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Security Failing in Maiwand

Young love if you do not fall in the battle of Maiwand;

By God someone is saving you as a token of shame

—Legendary cry of Malalai at the Battle Maiwand, 1880

I ’eard the knives be’ind me, but I dursn’t face my man,

Nor I don’t know where I went to, ’cause I didn’t ’alt to see,

Till I ’eard a beggar squealin’ out for quarter as ’e ran,

An’ I thought I knew the voice an’—it was me!

—Rudyard Kipling, “That Day,” 1896 poem about the Battle of Maiwand

Maiwand District occupies a special place in the hearts of the Afghan people, being the scene of one of their greatest victories over the British Empire. The defeat of the British at Maiwand in 1880, during which 969 British and Indian soldiers died, is the Afghans’ second-greatest triumph after the defeat of the British army in the retreat from Kabul in 1842, when most of the invaders were wiped out.

During the Second Afghan War the British pushed into Maiwand, where they built a fort in the center of the district. In July 1880 the British dispatched a force of twenty-five hundred men led by Brigadier George Burrows to run down and kill the youngest son of the emir they had deposed the previous year.

Hearing that Ayub Khan was approaching fast, the British sallied forth to meet him on the flat plain of central Maiwand. Streaming out of a mountain pass from the west, Ayub Khan and twenty-five thousand men hemmed in the British on three sides. Pummeling the British with artillery, the Afghans charged the enemy lines under the exhortations of a young Afghan girl named Malalai. During the furious fighting the left side of the British line ran out of ammunition, crumbled, and broke, and the defense collapsed. Soldiers streamed back toward Kandahar City, forty-five miles away. Hundreds of soldiers were cut up as they ran; hundreds more died of thirst on the road back. The Afghan army laid siege to the city. Only when the great British general Frederick Roberts swept down from Kabul and drove them away from the city did the siege end.

In 2012 everyone who worked in Maiwand knew its history. The old British fort stood next to our base, adjacent to Maiwand’s main market. We walked past it most days, uncomfortably aware that British troops were currently trying to stave off massive attacks by the Taliban only sixty miles west, in Helmand; history was repeating itself. This history would make it difficult for the Afghans to publicly root for the British, who were our very visible allies. Luckily most Afghans viewed the current insurgency as coming from Pakistan, which put the Afghans on our side against a different set of invaders.

We assumed the Afghans saw us as the good guys, but daily issues that cropped up made the situation not so clear cut. I arrived in April 2012. Every Monday I attended a security meeting, or shura, at the district police station. At one of these security shuras I saw how the Afghans stuck together and regarded outsiders with suspicion.

The office of the police chief was comfortable. A television that captured twenty channels hung near a window, the floor was covered with red carpets, and couches lined the walls. For the security shura a dozen folding chairs had been brought in. U.S. and Afghan soldiers and police and a few civilians filled the seats. In true Afghan tradition the most important persons, including the district governor, the American lieutenant colonel in command of the U.S. battalion in Maiwand, and the National Directorate of Security (NDS) chief, who ran the district security service, all sat beside the police chief. Lesser ranks and other Afghans filled in the open spaces.

Officers gave routine updates involving attacks, dispositions, and plans. What most interested the Afghans was the arrest of three men several days earlier. Several elders from the village of the suspects entered the room and said they wanted the men returned. The trio had been arrested after an IED went off nearby. The suspects were brought in—two older men and one lad in his late teens who was the son of one of the men. An elder declared the men were innocent.

District Governor Salih Mohammad replied, “We want to release the detainees. We are all Afghan. But if one of them has any relations with the enemy, I want him arrested.”

The NDS man chimed in, “We need to have family guarantees that they will not do it again.”

One of the elders insisted the men had done nothing. “If you had no evidence, why did you arrest them?” he asked.

The police chief, a large man with a heavy black beard and a deep voice, asked the elders, “Will you guarantee these men? And will you bring them back if we need them?”

One of the elders quickly agreed.

Another elder told the chief of police, “They were two kilometers away from the IED. The U.S. arrested them and said it was close to their house.”

The NDS chief conceded that the men might be innocent. “We have no information on these three. We will release two and seek more information. We can ask for information at the Wednesday shura and decide then.” Every Wednesday many village elders attended a general shura at the DG’s office. “We’ll release the two of them and keep the small guy,” he concluded.

