The Longest War (32 page)

It is very important
to keep our focus on this war in Afghanistan. It’s a classic military mistake to leave a partially defeated enemy on the battlefield in one form or another.

—Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, at a Pentagon news
conference on December 10, 2001, just days before Osama bin
Laden disappeared from Tora Bora

You have all the watches and we have all the time.

—saying commonly attributed to the Taliban

K
abul under the Taliban was simultaneously quiet, grim, and boring. Black-turbaned vigilantes roamed its streets like wraiths dispensing their ferocious brand of “Islamic” justice. Curfew started at 9
P.M
. and by 8
P.M
. the streets were deserted except for the young Taliban soldiers in turbans who stood at every traffic circle, carefully checking passing vehicles. Some wore kohl, a black eyeliner that gave them a look both feline and foreboding. The Taliban had banned pretty much any form of diversion and entertainment and had presided over the total collapse of the economy. A
doctor earned only six dollars a month. Government ministries worked without computers, their offices unheated in the brutal Kabul winter. There were no banks and the treasury of the country consisted of a box from which the Taliban leader Mullah Omar distributed wads of cash; the Taliban had pulled Afghanistan
back into the Middle Ages
.

In the years after the fall of the Taliban the capital slowly sprang to life. Kabuli men shaved off their beards while others celebrated by listening to music, flying kites, and watching television, pleasures that had long been denied them.
The money-changers down by the Kabul River
started doing a roaring trade and packed movie houses played Bollywood flicks. On Chicken Street, the decrepit Madison Avenue of the capital, a bookshop sold American and British newspapers. Other shops offered rich coats of fox fur and tiger skin. There were even traffic jams, the first time that the city had seen them since Afghanistan had been plunged into a series of wars more than two decades earlier. Refugees don’t return to places they don’t see having a real future and in 2002 alone
almost two million Afghans came home
from neighboring Pakistan and Iran. And there were millions of Afghan kids in school, including, of course, many girls.

Kandahar, the former Taliban stronghold in the south of the country, was now
firmly in the grip of the United States
. Kandahar airport, where once Taliban soldiers had shown off their anti-aircraft missiles to members of the international media, was now a vast U.S. base housing thousands of soldiers, as well as a twenty-four-hour coffee shop, a North Face clothing store, a day spa, and a PX the size of a Walmart. Next door, what had once been a base for bin Laden was now an American shooting range, while in downtown Kandahar, Mullah Omar’s gaudy compound was home to American Special Forces units.

The relative absence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda throughout Afghanistan during 2003 meant fewer U.S. casualties.
Forty-eight U.S. servicemen were killed
there that year, the lowest number of American deaths for any year in the decade after the fall of the Taliban. And by mid-2005 the Afghan government had succeeded in disarming almost all of the private
warlord-led militias
that had plagued Afghanistan since the early 1990s. More than sixty thousand men were disarmed and tens of thousands of light and heavy weapons were handed in to the government, all part of a larger pattern of seeming progress in Afghanistan.

During his first years in power, the new Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, seemed like a shrewd player of the kind of hardball politics that would have
warmed the heart of Lyndon Johnson. Karzai forced Ismail Khan, the powerful governor of the western province of Herat, to resign, giving him instead the
consolation prize
of the ministry of energy. Uzbek strongman Abdul Rashid Dostum was given a job in 2003 with a
fancy title but no real power
at the ministry of defense. The next year Karzai
dropped Mohammad Fahim
from his post as minister of defense; the power-hungry general had awarded himself the title of Field Marshal after the fall of the Taliban. With these moves Karzai not only skillfully neutralized his most powerful rivals, men who could field their own private armies, but he also increased the authority of the central government.

The presidential election held on October 9, 2004, was a success by any standard.
Ten million Afghans registered
to vote, far more than was initially projected, and almost half of those who signed up were women. The day of the election Afghans streamed to the polls. In conservative Pashtun areas such as Gardez—where weeks earlier insurgents had fired rockets at Karzai’s helicopter, and where even fully covered women are rarely seen on the streets—
turnout was heavy
. Groups of women clad in blue burqas besieged polling stations in Gardez, eager to vote.

