We know by painful experience that the Afghans are a people of a totally different character—turbulent—bred from infancy to the use of arms—and with a passion for independence in which they are exceeded by no people in this world. This love of independence is such as to make them intolerant, not only of foreign rule, but almost of any national, tribal or family rule. They are a people among whom every man would be a law unto himself.
—Sir George Campbell, The Afghan Frontier, 1879
The tall helpful guy was a Canadian development official named Antoine Huss. In his early thirties, with sun-bleached hair and a chiseled face that creased easily into a smile, Antoine served as the district political advisor appointed by coalition forces, officially titled the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). In Dand for almost a year he would depart in about six weeks. While Keith Pratt had concentrated on humanitarian projects and the economy, Antoine tried to improve the performance of the district sub-governor, Hamdullah Nazak, and keep Nazak’s relationship with ISAF running smoothly.1 Antoine spent hours each week teaching English to DG Nazak and advising him on relations with ISAF, villagers, and the provincial government. It helped that Antoine and Nazak were roughly the same age and shared a similar outlook on life.
Although a native of France, Antoine had moved to Canada and worked in a consular office before the tedium of processing passports and writing reports became too much to bear. He envisioned adventure in Afghanistan, obtained a position with the Canadian foreign office, and moved to Kandahar in 2010 after a brief stint in Mali. Wearing a light beard and clothes faded by a year of the blazing desert sun, Antoine was well known to Afghans throughout the district.
The year before Antoine’s arrival the Canadians had made a series of mistakes in Dand, the biggest one the appointment of a political advisor who rubbed DG Nazak the wrong way. A political advisor should help the DG to govern better and improve his work habits. The job can be a difficult balance, because the political advisor must implement policies formulated at higher levels of ISAF. Often the local Afghans are unimpressed with these ideas. The political officer then becomes the piggy in the middle.
The solution is for the political officer to make suggestions and to persuade and influence the Afghans but never to pressure them, which would place them in a subservient position from which they instinctively recoil. Antoine realized that cajoling and persuading would work far better than pressuring, and he solved this problem so neatly that DG Nazak consulted Antoine on almost everything of importance in the district.
The political advisor possesses several advantages, the most notable the fact that Afghans regard him as a potent status symbol, like a human Toyota SUV. The advisor’s mere presence proves that the governor is important enough to warrant a foreigner assigned solely to him. A political advisor is generally treasured by the DG, even more so if he can access money or development programs (a USAID officer has an automatic step up on this score). The smart advisor builds on this natural advantage.
Antoine’s Canadian predecessor had squandered this advantage and alienated DG Nazak with his brusque, dominant manner. Worse yet he pressured DG Nazak and his staff rather than influencing. Nazak complained the advisor wanted to run the district, expecting him as district governor to rubber-stamp ISAF’s ideas. DG Nazak felt sidelined within his own district center. “The Canadians told me to do things,” Nazak explained about that time. “So then I stayed outside at the clinic for ten days.”
Nazak protested by moving from his office inside the Dand District Center (DDC) to a small building outside the front gate that had once been used as a clinic. He refused to return until the advisor left. He also demanded the Canadian battle group strike its tents, which were then only a few yards away from the DDC, and move to a new base that would be built just outside the walls of the compound—which is how the gravel-covered military side of the combined base came into being.
With peace restored DG Nazak moved back into his office. Antoine arrived soon after, becoming DG Nazak’s best friend in ISAF and his most trusted advisor.
Nazak learned from this episode that ISAF could be defied if necessary. As security and governance in the district gradually improved and as Nazak gained experience, his leverage over ISAF steadily increased.
Antoine was personable and knowledgeable. He split the daily duties with Keith. Each day Antoine and Keith would walk through the gate separating the ISAF side of the base from the district center compound. Antoine would sit with the governor while Keith mentored the other staff, especially the director of agriculture.
Antoine lived in a white sheet-metal trailer next to mine. His trailer contained a desk and a bed. Mine had two desks, a bed, and a large metal box that housed the satellite receiver equipment. After we lugged in the footlocker filled with USAID-issued gear and my two bags from the helicopter, little space remained. I found that Keith had thoughtfully left a year’s supply of coffee, a deluxe brewing machine, and two CDs with files on all his activities.
