ONE EVENING IN THE SPRING OF 2008, I WAS SITTING ON A STOOP ON a dark street and speaking to several Sunni “concerned local citizens,” the new euphemism for American-backed militias in the Middle East. The young men were speaking of the danger coming from Shiites when I interrupted one of them, who was wearing a white sleeveless shirt, and said, “Don’t take this personally, but would you let your sister marry a Shiite?” In an instant he flattened his hand and moved his arm like a blade, slicing into the air the way he would slice her throat. I was not in Baghdad, where this might have been commonplace—I was in Beirut, where, as in pre-occupation Iraq, once it would not have been out of the ordinary for a Sunni and a Shiite to marry. In the early years of the American occupation of Iraq there were concerns about the Lebanonization of Iraq; but now it seemed Iraq was coming to Lebanon.
Sunni neighborhoods in Beirut felt insecure. Thuggish Shiite Amal supporters regularly zipped through on their scooters to shoot in the air and taunt them. Leaders from the Sunni-dominated March 14 coalition were being blown up occasionally, and it was clear the security forces could not protect them. The Future Movement’s leaders felt pressure to protect themselves and their anxious constituency, so they created a private security company to protect Future leaders and local militias in various Sunni neighborhoods throughout the country, established under the leadership of Salim Diab, former general coordinator of the Future Current.
Lebanon had no history of strife between Sunnis and Shiites. There had been class conflicts in the past—Sunnis were condescending to Shiites the way urban people often are to rural people, and Sunnis reviled Shiite religious traditions, which Shiites resented—but the divide had not been violent. Lebanese Sunni racism against Shiites was an artificial sectarianism, seeming to come out of nowhere. Lebanese Sunnis had never seen themselves exclusively as Sunnis. Even former Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri was not seen as a Sunni leader before his death. Until then he had not even had the support of most Sunnis, and Sunni leadership was not centralized. His death was exploited for political and sectarian reasons.
The first Sunni show of force was the Future Movement-backed demonstrations in February 2006 against the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, which turned into a riot targeting Christians. Hariri’s son Saad was very embarrassed by this. Sunni power often seemed to be devoid of specific goals except keeping Shiites out of power. Historically Shiites were called the epithet “mutwali.” But following Hizballah’s victory in the 2006 war, some urban Shiites reclaimed their victimization as a source of pride and made “mutwali” cool, in a way that resembled the African American reappropriation of the word “nigga.” Hizballah has never exploited sectarianism and has always gone out of its way to ease tensions. Hassan Nasrallah warned that the Americans were trying to drive a wedge between Shiites and Sunnis. But Hizballah could not escape the fact that it was a Shiite party.
From May to September 2007, the army had to contend with the crisis at the Nahr al-Barid Palestinian refugee camp, which left some 420 people killed, 168 of them soldiers. On September 4 of that year, Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr announced the cessation of 106 days of fighting against Islamic militants in the camp. It was the second war Lebanon had seen in two summers (see Chapter Six). The Lebanese army, which had stood by impotently in the summer of 2006 as the Israeli military destroyed much of the country in the name of fighting Hizballah, this time destroyed a refugee camp housing forty thousand people in the name of the war on terror. The three months of fighting with the jihadists from Fatah al-Islam, the worst the country had seen since its fifteen-year civil war ended in 1990, had been a distraction from growing internal divisions in Lebanon. These divisions had brought the country dangerously close to civil war once again in January 2007, when Sunnis and Shiites clashed on the streets.
There was a sense of foreboding that summer, a feeling that something worse was about to happen. The July war with Israel was still on everyone’s mind, and with it the fear that neither Israel nor Hizballah viewed the previous summer’s denouement as conclusive. Another war was ongoing in the north, with the interregnum punctuated by the occasional car bomb or assassination. And a third war, “the next civil war,” seemed to be on the horizon. Meanwhile, according to Lebanese political scientist Amer Mohsen, Lebanese politicians seemed like Shakespearean actors on a stage, “tragic characters who follow a path that was already charted for them—i.e., they have no agency in what is happening.” These politicians, Mohsen explained, “are clearly aware that, no matter what they do, events that control their country and destiny are decided by parties that are far larger than them.”
In November 2006, six Hizballah and Amal ministers resigned from the government coalition to protest violations of the agreed-upon rules by Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and his March 14 allies. They called for the government to uphold the tradition of cabinet consensus, which dated to the end of the civil war. The opposition began planning for street demonstrations, which were called off after a Christian politician was assassinated. That month a young Syrian man detonated his suicide vest on the Syrian border with Lebanon after he was denied permission to cross because his papers were discovered to be fake. He was said to belong to the Al Qaeda-linked Tawhid and Jihad organization. On December 1, 2006, the opposition condemned the government as illegitimate and staged a “sit-in” in downtown Beirut, establishing a huge tent city in Martyrs’ Square, the same place where anti-Syrian demonstrators had launched their March 14 “intifada.” Key roads were blocked, and traffic became unbearable. Numerous shops and boutiques in the downtown area went out of business. Some Sunnis began to view the sit-in as a Shiite occupation. Three days later, a Shiite supporter of Amal was shot dead. The Lebanese army was deployed on the city’s streets. On January 24, 2007, three young men were killed following a strike called by Hizballah, as opposition supporters blocked roads and burned tires. The next day four Lebanese were killed and more than 150 were injured in clashes at the Arab University of Beirut, near the Tariq al-Jadida neighborhood. It was left to Iran and Saudi Arabia to get involved and postpone further conflict. This was the nature of Lebanon’s sectarian system: it could never be stable; it was impossible to achieve ideal harmony. Lebanon was not a viable state.
Hizballah was the biggest party in the March 8 coalition, and its patron was Iran. Future, the Hariri family’s movement, was the biggest party in the March 14 movement, and its patron was Saudi Arabia. In a November 29, 2006, op-ed in the Washington Post, titled “Stepping Into Iraq; Saudi Arabia Will Protect Sunnis If the U.S. Leaves,” Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi foreign policy adviser to Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal, warned that the Saudis would have to defend Iraq’s Sunnis from the Shiites of Iraq and Iran if the Americans did not. The Saudis were worried that the Americans were allowing the Iranians to win in Iraq and Lebanon. Along with the Jordanians, they would provide Iraq’s Sunnis with weapons and financial support. The Saudis had already commenced construction of a multibillion-dollar barrier between them and Iraq to isolate them from the violence they had helped foment. The Saudis also assumed the role of defenders of Lebanon’s Sunnis. Two years later I met Prince Turki—who had been the ambassador to Washington, intelligence chief, and liason to Osama bin Laden—and asked him if he really feared Iran. “Iran wants Mecca and Medina,” he said. “They want their ideology to control it.” Hizballah in Lebanon was completely an Iranian tool, he said. “The Saudi interest is for Iraq to maintain its Arab identity and not fall under Persian influence. Iran views Saudi Arabia as the little Satan, not Israel—read Khomeini’s work.” But he added that Iran’s vulnerability was its ethnic minorities: the Kurds, Baluch, and Azeris.
The Saudis were getting nervous, watching their proxies throughout the region weaken. In the 1960s Egypt’s pan-Arab nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser was the main competition with Saudi influence in the region. The Saudis and Americans both tried to undermine Arab nationalist and leftist movements. The result was an increase in the power of fundamentalists and the weakening of Arab progressives. The Saudis now had no Arab rivals for their influence with the less powerful exceptions of Qatar and Syria. But Hizballah (and Hamas in Palestine) represented resistance to the Saudi, Israeli, and American project in the region, and the Saudis would not tolerate it.
ON AUGUST 10, 2007, four days before Hizballah was to commemorate the “divine victory” over Israel (as they called it), I visited the Salam Mosque in Tripoli, a northern coastal city—Lebanon’s second-largest—and its Sunni bastion. Hundreds of men filled the mosque and overflowed onto straw mats outside. They sat in the heat listening to a fiery sermon with apparent indifference. Sheikh Bilal Barudi, a Sunni cleric close to the March 14 coalition and also part of the Independent Islamic Gathering of Sunni clerics, gave the sermon. Arabs were once again in conflict with the Persians, he said, a conflict he saw as age-old and also between Sunnis and Shiites. “We ask the Iranians and Americans to withdraw from Iraq,” he said. “Iran is our historic enemy. Throughout history Iran always had an ambition of controlling Arab countries around them.” He spoke of the Shiites of Lebanon occupying Beirut, mocking Hizballah’s “divine victory” and calling its members enemies of Islam. The war had started after Hizballah captured two Israeli soldiers, hoping to exchange them for four leftist Lebanese resistance fighters held by the Israelis. Barudi condemned Hizballah for destroying Lebanon to rescue leftists whom he called “infidels.” This was a refrain I would hear repeatedly over the next year.
One of those attending the prayer that Friday was Samir Jisr, a member of Parliament with the Future Movement, the Saudi-backed political movement clustered around Saad al-Hariri, which he inherited from his father, Rafiq. I met Jisr in his home a few blocks away. He explained to me that just as Sunnis had felt threatened during the Syrian era, so now they felt threatened by Hizballah. “Most people here were with the resistance to Israel,” he said. “People looked at Hizballah as the resistance, but after the Israelis withdrew and they practiced politics and shifted to inside Lebanon, people considered it a threat.” He explained that it was the presence of pro-Hizballah demonstrators “in the heart of the streets . . . the way they threaten to stop the country,” and their possession of weapons, that “scares people.” Jisr had criticized the army publicly for allegedly torturing Lebanese Sunnis suspected of militancy. Now Sunni militants were afraid, he said.
He blamed poverty and oppression for increasing extremism and complained that after the civil war Beirut had gotten all the attention in the reconstruction while the north was neglected. The Syrians were hated, he said, because of their shelling of Tripoli in the 1980s, which he claimed killed up to 1,200 Sunnis. “It’s a big wound for people in Tripoli,” he said. The war in Iraq had negative effects on Lebanon too: “They are not spreading democracy. It’s obvious that they are trying to divide Iraq and steal its resources. Everybody believes the Americans are responsible for Sunni-Shiite problems. There is a fear among people that what is happening in Iraq will affect Lebanon.”
Dai al-Islam al-Shahal, Lebanon’s most important Salafi cleric, blamed Shiites and Iran for the civil war in Iraq. Many Salafi clerics like him were obsessed with Shiites; Shahal was rabidly anti-Shiite. “The Sunnis in Iraq are oppressed by Shiites, and Iranians are allying with Americans there,” he told me.
I met Shahal in his office in Tripoli’s Abu Samra neighborhood, where many Salafis are based. It was August 14, or “Victory Day,” according to Hizballah. As I waited for Shahal to arrive in the morning, his devoted young male secretary assured me that my heart would race when I saw him. Shahal had a white beard and wore a white robe, with a white cap and a white scarf on his head.
Like most Sunnis, he did not think that the war with Israel had, in fact, ended with a victory—he wished it had not happened. He viewed Hizballah as a threat to the Lebanese government and the entire country. “There is an old Shiite project to control Lebanon,” he told me, mentioning the canard of the “Shiite crescent,” first described by Jordan’s King Abdullah. “Iran is exporting its Islamic Revolution,” he said, and “the project of controlling Lebanon is being implemented. A minority rules Syria, allied with Shiites here and Iranians in Iraq.”
Although Sunnis were being targeted, “Sunnis are more powerful,” he told me. “If, God forbid, a civil war happens, they know how to defend themselves and are prepared.” Sunnis were engaged with the state, he explained, but in the event of a civil war they would require militias. And while Sunnis in the government were allying with the Americans, “people on the street are totally against the Americans.” Sunni Islamists had allied with the Future Movement and the Lebanese government because they defended Sunnis, he explained, but relations between Sunnis and the government had been damaged by the fighting in Nahr al-Barid.
Shahal had been one of the key negotiators between Lebanese authorities and Fatah al-Islam. “Fatah al-Islam used Fatah al-Intifada as a passage into Lebanon to set up a movement to fight Israel,” he said. “Most of Fatah al-Islam are not Palestinian.” Fatah al-Islam’s ideology had been close to that of Al Qaeda, he said. Muslims were under attack, he said, explaining that the American administration wanted to strike Islam and was trying to establish bases in Muslim lands to take their resources. “The defense of Muslim lands from America and the West is better than attacking Americans and the West in their countries,” he said. Al Qaeda’s mistake was “moving the battle to Western territory. When Muslims are under attack, it is right to defend themselves but not to move the battle to the West.”
IF THERE IS A RED LINE separating Sunnis from Shiites in Beirut, it is the Tariq al-Jadida neighborhood, a Sunni bastion close to Dahiyeh, the southern Shiite suburb dominated by Hizballah. Entering the neighborhood, one passes a Saudi flag, a Lebanese flag, and the flag of the Future Movement. Large posters of Saudi King Abdullah hang above the streets. Beginning in early 2007 various local militias began to appear, their names changing often. One was called the Panthers. Every night the streets of Tariq al-Jadida were patrolled by men who did not carry arms in public. They were recruited and paid by the Future Movement. Typically they were young men sitting on street corners, smoking water pipes, eating pistachios, and demanding that passersby present their identification papers. Sometimes they had lists of wanted men. They were supervised by older men, veterans of the Lebanese army, security forces, or militias from the civil war. Just in case, Interior Security Forces sat in armored personnel carriers in the center of the neighborhood. On my first visit, in 2007, I asked some of the young men who they were protecting the neighborhood from. “Zaaran,” said one muscular youth, referring to hoodlums, or thugs. I asked which zaaran. “From Dahiyeh,” he said. “We will chop them up.” During this visit, I was stopped by chubby young men on scooters who zipped over and took me to what they called on their radios Checkpoint One. Fortunately I had befriended a local militiaman named Fadi, a small man who owned a barbershop close to the edge of the neighborhood, who vouched for me. Fadi had a ponytail, wore tight black clothes, and had a huge shiny watch on his wrist. He patrolled his street on behalf of the local Future militia and was paid four hundred dollars a month by the Secure Plus company, which he said was the same as the Future Movement. Fadi had not done his military service, but he had received one month of training in Akkar.
Tariq al-Jadida, a mostly middle-class Sunni area, was the heart of Sunni power in Beirut. In contrast, Bab al-Tabbaneh, a district in Tripoli, in northern Lebanon, was poor and marginalized; many of its unemployed youth were used by the Sunnis of Beirut as shock troops to intimidate rivals. Unlike poor Shiites, impoverished Sunnis in Tariq al-Jadida—and elsewhere in Lebanon—do not have a powerful movement to provide for them or protect them. Instead, rival politicians compete for popularity by occasionally dispensing favors, usually before elections. Crumbling buildings torn apart by shells and bullet holes, with laundry drying outside the windows and balconies, look down over rows of garages and small workshops for wooden furniture. Black flags with Islamic slogans wave in the sun. Salafis helped clean up Bab al-Tabbaneh from gangs and drugs, improving its reputation. Many former gang members and drug addicts had become Salafis and even jihadists; the only evidence of their past delinquency was their remaining tattoos. In the 1980s, the Syrian army had been stationed in the Jabal Mohsen neighborhood, which towered above Tabbaneh. Thirty thousand Alawites lived there. From there the Syrians punished the recalcitrant Sunnis of Tabbaneh, and the scars had never healed.
I found a group of men drinking tea outside a shop. Mustafa Zaabi sat with his brothers and friends. “Everything is a lie,” he said. “There is no electricity, so everybody is on the street. If we talk, who will listen to us? What are we, Palestinian refugees? I wish we were Palestinians so we had care from the UN or the government.” They blamed the Palestinians for the fighting in Nahr al-Barid. “The people fighting in the camp are mostly Palestinian, just pretending to be Fatah al-Islam,” said Mustafa’s brother Muhamad. “It’s impossible that they will rebuild the camp,” said Mustafa.
Mustafa had been an active member of the Future Movement and had voted for the party in the past, but he had stopped giving his support. “They did nothing,” he said. “Many people feel betrayed. Those who said we are sons of Tabbaneh, where are you now? We don’t want the hundred dollars that you paid on election day. If we knew what was waiting for us, we wouldn’t have voted for the entire Hariri list. For three years I didn’t see anything from the house of Hariri.” Mustafa still had high hopes for Saad al-Hariri. “First because he is the son of Rafiq al-Hariri,” he said. “We saw how Hariri made Beirut. We hoped he would build Tripoli and create work opportunities for youth.”
Mustafa and his two brothers had all been accused of acts of sabotage against the Syrian military and had been jailed and tortured by the Syrians. Mustafa had belonged to the Murabitun militia in the 1980s. He spent six months training in Libya but had left in disgust because Lebanese weren’t trusted with weapons. Mustafa had been injured in the civil war when a shell landed nearby. His entire body had been burned, and his hand was still maimed. His brother Hussein was paralyzed and in a wheelchair, a result of being beaten on the back of the head with a gun while imprisoned.
Seated with Mustafa and his friends was a thin nineteen-year-old named Ayman. Like many young men, he was marked with crude tattoos and had scars up his entire arm that he had inflicted on himself. “He learned it in prison,” explained Mustafa. Ayman had spent seven months in prison “for a simple problem,” he said.
One way sectarian leaders in Lebanon distribute favors is by covering legal fees or helping people get out of prison. Ayman had many friends who had been to prison. “Most guys go to jail because of street fights with blades,” said Mustafa, “not for robberies. There is nothing to steal here.” Another thin young man, also called Mustafa, had similar scars from self-mutilation on his arms, which he had created with razors. I asked him why he had done it. “Depression,” he said. “There is no work—we take it out on ourselves.” The older Mustafa explained that young men like him used drugs and sniffed paint thinner.
They led me around the neighborhood, down dirt-strewn alleys with electrical cables hanging low and blackened walls ridden with bullets. I saw posters of Saddam on the walls next to posters of Rafiq al-Hariri. “Saddam is considered to be oppressed,” Mustafa told me. “The Americans took him to kill him.” Everybody in the area had been saddened by the news of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s death as well, he told me: “He was somebody liberating Muslim land.” A group of young men stood beneath posters of Saddam and Hariri, alongside a picture of Khalil Akkawi, the slain founder of the anti-Syrian Tawhid movement, which was militarily active in the 1980s. After Akkawi’s assassination and the arrest or killing of most of Tawhid’s members, there was no powerful group remaining to fill the vacuum in Bab al-Tabbaneh. I asked the young men why they liked Saddam. “He was a Muslim,” they all agreed, “a hero, a real Arab.” They had all been sad and angry when he was executed.
I asked them what they thought of Saad al-Hariri. “He is a Sunni Muslim, clean,” they said. I asked about Hizballah. “No! No!” they shouted, waving their hands. “Kish! Kish!” one added, making the sound he would make to shoo a dog away. “Nobody likes the Palestinians,” they told me. “They are pimps. They are the cause of all these problems; they let Fatah al-Islam into the camp. They should go back to Palestine.”
Several hundred Palestinian refugees had been housed in the Bab al-Tabbaneh Elementary School, and others were in seven other schools in the area of Tripoli. Locals had demanded that one of the school gates facing their neighborhood be kept locked. Blue plastic sheeting had been used to divide halls and create private spaces for families. They stood around or sat on chairs that students would soon need, just waiting. Hosam Ilmir, the principal, worried that the school year might be canceled if alternative housing was not found.
“Bab al-Tabbaneh has the poorest people in the country,” Ilmir told me. “They are strangers in their country. The basic requirements of life are not here. Most students in school are not concentrating because at home their brother or father is on drugs, drunk, beating their mother. They can’t sleep at home, so they sleep in class. There is sexual abuse of children.” The Future Movement paid poor Sunnis when they were needed for voting, protests, or demonstrations in Beirut, he said. Many people came down from Bab al-Tabbaneh for the Beirut protests over the Danish cartoons in February 2006, he said. The state mufti called for people to come down, the Sunni Endowment provided buses to transport some of the protesters, people were paid for their presence in Beirut, and gasoline prices were also covered for the ride. “One guy is responsible for many other guys,” he said, “and he distributes the money.” This was the case in all the main March 14 and Future Movement demonstrations in Beirut, he said.
“We Sunnis of Lebanon never had a militia,” Ilmir said. “The Sunni army was the Palestinians. Sunnis were businessmen.” Now Sunnis wanted their own militias, he said. Unlike the Future Movement, which offered only money when it needed manpower, “Hizballah always looks after their people.” The Future Movement had influenced people in Tripoli “to think Hizballah started the war and destroyed the country,” he said. He blamed the Lebanese media outlets associated with the Future Movement and March 14, such as LBC and Future TV, for inciting people. “For Sunnis in Lebanon, Hariri was seen as a Sunni leader, and his killing enraged Sunnis,” he told me. “Going back to the postwar period, the Sunni street was divided in two. Some Sunnis supported anybody who fights Israel, and some Sunnis said Hizballah will turn their guns on Sunnis.” He insisted that Sunnis were being armed under the guise of private security companies set up as legalized militias by the Future Movement. People were also joining Salafi movements, he said, because “people need work. If there is money, people will follow you all the way to China.”
Ilmir agreed that since the fighting began the heat had been turned up on Salafis. “There is a lot of pressure by security forces,” he said. “People with beards are arrested for no reason, like in the Syrian days. They hold you for a week and give you two hundred thousand liras. Getting tortured by your people is worse than being tortured by strangers. As a Sunni, if anybody comes and throws a stone at Israel from Tanzania, I will kiss his hand. This is not just my view, this is the view of the silent majority of Lebanon.” After I left he ran after me and clasped my hand. “Don’t be surprised from what you heard from me,” he said. “This is the view of all educated Sunnis.”
It certainly was not the view of several taxi drivers I met. One driver who took me from Bab al-Tabbaneh to downtown Tripoli explained the difference between the March 14 and March 8 coalitions. “The opposition thinks we are agents of America and Israel,” he said, and did not disagree with the notion. “We are with America and Israel, and they are with Iran and Syria.” Abu Ali, a taxi driver who picked me up in Tripoli, complained that politicians were destroying the country. “I have twelve children, and I can’t feed them,” he said, not wondering if perhaps he should have had fewer. “They ask me if I’m with Syria or America. No, sir, I’m with America. They freed us from Syria. I don’t hate Shiites because I’m a Sunni. They destroyed the country. Hizballah is the party of the devil. The Palestinians are pimps. The Palestinians are killing our army.” It seemed to me as though Lebanese Sunnis were becoming the new Maronite Christians, no longer interested in Arab nationalism but only in a narrow Lebanese chauvinism, looking to America for protection and hating the Palestinians to the point of sympathizing with Israel.
The army, long condemned by March 14 politicians, had become a rallying cry for them—so much so that in Marj, a small Sunni town in the Bekaa Valley, I passed under a banner that declared, “The Army is the solution.” It was a sharp contrast to the rallying cry “Islam is the solution,” which one often heard from various popular Islamist movements in the Middle East, such as the Muslim Brotherhood. Although Marj had once been a bastion of Arab nationalism, it had also produced 9/11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah. Not far from Marj was the town of Majd al-Anjar, from where at least a dozen men had gone to fight in Iraq. Salafism was introduced to Majd al-Anjar by Zuheir Shawish, a Kurd married to a local woman. Sheikh Adnan al-Umama was backed by Saudi funds and increased Salafi education. He was also on the Future payroll.
Minutes after I drove into town, in early August 2007, the mayor and a local police officer arrived to ask me who I was. I arranged to meet the mukhtar (town headman), who lived across from the Bilal Bin Rabah Mosque.
Graffiti on a wall by the mosque read, “They say it’s a war on terrorism, but it’s a war on Omar,” referring to the Prophet Muhammad’s companion, an important figure to Sunnis. Mukhtar Shaaban al-Ajami had held his position for nine years. A muscular man with a long red beard, he practiced martial arts and bragged about his strength. At forty-six years old, he was a leonine figure. He lived with his wife and four children and had his own farm. He proudly showed off his deep well, sheep, chickens, geese, vegetables, and fruit.
His grandfather had been mukhtar for forty years, in the days of Ottomans and the French. There were twenty thousand residents in the all-Sunni town, he told me. It had never had strong political parties, and parties never had more than ten people. There was almost no immigration from the town, and since 1985 it had become very religious, with everybody over fifteen attending one of the six mosques.
The Syrians had occupied Ajami’s house for ten years, and he had taken part in anti-Syrian military operations. “The Syrians tried to remove Sunnis from their role in the country and raise the status of Shiites,” he said. After the Hariri assassination, Sunnis had grown more extreme. “They made us feel this way. Shiites hate us and want their revenge after a thousand years. They killed Hariri and they don’t want a trial for the killers. Before Hariri died, Sunnis were not so extreme. They made us like this. Everybody supports Saad al-Hariri because of the sectarian conflict. It began when Iran entered Lebanon through Hizballah. Shiites consider themselves oppressed historically, and now it’s the chance for them to achieve what they want. Only Bashar al-Assad is stopping it, because if it starts here it will spread there between Alawites and Sunnis, and Alawites are the minority. Shiites made themselves different, special, always. Go back in history; they are obsessed with Hussein and want revenge. Hizballah is an Iranian party, that’s it—it serves Iranian interests.”
Ajami had encouraged young men to go fight in Iraq in the past, but no longer. “The situation is confusing, and you don’t know who the resistance is,” he said. “Al Qaeda is fighting people, people are fighting each other.” Ajami acknowledged that the March 14 movement, which he supported, was cooperating with the Americans. “The Americans are working for their own interests,” he said. “In Lebanon they are with the Sunnis. Their interests in Iraq are with the Shiites. The Future Movement is looking for protection from Syria, so it is allying with Americans and French.” He insisted that Fatah al-Islam had been a ploy to make Sunnis look like terrorists. “They made Fatah al-Islam terrorists and Shiites resistance. Making Nasrallah the hero is serving the Shiite agenda. Give me half the money they got, and I will form a much better resistance.”
Ajami took me to meet the mufti of the Bekaa Valley, Khalil al-Meis. Meis had been mufti since 1985. He had been famous for his strident sectarian speeches, which many identified as pro-Al Qaeda, until he was co-opted by the Future Movement in the 2005 elections. He too agreed that Sunnis felt targeted following the killing of Hariri. “They killed Hariri and now they are surrounding [Prime Minister] Siniora,” he said. “Siniora represents the Sunni presence in the state, so they are trying to weaken him.” In his view, common among Sunnis, Hizballah was part of Iran, and the group had used its victory over Israel to dominate Lebanon and try “to make Shiites feel less like Arab patriots and make them feel Iranian.” Such accusations had grown increasingly prevalent; even Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had called Shiites fifth columnists for Iran. “Sunnis are not allied with America, but the Americans are fighting Iran in Lebanon,” Meis said. “In Iraq America is allied with Shiites. In Afghanistan the Shiites benefited from the Americans. Americans are Americans—but they always look for their interests, with Sunnis here, with Shiites in Iraq.” Saddam had become a symbol for Sunnis because of the way he was executed and the timing, which coincided with the day on which Sunnis celebrated an important holiday. “Saddam is not the Iraqi Saddam anymore,” he said, but a Sunni symbol.
IN JANUARY 2008 the mufti of Mount Lebanon, Sheikh Muhamad Ali Juzu, attacked clerics who wore “black turbans,” meaning Shiite clerics. In April he warned that Hizballah was implementing an “armed invasion” of his majority-Sunni area and called on the government to allow Sunnis to carry weapons so that they could defend themselves.
I drove down to Juzu’s ornate home, on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean. It was guarded by a German shepherd and men wearing sandals and the uniform of the Internal Security Forces. Juzu was notorious for his anti-Shiite vitriol. Born in 1927, he had been mufti since 1962. Problems between Sunnis and Shiites were new, he said. He blamed them on Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian Revolution and the rise in the 1970s of the Lebanese cleric Imam Musa Sadr and his Amal Movement. “He divided people,” he said of Sadr. “Before, Shiites were in all parties and didn’t have this extreme assabiya [esprit de corps]. After the Iranian Revolution the Iranians began purchasing the loyalty of Sunnis throughout the Muslim world, he insisted. “Here in my area some Sunnis go with Hizballah because they get paid,” he said. “They want Sunnis against Sunnis, like what happened in Nahr al-Barid. It served Shiite interests.”
Juzu repeated the common observation among Sunnis that the Americans had changed the regional balance, empowering Iran and Shiites. “The destruction of Saddam and Iraq helped Iran,” he said, “Now Iran controls Iraq.” Juzu himself was a friend of Sheikh Harith al-Dhari, head of Iraq’s Association of Muslim Scholars. Dhari was among Iraq’s most sectarian Sunni leaders. The resistance organizations he backed had cooperated with Al Qaeda in attacks against Shiites. “Sheikh Harith fights and defends his country and his identity, and is fighting Iran and the Americans,” Juzu explained.
Juzu defended the need for Sunnis in Lebanon to arm themselves. “It’s natural when a man feels he is in danger to protect himself,” he said. “It’s easy to make war in Lebanon. The army would split in two if a civil war happened. If there are two equal poles, it’s good, it will prevent war; if one side has more power, there can be war.” Despite all this, he said, “If there is a war against Israel I am with Hizballah. Anybody who fights Israel—an Iranian, a communist—the Arab people will support him.”
The Sunnis of Lebanon are, of course, very diverse and not at all monolithic in their values or motivations, and the struggle within their community, as well as within Lebanon, is not between radicals and moderates. It can more accurately be described as a competition between haves and have nots. In Lebanon, as elsewhere, the poor have only two choices: to accept their fate or rebel. While rebellion in the 1960s or ’70s might have come under a leftist, secular, Marxist, or nationalist guise, today the language of rebellion is often that of Al Qaeda.
Although Lebanese Maronites—Syriac Eastern Catholics—have a mythology of being victimized by the Syrians, the Sunnis of Tripoli suffered much more when their city was bombarded. The Syrian presence was more pronounced in the north as well. In the 1980s there was a major face-off between Salafis and Syrians in the north. In 2000 Najib Mikati, a Sunni politician competing with Rafiq al-Hariri, began to rehabilitate Sunni Islamists from Tawhid and elsewhere. He even tried to free the prisoners from Dinniyeh, though he failed to do so—this maneuver was left to Saad al-Hariri in 2005. Mikati began his campaign to court Salafis when he feared the Muslim Brotherhood would not support him. It was only in 2004 that the Future Movement approached northern Salafis, and their relationship remains ambiguous to this day. The Future Movement had turned the formerly anti-Syrian elements of Tawhid into their street gangs in Tripoli, while other Tawhid veterans sided with pro-Syrian politicians such as Mikati. Lebanon’s Salafis were divided, and Hariri did what he and other rich Sunni politicians usually do: he bought people’s loyalty and calm.
Clerics close to the Future Movement such as Bilal Barudi tried to buy Fatah al-Islam off, but the group was neither a March 14 creation nor a Syrian one. State sponsors were no longer needed for these sinuous, nonstate entities. This pattern of buying support was not unique to Tripoli; in Sidon, in southern Lebanon, the Future Movement co-opted the Communists. “They were indiscriminate in accepting support as long as they received votes or loyalty, whether from Al Qaeda or former Communists,” says As’ad Abu Khalil, a Lebanese-American professor of political science at California State, Stanislaus. “Mikati capitalized on longstanding fanatical Sunni sentiment. Mikati and Rafiq al-Hariri had the same problem: yes, they did have the support of Syrian intelligence, but they wanted to institutionalize their bases of support. They needed permanent sources of support so they . . . went to areas where they fielded candidates and tried to co-opt existing forces on the ground.”
Salafis typically rejected the very notion of elections, viewing democracy as an alternative to religion and hence apostasy. But in Lebanon, especially beginning in 2005, Salafis campaigned and voted despite the fact that the system required a Christian president. Their motivation was to protect Sunnis, and clerics advised their followers to vote for the March 14 coalition. Traditional Salafis perceived the Hariri assassination as an attack on Sunni power. They received money from Saudis as well as the Hariri network and justified their interpretation of Islam in terms of defending Sunnis against an alleged Shiite threat. The Saudis had been battling a domestic Al Qaeda franchise since 2003, and as a result they had cut off support for jihadist Salafis. This allowed Future to come in and provide funds in exchange for moderation and cooperation, regarded by some of the rank and file as a betrayal.
ACCORDING TO A FORMER military commander of the Tawhid movement who had spent eleven years in a Syrian prison, “Tripoli is a reservoir for Sunni jihadists in Lebanon.” Hundreds of men had left Tripoli to fight in Iraq, and veterans of the Dinniyeh incident from Tripoli who had been released had also joined Fatah al-Islam. A veteran of Islamist movements, he believed that Fatah al-Islam was not allied with Syria or the March 14 coalition. There was a confluence between the interests of Syria and some of the Salafis, he said, but March 14 supported the “official Salafis” such as those in the Independent Islamic Gathering. He attributed some of the motivation to statements by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who had declared Lebanon a land for jihad and described the UN peacekeeping mission in the south as a crusader occupation. The Mujahideen Shura Council in Iraq had decided to fight the Americans in Lebanon, he said, and dispatched fighters there as well.
While Fatah al-Islam was not a creation of Saudi Arabia, or the Future Movement, or even Syria, as various parties in Lebanon allege, it did find a welcoming environment in northern Lebanon. Tripoli has a tradition of armed militancy and is full of armed groups and experienced veterans. When a Saudi militant named Juhayman al-Utaibi took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979, a key moment in jihadist Salafi history, three of his accomplices were from Tripoli. In addition to the Tawhid movement and Kanan Naji’s Jund Allah, there is also Suyuf Allah, or the Swords of God, founded by a judge in a religious court. As a result there was no need for Sunni leaders to turn to jihadists, since they had an available pool of veterans from the 1980s Tawhid experience. While conspiracy theorists have blamed Sunni leaders in Lebanon for arming their people, and there have been some independent initiatives of this nature, it is just as likely that the Sunnis were responding to pressure from below. Not responding would mean losing ground and popularity. The Muslim Brotherhood, embodied in the Jamaa Islamiya movement in Lebanon, was weakened in Tripoli because it failed to propose any solution for the events in Lebanon, according to Patrick Haenni of the International Crisis Group in Beirut. Haenni, who has also studied the Brotherhood in Egypt, explained that it normally operates under the slogan “Islam is the solution,” but in Lebanon, as the Shiite Hizballah movement had also conceded, this cannot be offered. As a result people have been pushed toward private initiatives, while the traditional Salafis have lost ground because they are too close to power and too moderate. In late 2006, in the Bab al-Tabbaneh slums of Tripoli, one banner that went up above the streets called for Saad al-Hariri to “arm us and leave the rest to us.”
Tripoli was once the main city in Lebanon; in the nineteenth century, Beirut was a backwater in comparison. The main publishing houses and intellectuals were all in Tripoli. When Lebanon was cut out from Syria, Tripolitans protested in opposition. Traditionally Lebanon’s Sunnis were hostile to the idea of Lebanon itself, which many viewed as a Christian project at odds with Arab nationalism. Tripoli’s economy suffered after it was separated from Syria. Rafiq al-Hariri helped spread Saudi money to buy votes in the north. Young people who might have gone to study in Jordan or Egypt instead went to study in Saudi Arabia. Saudi money also made its way to traditional Salafis as long as they avoided overt politics. When the jihadists appeared there was a sense among some in the March 14 coalition that the newcomers were their friends and could be political allies. The increasingly sectarian rhetoric used by Lebanese politicians and clerics provided the space for jihadist Salafis to feel at home. Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest city, is a majority-Sunni city with few other groups represented. During the civil war Sunni militias battled the Syrians there. The quality of life in some parts of Tripoli, and in the poor villages of Akkar nearby, resembled the Palestinian camps.
In June 2007, a Sunni member of Parliament called Walid Idu was blown up. He had been very pro-Syria until 2005, like many of the Future Movement’s members. When Idu’s body was brought to the hospital, sectarian chants could be heard. “Allah, Hariri, Tariq al-Jadida!” some shouted, modifying the Shiite pro-Hizballah chant “Allah, Nasrallah, and all of Dahiyeh!” Others chanted the names of early Sunni leaders like Omar and Uthman, and warned that the blood of Sunnis was boiling and that they wanted revenge on President Lahoud, Syrian President Assad, and Hizballah’s Nasrallah. At Idu’s funeral procession some mourners chanted for Hariri, Saddam, and Zarqawi, while others chanted for the United States. “Sunni! Sunni! Sunni!” they shouted. Some also shouted support for Libya, apparently because Libya was implicated in the death of the Amal Movement’s founder, Imam Musa Sadr. “My dick, Nasrallah, and all of Dahiyeh!” others shouted, and “We don’t want sectarianism, but God is with the Sunnis!”
According to Omar Nashabe, a Sunni journalist with the leading independent paper Al Akhbar, “March 14 created the environment by supporting Sunni assabiya.” He told me that when Lebanon’s mufti, the main Sunni cleric appointed by the state, spoke at the government headquarters in Beirut following the initiation of the Shiite sit-in the downtown area close to the Prime Minister’s office, he had called Siniora “our prime minister” (meaning the Sunnis) and stated that nobody (meaning the Shiites) would be allowed to remove him. Nashabe mocked the bogeyman of the Persian invasion. “Traditionally Maronites were said to be closest to the West,” he said. “After Hariri’s death it was the Sunni sect. The Saudi government pushed this to show that Sunnis are close to the American agenda, but most combatants of Fatah al-Islam were Saudis.” Nashabe explained that groups like Fatah al-Islam are not necessarily linked to any regime, nor do they have to be state-sponsored. Instead they benefit, like other criminal groups, from the tensions and organized crime in Lebanon. Like the Sunnis in Iraq, the Sunnis of Lebanon feel weak and on retreat compared with the Shiites, with no clear identity. As a result it often seems as if they support a hodgepodge of different and contradictory causes, like the disparate chants heard at Idu’s funeral.
According to As’ad Abu Khalil, “Hizballah’s arms existed from the 1990s until 2005, and back then it was praised by the same Sunni voices who were aligned with them. The Hariri Saudi alliance has been successful in alarming Sunnis in the wake of Hariri’s assassination. After the failure of Israel they tried to drive a bigger wedge between Sunnis and Hizballah. The Saudis surpassed the success of Al Qaeda in deepening the Sunni-Shiite rift—they are the heirs of Zarqawi in that regard, utilizing their media and defining every political issue in pure Sunni-Shiite term. The Saudis are the pillar of the American agenda in the Middle East and want to further American interests. The U.S. wants to weaken Hamas and Hizballah. So they make Hizballah seem not as a resistance movement (as it was perceived by Sunnis up until 2005) but portray it as a sectarian force that furthers Iranian interests in the region through their media, publishing houses, statements of their politicians. They control the culture industry in the region. Saudis control Arab newspapers in the Arab world and outside.”
To understand the point of view of Hizballah’s policy-makers, I met with the cerebral Nawaf al-Musawi, a key adviser to Nasrallah, as well as one of Hizballah’s most ubiquitous public faces and head of its foreign policy unit. Just recently Ahmad Fatfat, a key Future Movement figure who was the former interior minister and current minister of youth and sport, had described Nasrallah’s May 2007 statement on red lines (see Chapter Six) as the worst political mistake the Shiite leader had ever made. I asked Musawi about this. Nasrallah had been concerned about three issues, he told me. “First, protecting the Lebanese army, because it is the guarantee that prevents civil war from happening. If it is weakened, the pro-American faction in Lebanon will ask for the deployment of multinational forces. Second, preventing a new ‘War of the Camps’ in Lebanon and preventing Palestinians from being targets of new massacres and tragedies. This would destroy Lebanon and deepen the suffering of Palestinians, and would disperse the Palestinians and negate their right of return. Third, preventing Lebanon from becoming a place of war for Al Qaeda. This would transform Lebanon into an oven, and the coals of this oven would be the bodies and property of Lebanese and Palestinians. The Bush administration transformed Iraq into a place of war with Al Qaeda, and now it is a place of massacres, and we don’t want our country to become a place of massacres. So let the Bush administration solve their problems away from Lebanon.”
He rejected the notion that Sunni ideology had changed. “The new thing that happened with Hariri was the increase of Saudi influence in the Sunni environment,” he said, “And this happened with Syrian approval and cognizance, because without Hafiz al-Assad’s approval, Hariri would never have been prime minister. The Lebanese Sunni position reflects the Saudi position. The sectarian tension in Lebanon is enhancing Saudi influence in Lebanon. And the other way around as well: Saudi influence is enhancing sectarian tensions in Lebanon.”
Musawi insisted that the Future Movement, which dominated the Interior Ministry, was supporting jihadist Salafis in Lebanon. “These were the Sunni reserves to fight the Shiites,” he said. “Until Nahr al-Barid, the Ministry of Interior characterized the Palestinians as part of the Sunni reserves that would fight with them against Shiites. This idea of building a Sunni militia to fight Shiites began after the killing of Hariri. Since 2005 I was warning European officials on a constant basis and let them know that we see what the house of Hariri is doing with Sunni extremists and Salafis, and this is a very dangerous game and it will be against he who plays with it, as it happened in Afghanistan. As for us, we are not looking for any war with anybody, internally or externally. Our only objective is to defend and protect our country and preserve its stability.” He blamed Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to Washington, for the creation of groups like Fatah al-Islam. “It is Bandar’s project to take Saudi Salafis and bring them here to fight Hizballah.”
Musawi dismissed the notion that Hizballah wanted to impose a Shiite state. “We understand the political reality of Lebanon very well,” he said. “No single group can rule by itself. The Lebanese can’t be governed except by consensus, and we want a democratic and consensual country.”
In recent months a military alliance backed by the United States had been established in the region, and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had even explained that American arms shipments to Saudi Arabia were meant “to counter the negative influences of Al Qaeda, Hizballah, Syria, and Iran.” “It’s an illusion,” Musawi said. “Even the countries allied with the U.S. know Bush will not stay long. So these allies are not serious. The Saudis have their own concerns, Egypt and Jordan have their own concerns. If Rice says this, it doesn’t mean the Saudis will do this. They will do what’s in their best interest.” But like other Hizballah leaders, Musawi was concerned about the role of Jordan. Its intelligence agents were said to be in Lebanon, and Sunni militiamen were being trained in Jordan.
He rejected accusations that the demonstrations in downtown Beirut were an “occupation.” “Beirut is a cosmopolitan city in the international sense,” he said, “and a city for all Lebanese and its demographic fabric is proof of this. It’s not true that Beirut has one sectarian identity. It has Orthodox, Maronites, Shiites, etc., and Beirut is our capital. The Shiite presence in Lebanon is an old one. We are not refugees or guests. If they don’t like it, they can go find another place.”
Nothing was unique about Hizballah possessing an armed wing. “All the sectarian militias have weapons,” he said. “The only thing we have that they don’t have is missiles, and these cannot be used in a civil war.” But Musawi conceded that Hizballah might not have succeeded in explaining its position on Syria to the people of the north, who had suffered under the Syrian occupation, but he reminded me that until the mid-1990s the Syrians had supported Hizballah’s rivals. “I won’t defend the military, political, or security performance of the Syrians. We were the first victims of the Syrians.” He also reminded me that most of the so-called anti-Syrian politicians had collaborated closely with the Syrians politically and financially until the Hariri assassination. They had thanked Syria in 2005 for one reason, he said: their support for the resistance. “We are friends or enemies based on the position on Israel, not a struggle for power or sectarian differences.”
