Reporting a Fearful Rift Between Afghans and Americans

By ALISSA J. RUBIN

Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesAn Afghan soldier near a fuel truck that was set ablaze by the Taliban recently in Wardak Province, where Afghan and American soldiers shot at one another last month, leading to six deaths.

SISAY OUTPOST, Afghanistan — How far is Kabul from the war? These days, if you drive south or west, no more than an hour and a half. You can go and be back for dinner — if you aren’t kidnapped or blown up.
In the case of central Wardak Province, a place that has never fully been out of Taliban hands, it’s just 35 miles or so west of the capital. I went there to figure out what had happened on Sept. 29 when Afghan and American soldiers began shooting at each other and six men died: two Americans and four Afghans. After hours spent reporting, I could not answer the question I went there with: Did the Americans shoot at and kill innocent Afghans, or were some — or maybe all — of those Afghans shooting at the Americans?

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What I did learn was how much distrust has poisoned the relationship between Afghans and Americans — so much so that I realized it didn’t matter anymore that I was a civilian.
As tense as it is, Kabul can give you a misleading impression. Despite the blast walls and checkpoints and rubble, there’s still some normalcy there, and Westerners have carved out a niche. There are restaurants that cater to us, clothing shops, grocers — even a couple of neighborhoods where you might run into each other on the street. The Westerners have Afghan friends, too, and there is a sense of possibility. There are bombs and attacks, but not frequently.
The road to Wardak is smooth and busy as you start out from Kabul, but on the provincial capital’s southwest side the movie changes. The road empties out, and the few trucks and minibuses bounce over the scars of I.E.D. blasts every mile or two. The craters are filled in with gravel and earth, and send up clouds of dust that add to a sense of a world without color.

