by David Loyn
March 14, 2010. McChrystal was an enthusiastic whiteboard user to explain “insurgent math,” which holds that “for every innocent person you kill, you create ten new enemies.”
July 9, 2010. General David Petraeus in Kandahar with the British major general, Nick Carter (right).
July 12, 2011. Petraeus working out in Kabul. “I want the enemy to think that I’m the most competitive human being.”
August 4, 2011. General John Allen talking to elders in Marjah, Helmand.
June 12, 2013. The author interviewing General Joe Dunford for the BBC in Kunduz.
March 30, 2016. General John Campbell handing over command to his West Point classmate General Mick Nicholson.
June 16, 2018. Afghan minister of the interior Wais Barmak talking to Taliban fighters on the street in Kabul during a three-day ceasefire for the Eid holiday.
Mural on a blast wall in Kabul by ArtLords showing the handshake on the Doha deal on February 29, 2020, between U.S. negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad and Taliban negotiator Abdul Ghani Baradar. (The eyes are part of an anticorruption drive.)
March 21, 2021. General Scott Miller greeting defense secretary Lloyd Austin in Kabul as a new administration grapples with the challenges of the long war. (Two weeks earlier Miller had become the longest-serving commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.)
Afghanistan has changed since the Taliban, with a vibrant music scene, and singers like Aryana Sayeed. But for the country’s battered security forces, the long war has not ended.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have been fortunate in my traveling companions in Afghanistan. The wise and courtly Rahimullah Yusufzai, who won the trust of the Taliban and unlocked exclusive access for the BBC to the front line of their advance into Kabul in 1996, when I was with camera operator Fred Scott, and video editor Vladimir Lozinski. Najibullah Razaq, who, among many other acts of wizardry, negotiated my safe passage across front lines in Helmand for an interview with Taliban senior leaders in 2007. Vaughan Smith, who hitched rides on helicopters and walked with me through the Hindu Kush during the initial U.S. invasion in 2001, and a few months later we survived being stoned by a large mob in Helmand while reporting the return of poppy growing after the fall of the Taliban. Mahfouz Zubaide, whose constant resourcefulness is the heart of the BBC operation in Kabul, and who, with camera operator and editor Malik Mudasir Hassan, made my two years based in Afghanistan, 2013 to 2015, such a pleasure. And Robert Adams, who joined me on a shared quest to visit the Buddhas at Bamiyan in the winter of 2000. We had gone to shoot a story about a famine, which included haunting images of starving people living in caves carved in the hillside 1,500 years ago for monks. Once we had completed that we spent a day taking pictures of the remarkable vast stone Buddhas and the remnants of once beautiful cave paintings in the niches behind. We knew they were threatened by al-Qaeda and just a few months later they were no more.
And there were many other producers and videojournalists whose ideas, pictures, and perceptions added to the kaleidoscope of images, impressions, and ideas that have informed my writing and understanding of Afghanistan, and so contributed to The Long War, along with archive research and new interviews: Auliya Atrafi, Shoaib Sharifi, Bilal Sarwary, Massud Popalzai, Jafar Hand, Waheed Massoud, Aleem Agha, Ismael Saadat, Amir Shah, Duncan Stone, John Boon, Daud Qarizadeh, Paul Mongey Sanjay Ganguly, Andrew “Sarge” Herbert, Adam “Moose” Campbell, Bhasker Solanki, Rachel Thompson, Philip Palmer; and BBC reporting colleagues, among them William Reeve, Alastair Leithead, Martin Patience, Quentin Sommerville, Harun Najafizada, Lyse Doucet, and Hugh Sykes. Many Afghan journalists, other than those I worked closely with in the BBC, shared valuable insights into their country, in particular Danish Karokhel, Sharif Hassanyar, Lotfullah Najafizada, Javed Hamim Kakar, Massoud Hossaini, and Abdullah Khenjani (later a government minister).
During the year that I worked as an adviser in the Afghan president’s office, 2017 to 2018, I was fortunate in having a good friend, Dominic Medley, in Kabul at the same time. I had already begun research and interviews for the book and I have been able to draw on Dominic’s encyclopedic knowledge of the international intervention, learned in long years as a strategic communications expert on both the military and civilian sides in ISAF and the UN in Kabul. Dominic played a significant role in developing the free media in Afghanistan after 2001, one of the few real success stories of the last twenty years, and founded the now-defunct Afghan Scene magazine in the heady early days when there was a hope that tourism would follow the fall of the Taliban. He was justly honored with a medal by the British government for his contribution. I also benefited from the friendship of a real expert in strategic communications, Brett Boudreau, who was in Kabul at the same time as my 2017 role. Brett’s account of the NATO strategic communications effort in the combat years—We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us—was invaluable source material.
