Alex Strick van Linschoten - a war reporter on the road

Dear All,

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Alex

This weekend as part of the extended Eid festivities I decided to go on a trip.  With some friends and a warm patu, we drove all the way down to the south of Dand district, to the point where the flat plains and cultivatable land meets the desert.  You can see where I went on this map:

We arrived early in the afternoon, when people hadn’t begun to arrive.  It was just us, the desert, and a few camels along the way.  In Ghorabad, we visited the shrine of Hajji Latif, known in the west as ‘the lion of kandahar’, but who was also ‘king’ of the so-called paylouch, a secretive Kandahari group who valued honour above all and didn’t take insults lightly.  Gilles Dorronsoro describes:

“[The Paylouch] (the shoeless ones) … [were] under the leadership of Abdul Latif, an innkeeper before the war but now [their] leader. […] Their distinguishing signs of membership were a large knife, a yellow robe and distinctive slippers.  The paylouch were obliged to observe a code of honour and solidarity among members. […] They organised dogfights near a ziarat close to the town and smoked quantities of hashish.”

The shrine itself was white, and during the summer you can find thousands lounging in the gardens, swimming in the pools provided inside the shrine compound, or just enjoying the sun and picnicking with friends.

Back out in the desert, people started to arrive as word had spread that some musicians had come to perform at Ibrahim Khalifa Baba, the shrine of an old ’saint’.  I sat next to the head of one of Kandahar’s government administrations, who had also come out to the shrine.  He received a call from one of the police checkpoints further north of where we were.

“I have 8 Taliban with weapons in a car who say that they want to come to Ibrahim Khalifa Baba.  What should we do with them?” the policeman asked.  “Let them come!” my friend replied.  “They’re probably just coming to enjoy the music.  Who are we to stop them?”

And so they came.  The reader should note at this point that nobody sitting out there in the desert was worried.  In Kandahar, the Taliban are a fact of life; not necessarily liked, but there nonetheless.  The traditional Pashtun recourse to healthy dollops of pragmatism means that a government official can enjoy live music at a shrine just as much as a Talib can, and in fact they do it both knowing who the other is.  Here you can see all the people gathered around the performers:

In Kandahar there are blurred edges and shifting tectonics almost wherever you go.  The government is apparently fighting against ‘the Taliban’, this amorphous opposition force that everybody seems to have so much trouble defining, but there’s also place for them to enjoy music together.  Or to move further up the chain of command, previous governors of Kandahar have often talked with their Taliban counterparts (’shadow governor’ etc) over the phone on a regular basis.

This lack of boundaries and seeming indiscretion on the part of the government can be held alongside efforts made by journalists to ‘talk to the Taliban’.  The indefatigable Graeme Smith’s Talking to the Taliban report made the point well enough that journalists find it relatively easy to communicate and exchange information with members of ‘the Taliban’, while sometimes government member are less successful.

After the prison break from Kandahar’s Sarpoza jail earlier this year - in which hundreds of prisoners, criminals and Taliban alike, were set free - the government held up its hands in frustration at ‘not being able’ to capture any of the escaped prisoners.  At the same time, journalists were able to speak to tens of the prisoners on phones for stories that they were writing.  One friend of mine was able to put together a lost containing dozens of the names of escapees along with their phone numbers.

This was meant to be a short piece, but I seem to have got swept away.  All I meant to say is that any assumption that puts the Taliban and the government on opposing sides in southern Afghanistan has something wrong with it.

Be sure to check out William Easterly in the New York Review of Books writing about the politicisation and militarisation of aid and Sanjar writing about Kabul.

Oh, and here are the camels…

I wrote this oped with a colleague of mine in the hope it might get some coverage and - in part - help to stop the long march towards tribal militias that are being proposed as a ’solution’ for Afghanistan. Nobody took it, so we thought we’d put it up here:

Special agents from America, Germany and Pakistan are sent to a zoo in Afghanistan to track down some missing rabbits. The western agents start looking around, surveying the field, setting up field offices and establishing contacts. The Pakistani agent goes straight to a zebra.

A few days later, the others still haven’t been able to find a rabbit, so they go over to the Pakistani agent to see how he’s getting along. When they come closer they see him beating the zebra with a big pole, shouting at the top of his lungs: “SAY I’M A RABBIT! SAY I’M A RABBIT!”

This joke was told by a highly respected tribal elder in Kandahar last week at the end of a long and frustrating conversation about American plans to engage the tribes in Afghanistan and their apparent decision to support the (re-)formation of local militias.

It would have been funnier were the situation down here not so critical. Daily NATO bombing throughout the region, occasional suicide attacks within the city, pervasive and unashamed corruption, rising food and fuel prices, and an increasingly brutal campaign of assassinations are just some of the features of everyday life for the average Kandahari.

