by Ahmed Rashid
In 2004 – the first full year of the Taliban insurgency – some 4,200 metric tonnes of opium were harvested compared with 3,600 tonnes the previous year, representing a 64 per cent increase. In its annual report the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime estimated that opium was now being grown in all 34 provinces and that 2.3 million Afghans (14 per cent of the rural population) were involved in harvesting opium. At a time when no jobs were available, poverty was rampant and promised foreign investment in agriculture had not materialized, many farmers had no choice but to plant poppies and seek Taliban protection.
Britain had been appointed as the lead nation by the Western alliance to deal with counternarcotics, but there was no consensus amongst the international community as to the best strategy to adopt. There were endless debates about whether foreign troops should destroy the crops in the fields or wait and then intercept convoys of opium on the roads in order to catch the big drug traffickers. The problem was that no country, especially the USA, wanted its military forces to be involved in counternarcotics -regardless of the fact that foreign military forces were the only effective force on the ground. The Bush administration refused to acknowledge that drugs were helping fuel the insurgency, even though it was soon clear to everyone, including the UN, Western diplomats, and Western aid workers, that the income from drugs was a major source of funding for the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
Ultimately the US and other militaries refused to adopt a clear counternarcotics strategy until 2008. By then the insurgents had vastly expanded their profits, not just taxing farmers but refining raw opium, smuggling the product across borders and linking up with mafa groups in Turkey, Europe and Central Asia. According to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime annual report, opium production rose to 6,100 metric tonnes in 2006 and to 8,200 metric tonnes the following year, contributing some 50 per cent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product (estimated at US$6.7 billion in 2006).
Drug money was everywhere – fuelling the insurgency, subverting and corrupting the government, the police and the judicial system. And since President Karzai made no attempt to stop the wholesale involvement of senior politicians and warlords in the drug trade, drugs undermined formal work by development agencies, for the opium trade provided the better jobs, income and security that the state was unable to give. Drugs also led to increased addiction and despair among the people.
The first presidential election was held successfully in October 2004. Karzai won, gaining 55.4 per cent of the vote while his nearest rival, Younis Qanuni of the NA, won just 16.3 per cent. There was a large turnout: some 73 per cent of the voting population took part, indicating that people wanted the political system to work. People hoped that an empowered Karzai would act more decisively and provide better governance, but in the end little changed. In the following year's parliamentary elections the turnout was only 53 per cent, indicating the public disillusionment with the promise of the democratic process and the lack of economic progress. The Taliban were still not strong enough to derail either of the elections, although they threatened voters in an attempt to keep them from voting. But the elections demonstrated that although the Taliban posed a threat in some southern provinces, they were far from being either popular or widespread.
By late 2004, US and NATO intelligence officers had concluded that the ISI was running a full training programme for the Afghan Taliban out of Baluchistan province, allowing them to raise funds in the Persian Gulf and Pakistan and letting them import arms and ammunition, mainly from Dubai. Mullah Omar and the senior Taliban leaders operated out of villages in and around Quetta and met so frequently and freely that the Taliban leadership council came to be known as the Quetta Shura. US and Afghan soldiers reported to their superiors that the Pakistan army would give covering fire to groups of Taliban on the Afghan-Pakistani border that were either infltrating Afghanistan or returning to Pakistan after a foray.
Yet for several years the Americans refused to deploy sufficient troops in the critical southern provinces. Nor did they acknowledge the double game Musharraf was playing and never called his bluff until it was too late. When NATO troops finally deployed in the south in 2005, the USA was unable to give them sufficient intelligence about Quetta and southern Afghanistan because, as frustrated US military personnel told me, for several years the USA had made no sustained satellite surveillance of the south. The Taliban were thus free to come and go from Baluchistan, with nobody to stop or watch them.
The 2005 summer military campaign by the Taliban effectively demonstrated their new weapons, tactics and prowess. Having being tutored by Al Qaeda fighters from Iraq, the Taliban had dramatically improved their ambush tactics, their use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and mines on the roads and their tactical use of suicide bombers to carry out attacks in urban areas and against troop convoys. Karzai repeatedly warned President Bush that the Taliban constituted a growing threat and an even greater regional challenge than Al Qaeda, because the Taliban insurgency directly threatened his government. But the White House refused to accept his arguments, ignoring both the Taliban threat and the need to rebuild Afghanistan The USA continued to aim all its military efforts at trying to capture Al Qaeda members.
Realizing that the intensity of the insurgency could grow, Karzai tried to initiate talks with the Taliban and their allies. In 2005 he appointed a Peace and Reconciliation Commission that was charged with trying to persuade Taliban commanders and fighters to return home by offering them amnesty and some political incentives. But the programme was opposed by the NA leaders in the cabinet and parliament, and received no support from the Bush administration, which considered it a policy of appeasement.
