The Afghanistan Papers

by Craig Whitlock

  “I mean, the writing is on the wall now. We spent so much money and there is so little to show for it,” Michael Callen, an economist with the University of California San Diego who specialized in the Afghan public sector, said in a Lessons Learned interview. “What is a counter-factual if we had spent no money? I don’t know. Maybe it would be worse. Probably it would be worse but how much worse?”

  No nation needed more building than Afghanistan in 2001. Historically poor, it had been consumed by constant warfare since the Soviet invasion two decades earlier. Out of a population of about 22 million, an estimated 3 million had fled the country as refugees. Illiteracy and malnourishment plagued most who remained. As winter descended, aid agencies warned that one out of every three Afghans was at risk of starvation.

  At that point, however, the Bush administration still had not decided whether it wanted to commit to a long-term nation-building campaign or leave Afghanistan’s problems for others to deal with.

  In 2000, Bush had arrived at the White House professing an aversion for costly foreign entanglements. During the presidential campaign, he had ripped the Clinton administration for committing the armed forces to “nation-building exercises” in Somalia, Haiti and the Balkans. “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation-building,” he said during a debate with his Democratic opponent, Al Gore. “I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war.” When the plain-spoken Texan ordered the U.S. military to start bombing Afghanistan, he reassured Americans that the United Nations—not Washington—would “take over the so-called nation-building.”

  When Crocker arrived in Afghanistan in January 2002, he thought leaving its problems to others “would have been pretty hard to justify and defend, given the extraordinary conditions in the country and the suffering of the Afghan people.” But he wasn’t authorized to make any grand promises during his brief, three-month stint in Kabul.

  In reports back to Washington, officials with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) delivered bleak assessments about the Afghans’ ability to stabilize their country without massive help. A senior USAID official who was advising the Afghan government noted that the country had no banks and no legal tender; warlords had printed their own, largely worthless, currency. A Finance Ministry existed, but 80 percent of the staff could not read or write.

  “It’s hard to explain to people just how bad Afghanistan was in the early years,” the unnamed USAID official said in a Lessons Learned interview. “It would have been easier if they had nothing. We had to destroy what was there to start building.”

  Richard Boucher, the State Department’s chief spokesman, visited Kabul in January 2002 with Secretary of State Colin Powell. Karzai invited the U.S. diplomats to the stone-walled presidential palace to attend a meeting of his new cabinet, which felt like a hollow movie-set version of the American one back in Washington. Thirty people crowded around the table, including the minister for women’s affairs, a brand-new post the Americans had insisted upon for the new Afghan government.

  “It was just like the American cabinet. They were sitting around but they had nothing,” Boucher said in a Lessons Learned interview. “The central bank governor was telling us how he went and opened the vaults and there was nothing inside. There was no money, no currency, no gold and none of what you would expect.”

  But Karzai and his cabinet maintained their manners, insisting on a traditional display of Afghan hospitality. “Somehow the Afghans managed to put on this amazing lunch. This huge banquet with piles of rice and dead goats,” Boucher said. “They were capable people but they didn’t [have] anything to run a government with so it really was from scratch both organizationally and materially.”

  As Afghanistan’s desperation became plain for the world to see, Bush softened his stance on nation-building. During his January 2002 State of the Union Address to Congress, the president praised the spirit of the Afghan people and promised: “We’ll be partners in rebuilding that country.”

  The words brought a smile to Karzai’s bearded face. He had been invited to the speech as an honored guest and assigned a coveted seat next to the first lady, Laura Bush. Karzai clutched his lamb’s wool hat and bowed slightly when lawmakers gave him a standing ovation. Joining him in the first lady’s box was a bespectacled woman in a white headscarf: Sima Samar, the new Afghan minister of women’s affairs.

  Despite his new rhetoric about partnering with the Afghans, Bush clung to his tightwad inclinations. At an international donors’ conference for Afghanistan prior to the president’s State of the Union speech, the United States pledged $296 million in reconstruction aid and extended a $50 million line of credit. Combined, the amount was less than one-half of one percent of what Washington would end up spending to rebuild Afghanistan during the next two decades.

  Bush also refused to contribute U.S. troops to an international peacekeeping force in Kabul because he didn’t want the Pentagon to stray from its mission of chasing al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The Pentagon agreed to take responsibility for training a new Afghan army, but only as part of a nation-building division of labor among U.S. allies.

  Under the arrangement, the Germans accepted the task of creating a new Afghan police force, the Italians agreed to help the Afghans overhaul their justice system and the British volunteered to discourage Afghan farmers from growing opium—historically, the country’s leading cash crop. In the years to come, each of the allies muffed their assignments.

  In Lessons Learned interviews, several Bush administration officials said nobody wanted to draw attention to the fact that the president was gradually breaking his campaign vows about nation-building. But they said Bush and others in the White House feared repeating the mistake Washington made during the 1990s, when it stopped paying attention to Afghanistan after U.S.-backed rebels forced the Soviet Army to withdraw—leaving chaos in its wake.

