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

CHAPTER THIRTEEN A Three-Front War

IN LATE 2006 and early 2007, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry conducted a series of briefings on the Afghan insurgency for senior U.S. policymakers, including National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace, and Vice President Dick Cheney. The presentation showed where the command-and-control locations for the Taliban and other insurgent groups were headquartered, especially in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. In one section, for example, the briefers interspersed satellite images of a major compound used by Taliban ally Jalaluddin Haqqani in Miramshah with video footage from the PBS Frontline documentary “The Return of the Taliban.”

At one point in the documentary, producer Martin Smith asked Munir Akram, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United Nations: “Let me just raise a few things they say you can do. Haqqani, Jalaluddin Haqqani—why don’t you arrest him?”

Akram confidently responded: “Well, I think Jalaluddin Haqqani, if he’s found, I’m sure he’ll be arrested.”¹

The briefing team then presented satellite imagery of a wider area, which showed offices of the Pakistan Army next door. “Not only does Pakistan know where Haqqani is,” one of the briefers noted to senior U.S. officials, “but they are virtually co-located with him. If they wanted to get him, they could.”

The Pakistani government was also shown a version of the briefing, though the Frontline segment was taken out. It was a disturbing reminder to those at the highest levels of the U.S. government that insurgent groups operating in Afghanistan, who were killing U.S., NATO, and Afghan forces and civilians, used Pakistan as a sanctuary, especially for their top-level commanders.

Complex Adaptive System

The perfect storm that hit Afghanistan in 2006 involved a disparate set of groups that established a sanctuary in Pakistan. There were two striking themes. One was the sheer increase in the number of insurgent groups over the course of the decade. Some groups, such as Laskhar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad (Army of Muhammad), migrated to the Afghanistan theater. Both were formed in the early 1990s to fight against India over control of Jammu and Kashmir. Another theme was the diffuse, highly complex nature of the insurgency, which was perhaps best described as a complex adaptive system. This term refers to systems that are diverse (made up of multiple interconnected elements) and adaptive (possessing the capacity to change and learn from experience). Examples of complex adaptive systems include the stock market, ant colonies, and most major social organizations.²

At least five different categories of groups were included in this system. The first were insurgent groups, who were motivated to overthrow the Afghan government and coerce the withdrawal of international forces. They ranged from the Taliban to smaller groups such as the Haqqani network, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami, Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM), and al Qa’ida. A second category included criminal groups involved in such activities as drug trafficking and illicit timber and gem trading. The third included local tribes, subtribes, and clans that allied with insurgent groups. Most were Pashtun. The fourth category comprised the warlord militias, many of whom had become increasingly powerful after the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban regime. A fifth category included local or central government forces complicit in the insurgency, such as the Afghan National Police and the Pakistani Frontier Corps.

These groups could be divided along three geographic fronts: northern, central, and southern. Figure 13.1 provides a rough illustration.

The northern front stretched from Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province to Afghan provinces of Nuristan, Kunar, and Nangarhar. The largest of the groups in this region was Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami, but other groups were also operating in this front. One was an offshoot of Hezb-i-Islami led by Anwar al-Haq Mojahed, whose group was made up of former Hezb-i-Islami fighters, disgruntled tribesmen, and some ex-Taliban. Another was TNSM, whose objective was to enforce sharia law in Afghanistan and Pakistan. TNSM fractured into three blocs based out of Pakistan: Sufi Mohammad’s loyal following, a Swat-based faction started by Sufi Mohammad’s son-in-law Mullah Fazlullah, and a Bajaur-based militant group led by Mullah Faqir Muhammad. Bajaur is located at the northern tip of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and Swat district is located east of Bajaur in the North West Frontier Province.

