“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan—we didn’t know what we were doing,” Lute recalled in a Lessons Learned interview. “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.” Lute insisted he wasn’t being hyperbolic. “It’s really much worse than you think. There is a fundamental gap of understanding on the front end, overstated objectives, an overreliance on the military, and a lack of understanding of the resources necessary.”
As 2007 came to a close, news from the front grew bleaker. U.S. military deaths reached a new annual high. Civilian casualties from suicide bombings increased by 50 percent. Opium production set a record, with Afghanistan generating about 90 percent of the world’s supply.
Yet with lawmakers, the White House, journalists and other Americans fixated on Iraq, the war in Afghanistan drifted along with little scrutiny. When Afghanistan did come up in public, military commanders downplayed the Taliban’s resurgence to an almost laughable extent.
In a December 2007 television appearance on PBS, General McNeill dusted off the old military talking point that violence was getting worse not because the Taliban was growing stronger, but because U.S. and NATO forces were aggressively pursuing the enemy. “We just felt we wouldn’t wait on them and we’d go out after them,” he said.
The PBS interviewer, Gwen Ifill, was skeptical. “But the Taliban, we thought at one point, we were told at one point, was vanquished, had been wiped out,” she said. “Is it alive and well now?”
“Well, that statement didn’t come from me,” McNeill replied. “They had scattered to some areas where we could not get to them, and now we are getting into those areas.”
* * *
Though the war in Iraq had depleted the available supply of U.S. forces, in January 2008 the Pentagon scrounged up a little more Schlitz. It announced 3,000 additional troops would go to Afghanistan, for a total U.S. force of 28,000.
In a February news conference, McNeill put a spin on the grim conditions from the front. He told Pentagon reporters that the decision to send more troops showed the United States and NATO were winning, not losing.
“There’s a basic military adage that says reinforce where you’re having some success,” he said. “We are looking to have more success in 2008.” He insisted the insurgency had stalled, though military intelligence assessments uniformly reported that it was metastasizing.
The commander in chief reinforced the message in a political speech two days later. Speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Bush again scoffed at critics who said Afghanistan had devolved into a quagmire. “We stood our ground—and we have seen the results,” he said. “The Taliban, al-Qaeda and their allies are on the run.”
In private, however, Bush was concerned. Though he had less than a year remaining in his second term, he decided it was time to review the war strategy yet again. Lute, his war czar, and a team of aides traveled to Afghanistan in May 2008 to conduct an assessment for the White House. Meanwhile, the State Department and the Joint Staff at the Pentagon carried out their own strategy reviews.
None of the agencies thought the U.S. military was on the verge of defeat. The Taliban, while on the rebound, was still too weak to seize a major city or march on Kabul. But to Lute, it was apparent conditions did not favor the United States and were spiraling downward. The scale of attacks by insurgents, their geographic dispersion and overall levels of violence had risen for three straight years.
In a report compiled after his trip, Lute attributed many failings to the spaghetti-like chains-of-command that had taken root among the allies. One PowerPoint slide illustrated what he called “the 10-war problem.” Lute’s team had visited Kandahar—a Taliban hub—and found a host of different coalition forces working at cross-purposes: U.S. and NATO conventional troops, the CIA, Special Operations forces, the Afghan army, the Afghan police, combat advisers and trainers, and an assortment of others.
“The tally was ten, and the problem was that nobody was talking to all the others,” Lute said in a University of Virginia oral-history interview. “The left hand was not talking to the right hand.”
As an example, he said commandos from the Navy SEALs or the Army’s Delta Force “would come in, raid a compound overnight, and the conventional Army would not know [if] it was coming or going. The sun would come up and there would be a burning compound. And a conventional infantry unit would have to go and figure out what happened, make amends with the locals, and it just went on and on.”
More broadly, the war-strategy reviews in 2008 arrived at many of the same conclusions reached during previous reviews in 2003, 2006 and 2007. All found the conflict had been neglected because of Iraq and recommended that the U.S. government dedicate more time, money and other resources to Afghanistan.
