The Long War

by David Loyn

  GOOD AND BAD TALIBAN

  To try to win some breathing space, McKiernan revived links across the frontier with Pakistan, going to their army headquarters in Rawalpindi after the attack. McNeill had not been there since the fall of 2007 and had not met the new head of the Pakistan Army, General Ashfaq Kayani, who had been long in the shadows as the head of the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI. He succeeded General Pervez Musharraf as head of the army, regularizing command.

  Musharraf had held on to the role after seizing power in a military coup in 1999. It is an analyst’s cliché that Pakistan is not a country with an army but an army with a country, so Kayani’s role was critical.

  Given Pakistan’s role as safe haven for the Taliban, it is remarkable that it hardly featured in McKiernan’s pre-deployment briefing, “I wasn’t given any regional guidance.” The lack of coordination is even more surprising given the number of other U.S. agencies involved in dealing with Pakistan. McKiernan wanted to reset military-to-military relations. “There’s no war that’s contained within the borders of one country. In the case of the dilemma in Afghanistan, it will not be solved, nor will there be lasting effects, without Pakistan being in the equation.”

  McKiernan’s cross-border initiative came less than a year after a significant turning point when the Pakistani army mounted a full-scale military assault on the so-called Red Mosque in the heart of the capital, Islamabad. The emergence of the Red Mosque insurgents—Islamists now fighting against Pakistan—was a classic case of blowback, the violent unintended consequences of a state acquiescing in the dirty business of terrorism against its neighbors. Pakistan had armed and financed guerrillas fighting in India and Afghanistan for so many decades that some now turned inward. The mosque was being used to store weapons and train militants for attacks on the Pakistani state.

  The shock of the battle at the Red Mosque led to the beginning of a realization of the dangers of harboring the vicious bacteria of Islamist militancy. In the summer of 2008, an increase in violence against music shops, singers, and dancers in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar caused unease across the country, making it easier for McKiernan to suggest that the Pakistani military should take a more robust approach to Taliban crossing the frontier into Afghanistan.33 As a reminder of the alternative, there was a sustained U.S. artillery campaign across the frontier against militant strongholds in Waziristan.34

  McKiernan established close relations with Kayani, watching “a growing recognition on the part of the Pakistani leadership that they had an existential insurgent threat within their borders.” The two met about every six weeks, usually in Kayani’s headquarters in Rawalpindi, once going to a retreat in the hills. “Did we see the problems in Afghanistan differently? Yes. But as two military professionals, we had a pretty good relationship.” The Pakistani commander was a chain-smoker and mumbled indistinctly; McKiernan found he “really had to focus to get through the smoke and the mumbling.” Kayani became emotional when McKiernan told him he was leaving his post, “and he was not an emotional guy.”

  The two established a unit to coordinate investigations into cross-border incidents and disrupt safe havens. McKiernan set up a joint operations post at Torkham, the main border crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan at the Khyber Pass, with a live feed of pictures from a Predator drone flying along the frontier, and shared radio frequencies and access to intelligence.35 And in November 2008 came another reminder of the threat to the region from Pakistan’s willingness to support cross-border terrorism, with the deaths of 164 people at the hands of the Lashkar-e-Taiba group in the Indian city of Mumbai, launched from Pakistan and coordinated by phone throughout by Pakistani controllers.

  Despite McKiernan’s overtures, Pakistan continued to support the Taliban and their allies in the Haqqani network who operated freely from safe havens across Pakistan. The links of Pakistan’s security establishment with the Taliban went deep and would not be easily uprooted. On May 27, 2009, more than thirty police officers were killed by a suicide bomb attack that blew out the back half of a handsome redbrick colonial-era building in Lahore, Pakistan. Sitting in the unscathed front office, behind a handsome pillared porch, and speaking the cultured old-fashioned English of the Pakistani elite, the police chief condemned the TTP, the homegrown Pakistani Taliban, who had carried out the attack. “But of course,” he said, “I still support the Afghan Taliban in their fight for their country.”36 It was the clearest display of the Janus-faced hypocrisy of Pakistan’s establishment—a division between “good” and “bad” Taliban.

  CHEMICAL BILL

  McKiernan made little progress combating Afghanistan’s drug economy—a major driver of violence and criminality. Encouraged by the American ambassador, William Wood, a chain-smoking veteran of U.S. drug wars in Central America, the military now gave logistical support, including transport planes, to the Drug Enforcement Agency. Wood, known as “Chemical Bill” because of his enthusiasm for spraying crops, did not convince McKiernan, who saw this would damage only the farmers themselves—the poorest people in the supply chain. He reached his conclusion after personally going on a raid in a DEA helicopter.

  We were probably the second aircraft in, and we sat down outside of a village, and went in where the lead guys had gone in, and found a stash of wet opium that the local farmer was going to sell to somebody who was going to sell to somebody else, and eventually it was going to be converted into heroin and money. I watched this unfolding, and they found a significant amount—probably not in the totality of drugs that were available, but a significant amount. But the intelligence network of the Afghan villagers was such that they probably knew they were coming, and all the villagers had left the village and were sitting up on the side of the hill just watching this. And I thought, this isn’t going to do it. Who we’re hurting right now, making an effect on, is the farmer, and the farmer’s not the problem. The farmer’s trying to grow a crop and scrimp together enough to live on, and there’s not enough interdiction missions we can do that will change that dynamic.

