The 9/11 Wars (53 page)

The ambient fear – as well as the blast walls – led many to make a comparison with Baghdad. Certainly, much in Kabul and in the country more generally in the summer of 2008 was familiar to those who had seen Iraq, particularly in 2004, 2005 or 2006. It was as if the great tide of radicalization and violence which had surged out of south-west Asia, across the Middle East and into Europe between 2001 and 2005 had carried back an accumulated load of detritus from these theatres as, on the ebb, it had returned to its source. The war in Afghanistan had even changed visually to resemble the conflict elsewhere. The vast bases on which most international troops lived – such as Bagram, Kandahar or Camp Warehouse outside Kabul – had been the prototypes for those in Iraq. Now the situation was reversed. The Afghan bases were now supplied by same contractors and thus had the same menus, facilities and even road signs as those in the Middle East. The military technology developed in Iraq – such as the ‘up-armoured Humvees’ – could now be seen on Afghan roads. Soon ‘Mraps’ – vehicles with V-shaped hulls to deflect IED blasts – would arrive. The same language – the acronyms, insults, slang and neologisms – could be heard. Naturally there were connections between the theatres in terms of personnel too. The new commander of ISAF appointed in June 2008, General David McKiernan, had played a key role in the 2003 Iraq invasion. General Stone, who had reformed the prison system in Iraq, had arrived to do the same in Afghanistan. A high proportion of the officers and men on the ground had experience on the streets of Ramadi, Kut, Mosul or Baghdad itself. The same went for many civilian employees, NGO workers and, perhaps more worryingly, the increasing number of security contractors arriving in Afghanistan. Many among the 50,000 strong private-sector mercenary army in Iraq had seen new opportunities opening up further east. ‘Feels just like home,’ laughed one South African employee of Blackwater, the most notorious of the private security contractors working in the Middle East, as he surveyed the scene of a suicide bombing on the Jalalabad Road a few days after flying in from the Gulf. He and his three colleagues were all wearing the beard, Oakley shades, T-shirt and combat trousers that had become the distinctive uniform of the mercenary in the 9/11 Wars. Though their company had recently been forced to leave Iraq after trigger-happy employees shot and killed at least fourteen civilians in unprovoked ‘defensive’ fire in Baghdad, there was plenty of demand for their services in Afghanistan.
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As the summer of 2008 passed and despite London politicians’ insistence that the Taliban were being ‘beaten back’, a few British officials had begun to voice serious concerns at the direction Afghanistan had taken.
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British intelligence analysts in Kabul privately described the Taliban as better armed and better organized than ever before and said that fighting in the coming months would be the toughest yet seen.
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Many were deeply worried by the core weakness of the effort in Afghanistan: the incompetence, corruption, cynicism and effective paralysis of the central Kabul government. President Karzai, now in his seventh year in power, appeared incapacitated by a combination of extreme pragmatism and paranoia. The various ‘GOA’ (Government of Afghanistan) institutions such as the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police continued to suffer very serious structural problems ranging from huge ethnic imbalances in the under-resourced army to an almost total lack of capacity in the corrupt and violent police. The judiciary was a ruin, with many judges either fleeing their districts or simply handing over much of their caseload to clerics either linked to the Taliban or actively involved with the insurgents.
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Privately, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British ambassador in Kabul, listed the intractable structural problems inside Afghanistan, in the region and further afield. One problem, he said, was the failure to get the Islamic world involved in the effort in Afghanistan. Turkey had contributed 860 troops, and the United Arab Emirates had a unit of special forces secretly engaged in the east, but otherwise Muslim-majority nations had almost no official military or civilian presence in the theatre. But this was only one of many things that needed to change if there was to be a hope of ‘success’. There was also the lack of political will inside Afghanistan and of political focus in Europe. There was the drift in Washington as elections approached, the slumping support for the war among Western voters, the lack of regional diplomatic coordination and, perhaps most serious of all, the general lack of realism about what was now attainable in the short, medium and long term. ‘We cannot win without a major shift in strategy,’ Cowper-Coles said. ‘And we may not win even then. Whatever winning means.’
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The obvious question was: how, with so many initial advantages compared to Iraq, had so much gone so badly wrong?

