The Long War

by David Loyn

  There was no doubting Ghani’s political ambition. In the summer of 2006, he ran to be UN secretary-general, but his candidacy got nowhere; Ban Ki-moon was elected unanimously by the General Assembly. In 2009, his first run for the Afghan presidency, he won around 2 percent of the votes cast, in a poll marked by low turnout and violence. Because of his long residency in the U.S. and fluency in English, his chances then were overestimated by some foreign media, and by Richard Holbrooke, in a colossal error of judgment that put the final nail into the coffin of his relationship with President Karzai. Ghani did not even finish third—that place going to the gutsy anticorruption campaigner Ramazan Bashardost, who had launched his campaign from the tent in the park in Kabul. Bashardost had no rich backers and fought for every vote, campaigning village to village across the country in a battered Toyota Corolla with no security.

  Ghani was written off by the old warlords, now so firmly entrenched back in power. To them, he was as derided as one of the “doctors without borders,” highly educated returnees with no war record—not really Afghans.** What turned him into a more credible candidate in 2014 was his appointment by President Karzai as the main civilian representative in the transition of provinces from NATO to Afghan military control after 2012. Ghani went from city to city, making speeches and contacts, building the potential for a better run in 2014, but not constructing a political party or movement in the Western sense. He never saw the need for that. To make certain of votes from the north, where Pashtuns are in a minority, he did a deal with the devil, giving the most prominent northern warlord, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, the leading vice-presidential slot on his ticket,2 a move that severely questioned Ghani’s reformist credentials.

  Dostum had a checkered history, beginning as a private soldier in the Soviet-backed Afghan army, and rising to command them in the north, transforming the force quickly when Soviet forces withdrew in 1989 into a personal militia—fiercely loyal to him and his Junbish political movement. This force changed sides often during the civil war years and was as responsible as any for the destruction of Kabul before the arrival of the Taliban. They were feared and known out of their hearing as the kilim-jans, literally “carpet men,” since when they came they rolled up everything in the house and took it away. Dostum had a ruthless reputation for crushing opponents under tank tracks. I spent some time with him shortly before the Taliban took the north in 1997, to film a profile, and he arranged an inspection of his praetorian guard, lined up in front of armored personnel carriers, before leaping onto the APCs and racing toward some open ground to play buzkashi, the fierce wild contest between men on horses for control of the carcass of a calf. Dostum himself mounted a giant horse and spent some time in the mêlée of younger riders, crashing into each other in the dust.

  He had a weakness for very expensive Scotch whisky and by 2014 was a bloated caricature of his former warrior self. Before the campaign, Ghani went north to negotiate terms with Dostum. Ghani settled in a room in a large, soulless hotel in Shebargan, calling up Dostum and other local warlords one by one. After one meeting, Dostum came down into the lobby, slumped into a chair, and said, “He just doesn’t listen.”3 In his 2009 campaign, Ghani had called Dostum a “known killer.”4 But now he was convinced Dostum had “tired” of war, saying in a BBC interview, “National reconciliation is our key goal. We must avoid the politics of refusal.”5

  Without any real role as vice president, Dostum continued his warlord ways, competing for influence across the north of the country, sometimes violently. Three years after the election, he fled to Turkey, facing investigation for the alleged brutal torture and kidnapping of a political opponent, Ahmad Ishchi, at his central Kabul home. Ishchi, the former governor of Jowzjan Province, said he was sodomized with the barrel of an assault rifle, and Dostum threatened to rape him himself.6 For the next year, until he was able to return still theoretically with the post of vice president, Dostum held court in Turkey with others disaffected by Ghani’s rule, including some ministers from Ghani’s government, revealing the depth of failure of the national unity government project.

  The ploy of allying with this rogue secured the election for Ghani, but it empowered a man who would become a dangerous force at the heart of the administration. Ghani’s government had a troubled start—uneasily sharing power with his rival in the election and with an unstable and violent warlord as his vice president.

