The Quetta Shura Taliban has made Kandahar province and its capital, Kandahar City, primary objectives of their campaign in southern Afghanistan. Kandahar is also the birthplace of the Taliban movement, and the historical powerbase of the family of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
—Carl Forsberg, The Taliban’s Campaign for Kandahar, 2009
The twin-engine turboprop steadily descended out of the flawless blue sky on our approach to Kandahar City. Scattered clouds streaked the sky above. Gradually the mountains of Uruzgan and Zabul Provinces fell behind, and the hills of Kandahar, jagged and wind worn, rose from the flat desert floor. The land reflected infinite shades of brown, dashed with rectangles of green where fields clustered near streambeds and canals.
A large blue lake flashed by. Pooled behind the Dahla Dam, the lake provides water for almost a million people in Kandahar Province. Then Kandahar City slid past the right wing, tiny cars and motorcycles filling the main streets that cut through neighborhoods of compounds, each nestled behind thick walls. The city is flanked to the west by a line of hills that divide the urban area from the rural western districts of the province.
The plane lowered its flaps, dropped its landing gear, and lined up for Kandahar Airfield. Visible beyond the left wing, forty miles to the east, Pakistan lay behind another line of hills jumbled like a mass of waves rolling in from the Himalayas.
We descended the last few thousand feet over green grape vineyards and fallow fields. The plane swept low over a highway that led to Pakistan. We thumped hard onto the runway, the plane braking as we rolled past lines of dusty military helicopters, fighters, and transport planes on adjoining aprons.
Kandahar Airfield, better known as KAF, holds the distinction of being the world’s busiest military airfield. A kind of civilization of its own, it lay fifteen kilometers southeast of Kandahar City. It rivaled the Afghan metropolis, being a very American city covered in thick Afghan dust. The airfield was built around Kandahar International Airport, a grand title for a dusty runway and terminal building built in the 1960s as a way station for propeller airliners on the Tehran-to-Delhi route. Even before its completion the airport was obsolete, modern jets passing miles above.
Settling into dusty irrelevance, the airport was resurrected by the American invasion in 2001. During the seven years previous to our team’s arrival it had become a metropolis, a boomtown, and testimony to the ever-expanding war effort. KAF was a sprawling monstrosity of modular housing, domed metal workshops, dusty asphalt roads, tents, and the bustle of tens of thousands of people running and servicing the war in southern Afghanistan.
We stepped off the plane and into 85-degree sunshine on a ramp owned by the U.S. embassy. The State Department maintained its own air fleet. Vietnam-era Hueys lined up with rotors pointing crookedly at the sky beside a Russian-built Mil transport helicopter and two old CH-46 Sea Knight twin-rotor helicopters painted in State’s special gray-and-blue livery, also Vietnam vintage.
We and our bags were whisked by minivan to the government civilian compound, past military crews laboring over helicopters in various stages of loading and unloading, some with their cowlings open and engines exposed for maintenance. Hundreds of helicopters baked in the sun, most closed up and empty.
At the civilian office we checked in with staff. Regional Platform South, which accommodated civilian government employees who lived and worked in three prefabricated, two-story buildings, was tucked inside a tall wire fence.
The civilian buildings occupied a corner of a sprawling compound that housed the military headquarters. In previous years the embassy staff had worked in a drab, green-painted wooden building closer to the military. Now the hulking white prefabs of RP South represented a step up and a step away from the military’s purview, as the enclosure was inside a tall wire fence and sported its own entrance to the rest of KAF. Inside the Platform the linoleum on the floors was clean and free of dust, and the office doors were uniform and trim.
Regional Platform South complemented the military’s headquarters, known as Regional Command South. Never mind that the military had something approaching thirty thousand people in the south and the civilians numbered around two hundred sprinkled across the bases in Kandahar and three other provinces. The point was that the civilians were making an “equal” effort, and the military surge troops were being matched by equivalent civilians.
The Platform was organized into functional specialties, some people working on governance, others on agriculture and economics, or infrastructure, health, or education. Oddly the whole setup was almost exactly replicated about twelve miles away in downtown Kandahar City, where civilians and their military counterparts worked at another coalition base. There the Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) worked with Afghan ministries inside the city, covering the same subject areas and generally feuding with the people assigned to similar jobs at KAF.
Shown to our temporary accommodation trailers, we were released and told to be on hand for the next morning’s briefing. Inevitably daily life at KAF revolved around meetings, usually with other Americans and sometimes with other Americans at the PRT. Few KAF personnel, with some exceptions, met regularly with Afghans in the ministries in Kandahar City. Encouragingly the women in charge of health and education interacted with the Afghans—the only way to learn how Afghanistan worked.
