The Tangi Valley became notorious for its ambushes. Taliban there shot down a Chinook helicopter full of American and Afghan Navy SEALs and special operations commandos in 2011, killing all twenty-seven on board. The mutilation of victims, which was not often revealed to the public, was a particular horror for the men serving in Afghanistan, a sign of the brutalizing effects of the war. It was a grim burden for those who encountered it and led to acts of retaliation on both sides.
Two weeks later, Taliban seized positions on a craggy mountainside above the road beside the village of Durrani. Their target was a convoy of seven fuel tankers. The fireball was so enormous it set fire to roadside shops and civilian cars. Twenty-two civilians were burned alive.
As we saw in Wardak, the Taliban had swarmed right up to the gates of Kabul by the summer of 2008. They did not control any major towns but had gained such influence in the countryside that they had freedom of movement throughout the south and east of the country. Their target was increasingly Kabul and the faltering Karzai government. The Taliban began to hit right into the heart of the capital with a series of spectacular attacks aimed at grabbing headlines and vaunting their power.
In January 2008, a pair of suicide bombers wearing police uniforms attacked the Serena Hotel, the only five-star hotel in Kabul, just yards across the street from the presidential palace. One blew himself up at the gate, opening the way for the second to break through to the lobby of the hotel. He fired on guests and staff in the lobby, then turned down a corridor to the gym where he shot more people. He telephoned his controllers—in Pakistan—fourteen times during the attack, then hid his weapons and clothes and tried to escape among employees evacuating the building. Police picked him out of the line.
In April, gunmen made an assassination attempt on President Karzai. They attacked a national parade to commemorate the mujahideen’s defeat of the Communist government in 1992. One group of gunmen hid for days in a locked city hotel room. They opened fire from the window with a heavy machine gun while another group fired mortars smuggled into a nearby restaurant. The attack killed two legislators in the viewing stands and caused a stampede of diplomats and soldiers from the parade ground. The gunmen hiding in the hotel texted their commander in Pakistan, and he was urging them on, right up to the last minute, investigators found from the gunmen’s cell phones.
Then, in July, a suicide bomber drove a car packed with explosives into the gates of the Indian embassy in Kabul, across the street from the Interior Ministry. The bomber killed the Indian military attaché and another diplomat driving into the embassy at that moment, but the real slaughter occurred on the street where Afghans were queuing up for visas outside the embassy or walking to the ministry opposite. Fifty men, women, and children were killed and scores more injured in the carnage.
The Taliban, five years after starting their insurgency, were striking at will in the heart of the nation’s capital.
Sometimes the attackers resorted to indiscriminate slaughter, slaying bank customers in Jalalabad, supermarket shoppers in Kabul, and restaurant guests at the Qarga lakeside resort outside the capital. Other attacks were carefully targeted against the Indian and American embassies, and NATO military bases and vehicles. One suicide bombing in the capital was aimed at the Baluch rebel leader Brahumdagh Bugti, who had sought refuge from Pakistan with the Afghans. Bugti was not a target of the Taliban, but the Pakistani military certainly wanted him dead.
The U.S. military called these incidents “complex attacks” because they involved multiple attackers and weapons. Suicide bombers would often breach the outer security of the target, then gunmen and more bombers would rush in behind. The attacks showed a degree of expertise and planning not seen before with the Taliban indicating military training. But they did not seem to be driven by al Qaeda. There was growing evidence of a Pakistani agenda in the attacks as they expanded to targets in eastern and southern Afghanistan and even further afield to Mumbai, India, in November 2008. A team of Pakistani suicide gunmen attacked multiple targets in the city, killing over 160 people over a period of 48 hours. They used an attack plan originally drafted by the ISI.
Once again, intelligence officials of Pakistan were clearly collaborating with the militants and suicide bombers attacking targets in the Afghan capital. Almost every attack was traced back to Miranshah, the capital of North Waziristan, to the Haqqani network and Lashkar-e-Taiba, the two militant organizations operating there with the closest ties to the ISI. As investigators pieced together the attacks, they discovered a pattern. “Once again our country was attacked from Pakistani soil,” Amrullah Saleh, the head of the National Directorate of Security, said at a joint news conference with the defense and interior ministers a few days after the assassination attempt against Karzai. “This is as bright as the sun, and we have all the evidence to show that.”1 The Serena Hotel attack revealed a possible al Qaeda connection. Arabs in Miranshah planned the operation, and an Afghan based in an Arab country supplied the money for the attack, Afghan intelligence found. The operator on the ground, an Afghan called Homayoun, organized that attack and the next one, the assassination attempt on the parade ground, traveling back and forth from Waziristan in Pakistan. Personnel inside the Afghan Interior and Defense Ministries had helped them obtain weapons and access, but the plot was hatched in Pakistan.
Homayoun escaped to Pakistan the day of the Serena Hotel attack but called his wife from there the next day. Afghan officials who tracked the call passed his number to Pakistani officials. The Afghans later complained that no effort was made to find him, and he was able to return to Kabul for the parade attack. He was preparing yet a third suicide bombing attack with two foreigners, a couple with a child, three days later when police surrounded their house and killed them all in a firefight.
The Indian embassy bombing revealed the clearest evidence of ISI complicity in its planning and execution. American and Afghan surveillance intercepted phone calls from ISI officials in Pakistan and heard them planning the attack with the militants in Kabul in the days leading up to the bombing. At the time, intelligence officials monitoring the calls did not know what was being planned, but the involvement of a high-level ISI official in promoting a terrorist attack was clear.
The evidence was so damning that the Bush administration dispatched the deputy chief of the CIA, Stephen Kappes, to Islamabad to remonstrate with the Pakistanis. The bomber struck, however, before Kappes reached Pakistan. Investigators found the bomber’s cell phone in the wreckage of his exploded car. They tracked down his collaborator in Kabul, the man who had provided the logistics for the attack. That facilitator, an Afghan, had been in direct contact with Pakistan by telephone. The number he had called belonged to a high-level ISI official in Peshawar. The official had sufficient seniority that he reported directly to ISI headquarters in Islamabad.2 The embassy bombing was no operation by rogue ISI agents acting on their own. It was sanctioned and monitored by the most senior officials in Pakistani intelligence.
The choice of attack was also revealing. An attack on the Indian embassy and the military attaché, longtime foes of Pakistan, could be explained away by Pakistan as stemming from sixty years of antagonistic relations. But this was not a subtle attack needling an old foe. It was a massive car bomb detonated in the center of a capital city, designed to cause maximum injury and terror. The plan was also to terrify and undermine the confidence of the Afghans and their government, sending a message not just to India but to the forty-two countries that were contributing to the NATO-led international force to rebuild Afghanistan. The aim was to make the cost too high for everyone to continue backing the Karzai government. The ISI wanted them all to go home.
The Afghans recognized the overall strategy. It was the same they had used as mujahideen against the Soviet occupation: placing a stranglehold on the capital by ambushing the roads and running a campaign of sabotage inside the city to undermine the government and sap the morale of citizens.3
As it investigated every
attack, Afghan intelligence and police officials became convinced that the ISI was working with al Qaeda, the Taliban, the Haqqanis, and Pakistani groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was behind most of the attacks on Indian targets. “You think after so many years of this we don’t know who our enemy is?” a senior Afghan security official retorted when I questioned his findings. His American counterparts knew as well but just could not admit what Pakistan was doing, out of hubris, he said. “They always have the evidence, but they think the viability of Pakistan is more important.”
Pakistan denied all this. In every interview, officials insisted that they wanted a stable Afghanistan and were working to defeat terrorism. But Pakistan’s actions tell a different story. Even as its militants at home were surging out of control, and the cost in lives and stability to Pakistan was becoming exorbitant, Pakistan’s military leaders continued to pursue a policy of using the Taliban to attack the Afghan government and NATO forces in Afghanistan. One obvious reason was to deflect the militants’ lethal energy away from home. Another was as General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani had expounded: the Taliban, or specifically the Haqqanis, were an asset that Pakistan needed to keep in order to have a strong ally in Afghanistan when the American and international forces left.4 At the core of Pakistan’s thinking was an obsessive desire to dominate Afghanistan in order to protect its own rear flank from India. In that way of thinking, the Taliban were guarantors of Pakistan’s national strategic interests.
As the Taliban expanded their insurgency northward, security deteriorated. Despite the newly paved highway, we ceased driving down to Kandahar or out to Khost in 2006 because the roads had become so dangerous. The provinces ringing the capital started to slide out of control. By mid-2008, the decline seemed unstoppable. The Taliban were growing in numbers, and their resurgence was accompanied by a campaign of terror that magnified their influence. They had dispensed with the niceties of their propaganda campaign of 2006, when the mullah-commanders in the south had called people to the mosques and persuaded them to join the jihad. Instead, they increasingly used retribution for those who did not cooperate. We began to hear more accounts of torture and mutilation: truck drivers who had their ears cut off or their throats slit for carrying supplies for American forces. The campaign paralyzed local government as police, judges, provincial councillors, and teachers began abandoning their jobs and moving to the cities for protection.
The mayhem in Wardak forced the Afghan government to deploy units of the Afghan Army to defend the road. Soldiers of Afghanistan’s 201st Corps occupied old hilltop positions that the Soviet Army had used in the 1980s, surveying the road and the green side valleys that provided easy cover for the insurgents. It was an irony that the Karzai government was now deploying its army in former Soviet positions, against insurgents who were using the old mujahideen tactics. Karzai understood the incongruity. For a long time, he refused to refer to those fighting as Taliban or insurgents, calling them simply the enemy, and terrorists. He did not want to be on the wrong side of a popular war. Increasingly, the people were siding with, or at least not opposing, the Taliban.
