Armed Humanitarians (44 page)

The problem wasn't with the Police Mentoring Team, the general explained, it was with a company of Army Military Police who also patrolled the area. On a Thursday night, they had intruded on a wedding celebration in the village of Qalanderkhel, outraging the locals. And the day before, the MPs had nearly caused a riot in Charikar. During a visit to the city to do an assessment of polling sites for the upcoming election, the MPs had attempted to detain a young woman, a Canadian of Afghan descent who was visiting the town. She had been spotted taping the convoy with a video camera, something considered a fair pretext for detention by coalition forces. When the MPs tried to put her in their vehicle, however, hundreds of locals quickly gathered, incensed that an Afghan woman was being manhandled by foreign soldiers.

“She may have filmed them by mistake,” Ahmad conceded. “But they got her hand and tried to put her in an MRAP. It has a bad effect … These people are pissed off right now.”

Plucking an Afghan woman from the street, justified or not, was a major affront, and the MPs had completely misread the situation. They were accompanied by a contingent of Afghan National Police, who had tried to persuade them to deal with the problem in a more subtle way, but they had insisted on questioning the woman on the street, while the crowd grew angrier. It was precisely the kind of situation that General McChrystal's new tactical directive was designed to help the coalition avoid.

The major promised to look into the situation. But the police chief was still simmering about the incident. He laid the blame on one of the MPs—he didn't know his name, but said he recognized him by his jug ears. “He looks like this,” the translator said, putting his fingers behind his ears to make them stick out. “I don't know his name, but it's MPs, and it's Eighty-second,” the general said. “We can make sure. If she's a Talib, we'll arrest her, and turn her over. That was the whole issue there. Six hundred people got together yesterday when it happened. That is the only team that bothers these people.”

And there was another final insult. The MPs had run across an Afghan man wearing Army-issue pants. Troops were concerned about insurgents disguising themselves as coalition soldiers, but this young man was innocently wearing a pair of surplus trousers. The MPs stopped the young man in the street and stripped him of his pants, a grave insult in this conservative community.

“You can kill an Afghan, but you cannot take his pants off,” the police commander said. “In front of the community, it's a bad idea.”

“I'll speak with my higher headquarters,” the major replied.

The police chief clucked his tongue. “Everywhere they go they create problems,” he said. “Every time he sends one Ranger [truck] with ANP [Afghan National Police], they know that they have ANP and they can arrest anyone who is a problem. They are making this Parwan situation bad.”

An influx of new troops and a focus on social work were consistent with counterinsurgency theory, which called for a bigger presence in Afghanistan's towns and villages. But in practice, that meant more convoys on the road, more potential for escalationof-force incidents, and more chances for miscommunication. The counterinsurgency strategy also called for a massive investment in Afghan infrastructure: roads, dams, and power generation projects. But development, like security, did not instantly translate to success.

After the year he spent spreading the gospel of counterinsurgency during the Iraq surge, the Australian counterinsurgency specialist David Kilcullen shifted his attention to Afghanistan. While leading the effort to write the counterinsurgency handbook for civilian policymakers, he traveled to Afghanistan, where he spent extensive time in the field with Provincial Reconstruction Teams and coalition and Afghan units. In a post on the Small Wars Journal Web site in April 2008, he introduced his recent work in Afghanistan with an almost lyrical passage in which he reminisced about his early days teaching infantry tactics to British platoon commanders on the plains of rural England and south Wales. Noting that the old Roman mile-castles and military roads could still be seen on the modern landscape, he wrote: “Like the Romans, counterinsurgents through history have engaged in road-building as a tool for projecting military force, extending governance and the rule of law, enhancing political communication and bringing economic development, health and education to the population … But the political impact of road-building is even more striking than its tactical effect.”
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It was a simple, attractive argument: Roads equaled economic development and central control. They connected isolated rural populations to the central government, and provided a means for the counterinsurgency force to cause the ink-blot of security to spread. Kilcullen was particularly effusive about what he saw in Afghanistan's Kunar Province. While acknowledging that road construction could have “negative security and political effects, especially when executed unthinkingly or in an un-coordinated fashion,” he called what he saw in Kunar “a coordinated civil-military activity based on a political strategy of separating the insurgent from the people and connecting the people to the government. In short, this is a political maneuver with the road as a means to a political end.”
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By 2009, road projects had become the single biggest investment by coalition forces in Afghanistan. Major General Jeffrey Schloesser, the commander of the Combined Joint Task Force 101, told reporters in a June 2009 briefing that his forces had committed around $300 million of the total pool of $485 million in the Commander's Emergency Response Program funds to laying asphalt. “Roads still remain our biggest investment, just like last year,” he said. “They have a huge impact, as you know. They connect communities … to themselves, so they can have an economy. They connect the village to the government. And they help to increase the access to the larger cities and towns in Afghanistan.”

