by Stephen J. Thorne

Photo: Stephen J. Thorne, CP

Warrant Officer Rob Cushman, Sergeant Dave Dunn, Master Corporal Renell Mayer and M.Cpl. Aaron Wall survey Kabul from a mountainside.

My translator was an 18-year-old kid named Sohrab Shaheed. I called him Manilay, a name he reserved for his closest friends and relatives. His uncle had given him the name. It meant ‘the accepted one.’ ‘Shaheed’ meant ‘martyr for the cause of Islam.’ Manilay was a good Muslim—devout and peaceful. But he was no martyr, not in the sense that we have come to understand the word, at least.

A student in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, Manilay had high hopes of following in his brother and sister’s footsteps and becoming a doctor. He was taking a leave of absence from his formal schooling to work for me and other reporters who followed me to cover the Canadian military role as peacemakers in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul. Reporters travelling in countries like Afghanistan usually employ fixers, locals who speak their language as well as several local dialects and know the lay of the land. The ideal fixer usually has connections in bureaucratic backrooms and offices. They know the ins and outs of a city—even a country—and very often, they know where the skeletons are hidden, so to speak.

Photo: Stephen J. Thorne, CP

Buzkashi riders battle for the animal carcass during a scrimmage in Rege Rawan, Afghanistan.

Manilay seemed to know none of these things. He spoke very good English, and was passable as a translator. But for all his knowledge of the Koran, his life experience seemed very limited. Until one day we drove past the national stadium. We had driven past it many times. I knew the Taliban had banned beloved games like soccer and buzkashi—a kind of no-holds-barred polo played with horses and an animal carcass—and had conducted executions there. I hadn’t thought much about it until I tossed a question Manilay’s way.

“Isn’t that where they did the executions?”

“Yes,” came the reply.

“Did you ever go?” I asked, assuming he hadn’t.

“All the time,” he said.

Then Manilay proceeded to tell me how he still has nightmares about Friday afternoons under the Taliban. After prayers on the Muslim holy day, he and his friends would head to the stadium to watch punishments meted out under Sharia law in the form of executions, stonings and dismemberment. There would be a shot to the head for murder, a hail of rocks for adultery, a hand carefully removed for thievery. Only about 200 or 300 people would attend, he recalled, but they were almost all young boys.

He talked about ‘them’—those young boys—but every time he said ‘they,’ I understood him to mean ‘I,’ because he was really talking about himself. “Before an execution, they thought it would be very exciting to see what would happen,” he said. “For a young boy, it was entertainment. But afterward, they would be very sad. They couldn’t sleep at night, after seeing that terrible moment. They were disappointed, disgusted and embarrassed.”

The Taliban was an awful regime. At first it had been good for Afghanistan. It had brought order and discipline to a disparate society, curbing the infighting between warlords, ending more than 20 years of war, ridding the country of much of its illicit trade in poppy products like heroin and opium. But infiltration by al-Qaida loyalists out of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries had corrupted the regime. Its already-conservative interpretation of Islam became even narrower, to the point that non-Muslims had to wear identification on their clothing, much as Jews had to wear stars on their sleeves in Nazi-occupied Europe. Many Afghan families, including Manilay’s, had suffered under the Taliban and left.

It had been two years since the Taliban was ousted by a United States-led coalition of which Canadians were a part. Girls were going to school again, and shopkeepers were returning to Kabul by the thousands. They were playing soccer and boxing at the stadium again. And buzkashi—in all its wild glory—was back.

Yet Manilay felt that all was not right. Despite the fact he was still haunted by the images of blood, suffering and death at the stadium, he still believed the harsh Taliban law was the right law for Afghanistan. “It was a lesson for those people. They will never steal anything because they see if they steal anything, the same thing will happen to them. I agree because Islam says this.”

Under the Taliban, shopkeepers could leave their businesses unlocked at night and no one would dare steal from them, not even a single chocolate. “Now there is a lot of crime, a lot of prostitution, a lot of thieves (but) there is no punishment,” my translator told me. “There is police and they say they will catch the thief. But if that thief pays, they will leave that thief alone. So a lot of thieves from every part of Afghanistan, they have come here. Many killers, many criminals.”

Indeed, Afghan police and army forces are limited in their ability to maintain order. They constantly complain they haven’t been paid in months. Graft is simply a way of doing business here. What cash is available to the central government is picked clean by the time it filters down to local police precincts and army outposts. Police collect ‘taxes’ from truckers; they even say they issue receipts. Heavily armed, non-uniformed ‘soldiers’ at remote checkpoints smoke opium, hash and marijuana and are suspected of turning a blind eye to the insurgency. And within the government itself, titanic power struggles between Pashtuns and Tajiks continue to pose an underlying threat to the country’s stability.

