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

CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Water Must Boil

SEPTEMBER 22, 2005, was a crisp night in Shkin, Afghanistan, a small Pashtun village four miles from the Pakistan border in the eastern province of Paktika. With the exception of a few apple orchards, there is little agricultural activity because the soil is too poor. Several dirt roads snake through the area, but virtually none are paved. The landscape is strangely reminiscent of Frederic Remington or C. M. Russell’s paintings of the American West. Gritty layers of dust sap the life from a parched landscape. Shkin lies just south of the setting for Rudyard Kipling’s “Ballad of the King’s Jest,” which notes:

When spring-time flushes the desert grass,

Our kafilas wind through the Khyber Pass.

Lean are the camels but fat the frails,

Light are the purses but heavy the bales,

As the snowbound trade of the North comes down

To the market-square of Peshawur town.¹

There was an Afghan National Army observation post in Shkin. Four miles away was a U.S. firebase, which that night housed fewer than a dozen Americans, including two U.S. Marines and a handful of CIA personnel. It looked like a Wild West cavalry fort, ringed with coils of razor wire. A U.S. flag rippled above the three-foot-thick mud walls. In the watchtower, a guard scanned the expanse of ridges, rising to 8,000 feet, that marked the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. At 1 a.m., approximately forty insurgents came over the mountain passes from Pakistan and assaulted the Afghan observation post. Pakistani military observation posts to the east and southeast, at distances of a quarter-and a half-mile, provided supporting fire of heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. RPGs from the Pakistani posts struck the Afghan post and hit an ammunition storage area, igniting an uncontrollable fire. The compound was quickly surrounded. An Afghan Army Quick Reaction Force had already been dispatched to move into an assault position a thousand feet from the compound and retake it with support from artillery fire located at Firebase Shkin.

CIA personnel at the firebase worked furiously to contact Pakistani military authorities, who successfully reduced the artillery barrage coming from the Pakistani military posts. The small CIA and U.S. Marine contingent then began to direct artillery fire at the insurgent forces, shooting thirty-eight 105-millimeter rounds and scoring several direct hits. The insurgents made a hasty retreat. Using their Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor (JLENS), an aerostat with radars to provide over-the-horizon surveillance for defense against air threats, U.S. forces tracked the insurgents retreating across the Pakistan border. Although the insurgent assault was eventually repelled, it succeeded in killing two Afghan National Army soldiers, seriously wounding three others, and destroying an ammunition dump that housed machine guns, AK-47s, recoilless rifles, radios, and ammunition rounds.

Earlier that day, a 5th Special Forces Group operational detachment had departed from the Afghan observation post after conducting training with indigenous forces. The timing of the nighttime attack thus was suspicious, suggesting that the Pakistani military, the insurgents, or both had monitored their departure. The U.S. military after-action report noted that the Pakistani military’s direct engagement was an integral part of the insurgent attack. “The Pakistani military actively supported the enemy assault on the [observation post] despite past assurances of cooperation with Afghan and Coalition forces…. major damage to the [observation post] and friendly casualties would likely have been avoided had the enemy maneuver element been acting alone.” Moreover, it concluded that “[t]he past reluctance of U.S. forces to fire on Pakistani checkpoints when American personnel are not directly engaged likely emboldened the Pakistani military to blatantly support the enemy assault.”²

This incident was not isolated but rather part of a much broader pattern of attacks along Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan. Many of these attacks were supported directly or indirectly by Pakistan agencies—especially the ISI and the Frontier Corps. “The border is our albatross,” one 82nd Airborne officer lamented.³ Pakistan’s leaders had long been motivated to become involved in Afghanistan’s affairs—including through military engagement—to promote its national-security interests. As Pakistani dictator General Zia-ul-Haq remarked in 1979 to the head of the ISI, Lieutenant-General Akhtar Abdul Rehman Khan, “the water in Afghanistan must boil at the right temperature.”⁴

One of the major reasons why the insurgency began and strengthened in Afghanistan was that insurgent groups were able to acquire outside support. After the Taliban overthrow, surviving senior leaders from the Taliban and other groups relocated to Pakistan. Over the next several years, they received increasingly large amounts of support from a variety of state actors. While Afghan government officials had a tendency to blame all of Afghanistan’s ills on Pakistan, the ability of insurgent groups to operate from Pakistani soil was integral to their success.

The advantages of outside support for an insurgency are intuitive. It can significantly bolster the capabilities of insurgent groups by giving them more money, weapons, logistics, and other aid. States are usually the largest external donors during insurgencies, since they have the most significant resources. Their motivations tend to be selfish and based on efforts to increase their own security. Policymakers and their populations want to be secure from external threats, and they seek to influence others to ensure that security. This was certainly true with some members of the Pakistani government, which viewed the Taliban as an important proxy group that could push into Afghanistan and undermine the Karzai government’s power and authority.

