AAB KHIEL (Afghanistan): It was night when the American military helicopters landed in the dry cornfields around the village of Aab Khiel. Within minutes dozens of soldiers surrounded the small cluster of mud and brick homes, and the house-to-house search began.
“When they came to my house they didn’t knock on the door, they just forced their way in,” said Qarimullah, 28, a young farmer in the village, recalling last week’s raid. “They broke the locks on the doors and our safe boxes. They took my camera and they threw all our clothes on the floor. They said they were looking for Al Qaeda, but why did they come into our houses like this? This is not right.”
When America began Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan a year ago it was largely welcomed. At last the west was promising to bring peace and reconstruction to a country run by warlords and ravaged by drought and 20 years of conflict.
But slowly Afghans have grown resentful of the thousands of US troops. The bitterness is especially deep in the southern Pakhtoon tribal lands, where the Stars and Stripes flies above isolated and heavily fortified bases in areas that were once the Taliban’s heartland. Many Afghans, including powerful commanders, want them out.
Complaints of US army patrols becoming heavy handed in the past month have come from several villages in the south-east, particularly around the towns of Khost and Gardez. They say the soldiers have confiscated satellite telephones, passports, house and car documents and even family photographs.
No one was arrested Aab Khiel last week and no trace of Al Qaeda was found. The operation succeeded only in turning the village solidly against the US military presence.
“They took my satellite telephone to their base at Bagram,” said Mir Ullah, a trader living in the village. “They told us they would give it back but they gave us no receipt and they never returned it. The Americans told us we were using the phone to contact Osama bin Laden and the Arabs. But that’s just not true.”
Further east, close to the Pakistani border, Wali Badshah described how Afghan soldiers backing up the US patrols stole 45,000 Pakistani rupees from his house in the village of Kagow
“They took out four boxes holding our savings. They threw the boxes back at us but they kept the money. I went to the Americans to complain but I still don’t have my money back.”
These new voices of criticism have reached the grey-brick compound in Khost where the provincial government is base and Mohammad Khan Gulbaz is a senior official representing President Hamid Karzai’s national government, which is publicly still effusive in its support of the US military presence. Gulbaz, however, is distinctly frustrated.
“The Americans are not doing well. If this carries on they will begin to seem like the Russians,” he said.
Publicly the army denies that there is a problem. The southeast is a legitimate target for military operations: it was one of the Taliban’s strongest support bases and housed several Al Qaeda training camps, including those attacked in 1998 by US cruise missiles. US troops suffered heavy casualties in a month-long operation against Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters outside Gardez in March.
Major Steve Clutter, a spokesman at the US military headquarters at Bagram, admitted that there had been an internal investigation into the conduct of the 82nd airborne’s raids but said no evidence of wrongdoing had been found. He dismissed the criticism from the special forces as “inter-services rivalry”.
“We want our soldiers to show respect for the Afghan people and we certainly hope that they are,” he said. “If there are any complaints we will look into this.”
It does not take costly assessment missions by aid agencies to understand the resentment of villagers in areas such as Khost. South-east from Kabul the paved road runs as far as Gardez. The next 100 miles are a backbreaking five-hour drive on an pitted unmade track. There is not one school, hospital or clinic on the way. Khost’s once-famous timber industry is on its knees.
Yet not one cent of the promised $4.5 billion reconstruction money has been spent on the area, despite the west having to work harder there than perhaps anywhere else to win over the religiously conservative and fiercely independent Pakhtoons.
“The Americans came to Afghanistan to get rid of Al Qaeda. Now they cannot help us any more and they should leave,” said Bacha Khan Zadran, a renegade warlord and former mujahideen commander based in Khost province.
There is no doubt that the Loya Jirga, the grand council in June which decided the shape of the new government, failed to correct the continued dominance of the Northern Alliance, the largely ethnic Tajik commanders from the north who took the capital after the Taliban fled last November. Pakhtoons tend to consider themselves the natural rulers of the country and complain that they have little influence in the current administration.
“The government is only working for one group of people,” Zadran said in an interview in a mountain hideout near the Pakistani border, conducted by satellite telephone.
Although Washington backs the government in Kabul, the US military has recruited, armed and paid 600 of Zadran’s soldiers to help them patrol the south-east.
In Kabul the US, Britain and the UN have allowed the Northern Alliance to cement its power under Mohammad Fahim, the defence minister, who promoted himself to field marshal earlier this year.
The creation of a multi-ethnic national army has stalled but Marshal Fahim’s own force of Tajiks, largely from the Panjsher Valley, has grown substantially.
Many western officials privately accept that the dominance of the Northern Alliance is a destabilizing force.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.