  “We released the furies and then went home,” said Stephen Hadley, who served as Bush’s deputy national security adviser during his first term in the White House. Hadley and many other officials feared the country would again erupt in civil war and al-Qaeda would return if the United States failed to stabilize Afghanistan this time around.

  “Nation-building was not high on the agenda. But we got there and realized we couldn’t walk away,” one unnamed U.S. official said. Another unidentified U.S. official said that while it was clear to insiders that the policy had “changed from anti– to pro–nation-building,” the shift was never spelled out in strategy documents.

  Still, expectations remained low. Richard Haass, a senior diplomat who served as the Bush administration’s special coordinator for Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, said, “There was a profound sense of a lack of possibility in Afghanistan” and the U.S. government was “not willing to make a significant investment.”

  Haass recalled giving a briefing during fall 2001 to Bush, Powell, Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, with Vice President Dick Cheney patched in by video from an undisclosed location.

  “There was just not any appetite for what you might call an ambitious policy,” Haass said. “The feeling was that you could put a lot into it and you wouldn’t get a lot out of it. I would not call it cynical, I would call it pessimistic about what the relationship between investment and return in Afghanistan [might be].”

  Like the overall war strategy, the nation-building campaign suffered from a lack of clear goals and benchmarks. “When we’re doing reconstruction, what is our theory and objectives?” an unnamed senior Bush administration official said in a Lessons Learned interview. “We need a theory, instead of just sending someone like me and saying, go help President Karzai.”

  Internal divisions hardened. At the State Department, diplomats and USAID officials fought to do more, arguing that only the United States had the resources and influence to get Afghanistan on the right track. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld and his aides pushed back, countering that it would be a mista
ke to take ownership of all of Afghanistan’s problems.

  Crocker, who would later serve as U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, said Rumsfeld and other neoconservatives approached the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq in the same manner. He summarized Rumsfeld’s mindset this way: “ ‘Our job is about killing bad guys, so we will have killed the bad guys, who cares what happens next. That’s their problem. And if in a decade and a half, we have to go in and kill more bad guys, we can do that too, but we’re not going to get involved in nation-building.’ ”

  James Dobbins, the diplomat who helped organize the Bonn Conference in 2001, said the outcome of such philosophical disputes was rarely in doubt. The Pentagon, which had all the guns and unrivaled political clout, got its way.

  “There was no way the State Department was going to get the Defense Department or Don Rumsfeld to do what it wanted. It was hard enough for the White House to do that and virtually impossible for the State Department,” Dobbins said in a Lessons Learned interview.

  While many Foreign Service officers portrayed Rumsfeld as an uncompromising bogeyman, other officials called the critique overly simplistic. They said Rumsfeld had no problems with reconstruction. He just didn’t want the military to get saddled with a job that he thought civilians were supposed to do.

  After years of budget cuts, however, USAID was a diminished agency and depended on contractors to perform its work. The rest of the State Department and other arms of the government also lacked the capacity to put a dent in Afghanistan’s long list of problems. That made it easy for Rumsfeld to blame other agencies for a lack of progress.

  In an August 20, 2002, memo to Bush, Rumsfeld argued that “the critical problem in Afghanistan is not really a security problem. Rather, the problem that needs to be addressed is the slow progress that is being made on the civil side.” He agreed that Karzai’s fledgling government needed more help—financially and otherwise—but he warned that sending more U.S. troops to stabilize and rebuild Afghanistan could backfire.

  “The result would be that U.S. and coalition forces would grow in number and we could run the risk of ending up being as hated as the Soviets were,” Rumsfeld wrote. “In any event, without successful reconstruction, no amount of added security forces would be enough. The Soviets had over 100,000 troops and failed.”

  Marin Strmecki, a civilian adviser to Rumsfeld, called the Pentagon chief “a misunderstood figure.” He said Rumsfeld believed it was essential to strengthen Afghan government institutions, but didn’t want the Afghans to become perpetually dependent on Washington. “It is often easier to do stuff ourselves than to coach people along to do it, given the very low level of human capital after twenty-five years of war,” Strmecki said in a Lessons Learned interview. He added that Rumsfeld’s concern was that the United States would entangle itself so deeply in Afghanistan’s basic functions that it could never extricate itself.

  But did the United States ever have a plan for how to pull that off? In his Lessons Learned interview, Stephen Hadley admitted that the Bush White House labored to devise an effective model for nation-building in Afghanistan. Even in retrospect, he said it was difficult to envision an approach that would have succeeded.

  “We originally said that we won’t do nation-building but there is no way to ensure that al-Qaeda won’t come back without it,” he said. “We just don’t have a post-conflict stabilization model that works. Every time we have one of these things, it is a pickup game. I don’t have any confidence that if we did it again, we would do any better.”

  It didn’t take an Ivy League political scientist or a member of the Council on Foreign Relations to see that Afghanistan needed a better system of government. Riven by feuding tribes and implacable warlords, the country had a volatile history of coups, assassinations and civil wars.

  The 2001 Bonn Agreement laid out a timeline for the Afghans to agree on a new political framework. A loya jirga—a traditional assembly of elders and leaders—was supposed to write a constitution within two years. Technically, it was up to the Afghans to decide how they wanted to govern their country. But the Bush administration persuaded them to adopt a made-in-America solution: a constitutional democracy under a president elected by popular vote.

