The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (14 page)

The Obama Carpet

Hoh’s been in the country for four months. He arrives at the embassy in April. The embassy is ramping up to become the second-largest diplomatic mission in the world, after the 104-acre, $700 million spread in Baghdad. Embassy Kabul looks like it was built by a guy who lost out on the contract to design an Olympic Village. There’s a tennis sign-up sheet in the embassy lobby; there’s a pool and a gym and volleyball courts. Hanging on a wall on the third floor is a carpet woven with a portrait of President Obama.

It’s overcrowded. There are too many people and too few rooms, the excess numbers spilling out into prefabricated trailers. You aren’t really allowed to go out in Kabul without security, so most of the time, everyone at the embassy stays and lives at the embassy, their version of Kabul.

The embassy has requested 180 new positions. DC grants it the 180 new jobs. Hoh is there to take one of them. He served two tours in Iraq, once as a civilian advisor and once as a Marine. He’d been at the Pentagon working for the secretary of the Navy during the invasion of Iraq, worked on the Iraq desk at the State Department, and the whole State thing was an eye-opener—interagency meetings with CIA, NSC, Treasury,
DoD, USAID… meeting after meeting, nothing getting done, so few at the senior level wanting to work together because, God forbid, somebody gets credit and somebody else doesn’t.

He’s working Iraq, been on the ground there, but in Washington his experience doesn’t count—forget what you think about Iraq, it’s what you know about DC that matters. Hoh jumps at the chance to leave—he gets a job to run a Provincial Reconstruction Team, or PRT, for the State Department. Or so they told him before he left DC.

Embassy Kabul requested the 180 slots without knowing what it was going to do with the 180 slots. The embassy, Hoh says, is “completely dysfunctional,” disorganized, with no leadership. He’s standing in the PRT office and everyone is freaking out because they have no idea what to do with him. They submitted a request six months before, and in that time they failed to figure out how to use the 180 new slots. They tell him he’s going to work on a brigade staff in Jalalabad—only temporary, to fill in for two months. That’s not what he signed up for, but he goes anyway.

In Jalalabad, near the Pakistan border, he gets an overview of the war. He learns: The Taliban is not a monolithic organization. He learns: U.S. forces are not fighting and dying to combat terrorists, but are fighting and dying in local political disputes. In Asadabad, the neighboring capital, the governor doesn’t want Americans and the Afghan army going up to a certain area of the province because he’s got an illicit opium operation there. Another time, the governor tries to fly to Dubai during a crisis. The governor doesn’t give a shit; the Americans have to stop him at the airport and send him back to Asadabad.

Hoh flies over hundreds of valleys; he looks down at one, asks his friend from Special Forces, Ever been to that valley? No. Never will go to it, either.

He learns: Every valley has its own dynamic. “The Taliban” is a catchall phrase for local people who don’t want foreigners in their valley. Even if we wanted to put troops in every valley, it would require hundreds
of thousands—at least four hundred thousand, according to standard estimates.

His team gets approached by members of an insurgent group called Hizb-I-Islami, or HIG—they are open to negotiating with the government they’ve been fighting for years. Hoh tells the embassy, Let’s talk to them.

He learns: The embassy says stay out of it, not to interfere, not to negotiate. Despite the constant American refrain that there’s “no military solution” to the war, there is very little momentum in finding a political solution. Low-level entreaties are regularly ignored. If negotiations start, it has to start with Washington’s approval, then Kabul’s approval, and then, maybe, Hoh could start talking to the people he thought he was supposed to be talking to.

In June, he’s back in Kabul. He has a two-hour conversation with his boss and her deputy. He tells them he’s thinking about leaving. Everything he’s seen points toward a damning conclusion: What the Americans are doing is futile and has very little to do with protecting the United States from terrorists.

His bosses agree with him—they’re at the end of their tours—but tell him to give it a chance. A new group of people is coming in. Eikenberry just arrived. McChrystal just arrived. The elections are coming up. Why don’t you take a job at a Provincial Reconstruction Team down in the southeast, in Zabul province?

American officials consider the presidential election as the year’s key political event. It has been almost the entire focus of the U.S. diplomatic mission there over the past year. It will establish national leadership for at least the next five years. It is a major step, U.S. officials say, in finding that political solution.

The State Department official in charge of the elections leaves Afghanistan in June. The other State Department official who’s supposed to be running the election takes three and a half weeks of vacation in July, says Hoh. We’re not picking favorites, but Eikenberry holds press conferences
with two of Karzai’s opponents. Holbrooke talks to them as well. Karzai doesn’t like it.

Zabul isn’t much better than J-Bad. Same problems. No interest in reconciliation. Our policy is fueling the insurgency, not stopping it, Hoh thinks. Over-the-top corruption.

Two of Hoh’s Afghan friends call it the “golden era,” as in, it’s the era to get the gold.

On election day, August 20, 2009, Hoh isn’t supposed to go near a polling site. Luckily, the Afghans have set up an illegal polling site on the Afghan army base. Good for Hoh, because he has access to it. He recognizes a familiar face, the Afghan army colonel who runs the base is running the site. He’s in slacks and a button-down shirt today. He’s on his mobile phone, telling his men what candidate to vote for. About two or three hundred people show up at the polling site; the final tally of the day is twelve hundred votes cast.

