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

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN In the Eye of the Storm

AS IT BECAME CLEAR that the U.S. military would have to shift its focus from military operations to counterinsurgency tactics, new personnel were given a different set of responsibilities. U.S. Navy Commander Larry Legree was one of those new faces. Legree’s preparation for counterinsurgency operations in landlocked Afghanistan was, somewhat ironically, serving aboard an aircraft carrier, a destroyer, and an amphibious ship. It was not exactly standard training for participating on the front line of a major ground war. “I was a nuclear-trained surface warfare officer,” Legree told me, almost apologetically. “The four and a half months I spent at Fort Bragg in North Carolina before deploying to Afghanistan was about the only preparation I had. I learned how to wear body armor and shoot, move, and communicate, but didn’t learn any real fundamentals about counter-insurgency.” Most of that had to come on the fly.

Legree also didn’t have the stereotypical disposition of a war-fighter. His congenial, unassuming temperament, honed during his childhood in western Michigan, and his extraordinary politeness seemed oddly suited for Afghanistan’s bloody front lines. He was also something of an academic. Legree attended the prestigious U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and then went on to get three master’s degrees at George Washington University, Duke, and North Carolina State.

But he was a critical cog in the U.S. military’s transition in eastern Afghanistan from a purely war-fighting machine to a counterinsurgency force through 2008. Legree was sent to Kunar Province in eastern Afghanistan, only a few miles from the Pakistan border, to become the commander of a U.S. Provincial Reconstruction Team. Insurgent groups had dug into the impenetrable terrain and created extensive cave networks along the province’s border with Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. They had done the same thing during the Soviet era. Legree’s job was to show locals that the United States could provide reconstruction and development assistance. “Our primary contributions were building roads and bridges,” Legree said, “as well as helping establish a health care network. They brought concrete change to local Afghans.” The roads and bridges paid off: Legree and his colleagues helped build extensive infrastructure across the province, transforming the dynamics of the local economy. As commerce began to flow more rapidly and into new areas, Legree became a powerful and popular figure.

“I was almost never targeted,” Legree said, somewhat nonplussed, since Kunar was one of Afghanistan’s most violent provinces. “My view is that the locals were pragmatic. They wanted the money and they knew I was the checkbook. The message got out: Don’t mess with the Provincial Reconstruction Team.”¹ And Afghans in Kunar felt incresingly secure. A 2008 Asia Foundation poll indicated that Afghans in the province felt relatively secure, despite violence in isolated pocket like the Korengal Valley.²

An Epiphany

Legree was not alone in his efforts. The U.S. military gradually improved its counterinsurgency capabilities over the course of its tenure in Afghanistan, though it still faced an entrenched and dedicated enemy. Among the most successful contingents were those led by Major General David M. Rodriguez, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, Coalition Joint Task Force 82. Rodriguez is tall and immensely polite but somewhat uncomfortable in front of large crowds. He had served as deputy director of regional operations on the joint staff at the Pentagon, where he was responsible for synchronizing and monitoring U.S. military operations abroad.

The 82nd Airborne’s previous tours in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2004 had been marred by controversy, earning them a reputation as “doorkickers.” “We were good at one thing,” said Colonel Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division. “Killing bad guys.” This ultimately proved counterproductive. Schweitzer was a gregarious, affable colonel with short-cropped hair, bushy eyebrows, and dark sunglasses that clung to his neck like a necklace. “What we needed to do was to spend more time separating the enemy from the population. That meant engaging in non-kinetic operations,” Schweitzer continued. In U.S. military lingo, “non-kinetic” referred to reconstruction and development activities, such as building health clinics, roads, and schools.³

