Karzai was usually in a bad mood. By 2010, the days of amicable cooperation between him and U.S. leaders were gone; the relationship had succumbed to a combination of inept diplomacy, incoherent strategy, Karzai’s exhaustion, and a successful ISI psychological operation to make Pakistan the irreplaceable power broker in the war-torn country.31 A lack of trust and the tendency of Afghan and American leaders to suspect the worst of one another had contributed to the ineffective and inconsistent strategies. The lack of trust reinforced flawed assumptions, including that “counterterrorism only” was a viable strategy and that the Taliban could be easily separated from Al-Qaeda and would negotiate in good faith, allowing the United States an easy exit from the war.
Karzai had doubts about the dependability of the United States from the beginning. When President George W. Bush met with him in the Oval Office just three months after 9/11, Karzai told Bush that “the most common question I hear from my ministers and others in Afghanistan is whether the United States will continue to work with us.”32 Despite Bush’s reassurance, over the next seven years, the United States consistently gave the impression that its forces were on the verge of departure. When, on May 1, 2003, Rumsfeld announced an end to major combat operations in Afghanistan, Gen. Dan McNeill stated that the small U.S. force of seven thousand soldiers would soon shrink to an even smaller force, one focused exclusively on training the Afghan Army. It was the same day that President Bush announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq on board the USS Abraham Lincoln with a “Mission Accomplished” banner as the backdrop. Of course, neither the Taliban nor insurgents in Iraq complied. When Rumsfeld gave his speech, the Taliban had already initiated offensive operations along the border.33 The vast majority of casualties suffered in both Afghanistan and Iraq were yet to come. And American partners in both countries, confronted with the U.S. aversion to so-called “nation building” and an associated denial of the need to consolidate initial military successes into sustainable political outcomes, hedged against an American withdrawal.
By 2006, enemy gains compounded Karzai’s concerns over the staying power of his American ally. Between 2006 and 2009, the Taliban gained control of territory in the southern part of Afghanistan, including Karzai’s native province of Kandahar, which was also the birthplace and spiritual home of Mullah Omar and the Taliban. NATO forces, mainly from Canada, the United Kingdom, and Denmark, expected peacekeeping duty similar to operations in the Balkans in the 1990s. Instead, they found themselves in fierce combat. By 2008, the security situation in Kandahar and neighboring Helmand Province was dire. President Bush, recognizing that overconfidence based on initial military success against the Taliban had “left us short of the resources we needed” to stabilize Afghanistan, authorized an increase in the troop level to 45,000 as he left office.34 But the earlier announcements of withdrawal had already undermined Karzai’s trust, and as the security situation in his tribal homeland deteriorated, so did his relationship with the United States.
Between 2010 and 2012, it was clear to me that Karzai’s stress made him susceptible to conspiracy theories. Pakistan’s ISI took full advantage of the opportunity to drive a wedge between Karzai and the new Obama administration. During my visits to the palace, Karzai’s chief of staff, Abdul Karim Khoram, a short, rotund, unfriendly man, lurked in the background in the president’s office. Khoram had been imprisoned under Najibullah and later fled to Paris, where he received a master’s degree in international law and diplomacy. He seemed to be under the influence of the ISI.
The Taliban and the ISI used Khoram and other agents in the palace to convince Karzai that the United States had ulterior motives in Afghanistan beyond defeating jihadist terrorists.35 Khoram and others would bring Karzai initial, often inaccurate, reports of civilian casualties caused by U.S. and Afghan forces while soft-pedaling reports of Taliban atrocities. Karzai gradually began to oppose Coalition and Afghan military operations, especially night raids, which were designed to minimize risk to U.S. and Afghan troops as well as innocent civilians. By 2012, the relationship was irreparable. The commanders I accompanied to the meeting in the palace, Generals Petraeus and, later, Allen, did their best to control the damage.
The United States began to see the Afghan government as part of the problem rather than as an essential element of the solution. U.S. leaders made an already bad situation worse. President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton assigned the Afghanistan and Pakistan portfolio to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, a man whom many saw as imperious and condescending. The relationship with Karzai spiraled downward.36 Holbrooke actively opposed Karzai in the run-up to the 2009 Afghan presidential election. After the election, he suggested a second round, which, along with reports of fraud, led to two months of post-election turmoil. In April 2010, Karzai exploded: “If you and the international community pressure me more, I swear that I am going to join the Taliban.”37 By the time I arrived in Afghanistan to form a countercorruption task force, Karzai viewed U.S. complaints about corruption as another effort to undermine his presidency.
