Descent Into Chaos (81 page)

1
Ahmed Rashid,
Taliban: Islam, Oil, and the New Great Game in Central Asia,
London: I. B. Tauris, 2000.

2
We interviewed Khan and several poppy farmers. Abubaker Saddique, “In Afghan Province, Poppy Planting Has Strong Appeal,”
EurasiaNet.org
, October 11, 2003.

3
I give considerable detail about the involvement of the ISI in drug trafficking in my book on the Taliban. Also in Tom Carew,
Jihad: The SAS Secret War in Afghanistan,
London: Mainstream, 2000, the author describes how in the 1980s he saw Hikmetyar’s Hizb-e -Islami bring opium out of Afghanistan and then deliver the opium to ISI offices on the border.

4
Rashid,
Taliban.

5
Graham Farrell and John Thorne, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone? Evolution of the Taliban Crackdown Against Opium Poppy Cultivation in Afghanistan,”
International Journal of Drug Policy,
March 2005.

6
Under
salam
contracts the farmer agreed to provide the drug dealer or moneylender with opium after the harvest and in return got paid half the value of his future harvest in cash at the market prices prevalent at the time of loan.

7
Ahmed Rashid, “Flood of Afghan Heroin Expected,”
The Daily Telegraph,
September 26, 2001. I was told by UNODC officials that the Americans knew far more about drug labs than they claimed to know, and the failure to bomb them was a major setback to the counter-narcotics effort. See also James Risen,
State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,
New York: Free Press, 2006.

8
Barnett Rubin,
Road to Ruin: Afghanistan’s Booming Opium Industry,
Washington, D.C., and New York: Center for American Progress and Center on International Cooperation, New York University, 2004. See also Michael Von der Schulenburg, “Briefing Paper on Revenues Generated by Illicit Drug Trafficking in Afghanistan,” internal paper written for UNODC, 2000.

9
Quoted in David Rohde, “Afghan Symbol for Change Becomes a Symbol of Failure,”
The New York Times,
September 15, 2006.

10
See ibid. Rohde quotes a 2006 statement by the UNODC chief Antonio Costa that names Sher Mohammed as being allegedly involved in drugs. Also Paul Watson writes that Sher Mohammed was caught with ten thousand kilograms of opium in his office in 2005. See Paul Watson, “US Military Secrets for Sale at Afghan Bazaar,”
Los Angeles Times,
November 3, 2006.

11
Steve Shaulis headed the Central Asia Development Group (CADG), a for-profit aid agency carrying out agricultural reconstruction.

12
Ahmed Rashid, “Drugs Are Good for War,”
Far Eastern Economic Review,
October 16, 2003. See also Ahmed Rashid, “Unequal Forces Line Up in Struggle over Afghan Heroin Trade,”
The Daily Telegraph,
October 16, 2003.

13
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Afghanistan’s Drug Industry, Structure, Functioning Dynamics and Implications for Counter-Narcotics Policy,” edited by Doris Buddenberg and William Byrd, 2006.

14
Ashraf Ghani, “Where Democracy’s Greatest Enemy Is a Flower,”
The New York Times,
December 11, 2004. For the World Bank, see William Byrd and Christopher Ward, “Drugs and Development in Afghanistan,” Washington, The World Bank, Social Development Papers, Conflict Prevention and Reconstruction Paper no. 18, Washington, D.C., December 2004.

15
Donald Rumsfeld visited Kabul on September 7, 2003.

16
James Risen,
State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,
New York: Free Press, 2006.

17
Barnett Rubin et al., “Too Early to Declare Success: Counter-Narcotics Policy in Afghanistan,” Afghanistan policy brief by CARE International and the Center on International Cooperation, March 24, 2004.

18
In 2003, the United States had committed only $130 million for counter-narcotics. Risen,
State of War.
See also Sonni Efron, “Afghan Quandary for US,”
Los Angeles Times,
February 1, 2005.

19
UNODC, “Afghanistan’s Drug Industry.”

20
Carlotta Gall, “Afghan Poppy Growing Reaches Record Level,”
The New York Times,
November 19, 2004.

21
Personal communications with Western diplomats in Kabul.

22
Associated Press, “US Military Denies Report on Karzai’s Brother’s Drug Ties,” Kabul, June 23, 2006. See also Ron Moreau and Sami Yousufzai, “A Harvest of Treachery, ”
Newsweek,
January 9, 2006.

