The overstretched Canadians began to concentrate on a smaller geographical area around Kandahar City in the spring of 2009. Having pulled out of Panjwai, the Canadian battle group announced in April 2009 its plans to secure a small number of villages in the Dand district, on the southern edge of Kandahar City, where support for the government was stronger, and then to concentrate development aid on these villages.
—Carl Forsberg, The Taliban’s Campaign for Kandahar, 2009
The metrics of success aren’t how many enemy troops you kill.
—Fred Kaplan, The Insurgents, 2013
Near the crossroads of two paved roads are about twenty family compounds standing shoulder to shoulder, their high mud walls almost touching. This is the little village of Deh Bagh, a small settlement of a thousand farmers on the southern fringes of Kandahar City, where the urban sprawl gives way to open fields.
Near the crossroads sits an unused high school where one day in May 2011 a group of ragged kids climbed a blue-painted jungle gym and played on the swings. A tiny bazaar of a dozen shops occupies another corner of the crossroads, a bakery sits at the third, and a mosque stands at the fourth.
Next to the high school is the center of government for Dand District. Every American calls the district center the DC or DDC, for Dand District Center. In the military system of acronyms, the district governor becomes the DG and the district chief of police is the DCOP (pronounced D-cop).
The DC is a concrete oasis of modernity amid the somber tans and browns of the mud-walled village. The DC’s white paint reflects the sunshine brightly. Next to it stand two slightly shabbier buildings: the old district center, which is hardly used, and the DCOP’s poorly maintained police headquarters.
Dand is made up of widely scattered villages where farmers eke out a living by growing grapes, pomegranates, wheat, and vegetables. By the time I arrived in Dand in May 2011 the district had been effectively pacified, except for areas along the fringes to the north and southwest, where soldiers drove cautiously and occasionally hit large bombs. The Taliban skirted the district, infesting the fringes, and it still maintained a hold in Panjwai, the district next door. Dand had not been pacified for long.
In 2009 when the Canadians first redirected resources from across the province into Dand, they concentrated on Deh Bagh village. It became their model village. Stabilizing Deh Bagh was the first step to pacifying the entire district. They commissioned a Canadian NGO to make an agricultural survey of the village, and the consultants suggested improving agriculture and coming up with alternative businesses to boost the farmers’ incomes. The Canadians planned to expand that idea over the entire district.1
Despite the new resources, security remained poor for a more than a year. A favorite tactic of the insurgents was to use the homemade improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, that would explode when a person or vehicle moved over an electrified switch, detonating a jug of low-tech explosives. That year and the next, patrols regularly ran into IEDs. Canadian and American soldiers drove gingerly along the dirt roads, and they walked warily through fields and along irrigation dikes. The rattle of small-arms fire sounded routinely as security vehicles rolled across the landscape.
Slowly the district improved. In fact 2009 was not the lowest point. In 2007, when DG Nazak arrived, he inherited a district controlled by insurgents. The district center in Deh Bagh had a siege mentality, and the new DG was beleaguered.
“When I first got to Dand, the Taliban were all over the place,” Nazak recalled. “Gorgan, Malajat, Nakadak—the Taliban were everywhere. So I asked the people what their problems were and went from there.”
The Taliban had come back strongly since the American invasion. In 2001 the Taliban fled from Kandahar Province, heading northward and eastward away from the advancing U.S. Special Forces and the Afghan leaders Hamid Karzai and his local rival, Gul Agha Sherzai, a tribal chief and former governor of Kandahar. People welcomed the change of regime. But over time the Taliban slowly recovered and regrouped, living just over the Pakistani border in the cities of Chaman and Quetta. The Pakistanis helped the Taliban reorganize and push fighters back across the border, often pressing reluctant former Talib commanders back into the fray.
Meanwhile U.S. Special Forces and the Afghan government missed opportunities to recruit onto their own side former Taliban leaders who had given up the war, often persecuting them instead.2 Corruption set in under Gul Agha Sherzai’s rule in Kandahar, and people became disenchanted with the government’s inability to bring positive change to many rural villages. As the government and the security forces lost their halo of goodwill in the countryside, slowly the Taliban grew stronger and pushed in from their Pakistani bases, recruiting as they went.
For the first few years after 2001 Kandahar was quiet, NGOs operated freely, and life improved as health care and education ramped up. But then the number of insurgent attacks began to rise in the province and across the south and east.
