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

myself sitting with several grey-bearded old men in traditional Afghan clothes. They perched in bare feet under the shade of a mud wall and looked with bemusement at a balding Canadian commander who took off his helmet, dropped his weapon, and squatted down in front of them.
    “I see you’re quite prosperous with your fields here,” the commander said. “Everything is working nicely? Yeah? Good.” Then he got down to business, telling the elders that his soldiers had been ambushed nearby on the previous night, when five troops were injured. His men had also been attacked the night before in the same area, and the night before that. The commander made it clear that his patience was wearing thin. “We’ve seen a lot of Taliban activity,” he said.
    The elders murmured their disagreement.
    “We know there are Taliban in this area but we don’t see them,” said the villagers through an interpreter, a teenager with the slightest fuzz of moustache on his upper lip.
    “So there’s no criminal activity here, no interfering with your lives?”
    “No.”
    “So as village elders you know not only your own village but also nearby villages, correct?”
    “They know people from those villages, sir.”
    “So you know there are Taliban, then. When was the last time you saw Taliban in this area?”
    “Since the government of Taliban changed they haven’t seen any,” the interpreter said, referring to the collapse of the previous regime in 2001. The commander put a hand on his hip and stared at them, incredulous that anybody could have missed the armed insurgents swarming through the valley. He continued in the same vein for several minutes, getting the same denials, then broke into a monologue:
    “The best option for everybody here is for Taliban to give themselves up to coalition forces, so we can get rid of that menace,” he said, more loudly than necessary. “The second option, if they don’t give up? They will die an early death,” he continued. “We will find them, will hunt them down, and will kill them like the cowards they are. Because they are cowards. We know they’re cowards. They hide behind women and children. They use your young men to go fight for them for personal gain while they hide off in the mountains, while they hide off in these houses here, behind your own families.”
    The interpreter struggled to keep up. Many of the young men hired as field translators were unmotivated, poorly paid considering the risks, and weren’t familiar with local dialects of Pashto. It often seemed that only a small fraction of the words spoken in any of these meetings were understood by both parties. In this case, the interpreter gamely tried to convey the gist of the commander’s words, but gave up when the villagers broke into a chorus of complaints. After a few minutes, he managed to summarize the elders’ message: air strikes had killed women and children during recent fighting, and some people were abandoning the village out of fear.
    “What’s this?” asked a soldier who was scribbling notes.
    “They’re saying the bombing affects their families,” the commander said. “And I imagine it would,” he continued, turning back to the elders. “But the more the villagers get onside, those attacks will stop.”
    “In our village there is no Taliban, nothing,” they replied.
    “If there are no Taliban here we won’t shoot your village, it’s as simple as that,” the commander said. He continued threatening and cajoling, reminding them that he was willing to pay for information. They gave him nothing, only complained and spat in the dust. Flies buzzed around the tiny puddles of spittle, competing for drops of moisture. The afternoon light was fading. After another fruitless half hour, the troops returned to their outpost.
    I was disappointed by that excursion, and wrote nothing about the trip in the newspaper. In an e-mail, I told a friend:
    We were supposed to be on a combat mission but the Taliban