What Wars Leave Behind: The Faceless and the Forgotten

1. Securing District 4

1 Securing District 4 Kabul, Afghanistan: April 2004 I arrive at the base toward evening for a night patrol in the rain. The captain, however, must pick up an Afghan police officer. On paper the American, Canadian, Icelandic, and western and eastern European soldiers of the international security assistance forces play only a supportive role for the central Afghan government. The captain explains that protocol requires an Afghan police officer to lead patrols. The captain calls me by my last name, as he does his soldiers, and tells me I will ride with him. I am an embedded reporter. An hour later we leave the base in southern Kabul in a convoy of four Humvees, six soldiers in each vic, for the District 4 police station. The rain has stopped and the late afternoon light washes the sky and a few remaining clouds pink; as we proceed, it fades almost instantly to an impenetrable depth without stars. Kids wave to us from the shadows, as they always do when we go out on a night patrol, but it seems to me they also have one hand behind their back—and then I’ll hear their rocks ding our doors. Our dirt road climbs a hill. Birds swarm the broken towers of a stone castle that overlooks our progress. A soldier seated behind me tells me he served in Bosnia. There he knew who was hostile and who was not. In Afghanistan he doesn’t. Every Afghan, he says, is suspect. “We’re all scared. This is not our country, not our culture. Going out at night in town with all these people with weapons, it’s very different for us. My gun is nothing compared to their cache of rocket-propelled 7 8 conflic t zones grenades. The minute we stop being scared is the time something will happen.” We drive until we reach the ruins of a square cinder-block building. An oil lamp lights one small window. We get out, stones crunching beneath our boots. We hear someone approaching, and then a man in a green uniform, illuminated by our headlights, materializes before us. “Who are you?” he asks our translator. The captain shows him a paper. “What do you need?” he asks, glancing at the document. “We need a police officer on our patrol,” our captain says through the translator. “Which spot is yours to patrol?” “District 4. Your station is part of District 4. We’re here because we are mandated to bring a police officer along with us.” “We’ll get you a guy.” He turns and disappears into the dark. He returns a short time later—first the sound of his boots and then he again materializes in the headlights—accompanied by a short thin man in a green jacket much too large for his narrow body. His pants form pools of cloth around his ankles, and mud has turned his sandals to boots. Patchy stubble mars his face like a burn. He introduces himself: Saif Ali. Without another word he gets into the front seat of my vehicle and sits beside the captain, next to the passenger door. Saif turns around to shake hands. He does not distinguish me, the American reporter in the backseat wearing a helmet and Kevlar, from the soldiers in the Humvee. We start up again and follow a narrow stone road that takes us behind the police station and into some woods. The opaque shapes of leafless trees loom above us. Dogs bark in a disjointed chorus. Mud huts stand stark and mute in the sweep of our headlights. We cross a bridge and listen to water rushing invisibly beneath us until we reach a checkpoint. A man on a cot outside a shack kicks out from some blankets and waves us through. The captain tells me we have entered a bad area. Lots of robberies. But we should be fine, because we won’t be stopping to do foot patrols. Don’t need to. We’re on a presence patrol only. We’re not to do anything. Securing District 4 9 People just need to see us drive through and know we’re here, nothing more. The captain turns on the headlamp to illuminate Saif so the locals can see him. Saif stares out the windshield and raises a hand and smiles as if to reassure anyone watching us. Veiled women appear fleetingly on the side of the road, revealed by the sweep of our headlights. Stooped...