Descent Into Chaos (67 page)

On July 30 General Richards took over command of the merged NATO and U.S. forces. It was the first time that a non-American officer had commanded American troops in battle since the Korean War. All year, NATO had insisted that it would conduct the war differently from the Americans. There would be less “kicking down of doors,” fewer civilian casualties, and captured Taliban would be treated as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. However, NATO’s intentions remained at odds with its primary aim of protecting its own forces, which entailed substituting manpower for firepower. Without adequate armor, artillery, or helicopters, NATO forces continued to depend on air strikes to support ground troops in combat.

In the last six months of 2006—from June to December—there were a staggering 2,100 air strikes, compared with just 88 air strikes in Iraq over the same period, and more than were expended in the first four years of the war in Afghanistan.
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In addition, U.S. Special Forces operating under the Coalition also used excessive air power, and their secret maneuvers were largely unaccountable to NATO or the Kabul regime. Afghan civilian casualties rose dramatically and became a major embarrassment for Karzai.

The Taliban became expert at claiming civilian casualties after every battle. They also began to use more suicide bombers to sow insecurity and fear. This was something completely new for the Afghan people. There had not been a single suicide attack during the Afghan war against the Soviets. The first known suicide attack was in 1992, when a Saudi-backed warlord, Maulvi Jamil-ur Rehman, was killed in Kunar province. In 2001, Ahmad Shah Masud was killed by two al Qaeda suicide bombers. The Taliban mounted only six suicide attacks in 2004, and twenty-one in 2005. Then, in 2006, there were a staggering 141 suicide attacks, causing 1,166 casualties, and the following year 137 attacks took place, raising casualty numbers by 50 percent, to 1,730.

Many of the initial suicide bombers were orphans and mentally unstable teenagers from the asylums and orphanages in Pakistan. Mullah Dadullah correctly predicted that their sacrifice would create a wave that would enable him to recruit more capable bombers from the madrassas and Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. The Taliban glorified suicide bombers, calling them “Mullah Omar’s missiles” and “our atomic bombs.”
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Dadullah warned that “an increase in the number of foreign troops in Afghanistan will make it easier to inflict losses on them.”
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By the spring of 2006, suicide bombers were blowing themselves up outside the gates of the British PRT in Lashkargah and targeting Canadian convoys in the middle of Kandahar city.

Even Kabul was not immune. In one brazen attack on September 8, 2006, a suicide bomber hit a U.S. convoy just outside the American embassy in Kabul, killing sixteen Afghans and two U.S. guards. The resulting crackdown led to the arrests of a suicide bomber network in the city, which revealed to interrogators how extremist groups in Pakistan supplied the group with explosives. Several captured Afghan and Pakistani suicide bombers recounted how they were recruited in Pakistani madrassas, then moved to safe houses in Quetta and Chaman, where they were trained. Taliban couriers then took them into Afghanistan, where they were lodged at safe houses and provided with explosives and cars.

The links to Pakistan were unmistakable. “Every single bomber we arrest is linked to Pakistan in some way. The training, provisions, explosives, technical equipment, are all being manufactured in Pakistan, and the CIA knows this,” said Amrullah Saleh, the head of Afghan intelligence. During the summer of 2006 seventeen would-be suicide bombers who had been arrested in Kabul were interrogated by the CIA and NATO about their recruitment and training in Pakistan.
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There was also a huge increase in the Taliban’s use of IEDs, which rose from 530 in 2005 to 1,297 in 2006, a strategy that took NATO totally by surprise.

