Aftermath

by Nir Rosen

  A senior UN official agreed. “The police are highly corrupt,” he said. “They are at the center of the collapse of the state and the Karzai government. They are involved in everything from corruption to harassment. Locals feel alienation from police, and they have been the best promoters of the Taliban. The police make them support the Taliban.”

  “The Afghan National Police are corrupt and parasitic on the population partly because they are not well paid or trained,” according to Nathaniel Fick of the new Washington-based think tank the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). “It’s corruption from need, not from greed. At three hundred dollars a month, a family with a couple of kids can live in rural Afghanistan. The average minimum monthly salary is three hundred a month; we pay them one hundred and twenty a month.” Fick added that the salary was set to increase to a paltry two hundred a month, but one way or another, “the police always get paid.” Logistics were also a problem. “We need paved roads,” he said. “These guys get paid when the paymaster travels down a gravel road with an American escort with the money. So guys in rural outposts don’t get paid, so they become parasitic, and the circle goes around.”

  Fick is a former Marine officer who served in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002 and in Iraq in 2003. In 2007 he was an instructor at the counterinsurgency academy in Kabul. He was also portrayed in a positive light as the platoon leader in Generation Kill, a book based on a series in Rolling Stone that also became an HBO series. In August 2008 Fick returned from a visit to Afghanistan, where he and a colleague conducted research for CNAS’s impending strategic assessment of U.S. policy in that country. “We met with tribal elders in Ghazni, and they told us they were slapped on one cheek by the Taliban and on the other by government,” Fick told me. “There is bribery in every office, total lack of security, police corruption.” Afghans didn’t trust the coalition’s commitment, he said. “They think we’re going to leave, so they stay on the fence.”

  The Americans and their allies arrogantly presumed they could create a state out of nothing in a fissiparous country with barely any roads linking different regions to one another, and then tried to make it a strong centralized state at that. In the beginning, overcome with a sense of victory, they ignored the Taliban and Pakistan. The Taliban were not part of the peace process in Bonn because the Americans didn’t want them there. Pakistan’s role was neglected at the beginning of the power-sharing arrangement. Most of the members in Karzai’s first cabinet had close to ties to India, archenemy of Pakistan, or to Iran, and there were too few Pashtuns. The Pakistanis felt alienated, and they invested in the Taliban to regain influence and power.

  “The way people are treated in Afghanistan makes you feel disgusted about your own existence,” a senior UN humanitarian official told me. “For almost thirty years, Afghans lived in extreme flux. They are the most resilient and courageous population. They are skilled survivors. I can see the return of symptoms I saw before the fall of the Taliban: uncertainty, you are with several sides at once. This is everywhere—Kabul too.” A European ambassador added that even though Afghans don’t want the Taliban to rule, they will back a winner. “They don’t want to back the government, and in eighteen months’ time, the Taliban will ride back into the village and behead anybody who has made a deal with the coalition,” he said.

  Living in a country with few resources and a legacy of thirty years of war has made Afghans the ultimate survivors. Pashtun elders have to negotiate competing claims and obligations as well as competition for resources and complex identities—their tribe, their region, the governor. (Is his tribe allied or at odds with ours? Was he with the Taliban before or opposed to them? Which party was he with in the ’80s?) The elders can get resources from the government, the Americans, the Taliban, drug lords, and neighboring countries. If an elder meets with the Americans, he will have to answer to the Taliban that night. If he refuses to meet with the Americans, the Americans will perceive his village as hostile and might bomb it. There could be a blood feud with a neighboring town or tribe because somebody was killed as a result of competition over land or water resources.

  Even the reform of the Afghan army, of which the Americans were so proud, was fraught with problems. The army was still predominantly Tajik, so when it went to the south it was confronted with serious linguistic problems that may cause ethnic tensions in the future. The Afghan army relies on the support of U.S. forces and airpower; it will always require an American presence. It cannot function on its own. The Americans decided to expand the Afghan army from eighty thousand to one hundred twenty thousand, but this would take another five years (time they don’t have).

  In August 2008 the American-led coalition, the UN, and the Karzai government were pinning their hopes on the 2009 presidential elections in Afghanistan. But a senior UN official told me, “You can’t fix the insurgency with an election. It’s a socio-economic phenomenon that goes well beyond the border of Afghanistan.” A British intelligence officer told me, “The Taliban are only too happy to keep Karzai in power. He’s impotent in every single way. He made a lot of deals to get in power and stay in power, he’s all about his own political survival, he’s a weak man who refused to stand up to the bullies. We need a clean individual who these other individuals can’t nipple-tweak. We need a guy who can say, ‘All the old deals are off.’”

  Often very little distinguishes a tribe or village that decides to align itself with the government from one that decides to join the army or support the Taliban and send its sons to fight the Americans. It might be a contract, a personal dispute, a relative on one side or the other. “A lot of this is about power and local influence,” the intelligence officer said. “Parts of society will be poor and powerless if they accept Karzai’s order. They want to achieve status and influence. If they accept legitimate structures, they’re accepting their doom. A lot can be explained in Darwinian terms. Across nature you see alternative strategies. Fighting is an alternative strategy: you can be Mr. Big in your community.”

