Battlegrounds

by H. R. McMaster

  We took off from Andrews Air Force Base on April 14, 2017. Our team met in the large office that doubled as a bedroom at the back of the plane. During our discussion, I described the Taliban as a reactionary, ruthless, inhumane, and misogynistic organization that was intertwined with Al-Qaeda and other jihadist terrorist organizations. The stakes were high because the terrorist ecosystem in Afghanistan and Pakistan could produce powerful organizations with access to a lucrative drug trade in relatively inaccessible territory in which they are able to plan, resource, organize, and train for attacks. The drug trade is a source of strength for terrorists, putting hundreds of millions of dollars per year into their coffers. It is also a source of weakness for the Afghan government and institutions, as many officials are unable to resist the lure of easy money. I suggested that we heed the advice of the Chinese philosopher of war Sun Tzu, who observed 2,500 years ago that “If you know your enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained, you will also suffer a defeat.”4

  I quickly realized that some members of our team had become so emotionally invested in the withdraw-and-talk strategy that fantasy had overwhelmed reality. They imagined a reformed Taliban that would forswear its goal of establishing an Islamic Emirate under brutal Sharia law. Additionally, talking with the Taliban had become a cottage industry in which academics and think tank analysts got a crack at wartime diplomacy. But they were talking with the enemy of their imagination rather than the barbarous terrorists who had aided and abetted Al-Qaeda in the murder of nearly three thousand Americans on September 11, 2001, and who were perpetuating violence against the long-suffering Afghan people. I hoped that our trip might foster a higher degree of strategic empathy for the situation across South Asia and a better understanding of our enemies and adversaries in the region. For too many years, we had suffered a defeat for every victory gained.

  Foundational to strategy formation is the willingness to unearth and challenge assumptions. I asked the team to use discussions in Kabul to challenge four assumptions foundational to America’s fantasy in South Asia:

  First, that a narrow, counterterrorism-only approach that used intelligence collection to cue strikes and raids was adequate to prevent terrorist organizations from threatening the United States.

  Second, that the Taliban was separate and distinct from Al-Qaeda and other transnational terrorists who threatened the security of the United States, its allies, and its citizens abroad.

  Third, that the Taliban, even as it gained strength and the United States withdrew, would negotiate in good faith and agree to end its violent campaign.

  Finally, that Pakistan would, based on U.S. assistance and diplomatic requests, end or dramatically reduce its support for the Taliban and other terrorist organizations.

  * * *

  AS OUR plane touched down in Kabul, I was happy to be back. I had departed the country five years earlier after a twenty-month-long tour of duty. When he was named commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus had asked me to join him and help take on one of the greatest obstacles for success in Afghanistan, corruption and organized crime. In the job I left as I deployed, chief of concept development and learning for the army, I studied closely the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The two years in Afghanistan confirmed the principal lesson I had identified: the United States military and its civilian counterparts had failed to direct efforts toward achieving sustainable political outcomes. I was grateful for the opportunity to organize an effort that might, finally, develop a realistic strategy for Afghanistan. It was past time to act on the hard-won lessons of America’s longest war.

  Although the distance from the Kabul airport to the embassy was only 2.5 miles, we loaded onto helicopters and flew to a landing zone at the sprawling secure area that contains the U.S. Embassy and the headquarters for the U.S.-led military coalition. The fact that the city had become too unsafe for routine ground movement of U.S. officials was used by advocates for withdrawal as a sign of the war’s futility rather than as an indication of a deficient strategy. The U.S. chargé d’affaires Hugo Llorens, our ranking diplomat in Kabul until the president appointed a new ambassador, greeted us as the Black Hawks touched down. We walked together to the embassy. Hugo was our tenth chargé d’affaires in Afghanistan since 2001.

