The Longest War

by Peter L. Bergen

  The Uruzgan attack demonstrated, for those who hadn’t yet figured it out, just how the Taliban was seeking to exploit popular resentment against eradication efforts. All across the country, Afghan support for poppy cultivation was then on the upswing; almost 40 percent of Afghans considered it acceptable if there was no other way to earn a living, and in the southwest, where much of the poppy crop was grown, two out of three people said it was acceptable.

  Instead of taking such findings to heart, the Bush administration’s counternarcotics policy placed eradication at its center, even though it was met with growing Afghan skepticism and, in some cases, violence. Why was the policy so unpopular? Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world and many rural Afghans have few options to make money other than by poppy growing. Abruptly ending the poppy/opium trade was not an option, as that would have put up to three million people out of work, or around a tenth of the population, and impoverished millions more; the only really functional part of the economy was poppy and opium production. Farmers could earn as much as twelve dollars a day growing poppy, while a tailor might make that in a month. You simply could not eviscerate the livelihoods of the millions of Afghans who grew poppies and not expect a backlash.

  Manual eradication by Afghan policemen working together with DynCorp’s contractors failed to wipe out the drug trade. Quite the reverse: trade boomed and the eradication approach only created more enemies, since the farmers who had their crops destroyed were generally the poorer ones who couldn’t pay the bribes to have their fields left alone. Those farmers proved easy recruits to the Taliban cause. The U.S. government, in short, was deeply committed to an unsuccessful drug policy that helped its enemies. (The measure of a successful counternarcotics policy should not have been hectares of poppy destroyed every year, but hectares of other crops that were planted.)

  The drug trade not only helped fund the Taliban; it also fueled Afghanistan’s pervasive corruption. By 2008, according to the watchdog group Transparency International, Afghanistan was rated one of the most corrupt countries on the planet, alongside such completely failed states as Somalia, in part because government officials were reaping the benefits of the drug trade, and not just the Taliban. In June 2005, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials and Afghan police raided the office of the governor of Helmand, Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, and found nine tons of opium in his office. Wali Karzai, President Karzai’s brother and an important politician in Kandahar, was repeatedly identified in news reports as profiting from the drug business. Yet a culture of impunity existed for those at the top of the heroin trade, exemplified by the vast, gaudy mansions that the drug barons built for themselves in the center of Kabul.

  By 2006, Karzai, now often derided as the “mayor of Kabul,” seemed to be losing his grip. Not only would he not move against the drug lords, but some of the most competent officials, such as foreign minister Dr. Abdullah and the finance minister Ashraf Ghani, had left the government. There was also little true representation of Pashtun political interests in parliament because Karzai appeared to distrust political parties.

  In the latter half of the second Bush term, Afghanistan’s drift into chaos became a matter of concern at the White House. Meghan O’Sullivan, Bush’s adviser on Iraq and Afghanistan, had instituted a review of Afghan policy while Iraq was still on fire in 2006 but no substantive changes of policy emerged out of that review. O’Sullivan recalls: “The recommendations were made, and they were accepted, and then people were told to go and ferret out the resources, and we didn’t have them. And so, they weren’t executed.” Another official at the White House working on Afghanistan recalls that during this period, “There were many discussions about expanding the small Afghan national army,” but nothing of substance happened.

  In 2007, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, William Wood, and the commanding general in Afghanistan, Dan McNeill, were telling White House officials in videoconferences that everything was fine. One official recalled, “They believed it from their bubble.”

  But a group of senior Bush administration officials who dubbed themselves “the shura”—the Arabic word means council—had begun traveling to the country regularly and did not share this rosy view. Key members of the shura were Lieutenant General Douglas E. Lute, who had been appointed “war czar” at the White House for Iraq and Afghanistan in May 2007, and Eliot Cohen, one of Condoleezza Rice’s top deputies at the State Department. Cohen recalls that during the summer of 2007 he and his staff started examining color-coded maps of Afghanistan going back five years that the United Nations had drawn up to show where in the country it was safe for aid organizations to work: “And you can just see the green shrinking, the yellow growing, and the red really growing.” By the summer of 2008, after one of the trips of the shura to Afghanistan, it was obvious to the group that the country’s downward trajectory was now a real problem. General Lute recalled: “There was a point where we basically just concluded, this was really going bad on us: There’s no sort of seminal event but we were not winning. And in a counterinsurgency, that’s not good enough.”