  In 2006 the Taliban fought the Americans in conventional engagements. “The Taliban were being wiped out in huge numbers,” the intelligence officer said. “They were going at it jihad-style. So the Taliban went for asymmetry.” The Taliban were not experienced in insurgent warfare at the beginning of the occupation, but they showed themselves able to learn and adapt and even use technologies they had previously abhorred. They had a harder time accessing urban areas, so they made deals with criminal gangs. “The saving grace will be the winter,” said one senior NGO official. “They can’t move in the winter.” But in January 2008 the Taliban attacked the five-star Serena Hotel in Kabul using shooters and suicide bombers. The attack was important because it showed an intention to kill foreigners regardless of who they were.

  The Taliban were successfully bypassing traditional tribal mechanisms. Young men came into villages and ordered people around. Many did not care about Pashtunwali, the traditional code Pashtuns follow. Instead they were part of a new globalized jihadist identity. They established a harsh law and order, and didn’t allow others to fight or carry weapons. They engaged in more car bombings and suicide attacks, using tactics imported from Iraq. These attacks persuaded people not to cooperate with the Americans and demonstrated that the Americans could not provide security. Local Taliban commanders could be pressured and influenced by the communities they came from, so the Taliban were replacing them with outsiders free from that pressure. The Taliban ran a very effective social terror campaign and could operate deep in civilian communities. “They’re killing more and more tribal elders,” the senior NGO official said. “We can’t expect communities to show solidarity with the government when we can’t provide for their security—it’s ridiculous.” The military was wrongly focused on what he called “symptomatic” factors, like how many bombs went off in an area. “The pulse of a community is what drives an insurgency, not symptomatic factors,” he said. “Talk to Afghans, look at school burnings and assassinations. It’s a
qualitative assessment; you can’t crunch it in quantitative terms. But the military can’t do anything about it until it’s symptomatic. The conflict is taking place at a lower and lower level. There are not enough foreign troops or local troops. We’ve disarmed warlords and traditional power structures, and the Taliban are destroying traditional power structures, so it’s wiping out everything that stands in their way. Young Pashtuns are increasingly picking up arms against the government. We disarmed people and undermined traditional power structures, and we’re now wondering why the Taliban are running riot.”

  My friend who had served as a commander for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar until 1992 and then as an official in the Taliban government was not sanguine when he drew comparisons. During the Soviet occupation the foreign army was larger and more powerful than the coalition today, at more than one hundred thousand, and the Afghan government was stronger than the current one as well, he told me. “The Russians never arrested women,” he said. “The Americans arrest Afghan women and take them to bases. The end will be like with the Russians. The Americans will never succeed in containing the conflict. There will be more bleeding, evacuation of foreigners. It’s coming to the same situation as the Communist forces, who were confined to the provincial capitals by 1985 or 1986. There were 465,000 military and civilian members of the puppet government, but the Russians were still confined to their bases.”

  “Two years ago you could build a road or a bridge in a village and say, ‘Please don’t let the Taliban come,’” a senior development official told me. “Now you’ve reached the stage where the hearts-and-minds business doesn’t work. The countryside is caught between the coercive forces of state and coercive forces of antistate.” He quipped that the Americans’ continuous bombing of weddings wasn’t helping either. The Americans tried to increase aid and development and improve the government’s image only after it was too late. Afghans were already alienated, and the use of PRTs (Provincial Reconstruction Teams) delegitimized the aid, associating it with the military. American use of airpower convinced people that the coalition forces were not committed to fight and were cowardly, as I saw from my time with the Taliban.

  After I left Afghanistan, I got regular e-mails from the U.S. military notifying me of how many Taliban coalition forces had killed, but all this showed me was how popular the Taliban continued to be and how many more of them there were than the U.S. claimed. Of course, many of those killed were civilians, and those casualties—along with the Americans’ increasing reliance on warlords and militias, who had imposed a reign of terror on the population—meant that it was too late to win hearts and minds.

  The former Taliban government official agreed. “It’s too late to bring security by development.” That phase, the development official told me, ended in 2004. The former Taliban official explained the problems facing Afghan villagers. “You have to decide to be with Taliban or be with government,” he said. “In Logar, if you are with the government, you have to move to Kabul. If you are with Taliban you can stay, but you may have to give them your son.”

  IN MAY 2009 Defense Secretary Robert Gates—the only holdover from the Bush administration—announced that Gen. Stanley McChrystal would replace Gen. David McKiernan as the top commander in Afghanistan. The unceremonious defenestration of the respected McKiernan was meant to send a strong signal of a new approach to the war. McChrystal, known among colleagues as a “snake eater,” had a background in special operations and counterterrorism. He ordered the fifth strategic review of the war since Obama’s presidency.