  Llorens was an experienced diplomat who, after thirty-five years of working mainly on U.S. relations in the Western Hemisphere, had decided to retire. Hugo was energetic; he looked much younger than his sixty-two years. He had told me in Washington two weeks earlier that his concerns were growing. It was neither the Taliban’s mass murder attacks in Afghan cities, nor Taliban gains in the countryside, nor even large-scale offensives such as the September 2015 attack on Kunduz or the September 2016 attacks on Tarinkot that most concerned the ambassador. Rather, it was the lack of clearly stated U.S. goals and the ambiguity of U.S. strategy. Ambiguity emboldened the Taliban and shook the confidence of the Afghan government and people. Moreover, doubts about the future impeded reforms necessary to harden Afghan institutions against the regenerative capacity of the Taliban—regenerative capacity hidden across the mountainous border with Pakistan. The ambassador also worried about the depletion of U.S. will due to unrealistic expectations. Although the Afghan government needed to reduce the corruption that perpetuated state weakness, Afghanistan never would become, nor did it need to become, Switzerland.

  Since my first visit to Afghanistan in 2003, I had felt the emotional impetus behind Afghan policy shift from over-optimism to resignation and even defeatism. Hugo agreed that we needed a realistic strategy based on an honest appraisal of the situation and of the degree of influence that the United States and its partners could exert to ensure that South Asia never again became a base for terrorist organizations that aimed to attack the U.S. homeland, U.S. allies, or our citizens abroad. And we needed a sustainable strategy that could be pursued over time at a cost acceptable to the American people. As with understanding the challenges posed by Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China, the appraisal of the present and what was needed in the future had to begin with an understanding of the recent past.

  * * *

  AS WE walked out of the embassy compound on our way to the military headquarters, I reflected on the history of the place I had first visited seventeen months after Afghan militias and U.S. forces drove the Taliban out of Kabul. In December of 2001, U.S. Marines reoccupied the embassy building that their predecessors had abandoned in January 1989 as the last Soviet troops pulled out of the country. In a locked vault in the basement, the marines found a folded American flag and a handwritten note addressed to “Marines” from Sgt. James M. Blake who had led the last marine detachment. Afghan caretakers had kept the old embassy like a time capsule, taking care of the grounds but never entering the building. In 2001, Hamid Mamnoon, one of those caretakers, remembered that cold winter of 1989. He was “very unhappy that the international community forgot Afghanistan.” He told a reporter that he was “happy now that the international community is with us and they do not forget us anymore.”5 By 2017, the modest 1960s-era embassy building was dwarfed by large, gleaming structures. The scene reminded me of the classic children’s book The Little House, by Virginia Lee Burton. At a construction cost of nearly eight hundred million dollars, the embassy compound should have been a tangible symbol that America would see the war through; the United States was not going to forget Afghanistan again. But instead, the extravagant embassy seemed to belie America’s grave doubts about the mission in Afghanistan and the near-constant announcements of imminent military disengagement. It had come to symbolize the many inconsistencies and contradictions in U.S. policy that perplexed Americans and Afghans alike.

  The secure area that contains the U.S. embassy, various headquarters, and the Arg, home to Afghan leaders since 1880, is a museum of Afghanistan’s troubled recent history. In 1989, as the last Sovie
t troops departed and the Soviet Union began to collapse, support for their client government in Kabul dried up. In 1992, after anti-communist mujahideen militias unseated the last pro-Soviet leader, Mohammad Najibullah, a brutal civil war broke out. Najibullah and his brother fled from the Arg and were granted sanctuary in the United Nations compound. During the civil war, the Afghan people suffered as warlords and thugs preyed on them with impunity. Many Afghan tribes were led by criminals who not only extorted the population, but also engaged in murder, torture, rape, and egregious child abuse. The Taliban’s appeal was based on its pledge to end the chaos and criminality. In 1996, the Taliban, with Pakistani support, took over Kabul. Fighters secured the Arg palace for their leader, the one-eyed cleric, Mullah Omar. After declaring Afghanistan a “completely Islamic state” in which a “complete Islamic system will be enforced,” Omar gave his first order: seize Najibullah. A Taliban death squad dragged him and his brother from the UN compound, tortured them, murdered them, and hung their bloated bodies from a lamppost in the traffic circle outside the walls of the Arg.6 The Afghan people wanted order, but the Taliban would inflict on them a new form of brutality based on a ruthless purity agenda.