There is no feeling that the central government in Kabul projects a legitimate source of authority down here either. The reputation of that government – and foreign powers by association – has been muddied over the past 7 years. The early years of US raids and night abductions in Kandahar are still not forgotten; massive and unfiltered corruption has permeated to all levels of the government, often working from top-down and bottom-up at the same time; involvement of these government figures in the drug business goes on at a very high level; the central authorities are too weak to implement their decisions (and are perceived as such), and the parliament functions only as a shadow of itself; there has been no media campaign of any sophistication or that is able to respond with the speed that the Taliban themselves have proved capable; there is a concomitant lack of visible signs of development money – and much vanished in submissions back to western countries anyway; and there has been an effective, sophisticated and prioritized Taliban information and media campaign noting all of the above.

Despite this situation, on Tuesday Afghan parliamentarians emphatically spoke out against President Karzai’s own plan to arm local tribes against the Taliban drawn up by the Tribal Commission. MPs argued that the Afghan army and police force should be strengthened instead.

The authors’ own incidental experience talking to people from all kinds of backgrounds in Kandahar also offers overwhelming evidence that people fear the return of the militias. “If the militia comes, they will do everything,” explained one friend. “They will rape my boys and my wife. There will be no more government. Now we have maybe thirty percent law in the city. With the militia there will be none. It will be the end.”

The Soviets tried funding militias before they left – the bloodletting of the 1990s civil war was the result, with only the Taliban who imposed some order and restraints on the autonomous militia groups. Many of those living in southern Afghanistan remember those years.

So what could this tribal militia plan be useful for, then? If NATO and the US is just looking for an exit strategy – as the Soviets were in the mid-eighties – then militias might not be such a bad idea. If they just want to leave, then the militias could watch their backs. They would offer security in the very short-term, but all our aspirations to be builders of nations would have to be abandoned as the militiamen would pillage the country following the departure of foreign forces.

There is no universal strategy for Afghanistan, least of all one that seems to originate in the sands of Iraq. Kandahar is no Anbar, and the way tribes work in Afghanistan is different, more fractured, and more complex than how we found them in Iraq. To take Kandahar as an example, conflict within tribes is common, elders are being assassinated by the Taliban to leave a weak and ineffective leadership, and in any case the tribal structure was fatally damaged during the 1980s war with the Soviets.

What’s more, there is currently nobody attempting to self-fund these militias in the south. It’s not as if there’s no money, just that discussion has only been sparked because local tribesmen have heard that ‘the foreigners want to fund militias.’ Their interest is in gaining more power.

That the tribes themselves are divided and lack leadership isn’t important for them. That they’re a poor vehicle for taking control of the situation doesn’t seem to be important to those suggesting the plans. What happens, for instance, to the government once they are all rearmed? And why were millions spent on disarmament only to reverse track and change policies because NATO planners lack a sensible way to progress forward.

And this is the most dangerous part. The political strategy was left at the wayside a long time ago, and now we’re so far down the road that all vision and momentum comes from the military establishment. Negotiations with the Taliban, tribal militias and a surge (sic) are all being suggested as possible ways out of Afghanistan. But Afghanistan isn’t Iraq, and these solutions will not help the people of the country. They will only add to the confusion.

All of these problems would be more manageable if coalition forces (and the development/assistance community) took the time to study the situation, to think about options instead of blindly – or worse, knowingly – running with the first suggestion that seems to give some power. Six months spent on tour in Kandahar is never enough to get to know and understand the culture and society of the place in which NATO soldiers are operating. Ignorance is no excuse for rushing to half-baked solutions.

There needs to be better mechanisms for preserving the institutional experience and memory of the military, and wide-ranging and systematic studies of the area under NATO command – particularly in search of information relating to the powerful and shaping experience of the 1980s jihad. Only then should we start making suggestions.

Alex Strick and Felix Kuehn are the co-founders of AfghanWire.com and are the only non-embedded foreign researchers living permanently in Kandahar. They are currently editing the autobiography of a senior Taliban figure, due to be published in spring 2009 by Hurst.

I received this letter from a good Afghan friend of mine recently. As you can read in the short biography below, Orzala was involved for a long time in founding and building an organisation called HAWCA, one of the few local NGOs whose work I have always been genuinely and uniformly impressed by. She wrote these few comments in response to Obama’s election victory:

“I witnessed a historical moment in Washington when I first learnt of Obama’s victory. I joined the crowed of victorious young and old on the streets of America’s capital that night, somehow with confusing feelings. I say confused because I felt so proud to be in America when it happened, but I was unsure whether I should also be happy with what he would do in Afghanistan. I had just – that same day – seen the shocking pictures of women and children injured by a US coalition-forces bombardment in Shah Wali Kot district of Kandahar province. Would Obama be able to stop such atrocities? Would he be able to fight the war against terrorism with the social and economic means to oppose the military means?

“These were the questions in my mind which caused my confusion and made me doubt whether or not to celebrate the moment. I joined the crowd because I saw, for the first time in the history of this land, that an African-American was elected as president; I did so because I had heard him speaking over the past three months about the working class, the middle class and I saw that he was their voice. Such words sounded very unfamiliar to me in the context of a capitalist country, so I thought at least that he is not trying to ‘rescue’ the rich, but that rather he was there also to help the poor and so on. So I joined the crowed. I saw him speaking: “If there is any one out there who still doubts that everything is possible, today is my answer. For those who want to tear this world up, we will defeat you. For those who are looking for peace and security, we will support you…”

“I would like to offer, however, the expectations of the war generation and of all ordinary Afghan people who are neither part of the failed ruling government, nor are they terrorists or Taliban, and I do hope that these unheard voices have a space to be heard.

