by David Loyn
Changing the narrative to build hope and confidence is the work of strategic communications. In countries confident of the future, families make different decisions from those they would make if they thought things would get worse. And every decision feeds into a virtuous cycle—the opposite of the negative cycle that creates and feeds on short-termism. During my time advising in his office, when President Ghani did a good open press conference, exuding confidence, the impact was immediate. After one, a newspaper that had been critical of his administration did an editorial asking, “Where has this president been hiding all this time?” But such appearances were too rare, as strategic communications was never given the attention it deserved.
The week after I arrived to work as an adviser, there was an audacious Taliban attack on the main army headquarters of the 209th Corps in the north of the country. In hijacked Afghan army vehicles, wearing stolen army uniforms, the attackers were waved through several checkpoints inside the base to reach the mosque and adjacent dining hall. It was the time of Friday prayers, and few soldiers in that part of the base were armed. The government never admitted how many were killed, and while there were few publicity wins in such a catastrophe—the crisis management was an object lesson in what not to do. Every daily news cycle was dominated by stories that did the government damage. At no point was there an attempt to regain the media initiative.
From the beginning, the government went into a defensive crouch, refusing to share information, particularly on the number of casualties. Ghani went up the following day to see the site of the carnage, taking only his own media team, and not meeting local journalists or saying anything on camera—doing nothing to rebuild confidence. This was an open goal for an outspoken northern opponent, Atta Muhammad Nur, the governor of Balkh Province where the attack happened, to criticize the president. The next day, the main headline was about the Defence Ministry spokesman accusing a reporter of not being “Afghan” for asking reasonable questions about the disaster. The spokesman, General Dawlat Waziri, an amiable relic from the Communist-trained army of the 1980s, was loved by soldiers. In his daily briefings, he would willfully make up material about how government forces were “sweeping forward on many fronts” and the Taliban’s defeat was inevitable.
As the government continued to deny casualties on a mass scale in the attack on the 209th Corps HQ, the best-financed of the new news channels, TOLO TV, sent crews into every province, filming lines of coffins, and did their own count of the dead, coming to 135. The final toll was probably higher. Continued government silence looked like a cover-up.
Ghani’s public relations problem had been obvious since the beginning of his presidency. The natural instinct of many round the president was to produce a Soviet-style diet of dull announcements of meetings, no proactive messaging, little meaningful social media, and few appearances. Ghani, like Karzai before him, did more interviews with foreign than Afghan media.
When I arrived as an adviser in 2017, the sixth head of communications, Schah-Zaman Maiwandi, had just been appointed. He was one of the new generation of foreign-educated technocrats brought in by Ghani in an attempt to shake up the system. Many were good linguists, cycling through different languages from meeting to meeting. Maiwandi was ahead of most, speaking his mother tongue, Pashto, as well as German, English, and the main Afghan government language, Dari, all to a high level. Wanting to work with Ghani in the 2014 campaign, he found out when he would be traveling and arranged to be on the same flight. He was employed in the departure lounge. Three years on, he had his reward—with the tashkil, staff total, of 250, that went with the communications office, and daily meetings with the president. As his adviser, I settled into the corner of a traditional carved wooden Afghan seat in his office on the day I arrived and did not leave that spot. Maiwandi had brought a precious asset with him—a German coffee machine. I had access to better ground coffee than was available locally, and the individual bags had to be taken away to be scanned and kept overnight by Arg security when I brought them in, before being delivered ceremonially to Maiwandi’s office. He was a capable reformer, with an ambition to create a functional media operation, but it was an uphill struggle.
THE OLD GOVERNMENT DIGS IN
Changing the way Afghanistan did business was complex after thirteen years, when President Karzai empowered a corrupt new elite under the ever-present shadow of the old warlords, who were hard to shift. Ghani’s instinct was to include this group, while building up a new governing class. His aim was to be able to build a more enduring system, while squeezing the corruption and patronage capacity of the old system to limit its power. He knew that the ambitions of the reformist 1920s king Amanullah, whose desk he worked at, were cut short by a revolution started in conservative rural Afghanistan, and he wanted to keep the country with him as reforms took hold.
Ghani’s big tent even included one former warlord who had been allied with the Taliban for many years. In 2017, he concluded the only peace deal with any former insurgent group until then, when Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who had been fighting for forty years, came down from the mountains. Hekmatyar had allied with the Taliban against the U.S. intervention after 2001 but was successfully brought in with a promise of being treated respectfully. More than that, he was given a red-carpet welcome at the Arg. There was enormous interest in the homecoming. A screen grab of Hekmatyar at the event sitting next to Sayyaf, another 1980s warlord, that I tweeted, with no other comment than that it was extraordinary to see them sitting side by side in a democratic country, had many retweets and comments.
At the same time, Ghani aimed to squeeze the warlords out of real power. Later in the year, Ghani fired one of his biggest opponents, Atta Muhammad Nur, as governor of Balkh. He was one of the old mujahideen leaders stood up by Gary Schroen’s Jawbreaker team in 2001. Nur had a series of daily rolling news conferences to protest his treatment, but while he remained a significant influence, he did not regain the post as governor.