This is the daunting challenge facing Canadian troops and other members of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Despite the leadership of interim President Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan remains a land of poverty, unrest and stark contrasts. Looking to the future, it seems chained to its past. More than a million people have flocked to Kabul since the war. It is a bustling, cosmopolitan third-world city where business now thrives among the ruins.

But some say it is a false economy and fragile peace—that Kabul is an island in a gathering storm bolstered by the spending of 350 aid organizations whose members are often afraid to leave the capital and where law and order hang by a string in the form of the 5,500 North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops patrolling its streets and alleyways.

Relatively few women—maybe 20 per cent in Kabul; far fewer elsewhere—have shed the all-covering burkhas that became a symbol of the Taliban regime. They choose instead only to vary the colours from the requisite blue required under Taliban law.

Karzai’s government is seen to have little influence outside the city. “To the north and south, it is not going well,” Canada’s top soldier in Afghanistan at the time, Major-General Andrew Leslie, told me. “There have been more attacks in the last two weeks than in the previous 12. They are now targeting relief workers and care workers—people who are trying to help.”

ISAF is expanding its forces out into smaller centres in the form of provincial reconstruction teams, or PRTs, in which combat engineers and non-governmental aid organizations—protected by fighting forces—will build schools, reconstruct roads and restore infrastructure. Canada’s current commitment to the NATO-led ISAF ends soon. It has consisted of two rotations, each with 1,900 personnel. Last April, Prime Minister Paul Martin announced that approximately 600 CF members will be deployed to Afghanistan after the current commitment ends in August. He said the armed reconnaissance group will be supported by 200 air force personnel. He also stated that the group would be provided with Coyote armoured personnel vehicles.

When I left Afghanistan in mid-November 2003—after nearly four months in the country—new territorial battles between warlords were raging in Mazar-e Sharif, to the north of the capital. And despite the continued presence of 11,500 U.S.-led coalition troops in the country, Taliban and al-Qaida forces had regained footholds in some border regions with Pakistan, pushing to within 40 kilometres of Kabul. Their operatives have since launched successful suicide attacks on ISAF forces, killing Canadian and British soldiers earlier this year.

Another insurgent group, Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, or HIG, led by warlord and former prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, has reportedly formed alliances with former Taliban and al-Qaida enemies. Determined to oust the U.S.-sponsored government and all Western influences from his homeland, Hekmatyar launched a terrorist campaign against ISAF forces around the capital, starting with the bus attack that killed four German soldiers and wounded 29 others in June 2003. An Oct. 2 mine strike that killed two Canadian soldiers is believed to have been engineered by Hekmatyar’s people.

Corporal Dan Matthews was the only paratrooper to escape that mine blast without a scrape and as he sat weeping before me three days later, he didn’t know why. He had tragedy written all over his face and an overwhelming guilt gnawing at his soul. A soulful, spiritual man, the 32-year-old Toronto native was dealing with demons he’d never imagined existed. His section commander, Sergeant Robert Short, and one of his colleagues, Cpl. Robbie Beerenfenger, were killed when their lead jeep was blown beyond recognition by an anti-tank mine.

Matthews was in a jeep 20 metres behind the blast. His driver, Cpl. Cameron Laidlaw, and the front passenger, Master Cpl. Jason (Jay) Hamilton, were wounded along with the driver of the first vehicle, Cpl. Thomas Stirling.

Matthews, however, was rear security on the two-vehicle patrol. He was sitting with his back to the lead vehicle as they drove along a goat track in the foothills southwest of the main Canadian base, known as Camp Julien. “I was the lucky one. Hell, yes, I feel guilty. If I could take their spots, I would. We all have families. Why was I spared and they weren’t? I keep asking myself: How the hell did I get out of this without a mark on me? I don’t have any answers.”

He was sobbing.

“Right now, it’s just like a videotape that’s going on in my head and I can’t stop it.” He didn’t sleep for days after the blast. Yet he and his two jeepmates laughed through tears as they told stories and imparted fond memories of their fallen comrades. They wept openly as they relived in vivid detail the moments leading up to and after the blast.

Known to his colleagues as TJ, Stirling, 23, of Assiniboia, Sask., was thrown clear of the vehicle. He suffered shrapnel wounds and burns to his arms and hands. The six soldiers had been out all that morning Oct. 2, returning for lunch so that Short, a 42-year-old light engineer known as a pioneer, could confirm that the route had been proven. They had watched the engineers travelling the route, driving a 17-tonne armoured vehicle and two other vehicles up and down it that morning, beyond the rows of white rocks that marked de-mined areas. In fact, the engineers had passed along the route six times in the previous 24 hours without incident.