  IN EXTREMIS

  General John F. “JC” Campbell, who took over from General Dunford in August, put his packet of three-by-five cards on his office desk in Kabul, each bearing the name and personal details of those who had died under his command in Afghanistan. He had served there twice before, in Kandahar in the winter of 2002, as more troops were sent in the realization that the war might not be over soon, and commanding the 101st Airborne in the east in 2010 at the height of the surge, the only division-strength deployment in the long war. He also had long experience commanding in Iraq—an illustrious career that nearly did not happen.

  Campbell initially wanted to follow his master sergeant father, Ernie Campbell, into the air force, attracted by post-Vietnam air force training academy incentives in the mid-1970s, including a Corvette sports car. But salt tablets he was taking as a high school soccer player in California put up his blood pressure, and he failed the medical. Off the tablets, he reapplied to a number of military colleges and was accepted to West Point, not enjoying it much at the start. He said, “I wasn’t sure I wanted to go in the army, but what I did know is they paid for my education.” He thought he would do the minimum commitment, a five-year commission. He stayed for nearly thirty-seven years.

  In command in Kabul, he had just a few weeks with President Karzai before the change of administration. Ghani’s arrival pressed reset on the relationship. He had raised his family in the U.S. and spoke appreciatively of American and international support for Afghanistan. “Every time he talked,” Campbell said, “he talked about the sacrifice that the coalition, all the forces made.” Karzai retired to a compound adjacent to the Arg, “not in government but still a big factor we had to deal with.” He could be a problem or an asset.

  Campbell knew the value of good personal relations and saw President Ghani almost every day, including visiting his home late into the night, giving him detailed written reports of a length and density Karzai would not have read. Like Dunford, Campbell would wear dress uniform for the meetings, respecting the office and the man who held it. He established secure phone lines so he could speak directly to Ghani and Abdullah, and a new building was put up for the Afghan National Security Council with American money, its glass and marble slabs shimmering incongruously against the thick stone outer wall of the Arg complex, close to the grand main gate originally built for an elephant procession. Inside was a room with VTC connections to all the Afghan corps commands. Campbell’s prominence in TV coverage of the meetings led Afghan media to call him the “real Afghan defence minister.”

  Afghan ownership of their own war was a work in progress. The final NATO summit for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), in Newport, Wales, in September 2014 revealed the shaky foundations of the security they had built. The soldier sent to carry the Afghan flag in a parade claimed asylum as soon as he arrived in Britain and disappeared. As overnight replacement, Colonel Zia Karimi, General Sher Muhammad Karimi’s son, then on an advanced officer training course in the UK, was woken and bundled into a cab, arriving just in time to head the parade.

  On December 28, 2014, in a low-key ceremony on a cold basketball court inside the Kabul military base, Campbell rolled up one flag and unfurled another. ISAF, born at the post-Taliban Bonn conference thirteen long years before, was no more. The new flag, in green, had the letters RS written in white, for Resolute Support, with “Train, Advise, and Assist” written in Dari round the bottom. NATO’s combat mission ended, not with the defeat of the enemy but on the timetable.

  Campbell knew the next phase would not be as tidy as rolli
ng up a flag. “Fighting a war based on a number, a headcount, you know, boots on the ground, was very, very difficult as opposed to having a plan, a strategy and then following that plan or strategy.” Just as the long war began in 2001 with a lack of clarity over command and control and the object of the mission, so at the end there was improvisation by troops on the ground to deliver effect, without real understanding by those who sent them.

  About a third of the 9,800 U.S. troops under Campbell’s command were engaged in counterterrorism missions against the Taliban leadership and the remnants of al-Qaeda, with Operation Enduring Freedom now rebadged as Freedom’s Sentinel, but he could see that the distinction between this and the more limited authority to use lethal force only in self-defense for the majority of his troops on the train, advise, and assist mission of Resolute Support was not always clear. An ISAF spokesperson used an image like a Russian doll to explain the relations. “Think of it as a big box marked RS and inside that you have a small box marked Freedom’s Sentinel but inside that box you have two smaller boxes marked Resolute Support and another one marked counterterrorism.”7 Putting the NATO mission inside the Freedom’s Sentinel box unnerved allies who were remaining for a strictly noncombat mission. They had signed up to train Afghan troops, not fight alongside them. The continued presence of more than forty nations, half in NATO, was a vital element in the post-ISAF campaign plan. Italians in the west, Germans in the north, and Turks at the Kabul airport were essential pillars of the international operation. But they were not there on a combat mission.

