Keeping the Peace in Kabul’s War Zone

They’ve patrolled in Sierra Leone, East Timor, Bosnia, Kosovo, Northern Ireland and other war zones. But never, says Sgt. Martin Seville, have the “lads” seen a place as devastated as this.

The soldiers of the elite British battalion nicknamed “2 Para”--short for 2nd Battalion, Parachute Regiment--are part of the 4,000-strong multinational peacekeeping force deployed here in the Afghan capital to help police maintain order.

On this night, a dozen 2 Para soldiers, rifles cocked, are cruising the deserted blocks of the city’s worst neighborhood. Suddenly, a voice shouts, “Draish!”--Pashto for “halt.” A man appears from the darkness, a Kalashnikov rifle at the ready.

Seville yells, “Kill the lights!” The driver shuts off the headlights and engine, and they sit in the stillness of the night, the below-zero windchill burning their cheeks. A local interpreter jumps out of the vehicle and tells the man--a local police officer, it turns out--tonight’s password so each side knows that the other is friendly.

With no electricity whatsoever and not a car in sight, by night this neighborhood on Kabul’s south side seems like some cinematographer’s vision of the hell left by a nuclear bomb.

As the soldiers pass block after block of crumbled mud-and-brick walls, the patrol vehicle’s headlights bounce eerily through empty buildings, their windows, doors and most of their roofs destroyed by civil warfare of the early 1990s. In one lot, about 100 carcasses of buses lie stripped and rusted.

Afghanistan’s interim leader, Hamid Karzai, and senior U.N. officials have appealed for as many as 10 times the number of peacekeepers now in Kabul to spread beyond the capital, to help prevent the deadly ethnic clashes that have occurred in several Afghan cities. So far, the U.S. has resisted requests to lend any of its forces to the peacekeeping effort.

Although the peacekeepers, officially known as the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, have been called to assist in handling only a few armed robberies, their patrols provide confidence to the Afghan locals, some of whom offer thanks at the mosque for the troops’ presence.

“Foreign police are much better,” said Mir Abdul Aziz, 52, echoing the comments of several residents in the neighborhood. “For 20 years we’ve been living in fear, and now we feel secure.”

Crime rates have fallen as a result, local police say.

The work isn’t without its tough calls and tragedies. Over the weekend, peacekeepers apparently killed a local man taking his pregnant sister-in-law, in labor, to the hospital well after the 10 p.m. curfew. The peacekeeping mission claimed that its forces opened fire only after being fired upon.

But witnesses and local police say the peacekeepers fired without provocation, unleashing a hail of 60 bullets that killed Amaun Isaq.

Perhaps, said local Police Chief Mohammed Ismael Samdon, the soldiers heard the noisy start of the car and saw Isaq’s kerosene lantern and the headlights of the car and mistook them for the flash of a gun. The peacekeeping mission says that the case is under investigation and that two of the soldiers have been sent back to Britain.

“When they came, we thought there’d be no more disasters or fighting,” said Masrullah Yaqubi, the dead man’s uncle. “On the contrary, they’ve become the cause of the misfortune in the country.”

But the local police chiefs and most people interviewed around here still say there’s no question that the presence of the peacekeepers deters crime.

“The longer they’re here, the safer it is,” said Mohammed Hashem, 29, who was out talking with his friends the other day.

The local police are hobbled before they even begin: They have no patrol cars, only a few weapons or uniforms, no telephones and only kerosene lamps to light their way. Delivering a message to a chief from another station could take hours. The peacekeeping mission gave them their first walkie-talkies--and new bicycles--this week.

And protection in some police districts isn’t always meted out evenly. Minority ethnic groups, such as the Hazaras, have brought complaints directly to ISAF, because they feel that the police themselves are involved in the crimes, one peacekeeper said. It doesn’t help that the police haven’t been paid for months of work.

A U.S. Army major, David Buckingham, who was sent to 2 Para as part of a professional exchange program between the 82nd Airborne based in Ft. Bragg, N.C., and the British battalion, is in charge of the battalion’s post in a devastated neighborhood school.

Asked whether the U.S. should send troops here as peacekeepers, he said, “The U.S. has its hands full.” The men of 2 Para, he said, would trade places with the U.S. Special Forces in a heartbeat.

“My guys [in 2 Para] would be happier kicking through caves, interdicting convoys and pockets of Al Qaeda or Taliban soldiers,” said Buckingham, 36, a former U.S. Army Ranger.

When his troops arrived here in December, Buckingham said, he was shocked by the disparity between the majesty of the mountains that ring Kabul like giant white-ridged cones and the devastation of the city.

Even by day, it’s hard to believe that anyone could call this neighborhood home. The skeletons of homes, schools and university buildings that once formed a vibrant and affluent neighborhood are the legacy of the last decade’s civil war.

Yet thousands of Afghans have moved into any pocket of a crumbling building that may have an intact ceiling and a few standing walls. A single intact room in a demolished house or apartment building might hold an entire family, such as that of Ghulam Dastgeer and his wife, Shazia, both 35.

On a recent day, the couple and their eight children huddled around a blanket-covered table, under which sat a coal hibachi.

“America should provide security and kill the thieves,” said Dastgeer, a laborer who said he has no work now that it’s winter. “They should take the weapons and ammunition out of every house.”

Life, however, has gradually been returning to normal.

Women and children tote buckets and plastic gas canisters to the water pumps on the streets, carry their dough to the bakery to cook into loaves of flatbread, called naan, and try to scrape by. Every day since the fall of the Taliban late last year, there has been more activity: more vegetables, meats and grains available in the bazaar, and more wood stoves being pounded out of sheet metal by locals in tiny foundries made out of old freight containers.

After meeting the Kalashnikov-carrying policeman, Seville asks him whether anything has happened. The policeman replies that a body was found in a well: The victim was a Pushtun, the majority ethnic group in Afghanistan. Many Pushtuns supported the Taliban and are not very popular in northern Afghanistan. He was wearing old shoes, the officer explains, suggesting that he was killed not for his money but for ethnic reasons.

“Amniat!” the local policeman shouts--meaning it’s safe to pass.

For the most part, the 2 Para officers are bored, but the locals hope that the peacekeepers won’t leave.

“We need and require peacekeeping forces,” says another police chief, Mohammed Zim. “Our people require permanent peace--we’ve had such a hard time. I hope they won’t leave us alone.”