The Long War

by David Loyn

  Sarah Chayes, who first came into Kandahar in 2001 as an NPR reporter and stayed as an aid worker, brought some elders into the air base. One had a heart attack and was treated by U.S. Army doctors, which Campbell said helped to win support. But he admitted that “we probably helped build some of the corruption in there,” in contracts for construction and transport. Geraldo Rivera from Fox News came in and signed autographs for soldiers, going out on a couple of operations ahead of a one-hour live show from inside a hangar surrounded by the machinery of war. It was the night before the air attacks on Baghdad that began the Iraq war in March 2003, and Rivera tried to make out that the two campaigns were complementary and coordinated, which Campbell knew was not true. Already Afghanistan was the other war—the backdrop to Iraq.

  The new PRTs were staffed from the very small civil-military element in OEF, cobbled together at little notice, backed up by a Georgia National Guard unit. The commander, Brigadier General David E. Kratzer, had no civil affairs experience, which he saw as an advantage, allowing him to “approach the new command with a fresh perspective.”80 After a four-day planning session, he set out for Kabul.

  Even this small operation was viewed with concern by senior commanders, still intent on the light footprint. Interviewed for the army’s official history, Kratzer recalled his pre-deployment meeting with Franks, who “told me directly, with his finger in my face, that I would not get involved in nation-building.”81 It was a disorganized and unfocused way to run an intervention in the affairs of a complex and unstable country. But with no stabilization doctrine, they were literally making it up as they went along. It would be another year before trained civil affairs officers would command this part of the operation.82 The development activities by the military were like a vehicle engaging drive with the brake on, drawn to assist as well as fight, and not doing nation-building.

  In the winter of 2001, while Kratzer set up his HQ in a Kabul villa borrowed from the British government development agency Department for International Development (DFID), in the parallel universe of development, donors were lining up major commitments. Coordination became an increasing challenge, with humanitarian agencies jostling to manage the operation, suspicious of military involvement in development. The civil-military teams “added to the crush of … nongovernment organizations (NGOs), donors, and private sector organizations” arriving in Afghanistan.83

  2

  THE FOG OF AID

  What’s the only entity in Afghanistan that does not have any money or troops?

  Answer: The government.

  —Kabul “joke” in the early years of U.S.-led intervention

  UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

  Haji Mohammad sits every day with a wheelbarrow, waiting to get casual laboring jobs in the market area in Herat. Bearded, turbaned, and toothless, he does not know his age; but he remembers clearly how he lost his farm. It was 2002, the year after the Taliban fell. “I could not make any money because the price of wheat came down, and there was a lot of wheat from outside for sale. No one bought our wheat.” He had to sell a pair of oxen, donkeys, and a cow. There were good rains after three years of drought, and Afghan farmers had a record harvest. But the price collapsed by 80 percent because the country was flooded with food aid.

  Even without the war, Afghanistan would have needed food aid in that terrible winter after the Taliban fell in 2001. Hundreds of thousands of people left their homes in the mountains in western Afghanistan and moved to a makeshift camp in the inhospitable Maslakh desert outside Herat. They were displaced by fighting, but also by hunger caused by the long drought. Those who remained behind in the mountains were reduced to cooking weeds and grass.1 The initial international response was chaotic and uncoordinated. Many people died even once they reached Maslakh, because the camp was so badly managed. Food aid came by road from the north, through mountain passes that filled with fresh snow every morning. There was no traffic marshaling, and several trucks fell off the road into the ravine below. Much of what came through this hazardous pipeline did not reach the hungry. It was stolen, and sacks emblazoned with the words Gift from the American people emerged on the market in Herat, the beginning of the flood of food that suppressed prices.

  “We were importing food,” said Andrew Natsios, the head of USAID at the time. But by the spring, the fields were full of grain—the first good harvest for years. “If we’d bought the food locally from that surplus, the prices wouldn’t have collapsed.”2 He later calculated that if he had bought local grain to give away as food aid, rather than shipping in U.S. corn, he would have needed around 250,000 tons, which would have absorbed the surplus and stabilized the Afghan market.

  The collapse of the domestic wheat price that year caused by the flood of food aid had another effect—farmers had no option but to return to planting poppies. In the last two years of their rule, the Taliban had successfully banned the growing of opium poppies. But after the U.S. intervention, this changed quickly. In the Herat countryside, after the collapse in the wheat price, Jalil Hamad, a farmer, said that when it came to plant again, the decision was easy. “We grew only as much as we needed to eat, but grew poppies on the rest of the land.”3

  America’s generosity saved lives that winter. But an unintended consequence of generous food aid was that it led directly to some poor farmers losing their land and others returning to plant opium poppies. Lacking an agreed doctrine for intervention, and amid confused political direction, the improvised response fueled corruption, while failing to construct a sovereign independent state able to pay for itself. Poorly delivered aid fed into a negative cycle that worsened security, giving an opening to the Taliban. Afghanistan desperately needed aid, but wrongly applied, it contributed as much to the growing instability as the failure to put in enough troops to stabilize the country.

