The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [121]
The first lieutenant was unrepentant. “It makes sense. It’s an easy thing we can do that will really help them.”
“You can’t be serious,” the DynCorp guy said.
He was. Quick fixes, fast turnarounds, an easy bang for the buck. That pretty much typified the international approach. But the only thing that would make a difference with the Afghan police was a whole lot of training, for a whole lot of years, with a whole lot of money. This was a largely illiterate country wracked by thirty years of war, a place where young men from the provinces didn’t know how to lace their boots because they’d never had boots. It’s not like Afghans couldn’t fight—of course they could. But the only recruits willing to earn so little money to be cannon fodder were not the best and the brightest. Mostly, they were the no-hopes.
While on this embed, I wrote at least one good story for the Tribune about local soldiers helping in a foreign land. But I also wrote a few embarrassing clunkers to appeal to my new bosses, including one about the delivery of Chicago-style pizza to the soldiers, just in time for Super Bowl Sunday. The last time I had written anything that so reeked of jingoism and free advertising, I had just entered puberty. Even so, I got mocked by colleagues at the Associated Press and was sent a piece of hate mail because I quoted a soldier who criticized the pizza. I could not win.
Starved for the relative normalcy of Kabul, I soon left the soldiers. A friend who worked as a UN adviser to the Afghan-run Independent Electoral Commission came to town. Over lunch, he described the election fraud he had witnessed in the southeast. Already Afghans were registering to vote for the upcoming presidential election. But my friend had caught Afghan election workers creating thousands of fake registration cards. Women had also registered in unprecedented numbers in the conservative southeast—numbers that were likely inflated. In one province, when asked about registration, a top election official bragged that his province not only was registering a lot of women but was also registering children. My friend reported the suspected fraud; his UN superiors said they would send a committee to investigate but never did. I was not entirely surprised. The previous fall, Karzai had named loyalists to run three ministries—Interior, Education, and Tribal Affairs. Interior ran the police. Education ran the teachers. Both ministries had people everywhere. Tribal Affairs worked with the tribes, crucial to any election. By that point, the fix was in. UN officials and Western diplomats started distancing themselves from the election, referring to it as “an Afghan process” and “Afghan-led.” It wasn’t too difficult to decipher their meaning—they were absolving themselves of any responsibility, even as the UN put its hat out to raise more than $300 million to foot the bill.
A few weeks later, I flew to southern Helmand Province to watch Illinois soldiers posted there help eradicate poppies. This was part of NATO’s new approach to drugs, the first time that any foreign troops had been involved in eradication, even if they only guarded the Afghan police riding tractors that ripped up the poppies. The soldiers’ surroundings were stark, and they certainly didn’t get any Super Bowl Sunday pizza. Instead, they were attacked almost every time they left the base—by the Taliban, the farmers, the villagers. Outside the base, fields of newly planted poppies stretched forever, beautiful carpets of green. People in Washington sometimes tried to portray poppy farmers as small guys, eking a living from the land. In Helmand, at least, these were corporate drug farms.
The Afghans and their international guards made a show of clearing a patch of poppies right outside the base gate—a patch they had been saving to show off for the media and top Kabul luminaries, a patch with limited risk of attack. A man from the U.S. embassy, thrilled to be outside, wore a patch on his flak vest: AMERICA, FUCK YEAH, it said, quoting the movie Team America. Was