  The growing alarm about Afghanistan precipitated a soup-to-nuts review during the fall of 2008. David Kilcullen, who had recently served in Iraq as General David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency adviser, was then advising Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Kilcullen says, “By September there was critical mass in the Bush administration for a new review. Part of it was that this pressure had been building, to look at Afghanistan again; part of it was Iraq started to turn in the middle of ’07, and finally they got enough bandwidth back that they could think about something other than Iraq. It was very, very hard to get their attention on Afghanistan until Iraq started to turn around. They were just all Iraq, all the time.”

  In mid-September 2008, as the formal review began, President Bush’s instructions to his team were: “I don’t want a written report out of this thing any time before the twentieth of January ’09, and I want you to look at two issues. One, things I have to do now, as president, which are urgent. And secondly, what are we handing off to the next administration, and how do we help them understand the issue?” There was no disagreement among the couple of dozen officials who worked on the review that Afghanistan was on a downward slope. Participants were told that violence had gone up more than 500 percent in the past five years and Afghan support for international forces had plummeted by 33 percent in the past few months, according to private polling commissioned by the U.S. government.

  Two weeks before Americans went to the polls to vote for John McCain or Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, Bush administration officials briefed advisers to both campaigns about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. The meeting was held at the Army and Navy Club in downtown Washington, D.C., and was organized, in part, by Barnett Rubin, a professor at New York University and the country’s leading Afghan expert. Kilcullen remembers, “We gave them a briefing on the Afghanistan review. Sort of swore them to silence, and we told them everything we’d done. That was the point at which I realized Obama was going to win the election, because the McCain people were defeated and slumping and not even taking notes. And the Obama people were sitting up straight and they were taking notes. They were clearly people who expected to take office and assume responsibility for the problem.”

  After Obama won the election, and under instructions from Bush, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley briefed his incoming replacement, General James Jones, about the content of the Afghan review. Hadley recalls, “The president said, basically, ‘Why don’t you talk to Jones about it, ask him what he wants to do. My guess is they’ll opt to have us give them the strategy review and not announce it.’ I did talk to Jones, and they were briefed on the strategy review, and Jones said, ‘Leave it for us.’ So we did.” The unpublicized Bush review outlined some of the policies that the Obama administration would later adopt, including treating Afghanistan as a regional problem that included Pakistan and building up the Afghan st
ate at the provincial level, something that hitherto had been largely ignored, and it advocated an expanded counterinsurgency mission.

  General David McKiernan had recently consolidated control over U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan and started adjusting their tactics. McKiernan issued an order on September 2, 2008, that U.S./NATO forces should change their rules of engagement by emphasizing the need for proportional force in reacting to Taliban attacks so as to lower civilian casualties, the issue that was most damaging to the standing of the coalition among the Afghan population. A key part of McKiernan’s new strategy involved reaching out to Afghanistan’s many tribes. It was an approach that the U.S. military had successfully adopted in Iraq, where tens of thousands of Sunni tribe members involved in the “Sunni Awakening” were put on the American payroll. To attempt to replicate elements of that approach, the U.S. military and NATO started mapping the approximately four hundred tribes and their many sub-tribes across Afghanistan. And in the winter of 2008 a pilot program in the central Afghan province of Wardak, thirty miles from Kabul, was put in place to arm local militias to fight the resurgent local Taliban. In late 2008, McKiernan also requested more than 20,000 new troops to supplement the relatively small force of 32,000 then on the ground; around 10,000 of them were authorized by President Bush in the waning months of his final term.