As the Americans tried to galvanize Sunnis in the region to view Iran and its allies as a threat, they showed more signs of succeeding in Lebanon than anywhere outside Iraq. Events in Beirut in early 2008 reminded me of Baghdad in 2004, when the civil war was just beginning and every morning we would hear of small sectarian incidents. New militias were being formed, such as the all-Sunni Tripoli Brigades in the north. In Beirut, street fights regularly occurred between members of the Future Movement and the Shiite Amal Movement. Amal’s young men were more thuggish, and the movement was less ideological and disciplined than Hizballah, which normally avoided being drawn into internal conflict.
In December 2007 Brig. Gen. Francois al-Hajj was killed by a car bomb. It was the twelfth political assassination in the past three years but the first targeting an army officer. Hajj was expected to be the next commander of Lebanon’s army, but he had also been in charge of the army’s operations in Nahr al-Barid. He had been the army’s liaison with Hizballah and was not at all close to the March 14 camp, so it seemed unlikely that opposition forces were behind it. On the other hand, it may have been the hand of Fatah al-Islam reaching out for revenge. At an opposition demonstration, the army shot and killed seven Shiites who were protesting extended power cuts, complaining that the pro-opposition area of Dahiyeh had more cuts than progovernment Christian and Sunni areas. Neglect of Shiites was the whole reason Hizballah had created its so-called “state within a state.”
In the first few months of 2008 small clashes between Sunni and Shiite militias occurred regularly. A January roadside bomb targeted an American diplomatic convoy, but it was less newsworthy than the increasing sectarian polarization—which grew worse following the assassination that month of the Sunni Internal Security Forces official who was himself investigating Lebanon’s numerous political assassinations. At his funeral crowds chanted, “The blood of Sunnis is boiling!” The next month Saad al-Hariri seemed to move the country closer to a civil war. “If they are after a confrontation, we are up for the job,” the Future Movement leader announced. Sunni thugs then took to the streets and shot into the air in celebration. One Friday the sheikh of the Dhunurein Mosque, in Beirut’s Ras al-Nabaa neighborhood (formerly a front line between Christians and Muslims, now a front line between Sunnis and Shiites), declared that Beirut was occupied and Sunnis had to defend it. The implication was that Shiites were occupying Beirut and that they were the threat. The following day young men from the Shiite Amal militia vandalized the mosque. Graffiti warned Shiites to beware of Sunni rage and invoked the names of early Islamic leaders whom Shiites revile, such as Omar and Muawiya.
In Tariq al-Jadida’s main shopping street, Afif al-Tibi, there was a huge commotion one Monday morning following weekend clashes. The streets were lined with about two dozen retail and wholesale clothing stores owned by Shiites, who are a minority in this largely Sunni enclave just north of Shiite southern Beirut. At least five of these shops had their locks clogged with superglue by Future members. Earlier anti-Shiite slogans had been spray-painted on the Shiite-owned shops. After the superglue incident some Shiite shop owners felt threatened and left their shops closed, choosing to stay home. That weekend there had been intense clashes in the Ras al-Nabaa district. Members of the Future Movement had attacked an Amal Movement office. Following the fighting Future supporters stood guard at every street corner in the surrounding area. Many carried chains, metal clubs, or M-16 automatic rifles. They included Lebanese Kurds. After one young man concealed his M-16 from a passerby, another shouted at him, “Why are you hiding it? Show it, we don’t care! Let them know that we have guns too!” Shooting could be heard all night, and in Tariq al-Jadida supporters of the Future Movement destroyed the locally famous Ramadan Juice shop, which was owned by a Shiite man from Dahiyeh and had been open in the neighborhood for twenty years. Future members claimed he was a spy for Hizballah. One Future member explained why they were harassing local Shiites. “We don’t want them in Beirut,” he said. “Beirut is only for Sunnis.”
At the time of the superglue incident, the head of the local Future militia on Afif al-Tibi Street was Abu Ahmad. He had prevented hotheaded militiamen from burning down the Shiite-owned shops. He had also previously refused to arm his men or allow them to maintain a weapons depot because he sought to avoid problems with Shiites. He explained that Sunnis had been living side by side with their Shiite neighbors for many years and that they should solve their problems peacefully. He was replaced, however, by a more aggressive man, said to hate Shiites and love weapons, who armed the young men.
Although the Shiites of Tariq al-Jadida were not overtly political, it was becoming clear that they were not trusted or wanted. Militiamen assigned to intelligence duties stood watch on street corners all day long. Young men worked on various shifts, usually at night, getting paid a few hundred dollars a month, with the promise of a bonus if they took part in fighting. Some were posted in other areas, where more bodies were needed to confront the Shiite Amal movement, a less ideological and more sectarian group than Hizballah. Sunni militiamen coordinated with members of the security forces and army. The Future Movement also mobilized Sunnis from Akkar, who were considered more aggressive than Beiruti Sunnis. Other “real Sunnis” were imported from Dinniyeh and the town of Arsal in the Bekaa Valley to defend the Sunnis of Beirut. Numerous apartment and hotel rooms around the city were rented for them. The Future militias were also recruiting retired army and intelligence operatives. There was even a Future security company in Tariq al-Jadida, its office festooned with posters of Rafiq and Saad al-Hariri. Senior March 14 leader Walid Jumblatt confided to me that Sunnis were joining militias and training in Jordan. He disapproved of this and said they should join the security forces.
Shaqer al-Berjawi was one of the new militia leaders in Tariq al-Jadida. His movement was called the Arab Current. Berjawi had once belonged to the Murabitun militia and fought in west Beirut during the civil war. After Hariri was assassinated, he began forming his new movement (with support from the Future Movement) because Sunnis felt leaderless and weak. He recruited Fatah supporters from the Palestinian camps to fight alongside Sunnis, a growing phenomenon. Hamas members in Beirut blame his people for clashes that occurred between rival Palestinian factions. Berjawi participated in the January 2007 clashes and is rumored to be among the Sunni snipers who were targeting Shiites. He was arrested afterward and accused of weapons smuggling but soon was released.
I met a nineteen-year-old black-market weapons dealer in Tariq al-Jadida who had been selling guns illegally for nearly three years. “Its very profitable,” he told me. “You can double your investment, especially in these times, when all gun prices are getting more expensive lately and everybody is worried about themselves and getting ready for the ‘zero hour.’ People will defend their sect.” He explained that he sold to Sunnis, and occasionally to Christians or Druze, but never to Shiites because “these are the people we want to fight and they have a lot of weapons.” He admitted that until 2005 he had never heard sectarian language. “Now everybody is speaking about sectarian conflict,” he said. “Now even a four-year-old or a six-year-old kid speaks of Sunnis or Shiites.”
Business started getting good for him after the so-called “Tuesday incident,” which is how many Lebanese refer to the January 2007 clashes, and it improved again after the “Thursday incident,” when Amal and Future supporters clashed in 2008. “After those incidents, people demanded guns in a big way,” he told me. The Kalashnikov was in highest demand, with people often opting for a package deal including an ammunition vest and ammunition for eight hundred dollars.
Most of his customers were in Tariq al-Jadida, where he said three-quarters of the people were now armed. The majority of his clients were men between the ages of twenty and thirty, though women were also purchasing small pistols. Almost all of his clients were with the Future Movement.
The young gun dealer, thin and tattooed, also belonged to the local Future militia and worked as a guard. He explained that he had received paramilitary training on a base in Akkar for twenty days along with about sixty-five other young Sunni men. Retired army sergeants had done most of the training, though foreigners, including an Australian of Lebanese descent, had trained them in close protection. The training was conducted under the cover of the Secure Plus security company, one of several owned by Saad al-Hariri. The Interior Ministry was stacked with Sunnis loyal to Hariri, and its Internal Security Forces were viewed by Hizballah as a Sunni militia. Pro-Hariri control of the ministry has eased the way for legalizing these companies-cum-militias.
By the spring of 2008, it seemed as though there were two Lebanons: a Sunni one and a Shiite one, with less important groups just bystanders. The youth, not remembering the violence of the 1980s, seemed eager for another civil war. It was a good time to join Sunni militias, the gun dealer said, because there were several groups recruiting, and this was driving up prices for new recruits. The Murabitun, a civil war-era Sunni militia that had been reactivated, allegedly paid its men nearly three hundred dollars a month. Some Secure Plus recruits guarded installations such as the Saudi embassy. Others wore civilian clothing and monitored Sunni neighborhoods or stood on standby, well armed and uniformed, in case fighting erupted. If recruits proved especially capable, my young interlocutor explained, they were sent to front-line areas such as Ras al-Nabaa, where there were many Shiites. Some were selected for more advanced training in Jordan, which lasted longer. His brother had gone for this training, but graduates were secretive about what they were taught.
I asked him if he wanted to fight Shiites. “Definitely,” he said. “I want to defend my sect. Shiite areas are different. There are no police there, they train kids from an early age and put hatred in their hearts from an early age and teach them that Sunnis killed their leaders. I feel threatened leaving Sunni areas. Iran and Syria have a plan to control Lebanon but so far have not succeeded.” He drank alcohol and was not religious, so I asked him why he was fighting for Sunni Islam. “My identity card says I am a Sunni Muslim,” he said, “and I have to defend my sect. Before I didn’t know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. Shiites made us hate them by their acts.” He expected that there would be a war with Shiites, and he hoped so, not just because it would be good for business. “Sunnis can win only if they are united,” he told me with obvious approval, but he explained that they were not relying merely on the Sunnis of Lebanon but on the help of Saudi Arabia and other Sunni countries. “The Saudis will help. The Saudis are funding all this, not Hariri. Tariq al-Jadida is the castle of Sunnis. If it falls, Lebanon falls.”
On May 1 Walid Jumblatt, the most prominent Druze politician in Lebanon and the leader of the Progressive Socialist Party, called a press conference and announced the discovery of cameras that were monitoring Beirut International Airport. He implied that Hizballah was planning an operation and that it might fire shoulder-launched rockets at planes on the runway. He also warned that Hizballah had its own communications network. Two days later Jumblatt called for the Iranian ambassador’s expulsion and asked that flights from Iran to Beirut be banned to curtail the delivery of financial and military aid to Hizballah. Jumblatt then attacked the airport’s security chief, Gen. Wafiq Shuqair, accusing him of conspiring with Hizballah to install the secret cameras. Two days later, on May 5, Lebanese judicial authorities announced that they had ordered an investigation into the affair. Coincidentally or not, statements from American military officials were published in the Western media that day accusing Hizballah of training Iraqi Shiite militias.
On May 6 the government reassigned Shuqair. Given Hizballah’s angry reaction to his removal, it appears the charges against him were true. Then the Council of Ministers questioned the legality of Hizballah’s parallel communications network, which was a key element of the group’s military command and control ability. The government called the communications network “an attack on state sovereignty.” It was the first time Hizballah’s military was challenged internally; until then the weapons of the resistance had been off-limits. The government’s moves were conducted in coordination with the Americans and the UN envoy, who warned that Hizballah “maintains a massive paramilitary infrastructure separate from the state,” which “constitutes a threat to regional peace and security.” Nasrallah’s deputy Sheikh Naim Qasim said the network was an integral part of the resistance. It seemed like a culmination of a process beginning in September 2004, when the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1559, which supported Hizballah’s rivals’ call to disarm the resistance.
The General Federation of Labor Unions called for a strike and demonstration on May 7 to demand that the government raise the monthly minimum wage, which had not been changed since 1996. Hizballah and its supporters planned their mobilization for the same day. Early that morning Shiite demonstrators blocked bridges and roads throughout the city, including the important airport road, with burning tires, vehicles, garbage containers, cement blocks, and earthen mounds. The airport suspended flights. Many of the demonstrators were masked; some were armed.
A grenade exploded in the Corniche al-Mazraa neighborhood, wounding several people. As it became clear that the situation was getting out of control, the General Federation of Labor Unions called off the demonstration and strike it had planned for that day. As Sunni and Shiite zaaran clashed, throwing stones at one another, Lebanese soldiers separated the two sides by firing into the air and using tear gas. Upon hearing that the Future Movement’s office in the Nuweiri district was destroyed, Sunni supporters of Hariri in the north and the Beqaa gathered to come to Beirut and face the opposition. Small armed clashes occurred throughout the city.
I hurried toward Ras al-Nabaa with some local journalists searching for where shots were coming from and spotted Amal fighters hiding behind street corners and Sunni fighters huddled in front of Future offices. As armed men materialized from behind corners on both sides, I suddenly realized things were potentially more lethal than I had thought. I wanted to leave immediately, but Nada Bakri, a fearless stringer for the New York Times, went charging ahead, so I followed her, not wanting to appear to be cowardly. In the end, an armed man with a revolver in front of a Future office told us to go away, which I did with relief. That evening Hizballah supporters fortified barricades to block the road to the airport. Tents were brought in preparation for a long stay.
On May 8 I returned to Corniche al-Mazraa, to the divide between Barbir and Tariq al-Jadida. Hundreds of disorganized Shiite youth, mostly teenagers from other areas, were gathered on the road. Lebanese soldiers prevented them from crossing to the other side. The call to prayer blared from the nearby Sunni Jamal Abdel Nasr Mosque. The Shiite zaaran stood up. “The blood of Shiites is boiling!” they shouted, adding religious slogans. Some were holding stones or chips of cinder blocks; others had knives, clubs, and plastic bottles full of gasoline. They threw their stones and cinder-block chips across the road at the soldiers and the Sunni neighborhood. The soldiers threw the stones back. One of them was filming the Shiite youth. Some soldiers pleaded with the youth to stop, while others loaded and aimed their M-16s. I was surprised by how provocative the Amal supporters were. For them it was just a show of force to intimidate Sunnis. Older men, with serious faces, well-groomed stubble, and shirts buttoned all the way up, herded the boys. Whenever it seemed as though the boys were about to cross to the Sunni side, they were reined in. I felt as though Hizballah had Amal pit bulls who were foaming at the mouth, eager to attack, and that Hizballah was letting them bark and bite a little to show the other side that it was holding the leash and could let go at any time.
Many of the families living in Barbir had packed up and left for the mountains or their villages, expecting things to get worse. That afternoon, a few hundred Shiite shabab (youth) were organized in rows. Many Amal men wore combat boots and combat pants. They squatted and peered across the road at Tariq al-Jadida, squinting and pointing, looking for snipers in the buildings. Most of them were the same young men I had seen the day before. I saw a few men wearing the gray Internal Security Forces uniforms working together with the Amal men, who set up checkpoints and demanded identity papers in plain sight of the Lebanese soldiers. I sat on the street next to a few shabab who were resting, waiting for something to happen. One of them was from Dahiyeh. “Hamra Street is for them,” he said of Sunnis, and told me that there were Sunni volunteers from Akkar there. We discussed buying arms. The shabab told me that AK-47s were coming in from Iraq. I asked them why they were there. “We are here to defend the weapons of the resistance,” one of them said. “We as the Shiite sect are targeted. They are removing high-ranking Shiite officers from their positions.” We discussed which identity mattered most to them. Three agreed that they were Shiites only, not Arab or Lebanese, much to my surprise. “We are here to fight Qabbani,” one said, referring to the mufti of Lebanon. In the afternoon sandwiches were brought for all the shabab. I noticed men appearing with AK-47s and other rifles, sitting on corners, talking among themselves, getting ready for something.
That day the order came down from the Future leadership for the presenter on Future TV to begin the news segment on Nasrallah’s speech with the inflammatory “How the resistance became the occupier.” In Barbir we sat around listening to Nasrallah’s speech from car radios. Everybody cheered. Nasrallah said that the cause of the crisis was the attack on Hizballah’s military apparatus, which was “a declaration of war . . . against the resistance and its weapons for the benefit of America and Israel. The communications network is the significant part of the weapons of the resistance. I said that we will cut off the hand that targets the weapons of the resistance. . . . Today is the day to carry out this decision.” The opposition-led activities would not cease until the government revoked its decisions, Nasrallah concluded. Saad al-Hariri then responded in a speech calling the opposition actions a “crime” and warning, “We will not accept that Beirut kneel before anyone.” By Beirut, he meant Sunnis.
As the speeches ended, shots could be heard. The Lebanese army retreated as if on command, their vehicles rumbling away. The boys shouted in triumph and jumped. More and more armed men emerged from a building—some with ammunition vests, some in designer clothes with carefully gelled hair. They stood behind corners emptying their magazines into the buildings across the street without discrimination, firing from RPGs. The troops of boys who had been calling for blood until then fled, some started crying. The local commander, a dark-skinned man in his forties called Haj Firas, was a former Amal fighter who was now with Hizballah. He was frustrated with his men for not aiming properly. He took one fighter’s AK-47 and demonstrated, shouting, “Aim and shoot!” Shots were being returned from buildings and street corners on the other side, but nobody was aiming at anything. “It’s open now,” one Amal fighter told me. “It will get worse. I hope so, so we can win.” Reinforcements were brought in from Dahiyeh. A commander arrived and reported that Amal leader Nabih Beri had ordered them not to shoot too much. One of the men cursed Beri. “He wants us not to shoot too much, but they are shooting a lot at us,” he complained. Suddenly I recognized one of the Amal fighters. A fit young man, with gelled hair like the rest of them, he worked at the juice bar in my health club in the evenings and was a geography teacher during the day. We paused for a moment in surprised mutual recognition; then I sprinted across the street, ducking to avoid sniper fire. As fire from automatic weapons, sniper rifles, and the occasional RPG went back and forth, I was trapped on one block. I wound up spending the night in the lobby of an apartment building nearby with local journalists from Al Jazeera and other media.
The next morning, May 9, I walked home past armed Amal men on patrol, some of whom waved their party’s flag as they passed indifferent Lebanese soldiers and headed into Sunni areas. Clashes continued in much of Beirut, and the occasional RPG explosion could be heard. The Future newspaper office was attacked and burned. Hizballah surrounded the Future News television building, and the Lebanese army advised the station to halt all broadcasts, which it did. Ash Sharq radio, also belonging to the Future Movement, was taken off the air. Future TV offices containing archives were burned down after militiamen from the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) clashed with at least thirty-five armed Future supporters there. The SSNP looted the Future media office and hung pictures of the Syrian president. Shutting down the main news outlet may have been wise from Hizballah’s point of view—it prevented Future’s ability to mobilize supporters and probably helped prevent more violence—but it looked ugly, even if people were reminded that former Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri had shut down many opposition media outlets himself. Beirut residents were stunned to see Hizballah soldiers patrolling the streets and manning positions. They were in control of Hamra and Verdun, and there were a few last gun battles in the Sadat area as the Hizballah soldiers surrounded Hariri’s headquarters in Qoraitem.
In the morning March 14 officials were summoned for an urgent meeting in Maarab at the home of Samir Geagea, the leader of the extreme right-wing Christian Lebanese Forces. They decided to escalate the conflict in the north, where Hizballah and its allies were weaker. The mountain road from Beirut to the Beqaa Valley was closed, as was the main highway in Tripoli and the road to Halba in Akkar. The road leading to the Masnaa border crossing with Syria was blocked by angry Sunnis from the Beqaa, especially the town of Majd al-Anjar.
I walked on west Beirut’s Hamra Street and approached a group of soldiers wearing beards and irregular uniforms. I realized it was a mix of Hizballah soldiers and the Lebanese army. Some Hizballah soldiers had sacks of RPGs on their backs. A commander sat on a chair in front of the Crowne Plaza hotel. The streets were empty and shops were closed. A platoon of Hizballah soldiers patrolled in formation down Hamra, scanning the rooftops in all directions and covering one another. They wore knee pads and had gear like American soldiers. Their professionalism reminded me of the times I had patrolled the streets of Baghdad with Americans, except that some of these young men wore sneakers. They shooed away journalists and politely but firmly detained a friend and me; they removed his camera chips but for some reason allowed me to walk alongside their patrol all the way down Hamra Street. Once Hizballah secured locations throughout the city, it handed them over to the Lebanese army. It was clear the army—historically always a weak force—had taken sides and was collaborating with stronger side, the resistance, under the guise of appearing neutral.
In Tariq al-Jadida, I went looking for the Sunni reaction and ran into three men I had seen earlier. One had long hair, one was skinny, and one was fat. “You’re talking about Amal and Hizballah, man,” one told me when I asked him why they had given up so quickly. “There is no creed here. Sunnis fight for money. We were doing it for a hundred dollars. We’re only good for waving flags and singing songs. We were betrayed by our own leaders, even by Saad al-Hariri himself. We thought we had guns and ammunition, but when we went to ask for bullets and ammunition, our organizers and leaders abandoned us.” The Secure Plus headquarters had been burned down. One man denied they had surrendered to Hizballah. “We handed Tariq al-Jadida to the army ourselves,” he said. “If they come back, our shabab are ready.” Hizballah had twenty-five years of experience, one man told me, while local fighters in Tariq al-Jadida were getting high on pills. Close to the smoldering Secure Plus headquarters, a suspicious boy working security for Future checked our IDs. Angry youths surrounded us, but he assured them I was American and not working for Al Manar, Hizballah’s television station.
Checkpoint One, where I had been stopped before the fighting, was now closed—nobody was there. “Here it’s frustration,” one Future militiaman man told me. “They laughed at us. All the leaders are liars. Saad is a liar. The army is with them.” The volunteers from Akkar all ran away, they said. The fighters on the other side had all been Amal, they said. “If it was Hizballah, they would destroy us in a minute.” I asked one man if he wanted a national unity government. “I didn’t say yes and I didn’t say no—nobody asked me,” he said. “Ask them, the men with the guns.”
The feelings of shame and betrayal were palpable on people’s faces. “Beirut fell to AKs and RPGs,” one man said. “We won’t attack Shiite civilians, but they attacked Sunni civilians,” said another. “Our allies inside and outside didn’t help.” “They’re going to provoke us now; they want to make a Persian state.” “We are calling the people of the world: we are under siege. We were five hundred fighters facing fifty thousand fighters.”
The army had taken their weapons, the men complained. “We don’t trust the army. The army was against us in the battle.” They were worried that Shiite militias and their allies would come in now. “Secure Plus turned us down when we asked for weapons,” many people said, explaining that they were also worried that their names were in files inside. So local Sunnis burned it down.
“We are frustrated and everybody is cursing Saad,” one man said. “All militias in Lebanon, they pay money for their guys to prove themselves on the field,” said one. “Our militia didn’t support us. Now anybody who gives money or arms, everybody will support him.” They complained that the Future militia leaders had turned off their phones the previous night, not answering when they called for help.
HIZBALLAH MEN were patrolling the streets of Beirut, calling into question their commitment never to use weapons inside Lebanon, though they justified this by claiming they were defending the resistance’s weapons and that they sought no political advantage in the standoff. As Nasrallah explained at a press conference, Hizballah had used its weapons to defend its weapons. By the morning of May 9 all of west Beirut was in the hands of Hizballah or its armed allies. The government headquarters, called the Sérail, was surrounded, as were the homes of key March 14 leaders like Hariri and Jumblatt. It was the coup that never happened, but it galvanized the more militant Sunnis of the Beqaa and northern Lebanon. Even if Hizballah’s motives were not sectarian, the group could not evade the fact that one side was Shiite and the other was Sunni.
That evening Sahar al-Khatib, a relatively unknown presenter on Future News, appeared on the right-wing LBC TV. She broke down and spoke emotionally, condemning the army for taking Hizballah’s side. “We were driven out of the Future TV building,” she said. “We did not want to surrender.” Then she addressed the leaders of the opposition and the people of Dahiyeh and Baalbeq, meaning Shiites. She had given them a voice, she claimed. Now who would be the voice of the people of Beirut (meaning Sunnis)? Sunnis, she implied, were the people who said, “There is no god but God,” meaning they were the real Muslims. She directly addressed Shiites, who she said wore ski masks on the streets of Beirut. “People who are proud of their actions do not wear ski masks,” she said. Sunnis had opened their homes to Shiites in the July war. “They took you into their hearts,” she lectured Shiites. “We prepared food for you with love during the July 2006 aggression, but you threw it on the ground.” Shiites, she said, “have made me regret my objectivity” for reading the names of Shiite martyrs from the 2006 war. She had defended Shiites, she said. Who would now defend Sunnis when Future TV was shut down? Shiites had broken the hearts of Sunnis, she said, who loved them. It was rare to hear such openly sectarian language, but she grew more explicit. “Why do you hate us?” she asked. “You have awakened sectarianism in me. . . . You kill the people who build this country.”
The Bush administration promised to provide the Siniora government with whatever support it needed against what it described as a Hizballah “offensive.” March 14 officials described it as a coup.
On the night of May 9 the mufti of Akkar, Osama Rifai, went on television and radio and called indirectly for the Syrian Social Nationalist Party to be attacked, as revenge against the SSNP activists who had burned down the Future TV office in Beirut. Attacking Hizballah’s weak ally in the north was a safe way to send Hizballah a message. “We’ll teach them a lesson,” he said. SSNP leaders and their allies believe that the Future Movement leadership, including Saad al-Hariri, gave an order for a response. Khaled Dhaher, a former member of Parliament and leading Islamist politician allied with the Future Movement, and Musbah al-Ahdab, an independent Tripolitan member of Parliament, helped to organize the response in the north. The decision was made to send a warning to the March 8 coalition in Halba. The SSNP had a weak presence in the north, and Halba was a small, majority-Sunni town whose people supported the Future Movement. The two parties had clashed three years earlier. On the night of May 9 armed supporters of the Future Movement took positions around Halba.
Halba is the capital of Lebanon’s northern region of Akkar. Many of the towns sitting on the mountainous region afford views looking down all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. Green fields surrounded the town, with houses scattered on the green hills above it. Like most of Lebanon outside Beirut, it is a lawless region, at least in the sense that the state’s presence is not strongly felt or seen. Shortly after 9 a.m. on the morning of May 10, young men set tires on fire and parked trucks to block the roads leading into Halba. Bright red flames rose from the tires and black smoke billowed up, concealing the low apartment buildings. The wind carried the stinging rubbery stench. Members of the Internal Security Forces, in their gray uniforms with red berets, strolled around next to the crowds of young men who stood around the burning tires. Others in the army’s green uniforms took a look as well. They were not armed. More and more young men gathered, many carrying clubs and metal bars. Some zipped back and forth on scooters. They disappeared into the smoke. The rain that started to fall did nothing to slow the activities or the flames. Some dragged sandbags to fortify their roadblocks. Tractors came with tires piled on them and young men sitting on top. In Lebanon there always seem to be tires available to burn at roadblocks. Cars approaching turned around to look for a different route. At first traffic continued as normal—these armed acts of civil disobedience are normal in Lebanon, and the culprits are rarely punished.
Sunni leaders in the north used the loudspeakers on local mosques to call people together, and thousands of men gathered in the center of town for a demonstration. By now the sun was out again, shining on the sky-blue flags of the Future Movement as well as the green-and-black flags with Islamic slogans that men waved. Others carried posters of Rafiq and Saad al-Hariri. Many men clapped; others just watched. An Arab nationalist song from the 1960s blared from loudspeakers, sending the message that God would defeat the aggressors. Perhaps the organizers were trying to claim the mantle of Arab nationalism and deny it to their opponents. A speaker proclaimed that theirs was not a project of militias; it was the project of Rafiq al-Hariri, the project of education. Hariri did not graduate gangs or militias, he said. On one poster a man had written that Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, whom he called Ariel Sharon, was fully responsible and should take his thugs and tyrants out of Beirut. Another sign said, “Saad is a red line.”
Men shouted to God. Others chanted, “Oh, Nasrallah, you pimp! Take your dogs out of Beirut!” (which rhymes in Arabic). “Oh, Aoun, you pig! You should be executed with a chain!” “Tonight is a feast! Fuck Nasrallah!” “Nasrallah under the shoe!” “Who do you love? Saad!”
Suddenly in the distance shooting started. Some men ran away, while others ran toward it. One man in a loudspeaker shouted, “Fight! The order is yours!” Another man called for caution. “The Internal Security Forces should take the proper position so there won’t be any attack here, and we ask the army to control the situation,” he shouted. “The mufti is coming. Brothers, we need to control ourselves. We are delivering the wrong message to the others. We did not come to fight.”
Armed men stood on the top floors of apartment buildings, looking down from balconies. Others on the street with M-16s and AK-47s used buildings for cover. Exchanges of fire echoed through town. Men gathered in corners and peered over to see where the shots were coming from. Crowds remained in the center of town, and religious leaders from Akkar’s Sunni Endowment hurried to the scene to take part in the demonstration. Some were guarded by armed men in civilian clothes. Some members of the Internal Security Forces and Lebanese army also stood watching.
That morning fourteen members of the SSNP were manning the local party headquarters, which was in an apartment building off the main road, surrounded by trees. Founded in 1932 by Antoine Saadeh, the SSNP is an Arab nationalist party that calls for the establishment of a Greater Syria uniting all the countries of the Levant. It is one of the smaller parties in Lebanon, but it had allied itself with the powerful Hizballah and Amal-led March 8 bloc, and its militiamen were known for being more thuggish than most. It is not clear exactly what happened in the first moments of the battle, but one version suggests that around ten o’clock that morning hundreds of armed Future Movement members and supporters attacked the SSNP office with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. The SSNP members had some light arms in their office, and when they returned fire, two of the attackers were killed. Another version, equally plausible, is that a mob armed with sticks and clubs began to attack the SSNP office, and it was then that two of the Future Movement supporters were killed by the SSNP men inside. Armed attacks against the fourteen men inside the office followed. Trucks brought more men from the area into town. Many of the vehicles belonged to Future Movement officials or allies such as Khaled Dhaher.
Sporadic gunfire soon turned into steady volleys and exchanges. After a few minutes the first RPG hit the building. Two hours later the fire was so intense that the SSNP men asked their leadership in Beirut to help them get out. The Beirut office tried to coordinate with the Lebanese army and Internal Security Forces, attempting to negotiate the peaceful surrender of the SSNP men to the army. The building had been set on fire, and by then the smoke was making it difficult for the men to stay inside.
Muhamad Mahmud Tahash was one of the SSNP men inside. A low-ranking member of the party, he had gone to the office that morning completely unaware of what the day had in store for him. “RPGs were coming down like rain,” he later told me. “There was heavy shooting, and no army outside.” He went out of the building, hoping to seek the army’s protection, and was shot in the shoulder. “It shattered my bone,” he said. “I started walking in between people to go out, then the rest of the men went out as I was walking. I was beaten by people with rifle butts and screwdrivers.” He would later receive fifty stitches on his head. “I fell on the ground and they dragged me away to the Future Movement office, where they beat me,” he said. The other men who followed Tahash out of the building were all unarmed. They had reached an agreement with the Lebanese army, and they assumed that the Future Movement supporters and militiamen were part of the agreement. The local Future Movement leader, Hussein al-Masri, who was present for all the day’s events, had indeed told the army he agreed. But when the SSNP men emerged, one was hit with three shots and killed; another pretended to be dead; the others were all captured. Among them were other low-ranking members, guards, administrators, and a member of the local management committee. The Lebanese army was not there, but hundreds of armed men were. The SSNP men were beaten with stones and sticks, stabbed, burned, and shot in their legs to prevent their escape. The mob’s attack was filmed by many of the participants.
The men were sprawled on the ground, swollen, bloody, and barely conscious. Hundreds of men continued to beat and taunt and shoot at them. “Mahmud, shoot him!” one man called out as somebody cursed a victim’s female relatives and shots were fired. “We are Islam!” someone else shouted. “God will make us victorious!” “Shoot him! This is for Beirut! Fuck his mother! You think we are Jews that you’re shooting at us? Shoot the fucker! We are the rulers, you brother of a whore! Are you proud of yourself for shooting a Muslim?” “This guy shot Hariri’s picture! This guy, this guy!” the man was then beaten with a stick. “God won’t give you mercy! I’m going to shoot you like you shot my cousin! God is great!” One man in the crowd pleaded for the attackers to stop. “Enough, he’s dead, enough! Oh, Muslims!” Others continued to attack and shout. “You infidels! You Jews! By God, I’ll fuck your sister.” “Bring the flagstick,” somebody shouted. One of the victims was stabbed with a stick. “God is one! Pray for the Prophet!” The same lone voice continued to plead, “We are Muslims! In our religion this is forbidden! If they don’t know the religion we know the religion! Act like Muslims! Guys, act like the Prophet has told you guys! Guys, we are Islam, God will give us victory . . . please, please!” One young boy asked to be allowed to abuse the wounded men. “I don’t want to do anything, I don’t want to do anything,” he said. “I just want to break his arm.” “We have four men in here and we have one inside as well! Guys, burn them! Burn them now!” “By God, I’ll fuck your sister!” One of the wounded men moaned, “Oh, God! Oh, God!” One man pointed to one of the victims’ necks and said, “I’m going to shoot you here! You’re not going to die alone!” “Enough, Nabil, leave him!” Someone pleaded, while elsewhere the attack continued. “This is the first bastard that started shooting at us! And this one too, he shot at us directly, this one! Film me while I put my slipper in his mouth, film me!” “Make us proud, guys!” One young attacker with a Future Movement headband shouted to the men, “We want to fuck your sisters!” “Shoot the second one, come on!” “Fuck his mother!” “Guys, burn them!” “I’ll fuck your sister!”
Two adjacent buildings were also attacked. Hundreds of men surrounded them and shot from all sides. “God is great!” they shouted as they burst into apartments and ransacked them. Residents were terrified; there was nobody in charge. They broke into one family’s house and threatened a mother and her children, pointing their guns at them. “We will kill you,” they said. One of the boys was nine years old. As one group of attackers left the apartment another would charge in, and the terror would begin again. As the families from the apartments fled down the streets, they walked past bodies and pools of blood. One of the apartments belonged to a Christian Lebanese army officer and his family. Like their neighbors, they watched their furniture get destroyed, their clothes flung about, their apartment shot up. “When there is so much violence and hatred, it’s impossible to build a state,” the officer later told me. The eighty-year-old father of one of the Christian SSNP members was also in a nearby building. Despite being weak and sick, he too was detained for much of the day and threatened with death. The office of Arc en Ciel, an aid organization that helped the handicapped and was located above the SSNP headquarters, was looted and destroyed. A nearby gas station whose owner was affiliated with the SSNP was also torched.
Survivors of the attack on the SSNP office who made it to local hospitals were attacked by mobs that were waiting for them. Nasr Hammoudah was killed when a fire extinguisher was shoved into his mouth and emptied into him. Mohamad Hammoudah, Abed Khodr Abdel Rahman, and Ammar Moussa were also attacked on their way to the hospital and upon their arrival.
Khaled Dhaher was one of the leaders of the mob. Witnesses implicated him in ordering some of the executions and even of shooting the SSNP prisoners himself. Dhaher protected Muhamad Tahash from execution and interrogated him, asking him how many men were in the office and what kind of weapons they had. One of the men approached and shot Tahash in the belly. Dhaher’s bodyguard, who was Tahash’s childhood friend, helped spare his life. He prevented a man from executing Tahash, so instead the man kicked Tahash in the face and broke his teeth as Dhaher looked on. While in captivity, Tahash observed Dhaher giving detailed orders to the mob. Dhaher told his men to attack the local Syrian Baath Party office. They told him it had been closed for three years. “I don’t care,” Dhaher responded. “Break in and burn it.” Muhamad al-Masri, a local Future Movement leader, was also present. Dhaher’s bodyguard locked Tahash in a room and called the Internal Security Forces to pick him up. They drove him to the hospital in a white civilian Mercedes-Benz. Tahash saw the mob waiting to kill survivors of the massacre. “I was left in the Mercedes by myself,” he said. “Men came and tried to cut my arm off. They couldn’t, so they twisted it and broke it. Then they emptied a fire extinguisher in my mouth and all over me. While they were attacking us, they accused us of defending Hizballah and the Shiites.” Tahash’s wife learned of the attack in Halba from the news. She called her husband’s mobile phone, but a stranger answered. “Muhamad was burned to death,” he told her. “Fuck you and fuck Antoine Saadeh [founder of the SSNP].”
As the men lay dying on the dirt, their attackers and other gleeful onlookers filmed them with their cellphones, bringing the lenses in close and squatting to get better angles. The men were kicked in the head. Some of them were forced to reveal their genitals so the attackers could determine if they were Muslim or Christian. All but two of the victims were Sunni Muslims. Some had been beaten to death; others were still struggling to move or breathe. Their bodies, turned to bloody pulps, lay strewn on the ground. The attackers disappeared. Fires continued to crackle inside the building. One of the men still had his shirt pulled up and his pants open. By 5 p.m. eleven men were dead, crushed, beaten, and shot to death. Soon crowds came to view the bodies. Old men and young boys filmed the dead. The Lebanese Red Cross finally arrived, and then the Internal Security Forces and the Lebanese army. The bodies were taken away in ambulances. Army vehicles rumbled into town, taking positions on the streets. As in January 2007, the offices of the SSNP were attacked because it was an easy target with no sectarian base and less immediate consequences. But the SSNP had a long memory and a history of seeking revenge, party members in Beirut warned me. They believed that the mayor of the Akkar town of Fnaydek and his brother were among the leaders of the mob and that the attacks had been ordered by senior Future Party men and Sunni politician and Parliament member Musbah al-Ahdab.
In Tripoli that day I saw a banner that said, “No to Wilayat al-Faqih,” a reference to the Iranian system of government. That evening I interviewed Ahdab in his ostentatious Tripoli apartment. He had a small militia of dozens of fit armed men protecting him. One of his security guards belonged to Afwaj Trablus, the Tripoli Brigades. He was paid by Secure Plus. There were six or seven thousand men like him, he told me, who had been trained but not in the use of RPGs. A few had received advanced training in Jordan. “It would be better if the Syrians were here,” he said ruefully. “At least there was security.” Ahdab’s eyes were bloodshot and wide in near hysteria. His breath smelled strongly of alcohol. An Iranian militia had taken over an Arab capital, he told me. As we spoke, we got word of clashes in the slums of Bab al-Tabbaneh.
I raced over with a Lebanese friend. There was no power, but the buildings were illuminated by the occasional thunderous flashes of RPGs. At a nearby traffic circle, we saw dozens of men running toward Bab al-Tabbaneh carrying launchers and RPGs. They had long beards and were obviously Salafis. We stopped to talk to several men who stayed behind. They were fighting the Nusayris, they told me, using the pejorative term for Alawites, in the hilltop neighborhood of Jabal Mohsen, which overlooked Bab al-Tabbaneh. “They’ve hated us for 1,400 years,” one man told me, referring to Shiites. “The rich are in Beirut,” a garage owner who was watching the fighting said. “We are the poorest area of Lebanon.” “They are afraid of Tabbaneh. They are afraid of Sunnis,” another man told me. “We have assabiya for our sect.”
Hundreds of fighters rushed into the blackness. “This fight is revenge for Beirut,” one man said. I asked them why they didn’t go and fight in Beirut. “We are waiting for permission from Sheikh Saad,” someone told me. “Saad realized he didn’t want to fight Shiites, he doesn’t want a military conflict. Future is a moderate current. If Future disappears, then Sunnis will die. If you cut our wrists, the blood will come out and spell Saad, and spell Sunnis.”
My friend was a Sunni from the Ras Beirut area of the capital, which is identified as Sunni. He was stopped by several irate armed Salafis who demanded to see his ID card to confirm his address. “If you are not from Ras Beirut, I will slaughter you now,” the leader of the group barked at my friend.” One of the men disparaged the Sunnis of Baghdad, who had failed to stand up to Hizballah. “The Sunnis of Beirut want to have nice jackets, nice cars, and nice apartments,” he told my friend. “They like to go out on a Saturday night and stay out. Here we are day laborers, and we save money to buy guns because we know we will need them. That’s why we blame you.” As I left I realized Saad al-Hariri was actually a moderating force, preventing Sunnis from pursuing further violence.
The next morning I returned. One woman had been killed in the clashes, but no fighters had been hurt. I visited the home of nineteen-year-old Ibrahim Jumaa, who had gotten married a month and a half earlier and had just moved in. An RPG had gone through his wall, through his living room, and into his toilet. The Lebanese army was on the streets of Bab al-Tabbaneh. They had also been there before the previous evening’s clashes started. Like in Beirut, the fighting was preceded by youth throwing stones at one another. When the army withdrew, the shooting started. “We all fight,” one man told me. “It’s our neighborhood, our land. We are on fire after the battle of Beirut.” Some of the people tried to console my friend, who was a Sunni from Beirut. Others asked him why Tariq al-Jadida had fallen so quickly. Their radios crackled. “Hide your weapons, the army is coming,” somebody said. The men told me they hid their weapons when the army showed up for the sake of the army’s feelings. “The problem with the army is as soon as they hear a shot, they leave,” said one man.
Most of the bearded men in Afghan attire were gone in the morning, save a few of their leaders, who sat in a cafe and coordinated with their men by radio. Locals were hostile to the media, and warned that they would not accept Al Jazeera or the local Lebanese channel, New TV, which were perceived as pro-Hizballah. The Saudi-owned Arabiya network was welcome, though. They demanded that Future TV be allowed to operate again and that the siege on the airport be removed. “Hariri airport is not Nasrallah airport,” one man said. “We are mad because Sunnis were broken,” another said, but they were not angry at Saad. One man who had fought in Iraq in 2003 told me it was part of the same conflict.
Mustafa Zaabi, the man who had guided me through the area in the past, told me that “Sunnis here won’t be quiet.” I walked by a cafe with a poster of Saddam at his trial, in which he was holding the Koran. It said, “Long live the Muslim community, Long live Palestine, Arab freedom.” Mustafa had led his own group of fighters during the clashes. He carried an RPG launcher. He and the older men knew how to fight, he said, but the younger guys didn’t. He seemed ecstatic. “It’s an experience, fighting,” he said. “We felt as if they took us back twenty-seven years. We went back to the same positions we were in before.”
Hundreds of Tabbaneh residents had been massacred by the Syrians and their allies in the 1980s. The civil war had never ended there. The bitterness remained and occasionally erupted into violence, but with the influx of Salafis and jihadists and the interpretation of local conflicts through the paradigm of a regional conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, it was becoming more explosive. The Salafis played a crucial role in the latest battle. “We depend on them,” Mustafa told me. “They have a creed.”
