In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

CHAPTER TEN Collapse of Law and Order

BEGINNING IN 2005, Afghanistan’s fragile national-security architecture began to crumble. The Taliban and other insurgent groups began to mount more aggressive offensive operations, and Afghan forces proved incapable of counterattacking and protecting the population. To better understand this development, Amrullah Saleh, the head of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), commissioned a study on the state of the insurgency. Saleh was a Panjshiri Tajik who had been a trusted protégé of Ahmed Shah Massoud and had worked closely with the CIA before the September 11 attacks. He spoke excellent English and wore neatly pressed Western suits. Barely thirty years old in 2004, when Karzai appointed him to run Afghanistan’s spy agency, Saleh was a reformer with a reputation for great efficiency. He “had a real impact” on NDS, recalled the CIA’s Gary Schroen, “moving it forward with reorganization and restructuring, instituting training at all levels, establishing a recruitment program based on talent rather than ethnic or family background, and dramatically improving morale and performance.”¹

Saleh based the study, titled Strategy of Insurgents and Terrorists in Afghanistan, on intelligence reports from NDS stations across Afghanistan, reports from informants in Afghanistan and Pakistan, detainee interrogations, meetings with Taliban leaders, open-source information, and interviews with Afghan National Army commanders and a variety of national and local officials. It was designed to be the most comprehensive study of the current situation yet assembled. The study found that the Afghan police and army forces were failing in their primary mission on a monumental level. “When villagers and rural communities seek protection from the police, either it arrives late or arrives in a wrong way.” U.S. forces, still operating at “light-footprint” levels, could not fill the vacuum. The lack of security began to undermine local support, and many who had cooperated with the government were killed, intimidated into silence, or fled. “Those who are collaborating with the government or coalition forces are now forced to move their families to the cities fearing attacks from the Taliban. This exodus of government informants and collaborators from the villages is a welcome development for the Taliban, insurgents and terrorists.”

The result was that increasing amounts of territory fell into the hands of the Taliban or allied groups. Saleh’s report continued: “The villages are gradually emptied of pro-government political forces and individuals. These rural areas become sanctuaries for the Taliban and the population is left with no choice but to become sympathizers of the insurgents.” In these pockets, he found exactly what we might expect: The Taliban had begun to establish a shadow government, including an administrative structure and courts. Lamenting these disturbing results, Saleh wrote:

I wish to be contradicted in my analysis of the situation and our perspective of what is going on and what is going to happen. Unfortunately, everybody I have so far talked to agrees with this picture in general terms. It is unfortunate because it is no longer only terrorism. It is insurgency. It is not about which individual is hiding where but about a trend which is undermining us in the rural areas. I still hope that I am wrong.²

A Monopoly of Force?

It was no surprise that the police weren’t living up to expectations. Afghan police had not received formal training for at least two decades.³ Germany, which had sent special forces to Afghanistan in late 2001 and had hosted the Bonn Conference, had volunteered to assess and rebuild the police. The initial German fact-finding mission in January 2002 discovered that “the police force is in a deplorable state just a few months after the dissolution of the Taliban regime” and that “there is a total lack of equipment and supplies. No systematic training has been provided for around 20 years. At least one entire generation of trained police officers is missing.”⁴ The first team of German police advisers arrived in March 2002 to train police instructors at their academy in Kabul. Officers, mostly inspectors and lieutenants, started a three-year course, taking classes in human rights, tactical operations, narcotics investigations, traffic, criminal investigations, computer skills, and Islamic law.⁵

By 2003, however, officials at the U.S. State and Defense Departments and the White House became increasingly agitated about the German approach. Many argued that it was far too slow, trained too few police officers, and was seriously underfunded. As one high-level U.S. official told me: “When it became clear that they were not going to provide training to lower-level police officers, and were moving too slowly with too few resources, we decided to intervene to prevent the program from failing.”⁶ German assessments of progress in rebuilding the police noted that a paltry “17 German police officers—men and women from both our federal and state police forces—are advising the Afghan Transitional Authority on this challenging task of crucial importance for the country’s democratic future.”⁷ One can hardly blame U.S. government officials for thinking the Germans were not serious about training. In 2003, Donald Rumsfeld wrote to CPA Administrator Paul Bremer and General John Abizaid, commander of U.S. Central Command, scoffing, “Colin Powell told me this morning that the Germans have offered to help train police in Iraq. I mentioned that I thought they had a done a pretty slow job in Afghanistan.”⁸

