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

CHAPTER ELEVEN A Growing Cancer

A FEW YEARS after the fall of the Taliban regime, a joke began to work its way through Afghan intellectual circles. An Afghan goes in to see the minister of interior. “Minister,” he pleads, “you need to fix the growing corruption problem in our government. The people are becoming increasingly frustrated with government officials who are corrupt and self-serving.” After listening carefully, the minister responds: “You have convinced me there is a problem. Now how much money will you give me to fix it?”

Afghan faith in their government waned as they became concerned about skyrocketing corruption and incompetence. Senior U.S. officials were acutely aware of these problems. Lieutenant General David Barno argued that a critical pillar in counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan was “good governance,” which included the provision of essential services to the population.¹ International organizations such as the World Bank were equally keen to support governance. One World Bank assessment emphasized “investments in physical infrastructure (especially roads, water systems, and electricity), agriculture, securing land and property arrangements, creating a healthy business climate with access to skills and capital, good governance, health, and education.”²

The problem was not that Afghan and international leaders failed to understand the importance of governance and its impact on the insurgency. Virtually everyone paid lip service to governance. Rather, it was prioritizing governance over other efforts and translating this into reality. “Most people complained about policy,” explained Ronald Neumann, reflecting on his tenure as U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan over coffee one day in downtown Washington, DC. “But what we lacked was an ability to implement [it].”³ The challenge, he told me, was like Aesop’s fable “Belling the Cat.” A group of mice called together a committee to consider how to protect themselves from a cat that was harrassing them. The best solution, one mouse proposed, was to bell the cat, which was met with general applause. But this left one key question: Who would put the bell around the cat’s neck? “This was a question of implementation,” argued Neumann. “Since there were no volunteers, the policy was useless.”⁴

In a 2004 public-opinion poll conducted by the Asia Foundation, Afghans responded that two of the biggest problems in their local areas were the lack of jobs and the lack of electricity.⁵ Over the course of the next two years, jobs and electricity would remain the most significant infrastructure problems, in addition to access to water.⁶ U.S. government polls—most of which were not released publicly—showed similar results. In one survey conducted between August 30 and September 9, 2006, by the U.S. State Department, Afghans who supported the Taliban complained that they had little access to clean water and employment.⁷

There was international assistance to fix these problems, but it didn’t always reach its intended targets. One study found that the primary beneficiaries of assistance were “the urban elite.”⁸ This triggered deep-seated frustration and resentment among the rural population. There’s no doubt that the Afghan government suffered from a number of systemic problems and had difficulty attracting and retaining skilled professionals with management and administrative experience. Weak administration and lack of control in some provinces made tax policy and administration virtually impossible. In many rural areas, the government made no effort to collect taxes. In 2004, the World Bank warned of “a distant and hostile central administration that cannot provide pay or guidance to its staff in the provinces and districts in a timely manner.” It concluded that Afghan government personnel “at the provincial and district levels urgently need the resources and support necessary to do their jobs. In turn, mechanisms are needed at all levels of government to ensure that real accountability…is built into the administrative system.”⁹

Fixing the Dam Problem

By 2005, only 6 percent of the Afghan population had access to power from the electricity grid.¹⁰ Those who did have power suffered through low voltage, intermittent supply, and blackouts. The dire situation reflected a lack of investment by the Afghan government and the international community, as well as insufficient maintenance. In addition to grossly insufficient generation capacity (which was augmented by power imported from neighboring countries), the system was plagued by inadequate transmission, poor distribution, and lack of backup equipment. Most efforts focused on bringing electricity to urban areas of the country, not to rural areas in danger of succumbing to the Taliban.

