A struggle for peace in Afghan province most deadly for foreign troops

HELMAND PROVINCE, Afghanistan — The police in Gereshk knew the Taliban were digging tunnels, but they didn’t know where. The police chief, Hekmatullah Haqmal, heard clanking and whacking coming from underground near a checkpoint and ordered his men to dig a shaft.

Haqmal was known in Helmand as a brave fighter and a great tactician. He now wanted to put those skills to use, cutting off the rebels before they reached the checkpoint.

On the evening of April 7, the checkpoint came under fire by rockets and machine gun fire. Haqmal, who was stationed nearby, rushed toward the fighting to command the defense. He was halfway there when a massive explosion thundered through his convoy and flung his car in the air.

It turned out the Taliban had managed to dig tunnels all the way to the first checkpoint and several hundred meters beyond, toward the next police post, where they filled an underground cavity with explosives. When Haqmal reached the point above that site, the insurgents detonated their bombs. He was killed, along with four other policemen and seven workers searching for the tunnels, according to Helmand police.

Col. Mohammad Abdali relates this story in the police headquarters in Lashkar Gah one afternoon several days after Haqmal’s funeral. Abdali, 25, is the counternarcotics chief of Helmand and was one of Haqmal’s closest friends. Baby-faced with stubble and a chin dimple, Abdali has spent more then half an hour on Facebook, arranging a photo slideshow in Haqmal’s honor. Abdali mourns the way men of his generation often do: on social media.

“He was a good man,” he says, passing around his smartphone. A photo shows him and Haqmal walking the battlefields of Helmand. A tall man in his early 30s with a wrestler’s chest, Haqmal was seen by many as a stout bulwark against the Taliban. Since his death, he has assumed an almost mythical air.

“He could capture with 15 men what others couldn’t with one or two thousand,” Abdali says. 

Helmand has by far been the deadliest Afghan province for international troops. Of the 3,488 coalition soldiers killed in the country since 2001, 952 — or almost one-fourth — died in Helmand, and most of them were American or British. A total of 2,358 American soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan. Though the U.S. is attempting to wind down the war in Afghanistan, President Barack Obama has agreed to keep 9,800 soldiers in the country into next year. They form the bulk of the approximately 13,200 remaining troops, most of whom are focused on training and advising. After the British army handed over their main base, Camp Bastion, in October last year, men like Haqmal and Abdali have been in charge of protecting the fragile gains of 14 years of war.

Haqmal’s death is evidence of an insurgency that is stronger now than it has been at any other point since 2001. Because of his reputation and perhaps his father’s connections as a prominent local warlord, he was put in charge of Nahr-e Seraj, the most vital and embattled district in the province. Gereshk, in Nahr-e Seraj, is Helmand’s economic hub and its former capital.  It is located on Highway 1, the country’s main ring road that connects most of its major cities, and is home to a large irrigation canal and a booming opium business. It is also on a river crossing that allows anyone who controls it to collect taxes. Because of its military and economic importance, Nahr-e Seraj is, according to the Pentagon, the most dangerous place in Afghanistan.

The U.S. has spent more than $60 billion on training and equipping Afghan security forces since 2002. Still, there are signs that Afghan soldiers and policemen might not yet be ready to take over entirely. According to The New York Times, casualties among Afghan forces have risen to unprecedented numbers. From January to April of this year, 1,800 Afghan troops were killed, a 65 percent increase from the same period the year before. Helmand claimed more of those lives than any other province.

The renewed violence is partly due to the fact that young Afghan men have inherited a war that not only didn’t address the root causes of the Taliban insurgency but also sowed the seeds for the strengthened resistance that is now plaguing the country, says Deedee Derksen, an author and a researcher on Afghanistan. She believes the U.S. failed to replace astronomical amounts of aid money with responsible institutions and did little to help develop a sustainable economy. Officials failed to stop the abuse that Afghans suffered at the hands of international and Afghan forces, which eroded Afghans’ trust in a government meant to protect them.

Early in his career, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani was a vocal critic of international aid, saying that the country’s sovereignty was undermined whenever money did not go toward building government institutions. He believed that Western countries should invest more in Afghan resource development.

But Derksen says that was never the main purpose. “The reason for the U.S.-led intervention was not to build a new state. It was to defeat the Taliban. State building was added to the military campaign, but it was always secondary,” she says.

