Descent Into Chaos (78 page)

1
James Dobbins et al.,
America’s Role in Nation Building: From Germany to Iraq,
Washington, D.C., RAND, 2003.

2
These figures were quoted by James Dobbins in
The Washington Post.
Colum Lynch, “Peacekeping Grows, Strains UN,”
The Washington Post,
September 17, 2006.

3
Kofi Annan, “The Secretary General’s Message on the International Day of UN Peacekeepers,” United Nations, New York, May 29, 2006.

4
These thoughts were helped greatly by Madeleine Albright, “Bridges, Bombs or Bluster,”
Foreign Affairs,
September-October 2003.

5
Council on Foreign Relations, “In the Wake of War: Improving US Post-Conflict Capabilities,” report of an independent task force, July 2005.

6
“Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication,” Department of Defense, Washington, D.C., September 2004.

7
David Rohde and Carlotta Gall, “Delays Hurting US Rebuilding in Afghanistan,”
The New York Times,
November 2, 2005.

8
Statement by Alonzo Fulgham, see Agence France-Presse, “Afghan Unrest Kills 100 USAID Staff in Three Years,” Kabul, July 3, 2006.

9
Interview with Robert Finn, former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Yale University, New Haven, Conn., November 22, 2005.

10
Notes taken in meeting with USAID officials in Washington, D.C., January 24, 2002.

11
Personal communication by USAID staffer, March 2002.

12
Susan Milligan, “Together but Worlds Apart,”
The Boston Globe,
October 10, 2006.

13
Stephen Kinzer,
Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq,
New York: Times Books, 2006.

14
Francis Fukuyama,
State Building, Governance and World Order in the Twenty-first Century,
London: Profile Books, 2004.

15
Karzai said, “We have one fear that without a full partnership with the international community, Afghanistan may falter again. In an environment of inadequate security, fragmented governance, the nonintegration of Afghan returnees, Afghanistan could remain a source of instability to the world and the region. . . . It is an almost unprecedented situation where an administration has no immediate source of revenue.” Text of speech by Hamid Karzai at Tokyo, January 22, 2002.

16
The pledges made at Tokyo were varied. The United States gave only a measly $296 million for 2002; the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank each gave $ 500 million for 2.5 years, as did Japan; the EU gave $177 million for 2002; Iran, $580 million over 5 years; China, $100 million for 2002; Saudi Arabia, $220 million for 3 years; Britain, $288 million for 5 years; and India and Pakistan, $100 million each for 5 years. Reuters, “Afghan Aid Pledges Made,” Tokyo, January 22, 2002.

17
The name was changed to the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund on July 22, 2002, at another donors conference in Geneva. It was managed jointly by the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, the UN Development Programme, the Afghan government, and the Islamic Development Bank.

18
The UN Development Programme set up the Law and Order Trust Fund in order to encourage donors to contribute to helping rebuild the police.

19
Arthur Hilton, “Strategies for Afghanistan’s Immediate Recovery,” Council on Foreign Relations, July 2002. Hilton was later killed in Baghdad. Interview with Finn, Yale University, November 22, 2005.

20
Ahmed Rashid, “Afghan Finance Minister Is in a Hurry,”
The Wall Street Journal,
March 17, 2002.

21
Toby Proston, “The Battle to Rebuild Afghanistan,” BBC, April 10, 2006.

22
See Barnett Rubin, Humayun Hamidzada, and Abby Stoddard, “Through the Fog of Peace Building: Evaluating the Reconstruction of Afghanistan,” Center on International Cooperation, New York University, March 2003. The speech at the UN was delivered by Dr. Mukesh Kapila, who worked for the UN Assistance Mission for Afghanistan and Britain’s Department for International Development.

23
Carl Robichaud, “Remember Afghanistan: A Glass Half Full on the Titanic,”
World Policy Journal,
spring 2006.

24
Elizabeth Rubin, “Taking the Fight to the Taliban,”
The New York Times Magazine,
October 29, 2006.

25
See Ahmed Rashid, “Massive Literacy Campaign Starts in Afghanistan,”
The Nation,
March 17, 2002.

26
Interview with Robert Finn, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., November 22, 2005.

27
Hearing by Peter Tomsen, former U.S. special envoy and ambassador to Afghanistan, 1989-1992, House Committee on International Relations, June 19, 2003.