In 2006, PBS Frontline producer Martin Smith traveled to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region to analyze the consequences for U.S. policy. “After the fall of the Taliban,” his documentary concluded, “some experts warned of a nightmare scenario in which the Taliban and al Qa’ida would escape from Afghanistan into neighboring Pakistan and set up new command centers far out of America’s reach. That nightmare scenario has now come true.”⁵

Operation Al Mizan

Beginning in 2002, the U.S. strategy in Pakistan’s border areas had two major components. First, a major goal was to capture key al Qa’ida leaders. By 2005 and 2006, U.S. officials also began to pressure Pakistan to deal more harshly with Taliban and other insurgent leaders in Pakistan’s border regions. But al Qa’ida was the main focus. Second, no matter the outcome, the United States expected the Pakistani government to conduct the bulk of the operations. The United States provided assistance and occasionally targeted strikes, but it relied on Pakistan to take action.

Consequently, the U.S. government provided more than $1 billion per year to Pakistan’s key national-security agencies to conduct counterterrorist and counterinsurgency operations: the Pakistani Army, the Frontier Corps, the Frontier Constabulary, and the ISI. The Frontier Corps—the largest of the civil forces, with just under 100,000 personnel—is charged with securing Pakistan’s 3,800-mile western border. The Frontier Constabulary is a federal force assigned specifically to the boundary between the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the rest of Pakistan. Some Frontier Constabulary units, however, were deployed for internal-security purposes to other areas of Pakistan such as Quetta, Karachi, and Islamabad. The U.S. government channeled money and aid through the Department of Defense, including Coalition support funds, other military aid (including the provision of helicopters and air-assault training), and counternarcotics assistance. The United States also sent funds through the Department of State, the CIA, and other government agencies.⁶

The Coalition support funds were a particular point of contention. David Rohde and David Sanger reported in the New York Times that the United States was making the annual $I billion payments for what it called “reimbursements” to the country’s military for conducting counterterrorism efforts along the border with Afghanistan. But they also discovered that despite the additional funding, Pakistan’s president had decided to slash patrols through the area where al Qa’ida and Taliban fighters were most active. Over five years, Pakistan received more than $5.6 billion, more than half of the total aid the United States sent to the country since the September 11, 2001, attacks, not counting covert funds. Rohde and Sanger also reported that some American military officials in the region had recommended that the money be tied to Pakistan’s performance in pursuing al Qa’ida and keeping the Taliban from gaining a haven from which to attack Afghanistan, but this advice was not followed.⁷

Beginning in 2002, Pakistan conducted counterinsurgency campaigns under what became known as Operation Al Mizan. At that time, a number of senior U.S. officials viewed Pakistan as a reliable ally. “The Pakistanis were part of the solution, not the problem,” said Pentagon comptroller Dov Zakheim. “Musharraf was very helpful. He was definitely opposed to radicalization in Pakistan.”⁸

Pakistan’s army had limited experience in counterinsurgency operations. Prior to 2002, it had last done that sort of work in Eastern Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971 and 1972, and in Baluchistan between 1973 and 1977. Both campaigns had relied heavily on firepower and had inflicted significant collateral damage. But the major focus of Pakistani Army training had been geared toward a conventional war with India. During Operation Al Mizan, Pakistan deployed between 70,000 and 80,000 forces to the tribal areas. Despite their limited experience, however, the Pakistan military and intelligence services helped capture or kill such important al Qa’ida leaders as Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, Abu Zubeida, and Abu Talha al-Pakistani.⁹ The government also deployed the Pakistani Army and the Frontier Corps against foreign fighters in the Kurram and Khyber Agencies in December 2001. It continued deployments between 2002 and 2005, mainly in Baluchistan, just south of the FATA, and in North and South Waziristan.¹⁰ Hundreds and perhaps thousands of Pakistani soldiers died during these incursions. In early 2004, for example, Pakistan’s intelligence services had been gathering reports of al Qa’ida activities in the Wana Valley of South Waziristan. In March, the Pakistani Frontier Corps launched an operation to disrupt them, but when the troops reached Wana, they were ambushed. It was a typical al Qa’ida operation. Just as they had done to U.S. forces in 2002 during Operation Anaconda, the insurgents occupied the surrounding hills and mountains, leaving the Frontier Corps troops exposed in the low-lying area.¹¹

A barrage of firepower from entrenched positions in the mountains delivered heavy casualties to the Pakistan troops. The Pakistan Army was called in to retrieve the trapped Frontier Corps soldiers. Nearly 6,000 troops immediately moved in, including 600 lifted by helicopters. They set up a cordon around the ambush site and sent out a search operation. After sustained fighting, the army launched an attack on the ridge and cleared it, killing sixty-three militants, including thirty-six foreigners. They also disrupted a major al Qa’ida command-and-control center and a network of tunnels containing sophisticated electronic equipment.