  Those consequences could have been foreseen from previous interventions. But just as the military had no doctrine for foreign intervention, so development donors lacked an agreed way of moving forward. “Washington tended to treat each new operation as if it would also be the last, making little effort to capture the lessons,”4 wrote Jim Dobbins, the first emissary to Kabul after 9/11. Even after the frequent U.S. military interventions during the Clinton years in the 1990s, there was no accumulated knowledge to manage stability operations because America did not do nation-building. In Afghanistan, “new people” were sent “to face what should have been familiar problems.”5

  WITH US OR AGAINST US

  The world wanted to help in Afghanistan, amid unprecedented global sympathy and solidarity for America after 9/11. Within twenty-four hours of the attack, in a stunning show of support, NATO invoked its Article 5 for the first time in the fifty-two-year history of the alliance. This regards an attack on one member as an attack on all and commits all NATO members to assist. For many countries, 9/11 marked the biggest loss of their citizens in a terrorist attack. After Americans, the highest number of casualties were British, and Queen Elizabeth ordered “The Star-Spangled Banner” be played at Buckingham Palace for the Changing of the Guard ceremony on September 12. But President Bush mistook sympathy for consent to go to war. The formulation of the response to 9/11 as a global war on terror, with a binary choice of “with us or against us,” and the swift pivot to war on Iraq, caused political nervousness across otherwise friendly countries, particularly in Europe. Rarely can a nation have squandered goodwill so quickly. There was rising concern about U.S. intentions in Iraq as NATO members found the nature of the alliance redrawn to serve the narrow interests of the Bush administration.

  Two weeks after the unprecedented invocation of Article 5, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, on a visit to Brussels, redefined the purpose of the alliance—claiming its only relevance now was to support the U.S. counterterrorist effort. And after the Taliban fell, he said contemptuously, “We didn’t need most of NATO in Afghanistan.” NATO was “useless,” according to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “At no point has General
Tommy Franks even talked to anyone at NATO.”6 A senior NATO official, Edgar Buckley, who was instrumental in delivering the quick response to invoke Article 5, called this “a fundamental misjudgment about the nature of the Alliance that devalued the importance of strategic solidarity.”7

  President Bush’s formulation of an “Axis of Evil,” widening his target to include Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, in the State of the Union address in January 2002, raised further European concerns. Throughout 2002, while ISAF peacekeepers patrolled Kabul, the streets of European cities were filled with protestors opposed to the impending war with Iraq. The German chancellor Gerhard Schröder had to apologize after one of his ministers compared Bush to Hitler. As the political temperature on Iraq rose, with France and Germany still strongly opposed to the war against Saddam Hussein, there were contemptuous sneers in Washington about “old Europe” and nonsense about french fries being renamed “freedom fries.” It was the “gravest crisis” NATO had faced, according to Henry Kissinger. If France and Germany did not back the Iraq war, “a legacy of distrust will continue to weigh on Atlantic relations.”8 It was in this toxic atmosphere over Iraq that Afghanistan became the “good war,” in a reassertion by NATO’s European members and Canada of its relevance and the value of cooperation.

  NEW AFGHAN ARMY

  In October 2002, Major General Karl Eikenberry began the herculean labor of creating a new Afghan army. He was shocked by the unsanitary conditions both for American trainers and Afghan recruits at the huge training ground to the east of Kabul in December—the “Valley Forge of the Afghan Army.”9 The training ground was littered with the stripped-out hulks of armored vehicles, and a freezing wind blew through the broken windows of unheated buildings. It was unsurprising that desertion rates were so high. Marshal Fahim, now defence minister, made no effort to pay soldiers from central funds—he and his allies were content to operate with militias who owed allegiance to them; they had no interest in building a competing national army.10 He kept his tanks lined up north of Bagram on the Shomali Plain. In the looking glass world created by the warlords, the first post-Taliban Afghan Defence Minister did not want the state to have effective security forces, as they would threaten his mujahideen militias.

  Most of the soldiers trained by American soldiers in the first year immediately deserted, leaving the Afghan army at around two thousand. Fahim’s behavior underlined the central flaw in the light footprint plan. “At the end of the day,” General Franks wrote, “it would be the Afghans who would determine the success of our operations. If they were provided for, Phase IV (Reconstruction) would be accelerated immeasurably.”11 But warlord militias not connected to the state rode roughshod over this expectation.

  America took on responsibility for military training at an international summit in Tokyo hard on the heels of the Bonn summit at the end of 2001. Other tasks were carved up between a number of willing countries. The UK took on counter-narcotics; Germany, police; Italy, justice; and Japan, DDR—disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of militias. There was no liaison with Afghan partners about these priorities and no overall coordinator, which could result in one province “being pushed to eradicate poppy fields, disarm militias and remove its police chief all at the same time,”12 said the analyst Emma Sky. Inevitably, the U.S. military was drawn into these other areas of responsibility in a chaotic and uncoordinated manner.13

