The Longest War (35 page)

Poppy eradication was a particularly hard sell in the south of Afghanistan. In April 2007,
General Mohammed Daud
, who headed his government’s eradication efforts, traveled down to Uruzgan, an isolated, poverty-stricken province that retained a strong Taliban presence. Tarin Kowt, the dusty, fly-blown provincial capital, was devoid of any women, its central market peopled by fierce Pashtun tribesmen wearing the black turbans favored by the Taliban. General Daud met with Uruzgan’s deputy governor to discuss how and where eradication efforts might proceed. During a break in the meeting, one of Daud’s aides stepped out onto a balcony in the governor’s mansion and was greeted by the sight of a sea of lush poppy fields stretching from the walls of the governor’s mansion to a range of mountains several miles away. Already the distinctive red flowers of the mature poppy plants could be seen in some of the fields. The Afghan counternarcotics official said, “Uruzgan is a very beautiful place.” Smiling, he added, “And a very dangerous place.”

According to the UN, Uruzgan in 2007 had the
fifth-largest poppy harvest
of any of the thirty-four provinces in Afghanistan, making eradication efforts distinctly unpopular locally. No wonder the governor of the province had some pressing business elsewhere and was out of town for General Daud’s visit with his eradication force, the first high-level delegation from Kabul to spend any time in Tarin Kowt in years.

One morning Daud and his aides drove out to a scrubby, desert flatland area several miles out of Tarin Kowt, where they met up with what looked like a large traveling circus, albeit a heavily armed one. Two hundred policemen trucked in from Kabul had set up large green tents to live in during the two-week eradication program that was planned for the province. The policemen were members of the Afghan Eradication Force, which traveled around the country destroying poppy fields if the locals didn’t have the will or ability to do it for themselves, as was obviously the case in Uruzgan.

Large trucks disgorged some twenty all-terrain vehicles, powerful, four-wheel-drive mini-tractors with large tires. The ATVs were brought in because Afghan peasants would sometimes flood their fields to prevent ordinary tractors from doing the eradication. On the back of the vehicles workmen affixed
long metal bars that would be dragged over the poppy stalks to break them down. The entire operation, nominally an Afghan one, was directed by employees of DynCorp, a large American contractor. The
DynCorp guys were easy to spot
, as they were wearing the uniform of the American contractor in Afghanistan—Oakley shades, goatees and beards, baseball caps, T-shirts, tan pants, and work boots.

Three days into the eradication effort, Taliban fighters, some disguised in burqas, sprang a series of ambushes on the eradication force, pinning them down in an intense several-hour firefight that seriously injured four policemen.

The Uruzgan attack demonstrated, for those who hadn’t yet figured it out, just how the Taliban was seeking to exploit popular resentment against eradication efforts. All across the country,
Afghan support for poppy cultivation
was then on the upswing; almost 40 percent of Afghans considered it acceptable if there was no other way to earn a living, and in the southwest, where much of the poppy crop was grown, two out of three people said it was acceptable.

Instead of taking such findings to heart, the Bush administration’s counternarcotics policy placed eradication at its center, even though it was met with growing Afghan skepticism and, in some cases, violence. Why was the policy so unpopular? Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world and many rural Afghans have few options to make money other than by poppy growing. Abruptly ending the poppy/opium trade was not an option, as that would have
put up to three million people out of work
, or around a tenth of the population, and impoverished millions more; the only really functional part of the economy was poppy and opium production. Farmers could earn as much as
twelve dollars a day
growing poppy, while a tailor might make that in a month. You simply could not eviscerate the livelihoods of the millions of Afghans who grew poppies and not expect a backlash.

Manual eradication by Afghan policemen working together with DynCorp’s contractors failed to wipe out the drug trade. Quite the reverse: trade boomed and the eradication approach only created more enemies, since the farmers who had their crops destroyed were generally the poorer ones who couldn’t pay the bribes to have their fields left alone. Those farmers proved easy recruits to the Taliban cause. The U.S. government, in short, was deeply committed to an unsuccessful drug policy that helped its enemies. (The measure of a
successful counternarcotics policy
should not have been hectares of poppy destroyed every year, but hectares of other crops that were planted.)

The drug trade not only helped fund the Taliban; it also fueled Afghanistan’s
pervasive corruption. By 2008, according to the watchdog group Transparency International, Afghanistan was rated
one of the most corrupt countries
on the planet, alongside such completely failed states as Somalia, in part because government officials were reaping the benefits of the drug trade, and not just the Taliban. In June 2005, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials and Afghan police raided the office of the governor of Helmand, Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, and found
nine tons
of opium in his office. Wali Karzai, President Karzai’s brother and an important politician in Kandahar, was repeatedly identified in news reports as
profiting from the drug business
. Yet a culture of impunity existed for those at the top of the heroin trade, exemplified by the vast, gaudy mansions that the drug barons built for themselves in the center of Kabul.

By 2006, Karzai, now often derided as the “mayor of Kabul,” seemed to be losing his grip. Not only would he not move against the drug lords, but some of the most competent officials, such as foreign minister Dr. Abdullah and the finance minister Ashraf Ghani, had left the government. There was also little true representation of Pashtun political interests in parliament because Karzai appeared to distrust political parties.

In the latter half of the second Bush term, Afghanistan’s drift into chaos became a matter of concern at the White House. Meghan O’Sullivan, Bush’s adviser on Iraq and Afghanistan, had
instituted a review
of Afghan policy while Iraq was still on fire in 2006 but no substantive changes of policy emerged out of that review. O’Sullivan recalls: “The recommendations were made, and they were accepted, and then people were told to go and ferret out the resources, and we didn’t have them. And so, they weren’t executed.” Another official at the White House working on Afghanistan recalls that during this period, “
There were many discussions
about expanding the small Afghan national army,” but nothing of substance happened.

