Pakistani town he was studying in for another one, Quetta, more famous for being a Taliban safe haven. I told the Americans that the school in Pakistan he named practiced a moderate form of Islam anathema to the Taliban.
“People with a similar surname are known Taliban,” Westby said.
“I am a poor man. I don’t know why they arrested me,” Zeibullah said.
The American sergeant asked him why he had this music on his cellphone. “One of my friends put it on my cellphone,” Zeibullah said.
The sergeant smiled. “Bullshit,” he said, looking at Zahir. “How do you say bullshit in Pashtu?”
Zahir looked at the prisoner and said, “
Zahir and the police told me that Zeibullah’s cellphone had some videos of battles and one of a graduation from a religious school to be a mullah. “Everybody has them on their phones—even I have them,” Zahir said. Sergeant Ahmadullah told the Americans that he knew Zeibullah’s father, who was a good man. “But I don’t know him,” he said, “and his uncle is Taliban.”
Mansur the other translator scoffed: how could he know the man’s father but not know him? “He’s fucked up,” Mansur said of Ahmadullah. “Maybe it’s a personal vendetta. We also use Taliban songs,” Mansur added. Other policemen complained Ahmadullah had killed many people in “personal hostility.” One policeman told me that Ahmadullah told him he had killed seven or eight men in personal feuds in Babaji. Another policeman originally from Babaji also insisted the prisoner was innocent. But Zeibullah was taken away to be sent to the prison in Lashkar Gah. He might be released for money, the American sergeant told me. Or he might be in prison for years.
Westby and his men had been sent to patrol Highway 601 because the Taliban had blown up culverts along it, blocking traffic and forcing trucks to go through Taliban-controlled towns. It took Team Prowler about half a day to secure the road, while the British filled up broken culverts with earth so that vehicles could pass. Westby, a soft-spoken and taciturn soldier, was confronted with a Sisyphean task, but he never showed frustration in front of Afghans he worked with. On another afternoon, a few days later, while Westby and his men were recovering from an overnight mission, a soldier woke him up to tell him that two village elders were complaining that the British had blocked their water supply when they filled the craters with dirt. Westby was sleeping, groggy. “Well, I’m not here to solve all the world’s fucking problems,” he muttered.
He got up anyway and went to talk to the two old men. They wore white turbans and had long white beards and wrinkled leathery skin. They squatted, their tunics covering their bodies, and spoke in raspy voices. The British had blocked the water supply to thirty farming families when they filled in the craters on Highway 601, they said. The British ignored their complaints. They asked Westby to put a pipe through so they could water their crops. Westby promised to talk to local Afghan and American officials. They asked how long it would take. Westby guessed maybe a week. The two men seemed relieved. “We all have to work together to stop the Taliban,” Westby told them. The two apologized for bothering him. To them he was probably just another in a long string of foreign officers and local warlords who had come and gone.
The next day we drove by the first compound they had searched. The sandbag they had stuffed into the spy hole was gone. Dyer wanted to destroy that part of the wall, but Jasper said the new orders issued by General McChrystal stated a compound could be destroyed only if the soldiers were in imminent danger. The men were baffled. With their tour in Afghanistan coming to an end, Westby was reluctant to let his men enter compounds. It was militarily useless, he said, and he didn’t want any of his men killed a couple of weeks before they went home. When we got to town, one of the sergeants driving was ebullient. He started playing chicken with oncoming vehicles and laughing. As we left the ANCOP base to drive to the main base in Lashkar Gah, a kid picked up a rock to throw at the Humvee and a cop kicked him hard in the chest. The men of Ironhorse and Prowler returned to their lives in Illinois. Five men from Ironhorse went back to Afghanistan to work as private security contractors in Kandahar.
