Descent Into Chaos (40 page)

Fahim wanted an army of two hundred thousand men. Eikenberry politely informed him that nobody would pay for such a large army and that sixty thousand was more realistic. It took six months for the UN and Eikenberry to convince Fahim. In June 2002, at a conference in Geneva on security-sector reform, the international community agreed to a plan for an army of sixty thousand men, twelve thousand border guards, and an air force of eight thousand. The army would be divided into seven corps stationed around the country, with a quick-reaction corps based in Kabul. The Ministry of Defense would undergo restructuring to achieve professional and ethnic balance—in other words, dozens of Panjsheri officers would be removed.
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The United States would be responsible for training the army, while the initial costs of $75 million, plus the cost of building new barracks ($80 million), would be met by a UN-run trust fund for security sector reform to which all nations were asked to contribute. The Germans took on the responsibility to train a new Afghan National Police (ANP), a force of sixty-two thousand men. Fahim grudgingly accepted these plans.

UNAMA now went ahead with the collection of heavy weapons from the warlords, such as tanks and artillery, and prepared for disarming some one hundred thousand militia. Fahim was one of the last to give up his tanks and heavy guns. Brahimi stressed that training the ANA had to run parallel to disarming the militias, but the Pentagon refused to help in this task. “We have to phase out the armed militias and ensure that we are not just creating another army in a country that has too many already,” Brahimi said.
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The United States, however, was still recruiting militiamen to protect its bases, thereby increasing militia numbers even as the UN was trying to disarm them. Yet U.S. officials insisted that there was “no contradiction” in its strategy.

Khalilzad’s “accelerated success” program in 2003 pumped in more money and speedier training for the ANA. Finally Washington began to take seriously its responsibilities toward the new Afghan army, although it still refused to help the UN disarm the militias. U.S. expenditure on the ANA for 2004 was $797 million, the following year $788 million, and in 2005-2006 it rose to $830 million. Few other countries contributed, so the cost burden was almost wholly on the Americans.
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The first units of the ANA deployed in 2003 and generated enormous pride among ordinary Afghans. U.S. trainers were embedded with the units, living and sleeping with their Afghan troops as the units were used to maintain law and order or fight the Taliban in the south.

By the spring of 2006, when NATO deployed in the south to counter a major Taliban offensive, the ANA numbered 37,000 men. With its 650 embedded U.S. officers, it was outperforming the police and gaining the confidence of the Afghan population. In the summer of 2006 the United States began to provide the ANA with $2 billion worth of heavy weapons, vehicles, and other equipment. Yet problems persisted. Between 20 to 40 percent of troops in a battalion were illiterate. The desertion rate was extremely high—around 25 percent in 2005 and 13 percent in 2006. Soldiers went absent without leave, partly because they were not used to serving so far from their villages and could not send their salaries home because there was no nationwide banking system. Soldiers now received basic pay of seventy dollars a month and a hardship allowance when on the front line.
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Despite the initial reluctance of the Pentagon and interminable delays, the ANA has become the most successful U.S.-led nation-building exercise in Afghanistan.

Today the major issue is how to sustain the army, which at full strength will have a recurrent cost of $1 billion a year, or 4 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product. Afghanistan is not going to be able to pay for its own army for many years to come—perhaps never—so there will have to be long-term international funding for this, though it is still a bargain compared with the deployment of Western troops in the country, which cost ten times as much. (It cost the Pentagon $1 billion a month to maintain fifteen thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan.)

Training a police force proved to be far more difficult. The UN has determined that rebuilding the police force in a failed state is even more important than rebuilding an army. The police are on the front line of public security, law and order, and extending the writ of the government. A police force is critical to helping build a democracy because it has the capacity to generate trust between the government and the people. However, the international community failed to grasp early on the centrality of law enforcement and justice-sector reform in helping stabilize Afghanistan. Law enforcement was left for last, was given the least funding, and commanded the least attention of Western donors. Unlike the ANA, the Afghan national police was not rebuilt from scratch. Instead the government constructed it piecemeal, using corrupt officers from the warlords.