De-mining is probably the most co-ordinated national program in Afghanistan. And with good reason. Between five and 11 million mines are estimated to still lie buried beneath Afghan soil, but nobody knows for sure, said Dan Kelly of Newcastle, N.B., who has served as program director of the UN Mine Action Centre for Afghanistan for 4 1/2 years. Needless to say, a lot of potentially productive land has been rendered useless.

“The other major impact is on victims,” explained Kelly. “It is confirmed today that there are over 100 mine and unexploded ordnance victims per month in Afghanistan—definitely, definitely the highest victim figure in the world today.”

But it’s getting better. In the mid-1990s, the figure was 300 victims a month. Anti-mine groups aim to have the country mine-free by 2012, at a cost of some $670 million Cdn. The area where Short’s patrol was working had been de-mined and was in the process of being resettled. Short took time during their break that day to seek out tentage for a family of nomads living just a few hundred metres up the track from where he died.

They left camp again about 1 p.m., heading southwest into the dusty, rolling foothills they call the Badlands. They were just 3 1/2 kilometres away, as the crow flies, when all hell broke loose. “There was this huge flash, loud—I wouldn’t say like a bang or a thump—just a huge pop, like a balloon popping, but loud,” said Laidlaw, a kid-faced 25-year-old from Petawawa, Ont. The lead vehicle had struck an anti-tank mine. “The Iltis jumped up, over to the left,” added Laidlaw, known as Cam to his colleagues. “It was in flames and smoke was billowing up—black smoke. I looked to the right and there was TJ lying on the ground.”

Hamilton, his lined face betraying long years of military service, said the force of the blast drove him and Laidlaw back in their seats. Both sustained facial cuts, probably from flying debris. “I was dazed, at first,” said Hamilton, a 33-year-old native of Whitewood, Sask. “I got the snot knocked out of me, like a good jab. I felt my head and realized I was bleeding. I looked at Cam and he was bleeding from the mouth.”

Matthews heard the explosion and then a second one. He saw flames coming past their jeep and suddenly Laidlaw and Hamilton, blood streaming down their faces, were scrambling to the rear. “I thought we were being shot at,” said Matthews. “I got out of the jeep and started looking for somebody to shoot.”

The three took up positions behind the vehicle. Hamilton checked Laidlaw, fearing he’d sustained internal injuries. It turned out to be a cut lip. Hamilton said his heart told him they’d just been through a mine blast, but his head was disoriented and didn’t want to process what had happened.

He stumbled on his words as he ordered Laidlaw to call in the mine strike. Before he got the words out, Matthews, a radioman, was already calling it in.

Another para patrol, which had been designated the emergency response team, was reassigned to the scene within 10 minutes. In the heat of the fire, the ammunition from the lead vehicle was starting to crack off rounds all over the place, including rockets and grenades. Bullets and shrapnel were hitting the ground around them. Wary of more mines, Hamilton followed his training, taking off his vest and pulling out his bayonet to begin prodding the ground. He and Matthews started working their way toward Stirling and Short, lying motionless further up the track.

It was a painfully slow process as he lay on his belly and prodded the ground in front of him, centimetre by centimetre, for more mines. All the while, he was calling out the names of Short, Beerenfenger and Stirling. There were no replies until Stirling started yelling: “Get me out of here!” Hamilton warned him to keep his head down. The wounded driver started to crawl toward them and Hamilton asked him if he could prod. Stirling nodded. Hamilton told him to get his bayonet out and start prodding as they made their way toward each other. They prodded another metre or so before Stirling scrambled through the blast area toward them. “As soon as TJ got close enough, I just reached over top of Jay (Hamilton) and pulled him over top of him,” said Matthews. He then took Stirling back behind the jeep, where he and Laidlaw started administering first aid.

Hamilton continued, working his way toward Short, standing and taking big steps, then returning to the prone position to crawl back off the track toward Short. Beerenfenger was still nowhere to be seen. As he marked his cleared route with tape and foot powder, he continued to call out, but still there were no replies. He finally reached Short. “Once I got up to him, I looked at his face and did a visual,” said Hamilton. “I knew he had a broken leg but, to me, it was like he was sleeping. There were no apparent injuries. He was just lying there with his arms out. I grabbed him by the wrist and I couldn’t find a pulse. I went from his wrist to his neck, trying to get a pulse. I didn’t get a pulse. I knew at that point we were in trouble.” Hamilton ducked as a round went off in the dirt in front of him, then he worked his way up alongside Short’s body, cut off his equipment and began cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Nothing worked. Meanwhile, he had spotted Beerenfenger and directed Matthews toward him.

