Afghanistan’s biggest moving target

Highway 1, Kandahar, is perhaps the worst address in the world.

Living alongside it for about four days, we were often woken by explosions, and once by the crack of persistent gunfire that for an hour rang around our heads, and once bullets whistled passed my ear on the way back from breakfast.

Just outside the walls of a new American base here, one of the most vital daily battles of this war is raging.

The road is the only ground link between Pakistan’s bustling port of Karachi and the nexus of NATO’s war effort in Kandahar and Helmand. It’s the only supply route for the war.

You can spend ten days coming in through Central Asia, or fly things in at ten times the cost, or you can take this drive. And they do. Hundreds of trucks, carrying anything from portable cabins to aviation fuel to frozen food, stretching on for miles.

I stood there (well, nearby) for an hour and let it roll by. While it is – on the face of it, similar to a bad day of traffic on the M1 – this sight is jaw-dropping. You finally get the scale of what a hundred thousand troops and countless planes need every day. From a helicopter above, it stretches out for miles. It is perhaps the biggest moving target on earth.

Attacks

So almost daily, the insurgents take a pop at it. Sometimes it’s just one grenade, another day it’s a full-on assault.

The convoys come prepared, with dozens, sometimes hundreds of heavily armed SUVs, machine guns pointed from the window. And when they are targeted, they shoot back, unreservedly and often, according to American officers there, hitting locals as well as insurgents.

This makes the new neighbourhood of the 101st Airborne a desolate, dangerous place. The road musters a shimmering, hot, post-apocalyptic daze as it forges through the desert, making you wish you could think of a more sophisticated comparison than the Mad Max movies. But what is most remarkable is how rarely the Americans get involved in this multi-million dollar road war. It’s just on their doorstep – targeting supplies meant for them and often catching them in the crossfire – but not their fight.

The new NATO rules of engagement mean they cannot shoot unless they can see their attacker and their life is in immediate danger. So most of the time, they are restricted to sitting by the side of the road, waiting to be attacked.

‘Courageous restraint’

This is the new policy of “courageous restraint”- and here do not add to a hail of bullets that is probably already hitting civilians. You can imagine how frustrated some Americans got at being shot at with little recourse to defend themselves.

We only saw them shoot back once, and that was after their generators and vehicles were hit by bullets. The problem remains of who they have outsourced the job of protecting these convoys to. The men in the SUVs sometimes wear a uniform, and sometimes they do not. The haulage companies have names, but further examination suggests they outsource the fighting to another company, who in turns hires someone else – making the paper chain intangible, yet the violence no less bitter.

One of the guards on this route described to us the sheer chaos of their journeys. He spoke to us anonymously in Kabul, saying he earned $400 a month to make the journey three times a week. He said they had lost 70 guards in one attack and 13 during one assault just outside the American base where we were stationed.

He told us of the heavy intoxication the guards need before making this perilous run: “Everyone is on drugs”. You have to be because you can’t go on without being high. If we’re not on drugs we think about the danger and our families and kids. Without drugs we wouldn’t be brave enough.”

Their biggest fear though is capture.

He said that if the Talliban caught him or his men, “they will slaughter me… We carry 10 magazines of bullets with us at all times, but carry two bullets separately in another pocket. This is in case we run out of ammunition or are cornered by the Taliban. They’re so we can finish our own lives.”

Highway 1 runs right down the gulf between what NATO needs to do to function in the war here (run supplies) and what it wants to do strategically to win in the way it chooses. But the stark decision to hire private security (each truck allegedly costs $1500 according to a Congressional report into the issue Warlord Inc) exposes another worrying trend for Afghanistan’s future.

Warlords and hired guns

Where America can’t – or strategically chooses not to – provide security, someone steps into the gap. That is not Afghanistan’s beleaguered and corrupt state, but the “private sector”.

A euphemism for warlords, hired guns – an industry that completes an objective at any real cost. A tactic so far removed from America’s new soft and gentle approach to the war here, it makes you wonder if – in opting for these contractors – they have already seen the future of this country and decided there is no other way to go.