From pages of life to a book of the dead

Reading notes from her last trip to Kandahar leaves a reporter numb.

I STILL keep a reporter's notebook from five years ago even though it's fairly useless. All the pages are full and some have fallen out. But it holds interviews with 17 people from my last road trip to Kandahar, when the highway was still safe enough to drive. In a way, the notebook is evidence of what happened in Afghanistan and when things started to go wrong.

I spent much of the last decade in south Asia as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, first visiting Afghanistan shortly after the Taliban had been driven from power, a time when women hugged me on the streets of Kabul and hope was a contagion. And I kept coming back, even moving to the region, chronicling how the war moved from the good war to the forgotten war to the longest war.
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By June 2006, my last road trip to Kandahar, there were disturbing signs - a resurgent Taliban, an incompetent government, a transition in Western forces as the United States started trying to tiptoe out of the country. But still, there was no sense of how bad things could get. There was still hope.

Now it's October 2011. As of Friday, 10 years have passed since the war began, since the bombs first fell. Afghanistan has the distinction of being the longest war for the US.

Despite all assurances to the contrary, this conflict is not going well. The Afghan security forces, while improving, are by no means ready to go it alone. The Afghan government is not just corrupt, it lacks a mandate from people outside the cities. It's not as if the Taliban and their ilk are so strong - the Afghan government is just so weak. And meanwhile, there is this deadline of 2014, when the West plans to start pulling out most troops.

Understandably, the deadline hangs like a guillotine over many Afghans. Because while many just want the foreign forces gone, they know what such an exodus means. Chaos, civil war. And eventually, when the world rights itself, it means being run by some strongman who gains his power from neighbouring Pakistan.

It is easy enough to ask: So what? Who cares? In this long war that has cost billions of dollars, not to mention thousands of foreign lives, the fate of Afghans gets short shrift. They are most often collateral damage, forgotten.

So this story is for them, some kind of 10-year anniversary present, some kind of acknowledgment for what many Afghans bought into and what many lost.

In my notebook, there is Malalai Kakar, the first woman in Kandahar to return to the police force, who carried her Kalashnikov rifle beneath her all-encompassing blue burqa. She was a swaggering, smoking, swearing force of nature, who smiled slyly and called other police officers cowards for running from the Taliban.

''I am not concerned or nervous at all,'' she said about Taliban warnings to her. ''I don't think the Taliban are getting stronger. We are supported by the world. No one supports them.''

There is also Mohammad Akbar Khakrizwal, the former intelligence chief of Kandahar. He was a charmer, a man who mocked my burqa (it was too short), the brother of the former police chief, killed the year before. He, unlike many others, saw how things were changing.

''Write down this date,'' he said. ''In one year, the situation will be worse than it is today. I'm telling Americans, if they do not bring changes in their policies, they will say, thank heaven, Iraq is a heaven compared to here.''

It was June 13, 2006. He was right. A year later, the US claimed to have irrefutable evidence Iran was sending weapons to the Taliban. The International Red Cross said life for Afghans was worse than the year before. And mistaking each other for the enemy, Afghan police, known for their exuberant use of weapons, fired 49 rocket-propelled grenades at US-led troops. The Americans, more restrained but also more accurate, fired back, killing eight police.

Others are in my notebook, such as Dad Mohammad Khan, the parliamentarian who had just lost about 40 family members in a Taliban ambush. And Ahmad Wali Karzai, the brother of the President, who fervently denied all rumours that he was running drugs, that he was somehow corrupt.

During the years, the numbers changed. First, five were dead, then 10, then 15, and finally 16. All were gut-wrenching in some way, particularly Malalai, gunned down alongside her son as she left for work in the morning. But always, there was a punch line - of course, the only person left alive in my notebook was Karzai's brother, the alleged drug dealer and power broker.

Now that's not even true. He was the 17th target, killed in July. Looking through my notebook, I'd like to say I feel sad, but mostly I feel numb. There is no one left alive. Just notes about what they once said, what they once felt, who they once were. And meanwhile, the world talks of walking away.

Kim Barker, who spent five years in Afghanistan and Pakistan reporting for the Chicago Tribune, is the author of the newly released book The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Source: Fairfax Media