Battlegrounds
Page 18
We met Mick at the front steps. He was an old friend and one of the finest officers with whom I had served. When I entered West Point as a “plebe,” or freshman, in the class of 1984, Mick, a “firstie,” or senior cadet, was the “First Captain of the Corps.” He had an easy-going demeanor and a good sense of humor. And he was unflappable, having commanded multiple times in hotbeds of the Taliban insurgency from the agriculturally rich lowlands of Kandahar and Helmand, inhabited mainly by Durrani or lowland Pashtuns, to the steep mountains and lush valleys of the eastern highland region historically inhabited by Ghilzai or highland Pashtuns.
Mick understood the complex tribal dimension of the struggle for power in Afghanistan. Durranis consider themselves the rightful rulers of Afghanistan. They were the tribe of the monarchs since Emir Ahmad Shah Durrani founded the modern Afghan state in 1747. The Ghilzai Pashtuns, known mainly for their prowess as fighters, jealously guard tribal autonomy and challenged the Durrani claim to leadership. Divisiveness between those confederations and among the tribes within them caused shifts in loyalties between the government and the Taliban. Competitions within the Pashtun tribes and with other ethnic groups such as the Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazara were not a new feature of the Afghan social and cultural landscape.15 But this factionalism had intensified in recent decades, especially as foreign fighters flooded into Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight the Soviet Army, bringing with them an extreme Islamist ideology from Saudi Arabia and the Deobandi school from Pakistan. Among them was Osama bin Laden, the seventeenth son of a Yemeni who had immigrated to Saudi Arabia and built a billion-dollar construction company in the kingdom.
Osama bin Laden preferred holy war to the family construction business. He got his break in the war against the Soviets by using construction equipment from his family’s company to fortify guerrilla positions. He took part in selective battles to build his reputation as a mujahed. He was particularly skilled at raising money and providing logistical support, skills that would prove helpful after he and Palestinian cleric Abdullah Azzam founded the group he named Al-Qaeda (meaning “the base”) in 1988.16
Perhaps most important, bin Laden and his fellow jihadists brought with them an extreme and perverted interpretation of Islam. In Pakistan, proselytizing Islamist extremists found a sympathetic audience among those of the Deobandi school, an orthodoxy with roots in nineteenth-century northern India. Deobandis joined Arab jihadists to promote religious intolerance and brutal enforcement of Sharia law. A growing number of Afghan refugees in Pakistan and those who lived in the mountains along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border were susceptible to their demagoguery.
Bin Laden built Al-Qaeda on hatred of those who did not adhere to its extremist interpretation of Islam. The hatred was directed at Sunni Muslims, or “apostates,” who did not support Al-Qaeda’s sanctioned cruelty and misogyny. Later, under Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and other terrorist organizations such as ISIS, hatred expanded to include Christians and Jews, or “unbelievers”; Shia Muslims, or “rejectionists,” who regarded Ali, the fourth caliph, as Muhammad’s first true successor; and Sufis, who reject violence in favor of introspection and spiritual closeness with God. Al-Qaeda’s “near enemies” were governments in Muslim-majority countries that did not adhere to a severe form of Sharia law. Its “far enemies” were Israel, Europe, and the United States. Al-Qaeda believed that members of these groups had only two choices: either surrender and convert, or else be killed. Al-Qaeda was to serve as the vanguard for an Islamic revolution that would establish the caliphate.
Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were a match made in hell. Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden shared complementary missions and ideologies as well as an affinity for extreme brutality. Bin Laden urged the ummah (Muslim community) to unite behind the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (the Taliban) as “the seed” of global jihad. After U.S. Navy SEALs killed bin Laden in 2011, his successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, repeatedly swore allegiance to the Taliban’s emir, Mullah Omar. Al-Zawahiri stated that many Al-Qaeda terrorists had heeded bin Laden’s call and joined “together around this Islamic Emirate” to create “an international jihadist” alliance stretching from Central Asia to the Atlantic Ocean. In August 2015, after it was discovered that Mullah Omar had been dead for over two years, al-Zawahiri pledged his fealty to Omar’s successor, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour.17
Mick walked me to his office for a one-on-one meeting and a video telephone conference with the commander of Central Command, Gen. Joe Votel. Mick was on his sixth tour of duty in Afghanistan. In 2006, as a brigade commander in the mountainous border region in the east, he and his fellow soldiers saw up close the Taliban’s brutality.18 And after serving on the border of Pakistan, they knew that South Asia was a geographic epicenter in our effort to defeat terrorist organizations that threatened the United States and the world. Mick highlighted the connection between counterterrorism and the need for Afghan institutions to be strong enough to withstand the regenerative capacity of the Taliban. He and Votel agreed that counterterrorism from afar was problematic. Access to intelligence would evaporate as terrorists hid among the population, and a lack of pressure on their organizations would allow them to plan, organize, train for, and execute attacks as they had prior to September 11, 2001. Terrorist control of the narcotics trade had given them the financial strength to grow their organizations and improve the sophistication and lethality of their methods. Without a viable Afghan government and security forces, another large-scale terrorist attack might force the United States and coalition troops to return to Afghanistan in large numbers. Mick pointed out that Afghan forces were doing most of the fighting and making the preponderance of the sacrifices. If Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were to collapse the Afghan government, they would control territory that, like the Fertile Crescent of Ancient Mesopotamia, had great spiritual significance. Our conversation made clear that a narrow counterterrorism strategy using intelligence collection to cue long-distance raids or strikes was flawed.
We walked from Mick’s office into the command center that, in the time of the king, had served as the large dining room. Now it was full of flatscreen televisions broadcasting video feeds from drones and digital maps superimposed with military symbols. The wide range of camouflage patterns on the uniforms in the room indicated that officers from many of the thirty-nine coalition member nations were present. The uniforms symbolized broad support for stabilizing Afghanistan and fighting jihadist terrorists, but they also represented wide variance in coalition members’ willingness to take risks and engage in combat. Some nations were happy to train Afghan forces but unwilling to accompany them in battle. Many others fought courageously in difficult conditions only to leave the battlefield reluctantly after their nations were no longer willing to pay the price in blood. Inconsistencies in U.S. policy made the Coalition’s incoherence worse. Nations were reluctant to make long-term commitments and share burdens if they doubted America’s staying power. The experience in Afghanistan had validated Winston Churchill’s observation that “there is only one thing worse than fighting with allies and that is fighting without them.”19
Our team was welcome. The Americans and Coalition members present were hoping that the new administration might provide a sound and sustainable strategy to breathe new life into the effort. Some in the command feared that the war had been forgotten. Reporting on the war in U.S. and European media was scarce and shallow. Media business models, including newspapers, no longer supported professional, sustained coverage of wars. In the United States, television shows rarely cut to foreign correspondents in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Cable networks’ news programs found they could save money and maximize profits by replacing foreign correspondents with pundits paid to sit around tables and talk with (or at) each other, mainly about White House intrigue, partisan politics, or popular culture.
But the Afghan war was never well understood by Americans. Most strained even to name the Taliban and other terrorist groups we were fighting there, let alone describe their go
als and their strategy. The war garnered attention only sporadically, and then usually only after a spectacular enemy attack. Details about the numbers of troops deployed or casualties suffered appeared without context—what the United States and its allies should try to achieve in Afghanistan, why the outcome was important, and what strategies were that might deliver that outcome at an acceptable cost. Coverage portrayed American and Coalition warriors as passive recipients of enemy action. Casualties were mourned, but combat prowess and battlefield achievements went uncelebrated. The Afghan people and Afghan soldiers fighting to preserve their freedom from Taliban oppression were unknown to Americans. Some saw the problem as media bias, but the Afghan war seemed to be the most underreported and, therefore, least understood war in recent history.