One desk was mine and the other was used by the Afghan language assistant–cum-political advisor, Mohammad Zahir, who worked for the district support team (DST). A native of Kabul and in his early twenties, he was stocky and intelligent. He had worked for eight years for ISAF, mostly as a U.S. Army interpreter. Now assigned by the State Department to Dand, he kept the foreigners on our district support team out of trouble by advising us on Pashtun customs and etiquette even as he translated complicated Pashtu conversations into English and vice versa. When I arrived in May, Mohammad had been in the district for two months and was trusted by Nazak, which was invaluable as Antoine prepared to leave.
It didn’t take long to get settled into my little hooch. The metal container I lived in was located near the perimeter wall of the base and sported a single window. Standing on the wall, which was built of wire-mesh containers filled with dirt and stacked fourteen feet high, I could see every part of the base because the other side was only one hundred yards away. It took less than a minute to walk briskly from one side of the base to the other.
Originally named Strongpoint Edgerton by the Canadians, in memory of one of their soldiers who died in the vicinity, the base was later taken over by the U.S. Army and renamed Combat Outpost (COP) Edgerton. It housed about one hundred people who lived and worked in a dozen green army tents. With a Kuchi nomad camp located just outside in the desert dust, it was a sunnier version of a MASH unit. About a dozen Canadians, who mentored the police and managed projects, worked in the place. They would pull out at the same time Antoine departed.
A headquarters company of U.S. Army soldiers also lived on Edgerton. Three of its soldiers visited the district center daily. The rest of the soldiers, including a platoon of scout-snipers, ran the camp and spent a lot of time in the gym. On many evenings the scouts went out to snatch any Taliban unwary enough to live in Dand. A few stray civilians and military advisors rounded out the personnel.
The base was unlike the embassy and KAF, which were unhappy postings plagued with too many meetings, stifling bureaucracy, and a bar and pool that reminded the inmates of home but did little to cure homesickness. Our base was a small, Spartan prison behind fourteen-foot walls, well away from the pressures and demands of rear-echelon routine. Each day proved different, and being close to the Afghans meant you could see and interact with the people you were assigned to help. It was a happy base. Most people felt physically connected to the war, whether it was catching criminals and the Taliban or working alongside the Afghans. Paradoxically time in Dand slipped by easily with the countryside pressing in and America feeling incredibly remote; the experience at Edgerton felt authentic.
The advantage of living cheek by jowl with the district center became obvious. The morning commute took two minutes, and we could come and go unescorted, spending as much time there as we wanted. That day Antoine walked me over to the district center and showed me through the offices. The DDC was a large, two-story building paid for with Canadian money. It was just over a year old, with a blue stripe painted on the eaves and wire mesh over the windows. Faded red carpets lined the halls and framed photographs hung on the walls, memorializing school openings and VIP visits during the previous eighteen months.
More than twenty Afghan district staff occupied small offices in the building. First introductions felt a little bewildering, but the staff seemed friendly. Keith and Antoine were clearly liked and respected.
The Afghans sat at desks, many of which had computers and printers. I had seen a succession of district centers over the previous sixteen months, and almost none held any staff, let alone people working at desks. In the wilds of Zabul Province, in districts such as Atghar, Daechopan, or Arghandab, the offices stood empty and the district governors remained absent for months at a time. Many of the DGs, when they did appear, did almost no work. Just getting them to show up was an almost impossible task.
One of the most striking district centers was in Arghandab District in Zabul Province. Located in a remote mountain valley, it was a concrete building huddled behind high security walls with a guard tower at each of the four corners. The place resembled the set of an old movie on imperial soldiering, such as Beau Geste. The governor’s office was a room with a single desk shoved in the corner and a rug and pillows spread across the floor. The DG, Mohammad Afzel, was a well-fed Afghan of about forty-five. He said he wanted to help the people but had no resources. The Taliban had infiltrated the district center, which made it risky for local people to come and see him. Neither could he visit the villages because the Taliban were too strong and the Afghan security forces too weak. He was reluctant to place his life in the hands of his bodyguards from the Afghan National Police, confiding, “They just smoke hash. I don’t trust the ANP guys. They are a threat. I tell them to search houses, and they steal everything.”
From Arghandab the road to the provincial capital had been cut by the Taliban, so the villagers traveled along a back route through the hills. To get to the district the DG usually hitched a ride with the Afghan National Army soldiers, who made the journey once a month when their supplies ran low and cleared the road of bombs by hand using wooden poles. Consequently he spent most of his time in the provincial capital, Qalat, where he collected his pay and lay low. Governing ranked at the bottom of his list of priorities, and one could hardly blame him.
Here in Dand the staff seemed interested, competent, willing, and cheerful. They sat behind dusty Dell computers, some actually using them. Antoine explained the current priority was to get Internet into the building for the Afghan staff to use—his last goal before his departure, he said.
