The author, Matthieu Aikins (standing), visits with Afghans at a construction site in Spin Boldak.

PHOTO: MATTHIEU AIKINS

Abdul Wali was looking back over his shoulder, explaining to me how bad things had gotten for him, and about the gains the Taliban had been making in Kandahar, when, with a crunch, he rear-ended the car in front of us, another equally battered Corolla taxi that had been trying to take a left turn.

The car jolted to a halt. I slunk down in the back seat, glad that with my scruffy beard, half-Asian features, and local dress I looked convincingly Afghan—Kandahar City was a rough place for foreigners these days. Abdul Wali got out of the car and began haranguing the other driver, even though we were clearly at fault. The knot of honking cars behind us, realizing that we weren’t going anywhere, started pulling around.

After a minute, the looping wail of a siren rose from further up the street—the unmistakable warning signal of a military convoy. Looking through the back window I saw the tall bulks of armoured personnel carriers. The drivers around us scrambled to pull their vehicles off the road, leaving our two Corollas marooned alone out in the path of the convoy. We were on a portion of the route leading to the airfield nicknamed Iraq Road by the locals for the frequent suicide and Improvised Explosive Device (IED) attacks—the Canadian troops call the whole stretch, part of Highway 4, IED Alley.

A group of villagers from Spin Boldak participate in a traditional dhul or drum-dance ceremony.

PHOTO: MATTHIEU AIKINS

Abdul Wali strode around behind the car and, planting his feet wide apart, stared at the onrushing convoy and crossed his arms in an X above his head. The convoy, looming against his small figure, checked its speed slightly and swerved into the narrow lane beside us. The armoured vehicles towered over us, their wheels as tall as the car, and high up, I caught a glimpse of pale skin beneath the helmets and eyeglasses of the gunners, my countrymen.

The convoy howled off towards the airfield and, after a moment’s pause, the chaos of local traffic rushed back into the vacuum left by the convoy’s passage, a swarm of battered Corollas and auto rickshaws and donkey carts and pedestrians.

Abdul Wali resolved his dispute with the other driver, and we continued on our way out of the city, heading south towards the border town of Spin Boldak. Once we passed the airfield, he relaxed a bit, lighting up a cigarette and turning back to talk to me over his shoulder, a habit the accident hadn’t impeded. His square jaw, arched eyebrows and pencil moustache gave him a raffish look.

“As I was telling you, things have gotten really bad for the ordinary people here,” he said. Two weeks before, the Taliban had kidnapped his uncle from his home village in Arghestan district, east of Kandahar City. Now his family was putting together a delegation of elders to send across the border to the Baluchistan region of Pakistan—where many of the Taliban’s senior leaders linked to the Quetta Shura are believed to be—to negotiate for the uncle’s release. “They will tell them that I’m not in the army any more, and offer some money.”

Abdul Wali liked to boast that he was the first person to sign up for the new Afghan National Army in 2002. He had, in fact, been a fighter in the original CIA-sponsored militia, led by governor Gul Agha Shirzai, that had advanced up from Pakistan in November of 2001 under the aegis of U.S. airpower and taken the airport and city from the Taliban. Later, Abdul Wali had fought with the army’s 2nd Corps, an amalgam of local militias, alongside U.S. soldiers in Shah Wali Kot district.

Children work in an auto shop at a trading bazaar. Child labour is common in Afghanistan, as many families struggle to put food on the table.

PHOTO: MATTHIEU AIKINS

But Abdul Wali had found himself on the losing side of a counter-insurgency. The new Afghan government was slow to extend its reach. From their safe havens in Pakistan, the Taliban’s leaders methodically re-established their sway throughout the rural districts of Kandahar Province, working through tribal networks and cultivating a ‘shadow’ government, backed by the threat of abductions, bomb attacks and assassinations. Even pro-government mullahs were killed. Soon, Afghan villagers in the districts closest to Kandahar City had to balance the competing claims of the central government and the Taliban.

Eventually, Taliban pressure on Abdul Wali’s family in Arghestan made his position with the army untenable. The intimidation, which had begun with threatening phone calls and night letters, culminated two years back, he told me, when his young cousin had been abducted. The cousin had been freed with a ransom of a car and 10 Kalashnikovs, on the promise that Abdul Wali quit working for the government.

So Abdul Wali had quit his army post, which he was so proud of, and scraped by with work as a driver and occasional work in Spin Boldak. But, because of his close relations with the government, he was still a marked man. He had moved his wife and kids into the military cantonment and watched, year by year, as the Taliban’s grip around Kandahar tightened. His life had now shrunk to the city and the highway to Spin Boldak. He could not even safely visit Arghandab or Panjwai, two fertile valleys that abut the city. If he were stopped at a checkpoint by the Taliban, he might be recognized and summarily shot.

In 2009 the world was closing in on him—there were few options left. He rubbed his neck, and pulled on his cigarette, his eyes back on the road. “I must decide if I should stay and fight the Taliban, or take my family and go.”

Children in the northern Afghanistan village of Balkh.

PHOTO: MATTHIEU AIKINS

These days it seems as if, like Abdul Wali, all of Afghanistan is poised on the cusp of decision. In a final gambit, U.S. President Barack Obama has ordered a deployment of 30,000 additional U.S. soldiers, with an expiration date of July 2011. Policymakers and generals have pinned their hopes on a new, ‘population-centric’ counter-insurgency strategy, one focused on bringing security to the people. It’s a belated recognition of how NATO has struggled to do the one thing that matters most: improve the daily security of Afghans.