“In the beginning, the U.S. talked about hunting down Taliban and Al-Qaeda, and that created a certain dynamic,” she says. She believes that the U.S. was blindsided by its search for terrorists and that by allying with certain groups and power brokers for that purpose, it excluded other ethnic and tribal groups from the government. This dynamic, she says, “is still going on today.”

Babaji is 12 kilometers north of Lashkar Gah, across the brown gushing Helmand River, which gives the province its name. In the spring the sun is still pleasant, and blooming poppy fields stretch all the way to the edge of the highway, which bends and winds past mud villages and shoddy police stations.

The district used to be one of the most dangerous Taliban strongholds in all of Helmand. In 2009, in what the British Defense Ministry called one of the largest air operations of modern times, Operation Panther’s Claw, hundreds of British troops were airlifted into the area to push out the Taliban ahead of that year’s presidential election. They eventually did, but their role was purely muscular. The Taliban still managed to intimidate residents into not participating in elections they didn’t see as legitimate. That year, only 150 of Babaji’s estimated 80,000 residents came out to vote.

The area is now reasonably safe. Foreign troops built schools and a clinic and paved the main road. Though the Taliban’s presence is still felt, it is less intimidating than in other parts of Helmand. On a day in April, Abdali rides shotgun in a white Corolla, Afghan pop music blaring out the windows, while his driver navigates corners and bumps at a punishing speed.

“Before, we couldn’t even go here with 20 Humvees,” Abdali says. His only escort is a Toyota Hilux truck that can hardly keep up with him, containing four armed men in the back.

The owner of the land is nowhere to be found, but Abdul Hadi, a young farmer, says his crop was destroyed a few days earlier. Now he can’t pay back loans for fertilizer and use of machinery. “We have children,” he says. “Now we have to ask them to beg or maybe even steal.”

Most farmers in the area associate the government with trouble. Officials are corrupt, Hadi says, “and the foreign forces didn’t do anything good for us.” Even though outside aid funded roads and bridges, local politicians swept in to steal it, and they forced residents to feed workers. “The only thing I want from the government is to not put us in prison.”

Governance in Helmand is driven by local rivalries. After the ouster of the Taliban in 2001, four power brokers in Helmand, each representing different tribes, were put in charge of different branches of the local government. There was a governor, intelligence chief, police chief and commander of the 93rd Division of the newly established Afghan Military Force. The last position went to Haqmal’s father, Malem Mir Wali.

The four soon began jostling for power — and for control of the lucrative drug business, which exploded after 2001. (Sher Mohammad Akhundzada, the provincial governor, was fired by then-President Hamid Karzai in 2005 after a British-led team of counternarcotics police found 9 tons of opium and heroin in his cellar.) Private militias looted, killed, kidnapped and illegally taxed people who weren’t their allies. Local power brokers edged out rivals by denouncing them as Taliban to U.S. special operations forces, who then rewarded them with handsome bounties. That pattern continued through the arrival of British forces in 2006 and persisted after the U.S. Marines landed three years later.

On the sleepy dirt roads that run deep into the Nad Ali district west of Lashkar Gah, everyone stares at cars they don’t recognize. In a small village off one of these roads lives Ghulam Sakhi, a mild-mannered 55-year-old with a white skullcap and thin-frame glasses. He heads a unit of the Afghan Local Police (ALP), with 44 men under his command running five checkpoints, each earning a monthly salary of $160.

In this little island of calm, Sakhi is the government. He distributes salaries to his men on behalf of the provincial police in Lashkar Gah and makes sure the village school stays open for both boys and girls. “The girls even come here from other villages,” he says, beaming.

The ALP, has a tarnished reputation. Launched in 2010 at the behest of Gen. David Petraeus, the ALP is often the first line of defense against insurgents, a kind of neighborhood watch — only with guns and backing from the U.S. military. When the ALP was proposed, Karzai opposed its formation out of fear of propping up erratic warlords. In some places, that is exactly what happened.

While some ALP units are made up only of rifle-toting farmers entrusted with defending their village against well-armed Taliban fighters, in other areas ALP units act as private militias that local strongmen use to terrorize populations and gain control over the opium business. Human rights organizations have accused group members of rape, murder, arbitrary detention and land grabs.

In Helmand, the British began forming ALP units in 2011. Because of British officials’ lack of understanding of local politics, ALP commanders were encouraged to form units from their own communities, with little oversight. As the British author and former army Capt. Mike Martin has written, many of the resulting ALP units consisted of people from the same community who in many cases had been fighting with their neighbors over land or water. With international help, these rival groups were armed, and local conflicts escalated.

