Descent Into Chaos

by Ahmed Rashid

  On my first trip to Herat after its liberation I was ushered into Khan’s presence in the governor’s palace well past midnight, bypassing the hordes of petitioners waiting to see him. Like many insomniacs, Khan preferred doing business at night. I had come to interview him but also to ask for a favor. With some of the earnings from my book Taliban, I had started a small NGO to provide start-up funds for new print media in Afghanistan. The Taliban had destroyed journalism in Afghanistan, shutting down presses and exiling most journalists. Now the Open Media Fund for Afghanistan offered any credible Afghan group a cash grant to start a publication. In Herat, an extraordinary group of men and women, all with university degrees, had formed the Shura, or Council of Professionals, to help nation-building efforts. They were led by Mohammed Rafiq Shahir, who brought out a monthly magazine called Takhassos (Experts), which offered professional and technical advice on reconstruction projects.3 It was the only magazine of its kind in Afghanistan, and Khan had just banned it. He saw the Shura as a political threat and Shahir as a potential rival. I asked Khan if he would allow the magazine to be published, as it was non-political, and leave Shahir alone. He promised to do so as a favor to an old friend. The magazine came out, but Shahir was arrested twice in the next few months and severely tortured—once just before the Loya Jirga to which he had been elected as a delegate. It took direct intervention from the U.S. military, the American embassy in Kabul, the UN, and Karzai before Khan deigned to free him.

  Khan’s source of income made him especially important. He earned between three and five million dollars every month in customs revenue from the crossing point at Islam Qila, on the Iran-Afghanistan border. Here every day hundreds of trucks arrived loaded with Japanese tires, Iranian fuel, secondhand European cars, cooking gas cylinders from Turkmenistan, and consumer goods from the Arabian Gulf. Khan refused to share any of this income, let alone hand it over to the central government. The most powerful and richest warlords commanded border posts with Pakistan, Iran, or Central Asia, where they could gather customs duties, but none earned as much as Ismael Khan.

  Warlords such as Khan had emerged as result of the civil war in the 1990s, when they divided up the country into fiefdoms, until being swept out of power by the advancing Taliban. Now they had defeated the Taliban, and felt stronger than ever. Empowered by, but not necessarily loyal to, the Americans and Karzai, they dominated the political landscape. Often rapacious, corrupt, and ruthless, they hired large militias that terrorized the population but also kept a kind of peace. Their income came from road tolls, the drug trade, or the patronage they received from their foreign backers. Afghans hated them most because, invariably, they were the cat’s paw for neighboring countries. In fact, the Taliban’s initial popularity with the Afghan people had come from the group’s hatred of the warlords.

  Just before he died, Ahmad Shah Masud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, was trying to create a new disciplined political structure out of the loose alliance of warlords in his group. A few months before 9/11, the most important warlords, Rashid Dostum, Ismael Khan, and Karim Khalili, who had been defeated and driven out by the Taliban, returned to Afghanistan and took up arms under Masud’s leadership.

  The routing of the Taliban by the Americans had left the warlords in place and immeasurably strengthened. They were now considered U.S. allies and were all on the CIA’s extensive payroll, but they were a motley bunch. In the north, the Uzbek chief, Gen. Rashid Dostum, protected former Taliban commanders for a price even as his soldiers carried out widespread pillaging and looting against the minority Pashtun population, making it impossible for UN agencies to start humanitarian relief operations there. By February 2002, a few weeks later, fifty thousand Pashtun farmers fled the north. Turkey and Russia were supporting Dostum, but exercising little pressure on him to cooperate with Karzai.4 Dostum’s main rival was the Tajik general Mohammed Atta, who was loyal to Fahim and also armed by the Americans. Another Tajik warlord, General Daud, held sway over Kunduz and three northeastern provinces.