In June 2004, Pakistani forces conducted an attack in the Shakai Valley after a series of alarming intelligence reports claimed that a force of more than 200 Chechens and Uzbeks, some Arabs, and several hundred local supporters were gathering in the area. On June 10, the government deployed 10,000 Pakistan Army troops along with Pakistani Special Operations Task Force and Frontier Corps troops. Nearly 3,000 soldiers established an outer cordon before the Pakistan Air Force struck at dawn, using precision weapons against nine compounds. Pakistan Army forces used indirect artillery fire and precision rocket attacks by helicopter gunships. Other helicopters dropped off Pakistani Special Operations Task Force troops to search the compounds, and infantry troops initiated a simultaneous operation to clear the valley and link up with the Special Operations Task Force. Later, another 3,000 troops were brought into the area to clear more of the valley. During the operation, four soldiers were killed and twelve injured, while more than fifty militants were killed.

The Pakistani military, with help from U.S. Special Operations Forces and CIA assets, had just eliminated a major propaganda base and militant stronghold, which also included a facility for manufacturing improvised explosive devices. The haul from a large underground cellar in one of the compounds included two truckloads of TV sets, computers, laptops, disks, tape recorders, and tapes.¹² But it was only a tactical, short-term success, since militant groups afterward developed an increasingly robust sanctuary in Waziristan.

Besides this type of organized assault, Pakistani security services also provided clandestine assistance. In March and April 2007, the army covertly supported Taliban commander Mullah Nazir against Uzbek militants. Nazir was a charismatic man in his midthirties who spouted a religious fervor far beyond his minimal credentials. Several months earlier, he had been endorsed by Mullah Omar as the Taliban “emir” of South Waziristan. The Uzbeks had been extended memastia (Pashtun hospitality) by Nazir’s tribal rivals, the Ahmadzai, but they had become unpopular among locals for their criminality and viciousness.

One Pakistan government official said there was “a groundswell of support for action against Uzbeks and any attempt by the government to intervene in support of the tribal action would actually discredit it.”¹³ The Pakistan Army largely stayed out of the fighting, using Nazir’s forces as a proxy. But it eventually sent military and paramilitary forces into the area to seize strategic hilltops and ridges and to help establish law and order once the fighting stopped. In the end, Nazir’s forces were largely successful in pushing the Uzbeks out of Wazir areas.

Operation Al Mizan included several major operations, and Pakistani forces successfully killed or captured several local and foreign militants. But it ultimately failed to clear the area of militant groups, including al Qa’ida. There were several reasons for this failure.

First, Pakistan’s unresolved tensions with India meant that Pakistan’s national-security establishment, including the ISI, had a vested interest in supporting some militant groups directed at the Afghanistan and Kashmir fronts. Second, Pakistan’s operations were not sustained over time. Their efforts were marked by sweeps, searches, and occasionally bloody battles, but none of these operations employed a sufficient number of forces to clear and hold territory. Third, the government’s initiatives were hindered by religious conservative parties operating in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. These groups considered Pakistan government efforts against al Qa’ida and other militants an “American war.” Fourth, there was considerable local support for militant groups. Public-opinion polls indicated that even after the September 11, 2001, attacks, significant portions of the Pakistani population supported their government’s links to the Taliban and “favored by a wide margin increasing support for Mullah Omar’s regime.”¹⁴ In sum, Pakistan could not muster the political will to maintain the necessary operational tempo of counterinsurgency operations in the face of opposition within the country.

The United States Debates Pakistan

The debate in the U.S. government about Pakistan was a lively one. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said, “We had some information that there was assistance from the Pakistan government to the Taliban between 2002 and 2004. The question was how high up it went. Was it official Pakistan government policy?”¹⁵

Robert Grenier, the CIA station chief in Islamabad, was similarly blunt: “I never believed that government ties with these groups had been irrevocably cut.”¹⁶ A CIA operative deployed to Afghanistan further acknowledged that as early as 2001 and 2002, “ISID advisors were supporting the Taliban with expertise and material and, no doubt, sending a steady stream of intelligence back to Islamabad.”¹⁷ This caused some officials, both inside and outside of the government, to push for swift action. In an October 2003 memo to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, retired general James B. Vaught urged the secretary to “stop playing two faced games with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Syria. All three are supporting both sides to some degree.” He advised Rumsfeld: “Give them a choice, join and support the war against terrorism, no holding back, or we will neutralize them.”¹⁸

But U.S. government assessments were not uniform. When Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry took over as head of the Combined Forces Command—Afghanistan in 2005, he said the evidence of Pakistan’s complicity was not clear: “I was not initially convinced that Pakistan presented a grave problem. But that changed.”¹⁹

The confusion stemmed, in part, from the bifurcated nature of dealing with the insurgent threat in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Insurgents used both sides of the border, but the U.S. government had no joint Afghan-Pakistan strategy. In fact, there frequently were tensions between U.S. officials in Kabul and Islamabad. The CIA was virtually at war with itself. Agency personnel based in Islamabad argued that the Pakistani government, including the ISI, was still helpful in supporting U.S. efforts against al Qa’ida. They pointed to the capture of such targets as Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, and Abu Zubeida. But CIA officials in Kabul were frustrated with what they viewed as slow efforts to target al Qa’ida, Taliban, and other insurgents in Pakistan.²⁰ There was some concern among U.S. military officials, especially those based in Afghanistan, that the Pakistani Army had blundered in a number of operations in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and thus were extremely risk-averse.

