The 9/11 Wars (129 page)

115
.
Interview, Baghdad, November 2010.

CHAPTER 16: ‘AFPAK’ 2009–10

    1
.
This passage is based on the author’s reporting during a week spent with the 10th Mountain Division in March 2009.

    2
.
Author interview with David McKiernan, Kabul, March 2009. Author interviews and briefings with senior NATO-ISAF officers, Kabul, March 2009.

    3
.
Participation levels were however much lower than in 2005, and there was still considerable violence even if it did not reach the intensity some had feared.

    4
.
The bulk of which occurred in the insecure southern Pashtun heartlands. Abdullah Abdullah, though of mixed Tajik and Pashtun background, broadly represented the northern, Panjshiri, Dari-speaking and urban constituency. Karzai had rallied an unsavoury array of backers comprising many of Afghanistan’s most notorious warlords and powerbrokers but even with their support appears to have been unsure of outright victory. Whether or not the president himself was aware of the fraud is unclear.

    5
.
For a useful account of the review process see Bergen,
The Longest War
, pp. 539–45.

    6
.
Author interview, Kabul, March 2009.

    7
.
Author interview, Logar, Afghanistan, March 2009.

    8
.
‘Poll: More view Afghan war as mistake’,
USA Today
, March 16, 2009. Jennifer Agiesta and Jon Cohen, ‘Public opinion in U.S. turns against Afghan war’,
Washington Post
, August 20, 2009. Paul Steinhauser, ‘Poll: Support for Afghan war at all-time low’, CNN, September 15, 2009.

    9
.
George Packer, ‘The last mission’,
New Yorker
, September 28, 2009.

  10
.
Steve Luxenberg, ‘Bob Woodward book details Obama battles with advisers over exit plan for Afghan war’,
Washington Post
, September 22, 2010.

  11
.
The Dutch were to be out by the summer of 2010 and the Canadians by 2011, for example.

  12
.
Author interview with Admiral de Tarly, Paris, October 2008.

  13
.
‘In U.S., more support for increasing troops in Afghanistan’, Gallup, November 25, 2009. The Ministry of Defence released footage of the young man, third in line to the throne, blasting away at insurgents – ‘Terry Taliban’ – on a heavy machine gun. Author interview with senior Whitehall official, London, February 2009.

  14
.
A major political row in Helmand in 2007 saw the expulsion from Kabul of two foreign envoys, an Irish EU official, Michael Semple, and another Irishman, for ‘illicit meetings with the Taliban’. Author telephone interview, Michael Semple, October 2008. On assessments of success of reintegration programmes see Michael Semple,
Endgames: Reconciliation in Afghanistan
, United States Institute of Peace, September 2009, p. 55, cited in Thomas Ruttig,
The Battle For Afghanistan
, New America Foundation, May 2011. Author interviews with NATO, Afghan officials, Kabul, August 2008, March 2009.

  15
.
Jason Burke, ‘Secret Taliban peace talks’,
Observer
, September 28, 2008; author interviews with Muttawakel, Rahmani, Zaeef, Kabul, March, 2009. One reason was that perhaps the biggest contribution the Saudis could make was granting a respectable and safe asylum to senior figures who did decide to come in from the cold. None, however, appeared keen to take them up on the offer.

  16
.
Author interviews, Kabul, March 2009.

  17
.
Author interviews with Wood, Taliban spokesmen, senior US officers, Kabul and Logar, March 2009.
US Army Field Manual 3-24,
pp. 1–15.

  18
.
Gates actually said: ‘If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose, because nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience and money.’ Ann Scott Tyson, ‘Gates predicts “slog” in Afghanistan’,
Washington Post
, January 28, 2009.

  19
.
Author telephone interview with Andrew Exum, August 2009.

  20
.
Author telephone interview with Bruce Riedel, August 2009.

  21
.
As early as March 2009, Nick Williams, McKiernan’s senior political adviser, had told the author that the Taliban’s ability to fight through the previous winter had ‘provoked … a major reassessment of what is feasible in Afghanistan’.

  22
.
On casualties, ‘British injury toll in Afghanistan revealed’, Sky News, August 17, 2009 and UK Ministry of Defence website
http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/FactSheets/OperationsFactsheets/OperationsInAfghanistanBritishFatalities.htm
.

  23
.
From House of Commons International Development Committee report 2008, Paragraph 19. Author interviews, London, 2009.

  24
.
Author interview with DFID official, August 2009.

  25
.
Gordon Corera, ‘UK backs Taliban reintegration’, BBC News, November 13, 2009. Author interviews with British diplomats, Kabul, August 2008, March 2009.

  26
.
Dave Graham, ‘No Taliban “unconditional surrender” sought – Britain’, Reuters, February 6, 2010.