FIGURE 13.1 The Insurgent Fronts

Lashkar-e-Taiba was active on this front, as was al Qa’ida, including Abu Ikhlas al-Masri, an Egyptian who had fought against the Soviets in the 1980s and had married a local woman. There was also a variety of criminal organizations, especially groups involved in the illicit timber and gem trades. Timber was smuggled across the border into Pakistan by networks run by timber barons. Some Afghan and Pakistani government officials were also involved in assisting insurgents and criminal organizations—often to take a cut of lucrative business opportunities. “Illicit timber trading was big business,” noted Larry Legree, the Provincial Reconstruction Team commander from Kunar. “Everyone, from government officials to insurgent groups, had their hands in the profits.”³

The central front lay farther south along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. It stretched from Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas to eastern Afghan provinces of Paktika, Khowst, and Lowgar. One of the most significant groups was led by Jalaluddin Haqqani’s son Sirajuddin (“Siraj”), who was especially elusive. U.S. military and intelligence analysts strained to get a good photograph of him. Haqqani’s organization had close links with Pakistan’s ISI, from which it received aid, and it became lethal at conducting attacks deep into Afghanistan. Haqqani also had close ties to an umbrella group, Tehreek-e-Taliban-Pakistan, which operated out of Waziristan and was led by Baitullah Mehsud. Both the Pakistani government and the Central Intelligence Agency publicly stated that Mehsud was involved in the assassination of former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on December 27, 2007.⁴ Al Qai’da also operated in this area, along with a number of other foreign groups, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.

Finally, there was the southern front, in the southern Afghan provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, as well as in Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province. The largest group in this front was Mullah Omar’s Taliban, based near Quetta. The Taliban linked up with a number of Pashtun tribes, especially Ghilzai tribes, which provided logistical support, fighters, and local legitimacy. Its strategy involved approaching local tribes and commanders at the village and district levels. In some cases, Taliban commanders were well received because of common tribal affinities or because locals had become disillusioned with the Afghan government—fed up with the slow pace of reconstruction and the paucity of security. Where they weren’t well received, they sometimes resorted to brutal tactics. “They have perfected the art of targeted assassination,” one soldier noted, “to intimidate locals who support the Afghan government. A bullet in the head is all it takes.”⁵ The southern front also boasted criminal groups, especially drug-trafficking organizations, which operated on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The skyrocketing trade in poppy was a boon to insurgent organizations such as the Taliban, as well as to Afghan government officials.

There was evidence of some coordination among the major insurgent groups at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels, including through several shuras, or Islamic councils, located in Pakistan.⁶ But there was no unified leadership.

“Learning Organizations”

These groups focused on classic guerrilla warfare. Promoting disorder among the population is a key objective of most insurgents, and disrupting the economy and decreasing security helps produce discontent with the indigenous government, undermining its legitimacy. Once insurgents establish a hold over the population, those who are hostile to the insurgents often become too fearful to oppose them. Some may be eliminated, providing an example to others. Some may escape to other areas, and still others may be cowed into hiding their true feelings. By threatening the population, insurgents keep individuals from cooperating with the indigenous government and external actors.⁷

Afghan and Pakistani insurgent groups were successful at adapting their tactics, techniques, and procedures to become “learning organizations.”⁸ The command-and-control structure of the insurgent groups was fragmented. Within the Taliban, for example, the inner shura maintained links to field commanders through a weak hierarchical structure. A district or village commander usually had a connection to one or two shura members, as did a more important commander who operated in a wider geographic area. One UN study found that “there is no area ownership among TB [Taliban] commanders. Several TB commanders may carry out operations in the same area of operation without recognizing a hierarchy amongst them. Regular competition between commanders seems to be the norm rather than the exception.” It continued: “Once commanders grow in importance by laying claim to military success they receive special attention from al-Qaida and foreign donors. They subsequently adopt a more independent stature and start individual fundraising.”⁹

Insurgent groups conducted a wide variety of attacks against U.S., Coalition, and Afghan security forces as well as Afghan and international civilians. They generally yielded the population centers to U.S. and Afghan forces, choosing instead to base operations in rural areas. They staged ambushes and raids using small arms and grenades, and they shelled U.S. and other NATO troops using 107-millimeter and 122-millimeter rockets and 60-, 82-, and 120-millimeter mortars. The weapon that received the most media attention was the improvised explosive device (IED), which was particularly effective against Coalition ground convoys. Most shelling and rocket fire was not accurate, though there was some evidence that insurgent forces considered the simple harassment of enemy forces and populations to be valuable. Insurgent groups, especially the Taliban, also succeeded in capturing government installations, villages, and occasionally district centers, though usually for brief periods. They intimidated local villagers by distributing shabnamah, or night letters, leaflets that warned villagers not to cooperate with foreign forces or the Karzai regime. In addition, insurgents conducted targeted assassinations, torched reconstruction and development projects, and set up illegal checkpoints along major roads.¹⁰