Local militiamen scrounged their money and relied on donations from wealthy Sunni patrons and politicians. All the Sunni leaders in Lebanon had provided them with assistance, including Najib Mikati, Omar Karameh, and Saad Hariri. And their various supporters all fought together against the Alawites. They bought many of their weapons from the Palestinian camps. “If we had part of Hizb Ashaytan’s [the devil’s party] weapons, I would be talking to you from the mountaintop,” Mustafa told me. Musbah al-Ahdab was particularly loved in the area for his public anger and financial support. “Musbah was 20 percent popular before he went on TV and said that people should organize themselves and get their weapons so what happened in Beirut won’t happen here,” one man told me. “Then his popularity became 100 percent.” Some people told me that Ahdab had also provided them with weapons and ammunition. Khaled Dhaher was a good guy, they all agreed. (“He didn’t abandon us,” Mustafa told me. “He took care of us.”) Many of them had footage of the Halba massacre on their mobile phones. Dhaher’s people had been involved, everybody said proudly; his people were well armed. Mustafa bragged that Dhaher had killed some of the victims himself. It was rumored that the families of the two Sunni supporters of the Future Movement who were killed in Halba during the clashes each received one hundred thousand dollars from the Hariri family. Locals told me that Dhaher’s people had distributed ammunition to the militias of Tabbaneh. “Jund Allah dazzled us with their weapons and the amount of ammunition that they had,” Mustafa said of Kanan Naji’s militia. Two Future officials, Muhamad al-Aswad and Khalid al-Masri, also had armed groups in Tabbaneh.
The way the clashes erupted sounded familiar. Nobody knew who started shooting first, Mustafa told me. Zaaran from both sides were insulting one another and throwing stones, and then the shooting started. It was a result of an old anger in their hearts, he told me, which went back to the Syrian occupation. “It’s an old war,” he said. “There isn’t a house or a family in Tabbaneh that doesn’t want revenge on the Alawites, that doesn’t have a blood debt with the Alawites,” another man told me.
People had been told to expect a battle that day, so they had prepared for one. And indeed, a battle happened in Tabbaneh and other poor areas around it. Suddenly all the old armed groups that had once dominated Tripoli re-emerged, but their men were too old and the young men on the streets lacked proper training. As a result Sunnis often turned to current or former members of the security forces. An Alawite leader claimed that the first RPG had been fired by a pro-Syrian Sunni group.
The army had come the previous night during a truce, but when fighting resumed it withdrew again. Mustafa’s area was a front line. He broke a hole in the back of his building so his men could sneak out to the other side. One of his men showed me a wad of cash he had just received to buy more ammunition. The price for a hand grenade was now seventeen dollars. Before the fighting it had been four dollars. A rocket-propelled grenade was now seventy dollars. Mustafa would buy weapons from Palestinian dealers in the Minyeh area close to Bedawi.
One of his men had gone down to Tariq al-Jadida with several hundred others from the north for the Beirut fighting. They were only given clubs, he complained, not guns, and had barely been fed. He felt betrayed. “No,” said another, “Saad didn’t want bloodshed.”
“There is a strong Sunni awakening in Lebanon,” Mustafa’s younger brother Khudhr told me. “We all became terrorists,” another man said. “Hassan Nasrallah made us all terrorists. We don’t want to fight Israel.” Instead, they told me, they would fight the Shiites with all they had.
“We as the shabab of Tabbaneh are fighting as Islamists, not as the opposition or the majority,” Mustafa explained. “We are in solidarity in defense of our religion.” He told me that they feared a repeat of the massacres they had faced in the 1980s by the Syrians and their allies.
Whenever power was used against Salafis and Islamists, they became more devout and defended their religion, Mustafa told me. There was no area in Lebanon that had poverty and neglect and didn’t have people embracing their religion. “The comfortable citizen doesn’t think about the gun,” he said. “In this area it’s like you’re in a Palestinian camp.” If they could have left their area, they would have gone down to Beirut to defend Sunnis, he told me. They were resentful of the Sunni leadership, which had betrayed them. “During Nahr al-Barid they accused the shabab of belonging to Fatah al-Islam because they were Sunnis. They killed who they killed and imprisoned who they imprisoned just because they were Sunnis. But Hizballah did what they did in Beirut, and nobody questioned them or confronted them.”
“If we close the airport road, they will say we are terrorists,” one man said. “Yesterday I started to pray because I felt like I am in the hands of God. And that’s how I became a terrorist. They pushed me and abandoned me, and I am alone. What can I do? I seek shelter with God.”
One day I showed up in front of Mustafa’s shop and found him wearing a new military vest he had just purchased for twenty dollars. The other guys wanted one too. His Salafi cousin Shadi Jbara gave him money to purchase more. There had been fighting the night before. One of the men bragged that in all their fighting ten civilians had died in the clashes but none of the fighters had been killed.
Shadi had just been released from prison two weeks earlier and was opening a bakery. Along with several other Al Qaeda wanna-bes, he had tried to blow up a local Kentucky Fried Chicken. Shadi’s father had been assassinated during the battles of the 1980s, and he bragged that his mother had become a mujahida, carrying an AK-47 and shooting RPGs at the Alawites of Jabal Mohsen. Shadi had known some of the Fatah al-Islam men in prison. One of them, an Algerian, told Shadi he had come to Lebanon to defend Sunnis from Shiites.
At first Shadi wasn’t sure if he could talk to me because he hadn’t received permission from the sheikh he followed. He had once been like any other guy, he told me, going out at night, chasing women. In 1991 he met a man who led him to the right path—the path of God. He went to Saudi Arabia in 1993 and met with Afghan Arabs and leaders of Salafi movements. He worked in a restaurant, and at night he would study there. After five years he returned from Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden gave orders to attack U.S. businesses; the easiest targets for Shadi and his friends were restaurants, so they decided to attack a Kentucky Fried Chicken. They placed one kilogram of TNT by the restaurant early in the morning so nobody would get hurt. They didn’t want to cause casualties, just damage to the restaurant to gain media recognition.
Shadi explained that his friends had made a tactical error when they attacked a McDonald’s. Before leaving their explosives, they had sat down to eat and were captured on the security camera. Most of the men from the group were from Tabbaneh. They were rookies and confessed to the police immediately, informing on the KFC group as well. Prison was like a university, Shadi said. He spent five years behind bars and met men from different groups. At their peak Salafis like him numbered 420 in the prison. They were categorized as terrorists and separated from other inmates. In prison they had access to DVDs and CDs with lectures by Zarqawi and other famous jihadists. “Zarqawi, God have mercy on him, influenced the shabab more than bin Laden did,” he told me.
Fatah al-Islam was not a Syrian creation, he insisted. Many of its men had fought in Iraq or Bosnia. Some had belonged to Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda in Iraq. Most were Palestinians from Syria’s Yarmuk camp. Syria was like a reservoir for these groups, he told me, but thousands of men had been arrested there. Lebanon was a small country, and it was hard for Al Qaeda to operate there, he explained. Most of the Al Qaeda men in Lebanon weren’t planning operations in Lebanon but were looking to Iraq.
Sunnis in Lebanon were very weak, he said. “The Sunnis of Beirut are not fighters; they are traders. If there were fifty Salafi jihadi guys in Beirut, then Hizballah would have lost a lot. The only people who can face Hizballah must have an ideology and a military. We were very angry at Saad. Hizballah is a military party; you can’t fight them with politics.” Shiites in prison were celebrating and shouting for Ali after the Hizballah victory in Beirut. But Salafis in prison were happy when they heard about the Halba massacre. I asked Shadi where I could hear a strong sermon. “Sermons don’t affect people,” he told me. “It’s the small studying sessions that affect people. The guys who talk about jihad in the sermons tell people to stay home and not go to jihad.”
Shadi thought Prime Minister Siniora was an infidel, apostate, and ally of the Americans. But the Hizballah-led siege of Siniora’s government was not about Siniora, he said; it was about the sect. Shadi had friends who had fought in Iraq, but it was harder than ever to go there. Because there was so much pressure on veterans of the jihad in Iraq once they returned to Lebanon, many mujahideen preferred to die in Iraq, Mustafa approached his Salafi brother and Shadi and gave them instructions. “We need you sheikhs to take the mountain in the front, and we will follow.” Shadi responded that they were lacking ammunition and needed to better organize themselves. Shadi told me he understood that the people of Tabbaneh were being used by the Sunni elite in the country. And he knew that when that elite pressed a button again, the fighters of Tabbaneh would once more be activated.
The walls of Tabbaneh were covered with posters of Khalil Akkawi, the slain leader of the Tawhid movement. In the early 1980s he had been an ally of Kanan Naji. Together they had fought the Syrians. Akkawi was assassinated in 1986. I spoke with his son, Arabi, who remained very respected and connected throughout Tripoli because of his father’s legacy of resistance. Arabi had been nine years old at the time of his father’s death. Policemen smuggled him out of Tabbaneh with his mother and sister in the back of a pickup truck because the Alawites were looking for them to kill them.
The people of Tabbaneh did not view the Beirut fighting as a political dispute, Arabi told me. To them it was simply Shiites attacking Sunnis. They felt they were slapped in the face and had to react in Tripoli. If the Future Movement was weakened, then the Salafis would take their place. “Salafis are raging, and it’s the right environment for Salafis and Al Qaeda to grow,” he told me. Some Salafis had brought weapons to Tabbaneh with the support of officials from the Interior Ministry such as Gen. Ashraf Riffi. “On the street people are saying, ‘We wish Fatah al-Islam still existed.’ Al Qaeda became acceptable now. The environment is welcoming.”
There was no alternative to the Future party for Sunnis, he told me, and Future had not lost popularity. “Whenever sectarian conflict increases, then Future gains in popularity.” Arabi believed it was his father’s former ally Naji who had started the most recent battle with Jabal Mohsen. He told me that Naji’s men launched RPGs at the Alawites and opened fire on their neighborhood, so the Alawites thought the Sunnis were attacking them. Naji was backed by Dai al-Islam al-Shahal, Lebanon’s most prominent Salafi.
I returned regularly to the neighborhood. Tensions would occasionally increase, the army would withdraw, and people would return to their fighting positions. One explosion took down much of an apartment building. Men with military vests and AK-47s materialized suddenly. One of them had a body full of tattoos: “Because I love you,” said one; another said, “I’m not afraid of death but my mother’s tears kill me.”
I returned to see Shahal again, in his office in the Abu Samra area of Tripoli. There was a more obvious armed presence outside and inside his office than before. On his desk next to plastic flowers was a leaflet that said, “The Salafi Current in Lebanon is calling for the Sunnis to organize to face any danger.” Before we started, he closed his eyes and recited a long prayer. Then he opened his light blue eyes and started talking. A big fitna (internal strife) had happened, he told me; if it wasn’t contained it would open the door to dangerous events. Sunnis in Beirut were under heavy pressure because it was the capital and they were weaker than Sunnis in the north. There was a plot against Sunnis, but the north was their real stronghold, where the shabab were Salafis and stronger and disciplined. That’s why they could give balance to the Sunnis and halt the conspiracy against them. All Sunni forces in Lebanon united. “In Beirut and here there are weapons, personal weapons, and it isn’t enough. But we have faith. We don’t need Al Qaeda. The Salafi Current is on the ground. It has forces.”
As long as the Salafi movement existed, there was no need for Al Qaeda in Lebanon. “The Salafi street in Lebanon has its presence, its strength, and we will hopefully work on strengthening it,” Shahal said. “Salafis in Lebanon are intelligent, and they know the ground. They know the Lebanese situation, and they can play the game by its internal rules [meaning they had a local agenda], and they are not incapable of military conflict when it’s needed. We don’t need human support from outside Lebanon. What we need is psychological support and financial support. This is not a call to jihad. It’s a call to self-defense. We don’t expect any support from the regimes but from those who are convinced in our religion and our call.”
Sunni militias were beginning to form, and in Majd al-Anjar, a Sunni stronghold in Lebanon’s Beqaa, irate shabab closed the key Masnaa border road to Syria. On May 12 I drove there to check it out. Few roads led into the tightly connected narrow streets, where the plethora of mosques and the austerity and solidarity, among other things, reminded me of Falluja. I stopped to see if the mukhtar, Shaaban al-Ajami, was home. He was not. A muscular policeman with long hair stood in front of a mosque across the street, watching us. Suspicious locals stopped me to ask who I was. A hardened woman led us to a roadblock, just past a large intersection leading to the Syrian border crossing at Masnaa. Lebanese soldiers perched indolently atop their armored personnel carriers, phlegmatically watching anarchy as several hundred men with automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, pistols, and hand grenades manned roadblocks of earthen barriers and fires. Some wore masks. There was nobody in command—it was a mob, not a militia, and so even more frightening. The men were angry, afraid, suspicious, shouting at strangers and one another, each one an authority unto himself. They carelessly swung their weapons around, oblivious to where they were pointing. Some rested the barrels of their rifles on top of their feet, a sign they had no professional training. A car approached with a family inside. They surrounded it, shouting at the passengers. A woman inside shrieked in fear. Local police showed up in an official pickup truck; the young muscular policeman with long hair emerged and greeted the armed men, warmly kissing and embracing them.
When strangers approached, the men immediately demanded to know if they were Sunni or Shiite. Hundreds of Syrian laborers carrying bags and baskets descended from buses and walked between the earth barriers on their way to the border. Two old men were detained, their identity cards revealing them to be Shiites. Locals sitting in the shade by shops quickly descended when they heard Shiites were found. Rifles were loaded and a frisson passed through the mob. The harrowed Shiites were finally released unscathed.
Nabil Jalul, a redheaded thirty-four-year-old local leader, carried a tiny pistol he could hide in his pocket. He wore a ski mask but raised it above his brows so we could talk. He used the language of the takfiris I had met in Iraq, those extreme Sunnis who declare other Muslims who do not share their austere practices (especially Shiites) to be kufar (infidels). He called Shiites rafidha (rejectionists), an anti-Shiite slur, and told me they had been armed by the Nusayris, a slur for Alawites, meaning the Syrian regime. Shiites were agents of the Israelis, he said, and they had not liberated their holy sites in Iraq from the American occupiers, so who could take Shiites in Lebanon seriously when they spoke of liberating Jerusalem from the Israeli occupiers? “We fight based on a creed,” he said, while “they” (meaning Hizballah) used weapons against other Lebanese. “Resistance is not about entering Beirut and oppressing its people. This roadblock is for victory in Beirut and the Sunnis. We won’t open the road until they open the airport.”
Nabil referred to Hizballah (which means Party of God) as Hizb al-Lat (Party of Lot), meaning the party of sin. Like many other Salafis, he also called them Hizb Ashaytan (Party of the Devil). “We are the shabab of Majd al-Anjar,” he said. “We fight the rafidha. We ruled for hundreds of years. We have many mujahideen and martyrs in Iraq. If the Sunnis of Beirut call us, we will come.” He told me many jihadist websites published calls for Sunni volunteers to come to Lebanon. Some required secret passwords, but he wouldn’t give me his.
Nabil had no formal military training, but, like many in the Beqaa, he began handling weapons at a young age. His life changed when he fell under the influence of Abu Muhamad, a local of Kurdish descent who had been one of Zarqawi’s deputies. Abu Muhammad’s real name was Mustafa Ramadan. An ethnic Kurd from Beirut who had once been a hoodlum who drank alcohol, he married a woman from Majd al-Anjar and moved to Denmark. He returned a Salafi and recruited some youth from the town to his own network, finally going to Iraq with his sixteen-year-old son. Abu Muhamad was trained in Afghanistan and was part of Basim al-Kanj’s Dinniyeh group. He was arrested in 2002 in a mosque in Majd al-Anjar. After four months in prison he used his connections and paid his way out. In Iraq he was said to have dispatched the car bomb that killed SCIRI leader Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim in 2003. He died fighting in Iraq, in an attack on the Abu Ghraib prison that nearly breached its walls.
Nabil’s brother-in-law was killed fighting in Rawa, a town in Iraq’s Anbar province, in June 2003. I visited the town the morning after dozens of Iraqi and foreign fighters had been slain in their desert camp by Americans. Locals buried them by a mosque, placing their ID cards in bottles that served as tombstones. Other youths from Majd al-Anjar were buried in Rawa that day. One of them was the son of Abu Muhamad, which was why he was also known as Abu Shahid, or father of the martyr. At least seven young men from the town were martyred in Iraq, and Nabil had a plaque in their honor in his guest room.
Nabil was jailed from 2004 until 2005, accused of plotting to bomb Western embassies and other targets. He later proudly showed me the many articles about his arrest and release. He was released with other jihadists at the same time as Samir Geagea, a Lebanese war criminal and leader of the right-wing Christian Lebanese Forces. The release of the radical Sunnis was meant to placate Sunnis and bolster the Sunni credentials of the Future Movement.
Majd al-Anjar was an important smuggling center. After the American invasion of Iraq, Nabil smuggled weapons and fighters into Syria and Iraq. Smugglers from the town relied on dirt roads through the mountainous border. All of Lebanon’s political factions relied on smuggling through Syria, Nabil told me. Many of the Lebanese officers at the border received salaries from smugglers that could reach five thousand dollars a month. Smuggling was still a good business, but it was more difficult now. Only special explosives were smuggled from Lebanon to Iraq, such as C4 and TNT. He showed me a picture of himself from the early days of the Iraq War, with a beard down to his chest. Back then he was so religious he refused to own a television.
Abu Muhamad would come from Iraq and meet Nabil in Damascus, where they rented apartments. Nabil delivered truckloads of weapons to him: bombs and explosives as well as missiles and silencers for pistols. They bribed Syrian customs officials and used clandestine dirt roads. Nabil’s friend Ismail Khatib purchased the weapons, sometimes with his own money, and handled communication with their brethren in Iraq. “We were a very tight group,” Nabil said. “We couldn’t be penetrated.” Ismail’s cousin Ali was among the dead in Rawa in 2003. After another fighter was killed in Iraq and two trucks of weapons were seized, the authorities began to watch their network. The Syrians, who still maintained bases in Lebanon at the time, had an intelligence headquarters nearby. Nabil was arrested on September 19, 2004, two months after his last delivery of weapons to Syria. The Syrians were the ones who sent Nabil to prison. “They decided to stop the flow of foreigners into Iraq,” Nabil told me, “just like all the Arabs who changed their policies suddenly and decided to look good for the Americans.”
Majd al-Anjar was also an important stop in the network that smuggled fighters to Iraq from Lebanon and its Palestinian camps, especially Ayn al-Hilweh. Dozens of men from that camp were martyred in Iraq. Among its most famous martyrs was Abu Jaafar al-Qiblawi. His poster hung above one of the main roads in that camp. Nabil was his friend and had smuggled him into Syria. Ismail took him on to Iraq. In the last film showing Zarqawi, Abu Jaafar was the one who handed a machine gun to him. He was killed with Zarqawi in June 2006. After his death a thirteen-minute video, filmed in August 2005 on the banks of a river, showed his last will. In the video he held a machine gun and addressed his parents, calling on his father to remain steadfast and his brothers to join the jihad. The mujahideen would be victorious, he said, in their fight against the greatest power in the world, America, which was the leader of nonbelief. America had to be destroyed, he said, and Muslim lands had to be liberated. He sang songs for his mother and to his beloved. One of Abu Jaafar’s brothers was killed in the Nahr al-Barid battle in 2007, and another was arrested in 2008 by the Lebanese army while attempting to smuggle a Saudi fighter out of Ayn al-Hilweh.
When Nabil and the men in his network were arrested (they were found with fifty kilograms of TNT and five kilograms of C4), they were tortured by members of the Interior Ministry’s Information Branch. During the interrogations Nabil was hit in the back of his head with a club; his legs were bruised for months after the beatings. Nabil was accused of being the number-two man in the group. Ismail was tortured to death, and his funeral in Majd al-Anjar was an occasion for massive demonstrations. With Ismail’s death, Nabil lost his connections to Iraq and no longer smuggled on behalf of the jihad. Nabil bragged about those days. “We are Al Qaeda,” he told me. “We had connections to Abu Shahid.” Nabil knew seven or eight men who had returned home to Majd al-Anjar from Iraq, and he knew there were others. In town I met a middle-aged Iraqi Baathist who, I was told, had been in the resistance, though he refused to discuss his past except to say he had served the state. “I’m wanted in Syria for terrorism,” he told me, adding that he was also wanted in Lebanon for opening fire in a fight. Sheikh Dai al-Islam al-Shahal from Tripoli visited Nabil after his release from prison. “Dai al-Islam is a friend of mine,” he told me. “He knows the truth, but he won’t speak all of it.” It was clear Nabil didn’t think highly of him, and he made a contemptuous face.
Back at the roadblock Nabil and others set up in Masnaa, a convoy of expensive cars drove up, and Sheikh Muhamad Abdel Rahman, head of the Sunni religious endowment in the Beqaa, emerged. Hundreds of men surrounded him as he gave a speech with a loudspeaker. An establishment figure, he came, like others, to try to influence the men. The Sunni elite feared young men like Nabil, whom they could not control. Representatives from the Future Movement had asked them to open the roadblocks, Nabil said, as had the municipality. Although locals voted for the Future out of Sunni solidarity, they did not belong to the party—which had opposed the initiative taken by local youths to close the road.
Sheikh Muhamad addressed them directly. “You represent Majd al-Anjar,” he said. “The decision to open the road is yours. It’s impossible to open the road without your agreement. The decision must protect the interest of the town and the people of the town and the shabab of the town.” He warned that there were some infiltrators among them. “You are not here for stealing. If there are people among you stopping and stealing, it’s harming your dignity.” The issue was protecting Sunnis’ dignity and autonomy, he said; they would open the road if it was in the interests of the sect. “The Islamic Sunni resistance begins today,” he said. “We work for Lebanon, and they work for Iran.” Young men shot into the air as he spoke.
“The sheikh, the municipality, the Future Current, the world came to open the border,” one of the young men said triumphantly, “but the shabab of Majd al-Anjar who closed the border refused to open it.”
The following Friday I visited the Abdel Rahman Auf Mosque in Majd al-Anjar, also known as the Wahhabi Mosque. Nabil met us at the entrance to town and guided us to the mosque, handing us over to a chubby bearded friend before going home. Expensive cars were squeezed in around the mosque, which was full of young men and boys. It had two floors, with a screen on the second floor so people could watch the imam give his sermon. Sheikh Adnan al-Umama, a local, spoke of Hizballah’s “barbaric raid” on Beirut and condemned Iran. In Iraq the mujahideen were called terrorists, he said, while Hizballah’s Shiite brothers in Iraq helped the Americans.
The battle was one of creeds, he said, meaning between Sunnis and Shiites. “These people who came against us are secular and infidels. If they were honest about what they say, then we have to be ready to fight them. We saw them invading Beirut with hearts full of hate and accusing us of the murder of Hussein. If they have a problem with the government like they claim, why did they attack civilians and humiliate our women and our Muslim homes in Beirut?” Hizballah “terrorized us in our cities. Their friends in Iraq are friends with the Americans. We are the real people of the resistance. Sunnis are the real resistance.” The battle against Israel was a Sunni battle as well, he said. “I’m not agitating for a sectarian conflict. But, on the other hand, we won’t stand still if they try to humiliate or insult our homes and our women.” The Lebanese army would fall apart soon because of the sectarian division inside it, he said. It was time for Sunnis to stop being afraid of Shiites to start rising up. “Until the government is able to defend us, we insist on carrying our guns,” he said. “And we will resist [the Shiites] with our women and children and all the power we have. I praise our heroes who blocked the road. Yes, they did the right thing. We are the pure, noble Muslims, and we are merciful, and we won’t stay silent about the attack on the people and our women in our cities.”
As I listened to the sermon with a friend, a man turned to question us suspiciously, but Nabil’s friend explained that we were with him. Then suddenly a thick older man with a long gray beard took my friend’s notebook from his hands and demanded mine as well. After the prayer ended he interrogated us as others surrounded us. He tried to read the notes and ordered Nabil’s friend to make copies of our identity cards.
I later went to meet Sheikh Adnan at his home. Landscape paintings and gaudy European art decorated his guest room. Given the tone of his sermon, he was younger, quicker to smile, and more jovial than I had expected. He began by apologizing for the men who had interrogated us at his mosque. He normally preferred not to give political sermons, he told me, focusing instead on religion, because politics was always changing.
Majd al-Anjar, with its twenty thousand residents, was unique, he said, because it was close to the border, was populated only by Sunnis, had a large number of graduates in Islamic studies educated all over the Arab world, and had no secular political parties. Sheikh Adnan was not optimistic. “Outside powers determine events here,” he told me. Shiites were doing the same thing in Lebanon that they were doing in Iraq, but Iraqi Sunnis were stronger because they had weapons from the former regime at their disposal and a better geographical location. Bin Laden and Zawahiri were wrong when they called for Al Qaeda to operate in Lebanon, because they did not know the nature of the country, he said. It was too divided and mixed, and Al Qaeda could never establish a stronghold.
He did not want fitna in the Muslim community, he said; he wanted to fix the problems of arms in Lebanon and the dangers they posed for Sunnis. After seeing what happened in Beirut, Sunnis understandably wanted to arm themselves too. The Future Movement had no creed, he said. Its people worked only for money, unlike Hizballah. Sunnis were looking for a leader to represent them, but the Mufti Qabbani was too close to the Saudis and the Future Movement, and he was weak, having done nothing in response to the events in Beirut. There was an opening now for Islamist movements, but the experience of Nahr al-Barid had made Islamists wary of organizing. He wondered why the Americans had abandoned the Siniora government and asked me if I had any insight.
We drove to Nabil’s house. He lived with relatives on the second floor of a compound. Nabil’s guest room was a shrine to jihad. He had a large collection of ammunition shells and grenades on display in his cupboard. Upon entering his house, guests were greeted by framed pictures of the 9/11 attacks—the Twin Towers aflame and a smoldering Pentagon. “We are not in line with Sheikh Adnan,” Nabil told me. “He is moderate, as they say.” Instead Nabil and his friends took fatwas from scholars associated with Al Qaeda. Nabil asked his little boy what he wanted to be when he grew up. “A mujahid!” his son grinned. A tall man wearing jeans and a T-shirt that were too tight (in true Lebanese style) burst in the room. His name was Hossam, and he was one of the organizers of the roadblock. Seeing the pistol on his belt, I asked if he was a cop. “No, I’m a mujahid,” he said. He explained that closing the road was a spontaneous decision taken by the shabab. “Our conscience and our honor made us close it,” he said. “I smoke hashish, I’m not religious. It was something from the inside.”
I visited often in the spring and summer of 2008. Nabil always had his 9-millimeter Glock pistol in his hand, on his lap, or on the table beside him. Like many Glocks I had seen in Lebanon, it had been smuggled in from Iraq, an American gift to mostly Shiite Iraqi Security Forces now in the hands of radical Sunnis in Lebanon. Once, as I sat in Nabil’s guest room, he received a phone call. He grabbed his pistol and ran out. Three unknown cars with tinted windows had entered the town. He called Hossam. “Three cars came in,” Nabil said. “They might be military. Park your car and I’ll send someone to pick you up. . . . They’re raiding your house. . . . Don’t worry about me. I’ll start shooting if they get close to my house.” Nabil took out a walkie-talkie and contacted other men in their network. Hossam, sweating and out of breath, walked in with a thuggish-looking friend. Hossam wielded a new AK-47 equipped with a scope and flashlight as well as a drum magazine to hold far more ammunition. He wore an ammunition vest laden with extra ammunition and several American hand grenades that he said cost fifty dollars apiece. His friend carried a PKM, a belt-fed machine gun. “If Saddam Hussein was alive he would help us with ammunition,” Hossam said. “That’s why they killed him.”
Hossam’s father had killed a man, and the two families were feuding, which was why he always carried a pistol. But in the battle against Shiites the two families were together, he said. “I never carried a rifle before,” he said, “but since the Shiites attacked I started carrying one.” Hossam had taken part in sectarian clashes between Sunnis from the nearby town of Saad Nayel and the Shiites of Talabaya. A few days earlier Sunnis and Shiites had fought each other in the nearby town of Sawiri as well. Hossam claimed he had forced Shiite officials at the Masnaa border crossing to stop working there. This was why security officers were paying a visit to the town. “We and the state are opposed,” said the thuggish man.
“Before May 8 I used to love life,” said Hossam. “I would never sleep. I was into women, drugs, alcohol—I was living life to the fullest. Something happened in my heart I can’t explain to anybody. Since May 8 I am a different person. I started praying five times a day, feeling more confident when I’m fighting.” Now he fantasized about becoming a suicide bomber. “I should be doing martyrdom operations too,” he told me, his eyes darting to Nabil, looking for approval. “I would like to blow myself up during Nasrallah’s speech when there is a large group of people.” He got so much pleasure from shooting, he said, and he surmised that if he went on a martyrdom operation his soul would feel even better. Nabil expected suicide operations like those in Iraq to occur in Lebanon, targeting Shiites. “I won’t be surprised if it happened,” he said.
Nabil didn’t seem to have a job, but I soon realized he had a lucrative underground business selling weapons. I asked him why he always carried a pistol with him. He quoted a hadith about how one must always be armed. I asked if he was not worried about the authorities. “The army is not allowed in here,” Nabil said. I asked who didn’t allow them. “We don’t allow them,” he said. “None of them will survive. Do they want another Nahr al-Barid?” Likewise the police were not allowed to come into town, he said: “If they do, the whole town will fight.” I was reminded of the accusations that Hizballah was a state within a state. Outside Beirut there was little sign of any state willing or able to assert itself, and unlike Shiites, the Sunnis of Lebanon had no comparable social movement to fill the vacuum.
As we drove through the narrow alley leading to Nabil’s house, a man asked him to sell him two thousand rounds of ammunition. “Come to my house,” Nabil said. One day when I visited Nabil I found his living room converted into an armory. He had an RPG launcher, many boxes of ammunition, and eight rifles, including AK-47s, a PKM, and a Degtyaryov machine gun. In a box that originally contained a Syrian dress, Nabil had stuffed an assortment of grenades. He took some out to play with, to my displeasure, and showed me how to take them apart.
Nabil introduced me to Marwan Yassin, or Abu Hudheifa, a gentle, friendly man he called his sheikh and emir. Abu Hudheifa was not formally educated in Islam, but he studied Sharia at home and memorized the Koran at the late age of twenty-five. He had six children. He had just been released from prison after serving ten months. I asked him if he had been tortured. “Not this time,” he said with a smile. In 2004 the Syrians arrested him trying to enter Iraq. He spent eight months in a Syrian prison before he was transferred to a Lebanese prison, where he served three more months. He was tortured in both countries.
Majd al-Anjar was special, he said, because it had a lot of religious people of the same color, meaning Sunni. “We have a lot of people who went to Iraq and were killed there, so we have people who love jihad,” he said. “Iraq is under direct American occupation. Here, it’s an indirect Iranian occupation.” Sunnis in Lebanon were in a weak position, he said.
One night in June Nabil called around midnight to tell me he had just received word that two local boys, Abdallah Abdel Khalaq and Firas Yamin, had blown themselves up in Iraq on two consecutive days. Twenty-year-old Abdallah, whose nickname was Abu Obeida, called his family the night before to say goodbye and explain that the next day he would either park the car and detonate it or, if there was too much security, detonate it while driving. At noon the next day he blew himself up while driving in a crowded Baghdad street. Two hours later his companions called his parents to let them know the happy news about their son’s martyrdom. The family was religious and proud of him, and distributed candy. Firas, who was called Abu Omar, had gone to Iraq with Abdallah without telling anybody in town. Nabil had a film of them both with a Kuwaiti fighter who had been to Afghanistan. “If I had a chance I would go,” Nabil said.
Nabil took me to meet a group of friends in an office. They were drinking tea. Several had long hair and long beards. One had the physique of a bodybuilder. I asked them what they expected to happen. “Very bad things,” said one. Nabil spoke of prophecies in the Koran about a final battle occurring in Sham, or Greater Syria. The American invasion of Iraq was one sign of it. I had heard many jihadi Salafis in the region predict this imminent final battle, one that would be fought with swords. An older man in traditional Arab dress was the father of a young man who had been martyred in Rawa. As I chatted with the men, Nabil played absentmindedly with the pistol on his lap.
One morning one of Nabil’s friends drove me around town. He spoke on his cellphone to a woman. “We are ready,” he told her. “We didn’t sleep since last night.” The night before, Nabil said, the Lebanese army had arrested the father of one of the guys in their group in Masnaa. There were regular clashes with local Shiites, whom the men called Hizballah, probably inaccurately. “Last night we went down to Marj,” Nabil’s friend said, “patrolling with our cars with tinted windows, driving back and forth in the main streets of Majd al-Anjar and Marj. We had guns, we were ready.”
Nabil introduced me to a friend they called Dr. Saadi because he had a PhD in history from the University of Damascus. Only in his thirties, Saadi had a guest room well stocked with books on Islam. He’d been imprisoned for alleged involvement in the 2000 “millennium plot” to blow up the American Embassy in Jordan. After his release, he traveled to Falluja at the height of the jihad in 2004 and met Omar Hadid, a famed fighter in that town.
There was no Sunni party in Lebanon with a creed, Saadi complained, only those who fought for money. The Future Movement had become mercenaries without belief, he said. They controlled Lebanon’s Sunnis but obeyed the Americans, and Salafis were marginalized. But one day soon only the Salafi ideology would survive, and they would raise the Sunni flag in Lebanon. The May event had given a fillip to extreme movements in Lebanon such as Al Qaeda. The country’s unique diversity had moderated Saadi’s extremism, like it had for all of the Salafis I met in Lebanon. The variety of sects living in Lebanon meant that no single group could dominate the others, he said.
As we spoke, AK-47 shots suddenly erupted not far away. All the men burst out laughing, especially when they saw me flinch. A friend had just been released from prison and he was shooting into the air. “Army intelligence captured him,” Nabil explained, “and we threatened to block the roads. Now he is shooting into the air in celebration for himself.”
Like many Salafis I had met, Saadi was envious of Hizballah for confronting Israel but at the same time dismissive because Hizballah limited its activity to liberating Lebanese territory. “Hizballah protects the Jewish border with orders from the Syrian regime,” he said. Moreover, by respecting UN resolutions, Hizballah proved that it had no genuine commitment to liberating Palestine. Hizballah had proved it had no principles, he said, by forming an alliance with a Christian party, the Free Patriotic Movement. The goal of Hizballah’s “takeover” of Beirut was to weaken Sunnis in the Arab world, he said. The group was acting like the Mahdi Army in Iraq, proving it was only a Shiite militia. “Sunnis around the world are mad after what happened in Beirut,” he said. “The result will be a thousand Zarqawis coming after Hizballah.” Nabil was a great admirer of Zarqawi. “Behind the sword was a merciful heart,” he said, “an eye that cried for the whole Islamic nation. There will be thousands of Zarqawis now.”
I went with my friend to see Khaled Dhaher at his mountain redoubt in Bibnine. When we arrived in town we called Dhaher, who told us to give a few thousand liras to any taxi driver and ask him to lead us to his house. “Everybody knows where it is,” he said. A taxi driver agreed, and suddenly a man in civilian clothes approached the driver’s window, asking who we were and why we had weapons. We said we didn’t have any. He called Dhaher to see if we were authorized. Then he flashed his wallet open and told us he was an undercover officer for the Interior Ministry, but there was no government ID card in it.
Four fit young men slinging AK-47s stood outside Dhaher’s house, which was also a school. Inside there were three older men in a courtyard who were also armed. Dhaher was making and receiving phone calls when he arrived. “Tell them to stay away, and let’s wait until the dialogue is over because we might have to do to them what we did in Halba,” he told somebody, referring to the negotiations in Doha, Qatar, to resolve the crisis and threatening another massacre. “Let’s tell the brothers to gather and we can visit Mufti Rifai. At this point there is no turning back,” he said in another phone call. Then he called a lieutenant named Arabi and thanked him for his cooperation. Finally he spoke to an associate. “Stay in your position even if there is shooting at you,” he said. “Keep your eyes wide open. Never retreat, never surrender. An attack might happen tonight.” Dhaher’s brother was also there; he had come to ask about obtaining a gun license for somebody. “Who needs a license?” Dhaher asked. “Send some bodyguards to my center. There is no need to carry a license these days.”
Dhaher was a short, chubby man with dark skin and a beard. He was a spokesman for the Independent Islamic Gathering, which had been established in December 2006. Now the Gathering had a presence on the ground, he said. “In Akkar we have twenty thousand retired soldiers from the Lebanese army ready to put their efforts and experience in order to protect the Sunni reservoir of Lebanon here in the north,” he said. The recent fighting was a result of an Iranian, Safavid, Persian project, he told me, echoing a familiar litany. The Sunnis of Beirut were the people of bureaucrats, education, business, he said. They weren’t fighters like the people of the countryside. Now Sunnis were arming themselves in the north and the Beqaa and establishing a national Islamic resistance to create an equilibrium. “Now we are getting ready, we are arming ourselves so we can confront them and challenge them. Don’t forget that 60 percent of the army is Sunni. There are more then ten thousand trained and retired soldiers here, around us in Akkar. Sunni officers have resigned from the Lebanese army.” He was getting calls from sheikhs, he told me, adding, “Now we are all fighters.”
He explained that the Halba incident happened after the mufti of Akkar, Osama Rifai, called upon the Sunni street in the north to demonstrate against what had happened in Beirut. The Syrian Social Nationalist Party wanted to control Akkar, he said; they opened fire on the demonstration, killing two. The fighting wasn’t led by the Future Party, he told me; it was the citizens and sons of the area reacting to what happened in Beirut. “It’s only a simple reaction to what happened in Beirut. I personally protected the prisoners and gave them to the army,” he said. “We won’t give our weapons to the state until they do, and we will add to them and buy more arms. It is forbidden for Hizballah to occupy Sunni Beirut.”
Sunnis had lost their trust in the security forces, he told me, especially after seeing the Lebanese army side with Hizballah. “We will defend ourselves,” he said. He had met with members of the Lebanese army who supported what they were doing and would join them to fight by their side when needed, he told me. Dhaher’s brother chimed in: “The Sunnis of Beirut were hit, but we will hit back one hundred times.” Another brother added, “We don’t have a choice but to defend our honor.” They were disappointed in Saad al-Hariri, who hadn’t supported the sect enough. Dhaher added that they were coordinating with Sunnis in the Beqaa and in Arsal.
I went to Arsal, a town bordering Syria that I had not heard of before talking to Dhaher. I saw more posters for Saddam Hussein on the walls than for Rafiq al-Hariri. “We all sacrifice ourselves for you, Saddam,” read graffiti on the road approaching the town. Elsewhere I saw “We are all yours, glorious Saddam,” “All the Muslim community is for Saddam,” and “Saddam and 100 million Saddams.” The town was sprawled across a valley, invisible at first beyond desolate hills. Its homes were unpainted, incomplete, with rebar sticking out. The land around it was arid and barren.
We stopped at a cellphone shop and asked a man there to guide us to the mukhtar. Arsal was surrounded by a sea of Shiites, he bragged, disparaging other Sunni towns for being “faggots.” He got in his van, which had a Saddam sticker on it, and led us to the home of Basil al-Hujairi, the mayor. Hujairi was also a teacher who ran an Islamic school. His home overlooked the town from a hill. It was incomplete but ostentatious, with columns at the entrance. As we climbed the steps to the house, numerous calls to prayer echoed back and forth across the valley.
Hujairi had been mayor for four years. He was a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, he told me, but he admitted that in the recent fighting the Brotherhood had not had a strong stand. Only the Salafis had been strong. His town had forty thousand people, he told me, and they all had a strong Sunni identity. It was a poor town that relied on farming and smuggling. The Syrian border, only twenty kilometers away, was not controlled. Before 2005 the townspeople had clashed with the Syrians.
The town had at least ten mosques. Another was being built in honor of Ismail Hujairi who was martyred in Iraq the day Baghdad fell. His brothers, who brought his body back, were paying for it. Others from the town had fought in Iraq and returned.
Only three officers in the army were from Arsal, though many townsmen were enlisted. There were no government services in town. Electricity was four hours on, four hours off. I was thus surprised to learn that townspeople from Arsal still identified enough with the state to go down to Beirut and demonstrate so often. They had gone to protest the Danish cartoons and to show support for Saad Hariri. Sometimes on the way to and from these demonstrations, townspeople would clash with Shiites in the neighboring villages.
Shiites want revenge for the death of Hussein, Hujairi told me. They believed they would go to paradise if they killed Sunnis, he said, but Sunnis would defend their dignity. “Life without dignity or death—people will choose death.”
Although many Western journalists live in Beirut, and many others descend on it whenever there is a crisis, few venture outside Beirut. This is despite the fact that Lebanon is such a small country. So the neglected Sunni population and the anger of that community are relatively unknown. Likewise, most Lebanese don’t venture outside their areas, let alone into the areas of other sects or the slums and villages of the poor. In many of these towns, there is little electricity or other services, and people rely on remittances from relatives abroad for survival. Despite the presence of several Sunni billionaires in the country, there was no party equivalent to Hizballah that could provide social services to poor Sunnis.
Continuing my travels through the Beqaa, I visited the hillside town of Qaraun. Its houses were made of white stones with red roofs. In the town square I found a poster for Prime Minister Siniora and Rafiq and Saad al-Hariri. The town did not appear overtly religious, and I did not get the same hostile looks that I had received in Majd al-Anjar and Arsal. It had three mukhtars, and I met the most important, Nasr Dabaja, at the gas station he owned. His father had also been mukhtar and was famous for resisting the Israelis when they occupied the town in the mid-1980s. The town’s population was 8,500, he told me. A quarter were Christian, and the rest were Sunni Muslims. There were only two mosques in town, and only one was in regular use. The Future Movement had no local office.
Before we began talking, Dabaja asked us if we were Sunni. He eyed my friend from Beirut suspiciously and asked if he prayed five times a day. As we spoke a Shiite man walked into his office, and Dabaja told us to stop talking until the man left. Muslims in the town supported the Salafis, he told me.
During the Dinniyeh events of 2000, Lebanese intelligence arrested seven or eight men from Qaraun while three or four others absconded. They were accused of fighting the army. Five eighteen-year-old boys from the town had gone to fight in Iraq in 2003, he told me. He and his brother were excited to learn that I was going to Iraq. They asked me to inquire about the fate of the young mujahideen from their town.
All Sunnis felt threatened and were uniting, he said, whether with the Muslim Brotherhood or the Future Movement. The Brotherhood was gaining in popularity in town because Sunnis felt marginalized. When they asked the Future Movement for weapons, they were turned down, he complained. “The Islamists will protect the Sunnis,” he said, and the Salafi movement would emerge stronger after these events. Dabaja’s brother agreed. “People are moving to extremism,” he said. “Before they were supporting Future, which is moderate, but now we cry for Nahr al-Barid. We could have used those people.” Dabaja agreed: “Last year we supported the army in Nahr al-Barid, but now we regret killing the extremists. People are thinking of weapons. We are threatened now. Are we going to sit with our hands tied?” Hizballah was afraid of the Salafis, they said. Dabaja liked Dai al-Islam al-Shahal, who was a “big thinker.” He asked me for Shahal’s phone number. As mayor Dabaja used to be invited to Shiite villages, but now that sectarian feelings were hardening he was not visiting them anymore. Roads between Qaraun and nearby Shiite towns were blocked.
