The Afghanistan Papers

by Craig Whitlock

  “The Taliban’s claims that they were going after the vice president were absurd,” Army Col. Tom Collins, a spokesman for U.S. and NATO forces, told reporters.

  But the U.S. military officials were the ones hiding the truth.

  In an Army oral-history interview, then-Capt. Shawn Dalrymple, a company commander with the 82nd Airborne Division who was responsible for security at Bagram, said word had leaked out about Cheney’s presence. The suicide bomber, he added, saw a convoy of vehicles coming out of the front gate and blew himself up because he mistakenly thought Cheney was a passenger.

  The bomber wasn’t far off the mark. The vice president was supposed to depart for Kabul in a different convoy about thirty minutes later, according to Dalrymple, who had worked with the Secret Service to plan Cheney’s movements.

  “The insurgents knew this, it was all over the news no matter how much it was tried to keep secret,” Dalrymple said. “They caught a convoy going out the gate with an up-armored sport-utility vehicle and thought it was him… That opened up a lot of eyes into the fact that Bagram was not a safe place. There was a direct link with the insurgencies.”

  Their public statements notwithstanding, U.S. military officials had been so worried the Taliban might target Cheney on the drive to Kabul that they originally set up a ruse. Their plan was to depart Bagram from a rarely used gate. Members of Cheney’s traveling party would ride as decoys in the SUVs normally reserved for senior officials. Cheney would ride with Dalrymple in a lumbering military vehicle equipped with a machine gun. “You’d never expect him to ride in the gun truck,” Dalrymple said.I

  That plan was scrapped after the suicide attack. Military officials decided it was too dangerous for Cheney to travel by road. He waited for the weather to clear and instead flew to Kabul to meet with Karzai. Cheney finally left Afghanistan that afternoon on a C-17 military aircraft without further incident.

  But the episode marked an escalation in the war on two fronts. By targeting the vice president at the heavily fortified base at Bagram, the Taliban demonstrated an ability to inflict high-profile, mass-casualty attacks far from the insurgents’ strongholds in southern and eastern Afghanistan.

  And by lying about how close the insurgents had come to harming Cheney, the U.S. military sank deeper into a pattern of deceiving the public about many facets of the war, from discrete events to the big picture. What began as selective, self-serving disclosures hardened into willful distortions and, eventually, flat-out fabrications.

  For the United States and its NATO and Afghan allies, the previous year had been awful by any measure. During 2006, the number of suicide attacks increased almost fivefold and the number of roadside bombs doubled compared to 2005. The Taliban’s cross-border sanctuaries in Pakistan were fueling the problem, and Washington could do little about it. Before his arrival at Bagram, Cheney met with Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, to urge him to crack down. The Pakistani strongman offered no help, saying his government had already “done the maximum.”

  At the same time, the United States was faring even worse with its much-larger war in Iraq, where 150,000 U.S. troops were bogged down—about six times as many as the number deployed in Afghanistan. In January 2007, Bush announced he would send a surge force of 21,500 additional troops to Iraq and asked Congress to approve $94 billion in emergency war spending. Given the calamity in Iraq, the Bush administration badly wanted to avoid the perception it was losing in Afghanistan as well.

  Consequently, as the new year got underway, American commanders in Afghanistan expressed new levels of optimism in public that were so unwarranted and baseless that their statements amounted to a disinformation campaign.

  “We are prevailing,” Army Maj. Gen. Robert Durbin, the commander in charge of training the Afghan security forces, told reporters on January 9, 2007. He added that the Afghan army and police “continue to show great progress each day.”

  Army Maj. Gen. Benjamin Freakley, commander of the 10th Mountain Division, gave an even sunnier assessment a few weeks later. “We’re winning,” he said during a January 27 news conference. Despite the surge in bombings the year before, he declared that U.S. and Afghan forces had made “great progress” and “defeated the Taliban and the terrorists that oppose this nation at every turn.” As for the insurgents, Freakley said the rebels “achieved none of their objectives” and were “quickly running out of time.” He dismissed the increase in suicide attacks as a sign of the Taliban’s “desperation.”