THE TALIBAN RETURN, 2002–2006

The first thing the Taliban had done when crossing the border after fleeing Afghanistan in late 2001 and 2002 had been to make sure they had a secure base. Most returned to places that were well known to them: the religious schools or
medressas
, refugee camps and villages that had been home for many years and were still often home to relatives.
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‘Kabul was falling; I drove with my family across the border. There was no problem at the checkpoint. I have a lot of land in Pakistan, and everyone knows me,’ Maulvi Mohammed Arsala Rahmani, the former Taliban education minister, recalled.
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The experience of the column of Taliban who had fled from Jalalabad over the Spin Ghar mountains in mid November as the fighting started in Tora Bora was typical. Several hundred strong, they had reached the high valleys in Pakistani territory before local troops had deployed. They then doubled back into Afghanistan and, after a further day and night of travel, had split up. At least a third of the group – young Pakistanis who had come from the religious schools of the North West Frontier Province and the tribal agencies – were each given 5,000 Pakistani rupees ($60/£40 at 2001 rates) and told to go home. A second group – several dozen senior Taliban officials – hired vehicles to drive further south into Paktika province before crossing into Pakistan by the remote Gumal pass and entering the tribal agency of South Waziristan, where they were hosted by relatives and supporters. A final group of twenty wounded fighters were sent directly across the border to hospitals in Peshawar with the cover story that they were villagers who had been injured by the American bombardment.
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Thousands of other footsoldiers, hundreds of mid-level commanders and scores of senior figures – including almost the entire leadership of the Taliban – followed similar routes to escape from Afghanistan. By the middle of 2002, most had found new bases, either around Quetta, where a ‘Quetta Shura’ or leadership council under Mullah Omar was constituted, or Peshawar. Some found their way to more remote villages, and a very few ended up in Karachi.

If the secure bases they had across the border and the resources that flowed in from a network of supporters overseas in the Gulf and elsewhere were both key in sustaining the Taliban after their defeat and strategic retreat in 2001, it was nonetheless the particular combination of conditions within Afghanistan that created the vacuum and the grievances that allowed them to launch their campaign to return to power within a few short years and then build an insurgency of sufficient strength to cripple the Western project in the country. One crucial pre-condition for the Taliban re-establishing a presence within Afghanistan was the discontent of Pashtun populations in the south and east at what was felt to be an unjust post-war settlement. Pashtuns had ruled the Afghan state ever since it had been founded in 1747, with the only exceptions being chaotic interludes in 1929 and from 1992 to 1996, and though this narrative of Pashtun rule naturally glossed over the constant fighting between the great Pashtun tribal confederations of Durrani and Ghilzai, within tribes, between Pashtun
mujahideen
factions during the war against the Soviets and between Pashtun Communists during the same period, between pro- or anti-Taliban factions in the 1990s and, of course, between communities every day over water, wood or decades-old perceived slights to honour, it still meant the Pashtun community was broadly convinced of its historic right to govern the country. Unlike the Iraqi Sunnis, who had lost demographic dominance around a century before losing their hold on power, the Afghan Pashtuns had remained the country’s largest ethnicity – around 45 per cent, though no one really knew – and had retained a strong sense of entitlement.