Ambitiously, the Afghan government set a goal to increase coverage of the electricity grid in urban areas to 90 percent by 2015.¹¹ For those rich enough to buy generators, electricity was not a problem; their needs were met by the Afghan economy’s dominant informal sector. A large portion of the electricity supply, for example, was provided by small-scale generators. “The bulk of Afghans,” reported the World Bank, however, “still do not have reliable electric power supply and clean water. Thus the situation that prevailed in the 1970s and during the long period of conflict—basic social services not reaching most of Afghanistan’s people—has not yet been fundamentally changed, with the only partial exception being primary education, which actually improved considerably after the U.S. arrived in 2001.”¹²

Numerous government efforts to increase electricity ground to a halt. In 2002, for example, President Karzai’s cabinet explored the possibility of importing electricity into Kabul from Uzbekistan, which already supplied electric power to the northern area around Mazar-e-Sharif, supplementing a small local gas-fired power plant. Kabul received minimal electricity from three hydroelectric power dams: the 100-megawatt Naghlu Dam, the 66-megawatt Mahi Par Dam, and the 2 2-megawatt Sarobi Dam. Due to a lack of water flow on the Kabul River, however, only the Naghlu Dam was operational year-round.¹³ The Uzbek government had agreed in principle to provide energy to Afghanistan, but it requested in return that the Afghan government help pay for refurbishing and constructing transmission lines on a short stretch of land in Uzbekistan near the Afghan border. Debate in the cabinet stalled, and no decision was taken until 2004. By 2007, for bureaucratic reasons, electricity had still not been exported from Uzbekistan to Kabul, and the transmission lines from Uzbekistan to the Afghan border had still not been built.¹⁴

Of the Afghan power projects, few were as important as the Helmand Province’s Kajaki Dam, built in the 1950s with funding from the U.S. Export-Import Bank. The dam sits near the head of the Helmand River, fifty-five miles northwest of Kandahar City, surrounded by rolling hills and some of Afghanistan’s most fertile land. In 1975, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) commissioned the installation of two 16.5-megawatt generating units in a powerhouse constructed at the base of the dam.¹⁵ Twenty-six years later, U.S. aircraft bombed the Kajaki Dam powerhouse during the early stages of Operation Enduring Freedom. Transmission lines were also hit by a U.S. airstrike in November 2001, but they were repaired the following year. Over the next several years, the United States led efforts to rebuild the dam, but in 2006, the Taliban began a series of attacks on transmission lines, periodically cutting off power to Kandahar. With each outage, NATO began to recognize more fully the dam’s strategic importance and defended it more carefully. In reponse, the Taliban stepped up their campaign.

NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer noted that “when the turbine in that dam is [installed], it will give power to 2 million people and their businesses. It will provide irrigation for hundreds of farmers. And it will create jobs for 2,000 people. The Taliban, the spoilers, are attacking this project every day to stop it from going forward.”¹⁶

But protecting the dam was extraordinarily difficult, and the effort nearly collapsed several times. Perhaps the closest call was in 2006. USAID had contracted refurbishment of the dam’s turbines to the Louis Berger Group, a U.S.-based company that specialized in the planning, design, and construction management of highways, dams, and other infrastructure. Louis Berger subcontracted security for the dam to U.S. Protection and Investigations (USPI), a private company involved in armed escort and security protection in such countries as Nigeria, Algeria, Colombia, and Saudi Arabia. USPI, in turn, hired local Afghans to stand guard.

In the fall of 2006, the security situation at Kajaki became increasingly tenuous as the Taliban laid siege to the dam and Afghan security guards began to mutiny. The Taliban had intimidated local Afghans and threatened to kill anyone who cooperated with NATO, and the frightened police stopped showing up for work. Afghan engineers and American security contractors at the dam began to grow desperate; they had little food and other materials, since trucks couldn’t get through to resupply the few workers who remained. USAID personnel asked NATO for an emergency resupply. One NATO official said, “The situation was dire. If any more Afghan security officials had departed, USAID was going to pull out. There was no security. The dam was being attacked with recoilless rifles, rockets, and mortars.”¹⁷

Security of the dam was a frequent subject of discussion between Ambassador Neumann and General David Richards, head of the NATO International Security Assistance Force. “The basic problem was that our understanding of the situation on the ground was different, and worse, than ISAF’s understanding,” acknowledged Neumann. He took a trip to the dam with Brigadier General Stephen Layfield, ISAF’s deputy commander for security, on August 28, 2006, to assess the situation. They discovered that “the Taliban controlled everything around the dam and security was worse than ISAF thought because of the lack of ANA and desertions from the local security force. After that trip, U.S. Embassy and ISAF understanding of the situation seemed to improve.”¹⁸

