The Longest War (59 page)

Why did the alternative offered by the Obama administration, committing large numbers of boots on the ground and significant sums of money to Afghanistan, have a better chance of success than the policies of Bush there? In part, because the Afghan people—the center of gravity in a counterinsurgency—were rooting for the Taliban to lose. BBC/ABC countrywide polling found that in 2009, 58 percent of Afghans named the Taliban—whom only 7 percent of Afghans viewed favorably—as
the greatest threat
to their nation. There was nothing quite like living under Taliban rule to convince one that their promises of creating a seventh-century utopia here on earth were fantasies. And the same poll found that an astonishing 63 percent of Afghans continued to have a favorable view of the U.S. military even eight years after the fall of the Taliban. (To those who say you just can’t trust polls in Afghanistan, it’s worth noting that the same organizations that commissioned polls
in Afghanistan also did so in neighboring Pakistan, which was consistently found to be one of the most anti-American countries in the world.)

By early 2010, 70 percent of Afghans said their country was
going in the right direction
. Considering Afghanistan’s rampant drug trade, pervasive corruption, and rising violence, this seemed counterintuitive—until you recalled that no country in the world had ever suffered Afghanistan’s combination of an invasion and occupation by a totalitarian regime followed by a civil war, with subsequent “government” by warlords and then the neo-medieval misrule of the Taliban. In other words, the bar was pretty low. No Afghan was expecting that the country would turn into, say, Belgium, but there was an expectation that Afghanistan could be returned to the somewhat secure condition it had enjoyed in the 1970s before the Soviet invasion, and that the country would be able to grow its way out of being simply a subsistence agricultural economy.

There was one potential skunk at this garden party, and it was a rather large one: Afghanistan’s nuclear-armed, al-Qaeda-and Taliban-headquartering neighbor to the east. The Pakistani dimension of Obama’s “Af-Pak” strategy was his critics’ most reasonable objection to his plans for the region. It was difficult for the United States to have an effective strategy for Pakistan if
Pakistan
didn’t have an effective strategy for Pakistan.

Pakistan had also long stirred the pot in Afghanistan by supporting elements of the Taliban, in particular the Haqqani Network, which was
paid by the Pakistanis
to conduct operations against Indian targets in Afghanistan, including the bombings of the Indian embassy in Kabul in 2008 and 2009. That was compounded by the fact that the so-called Afghan Taliban continued to be headquartered in Pakistan, particularly in and around the western city of Quetta.

The most worrisome development in Pakistan as Obama assumed office was the gradual Talibanization of Swat, a northern region of lakes and mountains that had been one of the country’s premier tourist attractions.
In February 2009
the provincial government did a deal with the Taliban leader in Swat, Maulana Fazlullah (in his previous life a ski-lift operator), which allowed his self-styled religious warriors to impose their version of sharia law on the region’s inhabitants. As they had with other “peace” deals, the Taliban took the agreement as an opportunity to expand into new territory, pushing this time into the neighboring Buner district
just sixty miles
from Islamabad.

By 2009 there were some hopeful signs that the militants had shot themselves in the feet in Pakistan. Jihadist violence
had grown exponentially
, insurgent attacks had increased nearly 800 percent since 2005, and suicide attacks had increased
twentyfold
. Suicide bombers managed, for instance, to
strike in three different places
in Pakistan in just one twenty-four-hour period on April 4, 2009. There was no single “9/11 moment,” but the cumulative weight of the Taliban’s assassination of Benazir Bhutto; al-Qaeda’s bombing of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad in 2008; the widely circulated video images of the Taliban flogging a seventeen-year-old girl; and on October 10, 2009, the
twenty-hour Taliban attack
on Pakistan’s equivalent of the Pentagon, provoked revulsion and fear among the Pakistani public. Where once the Taliban had enjoyed something of a religious Robin Hood image among ordinary Pakistanis, they were now increasingly seen as just thugs.

The Taliban’s decision to take up positions only sixty miles from Islamabad was the tipping point that finally galvanized the sclerotic Pakistani state to confront the fact that the jihadist monster it had helped to spawn was now trying to swallow its creator. When the Taliban had been largely confined to Pakistan’s tribal regions (which are known in Urdu as “
foreign area
”), the Pakistani government and military could more or less live with them, but as they marched on the capital, bombing police stations and military posts along the way, the Pakistani establishment began to see the Taliban as a real threat.

After ordering
more than a million
residents out of the Swat Valley during the spring of 2009, the Pakistani military launched operations against the Taliban, which largely ended the reign of terror of the militants there. Then, after having suffered three defeats in the tribal region of South Waziristan over the course of the previous five years, the Pakistani army went in there again in October 2009, this time with a force of
at least thirty thousand troops
, following several months of bombing of Taliban positions. These operations were done with the support of at least half of the Pakistani public, which did not view them as solely for the benefit of the United States, as
previous military operations
against the Taliban had generally been seen.

Simultaneously, President Obama, far from curtailing the drone program he had inherited from President George W. Bush, dramatically increased the number of U.S. drone strikes into Pakistan’s tribal regions, targeting not only al-Qaeda but also the Taliban. There were
fifty-one American drone strikes in Pakistan in 2009 alone
under Obama, compared to forty-five in the entire eight years of the Bush administration. The leader of the Pakistani Taliban,
Baitullah Mehsud, the mastermind of Benazir Bhutto’s December 2007 assassination and many of the suicide bombings in Afghanistan, was a frequent target of these drone attacks. But he still didn’t see it coming. On August 5, 2009, Mehsud, a diabetic former gym instructor, was receiving a leg massage on the roof of a house in South Waziristan when a drone slammed into his hideout, killing one of his wives and the terrorist chief himself.