  During the months before the “end” of combat, there were several meetings in the White House over when troops would be able to use lethal force in the future. Campbell wanted rules clear enough for the “private or sergeant on the frontline, where he’s faced to make a split second decision whether he shoots or doesn’t shoot civilian, friend, foe.” He pushed back against the instinct of Obama’s advisers for a checklist or the need to refer all decisions upward, telling them, “Don’t give me fifteen things I’ve got to have to check, check, check, check.”

  Discussions centered round the words in extremis. Beyond the right of self-defense in the case of imminent threats, Campbell wanted the ability to act when pressure was “in extremis.” When a White House counsel objected, as this stretched the self-defense rules, Obama intervened. “Hey, let me give you a steer here. If we have folks in harm’s way, we’re going to protect them.” Turning to Campbell, he said, “John, that’s good enough for me. I’m going to authorize you for that use of force.”8

  Campbell’s legal adviser, navy captain Pat McCarthy, was instrumental in expanding the ability to operate against long-range threats like truck bombs, where there was actionable intelligence. And after many weeks of argument, he successfully made one further crucial change—U.S. troops would be able to defend Afghan troops too “in extremis.” The thought of being in an advisory capacity with Afghan forces but not being able to bring in close air support if they were in danger was an uncomfortable one for Campbell. “I knew from the very beginning that if the Afghans didn’t have some sort of capability, their own air force or airpower, it would be a very long hard haul.” McCarthy saw some in the White House as unrealistic about the situation faced by troops on the ground. “It was almost as if they thought somehow, we would keep 9,800 folks there, we’d train the Afghans and we could do it with clean, white, lily-white gloves.”

  The immediate impact of the “end” of combat operations was dramatic. In January and February 2015, the U.S. dropped seventy munitions from the air, less than half the total for the same months the year before and a tenth of what was dropped in January and February 2011 at the peak of the surge. As the Taliban inevitably probed the capacity of Afghan forces, not taking a winter pause, Campbell was assisted in his desire for a more robust response by the new Afghan president. That the transformation in the relationship was more than symbolic became clear when Ghani lifted Karzai’s restriction on Afghan forces calling in U.S. air strikes. By October 2015, more munitions were dropped than in the same month in 2013, during the “combat” years.

  Campbell denied media reporting that he was going beyond what was allowed. “I understand my authorities and what I have to do with Afghanistan’s forces and my forces.” The decision to use lethal force was solely American. Officers from allied nations were in the command center, watching images from drones, when decisions were taken to use munitions, but they were not in the chain of command. It led to what McCarthy called “some spirited conversations.”

  ATTRITION

  In the early months of 2015, General Karimi had one last major task to fulfill for his country. As head of the Afghan army, he visited the five corps commands to formally mark the moment this became Afghanistan’s war. NATO had held moving transition ceremonies before the “end of combat operations” the year before to hand over the war to Afghanistan. The events in 2015 were all-Afghan affairs. The old warrior had the unmatched record of serving at a senior level under every Afghan administration for fifty years—through a coup, a revolution, two assassinations of leaders, an invasion, an unstable foreign-backed government, a civil war, and even the Taliban for a short time, before fleeing just once, and returning soon after 9/11 to rise to the top as chief of army staff. He might have finished this extraordinary career as defence minister when Ghani appointed him to his first cabinet. But as if to prove they were more corrupt than any in the last decades of disruption and war, the elites in parliament, detached by stolen wealth from the reality of the poverty of their country, refused to endorse the appointment of this great public servant. He would not pay the bribes needed to secure his post.