The Taliban and other groups also began to stage kidnappings. Taliban commander Mansour Dadullah acknowledged: “Kidnapping is a very successful policy and I order all my mujahideen to kidnap foreigners of any nationality wherever they find them and then we should do the same kind of deal.”¹¹ Kidnappings were increasingly used to raise money. They had been profitable in Iraq, especially since a number of governments—such as France and Japan—paid ransoms for the release of hostages.¹² This practice had caused L. Paul Bremer to send out a memo to foreign embassies in Iraq condemning ransom payments. Bremer’s words were just as true for Afghanistan as they were for Iraq: “There is no greater spur and no greater encouragement to hostage takers, than the payment of ransom money in return for the liberation of hostages. Such payments make hostage takings more likely; they increase the level of jeopardy for present and future hostages; and they have the potential to fund the procurement of weapons that will be used to continue the terror that is damaging this nation and killing its people.”¹³

In Afghanistan, there were strong indications that foreign governments, including South Korea and Italy, paid for the release of hostages. ¹⁴ In 2007, dozens of hostages were taken, including an Italian journalist in Helmand Province, two French and three Afghan aid workers in Farah Province, two German engineers and four Afghan nationals in Wardak Province. The worst incident involved the kidnapping of twenty-three South Koreans in Ghazni Province. But the kidnappings were only the beginning. One Taliban military official said: “Our military tactic is to control a district center, kill the government soldiers there, and withdraw to our mountainous strongholds, where it would be very difficult for the government to pursue us.”¹⁵ Some, if not many, of these tactics, techniques, and procedures were similar to those used by mujahideen forces against Soviet and Democratic Republic of Afghanistan army forces during the Soviet-Afghan War.¹⁶

In such southern provinces as Helmand, insurgents deployed in larger numbers. In 2002, they operated in squad-and platoon-size units. In 2005, they operated in company-size units of up to a hundred or more fighters. In 2006 and 2007, there were a few cases in which they operated in battalion-size units of up to 400 fighters, though they deployed in smaller units as well.¹⁷ This suggested that insurgents moved around with more freedom without being targeted by Afghan or Coalition forces. They also shifted from hard targets, such as U.S. and other NATO forces, to soft targets, such as Afghans involved in election work, nongovernmental organization workers, Afghan National Police, and Afghan citizens believed to be cooperating with Coalition forces or the Afghan government.

Some of the most brutal incidents were the executions by insurgents of “collaborators” who sided with the Afghan government or Coalition forces.¹⁸ Taliban fighters killed Islamic clerics critical of their efforts, including Mawlawi Abdullah Fayyaz, head of the Ulema Council of Kandahar.¹⁹ Schools were increasingly targeted, and as one Taliban night letter warned: “Teachers’ salaries are financed by non-believers. Unless you stop getting wages from them, you will be counted among the American puppets.”²⁰ This rationale also extended to election candidates and members of Parliament, since “the elections are a part of the American program” and those who participate in the elections “are the enemies of Islam and the homeland.”²¹

The “New” Taliban

The Taliban was the largest of these groups. Its leadership’s ideological vision did not change significantly after its regime’s overthrow in 2001, and its senior leaders remained motivated to impose in Afghanistan a radical interpretation of Sunni Islam derived from the Deobandi school of thought.²² The Taliban’s primary means for accomplishing this objective were to overthrow the new Afghan government, break the political will of the United States and its Coalition partners, and coerce foreign forces to withdraw. They patiently prepared to outlast the international presence in Afghanistan. “We do have to bear in mind however that in an insurgency of this nature the insurgent wins if he does not lose and we lose if we do not win,” noted a British government assessment. “For the insurgent this places considerable emphasis on astute information operations, management of perceptions, retaining consent of the local population (by whatever means) and being patient. The longer he endures the more likely he will just wait out the counterinsurgency effort.”²³