Across Afghanistan the lengthening casualty lists reflected the rising number of attacks; 57 foreign soldiers had died in 2003, but by 2007 foreign forces had lost 232 service members.3 Worse, insurgents turned increasingly to laying IEDs, often using techniques learned in Iraq to make the explosions more deadly. The IEDs took an increasing toll. As the years passed the attacks continued to accelerate. In August 2008 the number of attacks per month was under fourteen hundred, but a year later that figure had jumped to twenty-five hundred. A report by DFID, the international development agency for the United Kingdom, noted in late 2008 that across the country “the security situation is rapidly deteriorating.”4
The American military was also pessimistic. In September 2009 General Stanley McChrystal argued that forty thousand more troops should be sent to Afghanistan to stabilize the worsening situation. Otherwise, he stated bluntly, the war could be lost. According to McChrystal, “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months)—while the Afghan insurgency matures—risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”5
In 2007 DG Nazak stepped into the middle of this rising tide of insurgent violence. He had few police in Dand and less money, and he lived out of a small, shabby district center in the middle of some fields in Deh Bagh.
Many of the villages where the Taliban held sway were in the southern areas of the district and hard to reach. These were the poorest villages in the district and were in a particularly dry area where Keith Pratt had wanted to dig deep wells and grow alfalfa. In 2007 the insurgents relied on these villages for food, accommodations, and information. It was thus vital to get the farmers on the side of the newly arrived governor. But the spread-out nature of the district made it difficult to gain a critical mass of support among these farmers, who rarely ventured far from their villages.
Worse still, Afghan security forces in Dand suffered from divided loyalties between the two rival tribes that lived in the district.
The rising number of attacks of the recent past and the district’s historical experience suggested the security forces would not do well. During the Soviet presence insurgents operating in Dand had overrun a Communist base at Deh Bagh village, killing fifty government soldiers. The Soviets had rarely pushed into the heart of Dand, and when they had they had not stayed long.
In one operation in 1985 the Soviets tried to kill a group of mujahidin leaders meeting in the village of Rumbasi, about ten kilometers along the road leading from Deh Bagh to Panjwai. Flights of troop-carrying helicopters and helicopter gunships swooped in to cut off the village, while more Soviets in armored vehicles pushed down from Kandahar City to sweep up the remaining insurgents.
It was a stiff fight. Trapped, the mujahidin skillfully fired on the encircling soldiers, trying to break out. According to an after-action report written by the Soviet commander, as the armored vehicles approached, “the enemy opened up with interlocking, integrated small arms fire which did not let the main body approach the village. . . . Mujahidin who tried to withdraw out of Rumbasi to Ruvabad were cut down by fire from our first lift.”6
In this encounter one hundred mujahidin died, and they lost thirty weapons. But the Soviet victory was short-lived, as the battalion immediately withdrew to Kandahar City, ceding the ground to the insurgents. Dand would continue to be a sharp thorn in the side of the Communists throughout the Soviet intervention.
So when Nazak arrived as district governor, he faced headwinds that suggested to any farmer the insurgents would be hard to beat. Few farmers would want to align themselves with the side more likely to lose, and this put the wind even more strongly in the sails of the Taliban.
Nazak faced a dilemma. Every day that passed with no progress would diminish the influence of the young and untested governor. His sole previous experience in government was as a simple village elder. It was not immediately obvious whether the appointment of the twenty-eight-year-old as district governor would be a success. So Nazak needed to do something immediately to pull the locals into his orbit. While he could defend the district center, it would be difficult to win people over to his side if he simply remained there and exerted little power in the villages. Yet if he overreached and suffered a defeat, he would lose much of his reputation even before he was established. He needed a plan to maximize his limited influence and resources.
Nazak set about exploiting the few advantages he had. Dand is the historic home of the Karzai family; the family village, Karz, lies in the northeast corner of the district. It is also the base of the Sherzais, an equally influential family whose most prominent son was Gul Agha Sherzai, the local strongman who took the post of provincial governor with the support of U.S. Special Forces in late 2001 after Hamid Karzai was appointed national leader. Sherzai had been governor before the Taliban took over in 1994. More than 60 percent of the people in Dand belong to the tribes of these two prominent government families, a circumstance that offered a natural opposition to the Taliban and was one of the few advantages Nazak held.
Nazak was concerned that the Taliban shadow governor controlled more of the district than he did. In effect Nazak’s radius of control around the district center was about as far as a gun would fire.
According to Nazak, he knew the Taliban shadow governor’s name was Hekmatullah and that he lived in Nakadak, a village about halfway between the district center and the desert in the south.
Nazak heard that Hekmatullah would go to prayers at a mosque in Nakadak every Friday. One night Nazak gathered up his six bodyguards, drove the six miles toward Nakadak, crossing the wide Tarnak River on the way, and approached the mosque as darkness fell. Coincidentally a wedding party was making its way past Nakadak. Nazak slipped his car into the line of revelers for cover. At the right moment the governor’s car slipped away from the wedding convoy and parked near the mosque. Nazak stationed his men near the mosque and walked inside.