  In the east, Abdul Qadir, the governor of Nangarhar province and the brother of slain commander Abdul Haq, had received lavish CIA funding during the war to mobilize thousands of Pashtun fighters against the Taliban. Yet he failed even to clear the strategic road between Jalalabad and Kabul of bandits. Convoys of relief supplies and foreign aid workers were frequently ambushed as they traveled from Peshawar to Kabul, and three Western journalists were killed on this road. Qadir’s control of four eastern provinces—Nangarhar, Laghman, Nuristan, and Kunar—was fiercely contested by Hazrat Ali, thirty-eight, a small-time tribal leader directly recruited by the CIA and now elevated to warlord.5 Hazrat Ali belonged to the Pashai ethnic minority, whom the Pashtuns considered an under-class, so inadvertently he became the symbol of Pashai assertion. Barely able to write his own name, he was given so much money by the CIA that he quickly created an eighteen-thousand-strong militia. At Tora Bora his men had allowed bin Laden to escape.

  In the southeast, former Taliban commanders were being paid by the CIA to keep the peace. The four critical provinces in the south were ruled by the governor of Kandahar province, Gul Agha Sherzai. The complex amalgam of Pashtun tribes that had supported the Taliban in the south needed special attention, but above all, fair-minded leadership. Instead, Sherzai empowered his own Barakzai tribe at the expense of the others. The Barakzai had a long historical rivalry with the Popalzai, Karzai’s tribe. (Ahmad Shah Abdali Durrani, the founder of modern Afghanistan, was a Popalzai, while his main rival, Jamal Khan, was a Barakzai.) Sherzai’s tribal rivals exposed him for trafficking in drugs, maintaining close contact with the Taliban, and allegedly remaining on the payroll of the ISI even as he earned money from the CIA.6

  In the west there was Ismael Khan, and in the center of the country, in the Hazarajat, the Hazara warlords Karim Khalili, Syed Akbari, and Mohammed Mohaqiq held sway. As they were alienated by Mohammad Fahim and his Tajiks, the Hazaras began to receive extensive aid from Iran. Fahim was by far the most powerful warlord in the country. Although defense minister, he had a narrow parochial interest in keeping the other warlord militias on the government payroll because that made them dependent on his support. He had little interest in building a national army. Fahim and the Tajik Panjsheris in the cabinet controlled all the key security ministries—Defense, Intelligence, Foreign Affairs, and Interior—which made Fahim, as their leader, the most powerful warlord in the cabinet.

  In the aftermath of the war, the Americans institutionalized these divisions, making Karzai and the central government weak and irrelevant. Washington was distracted by preparations for the war in Iraq, unwilling to put U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan to maintain the peace or spend the money needed to reinforce the government’s authority. As a result, the warlords were seen as a cheap and beneficial way to retain U.S. allies in the field who might even provide information about al Qaeda.

  The wealth of the warlords contrasted sharply with the interim government’s immediate poverty. Karzai had no state income, and for the first four months, no cash from donors to pay the salaries of civil servants and police officers. His presidential palace had been bombed out and the gaping holes in many of the rooms brought in snow flurries and chilling draughts. Some ministers moved into their offices to find no windows, desks, chairs, or even pens, while others did not even have a building to call their own. The UN organized the delivery of office supplies to every minister, which included the kind of basic items one gives to a child before he or she starts school. Meanwhile, the warlords were rolling in millions of dollars.

  The new transitional government faced far more daunting tasks than finding furniture for ministers after the war ended. Afghanistan boasted some of the worst living conditions and statistics ever recorded. Its first Human Development Report, compiled in 2004, showed the extent of public suffering.7 The country ranked 172nd out of the 178 countries on the UN Development Programme’s Human Development Index, effectively tying for last place with se
veral African countries. Easily preventable epidemics such as measles, flu, and even diarrhea were killing thousands of people every month, while fifteen thousand women died every year from pregnancy-related illnesses. The country had the highest rate of infant mortality in the world, with 165 infants out of 1,000 dying at birth, while 250, or a quarter, died before they reached the age of five. Life expectancy for women was just forty-four years, one year less than for men. As a result, Afghanistan had the youngest population in the world, with 57 percent under age eighteen. Multiple generations of adults had not had any education and had known only war.