During the civil war in the 1990s police stations were nothing more than an extension of the power of local commanders and warlords, and they continued to be so under Karzai. Justice was rarely meted out, and the police—lacking salaries or facilities—lived off the land by exploiting the public rather than serving it. They were heavily involved in the drug trade, land grabbing, kidnapping, and extortion. The Ministry of Interior, which ran the police after 9/11, became a center for drug trafficking, with police posts in opium-growing regions being auctioned to the highest bidder—sometimes for as much as a hundred thousand dollars for a job that had a salary of seventy dollars a month. Without police and judges, Afghans could hope for neither justice nor crime prevention.

In 2002 Germany had been given the task of training a new Afghan police force, but it was unwilling to provide sufficient funds and resources. Germany set up a police academy in Kabul to teach officers, but sent out only 41 trainers to train 3,500 Afghan officers over three years. There was no plan for the countrywide training of 62,000 policemen and almost no equipment handed out to police stations, which lacked radios, vehicles, and even weapons. Berlin spent a paltry $89 million between 2002 and 2006, a stinginess that angered the Americans, Afghans, and other European nations.
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Germany’s pathetic, next-to-useless performance in rebuilding the police and Italy’s apathy in rebuilding the justice system became the two weakest points in the international community’s efforts to rebuild state institutions in Afghanistan.

Washington decided to take over police training in 2003, but again there were interminable delays. The U.S. government had no organization through which it could help failed states develop police forces. USAID’s Office of Public Safety, which was responsible for training police forces during the cold war, was abolished in 1974 and never replaced. Police training fell to the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, whose core job was to counter narcotics, not train police.
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As the United States has no national police force—only state police forces—the State Department subcontracted police training in Afghanistan to DynCorp International, a private corporation that hired retired American police officers with no knowledge of Afghanistan to train Afghan police. (DynCorp had earlier been contracted to provide American bodyguards to protect President Karzai.)

The United States brought about a major change in the Interior Ministry by introducing Ali Ahmad Jalali into the government. In January 2003, Jalali, age sixty-two and a Pashtun, became the new interior minister and in effective control of police reform. An American-trained former Afghan army colonel who had settled in Washington, D.C., Jalali wrote military books and became head of the Afghan language section of the Voice of America radio service. He persuaded Karzai to sack several corrupt police chiefs and governors and joined up with other Pashtun reformers in the cabinet, such as Hanif Atmar and Ashraf Ghani, to put pressure on Karzai to sideline the warlords and drug traffickers. As a result, Jalali made many enemies, who eventually forced his ousting from office two years later.

The State Department had given DynCorp $24 million to set up seven regional training centers across Afghanistan. However, its three-week training courses were too short and they had no follow-up or mentoring, and there were no funds for equipment such as radios and vehicles. Between 2003 and 2005, the United States was to spend some $860 million in training forty thousand policemen, but the results were almost totally useless. DynCorp was training the police to fight an insurgency rather than win hearts and minds in their localities. The trained Afghan policemen returned home and continued acting in the same rapacious ways as before.
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“Having the police in the trenches fighting the Taliban is not a successful sign of counterinsurgency and means that army and police roles are being mixed up, which leaves the population bereft of law and order,” said Chris Alexander, the deputy head of UNAMA in 2006.
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The dynamic Alexander, the first Canadian ambassador to Kabul after 9 /11, was seconded to the UN, where he became the most outspoken advocate of the need to train a police force. The failure of DynCorp in training an effective police force led to enormous criticism of U.S. policy objectives. “The US training program [for the police] under DynCorp is an appalling joke . . . a complete shambles,” warned Richard Holbrooke, the former U.S. ambassador to the UN.
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The Pentagon proposed embedding U.S. military trainers with the police, just as it had done with the ANA. This suggestion resulted in a turf war between the Pentagon and the State Department, which objected to military officers training the civilian police structure. The Pentagon won out in 2005, and U.S. trainers were slowly embedded with the police.