“The ‘war on terror’ is a key issue in US foreign policy, and Afghanistan is one of the key battlefields for eliminating extremism and terrorism worldwide. Strengthening global security against terrorism must begin with an increased investment in the improvement of Afghan security forces. An increase in military troops worries us – we are concerned that it just means more house raids and more bombing of civilians. This is not a war that can be fought by military means. Today everyone knows who the Taliban were/are and why they’re fighting. This war needs to be fought with a totally different approach.

“We expect your support and investment in our local forces, while sending anti-corruption experts who ensure that the corruption is dealt with in a proper manner. This is essential for alleviating the responsibility from the international forces and will empower Afghans to defend their territory and fight against any kind of crimes on their own. Such a shift in security operations is important because the last seven years of military intervention is evidence for the failure to ensure overall security. Corruption is on the rise, the drug trade is booming and breaking world records, militants and warlords are violating the human rights of our most vulnerable citizens who have no avenues of recourse and still lack of basic social facilities. All this threatens the future of the country.

“The militarization of development aid has jeopardized the work of civilian humanitarian assistance organizations, and as a result, hundreds and thousands of people are deprived of basic health and educational opportunities. A major lesson could be learned from the case of Afghanistan if the old-fashioned prescription of what is ‘good’ for the nation were put aside, and if instead the Afghan people were asked to define what they want and need.

“Civil society, non-military political groups and tribal leaders are instrumental in maintaining support for a strong democratic Afghanistan that will deny terrorists a safe haven. However, such a strategy must and should not be considered ‘negotiations with the Taliban.’ The Taliban do not represent the Afghan communities. Should the US government and international community want to negotiate, it must be with the ones who have created this group – in other words, the intelligence services of Pakistan – because they have a big stake in directing the Taliban movement, not necessarily anyone in Afghanistan.

“Afghanistan presents a tragic example of what cannot be achieved by compromising with and integrating warlords and drug-lords into the governing core of the nation. This much is clear, because at this point, seven years after the fall of the Taliban, the situation still deteriorates. The encouragement of some members of the international community that we should negotiate with those who behead civilians, use women and children as human shields, manipulate young people and brainwash them to become terrorists, cannot be accepted by Afghan people. The real end to the ‘war on terror’ can only be achieved if there is accountability for war and crimes committed during the recent upheavals and when an effective system of justice is established in the country. Only then can we begin to re-establish the infrastructure and make progress in basic economic development. Such investments will improve the Afghan economy and create opportunities for employment.

“In the 21st century, the most important weapon to be given to Afghan people, of whom over 50% are youth, is the pen. More investment in education for a nation with a 71% illiteracy rate will significantly curb generations of prospective terrorist recruits against the West in general, and contribute to a sustainable peace in the region.

“Women in Afghanistan, despite some claims to the contrary, are not liberated. Nor they can be liberated by an outside force. They are under-represented in the leadership and political decision-making processes; and moreover, the debates and discussions about negotiating with extremist groups such as Taliban and Hezb-e Islami are indeed endangering the status of women by limiting their access to education, jobs and political participation. The process of democratization and gender equality requires strengthening grass-roots initiatives working on such issues on the ground. Implying western models in a country where customary law holds sway over 90% of the territory will endanger the status of women further and will limit their full participation in the development and political decision-making.

“I congratulate American women and men for electing a man of dignity, and one who is humble, an inspiring leader of our time and someone who walks to the White House with the idea of CHANGE. What we expect from you is to let the CHANGE for Afghanistan to be lead by Afghans and only support such CHANGE by supporting women and men, children and youth of Afghanistan with more economic development opportunities, more jobs, more education, and not by sending your troops and escalating the war. We need your help in fighting against corruption – the main cause of everything that you read in your newspapers or see on your television screen. Corruption has paved the ground for the re-organization of the Taliban; corruption is what opened the doors for the drug mafia, and indeed the larger global fight in Afghanistan should focus on corruption and ensuring rule of law.

“We deeply respect the sacrifice America has made to end this war, and we also hope that you will consider the daily losses of common civilians – in particular those of women and children – due to the ‘war on terror.’ We hope that we will all look back with pride at this endeavor in which we undertake together to free the world of terrorism and sectarian strife.”

Orzala Ashraf Nemat is currently a Yale World Fellow; she started first her career in helping journalists and foreign aid visitors to refugee communities that she was living in during the mid-1990s as a guide and translator. She is the founder of Humanitarian Assistance for the Women and Children of Afghanistan (HAWCA) and worked there as executive director between 1999 and 2007. Orzala has devoted ten years to establishing and delivering training programs to Afghan women and children in refugee communities in Pakistan and in Afghanistan. Often putting herself directly at risk under the Taliban regime, she launched underground literacy and health education programs for women and girls. Her organization initiated a programme for a Safe House for women and girls at risk which in present-day Afghanistan is a highly risky area of intervention. The organization under her leadership had significant achievements in creating nationwide mechanisms to deal with issues around violence against women. Orzala is increasingly involved in legal reform and advocacy for human rights and gender.

