Killing Machine (16 page)

In 1994 the Taliban captured the city after a fight with a local warlord, Gul Agha Sherzai. Seven years later an American invading force drove the Taliban out of Kabul and Kandahar during the
failed search for Osama bin Laden. Having installed Hamid Karzai as the new president of Afghanistan, however, the Americans left in a rush to go in search of Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. That quest turned into a prolonged struggle that ruined George Bush’s goal of birthing Middle East democracy, while Afghanistan slipped deep into the shadows. Meanwhile, the Taliban regrouped and threatened to regain the upper hand. With President Obama’s blessing, American strategists now saw Kandahar as a key testing ground for wars of the twenty-first century carried forward under the counterinsurgency banner. Time was of the essence now, because the Pentagon had to beat the Taliban back and, unless the campaign showed real promise, Obama’s timetable for bringing the troops home would come into play.

So a lot was riding on the outcome. Marja was, said Petraeus, “the first salvo” in the fight to control Kandahar. The city was not only important symbolically to the Taliban, who considered it their birthplace, but also a crucial point in the struggle to control all of Afghanistan, with accompanying international implications. Without Kandahar, it was said, Hamid Karzai could only claim to be mayor of Kabul. Karzai had himself been born in the city and had lasting connections there through his family, especially a half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, a politician and drug lord. Americans were never sure whether the president’s brother was a necessary evil in the fight against the Taliban or a detriment to their plans. Ahmed Wali Karzai “had his unsavory side, but he was someone we could work with and he kept a lid on things in Kandahar,” one U.S. official told the BBC. But others felt he was a major obstacle to American plans. Another anonymous “senior U.S. military official” told reporters he had paid a visit to Karzai to put him on notice. “I told him, ‘I’m going to be watching every step you take. If I catch you meeting an insurgent, I’m going to put you on the JPEL.’ ” The Joint Prioritized Engagement List was reserved for the most-wanted insurgents. “That means,” the official said he told Karzai, “that I can capture or kill you.”
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The Ahmed Wali Karzai “challenge” was but one part of what Obama had undertaken—a Sisyphean endeavor with many boulders
on many hills. And Ahmed Wali Karzai was present on many of those hills, collecting American money from the CIA for helping it push the boulders—when he chose to help, that is. The American military hated him, and the interagency feuds over the president’s half brother resembled, wrote Mark Mazzetti in his book
The Way of the Knife
, something of a cross “between a Graham Greene novel and
Mad
magazine’s
Spy vs. Spy.”
McChrystal detested him as the very sort of corrosive influence that undermined counterinsurgency operations. The supposed legend of General Creighton Abrams getting everyone on the same page over Vietnam was apparently just that: a legend.
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Despite the reality of ethnic divisions deeply embedded in Afghan history, military policy makers held up the new counterinsurgency manual, Field Manual 3-24, as a guide to the way forward in dealing with insurgencies of all sorts. Yes, it was true, there was a crucial missing piece: a strong central government in Kabul that could guarantee Afghans a better choice than the Taliban. But stabilizing Kandahar—even as people worked to correct what was wrong in Kabul—was deemed a high-priority objective, not only for thwarting the Taliban but also for influencing the country’s immediate neighbors, Pakistan and Iran, to leave Afghanistan alone.

Beyond those two, furthermore, India and China both had a big stake in any final settlement of the Afghan situation. Discouraging international rivalries began with Pakistan. Islamabad was already the most active player in the new Great Game, fearful of losing out when the Americans finally decided it was time to go home. Like Obama’s domestic critics, Pakistani leaders took the president’s West Point speech—no matter what the White House (or the Pentagon) said afterward—as signaling a determination to give the war one last try. Pakistan had a ringside seat as American leaders struggled mightily to produce a functional Afghan national security force to take over when the surge ended.