Prayers were under way and Hekmatullah was bent over in prayer with the other men. According to Nazak, he, too, bent over and joined the service, kneeling a few feet behind Hekmatullah.
The prayers continued. At last the mullah finished, and Nazak rose quickly. He called out for everyone to stay put, saying, “I am looking for a district governor! The Taliban district governor! Who is that? I am the real district governor! He or I will die!”
Hekmatullah stared at Nazak as he spoke. Nazak relates this tale with gusto, his eyes shining as he speaks. Afghan culture is based on tales of personal power and strength, but even allowing for hyperbole it was a striking thing to do. Nazak’s six men were miles from assistance back at the DDC, so it was a high-stakes gamble.
As it happened, no one died that night. Nazak, having made his point, beat a hasty retreat. He and his men, afraid of getting shot in their car on the way back to the district center, elected to walk the two miles north to the Tarnak River, and they didn’t stop until they reached the district center four miles beyond the river later that night.
The first roll of the dice in the war to oust the Taliban governor had paid off. Nazak survived and improved his reputation.
Several nights later Nazak repeated his exploit. He took his handful of men and pushed across the Tarnak River again, this time going farther south. They went to a town called Gorgan, where they read out a list of names of the Taliban sympathizers. They announced they knew who these men were, and they would be watching for them. Nazak warned, “Don’t ask for projects from me if you support the Taliban.” They departed, again reaching the district center safely.
Chancing his luck a third time, Nazak and his men again drove south of the Tarnak River, this time stopping in Chuplanay, a village near Nakadak. Arriving at night, Nazak delivered the same message, calling on people to stop supporting the Taliban. He and his men gave their short speech to the startled residents, who could scarcely believe that the newly installed district governor was pushing into areas far from the district center.
The lightning-strike visits were a clever stratagem. They showed Nazak could get into any village in the district, even in the south. His presence punctured the image of Taliban control. And it cost relatively little. In each village Nazak said the same thing: don’t work with the Taliban; work with me and get projects. Supporting the Taliban will lead to nothing. It is time to switch sides. Nazak said the visits took the initiative away from the Taliban, calling into question their control over the district.
More clandestine visits to villages in the south followed. Nazak and his men were never caught. Eventually, as security began to improve and more forces flowed in, Hekmatullah traveled to Pakistan and didn’t return.
Nazak had begun the long road to taking the district back, but he needed the support of the Canadians. When they had first arrived in southern Afghanistan in 2005, the Canadians tried to hold a score of districts, an impossible task. Gradually Canadian responsibilities narrowed to three districts: Dand, Panjwai, and Daman. The Americans took over elsewhere.
Change in Dand came slowly. Throughout 2008 and early 2009 the Afghan police waged a back-and-forth fight with the Taliban. Eventually Canadian money began to flow more freely, funding two new mosques and a playground in Deh Bagh, as well as the cleaning of several irrigation ditches in 2008.7
In the spring of 2009 the Canadians transformed Deh Bagh into a model village, pouring in resources and sending agricultural experts to visit farmers in their mud compounds. That summer the Taliban counterattacked but were beaten back over two days of fighting. The government, its seat secure, expanded projects into additional villages.
U.S. combat forces strengthened the district, and by September 2010 the tide had turned. Taliban attacks dropped significantly.
People told Nazak they wanted security and projects. Nazak invited them to the district center, and he set about spreading police and projects throughout the district.
Money trickled first into the northern part of the district. It gradually spread south toward the arid zone in the south bordering the Reg Desert. Projects reached the villages where Nazak had pursued the Taliban shadow governor. More people appeared at the district center to ask for projects. The Canadians spent millions of dollars to support those requests.
More than three years after Nazak became governor of Dand, the situation in the villages had been transformed. The district became the most secure in Kandahar Province, with the people firmly on the side of the district governor. As security improved, Nazak’s stature grew, with the Taliban reduced to trying to ambush him on the road as he drove past in his armored Toyota. Twelve ambushes at the district center, on the road to Kandahar City, and at his home in the city failed to kill him.
When I arrived in May 2011, Nazak was a young man with influence beyond his years. Elders visited him in the district center every day, one group after another trooping into his office for hours on end, every day.
But on days when the elders filed into his office to sit on cushioned chairs and ask for his judgment about a family fight or a dispute over land with the neighbors, Nazak often got a wistful look in his eye. It was the look of someone enmeshed in routine, who has reached his goals, at least for the moment, and yet cannot help but remember past heroic moments. In their place was a political system Nazak had designed from scratch, one that was built upon the white-bearded elders who appeared at his office each day.