I met Mohammad Naseem, who held the portfolio for the Ministry of Reconstruction and Rural Development (MRRD). He also coordinated projects. Just getting into middle age and sporting a dyed beard and the stance of a boxer, he laughed a lot and seemed very happy to be there. He attended Kandahar University in his spare time. He had a computer on his desk that he tapped at constantly, producing reports for the provincial MRRD offices.
Naseem was also a former businessman who traveled widely in the region and as far as Greece and Turkey, and he had worked for several medium-sized companies. Now he received the government wage of about $250 a month, plus top-ups paid out by a new USAID program. I suspected he knew more about Afghan trade than most of the American economic advisors brought in at great expense to work at KAF. A colleague in his office, a Mr. Qayum, happily and quietly filled innumerable notebooks, allowing Naseem to take the spotlight and share jokes with ISAF people who came to the office for green tea each day.
The government advisor assigned to the district was Karim Kamin. Only twenty-one, Karim dressed well and spoke polished English. He, too, attended Kandahar University. His father ran the Ministry of Finance section in Kandahar City, so whenever funds failed to clear the bureaucracy in Kandahar, Karim could quickly determine the cause.
Ambitious and smart, Karim had grown up in Kandahar City. Given his pedigree, common sense, and his parents’ desire to see him married and following in their footsteps, he would likely spend his life advancing through the Afghan government bureaucracy. Technocrats were slowly coming to the fore in Afghanistan as universities took advantage of the booming economy and stable security in the cities to produce more graduates.
The education director in Dand, Abdul Ahad, had managed to open almost all the district’s schools, and he had twelve thousand students enrolled. Tall, unsmiling, reserved, and thin, he was a Barakzai tribal elder. His tribal status trumped that of his job. And while he earned only about $500 a month, his visitors young and old often bowed and kissed his hand.
Finally Antoine took me in to see DG Nazak. Thirty-three years old, Nazak, slender with the beginnings of a paunch, knew some English and had quick, sly eyes and an easy smile. Nazak held the reputation of a young man with a future. After setting up a national youth organization that brought him credibility with the power brokers of the province, he received an appointment as district sub-governor at the tender age of twenty-eight. He possessed obvious shrewdness and willpower. The success of Dand in tamping down the insurgency happened in large part due to his ability to manipulate the villagers and gain their support in the teeth of an armed opposition.
His youthfulness didn’t concern the Afghans. The historic father of the Afghan people, Ahmad Shah Durrani, had risen to prominence at a young age. A former chief bodyguard to the Persian shah, Ahmad Shah was twenty-eight years old when the shah was murdered. Under suspicion, young Ahmad fled with the other Afghan bodyguards back to Kandahar, where he became the leader of the southern Afghans in 1747. He ruled with an iron hand that unified the Pashtuns and made them a force to be reckoned with in a region of much stronger neighbors. Nazak’s strengths were considerable, and ISAF valued him because he got things done.
By the end of our visit I felt pleased that so many things seemed to be going right. A convivial atmosphere prevailed among the staff, who seemed to care about their responsibilities, and the foreigners appeared to get along well with the Afghans.
Work ceased at midday for lunch. By two o’clock the DDC emptied as people scattered to their homes in Kandahar City. No one lived at the DDC; everyone commuted. I was struck by how similar the place felt to the small-town government offices in central Massachusetts that I had covered as reporter. Dand had a similar combination of coziness, amateurishness, and cheerful competence. An underlying open-mindedness and willingness to learn felt refreshing too.
Back at the base we met the rest of the Americans. The infantry battalion occupied a nearby larger base. One of its companies worked at Edgerton in a tent with offices constructed out of plywood and two-by-fours shipped from the United States and nailed together to form cubicles and a few tables. Radios buzzed, two screens showed readouts attached to a camera mounted on a tall pole and focused outside the wire, and a moving map displayed nearby ISAF patrols. The soldiers worked cheek by jowl in a jumble of spare batteries, bullets, a rack of weapons, and old magazines devoted to coverage of hot rods and hunting. A few hand-painted signs from home adorned the walls. It was jumbled, but in its own way it was as cozy as the Afghan setup across the fence.
An officer from battalion headquarters, Captain Matt Kotlarski, ran the projects from the military end. What we couldn’t do with USAID money Matt Kotlarski paid for with military money, which the Canadians had already been doing for two years. With the Canadians heading home, Matt would be the only game in town when it came to military-funded projects. Luckily he lived on Edgerton along with a few other battalion headquarters soldiers charged with coordinating the Afghans, the police mentor team, and the battalion scouts.
