Karzai was stuck. He was dependent on American military power for his own survival and now needed another influx of troops to prevent his government from being overrun. Vulnerable, ineffective, he lashed out in increasingly outspoken diatribes, often against his foreign backers. On one occasion, he burst into tears during a speech. On another memorable instance, he threatened to abandon the fight. “If you and the international community pressure me more,” he told members of parliament, “I swear that I am going to join the Taliban.”12
In 2009, Richard C. Holbrooke, the special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, began the first diplomatic efforts to open back-channel contacts with the Taliban. He tasked the German diplomat Michael Steiner, who had worked with him on the Dayton peace talks that ended the Bosnian war, to make the first contacts. Steiner succeeded in holding several meetings with Tayeb Agha, a young, English-speaking assistant to Mullah Omar. Steiner brought American officials in on at least one of these meetings. He was offering no quick fix. His working theory was that it took the Soviet Union five years of secret contacts with the mujahideen in order to negotiate the safe withdrawal of its forces from Afghanistan.
When I asked Holbrooke to describe the U.S. strategy for Afghanistan—was it doubling up the war effort with a surge or going for peace talks?—he told me it was both. “It’s jaw, jaw, war, war.” He was intentionally mangling Winston Churchill’s famous phrase that it was better to talk than wage war. Holbrooke added that when the United States was negotiating an end to the Vietnam War, negotiations that he took part in as a young diplomat, the fighting continued apace and U.S. casualties were at their highest, even as peace talks were underway. Well aware that the war in Afghanistan was running out of time, he was working hard to push through trade and political agreements between Afghanistan and Pakistan that would bind the two countries together and encourage peace.
Holbrooke was one of those who understood the wider diplomatic conundrum that Karzai was driving at. It was not peace between Kabul and the Taliban that was the key, but peace with Pakistan. When discussing the Western campaign against the Taliban with British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and senior diplomat Sherard Cowper-Coles, Holbrooke summed it up in typical blunt fashion: “We may be fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country.”13
12
Obama’s Surge
“We don’t trust foreigners. Their friendship lasts only until the end of the afternoon.”
—Afghan landowner
August 2010. The Taliban were at their zenith. News spread like wildfire that Taliban fighters had slung a chain across the road on the south side of Kandahar city and were stopping cars. For months, the insurgents had been steadily encroaching on the city from the surrounding districts. They roamed freely in the semirural suburb of Mahalajat just to the south, and were running checkpoints there in broad daylight, searching people and cars coming from the city. Now in the most brazen manner, the Taliban were operating inside the city.
Mahalajat was the Taliban’s springboard into the city. It was from this suburb that a massive tanker bomb had entered Kandahar the previous summer an entire block of houses and shops and leveled, killing forty people. The blast resounded through the whole city and struck working-class families as they were sitting down to the evening meal to break the Ramadan fast. A second truck bomb exploded a few weeks later in a cemetery in Mahalajat, apparently also on its way toward the city. Kandaharis had suffered scores of horrific suicide bombings for three years, but this was a new level of calamity and made them despair.
By August 2010, the government seemed almost defeated. Parliamentary elections were just a month away, and life around Kandahar was paralyzed. The Taliban crept closer to the provincial capital, flaunting their presence in the surrounding districts more aggressively than ever before. Fighters were so confident that some of them were dropping in from Pakistan for a few months, to make some easy money before returning home, a resident told me. They demanded contributions from wealthy families, extracted protection money from security contractors, who paid them for safe passage for their supply convoys, and kidnapped people for ransom.
In December 2009, President Barack Obama had announced that the United States would send 33,000 extra troops to Afghanistan. The influx would be similar to the surge that President Bush had sent into Iraq in 2007, when the insurgency there threatened to engulf the country. Afghanistan was on an equally dangerous trajectory. Eighteen months had passed since military commanders had first flagged the need for more forces to stem the Taliban resurgence, and General McChrystal had been warning that the war would be unwinnable if they waited any longer.1 Despite his campaign promises to put in the resources needed to win in Afghanistan, Obama was reluctant to send more troops when the crunch came. When he did send them, it was only just in time.
By August 2010, all the extra troops had arrived, but the surge had yet to make an impact in Kandahar. U.S. Marines had been operating in Helmand since the spring, but they seemed a whole planet away. American forces had been deploying over the summer months into Kandahar province, but they had not changed the status quo. Troops on forays from FOB Wilson on the main road of Kandahar were attacked every time, often within minutes of emerging from their base. Stryker Brigade units in Arghandab had been taking some of the heaviest casualties of any unit in Afghanistan, blown up by enormous roadside bombs that demolished their fighting vehicles. Afghan forces did conduct an operation to search Mahalajat in July, and NATO forces rounded up some Taliban suspects in a burst of heavy fighting in early August. Yet they had not dented the Taliban’s persistent pressure on the city.
Nine years after they were chased from power, the Taliban were poised to overrun their old capital. Several hundred armed men ranged around Mahalajat, walking in the open with weapons. White Taliban flags appeared on houses just a few blocks from the district center. The government was barely functioning. Officials and police did not dare enter the twisting lanes and clustered hamlets of the neighborhood beyond their compound, for fear of ambushes and mines.
The chain-link roadblocks conjured up old fears for the civilians of the area who had lived through the lawless years of the civil war when gunmen stopped cars and killed people at will. Villagers and farmers visiting their fields, many of them former mujahideen themselves, described how they had to stand in silence as teenage Taliban fighters searched their pockets, smashing their cell phones and calling them spies. The Taliban often accused villagers of using the phones to tip off NATO forces about Taliban presence. They held the population in thrall. If they regained control of Kandahar, they would dominate southern Afghanistan once more.
Taliban fighters had moved into positions close to two police stations on the edge of the urban area, likely targets for attack. Families were packing up and leaving Mahalajat for the city. Townspeople had for months recognized members of the Taliban walking in the streets, and heard talk that known commanders were back in the area. They braced for an attack.
For the provincial governor, Tooryalai Wesa, the news that the Taliban were operating a roadblock inside the city was alarming. A ponderous, Westernized bureaucrat, he had spent much of the previous twenty years in Canada working in development. He was no fighter. He called the person who was really in charge in the south: Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s brother. Together they called President Karzai to ask him to order NATO to intervene in Mahalajat. Karzai’s chief of staff, Umar Daudzai, was with the president when the call came through, and told me about it.
“How many Taliban are there?” Karzai asked.
“Probably thirty to forty.”
“How many bodyguards do you have between you?”
“Maybe a hundred.”
“Well, how come you cannot move against them?” the president asked.
It was typical Karzai, giving orders almost blithely. Yet what happened next dealt the Taliban a body blow across southern Afghanistan from which they would not recover.
Goaded into action, the
governor first ordered police to move against the Taliban checkpoint. Karzai had recently given his provincial governors the power to order operations by Afghan security forces in this kind of emergency. But the police soon ran into difficulties. Five policemen were killed by mines as they were returning to base.
The president’s brother then turned to a loyalist strongman, the thirty-two-year-old commander of the border guards, Abdul Razziq, asking him to come up from his base at Spin Boldak on the Pakistani border. Razziq was the boss of the border. With his tribesmen border guards, he dominated the trade and smuggling business at the busy border crossing of Spin Boldak. He was an unruly but formidable enemy of the Taliban. He was the son of a mujahideen commander killed by the Russians, and nephew of the commander Mansour Achakzai, whom the Taliban had hung from a tank barrel in 1994. It was Mansour who had famously pulled the beard of the ISI operative Colonel Imam when he tried to lead a Pakistani trade convoy into Afghanistan. Razziq was open and friendly and enthusiastically pro-American. He wore a glittering skullcap and shalwar kamize, and proved as fierce and flamboyant a character as his father and uncle—and a vengeful opponent of the Taliban and Pakistan.
Under his leadership, Spin Boldak swelled and prospered despite frequent suicide attacks. Razziq’s rule was so strong that the Taliban were kept at bay at the border, even as they encroached on the city of Kandahar. Part of Razziq’s success was that his border police force was a mujahideen-type militia force—the only one of its type left in Kandahar. It had survived the disarmament program and been trained into a border force by the U.S. contractor Blackwater, by then renamed Xe Services.
Razziq’s men, from the Achakzai tribe, fought and thought like the Taliban, and so were much more effective in combating the insurgents than other police forces. The Achakzai tribe lives on both sides of the border. Thanks to his tribal contacts in Pakistan, Razziq had accurate information about the movements of the Taliban and their leadership in exile in Quetta. He once told me he knew the houses and cell phone numbers of most of the Quetta shura, and I believed him. The pieces of information he gave me usually checked out. The American trainers put his men in uniforms and put them to work at customs at the airport, but at heart, Razziq and his force were still mujahideen. His men were mountain tribesmen, more familiar with guns and fighting than school or rulebooks. They lived by their own tribal code, and they hated the Taliban. They also were intent on reassuming their dominance of the border region and oppressing the Noorzai tribe, their rival in the region, which had prospered under the Taliban regime. The Karzai government understood Razziq’s value and kept him on, even after an ugly incident in which he pursued a group of Noorzai all the way to Kabul, where he had them abducted and killed. Razziq has always insisted that the group were Taliban and were killed in a firefight on the border. He and his men were ruthless. A member of the Taliban told me once that they did not fear capture by NATO or Afghan forces, since they could usually bribe their way out within weeks or months. It was Razziq they feared. He did not take prisoners; he fought to the death.
When Ahmed Wali Karzai called in Razziq to help clear the Taliban in Mahalajat in late August, Razziq burst into the neighborhood with just a hundred men and routed the Taliban in five days. He said his men killed two Taliban fighters in the whole operation, and only one of his men was injured in a mine blast. Residents from Mahalajat said the death toll was much higher.
Rumors flew that Razziq had hanged two Taliban members from a tree. Razziq said it was the Taliban who did the hanging, killing two employees of the government.2 He recounted with a grin that the Taliban had rigged a stolen police car with explosives; the bomber hid above it in a mulberry tree ready to pull the trigger. Suspicious, Razziq’s men fired on the car, blowing it up, and the bomber dropped out of the tree and was also killed.