Oddly, despite the difficult subject matter, Karzai and I had a good relationship. I had listened to Afghans and learned about the internal tribal, ethnic, and political competitions that drove corruption and perpetuated state weakness. Karzai seemed to enjoy our discussions, which were based on mutual understanding that the political settlement in Afghanistan had become dependent on unchecked corruption and organized crime. In exchange for their loyalty, Karzai had given mujahideen-era elites, including some of the most rapacious warlords, what amounted to a license to steal. They enriched themselves, grew their power bases, and controlled state institutions and functions, often extorting citizens at checkpoints, borders, and airports. We discussed how unchecked criminality perpetuated state weakness and dependence on international assistance while frustrating donors, who were less willing to underwrite corrupt enterprises that wasted their money. Despite our rapport, Karzai and I made only halting progress. Stabilizing Afghanistan, I had concluded, would take not only a better relationship with Afghan leaders, but also a sustained effort to convince those leaders to undertake reforms essential to the state’s survival. But the poor relationship with Karzai convinced some that reform of Afghan institutions and reduction of the threat from corruption were impossibilities. The lack of confidence in reform reinforced the alternatives: a narrow counterterrorism strategy and a deal with the Taliban.
During those meetings with Afghan leadership, I remember thinking that Khoram was playing the treacherous Iago to Karzai’s Othello. Just as Iago convinces Othello that his most loyal captain is having an affair with Othello’s wife, so Khoram (and Pakistani leaders) convinced Karzai that the United States was not a trusted partner. Like Karzai, Othello wins over audiences early in the play, but then, based in part on Iago’s web of lies, makes poor decisions that lead to his eventual undoing. Othello kills his wife, Desdemona, in the final act. Karzai left the presidency before he killed the partnership with the United States, NATO, and the international community. However, afterward, he continued to undermine the U.S.-Afghan relationship from his new home, adjacent to the palace grounds.38 The damage he did was significant, especially the impetus he gave to Americans’ flawed assumptions concerning the nature of the war, assumptions he would help revive later in the Trump administration.
It was in 2009 that our strategic narcissism in Afghanistan seemed to morph into Stockholm syndrome, or at least what psychologists call reaction formation, the superficial adoption and exaggeration of ideas and impulses dramatically opposed to one’s own. Disenchantment with Karzai and desperation for an easy way out of the war led to a strange phenomenon in which the Taliban was viewed as a partner in ending the war. Once U.S. leaders assumed that the Taliban (even as it continued to kill innocent civilians and Afghan, U.S., and Coalition soldiers) was not the problem, the Afghan government filled a newly available role in what was becoming a Shakespearian tragedy: the enemy. And once the Afghan government w
as portrayed as the problem, some Americans began to perceive the war as a popular resistance to U.S. occupation rather than a broad multinational effort to support a representative government against a terrorist organization that had brutalized the Afghan people. As the rift between the U.S. and Afghan governments grew, it was time for Pakistan to take advantage of the situation.
Frustrations with Karzai also contributed to the Obama administration’s doubling down on the Bush administration assumption that Pakistan, if offered a long-term relationship, would change its behavior. In a 2009 phone conversation, Karzai warned Obama that “the military and political dimensions of achieving peace in Afghanistan can’t be addressed unless the issue of sanctuary in Pakistan is made explicit and is a priority in the new strategy.”39 But shortly after that call, Obama’s NSC deliberately leaked to the press a “shift in thinking” designed to rationalize fewer troops than Gen. Stan McCrystal, the new American commander in Kabul, had recommended. Because the administration’s “reframe” of its war strategy included the self-delusions that the Taliban was separate from Al-Qaeda, and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was weak, it chose to focus efforts on Al-Qaeda in Pakistan rather than on the Taliban in Afghanistan.40 But the administration took self-deception to a new level with the assumption that Pakistan, whose army supported not only the Taliban but also a range of terrorist organizations, would be a willing partner in a counterterrorism campaign against Al-Qaeda.
