by David Loyn
Fortune never favored Operation Anaconda. Poor weather prevented reconnaissance of enemy positions ahead of the operation; the first American to be killed died under misdirected fire from an AC-130, America’s most fearsome aerial weapons platform—slow-moving but bristling with weapons, including a 105 mm howitzer. In the days that followed, the U.S. troops encountered the most intense fighting in Afghanistan to date. Four Apaches engaged on the first day, but all had to return to Bagram, having taken so much incoming fire they were no longer safe for combat missions. Most of the fatalities happened while attempting a rescue operation of a Navy SEAL, who slid on oil from hydraulics spilled from a pipe that burst when hit in withering fire and fell from the open back door of an MH-47 helicopter onto the snow below.
There were some Afghan militias working with the coalition at Anaconda. In the one joint mission, a Tajik militia band broke off early to loot an abandoned village, another group went ahead of the air strikes, lighting an enormous bonfire on top of a hill to keep warm, preventing the planned use of a daisy cutter bomb. After the failure of local allies in the first battle of the caves at Tora Bora, there might have been some adjustment. But the war planners under Franks did not see the military and political reality of the opposition forces they were depending on.
THE BIG TENT
It was a formative time for the new Afghanistan. The U.S. paid for a big tent to facilitate a Loya Jirga in the summer, a grand council of elders, the first opportunity for Afghanistan to meet and discuss its own future without interference since the Soviet invasion in 1979. The area where the Loya Jirga tent was erected, in the west of the city, the part most devastated by the fighting between rival mujahideen in the years before the Taliban, now filled with the warlords who had caused the destruction, each accompanied by gangs of armed men. In contrast, the new Afghan army was able to field just one battalion (1 BANG—the First Kandak, or Battalion of the Afghan National Guard) to provide some security, wearing uniforms provided by Turkey, after intensive specific training for the event by British troops.
There was an electric atmosphere in the tent as the conference was opened by Zahir Shah, the king whose ouster in a coup in 1973 had begun the country’s decline into war. His presence gave hope of the rediscovery of an Afghanistan lost in the tides of war. He had returned from exile in Rome and would die in Afghanistan soon afterward, to be buried with full honors alongside his father, Muhammad Nadir Shah, who had saved the country from another civil war in the 1920s. The Loya Jirga was the first opportunity for Afghans who had been close to the Communists, and the rival mujahideen, as well as returning exiles to sit and discuss their future. A notable exception in this broad national representation was of course the Taliban.
The Loya Jirga set the country on a path to elections for a president and the writing of a new constitution, but Afghanistan had not turned its back on violence. Inevitably, McNeill was drawn into matters that went well beyond strict military tactics. Soon afterward, a prominent leader from eastern Afghanistan, Haji Qadir, was gunned down in Kabul. In Washington, there was a fear that he had been targeted by the Tajik warlords who had retrenched themselves and that President Karzai might also be in their sights. McNeill was sent to issue a warning to Marshal Fahim.
In the usual Afghan way, when McNeill arrived, the leader was sitting on an ornate chair at one end of a room of heavy sofas with lines of hangers-on and petitioners waiting for a word with the chief. McNeill’s message was that the U.S. was keenly interested in Karzai’s health. Fahim quickly realized what he was being told and asked McNeill if he wanted to speak alone. The room was cleared of all but Fahim, McNeill, and an interpreter, Amrullah Saleh, a man of considerable influence himself, a CIA asset in the Taliban years, who would later head the Afghan intelligence service and become vice president.
After a long pause in the grand empty room, McNeill broke the silence by saying that he represented a group of freedom-loving nations and they wanted to move forward for Afghanistan’s benefit and that Karzai was essential to the stability that was needed. Fahim moved his big square body forward and said, “I’m no threat to Karzai.” McNeill asked him if he would run against Karzai as president, and he said, “When it comes, I’ll ask around, and if I think I have support I’m going to run against him. But you also need to know that only a Pashtun can run this country, and Karzai is probably as good as we can do in the Pashtuns.”
Less than a year later, thirty ISAF military vehicles surrounded the Arg, when there were new rumors of a Fahim-led coup.65 His northern Tajik tribe was smaller than the Pashtuns, who were mainly in the south and east, but the defeat of the Pashtun Taliban gave the Tajik warlords of the north the upper hand. U.S. military understanding of the Afghan tribal balance was then in its infancy. And because there was a strong sense that the war was over, few bothered to learn. The EU ambassador, Francesc Vendrell, said, “Because there was a feeling that things were still going to become normal, it was not thought necessary for us to understand the tribal system.”66 McChrystal’s conclusion was crisp. “The West’s effort was poorly informed, organized, and executed … We were like high-school students who had wandered into a mafia-owned bar, dangerously unaware of the tensions that filled the room and the authorities who controlled it.”67
Many Afghan civilians wanted no part of either the Taliban or the returning warlords but were caught up in the war nonetheless. In July 2002 came an incident that, more than any other, would sour Afghanistan’s mood about the American intervention—a turning point from which there was no going back. Several two-thousand-pound bombs were dropped on a wedding party in Uruzgan in the southwest of the country—local estimates said forty-eight people were killed, and more than one hundred injured. Most of those killed and injured were women and children. As was customary, there was celebratory firing into the air at the wedding party, mistaken as hostile fire by U.S. warplanes not familiar with local customs. It preyed on McNeill’s mind, although he had not personally ordered the attack. This was to become a constant challenge during the near two decades of the Afghan war; because there were many troops outside their command on the ground in Afghanistan, all the commanders of the international force faced the problem of explaining civilian casualties inflicted by forces not under their control.