The Mahalajat operation sealed Razziq’s reputation as a fearless conqueror of the Taliban. At last the Afghans were seeing their own government grasping the insurgents by the throat and forcing the Taliban into retreat. NATO commanders, for their part, especially the Canadians who had failed to keep the Taliban out of Mahalajat, were astonished at Razziq’s success.
Home to 1.2 million people, Kandahar was critical to the stability of the whole of southern Afghanistan. With only two thousand troops, the Canadians had failed to control the insurgency in the province since 2006. Extra British and American units since then had only brought temporary help. The McChrystal counterinsurgency plan was on an altogether different scale. It swelled coalition forces in the south to 24,000, and tripled the size of Afghan Army forces. Police forces in Kandahar city were increased fivefold, to guard the entrances to the city and comb neighborhoods to stamp down on assassinations and suicide attacks. American troops moved into the districts around Kandahar through the summer of 2010, north into Arghandab, west into Zhare district, and into Dand to the southeast. The Canadians were able to draw back and concentrate all their forces on one district, Panjwayi. For the first time in Kandahar province, there were enough forces to conduct operations into all the districts around the city simultaneously and cut off the Taliban’s infiltration routes. The Taliban had been used to escaping operations by moving into a neighboring area. Like a balloon, when squeezed in one place they would pop up in another. But this time they were feeling the squeeze in every quarter and finding their usual supply routes blocked.
Razziq’s border guards spearheaded offensive movements into the districts, routing Taliban in Arghandab in September, and in the western districts in October, but he could not sustain long operations. Each time, after a few days, he would pull his forces out. The hard grind of counterinsurgency, securing and holding the districts from small outposts and with relentless patrolling, was left to the American forces and smaller units of the Afghan Army.
In the late summer, troops from the 75th Cavalry Regiment, part of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division, made a slow, deliberate maneuver into Zhare, west of Kandahar city. It was a district infested with Taliban where coalition convoys and patrols had been repeatedly ambushed. The operation had been delayed for two months, partly because of Karzai’s reluctance, but that had given the troops time to train with their Afghan counterparts and study the lay of the land and Taliban movements. When they did move in September, they executed one of the most exemplary counterinsurgency operations of the war, targeting Taliban defenses they had earmarked from their surveillance and clearing half the district within days. There was significant structural damage but hardly a single civilian casualty, since the population had left the area.
Zhare stretches south from the main highway west of Kandahar down to the west bank of the River Arghandab, a densely cultivated patchwork of walled gardens and fruit farms. The district includes Sangesar, the home village of Mullah Omar, where the Taliban first formed and made a bid for power. Taliban fighters had filtered back into the area soon after the heavy battles of 2006, and for the last four years had enjoyed almost complete freedom of movement funneling fighters and weapons further north and into the city. Most of the population had left, except the poorest sharecroppers. The Taliban built a sophisticated defense system through the area, with command posts, weapons depots, and safe houses that they used to ambush convoys along the main highway.
The place was teeming with fighters. Canadian forces had an outpost at Pashmul but came under attack driving in and out. As they pushed south from the road and set up combat outposts, U.S. patrols ran into persistent firefights. “If you stopped, within five minutes they would come and attack,” Captain Matthew Crawford, an intelligence officer with the 101st, told me. The Taliban had scouts everywhere and were canny fighters. “They had a very early warning system, it was impossible to work undetected,” he said. “They had good fighting positions and were unbelievably quick at getting their wounded out.”
The Taliban used the terrain cleverly. They had built a layered defense, so they could pull back from their fighting positions through the gard
ens and vineyards to a cache where they would drop their weapons, and then fall back further to a safe house. But the 101st had been watching them for weeks, and as they fought their way down from Highway One, the main highway running due west, they targeted the Taliban safe houses and escape routes.
Within days the ambushes ceased on the main highway and traffic surged anew along the road. In mid-October, hundreds of American and Afghan troops made an air assault into the horn of Panjwayi, south of Zhare, seizing the region that served as the Taliban’s rear base adjoining the desert. Razziq and his border guards blasted into the Taliban’s last supply base at Bandi-Temur, on the edge of the Registan Desert, breaking open their jail and freeing a number of prisoners and kidnap victims. After a month of fighting, the Taliban pulled out entirely, escaping to Pakistan and ceding the area to the Americans. They told local residents they would wait out the surge and reinfiltrate fighters when the pressure was reduced.
U.S. forces were planning a different scenario, however. For the first time, they were moving into Kandahar’s districts with an intent to stay and hold them with large numbers of security forces. Their plan was to stake a permanent presence in a series of combat outposts along the river valley and through the most populated areas, and build up the Afghan Army and police to take over security of the region. By destroying Taliban bases and weapons caches, deploying police and army, and strengthening the government, the U.S. and Afghan forces would render the area inhospitable to a Taliban return, General McChrystal reasoned.
The Wrong Enemy Page 27