In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (27 page)

As the situation began to destabilize, the federal government grew more concerned. In 2006, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked Marin Strmecki to go to Afghanistan and assess the state of governance and the insurgency. Rumsfeld sent one of his “snowflakes” arguing that part of the Taliban’s success in Afghanistan was due to poor governance in the south, so he needed an assessment of Afghan governance and an analysis of possible solutions. Strmecki spent two weeks in Afghanistan, where he interviewed Afghan, U.S., NATO, and other allied government officials about the deteriorating security environment. He confirmed that one of the primary drivers was poor governance, particularly in southern Afghanistan, that created a power vacuum into which insurgents could move. He also reported that the region was controlled by corrupt or ineffective governors and district administrators, and patrolled by corrupt and incompetent police. He concluded that the Afghan government, in close cooperation with the international community, should systematically assess the capability of these officials province by province and district by district. It should replace ineffective or corrupt officials and appoint individuals who could win the support and confidence of local communities.
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But little of Strmecki’s assessment was ever implemented. No senior U.S. government official took decisive action, and President Karzai did not appear to see governance as an acute concern—or, at the very least, he was unwilling to take the risks involved with removing corrupt or incompetent officials.

These challenges not only had a debilitating impact on stabilization efforts but also strengthened the hand of insurgents. The absence of governance in rural areas and the lack of progress in key services—
especially employment, electricity, and water—caused growing frustration among the Afghan population. The Taliban was quick to use U.S. and Afghan failures in its recruitment propaganda, which created a band of “swing villages” in eastern, southern, and western Afghanistan, an area dominated by Pashtuns. Given sustained security and assistance, villages across this swath of territory might have sided with the Afghan government, but without that help, it moved toward the insurgents. Zabol Province was a good example. “The economy is the key solution,” noted Dalbar Ayman, the governor of Zabol. “If it is good, there will be no Taliban. But now, I cannot even support my brothers in Zabol with a piece of bread.”
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Across greater parts of the south, local groups began to support the Taliban. An internal United Nations study examined the Musa Qala area of Helmand, a Taliban stronghold: “Government capacity is virtually non-existent in most areas of Helmand. The limited level of government activity in Musa Qala reflects a similar level across the province.” It added that “the population and the Shura clearly want more assistance,” and that this was a significant factor fueling the insurgency.
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Michael Semple, the deputy European Union Special Representative for Afghanistan, told me after returning from a trip to the south: “The local population in these areas are revolting against the government. The Taliban move into areas where there is already unhappiness with the government’s performance, send night letters, and intimidate the population.” This was, he said, a standard “bed and breakfast guide” to Taliban operations. “Often, there is no government response.”
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The Taliban strategy was straightforward. They approached local tribes and commanders at the village and district levels. Sometimes they were well received because of common tribal affinities or, especially, because locals had given up on the Afghan government. Where they weren’t well received, they resorted to brutal tactics and intimidation. They also targeted weak points, such as undermanned district police stations.
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In some cases, Afghan National Police forces directly supported Taliban operations against NATO or Afghan forces.
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Among the most important factors was poverty. A memo produced by the Afghan government, the United States, and other international actors concluded that widespread poverty and the lack of essential services to rural areas “make people more susceptible to indoctrination and mean that the life of a fighter may be the only attractive option available.”
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A separate United Nations study found that “government corruption and poor governance increases the attraction for the Taliban in the population.” It continued that “ongoing trends point to a further attrition of the government’s ability to project good governance and hint at a further isolation of the political leadership of Afghanistan and the international community from the population.”
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This concern was reiterated in internal Afghan documents, such as
The National Military Strategy,
which noted in 2005 that if key essential services were “not provided quickly, the people will be more vulnerable to extremist elements claiming to offer a better alternative.”
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At the close of his tenure as commander of Combined Forces Command—Afghanistan in 2007, Lieutenant General Eikenberry prophetically warned: “The long-term threat to campaign success, though, is the potential irretrievable loss of legitimacy of the Government of Afghanistan. If the Afghan Government is unable to counter population frustration with the lack of progress in reform and national development, the Afghan people may lose confidence in the nature of their political system.” The result, he cautioned, would be a point “at which the Government of Afghanistan becomes irrelevant to its people, and the goal of establishing a democratic, moderate, self-sustaining state could be lost forever.”
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Corruption and Drugs

For rural villagers, suffering under crushing poverty and pressure from the Taliban, there was one significant way out. Each spring, Afghanistan is awash in a beautiful sea of white, pink, red, and magenta poppy fields. For Afghans and Westerners, poppies have long symbolized sleep and death. The Minoan poppy goddess wore poppy-seed
capsules, a source of narcosis, in garlands in her hair. In ancient Roman mythology, Somnus, the god of sleep, wore a crown of poppies and was frequently depicted lying in a bed of poppies. Likewise, the twin brothers Hypnos and Thanatos, the Greek gods of sleep and death, were often depicted carrying poppies in their hands. The Roman goddess of the harvest, Ceres, grew poppy to help her sleep after the loss of her daughter to Pluto, god of the underworld.

