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

international security assistance.” That statement seemed logical. Why wouldn’t villagers want the same advantages enjoyed in the capital?
    I paused my reading to squint out a window for my first look at Afghanistan. The descent into Kabul was steep because of concernsabout surface-to-air missiles, and while no passenger aircraft had been shot down in recent history, the pilots were taking no chances. We stayed low over the mountains, close enough to see the texture of the white snowcaps, then swept across a rocky landscape rich with colours: rust, grey, orange, pink, sage green and endless shades of brown. I had pictured Afghanistan as a moonscape of rocks and dust, so it was surprising to see that farmers had carved terraces into the mountain slopes and that trees dotted the crests. Lush fields surrounded the rivers. There was a beautiful moment as we hurtled toward the runway, when I could see an expanse of farmland on the outskirts of Kabul and mountains rising into the hazy distance. I climbed down from the plane feeling confident that my in-flight readings had given me a handle on the story. This was a country recovering from war. Foreigners were helping, but they needed more troops. It was wonderfully simple.
    A soft-spoken young man, the cousin of a colleague’s acquaintance, met me at the airport and took me to the Mustafa Hotel, a busy place in those days before suicide bombs scared off most of the customers. The bartender showed me the tattoo on his neck, a dotted line with the words
Cut Here
, a reference to the videos of beheadings we had all seen on the Internet. He proudly pointed to the bullet holes that decorated his establishment. Kabul seemed like a Wild West outpost from a boy’s imagination, a chaotic town at the edge of the world. A flak jacket was waiting for me at the hotel, and after I tore open the courier package I snapped a photo of myself—looking like a real war correspondent, I thought—standing in a snowdrift of foam packing. I seem excessively clean in that photograph: other journalists had advised me to get scruffy, grow a beard so I could blend in among Afghans, but on that first visit I wasn’t fooling anybody. My translator told me not to worry: foreigners in Kabul didn’t require disguises in those days, andcertainly no flak jackets. It was safe to walk around in jeans and a T-shirt.
    Not that the city was entirely calm. The next day, I visited the headquarters of the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC), which had responsibility for the most controversial part of the upcoming vote: deciding which candidates to disqualify because they refused to give up their private armies. This was a difficult task, because many of the candidates were notoriously violent characters, and the United Nations established the ECC only four months before voting day. The staff looked at thousands of complaints and disqualified a small number of low-profile candidates, but didn’t touch the big players. The head of the commission, a veteran United Nations consultant named Grant Kippen, cheerfully admitted that he didn’t have enough resources, but said the electoral process was going ahead smoothly under the circumstances. He invited me into his courtyard for a lunch of rice, chicken and diet soda. Relaxing under parasols beside flowering bushes, it was easy to think that this white-haired diplomat had the situation under control. Mr. Kippen, a dignified man in a pressed shirt and dress pants, described the election as part of the broader effort to make the Kabul government the only legitimate authority in the country. Yes, he said, many of the candidates stood accused of horrible crimes—election posters and billboards advertised newly minted politicians who had killed hundreds of people in civil wars—but the international community seemed ready to accept these militia leaders into government in hopes of disarming them and making them part of the system. Afghanistan was making a transition from