  Three days later, Karl Eikenberry, now a three-star general on his second tour of duty in Afghanistan, visited Berlin to shore up European public support for NATO forces. As the U.S. war commander, he said the allies were “postured well for success” in 2007 and suggested the Taliban was panicking. “Our assessment is that they actually look at time working against them,” Eikenberry added.

  The generals’ chorus of happy talk defied a yearlong stream of intelligence assessments that the insurgency had gained strength. The refrain about the Taliban’s desperation wholly contradicted classified reports that the guerrillas believed momentum and time were firmly on their side.

  In February 2006, Ronald Neumann, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, told officials in Washington in a classified diplomatic cable that a confident Taliban leader had warned, “You have all the clocks but we have all the time.”

  The flood of suicide attacks and roadside bombs—insurgent tactics imported from Iraq—stoked fear among U.S. officials in Afghanistan of a potential “Tet Offensive in Kandahar,” an unnamed Bush administration official said in a Lessons Learned interview, referring to the bloody 1968 military campaign by North Vietnamese forces that undermined public support for the Vietnam War. “The turning point came at the end of 2005, beginning of 2006 when we finally woke up to the fact that there was an insurgency that could actually make us fail,” the official said. “Everything was turning the wrong way at the end of 2005.”

  Neumann arrived in Kabul as the top U.S. diplomat in July 2005. The son of a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, he had spent a pleasant summer there as a young newlywed in 1967, traveling cross-country, camping and riding horses and yaks during a time of peace. When he returned thirty-eight years later, Afghanistan had been continuously at war for a quarter century. Right away, he told his superiors in Washington it was obvious the violence was about to escalate further.

  “By the fall of 2005, I had reported, in combination with General Eikenberry, that we were going to face a vastly increased insurgency in the next year, in 2006, and that it was going to get much bloodier, much worse,” Neumann said in a diplomatic oral-history interview. Despite his dire forecast, Washington balked at sending more troops and extra resources. Neumann said he requested $600 million in additional economic aid for the Afghan government, but the Bush administration approved only $43 million.

  “Nobody ever said to me, ‘You can’t have the money because we need it for Iraq,’ ” Neumann said. “But in fact, that’s what happened.”

  At first, many officials in Washington found it hard to believe the Taliban could present a serious danger. Even some military leaders in the field underestimated the Taliban and thought that, while it might control pockets of rural territory, it posed no threat to the government in Kabul. “We thought the Taliban’s capability was greatly reduced,” Brig. Gen. Bernard Champoux, deputy commander of a U.S. military task force from 2004 to 2005, said in an Army oral-history interview.

  Paul Toolan, a Special Forces captain who served in Helmand province in 2005, said many U.S. officials mistakenly viewed the war as a peacekeeping and reconstruction mission. He tried to explain to anyone who would listen that the fighting had intensified and the Taliban had bolstered its firepower. “If we don’t do this right, we’re going to allow these guys to keep us languishing here for a lot of years,” he cautioned.

  But the Bush administration suppressed the internal warnings and put a shine on the war in public. In a December 2005 interview wit
h CNN talk show host Larry King, Rumsfeld said things were going so well that the Pentagon would soon bring home 2,000 to 3,000 U.S. troops, or roughly 10 percent of its forces in Afghanistan.

  “It’s a direct result of the progress that’s being made in the country,” Rumsfeld declared.

  Two months later, however, Rumsfeld’s office and other officials in Washington received another classified warning from their ambassador in Kabul. In a gloomy February 21, 2006, cable, Neumann predicted that “violence will rise through the next several months,” with more suicide bombings in Kabul and other major cities. He blamed the Taliban’s sanctuaries in Pakistan and warned that, if left unaddressed, they could “lead to the re-emergence of the same strategic threat to the United States that prompted our… intervention over 4 years ago”—in other words, another 9/11.

