Descent Into Chaos (29 page)

Ryan Crocker, the first U.S. ambassador in Kabul later said, “We [the State Department] were asking how can central authority be established? Who was going to set up the police, army, carry out nation building and disarm the militias? The Pentagon’s view was our job is done and let’s get out of here. We got rid of the evil and we should not get stuck.”
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Some U.S. legislators realized the great dangers posed by Rumsfeld’s shortchanged policy. In May, Senator Joseph Biden warned, “America has replaced the Taliban with the warlords. Warlords are still on the US payroll but that hasn’t bought a cessation of violence. Not only is the US failing to rein in the warlords, we are actually making them the centerpiece of our strategy. Why does the Administration steadfastly resist any expansion of ISAF when everyone has called for an expansion of ISAF.”
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Rumsfeld, for his part, infuriated Biden and other senators, and the Afghans, by saying that the warlords should share power with the government: “How ought security to evolve in that country depends on really two things; one is what the interim government decides they think ought to happen, [the other is] what the warlord forces in the country decide they think ought to happen, and the interaction between those two.”
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Even U.S. women’s groups and humanitarian agencies pleaded with the administration: “How can we win the war and lose the keeping of the peace—not having more security forces is a disaster,” said Eleanor Smeal, the head of the Feminist Majority Foundation.
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The media weighed in against Rumsfeld: “Increasingly US support for the warlords is serving to undermine the efforts of the Afghanistan government to establish its political authority,” said
The Washington Post.
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Almost all the major U.S. newspapers and think tanks called for more troops to expand ISAF beyond the capital. Rumsfeld ignored them.
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Rumsfeld’s determination to legalize warlord authority against the wishes of the Afghan government and people was the most fatal mistake he was to make. It gave the Taliban just the propaganda excuse they needed to reorganize themselves. Karzai considered Rumsfeld’s statement an insult to all Afghans, and from that time on, he saw the secretary of defense as being completely out of touch with reality. Karzai spent the spring of 2002 touring world capitals appealing for more peacekeeping troops and money, but it was a hopeless task as long as the Americans refused to support the idea. Brahimi and Kofi Annan traveled separately to Washington in February to talk to the Bush administration. “It’s very difficult to have a major peace operation in Afghanistan without the Americans involved,” a sarcastic Brahimi said in Washington on February 10.
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The debate was all the more acrimonious and relevant because ISAF was proving to be a huge success, creating immense goodwill in Kabul as Western soldiers carried out foot patrols, helped local communities, and befriended citizens in a way unheard of by the Kabul police. When British soldiers patrolled the streets of Kabul, there would be an instant traffic jam. Hordes of well-wishers, including burqa-clad women and laughing children, crowded around them. Sadly, contrary to what many people thought, an ISAF expansion outside the capital did not need tens of thousands of troops. A blueprint drawn up by William Durch of the Henry L. Stimson Center, in Washington, argued for a modest expansion of 4,500 more troops to be based in six key cities, 6,500 troops to patrol the roads between those cities, and some combat engineer units to help repair roads between the cities and manage the demobilization of Afghan militias.
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In March 2002, disgruntled aid officials at the American embassy in Kabul told me that the CIA’s $1 billion budget was being used to pay off warlords and their militias, carry out quick-impact development projects, find al Qaeda leaders, and conduct classified operations against extremists. The State Department and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) had been completely cut out of policymaking. Even the British tried to complain about this monopolization of policymaking by the CIA and the Defense Department. Tony Blair was dismayed to hear that “the CIA was given $1 billion of extra funding to identify local groups and provide them with the cash and weapons to do America’s work.”
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By the early summer, forty-five thousand Afghan mercenaries were being paid by the CIA.

Moreover, in many areas, USAID humanitarian food deliveries and development projects were being taken over by the joint CIA-SOF teams. Credible Afghan tribal leaders who had been identified by the Afghan government or the UN as “positive agents of change,” capable of fostering stability at the community level, were bypassed in favor of the commanders and warlords preferred by the CIA. Afghan civil society was being strangled even as it emerged, and the Afghan government was made to look incompetent and powerless. Afghan policy was now in the hands of covert CIA-SOF operatives, who had vast sums at their disposal but no mandate to rebuild the country.