Heading out we picked up an old Bedouin man called Hassan Fayad, who lived in the town of Shaabiyat al-Faur. Fifty men from the town had gone to fight in Beirut, but they had only been given sticks. There was a strong sense of Sunni solidarity now, he said, and they wanted weapons. “Shiites exposed that they are against Sunnis,” he said. He cursed Hariri for betraying Sunnis’ trust and humiliating them. “If Hariri wants to gain Sunnis back, he has to arm us. Without dignity there is nothing. We won’t accept to be humiliated.”
I continued visiting Tariq al-Jadida in late May and early June. The Muslim Brotherhood had put up new posters, one of which said, “The people of Beirut will only turn their weapons on the Zionist enemy. Peace in Beirut is the red line.” All local shops owned by Shiites were now closed, even those that had been in the neighborhood a long time. Sunni shop owners who had been friendly with their Shiite colleagues did not help them. The brother of one man from Tariq al-Jadida who had been killed in the fighting had come back after the funeral and shouted, “We don’t want Shiites here!”
“The shabab are upset,” said Fadi, the local militiaman I had befriended. “Future brought us down to the street but could do nothing. Future is popular because there is no Sunni alternative.” Fadi and his men had asked Secure Plus for weapons but were told they didn’t have any. It seemed as though the leadership had sold the weapons for profit. Provocations were occurring on a nightly basis. One night a car drove down Fadi’s street blasting Hizballah songs. Before that motorcycles drove through the area with flags for Amal and Hizballah. They caught one man, beat him up, and burned his motorcycle.
“We know who was on the street and who was at home,” he said. Those who fought were told they would receive a hundred-dollar bonus. “This battle changed our thoughts. We returned to our religion, to our sect. I won’t die for the [Future Movement]. I will die for my home, my sect. I am a Sunni. Now there is no Sunni living who likes Shiites.” But Fadi still drank and didn’t pray five times a day. Like many other Sunnis, he was proud of the Halba massacre. “It’s our right to do what we did in Halba,” he said. “They shouldn’t have been involved in the game.”
I found it ironic that the neglected and often impoverished Sunnis of Lebanon identified so closely with the state and with the Sunni elite. I returned to visit Hossam Ilmir, the principal at Bab al-Tabbaneh Elementary School. I found Mustafa Zaabi sitting in Ilmir’s office. Ilmir had 1,082 children in his school this year. The yard was dirty and smelled of urine. He complained that his students had to drink dirty water. He had not changed his mind about supporting the resistance following the clashes, he told me, because the weapons of the resistance had been targeted and the government had tried to make it a sectarian issue.
Ilmir blamed poverty for the fighting between Tabbaneh and Jabal Mohsen. The youth of both neighborhoods were unemployed. The elite, he thought, wanted to keep them poor. Ilmir and Mustafa agreed that the origins of the conflict were not sectarian but economic—rich against poor, with the elite making it seem sectarian. The people of Tabbaneh were ignored by politicians because most of the neighborhood’s thirty-five thousand people were originally from Akkar and so did not vote in Tabbaneh. Only five thousand of them voted in Tabbaneh, so politicians had little to gain from helping them.
The people of Lebanon were still divided while their leaders drank coffee together, he said. “The more the leaders agitate the street, the more power they get. Some young kids don’t want calm. They hope it escalates. They can go to the leaders and get money from them. The leaders hire men from Tabbaneh to be their armed bodyguards.” The ideologies of both sides were bankrupt, he told me. Politicians escalated sectarian tensions in order to reach their goals. Leadership was based on creating fear and tension. Without fear and tension, they wouldn’t be leaders.
Mustafa agreed that the communities were being led by elites. He remembered throwing rocks at Jabal Mohsen when he was seven years old. “The rivalry goes back before the massacre,” he said. “We Sunnis oppressed the Alawites,” Ilmir admitted. “They were garbage collectors, then they got educated, and we couldn’t believe they changed.” When he tried to arrange a reconciliation involving youth soccer, he was discouraged. “The police said it would end in stabbings.”
For once the Palestinians had emerged unscathed, having wisely chosen to abstain from involvement. A local Hamas official told me that there had been a joint Palestinian decision to stay out of the fighting. Some Fatah men had been involved in the Tariq al-Jadida fighting, and others had shut the road from Saida to Beirut. Dai al-Islam al-Shahal asked Palestinians in the north to join him, but nobody responded. “Dai al-Islam is another kind of Salafi. We don’t trust him, and we don’t share his point of view,” the official told me. “There is a general feeling that Sunnis in Lebanon were insulted in this battle,” he said. Hizballah knew that if the conflict lasted any longer, it would spread in the region.
Some Sunnis were beginning to question their support for Saad al-Hariri. The Muslim Brotherhood had mediated between Hizballah and the Future Movement, so the Hamas official expected the Muslim Brotherhood would benefit from an increasingly influential role. Hizballah didn’t want bloodshed, the Hamas official told me, because every Sunni killed was a danger to the group. “Hizballah was very smart to end it in a short time.”
Fatah al-Islam had spread outside the camps and might seek a role as the defender of Sunnis, he told me, even though Shaker al-Absi, who was still alive, had not sought a fight with Shiites. “The atmosphere is very welcoming for these groups,” he said. “Sunnis felt that they were caught without their underwear on.” Now some Sunnis asked why they had supported the war on Fatah al-Islam, because they could have used them in the recent battles.
In Bedawi Palestinian officials told me that the Palestinian leadership in Beirut took a united stand and decided not to take sides. The pro-Syrian and pro-Fatah groups worked together, coordinating and refusing to get involved. Hizballah also met with Palestinian leaders and urged them not to participate. The Bedawi officials told me that Salafi clerics and leaflets had recently appeared in the camp, using the language of Iraq (such as referring to Shiites as rafidha), and Lebanese Salafi groups were active in the camps again. Representatives of Khaled Dhaher and Mufti Rifai were encouraging people to fight the Alawites of Jabal Mohsen. Shahal was openly calling for this, too, asking for Palestinians to fight Hizballah. There were rumors that Fatah al-Islam men were fighting the Alawites at his behest. Shahal and his fighters had allied with Dhaher and the Future Movement.
The officials believed Absi was alive and living in the Beqaa. One of the Palestinian intelligence officials had known him. Absi had come to Lebanon without Syrian backing, he told me. He had not wanted to fight Shiites, only the UN peacekeepers and Israel. But Abu Hureira, the Lebanese Fatah al-Islam member from Akkar, had wanted to take up the fight. The intelligence official had been in Nahr al-Barid when Abu Hureira attacked the Lebanese soldiers. Absi hadn’t known about it in advance and had emerged from his house astonished. Before the attack Abu Hureira had called Sheikh Bilal Barudi in Tripoli and told him that if his men from the bank robbery were not released, then they would attack. Fatah al-Islam had been more than one group. During the Nahr al-Barid fighting Mufti Osama Rifai issued a fatwa allowing for Palestinians to be killed and for their belongings to be looted. There was a backlash following the fighting with Fatah al-Islam. Many of the older sheikhs in the camp were resented and replaced by young ones. The Lebanese army still manned checkpoints around Nahr al-Barid and was still humiliating people.
Entry into Ayn al-Hilweh was harder than ever, but I managed to get the army’s permission to meet Abu Ahmad Fadhil, the Hamas leader in the camp. The various Palestinian factions had formed an emergency committee headed by Kamal Midhat of Fatah. “There was a Palestinian consensus against interference,” he told me. “Even Usbat al-Ansar is in it. We as Palestinians won’t get involved in internal Lebanese affairs, we told the opposition and the government.”
Fadhil worried that Al Qaeda in Iraq was sending fighters to Lebanon. “These guys, their situation in Iraq is difficult, and they can’t live in Syria either.” As a result, some of them were coming to the camp and to the Beqaa, especially Majd al-Anjar. Both sides had an interest in getting the Palestinians involved in the fighting, Fadhil said, and attempts to draw them in had been especially forceful in Beirut’s Shatila camp. But Palestinians had rejected Fatah al-Islam, and even the most extreme groups like Jund al-Sham and Usbat al-Ansar did not have an anti-Shiite reaction following the May 8 clashes. Ayn al-Hilweh was different from Nahr al-Barid. Nahr al-Barid was far from Tripoli, while Ayn al-Hilweh was part of Saida. In Nahr al-Barid, the Palestinian factions were weak and could not stand up to Fatah al-Islam, but in Ayn al-Hilweh, Palestinians “are very strong and have the ability to prevent groups like Fatah al-Islam from appearing.”
I went to see Abu Ghassan in the camp, with whom I had spent so much time in 2007. The last camp member to go fight in Iraq had left four or five months earlier. Now the border between Lebanon and Syria was hard to cross, and the Syrian Iraqi border was even harder. “We had nothing to do with the Beirut battles,” he told me. “Neither side likes us; they would all have blamed us. Hizballah sent people here and said, ‘These guys killed you last year in Nahr al-Barid, fight with us.’ Future said, ‘These guys killed you in the war of the camps, join us.’”
Attacks on Sunni mosques were evidence of sectarian hatred on both sides, he told me, but he regretted this. “We have doctrinal differences with them, but we have an enemy, Israel. I am speaking as a Muslim: if sectarian war happens here, like in Iraq, then Palestinians would get involved. In the end, we are Sunnis.”
I asked him which jihadist ideologues were most influential in the camp. He named Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a Saudi called Sheikh Khalid Rashid, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but “Sheikh Osama” bin Laden was the most important, “because he renewed jihad in our century.” Although many “terrorism experts” in the West were excited that several prominent jihad ideologues had recanted, Abu Ghassan confirmed my view that most people knew they had been forced to change their mind.
He had sold his Glock pistol recently. Weapons prices in the camp were related to the prices in Syria and Iraq, he told me. He now had a CZ75 pistol, which cost $1,500. As we spoke, we heard shots fired outside. He told his son to come in the house.
Back in Tripoli, Musbah al-Ahdab publicly stated that if Hizballah had a right to fight, then so too did Salafis. If the army could not protect Lebanese citizens, then he could not ask Salafis to disarm. If Hizballah did not lay its arms down, the whole north would become Salafis, he warned. “The only solution is to put Hizballah’s arms on the table and find a solution; otherwise, the whole north will become Salafists, and I can only sympathize with them,” he concluded.
In early July 2008 I returned to the Salam Mosque in Tripoli to hear Bilal Barudi speak. People sat smoking a nargila at a nearby cafe. I sat at one of the tables as Barudi’s sermon blasted throughout the area. Sunnis were in danger, he warned; they wanted tawtin, the granting of citizenship to the Palestinians. “We are in a rage now and we should take advantage of that rage,” he said. “We have to keep our sect together. Why are they afraid of tawtin? Because Palestinians are Sunnis. . . . There is a conspiracy against us Sunnis.” Why, he asked, did Armenians in Lebanon have citizenship when their homeland was stable but the Palestinians, who had nothing, were denied it?
I interviewed Barudi in his office. He was born a sheikh, he told me, explaining that his family had provided sheikhs for seven hundred years. Barudi had met Shaker al-Absi when Absi first arrived. “He started attracting young men with a call to defend Sunnis,” he told me. “I told him you are all going to get killed.” Barudi claimed he had gone to Beirut to meet Hassan Nasrallah and other Shiite officials after the 2006 Samarra shrine attack, but he said that Nasrallah had been very aggressive with him. He also claimed that Iran and Hizballah operatives blew up the shrine, and stressed that two hundred Sunni mosques in Iraq were destroyed on the same day.
“There is no alternative to Hariri,” he told me. “Hizballah is trying to control us and remove us from the Lebanese equation, but we asked the mufti and Saad al-Hariri to arm the guys on the street, and we know that the guys on the street are capable and ready to fight. There is no solution but the armed solution. This period of time will be dangerous. There is a chance for Al Qaeda to appear in Lebanon. We expect suicide bombers in Lebanon soon.” Barudi described the Islamic Gathering as “a national Islamic resistance against the Iranian plan in Lebanon,” warning that the Shiites would make him don an imama, as a Shiite clerical turban is known.
I asked Nawaf al-Musawi of Hizballah if he expected Al Qaeda to establish itself in Lebanon. “Saad won’t stay in Lebanon if this happens,” he said. “They will pay the price for this. The Al Qaeda agenda has other priorities. Musbah al-Ahdab will be the first victim.”
Musawi was feeling triumphant. “We are always thinking about how a threat can become an opportunity,” he told me. “The situation in Lebanon is different than Iraq. The Future Movement doesn’t have a future without an agreement with us. Experience shows that facing us is a losing battle for them. If they threaten us with Salafis, they are committing suicide. Dai al-Islam works for the Saudis, but his environment is an incubator for killer takfiris. We avoid any form of sectarian conflict.”
Future had a plan to control Beirut, Musawi explained. It was a good plan, he admitted: Future wanted to seize neighborhoods, isolate Dahiyeh from Beirut, surround Shiite neighborhoods, and close the roads around Dahiyeh and the Beqaa. The Future plan was not to occupy opposition areas but to besiege them and have an extended period of street fighting so that the government would tell the UN that Hizballah was an outlaw group. Then there would be an excuse to invite international forces into Lebanon and press the issue of Hizballah’s arms. “We had a quick operation, and we caused this plan to fail,” Musawi said. “As an organization we had good intelligence.” He explained that Hizballah had the centers of power in Beirut surrounded. “We had the head. The Saudis lost on the battlefield.”
Hizballah and its allies did not seek to change the government by force, nor did it seize control of government officers. Its demand was merely the revocation of the government’s two decisions targeting the resistance. On May 13 the government finally relented. Following the clashes in Beirut, a delegation from the Arab League managed to establish a truce. Roadblocks were removed, the country was reopened, and militias removed their weapons from the streets. Then the parties to the conflict were flown to Qatar, where the national dialogue resumed to resolve the crisis. For the Saudis it was a double humiliation: not only had their proxies been defeated in Lebanon but they had lost their lead diplomatic role to their rival Qatar.
March 14 proved itself utterly dependent on the Bush administration and the neoconservatives, widely perceived as closer to Israel and more anti-Arab than any other American regime. But Hizballah also suffered a blow to its credibility because it had violated its longstanding commitment never to use its weapons internally. In this sense American and Saudi proxies scored a victory by portraying Hizballah as merely one more sectarian militia in Lebanon, and no longer the national resistance.
“Backed by Syria and Iran, Hizballah and its allies are killing and injuring innocent citizens and undermining the legitimate authority of the Lebanese government and the institutions of the Lebanese state,” said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “Seeking to protect their state within a state, Hizballah has exploited its allies and demonstrated its contempt for its fellow Lebanese.”
The May incidents demonstrated the futility of Future adopting any kind of armed program. Hizballah’s brief takeover of Beirut demonstrated how little the Saudis, Americans, and French were willing to do for their local proxies in Lebanon, and in Doha March 14 was forced to conform to most of the opposition’s stipulation.
In Palestine the Americans had pushed Fatah and Hamas to the point of civil war, and then in Lebanon they had also managed to push political tension to armed conflict. In both cases the goal was to discredit overwhelming popular movements, subverting democracy and ignoring the popular will. In Lebanon the Bush administration pressured the ruling coalition not to compromise with the opposition. In December 2009 Nasrallah condemned Arab states—not for being silent, he said, but for their partnership with Israel in the murder of Palestinians. He called on the Egyptian people and army to protest and pressure the Egyptian dictatorship to open the siege on Gaza. It was the first time Hizballah had ever singled out an Arab state. Even during Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, the movement had not gone this far. The next month Nasrallah stated that although Hizballah had not made enemies of Arab states that supported Israel in the 2006 war it would make enemies of those that collaborated against Gaza and the Palestinians. If the Egyptians opened the border, he said, then food, medicine, and even weapons could reach Gaza—and the victory of the resistance in Lebanon could be repeated.
Sunni Islamists resent Hizballah for monopolizing the struggle with Israel and denying them access to fight the Zionists. The American invasion of Iraq gave them a worthy enemy for the first time since the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. It must have been galling to Al Qaeda leaders to see Hizballah regularly praised on Arabic satellite networks while it was condemned, to see that Nasrallah was the most beloved individual in the Arab world while bin Laden and Zawahiri were reviled or ignored. In September 2008 one of the Muslim world’s most prominent Islamic scholars, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who had condemned Al Qaeda in the past, denounced Shiites as heretics and warned that they were trying to penetrate the Sunni world.
In 2006 a poll of majority-Sunni Egypt revealed that Nasrallah, Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Hamas leader Khalid Meshal were the three most popular figures in the country. But following the execution of Saddam there was a backlash against Shiites. Some Fatah supporters took to labeling Hamas as Shiites because it received help from Iran. Iranian nuclear intransigence has led the Americans to seek an alliance with Sunni Arab dictatorships. The Americans and Israelis campaigned to convince regional governments that Iran was their real enemy. The notion of “moderate Sunni” states was propounded by the Americans, but the people of these states hated their regimes.
Throughout the region the Iraq War reinvigorated pre-existing sectarianism and provided a new framework for reviving sectarian politics. Since the mid-1970s Kuwait had been the most important center of Shiite radicalism and organization in the Gulf, with movements there reaching out to Shiites in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Kuwait had historic tensions between Shiites and Sunnis, which occasionally flared. Sunnis would gang up on Shiite candidates in parliamentary elections to sabotage their electoral chances. The social contract in which the ruler protected Kuwait’s Shiites from persecution collapsed after the Iran-Iraq War, but after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait it was restored because of the exaggerated role of Shiites resisting the Iraqi occupation. Some said that Shiites hadn’t fled from Kuwait like others because the Saudis wouldn’t let them across the border. Following the American invasion of Iraq tensions increased, fomented by members of the royal family. Given regional fears of a Shiite revival, Kuwait was vulnerable to these machinations.
After the February 2008 assassination of legendary Hizballah commander Imad Mughniyeh, up to two thousand Kuwaiti Shiites marched in his honor, including two Parliament members. They were met with anger and political maneuvering because any expressions of sympathy for Hizballah, Iraqi Shiites, or Iran were seen as disloyal.
Like in Kuwait, sectarian tensions in Bahrain had been a regular feature of the political landscape since the 1980s. They were typically initiated by the government but there were also flare-ups initiated by Shiites, who are the majority. Following the American invasion of Iraq the ruling family in Bahrain, like that of Kuwait, was better able to play the sectarian card—warning of a powerful Iran, a Shiite-dominated Iraq, and a fifth column at home.
In July 2009 Egypt charged twenty-six men with spying for Hizballah and plotting to attack tourists. “Iran, and Iran’s followers, want Egypt to become a maid of honor for the crowned Iranian queen when she enters the Middle East,” Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit declared. The next month Jordan put six of its citizens on trial for fomenting religious sectarianism and promoting Shiism. The Moroccan dictatorship severed its ties with Iran after accusing it of spreading Shiism in Morocco. Yemen accused Hizballah of training Zaydi rebels in the north. The Yemeni dictatorship was in the midst of two civil wars: one against southern secessionists and one against Zaydi tribesmen in the north. Zaydis, who ruled Yemen for centuries, are related to Shiites but are also very close in their beliefs to Yemen’s Sunnis. The Yemeni dictatorship had manipulated its sects, supporting Al Qaeda-like Salafis and veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan when it suited it, and then supporting Zaydis to counterbalance the Salafis. Now it was invoking the phantom Iranian and Hizballah threat as well as an exaggerated Al Qaeda presence to bolster its weak status, with American and Saudi help. Hizballah did admit to supporting Hamas, but it denied getting involved in conflicts between regimes and their people.
The Shiite belief that succession to the Prophet Muhammad should run through his bloodline through his cousin and son-in-law Ali is viewed by the Saudi clergy and royal family as a threat to their power. Shiites in Saudi Arabia are considered subhuman, an official view that is promoted in state schools; they are not allowed to practice their religion in public. During Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, leading Saudi cleric Sheikh Abdallah bin Jabrin banned support for Hizballah. In December 2008 Saudi security forces fired rubber bullets at crowds of Shiites demonstrating in solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza. In 2009 the imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca attacked Shiite clerics, calling them heretics. Even ordinary Shiites had no excuse for the ignorance and error of their beliefs, he said.
In Lebanon nothing has been resolved; the crisis has been merely further postponed. The 2009 elections were a slight setback for Hizballah’s Christian allies, but Hizballah lost no popularity, and all its candidates were elected. Although Hizballah’s Christian allies, led by Aoun, received the most votes among Christians, they were defeated thanks to some clever gerrymandering, which allowed Sunni voters to tilt the balance in favor of March 14 in Christian districts. But when the time came to apportion ministries, the Aoun movement received five, while Hariri’s Christian allies received only three.
In June 2009 Saad Hariri was sworn in as prime minister. The Syrians supported his election. The Saudis, who had begun their rapprochement with Syria earlier that year, pushed Hariri to visit Damascus and reconcile with the man he accused of killing his father. Hariri was now head of a national unity government, with Hizballah as his partner. But although Lebanon’s elites were governing together and even playing football matches, their constituency had not reconciled and remained at odds with one another. Sunnis, in particular, were still feeling humiliated and resentful. After the elections Dai al-Islam, Future’s main Salafi ally, expressed disappointment with the disrespect and neglect they felt Hariri was showing them.
The country’s volatile sectarian structure remained, as did its underlying social and economic injustices. The sectarian leaders who profit from the system—which forces these injustices to be expressed in sectarian and xenophobic language—remained too. The Palestinians remained without rights or hope. Nahr al-Barid remained under siege. No Palestinians had returned to the original old camp, while up to twenty thousand returned to the new one. The camp was now run by Lebanese army intelligence, which still arrested people and accused them of Fatah al-Islam membership. Humiliations and harassment continued at the checkpoints. Lebanon’s Sunnis remained bitter, though the state did begin taking aggressive action against my friends in Majd al-Anjar. Meanwhile, people waited for the next war with Israel.
ZE TALIBANO MILMAYAM: I AM A GUEST OF THE TALIBAN—IMPORTANT words to remember in Afghanistan. One Saturday afternoon in August 2008, two Taliban commanders met me in Kabul to take me to the Ghazni province, south of Afghanistan’s capital. The plan was to spend a week with various Taliban groups in areas they controlled. A well-connected Afghan friend I trusted had made the introductions. He knew many groups of fighters in Afghanistan, he said, but he would trust my security only with a group who knew that if anything happened to me, then they and their families would be killed. Contact had been made through a well-respected dignitary from Ghazni who connected us with Mullah Abdillah, a midlevel Taliban commander, who then contacted Mullah Baradar, the Taliban defense minister, and approved my trip.
Mullah Abdillah was a thin man with dark skin and a wispy beard that was long and tapered beneath his chin. He was quick to smile and looked like Bob Marley. He walked with a limp and was bandaged from a recent injury. He had come to Kabul to meet me a week earlier. I explained what I wanted to do. He promised to submit the request to his defense minister, but he was then called away on a mission to the north. I waited impatiently and nervously in my Kabul hotel to receive word about my trip, contemplating the many dangers and trying to ignore the admonitions of friends with more experience working in Afghanistan. Journalists had been able to access armed groups in the 1980s and ’90s, but now it was more dangerous. Afghan journalists were killed by the Taliban or arrested by the government if they succeeded in meeting the Taliban. In 2007 an Italian journalist was arrested by the Taliban; he was released at a price, but his driver and fixer were both murdered. In 2008 a British filmmaker, Sean Langan, was held for three months with his fixer, but both were eventually released. David Rohde of the New York Times also spent seven months in the company of the Taliban. Lack of access meant that very little was known or understood about the Taliban, one of the most important groups resisting the U.S. occupation.
The origins of the Taliban are in the jihad against the Soviets, who invaded Afghanistan in 1979. The United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan backed seven Sunni Islamist parties who fought the Soviets. Many of these mujahideen were extremists, but there was a preference for radical Muslim groups over nationalist groups. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami (Islamic Party) received the most backing. Jalaluddin Haqqani was another commander who received backing from the West. Both were now fighting the Americans and their allies in Afghanistan. The mujahideen were eventually successful, after the Soviets withdrew support for their quislings, and then the West forgot its proxies, who took to fighting among themselves and preying on the population. Into this postwar chaos stepped the Taliban.
The Taliban came from religious schools set up across the border in Pakistan. These schools provided a free religious education to millions of Afghan refugees and Pakistanis. Many of them helped to spread a radically strict form of Sunni Islam combined with Pashtunwali, the Pashtun tribal and social code of behavior. From a small core of devout religious students with rudimentary military skills, the Taliban grew into a vast state and military movement that controlled all but a fraction of Afghanistan. As the warlords were busy fighting one another and terrorizing Afghans, the Taliban seized their first town in 1993. Three years later they took Kabul. In 1998 the Taliban took the last major city in the north, Mazar-i-Sharif. The Pakistanis abandoned Hekmatyar in favor of the Taliban when they saw how successful the movement was. By 2001 less than 10 percent of Afghanistan remained in the hands of the Tajik Mujahideen, who continued a losing struggle against the Taliban until the Americans came to their rescue.
The Taliban have been portrayed as coming out of nowhere and rescuing a war-weary population that welcomed them because they were terrorized by warlords. In truth, most of the country was not in an anarchic state, although Kandahar and its environs were. In much of the country the Taliban had to fight its way into areas that were already at peace and where local services were better than anything the Taliban could provide. The Taliban even engaged in rape, murder, and massacres to conquer some areas. Some of their violence was ethnically motivated. In some places they violated Islamic laws of war with a scorched-earth policy. They even had a sex trade in Tajik girls. And while Kabul was not at peace, residents of the capital certainly did not welcome the arrival of the Taliban, who also bombarded the city. According to Afghan expert William Maley, “While the Taliban attempted to legitimate their power by reference to their provision of ‘security,’ with the passage of time it became clear that . . . they had made a wilderness and called it peace.”
The austere mix of strict Islam and Pashtunwali was harsh. But Western NGOs were able to work in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, though subject to draconian conditions, and the United States had a civil relationship with the group through diplomatic back channels until 1998. The Taliban had little interest in the West but instead cracked down on local practices they viewed as un-Islamic, including music and flying kites. The Pashtunwali code of hospitality forbade the Taliban leadership from handing over the Al Qaeda leadership, as the Americans demanded after September 11, and NATO, which was seeking a new reason for its existence after the demise of the Soviet Union, united to expel the Taliban from Afghanistan and install a friendlier government. The UN-brokered Bonn conference in December 2001 established an interim administration led by Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun with no power base of his own. Pashtuns are the largest of Afghanistan’s fifty-five ethnic groups, but the government was dominated by Tajiks, many of whom had battled the Taliban. In 2002 a loya jirga (grand assembly) was held, which established a transitional administration dominated by Tajiks. For the first four years, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was restricted to Kabul, where it protected the Karzai government but ignored the fires spreading throughout Afghanistan. After September 11, the Pakistanis played a double game, joining the U.S. “war on terror” while continuing to back the Taliban. The Pakistani dictatorship backed Islamists to help it confront its more secular and popular democratic opposition. But these Islamists were allied with the Taliban. Just as American neglect of Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal led to the Taliban and secure bases for Al Qaeda, so too did American neglect of Afghanistan after it removed the Taliban and moved on to Iraq lead to a resurgence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Following the defeat of the Taliban, the American strategy was centered on a “light footprint,” relying on Special Forces to turn Afghanistan over to local leaders, with a weak central government in Kabul. Warlords were paid to run things and fight Al Qaeda. A continuous flow of U.S. funds was necessary to maintain the local militias and prop up anti-Taliban elders.
I had first come to Afghanistan in 2004, after my time in Falluja, seeking respite from the war. It was an idyllic time for me. Afghanistan was still the forgotten war; the mood in the country was optimistic. I drove up to Bamiyan in the north and went swimming in lake Bandi Amir. South of Kabul, I took road trips through villages in Logar and Paktiya all the way to the Pakistani border. I watched the first presidential elections in Gardez. But by 2008 the distance between Iraq and Afghanistan seemed to have closed. It was as if Afghanistan had become Iraq’s neighbor. The foreign military occupation was now killing and arresting innocent civilians, always denying initial reports that turned out to be accurate. The insurgency was increasingly sophisticated, learning from Iraq; its IEDs and suicide bombings were devastating.
The alleged success of the surge in Iraq seemed to confirm the notion that more American troops could solve other problems. For American politicians and the complacent news media, the U.S. was on the verge of victory in Iraq, even if it had taken five years, the destruction of the country, a civil war, hundreds of thousands of dead, millions displaced, communities divided by concrete walls, and the creation of new militias to reduce the violence from its highest points. As I showed in previous chapters, this is not the case, and the reduction of violence, falsely attributed to the increase in American troops, was leading many to draw the wrong lessons from Iraq and then apply them to Afghanistan.
Seven years after the Americans overthrew the Taliban, the movement was gaining confidence, able to control territory right up to Kabul’s backyard, while the American-backed government was weaker than ever. President Hamid Karzai was unable to extend his control beyond the capital. CNN was calling Afghanistan the “forgotten war,” and it had indeed received less attention than Iraq from the international media and even from the Bush administration. The 2008 presidential campaign changed that.
For Republicans the military has traditionally been the chief tool of foreign policy, but Afghanistan became a much more central issue for Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama than it did for John McCain. Obama wanted to legitimize his call for a withdrawal from Iraq by increasing troops in Afghanistan. The Democratic narrative was that the United States should have stayed in Afghanistan and needed to swivel the cannons back to the original target. The Democrats worried about appearing weak. They wanted to prove that they too could be bellicose and tough, and kill foreigners. But calling the war in Iraq wrong didn’t necessarily mean that expanding the war in Afghanistan was right.
By September 2008 there were already about thirty-three thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan and a total of sixty-five thousand troops in the international coalition. They were facing more resistance than ever, and by September 2008 the 2007 total of 111 dead troops had already been surpassed. Speaking at the National Defense University on September 9, President Bush announced a modest troop increase in Afghanistan, which he described as a “quiet surge” to help “stabilize Afghanistan’s young democracy.” He would not allow the Taliban to return to Afghanistan, he said, unaware that they already had, and that only negotiation with the Taliban could bring any hope of stabilizing Afghanistan. “Iraq, Afghanistan, and parts of Pakistan pose the same challenge to our country, and they are all theaters in the same struggle,” he said, proclaiming his “faith in the power of freedom.” But the Taliban had their own faith, and so far they were winning.
There was a glitch in the matrix when, on September 10, 2008, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the House Armed Services Committee. In his prepared testimony, which he submitted after it was approved by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and President Bush, Admiral Mullen stated, “I am convinced we can win the war in Afghanistan.” His oral testimony was different. “I am not convinced we are winning it in Afghanistan,” he said. In a war, if you are not winning, then you are usually losing.
BEFORE LEAVING KABUL I bought several pairs of kala, or salwar kameez, the traditional dress worn by Afghan men consisting of a long tunic-like shirt with buttons on the top and baggy pants. I had grown my beard longer than ever, and endured suspicious looks in New York City subways as a result. In New York I had also taken intensive Pashtu-language classes, to at least have some basic communication skills. Very few Western journalists knew Pashtu, but it is the language spoken by the ethnic group that dominates the Taliban, one of the biggest thorns in the side of the American military in Afghanistan. It is also the language of those people in Afghanistan and Pakistan who support or protect the Taliban, and what remains of the original senior Al Qaeda leadership. Regardless of who ended up winning the 2008 election, I knew America was certain to remain embroiled in conflicts with movements based in the lawless majority-Pashtun areas of South Asia. I didn’t think conflicts could be understood by studying only one side; journalists needed to study Pashtu and not merely embed with the American military.
Pashtu was not exactly in high demand, and the book the language school gave me was pretty basic and clearly designed for the military. It had a list of ranks, such as “general of the Air Force” and “private first class.” It also gave me a list of weapons such as land mines and bullets. It provided the Pashtu translation for important phrases like “You are a prisoner,” “Show me your ID card,” “Hands up,” “Surrender,” and “Let the vehicle pass.” If I wanted to arrest an Afghan, I was now prepared. Interestingly, in the list of foods the book included hummus, which is eaten in the Arab world but not in Afghanistan (unless some fastidious Al Qaeda volunteer brought some with him). The book provided essential advice such as “Don’t burp or fart in public,” “Don’t call everyone Hajji,” “Don’t trust everyone,” “Don’t use the same route every time,” and “Don’t offer pork to any Muslim.” It also advised me not to whistle or make catcalls toward any woman and not to insult “a native” in public.
Ghazni fell to the Taliban in 1995, early in their campaign to seize Afghanistan from the warlords. I was told it fell without a fight, almost overnight, soon after Kandahar. There were many subcommanders allied with various mujahideen parties. Alliances shifted often, and it was easy for the Taliban to co-opt these commanders, who just put on turbans, flew the white flag of the Taliban, and said, “Okay, we’re Taliban.”
In the last few years of their reign the Taliban even succeeded in gaining the cooperation of Ghazni’s Shiite Hazara community. So the area was fertile ground for the neo-Taliban, whose control was spreading once again. Tribal leaders were weak in Ghazni while religious leaders were strong, making it easier for the Taliban to embed themselves with the population. The neo-Taliban also seized upon the population’s many grievances. Police would release prisoners in exchange for bribes, while Afghan soldiers looted people’s homes and government officials took goods from shops without paying for them. In 2006 forty policemen quit, and some joined the Taliban, because their salaries were many months late. Police chiefs had to buy supplies with their own money, so they extorted from the population. More and more clerics started supporting the Taliban. In 2006 the former governor of Ghazni was assassinated after announcing he was taking over security in the Andar district so that he could defeat the Taliban there. By 2006, in Andar alone dozens of government officials and others viewed as collaborators had been killed by the Taliban; soon there was no government presence in most of Ghazni’s countryside. When the Americans distributed cash to villagers, they would hand it over to the Taliban, and as soon as the Americans visited a village the Taliban would follow and seize anything that had been distributed. Former mujahideen commanders in Ghazni joined the Taliban. A 2006 military operation called Mountain Fury was said to have “dealt Taliban and foreign fighters a string of sharp defeats” in Andar. The U.S. Army claimed that “large swaths of southern and central Ghazni Province, described as ungovernable as recently as late August, embraced the allies and the reemerging provincial government.” But things continued to worsen. Twenty-three South Korean missionaries were captured by the Taliban in Ghazni in 2007. That year eighteen Afghan de-miners were kidnapped from their base in Andar three weeks after a military operation attempted to remove the Taliban’s “shadow government” there, and when President Karzai gave a speech in Andar, the Taliban fired fifteen rockets at the event. One month before I arrived, Afghan broadcasters showed clips of Taliban kidnapping and executing two Afghan women on charges of “immorality.”
Before I left for Ghazni, I spoke to a senior UN official. “I don’t think you should go,” he said. “It’s deteriorated. Many Taliban commanders were killed there, and the leadership is totally fragmented. There is a lot of criminality within. In the past there was a sense of protection for foreigners here, but being a foreigner there is a major risk. There are Taliban checkpoints in the middle of Ghazni at night. Much of Ghazni is under Taliban control.” I put his admonitions out of my mind. Three months earlier an Afghan soldier returned to Andar to irrigate his land. He was wearing civilian clothes, but the Taliban arrested him and executed him near the district bazaar. “The Andar district compound near the bazaar has only fifteen police,” said one local who now lived in Kabul and was afraid to return. “They can’t even secure their compound, so how can they secure the district?” His cousin had once worked for the Parliament in Kabul, but the Taliban had threatened him with death if he returned to his work, so he stayed in Andar.
The Taliban governor for Ghazni issued ID cards and passports for the Taliban regime, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Farmers with land disputes went to the Taliban there to seek justice according to their interpretation of Islamic jurisprudence. Beginning in 2004 the roads in Ghazni started getting dangerous, but now the Taliban could stop you there in broad daylight and check your cellphone to determine from your calls if you were a worthwhile captive. The Taliban’s former minister of education had been released in exchange for the Korean hostages in 2007. He returned to assume a position of importance among the Taliban of Ghazni. In order to gain control of one district, a senior UN official told me, the province’s government-appointed governor had to move his troops and surrender control of another district. Before leaving I asked my friend if I should worry about my trip succeeding. “In Afghanistan you should always worry,” he said.
Shafiq, another commander from Ghazni, drove us down as Mullah Abdillah sat in the front passenger seat. We were accompanied by Kamal, a twenty-eight-year-old Afghan who knew just enough English to confuse both of us. I had tried and failed to find a real translator; some were unavailable, and others refused when they were told what the trip entailed. With the Arabic I knew as well as my basic Farsi and Pashtu, I hoped I would manage.
Abdillah had been injured recently in clashes with a rival commander from the Taliban, though at first he told me the wound was from an American bullet. He paid one thousand dollars of his own money for two surgeries at a private Kabul hospital to repair nerve damage. The wound was now covered with a bandage. He bore older scars on his arm and leg, and had lost one of his legs in fighting in the civil war during the ’90s. Abdillah was now a commander in the Dih Yak district of Ghazni. He told me he had five hundred men under his command. Abdillah was also a liaison with more senior Taliban leaders and regularly communicated with the Taliban’s minister of defense. Shafiq had light skin with a short light-brown beard and wore a cap with embroidery and rhinestones. He had fought the Russians with the mujahideen. I asked him who was a more formidable foe: the Russians or the Americans. The Russians were stronger, he told me, more fierce. “We will put the Americans in graves,” he said. Shafiq was a commander of fighters in Andar. He and Abdillah chatted and joked on the way to Ghazni. We were stopped at an Afghan army checkpoint, and the wary soldiers singled me out, growing more suspicious when they heard in my accent that I was a foreigner. One of the soldiers wore a brown T-shirt, and on his black vest he had a roll of plastic American flex-cuffs. My companions persuaded the soldiers that I was only a journalist. As we drove away, Abdillah and Shafiq laughed, explaining that the soldiers thought I was a suicide bomber.
We soon left Kabul province and entered Wardak. The road, lined with poplar trees and green fields, took us between arid sand-colored mountains with sharp peaks. Nomadic Kuchi women with colorful scarves draped over them ignored us, tending to camels as small boys herded sheep. On the hill-sides were cemeteries with rough tombstones haphazardly pointing in various angles and multicolored flags flying above them. In Wardak the new road was torn apart by craters. We circled around them as if they were giant potholes, but most had been made by roadside bombs buried in culverts beneath the road. Without the culverts floods would wash away roads, but they were an ideal location to hide bombs targeting Afghan security forces, the U.S. military, and its allies, as well as the convoys of trucks that provided logistical support. We drove by a truck still smoldering from an attack the day before and a truck charred from an attack a month before. Three or four American armored vehicles drove by, as did Afghan National Army (ANA) pickup trucks.
By the time we reached the town of Salar in Wardak, we had passed about six trucks destroyed by Taliban bombs on the road. In Salar we approached a large group of cars with people standing on the side of the road by a gas station. Shafiq and Abdillah called Taliban friends on their mobile phones to see what was going on. “The Americans are fighting the Taliban,” my companions explained. We could see smoke several hundred meters away and heard the chatter of machine-gun fire interrupted by the thuds of mortar fire and loud explosions—which clapped against my ears and got closer, shaking us. I flinched and ducked, gasping and cursing, as Shafiq and Abdillah laughed at me. “Tawakkal ala Allah” (depend on God), Shafiq lectured me, using a common expression to tell me not to be afraid. That same month in Salar the Taliban had tried to assassinate the governor of Ghazni, wounding two of his guards.
Two small green NATO armored personnel carriers zipped by driving away from the battle. Shafiq and Abdillah laughed. Bulgarians, they told me. As more cars stopped on the road, more men got out to watch the battle, point at what they could spot, and chat. At a small shop by the gas station, my companions bought a syrupy Taiwanese version of Red Bull called Energy. People went to urinate behind rusting shipping containers. Afghan men squat all the way down when they piss. I couldn’t manage this feat of acrobatic skill, and a man standing as he relieved himself would have immediately attracted attention, so I waited until everybody had left before I went and pissed between shipping containers.
Several American vehicles drove by as well as two Polish and two ANA vehicles. A few minutes later three American vehicles sped in the direction of the fighting, shortly followed by three NATO vehicles. After an hour of waiting, everybody smiled and went back to their cars. Buses and cars drove toward us from the direction of the battle scene, honking to let us know the way was safe and the roadblocks had been opened. Trucks were ablaze on the side of the road, and large craters had torn through the asphalt, with chunks of the road tossed in our way. The trucks had been carrying drinks for the Americans, Abdillah told me. Sure enough, as we drove past them we could see hundreds of water bottles spilling out. We drove by the halted convoy. Dozens of trucks, some partially burned, crowded the road. The drivers stood outside the trucks, which had UKMOD (United Kingdom Ministry of Defense) stickers on their windshields. Armed escorts fanned around the road. Further down the road there were more craters and American armored vehicles blocked our path, with fire and smoke behind them. People told us to stop because the Americans were shooting at approaching cars. Shafiq slowly maneuvered the car to the front of the line and stopped. The Americans moved, and we all followed slowly like a nervous herd. We drove by yet more burning trucks down a stretch of road that had been smashed to bits. Abdillah pointed to three destroyed vehicles from an attack four days earlier.
We were on the “ring road,” the most critical road in Afghanistan. It was the fastest, most direct and practical means of getting from hub to hub, if you ignored the increasing risk. Without the ring road, one was relegated to using small provincial roads—which greatly increased the length of the trip, since many were just gravel or dirt. The ring road was the only one that was close to being a highway in the country and was the only viable route for those wishing to move large convoys. The Kabul-Kandahar highway had been a show-piece for the American coalition, connecting the two main American bases—in Bagram and Kandahar—and linking two halves of the country together. Now it was destroyed, and traffic in support of the Afghan government or the coalition forces was becoming more difficult. On June 24, 2008, the Taliban attacked a convoy of fifty-four trucks passing through Salar: they destroyed fifty-one of them, seized two Toyota escort vehicles that belonged to the security guards, captured loot, and killed some of the drivers. More recently, on September 8, in Zurmat—which is between Gardez province and Ghazni—a convoy of thirty-five trucks was attacked, and twenty-nine of them were destroyed.
At a lonely desert checkpoint manned by the Afghan army, a few soldiers with AK-47s asked us what had happened on the road. Later we passed by a pickup truck full of more Afghan soldiers. “They are bad,” Shafiq told me, explaining they were from Kandahar and were affiliated with President Karzai. “I fight them every day,” he said. Night fell, and we passed a police station. “From now on it’s all Taliban territory,” they told me. “The Americans and police don’t come here at night.” We no longer had mobile phone reception. Shafiq and Abdillah explained that the Taliban ordered the local phone towers to be shut down every night so they could better conduct operations. We stopped at a gas station, and they pointed to an Afghan in an SUV who they knew worked with the Americans at the nearby base. In the darkness we slowly rolled into the village of Nughi. It was the holiday of Shab-e-Barat, when Muslims believe God determines the destinies of people for the coming year. It seemed as though all the young boys of the village had gathered in small groups to swing balls of fire connected to wires. Like orange stars, hundreds of fiery circles glowed far into the distance. Carefully Shafiq maneuvered the car on the bumpy dirt road between mud houses. A traditional house in these areas, called a qala, is made of an extremely durable mixture of mud and straw and built like a fort, with high walls surrounding large compounds that often include different quarters and even areas for agriculture. We pulled up in front of one house, and Shafiq banged on the metal door. A man led us by motorcycle to another house, where a group of young men emerged. In the darkness I could make out a couple of them carrying weapons. We greeted the traditional way, each man placing his right hand on the other’s heart, leaning in but not fully embracing and inquiring about the other’s health, home, and family.
