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

see different colours.”
    By the time of my conversation with the Keeper of the Cloak, I’d spent enough years in Kandahar to feel that his answers were appropriate for such an inscrutable part of the world. Of course the holiest object in this land would be described to an outsider as shapeless, seamless and colourless. It was something that must be witnessed first-hand, like so much of Kandahar. The same thing applies to the war itself. I have no clear policy recommendations, no succinct lessons about the conduct of foreign interventions. I have only these memories, shapeless and seamless. It’s something you must see for yourself.

Highway 1 to Kandahar

CHAPTER 1
THE ROAD TO KANDAHAR SEPTEMBER 2005
    A grim lineup waited for the flight to Kabul. The passengers were short, dark men with fake leather jackets and broken noses, and many could have used a shower. I’d never seen such a bedraggled crowd in an airport; the plane itself looked like a survivor, too, as if the aircraft had been roughed up by thugs. My seat cushion slipped from its frame, and something dripped from the air vents. I would later recognize this as typical scenery aboard Ariana, the national airline of Afghanistan. I tried to ignore it, and focus on my reading.
    My editors at
The Globe and Mail
had assigned me to cover the 2005 parliamentary elections, and like many correspondents who drop into the country for quick visits, I clutched a stack of printouts in hopes of cramming the story into my brain. My reading materials from that day reveal the naïveté of the international community in the early years of the war. Nobody wrote much about the Taliban at that point, dismissing them as a broken movement, reduced to small bands of gunmen scattered in the mountains. Instead, my sheaf of reports focused on the foreigners’ optimistic vision of a new Afghanistan. The lead sentence of a
Washington Post
feature declared that “the country is gearing up enthusiastically for a massive exercise in postwar democracy.” A United Nations map showed how millions of refugees were streaming back across the border, returning homeafter decades of civil war. I’d even found a paper titled “Safeguarding Afghanistan’s Audio-Visual Heritage,” in which the Ministry of Information and Culture declared an “urgent” need to scan digital copies of government archives as part of the effort to build a new, efficient, modern bureaucracy in Kabul.
    It’s painful to read those papers now, years later. They capture a moment in history when foreigners and Afghan-born expatriates crowded into Kabul to build a democracy. In those initial years after the United States and its allies expelled the Taliban from the capital in 2001, a dream blossomed. It was the fervent hope that one of the world’s poorest countries, savaged by a generation of war, might flourish with a heavy dose of foreign assistance. Once upon a time in Afghanistan, it wasn’t crazy to say that one of Kabul’s top priorities should be digital recordkeeping.
    At the time, most critics said the international effort should be bigger and tougher. There was a widespread feeling that the Iraq War had distracted the United States, leaving Afghanistan without enough troops to enforce the central government’s rule. Nobody believed that remnants of the former Taliban regime could fill the power vacuum in the countryside; instead, most attention focused on the warlords who had helped US forces defeat the Taliban. “Warlords, militias, and brigands dominate the entire country,” declared the most sharply written paper in my stack of readings, a report by Human Rights Watch. Like many others, the advocacy group claimed that the lawless zones needed to be filled with foreign troops. Under the heading, “Wanted: Peacekeepers,” the report said that villagers would welcome a major deployment of forces in the rural countryside. “Afghans outside Kabul have been clamoring for two years to share in the benefits of