A Rope and a Prayer (9 page)

After journeying all night, the sun rises and we continue driving. Atiqullah and I engage in a seemingly friendly conversation about our families, politics, and religion. We joke, laugh, and discuss life. He tells me the names of his children. I do my best to appease him. When we speak about politics, I say that the United States’ dependence on Middle Eastern oil has warped its foreign policy. When we speak about religion, I try to emphasize the commonalities between Islam and Christianity. I offer to read an English-language Koran if he can find one.

After I describe the book I am writing in an effort to prove I’m a journalist, Atiqullah announces he is taking us to Helmand, where he said we will be released in a few days.

“You will fly home from the British base,” he tells me. I do not tell him that I had been on the base three weeks earlier. While researching my book, I had embedded with an American marine unit in northern Helmand Province. The unit arrived for what it thought was a police training mission. Instead, it took far more casualties in Afghanistan than it did in a tour of similar length in Iraq.

As we drive south, I fantasize about seeing the massive American-built hydroelectric dam and irrigation canals of Helmand. I’m getting desperate. I don’t want to be the latest in a long line of Americans dating back to Josiah Harlan who experience initial success in Afghanistan, followed by spectacular failure. I tell him I plan to quit journalism if I survive. He encourages me to stay in the profession.

Knowing that Atiqullah is likely to disappear again with little warning, I try to extract promises from him. Under the Pashtunwali code of honor, a promise of protection should be ironclad. I begin by asking him to promise to protect the three of us. Atiqullah responds that he will protect only me.

“I will not kill you,” he says. “You will survive.”

I insist that he promise to save Tahir and Asad as well. “You will not kill the three of us,” I say. “It has to be the three of us.”

Atiqullah refuses, and I raise the issue over and over as the drive drags on. At one point, I suggest that he cut off my finger instead of harming Tahir and Asad. He replies that the Taliban are not criminals.

Later that day, he finally promises to protect all three of us. “I give you my promise,” he says, as I lie in the back of the station wagon. “I will not kill any of the three of you.”

Then he says, “Let’s kill Asad first,” and laughs. I have no idea what to believe.

On the second night of our drive across rural Afghanistan, we arrive in a darkened village. Its dirt streets are deserted and the cold air suggests we are at high altitude. A spectacular array of stars that is the brightest I have ever seen blazes overhead.

Atiqullah, Tahir, Asad, and the other Taliban get out of the car and go to sleep in a mosque. Under the Taliban’s strict interpretation of Islam, I am not allowed in a mosque because I am a
kafir,
or nonbeliever. In the past, moderate Muslims have welcomed me in mosques.

I stay in the car with Akbar, the guard who speaks broken English and brought us food and clothes. Akbar whispers that Atiqullah has told him we will be exchanged within ten to fifteen days. I feel enormous relief. My patience, faith in Atiqullah, and statements about our worth appear to have paid off. Later that night, in another positive sign, I am brought into the mosque. Tahir has convinced the Taliban that it is wrong under Pashtunwali to make a guest sleep in the cold. After spending nearly twenty-four hours straight lying in the back of the car, I am exhausted.

On the third morning of our drive, Tahir’s car breaks down. Atiqullah sells it and buys a second station wagon. Tahir is furious but powerless to stop him. During the wait for the new vehicle, Akbar and the guards hold an impromptu machine gun marksmanship competition. Akbar wins.

At dusk, we drive through a barren mountainous area and are met by another Taliban commander. A bone-thin man with a long beard and one arm, he gets into the driver’s seat and guides us through barren, rock-strewn territory, steering the car and shifting gears with lightning-quick movements of his one hand.

I will later realize that we are making our way across rural Afghanistan with the help of a network of local Taliban fighters. They escort us from remote district to remote district. As we cross a particularly deserted area with no villages in sight, Atiqullah is so confident of the security vacuum that he allows me to walk outside at dusk. I stretch my legs as he and his men pray. Deserted, dirt-covered mountains surround us in every direction. We have crossed dozens of miles of Afghan government territory. I have not seen any signs of Afghan government or American forces in days.

I knew the vast security vacuum Atiqullah took advantage of was the product of years of American and Afghan government missteps. In 2002 and 2003, early decisions made by officials in Washington severely handicapped the effort to create a strong new Afghan government and national army. And then as Iraq unraveled in 2004 and 2005, Afghanistan was relegated to an afterthought.

A saying I first heard in postwar Bosnia—“Law and order first”—proved true in Afghanistan. Without a basic degree of security, political and economic reforms will all be handicapped. Local corruption as well will stymie reform.

For months in the spring of 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld clashed with Secretary of State Colin Powell over what role American troops should play in Afghanistan. The outcome of the debate was critical. The number of American troops initially deployed—and their marching orders—would set the tone for the international effort for years to come.

In a February 2002 White House meeting, Powell called for American troops to participate in the expansion of a 4,000-soldier international peacekeeping force then patrolling Kabul. In addition to hunting Taliban and Al Qaeda members, the expanded force would patrol Afghanistan’s other major cities and enforce the decisions of Karzai’s fledgling government.

Powell told me in a 2008 interview that he believed that all other reform efforts would fail in Afghanistan if adequate security was not established. “This would be the number one thing,” he said, “You’ve got to have order in society.”

Richard N. Haass, the former director of policy planning at the State Department, told me that informal conversations with European officials led him to believe the United States could recruit a force of 30,000 peacekeepers, half European, half American.