In the end, Karzai won 55 percent of the vote against more than a dozen other candidates in a reasonably fair election.
Eight million Afghans voted
, a more than
70 percent
voter turnout, a rate not seen in any American presidential election since 1900. The election was the high watermark of Afghanistan’s recovery. An ABC/BBC poll taken in 2005 captured this well.
Eighty-three percent
of Afghans approved of President Karzai’s work and the same number expressed a favorable opinion of the United States, unheard-of in a Muslim nation. Eight in ten Afghans supported the presence of U.S. and other international forces on their soil, while only 8 percent supported the Taliban. Three out of four Afghans said their living conditions were better than they had been under the Taliban and roughly the same number felt that the country was heading in the right direction. Contrast that with Iraq, where ABC/BBC also polled in 2005 and found that less than one in five Iraqis supported international forces in their country and were evenly split on the question of whether their lives were better or worse following the American-led invasion.

The generally positive feelings Afghans had about their future and the role that the international community was playing in their country—attitudes that lasted for several years after the fall of the Taliban—were not entirely surprising
when you considered what the country had suffered through during the previous grim two decades of its history: the occupation by the Soviets, the civil war that followed, and the rule of the Taliban, which brought a certain measure of security to the country but at the cost of forcing Afghans to live under an authoritarian, theocratic state incapable of delivering the most basic of services.

Almost every Afghan had a member of their immediate family who had been killed or maimed in the wars of the previous decades, and the whole country seemed to be in the grip of post-traumatic stress disorder. No country in history had been subjected to a communist occupation, followed by warlordism, followed by rigid Islamist fundamentalist rule—approaches to politics and economics that individually could have crippled any country, but in combination were devastating to ordinary Afghans.

There were many grim statistics
one could enumerate about how damaged the country was after decades of war, but suffice to say that even several years after the United States had toppled the Taliban, the countries of Afghanistan and Burkino Faso, in central Africa, were running neck and neck on their abysmal quality-of-life indicators. Life expectancy for an Afghan was forty-two, while in neighboring Iran it was seventy. And despite the tens of billions of dollars in aid supposedly spent on Afghan reconstruction, the Kabul River, which snakes through the center of the city, was still clogged with garbage and raw sewage many years after the departure of the Taliban.

One of the homes of Kabul’s
ubiquitous street kids
underlined the grinding poverty that was the lot of the vast majority of Afghans. Muzhgan, a slight, shy eleven-year-old girl, begged on the street and collected scraps of paper and cardboard for cooking fuel, while her fourteen-year-old sister Hamida worked in a textile factory. Their father, Abdullah, a day laborer, was unemployed throughout the long winter months when building construction stopped. Luckily, Muzhgan attended the Aschiana School, which provided her a hot lunch and some schooling, as it did for some six thousand other street kids in the Kabul area who would otherwise have gone hungry and uneducated. Together with her sister, Muzhgan brought in ten dollars a week, which was barely enough to cover the rent on the well-kept one-room home they shared with six other members of their family in one of Kabul’s burgeoning slums. Theirs was the lot of millions of the residents of Kabul.

On the other end of town, on a dimly lit road in Wazir Akbar Khan, the Upper East Side of Kabul, it was a whole other story. A couple of street kids
gestured toward an unmarked iron gate, behind which, they assured passersby, you can find what you are looking for. An Afghan guard gave prospective patrons a wary once-over and opened the gate onto a dark garden, at the end of which a door was slightly ajar and through which you stepped into a world far removed from the dust-blown avenues of Kabul and its street kids like Muzhgan.