The Pakistani press was jubilant. “Good Riddance, Killer Baitullah” was the
lead headline
in the quality
Dawn
newspaper. Much of the previous coverage in Pakistan of U.S. drone strikes in the tribal region had ranged from critical to downright hostile. But in the case of Mehsud, U.S. strategic interests and Pakistani interests were closely aligned because the Pakistani Taliban’s victims had included not only Bhutto, the country’s most popular politician, but also hundreds of Pakistani policemen, soldiers, and civilians. Now the Pakistani military and government—cognizant that American drones were often targeting militants who were attacking the Pakistani state—offered less pushback on this issue than they had in the past.

As a result of the unprecedented number of drone strikes authorized by the Obama administration aimed at Taliban and al-Qaeda networks, in 2009 about a half-dozen leaders of militant organizations were killed, including the head of an Uzbek terrorist group allied with al-Qaeda, as were hundreds of lower-level militants and civilians.

Despite the exponential rise in U.S. drone strikes, Afghanistan and Pakistan still faced high levels of violence, much of it traceable to militants based in the tribal regions. In 2009, there were a
record eighty-seven suicide attacks
in Pakistan, which killed around 1,300 people, while in Afghanistan
nearly 6,000 Afghan civilians
were killed or injured, the highest number of casualties recorded since the fall of the Taliban. While the drones were killing significant numbers of militant leaders and foot soldiers, these losses were clearly being absorbed. Nor had the expanded drone program stopped al-Qaeda and its allies from continuing to train Western recruits.
Around 100 to 150
Westerners in total were believed to have traveled to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in 2009 alone, including Faisal Shahzad, the failed Times Square bomber.

Of course, the drones program did create some real problems for the Taliban and its allies in the tribal regions. David Rohde, the
New York Times
reporter who was
held by the Haqqani Taliban network
for months in 2009, called the drones a “
terrifying presence
” in South Waziristan. And the Taliban
regularly executed
suspected “spies”
in Waziristan accused of providing information to the United States, suggesting they feared betrayal from within. But the U.S. drone strikes didn’t seem to have had any great effect on the Taliban’s ability to mount operations in Pakistan or Afghanistan or deter potential Western recruits, and they no longer had the element of surprise. By early 2010, after around eighteen months of sustained drone strikes, many of Pakistan’s militants had likely moved out of their once-safe haven in the tribal regions and into other parts of the country.

A December 2009
briefing prepared by the top U.S. intelligence official in Afghanistan mapped out the strategy and strength of the Taliban, concluding that the insurgency was increasingly effective. The briefing warned that the Taliban’s “organizational capabilities and operational reach are qualitatively and geographically expanding” and predicted that “security incidents [are] projected to be higher in 2010.”

It was in this context that President Obama announced his new Afghan strategy. On December 1, 2009, Obama traveled to the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, to deliver the key speech of his presidency about the war. Obama recalled, “
That was probably
the most emotional speech that I’ve made in terms of how I felt about it, because I was looking out over a group of cadets, some of whom were gonna be deployed to Afghanistan. And potentially some might not come back.”

Obama explained the reasoning behind the new strategy: “
I make this decision
because our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by al-Qaeda. It is from here where we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak.” Obama announced the thirty thousand new troops of the Afghan surge, but most news accounts of the speech seized on the fact that the president also said that some of those troops would be coming home in July 2011 as they transferred responsibility for a number of Afghanistan’s provinces to Afghan security forces. However, there was a large and little-noticed caveat inserted in the speech: that this drawdown would be based on conditions on the ground.
And at the time
only
one
of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces was under the control of the Afghan army and police, and that was Kabul itself.

In late June 2010, after accepting General McChrystal’s resignation in the wake of the controversial
Rolling Stone
article, Obama appointed General
David Petraeus as commander of the Afghan war; the second American president to pick the cerebral strategist to turn around a war that the United Sates wasn’t winning.

What you don’t often see in the news from Afghanistan is how lovely a place it can be. The city of Kabul sits six thousand feet above sea level and is rimmed by snow-tipped mountains. In spring the warming sun sends soft winds during the day and at night a pleasant chill begins to descend with dusk and the muezzin’s call to prayer. And as night falls it’s possible to remember that in the 1970s, before the series of wars that wrecked Afghanistan, Kabul was a major pit stop on the hippie trail to India and something of a tourist destination.

One day the tourists may come back, but for the moment, that all seems a long, long way off.

So my Lord
, if my demise has come, then let it not be
         
Upon a bier draped with green mantles.
But let my grave be an eagle’s belly, its resting place
   In the sky’s atmosphere amongst perched eagles.

—poem by Osama bin Laden released in the weeks
before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003

I have an excellent idea
of where [bin Laden] is.

—CIA director Porter J. Goss on June 22, 2005

W
hen you fly over the icy peaks of the Hindu Kush, which march in serried ranks toward the Himalayas, dividing Central Asia from the Indian subcontinent, you get a sense of the scale of the problem: Osama bin Laden is hiding somewhere out there. And despite the most extensive manhunt in history, he has eluded capture now for about a decade.