The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [52]
The soldiers called their new home Camp Hell or worse. Some referred to the nearest large village, Musa Qala, as Taliban Town. The base, its satellite, and the supply route had been attacked every few days. The soldiers were first ambushed outside of Kandahar, as they were leaving to set up the base. A gunner had been shot dead when his convoy was ambushed. A medic, who always carried a picture of his wife and newborn son, was killed when an old land mine exploded. The fighting was the reason I had to wait days in Kandahar for a helicopter ride.
Other militants attacked, but one of the most telling was a lone militant on a motorcycle, later dubbed by my friend Sean as the stupidest Taliban insurgent ever born. Three days after troops arrived, a man rode up on a motorcycle. Guards in the towers tracked him with binoculars for what seemed like a mile, always coming closer, carving an obvious path in the flat desert. The Afghan then stopped and pulled out a mirror from his pocket. He turned the mirror toward the base and flashed it quickly, as if to get the soldiers’ attention. Flash, flash. Flash, flash. Flash, flash. He drove a little farther and repeated his performance with the mirror. Attention caught, the U.S. soldiers on guard duty sent out an Afghan army truck to investigate. As the truck sped toward the man, he whipped out a Kalashnikov from under his outfit and began firing at the truck. He barely got a shot off. An Afghan soldier manning a heavy machine gun started firing. And firing. And firing more. He kept firing until his tub of bullets was empty and the motorcycle man had long stopped posing a threat. An American watching the scene unfold decided he had to talk to the Afghan soldier.
“Why did you keep shooting?” he asked the Afghan. “And why did you use all the bullets?”
“The Taliban killed my brother,” the Afghan replied, grinning. “I really hate them.”
And that showed just how impossible everything was out here. This was a war in which an Afghan militant thought his best option was to attack an American base alone on a motorcycle. And an Afghan soldier thought he was equally wise to unleash all his precious ammunition on a dead man, while Afghan soldiers in other parts of Afghanistan complained of having no weapons and no bullets and were even being killed for lack of ammunition. Figuring out the bigger idiot was tough.
Other Afghans trekked out to the base—but they were all elders, complaining that they did not want the U.S. soldiers to come to their villages anymore because everyone was scared of them and afraid of Taliban retaliation. It was a tough crowd. Hearts and minds were not on offer. A medical convoy tried to give free medical help to the village of Sarbesa. But the elders said the U.S. soldiers scared the women and children and asked the medics to hold their clinic somewhere else.
Unlike on other embeds, the officers here were so strapped, spread so thin, they had no time to worry about what I was doing or writing. They sent me on patrols with guys who had seen their friends die in Afghanistan, into a place that was by no means secure. The soldiers were nervous, which made me nervous. Any car, any person, major panic. Nobody waved. Children did not crowd around the Humvees, asking for pens and candy, as they did in the rest of Afghanistan. When we drove through a village, the women and children ran away. This was never a good sign.
On one patrol, we visited a clinic built through the U.S. schools-and-clinics program, the pet project of Zal, the former U.S. ambassador. The program was largely considered a debacle. The new buildings came in shoddy, late, and over budget. The lead USAID contractor, the Louis Berger Group of New Jersey, reportedly charged U.S. taxpayers an average of $226,000 for each building—almost five times as much as Afghans and European nonprofit groups had paid for similar buildings. Louis Berger officials told journalists that their buildings took longer to build because they were required to train Afghan contractors to do the