After supplementing German efforts, the United States reorganized the program to train recruits at a central facility in Kabul, as well as at regional centers in Kandahar, Mazar-e-Sharif, Gardez, and Jalalabad. The State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) oversaw the entire program. Since the end of the Cold War, INL had played an increasingly prominent role in civilian police efforts abroad. It had some administrative, budgetary, and managerial capacity to organize and run a policing program, but it had no police to deploy and no significant operational capabilities. Consequently, it contracted the private security firm DynCorp International, headquartered in the leafy Washington suburb of Falls Church, Virginia, to build facilities and help train the police in Afghanistan.⁹

DynCorp emerged out of two companies formed in 1946: California Eastern Airways and Land-Air, Inc. In 1951, California Eastern acquired Land-Air, and over the next several decades the company changed its name several times, settling on DynCorp in 1987. They were largely involved in providing mission support and repair to U.S. military aircraft. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the increase in U.S. stability operations in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, DynCorp broadened its scope to police training and security protection. DynCorp was not alone. With military costs rising and an increased number of operations abroad, the U.S. government began to rely on a growing list of companies—including Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI) and Blackwater—to provide such security functions as police training, protective security, convoy protection, border enforcement, and even drug eradication in failing states.

For their mission in Afghanistan, DynCorp recruited retired U.S. police officers, as well as some active members of state and local police forces, to serve as the U.S. contingents of civilian police teams. From the beginning, senior U.S. military officials had worried that the INL program was not doing a good job of creating more competent Afghan police, and others were concerned that many of the DynCorp advisers had had little experience training police from a Third World tribal society such as Afghanistan. This led to growing tension between the Defense and State Departments in Washington and Afghanistan. The relationship became so bad at times that key INL personnel were not allowed without an escort onto Camp Eggers in Kabul, the headquarters of U.S. police training efforts.

Afghan government officials also began to grow increasingly concerned about the shoddy state of the police and the unwillingness of the international community to make police training a priority. For example, Minister of Interior Jalali met with National Security Adviser Rice in Washington to push for police reform. He pleaded with her, arguing that the police “should be the front line in protecting highways, borders, and villages.” In September 2003, during Donald Rumsfeld’s five-day swing through Afghanistan and Iraq, Jalali lobbied the secretary to focus on the police. In a 2004 meeting in Berlin with Zalmay Khalilzad and German Interior Minister Otto Schily, Jalali suggested that the international community “should adopt the Balkans model of policing,” which would require the use of competent, high-level police such as the carabinieri and the gendarmerie to train and mentor Afghan police, as they had done in Bosnia and Kosovo.¹⁰ But U.S. policymakers were more interested in building the Afghan National Army than in training police. And German policymakers were reluctant to increase their commitment to police training.

By 2004, there was growing impatience in the White House and the Department of Defense that the State Department effort was failing in the police effort. Rumsfeld wrote a series of “snowflakes”-short, pithy memos that he frequently sent to senior Pentagon officials—expressing concern that the police program was undermining U.S. and broader NATO counterinsurgency efforts. His letters expressed a profound lack of confidence in the State Department’s police-training capability.

In 2004, Lieutenant General David Barno held a series of video teleconferences (VTCs) with Secretary Rumsfeld, telling him that “police training needed to be done more systematically. They needed a strategy, he said, for what the end state needed to look like, and what kind of resources were needed to get there.”¹¹ According to Barno, Secretary Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, by then the secretary of state, finally agreed to get the Defense Department more directly involved in police training, but only in the spring of 2005. This process had taken at least a year. Barno, Khalilzad, Rumsfeld, and other U.S. officials, including Under Secretary Douglas Feith, were supportive of this shift. But Robert Charles, assistant secretary at INL, who had developed a reputation as hardheaded and abrasive among those who worked with him inside and outside the State Department, blocked the shift. Turf concerns between State and Defense may have partly caused the resistance, since INL was the lead U.S. agency for training foreign police. Whatever the cause, the Department of Defense only became involved after Charles departed.¹²

Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, who succeeded Barno in May 2005 as commander of Combined Forces Command—Afghanistan, is a strikingly intelligent career soldier who earned master’s degrees from Harvard University in East Asian Studies and Stanford University in political science. He also served as a National Security Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Nora Bensahel, who later went on to Harvard University’s John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and the RAND Corporation, was in the same PhD class at Stanford University before Eikenberry was called back to the Pentagon in 1994. “He was very smart,” Bensahel recalled, “and brought a tremendous amount to the program. Not only could he talk international relations theory, he was a practitioner as well.”¹³ But some of his staff also found him confrontational. In a meeting with Afghan Minister of Defense Abdul Rahim Wardak in 2005, for example, he capped a testy conversation by saying: “Minister Wardak, I know your army better than you do.”

Eikenberry appointed Major General Robert Durbin in late 2005 to head the office in charge of training the Afghan police and army, which was saddled with an unwieldy name: Combined Security Transition Command—Afghanistan. Durbin had a reputation as a tough soldier who could also be thoughtful and reflective. Arriving in Kabul in January 2006, he found the police in terrible shape; the United States had people with the wrong skill sets in key positions, and their tours were only four to six months. “I honestly believed I could change the police force in a few months,” noted Durbin. “After a number of months, however, I began to realize that it would take over a decade. The amount of institutional change needed was immense.”¹⁴ It took Durbin until March 2006 to put together a plan to staff, equip, and train the Afghan National Police. By then, he had concluded that the United States needed to implement a program for the police similar to the one they had put in place for the Afghan National Army.

Durbin continued to develop the police plan until June 2006, when he was asked to put a price tag on this effort. After going back and forth with Eikenberry, the two agreed to request a total of $8.6 billion for the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police: $5.9 billion for fiscal year 2007 and $2.7 billion for fiscal year 2008. Roughly two-thirds of the money they requested was for new equipment for the police. The amount was astounding, more than the gross domestic product of about fifty countries.¹⁵ Through dogged efforts over several months, Durbin finally managed to get the budget approved, despite the initial displeasure of Secretary Rumsfeld.

Durbin also ramped up efforts to build an effective Ministry of Interior. He secured the assistance of the private contractor MPRI, which helped build personnel and logistics systems. MPRI helped the ministry formulate the budget, pay the soldiers, and perform other basic functions, but they also made sure the system was “Afghanized” by working with key Afghans in the ministry. Durbin’s plan envisioned three years to build what he called “base functionality” in the Ministry of Interior, since it was starting from scratch. In August 2006, he identified fifteen key systems and focused on the top five: personnel, finance, logistics, training management, and communications. Durbin told me, “We started at the top of the ministry and worked our way down.” His goal was to create full operating capacity within a year.¹⁶

For Durbin, one of the most challenging aspects of the police program was the number of countries involved. The United Kingdom, Canada, Netherlands, Germany, and other nations working with Afghan police all wanted a say in how their money and resources were spent. This was understandable, but it also made coordination problematic and made it difficult to assign police resources in the places where Durbin assessed gaps. Most countries tended to have parochial visions of the program. After Afghan police graduated from the regional training centers, NATO countries had different—and sometimes entirely incompatible—programs for developing police in the field. One senior Pentagon official told me:

Coalition efforts to build Afghan police and army forces were, to put it diplomatically, deeply challenging. The South Koreans pulled their forces out of Afghanistan in 2007, and then volunteered a few slots in their defense college for Afghan soldiers. How was this going to help us? Do three or four Afghans really need to go to South Korea for training? The Germans also wanted us to build a military logistics school for Afghans in the north, but not for all of Afghanistan. Our response was: we need to develop a program for all of Afghanistan, not just in specific sectors.¹⁷

Policing Woes

The painfully slow progress in refashioning Afghanistan’s police force created a slew of challenges. General Durbin told Condoleezza Rice in June 2006 that there was no office in the United States government that could effectively build a foreign government’s police force; INL did not have experience in rebuilding a large country’s police force, nor did the Departments of Defense and Justice.¹⁸

