In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (40 page)

NATO countries also faced deep challenges in linking military operations with reconstruction efforts. In a series of briefings in 2008 at NATO headquarters in Kabul, for example, key military officials from Regional Command South expressed growing frustration with the failure to meld reconstruction efforts with military operations. Despite oral commitments to focus on development and not combat operations, these officers reported: “By the time we get to executing plans, most of our operations are kinetic.” There was little comprehensive NATO activity on economic development in rural areas of the south, and no systematic coordination between the military and such civilian agencies as USAID, the Canadian International Development Agency, and the UK’s Department for International Development. “The biggest problem we have,” the briefers concluded, “is consolidating military gains with development.”
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Civilian Casualties

In addition to reconstruction challenges, civilian casualties—collateral damage”-from NATO airstrikes created an uproar among Afghans, even though the Taliban and other groups killed a larger number of civilians. In 2008, U.S. military data indicated that the number of civilian casualties caused by NATO and Taliban fighting increased by somewhere between 39 and 54 percent from 2007 levels.
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Over the course of the war, however, improvements in intelligence minimized the number of civilian casualties when the U.S. military planned airstrikes in advance. Rules were written to prevent major catastrophes. Targeters were required to obey strict procedures to minimize collateral damage. They had to make a positive identification of any target, and they were expected to alter the angle, depth, and type of bombs dropped, depending on the context. In addition, targeters were required to make a thorough assessment of who lived in a particular structure or area before calling in an airstrike. Problems sometimes emerged, however, when ground forces were ambushed in the field or came under unexpected fire. In such
“troops-in-contact” situations, NATO and Afghan forces required immediate support, leaving little time to complete a formal collateral-damage assessment and increasing the possibility of faulty intelligence and civilian casualties. It was in these situations that the close air support—AH Apache attack helicopters, A-10 and F-14 fighters, B-52 bombers, and AC-130 Spectre gunships—could lead to heavy civilian casualties. To make matters worse, the Taliban and other insurgent groups frequently fired from homes and other buildings near civilian populations, retreated into civilian areas, and concealed themselves as civilians while firing on NATO and Afghan forces. Their goal, of course, was to trick NATO forces into killing civilians, a nihilistic and horrifying tactic that has nevertheless worked in previous insurgencies.
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Not all civilian casualties were caused by airstrikes, however. One of the most widely publicized incidents took place on March 4, 2007, when nineteen civilians were killed in the eastern province of Nangarhar, a farming region known for its plump oranges, rice, and sugarcane. An explosives-rigged minivan had targeted a convoy of Marines from Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC), who were traveling along the road between Torkham and Jalalabad. Some local Afghans insisted that the Americans fired on civilian cars and pedestrians as they sped away. U.S. officials said insurgents shot at the Marines and may have caused some of the civilian casualties. But a U.S. investigation of the incident concluded that the Marines’ response was “out of proportion to the threat that was immediately there.” Lieutenant Colonel Paul Montanus, commander of 2nd Marine Special Operations Battalion, after consultation with Major General Dennis Hejlik, MARSOC commander, pulled the Marine company out of Afghanistan days after the incident. He had “lost trust and confidence in the MARSOC leadership” in Afghanistan.
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The U.S. military formally apologized, telling the families of the victims that they were “deeply, deeply ashamed” about the incident and describing it as a “terrible, terrible mistake.”
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The local response was swift and intense. Angry demonstrations erupted
in Nangarhar and other provinces, with locals chanting antigovernment and anti-American slogans.

On August 22, 2008, U.S. and Afghan forces in the Shindand district of Herat Province were ambushed during an operation against a Taliban commander named Mullah Sidiq, who was planning to attack a nearby American base. Pinned down under small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades, U.S. Special Forces engaged Taliban forces with small-arms fire, crew-served weapons, and close air support. Just after midnight, an AC-130H Spectre gunship opened fire with 20-millimeter guns and 105-millimeter howitzers on several compounds that were believed to house a large contingent of Taliban. But the airstrikes also killed civilians. The U.S. military initially reported that only seven civilians were killed in the attack while the strikes killed nearly three dozen Taliban insurgents, including Mullah Sidiq.
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A United Nations report on the incident, however, claimed that ninety civilians had been killed, including sixty children, fifteen women, and fifteen men.
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The Afghan Ministry of Interior released a statement blaming the United States and announcing that “seventy-six civilians, most of them women and children, were martyred today in a coalition force operation in Herat Province.”
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President Karzai, who rarely left the Presidential Palace in Kabul, made an unprecedented trip to Shindand and “strongly condemned the unilateral operation of the Coalition Forces in Shindand district of Herat Province.”
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On August 25, Karzai held an emotional meeting at the palace in which cabinet members vented about the U.S. actions. That same day, Karzai held a meeting with approximately fifty legislators, including speaker Yunus Qanooni, who harshly criticized the attack and pressed Karzai to condemn the U.S. actions.

American officials, including U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan William Wood, complained that these were cursory assessments and that there was no physical evidence to support the higher death tolls. They said that the UN and Afghan reports had relied on the word of villagers who either supported or were cowed by Taliban fighters. Ambassador Wood sent a memo to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates prior
to his September visit to Afghanistan, warning that President Karzai would express his outrage to Gates and would push for rethinking “the proportionality of air strikes, U.S. coordination with Afghan security forces, the violation of Afghan homes during night raids on residential compounds, and the detention of Afghans without prior approval of the government.”
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A subsequent U.S. military investigation, led by Brigadier General Michael Callan of the U.S. Air Force, concluded that thirty-three civilians had died, not the seven that U.S. commanders had initially announced. The report concluded that the United Nations, Afghan government, and other assessments were wrong because they relied primarily on “villager statements, limited forensics, and no access to a multi-disciplined intelligence architecture.”
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Regardless of what the actual number was, the attack had a searing impact on Afghans, who grew increasingly angry about the civilian casualties caused by U.S. airstrikes. An assessment for U.S. Central Command said American credibility had dropped “sharply” and found “that civilian casualties and security are strongly linked to attitudes to the U.S. military.”
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And an opinion poll in 2008 found that 40 percent of Afghans who sympathized with the Taliban were at least partly motivated by resentment about civilian casualties from NATO airstrikes.
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In a war over the hearts and minds of Afghans, civilian casualties undermined the gains made with infrastructure and other projects and increasingly pushed locals toward the Taliban and other insurgent groups.

