Holding Garmsir

After the Marines in Mustang Platoon routed the Taliban to capture a key stronghold in southern Afghanistan, they were faced with an even more difficult mission: defend against the heat, the boredom, the stress, the homesickness, and the weight of history in a place that had never been conquered—and held—by outsiders.

by John Spong

January 2009

(Page 5 of 7)

Life did not improve when the Soviets left, in 1989. “There were several ethnic groups in Afghanistan, all armed by the United States and other countries, all wanting their commander to be president,” he said. “For that reason they started fighting each other.” External forces maintained a hand in the fight. “Pakistan was supporting the Pashtuns, some Russians supported the Tajiks, the Turkish supported the Uzbeks, Iran was supporting the Hazara people. They were fighting for five years, and they took out fifty thousand Kabul citizens.

“Finally the Taliban came and started telling people, ‘We’re going to help you. We will fight these different groups, these killers and robbers. We don’t want power. We will have an election for you, and then you will have power.’ ”

With the backing of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the mostly Pashtun Taliban swept through southern Afghanistan in 1994 and took Kabul two years later. “Then their real face came,” Hamza said. “They said, ‘Females are not allowed to go to school anymore or work. Males have to grow beards. Don’t listen to music. You are not allowed to watch movies or wear Westernized clothes.’ They brought a lot of bullshit.”

They ruled through the constant threat of violence, quite often realized. “There is no one living in Kabul that hasn’t been punished by Talibs. They took my father-in-law in jail for two weeks because his beard wasn’t long enough.

“There was the night of my wedding. I invited classmates to my house to have a party. This was a happy night for us, and the females were making some noise. Talibs came and knocked on the door. If we had opened it, I wouldn’t be alive now. The women said through the door, ‘We are only females here.’ The Talibs said they saw males in our windows, and the females said those were only the kids. Our bicycles were in front of my house. The Talibs took all the bikes to their headquarters, and when my father went to get them the next day, they beat him with a piece of cable.”

Hamza welcomed the U.S. invasion as a possible end to all that. He took a job as a linguist for Special Forces in early 2002 and began splitting his time between med school and missions to Afghanistan’s eastern provinces. He translated seized documents and gathered intelligence at vehicle checkpoints and on medical-assistance trips into villages. “My mom said, ‘Why not do an easy job in the city and not get killed?’ But I said, ‘If these kids from America are coming over to help, if they are willing to die for Afghanistan, how can an Afghan not be willing to do the same?’ ”

His dual life lasted for three and a half years, until he learned that his name had appeared on a Taliban hit list in 2005, a threat he took seriously. “They behead a lot of linguists in Afghanistan and Iraq. There’s a price on our head, and they say we cost more than a U.S. soldier.”

He hid out for much of the next year, maintaining little contact with his parents, wife, and young children. Eventually he received political asylum in the United States, and at a friend’s suggestion he moved to Dallas, where he found an apartment near downtown, in a building with twenty or so other Afghan families. His plan was to study for the medical licensing exam and bring his family to Texas, but in the meantime he worked security for his landlord in exchange for cheaper rent on the unit he shared with two other Afghans. “One of us is a good cook, so he gets rice at Wal-Mart and cooks for us,” he said. “I have books from a friend at medical college that I read. We play volleyball, have barbecues, watch Bollywood and Hollywood movies, go to mosque sometimes.”

Dallas was comfortable but never quite home, especially with his wife and kids still in Afghanistan, where news reports depicted a resurgent Taliban operating unchecked in much of the country. After less than a year, he applied with a contractor that provides linguists to the military. The company sent him back to the war, and his first stint was with Mustang.

At Dwyer he bunked with the boots but frequently stopped in to Ray’s tent to visit with Branson. He went partly to discuss upcoming missions, to explain what to expect from the people and the place. But just as often they talked about getting his family to Dallas. Branson’s dad is a D.C. attorney, and he connected Hamza with a nonprofit specializing in gaining political asylum for Afghan and Iraqi families who help the U.S. Over the summer, Hamza was waiting for word about whether his wife could follow him to Dallas.