There were also different command-and-control arrangements for U.S. “white” and “black” Special Operations Forces, most of which were based in Afghanistan. Black forces focused on high-value targets; their operations were covert. In contrast, white forces initially took on a variety of missions to build the capacity of Afghan security forces (what is often called “foreign internal defense”) and to conduct strikes against insurgents, though they increasingly focused on the latter over the course of the insurgency. Their efforts were thwarted by an increasingly questionable ally across the border in Pakistan.

A Stab in the Back

The Pakistani government often insisted that it was not providing assistance to the Taliban. Some U.S. analysts agreed. After a trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan to meet with top U.S., NATO, Afghan, and Pakistani officials, retired general Barry McCaffrey concluded: “The Pakistanis are not actively supporting the Taliban—nor do they have a strategic purpose to destabilize Afghanistan.”²¹ But the evidence to the contrary was overwhelming. Some Pakistani forces—including individuals within the ISI and the Frontier Corps—abetted insurgents who would go on to fight U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. There was considerable disagreement about whether ISI support was directed by senior Pakistani government officials, at least until mid-2008, when the United States collected fairly solid evidence of senior-level complicity.²² But many U.S. officials, especially at the CIA, found it highly unlikely that ISI units would be able to carry out missions in support of groups like the Taliban without approval from senior ISI and military leaders.

ISI assistance, especially from Directorate S, which was charged with external operations, appeared to take several forms. One was a willingness to provide sanctuary to Pashtun militant groups and their senior leadership. Some ISI officials sent money and logistical supplies to insurgents, as they had previously done. As Husain Haqqani, who became Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, acknowledged during the 1990s, “Pakistani support for the Taliban was crucial.” ²³ In addition, ISI agents based in Peshawar, Quetta, and other areas kept in regular contact with militant leaders, including Mullah Omar, Jalaluddin Haqqani, and Siraj Haqqani.

At the end of his tenure as U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad quipped: “[Mullah Akhtar] Usmani, who is one of the Taliban leaders, spoke to Pakistan’s Geo TV at a time when the Pakistani intelligence services claimed that they did not know where they were. If a TV company could find him, how is it that the intelligence service of a country which has nuclear bombs and a lot of security and military forces cannot find them?”²⁴

Khalilzad was among those most frustrated with U.S. policy toward Pakistan. As the ambassador to Afghanistan, and later as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, he complained in person and in video teleconferences about the growing sanctuary in Pakistan. “We had the data and the intelligence estimates,” said one adviser to Khalilzad in Kabul, “but senior officials in the U.S. government were unwilling to put pressure on Pakistan and President Musharraf, especially to go after the Taliban.”²⁵

Indeed, some individuals in the ISI were helpful in providing strategic and operational advice to three main Afghan groups active on different fronts along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border: Mullah Omar’s Taliban, based in Quetta; the Haqqani network, based in North Waziristan; and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami, based in the northern parts of Pakistan’s tribal agencies and in the North West Frontier Province.

ISI officials helped train some Taliban and other insurgents destined for Afghanistan and Kashmir in Quetta, Mansehra, Shamshattu, Parachinar, and other areas in Pakistan. In order to minimize detection, the ISI also supplied indirect assistance—including financial assistance—to Taliban training camps. Some ISI officials also used former operatives to collaborate with Afghan insurgents to ensure deniability. One NATO document concluded that “external/local elements trained in Pakistan (Taliban/Hezb-i-Islami Haqqani/ISI) enter through the Paktika border.”²⁶

United States and NATO officials uncovered several instances in which the ISI provided intelligence to Taliban and other insurgents (such as the Haqqani network) at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. They tipped off Taliban forces about the location and movement of Afghan and Coalition forces, which undermined several anti-Taliban military operations. ISI operatives were highly aggressive in collecting intelligence on the movement and activity of Afghan, U.S., and other NATO forces in eastern and southern Afghanistan. ISI members then shared some of this information with the Taliban and other insurgent groups.²⁷ Most shockingly, some Pakistani intelligence officials were also involved in suicide attacks, including the Indian Embassy bombing in Kabul in July 2008.

The majority of the ISI’s assistance appeared to come directly from individuals in the middle and lower levels of the organization, but there were some reports that senior officials of the ISI and the Pakistani government were aware of the ISI’s role and were actively encouraging it. It was even reported that General Ashfaq Kayani, the chief of army staff, had referred to Jalaluddin Haqqani as a “strategic asset.”²⁸ Pakistani military officials (especially from the Frontier Corps) regularly failed to cooperate on stemming cross-border activity, and, in some cases, they actively helped insurgents cross the border. David Kilcullen, who served as a counterinsurgency adviser to Condoleezza Rice and General David Petraeus, remarked that some militants moved into Afghanistan “with direct assistance from Pakistani Frontier Corps troops.”²⁹ Officials such as General Hamid Gul (former head of the ISI) and Sultan Amir (former ISI member also known as Colonel Imam) gave speeches at Pakistani government and military institutions calling for jihad against the United States and the Afghan government.³⁰ Pakistan’s Frontier Corps also supported insurgent offensive operations. Interviews with U.S. soldiers indicated that there were dozens of incidents in 2006, for example, where Pakistani military posts—especially Frontier Corps posts—provided supporting fire for insurgent offensive operations. ³¹ One joint paper by the United Nations and the European Union offered a grim assessment:

Given the wide-ranging nature of ISI involvement, [the ISI] would need to endorse any talks with the Taliban. Anyone negotiating without their sanction would have to do so covertly, or face heavy consequences. It was not clear President Musharraf could be persuaded to control the ISI in this regard, which was not even obviously in his interest. His direction to the formal side was explicit, but forward and informal elements, retired generals with extremist views (e.g. Hamid Gul, Aziz Khan, Ehsan), retired Taliban liaison staff (e.g. Imam, Afridi) and many in a variety of services below the rank of major were more difficult to make accountable.³²

The U.S. government found that Pakistan largely refrained from conducting operations against the Taliban leadership structure.³³ As one Pakistani journalist pointed out, the Pakistan government “plunges into action when they know they can lay their hands on a foreign militant but they are still reluctant to proceed against the Taliban.”³⁴ The reluctance was even true of some key Taliban leaders who were arrested by Pakistani security forces. For example, Mullah Ubaidullah Akhund, who was captured by Pakistani forces in February 2007, continued to communicate with Taliban leaders even after his capture.³⁵

The Pakistani government negotiated several agreements with tribal leaders, including those allied with—or even members of—the Taliban. In April 2004, the government established an agreement, known as the Shakai Agreement, with the Taliban and local tribal leaders, including Nek Muhammad. Nek Muhammad was an upstart jihadi born in 1975. He had a youthful handsomeness, a thick black beard, and long, wavy hair, but it was his extraordinary confidence and tribal mien that catapulted him to power in South Waziristan. “Nek never had an intellectual mind but some other traits of his personality became evident during his stay at the Darul Uloom” seminary, recalled one of his teachers. “He showed himself to be a hard-headed boy, endowed with an impenetrable soul and an obstinate determination to carry out his will no matter how mindless it might be.”³⁶ He was mercurial and cavalier but also extremely charismatic, and the Pakistan government made a deal with him.

The Shakai Agreement included several provisions: Pakistan Army troops would not interfere in internal tribal affairs and agreed to stay in their cantonment areas; local insurgents would not attack Pakistan government personnel or infrastructure; and all foreigners would have to register with the government.³⁷ But Nek Muhammad quickly violated the agreement and refused to hand over any foreigners, while also publicly humiliating the Pakistan government, boasting to reporters, “I did not go to them, they came to my place. That should make it clear who surrendered to whom.”³⁸ He ultimately paid a hefty price. In June 2004, he was killed by a CIA Predator strike near Wana.³⁹ His successor, Maulvi Abbas, agreed not to attack Pakistani government positions if the government allowed him to run the affairs of his tribe without interference.

In September 2006, the governor of the North West Frontier Province, Lieutenant General (ret.) Ali Muhammad Jan Orakzai, reached an agreement in Miramshah with a tribal grand jirga whose members were drawn from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. As part of the agreement, the Taliban promised that it would not use the area to conduct attacks against the Afghan or Pakistani governments; it would stop targeted killings of pro-government maliks (tribal elders); and it would not impose its lifestyle on others by force. It also permitted the Taliban to retain their administrative and political position, allowed them to retain their weapons, and permitted foreigners to remain without any registration on promise of good conduct. In return, the Pakistan Army agreed to withdraw from most areas.⁴⁰

But the agreement had the exact opposite impact: It strengthened the power of the mullahs at the expense of the maliks. A Pakistan Ministry of Interior document informed President Pervez Musharraf that “Talibanisation has not only unfolded potential threats to our security, but is also casting its dark shadows over FATA and now in the settled areas adjoining the tribal belt. The reality is that it is spreading.” The document summarized the situation by affirming that there was “a general policy of appeasement towards the Taliban, which has further emboldened them.”⁴¹ A U.S. government assessment came to a similar conclusion, arguing that cross-border infiltration increased by 300 to 400 percent in some districts after the 2006 agreement in Miramshah. It found that the “Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) constitute an active sanctuary, along with Quetta and other parts of Baluchistan.”⁴² Local Taliban groups gradually became a parallel government in the tribal areas and a sanctuary for insurgent groups operating in Afghanistan. The traditional jirga was formally banned by the Taliban. In its place, aggrieved parties had to seek the intervention of their village Taliban representative, who performed the functions of police officer, administrator, and judge. The Taliban banned music stores, videos, and televisions and issued edicts that men had to grow beards. In 2005, the Taliban and other militants carried out a sustained campaign and killed more than 100 pro-government tribal elders. Other maliks fled from the tribal areas.⁴³

In 2006, President Musharraf acknowledged that the Pakistani tribal agreements “didn’t prove effective” and contributed to “the spread of Talibanization” in Pakistan’s tribal areas.⁴⁴ This had been the Taliban’s intention all along, and they did not hesitate to reinforce it in public statements.⁴⁵