Karzai felt these civilian losses deeply, weeping on television. It was not the first such attack in Uruzgan, although it was the worst to date, and the president had a special affinity with the province where he had been protected on his hazardous journey to power the year before. Not for the last time, McNeill found himself having to apologize in private to the president and in public to the nation. The press conference he did with the Afghan foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah he thought “as difficult” as anything he had done in his life.
There were other incidents as well. A group of elders were bombed on their way to President Karzai’s inauguration, and many were killed, as their convoy was mistaken for the Taliban. Heavily armed militiamen were taken out of their vehicles and beaten up by German peacekeepers when they refused to stop at a checkpoint on their way to the Loya Jirga. The bomb on the wedding party was of a different order. Without a significant ground presence of specialized forces configured for stabilization, and without access to far better intelligence, such incidents were bound to happen.
THE WARLORDS DIG IN68
Cash had not stopped flowing since Schroen’s first suitcase-full two weeks after 9/11. In the early weeks of the war, I hitched a ride across the snow-covered Hindu Kush mountains in an ancient Russian helicopter over the Taliban front line toward Bamiyan in the center of the country. The Taliban had conducted a reign of terror against the Hazara minority there and committed their worst cultural crime just six months before 9/11—destroying giant Buddhas carved into the solid sandstone wall of the mountain. I dug into giant plastic-wrapped parcels loaded onto pallets in the helicopter to see what they contained. Inside were bales of new Afghan banknotes, going to pay the Hazara forces, lubr
icating the wheels of war. A group of soldiers from Britain’s Special Air Service set up at a remote airfield near Ghazni in the center of the country, armed with briefcases full of cash, offering $1 million each for Stinger antiaircraft missiles still in circulation after being given to the mujahideen in the 1980s to shoot down Russian helicopters.
But the money available for information after the Taliban fell was given out in a way that damaged the capacity of a new nation to emerge. The old warlords found that all they needed to do was to give a list of names of suspects to the CIA in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars; inevitably, many used this to settle disputes with their enemies. While there was supposed to be cross-checking against other information, intelligence-gathering was rudimentary,69 and being named an al-Qaeda sympathizer was a one-way ticket to Bagram or Guantánamo for those not immediately killed.
The warlords were weak when the Taliban fell and expected to be questioned for past crimes. They were in awe of the power of the U.S. capacity to deliver precision death from the air, and that could have been leveraged at the time they were down. It was known as the B-52 effect. Dostum sought legal advice, fearing he would be carted off to face a tribunal in The Hague. As the sky filled with warplanes, McChrystal saw that “Afghans imagined American power to be infinite.”70 This could have been leveraged far better than it was. But the opportunity was lost. Instead of using this advantage to give Afghanistan a breathing space, the way was left clear for the very people who had brought ruin to much of the country in the early 1990s. They now found themselves wealthy enough to entrench the authority they had quickly grabbed when the Taliban fell. Twenty of the first thirty-four provincial governors appointed after the Taliban were former warlords. Forty warlords took seats in the first Afghan parliament in 2005 (along with twenty-four leaders of criminal gangs and seventeen drug traffickers).71 One of the first acts of the new parliament was to pass a general amnesty for past war crimes, celebrated with a huge gathering of warlords in the soccer stadium where the Taliban once executed people at halftime during matches.
The level of democratic failure this revealed was illustrated by a poll recording 94 percent support for war crimes trials.72 The political system that emerged did not represent the nation. “Security has been put in the hands of those who most threaten it,” wrote Human Rights Watch. In the relatively sophisticated western city of Herat, the return of the warlord Ismail Khan meant life was in ways worse than under the Taliban.73
U.S. actions lacked coherence in terms of confronting the demons of 9/11, let alone in terms of the future security of Afghanistan. One of those who became rich rather than being arrested, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, was later named by the 9/11 Commission as the mentor of the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. If this war were to prevent another 9/11, he was at least as much a suspect as the many minor figures who ended up in Guantánamo. Standing for president in 2014, he did not deny that he had worked with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. “I met him, I met Osama bin laden. I met bigger than them also.”74 He was accused of ordering appalling human rights abuses in a massacre of Hazaras in the Afshar suburb of Kabul in 1993.75 An exhaustive investigation found there had been mass rape and murder as Sayyaf’s men went house to house. Witnesses described lines of heads being left along the top of walls. Some of those he trained went to Indonesia to found the country’s most ruthless Islamist group, called Abu Sayyaf in his honor.
