Descent Into Chaos (64 page)

U.S. policy toward Uzbekistan and Central Asia was one-directional, ham-fisted, and without an ounce of nuance. The Bush administration had claimed to be advancing human rights and democracy in Central Asia, even as the CIA was becoming dependent on Uzbekistan’s security services for handling rendered prisoners and the Pentagon directed 80 percent of U.S. aid to the Uzbek military rather than to economic development. Once the Uzbeks had handed over the K2 base to the Americans, it would have been difficult but not impossible for the United States to use its aid, training programs, and personnel as leverage to push for reform and encourage a cadre of reformers to emerge from within the Uzbek elite. Instead, the Bush administration treated the country as a mere dumping ground for rendered prisoners and a logistics base for Afghanistan. Uzbekistan and its people—their hopes and aspirations—did not exist for anyone in Washington.

After the United States was evicted, nobody in Washington got up to ask, “Who lost Uzbekistan?” The question is important in the geostrategic context, given the massive gains made by China and Russia, the enormous setback to democracy, the continued sufferings of the Uzbek people, and the spread of Islamic extremism. U.S. aid for Central Asia declined by 24 percent in 2008 as the Bush administration yielded influence in the region to China and Russia. Uzbekistan’s trade with Russia ballooned from $2 billion in 2005 to $3 billion in 2007. Russian oil and gas companies began to make serious investments in the Uzbek oil industry and to buy increasing quantities of gas from Uzbekistan.

When I introduce Central Asia in this book I describe how the Central Asian regimes and their peoples wanted different things from the American presence in the region. The Bush administration’s lack of a strategy ensured that the regimes won and that public sympathy turned against the United States as Washington failed to support democracy or economic reforms. The United States lost a major opportunity to influence Central Asia for decades to come while gaining greater access to its energy resources. In 2001 the United States held a pivotal position in Central Asia, yet five years later it was forced to yield that position to Russia and China. Ultimately President Bush was responsible for losing Uzbekistan and Central Asia, as the U.S. administration pursued one-track policies that put torturing prisoners above the need for nation building.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Taliban Offensive
Battling for Control of Afghanistan, 2006-2007

On the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, as divisions between Washington and some European capitals grew, the twenty-six countries that make up NATO began discussions at headquarters in Brussels about how NATO could take over command of the International Security Assistance Force outside Kabul on a permanent basis and expand a peacekeeping presence beyond Kabul.

French president Jacques Chirac, German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, and his intellectually charged and charismatic foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, had led European opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Fischer now took the lead in trying to persuade NATO to help the United States out in Afghanistan. Fischer, a former radical leftist from the late 1960s, had trimmed his politics sufficiently to become leader of the Green Party and to persuade it to ally with Schröder’s Social Democrats. When the Red-Green Coalition won the 1998 German general elections, Schröder appointed Fischer as foreign minister—a post he was to hold until November 2005. Underlying the discussions at NATO were how the relationship between the United States and Europe could be salvaged despite Iraq and whether Afghanistan could bring the two together.

Fischer desperately wanted to find a way to continue Germany’s close ties with the United States. He proposed sending additional German troops to Afghanistan, who would carry out peacekeeping outside Kabul. However, Fischer refused to do so until the current UN Security Council mandate for ISAF was extended beyond the capital. He wanted a UN resolution that would mandate German troops to operate as part of a formal NATO presence in Afghanistan. The German army mapped out a deployment in one of the safest parts of Afghanistan—the northeast, where there was no fighting—making it easier for Fischer to sell the idea to the German parliament and the Greens. Hamid Karzai and the UN’s Lakhdar Brahimi had long been advocating just such an ISAF deployment outside Kabul. By now Rumsfeld, who had so vehemently opposed any deployment outside Kabul, was now also in favor. The Europeans had smarted at the contemptuous manner in which Rumsfeld dispensed with NATO’s offer of help after 9/11 to topple the Taliban.