Early on, the UN was faced with how to reform the Defense Ministry and get it out of the clutches of General Fahim and the hundreds of Panjsheri Tajik officers he had installed there. A confidential UN report stated that thirty out of thirty-three directorates in the Ministry of Defense were run by Panjsheris, and the same was true in the Amanyat, or the intelligence service, run by Mohammed Arif (known as Engineer Arif).
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Pashtun officials and governors in the south refused to trust Fahim or take orders from him. Pashtun warlords refused to disarm their militias as long as Fahim controlled the army.

At first the U.S. military was loath to pressure Fahim, even though his Panjsheri commanders had little love for the Americans or ISAF. Fahim was playing a double game, pledging loyalty to Karzai and the Americans, but at the same time telling his Panjsheri officers and men that the foreigners would soon be gone and they would be back in control. He kept his commanders sweet with cash, which he received in secret from Russia and Iran. In 2002 and 2003, Afghan and UN officials told me of their suspicions about money from Tehran and Moscow being carried into the country in diplomatic bags and handed over to Fahim. The Russians provided arms and spare parts for hundreds of tanks Fahim still held in the Panjsher Valley.

Russia, India, and Iran had been the long-term supporters of the Northern Alliance in its fight against the Taliban. These countries were convinced that U.S. forces would soon leave Afghanistan, and they were determined to maintain their influence with their former proxies. They saw Fahim as
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player, someone who would confront Pakistani influence and any return of the Taliban. Russia and Uzbekistan supported the northern warlords, such as Generals Dostum, Atta, and Daud, while Iran supported Ismael Khan.

At a conference near London in the autumn of 2002, I goaded senior Russian officials about their support to Fahim. They reacted angrily, saying they were willing to provide Fahim’s army—which they termed “the national army”—up to $100 million in arms and training.
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Without blinking, they claimed Russia had a legal right to do this according to the defense treaties Moscow had signed with the Soviet-backed communist regime in the 1980s! The Russian assertion shocked the American participants from the State Department and Pentagon, and prompted high-level talks between Russia and the United States in the following months, as the Americans tried to persuade the Russians to back away from Fahim.

Moscow’s diplomatic instrument was Zamir Kabulov, a tall good-looking man with floppy black hair whom I had known for twenty years. An Uzbek born in Tashkent, Kabulov spoke several Afghan languages, was fluent in English, and had served in the Soviet Foreign Ministry. We had first met in the mid-1980s during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, when Kabulov, then a junior diplomat, would brief foreign reporters every Wednesday at the vast Soviet embassy compound in Kabul. The press was never allowed to enter the embassy, so he did his briefing in a guard-room at the gate. Then, several evenings a week, he and other Russians, whom we presumed to be KGB officers, would visit the UN club, where the handful of foreign reporters gathered every evening to have a drink and dinner. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Kabulov was one of a few non-Russian diplomats who did not return to their home country but opted to remain in Russia’s Foreign Ministry. He represented Russia at all major events involving Afghanistan, and in the late 1990s, during the Taliban regime, he joined the UN mission to Afghanistan that was then based in Islamabad. He was the premier Russian expert on Afghanistan, so it was no surprise that he became ambassador to Kabul in 2005.

Brahimi and Karzai urged Fahim to carry out reforms in the Ministry of Defense, and to start by removing some Panjsheri officers. Fahim refused, and relations between him and Karzai became extremely tense. In July 2002, Vice President Abdul Qadir, forty-eight, the most prominent Pashtun in the Northern Alliance and brother to slain anti-Taliban leader Abdul Haq, was killed in a hail of bullets outside his office in Kabul. Qadir’s bodyguards had failed to protect him, and U.S. officials urged Karzai to accept American bodyguards. In August, a forty-five-man squad of U.S. SOF took over Karzai’s personal protection. Fahim took this as a snub, and relations between the two men worsened, especially as Fahim’s car was now searched by the Americans whenever he entered the palace. Kabul was full of talk of a coup by Fahim when Zalmay Khalilzad arrived to cool down tempers. Karzai’s American bodyguards were necessary, but they exposed both his dependency on the United States and a lack of trust for Afghans that went down badly with the population.
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