The 9/11 Wars (54 page)

None of this assured the return of the Taliban, but it did make it much easier. The ‘strategic centre of gravity’ of the Taliban’s campaign lay in Afghanistan’s 40,000-odd villages. For a long time, this had escaped their international adversaries, who, coming from highly urbanized societies, naturally concentrated their efforts on the country’s cities and towns. Reinforcing this error was a failure to understand the Taliban’s deep cultural and social roots and the nature of their rule in the 1990s. For though the Taliban had been an alien presence in much of the north and west of Afghanistan and in cosmopolitan cities such as Herat and Kabul, where Dari-speaking Tajik or Persian ethnic minorities dominated and levels of education were much higher, in most of the south and the east of the country the movement had often been an integral part of communities. Groups of ‘Taliban’, largely students, had fought, often independently of the increasingly discredited major
mujahideen
groups, against the Soviets.
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As Mullah Omar’s forces had advanced across Afghanistan between 1994 and 1996, they had attracted a variety of supporters. Sometimes these were sections of a community that had previously been marginalized, such as the lowly mullahs, landless families, those without connections to the central government or minor tribes who had historically been pushed around by bigger ones.
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On other occasions those aligning themselves with the new force had been local ‘commanders’ or minor warlords forced out by rivals during the civil war and who thus grafted their own small cause on to the greater one of Mullah Omar’s movement. Situations differed across the country, but in many areas the end of the Taliban rule in 2001 had not meant a liberation from a repressive and alien extremist state, as it was perceived to be so often in the West, but the defeat of one faction in a community and its replacement by another.
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It was simply another turn in the long contest for power, particularly acute since the start of the civil war in the 1970s, which had been continuing in Afghanistan on and off for many decades. Sometimes, down at the most ‘granular’ level, the differences between pro- and anti-Taliban elements could be simply no greater than those imposed by a longstanding blood feud or a question of who had fought for whom when the Communists were in power. As in earlier conflicts, families very often had one brother or son with the Taliban, another with a different faction.
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Language, ethnicity, culture and religious practice were thus broadly shared.
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It was these connections – both cultural and personal, general and very specific – that the Pakistan-based Taliban leadership exploited through late 2002 and on through 2003 and 2004. ‘Our goal is to unify the country against the occupiers,’ Maulvi Taj Mohammed had explained to the author six months after Tora Bora, adding that the movement aimed to ‘move slowly’ and to ‘bring order’ before launching ‘military actions’.
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As they set about rebuilding their strength in Afghanistan, often the Taliban used the same tactics employed almost a decade before, sending out emissaries to far-flung villages where local tribal and family connections guaranteed at least a hearing if not a welcome and running an extensive outreach programme to all those powerbrokers, former warlords, commanders or elders who saw their rivals profiting from cooperating with the government or foreign forces. Efforts were made to reach all sections of the population – ordinary villagers as well as more powerful individuals. On occasion, loudspeakers were set up or even a portable FM radio used to broadcast the Taliban’s message. Frequently violence was used to eliminate opposition.
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Often generational tensions – familiar from other theatres in the 9/11 Wars including Europe – were exploited, with younger contenders for power and influence being turned against often more moderate and pragmatic elders. Many of the latter ended up dead or in exile. But the successful communication of the insurgents’ discourse of Islam, nation and community, often relayed by the clerical network, depended as much on pre-existing xenophobia, the mistrust of Kabul, fear of bias towards ethnic rivals, anger at civilian casualties or intrusive searches by Western troops and, of course, a deep-rooted rural religious and social conservatism as on intimidation. When successful, the Taliban, or the local powerbrokers they had recruited into their ranks, were often able to take on a role as ‘protectors’ of a given community against local rivals, government officials and the few foreign troops who were ever seen. At the very least, given the vacuum in government authority in much of the country, they were simply able to establish some kind of rule of law where there was none. As it had been in the 1990s, the Taliban remained structured less as a militia or insurgent group and more as an ‘adaptive social movement’ in the words of political scientist Seth Jones or a ‘caravan’ in the more colourful phrase of the late Afghan expert Bernt Glatzer.
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To supplement the recruits brought in by their outreach programme in the villages the Taliban leaders, from their now secure base around Quetta and to a lesser extent Peshawar, drew on another tactic from the previous decade and mobilized the various resources of the cross-border ethnic and religious networks from which they had, in part, originally sprung. The most useful was the vast reservoir of combat-age manpower in the religious schools over the border in Pakistan. The young men who had sat in rows on the schools’ concrete floors rote-learning the Koran had provided critical fighting strength in the early Taliban campaigns of the mid 1990s, and Taliban leaders naturally once more turned to the
medressas
. One recruit was nineteen-year-old Rahmatullah, who in mid 2003 had travelled to Pakistan to be a religious student and had returned to Afghanistan as an armed
mujahid.
He explained his recruitment in simple terms: ‘I was in school, and my teachers told us that we should fight for my country and my religion against the unbelievers who had come to Afghanistan and the hypocrites in power. All my friends went, and I didn’t want to be left behind.’
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Older recruits were found in the large refugee camps in Pakistan, which were full of young men of Pashtun Afghan origins who had been raised on an ideological diet of radical conservative religion in communities stripped of the comforting traditional identities and hierarchies of tribe or village. Products of the extremely high fertility rates in the camps in the 1980s and early 1990s, jobless or chronically underemployed, they too, sometimes paid small sums, began to find their way across into the south-eastern provinces in increasing numbers by 2003 and 2004.
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The first areas to slip into Taliban control had been isolated districts on the eastern rim of the central mountainous core of the country as well as along the Pakistani border near the border point at Chaman.
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By late 2003, raiding parties from bases in these areas had been regularly attacking the road from Kabul to Kandahar and government buildings in even major towns. The seductive images of voters queuing outside polling stations for successive elections of 2004 and 2005 had, as in Iraq at around the same time, obscured the growing strength of the insurgency.
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By late 2005, significant parts of the environs of Kandahar, much of neighbouring Helmand province and large sections of the south-western desert were under de facto Taliban control, and groups of fighters loyal to networks allied to the Taliban, such as those run by former
mujahideen
leader and prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, the commander and cleric who gained fame in the 1980s and had eventually become a key ally of the Taliban, were establishing their own authority over swathes of north-eastern and eastern border provinces.
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The numbers of insurgents were still not great. If every fighter from tribal and village-level fellow travellers through to mercenary and criminal elements as well as contingents from the schools and the refugee camp populations had all been simultaneously mobilized, their number would not have exceeded several thousand.
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But the numbers were not important. The fugitive Taliban leaders in Peshawar had outlined three phases of their campaign – establishing contact with potential allies, establishing permanent areas of influence and authority and only then moving to overt military action. One of the advantages of the strategy was that progress would only become obvious to the enemy when it was probably too late. ‘By 2005 … we were looking carefully at a number of staff analyses that began to suggest the Taliban was exhibiting signs of defeat,’ Lieutenant General David W. Barno, commander of US forces from 2003 to 2005, remembered.
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General James Jones, then NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander (Europe), announced bluntly in early 2006 that ‘the Taliban and al-Qaeda are not in a position where they can restart an insurgency of any size and major scope’.
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A much more pessimistic analysis from the head of the Afghan National Directorate of Intelligence, Amrullah Saleh, was brushed aside. Saleh recalled later being told the Taliban were ‘irrelevant’. The Bush administration reduced its budgeted aid request to Congress for Afghanistan by 38 per cent to $3.1 billion.
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As had been the case in Iraq, the initiative had been seized by the insurgents.