In August 2002, the 82nd Airborne conducted Operation Mountain Sweep, which involved a weeklong hunt for al Qa’ida and Taliban fugitives in eastern Afghanistan. During the operation, a U.S. Special Forces team knocked at the door of a mud compound in the Shah-i-kot Valley, near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. An elderly Pashtun farmer let the soldiers inside. When they asked if there were any weapons in the house, he led them to his only firearm, a decrepit hunting rifle. The Special Forces team thanked him and walked toward the next house. Not long after the Special Forces left, six paratroopers, also from the 82nd Airborne, also part of Operation Mountain Sweep, kicked in the door. Terrified, the farmer tried to run but was grabbed by one of the soldiers, while others tried to frisk the women. “The women were screaming bloody murder,” recalled Mike, one of the Special Forces soldiers who was present during the confusion. “The guy was in tears. He had been completely dishonored.” It was a strategic blunder, recalled another soldier. “After Mountain Sweep,” he noted, “for the first time since we got here, we’re getting rocks thrown at us on the road in Khowst.”⁴

This and other experiences had marred the 82nd Airborne’s reputation. But through the end of its rotation in early 2008, the 82nd Airborne had worked assiduously to change the general impression of the division, embracing the three core principles of counterinsurgency: clear, hold, and build. Colonel Schweitzer declared: “The Taliban and other groups tell locals: don’t send your kids to school, don’t take advantage of the medical care provided, and don’t support the government by helping with security. We say the opposite. Send your kids to school and we’ll build them, seek the available medical care, and the government will support you through the construction of roads, schools, dams, and infrastructure that will stimulate the economy.”⁵

Building on counterinsurgency lessons from the British, French, and American historical experiences, the 82nd Airborne increasingly focused its efforts on “soft power.” This translated into a greater focus on reconstruction and development projects and less emphasis on combat operations. At the core of this strategy was an assumption that local Afghans were the center of gravity, a basic tenet of counter-insurgency warfare. The French counterinsurgency expert Roger Trinquier summed this up lucidly: “The sine qua non of victory in modern warfare is the unconditional support of a population.”⁶

Many Afghans had been frustrated by the lack of development over the previous several years, and unhappy with poor governance. To address these concerns, the 82nd Airborne worked with tribal leaders to identify local needs and to develop projects that helped address those needs. Thus, in Khowst Province, for example, Colonel Schweitzer and provincial governor Arsala Jamal teamed up to build infrastructure and hospitals. In Paktia Province and in Kunar, where Larry Legree was stationed, locals saw newly paved roads, electricity, and reliable water projects move toward swift completion. A sizable chunk of the money came from the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP), which enabled U.S. military commanders to dole out aid quickly. Another strategic component was hiring local Afghans to perform and evaluate the work.⁷

Against all odds, eastern Afghanistan appeared to rebound in 2008. In Khowst Province, the number of children in school quadrupled—from 38,000 in 2004 to more than 160,000 in 2008. Roughly 10 percent of Afghans in the east had access to basic health care in 2004, while more than 75 percent had access in 2008.⁸ And, perhaps one of the most revealing metrics of progress in a country where cell phones were a primary method of communication for those who could afford them, there suddenly seemed to be service throughout the region. It was a shock when my BlackBerry worked almost everywhere I visited in eastern Afghanistan, including in remote border outposts.

The 82nd Airborne Division’s efforts created a bit of defensiveness among some U.S. allies. In May 2008, the British government circulated a paper in response to “suggestions that U.S. successes in their counter-insurgency campaign in eastern Afghanistan should be migrated to the south,” where British forces were located. The paper asked whether there were any lessons that might be applied to British operations in Helmand Province. The British pointed out that U.S. forces had been present in eastern Afghanistan much longer than British forces had in Helmand; U.S. military tours of duty were longer than British tours; and the United States provided significantly more funding through its CERP and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) than Britain had in the south. Also, there were important differences between the east and the south in geography, population density, tribal structure, and types of jihadi groups. The result, British analysts concluded, was that “the east is easier terrain for counter-insurgency” and that “differences of geography, of resources, and of campaign timing suggest that many of the American approaches…are not transferable to Helmand.”⁹

Building on Success?

