Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (18 page)

Get in fast, kill faster, and get out still faster, was Sir John’s sage advice. And for anyone caring to read a bit of history, these recommendations were seconded by the very British general to whom Sir John referred, Lord Roberts of Khandahar. “It may not be very flattering to our
amour propre,
” Roberts wrote to his military and political superiors after the success of his 1878 punitive expedition, “but I feel sure that I am right when I say that the less the Afghans see of us the less they will dislike us. Should Russia in future years attempt to conquer Afghanistan, or invade India through it, we should have a better chance of attaching the Afghans to our interests if we avoid all interference with them in the meantime.”
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Notwithstanding the ready availability of such sound advice from a distinguished pro-U.S. scholar, as well as a general who is perhaps the only infidel military practitioner who was ever successful in Afghanistan, U.S. leaders said, Thanks for the comments, but history does not pertain to America, and we will—like Sinatra—do it our way. They did, and they will suffer a calamitous loss in Afghanistan because of it.

Beyond failing to read history, U.S. leaders have conducted the hunt for Osama bin Laden without giving any evidence that they are aware of what the U.S. government knew before the 2001 invasion about bin Laden and his wide-ranging ability to operate along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Killing bin Laden once he was cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora was necessary not only to punish the author of 9/11 but to prevent him from escaping into an area he knows extremely well. Based on information gathered since the late 1980s, U.S. leaders should have been aware that on arriving in Pakistan in 1979–80, bin Laden established close working relationships with Afghan Islamist leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizbi Islami insurgent group
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and with the Pakistani Islamist leader Qazi Hussein Ahmed and his Jamaat-e Islami political party. Both of those organizations were then and are now active in the tribal regions. In those first Afghan-jihad years, bin Laden—probably with the help of the Saudi intelligence service under Prince Turki—also developed a relationship with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISID) and the Pakistani army, both of which facilitated his access to the border regions during the Afghan jihad. Bin Laden also had a basis for finding sanctuary in the Pashtun tribal lands straddling the Pakistan-Afghanistan border through the activities of an Islamist NGO called the Makhtab al-Khidimat, or Services Bureau, which he and Shaykh Abdullah Azzam founded in the early 1980s to assist the Afghan mujahedin. Since the 1980s the Makhtab and tens of other Muslim NGOs have been active in the tribal areas in both humanitarian and military affairs. Overall, bin Laden spent almost a decade before al-Qaeda was formed in 1988 developing working relationships with Pashtun tribal leaders on the Pakistani side of the border and with the galaxy of Islamic NGOs (most sponsored by Saudi Arabia or other states on the Arabian Peninsula) that first set up shop in Peshawar, then spread into Afghanistan, and over time established offices across Pakistan. Most of the latter remain active today, contributing to the ongoing Islamization of Pakistani society.

On the Afghan side of the border, bin Laden began in about 1985 to cultivate ties with Yunis Khalis’s Hizbi Islami faction, which had earlier split with Hekmatyar, and this gave him access to Nangarhar province and the adjacent areas in Pakistan; like Hekmatyar, Khalis and his commanders would be instrumental in facilitating bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora in 2001. At the same time bin Laden built a durable relationship with Khalis’s top commander, Jalaluddin Haqqani, in the area around Khowst in Paktia province and the adjacent areas of Waziristan controlled by Haqqani’s Zadrani tribe. Indeed, bin Laden appears to have gained his first combat experience by leading a team of combat engineers in support of Haqqani’s fighters. The team used construction equipment brought to Afghanistan from the bin Laden family’s company in Saudi Arabia. It also appears that bin Laden made some of his first contacts with Kashmiri insurgents—fighters who later formed the Harakat ul-Ansar and Lashkar-e Tayba—at the Khowst-area training camps run by Haqqani. In addition, by the mid-1980s bin Laden enjoyed a strong relationship with the Islamic Union party of Abdur Rasul Sayyaf, who currently is a member of the Afghan parliament. Bin Laden first trained some of his Arab fighters at Sayyaf’s Sada Military Academy in northern Waziristan on the Pakistani side of the border, and he later built a camp of his own in an area controlled by Sayyaf’s group in the Jaji area of Paktia province.