DG Salih Mohammad agreed, summing up for everyone. “Today is Monday. ISAF arrested them near Loy Karez,” he said, referring to a village a few miles south of the district center. “ISAF did not know, so they brought them to us. We got some information that they are good. We will release the two guys. Two men from the bazaar are guaranteeing them.”

The American lieutenant colonel kept quiet, reluctant to justify the arrest.

The DG turned to the detainees. “We brought you here and you are good guys, so sorry for that. We are all families. We are all Muslims. We have to help the young guy if I can get information about him. On Wednesday we will release the young guy. Until then he stays here.”

The DG then gave the men a piece of paper with his stamp on it to show they’d been released.

Security in Maiwand was poor, and people were arrested all the time. Only a few villages were considered safe. From the district center a government official could work in an area two or three kilometers from east to west, plus a kilometer to the north and a kilometer to the south. I’d visited Maiwand in 2010 as a field researcher, and the size of this bubble of security had barely changed.

Security depended on the villagers cooperating with the security forces. But the villagers outside the security bubble were in a tight spot, squeezed between the Americans and the government on one hand and the Taliban on the other. It was risky to inform on the Taliban, who controlled most of the villages, and information was spotty.

When villagers were arrested, their families could ask the village elders to vouch for the men and get them released. But the Taliban could just as easily pressure village elders to vouch for guilty men. The security forces hoped that if they asked enough questions they could separate the good from the bad. It was an art rather than a science, despite the high-tech gadgetry the Americans used, such as the chemical detector swab pads applied to suspects’ hands to check for explosive residue.

If security across Maiwand was bad, the worst area included the southern fringe, in a region named Band-i Timor. A long and narrow patch of ground stretching the length of the district, Band-i Timor followed the Arghandab River as it flowed westward toward Helmand. On the northern side of the river a series of villages lay in what was known as the green zone, a lush and irrigated strip with many poppy fields. Across the river on the southern side the orange dunes of the Reg Desert towered high. Band-i Timor was a place where drug smugglers followed the riverbed toward Pakistan, while arms smugglers and Taliban fighters followed it back the other way, deeper into Afghanistan. In late 2011 the Americans positioned two small firebases seven miles apart in the green zone beside the river. Patrols leaving the bases inevitably ran into firefights if they ventured more than five hundred meters from the front gate.

One day in April the American and Afghan soldiers held the first-ever government-sponsored mass meeting in the village of Pain Kalay, about five hundred meters from one of the bases in the green zone. Thirty-five elders showed up, a surprisingly high turnout. They squatted down in a long line facing the soldiers. Most of the men were old, with dirty shalwar kameez clothing—long shirts and baggy trousers. Years of eking out a poor living under a hot sun were etched heavily in their faces.

Merely holding this gathering was a major breakthrough for the soldiers. Every villager was vulnerable to Taliban reprisals for attending and publicly speaking with the security forces. The Taliban would later visit many of them, demanding to know what they’d discussed.

The men listened as the Afghan and American soldiers offered assistance. One officer said they could start a few projects and patrol more often in the village to keep out the Taliban. They might even bring the district governor to visit.

“We can hand out some seed,” offered the American officer. “After the harvest we will meet and decide what to do.”

But the people dismissed most of these ideas. One man declared that the village didn’t need any assistance. Another said they did need help, but it was too risky.

“We need a school, seed, and a mosque, but we do not have security. When we get security, then we will get everything that we need,” he said.

Another elder, old and thin with a full white beard, replied that it was too soon to talk about this.

“Every elder from the village is here,” he said. “We are all scared of the Taliban. This is the life for us. We will work with you when it is safe.”

Another elder complained that it was impossible to work with the government. Whenever they went to the district center, the auxiliary police stopped and arrested them and demanded money to release them.

“If we go there, they will throw us in jail,” one elder explained.

The soldiers persisted, eventually persuading the villagers to accept two projects: two culverts that would be installed near the base, where an irrigation canal had washed out the road. Although the villagers agreed reluctantly, they pushed the start of work months into the future, explaining they were too busy with the harvest to work on them now. The culverts were never built.

Over the next few days I went with the soldiers on patrols in the area to talk to other farmers. They reported similar problems. When they went to the main market beside the district center, the auxiliary police took the opportunity to shake them down. A man talked to us for twenty minutes outside his compound, from which poppy fields spread into the distance along the green zone. His kids played nearby.

“We cannot go to the district center,” he said. “They will detain us and charge 5,000 or 6,000 Afghanis to let us go.” Equivalent to $100, this sum was a month’s wage.

