The Longest War (33 page)

Following the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, the Defense Department’s attitude and that of the George W. Bush administration in general was: Overthrow the Taliban. Go home. General Tommy Franks recalled that he and Rumsfeld agreed that they would keep the number of American troops in Afghanistan to a minimum. “‘
We don’t want to repeat the Soviets’ mistakes,’ I told the secretary.
” But this was a mistaken analogy. The Soviets employed a scorched-earth policy in Afghanistan, killing more than a million Afghans and forcing some five million more to flee the country, creating what was then the world’s largest refugee population.

On April 17, 2002, President Bush made a speech at the Virginia Military Institute, where General George C. Marshall had studied a century earlier, and seemed to promise some kind of
Marshall Plan to Afghanistan
. Bush said, “Marshall knew that our military victory against enemies in World War II had to be followed by a moral victory that resulted in better lives for individual human beings.” But no such plan was forthcoming in Afghanistan.
Aid per capita to Bosnians
following the end of the Balkan civil war in the mid-1990s was around thirty times that given to Afghans in the first two years after the fall of the Taliban. U.S. monies for reconstruction and humanitarian purposes hovered around an average of $1.75 billion a year between 2002 and 2009, which worked out at about $60 per year per Afghan. Ambassador James Dobbins, the Bush administration’s first American envoy to the new Afghan government, observed that “the American administration’s early aversion to nation building” meant there was “low input” and therefore “low output,” which resulted in “
low levels of security
and economic growth.”

As a result of the Bush administration’s early disdain for nation building and its desire to keep the U.S. military presence to a minimum, Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under both Bush and Obama, observed in a nice piece of understatement in 2008 that Afghanistan had been an “
economy of force
” operation since the fall of the Taliban. And you get what you pay for. According to a study by RAND, “Afghanistan has received the least amount of resources out of any major American-led, nation-building operation over the last 60 years.” Specifically, the initial deployment of American soldiers to Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban was the smallest per capita peacekeeping force of any U.S. post-conflict deployment
since World War II—some six thousand soldiers, about the size of the police force in a city like Houston; hardly sufficient for a country the size of Texas.

Both Karzai and Kofi Annan, then the head of the United Nations, wanted to post international peacekeepers around Afghanistan in early 2002. But the Bush administration blocked any non-U.S. troops from deploying outside Kabul for the first two years of the occupation. Dobbins recalls a
meeting in the White House Situation Room
in February 2002 in which Rumsfeld killed any idea of expanding the role of the largely European International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) then securing Kabul. Not only was the United States unwilling to police Afghanistan; it wasn’t going to let anyone else do it, either.

The six thousand U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan in 2002 had one mission: to hunt the Taliban and al-Qaeda—not to secure the population or help in reconstruction, the classical tasks of a successful counterinsurgency campaign—while the four thousand soldiers in ISAF remained only in Kabul. In the words of the official U.S. military history of the Afghan War, “The strong antipathy towards large-scale reconstruction and governance efforts at high levels in the US government persisted through 2002 and into 2003.” Of course, during this period Rumsfeld and other senior officials knew that war in Iraq was looming as a virtual certainty, which also entered into their calculus about maintaining only the lightest of footprints in Afghanistan. Lieutenant General John Vines, the U.S. commanding general in Afghanistan at the time, told Army historians that his bosses were “under enormous pressure not to over commit resources to Afghanistan to make sure everything possible was available for Iraq.”

As a result, security was often entrusted to local warlords—which, in turn,
slowed the formation
of a real Afghan national army. Afghanistan is a country ideally suited to guerrilla warfare, with its high mountain ranges and a landmass that is a third larger than Iraq’s, while its population is some four million or so greater. Yet, by the end of the second Bush term there were four times more soldiers and policemen in Iraq than there were in Afghanistan.

The relatively low number of soldiers meant that American and NATO forces could clear the Taliban out of areas but
couldn’t hold many of
those cleared areas and then rebuild them, the critical sequence in any successful counterinsurgency. One Western diplomat in Kabul described military operations in the south of the country as much like “
mowing the lawn
” every year. NATO forces went in and cleared out Taliban sanctuaries and then had to go back and do it all over again in the same place the following year.