Strategic Rationale

A group of U.S. officials, including General David Barno, thought that one reason Pakistan increased support to the Taliban was that the United States was discussing downsizing forces in Afghanistan. The trigger point was in 2005, when discussions had become intense about a U.S. drawdown and a handover to NATO. Pakistani and Afghan government officials interpreted this as a signal that the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan was waning. It encouraged Afghan government officials increasingly to look toward India as its long-term strategic partner, which in turn encouraged Pakistani government officials to support the Taliban.⁴⁶

In February 2007, General Barno testified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. “It is my personal opinion,” he said, “that since mid-2005, Pakistan has also calculated its position vis-à-vis Afghanistan in light of concerns for a diminished and less aggressive U.S. presence in the nation that lies in Pakistan’s backyard.”⁴⁷ Barno continued:

In mid-summer 2005, shortly after my departure from Afghanistan, the U.S. announced that NATO was assuming control from the U.S.-led coalition for the entire Afghan mission—and shortly thereafter, we also announced we were withdrawing over 1,000 U.S. troops from the combat zone. This, in my personal estimation, sent a most unfortunate and misinterpreted signal to friend and foe alike—that the U.S. was leaving and turning the mission over to some largely unknown (in that part of the world) organization of 26 countries directed from Europe. Tragically, I believe that this misunderstood message caused both friends and enemies to re-calculate their options—with a view toward the U.S. no longer being a lead actor in Afghanistan. The truth, of course, is much different but many of the shifts in enemy activity and even the behavior of Afghanistan’s neighbors, I believe, can be traced to this period.⁴⁸

The Indian Angle

The Indian threat was much more important for the Pakistani government than its commitments to the United States. An Indian intelligence official told me: “After the fall of the Taliban, India took advantage of a window of opportunity to develop close ties with Hamid Karzai’s government in Afghanistan and counter Pakistan in the region.”⁴⁹ Of course, Pakistan and India have long been involved in a balance-of-power struggle in South Asia; both laid claim to the Kashmir region and they have fought three major wars over Kashmir since 1947.

After September 11, 2001, India provided hundreds of millions of dollars in financial assistance to Afghanistan and sent money to Afghan political candidates during the 2004 presidential elections and 2005 parliamentary elections. India also helped fund construction of the new Afghan Parliament building, as well as provide financial assistance to elected legislators.⁵⁰ India built roads near the Pakistan border—projects that were run by India’s state-owned Border Roads Organisation, whose publicly acknowledged mission was to “support the [Indian] armed forces [to] meet their strategic needs.”⁵¹ When India established consulates in the Afghan cities of Jalalabad, Kandahar, and Herat, Pakistan accused India of using these consulates as bases for “terrorist activities” inside Pakistan, especially in the province of Baluchistan. One Pakistani Army official argued that these Indian consulates soon became a “hub of intelligence activities. Indian covert activities—under the guise of intelligence gathering and sharing information with the Coalition Forces—have been rampant along the Durand Line in Pashtun dominant areas.”⁵²

India pushed other projects that were clearly provocative. In the eastern Afghanistan province of Kunar, India built several schools within spitting distance of Pakistan. The Indian government signed a subnational local governance initiative with the minister of reconstruction and rural development in Kabul. Kunar Governor Sayed Fazlullah Wahidi—a man with a plump build, a bushy white beard, and a striking resemblance to Santa Claus—joked that he should start a bidding war between Pakistan and India to build infrastructure in the province.⁵³

The Indian-Afghan axis left Pakistan isolated and exposed in South Asia. In 2001, Pakistan had a close relationship with the Taliban government in Afghanistan, which it had nurtured since the Soviet War. But after the September 11 attacks, India’s growing relationship with the Afghan government shifted the balance of power in Afghanistan. Some Pakistan government officials discerned that India had several objectives in Afghanistan: destabilize Pakistan as a quid pro quo for Pakistan’s actions in Kashmir by supporting Baluch and other insurgents; create a two-front threat scenario for Pakistan; deny Pakistan direct economic, trade, and energy linkages to Central Asia; and prevent the rise of a radical Sunni regime in Kabul that would permit sanctuary for jihadi groups who threatened India.⁵⁴ Feroz Hassan Khan, brigadier general in the Pakistani Army, noted: “Pakistan perceives India seeking a “strategic envelopment,” a policy of manipulating events in Afghanistan and Iran to elicit anti-Pakistan responses so as to cause political and security problems for Pakistan. The foremost objective of Pakistan has been to establish a friendly government in Kabul that at the minimum does not pose a second front in the event of a war with India.”⁵⁵

Consequently, assistance to insurgents in Afghanistan was a way for some Pakistani officials to counter the growing Indian influence in Afghanistan. At the very least, it maximized Pakistan’s strategic depth. As President Musharraf had explained in 2001 to U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin, Pakistan needed “strategic depth” in Afghanistan to protect its western flank.⁵⁶ But Pakistan also knew that the United States and NATO eventually would withdraw from Afghanistan, just as the United States had done after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. During the 1990s, Pakistani support to the Taliban was extensive. In the absence of Soviet resistance and U.S. support, Pakistan provided arms, training, intelligence, vehicles, ammunition, fuel, and spare parts. In the back of every Pakistani official’s mind was the possibility that they once again would have to pick up the pieces in the region after the inevitable U.S. withdrawal.

