The Wrong Enemy

by Carlotta Gall

  A former mujahideen commander called Lewanai was driving along a side road toward the village when he heard the explosion and halted his car a few yards short of the main highway. He had three passengers with him: his eighty-year-old father, Haji Zarpadshah; his uncle, Haji Shin Makhe; and a sixteen-year-old nephew, Farid Gul. The Marines came into sight, and the gunner opened fire on his car, shredding it with dozens of rounds. Lewanai ducked and rolled out of his side door and took cover behind a mound of earth. His three passengers did not have time. They died in their seats, their bodies ripped apart by the barrage of fire. “They opened fire and were shooting for ten minutes,” Lewanai told us afterward. The car was struck by 250 bullets, Afghan investigators counted. Further along the road, the Marines shot at cars stopped at a gas station, killing four people in a minibus including a one-year-old baby.

  The Marines claimed that they had come under a complex ambush from several directions after the blast, but Afghan and U.S. military investigators disputed that assertion. When the same unit shot up two civilian cars five days later, commanders ordered them out of Afghanistan. “It is a matter of training, leadership, and discipline; there were lapses in all three,” Nicholson told me later.15 The training is to shoot your way out of an ambush, but the leader of a unit has to understand the situation, work out if the troops are receiving fire and where from, he said. To the Afghan survivors and relatives, he made the most heartfelt apology of any American commander in Afghanistan at a ceremony with relatives of the victims in Jalalabad. He repeated his apology in full to a news teleconference with Pentagon reporters:

  So I stand before you today, deeply, deeply ashamed and terribly sorry that Americans have killed and wounded innocent Afghan people. We are filled with grief and sadness at the death of any Afghan, but the death and wounding of innocent Afghans at the hand of Americans is a stain on our honor and on the memory of the many Americans who have died defending Afghanistan and the Afghan people. This was a terrible, terrible mistake, and my nation grieves with you for your loss and suffering. We humbly and respectfully ask for your forgiveness.

  His statement that he was ashamed of American Marines created anger back home, particularly among the Marines command. It nearly cost him a promotion. When I asked him later why he reacted to the shooting so strongly, his answer showed a deep sympathy and affinity for the Afghans. “These people, they have lives of such hardship and endure such deprivation that if you take away their respect, if you show disrespect to them, you have offended them much more deeply than, say, a Westerner can be offended by a similar action,” he said. “It is inconceivable how damaging it is to show disrespect to these people.”

  Nicholson got his promotion and went on to command American forces in southern Afghanistan at the beginning of the 2009 surge. He returned for a third tour in December 2010 as a major general, promoted to deputy chief of staff, operations, at the ISAF command headquarters in Kabul. By now the coalition was deep in the surge and preparing for the transition to Afghan-led security and the drawdown of U.S. forces. Nicholson was assigned to conduct an inquiry into civilian casualties and the U.S. conduct of night raids, which had become by then the source of the Afghan president’s greatest complaints against American forces. I went to interview him on the subject of night raids—and found he was a supporter of them, even though they were killing so many Afghans. By then the Taliban insurgency had become so prevalent that a full surge, and a pitiless campaign of dozens of raids a night, had become necessary. Nicholson reminded me of Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, the fearless and upright American officer who fills the pages of A Bright Shining Lie, Neil Sheehan’s epic chronicle of the Vietnam War.16 Vann gave more than a decade of service in Vietnam, exposed much of the brutality and ineffectiveness of U.S. strategy there, but also refused to give up on the idea of winning. Nicholson seemed to be the same: one of a growing number of American officers who have invested much of their careers in Afghanistan, who believe wholeheartedly in the mission, and who remain unswervingly optimistic.

  Yet despite the best intentions of men like Nicholson, the American-led campaign has destroyed much in the process of trying to build, and has left many Afghans vowing revenge and Afghanistan to an uncertain future.

  7

  The Taliban Return

  “We told the government for months the situation was bad, that the Taliban were coming and killing people, and that it would get difficult if they became too numerous.”

  —resident of Kandahar

  2005. The mujahideen had been part of life in Afghanistan for over two decades. Recruited from the villages and refugee camps to fight the Soviet occupation, they were mostly rural men—virtually every family in the countryside had sons among them. They fought a guerrilla war in the mountains for over a decade, and then in 1992 they seized power and invaded the cities. They occupied compounds and bases in every town. Their guards lolled on chairs outside the gates, and gunmen careered in and out in pickup trucks, rockets and machine guns strapped to the back. The Taliban carried on in much the same way when they took power. They used the same bases and showed the same love for weapons and cars. When the Taliban left, the mujahideen reappeared and took back their old compounds. They were mostly a rough lot, and were often loathed by city dwellers, but I learned early on that the mujahideen were always friendly to a foreign journalist, offering cups of tea and the latest news. They knew what was going on and were open with information.