  McChrystal’s promotion confirmed the ascendance of a new generation of officers epitomized by Gen. David Petraeus, now commander of Central Command and charged with overseeing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The wars had created a community of counterinsurgency proponents in the Defense Department and at Washington think tanks. Many were serious intellectuals and veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who had spent years exhorting the military and government to embrace COIN in fighting the global war on terror. The 2007 surge in Iraq and its alleged success in reducing violence has led this new generation of officers to dominate strategic thinking.

  In December 2008 General McKiernan asked for thirty thousand more troops and stressed that he needed them for a few years. It would not be a short surge, like the one in Iraq. In March 2009 President Obama unveiled his new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The goals were “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda and its safe havens in Pakistan and to prevent their return to Pakistan or Afghanistan.” The tool would be COIN. The Americans gave themselves one year to “shift the momentum” in the war, meaning to stop losing. With thirty-six thousand American troops already in Afghanistan, Obama ordered an additional seventeen thousand combat troops and four thousand trainers. By mid-2010, troop numbers finally equaled the number stationed in Iraq, at nearly one hundred thousand.

  Obama insisted that the war and extremism could not be solved through military means alone. He cautioned against focusing on the concept of “victory” when dealing with Al Qaeda, stressing that he wanted to deny the movement bases where they could train people or launch attacks. Obama’s new strategy called for a civilian surge as well. But there were not many civilians available, and most of those duties would be filled by the military.

  Despite admitting that there was no military solution, Obama was relying on the military. And he reproduced the pathologies of his predecessor, treating Muslims as if they were one entity and the world as if it was a battlefield. Under Obama the United States has expanded its operations in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. In all cases violence has increased. In Al Qaeda’s worldview, Muslims are under attack by Christians and Jews who want to take Muslims’ resources and perhaps convert them too.

  The Bush administration had to transform its response to the 9/11 attacks into a crusade because, in purely security terms, the most powerful nation the world has ever seen went to war against two hundred unsophisticated extremists. Looking at it like that diminishes to absurdity the enemy and the threat it poses, but many in the defense policy establishment were nostalgic for a real enemy, like fascism or communism, and so they made the conflict about culture. The United States adopted Al Qaeda’s view of the world, and it too treated the entire world stage as a battlefield.

  In July 2009 McChrystal issued new orders for soldiers not to pursue Taliban fighters if there was a chance of civilian casualties, and to drive slower and more respectfully on Afghanistan’s roads. But his predecessor had issued similar orders, albeit with less media fanfare—the new ones were not more likely to be obeyed. Thousands of Afghan civilians had been killed by the Americans since the war began. Most were killed by U.S. airstrikes, but many others were shot at checkpoints or in raids. Usually the military denied the civilian deaths until the media showed videos of their corpses. Most American-caused civilian casualties happened when soldiers called for close air support in the midst of a battle, so there was no time to check for civilians in the target range. In one attack alone, in May, the Americans killed between 86 and 140 civilians in an airstrike in western Afghanistan.

  In late June the U.S. military initiated the first big push of the Afghan surge. Four thousand Marines launched an offensive to take over Taliban-controlled villages in Helmand, the province with the most attacks and the most poppy production for the country’s lucrative drug trade. But the plan called for an “Afghan face,” in the form of the Afghan army and police, and the Americans were desperately short of those. Afghan police were essential because they knew the language and the people and could provide intelligence. Their presence was needed to convince Afghans that the Americans were fighting on behalf of Afghanistan, and that it wasn’t a foreign occupation. If the Americans ever wanted to leave, they would have to train enough Afghan security forces so that they could hand the task of securing the country to them. There were only about 170,000 members of the Afghan army and police, although their expansion was being fast tracked. Afghan National Security Forces (AN
SF) were supposed to hold an area after the Americans cleared it of insurgents, but there weren’t enough of them. While the Americans were initially focused on creating an Afghan army, they neglected the important need for a police force.

  In June 2009, in Helmand’s provincial capital of Lashkar Gah, I met a group of Americans working with the Afghan police. The Americans shared a base with the Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP) and the Provincial Reserve (PR), two special police units considered elite in comparison to local Afghan National Police (ANP). Authority in Helmand was divided between the British Army and the U.S. Marines. On my first day there I went to the ANCOP base and sat on the floor drinking green tea with the PR. One man asked me if I wanted to go sleep. He showed me where his bedroom was and offered to take me there. The next day he asked why I hadn’t come there to sleep with him. Jawad, another member, had been with the PR for one year. He had lost between fifteen and twenty friends in attacks since then, he said. “I like this job,” he told me when I asked if it wasn’t too dangerous. “If something is in your destiny, it’s coming, no one can save you. Every time we defeat them. It’s hard to remove the Taliban roots because some of them live here.” Many of the Americans had learned basic Farsi and Pashtu, the languages most commonly spoken in Afghanistan, and they bantered back and forth with the Afghans, teasing them with local expressions.