23
See Mark Shaw, “Drug Trafficking and the Development of Organized Crime in Post-Taliban Afghanistan,” in UNODC, “Afghanistan’s Drug Industry.”

24
Judy Dempsey, “General Calls Drugs Biggest Test for Afghans,”
International Herald Tribune,
May 22, 2006.

25
Reuters, “UN Says Afghanistan Addicted to Own Opium,” New Delhi, May 24, 2006.

26
Carlotta Gall, “Opium Harvest at Record Level in Afghanistan,”
The New York Times,
September 3, 2006.

27
Quoted in Moreau and Yousufzai, “A Harvest of Treachery.” Wilder did the study for the Kabul-based Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit.

28
UNODC Afghanistan Opium Survey, 2006, Vienna.

29
U.S. State Department’s International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, 2006, Washington, D.C., March 1, 2006.

30
Editorial, “The Poppies of Afghanistan,”
The New York Times,
May 27, 2005.

31
Eurasia Insight, “Arrest of Tajikistan’s Drug Czar Stirs Political Tension in Dushanbe, ”
EurasiaNet.org
, August 9, 2004.

32
Rustem Safranov, “Turkmenistan’s Niyazov Implicated in Drug Smuggling,” EurasiaNet, March 29, 2002.

33
Robert Ponce, “Rising Heroin Abuse in Central Asia Raises Threat of Public Health Crisis,” EurasiaNet, March 29, 2002.

34
IRIN (news service), “Bitter-Sweet Harvest: Afghanistan’s New War,” July 2004. See also Byrd and Ward, “Drugs and Development in Afghanistan.”

35
State Department, International Narcotics Control Strategy Report 2006, Washington, D.C., March 1, 2006.

36
Three outstanding reports on the parliamentary elections are International Crisis Group, “Afghanistan Elections: Endgame or New Beginning?” Kabul, July 2005; Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, “A Guide to Parliamentary Elections in Afghanistan, ” Kabul, August 2005; and Human Rights Watch, “Afghanistan on the Eve of Parliamentary Elections,” Kabul, September 2005.

37
In September, Emma Bonino, a European Union commissioner and prominent human rights activist, led a large EU observer mission to monitor the elections and rounded on Karzai, saying that his marginalization of political parties had allowed warlords to stand and would not produce a democratic culture.

38
Those Taliban standing for the elections included Abdul Samad Khaksar, the former deputy interior minister, and three Taliban commanders: Rais al-Baghrani, Abdul Salam, alias Rocketi, and Abdul Hakim Mounib.

39
Just over half the electorate, or 6.6 million, voted. Some 41 percent of the voters were women and 59 percent were men.

40
Three hundred polling stations were excluded from the initial count on suspicion of fraud—sixty-two of them in the district of Paghman, outside Kabul, where the fundamentalist Abdul Rasul Sayyaf was contesting the polls, although he won his seat.

41
Ahmed Rashid, “It Takes Two Hands to Clap,”
YaleGlobal Online,
October 6, 2005.

42
At the NATO meeting in Berlin on September 13, Rumsfeld had also urged NATO countries to drop their caveats or restrictions on their troops deployed in Kabul.

43
UN and European Union assessments of the makeup of parliament, private cables, Kabul, October 2005.

44
Four senior Taliban figures had accepted the amnesty in February: Abdul Hakim Mujahid, the former Taliban envoy to the UN; Arsallah Rahmani, the former deputy minister of higher education; Rahmatullah Wahidyar, the deputy minister for refugees; and Mullah Fawzi, the chargé d’affaires in Saudi Arabia. All four were from Paktika province.

45
Associated Press, “Commander Predicts Collapse of Taliban,” Kabul, April 17, 2005.

46
Nick Meo, “The Taliban Rises Again for Fighting Season,”
The Independent,
May 15, 2005.

47
Sarah Chayes explains his murder in great detail. See her
The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban,
New York: Penguin Books, 2006. Khakrezwal was attending the funeral prayers for Maulvi Abdullah Fayaz, who had been killed by the Taliban on May 29 for organizing a meeting of one thousand mullahs that had stripped Mullah Omar of any religious authority.