  McKiernan saw that a second-order effect of what they were doing in the dawn raids was to recruit soldiers for the Taliban. “If the farmer that we took his livelihood from that morning was neutral, he might not have been neutral after that day.” McKiernan preferred to go after labs, where the raw opium was processed into heroin. “When I say lab, I don’t mean a lab we would find in Boston; a lab might be some fifty-five gallon drums of water, some fire, and a couple of precursor chemicals that are easily obtained and heated up. Didn’t take an advanced degree to do that.” But despite pursuing better intelligence on the labs, and stepping up attacks, the effects on production were marginal.

  There was coincidentally a cut in opium poppy production in 2008 for the first time, but not caused by drug raids or eradication. Farmers in several areas had decided not to plant poppies after religious leaders were persuaded to preach against it, with stronger leadership by several provincial governors encouraged by development cash if they could prove their provinces poppy-free. The UN head, Kai Eide, also noted a more basic reason: “Drought had contributed to bad harvests, especially in the north and northwest … we could not take it for granted that the same positive trends would be seen next year.” Eradication from the air, or from chains dragged behind tractors, had limited effect. It was also hugely expensive—$36,000 a hectare, compared to $1,000 in Colombia.37

  ISAF was not responsible for much of this eradication activity, and when McKiernan arrived in Kabul, he was not even in command of many American troops in the country, in Operation Enduring Freedom under a three-star U.S. general at Bagram airport an hour’s drive north of Kabul, who reported directly to CENTCOM—not the ISAF chain of command to NATO in Europe. McNeill had put in place some mechanisms to deconflict operations, but there was still the potential for dangerous misunderstandings in overlapping campaigns without a single chain of command, especially after President Bush decided in July that U.S. forces would, in th
e future, carry out raids in Pakistan without informing the Pakistani authorities first. The decision was not announced at the time, but it was hard to keep such raids secret.38 On September 3, Navy SEALs landed several miles across the border and killed several Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. Pakistan called it a “gross violation”—claiming that sixteen civilians, including women and children, were among the dead. The operation was not under McKiernan’s command. In the resulting furor, NATO had no option but to issue a clear statement distancing ISAF troops from the incursion and saying they were “not authorized to enter or land in Pakistan.”39 It made McKiernan’s job harder. His lack of operational knowledge of the OEF counterterrorist campaign was a significant contributory factor in a decisive shift in the mood of President Karzai, who strongly moved against American intervention after the summer of 2008.

  MR. PINK AND MR. WHITE

  The turning point came in July 2008, at Deh Bala in Nangarhar in the east, when once again warplanes mistook celebratory gunfire at a wedding party for hostile action: forty-seven died, thirty-nine of them children and women, including the bride. Karzai was struck by the question of one elder when he visited the scene: “Mr. President, for how long will you be attending these funerals?”40 He returned to Kabul resolved to change the situation, and the opportunity would come in another attack a month later. A trusted senior adviser, Nematullah Shahrani, came into the Arg with a blanket containing body parts of children, which he threw onto the table in front of Karzai. The Afghan president became very emotional, crying out, “Call the general to see for himself, are these fingers of Taliban or fingers of children?” The final death toll in the killings at Azizabad, in the western province of Herat on August 21, was ninety-two, including many children. The body of the last victim to be found, a baby, was uncovered in the rubble ten days later.41 McKiernan had only the military account to work on, which held the line for some days that there were few if any civilian casualties in a successful operation to kill a local Taliban commander, Mullah Sadeq.

  McKiernan’s equable temperament worked against him on these occasions. His calm, professional manner infuriated the Afghan president, who had preferred the openly emotional McNeill, who would shed a tear with village elders when faced with evidence of civilian casualties. “McNeill was a man who had feelings, who would understand, who told the Afghan people that he was a good Christian,” Karzai said. “McKiernan was a quiet person; he would never speak.” McKiernan stayed inside his military lane and stuck to the account he had been given, since that is what he had been told by U.S. investigators. Not for him the approach of some other ISAF commanders, who wore Afghan army patches on their uniform and told the president they were “his” commander.