28
David Rohde, “Afghan Symbol for Change Becomes a Symbol of Failure,”
The New York Times,
September 5, 2006.

29
The Asian Development Bank had first offered to provide a loan of $150 million to the government to build the road, but Ghani had refused and demanded a grant.

30
Ahmed Rashid, “Karzai Threatens to Resign,”
The Daily Telegraph,
May 22, 2003.

31
“With both his command of details and American largesse, the Afghan-born envoy has created an alternative seat of power since his arrival,” wrote Amy Waldman in “In Afghanistan, US Envoy Sits in Seat of Power,”
The New York Times,
April 17, 2004.

32
See Jon Lee Anderson, “American Viceroy,”
The New Yorker,
December 19, 2005. Khalilzad’s mother died in November 2005 while he was ambassador in Baghdad. She had joined him in the United States during the 1980s but had returned to Kabul in 2004. Khalilzad is married to Cheryl Benard, an Austrian-born writer and scholar. They have two adult sons.

33
Just before 9/11, on April 14, 2000, Khalilzad and I spoke at a conference at Meridian House in Washington, D.C., where he advocated the need for an alternative emerging in Afghanistan that would replace the Taliban.

34
The paper, called “US Policy in Afghanistan: Challenges and Solutions,” published by the Afghanistan Foundation in July 1999, was cowritten by Zalmay Khalilzad, Daniel Byman, Elie Krakowski, and Don Ritter. Khalilzad suggested that “the US should offer to recognize and work with the Taliban if it agrees to a ceasefire [with the Northern Alliance] and meets a set of conditions regarding human rights, . . . terrorism and narcotics and the formation of a more genuinely representative government.” His suggestion that Washington could make the Taliban “more responsible” by working with them was misread by many, who saw it as pro-Taliban. In fact, he concluded that the Taliban would never agree to U.S. conditions, so the U.S. had no choice but to try to weaken them.

35
In September 2003, Congress was asked to provide an additional $1.2 billion for Afghanistan. The breakdown was $37.0 million for voter registration, $20.0 million to fund technical experts, $105.0 million for the Kabul-Kandahar highway, $40.0 million to build 275 schools and train 10,000 teachers, $28.0 million to build 150 clinics, and $45.0 million to complete land registry and build market centers. The remaining money was for training the ANA and the police. There was still no money allocated for agriculture.

36
See Ahmed Rashid, “US Policy, Afghanistan Is Waiting for This,”
Far Eastern Economic Review,
July 31, 2003. See also Elaine Grossman, “Bush Administration Readies New Security, Aid Package for Afghanistan,”
Inside the Pentagon
3 (July 2003).

37
Carlotta Gall and David Rohde, “Delays Hurting US Rebuilding in Afghanistan,”
The New York Times,
November 7, 2005. Louis Berger said that progress had been slowed by various requirements. The number of buildings it was asked to renovate or construct eventually rose to one thousand, and Berger did not have the staff, engineers, or monitoring experience to complete all this work. Another company, Brown and Root, monopolized the servicing of the major U.S. military camps in the country. In June 2002, Brown and Root won a $22.0 million contract to run support services at the K2 base in Uzbekistan. In November 2002, it won another $42.5 million contract to support the military bases at Bagram and Kandahar.

38
Joe Stephens and David Ottaway, “A Rebuilding Plan Full of Cracks,”
The Washington Post,
November 20, 2005. A former head of USAID’s Afghan operation was reported in a memo as saying that the numbers of schools and clinics to be built “were not determined through careful analysis . . . instead, they were based on back of the envelope calculations outside USAID.”

39
Margaret Cooker, “US Aid to Afghanistan Falls Short,” Cox News Service, November 19, 2005. Natsios was to leave USAID in January 2006 after five years as its head, calling his former agency “constipated.” However, he still refused to criticize the neocons, whose policies had by now failed USAID in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Celia Dugger, “Planning to Fight Poverty Outside the System,”
The New York Times,
January 14, 2006.