Ghani was saddled with the U.S.-brokered power-sharing deal that gave Abdullah half of the government posts, but that was not the obstruction to the second half of his strategy to reform leadership—putting younger technocrats into key roles. Instead, the opposition to this came mostly from inside his administration. The appointment of his first chief of staff, Abdul Salam Rahimi, an uncharismatic figure with little international profile, weakened his ability to build the government he wanted.
Rahimi fought off an attempt by the president to move Daud Noorzai, one of the most talented of the new reformers, into the heart of government. Brought up in Germany and trained by Deutsche Bank, Noorzai had made enough money to return to his ancestral homeland and work to rebuild it. He is a direct descendant of Mahmud Tarzi, the foreign minister in the 1920s, whose daughter, Soraya, married the reformist King Amanullah. Like many of the Afghan-origin Europeans, Canadians, and Americans now with Ghani after spending most of their lives abroad, his family reclaimed lands and were recognized as tribal leaders in the tough southern province of Kandahar; his father sat in the Afghan senate. The German Afghans, mostly from Hamburg, were closely related across generations—Maiwandi’s cousin Nisar Barakzai became the president’s private secretary.
After the 2014 election, Noorzai set up what was called the Administrative Office of the President in a large, rented house in the center of town—a test bed of a new kind of government of the sort Ghani wanted. It was like no office seen in Afghanistan before: large, open-plan rooms with big islands of shared desks and modern computers. Noorzai had a ready answer to the many foreign diplomats who asked how the government could afford it. “The office was not expensive,” he said. “The cost breaks down to 85% people and 15% kit. We had the desks made locally to my design, and 15% of even a small sum buys a lot of very good computers if you don’t steal it”—such a simple explanation as to why corruption is the worst affliction.
Noorzai’s bright young staff were inputting government data on procurement, spending of budgets across
key ministries, and land registration—until then, there was no centralized knowledge of Afghan land ownership. Young men and women sat together at the desks, the men all in dark suits. Like some other modern offices in Kabul, Noorzai insisted on a strict dress code for men.24 He smoked incessantly—particularly in a breakout room upstairs, the nerve center of the new reformers, constantly full of arguments and plans. He saw them as a new disruptive force, facing both inertia and actual opposition from what he called “old government.”
One of the more surreal days in my year in the Arg came when Ghani attempted to take significant functions from Rahimi and give Noorzai a bigger role at the heart of government. Negotiations over dividing responsibility took place on the day of a major funeral in the Arg for the president’s uncle Akmal Ghani Ahmadzai. In scenes as from The Sopranos, men in dark suits, white shirts, and somber ties came and went between Noorzai and Rahimi, carrying sheaves of documents, carving up the government. Noorzai had an office in one of the most beautiful buildings in the whole complex, the Harem Serai, built for the many wives of King Habibullah at the beginning of the twentieth century, set in a garden courtyard with giant ancient plane trees and a vine-covered walkway along one side. On another side was an ornate meeting room, dominated by a shallow indoor ornamental pool with goldfish, and a bar along one wall left over from the more tolerant 1920s, now of course shuttered.
Amid giant computer screens incongruously set up among the faded furniture and tapestries of the former royal harem, Noorzai’s team sat huddled together, with the president’s cousin Ajmal Ghani at the center of them. It was his father who was to be buried with full state honors. Ajmal was close to Noorzai and paid a price, with vicious internet attacks claiming he was a CIA spy. He said to me, “Watch out, they will say you are MI6.” The strategic communications operation was collateral damage in the carve-up. Rahimi held on to it, and Maiwandi was replaced by a nonentity whose only qualification was loyalty to Rahimi, and defaulted to the old ways.25 He was Ghani’s seventh head of communications in less than three years.
The argument was a waste of time and human capacity, squandering scarce resources, while in the world outside this squabble in the Arg, patronage and corruption had captured much of the power, and the Taliban were as threatening as ever. Within weeks, Rahimi had sidelined Noorzai altogether, who had to bide his time for a couple of years before masterminding part of Ghani’s reelection campaign in 2019 and coming back in a cabinet-level role as head of the national electricity grid—an influential job in a country where electric supply was not universal.
HELMAND GROUNDHOG DAY
Some of the most radical reforms of the Afghan armed forces happened during Nicholson’s two years and seven months in command. When he arrived, there were more generals in Afghanistan than the U.S., where the army is three times the size. “We don’t even know how many generals [there are],” said John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction. There were one thousand generals on the books, but there were suspected to be more. “It’s pretty pathetic, and here we are, 15 years into this.”26 The generals, many of them Soviet-era holdovers, drew full salaries, and many lived in government property but had little responsibility. Nicholson devised a scheme to retire most of them on very generous terms to open promotion opportunities all the way down and transform the fighting capacity of conventional forces.
