[R-G] The Surge That Failed: Afghanistan under the Bombs

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174986/anand_gopal_who_rules_afghanistan_

     The Surge That Failed
     Afghanistan under the Bombs
     By Anand Gopal

     A bit past midnight on a balmy night in late August, Hedayatullah  
awoke to a deafening blast. He stumbled out of bed and heard angry  
voices drawing closer. Suddenly, his bedroom doors banged open and  
dozens of silhouetted figures burst in, some shouting in a strange  
language.

     The intruders blindfolded Hedayatullah and, screaming with fury,  
forced him to the ground. An Afghan voice told him not to move or  
speak, or he would be killed. He listened for sounds from the next  
room, where his brother Noorullah slept with his family. He could hear  
his nephew, eight months old, crying hysterically. Then came the sound  
of an automatic rifle, after which his nephew fell silent.

     The rest of the family -- 18 people in all, including aunts,  
uncles, and cousins -- was herded outside into the darkness. The  
Afghan voice explained to Hedayatullah's terrified mother, "We are the  
Afghan National Army, here to accompany the American military. The  
Americans have killed one of your sons and his two children. They also  
shot his wife and they're taking her to the hospital."

     "Why?" Hedayatullah's mother stammered.

     "There is no why," the soldier replied. When she heard this, she  
started screaming, slamming her fists into her chest in anguish. The  
Afghan soldiers left her and loaded Hedayatullah and his cousin into  
the back of a military van, after which they drove off with an  
American convoy into the black of night.

     The next day, the Afghan forces released Hedayatullah and his  
cousin, calling the whole raid a mistake. However, Noorullah's wife,  
months pregnant, never came home: She died on the way to the hospital.

     Surging in Afghanistan

     When, decades from now, historians compile the record of this  
Afghan war, they will date the Afghan version of the surge -- the now  
trendy injection of large numbers of troops to resuscitate a flagging  
war effort -- to sometime in early 2007. Then, a growing insurgency  
was causing visible problems for U.S. and NATO forces in certain  
pockets in the southern parts of the country, long a Taliban  
stronghold. In response, military planners dramatically beefed up the  
international presence, raising the number of troops over the  
following 18 months by 20,000, a 45% jump.

     During this period, however, the violence also jumped -- by 50%.  
This shouldn't be surprising. More troops meant more targets for  
Taliban fighters and suicide bombers. In response, the international  
forces retaliated with massive aerial bombing campaigns and large- 
scale house raids. The number of civilians killed in the process  
skyrocketed. In the fifteen months of this surge, more civilians have  
been killed than in the previous four years combined.

     During the same period, the country descended into a state of  
utter dereliction -- no jobs, very little reconstruction, and ever  
less security. In turn, the rising civilian death toll and the  
decaying economy proved a profitable recipe for the Taliban, who  
recruited significant numbers of new fighters. They also won the  
sympathy of Afghans who saw them as the lesser of two evils. Once  
confined to the deep Afghan south, today the insurgents operate openly  
right at the doorstep of Kabul, the capital.

     This last surge, little noted by the media, failed miserably, but  
Washington is now planning another one, even as Afghanistan slips  
away. More boots on the ground, though, will do little to address the  
real causes of this country's unfolding tragedy.

     Revenge and the Taliban

     One day, as Zubair was walking home, he noticed that the carpet  
factory near his house in the southern province of Ghazni was silent.  
That's strange, he thought, because he could usually hear the din of  
spinning looms as he approached. As he rounded the corner, he saw a  
crowd of people, villagers and factory workers, gathered around his  
destroyed house. An American bomb had flattened it into a pancake of  
cement blocks and pulverized bricks. He ran toward the scene. It was  
only when he shoved his way through the crowd and up to the wreckage  
that he actually saw it -- his mother's severed head lying amid  
mangled furniture.

     He didn't scream. Instead, the sight induced a sort of catatonia;  
he picked up the head, cradled it in his arms, and started walking  
aimlessly. He carried on like this for days, until tribal elders pried  
the head from his hands and convinced him to deal with his loss more  
constructively. He decided he would get revenge by becoming a suicide  
bomber and inflicting a loss on some American family as painful as the  
one he had just suffered.

     When one decides to become a suicide bomber, it is pretty easy to  
find the Taliban. In Zubair's case he just asked a relative to direct  
him to the nearest Talib; every village in the country's south and  
east has at least a few. He found them and he trained -- yes, suicide  
bombing requires training -- for some time and then he was fitted with  
the latest model suicide vest. One morning, he made his way, as  
directed, towards an office building where Americans advisors were  
training their Afghan counterparts, but before he could detonate his  
vest, a pair of sharp-eyed intelligence officers spotted him and  
wrestled him to the ground. Zubair now spends his days in an Afghan  
prison.

     A poll of 42 Taliban fighters by the Canadian Globe and Mail  
newspaper earlier this year revealed that 12 had seen family members  
killed in air strikes, and six joined the insurgency after such  
attacks. Far more who don't join offer their support.

