In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (21 page)

U.S. financial support was also low. “Iraq definitely affected funding levels for Afghanistan in two respects,” explained Dov Zakheim. “The first was that we had only so much money and attention. We couldn’t keep going back to the same well. The second was probably unhappiness among some allies at the war in Iraq. It likely spilled over into other areas, including an unwillingness to help in Afghanistan in 2003 and beyond.”
⁶²
Sarah Chayes, who ran a nongovernmental organization in Kandahar Province, contended that a significant reason “why the great [American] machine that was supposed to deploy on all fronts churning out reconstruction for Afghanistan failed to gear up” was “the war in Iraq.”
⁶³

Low levels of money, energy, and troops made it nearly impossible
to secure Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban regime and almost certainly increased the probability of an insurgency. Ahmed Rashid, author of
Taliban,
concluded: “The main factor in preventing a stronger international commitment was the United States’ diversion of its effort and interest from 2002 onwards to Iraq. Within three months of the overthrow of the Taliban regime, the United States was pulling out from Afghanistan.”
⁶⁴
By 2003, the U.S. government had become convinced that Iraq, not Afghanistan, was the central hub in the war on terrorism. In a phone conversation in August 2003 with L. Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Condoleezza Rice said: “Colin [Powell] and I are convinced that Iraq has become the decisive theater in the war on terrorism and that if we win in Iraq, Islamic terrorism can be defeated.”
⁶⁵

Examination of internal U.S. government memos supports this argument. In a 2003 letter to Bremer, Jeb Mason, associate director of the White House’s Office of Strategic Initiatives, requested the adoption of “talking points” on progress in the “war on terror.” He wrote: “Iraq is now the central front in the War on Terror. As Vice President Cheney said on Sunday: “If we’re successful in Iraq…so that it’s not a safe haven for terrorists, now we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11.”
⁶⁶
Afghanistan and Pakistan had been relegated to secondary fronts. The United States lacked the military, financial, and political resources and attention to secure Afghanistan because they were diverted to Iraq. The result was too few soldiers, too little assistance, and too little awareness of what was happening.

Warlords

The light-footprint approach had another unforeseen repercussion. With too few international forces and too few competent indigenous forces, local militia commanders, or warlords, filled the vacuum.
Some were aided by the U.S. military.
⁶⁷
Since it was not politically feasible to increase the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the U.S. military decided that the need to fight al Qa’ida was urgent enough that the United States simply couldn’t wait to develop Afghan government forces. Lieutenant General John R. Vines, commander of Combined Joint Task Force 180 in Afghanistan, acknowledged that “militia are part of the existing reality.”
⁶⁸

Local-warlord militia forces “led every mounted patrol and most major operations,” partly because, according to one U.S. military assessment, “they knew the ground better and could more easily spot something that was out of place or suspicious.”
⁶⁹
Such forces were often used for the outer perimeter of cordon-and-search operations. In several operations, such as the Battle of Deh Chopan, militia forces were critical in providing intelligence and the bulk of the maneuver force.
⁷⁰

In the east, the United States gave money, arms, and other equipment to Pacha Khan Zadran, whose forces were based in Paktia Province. In the west, U.S. forces provided assistance to Ismail Khan, allowing him to establish significant political and fiscal autonomy in Herat Province. He controlled military and civil administration there, supported by large amounts of customs revenues from trade with Iran, Turkmenistan, and other Afghan provinces.
⁷¹
In the south, U.S. forces provided money and arms to Gul Agha Shirzai and others to help target al Qa’ida operatives.
⁷²