Nevertheless, British forces operating in Helmand Province refused to provide security, since they were already bogged down elsewhere in combat operations against Taliban and other fighters. In desperation, Michelle Parker, the NATO USAID development adviser, went to General Richards and pleaded for help. Richards, who had served three tours in the British Army in Northern Ireland, was a keen student of military history. He came through. Combat resupply reached the Kajaki Dam in thirty-six hours, though the lack of security complicated the mission. A lumbering Chinook, the versatile, twin-engine heavy-lift helicopter used by the U.S. military, had to turn around on the initial trip into the dam and enlist armed Apache AH-64 helicopter escorts because of attacks from Taliban ground forces. Fully resupplied, the dam now needed security, so General Richards ordered a platoon of British troops to protect it.¹⁹

The struggle to rebuild the dam, to provide electricity to parts of southern Afghanistan, and to counter local frustration highlights one of the core paradoxes of reconstruction in Afghanistan. How do you build infrastructure and deliver key services in a deteriorating security environment? Two years later, in September 2008, a convoy of 4,000 Coalition troops, 100 vehicles, and helicopter and airplane escorts fought their way through Taliban-controlled areas to deliver a new turbine to the Kajaki Dam. The turbine was flown into Kandahar Airfield and escorted 110 miles to the dam site.

Several Canadian International Development Agency officials lamented the difficulties of reconstruction in a war zone. One official, based out of Kandahar Province, told me: “Our biggest challenge is security. Virtually all non-governmental organizations have left the province because of the insurgency, except for a few pockets in urban areas such as Kandahar city…. The Canadian government, like the U.S. and British governments, faces extraordinary challenges in convincing civilians from development agencies to come here. It is too dangerous. The result,” he acknowledged, almost apologetically, “is that the military is stuck with reconstruction.”²⁰

Operational Primacy

Just months after the crisis at the Kajaki Dam, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, as commander of Combined Forces Command—Afghanistan, commissioned a major new strategic assessment. Dubbed Operational Primacy, it identified provinces ready to assume and sustain Afghan leadership, including leadership from the Afghan National Police and the Afghan National Army. The purpose of the study was to examine whether—and when—Afghan provinces could function “either alone or with minimal international assistance” to establish security and govern the population.²¹ The title of the study irked some Afghans, including Minister of Defense Abdul Rahim Wardak, who interpreted it to mean abandonment. In developing this analytic tool, the U.S. military worked closely with the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, the government of Afghanistan (especially the Ministries of Defense and Interior), the United Nations, and several nongovernmental organizations. The Operational Primacy assessment asked a series of questions: Do the people accept the government of Afghanistan? Do the people believe the government will meet their needs? How capable are the appointed and elected officials? How well can the government administer?

The results were troubling, though not surprising. Perhaps the biggest shortcoming was in reconstruction. The study found that numerous reconstruction programs “need the attention, buy-in, and assistance of the [Government of Afghanistan],” but that they were “confusing, uncoordinated, and create[d] staff redundancie”²² According to internal memos, international involvement in providing essential services to rural areas was deeply challenging. There were also challenges with U.S. and NATO Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs), which often consisted of between 60 and 100 civilians and soldiers deployed to operating bases to perform small reconstruction projects or provide security for others involved in reconstruction. A separate Pentagon report found that the major national reconstruction programs “were poorly coordinated with US-led PRTs. Lack of coordination limited the ability of the US-led PRT to align these programs to support the broader stabilization and reconstruction strategy. Additionally, nationally implemented donor programs had limited geographic reach.”²³

As the situation began to destabilize, the federal government grew more concerned. In 2006, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked Marin Strmecki to go to Afghanistan and assess the state of governance and the insurgency. Rumsfeld sent one of his “snowflakes” arguing that part of the Taliban’s success in Afghanistan was due to poor governance in the south, so he needed an assessment of Afghan governance and an analysis of possible solutions. Strmecki spent two weeks in Afghanistan, where he interviewed Afghan, U.S., NATO, and other allied government officials about the deteriorating security environment. He confirmed that one of the primary drivers was poor governance, particularly in southern Afghanistan, that created a power vacuum into which insurgents could move. He also reported that the region was controlled by corrupt or ineffective governors and district administrators, and patrolled by corrupt and incompetent police. He concluded that the Afghan government, in close cooperation with the international community, should systematically assess the capability of these officials province by province and district by district. It should replace ineffective or corrupt officials and appoint individuals who could win the support and confidence of local communities.²⁴

But little of Strmecki’s assessment was ever implemented. No senior U.S. government official took decisive action, and President Karzai did not appear to see governance as an acute concern—or, at the very least, he was unwilling to take the risks involved with removing corrupt or incompetent officials.