Fischer was using German troops as bait for a new NATO role with a new UN mandate in order to hook many reluctant European nations that were not at all keen on expanding their commitment to Afghanistan. NATO itself was ill prepared for its first deployment outside the European continent. However, Fischer’s timing was perfect and made good sense. The smaller European countries did not want to lose U.S. support because of their opposition to the Iraq war. And in Kabul, the crisis within ISAF was becoming hugely detrimental. Every six months ISAF-contributing countries struggled to find a nation willing to take over command of ISAF headquarters. In late 2002 Britain had handed over command of ISAF to Turkey, which was followed by a joint German-Dutch command and later a Canadian command. Each handover was marred by haggling, compromises, and interminable delays. “The unseemly scramble to find a country to command [the force] in Kabul gives neither the Afghans, their neighbors nor the remnants of the Taliban and al Qaeda the sense we are there for the long haul,” said a sarcastic George Robertson, NATO secretary-general, in February 2003.
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Germany was taken seriously in Afghanistan. In the late 1990s, Berlin had tried to end the civil war in Afghanistan by hosting a series of unofficial dialogues between the UN, the Taliban, and the Northern Alliance. It hosted the Bonn talks in December 2001 and had taken on the task of rebuilding the Afghan police force while contributing a thousand troops to ISAF in Kabul. Germany’s limitation was that under its constitution it could not deploy troops in an offensive role, but it had already helped out with peacekeeping in the former Yugoslavia.

Six months after the first discussions, on August 8, 2003, NATO took command of ISAF, while a UN Security Council resolution authorized ISAF to expand beyond the capital. Two hundred German troops and forty civilian advisers set up a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Kunduz, in the northeast. There were now two separate command structures for foreign forces in Afghanistan—the NATO-ISAF command was responsible for peacekeeping in Kabul and the provinces; while the hunt for terrorists would continue to be carried out by the U.S.-led Coalition under Operation Enduring Freedom. “Afghanistan will be . . . tough but it has to be a success . . .” Robertson warned. “Nations will have to waken up to what they have taken on.”
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In September, I, along with other experts, was invited to brief NATO ambassadors in Brussels. We stressed how important it was to expand NATO forces into the provinces to help stabilize the country, improve governance, and send a forceful message to the Taliban. A halfhearted NATO response would only give the Taliban a propaganda coup. Some of the NATO ambassadors were clearly disinterested in or nervous about an increased deployment or they did not take the Taliban resurgence seriously. Privately some criticized Fischer, whom they blamed for steamrolling NATO into Afghanistan when NATO was unprepared to go there.

NATO had no standing army or ready-to-go equipment and aircraft. It had no central budget; deployments were paid for by individual countries. Troops, aircraft, helicopters, and artillery had to be extracted from each country after endless meetings and then matched up with other donations. All this had been difficult enough to carry out in the former Yugoslavia. NATO urgently needed heavy airlift, special training, large numbers of helicopters, and culturally sensitized troops—a tough checklist for European governments that had chronically underspent on their militaries since the end of the cold war. In 2005 the total military budget of the twenty-six NATO member states was just $265 million, compared with the U.S. defense budget of $472 billion. NATO countries were expected to spend at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense, but only six out of the twenty-six members met that goal.

Yet it was still difficult to understand why with two million soldiers, NATO countries could not find the troops for Afghanistan. European governments won support from their parliaments and people by promising that their troops would be carrying out risk-free peacekeeping and reconstruction—a military mission that would build hospitals and schools and promote democracy, rule of law, and development, in the best traditions of European liberalism. No European leaders dared mention the possibility of war, combat deaths, or having to fight a counterinsurgency against the Taliban. To further reassure their publics at home, every European country set down its own caveats—restrictions on what its troops could and could not do. These caveats would soon come to paralyze the entire NATO effort.

Despite these problems, NATO set itself ambitious targets. It promised to undertake a four-phase expansion across Afghanistan, starting with the deployment of German troops across the entire north by June 2004 with headquarters in Mazar-e-Sharif. Phase two, to be completed three months later, would see NATO deploy to Herat and western Afghanistan after setting up new Provincial Reconstruction Teams. In Phases three and four NATO would deploy to the turbulent south and east, for which no timetable was set. When NATO defense ministers met in Munich in February 2004, they pledged to install a PRT in every one of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces.

