The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan Read Free

of the situation, containing only somewhat more educated guesses. Nor can you get much of a picture by thinking about these things on the level of theory, or metaphors—dragons, hornets or surgeons. When friends and family asked about Afghanistan, I often found myself with my mouth open, not making a sound, caught on the edge of speech.
    My usual excuse is that I’m not qualified to talk about the whole country, only the troubled south. I visited southern Afghanistan seventeen times from 2005 to 2011, working independently of the international forces and also spending time with US, Canadian, British and Dutch troops. None of that experience gives me the right tosummarize the broader situation in the country, but the southern region does serve as a useful case study. It’s where the war became most intense; it’s where policymakers focused much of their attention; it’s where the policy most obviously went wrong. The world needs to understand what happened and draw lessons from this debacle—and the only way of reaching those conclusions is by visceral immersion. You must get down in the dust and shit. I spent a lot of days smelling the death, getting sunburns. The charred flesh of suicide bombers got stuck in the treads of my shoes. I was shot at, bombed, rocketed, mortared, chased through narrow streets. I took photographs, recorded audio, filled a suitcase with leather-bound notebooks. I filed the material into folders on my computer, and later took a leave of absence from my job so I could sit quietly and let the echoes settle. I tried to pick out scenes and bits of dialogue that might help you understand. This was a healthy process. The nightmares faded, and I stopped obsessing about the tactical properties of every room. Eventually I could attend a fireworks show without feeling nauseous. My anxiety eased, not only because I spent time away from the battlefields but also because this writing project left me feeling less burdened. I could stop giving angry speeches about the war as I distilled my experience into these pages.
    Looking back on my time in Kandahar, trying to make sense of it, I often think about a meandering conversation I had while researching the holiest object in the south: the Prophet’s Cloak. Outsiders often wondered why the insurgents fought so fiercely for Kandahar, why a ramshackle city of maybe half a million people was considered the spiritual heart of the country. Part of the answer is locked in a silver box, itself nested inside two wooden chests, hidden from public view inside a sealed shrine in the middle of the city. It’s a cloak, reputedly presented by God to the Prophet Mohammed. The founder of Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Durrani, took the cloak during one of his sweeps through Central Asia and brought it back to what was then his capital city, Kandahar, in 1768.
    The cloak played a central role in Afghanistan’s history, and continues to hold symbolic power, but getting a clear description of the cloth itself proved incredibly hard. Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, is among the few politicians who has removed the cloak from its box, brandishing the cloth in front of his followers in 1996, but few people involved in that ceremony remained in Kandahar, or wanted to talk about it. The only person I could find who had touched the cloak was Mullah Masood Akhundzada, who inherited the duty of protecting the sacred object from a line of ancestors who have guarded the ornate blue-tiled shrine for more than two centuries. Known officially as Keeper of the Cloak, the solemn young man was only in his thirties but already had grey in his beard. I asked him: How big is the cloak? “Large,” he said. Bigger than your outstretched arms? “It changes shape.” He claimed that the cloak was woven from the hair of the “Camels of Paradise,” and did not have any seams. “It’s hard to describe,” he said. “It’s very soft, like silk. You cannot say what colour it is, because many people