Despite an innovative strategy, inadequate resources once again thwarted U.S. efforts. “We’re like the Pacific theatre in World War II,” a U.S. civil-affairs officer in eastern Afghanistan complained. “We will get more resources after we defeat Berlin,” he said, alluding to the U.S. focus on Iraq.¹⁰

There were too few American and Coalition military forces, and there was too little American civilian expertise to ensure the permanence of this progress. By 2008, some 56,000 Coalition forces were stationed in Afghanistan, compared with more than three times that number in Iraq. American troop strength was even more disproportionate. U.S. military force levels in Iraq were frozen at 140,000 personnel, while just over 30,000 were deployed to Afghanistan. Thus, as during the earlier periods of the campaign, the U.S. military, other Coalition forces, and the Afghan National Army could clear territory but generally could not hold it. In June 2008, General David McKiernan became commander of ISAF; several months later, his staff completed the ISAF campaign plan, which was fairly blunt about the lack of forces to hold territory, noting that NATO had to resort to an “economy of force and special operations” effort to make up for the shortfalls and “to disrupt the insurgency and shape future operations.”¹¹ Troops involved in reconstruction work could have been reallocated to combat operations, but there were still too few civilians in the field from the State Department and USAID. The rough living conditions and acute security concerns meant that the U.S. military had to shoulder most of the burden for governance and economic development activities, which in more normal circumstances would have fallen to officials in the Department of State, Commerce, Agriculture, or USAID.

U.S. and other NATO forces also had trouble “building” in some areas. In his book Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency, Roger Trinquier argued that counterinsurgency requires “an interlocking system of actions—political, economic, psychological, military—that aims at the [insurgents’ intended] overthrow of the established authority in a country and its replacement by another regime.”¹² One of the most innovative aspects of the Afghan counter-insurgency campaign was the cooperation between civil and military programs, especially the use of Provincial Reconstruction Teams.¹³ The “building” that the Americans were able to accomplish almost always happened through these PRTs.

Each PRT consisted of roughly 60 to 100 personnel. Soldiers, who made up the bulk of each team, were divided into civil-affairs units, Special Forces, force-protection units, and psychological operations personnel. In most cases, more than 90 percent of the personnel were soldiers because of the struggle to get civilian personnel.¹⁴ According to Larry Legree, “recruiting civilians was a tremendous challenge” in Kunar Province. “A number of U.S. agencies, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, were simply not optimized to operate in an insurgency.”¹⁵ Legree was fortunate, however, since he managed to recruit a handful of competent civilians to assist in development and reconstruction. One was Alison Blosser, a sharp, young foreign service officer who spoke Pashto and was instrumental in dealing with Kunar’s governor, Sayed Fazlullah Wahidi.

Both U.S. and NATO Provincial Reconstruction Teams faced significant staffing hurdles. Short tours of duty—including some for as little as three months—made it difficult for PRT members to understand local politics and culture. There were also too few of the teams. Five years after the overthrow of the Taliban regime, the United States and other NATO countries were able to put PRTs in virtually all major Afghan cities, but they had little operational reach into rural areas.¹⁶ Colonel John Agoglia, director of the Counterinsurgency Training Center on Afghanistan, bluntly acknowledged that “many Coalition forces do not actively and consistently patrol their areas of responsibility or, when they do patrol, they sally forth from Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) for a quick-order patrol that has very little enduring effect.”¹⁷

USAID faced serious challenges in adapting to the new environment. According to one official involved, USAID’s initial attitude was to treat Afghanistan as a post-conflict environment. It wasn’t. It was an insurgency. USAID did not prioritize reconstruction aid geographically and focus specifically on the south and east until 2006.¹⁸

NATO countries also faced deep challenges in linking military operations with reconstruction efforts. In a series of briefings in 2008 at NATO headquarters in Kabul, for example, key military officials from Regional Command South expressed growing frustration with the failure to meld reconstruction efforts with military operations. Despite oral commitments to focus on development and not combat operations, these officers reported: “By the time we get to executing plans, most of our operations are kinetic.” There was little comprehensive NATO activity on economic development in rural areas of the south, and no systematic coordination between the military and such civilian agencies as USAID, the Canadian International Development Agency, and the UK’s Department for International Development. “The biggest problem we have,” the briefers concluded, “is consolidating military gains with development.”¹⁹

