The Afghanistan Papers

by Craig Whitlock

  For the time being, it was enough to keep Afghanistan from tearing itself apart. In public, Rumsfeld acted as if he had never doubted the overall war plan for a minute.

  “I think that what was taking place in the earlier phases was exactly as planned. The conditions were being set for what needed to be done,” Rumsfeld said during a triumphant November 27 press conference at Central Command headquarters in Tampa. He leveled a sarcastic jab at reporters who had raised the specter of Vietnam. “It looked like nothing was happening. Indeed, it looked like we were in a—all together now!—quagmire.”

  At first, the U.S. Army was so intent on abbreviating its stay in Afghanistan that it refused to import basic amenities to make the troops more comfortable. Soldiers who wanted fresh clothes had to fly their dirty laundry by helicopter to a temporary support base in neighboring Uzbekistan.

  For Thanksgiving, the Army made a small concession to cleanliness and dispatched a two-man team to install the first shower at Bagram Air Base in northern Afghanistan—home at the time to about 200 Special Forces soldiers and scores of allied troops.

  “Some of the guys had been there for up to thirty days, so they needed a bath,” Maj. Jeremy Smith, the quartermaster who oversaw the laundry unit in Uzbekistan, said in an Army oral-history interview. His superiors didn’t want to send any extra personnel or equipment to Bagram but finally relented.

  “Eventually they said, ‘Okay, let’s go ahead and do this,’ ” Smith recalled. “But it was, ‘We’re not sure how long we’re going to be here, we’re not sure about a whole lot of things, so our presence here is going to be as small as possible. How few people can you send?’ The smallest number I could send was two. ‘What’s the smallest shower configuration you can send?’ ‘Well, it’s designed for twelve, but the smallest we can realistically send is a six-head shower unit.’ The mixer and the boiler and the pumps were all designed for a twelve-head shower, so a twelve-head shower only going through six heads had some really good water pressure. Everybody liked that.”

  Over time, Bagram would balloon in size to become one of the largest U.S. military bases overseas. When Smith returned to Bagram a decade later for a second tour of duty, he was greeted by a fully functioning city with a shopping mall, a Harley-Davidson dealer and about 30,000 troops, civilians and contractors. “Even before the plane stopped,” Smith said, “I instantly recognized the mountains and after that I noticed it was the same smell. Then getting off, it was like, ‘Holy cow! I don’t recognize hardly anything.’ ”

  In December 2001, however, only 2,500 American troops were on the ground in all of Afghanistan. Rumsfeld allowed the number to rise slowly but imposed strict limits. By the end of January, more U.S. military personnel were guarding the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City (4,369) than serving in Afghanistan (4,003).

  Many of the troops in southern Afghanistan stayed at an airstrip near Kandahar, where the conditions were even more primitive than at Bagram, about 300 miles away. “There was one shower point in the whole place,” Maj. David King of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment said in an Army oral-history interview. “You have to go in planning on using a piss tube and you’re going to be crapping in a barrel and burning it with diesel fuel… There wasn’t any honey wagon or porta potties or that stuff, at least at that point.”

  When Maj. Glen Helberg, an infantry officer, arrived at Kandahar Air Field in January 2002, he spent the night in a sleeping bag in the desert dirt. “It was moon dust and it rained that night and water was flowing under the tent flaps. I woke up and some of my stuff was floating,” he said in an Army oral-history interview.

  By the time Helberg’s unit departed six months later, soldiers slept on cots instead of the ground. No one imagined that the dusty camp at Kandahar was destined to become a giant combat hub on a similar scale to Bagram. At times, it would become the busiest airfield between Delhi and Dubai, handling 5,000 takeoffs and landings each week.

  Rather, in the moment, it felt as if the war had already crested and reached the mop-up stage. In an Army oral-history interview, Maj. Lance Baker, an intelligence officer, said rumors circulated that his unit, the 10th Mountain Division, didn’t “have anything else to do, there’s no more fighting, Afghanistan’s done. We’re going home.”

