The 9/11 Wars (120 page)

  22
.
This has escaped many accounts. The Taliban groups were largely non-tribal, an important difference from the heavily tribalized
mujahideen
groups operating in the south-east during the 1980s.

  23
.
Koochi nomadic tribesmen had a disproportionately large presence in the ranks of the Taliban given their numbers. The Koochi are Pashtun.

  24
.
See accounts of Taliban penetration of Helmand and Oruzgan in Giustozzi, ed.,
Decoding the New Taliban
, pp. 124 and 157, for two examples. There are many others.

  25
.
Ibid., p. 161.

  26
.
An anecdotal illustration of this was the experience of an Australian special forces officer exploring south of Ghazni in late 2002 who, when he had asked local elders if there were any Taliban in their village, had been directed to an empty house a few yards away from the mulberry tree in its centre. Its owner, head of one of two families who had contested power in the village for decades, had thrown in his lot with the Taliban a few years previously and had thus gained the upper hand. When the Taliban fell, he had been summoned to a village meeting and then left for Pakistan the following day. His rival, a relative, took over as the community’s leader. ‘So, no, there are no Taliban in the village … for the moment,’ the Australians were told. Author interview, senior Australian officer, Kabul, March 2009.

  27
.
Author interview, Peshawar, June 2002.

  28
.
Three clerics who opposed the Taliban were killed in June and July of 2003 in Kandahar with another dozen dying over the next two years in the city.

  29
.
See the perceptive analysis in Jones,
In the Graveyard of Empires
, p. 244. Also referring to the Taliban as a social movement is Barfield,
Afghanistan
, p. 261. See Robert D. Crews and Amin Tarzi,
The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan
, Harvard University Press, 2008, p. 243.

  30
.
Author interview, Kandahar, November 2003.

  31
.
See Antonio Giustozzi,
Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop
, Hurst, 2007, pp. 38–39, 55–6. See Ron Moreau, Sami Yousafzai and Michael Hirsh, ‘The rise of Jihadistan’,
Newsweek
, October 2, 2006. Multiple author interviews with military or other intelligence officials, British, American, Afghan, in Kabul, Kandahar, London, 2006, 2007. Interviews with local MPs in Afghanistan, July 2006, August 2008, March 2009. Interview with United Nations security experts, July 2006, August 2008.

  32
.
In Oruzgan and in western Zabul.

  33
.
Turn-out for the polls was very high, with up to 60 per cent of the eligible population registering even in Kandahar.

  34
.
Hekmatyar had returned to Afghanistan (probably via Pakistan) after being released from house arrest in Iran in 2002 as relations between Tehran and Washington deteriorated.

  35
.
My estimate is based on interviews with senior NATO officers, Afghan and Western intelligence officials, Taliban spokesmen. For an alternative estimate see Giustozzi,
Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop
, pp. 35, 68. Also in November 2006, a UN report estimated the number of armed insurgents in Mullah Omar’s movement to be around 4,000–5,000. UN Security Council,
Sixth Report of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team Appointed Pursuant to Security Council Resolutions 1526 (2004) and 1617 (2005) Concerning Al-Qaida and the Taliban and Associated Individuals and Entities
, November 7, 2006.

  36
.
Testimony of Lieutenant General David W. Barno, USA (Ret.) before the Committee on Foreign Affairs US House of Representatives, February 15, 2007.

  37
.
Jones,
In the Graveyard of Empires
, p. 205.

  38
.
Ronald Neumann,
The Other War: Winning and Losing in Afghanistan
, Potomac Books, 2009, pp. 39–40.

  39
.
Author interview with Amrullah Saleh, former head of Afghan National Directorate of Intelligence, Kabul, June 2011. In 2005, the Americans had a total of 19,000 troops in the country, with one less infantry battalion than in 2002, with their multinational allies in ISAF maintaining around another 15,000. In October 2003, US troops numbers were about 14,000, and NATO less than 6,000. They had then risen slightly to 16,500. See Jones,
In the Graveyard of Empires
, p. 204.

  40
.
Reid said that the British ‘would be perfectly happy to leave in three years and without firing one shot because our job is to protect reconstruction’. ‘UK troops “to target terrorists” ’, BBC, April 24, 2006. See also Rashid,
Descent into Chaos
, pp. 357–8.

  41
.
The US troops on the eastern frontier would remain part of the original Operation Enduring Freedom and therefore commanded direct from Cent-Com in the USA. Total American troops in Afghanistan were 22,300.

  42
.
Author interview, July 2006.

  43
.
Author interviews with Mark Laity, NATO spokesman, Kabul, July 2006 and February 2008. Author interview with Brigadier General Richard Blanchette, Kabul, 2008.

  44
.
‘Insurgent activity rising in Afghanistan’, Associated Press, November 13, 2006.

  45
.
Author interview, Kabul, July 2006.

  46
.
‘Nato hails shift on Afghan combat’, BBC News Online, November 29, 2006.

