The 9/11 Wars (76 page)

For, along with the new doctrines and the new troops, another major development of 2009 was the West’s increasingly explicit exasperation with Afghanistan, the Afghans and efforts to stabilize and secure the country. This was true of troops on the ground – ‘It would be so much easier for everyone if they would just let us help them,’ complained Sergeant Amber Robinson of the 10th Mountain Division in Logar – and of policy-makers and strategists in Western capital cities.
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In March 2009 42 per cent of respondents to one poll said the United States had made ‘a mistake’ in sending military forces to Afghanistan, up from 30 per cent in February. One poll in August 2009 showed that a majority of Americans saw the war in Afghanistan as not worth fighting, and just a quarter said more US troops should be sent to the country.
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In the same month, another survey showed half of Republican congressmen and 70 per cent of Democrats were against any escalation of US commitment to the war in Afghanistan. By September, polls showed even lower levels of support among politicians and the public alike.
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It was against this background that, after months of debate, Obama finally announced that he had made his decision on McChrystal’s recommendations. The general’s review, conducted by a mixed group of academics, experts and soldiers, had stressed that the reinforcements earlier in the spring had been too few to make a significant strategic difference, and the president decided to order a further reinforcement of 30,000. Other coalition members reluctantly contributed a further 5,000 over the year, and thus, by the early months of 2010, the NATO-ISAF commander in Afghanistan disposed of around 135,000 troops, seven times as many as eight years before, and with more American troops there than in Iraq for the first time. However, Obama also announced that American forces would start coming home in the summer of 2011. Though the military had asked for a commitment through to 2013, there was no way the new president was going to risk going into mid-term elections or even a campaign for a second term with an escalating war on his hands. ‘I’m not doing 10 years,’ Obama was reported to have told Defense Secretary Gates and Secretary of State Clinton. ‘I’m not doing long-term nation-building. I am not spending a trillion dollars.’
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Other NATO countries, also responding to public opinion that had long turned sour on the war in Afghanistan, were already imposing dates by when they would withdraw their soldiers.
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In Paris, the French ministry of defence had appointed an admiral to look at ways of managing local public opinion. ‘Selling a retreat is quite difficult,’ he admitted.
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The constant bad news, the growing casualties, the apparent complexity of the conflict, the disaster of the elections, the fact that al-Qaeda had not successfully attacked anywhere outside the Middle East or Maghreb for several years and was based, as far as anyone could tell, not in Afghanistan at all but in neighbouring Pakistan all combined to further undermine any remaining support for the war in the West. Domestic opinion was ‘dynamic’, of course. American backing for some kind of surge rose temporarily at the end of 2009, and internal UK government polling showed that support in Britain for the war ticked up 9 per cent when it was revealed that Prince Harry, the Queen’s grandson, had been fighting in Helmand and rousing footage of the young aristocrat firing heavy weapons at invisible ‘Terry Taliban’ was released.
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But the overall trend was evident to all. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that Karzai and his entourage should be sceptical of the repeated US claims of a long-term commitment.

This led to an apparently paradoxical situation: at the exact moment when the Americans, reluctantly followed by leaders such as Britain’s Gordon Brown, were escalating the Western commitment to Afghanistan to levels many times greater than ever seen before – the troop increases were accompanied by a ‘civilian surge’ of advisers, aid workers, technicians, diplomats and others as well as a commensurate boost to development assistance and UN funding – support for the war back home was disappearing. It was in this environment that the final major development in 2009 emerged: a collective recognition on the part of Western strategists and policy-makers that a serious effort needed to be made to negotiate with at least some of the insurgents. This would have been anathema in the first six or seven years of the conflict in Afghanistan, but alarm at the seriousness of the situation in 2008 and the recognition that many of the original aims of the Western project in Afghanistan had become simply unrealizable, had led to the understanding among some analysts and diplomats that, if the West was ever going to extricate itself from Afghanistan, it would be necessary to talk, somehow to the Taliban.