     Under the Bombs

     In the muddied outskirts of Kabul, an impromptu neighborhood has  
been sprouting, full of civilians fleeing the regular Allied aerial  
bombardments in the Afghan countryside. Sherafadeen Sadozay, a poor  
farmer from the south, spoke for many there when he told me that he  
had once had no opinion of the United States. Then, one day, a payload  
from an American sortie split his house in two, eviscerating his wife  
and three children. Now, he says, he'd rather have the Taliban back in  
power than nervously eye the skies every day.

     Even when the bombs don't fall, it's quite dangerous to be an  
Afghan. Journalist Jawed Ahmad was on assignment for Canadian  
Television in the southern city of Kandahar when American troops  
stopped him. In his possession, they found contact numbers to the cell  
phones of various Taliban fighters -- something every good journalist  
in the country has -- and threw him into prison, not to be heard from  
for almost a year. During interrogation, Ahmad says that American  
jailors kicked him, smashed his head into a table, and at one point  
prevented him from sleeping for nine days. They kept him standing on a  
snowy runway for six hours without shoes. Twice he fainted and twice  
the soldiers forced him to stand up again. After 11 months of  
detention, military authorities gave him a letter stating that he was  
not a threat to the U.S. and released him.

     Starving in Kabul

     If you're walking his street, there isn't a single day when you  
won't see Zayainullah. For as long as he can remember, the 11 year-old  
has perched on the sidewalk at one of Kabul's busiest intersections.  
Zayainullah has only one arm; the Taliban blew the other one away when  
he was a child. He uses this arm to beg for handouts, quietly in the  
mornings, more desperately as the day goes on. Both his parents are  
dead so he lives with his aunt, a widow. Given the mores of modern-day  
Afghanistan, she can't work because a woman needs a man's sanction to  
leave the house. So she puts young Zayainullah on the street as her  
sole breadwinner. If he comes home empty-handed she beats him,  
sometimes until he can no longer move.

     He sits there, shirtless, with a heaving, rounded belly --  
distended from severe malnutrition -- as scores of other beggars and  
pedestrians stream by him. No one really notices him though, because  
poverty has become endemic in this country.

     Afghanistan is now one of the poorest countries on the planet. It  
takes its place among desperate, destitute nations like Burkina Faso  
and Somalia whenever any international organization bothers to  
measure. The official unemployment rate, last calculated in 2005, was  
40% percent. According to recent estimates, it may today reach as high  
as 80% in some parts of the country.

     Approximately 45% of the population is now unable to purchase  
enough food to guarantee bare minimum health levels, according to the  
Brookings Institution. This winter, Afghan officials claim that hunger  
may kill up to 80% of the population in some northern provinces caught  
in a vicious drought. Reports are emerging of parents selling their  
children simply to make ends meet. In one district of the southern  
province of Ghazni last spring things got so bad that villagers  
started eating grass. Locals say that after a harsh winter and almost  
no food, they had no choice.

     Kabul itself lies in tatters. Roads have gone unpaved since 2001.  
Massive craters from decades of war blot the capital city. Poor  
Afghans live in crumbling warrens with no electricity and often  
without safe drinking water. Kabul, a city designed for about 800,000  
people, now holds more than four million, mostly squeezed into  
informal settlements and squatters' shacks.

     Washington spends about $100 million a day on this war -- close  
to $36 billion a year -- but only five cents of every dollar actually  
goes towards aid. From this paltry sum, the Agency Coordinating Body  
for Afghan Relief found that "a staggering 40 percent has returned to  
donor countries in corporate profits and salaries." The economy is so  
underdeveloped that opium production accounts for more than half of  
the country's gross domestic product.

     What little money does go for reconstruction is handed over to  
U.S. multinationals who then subcontract out to Afghan partners and  
cut corners every step of the way. As a result, the U.N. ranks the  
country as the fifth least-developed in the world -- a one-position  
drop from 2004.

     The government and coalition forces may not bring jobs to  
Afghanistan, but the Taliban does. The insurgents pay for fighters --  
in some cases, up to $200 a month, a windfall in a country where 42%  
of the population earns less than $14 a month. When a textile factory  
in Kandahar laid off 2,000 workers in September, most of them joined  
the Taliban. And that district in Ghazni where locals were reduced to  
eating grass? It is now a Taliban stronghold.

     Biking in Kabul

     A spate of suicide bombings and high-profile attacks in recent  
years have turned Kabul into a sort of garrison state, with roadblocks  
and checkpoints clogging many of the city's main arteries. The traffic  
is, at times, unbearable, so I bought a new motorbike, an Iranian  
import that can adroitly weave through traffic. I was puttering along  
one day recently when a police commander stopped me.

     "That's a nice bike," he said.

     "Thank you," I replied.

     "Is it new?"

     "Yes."

     "I'd like to have it. Get off."

     I stared at him in disbelief, not quite grasping at first that he  
was deadly serious. Then I began threatening him, saying I'd call a  
certain influential friend if he laid a finger on the bike. That  
finally hit home and he stepped back, waving me on.