While the strategy reviews were underway, the generals continued to deliver soothing reports in public. As his sixteen-month tour as war commander came to an end in June 2008, McNeill sounded upbeat notes about everything that the United States and NATO had accomplished on his watch. He cited “many signs of visible progress”—new roads, improved health care, better and bigger schools.
“I’m simply trying to make a statement that there has been progress there. There’s certainly progress in the security sector. There is progress in reconstruction,” he said in a farewell news conference at the Pentagon. “So, again, I see that the prospects are good and that progress there will continue.”
Yet as the months passed, the war strategy remained undefined. The contradictions between the generals’ happy talk and the discouraging reality on the ground became harder to ignore.
By summer 2008, U.S. commanders in the field decided the 3,000 extra troops that had arrived earlier in the year were insufficient. They asked the Pentagon for even more reinforcements. With a presidential election coming up, the Bush administration decided to leave the request for the next occupant of the White House.
Still, no general wanted to admit he couldn’t defeat the Taliban.
In September, Army Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, the commander of U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan, held a press conference to underscore the “steady progress” his troops were making. Choosing his words with care, he said he needed more soldiers “if we’re going to continue to make good progress in a timely way.”
Asked point-blank by a reporter if he was winning the war, Schloesser hesitated. “Look, you know, the truth is—is that I—I feel like, you know we’re making some steady progress,” he said. “It’s a slow win, I guess.”
Later that month, Gates, the defense secretary, visited Kabul to meet with Army Gen. David McKiernan, the new 57-year-old commander of U.S. and NATO forces. A Georgia native, McKiernan had served as the commander of U.S. ground forces during the invasion of Iraq five years earlier. Now he, too, was pressing for more troops in Afghanistan.
At a press conference, McKiernan said the Taliban was incapable of winning the war. But with unusual candor, he said the United States was not assured of victory, either. “We are not losing, but we are winning slower in some places than others,” he said.
Within weeks, his public remarks turned even more pessimistic. “In large parts of Afghanistan, we don’t see progress,” he told reporters during a visit to Washington in October. “I won’t say that things are all on the right track… We are in a tough fight. So the idea that it might get worse before it gets better is certainly a possibility.”
McKiernan’s shift in tone spoke volumes. For the first time an Afghanistan war commander had given the public a frank and honest account of how the tide of battle had shifted.
He would not last in the job for long.
CHAPTER TEN The Warlords
In December 2006, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch publicly urged Afghanistan to confront its tumultuous past by creating a special court to investigate warlords suspected of committing atrocities during the country’s civil war in the 1990s. The New York–based organizat
ion named and shamed a list of ten alleged war criminals who were still at large.
The plea for justice and accountability highlighted a wound that Washington had long tried to ignore. Several warlords on the list held senior posts in the Afghan government and enjoyed close relations with the U.S. government. Their brutal records were common knowledge in Afghanistan, but the list embarrassed the Bush administration and served as a reminder that it had teamed with an ugly cast of characters to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
Rather than distance themselves from the warlords because of the bad publicity, however, U.S. officials reached out to console them. Two days before Christmas, Richard Norland, the number-two diplomat at the U.S. embassy in Kabul, paid a private visit to one of the most notorious figures on the list, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, to reassure him that the United States still valued his friendship.
A merciless strongman with a passion for whiskey, Dostum commanded an Uzbek militia that shelled and looted Kabul in the early 1990s, leaving the capital in ruins. In 2001, his fighters killed hundreds of Taliban prisoners by suffocating them in shipping containers. Dostum stood personally accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting political rivals. But he also did the bidding of the CIA and the Pentagon, so U.S. officials wanted to preserve the alliance.