But looking to the future does not come naturally to Hamza. Making sense of the present is chore enough. “Afghans are religious people, but they are not educated,” he said. “They think because the word ‘Taliban’ means ‘religious student’ that Talibs should be respected. So someone comes and tells them, ‘I know Arabic. The Koran is in Arabic, and you cannot read it. So I will tell you what it says. It says this is a good war. It is jihad against the U.S.’

“But the Koran doesn’t say ‘jihad’ means to kill all nonbelievers. The word ‘Islam’ means ‘peace.’ When Muhammad was living in Medina, he was close friends with Christians. They were his business partners. He never said to kill all non-Muslims.

“This is not about females in the United States drinking alcohol or wearing little clothes. It is about economy. In Helmand Province, they have no roads. They cannot grow vegetables and take them to Kabul or Kandahar. So they grow poppy. There is so much money in it, and whoever makes that money will support the Taliban because they need this business. The locals know it is against Islam to grow poppy. But the Taliban tell them it goes to the U.S. and Europe and kills their people, and that is some kind of jihad.

“I think maybe these people are jealous of the U.S. and wonder why we don’t have anything. Every day I am telling the locals to tell the Taliban, ‘Instead of fighting, build our country.’ I tell them, ‘Your kids are walking without shoes, getting sick. Everyone is skinny, malnourished. You have no schools. Build your country. Get an education. That is good jihad.’ ”

Like most Afghans, when he got specific, he blamed Pakistan. “We have had a border problem with them for a hundred years,” he said. “They want a weak government here so we won’t take the land back. We are a big market for their products, and they get some goods from Afghanistan very cheap. And they send their crazy people, like Talibs, to fight here so they won’t fight there.

“Ask any local, ‘Where is the Taliban?’ They will tell you, ‘They escaped to Pakistan.’ And maybe six months from now, when we are not here, they will come back. So that is the problem.”

Asymmetric

The first half of the drive from Dwyer to Garmsir moved through seemingly infinite desert, with the solid wall of dust kicked up by the trucks broken periodically by shifts in the wind or patches of gravel, revealing only that there was nothing to see. The landscape was one long sheet of brown riffled by the heat and low-lying dunes. The trucks slowed on the approach to the outskirts of town, where the dunes gave way to scattered mud homes and, as we got closer to the Helmand River, the Green Zone’s belt of trees and fields. It was far enough from where the fighting had been that even on my first trip to meet up with Mustang the area was full of people. Small bunches of tiny boys in beaded pillbox hats had rushed out of doorways to wave and beg for food while the adults hung back, the men looking on without emotion and the women ducking their heads behind dark veils or scurrying behind mud walls. After crossing the Helmand and an Afghan National Army checkpoint, we pushed through Garmsir’s largest bazaar, a dirt road lined with more mud buildings, these like tan shoe boxes with beat-up metal rolling doors. Some doors were closed, and some were missing, showing nothing but bare rooms. There weren’t even any people inside making use of the shade. Unlike the streets of a place like Ramadi, there were few signs of destruction. Just emptiness.

The town had changed by the time I drove through with Mustang a week later. A shura had been convened in early June, the first meeting of area leaders in nearly three years, and Garmsir had been declared sufficiently secure to invite locals home. But the bazaar hadn’t exactly sprung back to life. There was little sign of commerce, just men lingering at storefronts in groups of five and ten, sitting or squatting next to dusty motorcycles, watching as the patrol crawled by.

To the Marines that was an indication of success but also cause for heightened concern. They’d been warned that the Taliban was going asymmetric, that they would be fighting from within the populace, planting IEDs and using suicide attacks. Mustang had been instructed to watch for anything unusual, such as freshly turned dirt or a face that didn’t fit in. The place didn’t look like Iraq, but it started to feel like it; any one of those men at the bazaar could have been wearing a vest packed with explosives under his shalwar kameez.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7  next »