On most days, the police patrol the alleys alone, except for a few Canadian soldiers whom NATO has assigned to train and mentor them. Although the Army lends support when the police encounter armed resistance, the soldiers then retreat to a base outside Pashmul.
Khan’s police unit patrols a war zone, and the men often do the work of soldiers rather than of normal beat police officers. Fighting has caused many Pashmul residents to flee to a temporary camp in the desert, from which they trek several miles each morning to cultivate the fields. Grape huts, scattered around the fields, have mud walls thick enough to stop bullets, and narrow ventilation slits that can accommodate rifle barrels. Because farmers are too poor to use wooden frames in their vineyards, their grapevines are supported by deep furrows cut in the earth thus in an apparently empty field hundreds of Taliban may be hidden. The main sources of livelihood, other than hemp and poppies, are grapes and pomegranates, and, during the summer fighting season, foliage in fields and orchards provides cover for insurgents. Pashmul is ideal terrain for an insurgency. Nearby are crumbling Pashtun villages of mud-brick homes, sprinkled with trash and unexploded ordnance. In July, I visited Pashmul’s police base, a small installation about twice as large as a tennis court and surrounded by ditches and razor wire.
Units like Khan’s, made up of a despised minority with an unsparing attitude toward those they police, embody many of the paradoxes involved in trying to bring order to Afghanistan’s ethnically fissured society. has become known for incompetence and corruption. (Last year, nearly four times as many Afghan police were killed as soldiers.) Among Afghans, the A.N.P. Recently, a draft of a National Intelligence Estimate said that increasingly effective insurgent attacks and widespread corruption in President Hamid Karzai’s government have eroded the government’s authority, and concluded that the country is in a “downward spiral.” And a leaked diplomatic cable quoted the British Ambassador as saying that “the presence of the coalition, in particular its military presence, is part of the problem, not part of its solution.” If the coalition were to leave, the country would be left with the ragtag Afghan National Army, or A.N.A., which deploys wherever it is needed to fight the Taliban in counter-insurgency battles, and the A.N.P., which is responsible for street-level law enforcement and now bears the brunt of the Taliban insurgency. Deploying Hazaras in this region is a risky move, and comes at a time when Taliban bombings and assassinations are making clear the failure of the U.S.-led NATO coalition and the Afghan government to secure the country. Last year, the Taliban all but wiped out the Afghan National Police, or A.N.P., squads there. The Pashmul base is just outside the city of Kandahar, in one of Afghanistan’s most dangerous regions. But, working alongside NATO soldiers, Hazara police units are now operating far to the south of these traditional battlegrounds and deep into Pashtun territory. On the border between the Hazara heartland, in the country’s mountainous and impoverished center, and the Pashtun plains in the south and east, conflicts over grazing land are common. Over the past century, the two peoples have fought periodically, and the Hazaras, who are thought to make up between nine and nineteen per cent of Afghanistan’s population-the Pashtuns make up nearly half-have usually lost.
Hazaras are mostly Shia, with a history of ties to Iran, whereas most Pashtuns are Sunni and have turned to Pakistan for support. Khan and his police officers are members of Afghanistan’s Hazara minority, identifiable among Afghans because of their Asiatic features the population they patrol is Pashtun. He ordered his men to set the harvest ablaze, moved upwind, then turned his back and left, with an expression of indifference.
But Khan wasn’t from Pashmul and he didn’t smoke. Afghan soldiers and policemen in the area also smoked, to the exasperation of the NATO troops who were training them. Farmers in the area had grown plants up to seven feet tall, and, being teetotallers, like many Afghans, they smoked hashish constantly. In late 2007, in Pashmul, a tiny cluster of villages in southern Afghanistan, Muhammad Khan began his tenure as the police commander by torching all the hemp in a farmer’s field.
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