In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (28 page)

There were some occasional bright spots in the drug war. In 2005, for instance, American and Afghan officials were cheered when poppy-cultivation numbers dropped, though they soared even higher the next year. Most of the reduction appeared to have been the result of Herculean efforts by Afghan leaders with international support. One of the most significant of these counternarcotics programs was implemented by the governor of Nangarhar, Haji Din Muhammad, and the police chief, Hazrat Ali.

They were an odd couple. Haji Din Muhammad came from a distinguished Pashtun family, and his great-grandfather, Wazir Arsala Khan, served as foreign minister of Afghanistan in 1869. Six feet tall and well built, Muhammad had an imposing presence. He was well educated and had the aura of an elder statesman, with a gentle demeanor, preferring to speak in soft, measured tones and capable of pontificating for hours. Hazrat Ali couldn’t have been more different. He was not a Pashtun but a Pashai, an ethnic group with a distinct language concentrated in northeastern Afghanistan. He had grown up in the isolated mountain village of Kushmoo, earning him the derogatory nickname
Shurrhi,
meaning “redneck” or “hillbilly” in Pashto. He was also illiterate, which did little to legitimize him among the Pashtun elite in Nangarhar. But Hazrat Ali was fortunate. He had been catapulted to power during the overthrow of the Taliban regime through the patronage of U.S. Special Forces. They had provided him money and weapons to target Taliban forces, and they viewed him as a reliable ally because of his close ties to Northern Alliance leaders.

Despite their differences, Haji Din Muhammad and Hazrat Ali developed a common strategy to decrease poppy in Nangarhar. Under Hazrat Ali’s orders, police jailed locals who cultivated poppy until they agreed to plow under their fields.
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The coercion was effective. According to public-opinion polling in Nangarhar, most villagers reported that they reduced or stopped poppy cultivation out of concern that they would be imprisoned or that their fields would be plowed under by Afghan authorities.
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In addition, Haji Din Muhammad and Hazrat Ali leveraged the support for President Karzai in the
region to convince villagers to buy into the counternarcotics plan. Almost three-fourths of the eradication (72 percent) in 2005 took place in Nangarhar and Helmand Provinces, where, in 2004, poppy cultivation had ranked highest in the nation.
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Indeed, provinces where declines in cultivation were most striking (Nangarhar—96 percent, Badakshan—53 percent), and where cultivation remained relatively stable (Helmand—10 percent), were the same three provinces that received the largest contributions for alternative development. Nangarhar received $70.1 million in assistance and Badakshan and Helmand received $47.3 million and $55.7 million, respectively.
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Yet these successes were no match for the broader problems in the justice system. Studying Afghan perceptions of the rule of law, the World Bank found that Afghanistan’s justice system was in the bottom 5 percent in the world by 2006, the exact same ranking as in 2000, the last full year of the Taliban regime.
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Reconstruction had done nothing to improve things. In comparison with other countries in the region—such as Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—Afghanistan’s justice system was the least effective. A major reason for this was endemic corruption. Unqualified personnel loyal to various factions were sometimes installed as court officials, and the Supreme Court and the Attorney General’s Office were accused of significant wrongdoing.
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An Afghanistan intelligence assessment complained that “criminals do not receive fair justice. This is another factor which has boosted the Taliban morale in southern Afghanistan. They are almost confident that they can buy justice at some stage.”
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A corrupt judiciary was a serious impediment to the success of the counternarcotics campaign. But more broadly, it further undermined governance and popular support for Karzai’s government, and it crippled the legal and institutional mechanism necessary to prosecute insurgents and criminals.