  47
.
Others had once been kept in check by a powerful local commander with strong conservative religious credentials who had backed Karzai before being detained by American forces acting independently. The story of that commander, Haji Rohullah, deserves a chapter in itself. A hardline Salafi commander in Kunar, Rohullah backed the central government after the fall of the Taliban but ended up in Guantanamo Bay. The author met him in Kabul in 2008, shortly after his release. Violence, limited in Kunar until his arrest, increased dramatically afterwards.

  48
.
One problem for commanders in the east was the degree to which their operational environment was influenced by what happened across the border. A truce in 2005 between the Pakistani army and local militants had trebled the number of cross-border attacks almost overnight. French troops east of Kabul tracked groups of fighters crossing over from Pakistan, moving along mountain roads before dropping off the hills and on to their positions. Author interviews, French officers, Forward Operating Base Tora, Sorobi, March 2009. Author interview, Chris Alexander, deputy head of mission, UNAMA, Kabul, March 2009. The most active insurgent networks along the Afghan side of the frontier were connected to Jalaluddin Haqqani, who was known to have lines of communications to Pakistani intelligence services, and a broader regional agenda clearly informed some of the clashes. So when an Indian construction company won a contract to build a major road close to the border around Khost, one of the largest forces yet seen in the area massed to attack them.

  49
.
United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan,
Internal Security Assessment on Wardak
, June 2008. Author collection.

  50
.
Author interviews with French officers, Forward Operating Base Tora, Sorobi, March 2009. Author interview with Qazi Syed Suleiman, vice governor of Nangahar, Sorobi, March 2009.

  51
.
Tom Coghlan, ‘The Taliban in Helmand: An Oral History’, in Giustozzi, ed.,
Decoding the New Taliban
, p. 122.

  52
.
Author interview with General Chris Brown, Kabul, July 2006.

  53
.
Author interviews, Kabul, August 2008.

  54
.
For the Belfast reference see Patrick Hennessey,
The Junior Officers Reading Club
, Allen Lane, 2009. I was invited to brief the Parachute Regiment, the Royal Green Jackets and 52 Mechanised Brigade HQ before departure.

  55
.
Canadians arriving in Kandahar took care to learn from their US predecessors, touring much of their new territory with the Americans and even fighting alongside them over a period of months. See Coghlan, ‘The Taliban in Helmand’, pp. 128, 152.

  56
.
Draft of report on ‘The situation in Helmand’, Ron Nash for FCO, 2007, author collection.

  57
.
See Kilcullen on Kunar,
The Accidental Guerrilla
, pp. 74–107.

  58
.
The British version of the
American Field Manual 3-24,
the counter-insurgency guide published in the US around the time the British troops arrived in Helmand, spoke of British ‘best practice’ in counter-insurgency and ingrained traditions of ‘cultural sensitivity’ and pointed to the examples of Malaya and Kenya among others. However, British tactics in Malaya, where the term ‘hearts and minds’ had been coined, had involved the forcible resettlement of 500,000 people, mass arrests, the death penalty for carrying arms, detention without trial for up to two years, deportations, control of food, censorship, collective punishment in the form of curfews and fines, the hanging of hundreds of prisoners and repeated atrocities in which unarmed civilians or combatants were killed. Means deployed against the Kikuyu or Mau Mau in Kenya included torture, hanging, indiscriminate bombing and toleration of local proxies’ use of sadistic violence, dismemberment and killing in custody. Though some of these measures were employed in Afghanistan, most were seen, for obvious and good reasons, as neither feasible, desirable nor appropriate. As for the oft-cited experience of Northern Ireland, the differences between south Armagh and Helmand fairly comprehensively outweighed any similarities, as soldiers driving the antiquated ‘Snatch’ Land Rovers through towns like Gereshk or Garmseer frequently pointed out in usually colourful language.

  59
.
Author interview, Kandahar, July 2006.

  60
.
Author interview with Brigadier Ed Butler, Kabul, July 2006.

  61
.
US Naval War College, Damien Mason,
Air Strikes and COIN in Operation Enduring Freedom
, Joint Military Operations Department report, May 3, 2010.

  62
.
Author interviews, Kajaki, January 2007. Giustozzi,
Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop
, p. 202.

  63
.
In late 2003 in Sangesar, the village that had been home for two decades to Mullah Mohammed Omar himself, villagers had planted opium from 2003.

  64
.
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC),
Afghanistan Opium Survey 2006,
September 2006. See Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy,
Opium: Uncovering the Politics of the Poppy
, I. B. Tauris, 2009, for a useful discussion.

  65
.
See also Ahmed Rashid, ‘Afghanistan: Taleban’s second coming’, BBC News Online, June 2, 2006.

  66
.
See also Gretchen Peters,
Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda
, Oneworld Publications, 2009, pp. 7–22. Also Giustozzi, ed.,
Decoding the New Taliban
.