Two of us from my training class remained at KAF for a few days to process in before heading to other areas. A third newbie would be based at KAF permanently.
In our downtime we strolled around KAF. The compound was located a short distance from the central quadrangle the Canadians had constructed of wood when they took control of Kandahar five years earlier. Called the boardwalk, it contained shops and fast-food restaurants, with coffee shops, a French-style bakery and deli, a German military exchange, as well as a fully stocked TGI Fridays and a KFC. Off-duty soldiers and a ragtag assortment of civilians in sunglasses and baseball hats strolled the boardwalk at all times of the day and night. Inside the quadrangle the Canadians had built a concrete-floored street hockey rink, complete with professional-looking boards. Matches between teams of sweating soldiers in an assortment of sports clothes were held before cheering crowds.
The surrealism of KAF was enhanced because of its disconnect in space, time, and outlook from the surrounding countryside, as nearby hills loomed over the hockey and volleyball games. A tall wire fence separated KAF from nearby villages, and the feel and flavor of the place was American. Third-country-national staff hired from Manila, Delhi, or one of a dozen other locales ran the dining halls and did most of the basic labor around the base. The atmosphere was determinedly American.
All day and every day jet fighters blasted off from the runway or screamed across the sky, making tight turns at a thousand feet to slow down and line up for landing.
Insurgent rockets occasionally impacted inside the vast base. People queuing for hamburgers in the dining halls might hear an alert and crouch down, waiting for a rocket to land, usually out of earshot. Minutes later they would go back to the buns and Heinz ketchup. The rockets arrived about four times a month but failed to bring the full reality of Afghanistan onto the base itself. Causing a minor trickle of casualties, they seemed like an unwelcome visitation from a war movie rather than an act of war itself.
KAF’s boardwalk was a tenacious outcrop of American life, but in the years before our team arrived it almost didn’t survive. The previous year the U.S. Army commander, General Stanley McChrystal, and his command sergeant major had taken issue with the “soft” life provided by the fast-food joints and knickknack shops. In his memoir McChrystal said he was disturbed that soldiers in the most forward bases worked without respite while those in the rear at KAF had it easy. He ejected Burger King, Subway, and a few pizza places from the boardwalk.
Six months later the army backpedaled. The “no-fun” policy was scrapped and fast-food joints reopened, with some official mutterings that a tight supply situation on the road from Pakistan had required the shutdown. This reasoning was viewed, widely and correctly, as mealy-mouthed subterfuge. I never met a forward-based soldier who hated the fast-food joints at KAF; they just hated KAF and viewed it as a bastion of rear-echelon people who contributed little to the war effort.
Our stopover in KAF lasted a week. I had been assigned to a half dozen districts by the time I reached KAF. Now I would be going to Dand, a small rural district just south of Kandahar City and just over the rise of hills to the west of KAF. Home to almost seventy-five thousand people, just one American and one Canadian civilian staffed the district. The U.S. guy had already left Dand, heading home, and we overlapped by about forty-eight hours at KAF.
Keith Pratt, a man with a weatherbeaten farmer’s face and piercing eyes, resembled a slimmed-down Santa Claus, complete with bushy beard. He blended well with the beard-wearing rural Afghans. The beard disappeared as he transitioned out.
Keith was opinionated and didn’t mind making waves. Unpopular in some offices at KAF, he was popular with the Afghans in Dand who saw in Keith someone who would fight for their interests. Keith was running a particularly sharp feud with an adjoining office named the Stabilization Unit, and he related the details with gusto.
Now firmly assigned to Dand, I would fly out the next day. Matthew, from my training class, would be taken to the adjoining district, Panjwai, which was unstable and dangerous.
Our forty-year-old refurbished Sikorsky Sea King helicopter lifted off from KAF and clattered its way fifteen miles west from KAF toward Dand. We flew past the jutting brown hills, looped up past Kandahar City. As we entered Dand we saw scattered villages, each surrounded by fields of yellow wheat and green grapes. Smoke climbed wispily from tall chimney stacks.
The big helicopter circled and descended to a small military base near a road junction. Military tents surrounded by gravel occupied one side of the base; a cluster of white-painted concrete buildings took the other. The base in Dand was home to about one hundred soldiers.
The helicopter circled once, banked harder, and then flared as it crossed a double layer of fortifications to land with a bump on the gravel by the tents. I grabbed my bags and dashed off the helicopter’s ramp. The chopper lifted off, sprinkling the base with debris.
A tall guy dressed in short sleeves and old combat pants stepped forward, grabbed a bag, and headed past some shipping containers. We dumped my bags and footlocker in front of a small white “living container” with a big satellite dish on top. A few dusty green tents flapped limply in the breeze. I had arrived at my new home for the next year.