  Despite such appalling conditions there was a powerful feeling of optimism on Kabul’s streets in those early months of 2002. Public confidence in the new government and in Karzai grew as officials and teachers were called back to their jobs, refugees from Iran and Pakistan returned home, and educated Afghans arrived from the West to see their families, bringing with them money to invest. Clean-shaven young men in trousers and shirts appeared in the corridors of the ministries. Shops refitted and painted their premises. A dozen embassies quickly opened, and rental prices soared as diplomats and Western aid agencies sought housing in the destroyed capital. The U.S. embassy reopened in December, under Ryan Crocker, the Dari-speaking diplomat who had led the Geneva talks with the Iranians. The first U.S. diplomat in Kabul for more than a decade, Crocker became the U.S. chargé d’affaires. The embassy building, situated in a vast compound off the main road to the city’s airport, was in total disrepair, and living conditions were tough. Crocker described them: “There were ninety marines and thirty staff, and we were all living and working together. The staff slept in a bunker next to the main building, and there was one room for men and one for women, with bunk beds in very cramped conditions. There were only two wash toilets for one hundred and twenty people, no running water, and it was very, very cold.”8

  In March 2002, Robert Finn was appointed the first U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan since 1992. Finn had spent the past ten years in war zones and spoke fifteen languages, including all the Central Asian tongues. He belonged to the school of diplomacy where expertise, knowledge, and intellectual interest in the countries where you worked were considered vital, as compared to the neoconservatives, who considered the CIA and intelligence gathering the epitome of success in nation building. Even living conditions in Kabul reflected the differences. While senior U.S. diplomats lived in camping trailers, the CIA vetted new recruits and enjoyed far better living conditions in a former Kabul hotel once used by al Qaeda. After the war, dozens of CIA agents were pulled out of retirement from the CIA’s Clandestine Service reserve and rushed to the region. They expanded their premises constantly, taking over adjacent buildings with the help of Fahim and his cronies. The hotel also housed the headquarters for joint CIA-SOF operations, whose goal was to nab al Qaeda leaders, and included space for the young CIA techies who were trawling through captured al Qaeda computers looking for intelligence.

  The CIA’s operations in Afghanistan were vast, complicated, and expensive. They were also inefficient, ineffective, and self-defeating. By funding warlords, who in turn recruited thousands of militiamen who acted as ground forces, bodyguards, and spies for the Americans, the CIA only created further mayhem in the countryside. When CIA-U.S. SOF teams set up bases along the Pakistan border to gather intelligence about al Qaeda, they hired Pashtun tribesmen, paying them up to two hundred dollars a month, plus bonuses to their commanders, when a top monthly wage in Kabul was only fifty dollars. These mercenaries—called the Afghan Militia Force, or AMF—were still being hired as late as 2006. SOF officers had the authority to employ up to one hundred AMF to guard their camps and act as drivers and interpreters. The AMF’s Afghan commanders received cash, weapons, uniforms, communications equipment, and their pick of unearthed Taliban weapons caches, which they then sold on the black market—and which were invariably bought by the Taliban. These commanders became an enormously destabilizing factor in the country, as they considered themselves as unaccountable as their American commanders. The irony was not lost on the Afghan people. Although the Americans had liberated them from the evil of the Taliban, they had brought back another evil: the warlords.

  Meanwhile, the warlords created even greater tensions as they fought one another over control of tolls, drugs, and weapons caches that had been hidden by the Taliban and were being uncovered. In the spring of 2002, when warlord armies were fighting one another in the north and east of the country, the Americans refused to intervene. Dr. Abdur Rehman, forty-nine, the jovial minister for tourism and civil aviation, had been stabbed to death on the tarmac of Kabul international airport by rival warlords in February. In his first nationwide radio address on January 10, 2002, Hamid Karzai spoke of the need to disarm the warlords. In reply, the warlords spurned him by saying that if the Americans had armed them, who was Karzai to tell them to disarm?

  Fahim and the warlords were deeply suspicious when the first British officers arrived in Kabul to head the UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which would take over security of the capital from Fahim’s forces. Fifteen hundred British troops formed the core of ISAF, with twenty-one more countries pledging to provide another five thousand. They were led by the tough, no-nonsense officer Gen. Sir John McColl, who commanded the British army’s Sixteenth Air Assault Brigade. Fahim set about defying McColl’s mandate and delaying the deployment of ISAF, refusing to demilitarize Kabul or remove his troops from the city, as the Bonn Agreement had stipulated. While visiting Tajik units in the city I discovered that Fahim had told his commanders that the foreign forces would soon leave and they should prepare to take control of Kabul again.

