The 9/11 Wars (17 page)

Many Westerners in Afghanistan at the time knew this and were wary of the expanded project for the country and the values with which it was loaded. Some of the better constructed aid programmes were designed to encourage a slow change in mentalities through empowering women by obliging men to allow them take part in the decision-making process that might trigger the delivery of funds to the village and in the management of the money.
²⁵
These projects encouraged basic economic activity – and thus often literacy – among women and were very successful. But such schemes were all too rare. Though Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN special envoy, had recruited many of the most informed people, often long-term residents who spoke local languages, as political officers, they were sidelined relatively rapidly by the new arrivals. So too were many of the more capable and aware local Afghan operators. The project in Afghanistan could have benefited from their deep knowledge and pragmatism. Instead, often following mission statements drafted in distant Western capitals, everything began to take a strongly ideological turn.

As so often, tensions became condensed in individual figures. One had been the aspirant Miss World, Vida Samadzai. Another was Malalai Kakar, one of Afghanistan’s rare female police officers. Small, active, sharp-featured, Kakar was undoubtedly both impressive and brave. She looked after the Kandahar Department of Crimes against Women, a tough and valuable job in an extremely dangerous environment.
²⁶
Her work, she explained, usually involved ‘family clashes’ or ‘boy and girl friendships where they run away’. Her days were spent trying to stop young women being killed by relatives for having ‘shamed’ their families by exercising a small degree of independent choice. Few such elopements ended in a sexual relationship. Many, however, ended in death. Kakar spoke about her work but was not interested in answering questions about the 1980s, when, having been inducted into the police in the footsteps of her father, she had served the Communist government. ‘I was a police officer before the Taliban came and I joined again to serve the people,’ she said drily, standing in the courtyard of Kandahar’s main prison with a mobile phone in one hand and a
burqa
thrown over her arm. Seen with some justification as a courageous campaigner for women’s rights in the West, Malalai Kakar was viewed rather differently locally. In her person, many local fault lines were reunited: urban and educated versus rural and illiterate, ‘modernizing’ and Westernized versus what was locally perceived to be authentically ‘Afghan’ or ‘Pashtun’, secular versus religious. For many around Kandahar, perhaps the most conservative part of the country and a zone where the Soviet war had seen huge destruction, displacement and loss of life in rural areas, Kakar represented memories of an earlier experience of a reforming project under the auspices of the ‘international community’ and of those who had collaborated with it. They hated her as a result.

THE ‘GREEN MACHINE’

Major Hilferty took as long a view of the conflict as anyone. Throughout most of 2002 the American reservist officer started every day by giving reporters a reminder of why they, he and around 4,000 other soldiers from a dozen or so countries were at Bagram airbase. ‘Today is the two hundred and thirty-third day since al-Qaeda terrorists murdered three thousand innocent people when they attacked the World Trade Center in New York,’ he said at 9 a.m. one morning in early May as he briefed journalists. He then read out another short obituary of one of the victims of the 9/11 attacks culled from the
New York Times
. On one morning it was ‘Robert McCarthy, thirty-three, a trader with Cantor Fitzgerald who gave his wife six dozen roses on their anniversary. Five for each year they had been married and a dozen for her colleagues. Every time she looks into the eyes of her son Shane she sees her husband.’ The next it was ‘Ricardo Quinn, forty, a paramedic who loved to make life-size sand sculptures on Jones Beach, where he loved to go with his family.’ Hilferty used the same formula – the time elapsed since 9/11, the obituary – every day. He ended every briefing with: ‘The hunt goes on. The war on terrorism in Afghanistan continues.’