Orzala has been awarded with several fellowships and has a Masters in Development Planning from the University of London. She has also worked with different international organizations working in Afghanistan as a consultant and officer, including Human Rights Watch, Swiss Development Cooperation, UNDP and UNIFEM. She is on the board of directors of the Afghan Women’s Network and other human rights networks in Afghanistan.

NOTE: Alex still can’t access the Frontline blogs in Kandahar so I’m posting this for him.

Photographs from the women’s section of the hospital in Kandahar today. Click the image above to scroll through the pictures. I am writing for the Globe and Mail newspaper in Canada for this story.

In interviews at Mirwais Hospital in Kandahar city, where at least 16 male victims and dozens of female victims were being treated Tuesday night, several villagers described the attack. While Mr. Khan corroborated much of the information witnesses gave during a separate interview, it was not possible to independently verify their account or the numbers of dead and injured they gave.

Witnesses gave conflicting statements about the identity of troops who arrived at the scene after the air attacks, with some saying they saw Canadian soldiers while others said they saw U.S. troops. It was not immediately clear which international forces were responsible for the air strikes. link

Note: I (Frontline blogger) am stepping in for Alex here as he can’t upload photos easily for now. Alex will update as and when he has the time.

Reports started to come in earlier today of a bombing of a wedding party in Kandahar province’s north-western district of Shah Wali Kot. I visited the hospital just now to visit and interview survivors.

Abdul Zahir, 24, is the bride’s brother. He was in Shah Wali Kot yesterday for the wedding when the bombing started. The celebrations for village weddings start early in the day, and it was around 4pm when the guests heard shots fired from a nearby mountain. There was fighting between the Taliban and Canadians near the crossroads in town earlier in the day, but roughly half an hour after that finished, witnesses said, bombing started. Abdul Zahir was not injured.

The bombing, they said, lasted from 4-9pm. Noor Ahmad, Hazrat Sadiq and Mohammad Rafiq all lay on beds in the hospital next to Abdul Zahir. Between 3 and 5 years old, they are the cousins of Abdul Zahir and were injured in the bombing. Of Abdul Zahir’s relatives, 8 people, he said, were killed and 14 injured. The dead in his family included 1 cousin, 2 brothers (called Qahir and Twahir), his grandmother and his uncle’s mother.

The bombing, witnesses said, wasn’t the end of their ordeal. At approximately 10pm, ‘the Americans’ came to their village and bound all their hands with plastic restraints and held them there for questioning. ‘Panjshiri’ interpreters working with the Americans kicked them, they said, and translated what the Americans were saying.

“If you fire one bullet from your village,” they said, “we will destroy your village.” Now I don’t necessarily believe this. In these kinds of events it’s an unfortunate fact that the reality starts to get shaped and distorted almost as soon as they happen.

Rahmatullah, another man present in Wech Baghtu (the village that was bombed), claimed that the translators had robbed them after tying them up. “They took 200 Afghani [about $4] and my mobile phone and all the papers from my pockets,” he said. Rahmatullah’s son Hekmatullah died in the bombing, he said, and his wife was injured.

Due to the sensitive nature of interactions with women in Kandahar, I was unable to visit any of the female victims of the attack. It is especially frustrating in the case of this bombing, since all witnesses said that 95% of the victims were women. Weddings are segregated in the villages in Kandahar, with women in one area, and men in another. It seems that the bombs struck the women’s section of the wedding.

Two villages seem to have been affected by the bombing – Wech Baghtu and Tor Gharak. ‘Americans’ came to take pictures after the bombing apparently, said one witness.

I glimpsed the bride through a crack in the door of a room. She, her brother told us, was also seriously injured.

Hospital intake statistics showed that 16 males had been admitted to the hospital with injuries from the bombing. I’m not sure how many females, because I didn’t make it to that part of the hospital.

As to how many people died, who was at fault, and all this other speculation, it’s too early to know, and in any case I don’t think we’ll ever find out how many people died. Some of the dead will be buried early tomorrow morning, and the details of the story will be hard to prove.

At any rate, the governor is holding a press conference tomorrow, and I’ll be going back to the hospital. More wounded will arrive overnight I think.

The yearly general and regional ‘conferences’ of the Tablighi Jamaat are perhaps the most undercovered big events that go on in Afghanistan. Last year I went to the general meeting in Kabul, a 4-day event that over 10,000 people attended. Not a single report was written, be it foreign media or Afghan media.

Now to my mind a meeting of 10,000 explicitly religious men from all over the country (with higher numbers coming from the south, even) would seem a pretty important event, if only just to hear what these guys are saying.