48
The Joint Declaration of Strategic Partnership was signed on May 17, 2005, White House, Washington, D.C.

49
Michael Fletcher, “Bush Rebuffs Karzai Request on Troops,”
The Washington Post,
May 24, 2005.

50
Fifty-twoAmerican soldiers were killed in 2004, forty-seven in 2003, and forty-three in 2002.

51
Al Jazeera, “Taliban Military Official Reveals Contacts with Iraq,” Doha, July 13, 2005.

1
David Cloud, “Pentagon’s Fuel Deal Is Lesson in Risks of Graft-Prone Regions,”
The New York Times,
November 14, 2005.

2
Agence France-Presse, “New Kyrgyz Leader Calls for Review of US Military Presence, ” Bishkek, July 12, 2005.

3
Eric Schmitt, “Rumsfeld Stop in Kyrgyzstan Aims to Keep Access to Base,”
The New York Times,
July 26, 2005.

4
The Turkmen government passed a new law in December 2006 banning exiles from returning home to contest the presidential elections held in February 2007, which Berdymukhamedow won by a landslide, taking 89 percent of the votes cast.

5
In contrast, the average monthly wage was $ 55 in Kyrgyzstan and $120 in Kazakhstan.

6
For greater details on her holdings, see International Crisis Group, “Uzbekistan: Stagnation and Uncertainty,” Brussels, August 22, 2007. See also Peter Baker, “Battle Royal,”
The Washington Post,
April 13, 2004. Baker is one of the few journalists to have interviewed Gulnora Karimova. Also “Uzbekistan Offers Rich Pickings for Leader’s Daughter,”
Financial Times,
August 19, 2003.

7
International Crisis Group, “Uzbekistan.”

8
Martha Brill Olcott, “In Uzbekistan, the Revolution Won’t Be Pretty,”
The Washington Post,
May 22, 2005.

9
“Karimov is thought to rely most heavily on the security services—the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) and the National Security Service (usually known by its Russian initials, SNB) —to retain power. An uneasy balance existed between the two, but in the wake of Andijan massacre, the SNB emerged as the dominant force.” International Crisis Group, “Uzbekistan.”

10
Text of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s remarks in Tashkent, U.S. embassy, Islamabad, February 25, 2004. The United States had provided $220 million in 2002 as aid to Uzbekistan and $86 million in 2003.

11
“Uzbek Leader Seeks to Block Influx of Alien Ideologies,”
EurasiaNet.org
, March 2, 2005. Karimov was addressing the Uzbek parliament.

12
Uzbekistan’s gas output in 2004 was 60 billon cubic meters (bcm). However, it had no sizeable exports, and Russian companies wanted to buy Uzbek gas cheaply to feed it into the pool of gas that Russia sold to the European Union at a much higher price. Russia exported a total of 107 bcm to Europe in 2004, a 13 percent increase from 2003. Both Gazprom and Lukoil pledged to develop new gas fields in Uzbekistan and to increase production at old ones.

13
N. C. Aizenman, “In Uzbekistan Families Caught in a Nightmare,”
The Washington Post,
May 18, 2005.

14
Steven Myers, “As Hundreds Flee, Violence Flares Anew at Uzbek Border,”
The New York Times,
May 15, 2005.

15
Human Rights Watch, “Bullets Were Falling Like Rain,” Moscow, June 7, 2005.

16
Jeffrey Smith, “US Opposes Calls at NATO for Probe of Uzbek Killings,”
The Washington Post,
June 14, 2005. At a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels, European countries pushed for NATO’s support for the EU proposal of an independent investigation into the killings, but the U.S. delegates said they could not afford to lose the K2 base.

17
Germany refused to take a tough line against Uzbekistan after the Andijan massacre. After 9/11, Germany trained Uzbek officers, provided a munitions factory, and delivered arms and night-vision equipment to Uzbekistan. Germany was the third-largest contributor of aid to Uzbekistan, providing $300 million worth of assistance between 1992 and 2005. In December, Uzbek survivors of Andijan filed suit against the Uzbek interior minister, Zokirjon Almatov, who was in Germany seeking medical treatment. At the time of the massacre, he oversaw the special security forces that carried out the shootings. Berlin came under intense criticism for allowing Almatov to travel to Germany despite the EU ban on his entering Europe.