  In June 2002, Army Maj. Andrew Steadman and his paratrooper battalion landed in Kandahar all gung-ho to hunt al-Qaeda—only to end up sitting on their hands. “The guys just played video games,” he said in an Army oral-history interview. “They worked out in the morning and did some training in the afternoon.”

  In eastern Afghanistan, near the Pakistani border, Army Maj. Steven Wallace’s rifle platoon also had a hard time finding anyone to battle. “We were there for eight weeks and didn’t have one single firefight,” he told Army historians. “It was actually very boring.”

  On the surface, Afghanistan looked like it was stabilizing. The United Nations hosted a conference in Bonn, Germany, that set up a governance plan for Afghanistan in December 2001. Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun tribal leader and CIA asset who spoke fluent English, was chosen as interim leader. Humanitarian groups and dozens of donor countries delivered much-needed aid.

  The Bush administration was still leery of getting bogged down. But the swift and decisive military victories boosted U.S. officials’ confidence and they tacked on new goals.

  Stephen Hadley, the White House’s deputy national security adviser at the time, said the war shifted into “an ideological phase” in which the United States decided to introduce freedom and democracy to Afghanistan as an alternative to terrorism. To make that happen, U.S. troops needed to prolong their stay.

  “We originally said that we don’t do nation-building but there is no way to ensure that al-Qaeda won’t come back without it,” Hadley said in a Lessons Learned interview. “[We] did not want to become occupiers or to overwhelm the Afghans. But once the Taliban was flushed, we did not want to throw that progress away.”

  By the time Bush gave his speech to the Virginia Military Institute cadets in April 2002, he had settled on a much more ambitious set of objectives for the war. The United States, he said, was obligated to help Afghanistan build a country free of terrorism, with a stable government, a new national army and an education system for boys and girls alike. “True peace will only be achieved when we give the Afghan people the means to achieve their own aspirations,” he added.

  Bush was now promising that the United States would transform an impoverished country that had been traumatized by warfare and ethnic strife for the past quarter-century. The goals were noble and high-minded, but Bush offered no specifics or benchmarks for achieving them. In his VMI speech, he also dodged the issue of how much it would all cost or how long it might take, saying only: “We’ll stay until the mission is done.”

  It was a classic mistake of failing to adhere to a clear strategy with concise, attainable objectives. Still, few people expressed concern that the United States had committed to an open-ended mission. Those who raised doubts were ignored. “When we went to Afghanistan everybody was talking about a year or two, and I said to them that we would be lucky if we were out of here in twenty years,” Robert Finn, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2002 to 2003, said in a Lessons Learned interview.

  For years, senior military commanders were reluctant to acknowledge that they had committed fundamental strategic errors. Tommy Franks, the Army general who oversaw the start of the war, believed he had done his duty: to defeat al-Qaeda and knock out the Taliban. “How many more attacks have there been on U.S. soil sponsored out of Afghanistan?” Franks said in a University of Virginia oral-history interview. “Give me a break, guys. We solved a problem.”

  As for sorting out the future of Afghanistan, Franks thought that was somebody else’s responsibility: “Now, we created other problems and we have not taken care of the centuries if not thousands of years of poverty and all the problems that go on in Afghanistan,” he said. “Should we have outlined
that as an objective? That’s not for me to say. I was glad many times that the president never asked me, ‘Well, should we do this?’ Because I would have said, ‘That’s your job, not mine.’ ”

  It wasn’t the last time Franks would lead an invasion but fail to plan adequately for the post-war occupation.

  Six months after the war began, the United States made the hubristic mistake of assuming the conflict had ended successfully, on American terms. Bin Laden was still on the loose, but otherwise people in Washington stopped paying much attention to Afghanistan and became preoccupied with another country in the region: Iraq.

  In May 2002, a new three-star Army general arrived in Afghanistan to take command of U.S. forces. Dan McNeill, a 54-year-old North Carolinian and a veteran of Vietnam, said the Pentagon was already so focused on Iraq that it gave him little guidance.