American political and military leaders were aware, on the other hand, of the known and suspected contacts the Pakistani intelligence service, ISI, had not only with Taliban leaders but also with the offshoot Haqqani terrorist network. Relations with the Haqqani
network had to be the greatest irony of the American Afghan War. The network, originally led by Jalaluddin Haqqani, had been a Cold War ally. All during the 1980s, the CIA funneled arms and cash to the Haqqanis via Pakistan to counter Soviet forces. But now American officials expended a great deal of time and effort trying to convince Islamabad’s leaders to see that their best interests did not reside in promoting such a nasty counterweight to Indian influence in Afghanistan. “It is really beginning to irk and anger us,” complained an American security official familiar with efforts to convince Islamabad to cut off its complicit relations with the Haqqanis. If Islamabad did not take care of the problem, he warned, “Americans will by resorting to broader and more frequent drone strikes in Pakistan.”
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The Marja-Kandahar offensive would relieve pressure on key issues—or so it was hoped. Most of all, it would show that the United States finally had, in counterinsurgency-speak, the proper military-political “inserts” to change not only the military equation inside Afghanistan, but also the good “outputs” from Afghanistan to correct the regional political balance of forces so that Afghanistan’s future would not become a permanent scramble for power. In Washington, however, war rhetoric stayed focused on the line that the surge had been necessary to make sure al Qaeda had no place to launch a new attack on the United States. The president also continued talking about not sacrificing the gains for women, casting that goal as a major war objective. Yet most savvy observers knew there were limits to Obama’s commitment. Above all he was determined to avoid another Vietnam. That determination, therefore, shaped the outer boundaries of what could be accomplished—at least by boots on the ground. And while he might not be around to enforce a final withdrawal of American forces should he not be reelected, the nation’s tolerance for a long war was not something the Pentagon cared to put to the test. “Nobody,” admitted a senior official, “wants to abandon the women of Afghanistan, but most Americans don’t want to keep fighting there for years and years. The grim reality is that, despite all of the talk about promoting women’s rights, things are going to have to give.”
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“How much?” was always the question. What could the Americans leave undone and still consider the mission achieved? The beginning of a final answer to that question, it was said, would depend on the success or failure of the Marja campaign. General David Petraeus had put a bet on Marja as the “initial salvo” in a hard fight to reverse the Taliban momentum of recent years, and he had encouraged McChrystal’s confidence that here was a real test for counterinsurgency theory.

Government in a Box

The most famous boast as the campaign for Marja began was McChrystal’s claim that he had a government in a box ready to roll out as soon as the area was pacified—or even as coalition and Afghan troops advanced. He was bringing with him, in other words, a cadre of new civilian authorities from Kabul prepared to give citizens security and needed services. As a prelude to the military campaign there had appeared a brief flurry of statements emanating from a variety of sources about the possibility of a political settlement to the war. For example, McChrystal himself said, “Any Afghan can play a role if they focus on the future and not on the past.” But this was again counterinsurgency-speak, referring to the notion that only a certain percentage of the enemy was actually fully committed to the cause, while others were simply waiting for a better deal.