Many of these new tactics were a result of a new wave of foreign fighters who were flowing back to Pakistan and Afghanistan for the first time since 2002. Fighters from Central Asia, western China, and Turkey and Arabs from a multitude of countries came as a result of al Qaeda’s call to help the Taliban. They worked in Pakistan’s FATA region, helping train a new generation of Taliban and Pakistani extremists in the arts of bomb making and fund-raising and also as sub-commanders in Afghanistan, honing the Taliban on new tactics. The Arabs in the camps used their international contacts to encourage more Muslim militants living in Europe to travel to Pakistan and Afghanistan for training. These included Muslims from Britain, France, Germany, and Scandinavia. In 2007, many of these militants were to fight alongside the Pakistani Taliban as they extended their writ across the North-West Frontier Province. Al Qaeda was reconstituting itself in ways that were unimaginable after its initial rout in Afghanistan.

In June, U.S., NATO, and Afghan intelligence compiled their information in a secret report that detailed how the Taliban movement was constituted. The report was discussed at a meeting of Western countries and the Afghan government on July 9, with Karzai in the chair.
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It surmised that the Taliban comprised four distinct elements: hard-core extremist leaders linked to al Qaeda, fighters recruited in Pakistan, unemployed youth, and disaffected tribes. The hard-core leaders had to be isolated, and no compromise could be shown to them. At least four of the top ten Taliban leaders were based in Pakistan. Fighters recruited primarily from the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan were “heavily indoctrinated” and “trained within Pakistan in combat, communications, IEDs and suicide operations.” The report described how the “elder fighters with experience are producing a steady throughput of fighters for the insurgency.” The last two categories of Taliban could be won over with jobs, education, and development projects, as they were not heavily indoctrinated but were “a result of the insurgency, not the cause of the insurgency.” The report described Pakistan’s role in the most unflattering light of any intelligence report so far:

As the report circulated to NATO capitals it became impossible for European governments to ignore Pakistan’s duplicity. Cabinet ministers of two NATO member governments told me that their ignorance about the ISI was compounded by Washington, particularly the State Department, which had assured them that the United States would deal with the Pakistanis. The Bush administration had not only failed to do so but had continued to heap praise on Musharraf. The ISI’s refusal to disrupt the Taliban’s command and control in Quetta now posed a major threat to NATO’s entire effort in southern Afghanistan. The UN presented an equally tough report to the Security Council in September. Tom Koenigs, a seasoned German diplomat and now head of UNAMA in Kabul, painted a grim picture of the worsening insurgency.
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He described how five Taliban command centers were operating “with widespread use of safe havens outside the country.” The five were the Taliban northern command, active in Afghanistan’s northeastern provinces, a Taliban eastern and southern command, and separate fronts established by two Taliban allies, Gulbuddin Hikmetyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani.
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A stream of foreign and defense ministers from NATO member states visited Washington to complain to Rice and Rumsfeld about ISI’s role and then traveled to Islamabad to privately admonish Musharraf, who remained in total denial. In ever-frequent displays of pique, Pakistani foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri lost his temper when the criticism became too strident. Pakistani officials complained that because the United States and NATO were losing the war in Afghanistan they were making Pakistan the scapegoat, just as the United States was doing with Iran in relation to its failures in Iraq. There was certainly truth to this, but it did not excuse the ISI’s failure to rein in the Taliban.

Musharraf’s schizophrenic behavior toward Karzai only heightened international concern about Pakistan’s president. On July 20, after denying there were any Taliban in Pakistan and accusing Karzai of being controlled by India, Musharraf suddenly admitted in a TV speech that there were Taliban in Pakistan, although their center was in Afghanistan and not Pakistan. Then, on September 6, just before he visited Washington and three days after signing the agreement with the Pakistani Taliban in North Waziristan, Musharraf unexpectedly visited Kabul, where he again admitted that “there are al Qaeda and Taliban in both Afghanistan and in Pakistan. ” He told Afghan parliamentarians that “the best way to fight this common enemy is to join hands, trust each other and form a common strategy.”
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The Afghan leadership hoped this was a genuine change of heart, but Musharraf’s aim was merely to deflect any American criticism before he arrived in Washington. A few days later, in Brussels, he contradicted himself again by glorifying the Taliban, saying they were Pashtuns with roots in the people who had always resisted foreign forces, and in Washington he again attacked Karzai for his ignorance and kowtowing to the Indians.