  In the dispatch, Neumann expressed fear that popular support would wane if expectations weren’t managed. “I thought it was important to try to prepare the American public for that so that they wouldn’t be surprised and see everything as a reverse,” he said in his diplomatic oral-history interview.

  But the public heard no such straight talk from the Bush administration. In a presidential visit to Afghanistan shortly after the ambassador sent his cable, Bush did not mention rising violence levels or the resurgent Taliban. Instead, he touted improvements such as the establishment of democracy and a free press, schools for girls and a growing entrepreneurial class.

  “We’re impressed by the progress your country is making,” Bush told Karzai at a March 1 news conference.

  Two weeks later, in a briefing with the Pentagon press corps via teleconference from Bagram Air Base, Major General Freakley denied that the Taliban and al-Qaeda were getting stronger. The reasons for the spikes in violence, the general said, were because the weather was getting warmer and his forces were going on the offensive.

  “We’re taking the fight to the enemy,” the 10th Mountain Division commander said. “If you see an increase in violence here in the coming weeks and months, it’s probably driven by offensive operations that the Afghan National Army, Afghan National Police and coalition forces are taking.” He added, “I’ll tell you that progress in Afghanistan is steady and you can really see it.”

  In another Pentagon press briefing in May, Major General Durbin presented a rosy report on the state of the Afghan security forces. He said they had been “effective at disrupting and destroying” their enemies and that the Afghan army had made “remarkable” progress in recruiting.

  The two-star general closed on a high note by praising the Afghan security forces and inviting journalists to visit the country and judge for themselves. “I think if you do, you’ll be as impressed as I am with their progress,” Durbin said.

  Later that May, someone did come see for himself. Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey was a hero of the first Persian Gulf war and served as the national drug czar in the Clinton administration. It had been a decade since he had been on active duty, but the U.S. military asked him to visit Afghanistan and Pakistan and conduct an independent assessment. The mission was not publicized.

  McCaffrey interviewed about fifty high-ranking officials over the course of a week. In his nine-page report, he lauded U.S. commanders and highlighted several successes, but he didn’t sugarcoat his verdict: the Taliban was nowhere near defeated and the war was “deteriorating.” He judged the Taliban as well-trained, “very aggressive and smart in their tactics,” as well as armed with “excellent weapons.” Far from panicking or feeling the pressure of time, the insurgents would “soon adopt a strategy of ‘waiting us out,’ ” he added.

  In contrast, McCaffrey said the Afghan army was “miserably under-resourced” and that its soldiers had little ammunition and shoddier weapons than the Taliban. He blasted the Afghan police as worthless. “They are in a disastrous condition: badly equipped, corrupt, incompetent, poorly led and trained, riddled by drug use.” Even under a best-case scenario, McCaffrey predicted, it would take another fourteen years—until 2020—before the Afghan security forces could operate without U.S. help.

  The report was passed up the chain of command to Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We will encounter some very unpleasant surprises in the coming twenty-four months,” McCaffrey warned. “The Afghan national leadership are collectively terrified that we will tip-toe out of Afghanistan in the coming years—leaving NATO holding the bag—and the whole thing will again collapse into mayhem.”

  If McCaffrey’s conclusions weren’t sobering enough, Rumsfeld soon received another harsh dose of reality. On August 17, 2006, Marin Strmecki, the defense secretary’s trusted civilian adviser, delivered a forty-page classified report titled, “Afghanistan at a Crossroads.” Strmecki made a separate fact-finding trip to the war zone after McCaffrey and arrived at many of the same conclusions. But he cast further doubt on the reliability and viability of Washington’s allies in Kabul.

  The Afghan government, he said, was crooked and feckless and had left a power vacuum in many parts of the country for the Taliban to exploit. “It is not that the enemy is so strong but that the Afghan government is so weak,” Strmecki added, repeating a comment he heard often during his visit.

