This photocopy of an image of Abdul Razaq, the killer of the three Marines, was given to the writer by a Marine in Helmand.
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This was one in a rash of insider attacks or "green-on-blues"--attacks in which Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) turn their weapons on U.S. troops. The name comes from radio code: blue for friendlies, green for neutrals, red for hostiles. According to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the number rose from two in 2007 to 64 in 2012. (So far in 2013 there have been nine. After last year's spurt, the military made a concerted prevention effort. It also greatly reduced the number of joint patrols--and thus opportunities for such attacks.) When a green kills a blue, it is shocking. As the father of one casualty put it, "At the end of the day, what happened is my son trained somebody to murder him." Superficially, green-on-blues are irrational, like a Frenchman killing an American in World War II. Except it is not like that, really, at all--it is insurgency.
Within that bloody frame, two narratives have emerged: infiltration and cultural or personal grievance. All sides put the explanations in competition, modifying them at will. The NATO coalition has attributed 75% of the attacks to personal grievance. Former Interior Minister and presidential hopeful Haneef Atmar attributed the majority to infiltration, accusing the Karzai administration of incompetence. And so on. But, as with most green-on-blues, exactly what happened on Aug. 10 in Helmand, 10 years and 10 months into the war, remained unclear.
Abdul Razaq's hometown, Musa Qala, is built mostly of mud, a collection of baked-brick compounds on the Helmand River. Wheat, poppies, corn, sorghum, goats, donkeys, chickens. Beyond the edges of the wadi, the land is desolate, beige. In the summer it is 100°F (38°C). Soft drinks, textiles, bright plastics from Pakistan are sold from stalls in the bazaar. Along the river, white egrets stalk and flap away from wild dogs.
As a boy, Abdul Razaq is a farmer in an economy of subsistence agriculture. Up at dawn, in bed at dark. Plowing, sowing, harvesting, threshing, milling--an endless horizon of hard labor and, without rain, famine. If he is like other children, for fun, he rolls knucklebones. Electricity is inconsistent, machines rare. There is not much running water or, by the standards of an American child, a lot to do. No one has birth certificates, but Abdul Razaq is in his 20s at the time of the attack. So at the oldest he is born in 1983, the year Russian tanks retake Musa Qala. Their occupation is marked by inaccurate Scud missiles, the dispersion of land mines and reprisal killings of civilians supporting the mujahedin. The numerous factions of mujahedin include villains who commit abuses equal to the Russians'. But at their best they are the noble resistance. In towns of farmers and shopkeepers they are heroes, wearing the mantle of those who slaughtered the arrogant, infidel, interfering British 140 years before. It is likely that Abdul Razaq and the boys he plays knucklebones with look up to such men. At the very youngest, if he is born in 1993, a particular type of mujahid is ascendant--the Taliban. Whether Abdul Razaq is born in the 1980s or the 1990s, he spends his entire childhood in a war zone. It's hard to know when he would himself fire a shot in anger, but there is little doubt that last Aug. 10, it was Abdul Razaq, now an Afghan national policeman, who shot and killed the three Marines of Special Operations Team 8133.