Mullah Abdillah left us, returning to his house. We followed the Taliban on foot to another house with the moon lighting our path. We entered through a short door into a guest room with a red carpet and wooden beams on the ceiling. A dim bulb barely lit the room. I spotted a rocket-propelled grenade launcher with several rockets beside it and a PKM, or belt-fed machine gun, leaning against the wall. An old man named Haji Shir Muhamad was sitting in the room. Shafiq, Kamal, and I were joined by two Talibs: Mullah Yusuf, a commander from Andar, and a boy called Muhamad. Mullah Yusuf had dark reddish skin and a handsome face. He wore a black turban with thin gold stripes and carried an AK-47. A boy brought a pitcher and basin, and we rinsed our hands. We drank green tea and ate a soup of mushy bread called shurwa with our hands. Some chunks of meat were served to us, followed by grapes. Haji Shir Muhamad had lived in Saudi Arabia for five years, so we were able to communicate in Arabic a little.
Mullah Yusuf slept in different houses every night, he said. He went from village to village, as did other Talibs, to avoid the Americans. He was Mullah Abdillah’s nephew and was originally from the Zarin village in Ghazni; although he was only thirty years old, he was an important commander in Andar. A year and a half before, Yusuf had been injured in battle by an American helicopter strike. The wound was in his thigh. He had been hospitalized but still had problems and walked with a pronounced limp. Yusuf’s cellphone rang with a bells-and-cymbals version of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice theme. Yusuf had been with the Taliban for five years. Before that he had studied at a famous religious school called Zia ul-Madaris al-Faruqia in Miranshah, center of Pakistan’s North Waziristan, where many Afghan refugees lived. He joined the jihad because foreigners had come to Afghanistan, he told me, and were fighting Afghans and poor people in their villages. He had not received training but had learned from friends. He claimed that he did not receive assistance from foreigners, only from people in the villages, who provided weapons and money. Yusuf told me he used what money he had to buy weapons and ammunition before he bought food. Local villagers even helped when the Taliban attacked checkpoints, he said. “All of this village helps because they are Muslim,” he said. “The Americans are not good. They go into houses. Some people from this area are in American jails. Fifteen days ago the Americans bombed here and killed a civilian.” Foreigners did occasionally come to fight with them, he said, including Saudis and Uzbeks. It soon became clear that he referred to all foreign fighters who volunteered to fight with the Taliban as Arabs. “They are like my brothers,” he said. Arabs and Chechens taught them how to use remotely detonated bombs.
“The Americans are blind in Afghanistan,” Yusuf said. Afghanistan would be a graveyard for them. But when the foreigners left, the Taliban could negotiate with the Afghan army and police, instead of continuing to fight. “They are brothers, Muslims,” he said. He fought with them now only because they were with the Americans. President Karzai would flee to America when the foreigners left, he said. When the foreigners left, girls could go to school and women could work, he added. I asked about the killing of aid workers. If foreigners didn’t fight the Taliban, he said, he didn’t fight them. The Afghans needed help, and it didn’t matter if aid workers were Muslims or infidels, but “the UN is with the Americans, so I fight them.”
A year before, in a big attack in Andar, the Americans killed a senior commander named Mullah Mu’min. Yusuf had been his deputy and assumed leadership after he was killed. Yusuf received his orders from his own commanders. The mujahideen always wanted to attack the Americans, he said, but their commanders told them when to attack. Mullah Yusuf operated only in Ghazni. Mullah Omar was the top commander, he told me, but only Yusuf’s most senior commanders could communicate with the one-eyed former leader of Afghanistan, who called himself the “commander of the faithful.”
Yusuf told me he would stop fighting when the foreigners left Afghanistan, but then he would go to other places like Chechnya, Palestine, Uzbekistan, Lebanon, and Somalia to fight. I doubted it was more than bravado; he knew little about the world outside Afghanistan and his refuge in Pakistan. Still, the pre-September 11 Taliban were much less connected to other struggles in the Muslim world. Globalized jihadism was penetrating even the remote Pashtun areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. While most Afghan Taliban fought only for Afghanistan, the longer the Americans remained, the more links the Taliban might forge. Out of curiosity, I asked Yusuf what he thought about Hizballah. Throughout the Muslim world, tensions between Sunnis and Shiites were increasing. In Pakistan the Sunni groups backing the Taliban were bitterly anti-Shiite and often murdered innocent Shiites. At first my hosts were confused between Libya and Lebanon. Shafiq said they didn’t like Shiites but they liked Hizballah because they fought America, though this was not exactly accurate. “Hizballah are mujahideen,” Yusuf said. “It is no problem that they are Shiites. They are our brothers. The Americans made problems between Sunnis and Shiites. All Muslims are one.”
Muhamad, Yusuf’s eighteen-year-old companion, was also from Ghazni but had gone to an Islamic school in the Pakistani city of Quetta, which borders Afghanistan and sheltered many Taliban leaders. The school was called Mahmadiya, and education was in Pashtu, the only language Muhamad knew. Room and board had been free. In Quetta he had joined the Taliban, he said, because they were Muslim and his whole village had joined, and because he didn’t like the Americans entering his village. His parents did not know he had joined; they thought he was still studying in Pakistan. He had been a fighter for only fifteen days but had received two or three months of training in Ghazni. The training was not difficult, he said, but he had taken part in only one attack so far, against a police checkpoint in Ghazni. He had used an AK-47, and his friend had used an RPG. The Afghan police were not good fighters, he said. Shafiq added that the Afghan army was very good, and soldiers hit their targets when they shot. Referring to Muhamad, Shafiq proudly said, “All our boys are Mullah Omar and Osama.”
After we finished eating we walked to a mud shed. Shafiq opened its wooden doors to reveal a white Toyota Corolla. The men loaded the RPG launcher and four rockets into the car, along with the PKM and the AK-47. We drove under the moonlit desert on dirt paths to the village of Kharkhasha, where Shafiq lived. Shafiq put a tape of Taliban chants on. They were in Pashtu and without music, which was officially forbidden by the Taliban. We walked over a short wooden footbridge, and Shafiq’s older brother opened the door to greet us.
We entered the guest room in darkness and sat down on the thin mattresses that lined the walls. A small gas lamp was brought out as well as grapes and green tea. Shafiq belonged to the Jalalzai tribe, which was the biggest in Andar, he said. He fought the Soviets alongside Maulvi Muhamad Younes Khalis’s hardline Hizb-e-Islami, a splinter group with the same name as the one led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Shafiq was jailed for five years in the Communist era, and he bore tattoos on his wrist from that time. During the jihad against the Soviets, he worked with Arab doctors who volunteered to help the mujahideen. He picked up some Arabic from a Lebanese doctor called Sheikh Aqil, whom he described as a big, strong man. Following the Soviet withdrawal, as the mujahideen started to fight one another, Shafiq said he saw that the mujahideen had become robbers. He joined the Taliban in 1994 because they wanted peace and Islam.
When the American forces left, Shafiq said, he would be willing to negotiate with the Taliban’s Afghan rivals—but not with President Karzai, who was not a Muslim but a Jew. “I cannot make a deal with Karzai because he is American,” he said. Shafiq wanted a Sharia government, meaning one where Islamic law was imposed, and he hoped that Mullah Omar would return to rule the country. Girls could attend school, he said, and women could work, as long as they wore a hijab that covered them appropriately. Women could even serve as Parliament members and as governors, but not as the president, he said. Shafiq had a seven-month-old daughter; he said he would send his daughters to school, but only if the teachers were women. He was wary of giving too much freedom to women. They could go to cinemas only with their brothers or fathers, he said, not with other boys. There weren’t many cinemas in Afghanistan, so I didn’t know what he was so worried about. “If you give women freedom, they will go with boys and get HIV,” he said. One of my favorite views in Kabul was of kites fluttering high above homes in Kabul. The Taliban regime had forbidden kite flying in the past, and I asked Shafiq what he thought. Kites are not good, he said; it was better to work or study, and flying a kite was not even a sport. Soccer was also bad, but exercise and martial arts were good. Even the boys we passed playing with fire were doing something that was haram (forbidden).
Shafiq wanted help from Saudi Arabia or Iran; he and his men needed money for ammunition. They received help from Saudi individuals, as well as Pakistanis, but he did not know of any state assistance. Iran did not help them, he said. “Whoever is fighting with America,” he said, “he is my brother.” Shafiq had a friend called Mullah Agha Jan, who was killed while fighting in Baghdad. They had benefited from the Iraq experience when remote-controlled bomb techniques were imported to Afghanistan. Shafiq had heard of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had run a training camp in western Afghanistan before leading Al Qaeda in Iraq. “He is a big mujahid,” Shafiq said, “famous in Afghanistan.” Shafiq had met Osama bin Laden twice: once before the Taliban took over and once during its reign. He had been impressed by bin Laden’s knowledge of Pashtu. (He must have had a better book than I did.) Shafiq had met Mullah Omar as well. He thought both Mullah Omar and bin Laden were very friendly. Arab, Pakistani, and Uzbek fighters had come through the Andar district, Shafiq said, mostly as suicide bombers but also as fighters. Some Afghans from Kandahar had also come to fight in Andar. The Kandaharis were the best fighters he had seen; they were not afraid. The Russians had fought fiercely, like dogs. He did not have a high opinion of his American foes. “Pakistan and Iran are not friends of Afghanistan,” Shafiq said. “They want to take Afghanistan, they don’t want peace.” In this he was representative of most Afghan Taliban, who despite their extremely conservative views were fundamentally nationalists. Like most Afghans, he was against suicide bombings as well. “Suicide attacks are not good because they kill Muslims,” he said.
I asked Shafiq what he thought of a recent attack that had killed the women and driver working for International Rescue Committee in Logar. It was not good to kill women, he said, even infidel women. The Taliban didn’t know it was women, he said. The windows were tinted, and they couldn’t see the passengers. On the other hand, UN staff were infidels. Human rights were American, so they were bad. The Koran gave all the rights. “People spent seven years in Guantánamo,” he said. “Where are the human rights?” Shafiq told me he had recently purchased weapons in Kabul, where a man gave him two PKMs and an RPG for free. Shafiq bought two jeeps from the Afghan police, who later told the Interior Ministry that the vehicles were lost in an attack. “Some police work with us,” he said. Shafiq told me that Taliban representatives visited different villages in the area to teach people about the Taliban and recruit on their behalf.
It was late, and the men washed themselves with a bucket of water for the final prayer of the day. We all lay down on the mattresses where we had been sitting and took the pillows that had been against the wall. Shafiq’s older brother brought a thick flannel blanket and covered me. In the morning they took turns washing themselves again for the first prayer of the day. Shafiq’s older brother brought tea and some dry bread for breakfast. I asked him if he was also with the Taliban. He was just a farmer, he said, pantomiming digging and pointing to the grapes. Shafiq had an eighteen-year-old brother at Ghazni University who was also a Taliban fighter. Another younger brother was in a local school. They owned a generator, which was their only source of occasional electricity, but fuel was expensive at five liters for four hundred Afghans, about eight dollars. I asked about a bathroom. Kamal told me there wasn’t any, and instructed me to go outside in the yard.
Shafiq and Kamal went to the bazaar, leaving me with the young Taliban fighter Muhamad, but they said I could walk in the garden as I waited. It was untended and wild. Sunflowers towered over the large mud wall compound, bushes and dry trees grew in rows. There was a deep pit for a well and a crude pump to irrigate the field and draw water for personal use. As we sat waiting in the guest room Mullah Yusuf showed up with a companion called Qadim, who was missing his front teeth. Shafiq carried his AK-47, and the larger Qadim carried a heavier PKM. Mullah Yusuf played with a pair of binoculars he found on the floor. Yusuf wore a vest with pockets for magazines of ammunition, and he had several grenades stuffed in as well. Shafiq returned and spoke on the phone with a fellow Talib fighter from Meidan Shah in Wardak. They had conducted a successful attack, capturing four trucks and drivers.
We got back into the Corolla, loading the PKM, RPG launcher, and four rockets into the trunk. Shafiq and his PKM were in the front passenger seat. Yusuf drove, with his AK-47 beside him. I hoped we wouldn’t hit too many bumps. Qadim rode his Honda motorcycle alongside us, an AK-47 strapped to his shoulder, a scarf around his face to protect from the sand and dust. As we drove I finally got to see the environment. It was flat and starkly arid. Everything was the color of sand, including the occasional man-made structure, the mud bleached by the sun. Yusuf pointed to a police checkpoint in the distance. The police knew him but did nothing, he said. “Every night I go on patrol and they don’t fight me,” he said. “They don’t have guns, and they are afraid.” I asked Shafiq and Yusuf what services or aid the Taliban provided people in Ghazni. They complained that they had no money to help.
Yusuf called a fellow commander and told him he was bringing over a journalist. The man on the other end of the call called me a devil and told him not to bring me. So we headed to another commander instead. Yusuf passed by a school called Ghams al-Ulum, which his predecessor, Mullah Mu’min, had built fourteen years earlier. There had once been three hundred boys studying at the school, but it had been closed since the Americans arrived. Three years earlier the Americans and Afghan army had used it as a base, he said, “but we fought them and they left.”
We drove in the desert to the village of Khodzai and entered a mosque. Eight men and two boys sat on the floor drinking tea. An RPG and several AK-47s were on the floor or against the wall. In addition to Yusuf, another senior commander from Andar was present. The men talked about fighting the Afghan army two days earlier in the nearby Naniki village. The commander I spoke to told me they had ambushed a logistical convoy of trucks using machine guns and RPGs; they killed twenty Afghan soldiers, and one Talib was injured. The Americans didn’t come here, and there was no Afghan government, he said. “We control this area. The Taliban is the government here.” All the older men agreed that the Russians were more dangerous than the Americans. I asked to take a picture of some of the fighters. The commander wrapped his young son up with a scarf and showed him how to hold the AK. Everybody laughed as I took his picture with the others. The men got ready to go on a patrol, putting on their vests, checking magazines, slinging AK-47s on their shoulders, and wrapping scarves around their faces. We all went out, standing in a sunny courtyard. Small boys and girls emerged to watch the men ready themselves. They got on their Honda motorcycles and carried their RPGs. Suddenly a coalition military helicopter flew low overhead, nearly coming to a hover above us. I clenched my fists in terror waiting for the helicopter to fire a missile at us. I struggled to control the urge to flee. The other men ignored it and laughed at me. One told me that he had fired an RPG at a helicopter the day before, and that they would fire at this one if it attacked us. To my relief, the helicopter continued flying. The men took off on their motorcycles. We drove away in the Corolla. Shafiq told me he had killed more than two hundred alleged spies. After a trial, if the judge gave a verdict of guilty, he explained, they would cut the spy’s head off. “First I warn people to stop, and if they continue I kill them,” Shafiq said. He explained that they could only fight for about twenty minutes before the helicopters came: “I can’t fight for two or three hours.”
As we drove he played more Taliban chants about brave boys going to fight. We passed by another school that had been closed. The sun shown bright on old mud houses. Many were worn out and looked like sand castles after the first wave hit them. There was only one school open in the area, Shafiq told me as we drove through the village of Kamalkhel. He pointed to a new yellow school, explaining that it was a government school run by the Taliban. “There are no government people here,” Shafiq said. One month earlier the Americans had arrested Mullah Faizani, the Taliban commander of Kamalkhel.
As we drove through villages a bearded man with his face partially concealed by a scarf stopped us on his motorcycle. He demanded to know who I was, and Shafiq told him I was a guest. He asked me if I was Pashtun. “Pukhtu nayam,” I said. “I am not Pashtun.” He glared at me and drove off.
We entered an old adobe home built seventy years ago. Livestock brayed past the gate. A large group of Taliban were seated around the room. I met a seventeen-year-old called Isa. Like Muhamad, he had been a Talib for only two weeks. He had studied at a local Islamic school in Andar. I asked him why he had joined. “I like the mujahideen,” he said, “and I want to do jihad.” I asked him why. “Because the Americans are here,” Yusuf said. Isa repeated Yusuf’s answer. He hoped to continue studying religion when he was done fighting. Food was brought out. More shurwa and chunks of meat. They got most of their news from listening to BBC on the radio. They could not watch television because of lack of electricity, they said. In the past the Taliban had prohibited television. One of the Talibs told me he thought the Americans would leave in one year. “When the Americans leave I want to fight them, because why did they attack Afghanistan?” said one man. “America is at war with Islam,” said Shafiq. “The war started with the Prophet Muhammad,” said Yusuf.
I asked the men who they thought should lead Afghanistan. It didn’t have to be Mullah Omar, they said, as long as Islamic law was imposed. I asked them if they would allow people like Osama bin Laden and other foreign fighters in once they controlled Afghanistan. “Islam has no borders,” said Shafiq affirmatively. I asked why most Taliban were Pashtun. “Pashtun people have more principles and religious faith than others,” said Shafiq. “It’s also because Pashtuns are the majority.” This is not exactly accurate: Pashtuns are the largest group in Afghanistan, but they are not the majority. “Life was better under the Taliban because it was an Islamic regime,” said Yusuf. They asked me questions about the Americans: what they thought of their being in Afghanistan, and if they thought they would win. I struggled to find the right answer. One of the commanders told Shafiq that I was an American CIA agent. Shafiq told him I wasn’t. I heard the words “istikhbarat” and “jasus,” which meant “army intelligence” and “spy,” as we readied ourselves to leave.
We left to meet more fighters. Yusuf stopped the car at a house where an American strike had killed two Talibs a year earlier and asked me to photograph it. We crawled through rocky paths between mud homes, a vast labyrinth. Everything looked the same to me. We got stuck in the sand, and a dust storm hit us, blinding and suffocating us as we struggled to push the car. We stopped in front of a shop with the PKM in full view and Taliban music playing. The people in the shop greeted Yusuf warmly. Six men came out to greet us as we sat waiting in the car. Yusuf bought many shoulder straps for AK-47s and put them in the car.
We drove to another mosque and found twelve men inside. A large shoulder-fired missile was on the floor, an anti-armor weapon I had not seen before. Most of the men in this room were older. Shafiq told me we were waiting to meet the commander who would approve my trip. I thought it had all been approved already. One of the men was called Abu Tayyeb, an Arabic nom de guerre. He spoke Arabic, so we were able to talk to each other. He told me he commanded two thousand men in Wardak and was visiting. He had lived in Saudi Arabia for one year and spent three months in a Saudi prison for mujahideen-related activities. He had joined the mujahideen fourteen years ago, he said, and under the Taliban he was a commander in the northern Kunduz province. He told me the large shoulder-fired weapon on the floor was an RR82, or some kind of recoilless rifle. I continued to ask him questions, but then the angry man—the one who had asked me if I was a Pashtun—came in holding a walkie-talkie and barked at him to stop talking to me until the commander, called Dr. Khalil, showed up. I noticed that some other men had walkie-talkies too, and that Kamal was nervous. There was a problem, he told me; the judge would decide what would happen to us. Upon hearing the word qazi (judge), I started to panic inside. As Shafiq had told me, a meeting with a judge could end with your head getting cut off.
We got up to go, and when we were out I was told to get in the car with the angry man and other strangers, who would take me to the judge. Yusuf was praying and Shafiq said he would pray and catch up with us. I told him I was not leaving him, that I was his guest. A desperate feeling was beginning to take over me. Holding their rifles the commander’s men shouted at me to get in their car. Yusuf came out, told me to get in our Corolla, and assured me he wouldn’t leave us. He put Qadim in the car with us. A standoff ensued. I called and sent text messages to my contacts back in Kabul to let them know I was in trouble. Qadim sat menacingly with an AK-47, his face concealed by a scarf. His phone rang: its ring tones were machine-gun fire and a song about the Taliban being born for martyrdom. Lack of water, fear, and the dust had dried my mouth, and I felt as though I had lost my voice. My friend in Kabul who had helped arrange the trip called Shafiq and told him he should not leave me, that I was Shafiq’s responsibility and he would hold him personally responsible if anything happened to me.
After an hour Shafiq told us we could get out. Abu Tayyeb, the Arabic speaker, tried to reassure me and told me not to worry. The angry man and his companions departed, taking the rocket launcher with them. I thought it was over, and put my hand on my heart as they left, to indicate no ill will. Then Shafiq told us Dr. Khalil was coming to see us. Abu Tayyeb had tried and failed to get them to let us leave. I wondered if all the increased phone traffic and movement of Taliban commanders would attract the attention of whatever American intelligence agency might be spying on us, and if we would be attacked. Abu Tayyeb apologetically explained that there were many Taliban groups and that the one causing me problems was different. Then the order came for us to go see Dr. Khalil ourselves.
We left in a heavy dust storm. The car crawled forward slowly, rocking back and forth on the rocky paths, and I felt as though I were in a boat being tossed about by waves. Yusuf said not to worry, that if they came to take me he would fight them. We drove from village to village with Qadim ahead on the motorcycle. In my loneliness it occurred to me that we had driven through an entire district, through many villages, and there was no authority other than the Taliban, who seemed completely comfortable in their territory and not half as concerned about the Americans as I was. “We have problem,” Kamal said, but he didn’t elaborate when I asked what it was. On the road I struggled to find network reception for my phone, cursing as the bars appeared and disappeared. I reached another one of my contacts. “I spoke to Dr. Khalil,” he said. “If they behave bad with you, don’t worry. They just want to punish you, but everything is okay. I have only one more guy to call, who is bigger than Dr. Khalil.” Shafiq also told me not to worry; he would get killed before he left me. We crawled at a snail’s pace to our denouement in a dark empty desert, which only made me more tense. I could see nothing on the horizon; it was clear we had a long way to go. I asked Shafiq if Dr. Khalil was a nice guy, a good guy. “He’s like you,” Shafiq answered cryptically. “No Muslim is a bad man. Don’t worry, the Doctor has a gun and I have a gun.” Dr. Khalil, apparently, was a Tajik, not a Pashtun, which was very unusual for a senior Taliban commander like him, and he was from the Tajik village of Asfanda in Ghazni. He had recently been released from an Afghan prison in a prisoner exchange. Shafiq later said that as soon as Dr. Khalil heard I was a foreigner, he thought he would be rich. He called his superiors and told them he caught Shafiq with a foreign spy. He called Mansur Dadullah and told him, “I arrested a foreigner and an Afghan in Wardak and brought them to Ghazni.” Mansur Dadullah was the brother of the slain Mullah Dadullah, who had commanded Taliban military operations after the 2001 American invasion until he was killed in May 2007. Mansur Dadullah was released with other Taliban prisoners in March 2007 in exchange for the Taliban release of an Italian journalist. He then commanded Taliban operations in some of the most dangerous southern provinces and served as a spokesman until he was reportedly demoted by Mullah Omar.
Mullah Abdillah called to say that he had reached a Taliban leader in Quetta in Pakistan and somebody in the United Arab Emirates, and they had promised to call Dr. Khalil and tell him not to harm us. “The Doctor will fight with me, not with you,” said Shafiq. My contact called again to tell me “they might slap you, but they won’t hit you or kill you, just punish you for coming without permission. They might keep you overnight as a guest. You are lucky you called me.” I felt some relief, but I was not convinced. Later he told me that Dr. Khalil had told him, “Don’t worry, we won’t do anything that isn’t Sharia,” but this was little consolation, since they considered Islamic law to permit beheading.
We drove through a Shiite village called Kara Barei on our way to the area between Gabari and Sher Kala village. “I’m a martyr, I’m a star,” sang the Taliban chants on the tape. “I’ve reached my goal, I’m a martyr . . . I will testify on behalf of my mother on Judgment Day. When I was small my mother put me on her lap and spoke sweetly to me . . .” We finally arrived at the mosque where Dr. Khalil was waiting for us. Upon entering I inadvertently stepped on a pair of Prada sunglasses. Dr. Khalil walked in at that moment and picked them up to examine them somberly. He was a burly man with light skin and a dark brown beard. He had thick hands and was stern. He wore a cap on his head. After everybody prayed together, Dr. Khalil told everybody to leave the room except for Kamal, Yusuf, and me. We sat on the floor. He put his sunglasses on. “Deir obekhi,” I said, apologizing for entering his territory without permission. He did not react but accused Kamal and me of being spies for the Afghan army. He asked how I got a visa to Afghanistan and why, and how I got visas to other countries. I told him I was there to write about the mujahideen and tell their story. If I liked them so much, he said, why didn’t I join them? He asked about my contact. I said he was a former mujahid from Jamiat-i Islami. He scoffed dismissively, telling me they were not mujahideen. Suddenly he got up and said he would make phone calls to Pakistan and elsewhere to investigate us, so we had to spend the night in the mosque—he would come back for us in the morning. He got up and left in a hurry as I tried to protest.
I sat glumly on the floor in the guest room. A few minutes later Shafiq stuck his head in and said, “Yallah,” Arabic for “come on.” I stood up with alacrity, relieved to get out of there though confused about why. But the Talibs sitting with us insisted we drink the tea they had just made. I hurriedly gulped down the scalding tea. We stepped out into the darkness and heard helicopters in the distance. Soon we could spot their silhouettes; everybody ducked behind the car and motorcycle, so I did too, wondering if the men I was with had heard of night-vision goggles. After the sky was silent again, Yusuf apologized for having to leave me and go see his family. Shafiq told me we had to return to this mosque in the morning, and I was once again crestfallen. He drove the Corolla slowly, painstakingly winding through invisible paths. The moonlight was blocked by dust. I could see nothing out the window and wondered what was guiding Shafiq. The mobile phone network was shut down again, and I had no way of updating my contacts in Kabul.
At Shafiq’s house I met his seventeen-year-old brother, who was studying at a nearby state school and knew some English. I was surprised that a Taliban commander would let his brother attend a government school. Shafiq’s brother told me he wanted to study engineering and didn’t want to fight. He had been with Mullah Abdillah all day, he said, and Abdillah had spent much of the day calling Taliban commanders to try to release me from Dr. Khalil. He had even called Mansur Dadullah in Kandahar.
Shafiq carried a television into the guest room and turned on the generator. He was able to read the English titles on the guide and found Al Jazeera, the Arabic satellite news channel. We watched coverage of attacks on the road from Kabul to Jalalabad and the ones we had driven by in Wardak. Boys were shown taking pieces of the trucks away. Shafiq got bored with Al Jazeera and put on Ariana, an Afghan channel, to watch an Indian soap opera dubbed in Dari. Women were shown in revealing Western attire. I was amazed that he would watch something so anathema to the Taliban. It was okay, he said. “It’s a drama about a family.” Later he put on a British Muslim channel called Islam and moved on to an Iranian American pop-music satellite channel. A portly singer with stubble and long hair imitated ’80s rock in Farsi. The next video showed an Iranian pop singer dressed up in leather like Davy Crockett and wearing brand-name tank tops. It was terrible stuff, but Shafiq told me he had no problem with these things. Qadim and Shafiq’s brother chatted. Shafiq read him something, and it became clear that Qadim was illiterate.
I finally managed to fall asleep, but at 11 p.m. there was shouting outside, and Kamal told me to wake up. “The Taliban are here for us,” he said, and my heart started racing again. Three young men carrying AK-47s with scarves and blankets draped around their heads and shoulders walked in. My knees felt weak as I stood up to greet them. “They’re a different group,” Shafiq’s brother said. They were not here for us at all. They hadn’t even heard of us but were merely a night patrol passing by. One of them sat on the floor with his barrel pointing at Shafiq. I eyed him nervously as he played with the trigger absentmindedly until Shafiq’s brother told him that his safety was off and it was dangerous. They left and came back again, this time leaving with Shafiq.
In the morning, I woke up to the sound of military planes overhead. I stepped out of the qala and saw a convoy of American armored vehicles a mile away. I fought the strong urge to walk to them and be rescued, knowing they might shoot me themselves and that it would doom everybody who had helped me. I waited impatiently for the phone network to go back up. One of my contacts in Kabul told me that he had spoken to senior Taliban people everywhere and had told Dr. Khalil not to harm us, but Dr. Khalil insisted we were spies. My contact thought he was just trying to assert his independence and hoped to exchange us for a large ransom. Mullah Nasir, a one-armed Kandahari who served as Taliban governor for Ghazni, was also helping us. Zaibullah Mujahed, the Taliban spokesman, had promised to call Dr. Khalil as well. I tried to persuade Shafiq to drive us to Ghazni’s capital, but he said that if he didn’t return us to Dr. Khalil, then Khalil would arrest him.
Shafiq’s nephew had been arrested the night before after a Taliban patrol spotted him walking with a girl. Shafiq left us to go release him. In the meantime I spoke to a contact in Kabul, who told me that we had gotten caught in a rivalry between Mullah Abdillah and Shafiq, on one side, and Dr. Khalil, on the other. Mullah Abdillah and his men had killed nearly a dozen Pakistanis and Arabs for trying to burn down a girls’ school, but the foreigners were commanded by Dr. Khalil, so bad blood lingered. My contact told me he had been told by senior Taliban that we would be released in the afternoon but that once we were on the road we should take the batteries out of our phones. Shafiq had to deal with more headaches when other Talibs called to complain that they had heard music coming from his house when they called him the night before. Exasperated, Shafiq protested that it was only Al Jazeera.
Mullah Baradar, the Taliban minister of defense and Mullah Omar’s deputy, called Dr. Khalil and demanded our release because he had given us permission to travel in Taliban territory. Another contact added pressure on Dr. Khalil by calling his former commander, who had arranged for his release in the prisoner exchange. Early in the afternoon Dr. Khalil finally showed up. He examined my passport and visas, and carefully went through my bags. He was most fascinated by my Gillette gel deodorant, opening it and smelling it. He took my toothbrush out of its container and carefully thumbed through the bristles, bringing it close to his eye to examine it. He leafed through my notebooks and was intrigued by my many medicines for diarrhea and dehydration. He asked me to show him the pictures I had taken. “Zaibullah Mujahed said I should hit you, but I will not,” he told me. Dr. Khalil’s attitude was markedly different, and he made me feel at ease. “What can I do for you?” he asked. I asked him a few questions. He was fighting for a government of Islamic law, he said, but Mullah Omar did not have to be the leader again. God willing, it would take up to twenty or thirty years until they got rid of the foreigners. If the foreigners left, he would still fight the Afghan army, and he refused to negotiate with President Karzai. Women could go to school and work, he conceded. Dr. Khalil had studied in the Hakim Sahib Sanai Islamic School in the Pakistani town of Jub and then studied internal medicine in Afghanistan. In 1992 he joined the Taliban, and he was a commander in the far northern Taluqan district.
I wasn’t in the mood to ask too many questions, and we piled into the Corolla again, loading an RPG into the trunk just in case. Dr. Khalil got in the driver’s seat with Shafiq beside him holding the PKM. Qadim held an AK-47 and squeezed in next to me. Dr. Khalil’s escort followed on another motorcycle, as did Shafiq’s brother. We drove for about an hour through villages. The car got stuck, and I helped collect rocks to put beneath the tires. We drove through Dr. Khalil’s village of Asfanda, and he pointed to its outer limits. “This is the border between the Taliban and the government,” he said, proudly stressing his control. We drove undisturbed through the village. He asked me what I would write in my article. I told him that I would write about how much control the Taliban had in much of Afghanistan. He was now jocular and relaxed.
He pointed to a nearby American base with a spy blimp parked on the ground and told me to take a picture of it. At the edge of town close to the main road he got out, followed by Shafiq, who held his PKM. The locals appeared stunned. He stopped a pickup truck and ordered the driver to take us to the bazaar. We parted warmly and climbed on the back of the truck. Shafiq’s younger brother followed us on a motorcycle to the bazaar, where we met Mullah Abdillah, who was very apologetic for what had happened to me. Abdillah was supposed to have been with me during my trip through Talibanistan, but he was tired from his surgery and had gone home to relax. “I paid for my mistake,” he later said. “This Doctor, he is a very nasty guy,” my contact told me on the phone. “He might send somebody to kidnap you on the way, and then I can do nothing for you.” Abdillah was also worried that Dr. Khalil had set up an ambush for me on the road. Later I learned more. Shafiq had incorrectly told local Taliban that I worked for Al Jazeera. Dr. Khalil called the Al Jazeera bureau chief in Pakistan and asked him if he knew me. When the chief said no they decided I was a spy. By the time Mullah Baradar had made the call to Dr. Khalil, the leadership in Andar had already decided to execute me.
We dodged craters in the road on the way back with Abdillah, and the sides of the road were strewn with burned-out and exploded cars. The trucks I had seen burning two days earlier were still smoldering, and children were playing with them, removing pieces. I teased Abdillah for his Taliban having destroyed the roads and made our drive more difficult and perilous, and was surprised when he seemed to agree. He later expressed disapproval of the Taliban for killing Afghan civilians, explaining that they were not acting like Afghans. We didn’t stop fast enough at an army checkpoint, and the soldier raised his AK at us. It was a sunny day with clear skies, and I felt euphoric as we drove north to Kabul.
I RETURNED TO KABUL to find that the UN had been put on four days of restricted movement to coincide with Afghanistan’s independence day and the anniversary of the 2003 attack on the UN in Baghdad. While I was there rockets were also fired at the airport in Kabul and at the ISAF base. I told a Western intelligence officer about the extent to which the Taliban were in charge of Ghazni. “Andar is a very bad place,” he said, explaining that it had recently become one of the most dangerous areas in the country. “The Taliban showed a lot of confidence and freedom of movement,” he said. “They pulled people off buses. That level of control is right on Kabul’s front door. The writing was on the wall for the central region two years ago. The international effort was fixated with the south, but they didn’t create conditions to act as a buttress against the insurgency. Environments regarded as extreme two years ago are still extreme but much worse. There has been a staggering intensification, and there are ominous signs elsewhere in country.”
Between Ghazni and Kabul are the formerly peaceful provinces of Wardak and Logar. “Logar and Wardak were like canaries in a mine, and now they have gone,” a senior development official told me. His NGO had divided Afghanistan into stable, unstable, and volatile areas. “Now unstable provinces have become volatile,” he said. “Now it’s too late.” A former Taliban government official told me that Logar had become dangerous in the summer of 2007. “I was watching trends in Logar and Wardak because there was no movement from the government side to push them back,” he said. “It was the weakness of the government and the strength of the Taliban.” He explained that Logar was an important center for religious education in Afghanistan, with perhaps more Islamic schools than any other province. “In the south there are not many official Islamic schools, so you can deal with tribes,” he said. But Logar was producing new Talibs in its schools. A waiter at my hotel in Kabul told me that he had been at a wedding in the town of Warajan in Logar on August 17 when suddenly about fourteen Talibs came in with AKs and RPGs. They didn’t say anything but simply checked to see if there was music being played. Like most of the country, Kunduz province, in the far north, was also declining. “Kunduz was very safe last year,” a senior humanitarian official told me. “I drove up there and spent Christmas there. Now there have been NGO staff killed, threats of kidnapping.” The German contingent there was attacked every night and had recently accidentally killed Afghan civilians.
As I saw on the road to Ghazni, the Taliban were cutting off Kabul from the rest of the country. The road southwest to Kandahar was lethal. “The Kabul-to-Ghazni road is gone,” the intelligence officer told me. “The Ghazni-to-Gardez road is exceedingly bad, the Wardak road is shitty, the Jalalabad road is sliding, and there is a sustainable deterioration in rural areas around the road—you run the risk of abduction. It’s routine ambushes now, so they have a routine capability.” In May and June 2007, the officer explained, there was a major shift in Wardak: “Within an eight-week period it went from nighttime ambushes to daylight roadblocks.” He told me that warnings had been issued about the Sarobi district of Kabul and the Qarghai district in the province of Laghman, which borders Kabul to the east. There was also an IED cell in the Puli Khumri junction, which was a key road for anything going from the north to Kabul. Even Badakhshan at the extreme northeast of the country was beginning to have problems. In the last three months the northern Parwan province, which borders Kabul, had also become more dangerous. It was mostly Tajik, but the main road was under pressure there as well. “All of a sudden we see IEDs in Parwan on the main road, attacks on police checkpoints,” he said. “It’s the last remaining key arterial route connecting Kabul to the rest of the country.” Hizb-e-Islami clerics were sent to Parwan to preach against the government, and an increase in violence soon followed. “Given the ethnicity of the area, it’s not a permissive environment, but there are effective IED cells operating there,” he said.
On August 13 the international community in Kabul and most Afghans were shocked when three Western female NGO workers from the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and their Afghan driver were ambushed on a road in Logar’s Puli Alam district in the morning and shot to death. The initial Taliban statement claimed the targets were legitimate because they were ISAF soldiers. In the past the Taliban said they would not attack NGOs, including international NGOs, which were free to work throughout the country. At first the Taliban statement seemed to imply that they had relied on bad intelligence and that they thought the victims were military people using civilian vehicles. “The IRC attack was a big watershed,” the intelligence officer told me, summarizing the final Taliban statement as “Yes, we killed them, and we’re proud of it—screw you.” He explained that the Taliban claimed they didn’t believe the IRC’s projects had merit or were in the interest of Afghanistan. In effect, the Taliban spokesman legitimized attacks on NGOs. On previous occasions the Taliban had admitted that similar attacks were mistakes, such as when they targeted organizations that disposed of land mines. “The IRC incident changed the whole rules of the game,” a senior UN official told me. “In the past, when de-miners were taken hostage and killed, they have issued statements that it’s Taliban policy not to attack de-miners,” the intelligence officer said. “That’s the story in Afghanistan with the Taliban, internal squabbling. They free de-miners in one place, and pick them up in another place.” In June 2008 there were twenty-one security incidents against NGOs, and the IRC attack in August brought NGO deaths in 2008 to twenty-three. “In Darfur we had thirteen killed in one year, and the international community went ballistic,” one senior Western NGO official told me. “Here there hasn’t been much of an outrage.”
Some NGO officials were not surprised. In 2006 Mullah Omar had issued a twenty-nine-article order that did not prohibit attacks against NGOs, which meant that in practice it allowed them. A former Taliban government official from Logar explained to me that if the Taliban abducted Afghans working for NGOs, then surely they would abduct internationals. Abductions were used to help finance their operations or for prisoner exchanges with jailed Taliban members. In the case of the IRC women, he said, “they were foreigners, that’s reason enough.” He explained that the Taliban had cars with armed men on standby. When they heard that a high-profile SUV with tinted windows was coming, they waited on the main road to ambush them and then simply returned to the villages. The same thing had recently happened in Logar’s Muhammad Agha district, which was even closer to Kabul, on its southern border. The Taliban ambushed a police convoy and simply drove into their villages afterward, and the police didn’t dare follow them “because everyone likes their life.” The government remained in control of the main urban centers. But the Taliban had little need to take Kabul; it wasn’t relevant, and it never fell even in the Soviet days. “But once you leave the city, how safe do you feel?” a senior UN official asked.
During this visit to Afghanistan I spoke with Western diplomats, security experts, former mujahideen commanders, former Taliban officials, NGO officials, and senior UN officials. All agreed that “things are not going well,” that the situation was “incredibly bleak.” Many told me that “what we’ve got to try and make happen is a fresh start” or “we have to start from zero again.”
“I’m not optimistic,” a longtime NGO official told me. “You can’t help getting this increased uncomfortable feeling that you are waiting for something terrible to happen.” Taliban confidence reminded him of the mujahideen he had known in the Soviet days. Another senior Western NGO official who had recently left Afghanistan with his family spoke of a “loss of hope” and told me that “Afghans with money want to move their families to Dubai or India—they’re looking at an exit strategy. I’m increasingly unsure about the way forward except that we should start preparing our exit strategy. We’re not up to the task of success in Afghanistan.”
“At the center is an extremely weak president,” said a European ambassador, “a corrupt and ineffective Ministry of Interior, an army that will fight but has no command or control, a dysfunctional international alliance.” The “enlightened” Afghan elite who lead the government have little in common with the majority of rural Afghans, who are the sea where the Taliban swim. There had been small successes in health, education, rural development, roads, bridges, dams, and wells, but these were ephemeral, a senior development official told me, and it would be easy to blow them up. “From the beginning I’ve been very worried and negative,” the European ambassador told me. “The analysis of our intelligence people is that things are getting worse. CIA analysts are extremely gloomy and worried. The administration in Washington is not fit for the purpose.” But there was a divide between the analysts and the trigger pullers. The British army did not accept the negative prognosis provided by that country’s intelligence and continued to insist that things were not getting worse.
“Last month was the worst ever and the month before that was the worst ever until then,” a senior UN official told me in August 2008. “The UN has 50 or 55 percent access in this country—in some parts we have zero.” UN maps divided the country into green areas for safety and red areas for danger. But the maps were misleading, he said: “Herat is green, but only essential staff are allowed there and only in the capital of the province. It’s actually 97 percent off-limits. In Kandahar we have plenty of international staff, but they are all hiding behind the doors.” The UN had declared Afghanistan to be in phase three out of its five phases of safety, with five being the worst. But in practice it was treated as phase four. “It’s a political decision,” he said. “They cannot say it’s phase four because ‘we are winning the war, we are controlling the situation. ’ We are thinking things will get much worse. There is a political interest in not acknowledging the situation. If they recognize that there are humanitarian issues, then they have failed.”
Following the Taliban’s speedy defeat by the Americans in 2001, there was a wholesale handover of government to the warlords and no institution building. NATO forces were restricted to Kabul, and the focus of the mission was counterterrorism. The Americans built up the warlords and let them become entrenched. They would find weapons caches and give them to the warlords. Those who had been responsible for atrocities in the past were given renewed legitimacy. The parliamentary elections of 2005 then legalized the legitimacy the Americans had bestowed upon the warlords. The Parliament was led by warlords; they served as governors and ministers. “The American intervention issued blank checks to these guys,” one longtime NGO official told me. “They threw money, weapons, vehicles at them. Anyone willing to work with the Americans was welcome. The warlords haven’t abandoned their bad habits. They’re abusing people and filling their pockets.” When President Karzai appointed governors and police chiefs, his options were limited. American-backed warlords were already in charge in many places, and Karzai had no choice but to appoint these same people—and he began to lose credibility.
“I thought the Americans and international community could succeed in 2001,” a former mujahideen commander and Taliban government official told me. “I thought we would get rid of all these warlords, but in the first six months they supported the warlords and put them in power. Then there was hope for the elections, but warlords won. In 2002 the warlords were nervous about the justice process. Now they are in Parliament, ministers, deputy ministers. The main mistake was the agreement between the Northern Alliance and the U.S. before Bonn and the fall of the Taliban. In Kandahar drug gangs were appointed police chiefs and district administrators.”
The UN, the U.S. embassy, and Karzai undermined justice and refused to take the warlords on because it would threaten stability. They ended up fundamentally undermining the process of creating a government that would be legitimate in the eyes of the population, who at best had an ambivalent view of a government that had done nothing to protect them. At the same time the American-led coalition dropped bombs on Afghans and shot them on the roads at greater and greater numbers.
