Battlegrounds
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No one doubted Ghani’s determination but some were concerned that his background in academia and at the World Bank had developed in him a pedantic style as well as impatience with those who could not grasp or embrace his often rapid-fire reform initiatives. Many of these reforms were sound and practical, while others were aspirational and lacked a clear bridge to implementation. Ghani could be mercurial, and his temper occasionally alienated those he needed to implement the reforms, but he brought in a strong team and was making progress. Our conversation focused on what would become the outline of President Trump’s South Asia strategy.
We sat alone in armchairs that turned slightly toward each other in a large room normally filled by international delegations and their Afghan counterparts. Like Ambassador Hugo Llorens, Ghani was concerned about the psychological dimension of the strategy. A joint strategy would have to generate confidence among the American and Afghan people, as well as Coalition members, while communicating determination to our enemies and their supporters. This “inside-out” effort to strengthen Afghanistan against the Taliban should be matched with an “outside-in” sustained diplomatic effort to convince key regional actors to play a positive, or at least a less destructive, role in Afghanistan and across the region. Our conversation was reminiscent of the many others we had had in his Kabul home five years earlier, over delicious dinners of lamb and Afghan pulau (basmati rice infused with a mix of carrots, raisins, and onions).
I was candid with Ghani about the principal constraint to sustaining a long-term approach in Afghanistan and South Asia: the will of the Afghan and American people. I asked for his and his government’s assistance in reaching American audiences to explain what was at stake not only for Afghans, but also for Americans and all humanity. Ghani and I believed that Afghanistan was a modern-day frontier between civilization and barbarism, but few Americans understood South and Central Asia as an ecosystem in which more than twenty U.S.- designated terrorist organizations thrived.4
That ecosystem emerged from ideal conditions such as state weakness, access to young male recruits, the support of Pakistan’s ISI, the ability to hide in loosely governed spaces, rivalries that allowed terrorists to gain sponsorship from particular tribes, access to a lucrative drug trade and other criminal enterprises, and the ability to flow money, weapons, people, and narcotics across porous borders. Geographically, the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region’s centrality and relative inaccessibility made it the ideal spot for basing a jihad and from which to project murderous campaigns outward to India, Central Asia, Russia, China, Europe, and the Middle East. Moreover, the region had a strong ideological draw due to a prophesy in the Hadith (a record of the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad) that an Islamic army will emerge from Khorasan under black banners and ultimately conquer Jerusalem. The text encourages Muslims to “join that Army, even if you have to crawl over ice; no power will be able to stop them.”5
Ghani knew that President Trump had been elected largely by people who did not understand what was at stake in that faraway place and who were skeptical about what more Americans were calling “forever” or endless wars. I asked Ghani to help the world understand, without obscuring the daunting challenges that Afghanistan faced, the good that their efforts, alongside those of courageous Afghans who were sacrificing every day, had achieved. Despite the difficulties encountered in that long war, Afghanistan, by 2017, was a transformed society. After the fall of the Taliban, hundreds of thousands of refugees returned to the country. The city of Kabul grew from a population of one million to close to five million.6 Social services expanded with the returning population. In October 2018, over 45 percent of Afghan voters voted in parliamentary elections. In September 2019, voter turnout dropped due to fears of Taliban attacks, but despite threats to murder anyone who went to the polls, two million people, approximately 27 percent of registered voters, voted in the presidential election.7 Although there was far too much fraud in the development effort in Afghanistan, the entire effort was not wasted, as some have claimed. Americans do not know that Afghanistan is a transformed society because they do not know Afghans who have benefited from the extraordinary changes that followed the defeat of the Taliban in 2001. The contrast between Afghanistan in 2001 and Afghanistan today in the areas of education, technology, and women’s rights is stark.
The education of young people expanded rapidly, including women who had been denied education under the Taliban. Prior to 2001, it was estimated that fewer than 1 million children in Afghanistan were enrolled in primary and secondary education. In 2017, UNESCO estimated children’s enrollment at a total of 9.3 million. Higher education has also expanded, with 300,000 students enrolled in private and public universities as of 2019, one third of them women.8
Because of access to technology and information, Afghanistan is no longer isolated from the world. Over 80 percent of Afghans have access to mobile phones and 400 percent more Afghans reported using the internet to access news and information in 2018 than in 2013. Access to technology is helping Afghans counter corruption through social media exposure and the use of mobile payments and banking. Afghanistan has the most open press in the region, a stark contrast to the complete blackout of the Taliban period and the state-controlled and influenced media in other countries, such as Pakistan, Iran, and Central Asian states. By 2019, there were 96 TV channels, 65 radio stations, and 911 print media in Kabul as well as 107 TV channels, 284 radio stations, and 416 print media outlets in other provinces.9
Under Taliban rule, women were denied education and brutally punished for actions such as venturing outside the home unaccompanied by a male relative or talking with men to whom they were not related, even by telephone. The Taliban enforce those oppressive measures in the areas they control; in 2018, women were lashed as punishment under Sharia law and a Taliban court ruling.10 By contrast, the progress achieved for women under the Afghan Constitution is unprecedented in the region. Afghan law requires that 25 percent of parliamentary seats be held by women, and a record high of 417 female candidates ran for parliament in October 2018.