The warlords were becoming even richer by receiving lucrative U.S. contracts for the supply of food and fuel to U.S. bases. Kandahar’s governor, Gul Agha Sherzai, endeared himself to U.S. commanders in the city by giving them everything they needed. He was soon earning an estimated $1.5 million a month for providing building materials, fuel, and other items. Gravel needed to repair the Kandahar runway costing eight dollars a truckload was sold to the base for one hundred dollars—and some three hundred truckloads a day were being delivered. Sherzai provided one thousand guards, laborers, and cleaners to the U.S. base in Kandahar, raking in a commission from both the base and the workers’ salaries.
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Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of the warlord policy, was in a state of denial about the U.S. role in supporting the warlords. “I don’t think in most parts of the country that the power of the warlords is a function of any support they get from us,” he said. “The real strength of the warlords comes from their local roots.”
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With a new warlord state being established under the patronage of the U.S. military, Karzai and his government could not compete.

Bush’s lack of control over the Pentagon and the extent to which Rumsfeld was making his own rules in Afghanistan became clearer in April. Until April 2002, Bush was firmly committed to “no nation building” in Afghanistan.
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Then, on April 17, in a speech given at the Virginia Military Institute, where Gen. George Marshall once trained, Bush surprised everyone by calling for a “Marshall Plan” for Afghanistan, referring to the plan the United States provided Europe after World War II. Bush promised to rebuild the government and the army and provide health and education services.
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He called Marshall’s work “a beacon to light the path that we, too, must follow.” This sudden U-turn, a result of the State Department and Colin Powell trying to regain a grip on policy, caused immense excitement in Kabul. Karzai telephoned me to say that his and my skepticism about the Americans had been misplaced and that Bush had finally come around. Then, nothing happened. The orders never went down. The National Security Council, under Condoleezza Rice, never presented any plan. The resources were never allocated.

Rumsfeld had blocked the idea even before it got off the ground. He said that U.S. troops would never be involved in nation building and he claimed that European countries were not prepared to expand ISAF— a lie. They had never been asked. In fact, Richard Haass had taken informal soundings from the Europeans for more troops, and the response had been very positive.
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“The last thing you’re going to hear from this podium is someone thinking they know how Afghanistan ought to organize itself,” Rumsfeld said in response. Wolfowitz said that Afghanistan was “notoriously hostile to foreigners and notoriously difficult to govern,” so the United States should not even try. He said that the CIA-SOF teams would continue working with the warlords, or “regional leaders,” as he now liked to call them. To do more, Wolfowitz added, would be to ignore an Afghan culture of “regional power with a great deal of autonomy,” while to intervene too actively on behalf of the central government would create a risk.
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Bush said nothing more, and no U.S. official ever again mentioned a “Marshall Plan” for Afghanistan.

Instead, the Defense Department now virtually took over reconstruction in Afghanistan from the State Department. Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense and comptroller, became its reconstruction coordinator in Afghanistan. Defense rather than State Department officials began to mobilize money from donor countries, which shocked their governments. Zakheim ordered army officers to go on fund-raising trips to Europe, Japan, and the Arabian Gulf. Later, Swedish diplomats told me they were appalled when a U.S. brigadier general arrived asking for more money for Afghanistan.

The warlords presented the biggest obstacle to the UN in 2002 as it implemented the first stage of the political agenda set out in the Bonn Agreement—the holding of a representative Loya Jirga (LJ), or grand tribal council. The LJ would choose an interim president until presidential elections were held, decide on the shape of the government, and choose a commission, which would then draw up a new constitution the following year. The holding of LJs to elect kings and decide upon weighty matters such as going to war were a long tradition and an accepted form of decision making by the Afghans. Traditionally the LJ had no rules of procedure or agenda, as each was specific to the time and the need. Chiefs and elders of the tribes were automatically all members. The first Loya Jirga, held in 1747, founded the modern Afghan state and established the Durrani monarchy. The last genuinely representative LJ was held in 1964. After the monarchy was overthrown in 1973, strongmen rulers, including the communists, held Loya Jirgas, but none was considered representative or legitimate. Taliban leader Mullah Omar considered the Loya Jirga anti-Islamic and refused to hold one.