The Taliban included an influx of new members—sometimes referred to as the “neo-Taliban” who were recruited at madrassas and other locations in Afghanistan and Pakistan.²⁴ The Taliban organization that emerged over the course of the insurgency involved two main tiers. The top tier included the leadership structure and key commanders. They were motivated by a radical version of Islam and saw the insurgency as a fight between Islam on one side and Western infidels and the West’s “puppet government” in Kabul on the other side. The Taliban’s inner shura was responsible for strategic decisions and for addressing the most egregious problems. Examples can be found in the Taliban Code of Conduct (Layeha), which included orders not to engage in separate negotiations and to report captures and wait for leadership decision.²⁵ Following the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban regime, the leadership moved to Pakistan. The top tier included the leadership structure and key commanders and was run by a shura headed by Mullah Omar.

With Mullah Omar at the top, the Taliban shura was divided into a series of functional committees: military, propaganda, finance, religious, political, and administrative. At various points, key members of the inner shura included such individuals as Mullah Omar, Mullah Berader (former Taliban governor of Herat), Akhtar Muhammad Mansour (former Taliban head of aviation), Mullah Nuruddin Turabi (former Taliban justice minister), Mullah Abdul Jalil (former Taliban minister of foreign affairs), and Noor Muhammad Saqib (former chief justice of the Supreme Court). Regional shuras in such locations as Peshawar and Waziristan also included political, military, finance, and other committees.

The bottom tier of Taliban guerrillas included thousands of local fighters—men from rural villages paid to set up roadside bombs, launch rockets and mortars at NATO and Afghan forces, or pick up a gun for a few weeks or months. The Taliban also organized a parallel Afghan government, which included governors for Afghan provinces and ministers for such areas as defense and justice.²⁶

While the Taliban remained a puritan religious movement, it had little political vision other than the establishment of sharia law. As scholars Mariam Abou Zahab and Olivier Roy maintained, the Taliban had little beyond “the Shari’a, the whole Shari’a, and nothing but the Shari’a.”²⁷ Mullah Dadullah Lang, the Taliban military commander who was killed by U.S. forces in 2007, declared: “We are not fighting here for Afghanistan, but we are fighting for all Muslims everywhere and also the Mujahideen in Iraq. The infidels attacked Muslim lands and it is a must that every Muslim should support his Muslim brothers.”²⁸ This argument was echoed by other insurgents, such as former Taliban spokesman Mofti Latifollah Hakimi: “The issue of Afghanistan is connected with the ongoing war between Islam and blasphemy in the world. Mullah Mohammad [Omar] is representing a huge umma, and a large nation is behind him.”²⁹ The Taliban used young Pakistan-trained mullahs to glorify their cause in mosques in Afghanistan’s east and south.

There were two notable differences between the Taliban’s religious ideology during the 1990s and their ideology after 2001. The Taliban eased some of their aversion to modern technology. During the 1990s, they generally discouraged the use of the Internet and television by closing down Internet cafés and banning television. After their overthrow, however, they leveraged Al-Sahab, al Qa’ida’s media enterprise, to distribute video propaganda and recruit supporters. Key Taliban leaders, such as Mullah Dadullah Lang, were comfortable and relaxed in front of a camera, reciting passages of the Qur’an and outlining the Taliban’s ideology.

In addition, the Taliban adopted suicide bombing as a tactic against Afghan and international forces with the assistance and encouragement of key al Qa’ida leaders, such as Ayman al-Zawahiri. During the 1990s, the Taliban conducted no suicide attacks, presumably because the Qur’an prohibits suicide. This changed by 2003 and 2004, though not all Taliban appeared to be on board with this new tactic. Signals and human intelligence picked up by NATO officials indicated that there were divisions within the Taliban about the use of suicide attacks. For some, collateral damage—especially when Afghan women and children were killed in the vicinity of a suicide attack—was unjustifiable. Infidels were fair game, but not innocent bystanders. The Taliban’s ideology seemed to be somewhat flexible over time, as long as it served strategic purposes.