“The amnesty bill gave all members of Parliament and warlords immunity from prosecution,” the intelligence officer said. “Karzai was under pressure from the UN and international community to block it. I felt the ambience of Kabul change after the bill. There was increasing cockiness and a sense of impunity, corruption increased, there were more cash-in-transit robberies.” But many of these warlords had violated the terms of the amnesty by maintaining their private militias. “The issue isn’t who the combatants are,” he said. “It’s the elders and government members who have secret handshakes with local Taliban. That corruption is the absolute way of life here, from your smallest villager dealing with his melon crop to your minister.” As the situation worsened, “there is desperation setting in among the government: ‘Let’s shove this into our pockets, because it won’t last.’ Government departments demand bribes.”
The intelligence officer singled out the general who headed the Interior Ministry’s Criminal Investigation and Terrorism department. The increased abuses coincided with the general’s rise, he said. “He’s a psychopath, that’s the only way I can put it. He’s a mafia don, a mini Al Capone, a nasty piece of work, the scum of the earth, a fucking hoodlum.” Police harassment of foreigners also increased, he said. “The international community proved to be a paper tiger. The police will raid foreign companies, even security companies, and just steal everything: iPods, money, weapons, radios. They even tried arresting foreigners for not having passports on them, which is not illegal. Afghans connected to the government who have security companies wanted them out, they wanted their business. Afghan security teams were moonlighting as bank robbers. There is no respect for laws in this country whatsoever—it’s meaningless. In my view this whole governance piece is the most critical part, but you have utterly disgusting people in power. People might hate the Taliban, but they hate the government just as much. At least the Taliban have rules. This government, they’re parasites fucking with you on a deal. If you go through the legitimate process, you haven’t got a chance.”
A senior UN official agreed. “The police are highly corrupt,” he said. “They are at the center of the collapse of the state and the Karzai government. They are involved in everything from corruption to harassment. Locals feel alienation from police, and they have been the best promoters of the Taliban. The police make them support the Taliban.”
“The Afghan National Police are corrupt and parasitic on the population partly because they are not well paid or trained,” according to Nathaniel Fick of the new Washington-based think tank the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). “It’s corruption from need, not from greed. At three hundred dollars a month, a family with a couple of kids can live in rural Afghanistan. The average minimum monthly salary is three hundred a month; we pay them one hundred and twenty a month.” Fick added that the salary was set to increase to a paltry two hundred a month, but one way or another, “the police always get paid.” Logistics were also a problem. “We need paved roads,” he said. “These guys get paid when the paymaster travels down a gravel road with an American escort with the money. So guys in rural outposts don’t get paid, so they become parasitic, and the circle goes around.”
Fick is a former Marine officer who served in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002 and in Iraq in 2003. In 2007 he was an instructor at the counterinsurgency academy in Kabul. He was also portrayed in a positive light as the platoon leader in Generation Kill, a book based on a series in Rolling Stone that also became an HBO series. In August 2008 Fick returned from a visit to Afghanistan, where he and a colleague conducted research for CNAS’s impending strategic assessment of U.S. policy in that country. “We met with tribal elders in Ghazni, and they told us they were slapped on one cheek by the Taliban and on the other by government,” Fick told me. “There is bribery in every office, total lack of security, police corruption.” Afghans didn’t trust the coalition’s commitment, he said. “They think we’re going to leave, so they stay on the fence.”
The Americans and their allies arrogantly presumed they could create a state out of nothing in a fissiparous country with barely any roads linking different regions to one another, and then tried to make it a strong centralized state at that. In the beginning, overcome with a sense of victory, they ignored the Taliban and Pakistan. The Taliban were not part of the peace process in Bonn because the Americans didn’t want them there. Pakistan’s role was neglected at the beginning of the power-sharing arrangement. Most of the members in Karzai’s first cabinet had close to ties to India, archenemy of Pakistan, or to Iran, and there were too few Pashtuns. The Pakistanis felt alienated, and they invested in the Taliban to regain influence and power.
“The way people are treated in Afghanistan makes you feel disgusted about your own existence,” a senior UN humanitarian official told me. “For almost thirty years, Afghans lived in extreme flux. They are the most resilient and courageous population. They are skilled survivors. I can see the return of symptoms I saw before the fall of the Taliban: uncertainty, you are with several sides at once. This is everywhere—Kabul too.” A European ambassador added that even though Afghans don’t want the Taliban to rule, they will back a winner. “They don’t want to back the government, and in eighteen months’ time, the Taliban will ride back into the village and behead anybody who has made a deal with the coalition,” he said.
Living in a country with few resources and a legacy of thirty years of war has made Afghans the ultimate survivors. Pashtun elders have to negotiate competing claims and obligations as well as competition for resources and complex identities—their tribe, their region, the governor. (Is his tribe allied or at odds with ours? Was he with the Taliban before or opposed to them? Which party was he with in the ’80s?) The elders can get resources from the government, the Americans, the Taliban, drug lords, and neighboring countries. If an elder meets with the Americans, he will have to answer to the Taliban that night. If he refuses to meet with the Americans, the Americans will perceive his village as hostile and might bomb it. There could be a blood feud with a neighboring town or tribe because somebody was killed as a result of competition over land or water resources.
Even the reform of the Afghan army, of which the Americans were so proud, was fraught with problems. The army was still predominantly Tajik, so when it went to the south it was confronted with serious linguistic problems that may cause ethnic tensions in the future. The Afghan army relies on the support of U.S. forces and airpower; it will always require an American presence. It cannot function on its own. The Americans decided to expand the Afghan army from eighty thousand to one hundred twenty thousand, but this would take another five years (time they don’t have).
In August 2008 the American-led coalition, the UN, and the Karzai government were pinning their hopes on the 2009 presidential elections in Afghanistan. But a senior UN official told me, “You can’t fix the insurgency with an election. It’s a socio-economic phenomenon that goes well beyond the border of Afghanistan.” A British intelligence officer told me, “The Taliban are only too happy to keep Karzai in power. He’s impotent in every single way. He made a lot of deals to get in power and stay in power, he’s all about his own political survival, he’s a weak man who refused to stand up to the bullies. We need a clean individual who these other individuals can’t nipple-tweak. We need a guy who can say, ‘All the old deals are off.’”
Often very little distinguishes a tribe or village that decides to align itself with the government from one that decides to join the army or support the Taliban and send its sons to fight the Americans. It might be a contract, a personal dispute, a relative on one side or the other. “A lot of this is about power and local influence,” the intelligence officer said. “Parts of society will be poor and powerless if they accept Karzai’s order. They want to achieve status and influence. If they accept legitimate structures, they’re accepting their doom. A lot can be explained in Darwinian terms. Across nature you see alternative strategies. Fighting is an alternative strategy: you can be Mr. Big in your community.”
In 2006 the Taliban fought the Americans in conventional engagements. “The Taliban were being wiped out in huge numbers,” the intelligence officer said. “They were going at it jihad-style. So the Taliban went for asymmetry.” The Taliban were not experienced in insurgent warfare at the beginning of the occupation, but they showed themselves able to learn and adapt and even use technologies they had previously abhorred. They had a harder time accessing urban areas, so they made deals with criminal gangs. “The saving grace will be the winter,” said one senior NGO official. “They can’t move in the winter.” But in January 2008 the Taliban attacked the five-star Serena Hotel in Kabul using shooters and suicide bombers. The attack was important because it showed an intention to kill foreigners regardless of who they were.
The Taliban were successfully bypassing traditional tribal mechanisms. Young men came into villages and ordered people around. Many did not care about Pashtunwali, the traditional code Pashtuns follow. Instead they were part of a new globalized jihadist identity. They established a harsh law and order, and didn’t allow others to fight or carry weapons. They engaged in more car bombings and suicide attacks, using tactics imported from Iraq. These attacks persuaded people not to cooperate with the Americans and demonstrated that the Americans could not provide security. Local Taliban commanders could be pressured and influenced by the communities they came from, so the Taliban were replacing them with outsiders free from that pressure. The Taliban ran a very effective social terror campaign and could operate deep in civilian communities. “They’re killing more and more tribal elders,” the senior NGO official said. “We can’t expect communities to show solidarity with the government when we can’t provide for their security—it’s ridiculous.” The military was wrongly focused on what he called “symptomatic” factors, like how many bombs went off in an area. “The pulse of a community is what drives an insurgency, not symptomatic factors,” he said. “Talk to Afghans, look at school burnings and assassinations. It’s a qualitative assessment; you can’t crunch it in quantitative terms. But the military can’t do anything about it until it’s symptomatic. The conflict is taking place at a lower and lower level. There are not enough foreign troops or local troops. We’ve disarmed warlords and traditional power structures, and the Taliban are destroying traditional power structures, so it’s wiping out everything that stands in their way. Young Pashtuns are increasingly picking up arms against the government. We disarmed people and undermined traditional power structures, and we’re now wondering why the Taliban are running riot.”
My friend who had served as a commander for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar until 1992 and then as an official in the Taliban government was not sanguine when he drew comparisons. During the Soviet occupation the foreign army was larger and more powerful than the coalition today, at more than one hundred thousand, and the Afghan government was stronger than the current one as well, he told me. “The Russians never arrested women,” he said. “The Americans arrest Afghan women and take them to bases. The end will be like with the Russians. The Americans will never succeed in containing the conflict. There will be more bleeding, evacuation of foreigners. It’s coming to the same situation as the Communist forces, who were confined to the provincial capitals by 1985 or 1986. There were 465,000 military and civilian members of the puppet government, but the Russians were still confined to their bases.”
“Two years ago you could build a road or a bridge in a village and say, ‘Please don’t let the Taliban come,’” a senior development official told me. “Now you’ve reached the stage where the hearts-and-minds business doesn’t work. The countryside is caught between the coercive forces of state and coercive forces of antistate.” He quipped that the Americans’ continuous bombing of weddings wasn’t helping either. The Americans tried to increase aid and development and improve the government’s image only after it was too late. Afghans were already alienated, and the use of PRTs (Provincial Reconstruction Teams) delegitimized the aid, associating it with the military. American use of airpower convinced people that the coalition forces were not committed to fight and were cowardly, as I saw from my time with the Taliban.
After I left Afghanistan, I got regular e-mails from the U.S. military notifying me of how many Taliban coalition forces had killed, but all this showed me was how popular the Taliban continued to be and how many more of them there were than the U.S. claimed. Of course, many of those killed were civilians, and those casualties—along with the Americans’ increasing reliance on warlords and militias, who had imposed a reign of terror on the population—meant that it was too late to win hearts and minds.
The former Taliban government official agreed. “It’s too late to bring security by development.” That phase, the development official told me, ended in 2004. The former Taliban official explained the problems facing Afghan villagers. “You have to decide to be with Taliban or be with government,” he said. “In Logar, if you are with the government, you have to move to Kabul. If you are with Taliban you can stay, but you may have to give them your son.”
IN MAY 2009 Defense Secretary Robert Gates—the only holdover from the Bush administration—announced that Gen. Stanley McChrystal would replace Gen. David McKiernan as the top commander in Afghanistan. The unceremonious defenestration of the respected McKiernan was meant to send a strong signal of a new approach to the war. McChrystal, known among colleagues as a “snake eater,” had a background in special operations and counterterrorism. He ordered the fifth strategic review of the war since Obama’s presidency.
McChrystal’s promotion confirmed the ascendance of a new generation of officers epitomized by Gen. David Petraeus, now commander of Central Command and charged with overseeing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The wars had created a community of counterinsurgency proponents in the Defense Department and at Washington think tanks. Many were serious intellectuals and veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who had spent years exhorting the military and government to embrace COIN in fighting the global war on terror. The 2007 surge in Iraq and its alleged success in reducing violence has led this new generation of officers to dominate strategic thinking.
In December 2008 General McKiernan asked for thirty thousand more troops and stressed that he needed them for a few years. It would not be a short surge, like the one in Iraq. In March 2009 President Obama unveiled his new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The goals were “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda and its safe havens in Pakistan and to prevent their return to Pakistan or Afghanistan.” The tool would be COIN. The Americans gave themselves one year to “shift the momentum” in the war, meaning to stop losing. With thirty-six thousand American troops already in Afghanistan, Obama ordered an additional seventeen thousand combat troops and four thousand trainers. By mid-2010, troop numbers finally equaled the number stationed in Iraq, at nearly one hundred thousand.
Obama insisted that the war and extremism could not be solved through military means alone. He cautioned against focusing on the concept of “victory” when dealing with Al Qaeda, stressing that he wanted to deny the movement bases where they could train people or launch attacks. Obama’s new strategy called for a civilian surge as well. But there were not many civilians available, and most of those duties would be filled by the military.
Despite admitting that there was no military solution, Obama was relying on the military. And he reproduced the pathologies of his predecessor, treating Muslims as if they were one entity and the world as if it was a battlefield. Under Obama the United States has expanded its operations in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. In all cases violence has increased. In Al Qaeda’s worldview, Muslims are under attack by Christians and Jews who want to take Muslims’ resources and perhaps convert them too.
The Bush administration had to transform its response to the 9/11 attacks into a crusade because, in purely security terms, the most powerful nation the world has ever seen went to war against two hundred unsophisticated extremists. Looking at it like that diminishes to absurdity the enemy and the threat it poses, but many in the defense policy establishment were nostalgic for a real enemy, like fascism or communism, and so they made the conflict about culture. The United States adopted Al Qaeda’s view of the world, and it too treated the entire world stage as a battlefield.
In July 2009 McChrystal issued new orders for soldiers not to pursue Taliban fighters if there was a chance of civilian casualties, and to drive slower and more respectfully on Afghanistan’s roads. But his predecessor had issued similar orders, albeit with less media fanfare—the new ones were not more likely to be obeyed. Thousands of Afghan civilians had been killed by the Americans since the war began. Most were killed by U.S. airstrikes, but many others were shot at checkpoints or in raids. Usually the military denied the civilian deaths until the media showed videos of their corpses. Most American-caused civilian casualties happened when soldiers called for close air support in the midst of a battle, so there was no time to check for civilians in the target range. In one attack alone, in May, the Americans killed between 86 and 140 civilians in an airstrike in western Afghanistan.
In late June the U.S. military initiated the first big push of the Afghan surge. Four thousand Marines launched an offensive to take over Taliban-controlled villages in Helmand, the province with the most attacks and the most poppy production for the country’s lucrative drug trade. But the plan called for an “Afghan face,” in the form of the Afghan army and police, and the Americans were desperately short of those. Afghan police were essential because they knew the language and the people and could provide intelligence. Their presence was needed to convince Afghans that the Americans were fighting on behalf of Afghanistan, and that it wasn’t a foreign occupation. If the Americans ever wanted to leave, they would have to train enough Afghan security forces so that they could hand the task of securing the country to them. There were only about 170,000 members of the Afghan army and police, although their expansion was being fast tracked. Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) were supposed to hold an area after the Americans cleared it of insurgents, but there weren’t enough of them. While the Americans were initially focused on creating an Afghan army, they neglected the important need for a police force.
In June 2009, in Helmand’s provincial capital of Lashkar Gah, I met a group of Americans working with the Afghan police. The Americans shared a base with the Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP) and the Provincial Reserve (PR), two special police units considered elite in comparison to local Afghan National Police (ANP). Authority in Helmand was divided between the British Army and the U.S. Marines. On my first day there I went to the ANCOP base and sat on the floor drinking green tea with the PR. One man asked me if I wanted to go sleep. He showed me where his bedroom was and offered to take me there. The next day he asked why I hadn’t come there to sleep with him. Jawad, another member, had been with the PR for one year. He had lost between fifteen and twenty friends in attacks since then, he said. “I like this job,” he told me when I asked if it wasn’t too dangerous. “If something is in your destiny, it’s coming, no one can save you. Every time we defeat them. It’s hard to remove the Taliban roots because some of them live here.” Many of the Americans had learned basic Farsi and Pashtu, the languages most commonly spoken in Afghanistan, and they bantered back and forth with the Afghans, teasing them with local expressions.
On my first night I had dinner with the Americans of Team Ironhorse and Colonel Saki, who headed the ANCOP in Helmand. Ironhorse was the U.S. squad training ANCOP. We found him watching Bollywood movies in his office. He brought out a pile of kabob and bread, and the Americans chatted with him through Bariyal, a thickly muscled translator the Americans called Shotgun. He was the 2002 weightlifting champion in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. Like most translators who spend enough time with the Americans, he adopted their argot as well. “ANCOP are fucking badass people,” he told me. Colonel Saki and the Americans shared the same macho warrior culture, and the language divide proved easily surmountable. Ironhorse’s captain was going on leave, and he asked Saki what he wanted from the United States. Saki said he just wanted him to come back.
The next morning the frustrated Americans on Team Prowler helped the PR unload a truck full of rifles and ammunition. The Afghans had just tossed them in a pile without conducting any inventory or organization. “I’m at my wits’ end!” shouted Sgt. Ryan Kilaki. Captain Westby was exasperated because many of the cops were at home and not on the base. They are a quick reaction force, he told me, and they are supposed to live on base.
The British and Helmand police command had mismanaged a few hundred thousand dollars in back pay for the police, and the Americans had stepped in to cover the loss. “Jesus, fuck, they got a long way to go,” said an exasperated Sergeant First Class Clark. The British army had taken sixty men from the Provincial Reserve with them on a recent operation in Babaji. The PR men didn’t want to go with them, and the Americans were pissed off because the reserve was supposed to be one unit. Like many Afghans, the police believed that the British secretly supported the Taliban.
On the Fourth of July, Team Prowler set off with the PR to patrol Highway 601, the key road in the province. It connected to Highway 1, the main road in the country. All trade entering the province passed through Highway 601, and it was also the land route to supply British, American, and Afghan forces. The “skuff ” hall in the British-run base was running out of food. Villages along the road were controlled by the Taliban. The British were supposed to control the route. Sergeant Dyer, a brawny former Navy SEAL with the stern gaze, square jaw, and low raspy voice of a real-life Marlboro man, complained to me about nightly reports that Highway 601 was mined but that the police didn’t pursue the insurgents. Civilian vehicles avoided it because of IEDs. The police knew where the Taliban were but didn’t pursue them, and they were growing too dependent on the Americans. “At one checkpoint they were still wearing their man-jammies, not uniforms,” he said. “IEDs are placed two clicks from police checkpoints, they don’t go on patrol, at the sound of the first shot they request air support. But they’ve cried wolf too many times, and then they say, ‘If we don’t get air support we’re leaving.’”
Dyer was on his third combat deployment in Afghanistan. “There’s too much talk of COIN and civil affairs,” he said. “It requires security. You can’t build a school if you can’t protect the teacher.” The rules of engagement had changed over the course of Dyer’s three deployments. He worried that his men were more at risk because of limitations on when they could shoot. Like many American troops, he could barely hide his contempt for most of the other coalition members. Only the British, Australians, and Canadians were aggressive, he said. Americans joke that NATO’s ISAF actually stands for “I see Americans fighting” or “I suck at fighting” or “I stay at the FOB.” Some of the European allies, meanwhile, complained that the Americans were too aggressive.
Driving down Highway 601, an insurgent with an itchy trigger finger prematurely detonated his IED on the road in front of Team Prowler and the police. The police discovered the command wire for it and fanned around to look in vain for the trigger man. The blast slowed down the police. Captain Westby complained to me that the police were “squirrelly” and that he had to do a lot of “mentoring” to get them to go forward. They headed toward a village called Balochan. The National Directorate of Security men accompanying them—the NDS is the Afghan equivalent of the FBI—didn’t know how to get there, and none of the police had ever been there, so they got lost. Westby worried that this would be a problem when the police ran their own operations. The Americans took the lead, but when they got to Balochan, Lieutenant Farid, the police commander, insisted it was the wrong town. In Balochan they were shot at from four hundred meters away. A British contingent was attacked with rocket-propelled grenades. The Americans, I was told, “lay devastating fire” on the tree line from where they received fire—then the insurgent fire subsided. The Americans couldn’t confirm any dead insurgents. “Afghans suck at shooting,” they said. The Americans thought they were up against foreign fighters because of the accurate shots. One policeman was shot in the head. The others thought he was dead; they laid him on the ground and covered his face. The Americans saw the man was still breathing and had a pulse, so they evacuated him by helicopter. The Americans searched the maze of compounds. One policeman was killed; his friend insisted on going out to save him, but the other Afghans were too scared. The police had no radios, so they couldn’t communicate, and their fire was coming too close to the Americans. They also weren’t wearing their armor. “They don’t like it because it’s heavy,” one American explained. Another policeman was shot in the chest. The others backed off, abandoning their friend. An American tried to figure out where the fire was coming from and drag the man to safety, as the interpreter Mansur ran to help. They extracted the dead policeman, and Lieutenant Farid was wounded in his calf. He was wearing a black T-shirt without body armor. “You and I as leaders have to make the decisions to set examples for our men,” Westby told him. Farid made excuses, and Westby felt like he was talking to a kid. Armor was hot and heavy and wouldn’t have helped his leg, Farid argued. An American was wounded. Mansur picked up the American’s rifle and started firing (all the interpreters were trained to fight as well). Sergeant Dyer was disappointed with the PR’s performance. “They sucked,” he said. “They folded,” one of his soldiers agreed.
The next day Team Prowler and the PR trained at the shooting range. Sergeant Dyer was dejected. “The Provincial Reserve aren’t ready,” he said. “Their training is too short. They can’t drive. They can’t shoot. They’re weak on tactics, lacking in motivation. In training the last few days, after two or three hours their performance drops even more. Squad leaders are terrible because in the Soviet system NCOs don’t do anything.” Mansur joined in, laughing. “They couldn’t hit targets,” he said. “Some hit the sand.” Out of eight men in each group, three could aim at a target, Specialist Campos told me.
Police working in the south had a high rate of desertion. They often refused to work if Americans were not present, and they were afraid to go on operations. Their vehicles were more vulnerable to IEDs and attacks. They lacked ammunition, fuel, and other essential supplies, and they didn’t have the logistical ability to provide it for themselves.
Bill Hix, an experienced Special Forces colonel with extensive COIN experience, led the Afghan Regional Security Integration Command in Kandahar, which was in charge of training and mentoring the Afghan police and army in southern Afghanistan, including Helmand. There were forty-one portraits on his wall of Americans from his organization who had died. All but two had been killed by IEDs. He would need a much bigger wall for the Afghans. From January 2007 to April 2009, he lost 2,096 Afghan police and 949 soldiers. Hix did not believe more American troops were needed, merely an “adequate” police force and army, whose numbers he hoped would double. “The police should be identifying clandestine networks,” he said. But there weren’t nearly enough of them: the ratio in southern Afghanistan was two police per thousand people. In the United States it was four per thousand; Afghanistan was at war, so more were needed. “We’re driving this car as we’re changing the engine,” he said.
Should Afghanistan cease to be a protectorate of the West, it wouldn’t be able to pay for its own security forces. It doesn’t have the resources to fund such a large military. The result, instead, would be a heavily militarized society. With the end of American subsidies, the men with weapons and training would return to warlordism and militias, preying on the population. Pakistan’s army, which had been subsidized by the Americans for years, became a state unto itself, independent of the civilian control it should have answered to.
An effective police requires an effective justice system, including judges, lawyers, court clerks, prisons, and an administrative system. Corruption among the police and other government officials was also a huge problem for the Soviet occupation of the 1980s. Afghan cops couldn’t be expected to turn down bribes when they knew that everyone else in the system was taking them. And it was the cops who took the greatest risks in the country’s most dangerous job. The high illiteracy rate also made it difficult to build a system of justice. How could records be kept? Training lasted only a couple of months. Creating and training security forces were difficult enough in peacetime, but they were even more challenging during war. After training the cops returned to the same conditions: corruption and lack of support. They were the only face of the Afghan government most people saw, and it was too often an ugly one.
Helmand is not only the worst province in Afghanistan; it is also the wealthiest. It has a sophisticated irrigation system and some paved roads. Its dam helps to pump out cheap, stable electricity. It is little wonder that Helmand, with some of the best agricultural land in the region, is the world’s largest grower of poppy. With the best resources in the country, it has been a convenient place for an insurgency to sustain itself. Although taxing heroin sales is one source of the Taliban’s finances, in fact the drug trade funds everybody and all sides in Afghanistan, and the Taliban get most of their funding from donors in the Arab Gulf and elsewhere. Heroin is Afghanistan’s only real industry, but it has created a parallel shadow economy that undermines and corrupts the government. The drug trade is more of a consequence than a cause of Afghanistan’s many problems.
In the 1980s and ’90s the Alizais dominated Helmand at the expense of their rival tribe, the Ishaqzais. Nasim Akhundzada was the top mujahideen commander in the area and was responsible for creating the poppy industry in Helmand. He brutally forced farmers to grow opium and established a sharecropping system that trapped poor indebted farmers in an endless cycle of planting opium. His brother Muhamad was his army commander, and Muhamad’s son Sher Muhamad Akhundzada, known as SMA, would go on to control Helmand. The Ishaqzais were dominant during the Taliban’s reign, from 1994 until 2001. But when SMA became governor after the Taliban were removed in 2001, the Ishaqzais were once again marginalized and punished. The Taliban took advantage of this rivalry to increase their influence over both majority-Ishaqzai areas and also Alizai groups. Most of the governors appointed by Kabul in 2002 were warlords. Helmand had no effective administration after 2001. The provincial government did not provide anything to locals, and it abused them. Between 2001 to 2006, SMA and those around him labored to build a strong base of support in Helmand, and he placed his men throughout the province’s police and government. Under his reign poppy growers affiliated with him were immune from eradication. SMA pressured farmers to grow poppy, leading to a 160 percent increase in the harvest. Meanwhile, the Taliban protected poppy farmers whose crops were targeted for eradication.
It took a while for Helmand to get really bad. In 2002 Afghan security locations in Helmand on the Pakistani border were attacked several times. In 2004 some clerics in the area urged their flocks to fight the Americans and Afghan government. Although militias allied with President Karzai helped ward off the Taliban, they also abused the population and took advantage of their power to punish rivals. They would also give false tips to the coalition or the Afghan security forces against their rivals. These fears drove many to seek protection with the Taliban. By 2004 it was clear that locals were being recruited in Helmand to join the new Taliban. Those who had suffered at the hands of Afghan security forces were especially susceptible to recruitment. In 2005 the Taliban began to set up strongholds in Helmand, and by 2006 they dominated most of Helmand. That year it became common for Taliban attacks in Helmand to involve hundreds of fighters.
Dad Muhamad Khan, the Helmand boss for the National Security Directorate under SMA’s reign, was known for being abusive. But the American military backed him because of his loyal service. In 2006 the British and the UN insisted that SMA be removed, and Karzai finally relented. The British had just taken over control of Helmand and discovered ten tons of heroin in the governor’s house. SMA’s successor as governor was Engineer Daud. Though Daud had not had a militia in the past, he demanded that he be allowed to set one up for his own survival. The government allowed him to have up to five hundred men. SMA still had a good relationship with Karzai, though, and was made a senator. His loyalists plotted against Daud, and Karzai made sure SMA was still the real power by appointing his brother as the deputy governor. Daud was pressured to support poppy eradication, which cost him the support of the local population. In late 2006 Karzai fired Daud, who was trying to go after militias and the unruly police of Helmand. Daud’s police chief was sent elsewhere. British Prime Minister Tony Blair tried to save Daud but failed. The British were angry and blamed the Americans for Daud’s removal. Daud’s successor was weak and too scared even to go to Lashkar Gah, the capital for Helmand, for the first few months. After SMA was removed his militias stopped fighting the Taliban, so security only worsened. The Americans got SMA to arm tribesmen to fight the Taliban, but many switched sides and joined the insurgency. Similar defections occurred when the Americans tried to set up tribal militias in other provinces. SMA kept his militia even after he was no longer in power; he and his men still worked with Afghan security forces and the British and abused the population.
Though the Taliban failed to set up a base in northern Helmand in 2004, two years later they succeeded—thanks to the increased popularity they enjoyed as a result of SMA’s abusive attitude and arrogance. The rivalry between Alizais and Ishaqzais also led to fighting. When the government and the coalition began attempting to eradicate poppy in Helmand, the Taliban’s popularity increased. Pro-Taliban songs and sermons could be purchased in Helmand markets. Villagers would act as informers and help the Taliban set up ambushes, and they would throw stones at coalition convoys. Soon districts began to fall under Taliban control. The Taliban recruited from the displaced people’s camps in Helmand. During 2006 the area where poppy was harvested increased by 250 percent, and the next year it nearly doubled. By 2006 the Taliban had the support of the population in Helmand, and most of the fighters were locals. There were reports of the police collaborating with the Taliban against the coalition in Helmand, or even fighting against it. Helmand police would arrest people and demand ransoms for their release. Following six months of fighting in one district alone fifty-two Afghan police were dead. In another Helmand police unit of 350 men, seventy deserted in 2006. The British thought they would defeat the Taliban by the summer of 2006. Instead they realized they were besieged by up to two thousand of them in northern Helmand alone. Although the British had spent nearly ten million dollars on reconstruction projects in Helmand by the end of 2006, nobody seemed to notice. District governors and police chiefs in northern and southern Helmand were targeted. There were failed assassination attempts against Daud. Most districts were abandoned or unable to operate. The Taliban had a logistical base and a clinic for fighters close to the provincial capital that could handle nearly one thousand men. In May 2006 the British launched an operation to take control of Helmand, but in July the Taliban captured the Nawa and Garmsir districts. The British retook Garmsir, and then the Taliban re-retook it.
By the fall of 2006, the British were exhausted in Helmand and negotiated truces with the Taliban via village elders in two districts that allowed the elders to choose the governor, chief of police, and other officials in the district governments. The Afghan government and American military were opposed to this “surrender,” but the UN backed the deal. A few months later the truces ended, with the British blaming the Americans for their demise. Daud had been crucial in negotiating the truces, but he was removed. Relations between the British and Afghan governments deteriorated. SMA maintained his pernicious control. In 2007 only four of the thirteen district police chiefs were appointed from Kabul, with the rest under the control of SMA, who remained close to Karzai. Karzai, meanwhile, complained that if it were not for pressure from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, he would have reinstated SMA. Most police in Helmand were more like a militia, and mostly from the same tribe.
The year 2007 was the first in which the Taliban faced pressure in Helmand, but the situation continued to deteriorate. The Afghan army complained that police in Helmand were demanding road taxes from drivers and stealing private property. That year five hundred kilograms of opium were seized by security forces in the area and divided between the police and the army, with only fifteen kilograms given to coalition forces. The British were opposed to eradication, while Americans pushed for aerial eradication, which only further alienated the population. The British floundered, unable to hold territory or defeat an enemy that fought asymmetrically. On one occasion in 2007, the British responded to a single shot fired by the Taliban with mortars, heavy machine guns, and missiles, and they dropped a bomb for good measure.
In 2008 the deputy governor was assassinated by a suicide bomber while still inside a mosque. That year the U.S. Marines joined the eight thousand British troops. The Marines tried to take Garmsir and also failed. They spoke of implementing COIN, living among and protecting the people, holding the territory they cleared, and winning over the population. It seemed as though every year there was a new plan that was better than the previous one, and when the foreign troops moved on, the Afghans who had made the mistake of working with them would be killed. Although the stated goal of the Western coalition was to extend the reach of the Afghan government, in the past extending the reach of the very unpopular central government had only caused further instability. The Americans and the Taliban had a similar narrative: the Taliban promised to protect people from the Afghan government, and the Americans promised to protect them by extending the government’s reach. By 2009 half of Afghanistan was controlled by Taliban, and Helmand was the province most surely in Taliban hands. “Control” might be overstating the strength of the Taliban in some areas, but at a minimum they could deny the government and international forces the ability to control. In some cases insurgents did not formally belong to the Taliban. They may have been locals who resented the American and British occupation just as they had resented the Soviet occupation. Increased foreign intervention had made the security situation only worse for locals.
In Helmand the security forces were dominated by the Nurzai tribe. Colonel Shirzad, from the Nurzai tribe, served in various security posts in Helmand before being appointed police chief. Abdul Rahman Jan, the first postwar police chief, was also a Nurzai, as was Lieutenant Colonel Ayub, who had served as deputy chief of police following the overthrow of the Taliban. Ayub was known as an uneducated illiterate warlord. Colonel Torjan, the logistics officer, was a Nurzai. The Helmand passport officer was a Nurzai. The Border Patrol chief for Helmand was a Nurzai. General Mirwais, the head of the police in southern Afghanistan, was a Nurzai. The Nurzais were a plurality in the province, especially in its important places. Marja, the district where the Taliban had its strongest hold, had a Nurzai plurality. In 2009 Marja had a bumper poppy crop thanks to Taliban protection. A few months later Marja was the first district targeted for a major U.S. offensive in 2010.
Every police chief in Helmand, including Shirzad, bought his post from officials at the Interior Ministry. Police in Helmand were known to release prisoners for bribes ranging from five hundred to twenty thousand dollars. Shirzad’s predecessor arrested a Taliban commander and was offered fifty thousand dollars for his release, but the Americans caught wind of it, so he couldn’t close the deal. To ease the pressure he was facing to release the prisoner, he asked for the prisoner to be flown to Kabul.
In 2007 a district police commander went to Colonel Torjan to receive his two mandated Ford Rangers, but Torjan demanded ten thousand dollars for each. The Americans took the commander’s report, but two or three weeks later he was killed by an IED. Conducting routine affairs in the Education Department required a bribe. The Justice Ministry in Helmand was particularly notorious. In addition to the poor quality of the police in Helmand, there just weren’t enough of them. Helmand was supposed to have an increase of five hundred police as part of the surge, but so far only 211 had been recruited.
Locals complained that the police charged taxes at checkpoints. “The police know we’re here to watch them as much as fight the Taliban,” said Sergeant Gustafson. “Shirzad is a wily adept politician,” he told me. “He comes with a lot of baggage.” Shirzad was tied to the warlords connected to the poppy trade. Following a large opium seizure in 2009, the drugs disappeared and the trail went cold at Shirzad’s headquarters. It was not that Afghans were corrupt and the Americans would teach them how to govern. The Americans helped bring corruption to Afghanistan by funding warlords, paying off tribes, and creating parallel institutions and a network of foreign and Afghan contractors. They created an infrastructure of unaccountability.
July 2009 was the worst month since the war started for the Americans and their allies, with forty-two Americans and twenty-two British soldiers killed, and a total of seventy-five foreign troops killed. Most of the casualties that month occurred in Helmand, when the Americans launched an operation for the fourth time to secure the area. More than four thousand Marines descended on the Helmand River Valley in a mission that had been planned months earlier. It was the first major operation of Obama’s presidency. Brig. Gen. Lawrence Nicholson, Marine commander for the operation, stressed that the focus was on getting the Afghan government back on its feet. He urged his men to get to know the people, to drink tea and eat goat with them. Six hundred and fifty Afghan soldiers also took part. Nicholson promised that “where we go we will stay, and where we stay, we will hold.” The Marines hoped to win over the population. So too had the thousands of British soldiers who had been in the province since 2006. The British military was conducting a simultaneous operation in Helmand. Like the Marines, they hoped to provide enough security so that the August presidential elections could be held credibly.
About 750 Marines made it to an agricultural district called Nawa south of Lashkar Gah. Before they arrived there were only about forty British soldiers there, ensconced with some Afghan soldiers and police in the district center, unable to move outside a small secure zone one kilometer wide. Beyond that the Taliban manned checkpoints. “Everybody knew we were coming,” a Marine colonel told me, “so we wanted to deceive the enemy about what that would mean.” On June 19 three hundred Marines flew into Nawa and conducted patrols to lull the Taliban and give them ten days to think that was it, that they could handle the surge. The patrols had an average of one contact with their enemy every day. On July 2, the rest of the battalion came to block the Taliban escape and reinforcements. The Marines had expected their invasion to be more kinetic, meaning they had expected more shooting. They encountered a few days of stiff resistance and were impressed with their enemy’s combat techniques. But then the Taliban wisely melted away, laying down their arms or fleeing to Marja, fifteen miles to the west. The Taliban left poorly hidden weapons caches and poorly placed IEDs, and the Marines caught some of them fleeing. The first two IEDs destroyed vehicles, but the Marines uncovered the next twenty before they detonated. The Taliban also set up antipersonnel mines, placing an IED in a tree with a kite string attached to it as a command wire, and another IED in a wall.
The Marines were led by Lieut. Col. William McCollough, who operated out of a partially constructed brick building covered with sandbags. Although they officially had 650 Afghan soldiers with them, in private the Marines complained that it was more like four hundred and that the lack of an “Afghan face” was their “Achilles’ heel.” For an operation months in the making, it was a huge and inexplicable shortage.
Team Ironhorse and the ANCOP were to go to Helmand at the same time to increase the Afghan veneer. “We will deliver stabilization and development,” a Marine colonel in Helmand told me. “The Taliban filled the space. They took the governance high ground. The Taliban rule through intimidation and coercion. Harassment by the Taliban has become more intense, and the population is becoming more dissatisfied.” There was now a civilian “stabilization adviser” in Nawa with the Marines, the colonel told me, who was “trying to coordinate with local Afghan leadership so that the district government and police chief can organize and take the governance high ground. We’re going to deliver governance by demilitarizing it as soon as possible. The most important lesson from Iraq was the transition piece. You need to have Afghans involved at every phase and remind yourself it’s about them and their country, and remind each other we have to get our Afghan partners involved at every level.” The short-term goal was to provide security so they could deliver the upcoming August presidential elections in a meaningful way.
Major Contreras led Team Ironhorse and Prowler in mentoring the police. The ANCOP were a highly trained unit (by local standards) that took over temporarily for local police units while they were sent away for training. Contreras was excited about his role in the war. “This is in its infancy,” he said. “We’re beginning to see the military might that we as a nation can bring.” A true believer, he explained that he was fighting to protect the American way of life and because his wife had been working in the Pentagon when it was hit on September 11. Contreras was concerned about the “negative tone” of my previous article on Afghanistan for Rolling Stone and hoped I would write a more positive article this time. “We can win this,” he told me. “We were doing it one year at a time before for seven years.”
But first he would have to overcome Afghan bureaucracy. He couldn’t go to Nawa to link up with the Marines because Colonel Saki had not received his official orders from the Interior Ministry. The order had been signed and sealed five days earlier, but it had to be delivered by courier to Saki. There was no e-mail or other way for Saki to receive his orders. This was minor compared with the problems Contreras usually had with the ministry, he joked. Colonel Saki had not received supplies like radios, ammunition, and fuel, so he did not even have the logistical ability to head down. Saki met Colonel Torjan, who was in charge of logistics, and asked him for a commitment to replenish the ANCOP’s weapons and ammunition. Torjan took him to his depot to show him that he had nothing to spare. The following day Contreras went to meet Torjan in the police headquarters. He stuffed a pistol between his belt and the small of his back, just in case.
Torjan had not received the official document from the ministry ordering him to equip the ANCOP. All he had was a letter from the ANCOP. The ANCOP could have made it up themselves, Torjan said. There was fighting in many parts of Helmand, and many people were running out of ammunition, he said. He received about one-third of what he requested from the ministry in Kabul. Two British officers advising the police headquarters sat in on the meeting, as did a portly civilian contract police adviser. The provincial reserve requested eighty radios. Contreras and the British disputed how many they actually needed. Then they struggled to figure out which form they needed to fill out to get the Interior Ministry to ship supplies to Kandahar and then to Helmand, and how to make sure the staff at the Kandahar headquarters didn’t keep most of the supplies for themselves. Contreras and Torjan discussed how the ANCOP would refuel in Nawa, with Torjan suggesting they find gas stations. Nobody knew if there were any gas stations in the area.
That evening Ironhorse sat waiting to be briefed by Contreras. They were all scouts, and some were snipers, chosen by their lieutenant because they were “rough” and “shooters.” The major’s original plan called for them to go to Nawa before the Marines got there. “We would have gotten eaten alive,” one of them joked. The Marines in Nawa were attempting to provide a safe and secure environment for the Afghan government in order to facilitate the handover of the security mission to the ANSF, he explained. Ironhorse’s mission was to conduct a movement to Nawa—traveling through the eastern desert to avoid the much faster main road, which had not been cleared of IEDs—in order to link up with Marines and support their operations.
Contreras said guys in police uniforms were harassing civilians in Nawa. The men seemed very skeptical about the whole thing. “Duration of mission and number of legitimate police in Nawa, and how will ANP get along with ANCOP, and who is mentoring the ANPs there?” Staff Sergeant McGuire tersely asked without moving or looking at the major. Staff Sergeant Verdorn complained that they would be doing the Marines’ job of clearing. As the major concluded his brief, McGuire loudly muttered, “It’s a cocksuck.” Contreras left. “That was very well thought out,” McGuire said. I asked him to elaborate. “Fuel will be the biggest issue,” he said. “We don’t know where we’re gonna live, we’re not taking tents.” It was the worst operations order he had ever seen, he said, just telling them to go down there and the Marines would tell them what to do. “It’s a ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ operation.” There was no plan for what would happen after they got to the school where the Marines were based. McGuire wondered what the mission was. If it was to give an Afghan face, well then there were already hundreds of Afghan soldiers there. Staff Sergeant Thacker was also worried. There were “a lot of I don’t knows” in the brief, he said, like the radio frequencies for the Marines. “A normal op order, even the lowliest private knows what everybody’s going to do,” McGuire told me.
The British warned against occupying a school, but Contreras dismissed the concern. “The point is to provide a safe and secure environment,” he said. He told the men to plan for seven days before they returned to base. “The reason why we’re going down is to put an Afghan face on the mission,” he said. “There isn’t enough ANSF there.” Contreras explained to me later that the goal was to set the conditions to deploy the ANCOP to work with the Marines in that area. It was a clear-and-hold operation, a basic element of counterinsurgency. “The Afghans have to feel like we’re there with them,” he said. The Marines would clear the area of Taliban, and the police would hold it. “My Afghan counterparts say that loads of Taliban want to stop fighting and reform,” Contreras told me. He believed the Taliban had seen the error of their ways. All evidence pointed to the contrary, though. The Taliban were more confident than ever.
“The Marines are trained to go off a ship, hit the ground and fucking charge,” Contreras told me, worrying that they might not be suitable for COIN. “I’ve never been to the place where I’m going. I have no idea what it looks like,” he admitted. Contreras drove to the ANCOP facility, and we walked to Saki’s office. There was a marijuana plant in the garden. Saki was watching Bollywood movies. He had a picture of President Karzai on his wall, some plastic flowers next to it, a bare desk, and a coffee table in his office, along with a map of Helmand. Saki wore an ornate salwar kameez, cream-colored with shiny embroidery. He had thick eyebrows and a short, well-groomed beard. “Intelligence we received says that in two days all the Taliban will leave Nawa and go to Marja, because of the large number of Marines,” he said. Saki warned that the Taliban planted at least one hundred IEDs in Nawa but added that most were of poor quality and would not explode. About twenty were properly planted and effective, he said, with remote control detonation. Saki showed the longer road through the desert we would take to avoid IEDs along the road to Nawa.