So when I heard they were meeting in Kandahar yesterday, I thought I’d head out and see how they do things down here. The venue was the Id Gah mosque next to the university. It is well known as ‘the mosque that Mullah Omar built,’ and reputedly not a single brick has been added to it since he left in 2001.

[The founder of the Tablighi Jamaat, Mawlana Mohammad Ilyas Kandhalawi] was a prominent member of the Deobandi movement and throughout Tabligh’s history there has been a degree of association between the two groups, although Tablighi Jamat does not see itself as Deobandi. link

I’m sure you’ll all remember of the frequent analyses of the Taliban that tie their religious world view with that of the Deobandis… But in actual fact, especially for Kandahar, the Taliban don’t get on well with the Tablighis at all.

So the Tablighi Jamaat are an association of the ultra-religious. You could certainly say that religion is their life, to the exclusion of almost everything else. In fact, they seem so busy discussing religious matters and praying that they don’t find time to follow some of their own advice.

A couple of my friends down here explained how nobody in Kandahar took them particularly seriously because they were always preaching on the virtues and obligations of jihad, but that they never could find to actually get out and fight themselves. “They’re too busy preaching,” they said.

They are pretty engaged in what’s known as da’wa, which is sort of a call to persuade people to come over to the right side (whether that’s conversion, or just reforming and becoming a ‘proper muslim’ again). So in Kabul I found myself being introduced to a crowd of a thousand on a loudspeaker system, only to be asked, “since it’s Friday, and since it’s such a holy day, and since it would such a great blessing for us, why don’t you convert to Islam in front of us today. It’d be great!”

One of the other things I found interesting talking to them in Kabul was the extent to which they seemed completely uninterested in politics. And believe me, I spent hours wandering up and down the makeshift tents they’d erected on a barren football field slightly outside town, listening out to any snippets of conversation that might be unrelated to religion. Nothing.

So, lest anyone in Washington read this and get any ’smart ideas’, let me just make the point that these hundreds of thousands of tablighi jamaat scattered around the country are not ‘the third force’, or ‘the solution’ for Afghanistan. If they’re not going to be bothered to fight for the Taliban – and, talking to some of them, you’d be hard pressed to distinguish the two – they’re certainly not going to fight for you.

I find it a bit depressing that I have to add these disclaimers to my posts these days. Tomorrow I’ll dissect an article from the AP on the proposed idea for ‘tribal militias’ and explain why it’s unsuitable for Kandahar. Oh, and you can view some other photos I took on Flickr here. And here’s a photo montage from the murals inside the mosque from when I first visited back in the summer of 2004:

idgahtile.jpg, originally uploaded by alex_strick.

 

Not much has happened in Kandahar since I last wrote – not on a grand scale, anyway. It seems the dead need to line up in the dozens for international media to take note. Today an attack on a USPI convoy killed several, but it will undoubtedly not be deemed newsworthy enough for anything more than a sentence or two, if that. I remember a few months ago 30 USPI guards died in a massive Taliban ambush on the Helmand/Kandahar border, but that story was never covered.

Another attack further up the road in Sanzari blocked the main highway for hours this afternoon, and friends of mine saw a car still on fire, with leaking petrol leaving a trail behind it, being taken back to the airport where international forces are based.

Yesterday, the head of the ministry of disabled and martyrs was gunned down in the morning as he went to work. His bodyguard was also killed and his driver injured in the attack.

I have been meaning to write about Mullah Naqib and the anniversary of his death a few days ago. The government put on a big ceremony – several, in fact, all over town – which I went to with friends. Lots of people showed up, a sort of who’s who of the 1980s jihad in Kandahar, along with the governors of Helmand, Kandahar, and even Asadullah Khaled, the former governor of Kandahar. It was a bit of an endurancy ceremony, though, as 21 people took turns to make speeches. It went on for 4 hours. Here’s a video with some snippets as well as a short shot taken at the lunch following the speeches:

Mullah Naqib was an important figure for Kandahar in many ways, important as a person in his own right, important for security, and important for Arghandab district. So he died a year ago, then Abdul Hakim Jan was killed this February in Afghanistan’s largest ever suicide bomb (largest in terms of casualties). After Abdul Hakim Jan – a character if ever there was one – it was more or less over for Arghandab. He was the last strongman there. But still the Taliban continued, and a couple of months ago they started a campaign of executions and kidnappings in the district. That’s still going on. Now there’s really nobody left.

Which is why – nice as it was – the ceremony was a bit of a damp squib. Yes, Mullah Naqib is gone. But that’s old news. Nobody was stirred to action with all the countless tales of Mullah Naqib’s bravery. Yes, one speaker said that he was a hero. “In times of insecurity, we need heroes,” he said. Not so many in town, I’m afraid. Kandahar is ruled by the dregs of society now, the people who are here just to make money, to rip off NATO in half-finished construction projects, and those who are too far invested in illegal corruption scams to leave now.

But let me explain the title of this post. I was talking about negotiations with a friend of mine from down here:

Southern Afghanistan is like a football match. The Taliban are 4 goals up, and NATO is clearly being dominated on the field. Thunder clouds appear on the horizon and it starts to rain. So the NATO players run over to the Taliban and ask, “let’s call it a draw, ok? It’s started to rain.” But the Taliban don’t care. They’re ahead and they don’t mind a bit of rain. This is what the negotiations are like.