These challenges not only had a debilitating impact on stabilization efforts but also strengthened the hand of insurgents. The absence of governance in rural areas and the lack of progress in key services—especially employment, electricity, and water—caused growing frustration among the Afghan population. The Taliban was quick to use U.S. and Afghan failures in its recruitment propaganda, which created a band of “swing villages” in eastern, southern, and western Afghanistan, an area dominated by Pashtuns. Given sustained security and assistance, villages across this swath of territory might have sided with the Afghan government, but without that help, it moved toward the insurgents. Zabol Province was a good example. “The economy is the key solution,” noted Dalbar Ayman, the governor of Zabol. “If it is good, there will be no Taliban. But now, I cannot even support my brothers in Zabol with a piece of bread.”²⁵

Across greater parts of the south, local groups began to support the Taliban. An internal United Nations study examined the Musa Qala area of Helmand, a Taliban stronghold: “Government capacity is virtually non-existent in most areas of Helmand. The limited level of government activity in Musa Qala reflects a similar level across the province.” It added that “the population and the Shura clearly want more assistance,” and that this was a significant factor fueling the insurgency.²⁶ Michael Semple, the deputy European Union Special Representative for Afghanistan, told me after returning from a trip to the south: “The local population in these areas are revolting against the government. The Taliban move into areas where there is already unhappiness with the government’s performance, send night letters, and intimidate the population.” This was, he said, a standard “bed and breakfast guide” to Taliban operations. “Often, there is no government response.”²⁷ The Taliban strategy was straightforward. They approached local tribes and commanders at the village and district levels. Sometimes they were well received because of common tribal affinities or, especially, because locals had given up on the Afghan government. Where they weren’t well received, they resorted to brutal tactics and intimidation. They also targeted weak points, such as undermanned district police stations.²⁸ In some cases, Afghan National Police forces directly supported Taliban operations against NATO or Afghan forces.²⁹

Among the most important factors was poverty. A memo produced by the Afghan government, the United States, and other international actors concluded that widespread poverty and the lack of essential services to rural areas “make people more susceptible to indoctrination and mean that the life of a fighter may be the only attractive option available.”³⁰ A separate United Nations study found that “government corruption and poor governance increases the attraction for the Taliban in the population.” It continued that “ongoing trends point to a further attrition of the government’s ability to project good governance and hint at a further isolation of the political leadership of Afghanistan and the international community from the population.”³¹ This concern was reiterated in internal Afghan documents, such as The National Military Strategy, which noted in 2005 that if key essential services were “not provided quickly, the people will be more vulnerable to extremist elements claiming to offer a better alternative.”³²

At the close of his tenure as commander of Combined Forces Command—Afghanistan in 2007, Lieutenant General Eikenberry prophetically warned: “The long-term threat to campaign success, though, is the potential irretrievable loss of legitimacy of the Government of Afghanistan. If the Afghan Government is unable to counter population frustration with the lack of progress in reform and national development, the Afghan people may lose confidence in the nature of their political system.” The result, he cautioned, would be a point “at which the Government of Afghanistan becomes irrelevant to its people, and the goal of establishing a democratic, moderate, self-sustaining state could be lost forever.”³³

Corruption and Drugs

For rural villagers, suffering under crushing poverty and pressure from the Taliban, there was one significant way out. Each spring, Afghanistan is awash in a beautiful sea of white, pink, red, and magenta poppy fields. For Afghans and Westerners, poppies have long symbolized sleep and death. The Minoan poppy goddess wore poppy-seed capsules, a source of narcosis, in garlands in her hair. In ancient Roman mythology, Somnus, the god of sleep, wore a crown of poppies and was frequently depicted lying in a bed of poppies. Likewise, the twin brothers Hypnos and Thanatos, the Greek gods of sleep and death, were often depicted carrying poppies in their hands. The Roman goddess of the harvest, Ceres, grew poppy to help her sleep after the loss of her daughter to Pluto, god of the underworld.