With Laidlaw directing him with the aid of binoculars, Matthews began working his way toward the casualty on his stomach, prodding the whole way. Laidlaw continued calming Stirling, talking to him and lighting cigarettes for him. “I remember distinctly and I will never forget TJ’s voice. He was just saying: “‘Get me out of here; get me out of here.’” Soon, it was apparent to Hamilton that Short was dead. He returned to his Iltis to check on the others. He gave Stirling yet another cigarette and began calming him down, before returning to continue marking the cleared lanes into the blast site.

The call back to base was necessarily cryptic: “One of our casualties is no longer with us.” No names could be broadcast over the radio. Meanwhile, the other para patrol had arrived and Sgt. Ted Hughson of Manitoulin Island, Ont., took over command at the scene. Laidlaw said he was amazed at Hughson’s calm and reassurance. Cpl. Brian Duval of Penetanguishene, Ont., joined Matthews in no-man’s land, staying behind him, talking to him and keeping him calm as the survivor worked his way toward Beerenfenger, who was dead.

Twenty-four hours later, the stricken jeep was still smouldering. Several days later, the head of HIG in Kabul, Abu Bakr, was arrested. On Jan. 26, two raids by Canadian Forces and Afghan authorities found landmines and other ordnance hidden near the site. They also netted more suspects, including the man they think planted the mines that killed Short and Beerenfenger.

Much was made of the role of the Iltis jeep following the mine strike, and in the suicide attack that followed in January. But these incidents were more the result of the distribution of Canadian assets in-theatre and how Canadians insisted on doing their jobs than any lack of equipment. The Canadian arsenal rivals any in ISAF. Our soldiers in Kabul want for nothing. They have the biggest and most lavish camp; they have the most armour; they have the best personal protection of any troops in the force. They also have by far the largest and most diverse area of operations. It ranges from cramped village markets to alleyways to desert and mountain passes. It is a daunting challenge for our undermanned army.

Perhaps Canadian troops should never have been travelling goat tracks in Iltises. And they don’t any more. But I contend that our soldiers are ill-served by the highly politicized debate over the Iltis. Indeed, the jeep is far from the ideal patrol vehicle, but the “ideal” patrol vehicle does not exist—certainly not in the 34-nation NATO force patrolling Kabul.

The Iltis is an open-topped vehicle; it’s underpowered, mechanically unreliable, dangerously cramped and it’s unarmoured. But Short and Beerenfenger didn’t die because they were under-equipped. They died because Canadian convention insists they do their jobs the Canadian way—up close and personal. Peace-support patrols from the back of a Bison are just not the same. The troops are elevated, they look down on the people they are supposed to protect.

Likewise, Cpl. Jamie Murphy didn’t die Jan. 27 because he was in an Iltis. I suggest he died because Canadians insist their soldiers inflict no “collateral damage,” that—according to orders from senior officers—they travel with their bullets in their magazines and not in their chambers. They do so because the military brass doesn’t want them to act too hastily and shoot the wrong man or, worse, woman or child. Senior officers told me in Kabul this past fall that it is better for a Canadian soldier to go down than an innocent Afghan civilian. The rationale is that if Canadian troops come under fire from, say, a sniper, they will dive for cover first and then return fire. Or if confronted with an opposing force, they can employ an escalating response—a verbal threat, a cocked weapon, a warning shot, then—and only then—lethal force. The problem is, these kinds of threats are scarce in this theatre of operations. This is because Taliban, al-Qaida, and HIG forces know they can inflict more damage with random suicide attacks or landmines than they can in any head-to-head confrontation.

Collaterals are not an issue among some allied forces. To some, killing innocent civilians is part of the cost of doing business. In Canada, we hold public inquiries and disband entire regiments over such things. In some ways, our soldiers are ill-served by the debate over military funding. I think Canadians tend to equate bad equipment with a bad military. That’s not the case. Far from it. The arguments for more equipment and the political contention that our troops haven’t got the tools to do their jobs overlook the fact that our soldiers can hold their own with any in the world.

Canadians have a disturbing habit of blaming themselves when things go wrong. It’s somehow our fault that an HIG operative planted three anti-tank mines along a goat track near the Canadian base. We’re to blame when a fanatic with a mortar strapped to his chest steps out of a crowd and blows himself up next to a Canadian jeep.

Certainly our military needs better equipment, more money, and more soldiers. But we also need to remember that perhaps incidents like these are part of the cost of doing business. Perhaps they are part of the price of the privilege of being Canadian.

Manilay knew all about that privilege. He has a brother in Toronto. He wants to come to Canada and practise medicine. He may not have been much of a fixer in Kabul, but he could make the drive to Peshawar and back without fear, or failure—no small feat, for sure. I have no doubt he could make his way around Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver or any other Canadian city. Maybe someday he will. And perhaps then, his nightmares will stop and his dreams will come true.