Uprooting an Afghan Village.
There are times in a village's life when it must buckle down, to bear a blistering drought or withstand a fatal famine. There are times when a village morphs, swallowing newcomers or losing residents to the city lights. And then, there are even times when a whole village decides to pack up and leave.This is what happened to the Afghan village of Garloch. To find out why, you'd have to travel deep into the Pashtun countryside, through the sweeping, verdant valleys of the eastern province of Laghman. You'd have to climb the craggy, unpaved road of a shallow hillside. You'd then need to find your way to a makeshift camp, built from tarpaulin and sienna-colored mud, and find a certain one-eyed village <pres:italics>malek</pres:italics> , or chief, called Hazrat.
"Many of my tribesman have decided to leave Afghanistan," the malek tells me, as we sit in a room with bare cement walls. Dozens of tribal elders from Garloch, turbaned and wrinkled, are gathered here, and nod in agreement.
Several months ago, in the early dawn hours, as villagers were stirring from sleep and starting their morning prayers, American choppers descended on them. Hundreds of soldiers cordoned the village and began a house-to-house search. The Americans threw grenades at the gates of some homes, the malek tells me, and smashed the locks of doors. They tied some villagers' hands behind their backs and dragged them across the ground. They shouted, "Don't move or we'll kill your" The whole operation took some six hours. After finishing, they sped away on those choppers.
The Americans claim there were gunshots as they left. The villagers deny it. Regardless, American bombers swooped by the village just after the soldiers left and dropped payload on one house. It belonged to Hajji Qadir, a pole-thin, wizened old man who was hosting more than forty relatives for a wedding party. The bomb split the house in two, killing sixteen, including twelve from Qadir's family, and wounding scores more. He shows me the mementos of that day: a chalky-white shard of concrete, a mangled sliver of metal, a smiling toddler, his eyes daubed with kohl, his foot missing. The malek went to the province's governor and delivered a stern warning: protect our villagers or we will turn against the Americans.
M any across the Pashtun hinterlands already have, and this might be President Obama's biggest challenge as he sends tens of thousands more troops to this embattled nation. Frequent civilian casualties and house raids have incensed the rural Pashtuns.
"Everybody knows that more troops mean more targets" and "less troops mean less civilian casualties," says Muhammad Janan, a government official in Wardak province.
Civilian casualties jumped by almost 40 percent in 2008, according to the United Nations, and Western and allied Afghan forces were responsible for nearly half of them.
"The Americans are acting like the Russians," says Kako Jan, a farmer from Kandahar province. "They are bombing villages and killing innocents."
Anwal Khan, a tribal leader from Logar province, warns that "if Obama sends more troops, we will have no choice but to stage protests."
And protests are indeed becoming commonplace. Consider one typical four-week stretch in early spring. Two thousand angry protesters blocked the main highway in Logar province, firing their weapons in the air, in protest of an American night raid. A week later, in southern Ghazni province, nearly 500 demonstrated against an alleged raid by NATO troops from Poland that damaged a mosque. The following week, villagers blocked the path of an American military convoy in the eastern province of Khost, hurling stones and chanting "Death to America" to protest a raid that locals claim killed civilians. In the fourth week, hundreds of protesters hurled stones and some fired at American troops in Logar province.
Not all Afghans are opposed to a buildup, however. In the serene northern provinces, where the Taliban are few and the troops even fewer, the locals favor more boots on the ground--in the south. The north consists mostly of ethnic minorities, such as the Tajiks and the Hazaras, who are staunchly opposed to the Pashtun-dominated Taliban.
But in the war-ravaged Pashtun south, anti-troop sentiment has grown to such an extent that it has sparked lawmakers from these areas to speak out against an escalation. In the spring, a group of nearly fifty members of parliament formed a working group aimed at blocking the troop increase. The move is purely symbolic: The Afghan government has no control over foreign deployments. But it resonates with the politicians' constituencies.