All told, Schloesser said, the task force had undertaken three hundred road projects and had paved or planned to pave two thousand kilometers of road. One of the more ambitious road projects begun in the summer of 2009 was the Parwan-to-Bamyan road, a major project for the north of Afghanistan that would link the isolated highland province of Bamyan with the rest of Afghanistan, and help create an alternative northern transportation route for the country. It was of strategic importance as well. The main highway linking Afghanistan to the southern ports of Pakistan passed through the vulnerable Khyber Pass, and supply convoys passing through Pakistan had come under increased attack by militants.

Bamyan Province was home to the Hazaras, Afghanistan's most oppressed and downtrodden minority group, most of them Shia Muslims. Subjugated by the country's Pashtun rulers and relegated to manual labor, they often worked as housemaids or night watchmen in Kabul. In their home province, they scratched out a living from subsistence farming. During their rule, the Taliban visited terrible violence on the Hazaras, in some cases systematically singling out Hazara men and boys for execution. The province was also the scene of the Taliban's most dramatic act of vandalism: the destruction of the giant Buddha statues in Bamyan Valley in 2001. Things had improved little since the fall of the Taliban. The province rarely seemed to command the attention of the central government, and in terms of development, Bamyan remained pretty much off the grid.

A new highway, it was thought, would not only connect the impoverished dwellers of Bamyan to markets but also, more important, bring them closer to the capital. The journey to Parwan Province, just north of Kabul, usually took twelve or fourteen hours by car; when the new highway was finished, travel time would be reduced to two or three hours. It was a major undertaking that would turn the dingy market town of Charikar into a central hub for travel, and create a bypass around the Salang Tunnel, the main north–south link in Afghanistan.

Responsibility for managing the road projects in Bamyan fell to the Bamyan Provincial Reconstruction Team, a 150-strong contingent of the New Zealand military based at a former Soviet airstrip just outside the town of Bamyan. The Bamyan PRT was generally seen as one of the more successful civil-military teams. New Zealand's soldiers had plenty of experience on peacekeeping operations; Kiwis had been deployed on peacekeeping operations and U.N. missions in around a dozen countries, including East Timor, the Solomon Islands, and Kosovo. They had a reputation for a low-key approach that was less aggressive than the Americans'. Equally important, the province's political leader, Habiba Surabi—Afghanistan's first female governor—was a strong proponent of development work. Around 125 different projects were under way in the province, with a total value of around forty million dollars. Some projects were modest in scale, such as flood protection walls, footbridges, school repairs, and wells. The largest share of funding came from the U.S. military, which was helping fund the more ambitious projects like the Parwan-to-Bamyan road.