18
Basic pay for soldiers stood at $135 to $180 a month, compared with $40 a month for a bureaucrat.

1
Victoria Burnett, “NATO May Take Prominent Role in Afghan Force,”
Financial Times,
February 11, 2003.

2
Agence France-Presse, “NATO Chief in Parting Shot,” Brussels, December 17, 2003.

3
Chris Marquis, “General Urges NATO to Send More Troops,”
The New York Times,
January 27, 2004.

4
Interview with Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, Washington, D.C., February 19, 2004.

5
Reuters, “NATO Head Says Alliance Credibility on Brink,” London, June 18, 2004.

6
Judy Dempsey, “Two Afghan Missions to Merge,”
International Herald Tribune,
February 11, 2005.

7
Editorial, “The Sound of One Domino Falling,”
The New York Times,
August 4, 2006.

8
Speech by Gen. James Jones heard by author at a NATO conference, Madrid, May 17, 2006. I met with Jones while his staff was decidedly nervous about his outspokenness on the caveats issue.

9
Roger Cohen, “Time for the Bundesmacht,”
The New York Times,
October 25, 2007.

10
“Blair Has One Last Chance to Defy Bush: Chris Patten,”
The Guardian,
January 9, 2007. For Carter’s comments, see John Preston and Kate Melissa, “Compliant and Subservient: Carter’s Explosive Critique of Tony Blair,”
Sunday Telegraph,
August 27, 2006. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security advisor to President Carter, was equally scathing: “Too often Mr. Blair would emerge from meetings with Mr. Bush and give an eloquent rationale to the crude unilateralism that Bush had expressed in the meeting. In that sense Tony Blair did us all a great disservice.” See Edward Luce, “Smooth-Talking Premier Gave Tongue-Tied President an Easy Ride,”
The Financial Times,
May 11, 2007.

11
I was not surprised when Geoff Hoon, the former British defense secretary, echoed these same words, saying that Cheney exercised more power than the British had anticipated in comparison with Rumsfeld and Powell. “Sometimes Blair had made his point with the President [Bush], and I’d made my point with Don [Rumsfeld] and then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw had made his point with Colin [Powell], and the decision came out of a completely different place,” Hoon said. Agence France-Presse, “Geoff Hoon Admits Poor Planning for Iraq Aftermath,” London, May 2, 2007.

12
Speech by shadow defense secretary Liam Fox, Conservative Party Conference, October 4, 2006. He said the navy was now smaller than the French navy and the entire ninety-thousand-strong army could be seated in the new Wembley football stadium.

13
Thomas Harding, “5000 Troops Are to Be Sent to Afghanistan,”
The Daily Telegraph,
January 27, 2006.

14
Agence France-Presse, “Reid Fears Taliban Comeback,” Copenhagen, April 1, 2006.

15
A report drawn up by officers from the Sixteenth Air Assault Brigade gave a withering assessment of how insufficient troops and equipment were sent out, how the deployment was conducted too slowly, and how the entire operation suffered from “a lack of early political direction.” Quoted in Daniel Dombey and Rachel Morajee, “UK to Send More Troops,”
Financial Times,
July 10, 2006.

16
Reuters, “Canada’s Help for Afghans Boosts Security,” Kabul, March 14, 2006.

17
“Support Plummets for Afghan Mission,”
Globe and Mail,
May 6, 2006.

18
Ahmed Rashid, “Intelligence Officers Widen the Net in Hunt for Taliban,”
The Daily Telegraph,
June 29, 2006.

19
Christina Lamb, “Soldier Quits as Blundering Campaign Turns into Pointless War,”
The Sunday Times,
September 10, 2006.

20
“Had the police been better trained, equipped and armed, they would have suffered less,” said Ali Jalali. Ali Jalali, “The Future of Afghanistan,”
Parameters,
Spring 2006. For figures of police dead, see International Crisis Group, “Reforming Afghan Police,” Brussels, August 30, 2007.

21
James Glanz and David Rohde, “US Reports Fault in Training of Afghan Police,”
The New York Times,
March 12, 2006.

22
The UN reported the status of these fourteen officers; see Tom Koenigs, “Briefing to the UN Security Council on Afghanistan,” UN document, New York, July 26, 2006.