  By the spring of 2005, though, the mujahideen were taken out of business. All over the country, the familiar compounds where we had often stopped by to ask about security or recent events stood abandoned. The mujahideen were being disarmed and demobilized under a UN-sponsored program. In the northern town of Balkh, a compound that had served as a barracks for mujahideen and Taliban for twenty years was returned to the adjacent hospital. In Herat in western Afghanistan, two sprawling bases that took up an entire hillside of the city were emptied. A few guards were left at the main gate, watching over a pile of rusting ammunition awaiting disposal. In Gereshk, in the southern province of Helmand, a base we had often visited was deserted, the gate left ajar.

  The commander of Gereshk was a man called Haji Mir Wali, a tall, barrel-chested fighter with a gray beard and a silk turban. His forearms were so big they made the Kalashnikov he carried look like a toy. His guards wore caps embroidered with glittering rhinestones, typical of Helmand and Kandahar. I had first met him back in January 2002, on a lonely stretch of road in Helmand when armed mujahideen had stopped our jeep. They were insisting that we proceed with an armed escort, and were offering us their services. It felt like a scam. We were standing in the middle of the road, arguing, when a large convoy of SUVs approached and I waved it down. Mir Wali emerged, Kalashnikov in hand. He listened in silence and then sent the mujahideen packing with a few short words. He gave us an escort of his own guards. As we drove off, they told us who he was: a leader of Hesbe-Islami, the largest Afghan mujahideen faction, now appointed the corps commander of Helmand, and the most powerful man in the southwest.

  Like many mujahideen, Mir Wali came from humble beginnings. A twenty-five-year-old secondary school teacher at the time of the Russian invasion in 1979, he formed a thirty-man-strong defense group with fellow teachers and students in their village. Their band grew as others joined them, some of whom had had guerrilla training, and they began attacking Soviet forces. Gradually their following stretched along a swath of the Helmand River Valley, which gave them a supply route from Pakistan and positions from which they could ambush Russian military convoys along the main ring road. By the early 1990s, Mir Wali commanded over a thousand men and had pushed out rivals to control half of Helmand province. His followers were students, engineers, and teachers like himself, and illiterate farmhands, shepherds, and laborers. They were hardy, canny fighters who knew the terrain, and he managed them with an iron fist. He and his men caused their share of strife in the 1990s as they battled other groups for local supremacy. Mir
Wali was eventually forced out by the Taliban, but seven years later, when the Taliban fell, he and his fighters returned. All over Afghanistan people accused U.S. forces of bringing back the warlords and unruly militias, which had plagued their lives in the 1990s, but many people in the villages had long ties with the mujahideen, and soon tribal figures and village elders swamped Mir Wali’s compound at Gereshk bearing greetings or petitions for jobs or assistance, or offering information. He was someone they all knew. He became the face of the new government in their district.

  For the next few years after 2001, Mir Wali served as the army corps commander in Helmand province, controlling 1,200 men including 225 officers from all over the province. Many of them were old comrades in arms or their sons and younger relatives from the villages. His role, he said, was to watch for any regrouping or buildup of Taliban, but the provincial governor, Sher Mohammad Akhundzada, and his security chiefs saw Mir Wali as a rival for power in the province. The corps commander and his men were among the first to be slated for disarmament and demobilization under a UN program in 2004.

  The United Nations and the U.S.-led coalition were intent on a nationwide disarmament program to reduce the power of the militia commanders and prevent any repeat of the factional violence of the 1990s. There was a strong sense in Kabul that peace was finally within reach after twenty-five years of war, and that, with a UN peacekeeping force in place—in the capital, if nowhere else—the warlords and their militias should be disarmed and prevented from destabilizing the fragile government. The mujahideen’s big guns and old Soviet tanks, booty from the Russian occupation, were put under wraps in government bases. A national army arose, built from scratch. Mir Wali was told by the president’s national security advisor that he could go into the highway police or run for parliament. He chose to run for parliament. He complied with the disarmament program, handed in his weapons, and tried to find jobs for his men, keeping just four bodyguards for his personal protection. In April 2005, he was one of eight former mujahideen commanders who made an all-expenses-paid trip to Japan. The Japanese government was the main donor financing the disarmament program, and the commanders were given a tour of Japan’s achievements of postwar reconstruction, including the peace memorial at Nagasaki and a Toyota factory, a highlight for the Afghans. For years they had fought their battles with Toyota pickup trucks.

  Yet back in Afghanistan, U.S. forces raided Mir Wali’s home twice to search for illegal weapons, apparently on the urging of his rival, the governor. He was humiliated. His men saw that he no longer had the power to protect them or provide them with jobs and drifted away. The Afghans understood that the Americans were siding with the governor, Sher Mohammad. Some of Mir Wali’s men transferred into a new highway police force intended to secure the main ring road from Taliban attacks, but soon that force too was disbanded under criticism that its men were extorting money from travelers.

  Western officials viewed this entire process as a success story. It was the first time that the UN had managed a disarmament program without a neutral peacekeeping force in place around the country to enforce it. The armed militias, estimated to number 100,000 men, so often criticized for their lawless behavior, were disbanded. The warlords, defanged, were encouraged to turn into responsible citizens in parliament and government. Karzai, who had little clout in the regions, would be strengthened.