  In March, under pressure from ISAF to show more cooperation, Fahim called all the warlords for a conference and a dressing-down in Kabul. It was a remarkable sight to see all the perpetrators of some of the worst crimes in Afghanistan’s history gathered in one room, pledging allegiance to Karzai and ISAF. Their hyperbole was even more extraordinary: “I have no desire for power. I only want to serve my country,” boomed Dostum, the former plumber and recent mass murderer. Ismael Khan stated that a modern army was not needed: “What this country needs are Mujahedin and not an army—marching up and down is a waste of time.” At the end of the conference the warlords promised to behave, but they all knew that as long as Fahim did not demobilize his own militia or rein in his forces, none of the other warlords would feel the need to do so either.

  McColl was a tough and brilliant soldier, with a patient, dogged negotiating style that stunned even the Afghans. He now argued for the need to expand ISAF outside Kabul so that international troops could replace the warlords in keeping the peace. Washington refused to allow any ISAF expansion, however, claiming it would interfere with the hunt for al Qaeda leaders. Rumsfeld quickly cut McColl out of all decision making and refused to meet with him. The biggest obstacle to peacekeeping was now not just warlords such as Fahim but also those in Washington such as Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld.

  As the war wound down, the Bush administration was faced with two policy choices. It was clear by the summer of 2002 that the warlords were becoming stronger while the Karzai regime lacked the resources to compete. The unstated U.S. strategy was to leave Karzai ineffectual in the capital, protected by foreign forces, while relying on the warlords to keep Pax Americana in the countryside and the U.S. SOF forces to hunt down al Qaeda. It was a minimalist, military intelligence-driven strategy that ignored nation building, creating state institutions, or rebuilding the country’s shattered infrastructure. By following such a strategy, the United States left everything in place from the Taliban era except for the fact of regime change.

  An alternative strategy for the United States would have been to adopt a more complex but productive policy of using its power, money, and recently won influence and goodwill to supplement Karzai’s scant power. The United States could have started rebuilding the economy and the army to reduce the influence of the warlords.
Yet Washington followed the first option as the way to minimize U.S. exposure in Afghanistan as it prepared for war in Iraq. Thus for the first eighteen months, until late 2003, the Americans employed a “warlord strategy” in order to be relieved of Afghanistan’s security and political and human rights responsibilities.9 This same strategy was to be recast in Iraq in 2003, when the United States disbanded the Iraqi army and then preferred allowing Shia warlords to mobilize militias rather than to rebuild state structures. Rumsfeld refused to comprehend that keeping the peace and rebuilding nations often needed more troops and resources than winning wars.

  Moreover, even attempts to achieve the first objective of the United States—hunting down al Qaeda—were to fail miserably as the upcoming war in Iraq sucked out the best U.S. resources from Afghanistan. General Franks began moving his best intelligence assets out of Afghanistan and to the Iraq theater. The specially constituted Task Force Five, made up of some 150 SOF who were hunting for bin Laden, was moved in its entirety to Iraq, while another 150 SOF troops in Afghanistan had their numbers cut to 30.10 In February, Franks cut by half the CENTCOM naval force deployed in the Arabian Gulf, even though al Qaeda was known to be escaping by sea to the Middle East. He also sent home the B-1 bombers based in Oman whose smoke trails across the Afghan skyline had signaled the omnipresence of U.S. power. The CIA closed its forward bases in Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif, and Kandahar in March and postponed an $80 million refit of the Afghan intelligence service.

  With the huge demand on CIA officers in Iraq, tours of duty in Afghanistan were just six to eight weeks long. In April, satellite surveillance over Afghanistan and the use of drones and other technological spying facilities were first reduced and then withdrawn. When I met with skeptical junior U.S. officers at Bagram in March, they told me that Franks believed the job in Afghanistan had been done. The war in Afghanistan had cost $17 billion between October 2001 and May 2002, and with an invasion of Iraq on the horizon, Franks had no interest in increasing costs in Afghanistan.11