Like the Panjshir, Bamyan was relatively peaceful and stable, but in the weeks before I arrived, the province had seen what Group Captain Greg Elliot, the Bamyan PRT commander, called an “uptick in kinetic activity”: some roadside bombs, a recent firefight at a police outpost. The Bamyan PRT had five liaison teams stationed at remote outposts, and a security patrol in the northeast region had recently been caught in a sophisticated ambush. Before I arrived at Kiwi Base, the team had been on lockdown for several days before over a security alert. According to one civilian on the team, everyone was “keyed up” because of the upcoming presidential elections and concerns that the Taliban were looking for a target in the north to demonstrate that they could strike anywhere.

Most of the recent violence had been confined to the northeast of Bamyan, near the border with Baghlan Province, where the Bamyan PRT was finishing a district roadbuilding project to the town of Madar. A ribbon-cutting ceremony was being planned to celebrate the completion of the road, as well as to inaugurate the western portion of the Parwan-to-Bamyan road. It would be an important photo opportunity for the coalition. To reach the far northeast corner of the province required a day-long journey. Helicopters were in short supply, and it took a bone-jarring eight-hour drive to reach the Bamyan PRT's remote patrol base.

I hitched a ride with two of the team's engineers, New Zealand army Captain Paul Mead, a combat engineer, and Mike Doherty of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. They did not have their own vehicles, so they rode along with a security patrol that was heading to the northeastern patrol base. On the way, they were planning to stop and visit some other projects. It was the best chance for them to measure the progress of the construction work the coalition was funding in the province.

The engineers' first stop was at a district government center where laborers were spreading asphalt coating on the roof. Mead and Doherty clambered up a rickety ladder to inspect their work. Doherty praised the contractor, but pointed out a number of improvements that needed to be made at the work site: Clean up those wood shavings; don't leave planks with nails sticking up; make sure that the ladder is fixed.

After their walk-through, the engineers spotted some workers getting ready to mix some concrete in a wheelbarrow, a cost-cutting measure that would save diesel used to run their mixer. Doherty politely scolded the contractor. “You shouldn't mix it in a wheelbarrow. The contract doesn't allow hand-mixed concrete.”

As the convoy wound farther north, the engineers stopped at more work sites, including a basic health clinic in the village of Ghandak, where they sat down to talk about building a flood wall with Nematullah, the clinic director, and the head of the local
shura
, or council. It was a further occasion for diplomacy. Mead began his meeting with a short, well-rehearsed speech: “The New Zealand PRT is committed to helping the people of Ghandak, and it's important that we have the full participation of the
shura
and the community in this project.”

Mead asked about the concertina wire they put around the clinic's wall: Had it made the community feel safer?

“The wires on the wall are very good,” Nematullah said. “During the middle of the night the patients feel safer. And the walls stop the dogs.”

“This is good to hear,” Mead said. “The next thing that our friends from Afghan Bamaco are going to do is put up a flood protection wall for the clinic.” He introduced a local contractor, who ceremoniously unrolled a sheaf of blueprints.

Village leaders were less than enthusiastic about that plan. “If you put the wall there, there'll be arguments with the farmers,” said Mohammad Daoud, the village elder. “We want a flood protection wall along the riverbank.”

The design of flood protection walls was a serious issue. In another village, Der Sheng, the two engineers inspected another flood wall that had caused a small disaster. The Der Sheng flood wall—perhaps built by an earlier rotation of the PRT, perhaps by a nongovernmental organization, no one was quite sure—had channeled the water into a “pinch point” that sent water hurtling down the valley at high velocity. It churned up the foundation of the flood wall and scoured out the floor of the channel, dragging along rock, soil, and boulders that covered up arable land further down the valley. People could go hungry because of good intentions.

Doherty, a Corps of Engineers flood-protection expert, spoke up: “This is what we want to do with the wall. Make sure that it's wide enough to accommodate the river. If the channel is too narrow, the velocity of the water will increase.”

The interpreter struggled with the technical explanation, and the Afghans were still unconvinced. “I appreciate your concern that you have,” said Mead. “However, in my experience—and Mike is an expert in America in flood protection—we believe it's not best if the flood wall is by the river. I ask that you trust the PRT engineers and the design that we've come up with.”