Soon after the visit, Ghani conducted an interview with Time magazine in which he told Americans that “their security depends on us.”11 He went on to assure them that Afghans would continue to shoulder the vast share of the burden, reminding Americans that the number of troops committed in Afghanistan and the cost of the war had been reduced by 90 percent. He also expressed gratitude for Americans’ sacrifices. He stated that the fewer than 50 U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan in the past eighteen months was “still too many” and asked Americans to compare those losses to the 2,300 Americans lost between 2001 and 2014. But the American people needed to hear more from their own leaders about what was at stake and what had been achieved. They also deserved a strategy designed to protect them at an acceptable cost.
Ghani was also well aware that sustaining American will required confidence in the reliability and virtue of the United States’ partners in Afghanistan. Accordingly, Ghani was working hard with Ambassador Llorens and General Nicholson on a compact between our countries to establish clear objectives for Afghan institutional reform and metrics to evaluate effectiveness. In contrast to Karzai, Ghani wanted the United States and other donors to impose conditions on assistance. Those conditions were meant to incentivize reforms and counter opposition from mujahideen-era elites who wanted to maintain their patronage networks.12 Ghani told me that his priority was to strengthen the security ministries of defense and interior as well as the intelligence ministry known as the National Directorate of Security (NDS). Also vital were institutions and functions critical to establishing rule of law.
But Ghani needed the United States to use its influence. American diplomats and military commanders were sometimes reluctant to impose conditionality of assistance because either they underappreciated the severity of the problem or were oversensitive to being seen as neocolonialists in a country that had fought four wars against occupiers: three against the
British and one against the Soviets. But influence exerted in coordination with elected Afghan leaders was supportive of Afghan sovereignty. Ghani described how the Afghan minister of defense was working with General Nicholson’s command to lessen the influence of criminalized patronage networks and improved dramatically the quality of leaders in the Afghan National Army.
We spoke about how the United States and others might reinforce Afghan efforts to lessen divisions and foster unity. Afghanistan is a decentralized nation in which local and tribal leaders jealously guard autonomy. Ghani’s dilemma was how to pursue reform without widening divisions that could weaken the state. While Afghans often profess their identity as Afghans rather than members of a particular ethnic group, decades of war and the Taliban’s brand of Pashtun nationalism mixed with religious extremism had bred resentment and fear of Pashtun domination among the Tajiks, Hazaras, and Turkic minorities in the country. The collapse of the Najib government in 1992 ushered in an era of competition among rival Islamist sects. During the resistance to Soviet occupation in the 1980s, Afghanistan’s mild indigenous forms of Islam, Hanafi Sunnism and Sufism, were overwhelmed by imported extremist Islamist sects. Divisions weakened popular will to resist the Taliban and created opportunities for foreign actors, such as Iran and Pakistan, to support proxies in return for political influence. There were opportunities for the United States and like-minded countries such as the United Kingdom, India, and Scandinavian countries that have long-standing relationships there to reduce those divisions and foster accommodations among Afghanistan’s communities.
Afghanistan is an increasingly urban and connected society. Communities come together physically in its burgeoning cities and electronically on the internet and through social media. The country’s population is young: 63 percent are under twenty-four years old. Afghanistan’s young people are better connected than ever before not only to the world, but also to one another. Ethnic communities converge on the plains north of Kabul and in the city itself, including Tajiks, Pashtuns, and Hazaras.13 Their knowledge is no longer confined to their ancestral lands.
One key destabilizing external force in these efforts was Pakistan. Ghani reminded me that, early in his presidency, he took significant political risk in engaging Pakistan and tried to convince the army leadership to pursue their interests in Afghanistan diplomatically rather than support terrorist organizations such as the Taliban and the Haqqani network. It did not work, and it was not the first time the Afghan president was burned.
Back when the Obama administration prioritized cooperation with Pakistan in the fight against Al-Qaeda in South Asia, Pakistan approached a despondent President Karzai. In May 2010, soon after he professed his commitment to his U.S. partners, Pakistan’s army commander, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, sent the head of ISI, Ahmad Shuja Pasha, to Kabul to suggest to Karzai a pact that excluded the United States.14 Karzai, after exhorting the United States to confront Pakistan for years, seemed ready to try something different. Kayani’s real motive was to weaken the war effort against the Taliban by driving a wedge between the United States and Afghanistan. The Pakistanis were smooth, and Karzai was vulnerable. In an October 2011 interview with Pakistan’s Geo Television, Karzai stated, “God forbid, if there is ever a war between Pakistan and America, then we will side with Pakistan. If Pakistan is attacked, and if the people of Pakistan need help, Afghanistan will be there with you. Afghanistan is a brother.”15 In the year of Pasha’s conciliatory visit to Kabul, the Taliban committed at least six major attacks with no military objective on Afghan civilians and four hundred other IED and suicide attacks throughout the country that resulted in civilian deaths.16 By 2017, I had come to believe that continuing to expect Pakistan to change its behavior after a perfect record of duplicity across almost two decades was the height of folly.