By May 2002, nearly 13,000 foreign troops had been deployed in Afghanistan, including 8,000 Americans involved in the ongoing Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and 4,650 of the newly established International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). The aims of the OEF troops were, as Hilferty said, to find and kill or capture American enemies in Afghanistan now usually labelled ‘AQT’, or ‘Al-Qaeda-Taliban’. Their task thus differed dramatically from that of ISAF, which, as the name suggested, was to ensure basic security in the zones where it was deployed and thus to assist stabilization operations and eventual reconstruction. Bagram was the main OEF base, and the specific task of the troops there was to be ready to be airlifted to wherever they might be needed as reinforcements for the special forces soldiers who were out in the hills trying to physically catch the fugitives. The one major engagement in previous months had been a bloody fiasco with eight dead American soldiers after planners had grossly underestimated the strength of a force of international militants and former Taliban fighters who had taken them on amid the mountains of Shah-e-Kot in the east of the country. Since then, the ‘Green Machine’, as its soldiers called the US military, was having trouble finding anyone to fight, and conventional military activities had largely been restricted to what Colonel Patrick Fetterman, commanding officer of the 187th Battalion of the 101st Airborne, called ‘clean and sweep’ operations.

Fetterman, a small, wiry forty-year-old, described the one contact his unit had had with the enemy in the last ten weeks. Four Afghan men had been killed after they opened fire on an Australian special forces patrol who had then called in support. Two hundred men from the 187th were airlifted in when the shooting started: ‘We landed on a hard LZ [landing zone] in very steep terrain above a village. We moved down into it and found blood traces and three large caches of ammunition. We had overwhelming force and, though some villagers were not very happy about it, we asked them to unlock their doors and we went through the village. Sometimes we had to break down doors, and that was hard for my guys, who are going from strong sunlight into interiors that could be hostile. Any AQT elements would not have been able to flee because we had air [support].’ His men had fired just one shot, to kill a dog that had attacked a soldier. ‘It was a pity, but better than one of my guys getting rabies,’ the colonel told the author.
²⁷

Fetterman’s statement encapsulated the flaws of the American military effort in Afghanistan at the time. The colonel, an intelligent graduate from West Point, was operating at battalion level, but the failures of the tactics he was employing were reproduced all the way up to the very highest levels of military and civilian leadership. The fundamental problem was that the American army, an extraordinary force of 1.8 million men and women funded by a defence budget in 2002 of $328 billion, had misconceived its mission.
²⁸
Instead of framing its operations as counter-insurgency, with a consequent emphasis on protecting the population from the enemy and on creating an environment propitious to the development of security and progressively stronger governance, the American army, from the top of the Pentagon to the lowest footsoldier, saw its job as ‘killing bad guys, not protecting good guys’.
²⁹
US commanders and the CIA were under orders not to refer to their task as fighting insurgents but as counter-terrorism.
³⁰
If villagers were upset by their operations, so be it.

Not that US troops would be around to see the consequences of the offence they caused. Strategy and doctrine called for the amount of time troops spent among Afghans to be minimized. Troops launched rapid raids from heavily fortified bases before returning as soon as possible to their Cheesy Nachos, beef jerky teriyaki, Pop-Tarts and bibles in tactical camouflage covers. Until the summer of 2002, food for the troops in Bagram was cooked at US bases in Ramstein, Germany, then flown 4,000 miles, reheated and served. The isolation meant, as conversations with US soldiers made absolutely clear, the environment ‘outside the wire’ was seen as populated by people who were at best picturesque, at worst evil. This created an inevitable vicious circle, making any contact with local communities much less likely, leading in turn to the reinforcement of the isolation. One soldier said that he liked going on patrol because it was like ‘being on safari’. Within weeks local trucks were known by the soldiers as ‘jinglies’, a reference to their jangling metallic decorations, and local people were called ‘habibis’ or, more disrespectfully, ‘hajis’.
³¹
Both the latter terms were, of course, Arabic in origin and had come, like the military’s taste for huge walled-off bases with all home comforts, from earlier deployments in the Gulf and the tedious task of flying enforcement missions over Iraq through the 1990s.