  “There was no campaign plan in the early days,” McNeill said in a Lessons Learned interview. “Rumsfeld would get excited if there was any increase in the number of boots on the ground.”

  By the time fall arrived, even the commander in chief had become distracted and had forgotten key details about the war.

  On the afternoon of October 21, Bush was working in the Oval Office when Rumsfeld walked in with a quick question: Did the president want to meet that week with General Franks and General McNeill?

  Bush seemed perplexed, according to a snowflake that Rumsfeld wrote later that day.

  “He said, ‘Who is General McNeill?’ ” Rumsfeld recalled. “I said he is the general in charge of Afghanistan. He said, ‘Well, I don’t need to meet with him.’ ”

  I. The Senate passed the legislation by a vote of 98–0 and the House of Representatives approved it by a vote of 420–1. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) cast the lone dissent.

  CHAPTER TWO “Who Are the Bad Guys?”

  In August 2002, an unusual report from the war zone caught the attention of Rumsfeld and other senior officials at the Pentagon. Written by a member of a team of allied commandos hunting for high-value targets, the fourteen-page email provided an unfiltered, firsthand account of conditions in southern Afghanistan.

  “Greetings from scenic Kandahar,” it began. “Formerly known as ‘Home of the Taliban.’ Now known as ‘Miserable Rat-Fuck Shithole.’ ”

  Part intelligence brief and part tongue-in-cheek travelogue, the unclassified email was authored by Roger Pardo-Maurer, a 38-year-old Green Beret with atypical credentials. A Connecticut native, the Yale graduate joined the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s and worked as a trade and investment consultant during the 1990s. He was serving in the Defense Department as a deputy assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs—the civilian equivalent of a three-star general—when his Army Reserve unit was activated after the 9/11 attacks.

  Known for his sense of humor at the office, Pardo-Maurer’s observations from the front became a must-read for his colleagues back at the Pentagon. He memorably described Kandahar’s suffocating summertime as “a quasi-Venusian sub-Martian environment of heat, dust, and parched air that stuns you, rasps your corneas, produces constant sinus-clogging migraines and nosebleeds, and crackles your skin in weird tender places.”

  “If there is a landscape less welcoming to humans anywhere on earth, apart from the Sahara, the Poles, and the cauldrons of Kilauea, I cannot imagine it, and I certainly don’t intend to go there,” he added.

  In the email, Pardo-Maurer unsparingly portrayed other actors on the wartime stage. His unit stayed in what was known as the Special Forces Village at Kandahar Air Field, a shantytown of tents and plywood shacks that housed “a formidable pack” of bearded commandos from the United States and allied nations.

  Pardo-Maurer depicted Navy SEALs as “louts” known for their “rowdy conceits,” including the time they trashed the courtyard of the New Zealand special forces unit and let the commander’s pet snakes loose. He dismissed CIA operatives as “crude vainglorious chumps” who wasted hours shopping for Afghan handicrafts.

  He spoke respectfully of the commandos from Canada, calling them “quite likely the deadliest bunch in town, but also the friendliest,” known for sharing deep-dish pizza and maintaining an Elvis shrine in their compound. As for the Afghans, he mocked Kandaharis as “a crusty lot of downtrodden moochers.”

  That summer in Washington, Pentagon officials repeatedly told Congress and the public that the Taliban had been destroyed, al-Qaeda dispersed and Afghanistan’s terrorist training camps shut down. But Pardo-Maurer warned his colleagues the war was far from over and that the enemy was unvanquished.

  “Time is of the essence here,” he noted in the email, which he wrote during five days in mid-August. “The situation we’re in now is that Al Qaeda have licked their wounds and are regrouping in the Southeast, with the connivance of a few disgruntled junior warlords and the double-dealing Pakistanis. The shooting match is still very much on. Along the border provinces, you can’t kick a stone over without Bad Guys swarming out like ants and snakes and scorpions.”