40
David Rohde and Carlotta Gall, “Delays Hurting US Rebuilding in Afghanistan,”
The New York Times,
November 2, 2005.

41
Ahmed Rashid, “The Great Trade Game,”
Far Eastern Economic Review,
January 23, 2003.

42
The shortest routes from Central Asia to the Gulf via Pakistan were Dushanbe-Kabul -Karachi, 1,270 miles; Tashkent-Kabul-Karachi, 1,706 miles; and Ashgabat-Kabul -Karachi, 1,761 miles. The shortest routes via Iran were slightly longer, with Dushanbe-Herat-Bandar Abbas, 1,769 miles; Tashkent-Herat-Bandar Abbas, 1,984 miles; and Ashgabat-Herat-Bandar Abbas, 1,463 miles. Gawadar would shorten the route via Pakistan considerably.

43
Letter from U.S. Government Accountability Office report to Congress, “Afghan Reconstruction, Deteriorating Security and Limited Resources Impeding Progress,” June 2004.

44
Anne Carlin, “Rush to Engagement in Afghanistan: The IFI’s Post-conflict Agenda,” World Bank, December 2003.

45
“US Made Some Decisions, Says Rice,” Reuters,
Dawn,
January 19, 2005.

46
In fiscal year 2001-2002 (from October 1, 2001, to September 30, 2002), the United States spent a total of $ 928.0 million in Afghanistan; in fiscal year 2002-2003, a total of $ 926.0 million; and in fiscal year 2003-2004, a total of $1.6 billion. In 2006, the United States spent $3.2 billion, of which more than half went toward building up the army and police. The United States planned to spend $10.0 billion in 2007, of which 80 percent would go to the Afghan National Army, and $4.7 billion in 2008.

47
In 2004-2005, U.S. aid to developing countries was just $15.6 billion—with nearly one third going to Israel and Egypt. In comparison, the defense budget was $450.0 billion. The United States contributes just 0.14 percent of its total income as aid; Britain gives 0.34 percent and Norway, 0.92 percent.

1
In Britain, fifty-six parliamentarians presented a petition to the government demanding an expansion of ISAF.

2
The quotes come from Ahmed Rashid, “US Embarks on New Afghan Strategy,”
The Daily Telegraph,
December 23, 2002, and “America’s New Strategy,”
Far Eastern Economic Review,
December 12, 2002. I spoke with General McNeill several times, but the longest discussion about PRTs was at Bagram, on December 13, 2002. The team of outside experts, including Barnett Rubin and myself, discussed the idea of regional teams intensively with UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, U.S. commander Gen. Dan McNeill, and Francesc Vendrell, the European Union envoy. There were also several concept papers put out by the UN.

3
The document was called “Principles Guiding PRT Working Relations with UNAMA, NGOs and Local Government,” March 2003.

4
Reuters, “Afghanistan Being Stabilized, Says Rumsfeld,” Kabul, May 1, 2003. See also David Rohde and David Sanger, “How the Good War in Afghanistan Went Bad,”
The New York Times,
August 12, 2007.

5
Richard Clarke,
Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror,
New York: Free Press, 2004.

6
In 2005 General Eikenberry was to return to Kabul as the commander of all U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

7
Interview with Gen. John McColl, Kabul, March 7, 2002.

8
I saw several reports and letters exchanged between the UN, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the U.S. embassy in Kabul.

9
United Nations document, “Creating the New Afghan National Armed Forces,” June 2002.

10
Brahimi spoke to me in Kabul. He made these same points in his address to the UN Security Council on July 19, 2002, in New York.

11
William Maley,
Rescuing Afghanistan,
London: Hurst and Co., 2006.

12
See Michael Bhatia, Kevin Lanigan, and Philip Wilkinson, “Minimal Investments, Minimal Results: The Failure of Security Policy in Afghanistan,” Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, Kabul, June 2004.