For Afghanistan, this metaphor of sleep and death was all too apt. The cultivation, production, and trafficking of poppy skyrocketed after the U.S. invasion, which had a debilitating impact on governance and contributed to widespread corruption at all levels of the Afghan government. As Figure 11.1 illustrates, poppy cultivation increased virtually every year after the overthrow of the Taliban regime, though it decreased 19 percent between 2007 and 2008. The drug trade eroded efforts to improve governance, fostered widespread corruption throughout the government, and hampered the development of a licit economy.
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The implications were staggering. “The drug problem is difficult to overstate,” Doug Wankel told me in late 2005 as we sipped tea in a cafeteria on the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.
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Wankel, the
director of the Office of Drug Control in the embassy, was a former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official who was hired in 2003 to organize the U.S. government’s counternarcotics effort in Afghanistan. He had previously served in Kabul as a young DEA official in the late 1970s. “I left on a flight to New Delhi a couple of hours before the Soviets rolled in,” he said. “People thought it was because I knew it was coming. I didn’t; I just happened to be leaving on a trip. But the Soviets branded me a C.I.A. agent, and so I couldn’t come back—until now, that is.”
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As we talked, the drug trade was down that year but still, he said, “it reaches into all facets of life in Afghanistan and undermines the very fabric of governance.”
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FIGURE 11.1 Opium Poppy Cultivation, 1991–2008
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Laboratories in Afghanistan convert opium into morphine base, white heroin, or one of several grades of brown heroin. But they could not do it alone. Afghanistan produces no essential or precursor chemicals for the conversion of opium into morphine base. Acetic anhydride—the most commonly used acetylating agent in heroin processing—is regularly smuggled into Afghanistan from Pakistan, India, Central Asia, China, and Europe. Some of the largest processing labs are located in Badakhshan, Nangarhar, and Helmand Provinces.
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Most of the opiates produced in Afghanistan are smuggled to markets in the West, although some were consumed in Afghanistan or the region as both opium and heroin. U.S. intelligence estimates indicate, for example, that “hundreds of kilograms of high-grade heroin destined for Saudi Arabia and Kuwait transit Iraq each month from the source countries of Afghanistan and Iran.”
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Afghan heroin moves via many routes; traffickers adjust their routes constantly based on law-enforcement and political actions. Afghan traffickers travel mostly by car and truck on overland routes to move drug shipments out of the country. Illicit drug convoys go regularly to southern and western Pakistan, while smaller shipments of heroin are sent through the frontier provinces to Karachi for onward shipment to the United States.
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“Drugs are critical for insurgent survival in southern Afghanistan,” one 82nd Airborne intelligence officer told me at Bagram Air Base,
thirty miles north of Kabul and the hub of U.S. forces operating in eastern Afghanistan. “Insurgents further north along the Afghan-Pakistan border,” he said, “get funding from a range of other sources like wealthy Arabs,
zakat
from mosques, and the trade in goods such as timber. But not a lot of drugs.”
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Drug and other criminal groups have developed an intricate transportation network connecting Afghanistan to Pakistan and other neighboring countries. The Taliban was involved at all levels: with farmers, opium brokers, lab operators, smugglers, and major drug barons, as well as the export to international markets. Where they controlled territory, the Taliban levied a tax on poppy farmers and offered farmers protection from the government’s eradication efforts. The Taliban was also paid by drug-trafficking organizations to provide security along key routes. And a number of Taliban fighters were directly involved in the poppy harvest, thus largely unavailable to fight until after the harvest ends in the spring.
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The Taliban had long been involved in drug trafficking. In 1997, for example, the Taliban received $75 million from drug smuggling between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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They had been nominally opposed to drugs, even creating an antinarcotics office. But they often turned a blind eye to the industry. The head of the Taliban’s antinarcotics forces in Kandahar was quoted as saying that “opium is permissible because it is consumed by
kafirs
[unbelievers] in the West and not by Muslims or Afghans.”
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According to Afghan intelligence estimates, roughly 30 percent of the Taliban’s income came from involvement in drug trafficking.
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But Afghan government officials were equally culpable. News reports circulated about high-level Afghan government officials involved in the drug trade. One of those most often accused was Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of President Hamid Karzai. ABC News, for example, obtained U.S. military documents that alleged that the president’s brother “receives money from drug lords as bribes to facilitate their work and movement.”
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And an investigative
New York Times
article that included interviews with senior U.S. government officials reported: “The White
House says it believes that Ahmed Wali Karzai is involved in drug trafficking, and American officials have repeatedly warned President Karzai that his brother is a political liability.”
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A number of senior U.S. intelligence officials, however, argued that the information on Ahmed Wali Karzai was based on second-and thirdhand reporting, and sometimes from people with an ax to grind against the Karzais.
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Whatever the reality, there was certainly a strong perception among some Afghans that he was complicit in the drug trade.

There were also regular allegations that other government officials were involved in bribery and drug trafficking. An investigative report by
The Times
(London), for example, named several individuals, including General Azzam, chief of staff to the interior minister. The report found that the “Ministry of Interior, key to establishing security in the country, remains the worst offender.” It found evidence pointing to “General Azzam, recently appointed Chief of Operations after his stint as Chief of Staff, and his deputy General Reshad as the prime recipients of bribes.” The Afghan government categorized Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces using a three-tiered scale. “A” denoted those with the highest potential profits for drug running; “C” provinces were the least remunerative; and “B” provinces were in between. Counter-narcotics officials estimated that one border police commander in eastern Afghanistan took home $400,000 a month from heroin smuggling.
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At the very least, these allegations increased the perception among Afghans that their government was corrupt, including those officials who were supposed to be leading counternarcotics efforts. As an editorial in the newspaper
Daily Afghanistan
summarized: