by Steve Coll
The Bush administration’s total spending on security in Afghanistan would nonetheless be greater during 2007 than during all previous years combined. The allocations included major new classified investments at Amrullah Saleh’s N.D.S., for the Afghan National Army, and for the police. Paul Miller, the C.I.A. analyst who moved to the White House that year to work on Afghanistan, estimated that total security assistance, classified and unclassified, ballooned toward almost $8 billion a year, at least four times the levels of the “Mr. Big” era when Khalilzad was ambassador in Kabul.10
In February 2007, Bush appeared at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington to speak about the global war on terror. He gave over much of his speech to Iraq, but about halfway through his talk, he disclosed that his administration had just finished “a top-to-bottom review of our strategy” in Afghanistan. Bush laid out renewed aims: “To help the people of that country to defeat the terrorists and establish a stable, moderate, and democratic state that respects the rights of its citizens, governs its territory effectively, and is a reliable ally in this war against extremists and terrorists.” He admitted, “Oh, for some that may seem like an impossible task. But it’s not impossible.”11
In fact, the war on the ground was deteriorating by the month. Its challenges had at last attracted the White House’s attention. Yet the Bush administration’s new strategy remained informed by undue optimism, not least because Afghanistan still looked much better than Iraq. Bush was defensive about the comparison. He told the Joint Chiefs, “Many in Congress don’t understand the military. ‘Afghanistan is good. Iraq is bad.’ Bullshit.”12
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In the parking lot of the Kabul International Airport, Brian Williams met Humayun, the tall driver-cum-bodyguard with whom he would work for the next two months. He was from Kandahar. He mentioned that he had not told his family about his work with the Karzai regime in Kabul, as this would only attract the Taliban’s ire. He kept a pistol in his car. He told Williams that he appreciated what the United States was trying to do in Afghanistan. “The day you leave, the Taliban will be back,” he predicted.13
Williams settled into a room in Hekmat Karzai’s walled compound. Each morning he descended to the common area for tea, naan, and cheese, and to check for news of the latest suicide bombings. If possible, he and Humayun would drive out to crime scenes. Sometimes they arrived when there was still blood on the ground.
Five days after he arrived, Williams drove to meet U.S. Army officers at Bagram Airfield. He was stunned by the self-imposed isolation of the American soldiers and military intelligence officers he met. By 2006 Bagram had acquired some of the amenities common on other American military bases worldwide. There was a bowling alley, a Burger King, and an Orange Julius, Williams discovered. He learned nothing from his meetings except that the American officers knew nothing about why the rise of suicide warfare had occurred or where it was heading. The officers he met seemed to consider “everything beyond their barrier to be a red zone.”14
At N.D.S. headquarters, Williams met Amrullah Saleh’s staff and several of his senior officers. They were better informed. They had a theory of how suicide bombings had accelerated. Their insights were derived mainly from arrests and interrogations. The Iraq war was one factor, they told Williams. Arab technicians fashioning suicide vests and vehicle bombs in Iraq were highly sophisticated, in comparison with the typically illiterate Pashtun commanders of the Taliban. The international jihadists were trying to export their suicide bomb technology to Afghanistan, but with mixed results. In Nimruz, a large province in the southwest, N.D.S. had arrested several Arabs crossing from Iran who were transporting prefabricated suicide belts for the Taliban. N.D.S. believed the majority of bombers striking inside Afghanistan were Pashtuns from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan.
Security officers at the United Nations, who were responsible for the safety of development and political officers scattered around Afghanistan, handed Williams a PowerPoint deck showing about fifty photographs of the severed heads of deceased bombers. There could have been a touch of dubious phrenology in the United Nations analysis of the pictures of the heads—a confidence about what the contours of the faces showed about the bomber’s ethnic or national origins that would not pass as science. But the photos did make clear that the bombers were all very young. To Williams, they appeared to be Pashtuns, not Arabs.
Williams slowly developed a composite picture of a typical suicide bomber in Afghanistan. The Taliban bombers were often young, as young as twelve or thirteen. They typically had little experience at driving, never mind at speed racing along roads in a battered, bomb-rigged Toyota Corolla. Under pressure, in the last seconds of their immature lives, they failed. Police officers summarizing interrogations of detainees in N.D.S. custody explained that the Taliban paid the families of suicide bombers in the range of two thousand dollars to ten thousand dollars, a small fortune in Waziristan or the rural south and east of Afghanistan. The boys were recruited from madrassas where they had been enrolled for years in a curriculum of suffocating political-religious instruction.15
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In Pakistan, during the first half of 2007, separately from Williams’s inquiries, Pakistan Army officers, psychologists, and social scientists confronted a parallel rise in suicide bombings against Pakistani targets. These attacks, too, emanated from Waziristan. Al Qaeda, Afghan Taliban, Pakistani Taliban, and Punjabi radicals had turned against the Pakistani state and I.S.I. itself on the grounds that it had betrayed Islam through alliance with the United States.
Abu Bakr Amin Bajwa, a Pakistani brigadier posted to Waziristan, stumbled into an abandoned Taliban suicide bomber school while on patrol. In Razmak, a district of North Waziristan near the Afghan border where Arab Al Qaeda units had embedded, he visited a jannat, or paradise facility for suicide bombers in the final stages of preparations. The recruits studied in concrete rooms whose walls were painted with murals of the afterlife, “channels of milk and honey, fruit trees, green mountains, street lights, and animals like camels and horses.” Another room depicted paintings of virgin girls. One of the young women was shown filling a water jug at a pond. The faces of the virgins and the animals had been crudely brushed out in keeping with Taliban proscriptions against living figures in art. On the walls of the final room, Bajwa saw the names of suicide bombers who had fulfilled their missions, “written in blood.” Across the way he found a water tank “where the Taliban used to execute or torture the people who would oppose them or spy on them.” Family finances, enticements of paradise, and torture created an environment that no thirteen-year-old boy was likely to withstand independently.16
Bajwa discovered further that the boys were injected daily with the antianxiety medicines Valium and Xanax and weekly with Penzocine, an analgesic. Trainers preferred boys who were either seriously ill, “mentally challenged,” or else had a reason for revenge, such as a family member killed in military operations. Bombers typically operated in pairs, monitored by their trainers. Those known to be suffering from mental illness or paralysis could be remotely detonated.17
Shazadi Beg, a British barrister who worked on programs to rehabilitate such boys in Pakistan after they were captured by authorities, encountered a fourteen-year-old in a Pakistani jail. He had been arrested after a failed suicide attack. The boy was shackled by the ankles and handcuffed. His eyes darted around the room. Beg asked what he was looking at. “I’m trying to see if there is something I can kill you with,” he answered.
The boy had been recruited from his family in South Waziristan but said he did not want to see them again. He had been arrested at an army checkpoint, wearing a suicide jacket, just two hours from his home; it was the first time he had ever left his village. “I am in dishonor. I failed in what I was supposed to do.” He said that if he was released he would complete his mission. His eyes brimmed with tears when Beg asked if he missed his mother, but he tried very hard not
to show emotion and said that his mission was to kill unbelievers. He refused to watch television because he believed it was the devil’s instrument and designed to deceive him. He had memorized the Koran yet could not translate the meaning of any verses from Arabic to Urdu or Pashto.18
Psychiatrists who counseled former suicide bomber recruits in Pakistan found that the kids were bullied, assigned menial tasks, and beaten if they did not accomplish them. They were provided marijuana as a reward. They adapted. They had no alternative.19
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The images of afterlife at the bomber school in Razmak—horses and virgins filling water pots from a pond—suggested how Taliban commanders had refined Al Qaeda’s ideology to communicate with rural Pashtun communities. To Brian Williams this helped to explain why so many Afghan Taliban suicide operations targeted armored military convoys or armed guards at the perimeter of walled security bases, rather than marketplaces, mosques, or other soft targets, where they might kill many more people and sow terror, even if their victims were civilians. During 2006 and 2007, Taliban suicide bombers did attack civilians in settings such as dog fights where gambling took place, but they did not often follow the Iraqi or Pakistani sectarian pattern of killing large numbers of civilians deliberately. To maintain legitimacy among Pashtun families sacrificing sons, the suicide operations had to be honorable. It was acceptable to die in an attempted military attack on a U.N. convoy, even if the attack was difficult. It was not as honorable to blow up pious Afghan Muslims in a bazaar. This pattern would dissolve in the years to come, particularly as I.S.I. and the Haqqani network sought to destabilize Kabul, and as sectarian feeling hardened in the intensifying war, but at the beginning of the suicide bombing wave, Williams’s research showed, the recruits and their families seemed to require a traditional military purpose.
As Williams completed his research, the number of Afghan suicide bombers who changed their minds at the last minute also impressed him. Afghan police showed him suicide vests that boys had torn off, dropped, and run away from. By now Williams empathized with the bombers and felt he understood their ambivalence. They really believed in the righteousness of their struggle. The attacks of September 11 meant nothing to them or their families; they did not even have televisions. The families that accepted payment for their sacrifice and glorified their martyrdom “really believe in the Taliban and believe in the war and the goodness of it,” Williams reflected.20
Yet suicide bombing should not be understood as an indigenous aspect of the Taliban’s revival, he concluded. In Gardez, he found D.V.D.s stacked for sale in a market. They were designed to inspire suicide bombers. The programs were Iraqi productions, originally produced in Arabic but dubbed in Pashto for the Afghan market. They presented calls to martyrdom amid naheeds, or Islamic vocal works. This was the clearest evidence Williams had yet encountered of “the Iraq effect.”
In fact, the number of suicide bombings in Afghanistan declined in the years after Williams’s study, while the number of land mine or improvised explosive device attacks increased more than sixfold. As N.A.T.O. and the U.N. imported armored vehicles and took greater precautions, powerful land mines were a more effective tactical counter for the Taliban. Suicide bombings constituted about 4 percent of all Taliban bombings in 2007; three years later, they constituted less than 1 percent, although the number of assassinations and mass casualty attacks against civilians increased.
Williams felt more convinced than ever before “of the rightness of the U.S. going into Afghanistan, that the U.S. needed to be there to fight off the Taliban,” as he put it. Yet his support was tempered by his shock at how badly the war was going. Back home, he wrote up classified and unclassified versions of his findings. (Because he did not yet have a top secret security clearance, once he turned in the classified paper, he wasn’t allowed to look at it again.) Williams presented his findings to analysts at the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center. The contractor who had recruited him to do the study also asked him to a conference at a Virginia hotel, to present his work to about eighty C.I.A., military, and other intelligence analysts.
“I don’t think this is organic” to Afghanistan, Williams told them. The C.I.A. analysts he encountered accepted that, but those from the Defense Intelligence Agency challenged him. The back-and-forth went on for ten minutes. How do you know suicide bombing did not evolve intrinsically from Afghan culture? the more skeptical analysts asked.
Well, Williams said, all he could say was that the pattern of attacks he had documented showed that Taliban suicide squads were made up of poorly qualified, often coerced youngsters. Many in his audience “didn’t like” his overall conclusion, which was: “The Iraq war had destabilized the Afghan war.”21
FIFTEEN
Plan Afghanistan
During the first few years after the Taliban’s fall from power, opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan rose by about a quarter. During 2006, it boomed. Afghan farmers planted just over four hundred thousand acres in poppy, the most ever measured, enough to manufacture just over 90 percent of the world’s annual heroin supply. More than three million Afghans—about 14 percent of the population—by now participated in the drug economy, according to the United Nations. Afghan farmers might earn just over $30 planting an acre of wheat, but more than $500 for poppy. The total export value of opium and derived products like morphine was about $4 billion, or just over half the size of the legal Afghan economy. It was hard to say how many Afghans participated in those export profits, yet they certainly benefited from the “farm gate” price for poppy of about $1 billion, which was more than 10 percent of the economy.1
More than half of the poppy crop grew in the irrigated river belts of Helmand and Kandahar, the Taliban heartland. George W. Bush had served eight years as a border state governor in Texas and knew how drug syndicates had destabilized Mexico and Colombia. The fact that the Taliban’s revival as a fighting force in 2006 coincided with an opium boom attracted Bush’s attention. The National Security Council had earlier asked the Drug Enforcement Administration’s intelligence division to produce a study comparing the Taliban with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or F.A.R.C., a leftist insurgent movement funded in part by Colombia’s cocaine economy.2 In the circumstances, this was the sort of intelligence study where both the commissioning party—the White House—and the analysts assigned knew roughly what the findings would be. It would have been surprising if the D.E.A. had reported back to the White House that the Taliban were not like the F.A.R.C. or that drugs figured little in their military resurgence.
Supervision of the assignment had fallen to Michael Braun, a career D.E.A. officer and administrator who had built up the agency’s presence in Afghanistan. He served as director of the D.E.A.’s Office of Special Intelligence until early 2005, when he became chief of operations. Earlier in his career, Braun had been deployed abroad for seven years in Operation Snowcap, the Reagan-era paramilitary program in which Special Forces–trained D.E.A. agents embedded with Bolivian, Peruvian, and Colombian police and military forces to attack Andean coca labs and traffickers. In the early 1990s, he had seen up close how the F.A.R.C. and Peru’s Shining Path Marxist guerrillas operated.3
The D.E.A. study about Afghanistan took note of recent academic work on the causes of civil wars. The Stanford University political scientists James Fearon and David D. Laitin had published influential studies in 2003 and 2004. They coded and analyzed scores of civil wars fought between 1945 and 1999. One of their most striking findings was that civil wars were getting longer. In the late 1940s, many internal conflicts lasted only two years, whereas by 1999, they lasted sixteen years on average. Fearon’s analysis also showed that self-funding guerrilla groups with direct access to drug profits fight for unusually long periods, up to thirty or forty years. The F.A.R.C., for example, had been battling the Colombian state since 1964.4
Now the Taliban were “going down the same path,” Braun concluded. Reporting from t
he D.E.A. office in Kabul showed that Taliban commanders had shifted from providing protection services to morphine labs in Afghanistan to actually running labs. To Braun, that made sense because it was similar to what Marxist groups in Latin America had done after they lost Soviet subsidies. Here the Taliban were also adapting to the loss of official subsidies. During the 1990s, the Taliban had received open support from Pakistan and Gulf States. Now the pressure on Pakistan not to get caught providing aid to the Taliban had forced the movement into greater financial self-reliance. Heroin was part of the Taliban’s solution, Braun believed. And since infidels in Europe consumed most of Afghanistan’s heroin, Taliban ideologists could rationalize their participation in the trade.5
The Bush administration had not previously linked war strategy in Afghanistan with drug policy. Mary Beth Long, an attorney, was the top Pentagon official in charge of counternarcotics policy. When she arrived in 2004, she discovered that the Pentagon’s leadership, military and civilian, were “not interested” in suppressing opium poppy planting in Afghanistan. Some Pentagon officials asserted that they did not have authority under American law to conduct aggressive antidrug campaigns outside Colombia, even if they wished to do so. Long developed a plan to clarify that the Army could indeed “use our authorities, like the authorities that we have in Colombia,” in Helmand and Kandahar. But it wasn’t clear to her that anyone outside of the D.E.A. wanted to militarize the fight against opium in Afghanistan. A staffer for General David Barno, the commander in Afghanistan during Zalmay Khalilzad’s tour as ambassador, accused Long of “trying to do a Cheney on them” by using argumentative intelligence to expand the war’s scope. In addition, it hardly needed pointing out that American policy after 2002 empowered warlords with ties to the drug trade, from north to south. The Pentagon and the C.I.A. worked with “the worst of the worst, and they didn’t care what these guys did on the side,” as Doug Wankel, a D.E.A. agent who served in the U.S. embassy in Kabul, put it. “That’s just a fact.”6