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I spoke to one of Razik's current commanders, who was initially extremely reluctant and agreed to meet only on the basis of absolute anonymity� ��"Razik would kill him if he knew he was talking, he said. Still, he came forward because he felt that the corruption had swelled to monstrous proportions, and he was anguished about the worsening security situation that was costing the lives of more and more of his men. He said that even as the commander of a company-sized force in a volatile border zone, he was powerless to stop the convoys of drug smugglers that ran through his area. Not only were they better armed than he and his men; some smugglers had shown him letters of protection signed by Razik himself. Many of these convoys, the commander said, were in fact made up of green Border Police pickup trucks headed for the heroin laboratories in Helmand Province's Taliban-controlled areas. Others were unmarked Land Cruisers headed south into Baluchistan.
What followed was a debacle. The Noorzais, fearing their tribal enemies, rose up and joined forces with the Taliban. Razik and his men responded to the unexpected resistance with brutality. � ���"They were killing women and children,� �� � said Ustaz Abdul Halim, a Noorzai and former mujahideen commander who lives in Kandahar city. � ���"After that, everyone was with the Taliban.� �� �
Capitalizing on the tribal dynamics, the Taliban installed a Noorzai, Mullah Rauf Lang, as their commander in Panjwaii District. Later that fall, newly arrived Canadian troops in the area would launch Operation Medusa, a large-scale assault that killed hundreds of fighters and scores of civilians in weeks of close combat and withering bombardments. Today, the area remains one of the most violent in Kandahar Province� ��"the Canadians suffer many of their casualties there and have recently abandoned two untenable forward operating bases in the area� ��"and anti-government sentiments still run high.
A grim irony of the rising pro-Taliban sentiments in the south is that the United States and its allies often returned to power the same forces responsible for the worst period in southerners' memory� ��"the post� ��"Soviet � ���"mujahideen nights.� �� � In the case of Gul Agha Shirzai (now governor of Nangarhar but still a major force in Kandahar), the same man occupied the exact same position; in the case of Razik, nephew of the notorious Mansour, it is the restoration of an heir. By installing these characters and then protecting them by force of arms, the ISAF (the International Security Assistance Force, a patchwork of different nations, that was bolstered by 20,000 additional U.S. soldiers sent to Afghanistan during the months leading up to the eighth anniversary of the 2001 invasion) has come to be associated, in the minds of many Afghans, with their criminality and abuses. � ���"We're doing the Taliban's work for them,� �� � said one international official with years of experience in counternarcotics here.
In the initial scramble to invade Afghanistan in 2001, there was a certain pragmatism to enlisting the mujahideen, who represented the best means of taking over the country in the absence of a substantial U.S. ground presence. But those troops were diverted to Iraq, and the ISAF was cobbled together slowly, arriving too late and with too few soldiers to upend the warlords' rule. Canadian forces didn't deploy to Kandahar until 2006, and even then their contingent of 2,500 was stretched far too thin to control one of the most critical provinces in Afghanistan.
� ���"We were facing the worst-case scenario in 2006� ��"a conventional takeover by Taliban forces,� �� � said Brigadier General Jonathan Vance, the Canadian commander of ISAF forces in Kandahar Province. He was proud that his country's small contingent had been able to hold the insurgency more or less at bay. But he admitted that the life of the average Kandahari had become less secure as the Taliban began to tighten their grip on Kandahar city. � ���"I don't have the capacity to make sure someone doesn't rip their guts out at night.� �� �
Military officers like General Vance find themselves in a peculiar fix when confronted with characters like Abdul Razik. These entrenched figures hold posts or wear uniforms whose legitimacy must be respected. But many of those who maintain their power through corruption and coercion were originally installed by the U.S. military� ��"a fact not lost on Afghans, who tend to have longer memories than Westerners here on nine- or twelve-month rotations.
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