Descent Into Chaos

by Ahmed Rashid

  Britain had urged Karzai to sack Sher Mohammed Akhunzada and Jan Mohammed Khan, the corrupt governors of Helmand and Uruzgan, as the price for its deployment. British intelligence officers were trying to put together a profile of Helmand province, where intelligence was virtually nonexistent, as U.S. satellite intelligence had never covered Helmand. The Americans promised the British that they would “handle” Musharraf and persuade him to stop the flood of Taliban recruits coming from Pakistan, but Cheney was to block any U.S. criticism of Musharraf.

  When Britain’s defense secretary, John Reid, finally announced the details of the deployment on the eve of the London conference, there was no mention of possible fighting. Fifty-seven hundred British troops would be deployed in Helmand, at a cost of $1 billion over five years. Tanks, artillery, Harrier jets, and Apache helicopters would provide backup. The British would establish a PRT in Lashkargah, while their main base would be Camp Bastion, in the desert. Reid described the mission as obtusely as possible—denying terrorists “an ungoverned space.”13 After heavy criticism from the Conservative opposition, Reid described the mission more fully several weeks later: “Our aim is to extend the authority of President Karzai’s government, to protect those civilian agencies assisting them to build a democratic government and to enable security, stability and economic development throughout the country.”14

  There was still no mention of fighting the Taliban or the drug mafias. In April 2006, Reid uttered words that would come to haunt the Blair government: “We would be perfectly happy to leave in three years and without firing one shot,” he said. Such statements only increased British public cynicism and opposition to the deployment, as the media rightly commented that the government was lying through its teeth.15

  In Canada the newly elected conservative prime minister Stephen Harper took a different tack. He tried to reassure the public that Afghanistan could not become another Iraq, but he did not diminish the dangers of the mission: “Unless we control the security situation in countries like Afghanistan we will see our own security diminished,” he said while visiting Canadian troops in Kandahar.16 The Canadians had received an early setback when Glyn Berry, a senior Canadian diplomat who headed the Kandahar PRT, was killed by a suicide bomber on January 15, 2006. By March, Canada had suffered the heaviest casualties in the south, with ten soldiers killed and thirty-three wounded. In May, when the Canadian parliament voted to extend its Afghan mission by another two years, Harper only narrowly won the vote, by 149 to 145. On the same day, the first Canadian female soldier to die in combat was killed near Kandahar. By May, over half of all Canadians opposed the deployment of Canadian troops.17

  The Dutch were committed to sending twelve hundred troops to Uruzgan—a place whose name most Dutch could neither spell nor pronounce. Dutch generals were extremely wary of any foreign deployment, as in 1995 some four hundred lightly armed Dutch troops deployed in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica were forced to stand by helplessly as the Serbs massacred eight thousand Muslim men and boys. Dutch prime minister Peter Balkenende governed with a coalition that held only a slim majority in parliament. He decided to have an open parliamentary debate on the deployment, so those opposing it could air their views—something that Blair had refused to allow. In the meantime, Balkenende put the Dutch deployment on hold, angering the British and Canadians. In the end, 131 out of 150 members of the Dutch parliament backed the deployment, showing that transparency was a better political strategy than obscuring the truth. Within a few weeks the first Dutch troops arrived in Uruzgan.

  The drama in European capitals was fully reported on the Pushtu and Dari language services of the BBC and Voice of America and played up by the Taliban, who told their fighters that NATO was weak, poorly armed, and demoralized as compared with the Americans. With advice from their supporters in the Pakistani military, the Taliban would exploit the time gap and power vacuum—as U.S. forces withdrew from Kandahar and Canadian and British forces arrived—to attack NATO forces. The Taliban’s strategic aim was to further weaken the resolve of European countries in sending troops to Afghanistan. Copying tactics being used by Iraqi insurgents, the Taliban stepped up suicide attacks and used larger mines and roadside bombs against NATO and Afghan security forces while hiding behind the civilian population.

