On one patrol, we visited a clinic built through the U.S. schools-and-clinics program, the pet project of Zal, the former U.S. ambassador. The program was largely considered a debacle. The new buildings came in shoddy, late, and over budget. The lead USAID contractor, the Louis Berger Group of New Jersey, reportedly charged U.S. taxpayers an average of $226,000 for each building—almost five times as much as Afghans and European nonprofit groups had paid for similar buildings. Louis Berger officials told journalists that their buildings took longer to build because they were required to train Afghan contractors to do the work; the buildings cost more because they were earthquake resistant. In reality, most of the money probably got chewed up along the way. USAID contractors like Louis Berger spent a lot of money on highly paid U.S. staff and couldn’t supervise projects in difficult areas, increasing the likelihood of fraud. And even though Louis Berger hired Afghan contractors, those companies often subcontracted to someone else, who sometimes subcontracted to someone else. Corners were cut. Many buildings were already falling apart. Some roofs had caved in from heavy snow.
We sat with the elders at their new clinic.
“Do you use it?” an American staff sergeant asked.
“Well … we have no medicine,” an Afghan answered, then added, almost as an afterthought, “And we have no doctor.”
In other words, no, they did not. I went on these missions when the soldiers did them, but sometimes they didn’t, and sometimes they didn’t invite me, like when it seemed too dangerous. Their mood was the opposite of the mood on my embed the year before, when I wrote primarily about the forgotten war. The men still felt like no one was paying attention to Afghanistan, but here they knew that their enemy was serious, and that someone should have maybe figured that out earlier.
On the base, conditions were so backpacking basic, we were all reduced to the same sexless, miserable, dust-covered robots, amused by fights between camel spiders and scorpions held in cardboard boxes. The soldiers filmed the fights and replayed the highlights, much like they watched videos of their recent firefights. The winner in Ultimate Fighter Afghanistan was a particularly large camel spider, which practically ripped the head off any scorpion found to challenge it.
I was occasionally bored, yet constantly exhausted. I rested in my cot and read my neighbor’s bad spy novels involving heroic Americans with names like Jimmy and Ace. I couldn’t watch videos or write. I couldn’t risk taking my computer out of my backpack, because of the omniscient and omnipresent wind, which carried the dust with it. The wind was always in the room, a participant in every conversation. The dust coated soldiers when they napped for an hour, and by the time the morning came around, all of us looked gray and dead. Not that we could sleep, for the heat, for the wind. Putting in contact lenses every morning was like scraping my corneas with a bunion remover.
One night I escaped to the only dustless place in the whole base, the TOC, to talk to the man in charge about everything that had happened. He was interrupted by a whisper about a TIC in the TOC—in other words, troops in contact that could be monitored in the tactical operations center.
In addition to Musa Qala, a satellite U.S. base had been set up in the north. That evening, the Taliban had attacked a U.S. patrol near there. The troops retaliated, backed by a B-1 bomber. Soldiers then spotted fourteen Afghans fleeing to an alleged known Taliban safe house. A Predator filmed the men running into the house, which was surrounded by mud walls. In the well-lit control room, we all watched the grainy Predator feed of the safe house on a large screen on the wall. The captain I had been interviewing verified the target with the men on the ground. He called his superiors; he was approved. So he told the B-1 bomber to drop a five-hundred-pound bomb. Yes, a five-hundred-pound bomb seemed a bit of overkill for a mud hut, but that was the only ammunition the B-1 had, and the Predator had nothing. On the screen, we watched the bomb hit, sending up a giant plume of smoke. The men cheered briefly. Then the smoke cleared.
The bomb had missed the house by about two hundred and twenty yards, a large gap that no one was able to explain, destroying a patch of trees, perhaps some animals, and hopefully no human beings.
“He missed,” the officers in the room said softly, incredulously, almost in unison. A few men put their heads in their hands. Then, slowly, everyone turned their heads toward me, the reporter standing in the room like an elephant. I held up my hands.
“What can you do?” I asked. It was a rhetorical question.
“Somebody’s messed up,” the captain muttered. Now he had to get approval to drop another bomb, which took hours.
The insurgents stayed in the safe house, allegedly, and this time, when the bomb was dropped, it hit the right target, setting off secondary explosions, likely from ammunition inside.
The Taliban had started seizing on such mistakes, especially in a hostile zone like Helmand Province, where people were more than willing to believe the worst of the U.S. military. It didn’t matter that much of Afghanistan was backward, occasionally primitive. Most Afghans seemed to have an almost religious faith in American technology, talking about how U.S. troops could drop a bomb on a two-inch target, and how if they missed, they missed on purpose.
The next day a patrol was sent to the site to inspect the rubble and talk to nearby villagers. The story was the same as elsewhere: No Taliban here. Security is fine. Please leave.
After four days, during which I bathed with gritty wet wipes and figured out the long odds, I got out of Camp Hell. I had seen no real government and little aid that mattered. The United States had set up a tiny base in the middle of Taliban territory and started firing off howitzers every night, a move that probably terrified any Afghans who might have wanted them around. The base wasn’t protecting anyone or able to win any hearts or minds. Instead, it stirred up a hornet’s nest, with no conceivable way to calm it down, no real alternatives to poppies, no government authority. The United States did not bear all the blame. The lack of resources and troops here was the product of years of outrageous neglect by the entire international coalition.
Soon after I left the Musa Qala outpost, set up at considerable expense by the Americans to pave the way for the British, the British arrived. Almost immediately, the British closed the base, deeming that they needed to actually be with the people in the town of Musa Qala to do an effective counterinsurgency. So the base was moved, but that didn’t really work, either. The Taliban constantly fired at the new outpost’s landing zone. Worried about being shot down, many helicopters simply turned back to the main British base, Camp Bastion.
With obvious supply problems and no reinforcements, British troops had little hope of dealing with the Musa Qala threat. The Taliban fought hard and dirty. The Brits spread out, fighting in the districts of Garmsir, Sangin, and Gereshk. The Danes relieved the Brits in Musa Qala, but were quickly replaced by the Brits again. So the British commander made a controversial decision in the fall of 2006—again, a few months after I was there—to respect a truce between the weak Afghan government and the tribal elders of Musa Qala, who swore up and down and promised a hundred times over that they would keep the Taliban away. The Taliban allegedly agreed. After the deal held for a month, the British moved out their troops, much to the consternation of the United States. These truces had been tried repeatedly in the tribal areas of Pakistan, had been criticized repeatedly by NATO and Afghan officials, and had failed repeatedly. Nonetheless, this time it would be different, the British maintained.