The 9/11 Wars (56 page)

The problems for the British in Helmand were the same for other forces around the country. Then there were other huge structural failings that hobbled the NATO force. The lines of command for international forces were impossibly tangled, running through Kandahar, Kabul, London, Brussels and, for the special forces and other Operation Enduring Freedom troops, US Centcom in Florida. The British served six-month tours (while the Americans did twelve or even fifteen months), which were barely long enough for a unit to get established, learn a little about the terrain and launch a single major operation before it was time to pack up again. Each new commanding officer brought a different approach. So whereas the brigade commander in Helmand in the first half of 2007 spoke of wearing down the enemy through attrition, ‘mowing the lawn’ as he termed it, his successor had a diametrically opposite vision of counter-insurgency warfare, telling the author in January 2008 that victory in Afghanistan could not be achieved through military means.
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Then there was the question of progress. How could it be measured? British government and United Nations officials all pointed to familiar markers: economic growth in the country as a whole, the number of girls in school, the explosion of the media sector, successful preparations for elections in 2009, minefields cleared, money spent, wheat distributed, the fact that most of the north, the west and the cities remained calm.
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Seventy per cent of violent incidents still occurred within ten districts, as ISAF spokesmen continued to repeat. On the other hand, in 2008 there were a third more ‘kinetic events’ than the previous year and 50 per cent more kidnappings and assassinations.
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Any private unease at the direction things were taking was kept very quiet. It was true that insurgents were being killed in large numbers. Though body counts were avoided – one commander spoke of them as a ‘corrupt measure’ – British senior officers nonetheless boasted of ‘neutralizing’ between 3,000 and 4,000 Taliban fighters in 2008 alone.
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But keeping Western casualties to politically manageable levels was proving hard. Six British soldiers had died between the end of the 2001 campaign and the new deployments of 2006. More than ten times as many were to die in the following two years. Across the country as a whole, there were 416 coalition deaths between June 2006 and July 2008, more than had been killed in the previous four and half years.
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Then there were the local casualties. Hundreds of government officials and nearly a thousand police died in 2007 alone. One was the courageous and effective female police chief in Kandahar, Malalai Kakar. ‘We killed her,’ a Taliban spokesman told AFP news agency. ‘She was our target, and we successfully eliminated our target.’
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In the middle of it all were people like Roz Khan, a day labourer, and Gul Pari, a widowed farmer’s wife. Both were villagers from the Sangin Valley, a crucial thoroughfare in the north of Helmand contested by British troops and insurgents. Forced to flee their homes, they described a grim daily routine of trying to reach their fields through air strikes and skirmishes, of pressure from the insurgents at night and of patrols by Western forces during the day. ‘If it was just one or the other things would be better. But when there is a fight over your house you can’t live in it,’ said Roz Khan. Almost every family he knew had lost at least one member to stray bullets or Western bombing, either poorly targeted or attracted by insurgents who deliberately hid among the villagers. The husband of Pari, who had four young children, had been killed in a ‘bombardment’ but she was unsure which side to blame. ‘When there was fighting, we did not know what was going on. But I think it was the fault of the Taliban because they were shooting and then there was an attack afterwards.’
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Many tens of thousands had fled to Kandahar or Kabul, where they lived in squalor and destitution in makeshift refugee camps, ignored by the government and receiving only rudimentary assistance from overstretched aid agencies.
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Pari tried to feed, clothe and house her family with the 50 Afghani [65p] that her eldest son earned from selling ice creams on the streets of the capital. She did not know how they would survive the winter.

With access to villages like those left by Roz Khan and Pari very difficult and their inhabitants very wary of speaking, piecing together an accurate picture of what communities genuinely felt about either the insurgents or the government and their Western allies was extremely difficult. But almost all the evidence confirmed that what most communities hoped most to avoid was rule neither by the Taliban nor the ‘Amriki’, as all international forces were known, but being caught between the two. The new fighting from 2006 on had suddenly placed hundreds of communities in an unenviable position between a Western rock and an insurgent hard place.
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Certainly, for tribal elders trying to juggle the various pressures from different insurgent factions, the Afghan police, the Afghan army, drugs traffickers and various rivals ready to unseat them at the slightest misstep, the arrival of a well-meaning and heavily armed Western officer asking ‘what he could do to help’ was the last thing they needed. ‘They keep asking us what we want. The answer is that they go away,’ one told the author near Maiwand, outside Kandahar, in July 2006.
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Such sentiments clearly posed a problem to a strategy based on convincing communities to ‘join the winning side’, as Tootal had described it.

That any elders tempted to cooperate with international forces or the government risked the wrath of the insurgents clearly did not help. This was especially evident during the successive operations to clear areas of Taliban. When the thinly spread international forces withdrew to commence another operation elsewhere, as they usually were forced to do, anyone who had cooperated locally was left very exposed. One of the more egregious examples occurred in Marjah, a rural district in central Helmand, which was cleared during an operation in 2007 and then turned over to ‘local security forces’. The district was subsequently left unprotected, allowing the Taliban to move back in and kill scores of local notables. Watching a patrol of heavily armed UK soldiers plod down a back lane in Lashkar Gah, where the coalition force in Helmand had its headquarters, one elderly man told the author that the British were the twelfth fighting force he had seen from the gate of his compound in the last twenty years. (The others were, in reverse historical order, Americans, the Taliban, at least four warring
mujahideen
groups
,
Soviet troops and Afghan government soldiers from three different regimes.) ‘They always arrive noisily saying they will win but leave much more quietly,’ he added and shrugged. It was not as if the insurgents were very far away. In a small mechanics’ workshop off the main bazaar in the town, only a few hundred yards past the gates of the NATO base, Fazl Rahman, forty years old, told the author bluntly: ‘I am Taliban. Why should I be afraid? You British and Americans should leave this country. You are here for your own benefit, to destabilize our country, which is a castle of Islam, to destroy our religion. Soon you will run.’
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THE END OF 2008: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE TALIBAN

