A year of living dangerously
Globe and Mail Update December 30, 2007
I started the year in January ducking mortar attacks from Sunni insurgents in Baghdad. I ended it in December, awakening to the explosion of Taliban rockets in Kabul.
Partly by chance, partly by choice, I had a front-row seat in the two main theatres of the so-called war on terror, as I filmed documentaries for the CBC. Through the dispassionate eye of the camera and the critical eye of the journalist, I came away shaken and saddened.
It’s the small things that strike you in war zones – the tiny triggers that hint all is not going according to the rosy plans and the positive media spin back home.
Embedded with American troops in a troubled neighbourhood in southeast Baghdad, I notice that, despite the gruelling sun, some of the Iraqi soldiers working alongside the U.S. forces wear ski masks. They fear being identified too closely with their erstwhile American allies and thereby becoming easy terror targets.
An Afghan National Army soldier keeps watch shortly before his patrol came under fire in the Taliban stronghold of Kolk in Zahri district, Kandahar province, southern Afghanistan, in November 15. (REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly)
In a chaotic traffic circle in the centre of Kandahar, I spot a Kalashnikov-toting policeman gripping a small knife in his right hand. A lot of good that will do him against a Taliban suicide bomb, I think. But then he stops a car with tinted windows and proceeds to use his little weapon to scrape off the lining inside the window. Presumably, that will make it harder for anyone to hide something suspicious inside the vehicle.
Not that it has helped much so far. Earlier this month, there were two suicide bombs along the main road in Kandahar.
I have chosen to live in the city, not behind the wire of the Canadian military base. Aided by a dark complexion, a newly grown beard and Afghan clothing, I can wander more or less freely in the streets with my local fixer, but we never spend more than 10 or 15 minutes in one place. For three days, I do not see the face of a single foreigner on the street – except when NATO soldiers race by in their well-protected convoys.
The irony is overwhelming. I am standing in the middle of the city that was the Taliban stronghold – and six years after they were driven from power, it is not safe for residents, much less Westerners.
Iraq was supposed to be the fiasco, Afghanistan the success story.
But, by the end of 2007, the streets of Baghdad are calmer than they have been in years, and Kandahar is teetering on the edge. Many fear the West largely abandoned Afghanistan to fight a misguided war in Iraq – and now the jihadist insurgencies are stronger in both countries.
When I was in Baghdad in January, there were 2,500 killings. Last month, there were 600. Better, but that’s still close to one every hour. In some cases, the violence has just moved elsewhere: In recent months, more than 40 women have been murdered in Basra – where the British have withdrawn – because they failed to conform to the harsh standards of the Islamist hard-liners who rule the city.
I came to see that, in war, you can’t always choose your enemy, but you can choose your ally. Choose wisely, because your allies can be as deadly as your enemies.
In Iraq, the Americans have bought a window of stability by buying off the Sunnis – funnelling money to armed Sunni community patrols. The Americans see them as a kind of neighbourhood watch; the Shiites see them as thugs and former insurgents. That’s more than a bit ironic, because the Shia-dominated government propped up by Washington for the past five years was widely condemned for human-rights abuses against the Sunni population.
In Afghanistan, the awkward allies are the warlords – the corrupt governors, drug barons and regional power brokers who are tightly enmeshed with the beleaguered government of President Hamad Karzai. “It’s not unusual to have to deal with people you call former warlords,” then-defence minister Gordon O’Connor said in late 2006 when questioned about Canadian military contracts to people of dubious character. “That’s the way it is in Afghanistan.”
The way it is, perhaps. But isn’t the Canadian mission in Afghanistan about the way it should be?
“Get rid of the warlords, you get rid of the Taliban,” Ehsanullah Ehsan, the Afghan-Canadian Community Centre director, told me over supper in Kandahar, perhaps somewhat simplistically. “You can’t use the warlords to fight the Taliban. They are helping the Taliban.”
Ehsan should know. He runs a school – largely financed by private Canadian donations – for 400 Kandahar young adults, half of them women. That has earned him death threats from the Taliban.
He is all too used to religious extremism. But what enrages him is how the bribery and shakedowns by the warlords are driving people away from an inept government that cannot even deliver electricity – much less security and justice – for more than a few hours a day. “I fear for my country much more now than ever before,” Ehsan says.
I will return to Kandahar in January, amidst warnings the security situation continues to deteriorate. Who knows where I will be next December. Who knows where the world will be by then, either, but I doubt it will be any safer.
This, indeed, has been a year of living dangerously – not for me but for the world. Unlike most civilians caught in the murderous crossfire of these wars, I am always only a plane ticket away from escape.
But there is no escape for the citizens of Kandahar or Baghdad. And no escape for the rest of us from the consequences of our military blunders and political blindness.
Julian Sher is an investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker.