The 9/11 Wars (78 page)

The second plank of the McChrystal strategy aimed to deal with all the multiple failings of the Afghan state revealed so brutally over the previous years. ‘Ultimately, defeating the insurgency will depend upon the government’s ability to improve security, deliver effective … services and expand development for economic opportunity,’ John McConnell, the United States director of national intelligence, had told Senators the previous year and one reason why so much had been pinned on the presidential elections was that there had been so little sign of any rapid improvement of governance or aid and development delivery. The paradox of ‘no security without development, no development without security’ remained unresolved in much of the country, particularly of course the south. Venal, brutal, still largely untrained and often unpaid police – described by ISAF staff officers as ‘the strategic hope’ of the international effort in Afghanistan – were still a scourge for many communities.
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Local people still turned to Taliban courts in much of the country for the speedy resolution of disputes. The official judiciary was corrupt, derided, inefficient and fearful. ‘The government asked me to accept a post in Baki Barrak [a remote town], and I think the people would have liked me to be there, but I was too scared,’ one Logar judge confessed.
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The lack of governance inevitably hindered efforts to reduce opium cultivation and combat the vast narcotics industry. Though the opium harvest for 2009 did in fact fall 10 per cent to 6,900 tons, this was more due to external factors such as low opium prices and high wheat prices on the global market than to any developments within Afghanistan. Even if the extent of cultivation registered a steeper decline – to 123,000 hectares, down from a peak of 193,000 hectares in 2007 – the money being generated overall by the drugs industry was still enough to contaminate every part of Afghan public and political life.
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Sadiqa Mobariz, the Hazara member of the national assembly and a staunch enemy of the Taliban, said she had been sufficiently shocked by the corruption she had seen among senior politicians for all her illusions to be shattered: ‘When I saw the parliament and all the new laws back in 2004 and 2005, it was like a dream … now that has become a nightmare.’
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She did not plan on standing for re-election. Occasional prosecutions by newly formed special teams of investigators and judges made little difference – not least because those convicted were regularly pardoned by the president. Nor did the new commitment of NATO to target opium factories and facilities and key individual traffickers.
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The corruption naturally impacted on aid delivery – or at least the willingness of donors to fund assistance programmes. Though the days of shoddily built schools costing half a million dollars or tube wells sunk with no regard for the local water table were largely over, a huge amount of cash continued to be spent by either foreign companies or NGOs independently of the Afghan government. ‘How can people respect their own authorities if they see that anything that is worthwhile is built by other people?’ asked Mohammed Ehsan Zia, the rural rehabilitation and development minister.
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‘How can we give them the cash if we can’t be sure it isn’t going to be stolen?’ countered a Western aid official, citing reports that $3 billion in cash, of which a significant portion was embezzled US aid and drugs money, had been openly flown out of Kabul International Airport between 2007 and 2009 to financial safe havens abroad.
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There were continuing question marks over the integrity of President Hamid Karzai’s close entourage, the interior ministry and other key institutions. In October 2009, the then vice president, Ahmad Zia Massoud, was stopped and questioned in Dubai when he flew into the emirate with $52 million in cash. He was no exception. ‘Vast amounts of cash come and go from the country on a weekly, monthly and annual basis,’ the American ambassador noted in a cable.
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Grave problems remained with senior local officials. Other cables from the American embassy in Kabul back to Washington accused the governors of two key provinces of ‘embezzling public funds, stealing humanitarian assistance, and misappropriating government property’.
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American suspicions of the president’s half-brother’s involvement in a range of illicit activities including narcotics were well known.
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‘You’d think finding a dozen competent ministers and thirty provincial governors would be possible, but apparently it isn’t,’ said Daoud Sultanzoy, the opposition MP.
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Nor did it look likely to suddenly become possible in the near future. NATO officers had been repeating for years that the Taliban were not strong, but the state was weak. In the end it did not matter where the relative strength lay. The Taliban simply needed to impede any improvement in governance, and most of their job would be done. As ever in such a conflict, all the insurgents needed to do was to avoid losing and wait for the foreign occupiers to run out of men, money or patience so they could get on with their primary strategic aim of fighting the country’s local rulers. ‘We are very closely following the EU and US opinion and all assessment shows that people [there] are tired of this war and they will ask Obama to withdraw from Afghanistan,’ the Taliban spokesman told the author in October 2009.
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The third element of McChrystal’s plan was to reduce the number of civilian casualties, clearly a key element of ‘protecting the population’. Western public opinion, particularly as it turned negative, was sensitive to Afghan civilian casualties too. Inevitably given the nature of the coalition and the structure of American forces, the implementation of the new COIN thinking within Afghanistan was uneven, whatever senior officers’ orders. Ten minutes after leaving an interview with the commander of NATO-ISAF forces, the author’s local taxi was effectively run off the road by an American army Humvee, whose masked top gunner very deliberately added insult to near injury by offering a single erect gloved finger as his own vehicle swung by. If getting soldiers to drive courteously in the capital was hard, ensuring that frontline tactical commanders chose to forgo air power and risk the lives of their own men rather than those of locals was naturally significantly harder.
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When McChrystal called for a policy of ‘courageous restraint’ in the use of firepower, he provoked a furious response from many of his own soldiers, who accused their commander of irresponsibly depriving them of the most effective weapons in NATO’s arsenal. However, the use of air power and heavy weapons did diminish steadily over 2009 and into the next year – down 60 per cent by the early months of 2010 even if the tension between the short-term objective of ‘force protection’ and the long-term aim of ‘protecting the population’ that had dogged military operations for years was as present as ever.
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Overall the new emphasis on avoiding civilian casualties meant that international troops or their Afghan allies were responsible for significantly fewer Afghan civilians killed or injured during 2009, despite heavier fighting.
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There was also the issue of the ‘collateral damage’ associated with the American special forces teams tasked with picking up ‘high-value targets’. Such units, drawn mainly from the 7th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, though with some from the British Special Boat Service and other allied elite units, had been responsible for many of the most egregious incidents of civilian casualties over the previous seven years.
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The units often contained significant numbers of Afghans, and it was the latter who often exacted the highest price from local communities suspected of sheltering senior Taliban figures, though without their international mentors apparently making much effort to restrain them.
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Concerns about the local fall-out of such operations had been repeatedly raised by commanders on the ground and had led to a short moratorium on such raids in early 2009.
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However, one lesson that McChrystal had taken away from the special forces operations he had led in Iraq had been that pressuring the enemy’s middle-level ranks could pay major dividends, ‘squeezing’ the entire command and control structure of the insurgents. He therefore sought to increase the ‘operational tempo’ of his special forces troops three-, four- or five-fold. In this McChrystal was backed by his superior, David Petraeus, who, politic as ever, understood that the higher-value targets ‘taken down’ were useful to boost the morale of wavering politicians back home and thus bought the military much needed time. Senior officers also argued that such ‘surgical’ operations meant less need for conventional troops to ‘go blundering around the Afghan countryside’, and the raids intensified in the second half of 2009.

