Nir Rosen - Aftermath

“I’m very sorry to hear that. You can rest assured that this is a different police,” said Westby. “Tell him we apologize for the disturbance, but we’re adamant about keeping these people out.”

“I am an old man,” one of them said. “If we talk to them, the Taliban will slap us. The Taliban sometimes come here and demand money. If we refuse, they’re going to kill us.”

The old men asked if they could go take their vegetables to the market. The Americans agreed. Westby told them that if they gave information on the Taliban that led to arrests, they would receive money. “If the Taliban see us talking to you, they will slaughter us tonight,” one of the men said. “The Taliban don’t tell us when they are coming. We’re sitting in our homes, and all of a sudden they come and we hear shots. The Taliban don’t sleep here. They come here like thieves.”

“Let them understand that we’re not the bad guys,” Westby told his translator. “We’re trying to stop them from doing what they are doing. The best way to accomplish that is by a partnership. We can’t keep coming here every day.”

“We can’t notify the police, but we’ll send some small child to tell the police,” one of the old men said.

The sun rose, golden over the shrubs, as we made our way back to the checkpoint. The police had mentioned seeing a Taliban car. “What was that about a Taliban car?” asked Kilaki. “The ANP think everything is Taliban,” Westby replied. “I don’t think they fuckin’ know. They’re so eager to impress that sometimes they call everything Taliban.”

The police at the next checkpoint radioed to say there were Taliban around. “They’re over there, and they’re over there, and they’re over there, but we can’t go on that road because it’s all IEDs, but the road is full of civilian traffic,” Westby said, mocking the useless information he got from the cops.

A highway patrol commander called Torabas came by with his men. He and his men had just seen two Corollas full of Taliban in the distance. I asked him how he knew. He had been living here for two years, he said, and he recognized their faces. All the hills north of our position were said to be controlled by the Taliban, but the police were too scared to go there. I asked Torabas why the Taliban were so popular in Helmand. “The Taliban are supported by the British,” he said, insisting that he had seen the British military drop fuel supplies to the Taliban. “Nobody likes the Taliban here,” he said. “It’s only out of fear. When the Taliban see people talking to the police, they kill them. They are here only by force, and many people dislike the police. Some police steal from houses. Before we recruited uneducated people who had no training.” About fifty of his men had been killed by the Taliban since he took command.

He was from the Nurzai tribe, like Colonel Shirzad and most police in Helmand, he told me. His father and grandfather had fought the Soviets with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami, the most radical faction of the mujahideen. When the Taliban seized Helmand and pushed out Hizb-e-Islami, Torabas’s family fled to Pakistan. He said Taliban had seized their lands.

“I’m living in Lashkar Gah, but my fields are still in the hands of the Taliban,” he said. “When the Taliban were defeated, they didn’t have any power. Then we were living in our compound, but now the Taliban are back.” It seemed his motive was to regain his land. “When the Russians attacked Afghanistan they were trying to destroy our country. The Taliban didn’t like the mujahideen. When the Americans start oppressing or disrespecting our culture—touching our women, disrespecting our elders—then we will fight jihad against them.”

That night Kilaki caught one of the police commanders smoking hashish in a car. “It looked like a Cheech and Chong movie,” he said. Westby gave the PR money to buy cooking supplies. “Their logistics process doesn’t work, and I can’t have them going hungry,” he said. Only one of the PR’s senior men showed any initiative and wanted to set up his own ambushes. Colonel Shirzad didn’t want to fight, Dyer told me, and without a charismatic leader like Farid the PR were content to just patrol Highway 601.

ONE AFTERNOON while I was marooned with Team Prowler and the PR in the small mud police outpost along Highway 601, languishing in the oppressive heat, surrounded by a moonscape of bleached rocks, hoping for some action to relieve my boredom, Sergeant Ahmadullah radioed to the young Afghan translator working with the Americans, called Mansur, and told him, “We found a Taliban, we have him here. What should we do, kill him or what?” Mansur told Ahmadullah he could not kill the prisoner, and instructed him to bring the man to the Americans.

The prisoner was a young man with a purple salwar kameez . He had long hair down to his neck and a cap atop his head. He looked bewildered. His eyes were wide with apprehension as he squatted on the dirt with his hands cuffed in front of him. He wore two different sandals. He had been a passenger in a taxi; the police had also brought the driver and the other passengers.

Ahmadullah said his prisoner’s cellphone had a Taliban song on it. This was his evidence. Ahmadullah was by the roadside, while I was standing with his men, at the police outpost, out of his earshot. His men were privately angry about their commander’s decision to arrest the man and wanted him released. Zahir, another translator working with the Americans, was outraged. “This is why people hate the fucking police and support the Taliban,” he said. I asked Captain Westby, Team Prowler’s commander, why the man was being held. “He had an anti-American ring tone,” Westby said, “and he has some relatives that Ahmadullah says are in the Taliban.”

Zahir explained to the Americans that the prisoner wanted to pray. The police were eager to uncuff him so he could, and the skeptical Americans relented. Zahir insisted the prisoner wouldn’t attempt an escape.

Sergeant Gustafson took one of the passengers by the wall to enter his biometric data into a handheld device. He took the man’s picture and another of his eyes, along with his fingerprints, name, father’s name, and tribe’s name. The man seemed amused. But he was now in the American system. Westby and a sergeant interrogated the prisoner, who was called Zeibullah Agha. He was a student in a famous religious school in the Pakistani city of Peshawar and was on his way back to Babaji, where the British were engaged in heavy combat with the Taliban, in order to help his family flee to safety because his father was an old man. The Americans asked him for the names of his brothers, father, and uncle, but they had trouble with the names and confused the Pakistani town he was studying in for another one, Quetta, more famous for being a Taliban safe haven. I told the Americans that the school in Pakistan he named practiced a moderate form of Islam anathema to the Taliban.

“People with a similar surname are known Taliban,” Westby said.

“I am a poor man. I don’t know why they arrested me,” Zeibullah said.

The American sergeant asked him why he had this music on his cellphone. “One of my friends put it on my cellphone,” Zeibullah said.

The sergeant smiled. “Bullshit,” he said, looking at Zahir. “How do you say bullshit in Pashtu?”

Zahir looked at the prisoner and said, “ Kus eh shir , ” meaning “a pussy’s poem.”

Zahir and the police told me that Zeibullah’s cellphone had some videos of battles and one of a graduation from a religious school to be a mullah. “Everybody has them on their phones—even I have them,” Zahir said. Sergeant Ahmadullah told the Americans that he knew Zeibullah’s father, who was a good man. “But I don’t know him,” he said, “and his uncle is Taliban.”