As soon as they arrived, the Afghan Army units found themselves in daily firefights. A unit we found camping in a school building in Salar said they had been called out the previous day to help the police, besieged in a station just two miles down the road. The commander, Captain Gul Jan, told us they had run into an ambush almost immediately and battled for three hours before they could even reach the police station. The local police were woefully outmanned and outgunned, and would not have survived much longer without the army, another officer, Captain Mohammad Zaman, told us. His platoon had set up camp in Durrani just after the conflagration there. “If there was no Afghan Army here, it would be too difficult to secure the road for one hour,” he said. Camping in the open, he had minimal defenses and was worried about Taliban mortar fire. Coordination with American forces in the area was so poor that a passing American military convoy had fired on Zaman’s positions just five days earlier and wounded one of his soldiers in both legs. Another group of Afghan soldiers, in an old Russian hilltop post, was more upbeat. “We can beat the Taliban conclusively when we build up our manpower,” said First Lieutenant Rahmatullah Minallah, who commanded a post overlooking the Tangi Valley, where the Americans had died. “I have fifty men here now. When I have one hundred men, I can leave fifty here and go and clear out the village.” Individual Afghans were often impressive, but the government always seemed to fall short.
Wardak was just one frontline province that needed urgent attention. At least half of the country had security problems. The United Nations was reporting that 20 percent of districts were off limits to their workers because of insecurity in 2008. Even Afghan government officials were unable to travel to 10 percent of districts.
Every Afghan I interviewed complained above all about the lack of security. Yet many in the international community decided that it was the lack of services that disaffected people from the government. Foreign governments talked of providing better healthcare, education, and other services to win hearts and minds. They pushed for more educated governors who understood human rights and how to implement assistance programs. The U.S. military beefed up its own assistance programs, allowing commanders on the ground to spend millions of dollars building schools, government buildings, police stations, and jails. One international idea was to improve the coordination between the central government and the provinces by supporting a new agency, the Independent Directorate of Local Governance. The directorate, working directly under President Karzai, was to oversee the appointment of governors, police chiefs, and district administrators, and ensure a more effective management of provincial affairs. Jelani Popal, the experienced manager of an Afghan aid organization, was chosen to run it. A Pashtun, he had spent many years working in the southern provinces on assistance projects. He knew the people and their needs. He saw the dangers of letting the insurgents grow so strong that only a full-blown military offensive could dislodge them, and he wanted to attend to provinces that might be targets of the insurgents before it was too late.
He quickly discovered the police chief in Wardak was a source of intense unhappiness in the community. Popal removed him. He found that, although there were 1,100 policemen on the books in the province, two thirds were phantom employees and only 400 were actually working. The salaries of the remainder were being pocketed by police bosses. Popal’s directorate was designed to streamline support for the provincial governments, and he saw it as critical that the government delivered on its promises. “The Taliban, when they say something, they do it,” he explained in an interview early in 2008. “They threaten to kill people and they do it. But when we say we will protect you, we often do not.”
Popal made sure the government supplied equipment and cars, increased salaries, and paid them on time to police and district officials. “We put the government in a very strong position,” he noted. They also removed several mullahs who were preaching antigovernment sermons. The population remained indifferent, however, so he began organizing councils of elders to try to engage the communities and address the grievances of the population. “If the community is organized and not indifferent to the government then they can make it very difficult for the Taliban to come,” he said. “We have to empower communities better to defend themselves, not with weapons but with organization.” Yet the plan soon faltered. It was too dangerous for elders to attend government meetings or be seen to be cooperating with the government. The Taliban were far from popular, but the people would not risk their lives to work with a government they did not trust. Lack of security was still the overriding problem.
East of Wardak, also on the doorstep of Kabul, sits the province of Logar, another important gateway to the capital. Just a short drive from the capital, in the provincial capital, Mohammad Agha, the Taliban began driving around and delivering threats in broad daylight to anyone working for the government.
A judge from Logar
spoke to us after resigning his post in July 2008. He was too scared to allow his name to be published. He had been working for six years in Logar without mishap. Then the Taliban came. They had begun some months earlier leaving night letters, warning that anyone working in the government, the police, or the intelligence agency should leave their jobs or be killed. The judge knew what the Taliban were capable of. A fellow judge, his former classmate, had been killed by the Taliban in the southeast. The threats became more frequent and more overt. The judge’s two brothers abandoned their police jobs and left Logar. He began receiving daily threats, by telephone and then one day in person.
A large group of masked gunmen came to his home. They said their top leader had ordered the judge to be killed because he was working for the Americans. The proof, they said, was the weekly directive that he received from the Supreme Court in Kabul. After seven years’ service, six of them in Logar, on a salary of forty dollars a month, the judge was giving up. “I have old parents and young children,” he said. “I cannot work anymore, the situation is getting worse and worse.” The government had to fight the Taliban with toughness and use of intelligence but was failing at every level, he said. The police chief was a thief. The governor was weak. The government intelligence department caught a suicide bomber, but he was released, almost certainly through bribery, the judge went on. The foreign military presence in Logar consisted only of a Czech Army provincial reconstruction team, which focused on civil affairs projects. People were disheartened by the widespread government corruption, and angered by the raids by foreign forces, which often targeted innocent people. Some Afghans were using the foreigners as a way to attack their enemies. “If the situation goes on like this, I see the Taliban growing day by day,” he concluded.
The Wrong Enemy Page 23