” he said. Only one of the PR’s senior men showed any initiative and wanted to set up his own ambushes. Colonel Shirzad didn’t want to fight, Dyer told me, and without a charismatic leader like Farid the PR were content to just patrol Highway 601.
ONE AFTERNOON while I was marooned with Team Prowler and the PR in the small mud police outpost along Highway 601, languishing in the oppressive heat, surrounded by a moonscape of bleached rocks, hoping for some action to relieve my boredom, Sergeant Ahmadullah radioed to the young Afghan translator working with the Americans, called Mansur, and told him, “We found a Taliban, we have him here. What should we do, kill him or what?” Mansur told Ahmadullah he could not kill the prisoner, and instructed him to bring the man to the Americans.
The prisoner was a young man with a purple
Ahmadullah said his prisoner’s cellphone had a Taliban song on it. This was his evidence. Ahmadullah was by the roadside, while I was standing with his men, at the police outpost, out of his earshot. His men were privately angry about their commander’s decision to arrest the man and wanted him released. Zahir, another translator working with the Americans, was outraged. “This is why people hate the fucking police and support the Taliban,” he said. I asked Captain Westby, Team Prowler’s commander, why the man was being held. “He had an anti-American ring tone,” Westby said, “and he has some relatives that Ahmadullah says are in the Taliban.”
Zahir explained to the Americans that the prisoner wanted to pray. The police were eager to uncuff him so he could, and the skeptical Americans relented. Zahir insisted the prisoner wouldn’t attempt an escape.
Sergeant Gustafson took one of the passengers by the wall to enter his biometric data into a handheld device. He took the man’s picture and another of his eyes, along with his fingerprints, name, father’s name, and tribe’s name. The man seemed amused. But he was now in the American system. Westby and a sergeant interrogated the prisoner, who was called Zeibullah Agha. He was a student in a famous religious school in the Pakistani city of Peshawar and was on his way back to Babaji, where the British were engaged in heavy combat with the Taliban, in order to help his family flee to safety because his father was an old man. The Americans asked him for the names of his brothers, father, and uncle, but they had trouble with the names and confused the