When Norland and other U.S. diplomats arrived at Dostum’s marbled new mansion in the capital’s Sherpur district—a nouveau riche neighborhood popular with war profiteers—they found the warlord in a melancholy mood. Stung by the Human Rights Watch criticism, the 52-year-old Dostum complained his opponents were also spreading gossip that he was plotting a coup against the central government and secretly scheming with the Taliban.
“I’ve been called so many names, there are no names left,” Dostum said, according to a classified diplomatic cable that Norland wrote summarizing the visit. “My sin was to fight for my country.”
Norland, a career Foreign Service officer, settled into an overstuffed chair and did his best to calm Dostum’s “quasi-paranoia,” telling the warlord “it would be a good idea for him to have a positive role in shaping current events.” In the cable, however, Norland told officials in Washington that Dostum remained as odious as ever, recounting rumors that he had recently raped a young house servant and ordered his guards to beat and rape a member of the Afghan parliament. “Stories about his drunkenness are constant fare,” the diplomat added.
While Dostum denied the allegations, the episode represented yet another awkward turn in the lengthy, toxic and codependent relationship between Afghanistan’s warlords and the U.S. government.
The partnership dated to the 1980s, when the CIA covertly delivered weapons and supplies to commanders of the mujahedin—the Islamist guerrillas fighting the Red Army and the communist Afghan regime. The CIA–mujahedin alliance pressured the Soviets into withdrawing in 1989. Afterward, in 1992, the Afghan state collapsed and the country plunged into civil war.
Mujahedin leaders turned on one another and the armed factions further tore the country apart in a free for all. Commanders of the various groups—which were usually based on tribe and ethnicity—became known as warlords and ruled as regional dictators. Though the CIA curtailed its contacts with the warlords during the 1990s, the U.S. government re-embraced many of them after 9/11 to fight the Taliban.
After driving the Taliban from power, the Bush administration wanted the warlords to support the new Afghan government, so it swallowed concerns about their human-rights records. But Washington’s tolerance of their behavior alienated and angered many Afghans who saw the warlords as corrupt, incorrigible and the root of the country’s problems.
The Taliban were just as cruel and oppressive. The group massacred thousands, treated women as chattel and beheaded people in public spectacles during their rule from 1996 to 2001. But compared to the warlords, a substantial number of Afghans viewed the Taliban as the lesser of two evils and credited them for their religious devotion and consistent, if harsh, administration of justice based on Islamic law.
Sarah Chayes, a journalist who lived in Kandahar during the 2000s and later served as a civilian adviser to the U.S. military, said the United States was so “obsessed with chasing” the Taliban after 9/11 that it failed to grasp the downside of partnering with thugs like Dostum. “On the basis of the enemy of my enemy is my friend, we relied on the warlords” and helped them grab power, she said in a Lessons Learned interview. “We didn’t know the population was thrilled with the Taliban kicking the warlords out.”
Within the Bush administration, opinions about the warlords diverged greatly. Many diplomats—though not all—held their noses when they had to engage with them. The CIA, which placed a lower priority on personal morality and human rights, treated warlords as vital partners and cemented their loyalty with gifts of cash. Some U.S. military commanders admired the most egregious warlords for their ability to impose order in their home regions. Others argued that they deserved imprisonment or death.
Andre Hollis, who served as the Pentagon’s senior official for drug policy under Bush, said the U.S. government took a “schizophrenic” approach with the warlords from the start and never straightened it out. “It was inconsistent across agencies and within agencies,” he said in a Lessons Learned interview.
Dostum filled a special niche in the warlords’ pantheon. A burly former wrestler with fierce eyebrows and a thick mustache, he fought alongside the Soviets and Afghan communists against the mujahedin during the 1980s. After the Russians left, he retained command of tens of thousands of Uzbek fighters, buttressed by tanks and a small fleet of aircraft. He expanded his power base in the northern cities of Sheberghan and Mazar-e-Sharif, nurturing a cult of personality by splashing his image on billboards.