A Regional War

In 2008, U.S. military data showed a stark increase in violence from 2007 levels. There was a 32 percent increase in insurgent-related violence, a 25 percent increase in attacks from improvised explosive devices, a 56 percent increase in kidnappings and assassinations, and a 300 percent increase in attacks on district centers. In addition, violence was up in several provinces, such as Helmand and Wardak, and
along major highways. Highway 4, which connects Kandahar City and Spin Boldak, experienced a 400 percent spike in violence.
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A leaked 2008 United Nations security report showed that insurgent violence had increased that year to the highest levels since the U.S. invasion in 2001.
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Afghan National Police and Afghan civilians took the brunt of insurgent attacks. Between January 2007 and July 2008, nearly two-thirds of the security forces killed were Afghan National Police, rather than Afghan National Army or Coalition forces.
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The Taliban and other insurgent groups also conducted a number of audacious attacks against U.S. and other NATO forces. On July 13, about 200 militants raided a U.S. base in Nuristan Province, using machine guns, crew-served weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars. They breached the walls of the base before eventually being driven back by U.S. forces, but the defense required the support from AH-64 Apache helicopters, a Predator drone with Hellfire missiles, and eventually B-1B, A-10, and F-15s. Afghan and U.S. reports indicated that the militants received assistance from locals in the village of Wanat, as well as the district governor, Zul Rachman. As a U.S. Army after-action report concluded, “post-attack intelligence indicates that both the District Police Chief and District Governor were complicit in supporting the AAF [Anti-Afghan Force] attack.”
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On August 18, the Taliban ambushed a French patrol east of Kabul, killing ten French soldiers and wounding another twenty-one. A NATO after-action report found that “the French platoon had only one radio,” making it difficult to call for air support, and the Afghan National Army “performed very poorly…. The ANA force spent much of the time lounging on the battlefield. When they finally dispersed, most left their military equipment [including] weapons, ID cards, and other items for the enemy.”
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The French soldiers’ bodies were not recovered until the following day; and insurgents had stripped most of the bodies and taken their equipment.

The irony of even the limited U.S. progress was that while such forces as the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions had made great gains
in counterinsurgency actions, they were hamstrung by militant groups crossing the border on a daily basis. “The problem,” one military intelligence officer candidly noted, is obvious: “We recognize the border. They don’t.”
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What had started out as a U.S.-led war in Afghanistan developed into a regional insurgency. In nuclear-armed Pakistan, militant groups were destabilizing the North West Frontier Province, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Baluchistan Province, and urban areas. The U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, circulated a memo in early 2008 warning that “militant extremists in Pakistan have sharply increased attacks, both in tribal areas along the Pak-Afghan border and into settled areas.” These attacks were “undermining regional stability and effective prosecution of the war on terror by Coalition Forces in Afghanistan,” and the Pakistan military was “hindered by significant capability gaps and fears of civilian casualties, which could undercut already weak public support for offensive operations.”
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Consequently, some U.S. officials advocated overhauling U.S. assistance to Pakistan and called for providing additional airmobile capacity, combat logistics and sustainment, counter-IED capability, and night operations.

But America’s biggest challenge was impacting the
will
of Pakistan’s security agencies. Efforts to bolster Pakistani security capabilities were significantly undermined by the political and security chaos in Pakistan. Pervez Musharraf, who had established a close relationship with Washington, resigned from the presidency on August 18, 2008, in the midst of impeachment proceedings. And a weak civilian government led by Asif Ali Zardari, widower of the assassinated presidential candidate Benazir Bhutto, tried to pick up the pieces.

In the fall of 2008, the government of Pakistan shuffled its way to the brink with a severe balance-of-payments crisis. The new civilian government, reluctant to jeopardize its popularity, maintained price controls on food and fuel, financing the difference from the budget. Pakistan’s trade deficit widened alarmingly because of higher global oil prices. The capital market upheavals on Wall Street triggered a
flight toward less risky assets, and Pakistani and foreign investors fled the rupee. In its 2008
Monetary Policy Statement,
the State Bank of Pakistan noted that government borrowing from the central bank—which it had earlier described as having reached “alarming levels” during 2007 and 2008—was “unsustainable.” The State Bank also concluded that inflationary pressures were “alarming,” and inflation continued to be stoked by “aggregate demand pressures” and a “fall in the productive capacity of the economy.”
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On September 9, Pakistan Army and Frontier Corps forces, supported by aerial bombing sorties, conducted operations in the Bajaur Agency and Swat district against several militant groups, including Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi. The effort was code-named Operation Sher Dil. They were met with staunch resistance from heavily armed militants reinforced by fighters who had come from Afghanistan. The conflict triggered significant population displacement within Pakistan, and some residents even fled to Afghanistan. The U.S. Agency for International Development’s Office of Transition Initiatives provided humanitarian relief, delivering nonfood items and engaging in reconstruction once the fighting stopped. USAID was also involved in governance and development projects in Pakistan’s tribal areas, including Bajaur. But as one senior State Department official remarked, “Pakistan has not employed a clear, hold, build counterinsurgency strategy,” making sustained reconstruction work virtually impossible.
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