In the meantime, as the USA became bogged down in Iraq and the Taliban insurgency gained power in Afghanistan, Washington had finally began to encourage the expansion of the ISAF – the peace-keeping force in Kabul – beyond the capital. Intensive talks had begun between the Bush administration and NATO as to how countries could deploy extra troops. The Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) that the Americans had established in certain critical provinces had been deemed a success, and the demand grew for different NATO countries to set up PRTs in each of Afghanistan's 34 provinces. PRTs were groups of up to a hundred soldiers, assisted by trainers and development workers, who were expected to provide backup for development and training to police and officials in the provinces. Many of the European countries who supported sending troops to Afghanistan under NATO auspices agreed to do so only in order to avoid sending troops to Iraq without offending Washington.
NATO took command of the ISAF in Kabul, and the first German troops arrived in northern Afghanistan in early 2004. In a four-phase plan NATO began to deploy troops in PRTs to every province, starting with the north in 2004 and ending with the south in 2006; there British, Dutch and Canadian troops faced the full brunt of the Taliban insurgency. Many countries, however, attached caveats to their troop deployment, forbidding their troops to take part in any fighting. Consequently, there were now two separate command structures: the NATO-ISAF command, which included US troops and was responsible for peace-keeping in the country, and the US-led coalition, still called ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, which hunted down the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Eventually both commands would be led by US generals.
In an effort to stem the spread of these foreign troops, the Taliban organized a broad offensive for the summer of 2006 aimed at seizing the southern capital of Kandahar and thus shaking NATO's resolve. In mid-May the Taliban launched coordinated attacks in four provinces involving several thousand fighters. British forces set up outposts in Helmand – the first foreign troops to arrive in the province since 2001 – and were immediately surrounded and attacked repeatedly by the Taliban. The fully equipped Taliban were now confident enough to operate in battalion-size units of up to 400 men each which could deploy hundreds of Toyota Land Cruisers and motorbikes to increase their mobility.
In the south the Taliban appointed governors and judges in
a bid to set up a parallel administration and justice system to woo the local population. It was an audacious but successful move that soon spread to eastern Afghanistan. In addition, the Taliban targeted the Afghan administration – officials, bureaucrats, teachers and most of all the police force, which was already demoralized and disorganized. More and more civilians were being killed either because they were deliberately targeted by Taliban suicide bombers or because they were caught in the crossfre. In 2006, according to news reports and UN end-of-year assessments, the Taliban burned down 187 schools and killed 85 teachers and more than 600 policemen.
Suicide bombers became a regular feature of the Taliban arsenal. Although the Taliban had mounted only six suicide attacks in 2004, the number had risen in 2006 to a staggering 141 attacks that left 1,166 casualties. Infantry attacks were increasingly planned around sending suicide bombers in first to create a breach in the defences of the target. Meanwhile the excessive use of airpower by US forces, owing to the shortage of troops and helicopters caused by the Iraq war, antagonized the local population, since bombs frequently killed as many civilians as they did Taliban fighters and the Taliban had become adept at using civilians as shields and hostages to prevent being bombed. NATO had also greatly expanded its use of airpower, largely because there were insufficient troops on the ground and because NATO countries wanted to avoid casualties. In the last six months of 2006 there were 2,100 air strikes by US forces compared to just 88 air strikes over Iraq in the same period.
In September 2006 the Taliban began to infltrate Kandahur from a base in the district of Panjwai near the outskirts of the city. The sparse Western forces patrolling outside Kandahar city discovered the well-established base and the thousands of fighters housed there only when the Taliban launched a major offensive against the city. The attack on Kandahar, for which the Taliban had prepared in Pakistan, organizing large amounts of arms, ammunition and other logistical aid, was a turning point in Western thinking about Pakistan. For the first time US and NATO commanders publicly accused Pakistan of aiding the Taliban.
The Taliban were also adept at exploiting the deep differences within the NATO alliance and the fact that many countries had sent forces to Afghanistan that were not empowered to fight. There were now troops from 37 countries taking part in peace-keeping operations, but the need was increasingly for more fighting troops. In 2006, NATO-led forces numbered 45,000 men, but only a third were available for fighting.
‘In committing the alliance to sustained ground combat operations in Afghanistan NATO has bet its future’, said US General James Jones, the former head of NATO and later the National Security Adviser for President Barack Obama. ‘If NATO were to fail, alliance cohesion will be at grave risk. A moribund or unravelled NATO would have a profoundly negative geo-strategic impact’, he added.4 In April 2007, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, who commanded the ISAF forces, became the first US general to publicly tell Congress and NATO that they could not win in Afghanistan without doing something about the sanctuaries the Taliban maintained in Pakistan.5
NATO countries spent much of 2007 bickering amongst themselves as to where the war in Afghanistan was heading rather than beefng up their contingents, providing more helicopters, removing the restrictions on their troops and coming up with a more comprehensive policy towards Pakistan. Even though the USA was now pouring in more money to establish an Afghan National Army of some 134,000 men and a trained and equipped police force of 80,000 men, the real US focus remained on Iraq.