The White House did not want to understand how the Taliban were destabilizing Afghanistan and Pakistan. U.S. leaders remained unwilling to rattle Musharraf, fearing a backlash from the Pakistan military. Senior U.S. diplomats later told me that Bush refused to push Musharraf on the Taliban issue when Bush had visited Islamabad in March, on his way back from a trip to India. “Nobody gave the Taliban much importance then,” said a senior U.S. official. “To hunt the Taliban we would have to take away focus on al Qaeda, and that was not possible because al Qaeda posed the main threat to the U.S.”
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In June, Condi Rice had briefly raised the issue of the Taliban for the first time when she visited Islamabad, but Musharraf denied any Taliban presence in Pakistan.

Bush declined to raise the issue of the Taliban sanctuary in Quetta when he hosted a tense tripartite dinner for Musharraf and Karzai at the White House on September 28. Karzai told me he had posed the issue, much to the chagrin of Musharraf, but that Bush had remained silent. “I raised in a very clear way the question of terrorist sanctuaries and that no country should rely on extremism as an instrument of policy,” Karzai said.

However, senior U.S. military officers had become enormously frustrated with the cover-up that Bush and Cheney were providing Musharraf, and they now took the initiative in becoming more outspoken. At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on September 21, Gen. James Jones, who was due to retire as NATO supreme commander, testified for the first time that the Taliban headquarters were based in Quetta.
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After the Democrats won congressional elections in November 2006, the new Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, accused Pakistan of failing to deal with the Taliban. Congress passed a resolution saying it would stop all military aid to Pakistan if it did not contain the Taliban. For the first time, the legislation mentioned Quetta by name, calling on Bush to certify that “the Government of Pakistan is making all possible efforts to prevent the Taliban from operating in areas under its sovereign control, including in the cities of Quetta and Chaman and in the North-West Frontier Province and Federally Administered Tribal Areas.”
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After Bush replaced Rumsfeld, the new defense secretary, Robert Gates, encouraged his generals to be frank in their public assessments about the ISI’s role. The new openness by Gates forced the State Department— whose dour assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, Richard Boucher, had long resisted any criticism of Musharraf—finally to admit that the Taliban were using regions of Pakistan “for sanctuary and for command and control and for regrouping and supply.”
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Several NATO countries added their voices, publicly calling on Pakistan to shut down Taliban operations on its soil.
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The unmistakable international pressure on Pakistan led to some changes in the winter of 2006/2007. The Pakistanis now appeared to be providing better intelligence about the movement of at least some Taliban leaders. On December 19, a U.S. drone fired a missile on a car in Helmand, killing Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Usmani, the number two to Mullah Omar in the Taliban
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Two other Taliban commanders were killed along with him. His car had been tracked from Quetta by a British RAF plane working alongside the U.S. Delta Force. The ISI had helped track him down in Quetta, forcing him to flee into Helmand.

The military regime also feared a cutback in U.S. aid from the new and very hostile Democratic-controlled Congress. Between 2002 and 2006 Pakistan had received $10.0 billion in U.S. aid, of which more than half—$5.5 billion—the Pakistan army received directly as Coalition Support Funds, or compensation for helping U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. That came to an average of $80 to $100 million a month for services rendered. Congress now determined that the army had been overbilling the United States, for which “there is no formal auditing mechanism to verify costs apart from local U.S. embassies and military officials vouching for the accuracy of the submitted bills.”
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Moreover, the army did not want to endanger its global shopping spree, in which it was buying new weapons systems at a cost of $8.4 billion. However, as we see in the next chapter, the main shift in the military’s thinking came as a result of the emergence of the Pakistan Taliban in the tribal areas and the growing spate of terrorist violence, with suicide attacks launched against the army, police, and politicians.