The first major test for McChrystal, the new NATO strategy and the new troops that had been arriving all through 2009 came in early 2010 at Marjah, a small rural district to the west of Lashkar Gah in the centre of Helmand province. Marjah, which had a population of approximately 100,000, had little inherent strategic importance other than being the westernmost point of a crescent of densely inhabited land running all the way across to the Pakistani border and being the target of the first major NATO-ISAF operation aimed at proving the ability of the newly reinforced Western and local forces to clear a Taliban-run area and then hold it through the creation of a more or less functional local administration.
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The district of Marjah had already been fought over in 2007 but, though ‘won’ from the insurgents, had subsequently been infiltrated once again by the Taliban, who had then killed many of those who had cooperated – or collaborated, depending on your point of view – with the Western forces. This time, the local population was told, not only would the area be secured and its inhabitants protected when the operation was over, but Marjah would then see a major development and administrative effort which would maintain the authority of the central government for the foreseeable future. Beyond the local aims, the operation had a broader national and international significance too. Not only would Marjah show how the new McChrystal strategy could work but it would ‘shape’ the local environment for what was planned to be the main event of the summer: a much more complex campaign for Kandahar which would break the stalemate in Afghanistan and change the course of the war.

The Marjah operation, named ‘Moshtarak’, or ‘Togetherness’, to emphasize the unity of effort of Afghan and international forces, turned out to be inconclusive. There were certain predictable problems – artillery and air strikes caused dozens of civilian casualties early on, for example – but the 15,000-strong Western-led force successfully fought its way through the villages for the loss of only thirteen men. An Afghan flag was raised by ANA soldiers over a badly damaged and abandoned marketplace in Marjah district centre on 17 February 2010. Though there had been some resistance, the insurgents had largely avoided a conventional confrontation, leaving behind hundreds of IEDs that continued to kill soldiers and locals for weeks. The operation was rapidly declared over, the main force pulled out and the attempt to establish a competent and responsive government was launched. This – the ‘build’ phase – met with limited success. The first governor installed turned out to be an incompetent virtual illiterate with a criminal record acquired while a refugee in Germany. The police deployed into Marjah proved as rapacious and brutal as anywhere else. Security forces proved unable to keep the insurgents out, as most of the latter were local men, whereas the ANA soldiers deployed to the district were from hundreds of miles away. Within weeks, the Taliban were back, at least at night. Local communities once more found themselves in the invidious position that had been so often theirs over previous years: trying to negotiate a miserable middle way between the insurgents and the Afghan government and their international allies. Within months, the United Nations had recorded at least 74 civilians killed in Marjah, 29 killed by ‘pro-government forces’, 32 by insurgents and 13 dying at the hands of ‘unknown actors’. Partly as a consequence, few of the 4,000 families who fled the spring fighting returned.
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In the aftermath of the Marjah operation the Kandahar campaign was postponed to allow ‘further shaping’ of the strategic environment. In May, the Taliban for their part launched their own offensive, named al-Faath, or ‘Conquest’, or ‘Victory’. All parties involved in the fighting in Afghanistan were very aware that its evolution through the summer would inevitably depend greatly on what was happening across the border, in Pakistan.

PAKISTAN, 2009–10

In February, as the Marines and their Afghan allies were fighting their way into Marjah, Pakistani intelligence officials had arrested more senior Taliban in a few days than they had done in the previous eight and a half years. Among those picked up in a series of dawn raids was Mullah Abdul Ghani Barader, effectively Mullah Omar’s deputy and one of the most capable and respected of the Quetta Shura members.
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Others included Maulvi Abdul Kabir, the former governor of Jalalabad who had escaped over the Spin Ghar mountains as the Tora Bora battle unfolded more than eight years before, who was picked up from a substantial house in which he had been living for some time on the outskirts of Peshawar.
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Several, including key advisers of Mullah Omar, were arrested in Karachi. In all, an impressive number of veteran Taliban figures, the arrest of whom had been sought by the West for many years, were detained.
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The response from Washington and European capitals was effusive. Richard Holbrooke, the special representative, called the arrests ‘another high water mark for Pakistani and American collaboration’.
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Bruce Riedel, who had led the Obama administration’s spring 2009 ‘AfPak’ policy review, hailed a ‘very major shift in Pakistani behaviour’.
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