In my extensive travels as a journalist throughout northern, southern and western Afghanistan, I encountered many Afghans who expressed an almost universal sentiment that conditions, particularly security, were getting worse. (Though in January, a BBC poll found that perceptions had improved somewhat since 2009, when I last visited.)

In Kabul, I visited Hajji Ahmad Shah Khan, the Member of Parliament for Spin Boldak District, and an elder of his tribal grouping, the Adozai. Hajji Ahmad Shah, a pot-bellied, white-bearded old fellow, who had weathered the mujahedeen years as a guerilla commander, lives in a modest little compound in a poor suburb on the outskirts of Kabul, unlike some of his fellow politicians. “At the (December 2001) Bonn Conference,” he told me mournfully, referring to the UN-brokered agreement following the fall of the Taliban, “they promised to bring back the peace and rebuild the country. The international community spent their money, they lost their children, and they have been unsuccessful here. Now we feel there’s no more choice, no more way for us.”

As an honest man, Hajji Ahmad Shah’s own authority among his tribe has been undermined by younger players who have access to tremendous resources through the drug trade and other illicit economic sectors. “Our commanders have all come for stealing,” he sermonized. “Where there was one Taliban, they make two.”

Members of the Afghan border police prepare to eat in their barracks at Spin Boldak.

PHOTO: MATTHIEU AIKINS

The weakness of the central government—its lack of authority and corruption—was the most common reason cited by Afghans to explain the rising strength of the insurgency and its support among the Afghan people. For there is clear evidence—anecdotally and in polls—that pro-Taliban sentiments are rising, particularly in the south. In order to understand this, one must understand how differently southerners experienced the original Taliban regime. Mullah Omar and his group were sons of the soil, retired fighters who in 1994 took up arms in the districts around Kandahar to put an end to the depredations of the mujahedeen warlords who had carved up the province among themselves.

“We may have been afraid to leave our homes in the period of the Taliban,” Shakiba Hashimi said, “but at least we felt safe in them.” Hashimi is a female, Shiite member of parliament from Kandahar; she taught school clandestinely in her home under the Taliban. Yet her memories of their reign are of things being quiet and safe. Along the same lines, a survey conducted by Oxfam found dramatic regional differences in Afghan’s perceptions. In Kabul, 78 per cent surveyed named the Taliban as the most harmful period they had endured since the Soviet invasion, versus just six per cent in Kandahar, and 17 per cent in Helmand.

Like Hajji Ahmad Shah, Hashimi’s strongest words were reserved for those holding positions of power in the south, particularly Ahmed Wali Karzai, who is President Karzai’s brother. Last year the New York Times reported that Ahmed Wali Karzai is a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade. He and President Karzai have dismissed the allegations as baseless.

In Spin Boldak, I met Habibullah Jan, a newly arrived doctor who had been educated in Pakistan in the 1970s. With his simple tunic and wide, bushy beard, Habibullah looked like any Pashtun farmer, but there was a certain urban poise to his mannerisms, as he described to me the symptoms for tuberculosis, and warned me how bad the dusty air could be for one’s lungs.

Habibullah had fought with the mujahedeen, showing particular skill with a rocket launcher against tanks, until his career was ended when he was strafed by a helicopter gunship—a tale which he immediately corroborated by hiking up his pant leg and showing me his calf, which was still missing most of its flesh under a mass of grey-white scarring.

Young members of the Afghan Border Police stand in front of portraits of Ahmad Shah Massoud and Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai.

PHOTO: MATTHIEU AIKINS

Now he was trying to help heal his country. In this, he’s representative of one of the bright spots of post-Taliban Afghanistan. Access to basic medical services has improved in most areas, though life expectancies and infant mortality are still among the worst in the world. Indeed, the little pharmacy-cum-clinic that Habibullah shared with one other doctor provided a good window on just how stark life is for many Afghans, especially out in the rural districts. Diarrhea, caused by unsafe drinking water, was the most common source of fatal children’s illnesses, and the few women who would visit male doctors generally only did so for serious conditions.

Working next door in a barber shop was Nazir, a recently arrived refugee from Helmand. A chatty little man who’d steal glances at himself in the big wall mirrors, his expression grew emotionless as he recounted how his family had fled fighting around Lashkar Gah between the British and the Taliban—a bomb had hit their neighbour’s family compound he said, killing an old woman. Here, in Spin Boldak, there wasn’t as much work, but at least it was safer.

Most Afghans simply want peace. Several research polls show that the majority of Afghans favour reconciliation with the Taliban, yet as of Janurary serious attempts at negotiation have yet to be pursued by any parties to the conflict.

Also, given the extent to which the international presence has become associated with the ongoing conflict and the widely disfavoured current government, it’s not surprising to find that hope among Afghans is wearing thin. One post-election study of Afghans conducted by the Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit, a Kabul-based group, found that, while opinions were mixed about the actions of Afghan leaders, strongest condemnation was reserved for the international community, who were seen as having manipulated the process: “The irony of the situation is that while many international observers worry that the democratic process and the government in Afghanistan have lost legitimacy,” the report states rather frankly, “in the eyes of many Afghans it is the international community that has lost legitimacy.”

Yet, given the direness of their situation, Afghans like Abdul Wali, Hajji Ahmad Shah and Shakiba Hashimi still view the West as a key partner in rebuilding their country. The problem is finding peace first.

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