For Afghanistan, this metaphor of sleep and death was all too apt. The cultivation, production, and trafficking of poppy skyrocketed after the U.S. invasion, which had a debilitating impact on governance and contributed to widespread corruption at all levels of the Afghan government. As Figure 11.1 illustrates, poppy cultivation increased virtually every year after the overthrow of the Taliban regime, though it decreased 19 percent between 2007 and 2008. The drug trade eroded efforts to improve governance, fostered widespread corruption throughout the government, and hampered the development of a licit economy.³⁴

The implications were staggering. “The drug problem is difficult to overstate,” Doug Wankel told me in late 2005 as we sipped tea in a cafeteria on the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.³⁵ Wankel, the director of the Office of Drug Control in the embassy, was a former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official who was hired in 2003 to organize the U.S. government’s counternarcotics effort in Afghanistan. He had previously served in Kabul as a young DEA official in the late 1970s. “I left on a flight to New Delhi a couple of hours before the Soviets rolled in,” he said. “People thought it was because I knew it was coming. I didn’t; I just happened to be leaving on a trip. But the Soviets branded me a C.I.A. agent, and so I couldn’t come back—until now, that is.”³⁷ As we talked, the drug trade was down that year but still, he said, “it reaches into all facets of life in Afghanistan and undermines the very fabric of governance.”³⁸

FIGURE 11.1 Opium Poppy Cultivation, 1991–2008³⁶

Laboratories in Afghanistan convert opium into morphine base, white heroin, or one of several grades of brown heroin. But they could not do it alone. Afghanistan produces no essential or precursor chemicals for the conversion of opium into morphine base. Acetic anhydride—the most commonly used acetylating agent in heroin processing—is regularly smuggled into Afghanistan from Pakistan, India, Central Asia, China, and Europe. Some of the largest processing labs are located in Badakhshan, Nangarhar, and Helmand Provinces.³⁹ Most of the opiates produced in Afghanistan are smuggled to markets in the West, although some were consumed in Afghanistan or the region as both opium and heroin. U.S. intelligence estimates indicate, for example, that “hundreds of kilograms of high-grade heroin destined for Saudi Arabia and Kuwait transit Iraq each month from the source countries of Afghanistan and Iran.”⁴⁰ Afghan heroin moves via many routes; traffickers adjust their routes constantly based on law-enforcement and political actions. Afghan traffickers travel mostly by car and truck on overland routes to move drug shipments out of the country. Illicit drug convoys go regularly to southern and western Pakistan, while smaller shipments of heroin are sent through the frontier provinces to Karachi for onward shipment to the United States.⁴¹

“Drugs are critical for insurgent survival in southern Afghanistan,” one 82nd Airborne intelligence officer told me at Bagram Air Base, thirty miles north of Kabul and the hub of U.S. forces operating in eastern Afghanistan. “Insurgents further north along the Afghan-Pakistan border,” he said, “get funding from a range of other sources like wealthy Arabs, zakat from mosques, and the trade in goods such as timber. But not a lot of drugs.”⁴²

Drug and other criminal groups have developed an intricate transportation network connecting Afghanistan to Pakistan and other neighboring countries. The Taliban was involved at all levels: with farmers, opium brokers, lab operators, smugglers, and major drug barons, as well as the export to international markets. Where they controlled territory, the Taliban levied a tax on poppy farmers and offered farmers protection from the government’s eradication efforts. The Taliban was also paid by drug-trafficking organizations to provide security along key routes. And a number of Taliban fighters were directly involved in the poppy harvest, thus largely unavailable to fight until after the harvest ends in the spring.⁴³

The Taliban had long been involved in drug trafficking. In 1997, for example, the Taliban received $75 million from drug smuggling between Afghanistan and Pakistan.⁴⁴ They had been nominally opposed to drugs, even creating an antinarcotics office. But they often turned a blind eye to the industry. The head of the Taliban’s antinarcotics forces in Kandahar was quoted as saying that “opium is permissible because it is consumed by kafirs [unbelievers] in the West and not by Muslims or Afghans.”⁴⁵

According to Afghan intelligence estimates, roughly 30 percent of the Taliban’s income came from involvement in drug trafficking.⁴⁶ But Afghan government officials were equally culpable. News reports circulated about high-level Afghan government officials involved in the drug trade. One of those most often accused was Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of President Hamid Karzai. ABC News, for example, obtained U.S. military documents that alleged that the president’s brother “receives money from drug lords as bribes to facilitate their work and movement.”⁴⁷ And an investigative New York Times article that included interviews with senior U.S. government officials reported: “The White House says it believes that Ahmed Wali Karzai is involved in drug trafficking, and American officials have repeatedly warned President Karzai that his brother is a political liability.”⁴⁸ A number of senior U.S. intelligence officials, however, argued that the information on Ahmed Wali Karzai was based on second-and thirdhand reporting, and sometimes from people with an ax to grind against the Karzais.⁴⁹ Whatever the reality, there was certainly a strong perception among some Afghans that he was complicit in the drug trade.

There were also regular allegations that other government officials were involved in bribery and drug trafficking. An investigative report by The Times (London), for example, named several individuals, including General Azzam, chief of staff to the interior minister. The report found that the “Ministry of Interior, key to establishing security in the country, remains the worst offender.” It found evidence pointing to “General Azzam, recently appointed Chief of Operations after his stint as Chief of Staff, and his deputy General Reshad as the prime recipients of bribes.” The Afghan government categorized Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces using a three-tiered scale. “A” denoted those with the highest potential profits for drug running; “C” provinces were the least remunerative; and “B” provinces were in between. Counter-narcotics officials estimated that one border police commander in eastern Afghanistan took home $400,000 a month from heroin smuggling.⁵⁰ At the very least, these allegations increased the perception among Afghans that their government was corrupt, including those officials who were supposed to be leading counternarcotics efforts. As an editorial in the newspaper Daily Afghanistan summarized:

People definitely do not trust the government. Governors warn that nobody should cultivate poppies and say the poppy fields will be destroyed, but they encourage farmers to keep up poppy cultivation by any means because the government officials make most of their money from poppy cultivation. There are reports that a minister ordered farmers to cultivate only poppies…. The government should identify these corrupt officials and should not fail to cut off their hands; otherwise it will face further challenges.⁵¹

There were some occasional bright spots in the drug war. In 2005, for instance, American and Afghan officials were cheered when poppy-cultivation numbers dropped, though they soared even higher the next year. Most of the reduction appeared to have been the result of Herculean efforts by Afghan leaders with international support. One of the most significant of these counternarcotics programs was implemented by the governor of Nangarhar, Haji Din Muhammad, and the police chief, Hazrat Ali.

They were an odd couple. Haji Din Muhammad came from a distinguished Pashtun family, and his great-grandfather, Wazir Arsala Khan, served as foreign minister of Afghanistan in 1869. Six feet tall and well built, Muhammad had an imposing presence. He was well educated and had the aura of an elder statesman, with a gentle demeanor, preferring to speak in soft, measured tones and capable of pontificating for hours. Hazrat Ali couldn’t have been more different. He was not a Pashtun but a Pashai, an ethnic group with a distinct language concentrated in northeastern Afghanistan. He had grown up in the isolated mountain village of Kushmoo, earning him the derogatory nickname Shurrhi, meaning “redneck” or “hillbilly” in Pashto. He was also illiterate, which did little to legitimize him among the Pashtun elite in Nangarhar. But Hazrat Ali was fortunate. He had been catapulted to power during the overthrow of the Taliban regime through the patronage of U.S. Special Forces. They had provided him money and weapons to target Taliban forces, and they viewed him as a reliable ally because of his close ties to Northern Alliance leaders.

Despite their differences, Haji Din Muhammad and Hazrat Ali developed a common strategy to decrease poppy in Nangarhar. Under Hazrat Ali’s orders, police jailed locals who cultivated poppy until they agreed to plow under their fields.⁵² The coercion was effective. According to public-opinion polling in Nangarhar, most villagers reported that they reduced or stopped poppy cultivation out of concern that they would be imprisoned or that their fields would be plowed under by Afghan authorities.⁵³ In addition, Haji Din Muhammad and Hazrat Ali leveraged the support for President Karzai in the region to convince villagers to buy into the counternarcotics plan. Almost three-fourths of the eradication (72 percent) in 2005 took place in Nangarhar and Helmand Provinces, where, in 2004, poppy cultivation had ranked highest in the nation.⁵⁴ Indeed, provinces where declines in cultivation were most striking (Nangarhar—96 percent, Badakshan—53 percent), and where cultivation remained relatively stable (Helmand—10 percent), were the same three provinces that received the largest contributions for alternative development. Nangarhar received $70.1 million in assistance and Badakshan and Helmand received $47.3 million and $55.7 million, respectively.⁵⁵