The Long War began as a project to conduct in-depth interviews with the commanders in Kabul covering just the eight years of the most intense combat from 2006 to 2014, and I am grateful for them spending time to share their experience. (Where quotations from the ISAF commanders are not footnoted, they come from those interviews.) The focus of the idea changed to cover the whole narrative of the long war when it became clear that there was no way to understand the challenges of the “surge” years without examining the background and context that led to this becoming America’s longest war, or the long, slow drawdown of troops. The scope also broadened to include analysis of the development and diplomatic strands of policy, as well as the defense challenge—the “three Ds.”
I had specialized in international development reporting for the BBC, and this gave me the background to look at the intersection between the “three Ds” and the tensions between the different communities. I write in the introduction about their different calendars, with military officers impatient for quick spending after taking ground, frustrated by development officials who know that lasting change will take far longer. I have been involved in all these worlds. At the peak of the combat years I learned much about the dynamics when I was one of a small group of civilian experts on Afghanistan who lectured every incoming British army brigade during their preparation for a tour, and I led on an in-career training course for British diplomats on policy in South Asia and Afghanistan. I have also worked as a strategic communications adviser on U.S.-funded programs in Kabul since 2015. I am grateful to Bill Byrd for looking over some of the material on development with the professional eye of an ex–World Bank economist with Afghan expertise.
Sources for The Long War include news accounts, online research, books and interviews, as well as my own notes from visits to Afghanistan every year since the early 1990s. Some of the most revealing books have come out only in the last few years, as CIA officers consider that enough time has elapsed to be able to give their account, which can now be tested against other evidence. It is striking how much open-source material there is online, including leaks of confidential military memos, blogs by military and development officials, academic research, and large volumes of official data. But it is also striking how many of the URLs, including from official sources, soon become unusable. The internet is a fleeting friend for modern historians—catch it now before it is gone. In checking endnotes for The Long War, links that worked only a year ago are no longer alive. This is an ongoing challenge for writers and archivists. Parchment survives for one thousand years; much key open-source Afghan data has gone in a couple of years.
The primary source material is interviews, conducted either when I was reporting in the field or specifically for the book. Among other interviews, I would like particularly to thank General Sir Nick Carter for taking time out of his role as the chief of the UK Defence Staff to talk about his significant experience in Afghanistan, beginning as a colonel in a tent in early 2002, up to his role as the deputy commander of ISAF, taking in several important command positions along the way. I am grateful for the time of a
number of analysts and military and development officials who shared their perceptions of the long dilemmas of Afghan policy for this book. Some I have agreed not to name, but others include Ambassador Ronald E. Neumann, Francesc Vendrell, Scott Guggenheim, Jeff Eggers, Doug Lute, Barney Rubin, Jarrett Blanc, Chris Kolenda, Carter Malkasian, Matt Sherman, Pat McCarthy, Cliff Trout, and Andrew Steinfeld. I spent a memorable day with Marc Chretien at his cider barn in the Virginia countryside talking about Afghanistan and visiting Civil War graves in a nearby churchyard with him on the way back to Washington. It was in early March 2020, and I had to cut the trip short and flee back across the Atlantic as COVID-19 began to close things down. Just over a week later I was in Kabul as a guest at the second inauguration of President Ghani, taking the opportunity on a brief trip to interview Hanif Atmar, then out of office but appointed Afghan foreign minister shortly afterward. That was to be the last face-to-face contact before I went onto Zoom with the rest of the globe in order to complete the interviews.
I had by then done a number of interviews with key Afghan players, and I am very grateful for their time, notably among them former president Hamid Karzai, owner of TOLO TV Saad Mohseni, former interior ministers Umer Daudzai and Wais Barmak, former deputy foreign minister Jawed Ludin, and former governor of Nuristan Tamim Nuristani. And I spoke at length to that great Afghan public servant, the former head of the army General Sher Muhammad Karimi, who is currently working on a Pashto translation of this text. I should also highlight among many others, a few people who have been influential in informing my understanding of Afghanistan, including Lynne O’Donnell, Jolyon Leslie, Kate Clark, Abdul Waheed Wafa, and Haseeb Humayoon.