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The high desert and relentless sun fade everything to beige. Bleak and treeless, the mountains rise in folds that range upward like the successive pleats in an accordion.
In October, the sun can still be harsh here, and it was on the day we drove to Wardak, although the worst of the summer was past. The roadside was mostly empty, punctuated only by the occasional small bazaar of cramped, ramshackle one-room shops, each adjoining the next: wheel repair places, small lumber purveyors, a few vegetable sellers.
The Afghan National Army soldiers there patrolled gingerly. One would walk around while the other stayed with the A.N.A. pickup truck in case they needed to make a quick escape. None of the locals approached them, making the soldiers seem barely tolerated. I thought they were brave to be out there, so exposed. So easy for a Taliban sniper to pick them out.
There were Taliban watchers everywhere, of course: little boys, old men, they squatted by the roadside just looking into each car. I was wearing local clothes, but began to fear that they could see through it and tell I was American, and then we would all be at risk. A couple of times we passed small groups of men with Kalashnikov rifles, lounging by the side of the road. Some wore traditional clothing, others the khaki uniforms of private security firms, and there was no clear hint of their intent or loyalty.
The battalion headquarters near the small outpost where the fighting happened was outlined by the ubiquitous Hesco barriers, modular cylinders that can be filled with sand or gravel to provide some cover. Within the perimeter were a few small plaster buildings, a bunch of vehicles, some supplies piled under tarps and more Hescos to subdivide the bigger square into smaller ones. Parked just outside the compound were three fuel tankers, two of them brightly painted.
Afghan Army soldiers milled around us, some looking curious, others faintly hostile.
As I was ushered into a bare room to meet the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Faiz Muhammad Khan, there was a noise outside that sounded like a small explosion. Then came a whoosh and then gunfire. The soldiers, including the commander, rushed outside. “Someone’s been injured! Been injured!” one shouted.
I followed the crowd and there, just beyond the walls, the fuel tankers were on fire — a huge conflagration, the flames arching upward through pitch-black smoke. The sky turned dark as if a thunderstorm was coming, although it was a cloudless day.
Later, we learned what had happened from our driver, who had been parking next to the fuel tankers just before the bomb detonated.
The road seemed almost empty, but within five minutes a motorcycle zipped by carrying two bearded men, he said. They were wearing traditional shalwar kameez, and their AK-47s were poking out between the folds. One slapped a fuel tanker as he went by — a local custom when you go by a truck, the driver said.
The driver did not see anything else, but a moment later, a boy on a bicycle appeared. As he raced past, the boy called out, “Did you see the bomb?”
The driver shifted into reverse and rushed backward down the road. After he had gone 100 yards or so, the first of the fuel tankers exploded.
The bomb, Lieutenant Colonel Khan said, was probably magnetic, and initially blew just a small hole in the tanker where it had been slapped on. But it set the oil on fire, leading to larger explosions and catching the other two tankers.
As the flames leapt higher, and as pieces of smoldering metal fell on our side of the walls, the soldiers drifted deeper and deeper into the base’s center. When we finally started our interviews, we had put a second row of Hescos between us and the blast, and were crouched down behind them.
Most of what I learned about the Sept. 29 shootings went into a news article, but there were many unanswered questions. The Americans shot at one Afghan soldier they said had killed an American sergeant, and then saw a man in an Afghan Army uniform shooting from behind the nearby Afghan outpost. They shot at him, too, injuring him, they said. Yet afterward, no body was found there, and no one saw him run away. Did he drag himself into the outpost? Was he one of the Afghans who died there? Did he survive but was injured?
No one was arrested after the shooting, so it seemed that no evidence the Americans offered was enough to persuade Afghan officers to detain one of their own men. For the Afghans’ part, they were steadfast in their denials that they had not done anything. And several said repeatedly that the Americans simply did not care for Afghan life and did not show respect.
An Afghan Army captain named Hamidullah whose unit was not directly involved in the shooting said the Americans now were so skittish that they could not be bothered to give deference to common military courtesies. Captain Hamidullah described an encounter a month ago: An off-duty Afghan Army colonel was trying to return home to Kabul from central Wardak, but the Americans had set up checkpoints and blocked the road. Cars were lining up for hours, and the colonel’s only alternative would be to go through the nearby villages. That would likely have been a death sentence, since the towns were held by the Taliban; if he were recognized, he would probably be tortured and killed.
“How valuable is an American colonel? He is very valuable to you,” Captain Hamidullah said. “In the same way, our colonel is very valuable to us.”
When Captain Hamidullah approached the American sergeant in charge of the checkpoint to explain that they just wanted to let their colonel get through, the sergeant brusquely waved him away and told him not to come back. “So what do you think: I have five emotional soldiers behind me seeing their captain disrespected. I am a captain, he was only a sergeant,” he said. “My solders were ready to shoot him in the face.”
That resentment extended to me.
“Look at this bitch — they kill us and she comes here to spy on us,” one soldier said while we were interviewing his comrades.
Another agreed, “They are all spies,” he said.
The Afghan reporter working with me plucked my sleeve. “Alissa, we should go,” he said.
The battalion commander for the Afghan men killed by the Americans in September is a soft-spoken lieutenant colonel from Kapisa Province who has spent 30 years of his life in the military. He suggested that leaders like him were caught in a vise. He needs an in-person apology from the Americans for what happened if he is to have any hope of calming his men, yet he seemed to know it was unlikely to be forthcoming.
“An apology will give us a kind of tool to persuade the soldiers who were attacked in the guard post; they are mostly illiterate and come from remote valleys and provinces,” he said.
He is frustrated by the Americans, yet also fearful about what will happen when they leave Afghanistan. “It will be more difficult in the future when you leave us alone,” he said. “We don’t have heavy weapons, we don’t have heavy artillery, we don’t have enough ammunition. We don’t have night vision, we don’t have an air force. This post doesn’t even have electricity — we use oil lamps at night.”
As we drove away, I thought about the soldiers here, with just a sand barrier between them and the bombed tankers, across the highway from a ridge where the Taliban routinely shoot down on them. If the Taliban attacked in force, how long would the base hold?
A few miles up the road, we saw a man wearing a long shalwar kameez, bent over something and climbing down next to a culvert.
“What is he doing?” I asked.
“It looks like he’s putting in an I.E.D.,” my Afghan colleague said. We didn’t stop to ask.