  Meanwhile, the U.S. embassy in Kabul grappled with a fresh wave of internal pessimism. Neumann, the ambassador, sent another dour classified cable to Washington on August 29, which began with this declaration: “We are not winning in Afghanistan.”

  Two weeks after the ambassador’s warning, Eikenberry sat down for an interview with ABC News on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and offered the flip version for public consumption. “We are winning,” the general said, adding, “but I also say we have not yet won.” Asked if the United States could lose, Eikenberry responded: “Losing is not an option in Afghanistan.”

  That fall, Rumsfeld’s speechwriters revved up the spin campaign with a new set of talking points titled, “Afghanistan: Five Years Later.” Brimming with optimism, it highlighted more than fifty promising facts and figures, from the number of Afghan women trained in “improved poultry management” (more than 19,000) to “the average speed on most roads” (up 300 percent).

  “Five years on, there is a multitude of good news,” the talking points asserted. “While it has become fashionable in some circles to call Afghanistan a forgotten war, or to say the United States has lost its focus, the facts belie the myths.”

  Rumsfeld thought it was brilliant. “This paper,” he wrote in an October 16 snowflake, “is an excellent piece. How do we use it? Should it be an article? An Op-ed piece? A handout? A press briefing? All of the above? I think it ought to get to a lot of people.” He shared a copy with the White House, while his staffers sent a version to reporters and posted it on the Pentagon’s website.

  If leaders at the Pentagon or the generals in Kabul and at Bagram had listened to their soldiers in the field, they would have heard a very different message. Staff Sgt. John Bickford, a 26-year-old soldier from Lake Placid, New York, spent much of 2006 in Paktika province in eastern Afghanistan. He was stationed with other 10th Mountain Division soldiers at Firebase Tillman, named after Pat Tillman, the NFL football player who enlisted in the Army after 9/11 and was killed by friendly fire two years later. Located about forty miles north of Shkin, on a little finger of rugged Afghan territory that poked into Pakistan, the isolated firebase sat a mile from the border between two enemy infiltration routes from North Waziristan.

  Bickford said the fighting was “about ten times worse” than his first deployment to eastern Afghanistan three years earlier. His unit clashed with insurgents four or five times a week during summer 2006. The enemy massed as many as 200 fighters to try to overrun U.S. observation posts.

  “We said that we defeated the Taliban, but they were always in Pakistan and regrouping and planning and now they’re back stronger than they have ever been,” he said in an Army oral-history interview. “Anytime that they did an assault or an ambush it was well-organized,
and they knew what they were doing.”

  In August 2006, Bickford was leading a patrol in an armored Humvee when insurgents ambushed his convoy with rocket-propelled grenades. One RPG blew some of the armor off Bickford’s vehicle. Another hit the same spot and penetrated the interior of the Humvee. Shrapnel tore up Bickford’s right thigh, calf, ankle and foot. His team fended off the assault, but his days as an infantryman were over.

  Bickford spent three months in a wheelchair and on crutches while he recovered at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. While convalescing, he reflected on what the United States faced in Afghanistan. “These are very smart people, and they’re the enemy but they deserve tons of respect and they should never, never, never be underestimated,” he said.

  Five years into the war, however, the U.S. military still lacked an understanding of its enemies and what motivated them to fight.

  Paul Toolan, the Special Forces captain who served in Helmand province, said U.S. troops often puzzled over who was shooting at them and why. In one area, it might be narcotics traffickers protecting their turf. In another, it might be “hardcore ideologues who were really anti-government and that was their only focus.” In yet another locale, it might be a hostile militia taking orders from a corrupt local official. “That’s a big question in Afghanistan: Who are you fighting and are you fighting the right guys?” he said.

  Some attacks were rooted in grievances that had simmered for generations or centuries. Maj. Darryl Schroeder, a psy-ops officer from Redding, California, served as an adviser to the Afghan police in 2006. He said his forces could drive through parts of Kandahar without taking any fire. But when British troops followed closely behind on the same route they would get attacked.