Kandahar: A joint American-Afghan force had just uncovered a weapons cache in a small mud village known for supporting the Taliban. Returning to base, the soldiers dumped two ageing boxes on the ground in an explosion of dust. Several Iranian-funded pro-mujahideen magazines spilled from the first case. In the second was equipment for launching mortars and several rusting weapons of Russian vintage.
Suddenly, the spirit of collegiality shattered as the Afghan and American commanders began fighting over ownership of the spoils. The Afghans sought to keep some of the weapons for themselves; the Americans wanted to pass them on to the Afghan judiciary so it could begin building a case against the netted detainees. A translator working for the Americans with an Afghan army general for a father and a running grudge match with the local army commander was the unlikely mediator between the two sides. A toe-to-toe shouting match only ended when the American commander waded in and screamed for quiet.
Power games aside, cultural misunderstandings are legion between the Americans and Afghans. Ordinary soldiers are not so much separated by the language barrier as saved by it. Nevertheless, the Americans’ trash-talking slang brogue penetrates through to their more modest Afghan colleagues, especially when they start parroting the Dari words for “Fuck you” and “passive homosexual.” The occasional fistfight is not unknown. Operationally, even more is lost in translation. “We found a ledger kept by the Taliban containing the names of people they had killed,” a former NYPD policeman currently working as a contractor for the US military claimed as he oversaw the unloading of the weapons. But no such document existed in the sheaves of magazines brought out.
When the Americans sally forth to the neighboring village, things are hardly better. Well-intentioned as the company commander may be, he commits unthinking faux pas such as not taking his boots off when entering enclosed spaces, repeatedly spitting in the dust when speaking to locals, peppering his speech with swear-words or yawning in full view of village elders. The deployment of the 82 Airborne Brigade to the Arghandab Valley, a fertile agricultural basin that is the spiritual home of the Taliban and historically provided shelter to Taliban operations, is the next stage in the war to win over Afghan hearts and minds. The question now is whether the American military is up to this task?
Top American commander General Stanley McChrystal feels that the US will never win the tactical war against an enemy willing to settle back and bide time. Instead, the only way to leave Afghanistan honorably is to build up the trust of the locals in the central government represented by President Hamid Karzai. Easier said than done in regions where central government has been absent for decades if not centuries and its current manifestation is dominated by a rival ethnic majority to the Pashtuns of the Arghandab Valley.
While the Taliban managed to offer security, the government of Hamid Karzai is notoriously corrupt. Karzai’s brother, the governor of Kandahar, is widely reported to be a CIA asset involved in the heroin trade, running a private militia and a mediator between the US and the Taliban. Given all this, it is hardly surprising that ordinary Afghans regard the Karzai regime as a NATO puppet government.
It is this kind of hopelessness over the future that pushed one local in the Kandahar Valley to confidentially tell a reporter that “we don’t have nuclear weapons or metal helmets but we can defend ourselves with our bones. We’ve lost everything aside from our ability to blow ourselves up.”
Confronted with this kind of deeply felt emotion, the young American soldiers who clamp on iPods and lose themselves in Hollywood blockbuster DVDs as soon as their patrols end don’t stand a chance. Aside from learning to press their hand to their hearts (a move so often and clumsily deployed that it appears comical), they do precious little else to immerse themselves in Afghani society.
Now, the American military is opting for a strategy of saturation. Tens of thousands of troops are being poured into this unruly valley from where the Taliban initially emerged. Helicopters and drones blanket the sky. For the first time, American soldiers are living inside the villages they are trying to sway towards their vision of the future. In the Arghandab Valley, I saw Special Forces men in T-shirts and no body armor, working out of an unfortified house on a village main street. One of their activities is to build a controversial local militia, which critics say openly encourages fresh warlordism and is an implicit vote of no confidence in the corrupt central government.
But McChrystal’s new, more culturally sensitive COIN regulations are restricting even the Green Berets. They can no longer go on night raids with the kind of abandon that resulted in over 300 civilians being killed in 2009. “The only time their presence registers on the public chart is when a family emerges, complaining that their men were taken away overnight by Americans,” said an Afghan political analyst who requested that his name be withheld. “Americans stumbling into a village at night poses more risk than gain,” said George Wilson, a former Washington Post military correspondent. “My larger concern is (McChrystal) going back to a pacification strategy I saw fail in Vietnam for lack of troops and trust of the people for their own government.”
Commanders are exhibiting new sensitivity and an emphasis on showing locals proof of guilt as a way of convincing them of their actions. Officers present shuras of village elders with photographic evidence implicating the men they detain as a means of building consensus. In the event of a false imprisonment, detainees are flown back from the detention facility in Bagram and presented to village elders in a bid to underscore that these detentions are not random but part of an underlying process.
Back at the military bases where the Americans cohabit with the Afghan security forces in a final effort to pull them up by their bootstraps ahead of the Americans’ scheduled departure in July 2011, the command rooms are a study in chaos. Busy American desk officers cluster around computers and plasma screens relaying live battlefield feeds from drones hovering five miles up. In a corner, a small desk with a hand-scrawled sign announces the Afghan National Police post. Though usually abandoned, sometimes a couple of lackadaisical Afghans take it—though they only exhibit a twinge of energy when it comes to yielding the tea thermos. “It’s training, it’s forcing them to take responsibility,” the American colonel in charge of the base told me. “But if we don’t do that, then what do we leave behind? We have to build capacity.”
Ultimately, what the Americans lack in large numbers is exactly what British colonialism was relatively successful in achieving: midlevel field officials with strong local knowledge who built up their regional expertise over successive tours of duty and intensive language training. US officials are so lost in the disorienting haze of their own popular culture that they have no time to engage with the country they occupy. Aside from discussing events “outside the wire,” the second most popular topic of conversation is discussing what they will do for R&R (Rest and Recreation) once their tour of duty ends.
Jo Soldier is expected to implement a confusing web of directives without the added frustration of First World regulations being imposed on an emerging system that is Third World at best. Though Afghanistan may have been spared the kind of outlandish Bush administration appointees who sought to impose smoking bans and traffic meters on a Baghdad lacking in electricity or water, some of the instructions filtering down now are equally incongruous. “This isn’t America where the DEA wants to do a drug bust, they call the local precinct and get two officers in 15 minutes,” one frustrated soldier told me. “When we call for the Afghan police, they’re usually hashed out of their brains so we have to go pick them up and escort them to the scene... It’s like nannying children.”
Iason Athanasiadis – journalist based in Istanbul. He covers Turkey, the Middle East and Central Asia. Since 1999, he has lived in Cairo, Damascus, Doha, Sana’a and Tehran.
