Wishing for peace, braced for war
Afghan forces expect the worst after being abandoned by US, Anthony Loyd writes.
No maps are needed for the scarred men on the hill to explain their war. Fought close enough at hand to see by eye, its battlefields are their woods and farms; their enemies are their neighbours and cousins.
Holding a beleaguered outpost on the front line just twenty minutes’ drive south of Kabul, the Afghan police unit here measures the passage of war not by date, but by the age of the bullet and shrapnel wounds on their bodies. They count their victories and defeats by pointing through the sleet and rain that drifts across no-man’s land to homes they have lost, or to the unreachable cemeteries where their fathers, brothers and children are buried. War here is personal, war is intimate: war has gone on so long it is enmeshed with life.
‘‘It has caused such divisions within our own communities that our problems are much greater than can be easily solved by Doha [the February 29 accord signed by the US and the Taliban],’’ explained Sardar Abdul Wali, a 25-year-old local businessman, a Pashtun, who assumed his father’s command of the unit eight months earlier after his death in a gun battle with the Taliban.
‘‘In each of our villages here circumstances divided families and drove some to join the Taliban, some to join government forces,’’ he added. ‘‘There was killing. Now the enmity within our own communities is bitter and deep enough for years of bloodshed.’’
Rather than being boosted with hopes for peace in the aftermath of the Doha accord, as Wali and his men recounted their individual war experiences it became apparent that the deal – in which the US agreed to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan – had instead burdened them with the twin sense of impending abandonment and imminent attack by the Taliban.
‘‘At first, the week-long ceasefire just before the Americans
signed their agreement with the Taliban lifted our spirits,’’ Wali said.
‘‘But since then the fighting started again as before. There is no reduction in violence here. We wish for peace, but we expect war.’’
Such fears are well grounded. Despite US wishes that a period of reduced fighting would occur parallel to the start of intra-Afghan talks after the Doha agreement, the opposite is happening. On Saturday, the Afghan Ministry of Defence recorded 95 separate attacks by the Taliban in a single 24-hour period, as violence escalates.
Thousands of Taliban fighters have capitalised on the cessation of US air strikes that followed Doha, moving from their winter sanctuary in Pakistan weeks earlier than normal, to bolster existing Taliban units near Kabul.
‘‘Our intelligence sources report that huge numbers of Taliban have arrived in our area over the past 15-20 days,’’ Wali said. ‘‘They no longer have the fear of airstrikes and drones. Once that fear has gone, then it’s easy for them to move up and prepare to fight us.’’
Meanwhile, the intra-Afghan peace negotiations, supposed to have begun last Wednesday have not yet started. The Kabul government is paralysed by a political crisis over its presidency and cannot agree on the make-up of a delegation to talk with the Taliban; nor can the opposing sides find accord over the terms of a prisoner release that the Doha agreement – signed without the participation of the Afghan government – stipulated would occur as a prelude to peace talks.
So the war goes on. Huddled against the winter wind on this ice-scabbed hill at Maidan Shahr, 45km from the centre of Kabul, the police unit’s duties here are entirely combat-related. Each one of the 23 local Pashtun men in Wali’s unit had either been wounded at least once, or had lost immediate relatives fighting against the Taliban.
‘‘That’s my house,’’ Wali said, pointing over some sandbags and barbed wire at a whitewashed building 300m away. ‘‘I left it last year after my uncle and a cousin, a Special Forces soldier, were killed in a neighbouring home by the Taliban at night. I have never been back.’’
He turned to his left and pointed out a burnt petrol station on the road below us.
‘‘That was my business,’’ he added, ‘‘until it was burnt out during a Taliban attack. Now they have that too.’’
Wali glanced around at the surrounding battlefield, which he had known since childhood: near by lay the carcass of a Soviet armoured vehicle from a previous era; snow-capped mountains sat in the distance, while behind him lay the ruins of a building belonging to the NDS Afghan intelligence service, destroyed by a Taliban suicide attack last year that left scores dead. Then he stepped back from the biting winter wind into the shelter of a bunker, where a poster of his slain father adorned the wall.
Plates of oranges, cups of tea and assault rifles lay in easy juxtaposition across the floor.
One by one I asked the fighters there to see their scars and hear their stories. Some smiled as they spoke, like Khawazak, a hatchetfaced 47-year-old policeman who like many Afghans went by a single name. He had a bullet wound in his leg which he had received while fighting beside Wali’s father the day he died. His own brother, a 22-year-old policeman, had been killed four years earlier when he trod on an improvised explosive device placed near a spring the unit used to collect water.
Others recounted their years at war without expression. Abdul Wahab, 49, bullet wounds to his leg and arm and one foot damaged by shrapnel, remained impassive as he recounted the death of his teenage son in an explosion eight years earlier, and the killing of his wife and 11-yearold daughter during a Taliban attack on his nearby village last autumn.
‘‘I lost my wife, my 11-year-old daughter and two of my police officers that night,’’ he said, unflinching. ‘‘When reinforcements managed to reach us the sun had risen. We collected the bodies, buried them, said our prayers, and then left the village. I never returned.’’
The fighters hunched closer to a portable gas fire in the bunker as outside the wind picked up and hurled sleet across no-man’s land. Talking among themselves about Doha and the prospect of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan they were typically fatalistic. I heard none of the men voice defeatism, but it was clear from the pauses in their conversation, the low tone of their words, and the gravity of their mood – so in contrast to the Taliban unit I saw earlier in the week – that they were deeply uneased by the February US-Taliban accord. ‘‘It’s not the war that is worrying us,’’ Wali said finally. ‘‘For we are familiar with war. It is just that we were hopeful about Doha. Now we see nothing has changed and we have to realise that for the first time in 20 years the Americans will leave us to fight it alone.’’ – The Times
‘‘In each of our villages here circumstances divided families and drove some to join the Taliban, some to join government forces. There was killing. Now the enmity within our own communities is bitter and deep enough for years of bloodshed.’’ Sardar Abdul Wali, Pashtun businessman