In the aftermath of the fall of Kabul to the Northern Alliance, which had been broadly composed of Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras, and the deposition of the largely Pashtun Taliban, many Pashtuns across Afghanistan were concerned that they would be the major losers in any new political set-up. The Bonn conference of December 2001, convened by the United Nations and managed jointly by UN and US diplomats to lay the basis for the future political set-up of Afghanistan, did little to reassure them. Karzai, the new ‘chief executive’ and president in waiting of the country, was a Pashtun but was highly Westernized, had returned from more than twenty years of exile and had little popular base beyond the following he had inherited from his father, a senior figure within the major southern Popalzai tribe.
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Then there was the widespread and unchecked score-settling which targeted Pashtun minorities in the north of the country in the early months of 2002, the sidelining of the ageing (Pashtun) king and the appointment of Tajiks from the Panjshir valley to head the so-called ‘power ministries’ of Defence, the Interior and Foreign Affairs.
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These and other developments reinforced the sense of political marginalization among Afghanistan’s Pashtuns, particularly in the rural areas or in the towns and cities of the south and east. This growing alienation was soon sharpened by a sense that the community was economically disadvantaged too. There were many areas of Afghanistan that benefited hugely in the years following the invasion. Kabul was transformed. So too were Jalalabad and Herat, with their links to Pakistan and Iran respectively. Even small towns like Pul-e-Khumri on the northern side of the critical Salang tunnel had bustling bazaars full of Chinese motorbikes, colourful blankets, inedible artificial jam that sold extraordinarily and inexplicably well, great piles of tin buckets and jerry cans of fuel. Bamiyan thrived, still poor and starved of development funds but stable and secure behind its mountain ramparts. But though the economy was booming, with growth rates of 8, 10 or even 14 per cent, the rural areas, particularly in the south, where the Pashtuns predominated, were missing out.
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The ‘primary beneficiaries of assistance were the urban elite,’ the World Bank noted in a 2005 report, exactly the constituency whose loyalty to the Western project in Afghanistan had always been assured.
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Kandahar itself might have changed – the governor’s palace had been repainted, roads resurfaced, there were drugs in the hospital and scores of ornate villas in the style favoured by local drug barons – but even a few miles outside the city there was little sign of any physical improvement since the end of the Taliban’s rule.

The reasons for this were simple: a lack of political attention, of funds, of security and of governance. Earlier chapters noted how Afghanistan received far less cash for reconstruction than almost all recent nation-building efforts.
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According to aid agencies, only half of the $20 billion that the international community had pledged to Afghanistan over previous years had actually arrived, and around 40 per cent of what had turned up had been spent on corporate profits and consultancy fees. Of the $6 billion that was left, a third was wasted.
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This meant that a fifth of what had been announced as given to Afghanistan actually reached Afghans.
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Spending the money that did get through was not easy either. The failure to deploy sufficient numbers of troops to Afghanistan had meant a minimal military presence in what were among the most critical parts of the country in terms of potential for violence. There was a US base for 2,500 troops in Kandahar and a couple of forward operating bases manned by small detachments of special forces who spent their time hunting fugitives or protecting under-resourced ‘Provincial Reconstruction Teams’, but otherwise there was no significant military presence across the four southern provinces of Kandahar, Herat, Farah and Nimroz between 2002 and 2006. International forces failed to secure even the major towns and highways in the south let alone the long unguarded border.
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In the four vital provinces further north – Oruzgan, Zabul, Ghazni and Paktika – Western troops were very thin on the ground too. As violence in the south began to increase from mid 2003, UN development agencies and Western and Afghan aid organizations were forced to first scale back their operations and then, by 2005, to virtually stop all work in what was the most strategically important part of Afghanistan after the capital.
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The consequences of the NGOs’ absence were all the more grave given the vast problems of governance. In a rerun of what had happened further north around Jalalabad, two factions had raced for Kandahar as the Taliban’s regime had collapsed in late 2001. Both were led by former warlords who had recently returned from exile. The winner was Gul Agha Sherzai, one of the most notorious of the commanders who had run the city and its surroundings in the early 1990s and whose depredations had prompted the foundation and permitted the early success of the Taliban. He owed his successful return to power in part to air strikes called in by American special forces and in part to the decision of two other major tribal leaders who had previously supported the Taliban to withdraw from the fight.
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Men like Sherzai – similar figures were coming to power in many other provinces across the south and east – made little effort to hide their own involvement in narcotics, dealing openly with both major drugs traffickers and the insurgents on a daily basis.
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They were neither interested in nor capable of dealing with the complex developmental challenges facing local communities at the time. These returning warlords had two layers of protection: the American special forces and intelligence agencies, for whom they acted as local proxies, and the Kabul government, for whom the sole criterion for resting in post was loyalty to President Karzai. For the majority of southern Pashtuns, these corrupt and brutal commanders, the administrations that such men led and the famously venal and violent police were the face of the new Afghanistan being built by the international powers.
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Those communities and individuals who were denied a slice of the lucrative new economic opportunities opening up to anyone with power and influence from 2002 naturally looked for ways to preserve their own zones of influence, cash flows and, in the zero-sum world of Afghan micro-politics, worked to deny their immediate rivals any advantage.