Finally, throughout the Afghan jihad bin Laden worked to ingratiate himself in Konar province and the area known as Nurestan, the northern-most Afghan sections of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Toward this end, he took advantage of Hekmatyar’s presence in the area and of the close ties Shaykh Azzam had with Ahmed Shah Masood’s forces and the Afghan Jamiat Islami party, to which Masood belonged. Bin Laden built on the latter by sending funding and military trainers and advisers to Masood; al-Qaeda’s first military commander would use the nom de guerre Abu Ubayda al-Panshjeri, a name he earned while serving with Masood and operating out of the Panshjer Valley. Bin Laden also took advantage of the work Saudi Salafi NGOs and missionary organizations had long been doing on both sides of the border in the Nurestan-Konar-Chitral (Pakistan) area, efforts that have made the area the most thoroughly Salafist-oriented region in Afghanistan. Bin Laden has said that he would have preferred to move in May 1997 from the Jalalabad area to Konar because of its remoteness and the prominence of Salafism there but decided that it was politically necessary to accept the Taliban’s invitation to move to Khandahar.

Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, therefore, had plenty of friendly contacts and allies along most of the length of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border at the time of the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. And the Taliban, of course, is dominated by men drawn from the Pashtun tribes that live on both sides of the border and so had an even easier time securing assistance for their escape. This information was available to the U.S. government well before the invasion and shaped the analysis that the Intelligence Community provided at the time. The core of that assessment was simply that bin Laden’s al-Qaeda had a wide variety of exit points along the border, stretching from Konar to Baluchistan, and would find no shortage of tribes, political groups, and insurgent organizations on both sides of the border that would be ready to assist their evacuation from Afghanistan. In addition, al-Qaeda could count on the networks of Islamic NGOs in Karachi, Peshawar, Quetta, and Lahore to assist those cadres leaving Pakistan once they exited the tribal regions on the border. The assessment also stressed that Pakistan’s border forces were lightly armed militias that were drawn from the local tribes and were beholden to and took their orders from tribal leaders, not from political or military authorities in Islamabad. Because the Pashtun tribes along the border were pro-Taliban and pro–al-Qaeda, Pakistan’s border forces would pose no obstacle to the Islamists’ evacuation. Finally, the assessment stressed that the Pakistani military and intelligence services would be very inclined to assist Taliban forces evacuating Afghanistan and that it would be naïve to believe they would not likewise assist al-Qaeda fighters, notwithstanding President Musharraf’s pledge to the contrary. In this regard, leading Saudi figures probably pressed Musharraf not to place too much emphasis on border control. Some support for this conclusion can be found in the fact that the Pakistani military did not stop Qazi Hussein Ahmed’s Jamaat-e Islami and the Kashmiri Lashkhar-e Tayba—both supported by wealthy Saudi donors—from moving cadres from eastern Pakistan into the western border areas to assist fleeing Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters.

Faced with this well-documented reality, the U.S. government proceeded to ignore the clear and absolute necessity of deploying sufficient U.S. and coalition forces to close the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and instead relied on Pakistan to do so.
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By seeking proxies to do its dirty work and by putting an unconscionably small number of troops in Afghanistan, Washington ensured that most al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters would escape with their arms to fight another day. And then things got much worse.