Jihadi leaders like Sayyaf were little better than the Taliban in their appalling treatment of women and in some ways worse. Restoring their power would make the fight for equality far harder in Afghanistan. He was in favor of women remaining at home, wearing burkas if they ventured out, and being educated only to the most basic level. But he was safe, as he was in the anti-Taliban coalition.
THE LONG WAR TAKES SHAPE
By the summer of 2002, the template for the long war was set. U.S. forces based in Kabul were training Afghan soldiers, while troops from several nations patrolled the streets. Combat remained mostly a Special Forces affair, and American troops controlled Bagram and the huge ex-Soviet airfield in Kandahar in the south. Although the mission already broke Rumsfeld’s ceiling of 5,200 troops, at the time McNeill was talking up an early withdrawal. “If we continue into a transitional government that is a success, if the Afghans are taking control of their own destiny and we don’t see the enemy for me to prosecute, you then reach a point where you begin to have an argument over why we need to have this joint task force.”76 If you had asked him the same question when he left a year later, he had changed his mind and believed the U.S. would be there for many years.
One reason for the change was a sense of idealism among some in the Bush administration about the new Afghanistan. There were two contradictory impulses in the White House—hardheaded opposition to nation-building ran counter to a mood of wanting to spread democracy and leave the world a better place. Given the struggles he was having for resources and attention, out of the blue in March 2002, that first envoy Dobbins was surprised to be called by the White House to be asked if it would be appropriate for the president to cite the Marshall Plan for European reconstruction after World War II as a model for Afghanistan.
There were substantial differences in the two situations, beyond the scale of the reconstruction commitment at the start. West Germany was rebuilt with a major military stabilization force, putting American, British, and French military teams into every corner of German life, and a widespread amnesty for former Nazis except the leadership. But in the speech at the Virginia Military Institute, where General George Marshall once taught, Bush talked of clearing minefields, building roads, improving medical care, and developing a new economy, invoking Marshall, who “knew that our military victory against enemies in World War II had to be followed by a moral victory.”
The principal legal authority for the war in Afghanistan, the Authorization for Use of Military Force, swiftly passed by Congress after 9/11, was limited to action against people connected to the 9/11 attacks, “in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States.” But this gave no clarity over what would happen in Phase IV of military operations, stabilization and reconstruction.† So it was improvised with two trends pulling in opposite directions—military action against terrorists and an increasing move toward something like nation-building, although it could not be called that.
There was no pause for discussion of goals, timelines, strategy, or tactics for Afghanistan, no single decision that led to the long war, but instead a series of small changes that led to incremental increases in troop numbers, with policy makers always believing that just a few more troops would make the difference—culminating in the force close to 150,000 ten years later. The light footprint was designed to satisfy the tax-paying public who had limited patience for long-term foreign military engagement, but as it failed to stabilize the country, it set the very conditions to make that long-term engagement inevitable.
In June 2002, the first ISAF troops were going home. McColl was replaced by a Turkish lieutenant general, Hilmi Akin Zorlu, whose troops refused to move in until British military engineers had built a better barracks and cookhouse.77 McColl’s force had successfully patrolled Kabul, and apart from “some gunfire exchanged with criminal gangs,” there had been no security challenges.78 Inevitably, the pull to extend ISAF beyond Kabul became too great to ignore, requiring a larger U.S. presence to provide logistics and airlift support. From these origins, ISAF grew incrementally into a nationwide peacekeeping operation.
The bear hunters of Bagram under Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) were now supplemented with significant conventional forces from thirty-seven nations, including 1,700 British Royal Marines, a substantial part of the fighting strength in 2002. Even if nation-building was off-limits, McChrystal encouraged McNeill to travel widely to talk to Afghan leaders, since the operation up to now was “poorly prepared.”79 Coordination was becoming essential, as the last piece of the jigsaw was place
d—a provincial reconstruction team (PRT) in Gardez in the east—not far from the mountains where Operation Anaconda was fought against al-Qaeda in the spring. The idea of nationwide PRTs that could help link the population to governance followed a visit by the British colonel in McChrystal’s HQ, Nick Carter. He observed that the U.S. Special Forces team in Gardez had a good rapport with local people, partly because among them were a doctor and a vet, who were reservists. The vet was particularly popular, and this contact clearly built local trust that might deliver intelligence. Civilian contractors were unable to leave Kabul because of security restrictions, and the PRTs would give them protection. McNeill agreed to try small military teams, with development experts on-site, to provide reassurance and the beginnings of reconstruction, to connect provinces to the center. By the fall of 2002, ten teams of six were deployed across the country to assess humanitarian need.
In the south, the light footprint had been replaced by battalion-size operations, around five hundred soldiers dropped from helicopters for two- to four-day fights to support special operators chasing al-Qaeda in the frontier mountains. Colonel Campbell’s 1st Brigade, 82nd Airborne, did these operations from Kandahar for six months. “We were just going out there to find bad guys,” he said. “There wasn’t a whole bunch of reconstruction efforts going on.” They were making it up as they went along. Later units would have cultural awareness training, including the need to find groups of elders to hold shuras, meetings to secure agreement. That was not part of training for Campbell’s soldiers in 2002. “We didn’t do shuras, we had no clue what that was.”