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami was also active, based out of such areas as the Shamshattu refugee camp near Peshawar.³⁰ He argued that jihad was critical in order to fight Western forces and to establish sharia law in Afghanistan. “Believe me,” he thundered in a video clip in response to questions from Agence France Presse, “we do this jihad as we pray, as we fast, or conduct hajj.”³¹ His daily newspapers, the Sha-haadat Daily and Tanweer Weekly, were available on the streets of Pakistani cities, especially Peshawar. They denounced the Afghan government for apostasy and called Hamid Karzai a puppet of the West. Hekmatyar argued that Western forces were infidels who occupied the land of Muslims. In a video, he proclaimed the United States as “the mother of problems” and warned that Afghanistan’s turmoil would not end until U.S. forces left the region. “The occupying forces…have only one successful way and…that is to pull out of Afghanistan as soon as possible.” In another video,³² Hekmatyar argued that “the Afghan mujahideen have pledged to themselves that they will force America out of their country like the Soviet Union and will not lay down their arms until they drive the occupying forces out of their country.”³³ This comment was notable not only for its anti-American rhetoric but also for its reference to the jihad against the Soviet Union. Hekmatyar, of course, had participated in that war with CIA assistance.

Hekmatyar’s traditional influence was strongest among Pashtun communities in Afghanistan’s northeast. Hezb-i-Islami generally enrolled Pashtuns and was implacably hostile to any form of political compromise with Western countries. From its earliest days, Hezb-i-Islami defined the “good Muslim” as one who was no longer defined by his religious attitude but by his political actions. Following the writings of Ibn Taymiyya, Hekmatyar believed it was possible to define a Muslim as a takfir for purely political reasons.³⁴ This gave Hezb-i-Islami notable credentials with the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi’s Jamiat-e-Islami in Pakistan, and the Saudi networks. Hekmatyar had particularly close ties with Jamiat-e-Islami and its view that the five pillars of Islam were merely phases of preparation for jihad and Islamic revolution. In a sense, their goal was to “Islamize modernity” by domesticating Western techniques and knowledge and putting them to work on behalf of an Islamic state. This differentiated them from Deobandi groups, such as the Taliban, who rejected such modernity out of hand.³⁵ Hekmatyar also adhered to Sayyid Qutb’s views about the need to vanquish corrupt Muslim leaders in order to establish true Islamic government.

Unlike either the Taliban or al Qa’ida, Hezb-i-Islami also became involved in politics. “The influence of Hezb-i-Islami in Afghan politics, including in the Parliament,” one senior Afghan official told me, “is significant.”³⁶ A number of Hezb-i-Islami members were elected to the Afghan Parliament in the September 2005 elections, though many claimed they had broken ranks with Hekmatyar. This suggested that it was not a unified organization. But it allowed Hezb-i-Islami to play a double game: some of its adherents targeted Afghan and NATO forces in the east and some participated in Afghan politics in Kabul and its outlying provinces. Political participation was strongly shunned by al Qa’ida leaders and other Islamists, who considered the democratic political system corrupt and contrary to the establishment of God’s law within a country. In addition, not all members of Hezb-i-Islami agreed on tactical, operational, or strategic decisions of other groups, especially the Taliban. One United Nations report asserted that Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami faction was for the Taliban a “particularly troublesome co-opted group” because “some of its members proved entirely incompatible with the [Taliban’s] ideology and campaign plan.”³⁷

Competing Motivations

The leaders of most major insurgent groups—especially the Taliban, Hezb-i-Islami, and al Qa’ida—were motivated by religion. There were also a number of smaller groups active in Afghanistan and Pakistan that professed somewhat similar ideologies, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. The IMU’s leaders were motivated to establish an Islamic state under sharia in Uzbekistan, though they also supported efforts to establish sharia in neighboring countries, including Afghanistan. This religious ideology helps explain why, even after the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001, these groups wanted to target Hamid Karzai’s government.

