The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan Read Online Free PDF Page A

brother set up an engineering firm. I spent happy afternoons with his nephews as they practised English and discussed the fighting styles of Jackie Chan and Spider-Man.
    But later, as the killings increased, his brother the engineer shut his office on the edge of Kandahar city and moved toward the safer heart of downtown. Over the following years he moved again, and again, and finally ended up in a high-walled compound near a US special forces base. Even there, in the shadow of the foreign troops, the engineer wasn’t safe from the rising chaos. One of his nephews was kidnapped, and his family had to pay a heavy ransom—hundreds of thousands of US dollars, a sum that impoverished his clan. My friend the doctor carried the ransom money himself, handing over the cash to a masked man and receiving in return a hand-drawn symbol in a corner of a crumpled note—which he later traded for his nephew at a different location. Another of his relatives was shot by unknown assailants, but survived. The engineer had already retreated from projects in the rural districts, limiting his work to the safer confines of the city, but the kidnapping and shooting drained his energy. Finally he shuttered his Kandahar business and moved to Kabul. The doctor pulled back, too, slowly becoming less visible on the streets, and the last time I saw him in Kandahar, in early 2009,he looked like an old man. His hair was greasy and unkempt, and his eyes suggested he hadn’t had a proper sleep in weeks. He spoke urgently about moving away. The simple prediction he gave me four years earlier—“It will be good”—turned out to be false.
    I met him again in 2011, after he escaped to Dubai with his family. We strolled through a shopping mall and he seemed to enjoy the stretches of polished marble, the giant aquariums, the coloured fountains that danced to music. He showed me his favourite ride at the mall’s amusement park, a flight simulator, but refused to join the children who screamed past on roller coasters, which he considered “too dangerous.” Kandahar had exhausted his appetite for risk. Having saved himself from Afghanistan, he looked back at the foreigners’ intervention with none of the equivocation he felt in 2005. He concluded that the benefits were outweighed by drawbacks: violence, instability, corruption and the dangerously fragile nature of the new regime. On a recent trip home, he had noticed Afghan soldiers cruising the roads in new air-conditioned vehicles with the windows rolled up, something he saw as a metaphor for the security forces’ lack of concern for anything except their own comfort. “The army men should have the windows open, looking at the city and seeing what is happening,” he said. “Instead they are enjoying themselves.” The same attitude permeated the Kabul government, he said, noting that many of the top officials had visas and passports that would allow them to leave Afghanistan. “If something bad happens they will run away,” he said. With only a hint of self-reproach, he added: “They will run away, like me.”
    The young translator who first welcomed me in 2005 and took me on that road trip to Kandahar has also escaped the country. (He now lives in Canada.) The astonishing freedom we enjoyed on that initial journey can only be understood in contrast with the way conditions deteriorated on the Kabul–Kandahar highway in subsequent years. By the spring of 2006, my translator looked at me like I was joking when I suggested a road trip. No, he explained, the Talibanhave started running checkpoints on the main highway. Gunmen stop cars and frisk passengers, looking for evidence of collaboration with the so-called infidel occupation; you would be kidnapped or killed. But he reluctantly agreed that it might be possible to travel by bus, because in those days the Taliban did not have a strong grip on the highway and didn’t want the hassle of searching bus passengers, most of whom would be ordinary