The Taliban made greater use of IEDs and suicide bombers. Some of the deadliest suicide attacks planned by the Jalaluddin Haqqani group took place in Kabul, such as the one in which 31 Afghan army recruits were killed in an army bus by a suicide bomber in September 2007. A few months later a wave of suicide bombers attacked the heavily guarded Serena Hotel in Kabul, killing six people. The police continued to be a major target for the Taliban in the countryside – some 900 policemen were killed in 2007.
Al Qaeda also taught the Taliban how to set up sophisticated media outlets, which produced tens of thousands of DVDs and inspirational tapes that sold for a few pennies in the bazaars of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Taliban now used web sites, FM radio stations and email, and their spokesmen (often based in Quetta) gave interviews to journalists based in Pakistan. Their favourite propaganda tool became an FM radio station that could be loaded on a donkey or the back of a pickup and carried around an area to avoid detection while broadcasting Taliban messages. This was all in sharp contrast to the Taliban of the 1990s, who abhorred the media, banning most media outlets including television out of a refusal to see the usefulness of propaganda. Much of the Taliban's newfound acumen came from the Al Qaeda media outlet ‘al-Sahab’, which issued 89 messages of various kinds in 2007 – including tapes of Osama Bin Laden and Aiman al-Zawahiri.
Despite the Taliban's increased sophistication, for the first time NATO started having some luck in their efforts to kill top Taliban commanders. There was also a limited improvement in intelligence cooperation between Pakistan and NATO and US forces. Mullah Akthar Usmani, the former Taliban corps commander and member of the Quetta Shura, was killed in a British air strike in Helmand in December 2006. In March 2007 Mullah Obaidullah Akhund was arrested in Quetta by the ISI after considerable US and British pressure, but he was later freed in a hostage exchange with Pakistani Taliban who were holding Pakistani soldiers. Mullah Dadullah, the much reviled and brutal commander in southern Afghanistan who had kicked off the insurgency in 2003 by killing a Red Cross official, was finally killed in May 2007 in a fire fight in Garmser in Helmand after being tracked down by British commandos. His brother replaced him as commander but was later arrested in Pakistan.
These losses led to the elevation of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a close companion of Mullah Omar's from the earliest days of the Taliban. He now presided over the Taliban's military committee in Quetta, appointed and demoted commanders and presided over the all-important war chest, from which he doled out funds to his field commanders.6 Baradar became the de facto field commander of the Taliban as Mullah Omar remained largely in hiding.
With all the problems within NATO and the lack of US focus, the Taliban were seeking to outlast Western forces, and to some extent they were succeeding. As long as the Karzai government failed to govern effectively or provide services and jobs to the people, as long as it allowed corruption and drug trafficking to take place under its very nose, the Taliban were winning by default. The failure of the government to provide quick and effective justice to the people only further helped the Taliban cause.
Equally important to the Taliban's growing success in Afghanistan was the fact that despite all the pressure on Islamabad and Pakistan's growing travails with the home-grown Taliban movement, the Pakistan army refused to abandon the Afghan Taliban leadership in Quetta. Nor did it put any pressure on the forces of Gulbuddin Hikmetyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, who were still based in FATA and whom Pakistani officials described as strategic allies of Pakistan.
In the summer of 2008 the Taliban expanded into the provinces surrounding Kabul, from which they had been ejected in 2001. This compelled US forces to take up positions in these provinces, particularly to safeguard major roads that ran out of Kabul to the provinces. Heavy fighting ensued as the Taliban tried to protect their gains, though the Americans were able to open the roads, and security improved in these provinces. The following year the Taliban expanded into the northern and western provinces, particularly Kunduz, where they fought German troops, and Herat, where Italian and Spanish troops were based. Here they were more successful because of the severe restrictions that the European troops operated under as their governments forbade them to go on the offensive against the Taliban.
Iraq consumed a great deal of attention during the US presidential election campaign in 2008, but the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, promised to make Afghanistan his principal focus, criticizing President Bush for neglecting the root causes of international
terrorism that lay in Pakistan and Afghanistan. At the same time, however, the election campaign led to a severe break in US policy towards Afghanistan that lasted throughout the second half of 2008 and until Obama was sworn in as president in January 2009. Afghanistan desperately needed more troops, more money and a new strategy so that the its own presidential elections, due to be held in August 2009, could be carried out with some security. But the Bush administration failed to take any of the decisions that were so desperately needed, leaving everything to the incoming Obama team.
The Taliban took advantage of the USA's inertia by launching spectacular suicide attacks in the cities and large-unit guerrilla assaults in the countryside, as well as stepping up the use of IEDs. The Taliban attempted to assassinate President Karzai in April 2008 while he was taking the salute at a parade in Kabul, and on 13 June there was a mass attack on Kandahar prison that freed 1,100 inmates, including 400 Taliban members. The following month the Indian embassy in Kabul was bombed, and nine US soldiers were killed and 15 wounded in a single day's fighting in Kunar province – the highest single battlefield loss for the US army since the war began.
For the first time more Western troops were dying in Afghanistan than in Iraq. There was a worsening of the humanitarian crisis in drought-plagued regions, and reconstruction came to a virtual halt as aid agencies limited themselves to Kabul after the deaths of 26 aid workers in 2008.