     Journalists may have influential friends, but ordinary Afghans  
are usually not so lucky. Locals tend to fear the neighborhood police  
as much as the many criminals who prowl Kabul's streets. The  
notoriously corrupt police force is just one face of a government that  
much of the population has come to loathe.

     Police are known to rob passengers at checkpoints. Many of the  
country's leading members of parliament and cabinet officials sport  
long, bloody records of human rights abuses. Rapists and serious  
criminals regularly bribe their way out of prison. Warlords and  
militia commanders run wild in the north, regularly raping young girls  
and snatching the land of villagers with impunity. Earlier this year  
newspapers revealed that President Hamid Karzai pardoned a pair of  
such militiamen accused of bayonet-raping a young woman.

     What Karzai does hardly matters, though. After all, his  
government barely functions. Most of the country is carved up into  
fiefdoms run by small-time commanders. A U.S. intelligence report in  
the spring of 2008 estimated that the central government then  
controlled just 30% of the country, and many say even that is now an  
optimistic assessment.

     Drive a few miles outside Kabul and the roads are controlled by  
bandits, off-duty cops, or anyone else with a gun and an eye for a  
quick buck. The Karzai government's popularity has plummeted to such  
levels that, believe it or not, many Afghans in Kabul wax nostalgic  
for the days of Dr. Mohammad Najibullah, the country's last Communist  
dictator. "That government was cruel and indifferent, but at least  
they gave us something," an Afghan friend typically told me. The  
Karzai government provides almost no social services, expending all  
its efforts just trying to keep itself together.

     Shadow Government

     Power abhors a vacuum, and so, in those areas where central  
government rule has crumbled, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan --  
the Taliban government -- is rising in its place. In Wardak, a  
province bordering Kabul Province, the Taliban has a stable foothold,  
complete with a shadow government of mayors and police chiefs. In  
Logar, another of Kabul's neighboring provinces, some "government- 
controlled" areas consist of the home of the district head, the NATO  
installation down the road -- and nothing else.

     With the rise of the Taliban in these areas comes their notorious  
brand of justice. Shadow courts now dispense Taliban-style draconian  
judgments and punishments in many districts and ever more locals are  
turning to them to settle disputes, either out of fear or because they  
are far more efficient than the corrupt government courts. The Taliban  
recently chopped off the ears of a schoolteacher in Zabul province for  
working for the government. They gunned down a popular drummer in  
Ghazni simply for playing music in public. Even the infamous public  
executions are back. The Taliban recently invited journalists to watch  
the execution of a pair of women on prostitution charges.

     The Taliban are as uninterested in social services and human  
rights as the Karzai government or the international forces, but they  
know how to turn a world of poverty, insecurity, and death from laser- 
guided missiles to their advantage. This is how the Islamic Emirate  
spreads, like so many weeds at first, poking out of areas where the  
government has failed. As the central government spins towards  
irrelevancy, the whole south and east of Afghanistan is becoming a  
thicket of Taliban before our very eyes.

     A War to be Lost

     One night the Taliban raided a police check post near my Kabul  
home, killing three policemen. The following morning, when a police  
contingent arrived on the scene to investigate, a bomb that the rebels  
had cleverly hidden at the site exploded and killed two more of them.  
I arrived shortly afterwards to find pieces of charred flesh littering  
the ground and a mangled, burnt out police van sitting overturned on a  
pile of rubble.

     The raid didn't make much news at the time, but it was actually  
the deepest the insurgents had penetrated the capital since they were  
overthrown seven years ago. They have dispatched many individual  
suicide bombers into the capital and rocketed it as well from time to  
time, but never had they marched in as an attacking force on foot.  
When I told an Afghan colleague that I couldn't believe the Taliban  
were coming into Kabul this way, he responded: "Coming? They've been  
here. They were just waiting for the government and the U.S. to fail."

     Failure is a notion now preoccupying the Western leadership of  
this war, which is why they are scrambling for yet another "surge"  
solution.

     Of course, the Taliban won't be capturing Kabul anytime soon; the  
international forces are much too powerful to topple militarily. But  
the Americans can't defeat the Taliban either; the guerrillas are too  
deeply rooted in a country scarred by no jobs, no security, and no  
hope. The result is a war of attrition, with the Americans planning to  
pour yet more fuel on the flames by throwing in more soldiers next year.

     This is a war to be won by constructing roads, creating jobs,  
cleaning up the government, and giving Afghans something they've had  
preciously little of in the last 30 years: hope. However, hope is  
fading fast here, and that's a fact Washington can ill afford to  
ignore; for once the Afghans lose all hope, the Americans will have  
lost this war.

     Anand Gopal writes frequently about Afghanistan, Pakistan, and  
the "War on Terror." He is a correspondent for the Christian Science  
Monitor, based in Afghanistan. For more of his information and  
dispatches from the region, visit anandgopal.com.