The consequences of this mix of physical and cultural isolation and ill-adapted tactics were exacerbated by the low number of troops committed to Afghanistan. At the end of 2002 the twin operations of ISAF and the American Operation Enduring Freedom, the former still restricted to the capital Kabul and ‘peacekeeping’ while the latter hunted for AQT targets, still only totalled around 14,000, which worked out at well under one soldier per thousand inhabitants. This compared unfavourably with the ration of 9.8 per thousand inhabitants in East Timor, 19.3 in Kosovo, 17.5 in Bosnia, 20 in Northern Ireland and a massive 89.3 per thousand in Germany after the Second World War.
³²

For political leaders such as Rumsfeld, who were committed to a continuing and broader Global War on Terror, it made sense to hold back as many resources as possible, partly to have more for further operations but also to enhance the deterrent effect that operations in Afghanistan were designed to have on others who might sponsor terrorism. The lesser the fraction of total available resources America deployed, the more impressive the operation would be. There was also the continuing desire to avoid the fate of the Soviets and not get bogged down in a country with such a long history of resisting outside interventions. A large army was not only slow, unwieldy and hugely expensive, but its presence would almost inevitably spark a national uprising, men like Wolfowitz and Feith still argued.
³³
Strong pressure from allies such as Tony Blair and from within the State Department to increase the size and extend the remit of ISAF to allow a physical permanent presence of up to 25,000 ‘peacekeeping’ troops across much of Afghanistan was therefore stubbornly resisted by Rumsfeld and the Pentagon.
³⁴

Senior British military officers also resisted proposals by British diplomats to station the country’s first ‘Provincial Reconstruction Team’, a joint base of soldiers and development and aid specialists, in Kandahar, arguing that the area was ‘too large and dangerous’.
³⁵
This meant that large parts of the country, such as the strategically critical south and south-west, remained without anything but the smallest presence of foreign troops throughout 2002 and 2003, frontiers went unsecured and the use of local proxies was continued and indeed expanded despite the problems experienced at Tora Bora and elsewhere.
³⁶
It was not just the return to prominent positions of warlords such as Rashid Dostum, Mohammed Fahim and Gul Agha Sherzai (the veteran and broadly feared commander who had won the race for Kandahar the previous autumn with the help of US special forces) that shocked many Afghans. They were also horrified by the emergence as local powerbrokers of a multitude of less high-profile figures. Around two-thirds of provincial governors appointed in 2002 led armed groups, and the sight of such men – especially when physically protected by American soldiers or clearly benefiting financially from a relationship with international powers – undermined the fledgling Afghan government’s attempts to re-establish some kind of central authority. Even down at district level, the best-armed and the best-connected were able to capture key elements of local government. The most sought-after posts were naturally those which commanded considerable opportunities for corruption, such as chief of police. Entire militias, often tribal in organization, were inducted into local security forces. Not only did this damage the credibility of the Western intervention but it also fuelled the usual Afghan competition between powerbrokers at every level from province to village across the entire country.
³⁷

PRISONER ABUSE STARTS

Alongside the ‘ideological turn’, the mistaken tactics and the ‘light footprint’ approach, another element that emerged very rapidly and then subsequently flowed on to other theatres was the abuse of captives. This occurred early in the conflict and continued in a systematic way throughout almost all of it. Of course, atrocities are a feature of most wars, and there seems no reason why this one should be any different. But the particular quality of the abuse, its odd uniformity across theatres and protagonists, is nonetheless striking. It is also significant that, though the mistreatment of prisoners in American-run facilities was to climax in 2004 and 2005, it was already widespread even before senior White House officials met to construct a legal framework that would officially determine procedure for prisoners captured during ‘the Global War on Terror’. This suggests the abuse was thus both a ‘ground-up’ and a ‘top-down’ phenomenon and thus deeply representative in a profoundly worrying way of the essence of the broader conflict. Along with images from live executions of detainees by militants, the abuse of prisoners by US troops would produce many of the starkest and most memorable visual images of the 9/11 Wars.