During the civil war in the 1990s, he allied himself with—and double-crossed—just about every other faction at one time or another. Twice, he fled the country to avoid capture by the Taliban. In May 2001, he returned to join the coalition of warlords known as the Northern Alliance in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the Taliban from seizing the few parts of Afghanistan it did not already control.
Dostum’s timing proved lucky. A few months later, small teams of CIA paramilitary operatives and Special Forces soldiers arrived in northern Afghanistan seeking vengeance for the 9/11 hijackings in the United States. They embedded with Dostum’s besieged forces as combat advisers and—backed by overwhelming U.S. airpower—orchestrated an offensive that forced the Taliban to abandon Mazar-e-Sharif and Kunduz, another key city in the north.
Thousands of Taliban fighters surrendered to Dostum’s militia in late November 2001, but that triggered another set of problems. Several hundred Taliban, whom Dostum had imprisoned in a decrepit fort near Mazar-e-Sharif, staged a bloody revolt that lasted several days. Dozens of Dostum’s men and a CIA officer—Johnny Micheal Spann—were killed in the uprising, along with at least 200 Taliban.
As the revolt unfolded, Dostum’s commanders packed about 2,000 other Taliban captives who had been apprehended near Kunduz into tightly sealed shipping containers. A convoy drove them 200 miles to another prison in Sheberghan. By the time the containers arrived, most of the prisoners had suffocated or been shot by Dostum’s forces. Their deaths remained a secret until early 2002, when journalists and human-rights groups discovered evidence that the prisoners had been buried in mass graves in the desert near Sheberghan. Advocacy organizations urged the Afghan and U.S. governments to conduct war-crimes investigations. The U.S. government opened an inquiry after Bush left office, but no one was ever held accountable.
U.S. officials said publicly that they were unaware of the convoy deaths until the news media broke the story, despite the close relationship CIA and Special Forces personnel had with Dostum and his staff. But documents show the Bush administration and Dostum went to great lengths to maintain lines of communication at the highest levels. A few weeks after the prisoner deaths, Dostum dispatched a warm holiday letter from his command post to the White House.
“Dear U.S. president, George W. Bush!” Dostum wrote in the typed note, which listed a U.S. military postal code as the return address. “Please accept my cardinal greetings on New Year’s Day! Afghan people, experiencing peace after a long period of sufferings are grateful for your efforts in this regard.”
“I wish your Excellency good health, great successes and the best of luck,” he added.
Rather than intercept the warlord’s missive, the Pentagon took special care to deliver it. On January 9, Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, faxed the letter directly to Donald Rumsfeld, who in turn dictated a snowflake ordering his staff to ensure that Dostum’s greetings reached Bush’s desk. “Dostum is one of the Northern Alliance commanders,” one of Rumsfeld’s aides scribbled on the snowflake. “He turned out to be quite a warfighter—and our forces worked very well with him.”
As Afghans tried to solidify their new government in 2002 and 2003, however, Dostum worked against them. His forces battled rival militias as they competed for supremacy in the northern provinces. He resisted international calls to demobilize his troops and surrender his heavy weaponry to the government in Kabul.
U.S. support for Dostum remained steadfast despite his disruptive ways. In April 2003, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican congressman from southern California, visited Hamid Karzai in the presidential palace and urged him to give Dostum more power in the new government. Oddly, the U.S. lawmaker also asked Karzai to stop calling Dostum and his ilk “warlords,” suggesting that he use a less pejorative term such as “ethnic leader” instead, according to a classified U.S. diplomatic cable describing the meeting.
Karzai was incredulous. He called Dostum an “outlaw” and pointed out that his fighters had gotten into a shootout just a few days earlier, killing seventeen people. He warned that if Dostum and other warlords didn’t stop killing, raping and looting, Afghans would wish for the return of the Taliban. “Karzai noted that what the people really want is to live under law, and people are starting to complain that under the Taliban at least there was law and order,” the cable concluded.
The Afghanistan Papers Page 13