Civilian Casualties

In addition to reconstruction challenges, civilian casualties—collateral damage”-from NATO airstrikes created an uproar among Afghans, even though the Taliban and other groups killed a larger number of civilians. In 2008, U.S. military data indicated that the number of civilian casualties caused by NATO and Taliban fighting increased by somewhere between 39 and 54 percent from 2007 levels. ²⁰ Over the course of the war, however, improvements in intelligence minimized the number of civilian casualties when the U.S. military planned airstrikes in advance. Rules were written to prevent major catastrophes. Targeters were required to obey strict procedures to minimize collateral damage. They had to make a positive identification of any target, and they were expected to alter the angle, depth, and type of bombs dropped, depending on the context. In addition, targeters were required to make a thorough assessment of who lived in a particular structure or area before calling in an airstrike. Problems sometimes emerged, however, when ground forces were ambushed in the field or came under unexpected fire. In such “troops-in-contact” situations, NATO and Afghan forces required immediate support, leaving little time to complete a formal collateral-damage assessment and increasing the possibility of faulty intelligence and civilian casualties. It was in these situations that the close air support—AH Apache attack helicopters, A-10 and F-14 fighters, B-52 bombers, and AC-130 Spectre gunships—could lead to heavy civilian casualties. To make matters worse, the Taliban and other insurgent groups frequently fired from homes and other buildings near civilian populations, retreated into civilian areas, and concealed themselves as civilians while firing on NATO and Afghan forces. Their goal, of course, was to trick NATO forces into killing civilians, a nihilistic and horrifying tactic that has nevertheless worked in previous insurgencies.²¹

Not all civilian casualties were caused by airstrikes, however. One of the most widely publicized incidents took place on March 4, 2007, when nineteen civilians were killed in the eastern province of Nangarhar, a farming region known for its plump oranges, rice, and sugarcane. An explosives-rigged minivan had targeted a convoy of Marines from Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC), who were traveling along the road between Torkham and Jalalabad. Some local Afghans insisted that the Americans fired on civilian cars and pedestrians as they sped away. U.S. officials said insurgents shot at the Marines and may have caused some of the civilian casualties. But a U.S. investigation of the incident concluded that the Marines’ response was “out of proportion to the threat that was immediately there.” Lieutenant Colonel Paul Montanus, commander of 2nd Marine Special Operations Battalion, after consultation with Major General Dennis Hejlik, MARSOC commander, pulled the Marine company out of Afghanistan days after the incident. He had “lost trust and confidence in the MARSOC leadership” in Afghanistan.²² The U.S. military formally apologized, telling the families of the victims that they were “deeply, deeply ashamed” about the incident and describing it as a “terrible, terrible mistake.”²³ The local response was swift and intense. Angry demonstrations erupted in Nangarhar and other provinces, with locals chanting antigovernment and anti-American slogans.

On August 22, 2008, U.S. and Afghan forces in the Shindand district of Herat Province were ambushed during an operation against a Taliban commander named Mullah Sidiq, who was planning to attack a nearby American base. Pinned down under small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades, U.S. Special Forces engaged Taliban forces with small-arms fire, crew-served weapons, and close air support. Just after midnight, an AC-130H Spectre gunship opened fire with 20-millimeter guns and 105-millimeter howitzers on several compounds that were believed to house a large contingent of Taliban. But the airstrikes also killed civilians. The U.S. military initially reported that only seven civilians were killed in the attack while the strikes killed nearly three dozen Taliban insurgents, including Mullah Sidiq.²⁴

