Descent Into Chaos (65 page)

Yet even as phase three got under way, the list of caveats about what countries would and would not do grew to the size of a telephone directory. General Jones called the seventy-one listed caveats in 2006 “NATO’s operational cancer . . . a sign of weakness and an impediment to success.”
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Some troops could not attack the Taliban; they were unauthorized to help in poppy eradication or interdiction of drug convoys; they could not engage with Afghan warlords or separate them if they fought each other, and they could not protect NGOs, schools, government buildings, or major infrastructure projects. Neither could they help with UN voter registration or UN disarmament programs.

The Germans had the most bizarre list of caveats. Their troops could not operate after dark; Afghan soldiers could not travel on German helicopters; and an ambulance had to accompany every patrol, thereby making it impossible to conduct foot patrols in the mountains. The first camp the Germans set up in Kunduz was in a poppy field, but their officers pretended not to see it. Self-protection reached extraordinary proportions. When they built their headquarters at Mazar-e-Sharif airport to house fifteen hundred troops at a cost of $70 million, German engineers erected a military city that used seventy-five thousand tons of steel and three hundred thousand tons of concrete.

To Western and Afghan aid workers on the ground, these NATO troops acted like scared rabbits rather than professional soldiers. Aid workers cynically commented that the first ones into a dangerous region were the aid agencies, followed by the UN and other international organizations, while the last ones in were the heavily armed NATO soldiers, who were then disallowed from protecting any of the above. Even after forty thousand NATO troops were deployed around the country and a full-scale Taliban offensive had erupted, the NATO mandate continued to be the “maintenance of security” in the interests of “reconstruction and humanitarian efforts.”
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As Taliban leaders in Quetta spent the winter preparing for their spring 2006 offensive, the international community spent the winter negotiating a new Afghanistan Compact with the Afghan government. The Compact would commit international development funding for the next five years and would become the successor to the 2001 Bonn Agreement. Its most significant feature was setting mutually agreed deadlines and targets that would force Kabul and the international community to complete projects on time. While Karzai was deeply frustrated at the lack of aid going through government ministries, Western donors were equally frustrated at the corruption and nepotism within his government. The Compact took five months to negotiate between the government, the UN, the World Bank, and a large number of donor countries and agencies.

On January 31, 2006, seventy foreign ministers and heads of international aid agencies met in the palatial rooms of Lancaster House in London at a sumptuous event put on by the British government. The Afghan government launched its Interim National Development Strategy, which required $4.0 billion in funding every year for the next five years. At the meeting, donors pledged $10.5 billion in aid to Afghanistan over the next five years. The United States was the largest single donor, giving $1.1 billion, followed by Britain with $800 million. The donors and the Afghan government made a series of pledges to one another. While the international community promised to recognize “Afghan ownership” and “build lasting Afghan capacity,” Kabul promised to “combat corruption and ensure public transparency and accountability.” The donors promised to create an Afghan army, border security, and a police force by 2010, as well as to provide electricity to 65 percent of all households in urban areas.

To many Afghans, the Compact was just a list of more unfulfilled promises and more grandstanding by foreign dignitaries talking about basic Afghan needs that should have been provided for already. Kabul still had insufficient electricity or clean water. Yet such thoughts were far from the minds of the well-heeled diplomats who crowded into Lancaster House that day. Even further from their minds was the prospect of a Taliban offensive, which was to relegate the Compact to the history books. The Taliban and al Qaeda, after all, were flush with cash from the drug trade.

NATO troops began to deploy in the south, but the task was immediately fraught with difficulties. The south had been a war zone since 2003, yet NATO failed to articulate a counterinsurgency strategy. All three countries deploying in the south—Canada, Britain and the Netherlands, which had agreed to deploy to Uruzgan—knew they would have to fight but did not declare so, as they all faced continued political opposition at home. Much rested on Britain, which would command NATO forces in the south, deploy the largest number of troops (more than 5,700), and had pledged to curb opium production.