Yet these successes were no match for the broader problems in the justice system. Studying Afghan perceptions of the rule of law, the World Bank found that Afghanistan’s justice system was in the bottom 5 percent in the world by 2006, the exact same ranking as in 2000, the last full year of the Taliban regime.⁵⁶ Reconstruction had done nothing to improve things. In comparison with other countries in the region—such as Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—Afghanistan’s justice system was the least effective. A major reason for this was endemic corruption. Unqualified personnel loyal to various factions were sometimes installed as court officials, and the Supreme Court and the Attorney General’s Office were accused of significant wrongdoing.⁵⁷

An Afghanistan intelligence assessment complained that “criminals do not receive fair justice. This is another factor which has boosted the Taliban morale in southern Afghanistan. They are almost confident that they can buy justice at some stage.”⁵⁸ A corrupt judiciary was a serious impediment to the success of the counternarcotics campaign. But more broadly, it further undermined governance and popular support for Karzai’s government, and it crippled the legal and institutional mechanism necessary to prosecute insurgents and criminals.

Afghans were well aware of the problem. An Asia Foundation poll in 2006 found that 77 percent of respondents said corruption was a major problem in Afghanistan; 66 percent believed corruption was a major problem in the provincial government; 42 percent said corruption was a major problem in their daily lives; and 40 percent said corruption was a major problem in their neighborhoods. Moreover, most Afghans believed that the corruption problem was getting worse. Approximately 60 percent of respondents believed that corruption had increased over the past year at the national level, and 50 percent believed that it had increased at the provincial level. Many had been directly involved in bribery, such as providing cash to a government official. Thirty-six percent said they had been involved in bribery with a police officer, 35 percent with a court official, and 34 percent with officials when applying for work.⁵⁹ Things were much worse in the areas of greater Taliban presence. People in southern and western Afghanistan were most likely to say they had personally experienced corruption, and those in central and northern Afghanistan were the least likely.⁶⁰

Much of the blame was leveled at the top echelons of the Afghan government. A 2006 State Department poll found that more than 50 percent of Afghans thought President Karzai and his administration failed to combat corruption. This tended to fuel support for the Taliban. According to the same State Department poll, 71 percent of Taliban backers said there was corruption among the police, 66 percent said there was corruption in the local government, and 68 percent said there was corruption in the courts.⁶¹

A number of sensitive Afghan national security documents expressed growing alarm at the link between poppy and government corruption. The Afghanistan National Security Council’s annual National Threat Assessment, for example, argued in 2004 that the “continued growth of the heroin and opium-producing poppy remains a major threat to the security of Afghanistan. The corruption and crime association with the drug trade will proliferate in and around Afghanistan, discouraging international investment and assistance in rebuilding Afghanistan.”⁶² The following year’s National Threat Assessment went even further, noting that the “corruption and crime associated with the drug trade will proliferate in Afghan society and the government administration.”⁶³

The cost of corruption, according to numerous Afghan and international assessments, was increased support for the Taliban and other insurgent groups. One joint European Union and United Nations assessment found that the Taliban “exploit certain sentiments that resonated within the general population,” such as the “corrupt state.”⁶⁴ An Afghan intelligence report concluded: “The propaganda effort of the enemy in rural areas is massive and strong. The theme is corruption in the government…. Their main target population is rural Afghanistan…. only good governance and sound leadership at the local level can counter this effectively and strongly.”⁶⁵ The Taliban and other insurgent groups pointed out in their propaganda the growing Afghan corruption on the district, provincial, and national levels. A joint paper produced by the Government of Afghanistan, the U.S. government, and other key international actors more boldly concluded: “The appointment of unprofessional, corrupt and ineffective government officials has reduced the trust and confidence of the people, especially in the provinces.”⁶⁶