In 2007, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, William Wood, and the commanding general in Afghanistan, Dan McNeill, were telling White House officials in videoconferences that
everything was fine
. One official recalled, “They believed it
from their bubble
.”

But a group of senior Bush administration officials who dubbed themselves “
the shura
”—the Arabic word means council—had begun traveling to the country regularly and did not share this rosy view. Key members of the shura were Lieutenant General Douglas E. Lute, who had been appointed
“war czar” at the White House for Iraq and Afghanistan in May 2007, and Eliot Cohen, one of Condoleezza Rice’s top deputies at the State Department. Cohen recalls that during the summer of 2007 he and his staff started examining color-coded maps of Afghanistan going back five years that the United Nations had drawn up to show where in the country it was safe for aid organizations to work: “And you can just see the green shrinking, the yellow growing, and the red really growing.” By the summer of 2008, after one of the trips of the shura to Afghanistan, it was obvious to the group that the country’s downward trajectory was now a real problem. General Lute recalled: “
There was a point
where we basically just concluded, this was really going bad on us: There’s no sort of seminal event but we were not winning. And in a counterinsurgency, that’s not good enough.”

The growing alarm about Afghanistan precipitated a
soup-to-nuts
review during the fall of 2008. David Kilcullen, who had recently served in Iraq as General David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency adviser, was then advising Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Kilcullen says, “By September there was critical mass in the Bush administration for a new review. Part of it was that this pressure had been building, to look at Afghanistan again; part of it was Iraq started to turn in the middle of ’07, and finally they got enough bandwidth back that they could think about something other than Iraq. It was very, very hard to get their attention on Afghanistan until Iraq started to turn around. They were just
all Iraq, all the time.
”

In mid-September 2008, as the formal review began, President Bush’s instructions to his team were: “
I don
’t want a written report out of this thing any time before the twentieth of January ’09, and I want you to look at two issues. One, things I have to do now, as president, which are urgent. And secondly, what are we handing off to the next administration, and how do we help them understand the issue?” There was no disagreement among the couple of dozen officials who worked on the review that Afghanistan was on a downward slope. Participants were told that violence had gone up more than 500 percent in the past five years and Afghan support for international forces had plummeted by 33 percent in the past few months, according to
private polling
commissioned by the U.S. government.

Two weeks before Americans went to the polls to vote for John McCain or Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, Bush administration officials briefed advisers to both campaigns about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. The meeting was held at the Army and Navy Club in downtown
Washington, D.C., and was organized, in part, by Barnett Rubin, a professor at New York University and the country’s leading Afghan expert. Kilcullen remembers, “
We gave them a briefing
on the Afghanistan review. Sort of swore them to silence, and we told them everything we’d done. That was the point at which I realized Obama was going to win the election, because the McCain people were defeated and slumping and not even taking notes. And the Obama people were sitting up straight and they were taking notes. They were clearly people who expected to take office and assume responsibility for the problem.”

After Obama won the election, and under instructions from Bush, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley briefed his incoming replacement, General James Jones, about the content of the Afghan review. Hadley recalls, “The president said, basically, ‘Why don’t you talk to Jones about it, ask him what he wants to do. My guess is they’ll opt to have us give them the strategy review and not announce it.’ I did talk to Jones, and they were briefed on the strategy review, and Jones said, ‘
Leave it for us
.’ So we did.” The
unpublicized Bush review
outlined some of the policies that the Obama administration would later adopt, including treating Afghanistan as a regional problem that included Pakistan and building up the Afghan state at the provincial level, something that hitherto had been largely ignored, and it advocated an expanded counterinsurgency mission.

General David McKiernan had recently consolidated control over U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan and started
adjusting their tactics
. McKiernan issued an order on September 2, 2008, that U.S./NATO forces should change their rules of engagement by emphasizing the need for proportional force in reacting to Taliban attacks so as to lower civilian casualties, the issue that was most damaging to the standing of the coalition among the Afghan population. A key part of McKiernan’s new strategy involved reaching out to Afghanistan’s many tribes. It was an approach that the U.S. military had successfully adopted in Iraq, where tens of thousands of Sunni tribe members involved in the “Sunni Awakening” were put on the American payroll. To attempt to replicate elements of that approach, the U.S. military and NATO started mapping the approximately
four hundred tribes
and their many sub-tribes across Afghanistan. And in the winter of 2008 a
pilot program
in the central Afghan province of Wardak, thirty miles from Kabul, was put in place to arm local militias to fight the resurgent local Taliban. In late 2008, McKiernan also
requested more than 20,000
new troops to supplement the relatively
small force of 32,000 then on the ground; around 10,000 of them were authorized by President Bush in the waning months of his final term.

But these incremental measures could not hide the fact that by the time Bush left office, the Taliban were stronger than at any point since they had lost Kabul seven years earlier. By one estimate the
Taliban had a permanent presence
in 72 percent of the country. The Taliban, which in 2002 had barely been more than a nuisance, now controlled large sections of Afghanistan’s most important road, the three-hundred-mile Kabul to Kandahar highway, and
by 2008 more American
soldiers were dying in Afghanistan than in Iraq.

Afghanistan should have been a demonstration project of American resolve and American compassion: a signal to her enemies that, once evicted from their sanctuaries, they would never be allowed back; and a signal to her friends that a peaceful, stable state could flourish in a land where militant Islamists had once reigned. But as Lieutenant General David Barno, the commanding general in Afghanistan between 2003 and 2005, later dryly noted of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan, “‘Nation-building’ was explicitly
not
part of the formula.
”

America’s neglect of Afghanistan after 2001 was an enormous missed opportunity and something that Bush officials only really began to grapple with seriously during their last year in office.