  As the Taliban took control of Kabul and most of the country, Ahmad Shah Massoud and thousands of militiamen, comprised mainly of ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras, hung on to territory in the north of the country and continued to resist the Islamist regime’s attempts to subjugate them. The Taliban and Al-Qaeda tried for years to assassinate Massoud. But Massoud inspired fierce loyalty. His image is still ubiquitous in Kabul on billboards, taxis, and in government offices. Osama bin Laden knew that once the United States traced the 9/11 murderers back to Al-Qaeda’s safe haven in Afghanistan, the combination of U.S. forces and Massoud’s Northern Alliance would be potent. So, on September 9, 2001, two Al-Qaeda terrorists disguised as Arab television journalists entered a concrete bungalow used as a Northern Alliance office on the pretext of interviewing Massoud. The terrorists detonated explosives hidden in their camera equipment, inflicting fatal injuries on him and serious injuries on his longtime political aide Massoud Khalili.7

  Osama bin Laden’s plan backfired. Instead of neutering the Northern Alliance, Massoud’s martyrdom rallied fighters determined to inflict retribution on the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Forty-nine days after CIA operatives and U.S. Special Forces soldiers arrived in the Northern Alliance’s camp in the Panjshir Valley, they liberated Kabul. U.S. casualties were low. It seemed that the “light footprint” approach, which combined special forces and CIA operators with U.S. airpower and anti-Taliban militias, had worked. The war, however, soon entered a new phase. To paraphrase Sun Tzu once again, that which depends on me I can do; that which depends on the enemy cannot be certain.8

  The initial campaign removed the Taliban, but in December 2001, Osama bin Laden and approximately five thousand terrorists and Taliban fighters escaped to Pakistan. The commander of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Tommy Franks, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, had decided to conduct a swift, economical campaign to unseat the Taliban and destroy Al-Qaeda. Their unwillingness to deploy the troops required, which was based on the belief that larger numbers of troops could immerse the United States in a protracted insurgency, set conditions for what they hoped to avoid as bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, and the Taliban began to reconstitute with the assistance of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).9 From 2001 to 2017, inconsistent, inadequate U.S. strategies gave Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other jihadist organizations the time and space needed to regain strength. When strategies did attempt to isolate the enemy from sources of support and harden Afghanistan against the Taliban’s regenerative capacity, those strategies were resourced inadequately or abandoned prematurely.

  In truth, the United States had been behind in the effort to stabilize post-Taliban Afghanistan from the very beginning. Paying little attention to the history of previous military interventions, U.S. planners did not prioritize the establishment of a replacement government as essential to preventing Afghanistan from becoming, once again, a terrorist sanctuary. Under the auspices of the United Nations, participants in a December 2001 conference in Bonn, Germany, planned a new constitutional order and elections for Afghanistan. A Loya Jirga, a grand assembly of representatives from all Afghanistan, chose Hamid Karzai as interim president. As the new government formed, U.S. officials kept the mission in Afghanistan focused narrowly on terrorism—military forces were there to hunt down Taliban and Al-Qaeda leaders.10 As we drove to the headquarters, I reflected on my first visit to Afghanistan, in 2003, just after Secretary Rumsfeld, the principal architect of the “light footprint” approach that left commanders with insufficient troops to block Al-Qaeda’s escape routes, had ordered further reductions that left fewer than one army combat brigade split between bases at Bagram and Kandahar. Rumsfeld stood with Commander of Coalition Forces Gen. Dan McNeil and Afghan president Hamid Karzai to announce that “we’re at a point where we clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction activities.”11 The war in Iraq, launched two months earlier, was receiving the preponderance of the George W. Bush administration’s attention at that point. The Iraq War would preoccupy the Bush administration and preclude the development of an effective strategy in Afghanistan and South Asia. Despite an international coalition that eventually grew to fifty-one nations, the war in Afghanistan remained under-resourced in those early years, even as the Taliban and Al-Qaeda were regenerating.