THE AFGHAN FRONTS 2006–8

Shortly after Jones’ statement, new Western troops began to arrive in Afghanistan in a major reinforcement of the international presence there. Given the prevailing wisdom that the Taliban were beaten, this would seem to indicate a serious divergence between public statements and private strategy-making on the part of Western politicians. In fact, it was more evidence of deep confusion among Western policy-makers and their very real failure to understand what was happening in Afghanistan at the time.

In theory the troops were the final part of a rolling extension through the country of ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force that had been created with a peace-keeping mission following the war of 2001.
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The reinforcements arriving in 2006 would bring the total number of troops committed to Afghanistan to 46,000, still only a third of those in Iraq but an increase of 20,000 on the previous year.

Their aim remained largely the same as that of 2002. They were not coming to launch a new offensive to roll back the Taliban. They were coming to ‘extend the authority of President Karzai’s government, to protect those civilian agencies assisting them to build a democratic government and to enable security, stability and economic development throughout the country’. The resistance these troops, particularly the British, were to encounter thus came as a rude surprise. John Reid, the British defence secretary, had even raised the possibility of the soldiers not having to fight at all, speaking of his hope that the troops could withdraw in three or five years ‘without firing a shot’.
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A secondary aim of the deployment had little to do with Afghanistan and much to do with global politics. European powers – particularly the British – had been concerned since 2003 that the increasingly unilateral approach of the Americans and the failure of other states to make any contribution to (or to stop) the war in Iraq would fatally undermine NATO, the keystone of the Western world’s defence architecture. The expansion of ISAF into the south of Afghanistan, five years after it had originally been mooted, with all Afghan operations placed under NATO command except those American forces dedicated to hunting bin Laden along the eastern frontier, was a way of reinvigorating the alliance and proving its utility in the changed strategic environment of the first decade of the twenty-first century.
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After some debate and argument, new Dutch, Canadian and British troops began arriving in Oruzgan, Kandahar and Helmand provinces respectively in the late spring of 2006. All spoke of winning ‘hearts and minds’. ‘We need to convince them that we are the winning team and once we do that – and we will – then they’ll come over to us,’ said Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Tootal, who deployed from Iraq via a stint in the UK to Helmand as part of the British 16th Air Assault Brigade. As he spoke, bulldozers lit by arc lights were shunting gravel into berms to protect Camp Bastion, the new British base in the province. Beyond the new ramparts, the desert stretched off into the night.
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Very rapidly, it became clear that potential resistance in Helmand and elsewhere had been grotesquely underestimated. Within weeks of arriving, the new troops across the country found themselves involved in heavy fighting. NATO officials in the headquarters compound in central Kabul, sitting in the garden of the coffee shop, attributed the increasingly extensive violence to international forces pushing into new areas and insisted that 70 per cent of the violence in Afghanistan was restricted to 10 per cent of the districts.
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Both these statements were true but ignored the fact that the Taliban had met the arrival of the new troops with an offensive of their own. Attacks on international forces went from 300 in March 2006 to 600 per month at the year’s end, traditionally a relatively quiet time.
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By the end of 2006, after six months or so of renewed NATO activity, at least a third of the east and south of the country was shaded a vivid red for ‘high risk’ on the ‘security charts’ compiled by NGOs trying with greater and greater difficulty to work outside the main cities. At least in the short term, the arrival of the new forces did not appear to be making the environment more secure but considerably more dangerous. This, NATO officials in Kabul said, was ‘the price of victory’.
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