  In many ways, the new government resembled a rudimentary version of Washington. Power was concentrated in the capital, Kabul. A federal bureaucracy began to sprout in all directions, cultivated by dollars and legions of Western advisers.

  Yet there was a key difference. The Bush administration pushed the Afghans to consolidate power in the hands of their president, with few checks or balances. Part of the reason was to curtail the influence of Afghanistan’s many regional warlords. But more importantly, Washington thought it had the perfect man to install as Afghanistan’s ruler: Karzai, an English-speaking tribal leader whom the Americans had taken under their wing.

  In Lessons Learned interviews, numerous U.S. and European officials who were directly involved in the nation-building deliberations admitted that the decision to put so much power in the hands of one man was a disastrous miscalculation. The rigid system conflicted with Afghan tradition, typified by a mix of decentralized authority and tribal customs. And while the Americans got along blissfully with Karzai at first, the relationship would crash and burn at critical times.

  “In hindsight the worst decision was to centralize power,” said an unnamed European Union official. An unidentified senior German official added that it would have made more sense to slowly build a democracy from the ground up, starting at the municipal level: “After the fall of the Taliban, it was thought that we needed a president right away, but that was wrong.”

  An unidentified senior U.S. official said he was astounded that the State Department thought an American-style presidency would work in Afghanistan. “You’d think they’ve never worked overseas,” he said. “Why did we create centralized government in a place that has never had one?”

  Even some State Department officials said they were baffled. “In Afghanistan our policy was to create a strong central government, which was idiotic because Afghanistan does not have a history of a strong central government,” said an unnamed senior U.S. diplomat. “The time frame for creating a strong central government is one hundred years, which we didn’t have.”

  “We did not know what we were doing,” added Richard Boucher, the former State Department chief spokesman. “The only time this country has worked properly was when it was a floating pool of tribes and warlords presided over by someone who had a certain eminence who was able to centralize them to the extent that they didn’t fight each other too much. I think this idea that we went in with, that this was going to become a state government like a U.S. state or something like that, was just wrong and is what condemned us to fifteen years of war instead of two or three.”

  Even American soldiers who had no familiarity with Afghan history and culture before they arrived said it became obvious that trying to impose a strong, centralized government was foolish. In Army oral-history interviews, they described Afghans as instinctually hostile toward national power brokers, with little concept of what a bureaucracy in Kabul might actually do.

  “You had to prove to a lot of people why government mattered to them at all, because you know, they’re remote people,” said Col. Terry Sellers, who served as a battalion commander in Uruzgan province. “The central government, at least to this point, in a lot of locations, had not been a provider to them, and they didn’t really understand or see a benefit to having a centralized government: ‘I’ve raised my sheep and goats and vegetables on this piece of land for hundreds of years and not had a central government. Why do I need one now?’ ”

  Other Army officers said it often fell to them to try to explain to the Afghans what a government did and how a democracy worked. Col. David Paschal, an infantry officer who served for six months in Ghazni province in eastern Afghanistan, said his unit handed out posters of Karzai to villagers who had never seen an image of their president
before.

  A veteran of the Balkan Wars in the 1990s, Paschal said when the U.S. military and its NATO allies established democracy in Bosnia and Kosovo, they started with elections for district chiefs and worked their way up to regional and national voting. “We did it the exact opposite in Afghanistan, though. We had them voting for the president first—and most of these people didn’t even know what it meant to vote. Yeah, they had the purple ink on their fingers,” but they didn’t understand the significance of casting a ballot, he said. “I think it’s very challenging in the rural environment. I remember one time we had a unit on patrol and people asked, ‘What are the Russians doing back here?’ These people didn’t even know the Americans had been there for a couple years.”

  Maj. Thomas Clinton Jr., a Marine officer, said the Afghan soldiers he trained were no different than average Americans: They wanted access to roads, schools, water and other basic services. But he said it was hard to explain to them how the American system of government paid for such things.

  “The Afghans think Americans have money coming out of their butts,” Clinton said. “I talked about taxation and all this stuff… They asked what taxes were. I started explaining that it was much like your warlords who used to tax people. ‘Oh no, that’s just stealing.’ Then I had to explain the whole tax thing. The officers were enthralled because they didn’t have any concept of taxes.”

  “There’s no real concept of a central government that has all this overarching power from Asadabad to Herat in the west down to Kalat and Kandahar in the south and Spin Boldak, and Mazar-e-Sharif to the north,” he added. “So that’s an education.”

  Lt. Col. Todd Guggisberg, an Army officer who was detailed to NATO headquarters in Kabul, said he was dubious that the Afghans would ever embrace a modern, centralized government. “They have a very long history of being loyal to their family and their tribe, so the guy sitting out in Chaghcharan couldn’t really care less who President Hamid Karzai is and the fact that he’s in charge of Kabul,” he said. “It reminds me of a Monty Python movie where the king goes riding by some peasant in the dirt and the king rides up and says, ‘I’m the king,’ and the peasant turns around and says, ‘What’s a king?’ ”