The U.S. assistance to warlords weakened the central government. President Karzai made a halfhearted attempt to reduce the power of warlords who also served as provincial governors by reassigning them away from their geographic power base. But Karzai’s tendency was to
move
warlords, not to
remove
them. Consequently, their networks continued to influence provincial-and district-level administration.
⁷³
Public-opinion polls showed that the warlords’ increasing power alarmed many Afghans. One poll conducted for the U.S. military concluded: “A high percentage of respondents identified local commanders as bringers of insecurity to their district.”
⁷⁴
According to the Afghanistan
National Security Council’s
National Threat Assessment
: “Non-statutory armed forces and their commanders pose a direct threat to the national security of Afghanistan. They are the principal obstacle to the expansion of the rule of law into the provinces and thus the achievement of the social and economic goals that the people of Afghanistan expect their Government, supported by the International Community, to deliver.”
⁷⁵
An Afghan provincial governor reinforced this conclusion, observing that “keeping warlords in power is weakening the government. The more the government pays them off, the stronger they will become and the weaker the government will be.”
⁷⁶

This brings up an important dilemma. In past counterinsurgencies, the local country has usually needed to take the lead over the long run for successful operations. A large foreign presence—especially foreign military forces—has often undermined local power and legitimacy. But what if there is no competent government force in the early stages of an insurgency? In the Afghan case, there were no Afghan Army forces and no trained police. While there are no ideal options in these situations, the most effective strategy may be to: (a) work with legitimate indigenous forces (especially police); (b) effectively train and mentor them as quickly as possible; and (c) backfill with sufficient numbers of U.S. and other international forces to accomplish key security tasks such as patrolling streets and villages, monitoring borders, and protecting critical infrastructure. Higher per-capita levels of U.S. and Coalition military and police might have been useful in the immediate aftermath of the Taliban’s overthrow. Preparations for the war in Iraq made this impossible.

Learning the Right Lessons?

The light-footprint plan was based on the assumption that a heavy footprint would lead to a Soviet-or British-style quagmire. A key lesson from the past was that a large foreign army would elicit large-scale popular resistance. U.S. officials also believed that small numbers of ground troops and airpower, working with Afghan forces,
would be sufficient to establish security. “The history of British and Soviet military failures in Afghanistan,” said Douglas Feith, “argued against a large U.S. invasion force.”
⁷⁷

But this was a misreading of the Soviet experience. The key lesson was not the number of Soviet forces deployed but rather how they were used. One of the most comprehensive studies of Soviet combat tactics in Afghanistan, Lester Grau’s book
The Bear Went Over the Mountain,
concludes: “The Soviet Army that marched into Afghanistan was trained to fight within the context of a theater war against a modern enemy who would obligingly occupy defensive positions stretching across the northern European plain.” The Soviets used artillery, tanks, and ground forces to destroy Afghan positions, and “Soviet tactics and equipment were designed solely to operate within the context of this massive strategic operation.”
⁷⁸

The Soviets used conventional tactics to fight an unconventional war. They terrorized the population rather than trying to win support for the Afghan regime. This allowed the United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and other governments to exploit the resentment by providing military and financial assistance to the mujahideen.
⁷⁹
In short, the problem with the Soviet approach was not a heavy footprint. Rather, the Soviets were unprepared to fight a counterinsurgency that required them to focus on garnering the support of the local population. The Soviet footprint was, in reality, light. In January 1984, for instance, CIA Director William Casey informed President Ronald Reagan that the Afghan mujahideen, with backing from the U.S., Pakistan, and Saudi intelligence services, controlled two-thirds of the countryside. He argued that the Soviets would have to triple or quadruple their deployments in Afghanistan to put down the rebellion. Rather than being overcommitted, they were underresourced.
⁸⁰

Was the light-footprint approach a wise one? In one of his final reports before leaving Kabul as the European Union’s special representative to Afghanistan, Francesc Vendrell poignantly remarked in 2008 that the “UN decision to adopt a ‘light’ footprint deprived the organization of the tools to undertake the kind of reforms the Afghans
desired.” In addition, he contended that the “U.S. obsession with Iraq diverted energies from Afghanistan, while the decision to limit the deployment of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to Kabul…limited its effectiveness.”
⁸¹
The rest of this book argues that while the light footprint may not have been the direct cause of the Afghanistan insurgency, it certainly played an important role. The low levels of international assistance—including troops, police, and financial aid—made it difficult to stabilize Afghanistan as the insurgency began to worsen. And it strengthened the role of local warlords. Despite these challenges, however, the initial engagement in Afghanistan had some early successes.