  The raid did not just affect U.S. relations with the president. It would cause one of the most serious rifts with the UN during the years of the Afghan war. When the first news of the attack emerged, McKiernan was in a meeting in Kandahar at the launch of a new initiative on Afghan local government. The head of the UN mission, Kai Eide, was at an adjoining table, and the two sat huddled separately with their staffs trying to understand what had happened in Azizabad. When Eide sent a senior official out of the room with a press release expressing deep concern about the reports of civilian casualties, she was obstructed by an ISAF officer who insisted it had been a successful attack against a Taliban leader.42

  The version put forward by the U.S. military, that there were only a handful of civilian casualties, was corroborated by, of all people, Oliver North, the former marine officer once notorious for his part in the dirty war that siphoned arms from Iran to right-wing Nicaraguan guerillas in the 1980s. He was in Afghanistan for his program on Fox News, War Stories with Oliver North. Embedded with special operators who raided the village, he reported it as a successful operation to kill a Taliban commander and twenty-five fighters, and seize an arms cache. He emphasized that U.S. troops rescued a wounded woman and child. He put the reports of civilian casualties down to a “very effective propaganda campaign” by the Taliban and their supporters.43

  There was a dispute about whether U.S. troops had investigated on the ground after the raiders left at dawn. McKiernan was told that they searched the village and found up to thirty-five bodies of military-age males and five dead women and children. But local people told the veteran New York Times reporter Carlotta Gall that no American soldiers had visited. In a report two weeks after the incident, Gall said that she saw cell phone images of around eleven dead children and heard credible accounts of more than forty fresh graves.44

  Relations between the UN mission and ISAF were now strained to the breaking point. Eide found his staff under attack from the American media and from the administration in Washington. “We were not talking about two versions that varied slightly, there were two very different stories. I wondered at one stage if we were talking about two different attacks.”45 He refused an offer by McKiernan to a joint UN-Afghan-ISAF investigation, since he believed the vested interests of each party would cloud their judgment. After sitting alone late into the night, counting pictures of dead children, he called in McKiernan and the U.S. ambassador, William Wood, separately to view the video footage assembled by UN investigators, and neither said much in response.

  Eide stuck to what he believed to be true. He had been facing intimidation since his appointment. When he first met the U.S. ambassador to NATO, Victoria Nuland, she warned him there should be “no surprises” about civilian casualties—she repeated it as he left her office: “No surprises.” It was as if the publicity were more serious than the civilian casualties themselves. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told him he should have consulted U.S. forces before reporting his findings at Azizabad. A Western diplomat in Kabul told him he was “serving the Taliban” by highlighting the incident.

  Eide’s firmness was strengthened by the aftermath of the earlier shooting at the wedding party. There was no dispute about the casualties on that occasion, but the UN was made to look “weak and indecisive”46 when he delayed releasing UN findings at the request of U.S. forces, who took some time to issue their own report.

  Eide condemned what he called “spin and deception” on the part of the U.S. It was for them an “automatic reflex” to issue an immediate denial of civilian casualties, then later have to admit they were wrong, resulting in a “loss of face every time it happened.”47 U.S. officials pointed out that on any given day, there were more civilian casualties in Iraq than Afghanistan, without the same uproar.

  One difference with Iraq was the “flash to bang time” in reporting the incident to the president himself was instant, as tribal elders would phone the palace while raids were on. McKiernan knew that in this new world, the military needed to be more proactive with the near-universal ownership of smartphones. “You have to be very quick with the truth and with evidence, and I think that’s something that leaders are going to have to grapple with because that’s going to be the nature of war in the twenty-first century.” This most methodical of commanders introduced a new policy to track civilian casualties and quickly investigate reports of them. There was no consistent system until he established the Civilian Casualty Tracking Cell, which recorded every suspected casualty caused by ISAF. He would routinely call in investigators from the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to review military findings.

  Eide sought to repair relations; he did not want to undermine the U.S. military and had some sympathy for McKiernan’s predicament—arguing a case that had been given him by investigators into an incident that was not under his command. When it was clear that some civilians had died, McKiernan went to Azizabad and faced a meeting of elders. Karzai insisted on new rules to limit civilian casualties, and by February 2009, he had secured an agreement signed by McKiernan and the Afghan defence minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak, to improve coordination between U.S. and Afghan forces. McKiernan also offered to share potential targets with Afghan intelligence officials, giving the right of veto to Preside
nt Karzai ahead of any operation.

  It would take more than ten years and a legal action against the Department of Defense to reveal the full story of the casualties at Azizabad. The investigation by Brett Murphy of USA TODAY in 2019 uncovered one of the strangest and most tragic incidents of the whole war.48

  The tip-off that there were senior Taliban present at Azizabad came from two sources code-named Romeo and Juliet. The military-age men who were killed were not Taliban but security guards for the nearby ISAF air base, and the weapons seized had been supplied not by the Taliban but by the U.S. for the security contract. According to the DOD inquiry uncovered by USA TODAY, the tip-off was as a result of a turf war between two local warlords to secure the lucrative contract. ArmorGroup, who ran the contract, code-named the two warlords “Mr. Pink” and “Mr. White”—the names of the feuding thieves in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.

  The civilians in Azizabad on the night of the raid had gathered for a memorial for Mr. White, who had been shot dead by Mr. Pink. To clarify who was on who’s side—the U.S. sources Romeo and Juliet were known associates of Mr. Pink, and the Taliban commander was Mr. White’s nephew.

  They were “the two most corrupt families in Afghanistan,” according to the district governor, Lal Muhammad Umarzai. But the American forces never asked for his advice.49 The Americans were used, as so often, to settle a local dispute by people claiming their enemies were Taliban—with the added irony on this occasion that those killed were actually contracted to provide security for NATO troops.