  But these incremental measures could not hide the fact that by the time Bush left office, the Taliban were stronger than at any point since they had lost Kabul seven years earlier. By one estimate the Taliban had a permanent presence in 72 percent of the country. The Taliban, which in 2002 had barely been more than a nuisance, now controlled large sections of Afghanistan’s most important road, the three-hundred-mile Kabul to Kandahar highway, and by 2008 more American soldiers were dying in Afghanistan than in Iraq.

  Afghanistan should have been a demonstration project of American resolve and American compassion: a signal to her enemies that, once evicted from their sanctuaries, they would never be allowed back; and a signal to her friends that a peaceful, stable state could flourish in a land where militant Islamists had once reigned. But as Lieutenant General David Barno, the commanding general in Afghanistan between 2003 and 2005, later dryly noted of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan, “‘Nation-building’ was explicitly not part of the formula.”

  America’s neglect of Afghanistan after 2001 was an enormous missed opportunity and something that Bush officials only really began to grapple with seriously during their last year in office.

  Chapter 12

  Al-Qaeda 2.0

  God has bestowed on our beloved emir Sheikh Osama bin Laden and his brothers the mujahideen what they wished for—and that is the globalization of the concept of jihad.

  —Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, al-Qaeda’s commander in Afghanistan,

  in a video released to Al Jazeera in 2007

  We are at war and I am a soldier.

  —Mohammed Siddique Khan, a British primary school teacher,

  who blew himself up on the London Underground, speaking on his

  al-Qaeda “martyrdom” videotape in 2005

  The plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely … it can remain dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests … it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves and … perhaps the day will come when, for the instruction of mankind, the plague will rouse its rats again and send them forth to die in a well-contented city.

  —Albert Camus

  On the morning of July 7, 2005, at around eight-thirty, four men hugged each other at Kings Cross railway station in London, a moment that was caught on one of the capital’s ubiquitous surveillance cameras. The men appeared to be happy, even euphoric before they separated to board three trains on the Underground and a double-decker bus. Within the next hour and a half the men detonated bombs that killed themselves and fifty-two commuters and maimed hundreds more. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in British history and the first time that British citizens had conducted suicide operations in their own country. The attacks took place as Prime Minister Tony Blair was hosting the G-8 meeting of world leaders in Scotland and appeared to be timed for maximum embarrassment to the government.

  A few days after the bombings, police identified all four of the suicide attackers from surveillance camera footage. The bombers were relatively easy to spot because three were of Pakistani descent and all of them were carrying large backpacks inside which were packed their bombs. They were an unremarkable bunch of blokes. Ringleader Mohammed Siddique Khan, known widely as “Sid,” was a beloved teacher at a primary school in the northern city of Leeds, teaching handicapped children, and the happily married thirty-year-old father of a baby daughter, with another kid on the way. Shehzad Tanweer, a keen cricketer, was the twenty-two-year-old son of a relatively prosperous businessman who owned a slaughterhouse and fish-and-chips shop in Leeds. Tanweer, a fastidious dresser, tooled around town in a red Mercedes that his father had given him. Eighteen-year-old Hasib Hussain was faring poorly at school and drifting in life, while Germaine Lindsay was an unemployed, nineteen-year-old Jamaican-British convert to Islam.

  While all the London bombers were known for their strict religious observance, none was regarded by their friends and families as a militant. They seemed utterly ordinary, their leisure time made up of cricket and soccer practice, working out together and going on paintballing trips. But there was another hidden dimension to their lives that centered on an Islamic bookshop in the bleak Leeds suburb of Beeston where they would go to buy jihadi videos. The Beeston cell bonded around watching videos of atrocities against Muslims in Iraq, Palestine, and Chechnya.

  Once radicalized in Britain, the two ringleaders, Khan and Tanweer, traveled to Pakistan to link up there with militant groups. Before making what would be his final trip to Pakistan in the winter of 2004, Khan made a farewell video of himself in his Leeds home. On the tape Khan addressed his baby daughter cradled in his arms and said, “Not too long to go now and I’m going to really miss you.” Khan, it seems, expected to die on his last trip to Pakistan, but something changed for him there, and instead he returned to his native land with plans to wreak mayhem in London.