23
Henry Schuster, “The Taliban’s Rules,” CNN, June 12, 2006.

24
Dave Markland, “Operation Medusa: Fog of War, NATO’s Failure and Afghanistan’s Future,”
ZNet,
February 5, 2007.

25
Matthew Fisher, “Top General Says Afghanistan Mission Unaffected by Political Furor,” CanWest News Service, October 15, 2007.

26
Ahmed Rashid, “NATO’s Top Brass Accuse Pakistan over Taliban Aid,”
The Daily Telegraph,
October 6, 2006.

27
The figures are derived from UN Assistance Mission for Afghanistan statistics, Kabul, June 2006

28
Interview with Chris Alexander, Kabul, June 19, 2006.

29
United Nations, “Southern Region, Recommended Actions to Address Governance Issues,” Kabul, September 2006.

30
David Cloud, “US Air Strikes Climb Sharply in Afghanistan,”
The New York Times,
November 17, 2006.

31
Sami Yousufzai and Ron Moreau, “Suicide Offensive,”
Newsweek,
April 16, 2007.

32
Reuters, “Taliban Say Hundreds of Suicide Attackers Ready,” Spin Baldak, January 18, 2007.

33
I interviewed Saleh several times during the summer of 2006 and corroborated what he told me with NATO officers.

34
“Special Security Initiative of the Policy Action Group,” papers presented to President Karzai at the meeting of the Policy Action Group, Kabul, July 9, 2006. The paper on the Taliban is called “Insurgency and Terrorism in Afghanistan. Who Is Fighting and Why?” and was prepared in June 2006.

35
Tom Koenigs, sixty-two, replaced Jean Arnault as head of UNAMA in Kabul in February 2006. Arnault had held the post from February 2004 to February 2005. Koenigs had headed UN peacekeeping operations in Kosovo and Guatemala and had worked at the German foreign office. He came from an illustrious Cologne banking family, but in 1973 he had given up his inheritance to Chilean resistance fighters and the Vietcong. He has been a member of the Green Party since 1983.

36
United Nations, “Report of the UN Secretary-General on the Situation in Afghanistan and Its Implications for Peace and Security,” New York, September 2006.

37
All the quotes come from IWPR, “Afghans Bemused by Mixed Messages from Musharraf,” Kabul, September 22, 2006. See also Reuters, “Pakistan Vows to Help Kabul Crush Taliban,” Kabul, September 6, 2006.

38
Interview with senior U.S. diplomat, Islamabad, March 5, 2007.

39
Ahmed Rashid, “How to Turn the Tide in Afghanistan,”
International Herald Tribune,
October 12, 2006.

40
David Montero, “Pakistan Faces a Less-Friendly US Congress,”
The Christian Science Monitor,
January 29, 2007.

41
Anwar Iqbal, “Taliban Command Structure in FATA Alarms US,”
Dawn,
December 27, 2006.

42
On November 4 the Dutch foreign minister Bernard Bot called for Pakistan to stop the Taliban from crossing into Uruzgan province, where 40 percent of them were coming in from Pakistan to attack Dutch troops. Two weeks later the Canadian foreign minister Peter MacKay called for Pakistan to arrest Taliban leaders based on its soil.

43
Center for Public Integrity, “Pakistan’s Blank Check for US Military Aid after 9/11,” Washington, D.C., March 27, 2007. See also RAND Corporation, “Securing Tyrant or Fostering Reform? U.S. Internal Security Assistance to Repressive and Transitioning Regimes,” Washington, D.C., 2006.

44
Statement of John Negroponte to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Washington, D.C., January 11, 2007.

45
Reuters, “World Underestimated the Potential for a Resurgent Taliban,” Kabul, June 30, 2006.

46
Radio Free Liberty, “Kabul’s Record Criticized at Brussels Forum,” Brussels, April 28, 2007.

47
Colum Lynch, “UN Plans to Send Troops to East Timor,”
The Washington Post,
June 14, 2006.

48
James Jones and Harlan Ullman, “What Is at Stake in Afghanistan,” letter to
The Washington Post,
April 10, 2007.