  The Karzai government pushed for the disbanding of the mujahideen in order to weaken those it saw as rivals or troublemakers, in particular the Northern Alliance that dominated Kabul. Some around Karzai wanted to crush the mujahideen because they saw them as Islamist fundamentalists, similar to, if not as extreme as, the Taliban. Such was the reputation of the worst offenders of the 1990s violence that there was little support for the mujahideen among policymakers. Since 9/11 it had become popular to blame the problem of Islamist terrorism on the U.S. policy of the 1980s of supporting the mujahideen against the Soviet occupation. I had always rejected that theory since the vast majority of Afghan mujahideen were moderate and did not support terrorism.

  The mujahideen saw it differently too of course. They had sacrificed blood and livelihoods through twenty-five years of war and deprivation defending their communities from the Russians, the Communists, and then the Taliban. Now they were being excluded from power and any formal role in the new state that they had helped to bring into being. They were being sent home with a pack of farming tools or a two-week vocational training course.

  What was missed in the hurry to disarm the mujahideen was the fact that—however self-serving these men were—they were natural leaders, resilient, resourceful, and brave, men who had organized and held together the resistance in their communities under very tough circumstances. At one disarmament ceremony, I met a distinguished-looking commander in a silk turban from Ghor province in northwestern Afghanistan, Ahmad Khan Murghabi. He had risen to the post of general in the mujahideen army. “The war is over and peace has come, and I don’t want to continue in the military,” he told me. But he added that he had not volunteered to disarm. “We accepted to take this package, but it was the government that fired us in fact.”

  A few people did warn that the mass demobilization, and the denigration of the mujahideen across the board as war criminals, was an error. Haji Nasrullah Baryalai, a brother of the war hero Abdul Haq and a presidential candidate against Karzai in 2009, cautioned that the Karzai government was losing touch with the people because it was pushing away so many local mujahideen who were the bedrock of the rural communities. “We have to integrate a wide spectrum of mujahideen who are a threat to the government,” he told me during the election campaign that year. “They are threatening that they have sacrificed a lot and they have no share in this government.” Every rural family had had men in the mujahideen, and the Taliban were benefiting from the growing disaffection, he warned.

  Karzai also wanted to do away with the mujahideen political parties, which he blamed for causing so much of the factional fighting in the 1990s, and he prevented them from canvassing in elections. Yet the mujahideen parties, which were generally conservative and Islamist in outlook but supported cooperation with the West and the democratic process, were best placed to offer a political alternative to the Taliban.

  Only later would the Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration program, known as DDR, be recognized as an ill-timed mistake. To me, it was as grave an error as the policy of de-Baathification and the demobilization of the Iraqi Army in 2003. The Afghan program disabled rivals to Karzai, but in a single action it removed the strongest anti-Taliban forces from service to their country. It created a vacuum of power and left tens of thousands of former fighters across the country sidelined and resentful. The Karzai government had just lost another large constituency of support.

  The disbanding of the mujahideen had a drastic effect on stability in the south of the country. There was no Afghan Army contingent in Helmand at the time. The police consisted of just a few hundred men, with units dispersed in a dozen district towns. U.S. special forces had a small presence in Gereshk, conducting counterterrorism raids, but they were not concerned with improving general security. Driving in southern Afghanistan became increasingly dangerous. Taliban attacks were on the rise, and the only serious deterrent had been removed.

  It was Mir Wali’s men who first alerted me to the scale and ambition of the Taliban resurgence. A group of them accompanied us as a security escort to the village of Shurakai, an hour’s drive north of Gereshk, for an interview in June 2004. They warned me the village was pro-Taliban. While we were there children threw stones at the men, even though they were armed. But we completed the interview, with a pro-Taliban mullah who had been tortured by Afghans working with American special forces, without mishap. We took a different route home, across the desert, in case of a Taliban ambush. There were no roads in this part of the country, and we relied entirely on the mujahideen who knew every track and ambush spot. They led us along dry river beds and desert tracks a
cross a moonscape of fine white sand. Our four-wheel-drive vehicles stirred up choking clouds of dust visible for miles. We encountered only one person out in the desert, an old hunter with his slender Afghan hounds, out chasing hare since dawn.

  Eighteen months later I ran into the same guards in Kabul at the opening of parliament in December 2005. Mir Wali had won a seat in the lower house. The guards told us that the Gereshk region was now infested with Taliban. “You know that village we went to?” Yaar Mohammad, the chief bodyguard, told me. “Now even if we had two hundred men we could not go there.”

  To many in Kabul, including the UN, the Western diplomats, the human rights organizations, and the Karzai government, Mir Wali was another warlord successfully removed from his home base, cut off from sources of illegal racketeering, and given a generous consolation prize as a member of parliament. Yet within a year, Mir Wali was no longer able to visit his constituency. The Taliban had moved into the vacuum he left behind. They now held sway in the countryside. When the highway police force was disbanded, the rest of Mir Wali’s men were made jobless. Some of them checked in with him with a question: Was it all right if they joined the Taliban?