A United Nations report on the incident, however, claimed that ninety civilians had been killed, including sixty children, fifteen women, and fifteen men.²⁵ The Afghan Ministry of Interior released a statement blaming the United States and announcing that “seventy-six civilians, most of them women and children, were martyred today in a coalition force operation in Herat Province.”²⁶ President Karzai, who rarely left the Presidential Palace in Kabul, made an unprecedented trip to Shindand and “strongly condemned the unilateral operation of the Coalition Forces in Shindand district of Herat Province.”²⁷ On August 25, Karzai held an emotional meeting at the palace in which cabinet members vented about the U.S. actions. That same day, Karzai held a meeting with approximately fifty legislators, including speaker Yunus Qanooni, who harshly criticized the attack and pressed Karzai to condemn the U.S. actions.

American officials, including U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan William Wood, complained that these were cursory assessments and that there was no physical evidence to support the higher death tolls. They said that the UN and Afghan reports had relied on the word of villagers who either supported or were cowed by Taliban fighters. Ambassador Wood sent a memo to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates prior to his September visit to Afghanistan, warning that President Karzai would express his outrage to Gates and would push for rethinking “the proportionality of air strikes, U.S. coordination with Afghan security forces, the violation of Afghan homes during night raids on residential compounds, and the detention of Afghans without prior approval of the government.”²⁸ A subsequent U.S. military investigation, led by Brigadier General Michael Callan of the U.S. Air Force, concluded that thirty-three civilians had died, not the seven that U.S. commanders had initially announced. The report concluded that the United Nations, Afghan government, and other assessments were wrong because they relied primarily on “villager statements, limited forensics, and no access to a multi-disciplined intelligence architecture.”²⁹

Regardless of what the actual number was, the attack had a searing impact on Afghans, who grew increasingly angry about the civilian casualties caused by U.S. airstrikes. An assessment for U.S. Central Command said American credibility had dropped “sharply” and found “that civilian casualties and security are strongly linked to attitudes to the U.S. military.”³⁰ And an opinion poll in 2008 found that 40 percent of Afghans who sympathized with the Taliban were at least partly motivated by resentment about civilian casualties from NATO airstrikes.³¹ In a war over the hearts and minds of Afghans, civilian casualties undermined the gains made with infrastructure and other projects and increasingly pushed locals toward the Taliban and other insurgent groups.

A Regional War

In 2008, U.S. military data showed a stark increase in violence from 2007 levels. There was a 32 percent increase in insurgent-related violence, a 25 percent increase in attacks from improvised explosive devices, a 56 percent increase in kidnappings and assassinations, and a 300 percent increase in attacks on district centers. In addition, violence was up in several provinces, such as Helmand and Wardak, and along major highways. Highway 4, which connects Kandahar City and Spin Boldak, experienced a 400 percent spike in violence.³² A leaked 2008 United Nations security report showed that insurgent violence had increased that year to the highest levels since the U.S. invasion in 2001.³³ Afghan National Police and Afghan civilians took the brunt of insurgent attacks. Between January 2007 and July 2008, nearly two-thirds of the security forces killed were Afghan National Police, rather than Afghan National Army or Coalition forces.³⁴

The Taliban and other insurgent groups also conducted a number of audacious attacks against U.S. and other NATO forces. On July 13, about 200 militants raided a U.S. base in Nuristan Province, using machine guns, crew-served weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars. They breached the walls of the base before eventually being driven back by U.S. forces, but the defense required the support from AH-64 Apache helicopters, a Predator drone with Hellfire missiles, and eventually B-1B, A-10, and F-15s. Afghan and U.S. reports indicated that the militants received assistance from locals in the village of Wanat, as well as the district governor, Zul Rachman. As a U.S. Army after-action report concluded, “post-attack intelligence indicates that both the District Police Chief and District Governor were complicit in supporting the AAF [Anti-Afghan Force] attack.”³⁵

On August 18, the Taliban ambushed a French patrol east of Kabul, killing ten French soldiers and wounding another twenty-one. A NATO after-action report found that “the French platoon had only one radio,” making it difficult to call for air support, and the Afghan National Army “performed very poorly…. The ANA force spent much of the time lounging on the battlefield. When they finally dispersed, most left their military equipment [including] weapons, ID cards, and other items for the enemy.”³⁶ The French soldiers’ bodies were not recovered until the following day; and insurgents had stripped most of the bodies and taken their equipment.