A Cancer in the Government

Reflecting on his term as Afghan foreign minister, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah told me in 2007 that his government had made some mistakes. “Where are the state institutions?” he asked. “There aren’t any.” We were sitting in his flat in Kabul, which was comfortably furnished with plush chairs and Western amenities, including a flat-screen television. Since it was Ramadan, Abdullah was fasting, but he thoughtfully offered me a glass of cold water. He said, ruefully, that “people are losing hope in their government. Villages cannot be protected. If villagers say something against the Taliban, they could be beheaded. We are losing the support of our population.”⁶⁷

Abdullah was an ophthalmologist and a protégé of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the charismatic Northern Alliance military leader. Well organized and smartly dressed, with a neatly trimmed beard, often preferring Western suit and tie to native Afghan clothes, he spoke excellent English with a slight accent. During the Bonn negotiations in late 2001, Abdullah impressed U.S. and other Western diplomats by joining them at meals during the month of Ramadan, even though he was fasting. “He always said he felt no pangs of hunger,” recalled U.S. Special Envoy James Dobbins, who worked with Abdullah. Dobbins described him as someone who “would speak with controlled passion about the travails his country had experienced over the past several decades.”⁶⁸ Abdullah’s comments about Afghan governance were a sobering and brutally frank admission of the challenges his government faced. They were seconded by a former Afghan provincial governor who complained: “The government has essentially collapsed. It has lost its meaning in the provinces, it has lost the security situation and lost its grip on civil servants. Corruption is playing havoc with the country.”⁶⁹

After Operation Mountain Thrust in the summer of 2006, during which American, Canadian, British, and Afghan forces conducted offensive actions in southern Afghanistan, Ambassador Ronald Neumann was briefed by the U.S. military on the results of the interrogations of more than 100 Taliban and other fighters. “We found that the critical reasons why these fighters supported the Taliban had little to do with religious ideology. Rather, they had to do with bad government and economics. The government could not protect them or deliver services, and they were often simply paid better by the Taliban.”⁷⁰

This was consistent with the findings of Afghan and NATO officials. As one senior Afghan intelligence official told me, the results of detainee interviews and intelligence assessments showed that “neither Afghan police, army, or NATO can protect villages and districts from the Taliban. This forces people to support the Taliban, even if they don’t like them. The other option, which was death,” he noted wryly, “was not palatable for most villagers.”⁷¹ One Afghan summed up the dilemma: “In the daytime, this government is coming to us, and in the nighttime the Taliban are coming to us. We are stuck in the middle.”⁷²

When the Taliban was overthrown in 2001, Afghanistan was an underdeveloped country whose levels of basic services and social indicators were near the bottom of the world. Afghanistan’s health indicators were among the worst on earth: it had an under-five mortality rate of 172 per 1,000 live births, infant mortality rate of 115 per 1,000 live births, maternal mortality rate of 16 per 1,000 live births, and 50 percent rate of chronic malnutrition. Life expectancy was estimated at 43 years, and only 9 percent of rural households reported a health facility in their village.⁷³

But Afghanistan’s underdevelopment was not the reason an insurgency began. Rather, the prevailing condition was the inability of that government to improve life in rural areas of the country. An internal memo from the UN and the European Union was deeply pessimistic: “Afghanistan’s current trajectory was negative: there was burgeoning disillusionment with government. Even officials were fed up, with governors voicing scathing criticism at the lack of tangible support for their work.” It went on to say that the “government was losing prestige; its image and influence were waning. Without a change in approach, Afghanistan and its international partners would lose ground: their fortunes were now linked. Civilians would be more likely to fight their ‘disgusting government’ both because they detested it and because they feared the consequences of not fighting.”⁷⁴

The damage was done. The government was unable to provide key services or protect the local population, especially in rural areas, and the government was widely viewed as corrupt. To make matters worse, the United States and its allies had focused almost entirely in a top-down strategy to stabilize the country by creating a strong central government. Not only was a strong Afghan state ahistorical, but U.S. policymakers spent little time trying to co-opt Pashtun tribes, subtribes, clans, and other local institutions in the south and east. There was little bottom-up strategy to complement top-down efforts. Storm clouds had been gathering for several years, waiting to burst. In 2006, they finally did.