In fact, various different initiatives involving ‘reconciliation’ had been underway for some time, all aiming in one way or another to convince those insurgents who were felt to be fighting for ‘non-ideological’ reasons to lay down their arms. At the lowest level, there had been an Afghan government initiative that had aimed to convince simple fighters – the so-called ‘Tier Three Taliban’ in NATO parlance – to hand in their weapons in return for a small sum and a guarantee of no prosecution. Assessments showed that almost none of the 5,000 or so ‘fighters’ who had supposedly surrendered under this programme could be reliably identified as insurgents. With its funding exhausted, it was effectively defunct. Then there had been the efforts to engage slightly higher-level Taliban, mainly leaders of groups of between a few score and a couple of hundred fighters. These ‘Tier Two Taliban’ had been engaged via a range of intermediaries in a variety of local initiatives. These efforts had also met with mixed success. Some had seen some partial progress, but many of the more ambitious attempts at bringing over Tier Two Taliban had gone disastrously awry. One British bid to win the loyalty of an insurgent leader in Helmand had prompted a huge political row between London and Kabul, resulting in the expulsion of the senior EU diplomat used by MI6 as an intermediary.
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Then there were efforts directed at the senior leadership, the Tier One Taliban. One initiative by the Saudi Arabian royal family saw a group of senior former Taliban figures including Mullah Wakil Muttawakel, the former foreign minister, and Abdul Salaam Zaeef, the former ambassador to Islamabad, as well as several individuals with more direct connections to members of the ‘Quetta Shura’ invited to Mecca to talk over potential roles for Riyadh in any peace process. This bid to establish contacts and lever the Saudis’ religious authority had gone nowhere despite logistic and diplomatic support from the British intelligence services and government.
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The spring of 2009 saw efforts at all levels re-energized with talks between representatives of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Karzai and a range of other contacts between the government and senior Taliban leaders through figures such as Maulvi Rahmani, the former deputy education minister who was also now living in Kabul. Once shunned, Muttawakel and Rahmani now regularly met a range of diplomats or other representatives of European and Middle Eastern powers as well as, more discreetly, the Americans. At the other end of the scale, commanders like Colonel Haight in Logar were meeting ‘shadow councils’ made up of ‘all kinds of people’ including active insurgents and in Helmand the creation of ‘leadership councils’ sponsored by the British in scores of villages in the south was allowing ‘people with broad contacts among the insurgents’, in the delicate formulation of one UK diplomat, to enter into dialogue with both the Kabul government and NATO-ISAF forces.
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But there was still little real progress. William Wood, the US ambassador in Kabul, called on the insurgents to drop their key demand to talk only once foreign troops had left the country. Taliban spokesmen and intermediaries maintained their position that the occupiers must go before any political process could be engaged. The new counter-insurgency manual overseen by Petraeus advised not wasting time on ‘extremists’ but concentrating on ‘groups with goals flexible enough to allow productive negotiations’.
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But who would negotiate? And about what? And with whom? The idea of ‘reconciliation’ raised as many questions as it provided potential answers. If any such process was going to work, a significant restructuring of not just the strategy but the entire project of the international community involved in Afghanistan was going to be necessary.

The groundwork for this restructuring had been laid during the spring of 2009, when, hitherto less sceptical than their European allies about achieving ‘victory’, many in the American security, military and political establishments began to question basic assumptions about what was achievable in Afghanistan. A key moment was reached when senior American officials began talking about ‘mitigating’ rather than eliminating the Taliban threat. Bob Gates, the American defense secretary, spoke about the folly of trying to create ‘Valhalla’ in central Asia. The mythical and geographic references might have been a little haphazard, but the sense was clear nonetheless. Wood, the American ambassador in Kabul, spoke of how everyone, including the Americans, had been ‘a bit too optimistic’ in the early years of the conflict in Afghanistan as regards to what kind of country could be built. ‘Certainly not your standard issue Western democracy,’ he explained.
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The new pragmatism Obama outlined in his Cairo speech and elsewhere was one driver. Another was the more generalized lack of confidence that even McChrystal’s new strategy might work. ‘Success is not unattainable, but I am pessimistic,’ Andrew Exum, a former US army officer and veteran of Afghanistan who had been part of the team of outside experts brought in to advise McChrystal, told the author a few weeks after returning from his mission in Afghanistan.
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Bruce Riedel, the former CIA analyst who had chaired the first Obama review, was more blunt: ‘It may be that the patient was dead on arrival.’
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Even within the White House there were very significant doubts, particularly on the part of Vice President Biden.