As I arrived in South Asia, the Haqqani network was preparing one of the deadliest mass murders in Afghanistan’s recent history, an attack that would kill more than 150 people in Kabul on June 6, 2017. At the time, the United States had over six billion dollars in military and economic assistance in the pipeline. It was past time for a different approach to Pakistan.
I talked with other Afghan officials that day, including Hanif Atmar and Abdullah Abdullah, both of whom would oppose Ghani in the October 2019 presidential election. That evening, I met with Amrullah Saleh, who would later join Ghani as his running mate and candidate for vice president in the presidential election and narrowly escape a Taliban assassination attempt. Saleh, who had served for six years as the head of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security until he and Atmar could no longer abide Karzai’s conspiracy theories, offended many of his American interlocutors with his direct and sometimes strident criticism of the war effort. But I appreciated his candor and his passion for his country. His unwavering opposition to the Taliban and his willingness to highlight flawed assumptions were refreshing. Saleh always made clear what was at stake.
My conversations with Afghan leaders left me with a sense of hope and regret. I hoped that we might finally align efforts not only to fight the enemy, but also to strengthen Afghanistan such that it could withstand the regenerative capacity of the Taliban. I regretted the missed opportunities due to short-term approaches we had taken to long-term problems over many years. Had we done irreparable damage to our will? Were we out of time? If only the United States and other nations had taken a long-term view in Afghanistan from the outset and not tried to turn the war into something alien to war’s very nature, we might not be in this situation. I was determined to get the U.S. president options to achieve sustainable security in Afghanistan and South Asia, but I knew it would not be easy to gain approval for those options and generate the will necessary to implement them.
* * *
MY LAST meeting of the day was with students who had been on the campus of American University of Afghanistan on August 24, 2016, when Taliban gunmen blasted through the university’s fortified wall with a truck bomb. The terrorists laid siege to the campus for nearly ten hours. They killed fifteen people, including students, faculty, guards, and crisis responders, in addition to wounding dozens more.17 When the school reopened seven months later, all but one of those students returned immediately. That student, paralyzed from the waist down, returned after medical treatment in Germany. Our conversation reinforced to me the importance of education in the long-term effort to defeat jihadist terrorists. Those intrepid young people were part of a cohort of young Afghans who transcended ethnic identity, rejected Islamist extremism, and were determined to build better lives for themselves and future generations.
Jihadist terrorists depend on ignorance. Decades of war and the brutality of the Taliban denied education to a population that became susceptible to the demagoguery of the Taliban and terrorist groups. These groups brainwash young people and foment hatred to inspire and justify violence against innocents. They prey on those most vulnerable: adolescents and teenage men (and increasingly women) who are disenfranchised or seek affirmation. Many young people are indoctrinated into jihadist terrorist organizations through sexual and other forms of abuse. The trauma they suffer prepares them to be systematically dehumanized, often through participation in beheadings or other egregious acts of violence. Those who claim piety not only commit the most heinous acts of violence, but also run an immense and profitable criminal enterprise that enriches its leaders, who live in comfortable compounds in Pakistan. Their children go to private schools there while they bomb girls’ schools in Afghanistan.
As I met with these courageous students, I wished that more Americans could get to know them and see the halting but real progress their country was making. I also wondered what those who advocated power sharing with the Taliban envisioned the result would look like. Would the Taliban be permitted to bulldoze only every other girls’ school? Would music and art be banned in only parts of the country? Would mass executions occur in the soccer stadium only every other Saturday? The lack of understanding of the enemy and o
f the Afghan people led to the paradox of excessive sympathy for the Taliban and disregard for (or at least disinterest in) courageous Afghans: soldiers, police, students, journalists, and government officials who were willing to die to defeat our common enemy and secure a better future for their children and ours. I would keep these brave Afghans in mind as I proceeded on to the next leg of my trip: Pakistan.
* * *
THE SHORT flight took us into Islamabad airport. It was familiar to me; during 2003 and 2004 I was a backbencher for several visits on the personal staff of Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of U.S. Central Command. Central Command is the overall military headquarters with responsibility for the wars in Afghanistan and, by then, Iraq and for military operations across the greater Middle East. Our ambassador to Pakistan, David Hale, met us. Hale joined the Foreign Service around the same time I entered the army, in the mid-1980s. We both spent considerable time in the Middle East, he at the U.S. missions to Tunisia, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia and as ambassador to Jordan and Lebanon. Hale was no stranger to tough, frustrating jobs; he was special envoy for Middle East Peace from May 2011 to June 2013. But his work in Islamabad might have been the toughest of all. That is because the policy he was asked to implement was fundamentally flawed, and because many of his interlocutors were the most duplicitous people on earth.