Out of the Mountains (3 page)

This particular project aimed to improve hygiene and efficiency in local livestock markets. In Afghan villages, you often see butcher shops or market stalls with bloody cuts of meat—even whole goats or sheep—hanging in the window. In this valley, the ADT had seen animals slaughtered in the open and then butchered on the bare earth. This traditional practice covered the meat in dirt, attracted flies, and left large standing pools of blood, creating a disease hazard. Community leaders agreed that it wasn't ideal, but they pointed out that lack of water or a suitable slaughterhouse meant that there was no practical alternative.

So, with considerable ingenuity, the ADT designed and helped build a slaughterhouse near the main road, with a rainwater tank and an animal holding pen alongside. The new slaughterhouse took months to construct. It used solar panels made by a local Afghan company to generate electric power for lighting, water heating, and cold storage, and applied techniques to minimize the use of precious water. Working with the PRT and the community, the agriculture team helped secure land for the site, and helped the local butchers' association negotiate an agreement so that butchers in the area could share the slaughterhouse, each using it in turn to slaughter animals under hygienic conditions. A local mullah inspected and certified the facility for compliance with Islamic religious requirements. Today, the district governor, elders, and religious leaders from the local community had come for the formal opening. The building was cool, well lit, and spotlessly clean. Our patrol stopped at the site for almost an hour while the governor made a speech, and the elders responded. It was only a few minutes after leaving the slaughterhouse that we were ambushed as we moved down the valley.

What might these projects tell us about the ambush? Was there a connection? If the ambushers weren't Taliban, who were they?

People near the ambush site lived closer to the district center than to either of these two projects. But other villages, farther up the valley, had gotten significant economic benefits—electric light and the slaughterhouse—from foreign assistance. It's quite possible that people down the valley felt cheated when the other villages got these lucrative projects. People had seen our column heading up the valley earlier in the day, and the ambushers must have known that, with our heavy road-bound gun trucks, we could only come back out along the same route. They may have seized the opportunity while we were up the valley visiting the micro-hydro plant and the slaughterhouse to set up a hasty ambush on the bridge and hit us on the way out. Hastiness in setting up the ambush would explain its poor positioning and the lack of a roadside bomb; if the attack was intended mainly to send us a message rather than kill us, this would also explain its halfhearted nature; and if the attackers were local men rather than members of a full-time Taliban column, this would explain their amateurish technique.

To someone unfamiliar with Afghanistan, ambushing a heavily armed patrol over something as minor as the placement of an aid project might seem like a ridiculous (and highly risky) overreaction, but this wouldn't be the first time that perceived injustice led Afghans to take up arms against foreign aid projects or outside contractors. In one incident a year later in Helmand province, in Afghanistan's southwest, insurgents attacked security guards working for a local contractor, killing twenty-one people. The project involved constructing a road to link the towns of Sangin and Gereshk. In media reporting it emerged that Taliban opposition to the road, which would bring security forces into an area they'd previously dominated, “meshed with opposition from villagers, who were upset that the contractor had not consulted them about building the road or asked what services they needed, nor offered local people jobs on the project.”
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“One of the big problems that the contractors face and one reason they get attacked is because they bring people from other villages as laborers and security guards,” said Haji Abdul Ahad Khan, an elder who on Friday was attending the funeral of one of the slain security guards. “They do not ask our villagers to participate in these projects or hire them to do any of the labor. This makes our people angry,” he said. “And they start projects in our area without consulting the village elders. They start cleaning our canals for us, or building a road for us. I don't want a road, why would you build that? We need a school or a clinic.”
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In other words, both the insurgents and the local population had a common interest in disrupting the road project. In addition to his rather entitled attitude, it's interesting to note that the local elder, Abdul Ahad Khan, implies (though he's careful not to say so directly) that the elders' anger against outside contractors may actually have led to the attack. The Taliban may have been responding to popular grievance and economic discontent, they may have acted on the basis of a shared interest with the community in stopping the road from coming into their area, or the elders may have actually asked the insurgents to mount the attack or struck a financial deal with them to drive out the contractor.

Something like this may also have happened during the battle of Wanat, which I mentioned earlier. An investigation by the U.S. Army's Combat Studies Institute found that the Waygal elders might have deliberately drawn out a meeting that had been called to discuss the site for the new American outpost, keeping the officers from
173
rd Airborne talking long enough for an ambush to get into place to attack the Americans as they left.
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The same study found that the local community, for historical, ethnic and economic reasons, had a strong incentive to stop the U.S. Army building a road into their valley—a traditional buffer zone between two antagonistic local population groups, Nuristanis and Safi Pashtuns, who competed politically and economically and had a long history of violent conflict.
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As in Helmand, the Waygal elders and the insurgents had a common interest in preventing the road project. The elders opposed the road because it would have connected them to ancestral enemies, undermining their safety and autonomy, while the Taliban and their sponsors in Pakistan opposed it because it brought our troops within striking distance of the major infiltration routes from their bases across the frontier. The army's report found evidence that the elders might actually have instigated the Wanat attack or at the very least might have been fully aware of it ahead of time, and perhaps their local men played a supporting role in the fighting. One of the first warning signs that something was wrong at Wanat came five days before the battle, when the Pashtun contractor from Jalalabad hired to construct the defenses (but intimidated by previous attacks on his people and equipment) failed to even turn up—a win for the Nuristani elders, who strongly opposed outside contractors, especially those using labor from the rival ethnic group rather than their own young men. During the battle, the Wanat police detachment was also suspected of providing covering fire to the Taliban attackers from within the grounds of their compound. These police were mostly young men from the village or the local district, so their loyalty to local elders (rather than the Taliban) may have played a role in their decision to support the insurgents against both the Americans and the Afghan National Army.