  But after an anemic and fragmented effort on reconstruction in the war’s early years, the Bush administration did an about-face and initiated large-scale programs and investments to help establish a functioning state. Money poured in from seemingly innumerable national, international, and nongovernmental organizations, but at unsustainable rates beyond the absorptive capacity of Afghanistan’s economy; much of the assistance was stolen or wasted. The effort to build state institutions was erratic, with different NATO nations sponsoring individual ministries. Development programs were ill-conceived; many sought to create centralized national-level systems incompatible with the traditionally decentralized form of governance in Afghanistan.12 The lack of transparency strengthened criminalized patronage networks that looted the assistance efforts, profited from the wartime economy, and preyed on the Afghan people. U.S. officials often averted their eyes from criminal activity, such as the theft of salaries for “ghost” soldiers and police, even though the diversion of aid and the extortion enriched not only corrupt leaders, but also the Taliban and terrorist organizations. In the absence of strong security forces and rule of law, many Afghans had no choice but to seek protection from powerful warlords, criminal networks, and militias, further fragmenting society and frustrating efforts to develop a common postwar Afghan identity and vision for the future. All were hedging against a return of civil war or the Taliban. So were some U.S. officials.

  From summer 2010 to spring 2012, I encountered many U.S. officials who believed that efforts to strengthen Afghan state institutions were unnecessary, impossibly hard, and even counterproductive. As an army brigadier general, I commanded a multinational intelligence, law enforcement, and military task force with the mission of reducing the threat of corruption and organized crime to a level that was no longer fatal to the Afghan state. But in Kabul and Washington, U.S. officials tended to view corruption as immutable and endemic to Afghanistan rather than as a product of political competition among factions and weak institutions. That view sometimes seemed like bigotry masquerading as cultural sensitivity—Afghans were not culturally predestined to corruption and criminality.13 Differences of opinion often reflected a false choice between unrealistic goals and doing nothing to encourage incremental reform. Afghanistan was not going to become corruption-free, but it was still possible to constrain corruption and the criminal actors that posed the biggest threats to a fragile state. The lack of U.S. action to do so often left Afghans perplexed. Some concluded that Amer
ican officials were incompetent, complicit, or both.

  In conversations with intelligence officials, I sensed nostalgia for the excitement of earlier campaigns. In the 1980s, CIA officers had supported mujahideen groups’ resistance to Soviet occupation, delivering that support mainly through a local ally, Pakistan’s ISI. In 2001, CIA officers were again on the front lines alongside U.S. special operations forces advising the Northern Alliance and other militias, including the militia of Hamid Karzai. They forged close relationships with mujahideen groups whom they empowered with money, weapons, intelligence, and air power.14 Years later, some of those same officers prioritized close relationships with militia leaders over incentivizing the reforms necessary to counter corruption and strengthen the Afghan state. It was a complicated dynamic—making assistance conditional on anticorruption measures might jeopardize relationships with those groups that could provide the intelligence we might need to fight the terrorists if the Afghan state did collapse. As we drove up to the headquarters, I wondered how our conversation would compare to conversations of five years earlier.

  * * *

  THE MILITARY headquarters, known by then as Resolute Support, was in a building with large Georgian columns that evoked its history under Mohammed Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan, who reigned from 1933 until he was deposed in 1973. The building served as the Army Club. Officers gathered in its well-appointed salons, where the military band often entertained them and their families. Officers’ children used to swim in the pool, which had been filled in to support the many temporary aluminum-sided buildings needed for the coalition staff under U.S. general John “Mick” Nicholson.