Reporters from other news organizations are friends and traveling companions as much as they compete for stories, particularly in foreign news, and I have benefited from their insights, shared particularly in the memorable years when the Gandamack Lodge in Kabul provided shelter and a bar, the ideal location for rest and recuperation. It was founded by freelance camera operator Peter Jouvenal, who has been traveling in Afghanistan since the early days of the Russian war in the 1980s, sometimes with me (I tell his story in my book Frontline). Peter led the BBC news crew who were the first into Kabul when it fell in 2001, and he soon put down his camera to find a location for the Gandamack.
In The Long War I have tried to describe the Afghanistan that is being constructed by the post-2001 generation, whether educated in Afghanistan or abroad, and how different this is to clichéd perceptions of the country seen from outside. I have learned a lot from the new reformers. Along with the journalists, figures in the government and civil society sector have a new vision for the country—people like Sadat Naderi, Nadir Naim, Daud Noorzai, Schah-Zaman Maiwandi, Farkhunda Naderi, Mirwais Farahi, Timor Sharan, Nargis Nehan, Adela Raz, Mariam Wardak, Nisar Barakzai, Hamid Khan, Samira Sayed-Rahman, and Omaid Sharifi, whose brilliant Artlords project has brought color to the gray-lined blast walls of Kabul with inventive political stencils. The 1980s warlords still hold disproportionate power, but the traditional society they stand for no longer has consent. The change that has come may be lasting if it is cherished. Women’s rights are not an irrelevant Western obsession; opinion polls show that women’s participation in the peace process is a popular demand across the country. Meetings between women’s groups and conservative religious leaders have come out with remarkably progressive agendas for women’s employment, education, and married rights.
The Long War is not a first-person account. It is a step back to deliver a historical narrative, and take a view of what the American war was (/is) about, and how it was (/is) conducted. I have tried to credit other accounts as comprehensively as possible where I have drawn on them. “I” am not much in the book, except where essential to tell the story. Where there are incidents recounted that are not footnoted, that is often because I witnessed them as a reporter, but I have not written myself into the account in the book.
For clarity, Afghan names have been standardized to the usual American first and last name format, although this is not the way they are always used in Afghanistan, where many people have only one name. The reason for the odd double name of the leading politician, Abdullah Abdullah, was that when he first encountered Western journalists in the 1980s and said he was called just “Abdullah,” they insisted he needed something else. So he said “Okay, then I am Abdullah Abdullah.” There is also usually no standard spelling of names, which are transliterations of Arabic script, so I have tried to take an informed view. As an example of the challenge, the name of a police chief, Aminullah Amerkhel, whose fight against corruption is told in chapter 10, can be spelt in the following ways, according to the excellent research resource www.afghan-bios.info—Amarkhel, Amerkheil, Amerkhail, Amarkhail, Amerkhil, Amar Khil, Amar Khail.
My agent, Charlie Viney, has been a great support during the journey toward the publication of The Long War, and many thanks also to lawyer Rupert Grey. Marc Resnick has had a clear guiding hand as editor, and his team at St. Martin’s Press, in particular Lily Cronig, have provided timely support.
First and last thanks go to Jean Seaton, my first reader, and the best partner for life a writer could have.
PICTURE CREDITS
Jason Amerine: Hamid Karzai with ODA 574.
Paula Bronstein/Getty Images: Gul Agha Sherzai.
Manny Ceneta/Getty Images: Donald Rumsfeld.
Massoud Hossaini/Getty Images: Joe Biden with Hamid Karzai; Aryana Sayeed.
Jack Ketch: Lloyd Austin and Scott Miller.
Shah Marai/Getty Images: Hamid Karzai, Dan McNeill and David Richards.
(Shah Marai was one of a group of journalists targeted and killed by a suicide bomber in their midst on April 30 2018).
Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Pictures: Journalists at Tora Bora; Zalmay Khalilzad.
Charles Ommanney/Getty Pictures: David Petraeus working out.
Andrew Quilty: Mick Nicholson and John Campbell; sleeping Helmand police officer; author with Ashraf Ghani.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images: Exhumation.
Mahfouz Zubaide: Blast wall picture of Khalilzad/Taliban handshake.
Afghan social media: Wais Barmak.
Other pictures from the U.S. Department of Defense. (Publication does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement).
Corporal Alex Guerra: David McKiernan.
Staff Sgt Bradley Lail: David Petraeus and Nick Carter.
Petty Officer First Class Mark O’Donald: Stanley McChrystal.
Lance Cpl. Richard P. Sanglap-Heramis: John Allen.
First Lieutenant Brian Tuthill: Stanley McChrystal and Hamid Karzai.
Dedication extract from The Art of War, Sun Tzu; edited by James Clavell; Dell; 1983.
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