In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (34 page)

Others questioned the German military’s ability to conduct sustained counterinsurgency operations. German army units, such as mechanized infantry and airborne brigades, had extensive experience in peacekeeping. But they lacked sufficient trained personnel, combat equipment, and supporting communications and intelligence gear necessary to perform offensive attacks, raids, and reconnaissance patrols. While Germany had approximately eighty Tiger attack helicopters, none were deployed to Afghanistan during the first several years of the mission; the German government refused to authorize their use in combat. The Germans also had some Tornado multipur
pose combat aircraft, but reconfiguring them for close air support would have been challenging. The German Parliament would have needed to issue a new mandate to arm the aircraft for ground-attack missions, pilots would have required more combat training, and logistics-support systems would have necessitated enhancements—none of which were possible in Germany’s antiwar political climate.

Several other countries lacked adequate enabler forces—including attack and lift helicopters, smart munitions, intelligence, engineers, medical staff, logistics, and digital command and control—to fully leverage and sustain their ground-combat power.
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But, more important, there was no unity of command. In previous nation-building missions, such as the one in Bosnia, the international community had created a team (headed by the High Representative) tasked with overseeing reconstruction and stabilization. This did not happen in Afghanistan on either the civilian or the military side. The result was several external forces operating in the same area with different missions and different rules of engagement.

Command-and-control arrangements had been challenging from the beginning. In December 2001, the commander of Task Force Dagger (essentially the 5th Special Forces Group plus supporting units) was in direct contact with General Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command. The subordinate elements of Task Force Dagger had the most current and accurate intelligence about the situation on the ground. But this changed when the 1t Mountain Division assumed operations in Afghanistan in March 2002, and again when the XVIII Airborne Corps took over control of the Afghan theater in June 2002. By late 2002, the bureaucracy had become so oppressive that a request by a Special Forces unit to conduct an operation potentially had to be processed through six levels of command before being approved. One general officer said there was simply “too much overhead” to get anything done.
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These challenges persisted over the next several years, especially as NATO began to take a more active role in 2006 and 2007.

In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee in
December 2007, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates sharply criticized NATO countries for not supplying urgently needed soldiers and other aid as violence escalated. He stated: “NATO still has shortfalls in meeting minimum requirements in troops, equipment, and other resources,” and the “Afghanistan mission has exposed constraints associated with interoperability, organization, critical equipment shortfalls, and national caveats.”
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For Gates and other senior U.S. policymakers, it was unconscionable that some NATO countries refused to deploy troops to southern Afghanistan as violence skyrocketed. In a broadside to America’s partners a month later, Gates later criticized most of the allies for failing to understand and prepare for counterinsurgency warfare. “Most of the European forces, NATO forces, are not trained in counterinsurgency; they were trained for the Fulda Gap,” he observed, referring to the region on the former East German-West German border where a Soviet ground invasion of Western Europe hypothetically might have occurred.
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Clearing, but Not Holding

The national caveats and light-footprint approach had a debilitating impact on NATO’s counterinsurgency operations and put undue strain on a select group of countries that chose to pursue combat
and
development. In previous counterinsurgencies, success had been achieved by defeating insurgent forces and their political organization in a given area, holding it, and implementing reconstruction projects.
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This has been called a “clear, hold, and build” strategy. Military forces set up secure zones and then slowly expand them outward like ink spots on blotting paper. Since only small numbers of U.S., Coalition, and Afghan forces were available, this strategy could be applied only in a few sectors of the country. Forces were assigned to contested areas to regain government presence and control, after which they conducted military and civil-military programs to expand the control and edge out insurgents. Counterinsurgency forces were supported with civil-affairs and psychological operations personnel.
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International forces in Afghanistan cast a wide net of operations outside their force-protection zone to disrupt and interdict insurgent operations. Units were required to live among the local population for significant amounts of time to gain their trust and support. Then they would proceed with patient intelligence work to ascertain the location of insurgents’ weapons caches, safe houses, and transit support systems. Once the hostile zones had been cleared, the force was to move to outer zones, where the population was neither friendly nor hostile to the counterinsurgency unit’s efforts. Occasional operations were conducted in these areas to keep the population “neutral” to the idea of supporting the insurgents. Battalion-size sweeps and clearing operations involving several hundred soldiers generally reaped far less than the effort required because of the difficulty of finding and fighting elusive insurgents.
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U.S., British, Dutch, and Canadian forces were sometimes successful at clearing territory through armed reconnaissance and specialized raiding. Individual units patrolled suspected insurgent areas. AC-130 Spectre gunships, Predator unmanned aerial vehicles, and other remote-reconnaissance tools helped support the patrols to keep insurgents off balance and disrupt their timing.
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The “clear, hold, and build” strategy seemed straightforward, but low levels of troops made it virtually impossible to hold territory in Afghanistan’s violent south. As one Western ambassador remarked to me: “We can clear territory, but we can’t hold it. There aren’t sufficient numbers of NATO or Afghan forces.”
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During Operation Medusa in 2006, for example, Canadian and other NATO forces had cleared Panjwai district from Taliban forces, but the Canadians and Afghans couldn’t hold the district. The Canadian military established a forward operating base in Panjwai and worked with local Afghan National Police, Afghan National Auxiliary Police, and some Afghan National Army soldiers to prevent a Taliban return. But their numbers were insufficient, and the Afghan police were unwilling to confront Taliban forces as they gradually reinfiltrated. By the summer of 2007, the Taliban were back in Panjwai at levels comparable to when Operation Medusa began.
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Reinfiltration was a persistent problem, especially across the south, where one NATO general told me that in mid-2007, “NATO and Afghan forces control at most 20 percent of the southern provinces of Nimroz, Helmand, Kandahar, Oruzgan, Day Kundi, and Zabol. The rest are controlled by Taliban, groups allied to the Taliban, or local commanders.”
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Writing on the Walls