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MANY OF the analysts and bureaucrats who regarded the Taliban and the Pakistan Army as partners and the Afghan government as a foe clung to that bizarre formulation even after presidential elections that resulted in a contested but peaceful transition of power from Hamid Karzai to President Ashraf Ghani in 2014. The election, beset by charges of corruption between the two leading opponents, brought the new secretary of state, John Kerry, to Afghanistan to broker an arrangement between Ghani, a Ghilzai Pashtun from the mountainous southeast, and Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, the primary Northern Alliance candidate and former foreign policy advisor to Ahmad Shah Massoud. Ghani reluctantly agreed to place Abdullah in an unprecedented and extraconstitutional position of chief executive officer. The hope was to create at least the veneer of unity between north and south, as well as between Pashtuns, Tajiks, and other ethnic groups.
In pursuit of a negotiated settlement, the Obama administration had encouraged Qatar to sponsor the opening of a Taliban political office in Doha comprised of high-ranking Taliban members.41 Through the negotiations, the Obama administration actually helped the Taliban retain a cohesive identity rather than fragment and weaken the organization. Administration and Department of Defense lawyers placed restrictions on how U.S. forces could target Taliban leadership and fighters. U.S. leaders deceived the Afghan government as well as themselves, speaking of any potential negotiation as Afghan-led while deliberately concealing negotiations from Afghan leadership. The effect was to give the enemy freedom of action while undermining the Afghan government’s legitimacy. Holbrooke bypassed the Afghan government to establish contact with Tayeb Agha, who served as head of the Taliban’s financial commission. Barnett Rubin, a New York University political scientist, was enlisted by Holbrooke to establish contact with Taliban leadership.
After attempts at negotiation foundered, the United States, in May 2014, released five Taliban detainees from the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in exchange for the release of a U.S. Army deserter. The subsequent effort to use the so-called Taliban Five to start effective negotiations appeared as an act of desperation.42
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AS WE drove through the arched sally port and entered the well-manicured grounds, I thought of the history of the Arg and the fact that until Karzai transferred power to Ghani in September 2014, Afghanistan had not seen a democratic, peaceful transition. Former prime minister Mohammed Daoud Khan ended the monarchy in 1973 by seizing power while his cousin King Mohammed Zahir Shah was visiting Italy. Five years later, Afghanistan’s decades-long wars began with an act of horrific violence in the same home in which Ghani now lived. After Daoud initiated a strategic opening to the United States and its allies, including Pakistan, the Soviets and their Afghan Communist clients decided that he had to go.
After seizing control of Bagram Airfield, the coup leaders executed thirty air force officers and seized Soviet MiG fighters to support a tank offensive against the Arg. The palace guard surrendered. Daoud had gathered twenty-four of his family members in the living room in the hope that they might be spared. It was not to be. Soldiers gunned down Daoud and all but seven of his family, then transported the bodies in a palace truck to the grounds surrounding the notorious Pul-e-Charki Prison, outside Kabul city. The officer in charge ordered his men to dump them into a ditch that an army bulldozer had readied.43 The bodies were discovered and given a proper burial only in 2009. Afghan leaders had a reason to feel insecure. I thought of how the compounded stress of historical memory and doubts about America’s commitment must have weighed on Karzai and were weighing on Ghani.
I met Hanif Atmar, Afghanistan’s national security advisor, outside the Arg. An honor guard in dress uniforms lined the walkway to the palace entrance. Atmar’s calm demeanor masked the trials of a turbulent life in which service in the Karzai and Ghani governments was only the latest chapter. Born to an ethnically Pashtun family in Laghman, Afghanistan, in 1968, Atmar served in the KHAD (Afghan secret police) in the 1980s. He used a cane and had to kick his prosthetic right leg ahead of him. He’d lost his leg in the lead-up to the seven-month-long Battle of Jalalabad in 1989, in which Afghan forces defeated a combined assault of mujahideen and Pakistan Army forces on the eastern city. Following the Soviet withdrawal, he went to Britain, where he earned two degrees from the University of York. He had served for years as a staff member in a Norwegian nongovernmental relief organization. In 2008, Atmar was appointed minister of the interior and tasked with reform of a ministry regarded by some as “the most corrupt of all government organizations.”44 I first met him after he resigned from the Karzai government in 2010. We spent hours together discussing the cauldron of Afghan politics, involving as it does avarice, historical animosity, deep distrust, and ever-shifting alliances.