Robert Grenier, the CIA station chief in Islamabad who had helped Hamid Karzai in his battle against the Taliban, was back in Washington in the summer of 2002 in the newly created job of Iraq mission manager. In October, Grenier
traveled to Kuwait City
to meet with Lieutenant General David McKiernan, who was in the advanced stages of planning the Iraq invasion. Grenier asked McKiernan what he would need for the coming conflict. “As much as you can give me,” said the general. Throughout late 2002 and early 2003, the best Agency paramilitary officers, counterterrorism specialists, case officers, and targeting personnel were shifted from dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan to dealing with Iraq. Grenier described the movement of resources focused on Iraq as a “big surge.”

“Operation Iraqi Freedom” consistently received around
five times more U.S. funding
than “Operation Enduring Freedom” in Afghanistan. And Iraq consumed the bulk of President Bush’s focus and effort. Senior U.S. intelligence official David Gordon recalls: “The president was just
way too committed to Iraq
to think about changing the weight of the commitments.”

As NATO expanded its role in Afghanistan in late 2005, on December 19
Rumsfeld ordered
that three thousand U.S. soldiers, a sixth of the force, be pulled out of the country. Though this was little noticed in the United States—and in the end didn’t happen because of the worsening security situation—Lieutenant General David Barno, who was then commanding U.S. forces in Afghanistan, later explained that this announcement sent exactly the wrong signal to other countries in the region: “
Tragically, I believe that
this misunderstood message caused both friends and enemies to recalculate their options—with a view toward the U.S. no longer being a lead actor in Afghanistan…. Many of the shifts in enemy activity and even the behavior of Afghanistan’s neighbors, I believe, can be traced to this period.”

The U.S. commanding officer in Afghanistan in 2006 was Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, an intense, intellectual soldier who speaks Mandarin and was on his second tour in the country. Eikenberry conceded that “the strength and coherence of the Taliban movement is greater than it was a year ago.” In addition to citing tribal and land disputes and narcotrafficking as reasons for the Taliban resurgence, Eikenberry made the following interesting observation about the relationship between reconstruction and violence: “
Where the road ends
, the Taliban begins.”

Certainly, Afghanistan needed much more reconstruction (which in itself
was a misnomer—there was little to “reconstruct”; everything needed to be built from scratch). The key road from Kabul to Kandahar, which under the Taliban had been a nightmarish seventeen-hour slalom course with giant potholes that could swallow cars whole, was rebuilt as a black-topped freeway with much hoopla in 2004. By then it was the only large-scale reconstruction project completed in the country since the U.S. invasion, and only two years after the new road was finished the security situation had deteriorated so much that the highway was a suicidal journey for anyone who was foolhardy enough to drive it without substantial security.

Afghans hadn’t seen much
for the billions of dollars of reconstruction aid that had supposedly been lavished on the country; a decade after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan remained one of the poorest countries in the world, on par with such basket cases as Somalia. Much of the aid was consumed by the various international organizations whose four-wheel drives clogged the streets of Kabul. In 2008 the leading British charity Oxfam released a report finding that some 40 percent of aid to Afghanistan was
funneled back
to donor countries to maintain offices in the West and pay for Western-style salaries, benefits, and vacations. And another study found that less than 20 percent of the international aid ended up being spent on local Afghan projects.
Too often
Western donor countries had, in effect, generously paid themselves in the guise of helping poor Afghans.

The Bush administration’s single-minded focus on Iraq and the relatively small number of American boots on the ground in Afghanistan and the desultory reconstruction efforts there all helped to create a vacuum of security and governance in the country, which the Taliban would deftly exploit.

In January 2007, somewhere in Logar province, forty miles south of Kabul, a twenty-year-old goat herder named Imdadullah strapped on a bulky black waistcoat lined with packages of TNT. The packages were wrapped with newspaper printed in Urdu, the lingua franca of Pakistan, and tied together with a cord that led to a switch attached to a battery capable of detonating the explosives. Glued to the newspapers were nails and ball bearings.