No insurgency progresses in a linear fashion, steadily advancing across a map, increasing in a regular exponential manner until finally taking power or expelling the foreign occupiers. Expansion is always marked by a series of inflection points. These are critical moments when the future evolution of the revolt, rebellion, movement or whatever are determined. Such moments involve significant challenges that have to be successfully met by insurgent leaders – and often lower-level participants too – if progress towards any given goal is to be maintained. It was thus inevitable that Mullah Mohammed Omar and the senior Taliban leadership also faced a series of acute problems as a consequence of the movement’s rapid resurgence between 2002 and 2008. These fell into three main categories: military, political and diplomatic.

The first and most pressing were the military challenges. The success of the Taliban had provoked a response from their enemies, belated but very real nonetheless, and the leadership needed to try to find a tactical and strategic answer to the successive NATO military efforts. One very costly experiment was a set-piece battle fought among the vineyards, villages and small mud-walled fields of Panjwai outside Kandahar in late 2006. Along with the district of Argandab to the north, the area had been a key battlefield during the war against the Soviets, and the Taliban leadership may have hoped either to definitively carve out a secure enclave from which to launch an assault on Kandahar itself – a sort of miniature ‘al-Zarqawi’ local strategy – or to inspire a more general insurrection across much of the country through seeking, and winning, a pitched confrontation in such a historically important location – the equivalent of al-Suri style ‘global intifada’, but on a national scale. Though the fighting was tough, with coalition forces close to running out of ammunition and suffering heavy casualties from both friendly and enemy fire, neither Taliban aim was achieved, and the insurgents were eventually forced to retreat in disorder across the desert to the south, where Western special forces killed hundreds.
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Though such losses were swiftly made good with further recruiting drives in the
medressas
, refugee camps and villages across the border, no such operation was ever attempted again.

The ‘caravan’ of the Taliban movement was far from the sort of organized, hierarchical army that could formulate, institutionalize and execute doctrinal change with rapid efficiency and uniformity. The insurgency resembled more a swarm of wasps from different nests momentarily travelling together in a single, very broad direction. The impact of strategic direction from individuals such as Mullah Omar, Hekmatyar or Jalaluddin Haqqani (or increasingly his son, Sirajuddin) was always somewhat haphazard. Tactical innovation was thus the work of individual commanders and spread as ‘best practice’ through example, experimentation and word of mouth. As in Iraq, however, this meant a capacity to adapt very fast and very effectively. Improvements in manoeuvre and ambushes were soon noted by Western troops.So too was the steep increase in the number of IEDs.These inflicted a heavy toll with little risk and, as had been the case in Iraq, rapidly became a key weapon. The roadside bombings, booby traps and other similar devices did not replace the direct confrontations – the proportion of which in fact went from 47 per cent to 57 per cent of all insurgent attacks between 2006 and 2007 – but complemented them. Suicide bombs were particularly effective against softer targets such as Afghan government buildings or the police. However, the civilian casualties they often caused were problematic, and the tactic sparked a fierce debate within Taliban ranks.
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The second broad area in which expansion posed problems for the insurgent leadership was a familiar one: as the Taliban had grown, discipline had suffered. This in its turn imperilled the insurgents’ hold on communities and thus the continued success of the movement. What the Taliban and the other insurgent groups needed to avoid was a cycle such as that which had so damaged al-Qaeda in Iraq and the al-Mahdi Army, whereby diminishing support necessitated greater measures of coercion, which exacerbated the original problem to the point where entire populations started shifting allegiance away from the militants. The steady attrition of experienced Taliban commanders such as Mullah Dadaullah Akhund – who had led the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, had escaped coalition forces in 2001 and had gone on to become increasingly unpredictable, violent and powerful – posed a challenge that went beyond simply replacing capable individuals.
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The ‘degrading’ of senior ranks led to a new cohort of younger leaders, many of whom had not been involved in the original Taliban movement of the 1990s, being appointed to run their own
mahaz
, or ‘front’. As with the al-Mahdi Army in Iraq, these new commanders tended to be much less disciplined than their elders had been and their often violent and indiscriminate actions undermined much of the work done to secure the support of local communities by more experienced and more ideologically or politically mature figures. By 2007 there was significant unrest in Ghazni – where local commanders had beaten and tortured locals who refused to give them fuel for motorbikes – in Zabul, in parts of Helmand and elsewhere. The insurgents, well-informed analysts often said, had always depended on the active support of 10 per cent and the acquiescence of another 60 per cent of the population and in these places the behaviour of the ‘new Taliban’, as many locals called them, was threatening both.
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Expansion also meant that the key tactic of providing honest and rapid justice, either through mobile courts or through local clerics acting with the authority of the movement, was being undermined because there were too few judges of sufficient calibre to fill all the posts in the new areas that came under Taliban control. Worse, a wide range of criminals had been passing themselves off as ‘Taliban’. Some mixed actions commissioned by the real Taliban leadership with more freelance activities designed for pure personal gain, often at the expense of local communities. A few respected the orders coming down the satellite phone from Quetta or the tribal areas – at least two Western journalists avoided being put on trial as spies by local commanders after Taliban ‘ministers’ sitting on the leadership council in Pakistan were contacted – but many were not in the least bothered by any such sense of hierarchy and simply got on with looting and banditry.
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A significant proportion of new commanders were too young to remember much of the pre-2001 Taliban rule.
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