  Pardo-Maurer’s colorful descriptions aside, U.S. troops struggled to distinguish the bad guys from everybody else in Afghanistan. Taliban and al-Qaeda regulars moved around in small groups and wore the same headwear and baggy trousers as local civilians, blending into the population. Just because someone carried an AK-47 didn’t automatically make them a combatant. Firearms had poured into the country since the Soviet invasion of 1979 and Afghans hoarded them for self-protection.

  On a broader level, the United States had jumped into the war with only a hazy idea of whom it was fighting—a fundamental blunder from which it would never recover.

  Although bin Laden and al-Qaeda had declared war against the United States in 1996, bombed two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 and nearly sank the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, U.S. national-security agencies had paid limited attention to the terrorist network and failed to see it as a threat to the continental United States.

  “The reality is that on 9/11 we didn’t know jack shit about al-Qaeda,” Robert Gates, who served as director of the CIA in the early 1990s and later replaced Rumsfeld as defense secretary, said in a University of Virginia oral-history interview. “If we’d had a great database and knew exactly what al-Qaeda was all about, what their capabilities were and stuff like that, some of these measures wouldn’t have been necessary. But the fact is that we’d just been attacked by a group we didn’t know anything about.”

  The Bush administration made another basic mistake by blurring the line between al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The two groups shared an extremist religious ideology and a mutual support pact, but pursued different goals and objectives.

  Al-Qaeda was primarily a network of Arabs, not Afghans, with a global presence and outlook; bin Laden spent his days plotting to overthrow the Saudi royal family and other Middle East autocrats allied with the United States. The al-Qaeda leader was living in Afghanistan only because he had been expelled from his previous refuge, in Sudan.

  In contrast, the Taliban’s preoccupations were entirely local. Most of its followers belonged to the Pashtun tribes in southern and eastern Afghanistan that had been warring for years with other ethnic groups and power brokers for control of the country. The Taliban protected bin Laden and built a strong alliance with al-Qaeda, but Afghans did not play a role in the 9/11 hijackings and there is no evidence they had advance knowledge of the attacks.

  The Bush administration targeted the Taliban because its leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, refused to hand over bin Laden after 9/11. In practice, however, the U.S. military drew little distinction between the Taliban and al-Qaeda, categorizing them all as bad guys.

  By 2002, few al-Qaeda followers remained in Afghanistan. Hundreds had been killed or captured, while the rest fled to Pakistan, Iran and other countries.

  The United States and its allies were left fighting the Taliban and other militants from the region—Uzbeks, Pakistanis, Chechens. So for the next two decades, the war in Afghanistan was waged against
people who had nothing to do with 9/11.

  Jeffrey Eggers, a Navy SEAL who served in Afghanistan and worked on the National Security Council staff under Bush and Obama, said most of the world felt the United States was justified in taking military action in Afghanistan in response to the 9/11 attacks. But once al-Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan shriveled up, U.S. officials failed to step back and reassess who else they were fighting or why.

  “The complexities will take a long time to unravel. Our entire post–9/11 response is all subject to question because of this increasing complexity. Why did we make the Taliban the enemy when we were attacked by al-Qaeda? Why did we want to defeat the Taliban? Why did we think it was necessary to build a hyper-function[ing] state to forgo the return of the Taliban?” Eggers said in a Lessons Learned interview.

  “Why, if we were focused on al-Qaeda, were we talking about the Taliban? Why were we talking about the Taliban all the time instead of focusing our strategy on al-Qaeda?”

  One reason the war dragged on for so long was because the United States never really understood what motivated its enemies to fight. At the war’s outset, scarcely any U.S. officials possessed an elementary understanding of Afghan society or had visited the country since the American embassy in Kabul closed in 1989. To an ignorant foreigner, Afghanistan’s history, complex tribal dynamics, and ethnic and religious fault lines felt bewildering. It was much easier to divide the country into two camps: good guys and bad guys.