Through the summer and autumn of 2009 it thus became very clear that the more ambitious of the goals of the West’s mission in the country were being quietly abandoned.
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To an extent Western governments had been caught out by their own previous rhetoric, having sold a security operation as a humanitarian intervention back in 2002 and subsequently used moral and ethical arguments to bolster public support. Many ordinary people in the US, the UK and elsewhere still believed that troops were in Afghanistan, at least in part, to spread liberal, secular modern values and to protect women from the ‘medieval’ Taliban. Ditching all the more idealistic rhetoric and returning to a more pragmatic, security-based justification for intervention in Afghanistan was, at the very least, a delicate operation. ‘Our objectives are being recalibrated in view of the circumstances,’ one senior FCO official admitted privately in October 2009. In July, a month which saw twenty-two British soldiers killed and ninety-four wounded in Helmand and seventy international troops killed across the country as a whole, the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, called for a ‘long-term inclusive political settlement in Afghanistan’ to draw away conservative Pashtun nationalists from the Taliban.
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In the face of criticism from elected representatives in the UK who argued that ‘it is fundamental to the rebuilding of Afghanistan that international commitments made by the Government of Afghanistan and by donors on the rights of women are honoured and given greater priority’, officials pointed at the American experience in Iraq as an example of what an overly ideological approach could bring.
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An internal review of priorities at the British aid ministry, DFID, saw ‘gender equality somewhat downgraded’, a second official admitted.
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When, in August, McChrystal’s review had been submitted to the president, it included, alongside the demand for 40,000 new troops, the recommendation that alternative political vehicles such as moderate Islamist parties be created for Taliban supporters and recommended that ‘reconciled’ insurgents be removed from the sanctions list established under UN Security Council Resolution 1267 back in 1999. Such a measure had been mentioned by many of the intermediaries such as Muttawakel or Rahmani as something important to senior insurgents and was a significant concession which British intelligence described to the author as ‘probably the first step towards genuine dialogue’. By November internal memos within the British Foreign Office – shared with McChrystal’s staff – were urging ‘a settlement with (most of) the Quetta Shura’. The memos also proposed a
loya jirga
– or national assembly – to be held in Kabul within two years that would work on reforming the Afghan constitution and reformulating the structure laid down by the Bonn agreement of late 2001.
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People like Sadiqa Mobariz, a Hazaran female member of the Afghan national assembly and thus exactly the sort of person who would suffer from any concessions to the conservatives, repeatedly expressed their fears of betrayal. Western politicians made little effort to allay such concerns. In January 2010, at a major conference in London the West finally declared their collective desire to ‘talk to the Taliban’ – or at least the ‘moderates’ among them. Half a billion dollars was pledged to buy off Taliban footsoldiers. A renewed – though less publicized – push to engage Taliban leaders would be made at a strategic level too. When asked in an interview days before the conference if it would be acceptable ‘if all this ended with a Taliban government in Kabul committed to a
sharia
caliphate state in Afghanistan’, Miliband had said his objection would be to the ‘caliphate’ element as that would mean an al-Qaeda link. His answer implied that a rigorous religious regime in Kabul would nonetheless be tolerated. A few days after the London conference’s close, Britain’s defence minister told reporters that Western powers were not seeking an ‘unconditional surrender’ of Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan because many could form part of a settlement’.
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His words contrasted with statements by his predecessor, who, just over a year before, had described ‘negotiating deals with the Taliban’ as ‘conceding defeat by another name’.
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Though the London conference also saw a renewed pledge of support from forty-odd nations to the strategy outlined in McChrystal’s review and sanctioned by Obama a month or so previously, it was obvious that the aim of the campaign of 2010 was not going to be paving the way for ‘outright victory’ but allowing any eventual negotiations with the insurgents to take place in a more favourable environment. No one at the conference deviated from the message about leaving behind a ‘sustainable, secure’ Afghanistan which would no longer pose a threat to the West but no one could conceal their impatience to close the increasingly gruelling Afghan chapter of the multi-volumed encyclopedia of the 9/11 Wars as soon as possible either.