There were, of course, some tensions and ideological differences across these groups. CIA estimates after the September 11 attacks, for example, found deep divisions between the Taliban and al Qa’ida. Al Qa’ida utilized support from the Taliban for outer-perimeter security, but many al Qa’ida fighters looked disdainfully on the masses of Taliban, and many Taliban viewed al Qa’ida members as unwelcome foreigners. The personal and ideological link between bin Laden and Mullah Omar was crucial to keeping intact an unsteady relationship. ³⁸ Despite these and other differences, however, they shared several common characteristics.³⁹

To begin with, they were jihadist—that is, their supporters advocated the necessity of jihad in order to recover “occupied” Muslim lands, or even to struggle against Muslim regimes regarded as traitorous. They were also loosely Salafist, demanding a return to strict Islam.⁴⁰ Many Salafist movements are opposed to armed jihad, either tactically or by conviction, and advocate the da’wa, or “call” to Islam, as a preferred form of action. For those who advocate both jihad and Salafism, jihad is the way by which Muslims can be united and recalled to the true practice of Islam. The underlying idea is that when the majority of Muslims return to the strict interpretation of Islam, they will be able to reestablish the Muslim umma (the community of all Muslims). In addition, these groups gave the Muslim umma priority over ethnic or national identities and interests. Al Qa’ida leader Abu Laith al-Libi—who was intimately involved in the Afghan insurgency against U.S. forces and was killed in a missile strike in January 2008—argued that in Afghanistan, “the jihad is a story which carries in its twists and turns the just cause of the umma, which seeks in overall terms to establish the religion on earth.”⁴¹ Finally, the groups often overlapped geographically. Although the Taliban had no serious objectives outside the frontiers of Afghanistan, they provided space within their territory for training camps for foreign volunteers and made use of units made up of such volunteers in their military campaigns.⁴²

Insurgent groups used religion as a propaganda tool in at least two respects. The Taliban regularly used arguments that “Western countries are trying to destroy Islam” in their conversations with tribal elders and in their night letters.⁴³ As Mullah Dadullah Lang argued: “God be praised, we now are aware of much of the U.S. plans. We know their target, which is within the general aim of wiping out Islam in this region.”⁴⁴ And the Taliban and other insurgent groups used religion in their recruitment efforts for suicide bombers.

These efforts had mixed success in Afghanistan, but more success in Pakistan. Since mosques historically served as a tipping point for major political upheavals in Afghanistan, Afghan government officials focused their attention on the mosques. One Afghan intelligence report stated: “There are 107 mosques in the city of Kandahar out of which 11 are preaching anti-government themes. Our approach is to have all the pro-government mosques incorporated with the process and work on the eleven anti-government ones to change their attitude or else stop their propaganda and leave the area.”⁴⁵ Another major factor was a public campaign by Afghan religious figures. For example, the Ulema Council of Afghanistan called on the Taliban to abandon violence and support the Afghan government in the name of Islam. They also called on the religious scholars of neighboring countries—including Pakistan—to help counter the activities and ideology of the Taliban and other insurgent organizations.⁴⁶ A number of Afghan Muslim clerics publicly supported the Afghan government and called the jihad un-Islamic.⁴⁷ Moreover, the Ulema Council and some Afghan ulema issued fatwas that unambiguously opposed suicide bombing. They argued that suicide bombing did not lead to an eternal life in paradise, did not permit martyrs to see the face of Allah, and did not allow martyrs to have the company of seventy-two beautiful maidens in paradise.⁴⁸

But religious ideology was not a sufficient condition for the rise of Afghanistan’s insurgency. Local Afghans were generally not motivated by religion to support insurgent groups and oppose the Afghan government. Rather, they were motivated by poor or nonexistent governance. In most cases, the Taliban and other insurgent groups were not necessarily popular; the Afghan government was simply unpopular. Support for the Taliban would undoubtedly have been greater had they not run Afghanistan with an iron fist in the 1990s. As Ambassador Ronald Neumann remarked to me, “The Taliban conquest of Afghanistan in the 1990s had a silver lining: it gave Afghans a chance to see what they were really like.”⁴⁹

Yet despite these challenges, the Taliban and other groups mounted increasingly effective operations across Afghanistan’s south and east in 2006 and 2007. They were met by NATO forces that struggled mightily to keep pace.