Afghan Special Forces had doubled in size since 2015 and were now the best in the region, capable of complex operations on their own, but they were becoming worn out fighting conventional battles, always sent in first, as they were so much more competent than the regular army that lagged behind. It was not until the end of 2016 that biometric ID cards were universal for soldiers, and salaries could then not be paid without them. But it was hard to change the way things were done. In 2020, SIGAR reported that 50–70 percent of police positions in the most contested southern provinces, including Kandahar and Helmand, were still filled by “ghost police.”27
Corruption and lack of good leadership cost lives. Police commanders still needed to buy their posts, so they needed to recoup the cost. In early 2016, a member of the district council in Helmand, Haji Ahmad, described the impact of corruption to The New York Times. “There’s 24 hours of fighting going on and at night the commander runs out of ammo. So he goes to his district commander and says, ‘We need ammo,’ and the commander says, ‘Well, give me money so I can give you ammo.’ And he doesn’t have any money, so the Taliban overrun the checkpoint and nine policemen are killed. That’s what happens.”28
In April 2017, the marines returned to Helmand, raising the same flag they had lowered when they left at the end of 2014. Half of those who came back had been there before, disheartened to have to support Afghan troops again to fight over the same ground they had previously taken at some cost. The Afghan military failure made their return inevitable. “It feels like Groundhog Day,” said Staff Sergeant Robin Spotts on his third deployment to Helmand.29
But some of the places where they had fought before were now effectively abandoned to the Taliban. Afghan troops were no longer trying to hold remote areas. All districts in the country were now categorized into three groups, as places where they would hold, fight, or disrupt. Areas they would hold included all major towns and other strategic locations. Other locations they would fight to retain, and some only disrupt where the Taliban presented opportunities. While the Taliban controlled a third of the country by some estimates, Nicholson pointed out that they ran only sparsely populated districts. He assessed that in terms of the population, the Taliban controlled only 10 percent, the government controlled 70 percent, and they were fighting over the rest. The hold/fight/disrupt division was an attempt to move Afghan forces away from their modus operandi of sitting in fixed positions and move them to more flexible maneuver warfare. But it meant withdrawing from large areas and was an acceptance of a significant Taliban presence—at variance with the strategy adopted by General Stanley McChrystal eight years before, who wanted to ensure that he “owned the villages.”
TOUGH NEIGHBORHOOD
On January 1, 2018, Trump signaled his priority for the new year in his first tweet, which read in full, “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!”
The president was stating clearly what many in the administration, and in particular in the military, had been saying for years. But Pakistan’s perceived fragility and the capacity of its nuclear arsenal to fall into the wrong hands had generally caused the U.S. to pull back to a more cautious policy. Tillerson had already put Pakistan on notice in the fall of 2017, adding it to its watch list for religious freedom, and threatening to withhold aid after Hafiz Saeed, the founder of one of the most powerful terrorist groups in the region, Lashkar-e-Taiba, was released from house arrest. Saeed had a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head, but they could not touch him in Pakistan. After the president’s January tweet, there was a freeze on military aid payments, then running at $1.3 billion a year. The new hard line was backed by Pakistan’s former ambassador in Washington, now settled in the U.S., Husain Haqqani. “The United States would be acting as a friend,” he wrote, “helping Pakistan realize through tough measures that the gravest threat to its future comes from religious extremism it is fostering in its effort to compete with India.”30
Nicholson had long experience dealing with Pakistan as commander of U.S. forces on the frontier early in the war and while heading the Pakistan-Afghanistan desk in the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He tried to work with Pakistan, saying the country needed to be dealt with “through a holistic review.”31 Terrorism crossed the frontier, so the U.S. needed a strategy to deal with that. The twenty-one terrorist organizations in the region live among “300 million people in Pakistan and Afghanistan, many of whom
don’t have education, job opportunities, hope. So this provides fertile ground for these groups to recruit from.”32 One of the effects of the major military operation that Pakistani forces had begun in 2014 to recover the frontier region was to push militants over the frontier into Afghanistan, so there needed to be close military and political links. There were times when the two sides cooperated, as when U.S. special operators rescued Ali Haider Gilani, the son of the former Pakistani prime minister, being held by al-Qaeda, and killed the Pakistani Taliban leader Umar Khalifa, who had carried out the Peshawar school attack in 2014 killing 130 children of Pakistani soldiers.
Nicholson’s desire for better regional relations was shared by Ghani, who sought to reposition Afghanistan as the key link between Central and South Asia, turning its geographical isolation from a liability into an asset. He often quoted the poet Muhammad Iqbal, who talked of Afghanistan as the “heart of Asia.” In early 2018, Kabul hosted the military leaders of Pakistan and five Central Asian republics, bordering Afghanistan to the north. Afghan officials handed the Pakistani delegation what was described as “undeniable” evidence that the series of deadly attacks in Kabul had been planned in Pakistan. Pakistan’s chief of army staff, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, delivered the usual denials, claiming, against the evidence, that Pakistan had eliminated all terrorist sanctuaries from its soil.33 Faltering talks continued for some time over a new joint security pact between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but nothing changed.