  NATO officers described to me their intelligence about the Taliban in the south as “appalling.” The British discovered that between 2002 and 2005 the United States had not bothered to monitor Taliban activity in four provinces in the south or across the border in Quetta. One U.S. general in Kabul admitted to me that NATO would pay the price for the U.S. military’s lack of a “lookdown satellite capability” in the south because the Iraq war had taken up so many resources and because the Pentagon had ignored the south, believing there to be no al Qaeda leaders there.

  In the winter of 2005/2006 NATO intelligence estimated that Mullah Dadullah, the overall Taliban commander in the south, had just three hundred men under him and that the Taliban’s total manpower was no more than two thousand. The first realization as to how wrong these estimates were occurred in the first week of February, when Dadullah threw three hundred Taliban into a bid to capture Sangin, a district headquarters in Helmand with important supply lines to Pakistan. The Taliban lost forty men but battled for three days before NATO air strikes forced them to retreat. Fearing a Taliban offensive just before British troops arrived, U.S. forces launched a counteroffensive called Operation Mountain Thrust. The British had planned to secure Lashkargah, acclimatize their troops, build up intelligence, and initiate development projects. Instead they were immediately sucked into battle.

  The Taliban countered by launching their own offensive. Over several days, starting on May 18, the Taliban launched attacks in four provinces, involving up to one thousand fighters, storming towns just a twenty-minute drive from Kandahar city. Dadullah claimed he had control of twenty districts in the south and twelve thousand Taliban under arms. It was the worst violence since 2001, and more than three hundred Afghans were killed. British soldiers occupied small towns in Helmand and were forced to hold them to prevent their falling back into the hands of the Taliban, even though they were undermanned, their logistics chain was not yet set up, and helicopters had not arrived. In the summer desert heat of 50° Celsius (122° Fahrenheit) British troops were stuck inside fortified “platoon houses,” or “hellholes,” for up to forty days at a stretch, holding off the Taliban.

  Relief convoys could not get through to the British garrison in Musa Qala for a month, and soldiers were forced to drink water from a rancid well. In Sangin, one hundred paratroopers fought back forty-four Taliban attacks in twenty-five days. Instead of these British garrisons becoming a security anchor for NATO to win over the population, they became a magnet for hundreds of Taliban, who poured in from Pakistan to do battle and were ready to take heavy losses. Officials from Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID), who were supposed to spearhead development with a budget of $50 million, never showed up.

  Lt.-Gen. David Richards took over command of all NATO troops on May 4. Like other British generals of his generation, Richards was known for both his military acumen and intellectualism. He had served in failing states in Africa and in East Timor and the former Yugoslavia. He arrived in Kabul with a plan to implement an ink spot strategy—occupy key locations, secure and develop them, and then spread out control like an ink stain on paper. However, with British troops surrounded by Taliban the moment they arrived in towns, the ink could not flow.

  Richards suffered under too many masters. NATO states wanted him to preserve their caveats, while Blair insisted that he go softly on Pakistan because of the ISI’s cooperation with MI5 in catching Britain’s domestic terrorists—even though British officers under fire in Helmand were seething with anger at the ISI’s support to the Taliban. The Americans and the Afghans said Richards was too soft with the Pakistanis. Open conflict erupted between Richards and the most senior U.S. officials—the n
ew U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Ron Neuman, and Lt.-Gen. Karl Eikenberry, who was the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and was doing his second stint of duty after having launched the creation of the Afghan National Army in 2002, when he was a major general—over a cease-fire at Musa Qala in Helmand, which British commanders negotiated with Afghan tribal elders in September and which led to the withdrawal of all armed groups, including the British. The Americans were convinced that the cease-fire was a surrender to the Taliban. Richards defended the action, suggesting that it was the way of the future.

  The battles in Helmand provided NATO with incontrovertible proof of Pakistan’s involvement in backing the Taliban. NATO intelligence officers now estimated that there were half a dozen Taliban “commanders’ shuras,” or councils, operating in neighboring Balochistan province. More than one hundred small and medium Taliban commanders—leading between fifteen and three hundred men—were loyal to these shuras, which provided them with recruits, arms, ammunition, money, and food. The Taliban began to operate in battalion-size units of up to four hundred men, with separate units providing logistics. In June the Taliban had sent to Helmand more than one hundred Toyota Land Cruisers from Quetta packed with soldiers and supplies.18

  With the help of al Qaeda and Pakistani extremists, the Taliban had also set up a lethal cottage industry along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border— the manufacture of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The components of the IEDs—electronic panels, triggers, explosives materials, and casings— were manufactured by tribal households on the Pakistani side and then collected by the Taliban, who sent them into Afghanistan, where they were assembled. Soon the Pakistani Taliban would be using the same IEDs against Pakistani forces.