Economically driven incidents of violence have, unfortunately, become extremely common across the south and east of Afghanistan, while even in the relatively quiet north a provincial governor half-jokingly told the German commander in his area, “The Pashtuns in the south shoot at you, and you give them money. Here we support you, and we get nothing. Who do we have to shoot to get some aid around here?”
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This pattern isn't unique to Afghanistan. In Iraq in
2007
I spent a little time with a reconstruction liaison team (RLT), a specialist team that monitored infrastructure projects. RLTs in Iraq were fielded by Aegis, the British security and consulting firm, by far the most competent and enlightened of the many security companies operating in Iraq—or, indeed, anywhere I've worked. Aegis teams worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Each comprised eight people in two vehicles, and always included a mix of Iraqi nationals with expatriate drivers and radio operators. The Iraqis took the lead in consultation with local communities, with the expats hanging back and keeping a low profile. The proof of this low-key approach was in the results: at a time when aggressive, heavily armed security contractors were getting into firefights every day, killing dozens of innocent Iraqi civilians, the Aegis RLTs pulled off more than three hundred successful operations, in the most dangerous parts of Iraq, without ever getting into a firefight, killing a single Iraqi, or losing a team member.

The RLT leader I was with, a cool and unflappable former German paratrooper, told me of an incident at a forward operating base in northern Iraq. A U.S. Army unit had just rotated into the area and was being mortared from a district that, until then, had been perfectly quiet. Suspecting the insurgents had sent fighters into the area, the Americans were considering a cordon-and-search operation, but first asked the Aegis team to check things out. In their quiet way, with Iraqi team members discreetly engaging the community, the RLT quickly had an answer: the local sheikh ran a construction company, and he'd been promised a contract by the outgoing unit. During the changeover between the two U.S. units, this seemingly minor detail had somehow slipped through the cracks. The new unit, unaware of the commitment, had given the contract to another company, so the sheikh was mortaring the base—in order, he said, to get people's attention and avenge the injustice.

Again, mortaring the base might seem like a risky overreaction to a mere contracting glitch. But the sheikh, whatever his feelings toward the coalition, had little choice: failing to avenge the slight would have undermined his authority, making him, his family, and his tribal group less safe. The loss of prestige would have weakened his ability to prevail in local disputes and negotiations, ultimately depriving his group of access to resources—and in a chaotic country with little rule of law and no welfare safety net, that was a potential death sentence. Thus what might look like a minor issue, and in fact
was
quite minor in itself, had major implications for this local leader and thus, by extension, for the American unit. It would have dishonored the sheikh to take a gentler approach (say, a phone call or a visit to complain to the new unit), since he couldn't afford to be seen as a supplicant. Prestige was the one essential currency he had, and he had to act to preserve that prestige: he really did have no choice. He hoped the Americans would understand, he told the Aegis team, that it was just business—nothing personal. Sure enough, when the new unit, acting on the RLT's advice, resolved the contracting issue, the mortaring stopped overnight.
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III

We'll never know for certain the background to this very minor firefight in Dara-i-Nur, just one of dozens of combat incidents that happened across Afghanistan that day in September 2009. Perhaps my guess, as I pondered the attack on the helicopter ride back to Kabul, was right, and the halfhearted ambush was part of the broader aid-and-contracting-driven pattern of violence that I and many others have observed elsewhere in Afghanistan, and that the Aegis team experienced in Iraq.

Perhaps it had nothing to do with the Taliban and everything to do with perverse incentives created by rapid and uneven development in a tribal society whose economic, social, and agricultural systems have been wrecked by decades of war. No external aid is neutral: a sudden influx of foreign assistance creates a contracting bonanza, benefiting some at others' expense, and in turn provoking conflict. Likewise, it creates spoils over which local power brokers fight for personal gain, to the detriment of the wider community, and can contribute to a sense of entitlement on the part of locals. Access to foreigners, who have lots of money and firepower but little time or inclination to gain an understanding of local dynamics, can give district power brokers incredibly lucrative opportunities for corruption. A tsunami of illicit cash washes over the society, provoking abuse, raising expectations but then disappointing them, and empowering local armed groups, who pose as clean and incorruptible, defenders of the disenfranchised, at least till they themselves gain access to sources of corruption.
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Then again, perhaps I was wrong—maybe the Taliban had already infiltrated the district by then, as they certainly did later, and for some reason the local fighters were just having trouble getting it together that day. Ambushes are complex enterprises, the most difficult task an infantry small unit can undertake, and they're won or lost in the first few seconds, with the outcome often decided in the very first burst of fire. Seemingly trivial details—the placement of a key weapon, the angle of the sun, a gust of wind, split-second timing in the moment of the first shot—can have disproportionately large effects. Maybe the ambushers did have a roadside bomb in place but it failed to go off, or perhaps they lacked time to put a bomb in. Another few inches to the left, and the first RPG would have hit the leading MRAP and disabled it in the middle of the bridge, with perhaps a far different outcome for the firefight. The quick response from the patrol—who, in their first real action, showed great composure and professionalism, calmly suppressing the ambush without overreacting—may also have had a lot to do with it.

Either way, it seems clear to me, as I'm sure it does to any reader, that “classical” counterinsurgency theory doesn't explain what happened here. Nor does it explain incidents like the Helmand road contractor attack, the Aegis team's Iraq experience, or the battle of Wanat. Counterinsurgency most certainly offers a partial explanation, and is demonstrably correct as far as it goes. But other factors were at work here, beyond solely the existence of “an organized, protracted politico-military struggle designed to weaken the control and legitimacy of an established government, occupying power, or other political authority while increasing insurgent control.”
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Indeed, it's impossible to determine what actually happened in any of these incidents on the basis of counterinsurgency theory alone.