His village elder complained to the district governor, but it made no difference. The next day another man two kilometers away reported a similar experience. He said that the last time someone drove to central Maiwand to buy oil in the bazaar this person was arrested by the auxiliary police for no reason. It had cost 120,000 Pakistani rupees, or about $1,250, to get him and his car back. Four elders who had gone to retrieve him had paid 30,000 rupees ($315) each, a massive sum in a farming district. The man said the auxiliary police who controlled a checkpoint closer to the green zone used to take money from travelers, but one night the local Afghan army unit put a stop to it.

Another man complained that the fighting had grown worse since the base had opened in Pain Kalay six months earlier.

“We are sick of the fighting. If the U.S. and Taliban keep shooting people, we will have to leave the area,” the man said flatly.

The police continued to regard the people in Band-i Timor as real or potential enemies, even when a few days later the district governor and the police chief went to the other American base in the green zone and held a meeting with two local elders. This trip marked the first real effort to get the government into Band-i Timor, and another shura would follow there the next month.

In Maiwand the Americans had an uphill battle persuading anyone to work with them. With so few Americans spread out over a large area, the soldiers couldn’t adequately cover every village. Most villages rarely, if ever, saw any security forces.

The Americans and the government were sworn to stamp out poppy production, but almost every farm grew poppy. Everyone feared for the safety of their crop. The government periodically sent soldiers with tractors into a few fields to knock down the poppy plants, but it was common practice in southern Afghanistan for the landowners to bribe corrupt government officials to bypass their land and move onto the next farm.

To some extent it was a tribal problem. Some tribes opposed the government. Worst of all, the Americans had a dismal history in Band-i Timor, and they had yet to live it down.

When I arrived, the local U.S. battalion was raiding villages in the desolate western sector of the district. Soldiers would drive out to villages and search them, hoping to draw fire from lurking insurgents. The vehicles often met up with soldiers inserted by helicopters. The trips sparked frequent firefights. The Taliban were very good fighters, yielding ground grudgingly. Because the Americans left immediately after the firefights and seldom returned, security never improved in the villages. The Taliban could always replace their losses. The U.S. effort didn’t produce long-term benefits, even if the Taliban stopped using an area for a few weeks.

Sometimes the soldiers pushed these raids south into Band-i Timor. In 2012 the area was a hotbed of the insurgency in Maiwand. Ironically the people in Band-i Timor in late 2001 had strongly supported the Americans.

The story of what went wrong in Band-i Timor at the beginning of the war started in Kandahar City. It’s documented by the American author Anand Gopal. When Gul Agha Sherzai became governor of the province, he didn’t just help Nazak. He turned on his enemies, among them the tribal chiefs in Band-i Timor.

The tribal elders had by this time turned against the Taliban. In early December 2001 the tribes in Band-i Timor had come together and decided to back the Americans. They’d previously supported the Taliban, but the extremists’ time was up. The Americans would bring schools, health care, and roads. Even tribes traditionally opposed to Sherzai’s Barakzai tribe signed up to support the government. It wasn’t just in Kandahar City, where men cheered and shaved their beards, that people celebrated the end of the old regime.

The elders persuaded Taliban bigwigs to turn themselves in and even delivered guns taken from the Taliban to Sherzai’s office. Sherzai saw Band-i Timor as a place where he could squeeze money out of tribal elders for whom he had little regard and could strengthen his control of the rackets that enriched him.

To do this he turned to the Americans. In December 2001, as the Taliban fled Kandahar City, many of them headed over the border to Pakistan. Many others simply stopped fighting and returned home. The Taliban was a spent force, and it would be two years before Mullah Omar even thought about resurrecting his troops.

But the Americans had an ongoing mission: to catch and kill Taliban, who might lead the way to al Qaeda. Sherzai pointed the Americans at business competitors, tribal rivals, and those from whom he wished to extort money. Families would pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars to have their relatives released.

One night U.S. Special Forces arrived in Band-i Timor and stormed a compound owned by one of the top tribal elders, Haji Burget Khan. They detained fifty-five men in a village and took them to KAF. Several men were shot in the raid, including Haji Burget Khan, who died in custody. Those who survived were all later released. Sherzai’s war had come to Band-i Timor, and it continued for months. Elders who had phoned Taliban leaders to persuade them to lay down their arms were accused of being Taliban supporters themselves.