And in case all of this is too serious for you, here’s a video of me getting my hair cut in town the other day:

In case you were wondering what’s happening outside the city in the districts, here’s a story and a half.

Ghorak district is north-west of the city, and not especially important in itself. Off the top of my head, it was the first district that the Soviets abandoned during the 1980s when they started their slow wind-down and withdrawal to the city. Nowadays its only value is its use and value as a transport hub for the Taliban.

Ghorak is relatively straightforward tribally speaking. It’s somewhere between 25 and 50% Popolzai (the same tribe as President Karzai), and two other big tribes are the Alikozai and Eshaqzai (along with dribs and drabs of others). There are maybe around 8000 people living there in just over 100 separate villages, with apparently only one teacher to cater for all of them. And there are no schools in the district – just 9 ‘inactive’ schools. There are no hospitals, no health clinics, and no doctors. There is no mobile phone coverage in the district either (although I imagine that will change in the next year).

It’s also not covered by the National Solidarity Programme (the NSP) which is often touted as evidence for development going on around the country (although the reality is a lot less clear). There are supposedly just under 100 Afghan policemen stationed there, but actually there are probably only about 30 present in the district, and even then they’re only in the district centre defending the building. There is no ANA (Afghan National Army) base, and the Canadian soldiers who were stationed there left some 8 or 9 months ago.

All in all, Ghorak is pretty far away from the city, and everything that the city might be seen to represent.

It also happens to be the only way to cross from Helmand (Sangin) into Uruzgan (Deh Rawud) province. It’s an important district in terms of drug traffic being transported from one place to another. The photo above is of US soldiers from the 82nd Airborne heading out for a patrol into the section of Ghorak valley that juts into Helmand province.

I was speaking to one of the big tribal elders of Ghorak in the middle of August about the jihad in the 1980s, but he kept coming back to the attack on his family home and fort a few days before. The Taliban had killed 3 of his relatives and another 3 were wounded. I saw one of the survivors that night – a bullet had entered in his neck and exited through one of his cheeks. This attack, the elder told me, was part of a campaign to force all the big tribal families and landowners (often the same thing) to leave the area. Of course in defending their land and tribal ’space’ many of his family were at the same time being used by the government as ‘police chief’, ‘district chief’ and so on.

Then a few weeks later I went to see a group of policemen who had just arrived that evening from Ghorak desperately seeking help for their fellow defenders of Ghorak district centre. Their guns and RPGs lay haphazardly spread around the room as if they’d just arrived or were about to head out that moment. There were policemen from all over the country sitting in that room – in the photo below you can see some of the guys from Herat, as well as the deputy police commander – and before even speaking to them you could tell that they’d been through a lot. Their eyes were red and a little bloodshot, their faces somewhat sallow and some of the younger ones fell asleep as they sat there.

Just over 8 or 9 months ago, the Canadians and the ANA who were stationed in Ghorak left the district. They handed control over to the ANP (Afghan National Police), of which there were around 120 men. Each had an AK-47 for himself, and they also had 4 PKs, 4 RPGs and 1 mortar (that apparently didn’t work properly). They had some ammunition, but once the fighting started they soon ran out. Their commander had to travel to Kandahar City personally to petition for more supplies for his men at one point.

Assigned to protect the district centre, these 120 policemen were marooned there for six months (“a nightmare”) under siege from the Taliban. There were four major battles, but the most recent one took place just a few days before I spoke with them. The fighting was characterised by them as “fierce”, and they lost 2 soldiers there in the 12-hour engagement. One of those two killed was the brother of the deputy commander, Fateh Mohammad, aged 32 (pictured wearing the black turban in the photo above). They had no support during this time from the government or from the Canadians, were resupplied no ammunition, and in fact their commander had to go to Kandahar City and personally knock on some doors to get some more bullets for his men.

And don’t think that ‘going to the city’ is like travelling from Windsor to London. All the roads leading from the district centre to anywhere else are controlled by the Taliban, as is the land surrounding those roads. At some point during the six-month siege (which you won’t have read about anywhere, by the way) things got so desperate that they decided to send men out of the district centre to summon help. Four left on foot but only two made it back alive. It took them 14 hours to walk to the nearest ‘safe’ road, and that journey took them up and down through mountains and valleys. It was, I was told, “easy to get lost in the mountains.”

They said that they’d left 25 policemen back at the district centre, but that they hoped to persuade the government to open up a real road of some sort to them at the district centre in Ghorak. “If this doesn’t happen, the place will fall any day now…” they said. The lack of any connection to the world outside their district centre building was even killing people. There were no doctors in the district and their inability to transport the injured to where they can be treated meant that policemen were dying of relatively simple wounds. Fateh Mohammad’s cousin was hit by shrapnel from a grenade (or a mortar, depending on who’s telling the story) on his ankle. A relatively minor injury, but he lost so much blood through the wound and through lack of medical supplies that he died after a day.