Afghans were well aware of the problem. An Asia Foundation poll in 2006 found that 77 percent of respondents said corruption was a major problem in Afghanistan; 66 percent believed corruption was a major problem in the provincial government; 42 percent said cor
ruption was a major problem in their daily lives; and 40 percent said corruption was a major problem in their neighborhoods. Moreover, most Afghans believed that the corruption problem was getting worse. Approximately 60 percent of respondents believed that corruption had increased over the past year at the national level, and 50 percent believed that it had increased at the provincial level. Many had been directly involved in bribery, such as providing cash to a government official. Thirty-six percent said they had been involved in bribery with a police officer, 35 percent with a court official, and 34 percent with officials when applying for work.
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Things were much worse in the areas of greater Taliban presence. People in southern and western Afghanistan were most likely to say they had personally experienced corruption, and those in central and northern Afghanistan were the least likely.
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Much of the blame was leveled at the top echelons of the Afghan government. A 2006 State Department poll found that more than 50 percent of Afghans thought President Karzai and his administration failed to combat corruption. This tended to fuel support for the Taliban. According to the same State Department poll, 71 percent of Taliban backers said there was corruption among the police, 66 percent said there was corruption in the local government, and 68 percent said there was corruption in the courts.
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A number of sensitive Afghan national security documents expressed growing alarm at the link between poppy and government corruption. The Afghanistan National Security Council’s annual
National Threat Assessment,
for example, argued in 2004 that the “continued growth of the heroin and opium-producing poppy remains a major threat to the security of Afghanistan. The corruption and crime association with the drug trade will proliferate in and around Afghanistan, discouraging international investment and assistance in rebuilding Afghanistan.”
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The following year’s
National Threat Assessment
went even further, noting that the “corruption and crime associated with the drug trade will proliferate in Afghan society and the government administration.”
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The cost of corruption, according to numerous Afghan and international assessments, was increased support for the Taliban and other insurgent groups. One joint European Union and United Nations assessment found that the Taliban “exploit certain sentiments that resonated within the general population,” such as the “corrupt state.”
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An Afghan intelligence report concluded: “The propaganda effort of the enemy in rural areas is massive and strong. The theme is corruption in the government…. Their main target population is rural Afghanistan…. only good governance and sound leadership at the local level can counter this effectively and strongly.”
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The Taliban and other insurgent groups pointed out in their propaganda the growing Afghan corruption on the district, provincial, and national levels. A joint paper produced by the Government of Afghanistan, the U.S. government, and other key international actors more boldly concluded: “The appointment of unprofessional, corrupt and ineffective government officials has reduced the trust and confidence of the people, especially in the provinces.”
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A Cancer in the Government

Reflecting on his term as Afghan foreign minister, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah told me in 2007 that his government had made some mistakes. “Where are the state institutions?” he asked. “There aren’t any.” We were sitting in his flat in Kabul, which was comfortably furnished with plush chairs and Western amenities, including a flat-screen television. Since it was Ramadan, Abdullah was fasting, but he thoughtfully offered me a glass of cold water. He said, ruefully, that “people are losing hope in their government. Villages cannot be protected. If villagers say something against the Taliban, they could be beheaded. We are losing the support of our population.”
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Abdullah was an ophthalmologist and a protégé of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the charismatic Northern Alliance military leader. Well organized and smartly dressed, with a neatly trimmed beard, often preferring Western suit and tie to native Afghan clothes, he spoke excellent Eng
lish with a slight accent. During the Bonn negotiations in late 2001, Abdullah impressed U.S. and other Western diplomats by joining them at meals during the month of Ramadan, even though he was fasting. “He always said he felt no pangs of hunger,” recalled U.S. Special Envoy James Dobbins, who worked with Abdullah. Dobbins described him as someone who “would speak with controlled passion about the travails his country had experienced over the past several decades.”
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Abdullah’s comments about Afghan governance were a sobering and brutally frank admission of the challenges his government faced. They were seconded by a former Afghan provincial governor who complained: “The government has essentially collapsed. It has lost its meaning in the provinces, it has lost the security situation and lost its grip on civil servants. Corruption is playing havoc with the country.”
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After Operation Mountain Thrust in the summer of 2006, during which American, Canadian, British, and Afghan forces conducted offensive actions in southern Afghanistan, Ambassador Ronald Neumann was briefed by the U.S. military on the results of the interrogations of more than 100 Taliban and other fighters. “We found that the critical reasons why these fighters supported the Taliban had little to do with religious ideology. Rather, they had to do with bad government and economics. The government could not protect them or deliver services, and they were often simply paid better by the Taliban.”
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This was consistent with the findings of Afghan and NATO officials. As one senior Afghan intelligence official told me, the results of detainee interviews and intelligence assessments showed that “neither Afghan police, army, or NATO can protect villages and districts from the Taliban. This forces people to support the Taliban, even if they don’t like them. The other option, which was death,” he noted wryly, “was not palatable for most villagers.”
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One Afghan summed up the dilemma: “In the daytime, this government is coming to us, and in the nighttime the Taliban are coming to us. We are stuck in the middle.”
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When the Taliban was overthrown in 2001, Afghanistan was an underdeveloped country whose levels of basic services and social
indicators were near the bottom of the world. Afghanistan’s health indicators were among the worst on earth: it had an under-five mortality rate of 172 per 1,000 live births, infant mortality rate of 115 per 1,000 live births, maternal mortality rate of 16 per 1,000 live births, and 50 percent rate of chronic malnutrition. Life expectancy was estimated at 43 years, and only 9 percent of rural households reported a health facility in their village.
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But Afghanistan’s underdevelopment was not the reason an insurgency began. Rather, the prevailing condition was the inability of that government to improve life in rural areas of the country. An internal memo from the UN and the European Union was deeply pessimistic: “Afghanistan’s current trajectory was negative: there was burgeoning disillusionment with government. Even officials were fed up, with governors voicing scathing criticism at the lack of tangible support for their work.” It went on to say that the “government was losing prestige; its image and influence were waning. Without a change in approach, Afghanistan and its international partners would lose ground: their fortunes were now linked. Civilians would be more likely to fight their ‘disgusting government’ both because they detested it and because they feared the consequences of not fighting.”
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The damage was done. The government was unable to provide key services or protect the local population, especially in rural areas, and the government was widely viewed as corrupt. To make matters worse, the United States and its allies had focused almost entirely in a top-down strategy to stabilize the country by creating a strong central government. Not only was a strong Afghan state ahistorical, but U.S. policymakers spent little time trying to co-opt Pashtun tribes, subtribes, clans, and other local institutions in the south and east. There was little bottom-up strategy to complement top-down efforts. Storm clouds had been gathering for several years, waiting to burst. In 2006, they finally did.