"The people of my district are 100 percent against the coming of new troops," explains parliamentarian Roshanak Wardak.
Those opposed to the troops aren't necessarily for the Taliban. This was the case in Garloch village. After the American bombing that killed more than a dozen of his villagers, malek Hazrat paid a visit to the governor of Laghman province and demanded an explanation.
"I told him that the Americans say your village is harboring insurgents," Governor Meshal Lutfallah recalls.
It was true. There were two Taliban guerrillas living in the village, and the malek returned home and confronted the insurgents.
"Don't be a coward and hide amongst civilians," he told the Talibs. "If you want to fight Americans, go down south and leave us alone."
Under pressure from the malek and the rest of the community, the pair of insurgents eventually left. The problem, the malek told his grieving neighbors, was over.
But then, twenty-seven days later, in the inky hours just after dawn, the Americans came back. Choppers landed in a field, and the villagers, with the last attack flesh on their minds, fled in panic. Soldiers fired into the melee, killing a couple of shepherds and a woman. They then cordoned off the village, and once again did a house-to-house search. They smashed locks and exploded doors, the villagers say. The Americans deny that the incident ever took place. But the people of Garloch swear by it. And from then on, whenever a helicopter buzzed by, they ran in terror into their homes.
One night, two months later, the Americans returned once more to Garloch, in what commanders later said was an attempt to target nearly 100 insurgents in the area. But instead, they killed 200 sheep. Laghman police chief Abdul Karim Omaryar told reporters the next day that "U.S. forces under a NATO-led international drive against terrorism attacked sheep." The headline of a local news outlet read: "This Time Sheep Mistaken as Enemy Combatants." The locals, many of whom were herdsmen, erupted in fury and dropped the eviscerated carcasses in front of the governor's house in protest.
V illages like Garloch are small settlements that dot the many isolated valleys of Laghman. Life here is austere, without running water or electricity, and no hospitals for miles. The closest town is a two-hour drive over a rock-studded, unpaved road. That town is the provincial capital, Mehter Lam, a cluster of lively streets, crammed with vendors and rickshaws. The American military strategy has been oriented toward towns like Mehter Lam, and the main U.S. base is nearby. More than 4,000 Afghans live there, a lion-sized figure compared to other towns in the region. But only a tiny fraction of Laghman's population lives in such urban areas.
The Americans have brought over a mindset from Iraq, a largely urban society where battles were won and lost in the cities. But in Afghanistan the fight is in the villages. Nothing short of troops in every major village--amounting to hundreds of thousands in total--could have a positive effect, according to counterinsurgency wisdom. But more boots on the soil, the villagers will be eager to tell you, will mean more house raids and more aerial raids, since those usually accompany fighting on the ground.
The only experience most rural villagers have of the Americans comes through nighttime raids or the occasional daytime patrols. The Taliban, on the other hand, are embedded in the countryside. To win over the locals, they are following a sort of guerrilla-style carrot-and-stick policy. They rule through fear, targeting anyone even remotely connected to the government. They distribute "night letters," threatening documents that warn the recipient against working for nongovernmental organizations or the government. One letter, delivered to a local in Kunar province, states, "You are requested to forbid your family members, such as your sister, from going to" work for a nongovernmental organization. "Otherwise the consequences will be the same as for your friend" (whom the Taliban had killed).
When an American patrol moves into a village, Taliban informants often watch who speaks to the soldiers. Once the patrol leaves, the guerrillas emerge and question the villagers. Recently in Wardak province, for example, two children were seen practicing their fledgling English with American soldiers. Once the soldiers left, the Taliban captured and executed the pair.
In some cases, though, the villagers turn to the insurgents to adjudicate disputes, or to capture criminals. The Taliban practice a rough-and-ready justice, cutting off the hands of thieves and shooting adulterers. They have a reputation for being much less corrupt than the venal government. And as the war intensifies, many Pashtuns are waxing nostalgic for the days when the Taliban ruled, when there was no war or insecurity in the Pashtun lands.