Consequently, government analysts began to express increasing alarm at the state of the Afghan police. The Offices of Inspector General of the Departments of State and Defense reported that the readiness of the Afghan police force “to carry out its internal security and conventional police responsibilities is far from adequate. The obstacles to establish a fully professional [Afghan National Police] are formidable.” It found major obstacles: “no effective field training officer (FTO) program, illiterate recruits, a history of low pay and pervasive corruption, and an insecure environment.”¹⁹ Another assessment led by U.S. Colonel Rick Adams lambasted the Ministry of Interior as “ineffective,” “poorly led,” and “corrupt,” and the police forces as “poorly equipped.”²⁰

A number of Afghan government officials agreed, at least in theory. ²¹ But the Afghan government was sometimes its own worst enemy. In 2003, Interior Minister Jalali had pushed for the implementation of what became known as the Afghan Stabilization Program. As envisioned by President Karzai’s cabinet, the program was intended to spread the central government’s authority to all provinces and districts. Working on the assumption that all politics in Afghanistan are local, the Afghan Stabilization Program included the construction of key infrastructure in each district, such as police barracks, a prison, a post office, and a mosque. Ideally, well-trained and well-paid Afghan police thus could be sent to a functioning district center. But the program became bogged down in interministerial turf battles, with several key ministers—from the Ministries of Finance, Rural Rehabilitation and Development, and Communications—fighting over a share of the money. There was also significant disagreement about which areas of the country the program should target. Some pushed for Balkh, a relatively quiet province in the north that was home to such strongmen as Abdul Rashid Dostum. But others argued that it should focus on the east and the south, where the Afghan government and NATO forces were fighting insurgents.²² In the end, the Afghanistan Stabilization Program floundered. In a moment of polite understatement, a private consulting firm reported that the plan fell “short of requirements.”²³

The police were sorely needed to help establish order in urban and rural areas, but, as we’ve seen, they were poorly equipped, corrupt, and badly trained. Worst of all, they lacked any semblance of a national police infrastructure. This was especially true in southern Afghanistan. In 2006, the U.S. military concluded that in the south, the Afghan National Police had only “87 percent of weapons with 71% of ammunition; 60% of vehicles; 24% of communications; and 0% of individual equipment such as body armor, batons, handcuffs, binoculars, jackets and first aid equipment.”²⁴ They also lacked uniforms, police stations and jails, national command and control, and investigative training.²⁵ The Ministry of Interior was in particularly bad shape. Another U.S. military report found that the “MoI Finance is broken at every level.” There was “no actual disbursement capability” to pay police officers, “no formal lines of accountability” which “perpetuates corruption at every level.”²⁶

Afghan, U.S., and European officials involved in police training reported pervasive corruption throughout the force. An Afghan trucker put it succinctly: “Forget about the Taliban, our biggest problems are with the police.”²⁷ Police regularly demanded bribes to allow drugs and other licit and illicit goods to pass along routes they controlled. Police chiefs were frequently involved in skimming money they received to pay their police officers.²⁸ Some district-and provincial-level police chiefs were also involved in “ghost police” schemes. Since the international community paid law-enforcement salaries, some chiefs inflated the number of officers on their payrolls and pocketed the extra money.²⁹ Colonel Rick Adams, who headed the Police Reform Directorate for the U.S.-led Combined Security Transition Command—Afghanistan, said the first challenge in reforming the police was “overcoming a culture of corruption.”³⁰ An Afghan government report was even more frank, claiming that “allegations of nepotism and unethical recruitment practices are commonplace,” and “financial improprieties have been one of the most visible problems afflicting the Ministry and the police reform process.”³¹ These findings led to a flurry of efforts within the U.S. military and the State Department to curb corruption in the police. Durbin and his staff began vetting top-level police officials, trying to audit cash flows for paying police officers. They also increased the number of police paid through electronic funds transfers at local banks, rather than giving the money to police commanders, who inevitably would pocket some of it.

Nevertheless, U.S. State and Defense Department officials acknowledged that it was extremely difficult to vet Afghan police officers or units.³² There was little systematic information on the background of individuals or units, and documents frequently were destroyed by the Afghan Ministry of Interior—or never existed in the first place. The office in charge of training the Afghan police and army, Combined Security Transition Command—Afghanistan, focused largely on vetting top-level Ministry of Interior officials. There was comparatively little focus on mid-and lower-level police.³³ As discouraging as it was, corruption appeared to be more pervasive in the police than in the other security forces.³⁴

The result was that Afghan National Police were often overmatched in conducting counterinsurgency and counternarcotics operations, as well as curbing cross-border infiltration. In some cases, including in southern Afghanistan, Afghan police actively collaborated with Taliban. A German assessment of the border police reported: “Neither the Afghan border police nor the customs authorities are currently in a position to meet the challenges presented by this long border.”³⁵ Interior Minister Jalali argued that “because of the late start in comprehensive police development, the [Afghan National Police] continues to be ill-trained, poorly paid, under-equipped, and inadequately armed.”³⁶ Afghan forces had a difficult time even against criminal organizations. In one incident in Balkh Province, police forces were attacked, captured, and disarmed by a drug cartel after an armed clash.³⁷ And again, in the days following a police-led operation to capture Taliban fighters in Sangsar village in the southern province of Kandahar, an after-action report found that there was “no joint plan,” “no unity of command,” and “no intel sharing” between the police and Afghanistan’s intelligence service. The result was seven casualties and one friendly-fire incident. All Taliban escaped.³⁸

In many ways, however, the police were an afterthought; the international training for law enforcement was simply not as good as it was for the Afghan National Army. In the course of four years, control over the police was shifted among three agencies—from the German lead in 2002, to the U.S. State Department in 2003, and finally to the U.S. Defense Department in 2005. DynCorp International set the tone for this sorry state of affairs early on, and some of the blame can be assigned to them. The State Department and DynCorp focused largely on “outputs,” such as the number of police trained, rather than “outcome” measures such as police performance against insurgents or drug traffickers. They had too few people and too few resources.³⁹ The quality of DynCorp police trainers varied widely. Some had significant international police training experience and were competent in dealing with police in a tribal society in the middle of an insurgency. But many other DynCorp trainers had little experience in such an environment.⁴⁰

Senior Bush administration officials had more scathing criticism of DynCorp. Ambassador Ronald Neumann told me: “What DynCorp did was take a police officer out of a cesspool, train him for a few weeks, and throw him back into a cesspool. This,” he said pointedly, “did not result in a lot of cleanliness over the long run.”⁴¹ Yet Neumann was quick to acknowledge that building competent and legitimate police has been a major problem in past counterinsurgency operations. “The early focus on low-level training was inadequate,” said Neumann. “DynCorp was executing the contract they were given and I do not think one can entirely hold them reponsible for how the contract was structured.”⁴² Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage similarly told me that “DynCorp simply didn’t do a good job in training the police.”⁴³ Afghan officials repeated this charge. Minister of Interior Jalali said, “The DynCorp police trainers were a mixed bag. I personally rejected a number of DynCorp contractors because they had little or no useful background for training police in Afghanistan.” He noted that DynCorp “checked boxes” they were more interested in completing a contract, not in creating a competent, viable police force.⁴⁴

To help alleviate the police concerns, the Afghan government and the Combined Security Transition Command—Afghanistan came up with a plan to build what became known as the Afghan National Auxiliary Police. “There were not enough guns and people to protect local villagers,” remarked Ambassador Neumann. “This is counterinsurgency 101: to protect the local population.”⁴⁵

In February 2006, Ambassador Neumann and General Durbin were approached by senior officials from the Afghan Ministries of Interior and Finance while General Eikenberry was out of town. The Afghans wanted to hire an additional 200 to 400 police per district. The idea was to create a new force, to be called the Afghan National Auxiliary Police. Durbin and his deputy, Canadian Brigadier General Gary O’Brien, briefed Neumann on the initial concept in the spring of 2006, and Durbin then briefed President Karzai in May 2006. The plan was to establish a police force designed to fill the local gaps in Afghan security forces.⁴⁶ The auxiliary-police program meant training a local force for ten days and equipping its members with guns. They were then sent to secure static checkpoints and to conduct operations with Coalition forces against insurgents in six unstable provinces: Helmand, Zabol, Kandahar, Farah, Oruzgan, and Ghazni.⁴⁷ At the same time, Durbin moved to dissolve the Highway Police, who were interminably corrupt, regularly took bribes at checkpoints along major highways, and harassed local Afghans.

U.S. officials pointedly tried to avoid turning the auxiliary police into a village militia by recruiting them individually and paying and supervising them through the Ministry of Interior. “There were numerous efforts on the provincial level by local officials to recruit on a militia basis,” said Neumann. “We tried to fix those problems by sending out mixed teams from the U.S. Embassy, CSTC—A [Combined Security Transition Command—Afghanistan], and DynCorp to see what was happening on the local level. We fixed some of those problems.” But the auxiliary-police program still ran into additional snags. Ministry of Interior officials began recruiting without supervision in other provinces and then went to U.S. officials for reimbursement. “I refused to concur with this request and blocked it,” remarked Neumann, “on the grounds that the recruits had not been vetted.”⁴⁸ Still, the auxiliary police were never well integrated into Pashtun tribes, subtribes, clans, and qawms in the south and east—and, consequently, were never accepted at the social level.

The program was opposed by some senior U.S. military leaders, such as General Eikenberry, who argued that it was only a stopgap measure—a tactical solution to a systemic problem with the police. But Eikenberry, who wanted to avoid a major fight with the State Department and the White House, ultimately did not pull out a “red card” and kill the program.⁴⁹ In retrospect, he didn’t have to. The auxiliary-police program eventually lost steam. When I visited Kandahar and Helmand Provinces in September 2007, for example, most auxiliary police were being used intermittently. By 2008, when I went back again, they were essentially gone.

Afghan National Army

The Afghan National Army was better. The United States led rebuilding efforts for the ANA, although French, British, and Turkish instructors, as well as instructors from other Coalition countries, were also involved.⁵⁰ Training commenced in May 2002, when the Afghan Army’s first regular army battalion began ten weeks of infantry and combat training at the Kabul Military Training Center. The United States then assigned some of its best soldiers, from 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group, to organize the initial effort. ⁵¹ Unlike the police program, the effort to build a viable army began immediately after the overthrow of the Taliban.

In the fall of 2002, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked General Eikenberry to help coordinate security-sector efforts in Afghanistan. Eikenberry then headed the Office of Military Cooperation—Afghanistan, which was charged with building the Afghan National Army. He developed a comprehensive approach, so one of his most significant contributions was to reform the Ministry of Defense. “There was an existing ministry and a General Staff that had been taken over by members of the Northern Alliance in 2002,” Eikenberry noted, “but it was dysfunctional and not inclusive of all ethnic groups.” Eikenberry and his team, with assistance from MPRI, built an organizational diagram of the Ministry of Defense that included key offices and positions. “My next step was to begin compiling a list of candidates for the top 35 positions in the General Staff with an eye toward creating an ethnically-balanced, merit-based ministry,” he continued. The process for choosing candidates was fairly transparent and done with Afghan partnership.

“In the late spring and early summer of 2003, my team and I briefed President Karzai and other key Afghan leaders, who provided additional candidates for the 35 positions,” he recalled. “I wanted to create sustainable institutions that were well-vetted with and trusted by the Afghans.”⁵²

Eikenberry’s efforts had a significant impact on the training of Ministry of Defense officials and soldiers.⁵³ New Afghan recruits received training in basic rifle marksmanship, platoon-and company-level tactics, use of heavy weapons, and engineering and other skills. Desertion rates were initially high—Afghanistan’s 1st Battalion had a desertion rate of approximately 50 percent per month—but the rate eventually dropped to 10 percent per month by the summer of 2003, between 2 percent and 3 percent per month by 2004, and 1.25 percent per month by 2006.⁵⁴