Rumsfeld and his aides were skeptical. Douglas J. Feith, then the Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy, told me they feared European countries would not provide enough troops. They also wanted to avoid the Clinton administration approach of having United Nations officials administer a postconflict country, arguing it would breed passivity and anger in the local population.

“There is a way to do nation building where the UN or someone else takes responsibility out of the hands of the local people and runs the place as a colony,” Mr. Feith told me. “We were going against that model.”

Feith said Pentagon officials hoped to train Afghan security forces, but not create such a large American troop presence in the country that it stoked what they saw as Afghans’ historic resentment of foreigners.

Ali Ahmed Jalali, the country’s interior minister from 2002 to 2005, told me in an interview that Afghan resentment of American troops was “a myth.” After ten years of internecine civil war fueled by neighboring counties that funneled cash and weapons to each warring faction, he said, Afghans yearned in 2002 for the United States to step in. He said Afghans saw Americans as neutral because they had not strongly backed a side in the bloody civil war as had Pakistan, India, Russia, and Iran.

“They could not help themselves,” he argued, referring to Afghans. “They were at war with themselves.”

The deadlock dragged on for months.

In the late spring of 2002, Powell’s proposal died. “The president, the vice president, the secretary of defense, the national security staff, all of them were skeptical of an ambitious project in Afghanistan,” Haass said. “I didn’t see support.”

Powell said the United States did not make the sweeping commitment needed in Afghanistan. “We never quite bit the bullet that it was going to take all it could,” he told me.

President Bush, though, remained skeptical. During the 2000 presidential election, he had said he opposed using U.S. troops for “nation-building.” Following the 9/11 attacks and postinvasion chaos in Iraq, his views gradually shifted. He slowly accepted that if the United States toppled a regime it had to help create a new government and security force to fill the ensuing vacuum. By the time the shift in Bush’s thinking occurred in Afghanistan, though, it was too late. In the end, the Bush administration deployed 8,000 troops to Afghanistan in 2002, with orders to hunt Taliban and Qaeda members and not to engage in peacekeeping or reconstruction. The 4,000-member international peacekeeping force did not venture beyond Kabul.

As an alternative, the United States and its allies hatched a loosely organized plan for Afghans to secure the country themselves. The United States would train a 70,000-member army. Japan would disarm some 100,000 militia fighters. Britain would mount an antinarcotics program. Italy would carry out reforms in the judiciary. And Germany would train a 62,000-member police force.

But that left no one in overall command. On the ground, holes quickly emerged in the American and European security effort.

The training of a new Afghan army proved difficult. When Robert Finn, the U.S. ambassador, reviewed the first Afghan National Army troops trained by the Americans in the summer of 2002, he was dismayed.

“They were illiterate,” Finn told me. “They were at a much lower level than people expected.”

American military officials told him that local Afghan commanders sent them their worst conscripts. In 2004, three years after the fall of the Taliban, the new force had only 21,000 soldiers. By comparison the United States had trained five times as many Iraqi soldiers three years after the fall of Baghdad.

The police were even more challenging. Seventy percent of the existing 80,000 officers were illiterate. Eighty percent lacked proper equipment, and corruption was endemic. Afghan police did not patrol. They set up checkpoints and waited for residents to report crimes. Afghans said they had to bribe the police, in fact, simply to report a crime.

Yet Germany, the country responsible for police training, dispatched only forty advisers in 2002 and 2003. They reopened the Kabul police academy and began a program designed to graduate 3,500 senior officers in three years. German officials said developing a core of skilled commanders was the key to reform, frustrating American officials who backed a large, countrywide training effort. Some American and European military units conducted ad hoc, two- to six-week training sessions around the country, but no comprehensive instruction occurred outside Kabul.

James Dobbins, the administration’s former special envoy for Afghanistan, said Defense Department hopes that Afghans could quickly take responsibility for their own security proved unrealistic.

“The reason we are there is that these are failed states,” said Dobbins, who had also served as special envoy to Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Somalia. “The thought that this can be quickly remedied has proved unjustified in most cases.”

Confusion, infighting, and a failure to grasp the depth of Afghanistan’s problems hampered the American reconstruction effort as well. After privately rejecting a large American troop deployment in Afghanistan, Bush publicly announced a vast American reconstruction effort. The move surprised Dobbins, who had lost the fight for more troops. In April 2002, Dobbins received a phone call as he sat in his State Department office. Mr. Bush, he was told, was planning to proclaim America’s commitment to rebuild Afghanistan.

“I got a call from the White House speech writers saying they were writing a speech and did I see any reason not to cite the Marshall Plan,” Dobbins recalled, referring to the American rebuilding of post-World War II Europe. “I said, ‘No, I see no objections,’ so they put it in the speech.”

On April 17, Bush traveled to the Virginia Military Institute, where General George C. Marshall had trained a century before. In a speech that received scant media attention in the United States but raised hopes in Afghanistan, Bush promised a sweeping reconstruction effort.

“Marshall knew that our military victory against enemies in World War II had to be followed by a moral victory that resulted in better lives for individual human beings,” Bush said. He called Marshall’s work “a beacon to light the path that we, too, must follow.”

Aware that Afghans felt his father’s administration had abandoned the country following the 1989 Soviet withdrawal, he vowed to avoid the syndrome of “initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure.”

“We’re not going to repeat that mistake,” he said. “We’re tough, we’re determined, we’re relentless. We will stay until the mission is done.”