The Wrong Enemy

by Carlotta Gall

  Militants were appearing in large numbers in the remoter districts. American forces, which had maintained a consistent presence in the eastern provinces along the Pakistani border and steadily built up their bases and numbers since 2001, had pushed out to the more remote provinces of Kunar and Nuristan in the northeast since 2006. Yet the insurgency grew faster, and the entire eastern border region became restive, infiltrated by Taliban and pockets of Pakistani and al Qaeda fighters. In July 2008, a mass of insurgents came together in an attack in Wanat, in the far northeastern mountains of Afghanistan. Hundreds of militants, including foreign fighters and members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, attacked and nearly overran a patrol base there. Nine American soldiers died in a frantic defense of the base. More were wounded.

  An army investigation found the base was ill-positioned and poorly protected. Nevertheless, the attack showed the buildup of extremist militants in the north of Kunar and Nuristan. The remote mountain valleys had drawn Arab Salafists to Nuristan and the upper reaches of Kunar since the 1970s, and they had been able to maintain a presence in the most remote reaches throughout the Soviet occupation and the years after. Afghan officials told me that Islamist groups from Pakistan had been building up a new presence in the area since 2005. “The ISI has expended a lot of money and work,” an elder from Nuristan, a former mujahid, told me.5 Like most of the mujahideen, he had been trained in the Pakistani militant camps and knew the leaders behind the resurgence.

  Yet if a local leader stood up against the Taliban, the government often failed to protect him. One example was a widely respected religious elder from Barg-e-Matal, a district of Nuristan that borders Pakistan. The elder, Fazle Ahad, presided over a large gathering of tribal elders and dignitaries brought together in Barg-e-Matal by the government. He spoke passionately, urging people that it was not the time for jihad and that they should work instead to rebuild the country.

  The Taliban killed him soon after. They tortured him first, breaking his hands and shooting out his eyes. The provincial government traced the killers to a district in the neighboring province, but the central government did nothing to pursue them. The killing caused outrage among the local people, and they were ready to retaliate. The failure to act by the central government left people disillusioned, the Nuristani elder told me.

  The Taliban were much sterner masters. They rewarded their men for successful attacks, paying sums of money for every government official or American soldier killed. They punished or executed those who transgressed their rules. The Taliban also strongly supported their fighters. If one of their men was captured by the government, they would kidnap someone in order to exchange him for their man. It was a time of greatest need in the provinces, but in Kabul and Western capitals, there was a sense of drift.

  General David D. McKiernan, who had commanded all allied forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, took over command of the NATO-led force in Afghanistan in June 2008. More than any commander of the entire war, McKiernan was hampered by the lack of forces at his disposal. He was struck by how few men he had in Afghanistan—35,000 U.S. troops in 2008—compared to commanders in Iraq who had 160,000 that year to cover roughly the same size population. Every day after he arrived, his forces came under attack from insurgents crossing the border from Pakistan. The lack of troops forced him to use more airpower, and casualties were rising on all sides. American military casualties in Afghanistan since 2001 passed the five hundred mark in July 2008. For the first time, in June and July of that year, more American soldiers died in Afghanistan than in Iraq.

  McKiernan put in requests for more troops, appealing to European nations that already had forces in Afghanistan to boost their numbers. By November 2008, he had realized that his NATO partners were not going to increase their forces. He turned to the Pentagon, requesting twenty thousand additional U.S. troops. Well aware of the war still ongoing in Iraq, he nevertheless urged leaders in Washington to consider sparing some forces from Iraq to prevent Afghanistan from failing. “A country that is one-third smaller in size than Afghanistan, has far less fighters—whether they are insurgents, foreign fighters, whatever groupings, criminals, narco-traffickers, far less—and between them the Iraqi forces and international forces number 800,000,” he told me. In Afghanistan, facing the insurgents, McKiernan had a combined force of NATO and Afghan Army and police forces of no more than 200,000. “It is time to have to take some risks in Iraq, and boost forces in Afghanistan.”

  In February 2009, the newly elected President Barack Obama announced seventeen thousand extra American troops would be sent to Afghanistan. One of their tasks would be to improve security for Afghan presidential elections in August 2009. Already by then it was not enough.

  By the spring of 2009, inside the Kabul office of the Afghan interior minister, Hanif Atmar, a map showed that nearly half the country was a danger zone for his officials. Ten of Afghanistan’s 364 districts were colored black, meaning they were wholly under Taliban control, and 156 were colored red or amber to indicate high-risk areas for officials or anyone associated with the government.

  The instability not only meant it would be physically difficult to run the elections, but they might also be skewed politically. The north was more stable. There, voters were agitating for a change from the Karzai government. The population in the south and east, subsumed in violence, was so despairing that few said they would go and vote. Yet the south and east was Karzai’s main constituency. Without their participation, Karzai would be robbed of the bulk of his support and could lose the election. More important, without Pashtun participation in the election, the country could break apart and the south slide away entirely into the arms of the Taliban, al Qaeda, and Pakistan. Despite their reservations about the security situation and about Karzai’s leadership, Afghan officials bent to the task of opening as many polling stations as possible.

  Diplomats briefed journalists on the electoral process, laying out a timeline with willful optimism. They delayed the election until August, illegally extending Karzai’s constitutional mandate and ignoring the evident security problems, not to mention disaffection in the south and signs of fraud in voter registration.

  In the south, the population was cracking. Hundreds of families displaced by the fighting filled the main towns. On three occasions that summer of 2009, I watched grown men break down and weep in the middle of interviews. The usually resilient and self-reliant Afghans were showing signs of desperation. People kept asking me why, if the United States could spot a four-inch-long speck with their satellites, could they not find the Taliban?

  A tall, thin man stood and talked to me at an election rally in Kandahar city. He was forty-five, a laborer who had fled his home in the western province of Farah three months earlier when fighting had flared. The Taliban had moved into his area, and the Americans were bombing, he told me. “We cannot even step out of the house,” he said. He began to cry. He had come to see Karzai’s main rival in the election, Abdullah Abdullah, because the country needed new leadership. “We need a change because we have been broken.”

  Others wanted nothing to do with the whole process. A farmer who had fled the fighting in Panjwayi with his family to live in Kandahar city said he could not bear to vote. “What can I say? We are living in destitution. We have lost every single thing we had. To tell the truth I will not participate in presidential election, even though I have a registration card, my mind doesn’t allow me to use it, my heart and my feelings are crushed.”6

  On August 20, few people turned out to vote in Kandahar or anywhere in southern Afghanistan. Observers estimated turnout was no higher than 15 percent in the southern provinces, and in some places in the single digits. The Taliban had warned of harsh penalties if anyone voted—threatening to cut off fingers of those who had the telltale inked digit. They attacked a number of polling stations and ordered a curfew, forbidding villagers to go out. “No one voted, no one could dare go out of their house,” Haji Abdul Majid, a prominent elder from Arghestan district, to
ld me.7 It was not only fear that kept voters away. Even in heavily guarded central Kandahar, voters stayed at home out of disgust for the government and the whole Western experiment in Afghanistan.

  As the votes came in, so did allegations of massive fraud. The absurdity of holding an election in the middle of a losing war was revealed to all. Officials in southern Afghanistan, led by the president’s brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, the strongman of the south, forged hundreds of thousands of votes in Karzai’s favor. Their reasoning was that it was too dangerous to leave the Pashtuns disenfranchised, and given the chance to vote, the Pashtuns would have chosen Karzai anyway. They were right—but the fraud was too blatant for one American diplomat, posted as a deputy head of mission at the United Nations office in Kabul. Peter Galbraith blew the whistle, busting open the mess of the election and Western efforts to show that the Afghan mission was on track.

  Despite Karzai’s insistence that he won a fair election, one of his political supporters told me several years later that officials had stuffed ballot boxes for Karzai in both the 2004 and 2009 presidential elections. “I helped Karzai and I campaigned for him,” Samad Zazai, a businessman from Paktia, told me. “I myself stuffed boxes for Karzai in both elections.” When I asked him if the palace had known what he was doing, he answered, “If we did not have support, no one would have dared do that. There were people in Paktia, Paktika, and Khost provinces who did not let their wives and daughters vote, so we did it for them. I don’t know exactly if Karzai knew, but people in power in all the three provinces where we worked all knew. We had meetings about how to do it all.”8

  “Karzai is the president of Afghanistan now, and not a single Pashtun can relax in his home,” complained Mohammad Haq Jenabi, an elder in a black turban from Kandahar city, just after the election. “The Taliban are more and more powerful and officials are living in bunkers and building security fences. What kind of system is this?” he went on. “We need a favor from the international community. If they could bring giant airplanes and take all the Pashtuns and drop us in the ocean, then we would get rid of this situation. Every day, every night we are in pain.”9

  11

  Karzai’s Turn

  “For how long will you be attending funerals and shedding tears? You are the president. Change the situation.”

  —elder in Nangarhar to President Hamid Karzai

  October 2009. President Karzai had aged in just a few weeks. The bags under his eyes were deeper, his skin was sallow, and his eyes showed hurt. It was the face of humiliation that appeared at the podium before the world’s press. He whispered something in the ear of U.S. Senator John Kerry, who looked sharper and healthier than the Afghan president despite his nonstop shuttle diplomacy of the last five days. Karzai, usually so ebullient and breezy at news conferences, was curt and humorless. He read a short statement. The election commission had announced the presidential election would go to a second round; the decision was legitimate, legal, and constitutional, he said. He was conceding that he had failed to win the election. He had fallen short of the necessary 50 percent in the first round and would have to contest a second against the runner-up. Kerry, who had spent twenty hours of meetings in five days with the Afghan president to win this concession, congratulated him for showing statesmanship. He was strengthening the country by embracing the constitution and the rule of law, Kerry said.

  Karzai did not believe any of it. He did not believe the Independent Election Commission’s tally of the results giving him only 49.7 percent of the vote, when his own finance minister had leaked early results showing he had won 54 percent. He did not believe that accepting the election commission’s count, which had canceled 1.3 million votes in his favor on the grounds they were fraudulent, made him anything like a statesman in the eyes of the Afghan people—or the world.

  Above all, he did not believe anymore that the United States was a genuine partner. He had watched American officials court his rivals, and he felt betrayed. He was convinced that the accusations of fraud, delaying for two months the results of the August 20 vote, and leaked by the American diplomat at the UN mission, Peter Galbraith, had been engineered to remove him from power. His acceptance of the result was a charade, since no one in the international community wanted to go through the immense logistical and security effort of a second round of voting. Sure enough, Karzai’s challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, pulled out of the second round days later, citing fears of fraud and conceding the presidency to Karzai. In their hours of talks and long walks in the palace gardens, Kerry had told Karzai about his own 2004 election defeat. “Sometimes there are tough things,” the future U.S. secretary of state said.1 Kerry was off the mark. Afghans could take losing. It was public humiliation that they could not stand. As I watched Karzai’s face that day in the palace with Kerry, I knew he would not forgive America for the humiliation.

  Karzai’s honeymoon with the United States had been over for a while, but this was the moment that broke the relationship. It would never be the same. The brave and charismatic hero who had risked his life to persuade tribesmen to rise up against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan seemed to have been forgotten by the United States. The “best-dressed world leader,” a label given him in 2002 by former Gucci designer Tom Ford for his lambskin hats and striped, silk coats, had worn out his welcome. His fluency and persuasiveness, which impressed Western audiences, were no longer convincing foreign governments. Afghans had long wearied of his speeches and promises, since he had failed to meet their expectations. Western nations increasingly found his blithe statements infuriating and disingenuous. His commitment to the war on terror and his strong opposition to al Qaeda and the Taliban, which brought him a standing ovation in the U.S. Congress in 2004 and a Camp David visit with President Bush in 2007, were no longer enough. Now the war in Afghanistan was turning bad.

  By 2009, as U.S. and NATO forces were facing the prospect of defeat by the Taliban, recriminations grew on both sides. Western leaders blamed Karzai for poor leadership, for losing the support of his people by running a shambolic, corrupt administration, and failing to lead the fight against the Taliban. “President Karzai was not an adequate strategic partner,” Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, formerly the U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, stated in a diplomatic cable that was leaked to the New York Times.2 Ambassador Francesc Vendrell, the long-serving European Union ambassador in Kabul, had earlier predicted that Karzai would be made a scapegoat as Western governments, anxious to find an exit from Afghanistan, sought to lay the blame elsewhere.

  Others warned that he was still better than the alternatives in Afghanistan. “President Karzai is a much better man than he is made out to be,” the former British ambassador to Kabul, Sherard Cowper-Coles, said in testimony to a parliamentary select committee in the United Kingdom in 2010. “He’s gone from hero to zero, but the truth is somewhere in between. He’s a great king, but a poor chief executive.”3

  Karzai, conscious he was being made a scapegoat, lashed out with increasingly harsh complaints and accusations over cultural blunders and civilian casualties. He repeated his usual refrain: the United States and its coalition were failing to tackle the insurgency at its source in the training camps and ISI offices in Pakistan. It was a disastrous falling-­out, when the war was at its most dangerous point. The Taliban and Pakistan were able to press their advantage.

  Karzai had seemed at first an ideal candidate for leader of Afghanistan. He was from the largest ethnic group, the Pashtun, but a nationalist, anti-Taliban, and accepted by the northern factions. He had a long record of work in the Afghan resistance to the Soviets, still essential for any leader of Afghanistan, but he had no blood on his hands. He was educated, a fluent English speaker, pro-American, and a moderate who supported a constitutional monarchy and democratic system for Afghanistan. His early speeches of unity and peace genuinely inspired many of his countrymen across ethnic and geographic boundaries. I met people all over the country, even herders high up in the Wakhan corridor, t
he furthest sliver of Afghanistan reaching toward China, who spoke approvingly of his message for unity. Everyone was weary of war.

  Karzai was one of the privileged class in Afghanistan. Born in 1957, he came from a prominent landowning family in the village of Karz, just outside Kandahar city. His father and grandfather were both members of Afghanistan’s National Assembly, his grandfather served as deputy speaker of the Senate, and his father, Abdul Ahad Karzai, was deputy speaker of the lower house. They came from the Populzai tribe, a minor tribe but part of the dominant Durrani tribal confederation that has ruled Afghanistan for over two centuries. Karzai attended high school in Kabul and went on to college in India, completing a degree at the University of Simla, the former summer capital during the British Raj. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan occurred when he was in India. His family left for Quetta, and Karzai began life as an exile. He was lucky by Afghan standards in that he was able to complete his studies. He then moved to Pakistan to work beside his father.

  Karzai’s brothers had emigrated to the United States where they ran restaurants. Yet he chose from the beginning to stay and work for his country, which was then under foreign occupation. Early influences that were to color his career in politics included Mahatma Gandhi, who led the movement for Indian independence from British rule, and Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the grand old Pashtun nationalist leader from India’s northwest frontier and senior member of Gandhi’s Congress Party.