The irony of even the limited U.S. progress was that while such forces as the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions had made great gains in counterinsurgency actions, they were hamstrung by militant groups crossing the border on a daily basis. “The problem,” one military intelligence officer candidly noted, is obvious: “We recognize the border. They don’t.”³⁷

What had started out as a U.S.-led war in Afghanistan developed into a regional insurgency. In nuclear-armed Pakistan, militant groups were destabilizing the North West Frontier Province, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Baluchistan Province, and urban areas. The U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, circulated a memo in early 2008 warning that “militant extremists in Pakistan have sharply increased attacks, both in tribal areas along the Pak-Afghan border and into settled areas.” These attacks were “undermining regional stability and effective prosecution of the war on terror by Coalition Forces in Afghanistan,” and the Pakistan military was “hindered by significant capability gaps and fears of civilian casualties, which could undercut already weak public support for offensive operations.”³⁸ Consequently, some U.S. officials advocated overhauling U.S. assistance to Pakistan and called for providing additional airmobile capacity, combat logistics and sustainment, counter-IED capability, and night operations.

But America’s biggest challenge was impacting the will of Pakistan’s security agencies. Efforts to bolster Pakistani security capabilities were significantly undermined by the political and security chaos in Pakistan. Pervez Musharraf, who had established a close relationship with Washington, resigned from the presidency on August 18, 2008, in the midst of impeachment proceedings. And a weak civilian government led by Asif Ali Zardari, widower of the assassinated presidential candidate Benazir Bhutto, tried to pick up the pieces.

In the fall of 2008, the government of Pakistan shuffled its way to the brink with a severe balance-of-payments crisis. The new civilian government, reluctant to jeopardize its popularity, maintained price controls on food and fuel, financing the difference from the budget. Pakistan’s trade deficit widened alarmingly because of higher global oil prices. The capital market upheavals on Wall Street triggered a flight toward less risky assets, and Pakistani and foreign investors fled the rupee. In its 2008 Monetary Policy Statement, the State Bank of Pakistan noted that government borrowing from the central bank—which it had earlier described as having reached “alarming levels” during 2007 and 2008—was “unsustainable.” The State Bank also concluded that inflationary pressures were “alarming,” and inflation continued to be stoked by “aggregate demand pressures” and a “fall in the productive capacity of the economy.”³⁹

On September 9, Pakistan Army and Frontier Corps forces, supported by aerial bombing sorties, conducted operations in the Bajaur Agency and Swat district against several militant groups, including Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi. The effort was code-named Operation Sher Dil. They were met with staunch resistance from heavily armed militants reinforced by fighters who had come from Afghanistan. The conflict triggered significant population displacement within Pakistan, and some residents even fled to Afghanistan. The U.S. Agency for International Development’s Office of Transition Initiatives provided humanitarian relief, delivering nonfood items and engaging in reconstruction once the fighting stopped. USAID was also involved in governance and development projects in Pakistan’s tribal areas, including Bajaur. But as one senior State Department official remarked, “Pakistan has not employed a clear, hold, build counterinsurgency strategy,” making sustained reconstruction work virtually impossible.⁴⁰

On September 20, a truck bomb exploded outside the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, killing more than fifty people, including two Americans. It left a crater forty feet wide and twenty-five feet deep, mangling cars and charring trees in the blast zone. “All roads lead to FATA,” said Interior Minister Rehman Malik, explaining where the terrorists came from.⁴¹ The Marriott bombing damaged a nearby office building (the Evacuee Trust Complex, also known as Software Technology Park 2), which housed local offices of American and multinational information-technology companies, including Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Motorola, and Kestral (the local representative of Lockheed Martin).