However, compared with its influential role in 2002—when Gen. John McColl had stood up the first ISAF force and when Tony Blair’s advice to Bush on Afghanistan was critical—Britain now found its political credibility hitting rock bottom. Blair had been the first foreign leader to visit Afghanistan in January 2002, but he did not visit again for another four years, and the issue seemed to have disappeared from his agenda. Instead, he followed the Americans so unquestioningly and blindly into Iraq that he lost his influence in the White House. The neocons now saw Blair as their poodle, someone who could easily be bullied and told what to do. Blair lost his ability to change Bush’s mind on anything, including policies for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Attempts by Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to prop up Colin Powell to take on the neocons were constantly undermined by Blair. “Not only did we fail ourselves to exert any recognizable influence over the conduct of US policy, we also reduced the influence of those we might have regarded as like-minded internationalists in Washington,” said the conservative politician Chris Patten. Former president Jimmy Carter bemoaned how Blair was too “compliant and subservient” to Bush, adding that he was “extremely disappointed by Tony Blair’s behavior.”
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The British were at a loss as to why Bush had ceded so much power to Cheney, who had a huge staff to deal with foreign policy and often overruled the State Department.
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In late 2005 in London, I was invited to brief British officers to give them a taste of what Helmand would be like. Although they were enthusiastic about their deployment, the officers were disturbed by Blair’s failure so far to give them a clear and concise mandate. They asked many questions. Why had Britain chosen the most volatile and drug-infested province in Afghanistan to send underresourced British troops? Why was the government still unclear as to what British troops would do there? What should be done about Pakistan’s support to the Taliban? And was their mandate to be reconstruction or counterinsurgency? Could they do both? Meanwhile, the British army was vastly overstretched and received only 2.5 percent of British GDP in 2006—the smallest proportion of GDP since 1930.
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None of these questions was answered by the government, even after the deployment had taken place. British officials admitted that Blair’s office was increasingly cut off from reality. There was infighting between the Ministry of Defense and the Foreign Office over the terms of the deployment. Like the Pentagon, Defense refused to allow its soldiers to get their hands dirty by doing drug control. It demanded heavy air support to protect the troops, while the Foreign Office and the Treasury wanted the operation done on the cheap. Blair just wanted the troops to do anything he asked and to stop asking questions. As London dithered on deciding the mandate, the troops’ deployment was delayed. Soldiers were trained, and then sat on their haunches in a state of limbo. British container ships packed with military equipment idled off Karachi port, waiting to know if they should dock or not. The start of the deployment was already proving to be massively demoralizing for the army.

Britain had urged Karzai to sack Sher Mohammed Akhunzada and Jan Mohammed Khan, the corrupt governors of Helmand and Uruzgan, as the price for its deployment. British intelligence officers were trying to put together a profile of Helmand province, where intelligence was virtually nonexistent, as U.S. satellite intelligence had never covered Helmand. The Americans promised the British that they would “handle” Musharraf and persuade him to stop the flood of Taliban recruits coming from Pakistan, but Cheney was to block any U.S. criticism of Musharraf.