  27
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John Hutton, Remembrance Day speech, November 11, 2008, published text.

  28
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Author interview by email with Taliban spokesman, October 2009.

  29
.
Stenersen,
The Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan
, p. 26.

  30
.
The move indicated that the faction within the Taliban senior command which had opposed their use had won the argument. ‘Code of Conduct, the Taliban’, May 9, 2009, posted in Pashto on the Shahmat website on August 6, 2009.

  31
.
See Hekmat Karzai, ‘Suicide Terrorism: The Case of Afghanistan’,
Security and Terrorism
, March 2007, p. 36; and data for Centre for Conflict and Peace Studies (CAPS), Kabul. Author interviews with Hekmat Karzai, Paris, Kabul, 2009.

  32
.
UNAMA,
Afghanistan Annual Report on Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, 2009,
December 31, 2009. pp. 7–8. Over 1,000 were killed directly by suicide attacks or IEDs.

  33
.
Anthony H. Cordesman, ‘The Afghan War: The Campaign in the Spring of 2010’, Centre for Strategic and International Studies, May 24, 2010.

  34
.
Author interview, MI6, Kabul, March 2009.

  35
.
See Thomas Ruttig,
The Other Side: Dimensions of the Afghan Insurgency
, The Afghan Analysts Network, July 2009.

  36
.
Taliban Leader Mullah Omar, ‘In Celebration of Eid al-Adha’, NEFA Foundation, November 25, 2009.

  37
.
UNAMA,
Afghanistan Annual Report on Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, 2009
, pp. 12–13.

  38
.
‘Afghan people “losing confidence” ’, BBC, February 9, 2009. The Afghan Centre for Social and Opinion Research in Kabul carried out the fieldwork, via face-to-face interviews with 1,534 Afghans in all of the country’s thirty-four provinces between December 30, 2008 and January 12, 2009. The poll was commissioned by the BBC, ABC News of America and ARD of Germany. ‘Afghans more optimistic for future, survey shows’, BBC, January 11, 2010. This second survey was also conducted by the Afghan Center for Socio-Economic and Opinion Research (ACSOR). Interviews were conducted in person, in Dari or Pashto, among a random national sample of 1,534 Afghan adults December 11–23, 2009.

  39
.
Author interview, United Nations official, Kabul, March 2009.

  40
.
‘Biden cites mounting problems in Afghanistan, but says war “far from lost” ’, Radio Free Europe, March 10, 2009.

  41
.
Marr interview with David Miliband.

  42
.
Sarah Ladbury, Testing Hypotheses on Radicalisation in Afghanistan, for Department for International Development, August 14, 2009. The study also made the very useful point that much of the process of ‘radicalization’ occurred after the individual had come into contact with or become integrated with a group of Taliban or insurgent circles.

  43
.
Kate Clark, ‘Afghanistan’s “weekend jihadis”,
The World Tonight
, Radio Four, September 11, 2009.

  44
.
Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai, ‘Turning the Taliban’,
Newsweek
, February 22, 2010.

  45
.
Marr interview with David Miliband.

  46
.
‘We have very few Pashtuns,’ admitted General Ali Ahmed, the commanding officer of Camp Alamo, to the author in March 2009. Each
kandaq
should have been composed according to the ethnicity of the whole country, so with between 40 or 45 per cent Pashtuns. Instead, the proportion was around 10 per cent, and most of those were from the north and east, not the south. The output data were based on those sent from the Afghan recruiting centres, where scant attention was paid to ethnic balance given the pressure to create new units. The Western officers were incapable of telling the difference between ethnic groups. When asked to produce a recruit from Helmand, those running the training camp brought forward a handful of disconsolate Helmandi Hazaras, one of the most persecuted local communities, for whom life as a soldier was better than that in Lashkar Gah, whatever the risks to their family.

  47
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General Ali Ahmed had joined the army in 1982 and had thus fought for the Communist regime against the
mujahideen
. So too had the officers leading the detachment in Logar with Captain Vasquez.

  48
.
This was Abdul Rahim Wardak.

  49
.
Author interviews, Camp Alamo, March 2009.

  50
.
Author interview, ISAF headquarters, Kabul, March 2009.

  51
.
Author interview, Wakil Safir Rahman, Kabul, March 2009.

  52
.
UNODC,
Afghan Opium Survey 2009
, 2 September 2009, pp. 3–5.

  53
.
Author interview, Kabul, March 2009.

  54
.
James Risen, ‘U.S. to hunt down Afghan drug lords tied to Taliban’,
New York Times
, August 10, 2009. ‘NATO to attack Afghan opium labs’, BBC News, October 10, 2008.