  Standing in front of thousands of troops on parade with armored vehicles and helicopters, observed by viewing stands full of watchful elders, the tall, barrel-chested general told them that while grateful for ISAF’s support, this was now their fight. “It is for us to defend our homeland, to fight alone for Afghanistan.” At the end of the speech, the massed ranks responded with a deep-throated triple roar of “JOUAND, JOUAND, JOUAND”—literally “Life, Life, Life”—the Afghan army battle cry. There was no doubting the public demonstration of morale, but this was an army that was losing lives at a rate that would be unsustainable for any modern Western country. As Afghan forces took on the war for themselves, their casualties rose to a post-2001 peak in 2014, the last year of formal NATO combat operations, and then continued to rise. There were 5,523 deaths in the first six months of 2016, and although the losses were rarely reported in the Afghan media, everybody knew what was going on.

  Internal flights from Helmand or Kandahar would be delayed for military coffins to be loaded in after the civilian baggage. At the Four-Hundred-Bed military hospital in Kabul, the morgue was filled to overflowing, and a sad line of taxis and cars waited to tie a coffin to the roof to be driven home for burial. Many relatives would take off the Afghan flag, given to honor their dead, and leave it behind. With widespread Taliban influence in rural areas, identification as a military family could be a death sentence.

  The attrition rate meant that at the time America was spending most on building Afghan forces, the Afghan army was actually declining. To try to fill the gaps, they raised the maximum age of enlistment from thirty-five to forty. About one-third of the force was taken out every year by death, discharge, or desertion. Although new recruits were going through training as fast as possible, the army was 25,000 short of its target of 195,000. And in many places, the ranks were thinner than the figures suggested, as “ghost soldiers” were entered into the register, their wages taken by senior officers. Attempts to introduce electronic direct payments had been blocked for years by corruption and institutional inertia. This turnover made it very difficult to build advanced warrior skills or promote good NCOs. As the congressional watchdog SIGAR put it, “Such high attrition increasingly created a military with little to no training.”9

  Low morale because of the pressures of the war led to an increase in
insider attacks—green on green—which took the lives of more than 250 Afghan soldiers in the first eighteen months after the end of NATO combat operations.10 This meant the army’s leaders could not trust their own troops. At the parade in Helmand where General Karimi spoke so passionately about Afghan pride, the recovery of sovereignty, and the need to protect the homeland, armed soldiers from Special Forces units stood at every ten yards in a line facing the troops to protect the elders and the senior officers from the risk of attack.

  TEN-FEET-TALL TALIBAN

  While the new model Afghan army was now being tested as never before, America was heading for the exit. In terms of the surge bell curve, the American mission was now leveling out. The only remaining question was the thickness of the rim of the bell. Campbell liked to talk of a “glide path” out,11 but it had a clear end, that landing point of “embassy level” military cover set for the end of 2016. At both ends of the surge, the strict timelines and troop numbers set by President Obama left little room to maneuver. When pressed to criticize the president for setting a firm deadline by Senator John McCain, Campbell dodged the question, quoting General Dunford, who said, “he hoped that there’d be more ambiguity here.”12 The outgoing Kabul ambassador, James Cunningham, was blunter. “The timeline is probably too short and the rate of withdrawal is too steep.”13

  On his appointment, Obama told Campbell not to hide bad news and to remember the context. When he was asking for resources for Afghanistan, the president had “the whole world to worry about.” Campbell told him, “Mr. President. I got it.” The first White House meeting to discuss post-2016 troop levels, in April 2015, did not go well for him. The deadline of “embassy level” troops would then be only a year away. Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough said they should “re-imagine” the conflict in Afghanistan, implying they should allow the Taliban to take over part of the country, which Campbell did not see as a helpful way forward. Vice President Joe Biden continued his push to end the campaign, and Defense Secretary Ash Carter, only recently appointed, did not back Campbell’s aim to keep a larger presence for longer.