Afghan Army efforts ran into trouble after Eikenberry left Afghanistan in 2003, though he returned in 2005 as head of Combined Forces Command—Afghanistan. He was followed by two U.S. Air Force generals with little experience in building foreign armies: U.S. Air Force Major General Craig P. Weston and U.S. Air Force Major General John T. Brennan. “Putting Air Force personnel in charge of army training was like putting an Army general in charge of building an Afghan Air Force. He wouldn’t know what to do,” one senior U.S. Army official told me.⁵⁵

In December 2005, Secretary Rumsfeld visited Kabul and met with Minister of Defense Wardak, National Security Adviser Zalmai Rassoul, and Minister of Finance Anwar ul-Haq Ahadi. Wardak is a burly, overbearing figure who became an officer in the Afghan Army in the 1980s but later defected to the mujahideen and joined the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan of Pir Sayyid Ahmad Gailani. He was involved in one of the most lethal attacks against the Soviet Union, code-named Operation Avalanche, a 1987 ambush against a Soviet convoy that inflicted one of the highest levels of Soviet casualties in one day since World War II.⁵⁶ Wardak had an affinity for the United States, testifying several times before the U.S. Congress during the Soviet War, and received medical treatment in the United States after being wounded by a Scud missile in 1989. Ahadi also had close connections with the United States, having received his PhD in political science from Northwestern University. He had taught at Carleton and Providence Colleges.

“Rumsfeld read us the riot act,” recalled Daoud Yaqub, who was present at the December meeting. An Afghan army of 70,000, which Minister of Defense Wardak had supported, was simply unsustainable. Rumsfeld said an army with between 45,000 and 52,000 soldiers was “a bit more reasonable.” If the Afghans wanted to have a 70,000-man army, he warned, they would have to take money from somewhere else. This triggered major budget discussions within the Afghan government, although the funds were eventually found to support the larger number.⁵⁷ With Durbin at the helm of Combined Security Transition Command—Afghanistan in 2006, performance steadily improved. Several units of the ANA were deployed throughout Afghanistan to conduct combat operations and establish law and order.

In 2005, Afghan National Army forces had notable success in Kunar Province with Operation Catania, which targeted insurgent hideouts prior to the September parliamentary elections.⁵⁸ In 2006, ANA soldiers played a key role in two major counterinsurgency offensives—Operation Mountain Thrust in southern Afghanistan and Operation Mountain Lion in Kunar—among several others.⁵⁹ Soldiers from the 3rd Brigade of the Afghan National Army’s 203rd Corps fought alongside members of U.S. Task Force Spartan, made up of soldiers from the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 10th Mountain Division and Marines from the 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment. More than 2,500 Afghan National Army and Coalition forces were involved in the operation.⁶⁰ In 2007, ANA units, backed by a small contingent of U.S. military forces, played the leading role in Operation Maiwand in Ghazni Province against the Taliban. They also played critical roles in fighting Taliban forces during Operation Achilles in Helmand Province.

Sometimes members of the ANA were helpful in more lighthearted ways. In 2006, for example, U.S. Special Operations Forces and Afghan Army forces were involved in heavy fighting near Tarin Kowt, a small, dusty town of 10,000 in central Afghanistan’s Oruzgan Province. The town’s only airstrip was on the military base of the NATO provincial reconstruction team, which was locally called “Kamp Holland” since it housed a sizable contingent of Dutch soldiers. One Special Operations soldier watched, somewhat perplexed, as an Afghan Army soldier put down his Kalashnikov during the fighting, looked toward Mecca, and prayed to Allah. He repeated the action far more than the five obligatory daily prayer times for Muslims.

At the end of the battle, the U.S. soldier asked him what he was doing. “I was praying to Allah to deliver U.S. Apache helicopters,” the Afghan responded. “And you know what? Allah listened. The Apaches showed up and saved the day.” Just as the Russians had relied heavily on helicopter support, the Apache attack helicopter was deployed fairly often by the United States against insurgents operating in rural areas. It could lay down a dizzying display of fire from 30-millimeter automatic cannons that could shoot 625 rounds per minute, Hellfire antitank missiles, and rockets. The Hellfire thermobaric missiles carried by some Apaches were particularly ruthless. “The effect of the explosion within confined spaces is immense,” one CIA report noted. “Those near the ignition point are obliterated. Those at the fringe are likely to suffer many internal and thus invisible injuries.”⁶¹