After bin Laden’s escape and a spasm of inconclusive U.S. military operations concluding at Shahi Kowt in March 2002,
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Washington’s Afghan policy, which had bipartisan support, was dominated by policies that could only have come from unreformed Cold War thinkers. Washington’s fixation on nation-states focused U.S. efforts in Afghanistan on trying to build a secular, pluralistic polity just as it did in Germany and Japan after World War II and the countries of Eastern Europe after the Soviet collapse. Washington installed Masood’s minority-groups-dominated Northern Alliance in Kabul as the governing regime and put at its head Hamid Karzai, a detribalized Pashtun who had spent most of the war against the USSR abroad. In so doing U.S. officials did not seem aware that they were undoing by force of infidel arms a three-plus-century tradition of Pashtun rule in Afghanistan; if they knew of this tradition, they ahistorically and foolishly concluded that the Afghan world started anew on the day of the U.S.-led invasion. The subsequent elections for parliament and president put more Pashtuns into the central government, but the Pashtun tribes perceived that the United States was keeping both the levers of military power and the revenue coffers firmly in the hands of the Afghan minorities—their historic ethnic enemies—and the Westernized Pashtun elite. The upshot was, ironically, that because Washington decided to remake Afghan society in America’s image rather than a two-millennia-old Afghan image, it ensured that not even a nominally effective nation-state—which is the best that has ever existed in Afghan history—would be created during the U.S. occupation. For the Pashtuns, the advent of elections and democracy in Afghanistan simply meant that their enemies would hold power and that therefore their only sensible option was to support the return of the Taliban and al-Qaeda to power and with them seek the reestablishment of their traditional political primacy by military means.

Concluding the War, Learning the Lessons of Defeat

For the United States, the war in Afghanistan has been lost. By failing to recognize that the only achievable U.S. mission in Afghanistan was to destroy the Taliban and al-Qaeda and their leaders and get out, Washington is now faced with fighting a protracted and growing insurgency. The only upside of this coming defeat is that it is a debacle of our own making. We are not being defeated by our enemies; we are in the midst of defeating ourselves. It makes one believe, or at least hope, that there is still some validity to Winston Churchill’s maxim that God always protects drunks and the United States of America.

How did we manufacture this defeat? By deciding not to continue the military campaign to the point that the Taliban and al-Qaeda were annihilated. By incorrectly assuming that a six-month demonstration of our massive military power had permanently cowed the enemy and that we safely could move on to reconstruction activities aimed at bringing pluralistic democracy and secularism to an ethnically divided and intensely tribal Islamic land. By removing the tough but effective law-and-order regime the Taliban had established over most of Afghanistan and then failing utterly to replace it with a regime as good, causing increasing numbers of Afghans to yearn for the Taliban’s harsh but effective security system. Most especially, by believing that the lessons of history did not apply to the United States. We let the enemy escape across open borders; we concluded that winning the Afghan cities equated to winning the war; we believed that Afghans wanted representative government more than security for their families; we stayed six-plus years in a country where a foreigner’s welcome begins to decay the day he arrives; we believed we could do with a small, multinational force of 50,000 troops and civility what the Red Army could not do with 120,000 troops and the utmost barbarity; and we thought that by establishing a minority-dominated semisecular, pro-Indian government, we would neither threaten the identity nor raise the ire of the Pashtun tribes nor endanger Pakistan’s national security.
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In view of the willful historical ignorance apparent in Washington’s Afghan strategy and operations, it is important that, after the U.S.-led coalition is defeated in Afghanistan, Americans not let their political and military leaders off the hook of responsibility. These leaders are already beginning to claim—and the claims will grow shriller over time—that the coming U.S. defeat is the result of the unexpected consequences flowing from well-intended U.S. actions. Charity demands that we give U.S. leaders the benefit of the doubt when they claim that they did not intend the consequences that are causing us to lose the war. But we must not allow them to evade culpability for their historical ignorance. Unintended consequences are not always unpredictable consequences, and in Afghanistan (as well as in Iraq) the disasters that have befallen America since 2001 were predictable in the context of historical experience. For the continuing utility of learning history and the predictability of what the United States is now experiencing in Afghanistan, reflect on the following passage from the eminent classicist Frank L. Holt. Such reflection surely will discredit the official alibi of unintended consequences. “Alexander’s reputation as a military genius, though richly deserved,” Holt writes of a time two millennia past,