RONALD NEUMANN
was reaching for the light switch in his hotel room at the Crowne Plaza in Amman, Jordan, when the phone rang.

“Hello?” he asked, somewhat perplexed. It was 2005, and he was on a brief layover on his way back to the United States from Iraq, where he had been serving as a senior political-military officer and the U.S. Embassy’s principal interlocutor with the Multi-National Command.

It was Robert Pearson, director general of the State Department’s Foreign Service: “I understand you are arriving in Washington tomorrow,” he said.

“I am,” Neumann replied.

“The Secretary of State would like to see you about where you’re going next,” Pearson noted. “But it’s not where you think.” That was it. He said nothing else.

Neumann could barely sleep that night, anxious about what awaited. Two days later, when he walked into the office of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, she asked him whether he would be interested in serving as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. Without hesitation, he said yes.

He later recalled: “It was the only time I was asked directly by the Secretary of State to serve as an ambassador.” Neumann, who had served as U.S. ambassador to Algeria and Bahrain, didn’t leave his
Baghdad position until several months later. His final recollections were poignant. “I remember driving up Route Irish in a sandstorm in a convoy,” he recalled, referring to the excruciatingly dangerous road to the Baghdad Airport. “We couldn’t get a helicopter out because of the sandstorm, but we were able to hitch a ride with General Casey,” the commanding general of Multi-National Force—Iraq.
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It was an ironic twist of events. Neumann was leaving Iraq during a sandstorm and entering Afghanistan during what Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry would eventually call “the perfect storm.” The Afghan insurgency was about to explode.