Escalation Among “Allies”

American and Pakistani forces engaged in several firefights in 2008, escalating tensions along the border—often referred to as the “zero line” by U.S. military and CIA forces. During a June 10 firefight, U.S. forces killed about a dozen Pakistani Frontier Corps soldiers who were targeting them. One villager from Suran Dara, a few hundred yards from the fighting on the Pakistan side, remarked: “When the Americans started bombing the Taliban, the Frontier Corps started shooting at the Americans…. They were trying to help the Taliban. And then the American planes bombed the Pakistani post.”⁴²

On July 29, NATO, Afghan, and Pakistani military commanders met at Nawa Pass in eastern Afghanistan to discuss cross-border issues. Afghanistan’s border police central-zone commander, Colonel Qadir-Gul, represented the Afghan side; Brigadier General Adamcyn Khan and Lieutenant Colonel Ahmed headed the Pakistani delegation. According to a senior NATO official involved in the meeting, “the Pakistanis wanted to recuperate their weapons and equipment,” which they claimed had been taken from their border posts during a firefight a few months earlier. During the fighting, the Frontier Corps had abandoned several positions along the border to insurgents, who then directed fire against Afghan forces. The Afghans counterattacked and seized the border posts, occupying the positions for seventy-two hours before Afghan and Pakistani commanders could negotiate their withdrawal. In a provocative move, Afghan troops then posed for the press with the captured equipment. But the July 29 meeting degenerated into finger-pointing. As the NATO official remarked, “sentiment on both sides of the Durand Line is coloring border units’ ability to cooperate. Afghan claims that Pakistani units are complicit in cross-border attacks and have undermined the two sides’ relationship.” Part of the problem was that Afghan and Pakistani officials disagreed about the exact location of the border. “The Durand Line underlies much of the argument; the two sides will not openly disagree about where territory lies, but appear to be under orders not to concede anything.”⁴³

A defining moment for U.S.-Pakistan relations came in late July 2008, following the July 7 bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul. U.S. intelligence assessments, which were based on intercepted communications, concluded that ISI agents were involved in planning the attack, which killed fifty-four people, including an Indian defense attaché.⁴⁴ The attack destroyed the embassy’s protective blast walls and front gates and tore into civilians waiting outside for visas.

After being briefed on the situation by U.S. intelligence officials, President Bush lost his temper. He approved orders that allowed U.S. Special Operations Forces to conduct ground operations in Pakistan without the approval of Pakistan’s weak civilian government or the ISI. “We had no other option,” said a senior White House official I interviewed. “A range of high-value targets were operating at will in Pakistan, and conducting attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Security in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as at home in the United States, was in serious jeopardy.”⁴⁵

In early September, U.S. Navy SEALs working for a Joint Special Operations Command task force, supported by AC-130 Spectre gunships, launched a ground assault from Afghanistan into South Waziristan against members of al Qa’ida and the Haqqani network. These and other cross-border U.S. attacks raised the ire of Pakistani officials. General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan’s chief of army staff, responded that the “right to conduct operations against the militants inside our own territory is solely the responsibility of the [Pakistani] armed forces.”⁴⁶ President Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani supported Kayani’s statement, as did the Pakistani press. The English-language Daily Times front page ran side-by-side headlines: “Boots on Ground: Bush” and “No Way, Says Kayani.”

Between June 20 and July 20, 2008, there had been more than sixty insurgent attacks against Afghan or Coalition forces along the Paktika and Khowst border with North and South Waziristan. There were also twenty attacks along the Kunar and Nangarhar border with Pakistan’s Bajaur, Mohmand, and Khyber Agencies.⁴⁷ On September 25, U.S. OH-58 Kiowa helicopters flying near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border came under small-arms fire from a Pakistani military checkpoint near Tanai district in Khowst Province. A ground-based American patrol then returned fire with the checkpoint. What had begun in September 2001 as a U.S.-led war in Afghanistan had gradually transitioned into a regional struggle involving the United States and all major countries in the region. The Great Game was alive and well.