By 2007, there were growing signs of NATO’s distress. Too few NATO forces and crippling national caveats impacted the organization’s ability to stem the rising violence, especially in southern Afghanistan. In December, Paddy Ashdown, a former member of the British Parliament and High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, who was being considered to head civilian reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, wrote to Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Foreign Secretary David Miliband, warning: “We do not have enough troops, aid or international will to make Afghanistan much different from what it has been for the last 1,000 years…. And even if we had all of these in sufficient quantities, we would not have them for sufficient time…to make the aim of fundamentally altering the nature of Afghanistan, achievable.”
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If Afghanistan was supposed to be NATO’s first opportunity to show its new
raison d’être,
the result was underwhelming. “One of the lessons of NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan,” General Eikenberry told me, “is the need to fulfill minimal requirements
before
deploying forces. If minimal requirements are not filled, then perhaps NATO shouldn’t go in.”
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There were other lessons as well. One of the most salient was the lesson of securing neighboring countries. The history of recent insurgencies demonstrates that the ability of insurgents to gain sanctuary and support in adjacent states significantly increases their probability of success over the long run. This brings us to Pakistan.

SEPTEMBER 22, 2005
, was a crisp night in Shkin, Afghanistan, a small Pashtun village four miles from the Pakistan border in the eastern province of Paktika. With the exception of a few apple orchards, there is little agricultural activity because the soil is too poor. Several dirt roads snake through the area, but virtually none are paved. The landscape is strangely reminiscent of Frederic Remington or C. M. Russell’s paintings of the American West. Gritty layers of dust sap the life from a parched landscape. Shkin lies just south of the setting for Rudyard Kipling’s “Ballad of the King’s Jest,” which notes:

There was an Afghan National Army observation post in Shkin. Four miles away was a U.S. firebase, which that night housed fewer than a dozen Americans, including two U.S. Marines and a handful of CIA personnel. It looked like a Wild West cavalry fort, ringed with coils of razor wire. A U.S. flag rippled above the three-foot-thick mud walls. In the watchtower, a guard scanned the expanse of ridges,
rising to 8,000 feet, that marked the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. At 1 a.m., approximately forty insurgents came over the mountain passes from Pakistan and assaulted the Afghan observation post. Pakistani military observation posts to the east and southeast, at distances of a quarter-and a half-mile, provided supporting fire of heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. RPGs from the Pakistani posts struck the Afghan post and hit an ammunition storage area, igniting an uncontrollable fire. The compound was quickly surrounded. An Afghan Army Quick Reaction Force had already been dispatched to move into an assault position a thousand feet from the compound and retake it with support from artillery fire located at Firebase Shkin.

CIA personnel at the firebase worked furiously to contact Pakistani military authorities, who successfully reduced the artillery barrage coming from the Pakistani military posts. The small CIA and U.S. Marine contingent then began to direct artillery fire at the insurgent forces, shooting thirty-eight 105-millimeter rounds and scoring several direct hits. The insurgents made a hasty retreat. Using their Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor (JLENS), an aerostat with radars to provide over-the-horizon surveillance for defense against air threats, U.S. forces tracked the insurgents retreating across the Pakistan border. Although the insurgent assault was eventually repelled, it succeeded in killing two Afghan National Army soldiers, seriously wounding three others, and destroying an ammunition dump that housed machine guns, AK-47s, recoilless rifles, radios, and ammunition rounds.