Afghan National Army soldiers began to earn a reputation as tenacious fighters in battle. By all accounts, they were more proficient in tactics, techniques, and procedures for fighting counterinsurgency warfare after their U.S. training. When asked to perform crowd control, deliver humanitarian assistance, gather intelligence about insurgents and their support network, and assist in other civil-action projects, the ANA impressed many observers.⁶² They were also effective in gathering intelligence about insurgents, their support network, and weapons caches. Some argued, however, that the emphasis on quality had had too high a price tag. A World Bank study found that the “ANA salary structure, determined apparently without reference to fiscal constraints or pay elsewhere in the civil service, has set a precedent which the police and other sectors aspire to and which will be fiscally costly.”⁶³

Despite increasing levels of competence, however, Afghan Army forces still suffered from a lack of indigenous air support and the absence of a self-sustaining operational budget. They relied on embedded international forces and U.S. air support during combat, and their weapons were shoddy. As with the police, many soldiers had little ammunition and few magazines. Afghan Army units had few mortars, machine guns, MK-19 grenade machine guns, and artillery. They had almost no helicopter or fixed-wing transport, and no attack aviation. They had little or no body armor or blast glasses, Kevlar helmets, up-armored Humvees, or light-armor tracked vehicles with machine-gun cupolas and slat armor.⁶⁴ This impacted their ability to conduct sustained operations on their own against well-equipped Taliban raiding forces, who possessed rocket-propelled grenades, recoilless rifles, and antiaircraft artillery such as the Russian-made DShK 12.7-millimeter machine gun.⁶⁵

Protecting the Local Population

The inability to establish law and order in rural areas of Afghanistan pushed local communities into the hands of the Taliban. Afghan intelligence admitted, “We have not been able to provide policing and protection for the villages against the insurgents or the negative elements in general.”⁶⁶ Other internal Afghan documents reiterated this problem. There “is a perception amongst the population that not enough is being done to improve their security and that widespread criminality and corruption contribute to a situation not dissimilar from that which led to the rise of the Taliban [in the early 1990s].”⁶⁷ This was a striking conclusion. As one senior Afghan official told me: “The Afghan National Army goes into a town, clears it of insurgents, stays for a few days, and then leaves. But it doesn’t provide long-term security. This causes significant unhappiness among the local population.” He continued: “Much of the local ‘support’ for the Taliban is passive. People fear for their lives if they oppose the Taliban.”⁶⁸

A public-opinion poll conducted for Combined Forces Command—Afghanistan acknowledged that approximately 50 percent or more of most respondents in the east and south had no weekly contact with the Afghan National Police. The same poll found that less than 20 percent of local respondents in most eastern and southern provinces trusted the police.⁶⁹ This had a ripple effect on rural villagers. Afghans who cooperated with the government, or even openly supported it, often faced grave danger from Taliban and other insurgent forces across the south and east of the country.

By late 2005, a growing number of villages in these rural areas were emptied of pro-government political forces and supporters, and they gradually fell into the hands of the Taliban and other insurgent groups. This process was not entirely different from the approach that Afghan mujahideen took during the Soviet War, focusing most of their efforts on rural areas. The population was left with little choice but to become active or tacit supporters of the insurgents. A study for NATO forces in Afghanistan discovered that support for the Taliban was positively correlated with rural areas, partly because they had little or no government security presence. “The capacity of the government to protect people is more limited outside the centre of the province,” it acknowledged. “A majority of people in provincial centres believe that the government can protect them from insecurity, compared to a minority outside the centres.”⁷⁰

While the United States had committed sufficient attention and resources to building the Afghan National Army, it took a pass on the police. It handed over the police program to Germany, which failed to seriously fund or manage the program. Initial U.S. efforts to salvage the police floundered, as the State Department relied on DynCorp International, which lacked the capacity to rebuild a broken police force from scratch in a tribal society. By the time the U.S. military tried to bail out the police program in 2006, incalculable damage had already been done. These challenges might have been mitigated had the Afghan government not begun to come apart at the seams in other areas.