IN SEPTEMBER 2004, Zalmay Khalilzad flew to the western Afghan city of Herat to meet with the Tajik warlord Ismail Khan. With his bushy white beard, Khan had a reputation for running the best fiefdom in Afghanistan. At the request of President Bush, Khalilzad had left Washington in November 2003 to become the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. He was going to see Ismail Khan on a sensitive mission, and he had the support of Washington and President Karzai.

“We had been encouraging the removal of several governors who were weakening the power of the central government,” Khalilzad told me. So he flew to Herat, met with Ismail Khan, and, standing next to him, announced that Ismail Khan had agreed to move to Kabul.
¹

This brazen act—putting Ismail Khan on the spot by offering him a position in Karzai’s cabinet, which he reluctantly accepted—was vintage Khalilzad. He was the only senior White House official in the Bush administration who had lived in Afghanistan, and he had a visceral feel for the country’s social, cultural, and political intricacies. As an Afghan, he understood the people of Afghanistan and their warrior spirit, and his familiarity with Pashtun culture, including his fluency in both national Afghan languages, Dari and Pashto, made him a tremendous asset. His influence among Afghan officials was unparalleled among U.S. diplomats in the country. Behind his thick, six-foot
frame was a charming, almost unassuming, personality. But Khalilzad could also be an imposing figure. He exuded an extraordinary sense of confidence and authority when he walked into a room, but his true métier was the face-to-face meeting.

Herat, in the fertile Hari River Valley, lies seventy miles from the Iranian border, along the ancient trade routes that linked Europe with the Middle East, India, and China. The city was later used by the British, Soviet, and Taliban armies, each of whom conquered the city and constructed key military installations. Ismail Khan had been a staple figure in Herat for several decades, participating in the Soviet War in the 1980s and the Afghan civil war in the early 1990s, until he was captured by the Taliban later in the decade. He escaped from a Taliban prison in 2000 and assisted United States forces during the 2001 invasion.

As U.S. forces withdrew to Iraq and international support withered, Ismail Khan became the de facto ruler of Herat. A decade earlier, the city’s western suburbs had been a sea of ruins littered with burned-out tanks and land mines, a far cry from the city that Mountstuart Elphinstone had described two centuries earlier as the most stunning city in Afghanistan, with its “beauty and variety from the mosques, tombs, and other edifices, intermixed with numerous trees and gardens, with which it is embellished, and from the lofty mountains by which it is surrounded.”
²
After coming to power, Ismail Khan began a major architectural refurbishing of this once-beautiful city. He orchestrated a flurry of new construction projects, including modern apartment blocks and tree-filled parks, and ensured a regular supply of electricity. Streetlights with energy-efficient bulbs gave the city an eerie, almost modern glow.
³

But there was a problem. Ismail Khan had established security with his own militia forces and had retained most of the customs revenue from the trade that flourished between Herat and Iran and Central Asia. Other Afghan warlords were doing the same, but Ismail Khan posed one of the greatest challenges to Hamid Karzai and U.S. offi
cials, including Khalilzad, who were trying to establish a strong, viable central government. Fighting involving tanks and mortars had erupted in March 2004 between Khan’s forces and Afghan National Army units under General Abdul Zahir Nayebzadeh. Gunmen killed Ismail Khan’s son, Mirwai Sadeq, the minister of civil aviation and tourism in Karzai’s cabinet. On March 22, the Afghan government dispatched a force of 1,500 soldiers, headed by Defense Minister Muhammad Fahim, to restore order in Herat. But tensions continued, so Khalilzad made his trek to the city.

This period was, in many ways, a high-water mark of the U.S. experience in Afghanistan. Within the first two years of U.S. engagement, Afghanistan made significant gains on the political front. It held presidential and parliamentary elections, and the levels of insurgent violence stayed relatively low. But this hopeful opportunity for peace would eventually be squandered, as Khalilzad—ironically because of his success—was later moved to become U.S. ambassador to Iraq, and the United States increasingly shifted its attention and resources away from Kabul and the war in Afghanistan.