Eikenberry recalled, “Several things came together. The Taliban and al Qa’ida had sanctuary in Pakistan and conducted operations from bases in Pakistan. Local governance was not taking hold. Narco-trafficking and associated criminality were emerging as significant threats to security. The planning and implementation of critical economic infrastructure projects—roads, power, and water management—were lagging.” As these problems became more acute, however, the United States neglected to respond with sufficient resources. “There were too few international and Afghan National Security forces. In the case of the U.S. forces,” said Eikenberry, “we had one less infantry battalion in the summer of 2006 than in the summer of 2005. All these factors—a complex mix of security, governance, and economic elements—combined to make for a perfect storm as NATO began its enlargement into southern Afghanistan in June 2006.”
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Senior Afghan officials had also become increasingly alarmed. Dr. Abdullah, Afghanistan’s foreign minister, worried that the United States and the broader international community mistakenly believed that the Taliban and al Qa’ida were finished. “Our intelligence estimates,” he repeatedly warned U.S. officials, “show quite the reverse.” In his final meeting with Secretary Rice in March 2006 before he left the Afghan government, Dr. Abdullah warned her not to let Afghanistan continue to slip into conflict. “I am deeply worried about the rising insurgency,” he said. “People are beginning to lose hope in their government. We are losing the support of our population.”
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But there was some disagreement among the U.S. policymakers about the severity of the insurgency. “My take on the situation in Afghanistan,” said General James Jones, the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, in early 2006, “is that the Taliban and al Qa’ida are not in a position where they can restart an insurgency of any size and major scope.”
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Jones was a steely Marine who would become President Barack Obama’s national security adviser. He also became outspoken in his assessment of the insurgency in his 2008
Afghanistan Study Group Report,
which concluded that the progress in Afghanistan was “under serious threat from resurgent violence, weakening international resolve, mounting regional challenges and a growing lack of confidence on the part of the Afghan people about the future direction of their country.”
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The day after General Tommy Franks, head of U.S. Central Command, had been battered by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on his war plan for Afghanistan in their conference room (known as “the Tank”), Franks had confronted Jones and Admiral Vern Clark of the U.S. Navy and told them: “Yesterday in the Tank, you guys came across like a mob of Title X motherers, not like the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
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The reference was to Title X of the U.S. Code, which outlines the role of the armed forces, including the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force. Whatever the staff disagreements may have been in the armed services, the writing in Afghanistan was on the wall by the end of 2006. Levels of violence had reached their highest levels since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001.

Upbeat Assessments

The year 2006 did not begin so badly, at least among many policymakers in Washington. Estimates in some sectors were upbeat. According to the World Bank, for example, Afghanistan’s economy grew an estimated 14 percent in 2005 and 5.3 percent in 2006.
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Annual end-period inflation, as measured by the consumer price index for Kabul, decreased to 4.8 percent. Annual end-period “national” inflation, covering Kabul and five other cities, was 3.9 per
cent.
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In addition, construction was booming in some Afghan cities, several major roads were built, markets were full of goods, small and large shops had sprouted up, and several large telecommunications companies and commercial airlines were operating and competing for business.

“Cell phones are a wonderful boon in this city,” said one Afghan in Kabul to me, gripping his bright yellow phone and his Roshan calling card. “I don’t know what I’d do without mine.”
Roshan,
which means “light” in both Dari and Pashto, was one of Afghanistan’s largest telecommunications companies. In February 2005, Roshan won the Best Marketing Award at the Mobile World Congress, the mobile-phone industry’s leading annual event. In September 2006, it won the Best Brand Award at the CommsMEA Awards Ceremony in Dubai. This marked a breathtaking change.

In 2002, more than 99 percent of the Afghan population had no access to telecommunications services. Only five major cities had telephone services, and Kabul accounted for about two-thirds of the country’s 57,000 functioning lines. The country had little or no access to the Internet, and postal services were still recovering from years of conflict. By 2006, the number of telephones in Afghanistan had increased to 2.16 million, and all provinces were connected to a national telecommunications network. Mobile-phone prices dropped from about $400 in 2002 to less than $50 in 2006, and calling costs fell dramatically. The telecommunications sector attracted more than $300 million in private investments—60 percent of all foreign direct investment in Afghanistan.
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Robert Gates, who replaced Donald Rumsfeld as U.S. secretary of defense in 2006, argued that “notwithstanding the news [the American people] hear out of Afghanistan, the efforts of the United States, our allies, and the Afghan government and people have been producing solid results.” He noted that, contrary to the situation during the Taliban era, when few Afghans had access to health care, 670 clinics and hospitals were built or refurbished and nearly 11,000 doctors, nurses, and midwives were trained. Fewer than a million children
were in school in 2001. “Now more than five million students—at least one and a half million of them girls—are enrolled in school.” He also pointed out that the country’s central bank had been rebuilt and supported with more than $2.5 billion in reserves—a remarkable feat, since there was no commercial banking under the Taliban.
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Reading the Tea Leaves