13
Judy Dempsey, “Germany Assailed for Training Afghan Police Poorly,”
International Herald Tribune,
November 15, 2006.

14
For the best discussion on U.S. policy related to the police, see Vance Serchuk, “Cop Out: Why Afghanistan Has No Police,” American Enterprise Institute, July 25, 2006.

15
International Crisis Group, “Reforming Afghan Police,” Brussels, August 30, 2007.

16
Interview with Chris Alexander, Kabul, November 2006.

17
Associated Press, “Unpopularity of Karzai Government Threatens Afghanistan War Effort, Holbrooke Warns,” Brussels, April 28, 2007.

18
Confidential UN report to the UN secretary-general, Kabul, March 6, 2002.

19
The British Foreign Office-organized conference was held at Wilton Park, England, in October 2002.

20
In September the State Department’s diplomatic security service took over Karzai’s protection, and a few weeks later they arranged for the task to be taken over by DynCorp.

21
Interview with Gen. Mohammed Fahim, Kabul, December 14, 2002. See Ahmed Rashid, “Karzai Risks All to Confront the Militia Generals,”
The Daily Telegraph,
December 24, 2002.

22
I was told these details by UN and U.S. officials. See also
Daily Times,
“NA Printed Themselves a Fortune,” reprinted from
The New York Times,
May 3, 2002.

23
United Nations document, Report by Lakhdar Brahimi to the UN Security Council, January 15, 2003.

24
Report of the high-level panel set up by UN secretary-general, “Threats, Challenges and Change,” December 2004.

25
Barnett Rubin and Ahmed Rashid, "S.O.S. from Afghanistan,”
The Wall Street Journal,
May 29, 2003.

26
David Rohde, “Afghan Symbol for Change Becomes a Symbol of Failure,”
The New York Times,
September 5, 2006.

27
Ahmed Rashid, “Warlord Adds to Woes of Coalition,”
The Daily Telegraph,
July 4, 2003.

28
“Non-Paper: Centrist, Ethnic and Fundamentalist Politics in Afghanistan,” paper circulated to senior U.S. officials in Washington and received by me on May 12, 2003.

29
Members of the Constitutional Commission of Afghanistan, appointed April 24, 2003, and their ethnic origins: Chair and deputy, Neyamatullah Shahrani (head of commission) , Uzbek; Abdul Salam Azimi (deputy), Pashtun. Members: Mohammad Musa Maroofi, Pashtun; Mohammad Musa Ashari, Tajik; Dr. Rahim Shirzoi, Pashtun; Mohammad Sarwar Danish, Hazara; Dr. Abdulhai Elahi, Tajik; Mohammad Ashraf Rasooli, Tajik; Abdul Haq Wala, Tajik; Abdul Aziz, Pashtun; Dr. Mohammad Tahir Borgai, Pashtun; Dr. Mohammad Yaqub Wahidi, Uzbek; Shamsuddin Khan, Tajik; Dr. Mohammad Alam Eshaqzai, Pashtun; Judge Mohammad Amin Wiqad, Pashtun; Eng. Mohammad Akram, Tajik; Nadir Shah Nekiyar, Pashtun; Likraj, Hindu; Mrs. Parwin Momand, Pashtun; Mohammad Amin Ahmadi, Hazara; Mrs. Fatima Gilani, Arab; Sulaiman Baloch, Baloch; Mrs. Shukria Barikzai, Pashtun; Mrs. Sidiqa Balkhi, Hazara; Mrs. Amina Afzali, Tajik; Mohammad Sidiq Patman, Pashtun; Abdulhai Khoorasani, Tajik; Mrs. Parwin Ali Majrooh. The following were of unknown ethnic origin: Mir Mohammad Afzal, Prof. Mohammad Hashim Kamali, Eng. Merajuddin, Mrs. Fatima Mashaal, Eng. Dawoud Musa, Nadir Ali Mahdawi, Prof. Tahir Hashimi. Three additional members’ names are not available.