Supporters of McChrystal said “he gets it,” as if there was a magic COIN formula they discovered in 2009. But Afghans have a memory. They remember, for example, that the American-backed mujahideen killed thousands of Afghan teachers and bombed schools in the name of their anti-Soviet jihad. The Taliban atrocities had not arisen in a vacuum. Similarly, past American actions have consequences. Opinions were already formed. The Taliban were gaining power thanks to American actions and alliances. Warlords were empowered by the Americans. No justice was sought for victims. The government and police were corrupt. The president stole the elections. The message was that there was no justice, and a pervasive sense of lawlessness and impunity had set in. Afghans who had been humiliated or victimized by the Americans and their allies were unlikely to become smitten by them merely because of some aid they received. And the aid was relatively small compared with other international projects, like Bosnia, Haiti, Rwanda, and East Timor. The Americans thought that by building roads they could win over opinion. But roads are just as useful for insurgents as they are for occupiers. The Americans had failed to convince Afghans that they should like them or want them to stay, and they certainly had not been convinced that Karzai’s government has legitimacy. You can’t win hearts and minds with aid work when you are an occupying force.
The Taliban was the most obscurantist, backward, traditional, and despised government on earth. The fact that the Taliban was making a comeback was a testimony to the regime that the U.S. set up there, and to the atrocities that have been committed in Afghanistan by occupation troops and their Afghan allies. It was sheer arrogance to think that adding another thirty thousand or fifty thousand troops would change the situation so much that the occupation would become an attractive alternative.
There was little evidence that aid money in COIN had an impact. There was not a strong correlation between poverty and insecurity or between aid money and security. The more insecure you were, the more development money you got. The safer provinces felt as if they were being penalized for not having Taliban or poppy cultivation. The aid system raised expectations but didn’t satisfy them. Life remained nasty, brutish, and short for most Afghans.
Aid and force do not go well together. The Americans assumed that material goods superseded all other values. This was not true in Iraq or Afghanistan. Positive as the aid was, it did not outweigh the civilian casualties or the offensive and humiliating behavior of the past eight years. In Iraq it took the trauma of the civil war to make the Americans look good. There might have been a new administration in Washington, but for Afghans it was the same America: the America of civilian casualties, night raids, foreign occupation, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib—the America seemingly at war with Islam.
The Pentagon propaganda machine, for instance, turned Marja from a backwater to a key strategic city, and the American media accepted it. But in fact there were only a few thousand people living in Marja. It took months and thousands of troops for the Americans to seize Marja, only to learn that the Taliban were popular there. And there were up to twenty thousand similar Marjas throughout the country. In Marja the ANCOP too proved a failure, incompetent and dependent on the Americans. Fighting remained frequent. The Americans were not effective in evaluating Afghan police units. Although hailed as elite, the ANCOP annual attrition due to all causes ranged from seventy to one hundred and forty percent. Even by local standards they weren’t elite.
The storming of Marja was meant to be the first sally in a larger campaign to expel the Taliban from their southern heartland, especially Kandahar. The Americans thought if they could wrest it from Taliban hands, then it would turn the tide against the Taliban. But Kandahar meant little to anybody who wasn’t a Kandahari. It was part of the same focus on population centers that were overwhelmingly urban.
Violence was getting worse. How long would the Afghan people accept the presence of armed foreigners in their country? Even a message of help can be humiliating, more so when it is backed by a gun. The Americans underestimated the importance of dignity and the extent to which their very presence in Afghanistan was deeply offensive.
In May 2006 riots erupted in Kabul after a road accident with American forces, and the Americans shot at the crowd. The episode revealed an underlying anger that could explode at any moment. In September 2009 a British plane dropped a box of leaflets that failed to open, landing on a girl and killing her. Given that most Afghans are illiterate, it would not have been any more persuasive had it opened. Despite the lip service given to “protecting the population,” in 2010 the American-led coalition killed far more civilians than previous years. In February a night raid by American special forces killed two pregnant women; the Americans attempted to cover it up. “Son of an American” has become an insult among Pashtuns the way “Son of a Russian” once was.
