2006. Afghanistan’s largest reservoir lies like a bright blue jewel amid the brown mountains of Kajaki, a district in the far north of Helmand province. The area is remote and sparsely populated. The villages and district center, a sleepy, one-street town, lie in a green ribbon of irrigated orchards and wheat fields along the river valley. Beyond is rocky desert. The district had been largely peaceful since the fall of the Taliban. A few aid projects had reached this faraway corner, including a small health clinic beside the dam. Despite years of neglect, the American-built dam was still operating and generating electricity. An American security company was guarding the dam turbine and the camp beside it with a handful of Afghan guards. The district chief, Abdul Razziq, hoped more aid was heading their way. There was a U.S. government plan to install a third turbine and increase the electricity generated by the dam. NATO peacekeepers were expanding into southern Afghanistan in 2006, and British troops would soon be deployed to Helmand.
Razziq was a local landowner. He had grown up in a village near the district center where he went to school. Like most farmers, he had joined the mujahideen when the Soviet Union invaded. He opposed the Taliban and fled his home when the mullahs took power, returning home only after their fall in 2001. He knew the people of Kajaki did not support the mullahs. The farmers had suffered economically under the Taliban, from the seven-year drought and the effects of constant war, and they hoped international aid would bring some relief. The district had turned out in big numbers, including sixteen thousand women, to vote for Karzai in presidential elections in 2004, he said.
By the spring of 2006, however, Razziq was starting to feel squeezed. Helmand had been growing increasingly dangerous for men like him. Four district chiefs had been murdered in Helmand in the previous six months. The Taliban had the run of nearly half of the province—six of Helmand’s thirteen districts—and were ambushing government convoys and outlying police posts. In February 2006, they mounted coordinated attacks in three districts adjoining Kajaki. Taliban fighters stormed the town of Musa Qala, pinning down the police and firing rockets into government buildings, killing the district chief, Haji Abdul Qudous, inside his office. Fighting raged for two days and left twenty-eight people dead. Twenty of them were police. British troops, caught in an ambush in Sangin district at the same time, were forced to call in airstrikes. Police fought off a third attack on their station in Nawzad. Taliban fighters had repeatedly cut the road through Sangin to Kajaki, searching cars, threatening people, and ambushing government and NATO forces. In March, the district chief of Sangin was killed while visiting his home in Musa Qala.
In Kajaki, Razziq had fifty policemen and a small unit of the Afghan Army with French advisors. The police were a rough group. They had been badly mauled in Musa Qala in February and had pulled back to Kajaki with their commander. They had asked for relief, but they knew reinforcements would be ambushed if they tried to come. Razziq kept holding out for assistance.
The first newcomers that spring were not peacekeepers or aid workers. They were the Taliban. Two powerful commanders, Mullah Maruf and Mullah Janan, arrived. Razziq knew them both. They were from his own tribe, the Alizai. Like him, they had fought with the mujahideen against the Russians. But unlike him, they had joined the Taliban and held senior positions in that government. Mullah Maruf was the brother of Mullah Abdul Rauf, a former corps commander of the Taliban army, and one of the top Taliban members detained in Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba.1 The two commanders brought followers with them. They settled back in their homes, billeting their men with supporters in the villages. They began traveling around and preaching at village mosques. The Taliban regime had always forced the men of the community to attend prayers at the mosque five times a day under threat of punishment. This time, the commanders encouraged villagers with a friendly invitation. People obeyed and went to hear them preach. They began warning the villagers of the forthcoming expansion of the foreign military into Helmand and urged them to resist. “We are Muslims, we should not cooperate with the government. We should wage jihad.”2
The Taliban were skilled at preaching, and they knew instinctively how to influence the Pashtun tribesmen. They had prepared the way for months across southern Afghanistan, posting official notices from the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” in mosques and dropping fliers in the bazaars. The notices warned that jihad was every Muslim’s duty, that the foreigners were coming with evil intent and would trick them with promises of assistance. They countered the government in every way they could: instructing people not to send their children to school, ordering them to grow opium poppies, and warning that government workers and collaborators would be beheaded.3
In Kajaki, the Taliban commanders pressed the same message. They urged villagers to grow poppy and make some money, but warned them that the foreigners would come and try to destroy their crops. They told the villagers that the United States was not coming to help them, that the infidels had darker aims in occupying the country. It was an argument designed to tap into the Afghans’ deep historic distrust of foreign invaders. The Soviet invasion was still a living memory that had affected every single Afghan family, and the three wars British imperial armies fought in Afghanistan are alive in Afghan folklore. Most families in the south have an ancestor who fought against the British.4
Razziq knew this was a direct challenge to the government, but his police force was too small to confront these men, and there was little chance of a stronger force reaching Kajaki. Instead he worked to counter their propaganda by congregating 450 clerics and tribal elders from around the district to push back against the Taliban call for jihad. Jihad is a struggle in the name of Islam, and is the duty of all Muslims. Yet in the Afghan tradition, jihad has to be declared by a prominent religious leader and can only be called against the government if that government is deemed to be un-Islamic. Razziq’s gathering of religious leaders selected ten spokesmen who announced that the Karzai government was legitimate and indeed Muslim, and that jihad was not warranted. Razziq called on the governor and the central government to reinforce the message but never heard back. The Taliban meanwhile continued their aggressive campaigning. They were assiduous in touring every mosque and village. They began to behave as if they were the rightful rulers, and they carried weapons with them wherever they went, right into the mosque.
Abdul Razziq went out as much as he could among the people with his own message. “I told them Kajaki is a garden. You should stop people coming in to ruin it,” he said. He convened another gathering of two thousand elders and won promises of support from tribal leaders. Yet as the government’s weakness became evident, that support slipped away. Police reinforcements never arrived. The district chief became so cash-strapped he had to borrow money from townspeople. Then the Taliban started laying mines on the roads. Razziq and his men defused a few of them, but one blew up his car just a mile outside his base. No one was hurt, but Razziq lamented it was a sign of his loss of local support. “I was so weak that I could not discover that there was a mine one and a half kilometers away,” he told me. Gradually the villages became unsafe for him and his men.
In May 2006, the Taliban mounted another series of attacks in northern Helmand, this time boosted by large numbers of local tribesmen. They besieged Afghan police and threatened to overrun several towns. British troops were just deploying to the province, in what they had planned as a peacekeeping mission, but within days the governor, Mohammad Daoud, appealed to them to save the towns of northern Helmand from falling. British troops were dropped into the towns of Nawzad, Sangin, and Musa Qala to shore up police defenses, and found themselves fighting off several assaults a day by the Taliban.
In early June, the Taliban attacked Kajaki. The Afghan Army and their French advisors had left. Razziq was alone with his fifty police. Cut off for so long, they were low on ammunition and food. They survived on fortified biscuits donated by the Indian government and intended for the district’s schoolchildren. A group of fifty Talib
an broke through and seized positions just half a mile to the north of the dam as another group closed in from the south. They pounded the camp with mortars. “We were completely surrounded by the enemy,” Razziq told me. “It was a very tough situation, we could not even raise our heads.” The Taliban force, which he said included foreign fighters, tried to capture the dam. Seizing such a prime economic asset, destroying it, or shutting down the electricity across the south would have been a political and economic disaster for the Karzai government and NATO forces. “They came very close,” Razziq observed.
British troops reached Kajaki later in the summer but could do little more than defend the dam and the camp next to it. All over northern Helmand, their troops were trapped in makeshift bases, often private compounds known as platoon houses, fighting off waves of Taliban attacks through the infernal heat. They fought on through the summer, running low on rations and ammunition as helicopters struggled to resupply them through heavy enemy gunfire, sometimes waiting hours to evacuate the wounded and losing some men because of the delay. They lost thirty-three men by September, a shock to the British public who had expected the mission in Afghanistan to be focused on development and reconstruction.
It was a disastrous policy to use British troops to guard government positions in these small towns. Without enough troops to push out patrols and take the fight to the Taliban, they ended up just battling to defend their platoon houses, while calling in artillery and airstrikes on the destroyed townscape around them. Nawzad, Musa Qala, Sangin, and Kajaki, as well as the southern towns of Garmser and Nawa, became ghost towns as the residents fled and NATO and the Taliban scrapped over the ruins day and night.
President Karzai did little to counter the insurgency and keep the people on his side. He trusted too much in his own popularity—he had won a resounding vote in the 2004 presidential election—and was ill-served by his own officials. Many analysts have blamed Karzai’s first appointee as governor of Helmand, Sher Mohammad Akhundzada, and his security chiefs for alienating much of the population through their misrule. Karzai’s half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, who acted as the president’s representative in the south and wielded enormous influence in appointing officials and removing opponents, also left many disaffected. The government should have been as assiduous as the Taliban at wooing the public, countering the Taliban propaganda, and listening to people’s grievances. Above all, the Afghan government should have provided a strong defense against the Taliban. Instead, Karzai turned to foreign troops to do the job, which was a fatal mistake. Using foreign soldiers to defend district towns with inadequate local forces was to use the wrong tool for the job.
Thousands of Taliban fighters and weapons infiltrated into southern and eastern Afghanistan through the spring and summer of 2006. The Taliban was transformed. Until then a shadow guerrilla army, it was now making an ambitious bid to seize control of southern Afghanistan and stall the expansion of NATO peacekeepers into its traditional heartland. Mullah Dadullah was the mastermind behind the offensive. He recruited thousands of Afghans from both sides of the border, and met with al Qaeda and Pakistani militant leaders, traveling several times to South and North Waziristan in 2005 and 2006 to sign up additional men, explosives, and trainers.5
The previous September, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had announced the withdrawal of three thousand American troops from Afghanistan. They were needed in Iraq, where that war was demanding more and more manpower. The cuts were never carried out, since the need for troops grew in eastern Afghanistan, yet the announcement was taken as a sign of dwindling U.S. commitment. It alarmed Afghans, who had been abandoned before in the 1990s after the Soviet pullout, and signaled especially to those living in the south that the United States was not serious about countering the Taliban resurgence. The announcement also affected Pakistan’s calculations. The Pakistani military had surmised that the United States could not wage two counterinsurgencies at once, and would withdraw its troops from Afghanistan in order to deal fully with Iraq.6 Pakistan was happy to see U.S. forces leave the southern Pashtun belt of Afghanistan, which it considered its own back yard. Yet in December, NATO had announced an expansion of its UN-mandated peacekeeping force to southern Afghanistan. Six thousand troops, including British, Canadian, Dutch, and other forces, would arrive shortly.
That was a red rag to the ISI and it pushed the Taliban to give NATO troops, new to the terrain, an unpleasant welcome. It was time, the intelligence agency calculated, for the Taliban to make a lunge for control of the south.
Karzai and his security officials tried to deflect the coming storm. In February, Karzai traveled to Islamabad where he met with General Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz and gave a speech at the National Defense College of Pakistan. The Afghan president tried to make the case for Pakistan not to support the Taliban. The Taliban government had been a burden on Pakistan, and his new government offered a good business opportunity to its neighbor, he told them. Pakistani exports to Afghanistan during the Taliban rule amounted to only $25 million but had since risen to $1.2 billion. Nurturing extremism and training militants would only hurt Pakistan, he warned. “If anyone thinks that he can train a snake to bite another person, he should know that it is possible at any time for the snake to turn and bite his trainer,” he argued. “Terrorism is something like this example. It is nobody’s friend.”7 He also took his intelligence chief, the director of the National Directorate of Security, Amrullah Saleh, in to meet with Musharraf. They handed the Pakistani leader a dossier of al Qaeda and Taliban members active in the insurgency, including details of their whereabouts in Pakistan. The first two to three pages of the dossier detailed intelligence that al Qaeda operatives were hiding in safe houses in Mansehra, a hilly area north of Pakistan’s capital, adjacent to the towns of Haripur and Abbottabad.