"This whole country is a mess," says a police officer from Kabul province. "Mullah Omar was the greatest ruler this country ever had. We had peace in the south then."
But this message might not resonate with the locals of Laghman. In October of 2008, outside of Kandahat city, the Taliban stopped a bus full of Laghman locals on their way to find work in Iran and systematically killed twenty-seven, beheading some of them. In Laghman, hundreds demonstrated outside of the governor's mansion, shouting "Death to the Taliban!" So malek Hazrat approached the government, not the Taliban, for protection. He demanded that the Americans' raids must be stopped, or all the residents of Garloch would leave for Pakistan. President Hamid Karzai called and assured the malek that he had spoken to the Americans and that the people of Garloch would be safe from now on. So the malek returned to his village and announced that there would be no more attacks.
But he was wrong. A few weeks later, the Americans returned, in the blackness of the night. As they approached a home, a dog started yawping and growling. They shot the dog. One of the villagers, thinking a thief was lurking about, ran outside and shouted. The soldiers quickly shot and killed him. The slain man's younger brother ran outside with a gun and fired into the darkness, while calling for his neighbors to help. The soldiers answered with a barrage of bullets, killing the man and his mother, who had been peering outside. A pair of children who witnessed the scene say that the soldiers tied the three dead bodies together, dragged them into a room and then planted explosives.
"After the explosion," says one villager, "we couldn't find their bodies anywhere. All we found was the mother's leg."
A neighbor, an old man, emerged from the next house as the shots were being fired, holding an oil lamp. The soldiers shot him. His son ran out to find his father's body slumped to the ground. The soldiers then shot him, too. Sometime during this siege, the old man's nephew was killed as well, but no one knows how exactly. The next morning, the nephew's body was found hanging from a tree. He may have falsely informed the Americans of insurgents in the area and earned the villagers' retribution, but no one can say for sure.
In all, seventeen were killed that night. The Americans announced that the seventeen were all militants, and they deny hanging anyone. But the villagers were able to produce photos of dead civilians, bruised and discolored women and old men. And nearly a dozen villagers attest that they saw the hanging body and helped cut it down.
The villagers erupted once more in fury. "I don't give a shit about your roads and schools," the malek shouted, in a message to the United States. "I want safety for my family." Hundreds surrounded the governor's mansion in Mehter Lam. The governor emerged and tried to calm the crowd, but the protestors hurled stones at him. The people of Garloch, distrustful of the Taliban and angry with the government, decided only one course of action remained: to leave.
So they left. They trekked, sheep and children in tow, across the long stretch of crabgrass and gravel that is the only road out of the village. Some erected a makeshift camp near the provincial capital. Many others, however, left for Pakistan. And quickly, large parts of Garloch became a ghost town. Sometimes a villager would get the urge to go back. Matiullah, a young farmer, tried this, but upon his return he saw a dog roaming about, holding a human hand in its clenched teeth. He promptly turned back.
Malek Hazrat lives in the new camp, which the villagers call Garloch. Residents of this "New Garloch" are still fearful, dreading the nights and watching the skies. So they, too, are planning to head to Pakistan. But on the day I meet him, in that room with bare cement walls, he is more interested in talking about the Americans than Pakistan. He says he is against, with all of his heart, the arrival of new troops. But if they must come, he hopes they will learn from their mistakes. And if they arrive in Laghman, he says, he hopes they will come to understand why a whole village had, one day, decided to pack up and leave.
<pres:italics>Illustration by Jeremy Traum</pres:italics>
<pres:italics>Anand Gopal, a Kabul-based journalist, covers the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Read his dispatches at www.anandgopal.com. </pres:italics>
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| Publication: | The Progressive |
|---|---|
| Article Type: | Essay |
| Geographic Code: | 9AFGH |
| Date: | Jun 1, 2009 |
| Words: | 2312 |
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