Five years ago, Sakhi was the first in his village to take up arms when the Taliban began recruiting and building improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in the school.

“Without weapons, I couldn’t live here,” he says. After they expelled the insurgents, his men received training from the British forces. He insists his colleagues treat people with respect, though he can’t say the same for other units. “In some areas, ALP have not done a good job. Many people hate them,” he says.

The ALP was formed shortly after Obama ordered a troop surge in Afghanistan to stomp out the remnants of Taliban and Al-Qaeda. ALP members were barely vetted and often acted with impunity, and U.S. special forces, impatient to wrap up the “war on terrorism,” clamped down on areas known to house insurgents even when there were no Taliban around. By treating anyone who resisted them as Taliban, troops drove some locals into the insurgency.

“They were hunting for Taliban,” Derksen says, “but they created a lot of Taliban. What the people really wanted was law and order.”

Eight months after the main international base in Helmand was handed over to the Afghan army, there is one question that almost always makes Helmandis chuckle: “Western politicians say the war in Afghanistan is over. Are they right?”

In the governor’s office in Lashkar Gah, local politicians snicker at the question. “Everyone has their own opinion,” Deputy Gov. Mohammad Jan Rasolyan says. “All I know is that ISAF [the international forces] should still be here.”

Not everyone is that diplomatic.

“That the war is over is a complete joke,” says Dimitra Giannakopoulou, the medical coordinator at the Emergency Hospital for war victims in Lashkar Gah. Last year was the bloodiest on record for Afghan civilians, with more than 10,000 casualties, according to the U.N. She partly blames Western governments. “Is the fighting over? No. I don’t understand how you can pull out in the middle of a fight.”

The hospital can hold up to 80 patients, yet the hospital receives almost 300 a month. Last summer, when fighting was at its worst, the staff cafeteria was converted into a ward, and the hospital was forced to accept only life-threatening cases. “It has dropped a little since then, but we are also only just coming up to the fighting season,” she says.

In the operating theater at Emergency, doctors wash what’s left of a young policeman’s right leg, a bloody stump so open that you can see bone marrow. Before a land mine tore off his leg off a week earlier, he was working for a salary of about $200 a month. Elsewhere in the hospital, 24-year-old Habibullah, a victim of an IED, flashes a big smile and a thumbs-up. He’s shell-shocked, and his speech is incoherent and rambling; he keeps saying he is three years old. Nearby, 10-year-old Abdullah has only one sandal next to his bed. After being hit by a misfired mortar on his way to school, he won’t need the other one.

Working at Emergency is taxing, and the nurses and doctors spend their lives in the hospital, at the compound where they live and in the cars that drive them back and forth. Yet Giannakopoulou sees hope for the country in the collective resilience of Afghans. She says that after mass attacks, people line up outside the hospital to donate blood. “Once 60 people queued up outside,” she says. “I asked them, ‘Who told you to come?’ They said, ‘Facebook!’”

On the lawn outside Lashkar Gah’s main hotel, a group of elders gather for a meeting with local senators and members of parliament. They’ve been convening all week to discuss issues like irrigation and security concerns.

A few days before, the government wrapped up a months-long military campaign, Operation Zulfiqar, to clear the heavily contested Sangin district in Helmand of insurgents. A spokesman for the Ministry of Defense, Brig. Gen. Dowlat Waziri hailed the operation as a “complete success,” in which only seven civilians and 93 government forces were killed. But that is not the story that locals and Western officials tell. On the last day of Zulfiqar, local journalists reported that Taliban insurgents overran 17 checkpoints in Sangin, and according to a senior Western security official in Kabul, at least 140 security forces were killed and hundreds more injured, a development the official calls “unfavorable” for the government.

The government’s proclaimed victory seemed even emptier to Bibi Zahra, a female ALP commander who just escaped Sangin. She fought for four years, trained with foreign troops and rode tanks with the district governor, but in the end, she decided to flee. She now owes a local bakery 250,000 Afghanis (about $4,200) that she borrowed to pay salaries when the provincial police failed to pay her. She believes that the Taliban is advancing and that the tactics of government forces are only strengthening the insurgency. “The army and the police are destroying private houses to make checkpoints. They can’t maintain security like that,” she says. “What will be left of Sangin?”

On the lawn outside the hotel, a local senator dressed in a dashing black shalwar-kameez and a black turban seems to have had enough. He starts handing out wads of Pakistani bills. The elders, apparently pleased, wave wads of cash and smile for photos. The government just bought a little more legitimacy, however long it may last.