Musharraf was dismissive of the information but uncomfortable at being put on the spot. He shifted in his chair, grasping the arms, almost shaking at the mention of Mansehra. “I did not know then that that was where bin Laden was hiding,” Saleh recounted later.8 The Afghans’ effort to share intelligence brought them nothing. Not a single member of the Taliban was detained or handed over.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban began popping up everywhere in numbers never seen before. In April, a force of fifty to sixty Taliban turned up around the village of Sartak, near Mullah Omar’s old base of Sangesar. They were moving around on motorbikes and in small cars, keeping away from the main villages. A farmer told us that he saw a group of several dozen Taliban fighters carrying heavy machine guns and brand-new Chinese-made Kalashnikovs. Soon after, the Taliban laid siege to the police force at Sartak, battling them for hours until the police requested help from NATO forces, who called in airstrikes. A young woman was killed, as well as six policemen. Within two weeks, a villager told an Afghan colleague that the Taliban had returned, walking openly in the villages with their weapons and sitting under the trees eating mulberries, one of the Afghans’ favorite summer pastimes. The Taliban were demanding food, lodging, and the Muslim tithing, zakat, from villagers.9 Their brazen behavior, and the failure of the U.S.-led coalition to apprehend them, was turning public opinion. People were questioning the seriousness of NATO and the government.
The province of Uruzgan, where tribesmen had been the first to rise up in support of Karzai in 2001, was once more in the thrall of the Taliban. Insurgents had reclaimed the countryside and controlled the main roads, placing the provincial capital, Tarin Kot, in a stranglehold. Security commanders and townspeople warned Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, when he visited in April that the town might fall. The map used at a military briefing showed every district of the province as red or amber, indicating instability. A shopkeeper, Haji Saifullah, told the general, “During the day the people, the police, and the army are with the government, but during the night, they are all with the Taliban and al Qaeda.” Young men were running to the hills to join the Taliban because t
hey were scared of raids and house searches, another man called Rahmatullah said. Young, unemployed men were going to Pakistan in search of work and being recruited by the Taliban, Mullah Hamdullah, the elected head of the provincial council, explained. “The unemployment rate is very high and the people of Uruzgan are very poor,” he warned the general. The Taliban were paying them $175 a month to join up and fight.
The slide in Uruzgan was blamed on the former governor, Jan Mohammad, a grizzled, one-eyed old mujahideen commander and former ally of Karzai’s late father. He was sternly anti-Taliban after being imprisoned by them, yet he had alienated his own people by amassing too much power and crushing his rivals, sometimes brutally. Karzai had been forced to replace him with the thirty-five-year-old Maulavi Abdul Hakim Munib, a serious, educated, religious man who had served as deputy minister of tribal affairs in the Taliban government. Yet Munib looked alarmed after barely a month in the job. Sitting on the first floor of the governor’s office, he complained to a visiting delegation of Afghan and American officials that security was precarious. A sea of white and pink poppies in full bloom stretched out from beneath his windows to the hills beyond.
Governor Munib said he needed more policemen. The Taliban were several times the strength of the government forces in the province. The government had recently sent 500 newly trained army recruits, yet the police, which were in the forefront of every encounter with the Taliban, numbered only 347, roughly 45 men for each district. That was barely enough to man a single police station. No one really knew how many Taliban there were in Uruzgan, but the lowest estimate was 300. They were certainly better armed than the police.10 The governors of Helmand and Kandahar had joined Munib in asking the central government for a quadrupling of the forces they had, as well as for more resources and equipment. A deputy interior minister, Abdul Malik Siddiqi, announced to the governor in front of a gathering of provincial elders that the government planned to send 250 to 500 men to each district. Yet outside the meeting the American commander, General Eikenberry, expressed reservations. There were not enough trained men to send to the area, and, more important, there were too few good leaders to control them. The police never arrived in the numbers that had been announced to the elders.
The Wrong Enemy Page 16