IEDs were the biggest threat, the perfect asymmetric weapon. In 2009 there were thousands of IED attacks on ANSF. Most of the American and British soldiers killed every month were victims of IEDs, not small-arms fire, but IEDs were not just effective when they exploded. The threat of them crippled foreign and Afghan security forces. It meant that their vehicles were not free to go to all areas, and that they had to proceed at a snail’s pace with bomb detectors walking in front of convoys or their vehicles crawling ahead. IEDs were built from homemade explosives like fertilizer and fuel as well as old mortars from past wars. Some were detonated by remote control, by cable or a pressure plate. In Iraq paved roads made it harder to conceal them; in Afghanistan the prevalence of dirt roads made it easier.
The men of Ironhorse had lost their lieutenant and a sergeant, as well as an interpreter and a cop, in a February 2009 IED blast. Lieutenant Southworth and Staff Sergeant Burkholder had gone to examine an IED the ANCOP discovered. They asked for an explosive ordnance disposal team to destroy it because they needed the road open and they worried civilians would get blown up. The British told them to mark the location and move on. As the ANCOP tried to dismantle the IED, it blew up. Ironhorse and the police spent an hour picking up pieces of their friends from the road and even a tree. Ironhorse later got a good tip on the IED maker who had killed their two friends. They raided his house, arresting him and his son, but when the two prisoners were in police detention they paid $1,500 to two guards and escaped. Ironhorse had returned to the house three times looking for them.
Although the men were chosen by their lieutenant for being “meat eaters,” the months of daily operations and shitting in bags had taken a toll on them. They hated being in Afghanistan and being sent on missions that weren’t their own; they resented the neglect they felt and the lack of progress. One sergeant’s parents owned a hardware store and sent the team four tow straps for their Humvees because their request through the military was going nowhere. One Humvee drove around with bad transmission for a month and a half because they couldn’t get a mechanic. “That’s the kind of shit that just wears on you,” Sergeant McGuire told me. “We were doing repairs above our mechanical level because there wasn’t anybody to look at it, and then we got an e-mail asking why we were doing it, a kick in the nuts.” While stationed in southern Helmand, they had to find their own water supply because the Army wasn’t providing them with any.
Southworth had been very passionate, his men told me; he believed he had come to give Afghan kids a better future, and he loved what he was doing. He paid Afghans $150 for pointing out IEDs. A rich aunt sent him the money. It was unusual but it worked, his men said. The men had been told they would be on a large base in a safe job. Southworth knew different. They were going into the shit. He spent over a year putting the team together, sending them to schools for sniper, scout, combat lifesaver, and mountain skills. He gave a speech to the men before their final leave back home, warning them that a couple of them wouldn’t make it back. His death was a huge loss for the team.
Contreras agreed to go through the desert to avoid the main road. The Marines or police working with them would meet them on the other side of the Argandab River to guide them to the schoolhouse base. The Marines were in the desert between Marja and Nawa to prevent an exodus of Taliban to Marja and prevent reinforcements from Marja coming into Nawa. Saki thought the Marines couldn’t distinguish between Taliban and civilians. He asked for gunpowder residue kits so that people’s hands could be tested to see if they were handling weapons. None were available. Saki strongly believed most Taliban were local farmworkers who fired when they had a chance and then threw down their weapons and took up shovels. Contreras told Saki he wanted him to set up two checkpoints with thirty men each so there would be about thirty left for patrolling and other missions. “If there are Marines with us, we can man checkpoints,” Saki said. “Otherwise we can’t.” It was too dangerous for his men to do it alone.
But Saki had still has not received his written orders from the Interior Ministry to go on the mission on Sunday, and it was already Friday. He joked that by the time he got the orders the Nawa operation would be over. He worried that his chain of command would make problems for him, especially if he lost somebody there. Saki asked Contreras to tell the American training headquarters in Kandahar to e-mail the deputy minister of interior and explain that they needed an order to move to Nawa. He still could not even confirm that he would go there. He needed orders or he would get in trouble, but he didn’t have the authority to speak to the ANCOP commander in Kabul or the deputy minister of interior. He asked the Americans to do it for him and pressure his leadership to give him the mission orders. A key element in the year’s largest operation was being held up by bureaucracy.
Saki was concerned about his informant in Nawa, who was traveling on foot. He asked Contreras for money to get him a motorcycle. It would cost $500 at the most, he said. He lost informants because of lack of resources, he said, and asked for more to help them. But Contreras was noncommittal. Saki had not heard from one of his informants for the past two days. He worried that the man had been captured by the Taliban. Saki had no food, fuel, or water for the mission. The Marines would help provide food, Contreras assured him, while Ironhorse would take care of the water. This left only the need for diesel fuel. The Marines had fifty heat casualties yesterday, Contreras told Saki: “They haven’t learned to stop working in the middle of the day.” Saki and his assistant laughed.
The next day Contreras met with Saki again. “The Marines are giving me a lot of problems because of the delay,” he said. Contreras asked for an assurance that they could leave in two days. Saki was still waiting for supplies. A quick reaction force of forty men from Kandahar would also go along with Saki’s sixty or so men from ANCOP, and he would equip them. “They will look like ANCOP, but will they act like ANCOP?” Contreras asked, worried that they might spoil the good name of Saki’s ANCOP. “As long as you and I are in charge it will be okay,” Saki said with a smile. He told Contreras he heard the Marines were trying to get close to the people but the local police were making problems and people were complaining that the police were thieves. “We will tie Taliban to trees and shoot them,” Saki said. Contreras looked down and shook his head, laughing. “Enemy morale is low,” said Saki. “The enemy is nothing.” Saki didn’t trust the local Nawa ANP. “They inform the Taliban,” he said. He also didn’t trust the police in Lashkar Gah and warned Contreras not to travel with them. “If they could, the ANP would hand me over to the Taliban,” Saki said. The ANCOP liked to say about the ANP that “you can change the blanket on a donkey, but it’s still a donkey.”
Two days later they finally get the order to go. McGuire was in command of the first Humvee, and I joined him as a passenger. The gunner up top shot pen flares at cars that got too close. The pop sounded like a gunshot and served as a warning. We drove by a group of small kids fighting, punching one another in the face. The men cheered. McGuire opened the windows and shouted, urging them on. McGuire asked if I was sure I wanted to be in the first vehicle. It would be the first one to get blown up by IEDs.
The team linked up with the ANCOP and waited for them to get ready. Contreras met with Saki and assured him that he would also take part in all the meetings with the Marines. Saki suggested that the Americans’ armored vehicles take the lead once they crossed the river because his vehicles were more vulnerable to IEDs, and recommended that the Americans stay in the lead in dangerous areas. Contreras agreed. He told Saki he still didn’t know who would meet them on the other side.
As we drove south the ANCOP stopped in front of every culvert to search both sides of it. Progress was slow. Some of the police pickup trucks got stuck in the deep soft sand. The Americans grew frustrated with the way the ANCOP plodded through the desert. Our vehicle searched for a place to cross the hundred-meter Argandab River, avoiding the unexploded mortars on the sand. McGuire emerged to walk across it, making sure the vehicles could cross. The water reached his mid-thigh. Water seeped inside the Humvee, reaching up to my calves. The rest of the vehicles followed. One of the rangers got stuck in the water and had to be towed out. “ANCOP is better than the ANP in running checkpoints,” McGuire said, “but little things like vehicle movement, and it all breaks down.” “Instead of following each other they race around,” Sergeant Sadler said, laughing at the ANCOPs crossing the river like they were at Nascar. Two of the police got into an argument about the driving, and one pointed his rifle menacingly at the other. This had happened before, Verdorn later told me. Once, on their base, two of the ANCOPs got pissed at each other and drew their pistols. “There was blood in their eyes,” Verdorn said. The Americans were caught between them.
Two Marine Humvees met Ironhorse across the river. Thacker chatted with them about what kinds of IEDs they had encountered. We were in a thick vegetated area of farmland and trees. Cows grazed near flooded fields. We crossed narrow canals and arrived at the schoolhouse. Sandbags lined the top of it. Hundreds of Marines wandered around shirtless, wearing green shorts and kicking up dust as they walked. It looked like Lord of the Flies. They slept on the ground outside or in classrooms that smelled of sweaty feet.
A Marine captain thanked Contreras for his arrival. “Our weak spot” was the shortage of ANSF, he said, so the additional cops were helpful. Nawa had been quiet for the past five days, since July 2. “The Taliban left for Marja to lie low,” the captain said, “but this is their breadbasket, so they’re not likely to give it up.” Ironhorse occupied two dirty arched rooms in the schoolhouse. The men hastily swept the broken glass, dust, and dirt and set up cots, unloading boxes of water bottles and food, making it home.
The Marine commander, Lieutenant Colonel McCollough, told Contreras that they had discovered “rogue” police who were abusing people in Aynak, to the north. In two communities people had complained about the police. When the Marines first encountered the local police in Aynak, the police were so startled that they fired warning shots and nearly got into a firefight. “They weren’t disciplined and appeared to be on drugs,” he said, addressing Saki. “They had no mentors and had no connection to a higher headquarters. It worries me that that’s how those communities view the Afghan police, so I wanted the ANCOP to replace those police and show those communities what ANSF is about.”
McCollough turned to Contreras and said, “I’m glad you’re here. You couldn’t have come at a better time.” Nawa’s chief of police, Nafaz Khan, sat in on the meeting. He had a long beard and a long, nervous face. The Marines described him as a local mafia boss. “The Taliban come to people’s houses at night and demand collaboration,” Khan said. “If people don’t get away from the Taliban, the elections will fail.” Although he had 250 men officially working under him, he said the real number for this large rural area of 180,000 people was only 138. “We had a lot of tough days here and we cannot handle those days anymore,” he said. “There were times when we had no food and nobody came to ask us how we were doing.” Sergeant Sadler suspected that Khan was keeping his men’s salary for himself, forcing the police to steal for a living. Khan denied that the police in Aynak were under his authority and claimed he had never heard of them.
Saki didn’t trust the Nawa commander and waited until he left to speak freely. McCollough told Saki that he should supplant the “rogue police” in Aynak. “Those are not police officers,” he said. “They’re criminals.” He estimated there were about sixty of them. The Marines had to fight to get up to Aynak, and although it was only a few kilometers away, they planned our trip up there like a careful military operation.
The next day we waited. The men of Ironhorse played cards. The ANCOP sat in the shade of a tree.
The Marines promised that once in Aynak they would meet with locals in a shura, or council. But Thacker dismissed it. “These shuras are just a bitch session,” he said. “They’ll complain about cops shaking them down. The major will make promises, and the ANP will come back and go back to the same ways.” After their additional training, when the ANP returned to one district where Ironhorse had taken over, they went back to setting up illegal checkpoints and demanding money from cars passing by. When Ironhorse and the ANCOP came in, towns that were formerly abandoned would slowly get re-populated with their residents, and when Ironhorse and the ANCOP prepared to leave and make way for the ANP again, people would flee and move back to Lashkar Gah. “We don’t see what it’s like after we leave,” Thacker told me. One team of police who came back from training actually got into a firefight with the Afghan army and killed four men. In one district the ANP came back from their training with new body armor, boots, goggles, and rifles; later, when Ironhorse returned on a mission to support the British, whose base was in danger of being overrun, they found the same ANP wearing sandals but not their body armor or goggles. The problem with coming in for a short cycle as the local ANP were sent on training, Thacker told me, was that just when they got to know the area and the people, they had to leave.
The men prepared for a departure the following morning. The Marines gave them enough fuel for another day or so. McGuire worried about what they would do after that. “The homework wasn’t done in advance,” he said. At 5 a.m. Sergeant First Class Sadler showed the men the route. The military command for Helmand contradicted the Marines and Nafaz Khan, informing Contreras that the Aynak police were legitimate and that they belonged to the Nawa headquarters and Khan. We rumbled slowly along a green canal. Marine minesweepers walked ahead of us. At 9 a.m., nearly four hours after leaving, we had gone only four or five kilometers. It was a numbing pace and one that allowed the fleet-footed Taliban to flee well in advance. The Americans’ enemy was elusive, normally engaging them from a few hundred meters away unburdened by the heavy body armor and gear the Americans had.
As we progressed, I watched children tending cows and sheep in dark green fields. It was almost idyllic. The men I was traveling with linked up with the Marines at 10:30 a.m. Dozens of their vehicles were parked off the dirt road on plowed fields, crushing corn plants. “This farmer is not gonna be happy,” Corporal Chapman said. The Marines had paid damages to farmers in the past few days. They accidentally set one field on fire and ran around trying to put it out.
The shura meeting was canceled because we were so late. Instead, Marines lay about in the shade. Specialist Baker sat atop a Humvee. “We came, we parked, we relocated, then we parked,” he said triumphantly.
Marine Captain Schoenmaker told Contreras that when they first arrived in Aynak and asked locals about the Taliban, they heard complaints about the police instead. He estimated that there were about 150 of them. They were stoned, he said, wearing beads and looking shady. “It was uncomfortable when we met them, they were all high,” he explained. Aynak was mostly deserted, he said. The Marines didn’t know what to expect up there, and Colonel Saki was frustrated with the lack of a plan.
We languished in the heat for hours, eating watermelons purchased from a local farmer. McCollough complained that he had been given only one hundred Afghan soldiers. The night before he had watched satellite footage of twenty-five guys dressed in black meeting the cops at the Aynak checkpoint, he told Contreras. I thought they might have just been other cops. Saki called his boss, Colonel Shirzad, who said he would send somebody down to Aynak. Shirzad said one station in Aynak belonged to Nawa district and the other one belonged to Lashkar Gah, and both would be instructed to hand over control of their stations to the ANCOP. Saki said all the Taliban had left the area. I asked him if the ANP improved after coming back from their additional training. “Only for the first five days,” he joked, then they went back to their old ways. “The academy has good showers, free food—the result is these first five days. They need more training.” He told me of an incident where police returned and then deserted to join the Taliban.
“Why are we driving into this town to remove the ANP?” Thacker asked. “Because the Marines want us to,” Contreras told him. “These ANP up here sound like the ANP everywhere in this fucking country,” Thacker said. “The ANP are crooked. This problem is everywhere in this country.”
We wouldn’t be leaving until 4:30 in the afternoon. Verdorn was concerned. “It seems like the Marines want to get in a firefight,” he said. “5:30 PM is the beginning of fighting time.” “I’m beginning to think these Marines are a bunch of cheese dicks,” Thacker muttered. I asked the major why the operation was being delayed. “Because it’s fucking hot,” he said, and the Marines had to walk. Since the operation started they had lost dozens of casualties just to the heat.
A couple of Marines told Thacker that it seemed like there was going be a fight in Aynak. He dismissed them. “What, are there signs up?” he asked. “No briefing about what we’re doing, how far it is, how the convoy will be spread out,” McGuire complained. As the vehicles slowly lined up on the road, the Marines and soldiers had trouble communicating, which made McGuire even more impatient. “Unbelievable, there’s no command and control. I’m awestruck. What a clusterfuck. A good leader puts together a plan, formulates an op order, and then briefs our men.”
We finally began to plod along on the rocky road, the Marines walking in front of us. Kids stood motionless in front of homes and glared at the Americans, unlike the children in Lashkar Gah, who often waved (though sometimes they threw stones too). Men with black beards and black turbans stared at the Americans, expressionless, standing ramrod-straight. “That’s a fucking Talib if I’ve ever seen one,” McGuire said.
There were no paved roads in the villages we passed, only rocky paths. We drove around a large crater. “That’s a pretty fucking good bomb there, hell yeah!” McGuire said. The wall next to it was destroyed, and a new one was being built of fresh mud. A boy emerged from behind a metal gate and mud walls to talk to the ANCOP, but none of them spoke Pashtu and he didn’t know Farsi. The Americans’ interpreter translated. There was an IED on the road up ahead, the boy said. His father came out wearing a green salwar kameez. He fingered red worry beads nervously. The IED was planted on the road on the side of their house. Several days before the Taliban were hiding in the house several hundred meters away, he said, pointing toward it. He worried locals would inform the Taliban that they had warned the Americans about the IED. McGuire walked five feet up to the IED and saw it partially buried and concealed by shrubs. “Plain as day,” he announced. The minesweepers arrived but were dismissive. They didn’t think a guy from the Army could find an IED or that they could miss one. They sent a robot to place plastic explosives on it. On the first attempt, the explosives blew up but not the IED. The second attempt worked, sending up a huge cloud of smoke and debris. Rocks rained down on us a few hundred meters away. The men speculated if it would have been a catastrophic kill. McGuire thought it would have just tossed us up a bit in our armored vehicle but would have obliterated the police.
We made it to Aynak after nightfall. It had taken an entire day to go twenty kilometers. Clouds hid the moon. It was pitch black, impossible to distinguish faces at the checkpoint. Dozens of local cops surrounded the five Americans, Saki, and some of his men. Many of the cops wore turbans and the salwar kameez. They looked like the Taliban. They were cooperative and friendly, unlike what the Marines described. They shook hands and moved out. Thacker and McGuire were impressed with them; they seemed just like any other ANP, but their facility was cleaner than most. The Marines had never seen the ANP before and had nothing to compare them to.
We slept under the stars that night, the men taking turns on guard shift. Overnight we heard explosions and gunfire in the distance. The next morning we were able to explore the dusty abandoned schoolhouse. The police used an adjacent mud compound as a bathroom, and so did we. Shell casings from ANP battles with the Taliban littered the sand. There was nothing to do except wait. The men discussed the odds of getting into a firefight. The consensus was that there were too many Americans and the Taliban would not risk it. That morning an Afghan man approached the Marine captain. He poked him in the chest and said they were occupying his property. Then he slapped the Marines’ interpreter.
Colonel Shirzad, the ANP commander for Helmand, showed up. I hitched a ride back to Lashkar Gah with him, sitting in one of the four Ford Rangers in his convoy. It took us thirty minutes to drive to Lashkar Gah. The trip from there to Aynak with the military had taken three days. Shirzad’s men did not stop to check the road for IEDs, which could shred their vulnerable Rangers. I scanned the road desperately.
The next morning Ironhorse went out on patrol with the ANCOP and found five IEDs placed on the road I had just taken. That day a twenty-vehicle Marine convoy from a base in the desert to the west tried to go to Aynak to resupply the Americans. Twenty kilometers away the Taliban attacked the convoy so fiercely that it turned back. Eight British soldiers had been killed in Helmand the previous night. On the afternoon of my return to Lashkar Gah, two mortars landed just outside the base.
The Afghan army refused to come to Helmand, the Americans said. Tens of thousands of Afghan soldiers had been trained at the cost of billions, and yet the Afghan army was a no-show in a major operation contingent on an “Afghan face” that wasn’t there. What was the point of an army that didn’t deploy?
EIGHT YEARS INTO THE WAR, the Americans and ISAF were making their big push. With more international troops and more combat would come more civilian casualties. The American focus on the south had allowed provinces like Logar and Wardak in Kabul’s backyard to fall into Taliban hands. With only sixty thousand Afghan soldiers it would take too long to increase the size of the army and there would never be enough foreign troops to remain in villages and control them, a British counterinsurgency expert in Afghanistan told me, so the Americans would remain like firemen responding to crises but never achieving sufficient density to get to know the community.
Meanwhile, the Taliban were seamlessly embedded into communities. They were the locals. They did not need Kalashnikovs; a simple knock on the door could be as effective. The police were useless, timid during the day and terrified at night. Neither the Americans nor the Afghan security forces conducted night patrols. At night the Taliban controlled the communities, undoing whatever the Americans had tried to accomplish during the day. The Taliban took a step back in reaction to the American surge to measure their adversary. It did not matter if the Americans were effective here and there. “Emptying out the Titanic with a teacup has an effect, but it doesn’t stop the ship from sinking,” the Brit told me. The insurgents were learning, avoiding direct encounters. They could continue placing IEDs despite the increase in troops, which could make getting around close to impossible and easily neutralize police units.
The much-hailed operation in Helmand didn’t fail, but there was little to show for the tremendous amount of effort that went into it—the operation merely advanced the stalemate longer. The Taliban weren’t winning so much as the government was losing. Next the focus turned to nearby Kandahar, and there was talk of pouring troops in there. It was the same mistake. When the Americans were focused on the south, they let Logar and Wardak provinces slip under Taliban control; by the summer of 2009, it was clear that much of the formerly safe north, such as Kunduz, was falling to the Taliban as well.
Bill Hix, the commander of the American task force in charge of training Afghan security forces in southern Afghanistan, believed the Taliban had slid their Kalashnikovs under their beds and were waiting, observing their opponents, just as they did following a similar operation the Marines undertook in southern Helmand’s Garmsir district in 2008. The Taliban melted away to other districts in Helmand. This year the Marines were back in Garmsir again. According to Hix, the lack of Taliban was not a sign of weakness but of strategy. “Their target is the Afghan people, not the British or the Americans,” he said. “They are waiting and seeing.” Hix spent twenty months working with the Afghan Regional Security Integration Command, and he enjoyed his job. In his view the Afghan army should have been pushing the enemy away from the population while the police should have been protecting and controlling the population.
Control is essential to a successful COIN campaign. According to Stathis Kalyvas, a Yale political scientist and expert on civil war whose book The Logic of Violence in Civil War was very influential among counterinsurgency theorists, “The higher the level of control exercised by the actor, the higher the rate of collaboration with this actor—and, inversely, the lower the rate of defection.” Control leads to collaboration and allows the counterinsurgents to separate the insurgents from the community. But the Americans would never have enough troops in Afghanistan to achieve control. Unlike in Iraq, where the surge focused on Baghdad, a densely urban environment where a census could be conducted, neighborhoods closed off with Americans at the access points, in Afghanistan the war was rural. The Americans got lucky in Iraq, benefiting from sectarianism that changed the dynamics of the conflict from an anti-occupation struggle to a civil war. Millions were displaced, hundreds of thousands were killed. The Americans looked good in comparison, and they decided to focus on protecting the people. Then the Shiites defeated the Sunnis, and Sunni militias chose to ally themselves with the Americans. But a caricature of the surge dominated popular culture. Both Washington and the military came to believe that COIN just might be the magic formula in Afghanistan. While ignoring the right lessons from Iraq, such as the use of community outposts, there was much talk of bribing Afghan tribes, which misunderstood why Sunnis stopped resisting in Iraq and gave way too much importance to tribalism in Afghan society. The Americans were unable to grasp that material benefits were not the only thing that could motivate people. McChrystal called for a new focus on the urban population centers of the country and less on the rural areas. This was also the failed approach favored by the Soviet occupiers in the 1980s. Like the mujahideen, the Taliban are strong in the rural areas, in mountains and valleys.
McChrystal insisted that securing the people of Afghanistan was his goal. But why, then, were the Americans operating out of large bases and not in the communities? The community outposts that existed in Afghanistan were actually away from the population. In Iraq the Americans’ best success came with their use of community outposts. If they set up similar outposts in Afghanistan, they would not have to “commute to work” on roads vulnerable to IEDs in mammoth vehicles that keep them removed from the people, staring at them like aliens in spaceships unable to breathe in their atmosphere. It was a paradox of population-centric COIN in Afghanistan that the areas where the population was most concentrated were not the insurgent strongholds; instead the insurgents were based in the rural areas, away from population centers. The surge in Iraq was urban-based, and much easier. In Baghdad the Americans figured out who lived where, what they did, and what they wanted. That lesson didn’t make it over to Afghanistan.
THE AMERICANS’ OBSESSION with Afghanistan’s elections also resembled their Iraq approach, which erroneously focused on landmark events. Just as in Iraq, when elections helped enshrine sectarianism and pave the way to civil war, so too in Afghanistan the elections empowered warlords; enshrined a corrupt order; and, in the case of the August 2009 elections, completely discredited the government and its foreign backers. Strategy in Afghanistan was put on hold so that the elections could be held. Turnout in the south was less than 10 percent, and zero in some places. There was overwhelming evidence of systematic election fraud and ballot stuffing. The Taliban managed to reduce the turnout compared with previous years. There were seven thousand polling stations throughout the country, so the Taliban could not actually disrupt voting too much. It would have also been bad PR for them to kill too many civilians. Their lack of operations might have shown that even they knew the elections didn’t matter and that nothing could better serve their ends than letting the elections take place and ending up with a deeply flawed result. Meanwhile, the Americans and their allies immediately hailed the elections as a success, merely because violence was low, thus further associating themselves with a corrupt government. How could Afghans take Americans seriously when they backed a corrupt government and were deeply implicated in corruption? The failed elections were a message to Afghans that there was no hope of improvement or change.
In September 2009 McChrystal’s assessment of the war in Afghanistan was leaked to the media. He had been advised by a team of experts, many of them celebrity pundits from Washington think tanks. Only one of his advisers was an expert on Afghanistan. When Petraeus conducted his Iraq review, he called on people who really knew Iraq to join his “brain trust.” McChrystal called in advisers from both sides of the political divide in Washington who already believed that population-centric COIN was the solution to everything. It was a savvy move, sure to help him gain support in Congress. There was a cult of celebrity in the D.C. policy set. Many of the same pseudo experts who were once convinced that the war in Iraq was the most important thing in the world, even at the expense of Afghanistan, were now convinced that Afghanistan was the most important thing in the world, and were organizing panels with other pseudo experts in Washington think tanks. They offered trendy solutions, like an industry giving managed and preplanned narratives about what was going on. COIN advocates from DC think tanks were connected to political appointees who came from DC think tanks. There was an explosion of commentary on Afghanistan coming from positions of ignorance, quoting generalities. McChrystal himself had been chosen because he could drum up bipartisan support. He was another hero general like Petraeus, with an aura of infallibility—he was there to save the day. Fawning articles praised his low percentage of body fat, his ascetic habit of eating one meal a day, his repetition of simple COIN aphorisms that had already become clichés in Iraq by 2007. He was another warrior scholar the media could write panegyrics about.
Just as Petraeus replaced a discredited General Casey in Iraq, and Abrams replaced a discredited General Westmorland in Vietnam, so too had McChrystal replaced a discredited McKiernan, and the media eagerly consumed the hype about the new general. The generals were manipulating public opinion, inviting celebrity pundits to take part in reviews and then write opinion pieces in newspapers in support of the conclusion that the pundits and generals proposed. The military was setting the agenda for the war, and in the end it came down to more troops. McChrystal and the military were playing Obama. They wanted billions of dollars and a war without end so they could experiment with COIN, the solution for all problems. McChrystal bluntly stated that if his strategy wasn’t followed, then the mission in Afghanistan would fail. Neither he nor his backers explained what the qualitative difference would be. They were not doing COIN properly with the troops they had already, so why bring in more?
Even though McChrystal’s assessment identified the biggest challenges the Americans faced as political, social, and economic, his solution was military. The generals were trying to make all of Afghanistan’s problems look like a nail, and they kept wanting to apply the hammer. They were saying they could fight a war by not focusing on the enemy, but they were not actually taking the steps to protect people, either. Instead of relying on civilian experts, the government ended up using the military even to solve problems that weren’t military. McChrystal advocated a war that was population-centric and not enemy-centric, and yet all the talk was over how many troops they would need, instead of what a successful COIN strategy would require. Despite all the talk of a civilian surge, the civilians—diplomats, advisers, trainers—to staff even the much lower requirements of the last seven years were not found. Nor were the civilians found to meet the requirements for the American mission in Iraq. Instead, McChrystal increased the number of special operators to kill Taliban instead of trainers for the police and army.
More than a specific code of action, COIN was a mentality. But it hadn’t really trickled down. Once you got down to the rifle squad, COIN didn’t make any sense. It was hard for the troops to keep the greater strategic picture in their minds. They were being asked to be Wyatt Earp and Mother Teresa at the same time. Most soldiers didn’t care about the mission; they just wanted to live through the deployment. Lip service is paid to COIN, but the military isn’t implementing its own plan very well. Officers speak of going into villages and “doing that COIN shit.” COIN required the Americans in their bases to learn about and live with the people in the villages. They couldn’t just go in for a few hours, call a shura with some elders, and then rush back to base before the chow hall closed. COIN was dangerous, and the military was risk-averse. In Iraq the American casualties peaked when the military got serious about protecting the people. The faces in charge of the war in Afghanistan had changed, but the strategy had not.
The American military and policy establishments were institutionally incapable of doing COIN. They lacked the curiosity to understand other cultures and the empathy to understand what motivated other people. In the military in particular, Afghans were still viewed as “hajjis.” Alternative viewpoints were not considered. Many journalists failed to understand that when you’re with the military you’re changing your selection bias. By showing up with the white guys with guns, you are eliminating all the people who don’t want to talk to the military, or talking to those who have an interest in engaging the foreign occupier. Regular people won’t relate to you in a natural or honest way. For the U.S. military, seeing something from a reporter’s or Afghan’s perspective is an exception. Even the media were perceived as the enemy. Military officers had been talking for a long time about being good at complex operations, providing aid while engaging in military operations, but they still made it up as they went and hoped that the previous unit had learned something. Units were terrible at handing over the knowledge they had gained, and relationships formed with Afghans were lost. Even when officers got it right, the system wouldn’t, because the military Weltanschauung could not account for complex social environments. The military’s way of thinking was still very conventional. All the officers could do was to try to take COIN and graft it onto conventional doctrine, putting a COIN face on the same old army. The Pentagon cultivated engineers, but Afghanistan could not be approached from a systems engineering perspective. COIN was hard to translate into PowerPoint, the military’s favorite language. The greatest advantage the Taliban had may have been not relying on PowerPoint.
COIN inevitably required military action against a major segment of the Afghan population, and in doing so it undermined the project of state building and national consensus that the international community was simultaneously involved in. The new American mantra called not for targeting the insurgents but protecting the population. But the population was attacked by the Taliban only to the extent that it collaborated with the Americans and their puppet government. Does protecting the population mean protecting them from the Taliban or the police or the Americans? The Americans in Afghanistan were like firemen attracting pyromaniacs.
McChrystal did have an academic “red cell” formed under the auspices of Harvard, but they were never sent the strategy to review, so these bona fide experts were never really consulted. Instead McChrystal’s team listened to urban Afghan expats, fluent in English, who “drank the Kool-Aid of the Kabulis,” as one academic participant described it to me. The center of gravity in Afghanistan are the rural areas, where the Taliban has its greatest strength and where the war will be won or lost. But these expats prioritized the urban, had never been out in the hinterland, a strategy, ironically, out of the old Soviet playbook. They were giving McChrystal the advice Kabulis wanted to hear.
McChrystal had a list of goals with vague suggestions about how they might be achieved. His job was to answer the question of how Afghanistan could control its own territory. But President Obama was busy asking an entirely different question, about whether the strategy itself was correct. He was asking whether the goal was valid. First they had to agree on what the problem was. Was it global terrorism, as Obama said, or was it a unified, peaceful Afghanistan? For the narrow goal of preventing Al Qaeda from having bases in Afghanistan, the United States has prescribed for itself the creation of a new Afghanistan and a never-ending counterinsurgency. So defeating Al Qaeda became building Afghanistan. McChrystal was concerned less with Al Qaeda, the original cause of the mission in Afghanistan, and more with the problem of the expanding Taliban. If Obama’s stated goal in Afghanistan was to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda, then why was McChrystal determined to fight the Taliban? Perhaps he believed that if the Taliban took over, Al Qaeda might obtain bases in Afghanistan. But Al Qaeda was in Pakistan, it was on the Internet, it was in Europe (the 9/11 attacks were planned in Germany, after all).
There was an impossible disconnect between the assessment and McChrystal’s plan. McChrystal provided an accurate assessment of the dismal situation in Afghanistan. But the plan he proposed failed to address the key problems he noted. He explained that building Afghan civilian government capacity was critical, but he devoted a single page in Annex C to what he thought would fix the government.
The assessment noted that the Americans needed a much larger Afghan army and proposed doubling it. Yet it did not address how to do that, given that after eight years the Americans still had not provided sufficient trainers to get the army to the earlier goal of 134,000.
The assessment noted that the Afghan police were a major problem. Yet it suggested no new ideas for how to eliminate police corruption. It never even mentioned the justice system. The proposed solution was to double the size of the police force, but it did not explain how doubling the corrupt and dysfunctional force could help with COIN. “If I take drug dealers and gang bangers from the streets of DC to an eight-week program and then put them back in the same environment, can we expect it to change their activities?” one skeptical COIN expert working on Afghanistan asked me. “This corrupt force is the problem, so why put twice as many corrupt police out there?”
The underlying assumptions were not addressed in the assessment. The most important assumptions were those dealing with the political situations in Afghanistan, the United States, and allied nations. One key assumption was that it is possible to create a centralized, functioning state in Afghanistan. The Americans wanted to extend the reach of the government, but in the past extending the reach of an unpopular central government in Afghanistan caused instability. And after almost eight years in power, the Karzai government was only one of several competing powers within the country.
Another assumption was that the Karzai government would be perceived as sufficiently legitimate to gain the loyalty of the population. Before the election, Karzai’s legitimacy faced two major problems: many Afghans felt his government represented and was imposed by foreign interests, and it was permeated by widespread, systematic corruption that severely undercut the government’s legitimacy even in those areas it controlled. After the 2009 elections it was clear that Karzai could never gain legitimacy. Associating themselves with an illegitimate government only discredits the Americans.
A third assumption was that ISAF (meaning, primarily, the United States) would provide the resources necessary to conduct a population-centric COIN campaign. But even with the infusion of seventeen thousand U.S. troops, ISAF had too few troops to meet the training program goal for the Afghan security forces and vastly too few to secure the population. The “civilian surge” simply did not occur, and there was no indication that it would.
The assessment also assumed that the voters of ISAF nations, including the United States, would support this effort for the decade that historical examples suggest would be necessary for population-centric COIN to work. But Canada reaffirmed its intention to withdraw its 2,500 soldiers in 2011. The Dutch also stated they would withdraw. British public opinion was strongly against the war, and the validity and cost of the war was becoming an issue in the United States. To last for ten more years, the support would have to survive five more Congressional and two presidential elections.
A final assumption was that failure to create a unified, centralized state in Afghanistan would result in it the country’s reverting to a major base for Al Qaeda. But there was widespread disagreement about whether this would happen. Al Qaeda was already ensconced in Pakistan. Bases in Afghanistan could be bombed, and Afghans themselves might not be so welcoming to Al Qaeda.
If any of these five assumptions were not true or ceased to be true, then the Americans needed to rethink their strategy accordingly. This did not mean an immediate withdrawal, which could leave a vacuum that might make things even worse, but it required figuring out how to achieve the primary strategic ends in ways that could be supported by the means the Americans and their ISAF allies were willing to provide.
The underlying assumptions of the invasion of Iraq were that Iraqis would greet the Americans with flowers, that the Iraqi institutions would remain functioning with the leadership merely replaced, that the war would pay for itself, and that fewer troops would be needed to secure the country than were needed to invade it. All these assumptions proved wrong, and the result was a catastrophic setback for the United States—not to mention the further destruction of Iraq and the creation of Al Qaeda where it previously had not existed.
Assuming that Al Qaeda would set up bases in Afghanistan was like assuming Saddam would give his imaginary WMDs to Al Qaeda. It assumed that the Taliban were irrational and unaware of their interests. Their alliance with Al Qaeda was a result of common interests, but the Taliban were not interested in global jihad (though the longer the Americans are in Afghanistan, the stronger the alliance will become). Even Pashtuns who supported the Taliban were opposed to Al Qaeda attacks. And most Afghans disliked the Arab extremist volunteers.
For the first time in its history, the U.S. army had created a new category of warfare: “stability operations” were now given the same importance as offensive and defensive operations. Despite this the COIN community felt like insurgents in their own establishment, combating the forces of “Big Army.” Many of the COIN pioneers in Iraq were very influential in Washington. But opponents feared that this focus on irregular warfare and low-intensity warfare was weakening the U.S. military. To bolster their case, the COIN critics pointed to the Israeli military, which after years of being bogged down as an occupying army was defeated by Hizballah in 2006.
Some see Iraq as a victory that vindicated COIN and showed just how much the U.S. military can do, while others saw Iraq as a catastrophe demonstrating the limits of U.S. military power. If the U.S. military had learned lessons from classic imperialist counterinsurgencies such as the French campaign in Algeria, did that make the COIN doctrine any less imperialist? Of course, the most important questions were, Should the United States be involved in any of this? Should it act as an imperial power? Should the U.S. Army be doing stability operations in the first place? But these were questions for the politicians, not the military.
In some ways COIN was a rejection of the neoconservative use of military power as the main tool of U.S. foreign policy, since COIN recognized that military force cannot solve conflicts alone. It was tempting to welcome the new doctrine, because tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians had been killed as a result of the U.S. military not knowing how to operate in complex environments where “the terrain is the people.” Just as the neoconservatives had taken over the Pentagon during the Bush administration, so it seemed that the proponents of counterinsurgency, former dissidents within the military, now held key positions and enjoyed a preponderance of influence over the Obama administration. Many were veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. The lessons they learned from Iraq and Afghanistan were less about questions over strategy (such as whether to invade a country) and more about the practice. They criticized as counterproductive the overwhelming blunt force of the U.S. military, and maintained that repeated assassinations of senior insurgent leaders were not effective. They urged all the other civilian agencies of the U.S. government to contribute to the effort to win the support of the population and separate them from the insurgents. The best way to do this was to learn what people’s grievances were and respond to them. Chief among these needs was the provision of security. Another key element in winning a counterinsurgency war was the creation of an effective local security force. The COIN proponents urged a huge expansion of the Afghan security forces and the creation of many more military advisers to train the Afghan security forces.
COIN advocates fought such a determined and near fanatical battle to gain influence over a calcified military establishment that they started believing in themselves a bit too much. Even if you implement a perfect COIN campaign, you can still fail to achieve your goals. President Obama’s new approach to Afghanistan was drafted by these counterinsurgency theorists. The idea was to get troops to where the population was, to deny the insurgents access to the population while increasing the number of aid workers and diplomats in the country who could improve governance. The focus would be on local leaders instead of the corrupt and incompetent central government in Kabul.
For liberals these COINdinistas, as they call themselves, might seem like kindred spirits. They emphasize nonlethal means, humanitarian aid, development work, making peace with enemies instead of just killing them, and protecting the civilian population. But the end result was still a foreign military occupation. Sometimes the very locals the Americans were promoting were the ones oppressing the population. Other times the Americans harmed the population even while trying to help. The neoconservatives also co-opted COIN. Neocons didn’t care what it took; they just wanted an American combat presence on the ground. Though they preferred an enemy-centered presence, population-centric COIN was the best way to repackage and sell their goals. For liberal interventionists who think they can re-engineer societies—those who supported the U.S. interventions in the Balkans and elsewhere in the 1990s, some of whom supported the invasion of Iraq—COIN provides the perfect template, clearing and holding thousands of villages in the middle of nowhere, one at a time, on the road to civilization.
In 2005 the respected COIN theorist and practitioner Kalev Sepp—a former Special Forces officer and deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations capabilities—wrote a seminal article, “Best Practices in Counterinsurgency,” in Military Review. In the article Sepp claimed that a country’s political leaders (and not the military) must direct the struggle to win the allegiance of the people, that the “security of the people must be assured along with food, water, shelter, health care, and a means of living. These are human rights, along with freedom of worship, access to education, and equal rights for women. The failure of counterinsurgencies and the root cause of the insurgencies themselves can often be traced to government disregard of these basic rights.”
In addition, he noted, “Intelligence operations that help detect terrorist insurgents for arrest and prosecution are the single most important practice to protect a population from threats to its security. Honest, trained, robust police forces responsible for security can gather intelligence at the community level. Historically, robustness in wartime requires a ratio of 20 police and auxiliaries for each 1,000 civilians. In turn, an incorrupt, functioning judiciary must support the police.”
On each of Sepp’s criteria Afghanistan has been a study in abject failure. The civilian Afghan government is insignificant; it is the American military that is leading the war effort. The Afghan government does not provide any services or protect rights. Moreover, the U.S. military regularly kills civilians with impunity, arresting many more and holding them without trial. The Taliban have not been penetrated. There is no honest or well-trained police force, and the American-led coalition will never come near to the ratio that Sepp calls for.
In the article Sepp also called for population control measures, but there are too few troops to control the majority of the Afghan population, who live in remote rural areas. He called on counterinsurgents to “convince insurgents they can best meet their personal interests and avoid the risk of imprisonment or death by reintegrating themselves into the population through amnesty, rehabilitation, or by simply not fighting.” This has been a total failure in Afghanistan. And why would the Taliban, who have all the momentum and are winning, contemplate an amnesty or rehabilitation program?
Ironically, what Sepp describes as the American experience in Vietnam and the Soviet one in Afghanistan, in which military staff rather than civil governments guided operations, resembles Afghanistan under American occupation today. “Indigenous regular armies, although fighting in their own country and more numerous than foreign forces, were subordinate to them. Conventional forces trained indigenous units in their image—with historically poor results. Special operations forces committed most of their units to raids and reconnaissance missions, with successful but narrow results. The Americans further marginalized their Special Forces by economy-of-force assignments to sparsely populated hinterlands. Later, Spetznaziki [Russian Special Forces] roamed the Afghan mountains at will but with little effect. . . . The Soviet command in Afghanistan was unified but wholly militarized, and the Afghan government they established was perfunctory.”
COIN was a massive endeavor, I was told by retired Col. Pat Lang, who had conducted COIN operations in Vietnam, Latin America, and elsewhere. There were insufficient resources committed to doing it in Afghanistan, but if the Americans didn’t plan on owning Afghanistan, he argued, why waste time on it? It was worth the expenditure of resources only if you were the local government seeking to establish authority, or an imperialist power that wanted to hang around for a while. There were thirty million people in Afghanistan, and they were widely dispersed in small towns. “You have to provide security for the whole country,” he said, “because if you move around they just move in behind you and undo what you did. So you need to have effective security and a massive multifaceted development organization that covers the whole place. COIN advisers have to stay in place all the time; they can’t commute to work. If you’re going to do COIN, it really amounts to nation building, and troops are there to provide protection for the nation builders. Afghanistan doesn’t matter. The Taliban is not part of the worldwide jihadi community at war with U.S. We need to disaggregate Taliban from Al Qaeda. The idea that Al Qaeda is an existential threat to the U.S., it’s so absurd that you don’t know how to deal with it.”
Ariel David Adesnik, a defense analyst who works as a consultant for the U.S. government, has been critical of attempts to turn COIN into a science. “One of the hardest parts of COIN operations is measuring progress,” he says. “There is a strong temptation to measure progress with statistics, since numerical data imply a measure of objectivity. The counterinsurgency manual says you need twenty pairs of boots on the ground for every thousand inhabitants in the area of operations. This ratio has become an article of faith across the political spectrum. Yet the twenty-per-thousand rule is little more than a plausible guess based on a handful of historical examples, such as the British operations in Malaya and Northern Ireland. No one is exactly sure how to count either soldiers or inhabitants. Does a logistics officer at headquarters count the same as an infantryman on patrol? Does a rookie Afghan cop count the same as a battle-hardened Marine? What about contractors?