I wished that the American people could have heard the briefing from Nicholson’s staff that day. His intelligence officer explained how the terrorist ecosystem in Pakistan has global reach. As of 2019, there were twenty terrorist groups based in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. Operations against a particularly brutal and well-trained terrorist organization, ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K), demonstrated how those jihadist terrorist organizations were intertwined and thrived in the terrorist ecosystem in Pakistan and Afghanistan. ISIS-K was a branch of the terrorist group that had, in the summer of 2014, conducted a murderous offensive in Syria and Iraq that left it in control of territory larger than the state of Maryland. As ISIS lost control of its wilayets, or provinces, there, ISIS-Khorasan became more important to the global jihad.20 Although it competed with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, those organizations shared common goals and many of the same people.
One powerful ISIS ally is Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a group waging jihad against the Pakistani government. Around 2004, TTP began absorbing portions of thirteen terrorist organizations (many of which had been created by the Pakistan ISI’s Directorate S) to fight against the U.S.-led coalition and Afghan security forces.21 The TTP was one of ISI’s Frankenstein’s monsters; the organization turned on its creator, killing tens of thousands of Pakistanis from 2007 to 2014. On December 16, 2014, in what may have been its most heinous act, six TTP terrorists attacked the Army Public School in Peshawar, Pakistan, murdering 149 innocents and injuring 114 more, the vast majority of them schoolchildren between the ages of eight and eighteen. The attack demonstrated not only TTP’s brutality, but also how it and other groups had evolved from an international network that breeds terrorists in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. The murderers included a Chechen, Egyptian, Saudi, Moroccan, and two Afghans. TTP and Al-Qaeda trained together in Pakistan. They and other groups shared resources and expertise in the terrorist ecosystem astride the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.22
If given the opportunity, many of the groups based in South Asia would commit mass murder in the United States. For example, TTP-trained Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistan-born U.S. citizen, aimed to set off a car bomb in Manhattan’s Times Square. On May 1, 2010, the bomb malfunctioned, in part because Shahzad had had only superficial training in Pakistan. U.S. intelligence collection and strike capabilities based in Afghanistan had forced Shahzad and his trainers to stay on the move.23 It was the effectiveness of the U.S. intelligence facility in Khost that led TTP on December 30, 2009, to use a Jordanian doctor to infiltrate the base and detonate a suicide vest, killing three security contractors, four CIA officers, and a Jordanian intelligence official.
Ensuring that terrorists remain preoccupied with surviving rather than plotting attacks on innocents requires a sustained effort against determined, adaptive, and ruthless enemies. Nicholson’s staff summarized Afghan operations in mountainous Nangarhar and Kunar Provinces against ISIS-K with U.S. air power, Special Forces, and Army Rangers in support. A U.S. drone strike killed ISIS-K’s first emir, Pakistani national Hafiz Saeed Khan, on July 26, 2016.24 His successor, Abdul Hasib, had masterminded a heinous attack on Afghanistan’s military hospital in Kabul a few weeks before my visit, killing thirty defenseless hospital personnel and patients and wounding over fifty more.25 Two weeks after my visit, Afghan special security services and U.S. Army Rangers would hunt Hasib down and kill him.
The briefers’ explanation of the ecosystem that sustained TTP, ISIS-K, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other terrorist organizations exposed flawed assumptions that our policymakers had made about the enemy. U.S. leaders often imagined bold lines between terrorist groups—lines that simply did not exist. Although the Taliban and numerous terrorist organizations in Afghanistan and Pakistan sometimes clashed with one another, they more often formed alliances or shared resources to pursue their common cause. But the desire to simplify and shorten the war perpetuated self-delusion. Self-delusion about the enemy was the basis for America’s South Asian fantasy, in particular regarding the Taliban and Al-Qaeda as completely separate organizations. An extreme version of this delusion, created during the Obama administration and initially debunked but resurrected later in the Trump administration, sustained the forlorn hope that conciliation with the Taliban could provide an easy way out of Afghanistan. The false hope was also based in a failure to realize that the terrorist ecosystem along the Afghan-Pakistan border had not developed organically; it was a creation of the Pakistani military to keep ethnic Baluch and Pashtun populations suppressed and to prevent them from seeking either independence or finding common cause with their kinfolk across the 2,430-kilometer-long “Durand Line” drawn by a British diplomat and Afghan Abdur Rahman Khan to delineate British and Afghan spheres of influence. Paradoxically, the effort to simplify the enemy to shorten the war not only obscured the stakes in Afghanistan and diminished the will necessary to sustain the mission, but also complicated and prolonged what had become America’s longest war.