Other State Supporters

In addition to Pakistan, U.S. and other NATO troops had to contend with interference from Iran. Iranian interest in Afghanistan, especially in the west, dated back thousands of years. Part of the ancient Persian Achaemenid Empire became Afghanistan, and the Persian Samanid dynasty reincorporated Afghanistan as a Persian-ruled domain in the ninth century. In the fifteenth century, Jahan Shah briefly established Herat as the capital of his Iranian domains. In the early sixteenth century, the Safavid Shah Tahmasp drove the Uzbeks from Herat for a short time, but by the turn of that century, Shah Abbas had reasserted Iranian dominance over the city and all of western Afghanistan. In the early nineteenth century, the Qajar dynasty ruler Muhammad Shah tried to reassert Iran’s claim to Herat by marching on the city in 1837, but the international landscape had changed.

British policymakers, who believed India was vulnerable to an overland invasion from Russia, worried that the Iranian shah might welcome Russian transit, so they resolved to keep Afghanistan under informal British influence. Pressured by the British, Muhammad Shah withdrew his army, and Iranian troops seized Herat in October 1856. A few weeks later, British authorities in Bombay dispatched forty-five ships carrying almost 6,000 troops, seized the Iranian port of Bushehr, and pushed inland. The shah sued for peace and, in the 1857 Treaty of Paris, he relinquished all claim to Afghanistan. In return, the British forces withdrew.⁵⁷ But western Afghanistan has always remained an area of strategic interest to Iranian leaders.

After the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001, the Iranians employed what was known as a “hedging strategy” in Afghanistan. The logic was that if Iran could demonstrate an ability to undermine U.S. efforts on a variety of fronts, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States might be deterred from conducting an attack against Iranian nuclear facilities. On top of an array of patron-client relationships with powerful Shi’ite groups in Lebanon and Iraq, Tehran developed partnerships with some Sunni jihadists across the region, including the Taliban. General Dan McNeill, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan until mid-2008, acknowledged that NATO forces had tracked supply convoys from Iran into Afghanistan.

McNeill, a stockily built man with gray hair and slight southern accent, described an incident in 2007 in which several vehicles were monitored crossing from Iran into western Afghanistan. A straight shooter who spoke bluntly in both public and private, McNeill said that NATO forces, after engaging the vehicles, found that one contained small-arms ammunition, mortar rounds, and more than 300 kilograms of C4 demolition charges. Other convoys from Iran carried rocket-propelled grenades, 107-millimeter rockets, and improvised explosive devices.⁵⁸

Some of these shipments may have come from international arms dealers. But NATO and Afghan officials claimed that elements of the Iranian government, especially the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, provided small arms and limited advanced-technology weapons to the Taliban and other insurgent groups.⁵⁹ One of the most disturbing trends was the export of a handful of explosively formed penetrators (EFPs), which send a semimolten copper slug through the armor of a Humvee and then create a deadly spray of hot metal inside the vehicle. EFPs were used against Israeli forces in Lebanon in 2006 and against U.S. forces in Iraq beginning in 2005.⁶⁰ In addition, there is some evidence that units of the Iranian government may have assisted—or knowingly allowed—the transit of jihadists moving between the Pakistan-Afghanistan front and the broader Middle East, especially Iraq.⁶¹

Though Iran had a strategic motive, its support for the Taliban was somewhat surprising, since Iran’s historical relationship with the Taliban was not a good one. Iran, which is predominantly Shi’ite, viewed with deep concern the rise of the Sunni Taliban in the 1990s. In October 1998, for instance, nearly 200,000 regular Iranian troops massed along the border with Afghanistan, and the Taliban mobilized thousands of fighters to thwart an expected Iranian invasion. Only a last-minute effort by the United Nations prevented a war between the Taliban and Iran. Despite those tensions, however, Iran had a fairly close relationship with the Afghan government.⁶² Iran and Afghanistan cooperated on drug enforcement across their shared border and conducted trade, energy, investment, cultural, and scientific exchanges. Iran also played a helpful role at the 2001 Bonn Conference. According to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the UN worked well with Iran in Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban regime.⁶³

But the prospect of conflict with the United States appeared to temporarily change Iran’s strategic calculations. And there was some precedent for Iranian support to Sunni extremist groups. According to Defense Intelligence Agency estimates, for example, Iran joined the United States in providing rifles, land mines, shoulder-fired antitank rockets, heavy machine guns, and nonlethal assistance to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and other Sunni leaders against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.⁶⁴ Former U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns was quoted as saying that there was “irrefutable evidence” of arms “from the government of Iran.”⁶⁵ In addition, the Iranian government provided aid to Tajik, Hazara, and Uzbek commanders in northern, central, and western Afghanistan, as they had done during the 1980s and 1990s.

