The Times
Jerome Starkey in Kandahar
No one realised Joe was dead. The soldiers walked on.
Lieutenant Joseph Theinert, 24, a star athlete and the king of his high school prom, had jumped over a chest-high mud wall between two fields and stepped on a homemade bomb. His body was hurled into a narrow ditch and was hidden where it lay by the grapevines that grow in steep, undulating rows along man-made mounds that corrugate the fields.
Three American soldiers and an Afghan interpreter had all climbed the wall in front of him. Captain Dylan Mixson had walked around the side of the wall and was only a few metres away when the bomb exploded. All five were blown over by the shockwave and, as the dust cleared, the survivors braced themselves for a Taleban ambush.
Dand, where they were based, is supposed to be one of Kandahar’s safest districts.Onthe southern edge of Afghanistan’s ancient capital it is one of the few districts still under government control and is the place President Karzai and his brothers call home.
For US and Nato forces it is a mustwin — or, rather, must-not-lose — patch of farmland in the make-orbreak offensive to regain momentum in the south. “I just remember coming round the wall. I took a few steps and I heard the explosion,” Captain Mixson, 28, said. “It went black for a minute and my ears started ringing.”
A few seconds later they checked each other for shrapnel wounds. Everyone was all right, they weren’t being ambushed—and the patrol pushed on.
“We just didn’t see him,” Captain Mixson said. He and Joe lived five doors from each other in an apartment building about a mile outside Fort Drum, in upstate New York. They had planned to go skiing together in Canada when their tour was over.
The 10th Mountain Division was diverted to Afghanistan as part of President Obama’s 30,000-soldier “surge” and Joe’s unit, the 1-71 Cavalry, was sent to relieve a Canadian unit in Dand, just outside Kandahar city.
On the day Joe died he was part of a quick-reaction force that was called out when aUS foot patrol was attacked at close range with at least eight rocket-propelled grenades. Captain Mixson and his men had walked about 50 yards past the blast site before they realised Joe was missing. He had been flitting between two sections as the men advanced and each group thought he was with the other.
They turned back and found his mangled, lifeless body among the vines. He had lost a hand and both legs.
The soldiers on the patrol are haunted by the question of whether their lieutenant might have lived if only they had found him a little sooner. “I just hope that his last thought was taking a step, not: ‘S*** — I’m bleeding out face-down in a ditch’,” said one.
All of them are desperate to see his sacrifice count for something. “Of course we ask, was it worth it?” said Joe’s squadron commander, Lieutenant-Colonel John Paganini The measure of worth for the Nato mission has become the point at which it is possible to leave, and despite the violence—school burnings and assassinations and the threatening “night letters” taped by militants to residents’ doors — Colonel Paganini believes that efforts to stabilise the area are working.
When General Stanley McChrystal, the top US officer in Afghanistan, visited the area last month, Colonel Paganini told him his intention was to “turn this district over to the Afghans” rather than be “backfilled by another coalition force”. That, in a nutshell, is Nato’s exit strategy.
What did General McChrystal say? “He said he wished he could bottle my optimism,” Colonel Paganini replied.
The general recently described Marjah, where thousands of US and Afghan troops cleared a Taleban stronghold in Helmand, as a “bleeding ulcer” and he told his generals he was not happy with the pace of progress in the south.
Dand, though, is supposedly where the plan is working. The Canadians once trumpeted Deh-e Bagh, the district capital, as a “model village” and there is a sense that Western activity here is counterinsurgency at its best. In the past six weeks Nato has wheeled in at least eight journalists, four generals and the provincial governor to have a look.
The Dand district governor, Ahmadullah Nazek, is well liked by the military and by his people, according to Captain William Biggs, the US liaison officer in Deh-e Bagh.
In the villages west of Deh-e Bagh, where Mr Nazek is based, however, the compromises in the Nato plan start to emerge. “He [Mr Nazek] gets paid $600 a month to be the district governor, but he’s got three cars and a couple of houses, eight kids and three wives,” Captain Biggs said. “As long as his people follow him, I am not concerned,” he added.
Instead of battling the Taleban, the cavalry spend most of their time trying to build and empower a functioning local government. A Canadian adviser said that the key to their success was a government to which people feel connected.
“If people don’t feel it can reach into their lives and affect them, it doesn’t matter,” he said.
In Dand this connection is relatively easy to establish: most of the farmers are either Popalzai, the President’s tribe, or Barakzai. Both have grown rich under the President’s patronage.
Gul Agha Sherzai is a Barakzai warlordturned-governor who used his private militia to help US special forces to capture the Kandahar airfield in 2001. He is now the governor of Nangahar and, despite his modest salary, maintains a militia of hundreds, possibly thousands, of men in southeast Dand. Colonel Paganini said that they rarely need to visit his patch, nor do they do any reconstruction there, because security and development are taken care of.
After years of trying—and failing— to disarm militias, Nato is now embracing them where it can. In Dand they are incorporating Mr Sherzai’s men into the police force.
“The idea that we are going to turn this into a Utopian society just isn’t realistic,” Captain Biggs said. “There are bad people — but there are still freedoms you can enjoy.”
Pentagon staff claim that military intelligence is unmasking corrupt officials, but for staff trying to build a civil administration it seems that there is no official policy for tackling complicated fraud, backhanders and nepotism. Most tolerate it or simply turn a blind eye so that, in the words of Specialist Matthew Garret, “by the time I leave here this district is functional — and I never have to come back”.