  NATO’s unwillingness to take casualties forced it to depend more heavily on air power than the Americans had ever done, but in doing so it lost any hope of winning over the population. In May alone an estimated 400 Taliban fighters and Afghan civilians were killed in 750 air strikes in the south, more than Afghanistan had ever seen. Capt. Leo Docherty, a British officer in Helmand, later described the campaign as “a textbook case of how to screw up a counterinsurgency.” After quitting the army, he wrote, “We’ve been grotesquely clumsy—we’ve said we’ll be different to the Americans who were bombing and strafing villages, then behaved exactly like them.”19

  The heavy fighting in the south, the widespread publicized deaths of civilians, and a new refugee crisis as families fled the war zone caused a pall of gloom to envelop Kabul, which soon exploded into fury. On May 29 a U.S. Army truck, part of a convoy, had brake failure on a steep hill on the outskirts of Kabul and careened down, hitting a dozen vehicles and killing five people. As crowds gathered, nervous American soldiers in the other trucks opened fire. The killings sparked riots across the city. Police deserted their posts and threw away their uniforms as small groups of rioters rampaged through residential areas, stoning, burning, and ransacking offices of Westerners and NGOs. One mob tried to march on the U.S. embassy, another on the presidential palace, shouting, “Down with Karzai” and “Death to America.” Karzai made no public appearance until the evening. Finally, the ANA restored order, a curfew was imposed, and Karzai appeared on TV to appeal for calm. However, 17 Afghans were dead, scores were injured, and 250 were detained. Karzai promptly accused the NA warlords of instigating the riots, an accusation that led to further political tension.

  Karzai insisted to me that his government was not paralyzed, but that is what it felt like in Kabul as Afghans and Western diplomats openly asked how long the regime could survive with firefights with the Taliban taking place just forty miles away. The riots should have been a wake-up call for the Afghan government about how swiftly it was losing public support. Ministers had stayed at home rather than dealing with the crisis, while NATO and U.S. forces had refused to move out of their barracks. The performance of the police had been downright treacherous. As the Taliban insurgency spread, the police were on the front line, losing more men than the ANA and Western forces combined. In 2005 at least six policemen were killed for every Afghan soldier.20 During the 2006 offensive the Taliban targeted police. Over a year (May 2006 to May 2007), 406 policemen were killed, compared with 170 ANA soldiers. In June 2007, one of the worst months, 67 policemen were killed.

  In April 2005 the U.S. Defense Department took over police training from the Germans, embedding four hundred American advisers with the local police and providing $1.1 billion for training.21 Karzai was expected to carry out police reforms, but in what was now becoming the norm with difficult decisions, he procrastinated indefinitely. After the riots, he finally appointed 69 new police chiefs from a list of 270 officers trained and vetted by the Germans. However, he also appointed 14 other officers who had failed their tests and were known to be crooks.22 In appointing them, Karzai ignored a merit-based system that had been set up with great difficulty. In 2007, as the police crisis remained fraught, the European Union agreed to become a major partner alongside the United States in training the police. In June a European Union Police Mission, or EUPOL, was created to standardize police training, but the Europeans were slow to send trainers into the field.

  On several counts the Taliban began to provide the Pashtuns in the south the semblance of an alternative government. The absence of justice had become one of the primary recruiting tools for the Taliban, who carried out a primitive “justice on the spot” system, according to their interpretation of Sharia law. Their system was brutally harsh but effective, compared with that of the existing courts, which were riddled with corruption and long delays. People did not necessarily prefer Sharia law, but they were comparing it with the absence of any other kind of law. Crime dropped dramatically in areas where the Taliban provided such services. The public also took note when Mullah Omar issued a thirty-point rule book for Taliban fighters to improve their performance in governance and behavior.23 Yet the old bad ways were still there, as the Taliban could not tolerate education, especially for girls. In 2006 the Taliban killed 85 teachers and students and burned down 187 schools, while another 350 more schools were shut down in the south because of Taliban threats.