But Iran and Pakistan weren’t the only external supporters of the insurgency. There were reports that China sent arms to the Taliban, including ammunition and small arms.⁶⁶ The EFPs that seem to have arrived from Iran also may have included Chinese technology. Yet the Chinese government’s role was not entirely clear. One NATO soldier, who specialized in information operations, told me that China’s most important role in Afghanistan was more accidental than purposeful. “Virtually every soccer ball or toy that I purchase and hand out to Afghan kids,” he noted, “says ‘Made in China.’ How’s that for information operations?”⁶⁷ China’s historical role in Afghanistan was minimal compared with that of many of Afghanistan’s other neighbors, though China did provide small arms such as AK-47s and 60-millimeter mortars to Afghan mujahideen during the 1980s.⁶⁸

Finally, there were reports that wealthy donors from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and other Gulf states provided support to insurgents and other militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan, though it was not entirely clear to what degree these governments were directly involved. At least one European Union and UN assessment held that “[c]urtailing Taliban financing—from Saudi Arabia and UAE—was also key.”⁶⁹ Saudi Arabia had been among the first countries to recognize the Taliban regime in May 1997, despite the fact that Osama bin Laden, a committed enemy of the Saudi regime, had returned to Afghanistan a year earlier.⁷⁰ But after the Saudi government’s fallout with Osama bin Laden and then the Taliban in the late 1990s, its support for Taliban fighters dwindled. After the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001, zakat (almsgiving) was a key funding source for the Taliban and its allies. Saudi money was especially important for the Taliban because it helped fund mosques and madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the most important centers of community support and recruitment for the Taliban.

The Razor’s Edge

The challenge of borders had perhaps best been evoked by Lord Curzon of Kedleston, who served as viceroy of India and British foreign secretary in the early twentieth century. While riding horseback as a teenager, he incurred a spinal injury that required him to wear a metal corset under his clothes. This gave him a formal air of rigidity and haughtiness. In January 1899, he was appointed viceroy of India and had to deal with insurrection in the tribal areas, along the border with Afghanistan. In a 1907 lecture at All Souls College, Oxford University, that regal bearing was on display during his speech, in which he famously remarked: “Frontiers are indeed the razor’s edge on which hang suspended the modern issues of war and peace, of life and death to nations.”⁷¹

As for the most recent insurgency, external frontiers and support were critical at the onset. Of particular significance was the use of Pakistan by insurgent groups; after the overthrow of the Taliban regime, there was a massive exodus of Taliban, al Qa’ida, and other fighters across the snow-capped Hindu Kush mountains. Over the next several years, these fighters regrouped and began their sustained insurgency to overthrow the Afghan government. The solution to this problem was to have the Pakistani government, or tribal proxies—with U.S. support—target groups operating out of this sanctuary. A U.S. State Department document averred that the United States needed to “move against the Taliban in Quetta” and other areas of Pakistan:

Actions to support this would include detaining Taliban leaders, financiers and operational support cells; pressing Pakistan to close madrassas whose students participated in the recent Pashmul/Panjwai fighting; seizing Taliban-linked financial assets in Quetta; interdicting courier movement between Quetta, the FATA, and Afghanistan and closing arms bazaars in the Quetta area. While Pakistani-led action is ideal, we may need to consider unilateral action, or the threat of it, to encourage a sufficiently energetic Pakistani response.⁷²

Most of these steps, however, did not occur. In 2007, for example, an American military proposal outlined an intensified effort to enlist FATA tribal leaders in the fight against al Qa’ida and the Taliban. It was part of a broader effort to bolster Pakistani forces against an expanding militancy. The proposal came in a strategy paper prepared by staff members of the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM). The planning at SOCOM had intensified after Admiral Eric Olson, the SOCOM commander, met with President Pervez Musharraf and senior Pakistani military leaders in late August 2007 to discuss how the U.S. military could increase cooperation in Pakistan’s fight against the extremists. The briefing stated that U.S. forces would not be involved in any conventional combat in Pakistan but that elements of the Joint Special Operations Command, an elite counterterrorism unit, might be involved in strikes against militant leaders under specific conditions.⁷³

But there were no sustained operations. The vast majority of U.S. planning was on paper, not in practice. The United States refused to take concerted action against the Taliban and other insurgents in Pakistan—especially in Baluchistan Province, where the Taliban’s inner shura was located—or to put serious pressure on Pakistan to do it. At least one White House official acknowledged that the U.S. government did not place any serious conditions on its assistance to Pakistan. It did not request a quid pro quo in which the United States provided money and equipment and Pakistan helped capture or kill key Taliban and other militants.⁷⁴ Several Western ambassadors—especially those from countries whose troops were fighting and dying in Afghanistan—became frustrated at America’s apparent unwillingness to confront Pakistan.⁷⁵ At the same time, a resurgent al Qa’ida on Pakistani soil became an increasingly acute threat.