The first day’s meeting reinforced my belief that narrow counterterrorism efforts focusing exclusively on Al-Qaeda would prove insufficient to protect the United States from jihadist terrorists based in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and other terrorist organizations were interconnected both ideologically and physically, in the mountainous region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
The briefings also revealed that, despite the Obama administration’s 2014 declaration that the war was over, American soldiers, alongside Afghan armed forces, were still fighting against ruthless enemies that were determined to establish control of territory, people, and resources. Their twisted aim was to establish an Islamic Emirate based on a distorted interpretation of Islam. It was clear to me that time was running out. The Department of Defense was executing the Obama administration’s policy of withdrawal. U.S. troop strength fell from a high of 100,000 in the spring of 2011 to 9,800 at the end of 2014 to roughly 8,400 in March 2017.26 The “troop cap” had no connection to what military forces were meant to achieve. Restrictions on how the military fought limited its effectiveness and created opportunities for the Taliban and its terrorist allies. Moreover, military and diplomatic efforts were completely disconnected. Since 2009, the Department of State had tried to negotiate an acceptable peace agreement with the Taliban while executing an announced withdrawal.27 The Obama administration even declared that the Taliban was no longer an enemy force, which meant that the U.S. military stopped offensive operations against the Taliban and was unable to bring its considerable intelligence and airpower capabilities to bear offensively unless hostile actions were taken against them. Without U.S. advisors, airpower was less responsive; bombs directed from remote headquarters often fell far from intended targets and sometimes inflicted unintended losses on civilians caught between the Afghan Army and the Taliban. Emboldened, the Taliban stepped up attacks on Afghan National Security Forces and U.S. forces. “Insider attacks,” in which Taliban infiltrators opened fire on Afghan or U.S. forces from within what were supposed to be secure locations, were meant to erode trust among Afghan soldiers and between Afghan and U.S. forces. The Taliban and associated terrorist networks also expanded mass murder attacks against Afghan civilians, often with the assistance of the P
akistan Army’s intelligence arm, the ISI.28 In 2015 and 2016, the Afghan National Security Forces lost at least 13,422 killed and 24,248 wounded. In those two years, the Taliban and other terrorist organizations murdered 4,446 innocent civilians.29 Battlefield gains, insider attacks, and the murder of civilians were meant to exhaust the will of the Afghan people and the American public. It was working. Meanwhile, the Taliban gained control of more territory, intensified attacks, and inflicted more losses on U.S. forces and especially on Afghan forces and the civilian population.
As we left General Nicholson’s headquarters, I was even more determined to provide the president with options, including a strategy based on strategic empathy rather than narcissism. Effective strategies require a clear-eyed understanding of the enemy and a harmonizing of the ends (or what is to be achieved) with the ways (the methods and tactics) and the means (the resources applied). If the aim was to ensure that Afghanistan could never again harbor terrorists who could attack the United States and our interests abroad, there was not only a persistent mismatch in South Asia strategy between ends, ways, and means, but also inconsistencies across all three over time.
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THE SECOND day in Kabul started early, with the familiar drive past the headquarters and then down the tree-lined road to the Arg. The palace, constructed in the late nineteenth century, sat behind high walls on eighty-three acres in the center of Kabul city. The grounds contained gardens, a mosque, offices, and the official and private residences of the president.30 I visited the palace and the National Security Council building many times from June 2010 to March 2012. I often accompanied U.S. ambassadors Karl Eikenberry and, later, Ryan Crocker, as well as commanders of the International Security Assistance Force, first Gen. David Petraeus and later Gen. John Allen, for meetings with then-President Hamid Karzai. The meetings were touchy. They dealt with the problem of how to reduce the threat of corruption and organized crime to Afghan institutions and key sectors of the Afghan economy.