Across the country, the reports of fraud flood in. Rumors abound about entire ballot boxes filled out in Pakistan and shipped in across the border. Some voters are using disappearing ink, voting ten or twenty times a person. Thousands of votes are counted where only hundreds of Afghans cast ballots. Turnout in the south of the country is an estimated 8 or 9 percent, yet the vote tally indicates that at least 40 percent of the population voted. All in all, an estimated 1.5 million fraudulent votes. That’s probably a low estimate. In Kandahar, Karzai’s power base, three hundred fifty thousand votes come in, though only twenty-five thousand people went to the polls. There are eight hundred fake polling sites like the one where Hoh is.

Hoh wonders if the $300 million spent to hold the election was a wise use of resources.

  APRIL 18–19, 2010, FRENCH–GERMAN BORDER

FROM: D BOOTHBY

Sun, April 18, 10:03
P.M.

How is your trip progressing. You missed the worst meal in paris. Flynn wore a sparkly hat.

FROM: M HASTINGS

Sun, April 18, 10:16
P.M.

Good. On way to berlin. In compartment with two hot French chicks and gypsy family. Flynn is mad genius. How are things?

FROM: D BOOTHBY

Mon, April 19, 1:53
P.M.

Not as good as with 2 hot French chicks. New eta afternoon. Totally right on mad genius.

FROM: D. BOOTHBY

Mon, April 19, 1:54
P.M.

Germans won’t let us in german chief of defense who is escorting 4 bodies has been prohibited from flying—stuck in Uzebsiktan. Commander has

Therefore cancelled rest of europe trip and we are trying to get home as soon. As possible. Might have to drive to southern Italy. Most likely cancelled but we are trying one more trick for germany should know by this evening. There is a bus load of Japanese ladies camping out in the lobby. This is getting wierd. Waiting for a swarm of bees next. How are you?

FROM: M HASTINGS

Mon, April 19, 8:56
P.M.

That sucks. Hoping you all make it. Hanging at Ritz.

FROM: D BOOTHBY

Tues, April 20, 5:37
A.M.

still trying an on outside pull to get in to germ. Requires special permissions from French and Germans and some expert flying and a quick diversion to Iceland to extinguish volcano. More in the AM.

FROM: D BOOTHBY

Were comming.

 AUGUST TO OCTOBER 2009, KABUL

In Kabul, the election becomes a political crisis.

Peter Galbraith is the number-two man at the United Nations mission in Afghanistan. He’s Holbrooke’s guy—they’d run into each other in Pakistan earlier in the year, and Holbrooke offers him a job. He’s the former U.S. ambassador to Croatia, negotiated a treaty in East Timor in 2001, and wrote two bestselling books on Iraq. He’d been in the thick of it with the Kurds when Saddam launched a genocidal campaign against them in the eighties. He had great relationships with the Pakistanis—Benazir Bhutto was a childhood friend—and his gig in Kabul would allow him to participate in what were likely going to be very difficult and lengthy negotiations with the Pakistanis, “shuttle diplomacy,” as Galbraith calls it. Before he can get to that, though, he’s got the job of supporting the Afghan elections.

Galbraith is living in Palace 7, a former royal estate where the UN headquarters staff lives. There’s a filled-in swimming pool that the Taliban allegedly used for executions. There’s an enormous dining area with a “ten-mile-long table,” Galbraith says, and a sweeping staircase leading
up to the second-floor suites, where Galbraith has his room. It’s palatial and surreal, and the Romanian security guards have pet peacocks that roam around the grounds to the sound track of the loud diesel generator. At the other end of the hall lives Kai Eide, his boss. Eide has a nicer room. Eide is Norwegian. Galbraith and Eide have a history—Eide introduced Galbraith to his wife back in the early ’90s in Zagreb, Croatia. She’s Norwegian, too. More important, Galbraith wasn’t Eide’s choice for the job—the Americans forced Galbraith on him, Eide will tell me. “I was under tremendous pressure to appoint him,” Eide says. “He was Dick Holbrooke’s arm into the UN mission.”

Galbraith arrives in Kabul in June. He starts to travel around the country, inquiring about the polling sites. He asks to visit a number of them, and isn’t given permission to do so. He finds what he describes as an “election process in chaos.” When Eide has to leave the country to travel during the summer, Galbraith is in charge. It’s Galbraith who realizes that twelve hundred of the polling stations exist “only on paper.” He’ll call them “ghost polling sites.” While Eide is out, Galbraith brings his concerns up to the Afghan minister of defense and the Afghan minister of interior. The Afghan ministers aren’t too interested in hearing about fake polling centers, and neither is Eide. Galbraith thinks Eide is close to Karzai and is worried about upsetting him. When Eide returns after one of his trips, he tells Galbraith to knock it off—the Afghan government has complained about his questions. Don’t bring up the ghost polling centers again, Eide warns him.

On the night of August 20, 2009, it’s clear to those UN officials gathered in the twenty-four-hour election-monitoring center that the fraud Galbraith warned about is happening. One province, Paktika, was reporting a 200 percent turnout. Other counts, in the country’s most dangerous areas, are wildly overblown as well. The election center collects more than eighty pages of complaints about fraud and voting irregularities. Other problems: 91 percent of the election coverage from the
state-run radio focused on Karzai, and he got six times more play from the state-run TV station than his closest opponent. (According to Galbraith, Eide later deletes this paragraph about media bias from an official report.) Eide is briefed on the fraud, but doesn’t want his staff to say anything to anyone about it. “Galbraith wanted me to come out with a strong statement indicating the amount of fraud,” Eide explains. “How could I possibly do that? I had no indication of whether it was ten or fifteen or twenty percent.”