This new Loya Jirga for Afghanistan would elect members through an indirect process that would be supervised by the UN and the twenty-one-man Loya Jirga Commission, appointed by Karzai. Ismael Qasimyar, a constitutional law expert, was appointed chairman of the Loya Jirga Commission. He had taken part in every LJ since 1964 and now promised to bring together a far more complete mix of representatives, including women, than ever before so that nobody could question the LJ’s legitimacy. “The only disqualification is that members cannot belong to terrorist groups or the Taliban,” said Qasimyar.
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The key issue for the commission was to limit the control of the warlords, who would try to determine who was elected from their region. In a process of indirect elections, people would vote for 1,050 delegates from across the country. The commission would select another 500 delegates to represent women, technocrats, refugees in Pakistan and Iran, nomads, and Afghans in exile in the West. At least 150, or 10 percent of the 1,501 representatives, would be women.
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Across the country women were to assert themselves for the first time in decades. Female teachers and midwives were the most active, and they mobilized illiterate peasant women.

There were no Western peacekeeping forces outside Kabul to maintain the impartiality of the voting process, while local security forces were thin on the ground or controlled by warlords, yet the elections passed remarkably peacefully. The warlords did try to influence the process in every corner of the country. Delegates were threatened, harassed, or even kidnapped to make sure they represented the warlord’s views or supported the warlord’s candidate in the next round of voting. Yet when the LJ was held, more than one third of the delegates declared themselves to be independent.

There was an enormous amount of politicking before the LJ started. Zahir Shah had returned to Kabul from Rome on April 18, 2002. He was eighty-seven years old and frail, but all the warlords and thousands of people arrived to pay him homage. I met him a few days later. The excitement of coming home after twenty-eight years seemed to have reversed the aging process by a decade. He spoke with an energy and lucidity I had not seen in him before. Then the problems started. The Rome group and other Pashtun notables who had felt left out at Bonn urged the former king to stand against Karzai for president, although he was not well enough to do so. Karzai, the Northern Alliance, and the international community wanted him to accept a symbolic title, such as father of the nation.

For the UN, a key aim of the elections was to make sure that the Pashtuns felt fully enfranchised. So it was difficult for the UN to openly oppose the machinations of Zahir Shah’s supporters, although no one wanted to see a weak old man as head of state. The UN was also concerned that unless the United States exerted pressure, the most powerful warlords could totally ignore the democratization process. Zalmay Khalilzad, now President Bush’s special representative for Afghanistan, took it upon himself to pull the rug out from under the king’s supporters and end the uncertainty. After persuading Zahir Shah to renounce all aspirations toward the presidency, Khalilzad held a press conference on June 10 in the garden of the king’s house. In front of a bemused press, he sat with the king, Karzai, and Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah. The king’s spokesman, Nasir Zia, read out a statement from the king: “I have no intention of restoring the monarchy and I am not a candidate for any position.” Khalilzad said the confusion about the king’s role had been due to a misunderstanding.

The Panjsheri leaders warned that they would walk out of the LJ if the king were nominated president.
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Behind the scenes Khalilzad convinced the three powerful Panjsheri Tajiks, who held the ministries of Defense, Foreign Affairs, and Interior, that they would have to relinquish one post as a gesture to the Pashtuns. Subsequently during the LJ, Younus Qanuni stepped down as interior minister after a dramatic speech and was replaced by a Pashtun, although Qanuni returned to the cabinet as education minister.
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The opening of the LJ was postponed by twenty-four hours so that everyone could digest what had happened. Some Pashtun delegates denounced Khalilzad for acting like a British viceroy. Others criticized American activism in keeping out the king in sharp contrast to the American accommodation of the warlords. However, there is little doubt that if the king had been given any political role, the LJ would have ended in chaos.