As the arrests and raids continued, people in Band-i Timor turned against the Americans and the government. Influential elders who were pro-American were scooped up. People drifted. Over time the old smuggling routes prospered, the Taliban came back, and Band-i Timor supported them as they had before 9/11.1

In 2012 Maiwand suffered because Band-i Timor had suffered ten years earlier. It was tragic. The soldiers suffered alongside the villagers as they patrolled Band-i Timor and tried to win back what had been lost.

As 2012 slipped by, security in parts of Band-i Timor improved. Early one morning in November 2012 the Americans climbed into their Stryker armored fighting vehicles at the easternmost base in the green zone. They slowly pushed toward the other base, at Pain Kalay, setting up checkpoints guarded by Afghan soldiers as they progressed. They worked their way through several Taliban strongholds and put down a gravel road as they inched forward. Roads would give the soldiers access to the newly opened areas and allow the villagers to drive to markets more easily.

For two weeks they pushed along the road. Most nights they slept in abandoned mud compounds or in their trucks. The next day they rose early and pushed on. They uncovered caches of IEDs in undergrowth, in orchards, and along the riverbed. In one of the villages the Taliban had recently convened its district court, trying cases brought by the local people.

Progress eventually ground to a halt halfway to Pain Kalay as the soldiers finished a final section of gravel road. The Afghan security forces ran out of men. Without more they could not build and guard additional checkpoints.

A few days later another gravel road was built from the district center north fifteen kilometers to the village of De Maiwand, where U.S. and Afghan soldiers maintained a precarious hold on an outpost that anchored security for the entire northern sector of the district. The soldiers had found more than fifty IEDs in the south, and they had found another eighty while driving north. Four security vehicles were blown up along the way, but two weeks after the operation began the road to the village of De Maiwand was declared open after being closed for years. Seven new checkpoints were hastily built along the road.

The government was revitalized. In the course of a month the Taliban had lost control of about a third of the district. Of the five important population centers in the district the security forces now controlled three.

Soon after the northern road opened, Afghan and American soldiers from the base at De Maiwand called the village elders together. They sat in front of a large concrete mosque with domed shapes cut below the eaves of the roof. The soldiers told the elders that life was improving, and it was time to support the government.

One elder answered warily, “We want peace and security in the village.” His beard was very white against his wide, dark brown face. “You make promises, but you never do anything.”

The soldiers replied that the elders had asked for the road to be opened and now it was. But this did not satisfy them. Every day the Taliban shot at the checkpoints along the road within a mile or two of the village, reminding the villagers that they remained close by.

Worse, the Taliban had banned the villagers from using the newly built road and threatened to kill them if they did. Now local people had to use an older, bumpier road, and the travel time to the bazaar in central Maiwand had jumped from half an hour to an hour. One man complained the operation was making life worse, not better.

Yet the villagers made a partial opening to the soldiers. They wanted projects and were willing to work with the government to get them. Drinking water was a particular problem.

The elder with the white beard said, “We want many more wells, like hand-pump wells. If we got five more wells that would be good.”

The soldiers replied that the elders needed to go to the weekly shura and ask the district governor directly.

That was impossible, the elders insisted. The Taliban would surely hear of it and kill them the same day. They said the district governor had come a few weeks earlier and made promises and left. They received nothing. So what was the point?

Time proved the elders right to stay on the fence. The Taliban remained strong in the area and fighting raged on for years.

The U.S. Army closed its main base in Maiwand but left its soldiers guarding the scattered outposts. The drawdown continued. Soon only a mix of police and auxiliary police held the district, with periodic help from Afghan soldiers operating out of the neighboring district of Zhari. The Maiwand DST closed in mid-2013. By the end of 2014 all of the Americans were gone. That December an elder in Maiwand complained about the intense fighting.

“The security situation is really bad, with constant fighting between drug smugglers, the Taliban, and security forces,” said Malik Din Mohammad, one of the primary elders in charge of Pain Kalay in Band-i Timor. “The government is not powerful enough to contain the situation,” he told a reporter.2

The agony of Band-i Timor would continue well into 2015. As the year began, heavy fighting was reported as the government battled to regain control of the area.3

In Maiwand the close cooperation among the civil government, the villagers, and the security forces never really got off the ground. Unlike in Dand the security situation failed to reach escape velocity. Without security the civil government couldn’t use its persuasive power to get the villagers to work on its side. When I arrived, the Americans were poised to leave, with about a year remaining. With time about to run out, we tried to salvage something from our long-running effort there.