In the Afghan War, the debate about a political settlement had suddenly become all about “reintegration” of individuals versus “reconciliation” with the Taliban as a whole. These were code words, of course, and they did not make understanding the different positions easy—on purpose. In one sense, it was little more than an updating of the Vietnam War debate over negotiations with the Vietcong circa 1965–67 when Washington offered “unconditional talks” as soon as the enemy gave up its effort to shoot its way into power, as Secretary of State Dean Rusk put it, and came in out of the jungle to participate as individuals in the political process. Just as Rusk had not expected the Vietcong to respond to any offer he
made, American policy makers did not expect negotiations with the Taliban until the momentum in the war had shifted completely. “ ‘Talking to the Taliban,’” writes Jonathan Steele, who reported from Afghanistan for many years for
The Guardian
, “was not intended as a genuine move toward negotiations. It was a weapon of war and a counterinsurgency tool, designed to undermine the Taliban by encouraging defections and breaking the movement into more easily defeatable fragments.”
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The debate about “reconciliation” and “reintegration” was, however, considered a useful tactic to meet some of Hamid Karzai’s proposals for reaching out to midlevel Taliban officials, a proposal he put before a January 2010 London conference of ISAF bigwigs. British and American officials were afraid Karzai would jump out ahead of the military with a proposal for talking with Mullah Muhammad Omar, at the top of the Taliban high command, or other “hard-core” types that Washington had declared “not reconcilable.” The conference did decide on a $100 million investment in trying to encourage defections, but like so many other initiatives little was heard of it ever after. In any event, said dubious American officials, nothing could be expected from the other side until the thirty thousand soldiers of the surge made a serious dent in the Taliban’s aspirations. Even then, as in the Vietnam “offer,” any “reconciliation” would require Taliban leaders to renounce violence. “That’s a pretty high bar for the Taliban leadership,” commented Brian Katulis of the Center for American Progress, a think tank with ties to the Obama administration.
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Karzai’s behavior offered a reason, therefore, to launch a military campaign to reverse, or preempt, any surfacing of a Karzai “peace offensive.” Early in January, the Afghan president had invited about two dozen prominent Afghan media and business figures for a lunch at the palace. During the meal he said some things and outlined a theory of American motives and plans that leaked out. Their goal, he said, was not to build up an independent Afghanistan but to exercise power over regional issues. He bore a heavy burden, he told them, of standing up to the Americans. Left alone, he could strike a deal with the Taliban, but the United States refused to allow him
to do so. They wanted to keep the war going so as to allow American troops to stay indefinitely.
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Deciding how serious Karzai was about such maneuvers sounded another echo of Vietnam. In 1963 American suspicions that South Vietnam’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem, was entertaining, or actually engaging in, negotiations with North Vietnamese contacts as a last-ditch effort to prevent a large number of American troops coming into the country—and with them political demands for “reform”—had been a factor in Washington’s decision to encourage South Vietnamese generals to move against the presidential palace in the fall.
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At least one difference from the Vietnam experience stood out, however. In that conflict, set against the background of the Cold War, the enemy was the Vietcong/North Vietnam alliance; in Afghanistan the constant conflation of al Qaeda and the Taliban confused the issue of war and peace negotiations almost beyond understanding.

Similar confusions abounded about Marja itself. Although it was described in a military briefing on February 2, 2010, as a “city” or “town,” it was really an unincorporated agricultural district with about eighty thousand inhabitants spread out over a large area in the southern province of Helmand. At its center was a collection of farm markets and a few mosques. Ahead of the military advance it was reported that thousands of residents had fled the area waiting for the dust to settle. That was just fine with McChrystal, for he said it would limit civilian casualties and perhaps lure some “lukewarm” Taliban to the government side. “We’re not interested in how many Taliban we kill,” he said. “We’d much rather have them see the inevitability that things are changing and just accept that.”
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McChrystal elaborated several times on that theme, with one eye on Obama’s pledge to start bringing the troops home in July 2011. “This is all a war of perceptions. Part of what we’ve had to do is convince ourselves and our Afghan partners that we can do this.”
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Operation Moshtarak (meaning “together” in the Dari language of Afghanistan) almost didn’t get started—at least on the scheduled D-Day. There were supposed to have been last-minute negotiations with a Taliban figure, but another explanation is that McChrystal
could not get President Karzai’s permission to start the battle on time because the Afghan leader was “napping.” He had a cold and was staying in bed, said aides, while the American general fumed over a leader who seemingly had no interest in the biggest moment of his career. The awful truth was that Karzai did not really have a lot of faith in counterinsurgency, McChrystal, or Obama. Presenting himself at the palace, McChrystal told Karzai, “This is your insurgency, but I’m your general.” Well, said, Karzai this was the first time anyone had asked his permission to launch an offensive. After forty-five minutes the general left with his permission slip.
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