  Once they got over the shock of the fact that the London attacks were conducted by their own citizens, the British press and government initially portrayed the bombings as an entirely “homegrown” plot with no links to an overseas group, carried out by “self-starting” militants who had radicalized themselves in their hometown of Leeds. Typical of this view was a report in the well-sourced Sunday Times newspaper, which said that British authorities had found no evidence linking the bombers to al-Qaeda and they were instead a new breed of “unaffiliated” militants. But while the London bombings were certainly implemented by homegrown terrorists, what had in fact turned them from a group of angry young men into an effective terrorist cell was the training and direction that the leader of the group had received from al-Qaeda in Pakistan.

  Two months after the London bombings, a videotape of Khan, the lead suicide attacker, appeared on Al Jazeera branded with the distinctive, golden Arabic logo of al-Qaeda’s Pakistan-based media arm, Al-Sahab (“the Clouds”). On his “martyrdom” videotape—a standard accoutrement of al-Qaeda attackers since 9/11—Khan addressed his audience in the broad accent of his native Yorkshire, saying softly, “I’m going to talk to you in a language that you understand. Our words are dead until we give them life with our blood.” Khan, wearing a Palestinian-style red and white checkered head scarf, went on to describe bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri as “today’s heroes.”

  On the same videotape Zawahiri himself made an appearance, explaining that the London bombings were revenge for Britain’s participation in the war in Iraq, and came as a result of ignoring bin Laden’s earlier offer of a “truce” with those European nations participating in the coalition in Iraq that were willing to pull out of the country. That truce offer expired on July 15, 2004, almost exactly a year before the Londo
n attacks took place. (In 2006 a martyrdom video of bomber Shehzad Tanweer appeared; this one was also made by Al-Sahab, further evidence of al-Qaeda’s role in the bombings.)

  Khan returned to England in February 2005 and made his first purchase of hydrogen peroxide chemicals with which to build bombs. In an apartment in Leeds that Khan and his fellow plotters rented to serve as their bomb factory, they mixed the chemicals, which were so noxious that neighbors noticed that their plants were wilting. As they brewed up the batches of chemicals, the bombers wore disposable masks because of the high toxicity of the materials, which bleached their dark hair a noticeably lighter color. They also installed a commercial-grade refrigerator in the apartment to keep the highly unstable bomb ingredients cold. The four bombs that detonated in London on July 7, 2005, were all hydrogen-peroxide-based devices, a signature of plots that have had a connection to al-Qaeda’s Pakistani training camps since 9/11.

  The bombings were largely financed by Khan using credit cards and a personal loan from a bank. (Much of the hysterical analysis about “Saudi funding” for terrorism, which was pervasive after 9/11, fell apart when you looked at particular terrorism cases in any detail; the plots were often self-financed and, in any event, generally didn’t cost much money.) Underlining the fact that terrorism is a cheap form of warfare, the British government found that the entire London operation cost around £8,000 ($14,000), including airfares to Pakistan and the chemicals to make the bombs.

  Two weeks after the 7/7 attacks, on July 21, 2005, a second wave of hydrogen-peroxide-based bombs was set off in London, this one organized by a cell of Somali and Eritrean men who were first-generation immigrants. Like the 7/7 bombers, the 7/21 cell members would gather in each other’s flats to watch videos of the Iraq War and the beheadings of “infidels.” Fortunately, while four bombs were set to detonate on 7/21—three on the London Underground and one on a bus, mimicking the attacks two weeks earlier—their faulty construction rendered them harmless. One of the conspirators fled London wearing an all-enveloping black burqa, accessorized with a handbag, and was recorded by surveillance cameras in Birmingham a day after the failed bombings. With the July 21 bombing attempts, Londoners, who had taken the 7/7 attacks somewhat in their stride, were now facing the unnerving possibility that there would be a sustained campaign of suicide attacks in the capital.