Forces raided his village. “They killed a sleeping farmer,” he said. “They dragged women and held them, they beat four villagers and detained four villagers. From that day Musahi district is not secure. The villagers don’t care if the Taliban intrude into villages. After the raid the local Italian commander was killed, two district council members were killed. I am also a council member, but I don’t go back much. The district police chief was killed, a local road construction company had its machines burned, and since then every day there is something.”
The gap between the people and government was enormous, Fazel said. “Between the people and the international presence it’s much more huge, and between the people and the Americans even more, and with the Special Forces much, much more.”
When people compared the two evils of the Americans and the Taliban, they chose the lesser evil. “At least people can communicate with the Taliban,” he said. “The elders can have influence; they are from the same culture. People are not progovernment or pro-Taliban, but they prefer the Taliban. The government isn’t in a position to deliver any services.”
The Americans relied on their own analysts, who didn’t have in-depth knowledge of the Afghan context, he told me. “Our culture varies from village to village, tribe to tribe, region to region. As an Afghan I am not in a position to have in-depth knowledge; my knowledge will be superficial. Afghans don’t trust you, so they won’t tell you what’s in their hearts and minds. They will say you are doing a great job.”
He mocked the notion that the Americans could use Pashtunwali to their advantage. “The Americans are against Pashtunwali,” he said. “They are carrying out house raids. Are you Pashtun so that you can do Pashtunwali with Pashtun? Before the war, if you were a foreigner or American, you could go everywhere safely. Today that is not the case. The whole situation is stirred into chaos, and everyone is provoking mistrust. The McChrystal plan is more troops, more casualties, more victims, more civilian dead. The wrong policies, the wrong approaches. If you come at 2 a.m. and kill my father, how will you expect me not to go mad?”
In late June a
Local militias had been created before and given different names. Previous attempts to use militias led to cooptation by the Taliban and other abuses. The new militias would not receive any training. The plan risked further destabilizing Afghanistan for the sake of expedience. Unlike the Awakening groups that began in the Iraqi Anbar and spread throughout that country, the militias in Afghanistan are not the result of a strategic shift in the insurgency and are not composed of former insurgents. Afghanistan dose not have anything resembling the Sunni-Shiite divide and inter-Sunni conflict with al Qaeda that led insurgents in Iraq to temporarily ally with the Americans. In Afghanistan the creation of more militias can lead to a return to the chaos of the post-Soviet withdrawal. Decentralization is a good idea on the political level but not when it comes to security and the state’s monopoly on violence. Creating militias means choosing sides in local tribal and inter-ethnic conflicts. According to one Afghan Army brigade commander in Helmand: “A militia empowers a man, an Army and Police force protect a people and empower a nation.” Senior Afghan security officials worried that so-called local defense forces were the first step towards the return of the regionalism and warlordism that tore the country a part in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal. After 1989 small, local militias continued to fight against the central government. After the government was overthrown larger militias fought between themselves for control of Kabul. In a country torn by fighting, the Americans thought that more fighting was the solution. Meanwhile as Petraeus settled in the governor of Marja in Helmand was fired only months after the Americans helped install him.
With Petraeus, Obama had appointed the one general with the clout to ask for more troops and more time, but also the one sufficiently respected by all parties to be able to declare Afghanistan a lost cause. The Americans had won in Afghanistan when it was merely a punishment campaign. Once they lingered following the flight of bin Laden they began to flounder. And when they turned it into a war against the Taliban, an indigenous movement, they lost.
EPILOGUE
IT WAS IN THE SPRING OF 2009 THAT I BEGAN TO REALIZE THAT THINGS were changing in Iraq. The civil war was over. There was no group that could overthrow the government. The Iraqi Security Forces had monopolized power, even if it wasn’t pretty. I felt this most intensely one day when I was driving down Baghdad’s Saadun Street with Captain Salim from Washash and a couple of friends. Salim was dressed in civilian clothes, with a pistol tucked under his shirt. A man in a black sedan tried to cut us off, but my friend behind the wheel aggressively sped up and prevented him from doing so. A war of angry faces and waving hands ensued until we were stopped in traffic just before Tahrir circle, at a checkpoint manned by armed men. The driver of the sedan emerged and blocked our path. He was tall, with thick shoulders, a big belly, and a mustache—the Iraqi security look. He had a shaved head and a pistol on his waist. He demanded that we get out of the car. Salim told him to leave us alone, that he was an officer. Where was he an officer? the bald man insisted.
“I’m with a very dangerous ministry,” warned Salim, “you don’t want to know.”
As armed guards looked on, they stood shouting at each other—each demanding to see the other’s ID cards and each refusing, not knowing who was, in fact, more powerful. As I sat in the car, I was getting more and more nervous. But after ten tense minutes they embraced and kissed. It turned out they knew each other. This was fortunate, because the bald man was an officer with the puissant Office of the Prime Minister, and he trumped Salim, who was a mere army officer. A friend later commented that the standoff reminded him of Iraq under Saddam, when a plethora of security agencies competed with one another.
Six years after the fall of Baghdad, it felt as if the Iraqis were occupying Iraq. Roads were no longer blocked by aggressive American troops but by aggressive Iraqi Security Forces in military, police, or civilian attire, waving their weapons, shouting. They were just as intimidating as their U.S. counterparts. They manned ubiquitous checkpoints throughout the city, stopping cars, searching them. They had brought a measure of security to the war-torn capital, but the price was a heavily militarized society. Even if the overt sectarianism of the security forces had been tempered—they no longer slaughtered Sunnis—their Shiite identity was apparent and made Sunnis who were stopped at checkpoints nervous.
On a different day I was driving with a friend in a car that belonged to a third friend of ours. We were stopped at an Iraqi National Police checkpoint. The policeman asked for the car’s registration. When my friend told him that it was not in his name, the policeman became hostile. He demanded my friend’s ID. He read his name out loud, “Hassanein,” an obviously Shiite name, and his demeanor changed. He smiled and waved us on our way. When I visited government buildings and police stations, the walls were often festooned with posters of Hussein, a clear sign that they were dominated by Shiites. On the concrete barriers outside the National Assembly, there was a large mural of Shiite pilgrims marching to Karbala. These displays created a sense among Sunnis that the state and its security forces were Shiite, that they did not belong.
Not that the Americans had withdrawn. One friend working with the American military in Baghdad’s Yarmuk and Qadisiya districts told me he knew of twenty or twenty-five innocent Iraqis who had been killed by U.S. Special Forces. One old man approached his door when he heard American soldiers coming so that he could open it for