Matt was dark-haired and fit, a long-distance runner and West Point graduate who hailed from Indiana. His time in the army was scheduled to conclude at the end of his tour, but he wanted to make things better before he rotated out. He saw Dand as a good place to make a mark, and he spent hours in the district center and behind his computer, writing contracts, finding contractors, and consulting with the Afghans and the battalion staff to make sure the details were right.
His boss, the battalion commander of 1-5 Infantry, was Lt. Colonel Brian Payne, a blunt and determined man with an army buzz cut. Medium height and early forties, Payne had an imposing but friendly presence, and with more than twenty years in the U.S. Army he acted as if this posting to a battalion command in a combat zone was the prize of his life. Married with four children, he openly drew parallels between his offspring and the Afghans and his subordinates, as if the rules governing his children back home applied universally. Smart and aggressive in doing whatever it took to improve Dand, he supported the Afghans and Nazak.
A man on a mission, Payne intended to get his soldiers out of Dand, which saw only sporadic insurgent activity, and into the more savage fight next door in the very unstable Panjwai District. He wanted to move his men as quickly as possible, but his five companies in Dand could not leave if the situation deteriorated. So he needed to help the U.S. civilians keep Dand stable while his soldiers left. He directed Matt Kotlarski to work with us to figure out how to keep the insurgents out with ever-fewer resources. He vowed to do whatever it took to make that happen.
That was the vision for Dand laid out at the Platform, where the goal was to begin to turn Dand over to the Afghans. It would be easy to work together, because our basic goals meshed. I had lucked out. No one at USAID had provided a blueprint of how to work with the military. Training provided us even less insight. We’d been told to “be nice and cooperate well.” Working closely with the military was key. The civilian plan and the military plan were interdependent, requiring mutual support. If the military and the civilians took off on different tangents while covering exactly the same ground, it could be potentially disastrous, as when DG Nazak moved out of the DDC and then kicked the Canadians off the base.
This lack of preparation for cooperation, or “civ-mil” in the jargon, was puzzling. It was especially so because the previous fall the U.S. government’s Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (known as SIGAR) had issued a report pinpointing several problems with this type of cooperation, noting that ISAF lacked a cohesive structure through which the military and civilians could work together. The report said that, in practice, the civilians and military tended to figure out how to work together once they arrived on the ground, for good or for ill, depending on the personalities involved. It noted that “civilian-military integration relies primarily on individual personalities.”2
So in this crapshoot we had hit a vein of very good luck with Brian Payne and Matt Kotlarski. Payne would consider anything that might keep Dand stable as he pulled his men out company by company and sent them to Panjwai, and he immediately made me his partner to ensure the Afghan government was supported during the transition. In weekly meetings held at the battalion base, which coordinated the companies, the headquarters, and other elements such as the police training team, he directed that I sit next to him and consulted me often as we considered different courses of action. No-nonsense and results oriented, Brian Payne was willing to back up his convictions with time, cash, and manpower to quickly achieve his long-term results.
By the end of day one in Dand the district looked promising, but the task would obviously be enormous: to improve the performance of the Afghan government and keep insurgents out as security forces departed. The number of civilian programs promised to begin dropping soon, too. At the same time, I faced a steep learning curve. Even while observing how the Afghan government really worked, I needed to develop plans to improve governance and the economy and to reinforce security to make the security gains irreversible, while also ensuring our plans accorded with the plans at the battalion and Platform.
To do all this we would mentor the Afghans and help them to improve governance by putting in a number of development or stabilization projects. The Afghan staff would learn to govern better the same way a college computer science student might learn to write code: by doing it. We would help them by using American money and then help them as they eventually started to govern using their own Afghan government money (at that time in very short supply). It was a rough blueprint.
Potential problems loomed. Memories of a tension-filled first meeting I had attended at KAF with Keith and two stabilization officials still lingered. They had butted heads over the way forward for Dand’s economy, adjourning after an hour in mutual disgust. I wondered when similar obstacles would begin to emerge for me and how long the honeymoon would last.
But first I had other things to worry about. We would need a civilian plan that would improve the Afghans’ staff, improve the economy of the district, and shore up security as American soldiers left for Panjwai.
In 2011 Dand experienced only scattered roadside bombs and firefights, but it had been an extremely violent place only a short time earlier and it could easily slide back into the abyss. No one wanted that to happen, least of all the local residents.