They had requested air support six times during their time under siege, but no bomb was ever dropped. When they passed on the GPS data to NATO in the midst of battle, they counted on getting that support. Instead – in what they assume is hesitation borne out of a desire to avoid civilian casualties – planes simply flew past but never actually engaged the Taliban.

As I left to go home they drew my attention to one of the cars standing in the yard. One day they heard that the Taliban were preparing an ambush so some of the policemen went out to challenge them before something happened. A fight ensued, and – don’t ask me how – by the time both sides had disengaged, the Taliban had seized the two police cars, and the police had taken two of the Taliban’s vehicles. These were the vehicles that the policemen had used to get into Kandahar city on the day I met with them.

This afternoon I get a call from an old friend. “Do you want to come to the hospital?” he says. I hold my breath. Every time he asks me this question it means something has gone wrong somewhere; I worry about the friends I have here, that they will get targeted or caught up in something.

The Chinese Hospital in Kandahar city is the mirror of shadows that sometimes allows you a glimpse into what’s going on in the districts. If there was a battle in Panjwayi, the wounded end up there. If there’s a suicide bomb in town, the bodies get taken there to the morgue.

So I spent this afternoon with Hajji Abdul Zahir and several of his sons, in fact relatives of the tribal elder I met in August. You can sort of see it in the video, but he was injured in his knee, waist, and one of his thumbs had to be amputated - none of which seemed to be causing him any pain, I might add. I did some video recording during the interview with my Flip Camera but you’ll have to excuse the fact that none of this is subtitled. It would take too long, and in any case the clip isn’t long enough for what he said to be especially interesting. I’d rather have this post up sooner than in a week when the story has taken on another dimension again. And apologies for the noise in the background; we were about 15 people crammed into a very small room and everyone was having their own discussion.

600 Taliban versus 8 men from the same family defending their house. Those were the odds Hajji Abdul Zahir and his sons faced, he told us this afternoon. They had been receiving guests for the post-Ramazan ‘Eid celebrations at their homes, as is the tradition. Not all the visitors were necessarily ‘good guys’, and they went back and told the Taliban that there were few people in the house and presumably that it wouldn’t be too difficult to mount an attack.

So a week ago the government called them on their satellite phone to warn them that there were numbers of Taliban moving in their direction and that they should expect an attack. It didn’t happen that evening, but the next morning after the dawn prayer Hajji Abdul Zahir was on the roof and he saw the Taliban setting up their weapons all around. He shouted to his sons (some of whom were in a nearby house) to come and defend the main compound.

A pair of shots rang out from the Taliban side, but nobody was hurt. Then Abdul Zahir’s sons mounted their own attack, firing some mortars against the Taliban hiding in nearby pomegranate orchards. The Taliban responded with their own volley of mortars and the battle had started. They didn’t stop fighting until many hours later at around 11pm.

The forty surrounding houses were occupied by the Taliban, and Hajji Abdul Zahir and his sons had to defend their compound. The Taliban came up close and started firing mortars and other smaller shells (from a weapon called Agayaz in Pashtu) directly into the compound. When we spoke with the sons they were still wondering how the Taliban managed to get hold of these weapons. The last time they’d seen them was in Canadian hands while they were working together with the police forces in the area. Maybe that’s how they ended up with the Taliban, they mused.

At any rate, it was these mortars (large and small) which caused most of the injuries. Five of Hajji Abdul Zahir’s nine sons were injured on that day – one had been killed the previous year by the Taliban, also defending Ghorak – as well as two of the women from his family. Some of his grandsons were injured, too.

The only fatality of the battle was a policeman who died stepping on a landmine when leaving the house during the battle. The 10-year old son of Hajji Abdul Zahir was also injured – he was one of those fighting to defend against the Taliban, injured on his back from grenade shrapnel. He kept quiet about his injuries until they reached Kandahar City because he was a tough guy (essentially).

During the initial hour of the attack members of Hajji Abdul Zahir’s family made frantic calls to friends in Kandahar to rally support and to alert the Canadians at the PRT (who had left a business card ‘in case you have problems in the future’). The calls they made on their satellite phone finally appeared to have paid off when they heard the sound of helicopters and jets in the skies above.

At the same time, they could hear the Taliban shouting amongst themselves to ‘bring the landmines’, with which they wanted to blow up the outer walls to the compound and thus gain entrance. In fact they managed to do this, but the jets appeared roughly at the same time and made several passes close to the area from which a massive smoke plume was now rising.

Down on the ground, neither the Taliban nor Abdul Zahir and his sons could see anything. “It was all smoke and dust, and I think we were all confused,” he said. And nothing happened with the planes either, he was quick to point out. “They hovered around and about for a few hours,” he said, “but not a single bullet was fired.”

Trying to call the PRT over the phone to get them to engage the Taliban wasn’t easy either. “Whenever we made a call, the Taliban could hear our voices and then they knew where we were. A few seconds later several mortars would get launched in our direction,” he said. They gave up trying after a few attempts.