Important Strides

Even before Khalilzad’s trip to Herat, the Afghan government had made extraordinary progress. In late 2001, James Dobbins had been appointed the U.S. envoy to the Afghan opposition; he was tasked with leading U.S. efforts to establish an Afghan government. Dobbins had no experience in Afghanistan, but he had performed admirably as U.S. special envoy to four major hotspots in the 1990s: Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. He was, he told me, “the State Department’s handyman of choice in the increasingly busy craft of nation-building.” Dobbins’s goal was to broker an interim government among Afghan political leaders. While the United States would be deeply involved in this process, Dobbins admitted that the United States wanted to avoid “any appearance of occupying Afghanistan or selecting its new government.” Consequently, the United States asked the
United Nations to take the lead. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan assigned the job to Lakhdar Brahimi.
⁴

In late November 2001, Brahimi, Dobbins, Khalilzad, and senior officials from India, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and a number of European countries hammered out an agreement with Afghan leaders. The negotiations were fraught with difficulties. One delegate, Haji Qadir, abandoned the conference in a well-publicized huff, claiming that his ethnic group, the Pashtuns, was underrepresented. His tense departure raised the specter of further defections, which threatened to undermine the credibility of the whole process. Perhaps the most rancorous debates occurred during the choices of a leader and key cabinet ministers. Hamid Karzai was the leading candidate of the Iranians, Indians, Russians, and many of the European delegates. Pakistan’s ISI also suggested Karzai as a candidate, something they undoubtedly regretted several years later. But the Afghans could not agree. Many wanted Abdul Sattar Sirat, a respected scholar of Islamic law who had been teaching in Saudi Arabia for several years. Finally, after intense pressure from Brahimi, Dobbins, and ultimately the Russians, the delegates agreed to an interim constitution and cabinet.

As Dobbins recalled: “The critical moment came when the Russian Ambassador in Kabul interrupted a meeting of the Northern Alliance top leadership to deliver a message from Moscow. The Russian government wanted the Northern Alliance leadership to understand that if they did not accept the package which was on the table in Bonn, they should expect no further Russian aid.”
⁵

On December 5, 2001, Afghan leaders officially signed the Bonn Agreement, and the UN Security Council endorsed it the following day.
⁶
The parties at Bonn had also asked the United Nations to “monitor and assist in the implementation of all aspects” of the agreement. UN Security Council Resolution 1401, passed on March 28, 2002, established the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).
⁷

In January 2002 in Tokyo, international donors pledged more than $4.5 billion to reconstruction efforts. Additional roles were assigned:
Britain agreed to be the lead nation for counternarcotics, Italy for justice, the United States for the army, Germany for police, and Japan for the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of former combatants. The emergency
loya jirga,
which was attended by about 2,000 people, took place between June 12 and June 19, 2002, following extensive preparations and countrywide consultations. At the conclusion, Afghan delegates chose Hamid Karzai as president of the transitional administration and head of state, and approved his nominees for key posts in the administration. Karzai gave the defense and foreign-affairs portfolios to the mainly Tajik Northern Alliance, and the Ministry of Interior portfolio to a Pashtun regional governor.

Following this breakthrough, media outlets thrived in the more permissive environment. Within three years, the government had registered 350 publications, 42 radio stations, and 8 television channels. Tolo TV, the most popular television station in Afghanistan, introduced a mixture of drama and satire to those Afghans who could afford televisions.
⁸

Afghanistan also established the National Security Council (NSC) to provide advice and analysis to Karzai. “It was modeled after the United States NSC system,” explained Daoud Yaqub, director for security-sector reform on the Afghan NSC. “But the British played the critical role of funding it and ensuring that it got off the ground.”
⁹
Yaqub, an erudite, bespectacled Afghan-American with olive skin and carefully combed hair, had received his law degree from the University of Pittsburgh. In addition to Yaqub, Karzai appointed Zalmai Rassoul, a physician who had served at the Paris Cardiology Research Institute, as the first national security adviser. By 2003, the National Security Council had expanded to twenty members, meeting twice a week and coordinating among Afghan ministries.