Earlier that day, a 5th Special Forces Group operational detachment had departed from the Afghan observation post after conducting training with indigenous forces. The timing of the nighttime attack thus was suspicious, suggesting that the Pakistani military, the insurgents, or both had monitored their departure. The U.S. military after-action report noted that the Pakistani military’s direct engagement was an integral part of the insurgent attack. “The Pakistani military actively supported the enemy assault on the [observation post]
despite past assurances of cooperation with Afghan and Coalition forces…. major damage to the [observation post] and friendly casualties would likely have been avoided had the enemy maneuver element been acting alone.” Moreover, it concluded that “[t]he past reluctance of U.S. forces to fire on Pakistani checkpoints when American personnel are not directly engaged likely emboldened the Pakistani military to blatantly support the enemy assault.”
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This incident was not isolated but rather part of a much broader pattern of attacks along Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan. Many of these attacks were supported directly or indirectly by Pakistan agencies—especially the ISI and the Frontier Corps. “The border is our albatross,” one 82nd Airborne officer lamented.
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Pakistan’s leaders had long been motivated to become involved in Afghanistan’s affairs—including through military engagement—to promote its national-security interests. As Pakistani dictator General Zia-ul-Haq remarked in 1979 to the head of the ISI, Lieutenant-General Akhtar Abdul Rehman Khan, “the water in Afghanistan must boil at the right temperature.”
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One of the major reasons why the insurgency began and strengthened in Afghanistan was that insurgent groups were able to acquire outside support. After the Taliban overthrow, surviving senior leaders from the Taliban and other groups relocated to Pakistan. Over the next several years, they received increasingly large amounts of support from a variety of state actors. While Afghan government officials had a tendency to blame all of Afghanistan’s ills on Pakistan, the ability of insurgent groups to operate from Pakistani soil was integral to their success.

The advantages of outside support for an insurgency are intuitive. It can significantly bolster the capabilities of insurgent groups by giving them more money, weapons, logistics, and other aid. States are usually the largest external donors during insurgencies, since they have the most significant resources. Their motivations tend to be selfish and based on efforts to increase their own security. Policymakers and their populations want to be secure from external threats, and
they seek to influence others to ensure that security. This was certainly true with some members of the Pakistani government, which viewed the Taliban as an important proxy group that could push into Afghanistan and undermine the Karzai government’s power and authority.

In 2006, PBS
Frontline
producer Martin Smith traveled to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region to analyze the consequences for U.S. policy. “After the fall of the Taliban,” his documentary concluded, “some experts warned of a nightmare scenario in which the Taliban and al Qa’ida would escape from Afghanistan into neighboring Pakistan and set up new command centers far out of America’s reach. That nightmare scenario has now come true.”
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Operation Al Mizan

Beginning in 2002, the U.S. strategy in Pakistan’s border areas had two major components. First, a major goal was to capture key al Qa’ida leaders. By 2005 and 2006, U.S. officials also began to pressure Pakistan to deal more harshly with Taliban and other insurgent leaders in Pakistan’s border regions. But al Qa’ida was the main focus. Second, no matter the outcome, the United States expected the Pakistani government to conduct the bulk of the operations. The United States provided assistance and occasionally targeted strikes, but it relied on Pakistan to take action.