Early the next morning ‘Americans’ came with helicopters and evacuated Hajji Abdul Zahir, all his sons and all the women from the house. The only possession Hajji Abdul Zahir managed to save from his home was a spare pare of clothes, he said. Everything else was lost. He presumes that the Taliban have blown his house up with the landmines that they were using on the outer walls.

***

So there are three roads leading from the district centre in Ghorak – one going to Sangin in Helmand province, one going to Garmabak/Maiwand and the other going to Khakrez district. All of these are in the hands of the Taliban, the numerous survivors of last week’s battle who were gathered in the cramped hospital room told us. “Now that we have left, the district is 100% controlled by the Taliban.”

Apart from the district centre, that is. The Taliban apparently moved on from Hajji Abdul Zahir’s house and turned on the district centre building, although as I write this there hasn’t been active combat between the police and Taliban for a couple of days.

So why is this an interesting story? Why did I write all this detail. Well firstly, the actual detail of the story is far more complicated than actually related here, whether that’s when you consider the relationships between the police, the families living in the area, and the Taliban fighting on the other side. Then when you look at the tribal issue the stew thickens. Why, we had asked the policemen who came to Kandahar city a month ago, why are you fighting against the Taliban? Why don’t you just give up? (Or why aren’t you simply fighting with the Taliban?)

“We’re Popolzai,” the ones originally from Ghorak answered. The Taliban – and this is a generalisation, because there are in fact many Popolzai Taliban – see the Popolzai tribe as being tainted by Karzai, and as such they “have no choice” but to fight with the government. Even if they didn’t want to do so, they couldn’t just live in their houses oblivious to things going on around them – the Taliban force them to fight.

And then there’s the whole issue of district centres. As everyone acknowledged, Ghorak is only one of several districts currently controlled by the Taliban that only have a government presence in the district centre. Others include: Maiwand to the west, Miya Nisheen to the north, Shah Wali Kot to the north, and Khakrez just to the east of Ghorak. “You can’t go even 1 kilometre outside the district centre in any of those districts,” the deputy commander of Ghorak told us. Now of course this isn’t news to anyone who has been following events in Kandahar.

But what does it actually mean to continue holding these district centres? Of the 120 policemen entrusted with Ghorak when the Canadians and ANA left 8 months ago only around 25 are still alive. Can we say that their deaths have served some greater purpose? Can we say look Hajji Abdul Zahir straight in the eyes and say that we really care what goes on in Ghorak? Or are we holding the district centre just for show, so when the BBC or CNN produces a map of government control we can say that ‘most of Kandahar is being policed by the government’, or something to that effect. Then again, what message would it send to abandon all these district outposts altogether?

All hard questions, I think, but if we’re going to continue to claim the moral high ground in the mission that foreign troops are carrying out in places like Kandahar, we need to thoroughly reconsider our entire presence there. Are the Taliban an inevitable force? And to what extent are foreign troops the Taliban’s raison d’etre?

I ended my last post saying that I hope to write on the small group of ideas being floated around western policy circles these days: negotiations, ‘sons of Afghanistan’ or Afghan Awakening Councils, and the ‘surge’. Will get round to it soon, I promise…

[Thanks to Baghdad Brian of Alive in Baghdad for helping upload the site – unbelievably circuitous process…]

Amniat kharab day. Hokumat kharab day. Taliban kharab day. Security is messed up. The government’s messed up. The Taliban are messed up.

I was trying to have a conversation with old colleague of mine from Kabul on the plane down to Kandahar. He’s originally from there, of course, but now lived and worked in the capital. Usually I like to take a few days reacclimatizing myself to the country but this time I couldn’t be sure of a flight down south for a few days so took the first ticket available.

So what had changed in the two weeks I’d been gone? Well nothing, apparently, judging from my friend’s response. Malalai Kakar, Kandahar’s female police officer-cum-international star courtesy of an al-Jazeera Witness documentary on her life, had been gunned down near her house. Her son is lying in hospital in a coma.

Eid came and went, almost without my noticing it. People went home to family living in Quetta or Karachi. A friend of mine came back this morning from Quetta telling stories of gun battles between Baluch and Punjabis on the streets outside his house. “I wanted just to get away from the bloodshed of Kandahar for a few days, but it followed me back,” he said.

If there’s one thing two weeks abroad (California and London) does it gives a certain perspective on the things you quickly accept as ‘normal’ when living in Kandahar. If someone would unholster his pistol and place it on the table at Café Nero in London I think they’d have a problem or two, but in Kandahar I don’t blink twice when interviewees or friends come in off the street and lay their AK-47 or even once an RPG next to the wall.

Otherwise the city’s pretty quiet. It’s a good seven or eight degrees hotter than it was before I left, which is a little strange, but it makes a change from Kabul where it gets a little nippy in the evenings.

Having a little more exposure to English-language media over the past week I’m a little concerned how ‘Awakening Councils’ or ‘Sons of Afghanistan’ are on everyone’s lips, from Governor Palin in the VP debate a few days ago, to all colours of columnists. Will try to write something on that in the next few days.