  The missing element was building Afghan institutional capacity to govern itself and provide a counterbalance to the power of the warlords. The main government buildings lie near each other in the center of Kabul, mostly surrounded by open green space and trees—a memory of a gentler age. The presidential office in the Arg sits in more than eighty acres of parkland, quadruple the size of the White House estate, and more than twice the size of Buckingham Palace. Nearby lie the rolling lawns and parade grounds around the Ministry of Defense, set on a large site going down to the Kabul River. Major General Sher Muhammad Karimi had been called by President Karzai to reestablish the MOD under Fahim. He had a hard time dealing with his American advisers. “Unfortunately in those days they didn’t listen much to us Afghans.”14

  Karimi is an outstanding officer with a remarkable military career, serving every Afghan administration, including the Taliban, since he became an officer more than fifty years ago. He graduated from the British officer academy at Sandhurst in 1968 and later passed out of Ranger school in the U.S. Apart from eighteen months in jail during the dark days before the Soviet invasion in 1979, when he was badly tortured, he worked for the Afghan army all his life. Soon after his release from jail, he went back to the MOD, now under Soviet control, and even though he had been a senior officer in that regime, the mujahideen called him to work for them in the early 1990s, as did the Taliban in their turn, such was his reputation for competence. He found the Taliban poorly educated and cruelly unpredictable, and was asked to teach their defense minister, Mullah Obaidullah, how to do the job.

  Karimi grew watchful and began to notice other staff officers disappearing. He stayed in a different house every night, and when he left, he planned his escape carefully, under the guise of visiting his family in Khost Province in the east, neighboring Pakistan. Once there, he made his way across the frontier and spent some time in exile in Peshawar, translating documents for Nancy Hatch Dupree, a remarkable American who lived in Afghanistan for nearly all her life and was now trying to recover looted Afghan artifacts—many of which her late husband, Louis, had dug up as an archaeologist.15 So the only time Karimi left the country he served for so long was briefly in the later years of Taliban rule.

  This most experienced of Afghan officers found that the new American arrivals did not ask his advice. He is a proud member of Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns, prominent across the east and south, where the Taliban first emerged. The first two U.S. officers he worked with as the MOD was repopulated after 9/11 insulted Karimi by saying, as if in a joke, in their first meeting, “If you are Pashtun, you must be Taliban.”16 He was bitter and explained that while the Taliban were Pashtun, not all Pashtuns were Taliban. “This is the first mistake you are making. The majority of this country are Pashtuns. I am proud to be Pashtun, but not a biased, prejudiced Pashtun.” To Karimi, his new allies came in with fixed views that had to come from Pakistani intelligence, the ISI. “They were seeing everything through the eyes of the ISI, not through the eyes of Afghans.”

  Worse, they had no sense of financial accountability, but were building the new army from the bottom, battalion by battalion, without institutional framework at the center. The soldiers being trained would get equipment, weapons, vehicles, fuel as they needed, with no one counting the cost. To Karimi, this was the wrong way around. He wanted to build a headquarters and then an army. But when he objected, he was told by his new American allies, “We must go up from a battalion all the way to brigade, to corps. Then when we have a corps, we will have MOD general staff headquarters.” This made it easier for Fahim to manipulate the system, as without a central structure, he could ensure the new force remained weak.

  Disarmament did not start until 2003—far too late to deal with the post-Taliban return of the warlord militias. It lacked teeth, according to the first EU envoy to Kabul after the Taliban, Francesc Vendrell. To work, it would have needed a “weaponized military force telling people ‘disarm or else.’”17 There was no attempt to verify disarmament with biometric data, although this was available. The UN agencies had a database of more than a million Afghans they collected to verify returning refugees. But the warlords obstructed its use in the disarmament process. Before the Taliban fell, when Vendrell asked Fahim’s predecessor as Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud how many troops he had available, he answered twenty thousand. But Massoud’s successor Fahim claimed sixty thousand when it came to receiving incentives for disarmament.18

  Everything was the wrong way around: too much food aid damaged the rural economy; too few troops meant many more had to come
later; building the army from platoon upward left it without a central structure; no disarmament at the start left a virtual monopoly of violence in the hands of one faction. And finally, Bush’s vague desire to “help a democratic government emerge”19 meant there was a move toward a constitution and elections without any of the institutional architecture that made them work. This was in reverse sequence to what should happen. The priority should have been for institutions not individuals, disarmament not democracy—building a system that would have made it easier for democracy to emerge, rather than ensuring it would be founded on corruption. When Afghan elections happened, those in government were accountable not to their taxpayers but international funding. This was representation without taxation—the opposite of the Jeffersonian ideal.

  NEW BLOOD

  Afghanistan did not lack attention at the top level. More world leaders came to visit in the months after the Taliban fell than in any period of Afghanistan’s history. The UN official who had “handed over” Kabul to Fahim, Wais Barmak, thought it an emotional response. People knew about the Taliban, or thought they knew, and wanted to visit. When the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, came to town, Barmak was asked to make a speech as the senior Afghan on staff and was encouraged to speak as an Afghan, not an international official. He appealed for support to “build government institutions to be able to serve the people of this country who have suffered for decades,” instead of funding the UN and international NGOs. “We are so happy that Afghanistan has been freed, and there is no Taliban rule in this country. We are moving for the first time in our history towards having democracy and democratic rights here in this country.”