Consequently, the U.S. government provided more than $1 billion per year to Pakistan’s key national-security agencies to conduct counterterrorist and counterinsurgency operations: the Pakistani Army, the Frontier Corps, the Frontier Constabulary, and the ISI. The Frontier Corps—the largest of the civil forces, with just under 100,000 personnel—is charged with securing Pakistan’s 3,800-mile western border. The Frontier Constabulary is a federal force assigned specifically to the boundary between the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the rest of Pakistan. Some Frontier Constabulary units, however, were deployed for internal-security purposes to other
areas of Pakistan such as Quetta, Karachi, and Islamabad. The U.S. government channeled money and aid through the Department of Defense, including Coalition support funds, other military aid (including the provision of helicopters and air-assault training), and counternarcotics assistance. The United States also sent funds through the Department of State, the CIA, and other government agencies.
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The Coalition support funds were a particular point of contention. David Rohde and David Sanger reported in the
New York Times
that the United States was making the annual $I billion payments for what it called “reimbursements” to the country’s military for conducting counterterrorism efforts along the border with Afghanistan. But they also discovered that despite the additional funding, Pakistan’s president had decided to slash patrols through the area where al Qa’ida and Taliban fighters were most active. Over five years, Pakistan received more than $5.6 billion, more than half of the total aid the United States sent to the country since the September 11, 2001, attacks, not counting covert funds. Rohde and Sanger also reported that some American military officials in the region had recommended that the money be tied to Pakistan’s performance in pursuing al Qa’ida and keeping the Taliban from gaining a haven from which to attack Afghanistan, but this advice was not followed.
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Beginning in 2002, Pakistan conducted counterinsurgency campaigns under what became known as Operation Al Mizan. At that time, a number of senior U.S. officials viewed Pakistan as a reliable ally. “The Pakistanis were part of the solution, not the problem,” said Pentagon comptroller Dov Zakheim. “Musharraf was very helpful. He was definitely opposed to radicalization in Pakistan.”
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Pakistan’s army had limited experience in counterinsurgency operations. Prior to 2002, it had last done that sort of work in Eastern Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971 and 1972, and in Baluchistan between 1973 and 1977. Both campaigns had relied heavily on firepower and had inflicted significant collateral damage. But the major focus of Pakistani Army training had been geared toward a conventional war with India. During Operation Al Mizan, Pakistan deployed between 70,000 and
80,000 forces to the tribal areas. Despite their limited experience, however, the Pakistan military and intelligence services helped capture or kill such important al Qa’ida leaders as Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, Abu Zubeida, and Abu Talha al-Pakistani.
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The government also deployed the Pakistani Army and the Frontier Corps against foreign fighters in the Kurram and Khyber Agencies in December 2001. It continued deployments between 2002 and 2005, mainly in Baluchistan, just south of the FATA, and in North and South Waziristan.
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Hundreds and perhaps thousands of Pakistani soldiers died during these incursions. In early 2004, for example, Pakistan’s intelligence services had been gathering reports of al Qa’ida activities in the Wana Valley of South Waziristan. In March, the Pakistani Frontier Corps launched an operation to disrupt them, but when the troops reached Wana, they were ambushed. It was a typical al Qa’ida operation. Just as they had done to U.S. forces in 2002 during Operation Anaconda, the insurgents occupied the surrounding hills and mountains, leaving the Frontier Corps troops exposed in the low-lying area.
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A barrage of firepower from entrenched positions in the mountains delivered heavy casualties to the Pakistan troops. The Pakistan Army was called in to retrieve the trapped Frontier Corps soldiers. Nearly 6,000 troops immediately moved in, including 600 lifted by helicopters. They set up a cordon around the ambush site and sent out a search operation. After sustained fighting, the army launched an attack on the ridge and cleared it, killing sixty-three militants, including thirty-six foreigners. They also disrupted a major al Qa’ida command-and-control center and a network of tunnels containing sophisticated electronic equipment.

In June 2004, Pakistani forces conducted an attack in the Shakai Valley after a series of alarming intelligence reports claimed that a force of more than 200 Chechens and Uzbeks, some Arabs, and several hundred local supporters were gathering in the area. On June 10, the government deployed 10,000 Pakistan Army troops along with Pakistani Special Operations Task Force and Frontier Corps troops. Nearly 3,000 soldiers established an outer cordon before the Pakistan Air
Force struck at dawn, using precision weapons against nine compounds. Pakistan Army forces used indirect artillery fire and precision rocket attacks by helicopter gunships. Other helicopters dropped off Pakistani Special Operations Task Force troops to search the compounds, and infantry troops initiated a simultaneous operation to clear the valley and link up with the Special Operations Task Force. Later, another 3,000 troops were brought into the area to clear more of the valley. During the operation, four soldiers were killed and twelve injured, while more than fifty militants were killed.

The Pakistani military, with help from U.S. Special Operations Forces and CIA assets, had just eliminated a major propaganda base and militant stronghold, which also included a facility for manufacturing improvised explosive devices. The haul from a large underground cellar in one of the compounds included two truckloads of TV sets, computers, laptops, disks, tape recorders, and tapes.
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But it was only a tactical, short-term success, since militant groups afterward developed an increasingly robust sanctuary in Waziristan.

Besides this type of organized assault, Pakistani security services also provided clandestine assistance. In March and April 2007, the army covertly supported Taliban commander Mullah Nazir against Uzbek militants. Nazir was a charismatic man in his midthirties who spouted a religious fervor far beyond his minimal credentials. Several months earlier, he had been endorsed by Mullah Omar as the Taliban “emir” of South Waziristan. The Uzbeks had been extended
memastia
(Pashtun hospitality) by Nazir’s tribal rivals, the Ahmadzai, but they had become unpopular among locals for their criminality and viciousness.

One Pakistan government official said there was “a groundswell of support for action against Uzbeks and any attempt by the government to intervene in support of the tribal action would actually discredit it.”
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The Pakistan Army largely stayed out of the fighting, using Nazir’s forces as a proxy. But it eventually sent military and paramilitary forces into the area to seize strategic hilltops and ridges and to help establish law and order once the fighting stopped. In the end, Nazir’s forces were largely successful in pushing the Uzbeks out of Wazir areas.