30
Ahmed Rashid, “A Strong Constitution,”
Far Eastern Economic Review,
August 14, 2003.

31
The others were the 1931 Constitution issued by King Nadir Shah, the 1964 Constitution by King Zahir Shah, the 1977 republican constitution by President Daud, and a subsequent communist constitution, in 1987. Zahir Shah had set up a seven-member commission that spent a year deliberating the draft constitution, which was ratified on September 9, 1964, after just nine days of discussion by a 455-person Loya Jirga. See International Crisis Group, “Afghanistan’s Flawed Constitutional Process,” June 12, 2003.

32
Kofi Annan address to the UN Security Council, e-mail of speech received from the UN, December 8, 2003.

33
The four candidates were Dr. Ranjbar from Kabul, a former communist, who got 29 votes; Azizullah Wasifi, a monarchist, who received 43 votes; Hafiz Mansur, a firebrand from the Jamiat-e-Islami and close to Burhanuddin Rabbani; and General Fahim, who had headed Afghan state TV after the liberation of Kabul in December 2001 and received 154 votes; and Sibghatullah Mujaddedi, who received 252 votes.

34
I was present for much of the CLJ, both inside the main tent for several days listening to the debate and outside meeting foreign diplomats and soldiers. Ahmed Rashid, “Let’s Make a Democracy,”
Far Eastern Economic Review,
December 25, 2003.

35
Human Rights Watch, “Blood-Stained Hands: Past Atrocities in Kabul and Afghanistan’s Legacy of Impunity,” New York, July 7, 2005. Karzai refused to question Sayyaf about the brutal allegations made about him in this document.

36
Human Rights Watch, “Killing You Is a Very Easy Thing for Us: Human Rights Abuses in Southeast Afghanistan,” July 2003. See also Ahmed Rashid, “The Mess in Afghanistan, ”
New York Review of Books,
February 12, 2004: “In Paghman district, the district’s governor and the local police are under Sayyaf’s command. One of the most powerful commanders in the Kabul region, Shir Alam, is also one of Sayyaf’s subordinates and controls most military checkpoints in Paghman. Zalmay Tofan, a commander of the Kabul Liwa, a large military base in Kabul province, is loyal to Sayyaf and close to Defense Minister Fahim. Mullah Taj Mohammad, the governor of Kabul province, is also a subordinate of Sayyaf.”

37
Gary Schroen,
First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan,
New York: Ballantine Books, 2005.

38
President Hamid Karzai’s closing speech to the CLJ, Kabul, January 4, 2004. Karzai also spoke out against ethnicity: “Our vision for Afghanistan is of a country where people relate to each other through reason and shared ideas, convictions and behavior, not through ethnic bonds, because this is not the way of building nations. I never want— neither do you—I am sure that a person who belongs to the majority ethnic group necessarily becomes the president, and another belonging to the second largest ethnic group becomes the vice president, leaving the leftovers to the smaller ethnic groups. I do not want such an Afghanistan.”

39
Speech by Lakhdar Brahimi at the closing of the CLJ, Kabul, January 4, 2004. Karzai tried to prevent Brahimi from leaving: “I had told Mr. Brahimi that I would not let him leave Afghanistan, and that the Loya Jirga will not allow him to leave. We are not happy about his departure. He has been a real friend of Afghanistan. He has shown real feelings and shed tears for this country. We pray for him.” Brahimi answered, “The president and many of you are telling me that I shouldn’t leave. But I have a boss, a kind of central government in New York, and he has given me orders to leave. If I don’t, then I will be called a warlord for refusing the instructions of the central government. I am sure that you don’t want me to be called a warlord . . . I will leave, but my heart will stay here and my prayers will be with you and my support is yours as long as I live.”

40
I am grateful for the use of several internal UN documents for this analysis. Barnett Rubin, private note for the UN, “A Brief Look at the Final Negotiations on the Constitution of Afghanistan,” Kabul, January 4, 2004. Also “Political Analysis of CLJ Drafted on Behalf of Lakhdar Brahimi,” an internal UN document, Kabul, January 4, 2004. I also saw daily UN reports on the progress of the various CLJ committees. The European Union also shared their reports with me. However, the best publicly available analysis of the CLJ is Barnett Rubin, “Crafting a Constitution for Afghanistan,”
Journal of Democracy,
July 2004.