Like Yaqub, Rassoul and Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani, many of Afghanistan’s key policymakers were Western educated and had extensive experience living abroad. Ali Jalali, the minister of interior in charge of Afghanistan’s vast police apparatus, was an American citizen who had served as the director of the Afghanistan National Radio
Network Initiative and chief of the Pashto Service at the Voice of America in Washington, DC. Muhammad Hanif Atmar, the minister of rural rehabilitation and development who later became minister of education, received his bachelor’s degree in international relations and postwar development from York University in England. The fact that so many prominent senior Afghan government officials had lived abroad, however, naturally caused resentment among Afghan officials who had never left.

“Accelerating Success”

When Khalilzad took over as U.S. ambassador in 2003 from Robert Finn, America’s first ambassador after the Taliban collapse, one of his most important contributions was bringing roughly $2 billion in additional assistance to Afghanistan—nearly twice the amount of the previous year—as well as a new political-military strategy and private experts to intensify rebuilding.
¹⁰
Relations were close between Khalilzad and Lieutenant General David Barno, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. A native of Endicott, New York, seventy miles south of Syracuse, Barno was congenial, almost unassuming, and was well liked by his staff. He was also extremely smart and surprisingly easy to get along with.

Barno moved into a half-trailer on the U.S. Embassy compound and established an office next to Khalilzad’s. Each day, Barno attended country-team and security-group meetings with Khalilzad, and the two developed a common view of counterinsurgency operations. Barno also seconded five military staff officers to Khalilzad to make up an interagency planning group. This small core of talented planners—referred to as “the piglets”—applied structured military staff planning to the requirements Khalilzad faced in shaping the interagency response in Afghanistan.
¹¹
Together, they developed a broad strategy in Afghanistan, though the planning had been underway for several months.

In early 2003, Marin Strmecki at the Department of Defense had helped develop an acceleration package for Afghanistan, which he
had presented to Secretary Rumsfeld. The plan outlined a process for building Afghan institutions and defeating a low-level insurgency. Strmecki was a bright, somewhat reserved intellectual who had a law degree from Yale and a PhD from Georgetown University. He had served for sixteen years as a foreign-policy assistant to Richard Nixon, helping him with the research and writing of seven books on foreign policy and politics. At the time, Strmecki was the U.S. Department of Defense’s Afghanistan policy coordinator and also served as the vice president and director of programs at the Smith Richardson Foundation.

Khalilzad, then at the National Security Council and a close confidant of Strmecki, took the acceleration package for Afghanistan to the White House and helped push it forward. It evolved into a Power Point presentation of roughly thirty slides that set U.S. goals for Afghanistan. The document assumed that Afghanistan was a central front in America’s war against terrorism and, as Khalilzad prophetically warned, that a “lack of success—a renewed civil war, a narco-state, a successful Taliban insurgency, or a failed state—would undermine the Coalition’s efforts in the global war on terrorism and could stimulate an increase in Islamist militancy and terrorism.”
¹²
The “accelerating success” concept was approved by the Deputies Committee of the National Security Council on June 18, by the Principals Committee on June 19, and by President Bush on June 20, 2003. Khalilzad then began to work on obtaining additional funding even before he became ambassador to Afghanistan.

“There were several components of the strategy,” noted Khalilzad. “The first was getting Afghan institutions built.”
¹³
His goal was to enable the Afghan people to elect their government and build a national government with viable ministries that could deliver services to the population. “A key point of emphasis in our program,” Khalilzad asserted, would be “on rural development and the private sector in Afghanistan. Economic development—the establishment of a thriving private sector—is as important as rebuilding infrastructure, schools, and clinics.”
¹⁴
This was an important lesson from
Afghanistan’s history, since Afghan wars have typically been won—and lost—in rural areas, not in the cities. One of the first orders of business would be jump-starting reconstruction. Khalilzad vowed to finish the road from Kandahar to Kabul, and he started a new one from Kandahar to Herat.