NATO missed its very first deadline, failing to man the five PRTs in the north on time, which then delayed completion of phase two. Countries did not come up with enough troops and equipment on time. For the first six months of 2004, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the new NATO secretary-general and its supreme commander, Gen. James Jones, could not find three helicopters to send to Kabul, prompting a frustrated Jones to tell the U.S. Senate that “the alliance has agreed, the donor countries have been identified, and yet we find ourselves mired in the administrative details of who’s going to pay for it, who’s going to transport it, how it’s going to be maintained.”
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There was further cynicism in the Pentagon, where Paul Wolfowitz told me in February 2004, “We needed some helicopter support, and NATO did not come through. There’s a tendency to talk very boldly about the European security structure and then not make available any of the funding necessary to make them happen.”
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NATO’s inability to complete phase one on time deeply frustrated Karzai, who had asked for even more troops to be temporarily deployed for the upcoming 2004 presidential elections. NATO promised an “over the horizon” deployment—troops who would not leave their base in Italy but who in theory would be ready to go to Afghanistan. It was an absurd arrangement that angered Karzai and buoyed the Taliban. “I don’t mind taking out my begging bowl once in a while. But as standard operating procedure, this is simply intolerable,” Scheffer said.
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By now the United States was bogged down in Iraq and desperately needed NATO to take up more responsibility in Afghanistan so that it could withdraw some of its own troops. In February 2005, at a meeting in Nice, France, NATO defense ministers discussed the idea of creating a single unified command by merging the NATO-ISAF command with Operation Enduring Freedom. Predictably, France, Germany, and others objected because it would mean getting involved in fighting the Taliban. “NATO is not equipped to do counter-terrorism missions,” said the French defense minister Michèle Alliot-Marie.
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Those at the Nice meeting did agree on Italy’s heading the deployment to Herat, and phase two was finally completed eight months late.

Rumsfeld’s intentions in speeding up a merger became clearer after he dropped the bombshell that Washington would cut its nineteen-thousand -strong troop level in Afghanistan by 20 percent by the spring of 2006.

I interviewed a senior official at the White House just after Rumsfeld’s statement and asked what had prompted him to say such a thing at such a sensitive time. The official looked at the ceiling, as if to say that Rumsfeld’s decisions were his own and could not be questioned even by the White House. Yet at the same time Rumsfeld was arguing just the opposite for Iraq, saying the United States could defend the homeland only if its forces stayed in the Middle East. “If we left Iraq prematurely, the enemy would tell us to leave Afghanistan and then withdraw from the Middle East. And if we left the Middle East, they’d order us . . . to leave what they call the occupied Muslim lands from Spain to the Philippines.”
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On December 19, 2005, Rumsfeld signed orders pulling out three thousand U.S. troops from the south, reducing the total number to sixteen thousand. It was the worst possible moment, as the largest Taliban offensive was about to unfold, but Rumsfeld refused to accept that the Taliban insurgency was expanding. To demonstrate that it would maintain its presence, Washington announced the building of a new $83 million runway at Bagram air base and the improvement of fourteen military airfields across the country. The American pullout speeded up agreement on creating a joint command. All NATO forces and half the U.S. force in Afghanistan would come under NATO-ISAF command, while the remaining eight thousand American troops would continue to carry out counterterrorism operations under a separate U.S. command.

Meanwhile, British and Canadian forces were preparing to deploy to Helmand and Kandahar provinces, respectively, as part of phase three. They were desperately trying to persuade the Dutch to take command of neighboring Uruzgan province. The Dutch government was keen, but there was a strong left-wing opposition in the Dutch parliament, which blocked any deployment to Afghanistan. Britain told NATO that it would lead the deployment in the south as long as it could raise sufficient numbers of troops to take on the Taliban and received adequate backing from NATO allies, the Dutch deployed in Uruzgan, and funds were available for development and reconstruction. It was already clear to the British that unlike the NATO deployments in the north and west, phase three in the south would involve heavy fighting with the Taliban.