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

Afghans. This time I couldn’t wear Western clothing because he was worried that our fellow passengers might use their cellphones to tip off the Taliban. So I shambled up to the bus station without looking anybody in the eye or speaking a word, fully disguised in local clothing. My translator shepherded me onto the old coach like a mentally impaired child and tucked me away in a window seat near the back. We sat tense and silent for several hours, watching the beige emptiness of the south give way to rolling hills as we drove into the central region. When my translator recognized the landscape of Wardak province he visibly relaxed and informed me that Taliban were no longer a threat. We started chatting in English, which caused a sensation among the other passengers. People turned around in their seats to stare at the strange presence of a Westerner who had passed himself off as an Afghan. Some of the looks weren’t welcoming, but my translator assured me that we had emerged from the danger zone, having escaped Taliban territory and entered the security bubble around Kabul. The final hour of the drive passed easily.
    That was my last road trip between Afghanistan’s two main cities. By the following year, 2007, I didn’t need to ask my staff about security on the highway. Wardak province was no longer a place where people relaxed, as the growing violence littered the road with burned hulks of military vehicles and fuel tankers. That province became such a Taliban stronghold that an insurgent later bragged to me that his men had burrowed tunnels into Wardak’s mountains and lined them with fresh concrete to hold all their weapons and ammunition. Foreigners travelled by plane when going to southern Afghanistan.
    The foolhardy ones who risked the roads quickly became examples of the rising danger, as happened in July 2007 when the Taliban captured a busload of Korean missionaries on the highway to Kandahar and held them for ransom. Two were killed and twenty-one released, with the Taliban reportedly getting about a million dollars for each of them. The highway also became risky for Afghans whose jobs brought them into contact with foreigners, and they started taking extraordinary precautions to avoid getting caught at insurgent checkpoints. An Afghan who managed a professional office in Kandahar once pointed to a wicker basket on his desk that contained nothing but three cellphones. Before travelling, he explained, his employees stripped themselves of any item that could identify them and put on shabby wristwatches and shoes. They removed the memory chips from their cellphones and replaced them with new ones whose contact lists contained only three names, and each number rang one of the phones in the basket. His employees introduced themselves as religious students, and the manager said he was accustomed to taking calls from Taliban checkpoints, responding with a gruff impersonation of a mullah who doesn’t like being bothered to confirm the bona fides of his followers. He chuckled at his own cleverness, but he looked tired every time I saw him. Despite the precautions, his employees were still getting killed on a regular basis.
    For those of us who survived Afghanistan, the bright shine of the early years remains haunting. All of the old hands have stories about the freedoms they enjoyed in that golden period, roughly 2002 to 2005, and many have regrets about how events later unfolded. At a dinner party a few years ago, I sat across from Francesc Vendrell, who served as the European Union’s special representative to Afghanistan after the collapse of the Taliban regime. He ranked among the most senior diplomats in the country by the time of his departure in 2008, with access to the inner workings of Kabul. By all accounts he wasa voice of conscience, but I was still curious about whether he felt sadness about his role in the machinery of war. Our dinner companions grew quieter as Mr. Vendrell fingered the stem of his