  At the end of the summer of 2006 the Taliban aimed to rout the Canadians and capture Kandahar city. Over the summer the Taliban collected hundreds of men in Panjwai, a district near Kandahar, and one at a time began to infiltrate them into Kandahar. NATO retaliated belatedly on September 2, when some 10,000 troops, including 2,300 Americans, 2,200 Canadians, and 3,300 British, launched Operation Medusa to clear Panjwai. They discovered thousands of well-entrenched Taliban. Panjwai’s dense orchards, vineyards, mud walls, alleys, and tunnels provided ideal cover for the Taliban as they fought house to house, often using civilians as shields. The Canadians surrounded some 700 Taliban in a cluster of villages called Pashmul, but the Taliban called in heavy reinforcements from Pakistan. Heavy fighting ensued until September 17, when Pashmul, spread across just four square miles, was finally cleared by Afghan troops, who fought the Taliban in hand-to-hand combat.

  NATO chalked up 512 Taliban killed and 160 captured, but then significantly hiked its figures to more than 1,000 killed. Hundreds of Taliban reinforcements coming from Pakistan had been killed in air strikes. While NATO troops were still counting the dead, a suicide bomber killed four Canadian soldiers in Pashmul on September 18.24 Once again the Taliban had taken advantage of a rotation of Canadian troops to mount their offensive. Lt.-Gen. Michael Gauthier, head of the Canadian forces in Afghanistan, later described how “at the point of transition we had insurgents who chose to make a stand and go conventional on us . . . as the next rotation arrived there was a clear and present danger to Kandahar city.”25

  After the battle a report compiled by U.S., NATO, and Afghan forces described the preparations the Taliban had made to capture Kandahar. In the battle, the Taliban had fired an estimated four hundred thousand rounds of ammunition, two thousand rocket-propelled grenades, and one thousand mortar shells, all of which had been stoc
kpiled in Panjwai over many months. More than a million rounds of unused ammunition were unearthed. The Taliban had established training facilities to carry out suicide bombings. A full surgical field hospital was uncovered. NATO intelligence was now better able to map out the Taliban support structure in Balochistan, from ISI-run training camps near Quetta to ammunition dumps to arrival points for the Taliban’s new weapons and meeting places for Taliban commanders in Quetta. “Madrassas run by the Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam Party continue to provide the main source of recruitment while Taliban decision making and its logistics are all inside Pakistan,” the Afghan defense minister, Gen. Rahim Wardak, told me.

  NATO had only just been able to prevent a massive Taliban assault on Kandahar city. There was growing anger within NATO at Pakistan. “It is time for an ‘either you are with us or against us’ ultimatum delivered bluntly to Musharraf,” one NATO commander told me in Kabul. “Our soldiers in the south are hurting because of what is coming out of Quetta, where the Pakistanis are providing the Taliban with a logistics chain and operating cushion.”26 General Richards delivered a blunt message to Musharraf in the first week of October, warning the Pakistani leader that if Kandahar fell, so might his government in Islamabad, because the West would not have tolerated such a setback and would lay the blame squarely on Pakistan.

  The first six months of 2006 witnessed the greatest number of conflict-related deaths since the fall of the Taliban—more than one thousand dead, compared with sixteen hundred killed in the whole of 2005. Twenty-four aid workers had been killed in the same period, compared with thirty-one for the whole of 2005, and forty-seven American and seventeen European soldiers had died in the same period.27 Although they had failed to penetrate Kandahar, the Taliban had put so many men in the field that they were able to continue suicide bombings, ambushes, and attacks in the western and eastern provinces for several weeks. On October 31 they launched simultaneous attacks in five provinces in which 150 people were killed, including four NATO soldiers. It was impossible to improve governance or carry out reconstruction in such a state of insecurity. “The violence is hollowing out government institutions, cowering the population, and testing even enlarged NATO force levels,” said Chris Alexander, the deputy chief of UNAMA.28