The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan by Graeme Smith Page A

announcement would be cancelled anyway, because it would look ridiculous to declare victory against such a gruesome backdrop. Surprisingly, the event went ahead. “We beat them,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Hope, describing a series of recent battles in the Panjwai valley. “Four successive strikes against the Taliban broke the back of their insurgency here.”
    He was speaking on June 4, 2006. If you chart the violence in southern Afghanistan, the line graph resembles mountains, soaring peaks growing higher and higher. Military commanders boldly predicted that each brutal ascent was the final push before reaching Shangri-La. This always led to disappointment, but the idea of success hidden just beyond the next peak of violence proved an enduring feature of military thinking. The same weekend of the surreal press conference in Panjwai, I sat down with NATO’s top southern commander, Canadian Brigadier-General David Fraser. I askedhim what he expected to happen as the number of foreign troops almost doubled in the coming month. “We’ve got more firepower,” Brigadier-General Fraser said. “In the short term, it might appear as if it’s getting worse. But in the mid-term and long run, I think it actually will make things better.” (One of my colleagues asked me to summarize the general’s outlook, and I answered only half-jokingly: “Rivers of blood, rivers of blood … but it’s a good thing.”) That kind of optimism went straight down through the ranks, for the most part. A few days earlier, I had visited an outpost where Canadians troops were recovering from a Taliban ambush. Insurgents had opened fire on their convoy in the middle of the night, injuring five soldiers. I talked to a young man who had saved his friend’s life by applying a tourniquet below his bleeding hand. “I shined my light on his hand and it was like a red pulp,” he said. “He had two fingers but the rest was mashed, like it was squished by something.” The soldiers fought all night, but were preparing to resume patrols the same afternoon without sleep. A charismatic sergeant, Patrick Tower, told me the troops could sense the insurgents growing desperate. “I think they’re feeling the breaking point coming,” he said. “It’s just around the bend.”
    His friend, a master corporal from New Zealand, nodded in agreement. “No matter how many extra fighters they’ve thrown into this fight in the last two weeks, I mean, they throw in a hundred and we’ve destroyed more than that.”
    “Yeah,” Sergeant Tower said. “No matter how many they bring in, they cannot pile on the numbers we can pile on, and they don’t have the resources we have to sustain a fight.”
    I asked: “So you think they just can’t keep this up?”
    “No,” the Canadian said, without hesitation.
    “There’s no way they can,” added the New Zealander. “They’re running scared, they’re falling apart, their leadership is collapsing. People are sick of them. I think they’re in their last final effort.”
    That summer of battle killed nine soldiers from their rotation. Patrick Tower would endure such heavy fire, and perform so bravely,that he was later awarded the Star of Military Valour, the highest decoration earned by a Canadian soldier in half a century. He wasn’t the only soldier who underestimated the Taliban, however. Almost everybody I met at the filthy patrol bases in Kandahar seemed to think they were about to defeat their opponents. They were equally convinced that average Afghans supported their cause: “The Taliban represents such a minute percentage of the population here,” Sergeant Tower said. “I think the average Afghan wants nothing to do with the Taliban.” Villagers were reporting insurgent weapons caches and offering other useful tips, he added, suggesting that I might witness this spirit of co-operation when we visited tribal elders that afternoon.
    Hours later, after trudging past a field of marijuana, I found