When Britain’s defense secretary, John Reid, finally announced the details of the deployment on the eve of the London conference, there was no mention of possible fighting. Fifty-seven hundred British troops would be deployed in Helmand, at a cost of $1 billion over five years. Tanks, artillery, Harrier jets, and Apache helicopters would provide backup. The British would establish a PRT in Lashkargah, while their main base would be Camp Bastion, in the desert. Reid described the mission as obtusely as possible—denying terrorists “an ungoverned space.”
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After heavy criticism from the Conservative opposition, Reid described the mission more fully several weeks later: “Our aim is to extend the authority of President Karzai’s government, to protect those civilian agencies assisting them to build a democratic government and to enable security, stability and economic development throughout the country.”
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There was still no mention of fighting the Taliban or the drug mafias. In April 2006, Reid uttered words that would come to haunt the Blair government: “We would be perfectly happy to leave in three years and without firing one shot,” he said. Such statements only increased British public cynicism and opposition to the deployment, as the media rightly commented that the government was lying through its teeth.
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In Canada the newly elected conservative prime minister Stephen Harper took a different tack. He tried to reassure the public that Afghanistan could not become another Iraq, but he did not diminish the dangers of the mission: “Unless we control the security situation in countries like Afghanistan we will see our own security diminished,” he said while visiting Canadian troops in Kandahar.
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The Canadians had received an early setback when Glyn Berry, a senior Canadian diplomat who headed the Kandahar PRT, was killed by a suicide bomber on January 15, 2006. By March, Canada had suffered the heaviest casualties in the south, with ten soldiers killed and thirty-three wounded. In May, when the Canadian parliament voted to extend its Afghan mission by another two years, Harper only narrowly won the vote, by 149 to 145. On the same day, the first Canadian female soldier to die in combat was killed near Kandahar. By May, over half of all Canadians opposed the deployment of Canadian troops.
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The Dutch were committed to sending twelve hundred troops to Uruzgan—a place whose name most Dutch could neither spell nor pronounce. Dutch generals were extremely wary of any foreign deployment, as in 1995 some four hundred lightly armed Dutch troops deployed in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica were forced to stand by helplessly as the Serbs massacred eight thousand Muslim men and boys. Dutch prime minister Peter Balkenende governed with a coalition that held only a slim majority in parliament. He decided to have an open parliamentary debate on the deployment, so those opposing it could air their views—something that Blair had refused to allow. In the meantime, Balkenende put the Dutch deployment on hold, angering the British and Canadians. In the end, 131 out of 150 members of the Dutch parliament backed the deployment, showing that transparency was a better political strategy than obscuring the truth. Within a few weeks the first Dutch troops arrived in Uruzgan.

The drama in European capitals was fully reported on the Pushtu and Dari language services of the BBC and Voice of America and played up by the Taliban, who told their fighters that NATO was weak, poorly armed, and demoralized as compared with the Americans. With advice from their supporters in the Pakistani military, the Taliban would exploit the time gap and power vacuum—as U.S. forces withdrew from Kandahar and Canadian and British forces arrived—to attack NATO forces. The Taliban’s strategic aim was to further weaken the resolve of European countries in sending troops to Afghanistan. Copying tactics being used by Iraqi insurgents, the Taliban stepped up suicide attacks and used larger mines and roadside bombs against NATO and Afghan security forces while hiding behind the civilian population.

NATO officers described to me their intelligence about the Taliban in the south as “appalling.” The British discovered that between 2002 and 2005 the United States had not bothered to monitor Taliban activity in four provinces in the south or across the border in Quetta. One U.S. general in Kabul admitted to me that NATO would pay the price for the U.S. military’s lack of a “lookdown satellite capability” in the south because the Iraq war had taken up so many resources and because the Pentagon had ignored the south, believing there to be no al Qaeda leaders there.

In the winter of 2005/2006 NATO intelligence estimated that Mullah Dadullah, the overall Taliban commander in the south, had just three hundred men under him and that the Taliban’s total manpower was no more than two thousand. The first realization as to how wrong these estimates were occurred in the first week of February, when Dadullah threw three hundred Taliban into a bid to capture Sangin, a district headquarters in Helmand with important supply lines to Pakistan. The Taliban lost forty men but battled for three days before NATO air strikes forced them to retreat. Fearing a Taliban offensive just before British troops arrived, U.S. forces launched a counteroffensive called Operation Mountain Thrust. The British had planned to secure Lashkargah, acclimatize their troops, build up intelligence, and initiate development projects. Instead they were immediately sucked into battle.

The Taliban countered by launching their own offensive. Over several days, starting on May 18, the Taliban launched attacks in four provinces, involving up to one thousand fighters, storming towns just a twenty-minute drive from Kandahar city. Dadullah claimed he had control of twenty districts in the south and twelve thousand Taliban under arms. It was the worst violence since 2001, and more than three hundred Afghans were killed. British soldiers occupied small towns in Helmand and were forced to hold them to prevent their falling back into the hands of the Taliban, even though they were undermanned, their logistics chain was not yet set up, and helicopters had not arrived. In the summer desert heat of 50° Celsius (122° Fahrenheit) British troops were stuck inside fortified “platoon houses,” or “hellholes,” for up to forty days at a stretch, holding off the Taliban.