Over the years, discussions with Atmar, Ghani, Abdullah, and other Afghan leaders convinced me that U.S. policy and strategy in Afghanistan was the opposite of what was needed. Afghanistan required a long-term commitment; the U.S. constantly announced its withdrawal timetable. Diplomatic and military efforts should be aligned; instead, they cut against each other, such as President Obama’s announcement of U.S. withdrawal while negotiating with the enemy. Pakistan and other regional actors must play a less destructive role; the U.S. sent mixed signals and increased aid to Pakistan while the ISI increased support to the Taliban and other terrorist organizations. Reforms to strengthen Afghan institutions were critical; anticipated U.S. withdrawal incentivized corruption that weakened those institutions.
Atmar and I walked through the cordon of soldiers, entered the building, and walked slowly up the staircase. He would leave me with President Ghani, and I would see him later in the day. I had looked forward to the meeting with Ghani. We had a shared understanding of how the war had evolved and the flawed assumptions that had underpinned failed policies. I hoped that our discussion might crystalize the outline of the first sound, long-term, and sustainable strategy for the war.
Chapter 6
Fighting for Peace
We do not seek peace in order to be at war, but we go to war that we may have peace. Be peaceful, therefore, in warring, so that you may vanquish those whom you war against, and bring them to the prosperity of peace.
—SAINT AUGUSTINE
PRESIDENT GHANI greeted me in his office. We talked alone for an hour. I had known him since the early days of America’s war in Afghanistan. We had often lamented together opportunities lost in a conflict that had lasted almost two decades.
The contrast between Ghani and Karzai could not
have been starker. Ghani loved the United States because the country had given him the opportunity to escape the horrors of war and achieve success as an academic and development expert. Born into a wealthy Pashtun family in 1949, he received a liberal education at Habibia High School in Kabul and went on to attend the American University of Beirut, where he met his future wife, Rula, a Lebanese Christian.1 After teaching at Kabul University, he was awarded a scholarship to pursue a master’s degree at Columbia University in New York City. He left Afghanistan in 1977, just months before soldiers gunned down President Daoud and his family and just two years before Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan to keep a friendly Communist government in power after the assassination of Daoud’s successor, President Nur Muhammad Taraki.2 Taraki, like Daoud, was assassinated in the palace in which Ghani and his wife would live. His family, however, was spared, and the act was less bloody: Taraki was instructed to lie down on a bed, was suffocated by three men with pillows, and then was secretly buried at night. It was during this turbulent period that most of Ghani’s family was imprisoned. Ashraf stayed in the United States and completed his PhD in anthropology.
On September 11, 2001, Ghani was at his desk in Washington when a passenger jet carrying six crew members and fifty-eight passengers, including five Al-Qaeda terrorists, slammed into the Pentagon across the river from his World Bank office. He knew that there would soon be dramatic change in his native country. An exuberant man who, while discussing almost any development-related topic, would exclaim, “I have a paper on that!” Ghani immediately drafted a five-step plan for political, social, and economic transformation in Afghanistan. Two months after 9/11, his work with a smart, soft-spoken British human rights lawyer, Clare Lockhart, influenced the formation of the Afghan government following the Bonn Conference. Ghani joined Karzai’s government to try to put his ideas into practice as finance minister. He warned against empowering warlords who would perpetuate state weakness and the lawlessness that gave rise to the Taliban. But he was unable to convince Karzai, whose writ depended on accommodating those same warlords. Ghani departed Afghanistan in 2006 and cofounded with Lockhart the Institute for State Effectiveness. The pair authored a book entitled Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World, in which they describe the essential functions necessary to strengthen states in distress.3 In 2011, the man who literally wrote the book on what needed to be done returned to Afghanistan to help President Karzai and the Coalition transition secure provinces to Afghan government control. Ghani ran for president of Afghanistan in 2014 as someone who could bridge the worlds of a Western development expert and a traditional Ghilzai Pashtun from eastern Afghanistan. He came from a people, the Ahmadzais, known as warrior-poets who relished autonomy and practiced Pashtunwali, the traditional Pashtun code of honor and hospitality.
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