“The population isn’t much easier to count. The population of an Iraqi or Afghan district is often a matter of guesswork. Should peaceful districts be included in the area of operations, or only those with a certain amount of violence? If you change the rules for counting, the ratio of troops to inhabitants can go up or down by a factor of two, three, or more. Using historical data, my research team tried to figure out the actual ratios employed in around forty COIN operations over the past sixty-five years. We found a rough correlation between higher ratios and better outcomes, especially at ratios of thirty to fifty troops per thousand inhabitants. Other researchers found no correlation at all.”
In theory, success to McChrystal would result in a handover to the Afghan security forces. But there weren’t enough of them, they were hopelessly incompetent or corrupt, and the few good ones were too often killed. The Provincial Reserve police were not paid until they completed their training and took a urine test for drugs. Then they got their back pay. But out of the eighty men scheduled to take the test in July 2009, only fifty-three showed up, some refused to take it, and twenty tested positive. Meanwhile, of twenty-five new police recruits in Helmand, twenty tested positive for marijuana, opium, or both. An Air Force major conducting drug tests on police throughout the country told me that in some districts 60 percent of the police force tested positive. The south was the worst. Some police had tried to give him water instead of urine. Sergeant Kilaki thought the Provincial Reserve needed more training in tactics, techniques, and procedures as well as scenarios. “It sounded like they just dragged the eight-week curriculum to fourteen weeks,” Captain Westby said.
In July 2009 a police checkpoint on Highway 601 had observed the Taliban destroying the road and constructing a four-foot barrier on it. Team Prowler and the Provincial Reserve went back on the road and clashed with twelve to fifteen Taliban, killing at least one. The team had no engineer assets, so they couldn’t take down the barrier. The Taliban cleverly diverted traffic through the village to shake people down and control who passed. Colonel Shirzad sent the Provincial Reserve, with Lieutenant Farid in command, without their American mentors to Highway 601.
Lieutenant Farid’s Ford Ranger drove over an IED or was hit by an RPG and was blown to pieces. Farid was killed along with two other cops. Five PR men were killed and five wounded in action in seven days. “601 is the most insecure road in Afghanistan,” said Sergeant First Class Clark. “There’s nothing but Taliban out there. That road is the lifeline to Lashkar Gah. We’re being asked to deal with it with fifty-five men, and we lost five last night and five in the last fight.” Team Prowler was supposed to have eighty police with them, but the British had taken some for themselves. There weren’t enough police to go around.
I had met Lieutenant Farid when I first arrived in Lashkar Gah. I had hoped to interview him at length. He was jovial and chubby and had a short beard, and he looked older than his twenty-eight years. Farid was Colonel Shirzad’s cousin from Helmand. Before he set off on his mission, his kids came to see him at the base. He was good-humored and an advocate for his men, apparently. At first he had a hard time delegating responsibility. NCOs were weak in the Afghan security forces, so he was a dominant figure and his loss was even bigger. The Americans took Farid’s loss heavily. “He was going to be a good commander,” said Westby. “It’s frustrating.” Staff Sergeant Enriquez had worked with Farid for seven months. “He’s one of the only noncorrupt officers there were,” he said. “I was pissed. He worked his ass off for his men. It felt like losing one of our own.”
“We’re asking a lot from these men,” Westby said worriedly about the police. Westby was also frustrated by the British army, who controlled security in the Helmand province and who he had to report to, as well as his American masters in Kandahar. “The British attitude is ‘Go now, get your men out there and go.’ These are cops, not soldiers, but we’re treating them like soldiers.” Clark sympathized with them too. “We come out here for a year and we’re done. These ANP come out here until they get killed.”
Despite the loss, the police were told to go on a mission the next night by the British to relieve four checkpoints of highway police. The highway police were supposed to have been disbanded because they were committing highway robbery, but they still existed. The police would set up three checkpoints while the highway patrolmen were sent to training. “These ANP are mentored by the British,” I was told, “even the British say they’re shit.” One American added, “But all the cops mentored by the British are shit.”
The British warned Team Prowler that Highway 601 was blown in three places and that there were IEDs all over, on and off the road. I wondered why eight thousand British soldiers in Helmand had such difficulty controlling one fifty-kilometer stretch of road. “601 is impassable,” a British officer had admitted to Clark. Many officers I spoke to complained about how imperious the British were to them and the Afghans.
The British were commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Jasper de Quincy Adams, who worked closely with Colonel Shirzad. The mission was to clear Popalzai, a Taliban-dominated village along the highway. Prowler and the police would take one side, while the British and the Afghan army would take the other side and deny the Taliban an escape route. “There’s nobody good left in Balochan and Popalzai,” Dyer told me. “They sent all the women and children away. There’s nobody good left. They’re really bad.” The police also said there was nobody good left in those towns. The Americans told me how odd it was that they never received a brief on the rules of engagement, which varied depending on what province they were in. It was as if there were no rules for Helmand. One American called it “an open-fire zone.”
Clark was unhappy that Team Prowler was going in their more vulnerable Humvees and not in the Cougars, larger vehicles suspended higher above the ground. But the Humvees were necessary if they went off-road in villages. “We’re not a fuckin’ route clearance package,” said Dyer. “Who are we gonna send out to blow ’em?” “We can say we’re not going,” Westby said with frustration. But even if he didn’t go, his police would, and it was Prowler’s job as the mentor team to go with them. “I’m pissed at [Lieutenant Colonel] Jasper too,” he said. “I see people getting hurt or killed if we do route clearance with the police,” Dyer said. “The police should be given assets. If you’re not going to give us the assets, don’t fucking ask us to do it.”
A stout, bearded sergeant called Ahmadullah was placed in command until a replacement for Farid could be found. Ahmadullah, a former schoolteacher, had joined the police after he was threatened by the Taliban, the Americans told me. He and his senior men gathered around Westby and Dyer along with many of the police, who were on the verge of a mutiny after hearing that they had to go back to Highway 601. The mood was tense; the policemen had only hours earlier been collecting Farid’s body parts off the road. “Today they lost their commander who they really respected,” Westby texted to Jasper on the Blue Force Tracker (BFT), a computer in his vehicle that allowed him to communicate with other forces in the area.
The Afghans insisted they lacked ammunition, and the men of Prowler were confounded by the number of machine-gun and RPG rounds that were unaccounted for. The Afghans told them that twenty-seven RPG heads had been destroyed in Lieutenant Farid’s vehicle as well thousands of rounds of machine-gun ammo. The Americans were skeptical that Farid had been carrying such a huge number of rounds; he was coming back to get more supplies, so his truck should have been empty. “They’re claiming a suspicious amount of ammo is missing,” Enriquez said. The police didn’t want to go because it was a British operation, and they felt like the Americans didn’t care about Farid’s death. “To restore their confidence, they have to go wipe out some Taliban location,” Sergeant Kilaki said.
The Americans weren’t happy about going on the mission either. “This is a bullshit British mission,” said Dyer. “It’s obvious the Brits don’t give a fuck about the men,” Enriquez said. Westby persuaded the British to postpone the operation until the following day. “Sir, it’s almost a mutiny right now,” Westby told Jasper, who agreed to postpone. “He doesn’t want a mutiny,” said Westby. “They’ve lost nine guys in seven days, and they need to do weapons maintenance.”
Because British clinics were full with their wounded, and the British media were focusing on the numerous British casualties, including a dead lieutenant colonel, the British decided to cancel their clearing operation in Popalzai. The Afghan army didn’t feel like going on the mission anyway.
Instead, Westby focused on replacing the highway patrol checkpoints. He spread a blanket on the floor and split open a watermelon, sitting with four senior policemen to discuss the next day’s mission. They thanked him for postponing until the morning and they discussed where they might set up their new checkpoint. The Afghans couldn’t read the map even to tell that the blue undulating line was a river. One of the checkpoints on 601 had recently been attacked, with eleven Afghan policemen killed. Sergeant Abdulahad—an Afghan police officer from the Provincial Reserve—expected heavy Taliban attacks when we arrived. He worried that they wouldn’t have enough supplies. Westby, meanwhile, tried to figure out how to get them money so they could buy food and fuel. Westby explained to the policemen that they had to depart at 7 a.m. so the highway policemen could be relieved in time to make it to their flight for training.
“When we get to the area where the diversion through the villages is, that’s where we will definitely have contact with the Taliban,” Abdulahad said. “It’s all dirt roads there, and the Taliban put many IEDs on the roads, and it will be hard to see them.” He was unenthusiastic about the mission and came up with numerous reasons not to do it. He suggested a different route through the desert along the river, which would take an entire day.
Westby was baffled but maintained his aplomb. “I think we are strong and we can attack them back,” he said. “We have enough firepower with our trucks, and I can radio for helicopters.”
Abdulahad explained that they were not scared of the Taliban but of IEDs. His men did not have armored vehicles like the Americans, and he worried that the sandy and rocky roads would be perfect cover for IEDs. Westby finally persuaded them to go, but then they raised more objections. There were many Taliban checkpoints, Abdulahad objected, and his men didn’t have enough ammunition. There were only thirty-three Provincial Reserve men on the base that night, Westby said, so when the remaining twenty returned the following day they could solve the supply problems and join the rest of the team. The Afghans reluctantly agreed, having run out of objections. Westby painstakingly made sure each one of them knew his task and would do it.
BUT THE POLICE were not ready at 7 a.m. “New leadership and lack of motivation are making the PR slow this morning,” Westby texted to his headquarters on the BFT. “I’m sure some of these dudes are scared shitless,” one soldier from Team Prowler said as the PR slowly lined up. “Before Farid got killed, the men were usually on time,” Enriquez told me. “I’m sick and fucking tired of waiting,” Westby told his men, hiding his frustration from the Afghans. “Not getting paid, the high-op tempo, the casualties, are taking a huge toll on their morale,” Westby texted to Jasper. Thirty-six Afghans from the PR finally got into seven Ford Rangers, and the fifteen men from Prowler along with their two interpreters joined the convoy in four Humvees.
We left, eventually, at 8:13 a.m. Highway 601 was a new road and the driving was smooth, with the PR hopping out every few minutes to look inside culverts for IEDs. At 8:40 Sergeant Gus radioed from the front of the convoy to announce that the Taliban had blown up a new part of the road. “There’s pretty significant damage,” he said of the culvert that had been blown up. “It’s pretty fucked up here. It looks like we’re gonna have to take a bypass.” It took fifteen minutes to figure out how to bypass the road. Sergeant Dyer wanted to clear the compounds in the area to see if there was any sign of the Taliban and to look for command wires that could detonate an IED.
“I like Sergeant Dyer’s enthusiasm, but we don’t have time to clear every compound that’s two hundred meters from the road,” Westby said.
“Look for freshly dug ant trails” on the dirt road, Westby ordered. They would be signs of command wires leading to an IED. “That culvert was 1,100 meters from an ANP checkpoint, and they couldn’t keep it protected,” Westby said in wonder of the blown road, and there was another ANP checkpoint 1,500 meters after it. The diversion exposed traffic to the nearby compounds, he wrote in his BFT. “Textbook setup for pressure plate IED and command wire IED from those compounds.”
Kilaki asked Westby if they should stop at a nearby ANP checkpoint. “I’ve got a feeling he’ll say what he always says,” said Westby. “There’s Taliban all around us! They’re all over!” We stopped at a schoolhouse that had been converted to a checkpoint. It was surrounded by concertina wire and sandbagged positions. The night before, it had been attacked by the Taliban. We reached another blown-up part of the road, and the vehicles rolled down into the desert, driving through a moonscape, passing sheep and their herdsmen and the mud compounds they shared.
We stopped at a checkpoint with mud walls. Outside were the charred carcasses of destroyed vehicles, including a police Ranger. It too had been attacked the previous night and early that morning by Taliban who shot machine-gun fire and RPGs from motorcycles and Toyota Corollas. “North of us the Taliban have a checkpoint,” one of the highway patrolmen told me. Originally from the north, he had been in the police for a year and a half and had lost nearly a hundred comrades. “We have a graveyard for the police not far away,” he said. Many police were not wearing uniforms or boots. They warned that if any of the checkpoints were abandoned, then the next day the road would be full of IEDs. The men left two Rangers and their occupants behind with only half a can of water and no food. “These motherfucking idiots, like Goddamn children,” Westby complained, exasperated that their commanders gave them no supplies. Ahmadullah and many of his men were not wearing their body armor.
We passed another blown-up culvert only a few hundred meters away from the police checkpoint. Westby wondered how the police hadn’t seen it happen. “They were sleeping,” said Kilaki. Westby conceded that they didn’t have night vision. The bypass took us over a canal. We leaned to the right and nearly tipped over. Locals struggling with their vehicles warned that the alternative bypass went through a Taliban-controlled area where they had their own checkpoint. “The village you go through just 800 meters away is Taliban territory,” Westby wrote on the BFT. We passed another destroyed piece of road and then another IED crater. Westby decided to keep all the checkpoints open. Colonels Shirzad and Jasper had ordered one police commander to stay at a different checkpoint with the British army. He didn’t trust the British, so he refused. He finally agreed but then went to town instead. “It wears on you, these guys,” Westby sighed.
“The PR have no radios to communicate from checkpoint to checkpoint,” Westby texted to Jasper. “Vehicle radios don’t have enough range, food water fuel ammo resupply still an issue. PR not equipped to be self-sustaining here, no cooking equipment, only one CP has a well.” Westby was still hoping the remaining PR would come that day, but he doubted it. “They’ll come up with some excuse,” he said. Westby gave the PR additional jugs of water so at least they wouldn’t die in the heat. Most of the PR had not been paid for months, he told me. They didn’t have radios, so they would have no way of notifying the Americans if they were attacked. He hoped their vehicle radios worked and tried to explain to the PR squad leader that communication was essential. Westby didn’t expect his own position to be attacked because the Taliban probably saw that there were Americans there.
Lieut. Col. Jasper De Quincy Adams showed up. He was young, handsome, and full of energy. He complained about the highway police commander. “When locals interact with him, they think the Taliban are better,” he said, worrying that the commander delegitimized the government. “We’ll turn this around by aggressive patrolling,” he told Westby. “Your mission is all about deterring and disrupting.” He wanted Westby to lay ambushes and take the fight to the enemy. “I think that Popalzai needs to be patrolled very aggressively,” he said. “Have large numbers of patrol and ambush.” Jasper’s men followed us and fixed the holes in the road, filling them with dirt. Jasper complained that about twenty of the twenty-five recruits had tested positive for opiates. “That’s why the road is full of IEDs,” Westby told me. “They’re high all the time.”
The men of Team Prowler broke the mud walls with sledgehammers so that they could fit their Humvees inside. Then they parked on all sides so that they could have 360 degrees of coverage. They broke the tops of walls so they could fire better. Garbage littered the compound, including sheeps’ hooves and bones, the remnants of previous meals. The Americans tried to clean it all up and set it on fire. Westby told me he didn’t think everybody in the villages around Highway 601 was Taliban; some were just normal civilians.
The commander of one of the checkpoints got on the radio to announce that his men had seen a Corolla full of Taliban with weapons. The commander met with local villagers by his checkpoint and explained that they were a different police unit replacing the old one to establish security. “It’s good initiative,” said Westby. That night the men drove up and down the road and found a suspected IED. It was too dark to do anything about it. They did a recon by fire, meaning they shot at the house where they suspected the trigger man might be hiding, but nothing happened. If anything detonated, they would have annihilated the suspected firing point.
The next morning the team drove to a compound they suspected had been used by the men who placed the IED. They dismounted with the PR, walking past green fields into the first mud compound. On one corner by the road was a spy hole and another hole at the bottom with two ant trails coming out of it. Inside was a cornfield, a marijuana field, and harvested poppy plants. Several of the police on patrol didn’t wear their body armor and stood casually in fields of fire. Team Prowler kept pushing ahead. We passed by large poppy fields. The plants were dry and harvested. The police came across three small brothers who pointed to a narrow path between two mud walls and said five armed Taliban had just moved north of the compound. But Dyer didn’t pursue the Taliban because he didn’t want to be channeled through the narrow path.
The men found a mosque with mattresses and a room with corn kernels, bags of nitrogen, and a car battery. The nitrogen could have easily been used for fertilizer or explosives. While the Americans were poking around inside the mosque, the police sat in the shade beneath nearby trees. Some of them filmed the patrol with their camera phones. “I need those men from Lashkar Gah to get in some Rangers and drive their sorry asses out here,” Westby complained, and asked Mansur, the translator, to radio them. Back at the mud checkpoint Westby briefed his men. Their mission was to “deter and disrupt enemy forces burying IEDs,” and the “center of gravity is Popalzai.”
That night Dyer led an ambush by the mosque, where the team suspected the Taliban were sleeping. They hoped that when the Taliban tried to leave, the ambush team blocking the narrow path between the mud walls would kill them. They drove without lights in blackout. Dyer told the men to make sure the ANP had no cigarettes, didn’t play music, and didn’t talk. “Enforce light and noise discipline,” he said. “Throw some fucking grenades. We’re not there to arrest people, just fucking kill people.”
“The Hazara fighters are better than these lazy bones sleeping all day,” said Westby, referring to the Pashtun police. “And they’re better shots,” Dyer added. Westby estimated there would be five to ten Taliban in the mosque. Somehow I doubted the Taliban would be there. They weren’t stupid: they did not sleep in the same place every night, and they would know that the Americans had found their hideout.
At 3 a.m. they started getting ready. “I hope we catch these sons of bitches with their pants down,” Kilaki said. “I’ll be so pissed if there’s nobody fucking there,” said Campos. There were supposed to be only six police dismounts on the ambush, but twice as many got out of their vehicles to join the five Americans who went on the ambush. Westby got out of his Humvee to resolve the problem. “It just goes to show that no matter how many times you prep ’em . . .” said Kilaki. “They all thought they were going on patrol,” Westby said with a laugh. “I just explained it to their commander, and they nodded north and south.” An unmanned Predator drone was flying overhead, but Team Prowler had no way of talking to those controlling it.
As it happened, the mosque was empty. Several Afghans walking by on the way to their fields or morning prayers were taken down the alleyway. “They can fuckin’ sit and shut up,” Dyer said. “I wish I was the dismount watching the people come out all spooked,” Campos said. “On the Fourth we had the women crying,” said Kilaki. “Yeah, I know,” said Campos. “I saw the women coming out, tears all down their faces. Shut the fuck up! We’re doing you a favor.”
When the rest of Team Prowler joined the ambush team, I found the Afghan men sitting and waiting to be let go. They were middle-aged and elderly. They asked to pray several times, and finally Dyer let them conduct their ablutions and pray on the grass. One of the old men told me that they were all very bothered by the Taliban. “They come here to shoot,” he said. “They don’t let us irrigate our fields. When the Taliban shoot from this area, the Americans and police come and we have to run away. Our neighbors were bothered by the Taliban, and they fled. We have to take our women and children away when the police respond to Taliban ambushes.” Another old man chimed in. “Three months ago the Taliban set up an ambush on the road,” he said. “The police entered our houses, they stole our sheep and everything from our houses. We complained to Lashkar Gah police headquarters, and they gave us back two motorcycles and one sheep but not the rest of our things. We had a shop, and they took all the merchandise from it.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that. You can rest assured that this is a different police,” said Westby. “Tell him we apologize for the disturbance, but we’re adamant about keeping these people out.”
“I am an old man,” one of them said. “If we talk to them, the Taliban will slap us. The Taliban sometimes come here and demand money. If we refuse, they’re going to kill us.”
The old men asked if they could go take their vegetables to the market. The Americans agreed. Westby told them that if they gave information on the Taliban that led to arrests, they would receive money. “If the Taliban see us talking to you, they will slaughter us tonight,” one of the men said. “The Taliban don’t tell us when they are coming. We’re sitting in our homes, and all of a sudden they come and we hear shots. The Taliban don’t sleep here. They come here like thieves.”
“Let them understand that we’re not the bad guys,” Westby told his translator. “We’re trying to stop them from doing what they are doing. The best way to accomplish that is by a partnership. We can’t keep coming here every day.”
“We can’t notify the police, but we’ll send some small child to tell the police,” one of the old men said.
The sun rose, golden over the shrubs, as we made our way back to the checkpoint. The police had mentioned seeing a Taliban car. “What was that about a Taliban car?” asked Kilaki. “The ANP think everything is Taliban,” Westby replied. “I don’t think they fuckin’ know. They’re so eager to impress that sometimes they call everything Taliban.”
The police at the next checkpoint radioed to say there were Taliban around. “They’re over there, and they’re over there, and they’re over there, but we can’t go on that road because it’s all IEDs, but the road is full of civilian traffic,” Westby said, mocking the useless information he got from the cops.
A highway patrol commander called Torabas came by with his men. He and his men had just seen two Corollas full of Taliban in the distance. I asked him how he knew. He had been living here for two years, he said, and he recognized their faces. All the hills north of our position were said to be controlled by the Taliban, but the police were too scared to go there. I asked Torabas why the Taliban were so popular in Helmand. “The Taliban are supported by the British,” he said, insisting that he had seen the British military drop fuel supplies to the Taliban. “Nobody likes the Taliban here,” he said. “It’s only out of fear. When the Taliban see people talking to the police, they kill them. They are here only by force, and many people dislike the police. Some police steal from houses. Before we recruited uneducated people who had no training.” About fifty of his men had been killed by the Taliban since he took command.
He was from the Nurzai tribe, like Colonel Shirzad and most police in Helmand, he told me. His father and grandfather had fought the Soviets with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami, the most radical faction of the mujahideen. When the Taliban seized Helmand and pushed out Hizb-e-Islami, Torabas’s family fled to Pakistan. He said Taliban had seized their lands.
“I’m living in Lashkar Gah, but my fields are still in the hands of the Taliban,” he said. “When the Taliban were defeated, they didn’t have any power. Then we were living in our compound, but now the Taliban are back.” It seemed his motive was to regain his land. “When the Russians attacked Afghanistan they were trying to destroy our country. The Taliban didn’t like the mujahideen. When the Americans start oppressing or disrespecting our culture—touching our women, disrespecting our elders—then we will fight jihad against them.”
That night Kilaki caught one of the police commanders smoking hashish in a car. “It looked like a Cheech and Chong movie,” he said. Westby gave the PR money to buy cooking supplies. “Their logistics process doesn’t work, and I can’t have them going hungry,” he said. Only one of the PR’s senior men showed any initiative and wanted to set up his own ambushes. Colonel Shirzad didn’t want to fight, Dyer told me, and without a charismatic leader like Farid the PR were content to just patrol Highway 601.
ONE AFTERNOON while I was marooned with Team Prowler and the PR in the small mud police outpost along Highway 601, languishing in the oppressive heat, surrounded by a moonscape of bleached rocks, hoping for some action to relieve my boredom, Sergeant Ahmadullah radioed to the young Afghan translator working with the Americans, called Mansur, and told him, “We found a Taliban, we have him here. What should we do, kill him or what?” Mansur told Ahmadullah he could not kill the prisoner, and instructed him to bring the man to the Americans.
The prisoner was a young man with a purple salwar kameez. He had long hair down to his neck and a cap atop his head. He looked bewildered. His eyes were wide with apprehension as he squatted on the dirt with his hands cuffed in front of him. He wore two different sandals. He had been a passenger in a taxi; the police had also brought the driver and the other passengers.
Ahmadullah said his prisoner’s cellphone had a Taliban song on it. This was his evidence. Ahmadullah was by the roadside, while I was standing with his men, at the police outpost, out of his earshot. His men were privately angry about their commander’s decision to arrest the man and wanted him released. Zahir, another translator working with the Americans, was outraged. “This is why people hate the fucking police and support the Taliban,” he said. I asked Captain Westby, Team Prowler’s commander, why the man was being held. “He had an anti-American ring tone,” Westby said, “and he has some relatives that Ahmadullah says are in the Taliban.”
Zahir explained to the Americans that the prisoner wanted to pray. The police were eager to uncuff him so he could, and the skeptical Americans relented. Zahir insisted the prisoner wouldn’t attempt an escape.
Sergeant Gustafson took one of the passengers by the wall to enter his biometric data into a handheld device. He took the man’s picture and another of his eyes, along with his fingerprints, name, father’s name, and tribe’s name. The man seemed amused. But he was now in the American system. Westby and a sergeant interrogated the prisoner, who was called Zeibullah Agha. He was a student in a famous religious school in the Pakistani city of Peshawar and was on his way back to Babaji, where the British were engaged in heavy combat with the Taliban, in order to help his family flee to safety because his father was an old man. The Americans asked him for the names of his brothers, father, and uncle, but they had trouble with the names and confused the Pakistani town he was studying in for another one, Quetta, more famous for being a Taliban safe haven. I told the Americans that the school in Pakistan he named practiced a moderate form of Islam anathema to the Taliban.
“People with a similar surname are known Taliban,” Westby said.
“I am a poor man. I don’t know why they arrested me,” Zeibullah said.
The American sergeant asked him why he had this music on his cellphone. “One of my friends put it on my cellphone,” Zeibullah said.
The sergeant smiled. “Bullshit,” he said, looking at Zahir. “How do you say bullshit in Pashtu?”
Zahir looked at the prisoner and said, “Kus eh shir,” meaning “a pussy’s poem.”
Zahir and the police told me that Zeibullah’s cellphone had some videos of battles and one of a graduation from a religious school to be a mullah. “Everybody has them on their phones—even I have them,” Zahir said. Sergeant Ahmadullah told the Americans that he knew Zeibullah’s father, who was a good man. “But I don’t know him,” he said, “and his uncle is Taliban.”
Mansur the other translator scoffed: how could he know the man’s father but not know him? “He’s fucked up,” Mansur said of Ahmadullah. “Maybe it’s a personal vendetta. We also use Taliban songs,” Mansur added. Other policemen complained Ahmadullah had killed many people in “personal hostility.” One policeman told me that Ahmadullah told him he had killed seven or eight men in personal feuds in Babaji. Another policeman originally from Babaji also insisted the prisoner was innocent. But Zeibullah was taken away to be sent to the prison in Lashkar Gah. He might be released for money, the American sergeant told me. Or he might be in prison for years.
Westby and his men had been sent to patrol Highway 601 because the Taliban had blown up culverts along it, blocking traffic and forcing trucks to go through Taliban-controlled towns. It took Team Prowler about half a day to secure the road, while the British filled up broken culverts with earth so that vehicles could pass. Westby, a soft-spoken and taciturn soldier, was confronted with a Sisyphean task, but he never showed frustration in front of Afghans he worked with. On another afternoon, a few days later, while Westby and his men were recovering from an overnight mission, a soldier woke him up to tell him that two village elders were complaining that the British had blocked their water supply when they filled the craters with dirt. Westby was sleeping, groggy. “Well, I’m not here to solve all the world’s fucking problems,” he muttered.
He got up anyway and went to talk to the two old men. They wore white turbans and had long white beards and wrinkled leathery skin. They squatted, their tunics covering their bodies, and spoke in raspy voices. The British had blocked the water supply to thirty farming families when they filled in the craters on Highway 601, they said. The British ignored their complaints. They asked Westby to put a pipe through so they could water their crops. Westby promised to talk to local Afghan and American officials. They asked how long it would take. Westby guessed maybe a week. The two men seemed relieved. “We all have to work together to stop the Taliban,” Westby told them. The two apologized for bothering him. To them he was probably just another in a long string of foreign officers and local warlords who had come and gone.
The next day we drove by the first compound they had searched. The sandbag they had stuffed into the spy hole was gone. Dyer wanted to destroy that part of the wall, but Jasper said the new orders issued by General McChrystal stated a compound could be destroyed only if the soldiers were in imminent danger. The men were baffled. With their tour in Afghanistan coming to an end, Westby was reluctant to let his men enter compounds. It was militarily useless, he said, and he didn’t want any of his men killed a couple of weeks before they went home. When we got to town, one of the sergeants driving was ebullient. He started playing chicken with oncoming vehicles and laughing. As we left the ANCOP base to drive to the main base in Lashkar Gah, a kid picked up a rock to throw at the Humvee and a cop kicked him hard in the chest. The men of Ironhorse and Prowler returned to their lives in Illinois. Five men from Ironhorse went back to Afghanistan to work as private security contractors in Kandahar.
“That’s why all the children are dying for you, Afghanistan.”
Supporters of McChrystal said “he gets it,” as if there was a magic COIN formula they discovered in 2009. But Afghans have a memory. They remember, for example, that the American-backed mujahideen killed thousands of Afghan teachers and bombed schools in the name of their anti-Soviet jihad. The Taliban atrocities had not arisen in a vacuum. Similarly, past American actions have consequences. Opinions were already formed. The Taliban were gaining power thanks to American actions and alliances. Warlords were empowered by the Americans. No justice was sought for victims. The government and police were corrupt. The president stole the elections. The message was that there was no justice, and a pervasive sense of lawlessness and impunity had set in. Afghans who had been humiliated or victimized by the Americans and their allies were unlikely to become smitten by them merely because of some aid they received. And the aid was relatively small compared with other international projects, like Bosnia, Haiti, Rwanda, and East Timor. The Americans thought that by building roads they could win over opinion. But roads are just as useful for insurgents as they are for occupiers. The Americans had failed to convince Afghans that they should like them or want them to stay, and they certainly had not been convinced that Karzai’s government has legitimacy. You can’t win hearts and minds with aid work when you are an occupying force.
The Taliban was the most obscurantist, backward, traditional, and despised government on earth. The fact that the Taliban was making a comeback was a testimony to the regime that the U.S. set up there, and to the atrocities that have been committed in Afghanistan by occupation troops and their Afghan allies. It was sheer arrogance to think that adding another thirty thousand or fifty thousand troops would change the situation so much that the occupation would become an attractive alternative.
There was little evidence that aid money in COIN had an impact. There was not a strong correlation between poverty and insecurity or between aid money and security. The more insecure you were, the more development money you got. The safer provinces felt as if they were being penalized for not having Taliban or poppy cultivation. The aid system raised expectations but didn’t satisfy them. Life remained nasty, brutish, and short for most Afghans.
Aid and force do not go well together. The Americans assumed that material goods superseded all other values. This was not true in Iraq or Afghanistan. Positive as the aid was, it did not outweigh the civilian casualties or the offensive and humiliating behavior of the past eight years. In Iraq it took the trauma of the civil war to make the Americans look good. There might have been a new administration in Washington, but for Afghans it was the same America: the America of civilian casualties, night raids, foreign occupation, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib—the America seemingly at war with Islam.
The Pentagon propaganda machine, for instance, turned Marja from a backwater to a key strategic city, and the American media accepted it. But in fact there were only a few thousand people living in Marja. It took months and thousands of troops for the Americans to seize Marja, only to learn that the Taliban were popular there. And there were up to twenty thousand similar Marjas throughout the country. In Marja the ANCOP too proved a failure, incompetent and dependent on the Americans. Fighting remained frequent. The Americans were not effective in evaluating Afghan police units. Although hailed as elite, the ANCOP annual attrition due to all causes ranged from seventy to one hundred and forty percent. Even by local standards they weren’t elite.
The storming of Marja was meant to be the first sally in a larger campaign to expel the Taliban from their southern heartland, especially Kandahar. The Americans thought if they could wrest it from Taliban hands, then it would turn the tide against the Taliban. But Kandahar meant little to anybody who wasn’t a Kandahari. It was part of the same focus on population centers that were overwhelmingly urban.
Violence was getting worse. How long would the Afghan people accept the presence of armed foreigners in their country? Even a message of help can be humiliating, more so when it is backed by a gun. The Americans underestimated the importance of dignity and the extent to which their very presence in Afghanistan was deeply offensive.
In May 2006 riots erupted in Kabul after a road accident with American forces, and the Americans shot at the crowd. The episode revealed an underlying anger that could explode at any moment. In September 2009 a British plane dropped a box of leaflets that failed to open, landing on a girl and killing her. Given that most Afghans are illiterate, it would not have been any more persuasive had it opened. Despite the lip service given to “protecting the population,” in 2010 the American-led coalition killed far more civilians than previous years. In February a night raid by American special forces killed two pregnant women; the Americans attempted to cover it up. “Son of an American” has become an insult among Pashtuns the way “Son of a Russian” once was.
Folk poetry throughout Pashtun areas of Afghanistan is now often anti-occupation. Below is one recent ghazal (poem), by a woman called Zerlakhta Hafeez:
Americans lacked the political will for a long-term commitment, regardless of whether it was right or wrong. The Americans would bail on Afghanistan sooner or later. It would be tragic if it happened within Obama’s eighteen-month deadline or after five years. There was no way to “fix” Afghanistan. According to Andrew Wilder, a longtime aid worker in the country, “It may be more realistic to look for ways to slow down the descent into anarchy.” The Soviets never lost the war in Afghanistan. In fact, the puppet regime they installed had pretty much crushed the mujahideen until the Soviets withdrew support. The Soviets won their last battle in Afghanistan in Khost’s Operation Magistral. But it made no difference. Only the rusting ruins of tanks and a few Russian-speaking Afghans remained in Afghanistan. The Americans too weren’t losing, stressed a retired American military officer working on security in Afghanistan. “Every time our boys face them, they win,” he said. “We’re winning every day. Are we going to keep winning for twenty years?”
I returned to Afghanistan in January 2010. In what was a routine incident, the Americans had just killed four Afghans in Ghazni’s Qarabagh district: one of the men worked for the Basim phone company, one was a cobbler, and two were students. Locals took the bodies and protested on the highway between Kabul and Kandahar.
On the way to Maidan Shahr, the capital of Wardak province, I stopped to talk to bus drivers about the conditions on the road. “There are a lot of roadblocks because of the Americans,” a bus driver called Mir Ali told me. “They oppress people a lot.” A passenger chimed in. “Tell him the problem of the people,” he said. “There are certainly attacks. The Americans attack and raid homes every night. They indiscriminately and continuously arrest people and take people out of their homes.” Mir Ali told the man that we were only talking about security on the road. “Who cares about the road?” the man asked. “They are indiscriminately raiding and searching homes in places where there is no Taliban or enemy. People have personal conflicts, and the Americans come and arrest them and drag them and imprison them.”
Gul Rahman was also a driver on the same route. “The road security is fine, but people are oppressed by the Americans,” he told me. “They are raiding during the nights. Some people have hostility from the time of the factions [the 1990s], from the revolution in the past, some people have enmity with each other. Now some people report to the government or tribal militias, so the Americans continuously raid, arrest, and imprison people. They have done this in Andar and Badam. They have killed more innocent people than you can imagine.” He told me to go see for myself. “You will see people tortured, arrested, and imprisoned for no reason,” he said. Even at the bus station, he complained, the police beat people without reason.
Zainullah was a driver on the road between Kabul and Helmand. For the past two days the road past Qarabagh in Ghazni had been closed, he said. “The Americans have killed people there, women and children. That is why people are protesting, and they have blocked the highway. The Taliban do not harm us, but there is a danger of thieves, and people are bothered by Americans. When American forces come, then the road is blocked for hours, and then we have to wait for hours, sometimes the whole day. Sick passengers and women also have to wait. The road is 70 percent damaged and 30 percent built. There are no bridges, and most of the road is not paved.”
The local travel agent at the bus stop agreed. “The situation was good before, but now it is worse,” he said. “People cannot travel in these buses anymore because there is no security. About thirty or forty buses would leave from here before, but now the number is about ten to fifteen. During the evening and nighttime, it is not possible to leave.” I asked if people were pleased with the work of the government or the Americans. “Nobody likes them,” he said. “How can we be happy when travels are delayed by the national army, American troops, or the police? How can they be happy?”
Zainullah told me of a bus that was robbed by thieves in Ghazni and then in Khushkabad. “This bus was robbed two times in one night,” he said. “The whole station knows this story. Taliban do not harm people. The Taliban deal with the people that they need to deal with. Taliban harms no one. The danger always comes from Americans and thieves. The danger from the Americans on the highway is that they check each and every bridge for their security, and we have to wait. Even if you have sick passengers or children, the Americans don’t care at all. The road will be blocked by Americans. If something happens to them, then Americans indiscriminately shoot and arrest anyone. They don’t care about anyone. The problems are because of American troops. This is certainly the job of government. They should stop it, and we don’t have that power. My demand from the government is that the government should punish these people. If the government is not able to do so, then Afghans should be allowed to make a national movement. It is not going to work like this.”
As we were speaking, several policemen showed up and made us leave, asking us to come to the police station because they hadn’t been informed that we were in the area.
In Meidan Shah I attended a training session in basic science for several dozen village teachers from throughout Wardak (all of whom were men). When I showed up they were being taught the science behind basic hygiene.
The Taliban had a reputation for attacking state teachers, so I asked the men if they had been threatened. “There is no threat to education in this province,” one man told me. “Education is neutral here,” said another. “It neither supports the resistance nor the government.” The Taliban did not harm schools and clinics, he said. “Most of the security problems are created by Americans. The Taliban do not make problems.” I asked him what problems the Americans made. “Our hours start here at 8:00 or 8:30 a.m. We are not allowed to come here before American troops come to the provincial center. When we go to school, we experience the same problems. There is no alternative way. If we use another route, there is fear of thieves. There are many problems. This year somebody fired on the Americans, so the Americans entered the school and fired—which terrorized children so much that one boy wet himself. They were so scared that they did not come to school for five or six days, and finally the children were convinced and brought by their parents to school. The Americans first shot at the school, then they surrounded the school, then they entered and started firing inside it.”
Outside the school the men pointed to villages only one kilometer away. Everything outside the provincial capital was in Taliban hands, they said. In the same town I attended a meeting of the National Solidarity Program, an Afghan-run, foreign-funded development program that gave grants to communities to develop local projects. I spoke to Muhamad Nasir Farida, the local government official in charge of the program in Wardak. “Many problems are created by the Americans,” he said. “The Americans raid homes at nights, land helicopters, and whoever they see they kill them or arrest them.”
Fazel Rabie Haqbeen was a former mujahid who worked as a senior official for the Asia Foundation, an American development NGO, in Kabul. He had twenty years of experience as an aid worker. He too wanted to talk about the deaths in Qarabagh. “Two hundred villagers are protesting with the dead bodies in Qarabagh,” he said. “Villagers are crying and blocking the road for two days. Where are the hearts and minds of these villagers? The two hundred villagers are a casualty. It’s not just the physical dead. Let me walk you through Kabul and ask a little child what he thinks of Americans. They are not winning hearts and minds.”
Fazel was originally from the village of Miakhel in southern Kabul’s Musahi district. In 2006 American Special Forces raided his village. “They killed a sleeping farmer,” he said. “They dragged women and held them, they beat four villagers and detained four villagers. From that day Musahi district is not secure. The villagers don’t care if the Taliban intrude into villages. After the raid the local Italian commander was killed, two district council members were killed. I am also a council member, but I don’t go back much. The district police chief was killed, a local road construction company had its machines burned, and since then every day there is something.”
The gap between the people and government was enormous, Fazel said. “Between the people and the international presence it’s much more huge, and between the people and the Americans even more, and with the Special Forces much, much more.”
When people compared the two evils of the Americans and the Taliban, they chose the lesser evil. “At least people can communicate with the Taliban,” he said. “The elders can have influence; they are from the same culture. People are not progovernment or pro-Taliban, but they prefer the Taliban. The government isn’t in a position to deliver any services.”
The Americans relied on their own analysts, who didn’t have in-depth knowledge of the Afghan context, he told me. “Our culture varies from village to village, tribe to tribe, region to region. As an Afghan I am not in a position to have in-depth knowledge; my knowledge will be superficial. Afghans don’t trust you, so they won’t tell you what’s in their hearts and minds. They will say you are doing a great job.”
He mocked the notion that the Americans could use Pashtunwali to their advantage. “The Americans are against Pashtunwali,” he said. “They are carrying out house raids. Are you Pashtun so that you can do Pashtunwali with Pashtun? Before the war, if you were a foreigner or American, you could go everywhere safely. Today that is not the case. The whole situation is stirred into chaos, and everyone is provoking mistrust. The McChrystal plan is more troops, more casualties, more victims, more civilian dead. The wrong policies, the wrong approaches. If you come at 2 a.m. and kill my father, how will you expect me not to go mad?”
In late June a Rolling Stone magazine profile of General McChrystal revealed the contempt he and his men felt for their civilian counterparts and leadership. President Obama seized the opportunity to dismiss McChrystal and replace him with General Petraeus. McChrystal had opposed Obama’s eighteen-month deadline. He had wanted “to win.” Obama merely wanted to “halt the Taliban’s momentum.” COIN was a long-term strategy and a stable extremist-free Afghanistan was an open-ended commitment, but the president seemed determined to leave as soon as he could. McChrystal and Obama had always been mismatched. Afghanistan policy seemed subordinate to domestic political considerations. The Democrats did not want to appear weak and reinforce the belief that Republicans were stronger on defense, especially as the November elections approached. Petraeus promised to reconsider the restrictions placed on the military meant to reduce civilian casualties. He announced a plan for “local police forces” or local militias. Just before Petraeus made his announcement Afghan President Karzai met with leaders from Kandahar and promised them that he would never agree to the American plan to create more militias.
Local militias had been created before and given different names. Previous attempts to use militias led to cooptation by the Taliban and other abuses. The new militias would not receive any training. The plan risked further destabilizing Afghanistan for the sake of expedience. Unlike the Awakening groups that began in the Iraqi Anbar and spread throughout that country, the militias in Afghanistan are not the result of a strategic shift in the insurgency and are not composed of former insurgents. Afghanistan dose not have anything resembling the Sunni-Shiite divide and inter-Sunni conflict with al Qaeda that led insurgents in Iraq to temporarily ally with the Americans. In Afghanistan the creation of more militias can lead to a return to the chaos of the post-Soviet withdrawal. Decentralization is a good idea on the political level but not when it comes to security and the state’s monopoly on violence. Creating militias means choosing sides in local tribal and inter-ethnic conflicts. According to one Afghan Army brigade commander in Helmand: “A militia empowers a man, an Army and Police force protect a people and empower a nation.” Senior Afghan security officials worried that so-called local defense forces were the first step towards the return of the regionalism and warlordism that tore the country a part in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal. After 1989 small, local militias continued to fight against the central government. After the government was overthrown larger militias fought between themselves for control of Kabul. In a country torn by fighting, the Americans thought that more fighting was the solution. Meanwhile as Petraeus settled in the governor of Marja in Helmand was fired only months after the Americans helped install him.
With Petraeus, Obama had appointed the one general with the clout to ask for more troops and more time, but also the one sufficiently respected by all parties to be able to declare Afghanistan a lost cause. The Americans had won in Afghanistan when it was merely a punishment campaign. Once they lingered following the flight of bin Laden they began to flounder. And when they turned it into a war against the Taliban, an indigenous movement, they lost.