But all was not well, and violence in 2006 reached the highest levels since U.S. forces had invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Observers who hadn’t visited Afghanistan, or who hadn’t traveled outside of major urban areas, could be forgiven for thinking there was security and a viable government. The truth, however, was that governance did not extend into rural areas of the country. As former Taliban commander and Afghan Parliament member Abdul Salam Rocketi told me over lunch one day in 2006, “we have created a government that looks good on paper but is very weak in reality. Most Afghans in rural areas never see or hear anything from it.”
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Key metrics of violence showed a disturbing increase. The number of suicide attacks increased from one in 2002 to two in 2003, six in 2004, 21 in 2005, 139 in 2006, and 140 in 2007. Between 2005 and 2006, the number of remotely detonated bombings more than doubled, from 783 to 1,677, and armed attacks nearly tripled, from 1,558 to 4,542.
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In 2007, insurgent-initiated attacks rose another 27 percent from the 2006 levels, and Helmand Province witnessed among the highest levels of violence, rising 60 percent between 2006 and 2007.
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The Taliban and other groups assassinated Afghan government supporters in district and provincial centers. Key targets included police, Afghan intelligence agents, judges, clerics, NGO workers, and any others believed to be collaborating with the government.
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Public-opinion polls showed that Afghans had noticed the trend. In 2006, just under 50 percent of Afghans said the biggest problem in their country was the lack of security, including from the Taliban and warlords. Concerns were most acute in the south and east.
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A public-
opinion poll for U.S. Central Command indicated that 41 percent of Afghans said they felt less safe in 2007 than in 2006, compared with only 28 percent who said they felt safer. Support levels for the Taliban doubled during the same time period. “The largest increases in Taliban support,” the report concluded, “are among rural people, women, and in Pakistan border regions.”
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While a bare majority of Afghans continued to believe the country was moving in the right direction, the percentage had decreased from 77 percent in 2005 to 55 percent in 2006 and 54 percent in 2007.
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In a press conference with President Bush at Camp David in August 2007, Afghan President Hamid Karzai optimistically reported that the Taliban was “a force that’s defeated.”
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But this was plainly not the case. In private, the Afghan government’s own security assessments had been getting progressively more alarming.

As far back as 2004, Afghanistan’s
National Threat Assessment
warned that the drug trade, among other factors, was making “Afghanistan an attractive haven for international terrorist groups, organized crime and other extremists while also funding the continued, destabilizing presence of non-statutory armed forces.”
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The 2005
National Threat Assessment
was even less rosy, finding that the security environment was declining and that “the primary source of political subversion comes from internal actors, non-statutory armed forces and their commanders…. [The] window of opportunity that the Government and International Community have to deliver security and improvements to the quality of life of ordinary Afghans is limited, before people become impatient.”
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And Afghanistan’s 2006
National Security Policy
noted: “Non-statutory armed forces and their commanders pose a direct threat to the national security of Afghanistan. They are a major obstacle to the expansion of the rule of law into the provinces.”
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U.S. intelligence assessments expressed similar alarm. In November 2006, the CIA reported that “the Taliban has built momentum this year. The level of violence associated with the insurgency has increased significantly and the group has become more aggressive than in years past.” It warned that the “Taliban almost certainly refo
cused its attacks in an attempt to stymie NATO’s efforts in southern Afghanistan.”
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Defense Intelligence Agency analysts reached a similar conclusion, deducing that levels of violence had hit an all-time high. One report, titled
The Current Situation in Iraq and Afghanistan,
was ominous: “If a substantial international military and Afghan security presence throughout the volatile Pashtun south and east is not established alongside credible civil administrations, central government control over these areas will be substantially restricted.”
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United Nations assessments were similarly alarming: “The security situation in Afghanistan is assessed by most analysts as having deteriorated at a constant rate…. The Afghan National Police (ANP) has become a primary target of insurgents and intimidation of all kinds has increased against the civilian population, especially those perceived to be in support of the government, international military forces as well as the humanitarian and development community.”
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In February 2006, Ambassador Neumann sent a cable to Secretary of State Rice offering the unfortunate news that “2006 was likely to be a bloody year in Afghanistan.” He warned that the Taliban had successfully regrouped in Pakistan, and neither the United States nor Pakistan had effectively targeted them in their border sanctuaries. The United States had also largely left alone Afghanistan’s lawless south, the Taliban’s traditional heartland. The United States military had some Special Operations Forces in Helmand and other provinces, but most of its resources were focused on counterterrorist operations in the east.
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Unit commanders had been told not to use the word
counterinsurgency
in describing their operations, since they were only supposed to be conducting “counterterrorist” operations, in keeping with the national strategic guidance and an operational focus on fighting al Qa’ida.
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The same thing was true for CIA personnel.
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