Imdadullah was in Afghanistan at the time, but he was originally from the Pakistani town of Bannu in the North-West Frontier Province, where he had trained for his mission. In that sense he was
typical of suicide bombers in Afghanistan
, many of whom were Pashtuns from Pakistan. He had been given his explosives-laden vest by a Pakistani Taliban commander named Akthar
Mohammed, but, unlike some suicide bombers, he was not given tranquilizers before setting off on his assignment: to blow up a convoy of Western soldiers and so earn his ticket to Paradise.

But as Imdadullah approached the convoy, fiddling with his detonator switch, he was spotted by an eagle-eyed Afghan policeman. Whether because of faulty wiring or because he simply lost his nerve, Imdadullah’s bomb never went off, and, instead of Paradise, he ended up in jail. Three months later, he sat in an interrogation room at a dingy Kabul prison, wrapped in a dark cloak to ward off the building’s chill. A cataract had occluded one of his eyes, turning it from brown to a milky color. He said he was not being mistreated by Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security—which had arranged the interview—and was speaking of his own free will.

It’s not often that you get to
chat with a failed suicide bomber
, which is perhaps as good a definition of failure as any other, and it was interesting to hear what Imdadullah had hoped to achieve. “I regret that Almighty Allah did not allow me to sacrifice myself. I wanted to attack the British and foreigners and Americans,” he said, expressing confidence that as a martyr he would have been granted the promised seventy-two virgins.

Had Imdadullah’s bomb gone off, he almost certainly would have killed a number of Muslims.
Eight of every ten
victims of suicide attacks in Afghanistan in the previous year were civilians. Suicide bombers like Imdadullah seemed oblivious or unaware of the high civilian toll of their operations (which, however, never matched the carnage inflicted in Iraq by suicide attackers).

Imdadullah explained that he wanted to kill Americans and other foreigners because “it’s written in the Holy Koran to do jihad against the infidels.” It was pointed out to Imdadullah that it is also written in the Koran that to kill one person is as if to kill the whole of humanity, and that the holy book also admonishes warriors not to kill civilians, which he would undoubtedly have done as his explosive vest—heavy with ball bearings and nails—was designed to be a devastating antipersonnel device. Imdadullah parried: “It’s not fair to kill Muslims. It is fair to kill the British and the Americans. Allah has promised us Paradise if we do this.” When asked if he still hoped to be a martyr once he got out of jail, Imdadullah replied “Of course,” in a tone that suggested he had just been asked a stupid question.

By 2006 in the south and east of Afghanistan, the
Taliban were back with a vengeance
, propelled in part by suicide attackers like Imdadullah. Suicide
attacks went up more than fivefold, from seventeen in 2005 to 123 a year later, while IED attacks doubled; attacks on international forces tripled; Afghan civilian deaths at the hands of the insurgents reached a record seven hundred; and American and NATO military deaths were at their highest levels since the Taliban were ousted.

On September 11, 2006, as the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was commemorated with the mournful dirge of a bagpiper on the small U.S. base of Bermel, a few miles from the Pakistani border, incoming rockets forced the 150 soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division’s Bravo Company gathered together to observe a minute of silence to run for cover. Bravo Company fired back long-barreled 105 mm howitzers, which rocketed off with an earsplitting report. Captain Jason Dye, who commanded Bravo Company, explained that “we used to get a rocket attack once a week. Now it’s every other day.”

This was an interesting observation because just a week before, the Pakistani government had signed a peace deal with the militants in North Waziristan, a tribal area of Pakistan just across the border from the Bermel base. While the peace agreement might have lowered the tempo of militant attacks inside Pakistan, the deal
brought more attacks into Afghanistan
. Up in the steep hills high above the Bermel base, Dye’s men found cross marks and horizontal slashes cut deep into the trees, reference points the Taliban used for calibrating and bracketing the rocket attacks on the American base below them.