At one end of a long room was a well-stocked bar tended by a Chinese madam who assessed prospective customers with a practiced calculus. In front of her were more than a dozen scantily clad, smiling young Chinese women sprawled over a series of bar stools and couches. Adorning the walls were red lanterns and large posters of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. Nestling next to the ladies of the night were several mustached, glazed-eyed Afghan men who occasionally took unsteady steps onto a makeshift dance floor to bust some surprisingly graceful traditional moves. A couple of the women tittered as they gamely joined in.

Several of the women tried to make conversation, most of which consisted of “
Me no speak English
.” Conversation was not really the point here. One of the prostitutes whispered, “You guys worry about the attacks?” She was referring to the massive car bomb that had blown up a day earlier a couple of hundred yards from the U.S. embassy, killing two American soldiers, one of them a fifty-two-year-old female reservist, and more than a dozen Afghan bystanders. Shortly after the attack, body parts that looked like fried pieces of meat and bone were found scattered a couple of blocks away from where the bomb had exploded.

Years after the fall of the Taliban, Kabul had a distinctly
fin-de-siècle
air. An economy steeped in corruption and driven by the heroin/opium trade and foreign aid enriched an elite who partied into the night, taking advantage of new freedoms that under the Taliban might have earned them a reprimand from the religious police (listening to music); landed them in prison (drinking alcohol); or had them stoned to death (sex outside marriage). Hotels played loungey house music at night and discreetly served beer and wine. Private parties featured vodka Jello shots and sound systems blasting techno. One restaurant even boasted a pool where comely French female aid workers could display their charms. But, as the years went by, the establishments catering to foreigners and rich Afghans increasingly took on the look of fortresses. Hotels invested in bomb shelters and restaurants deployed armed guards. These were sensible precautions; in May 2006 an angry anti-American
mob shot out the ground-floor windows of Kabul’s five-star Serena hotel, and a year later Taliban fighters
shot the guards
outside the same hotel and went room to room hunting and shooting Westerners.

The Taliban played on the fears of a generally conservative population who worried about the corrupting foreign influences exemplified by the thriving bar scene and the bustling Chinese brothels of Kabul.
Graeme Smith
, a reporter based in Kandahar for Canada’s
Globe and Mail
, interviewed forty-two Taliban foot soldiers through an intermediary and was able to make some observations about the insurgents in the Kandahar region: that the Taliban at its core was an uprising by rural Afghans who often had a distaste for the “corruption” foreigners had brought into their cities; that it was a rebellion largely driven by tribes excluded from government; and that the majority of Taliban fighters were engaged in poppy farming.

The Taliban also benefited
from American missteps in the early years of the war, which were the result of a number of the Bush administration’s ideological positions. The first was an intense dislike of “nation building” being performed by the U.S. military, something that was regarded as the preserve of Clintonian liberals. During the 2000 election campaign, Condoleezza Rice said that “we don’t need the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten.” And, as a candidate, Bush explained in a debate with his Democratic rival, Al Gore, “The vice president and I have a disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in nation building. I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders.” The results of this attitude could be seen in a memo written to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld by one of his top deputies, Douglas J. Feith. Four days after the American campaign against the Taliban had begun on October 7, 2001, Feith wrote his boss that “nation building is
not
our key strategic goal” (emphasis in original).

The trio who ran the Pentagon—Rumsfeld, Feith, and Wolfowitz—prided themselves on their big-picture strategic thinking, yet the most cursory knowledge of Afghan history suggested that the absence of a strong supportive relationship between the United States and the government in Kabul would be a prelude to the Taliban returning to power. By 9/11 the story of the American neglect of Afghanistan was well-known. Following the expulsion of the Soviets, the George H. W. Bush administration had closed the American embassy in Kabul in 1989 and for more than a decade U.S. policy makers paid virtually no attention to Afghans. As the country was battered by multiple civil wars, the Taliban and later al-Qaeda took good advantage of the
resulting vacuum. On 9/11 the United States learned a deadly and expensive lesson about how mistaken it was to stand on the sidelines as Afghanistan sank into chaos.