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

AFTERWORD

THE GREAT CHALLENGE of writing about any ongoing conflict is knowing when to “end” the story. While I was living in Kabul in 2009, there appeared to be no end to the insurgency—at least on the surface. Many Afghans remained defiant of the Taliban, but insurgents continued to pull off lethal attacks against international forces and Afghans. Not far from my office, the Haqqani network blew up a two-vehicle Italian military convoy traveling from Kabul International Airport in September. The suicide bomber pulled out of a side street in an SUV, maneuvered between the two vehicles, and detonated. The blast was deafening. The explosive weight of the main charge was between 600 and 800 pounds, and left a huge crater in the middle of the road. The force of the blast threw the front Italian vehicle thirty-five meters to a dirt patch on the shoulder and peeled the roof off the passenger compartment. As with many suicide attacks in Afghanistan, it was innocent Afghans who took the most casualties. Sixteen civilians were killed and another sixty were wounded, in addition to the six Italian soldiers and four Afghan police officers who were killed.

“It was a mess,” said one U.S. army soldier who had been standing near the blast zone. “Shrapnel was coming down like rain. And car fragments, dirt, rocks, and chunks of nearby trees came hurtling at us.”¹

But there were bright spots. I noticed grassroots initiatives sprouting across Afghanistan in which local tribes and communities began to resist the Taliban and other insurgents. They ranged from Noorzais, Barakzais, and Alikozais in the west and south to Shinwaris, Kharotis, Mangals, and Jajis in the east. Even in such northern provinces as Konduz, there were ongoing local efforts by Tajiks, Uzbeks, and even Pashtuns to fight the Taliban. In October 2009 in Herat Province, Afghan army commandos and U.S. Special Operations Forces killed Ghulam Yahya Akbari, a senior insurgent leader who had just tried (and failed) to assassinate Afghan Minister of Water and Energy Ismail Khan. Akbari was colloquially referred to as the “scourge of Herat” because he had committed so many kidnappings and assassinations. Seventeen of his close associates were also killed during the air assault as AH-64 Apache attack helicopters closed in on them after they scrambled away from a camp of nomadic Kuchi herdsman with whom they had been hiding. The most startling outcome of Akbari’s assassination, however, was that seventy insurgents loyal to him turned themselves in to U.S. Special Operations Forces and the Afghans, vowing to support the government.

The Obama administration, which had come to office pledging to reverse course in Afghanistan and defeat the Taliban and al Qa’ida, still found itself in a predicament. “This is not quite where we expected to be,” one White House official told me somewhat wryly.² U.S. General Stanley McChrystal’s summer 2009 assessment of Afghanistan said, “we face not only a resilient and growing insurgency; there is also a crisis of confidence among Afghans—in both their government and the international community—that undermines our credibility and emboldens the insurgents.”³ For many Americans, support for the war boiled down to a simple question: What are America’s strategic interests in Afghanistan?

Al Qa’ida and Russian Roulette

For some, Afghanistan has little strategic value for the United States. They contend that the objectives are skewed and the war is unwinnable. Instead of continuing a faltering counterinsurgency campaign, they believe the United States should withdraw most of its forces and shift to a counterterrorism strategy that targets al Qa’ida terrorists with Special Operations Forces and drones.

Steven Simon, for example, who served as senior director for transnational threats on the Clinton administration’s National Security Council, said that “Washington should concentrate on its already effective policy of eliminating al Qa’ida’s leadership with drone strikes” rather than target the Taliban, since “the moment to rescue the mission…has passed.”⁴ Simon continued that the core al Qa’ida threat to America resides in Pakistan, not Afghanistan.⁵ University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, a West Point graduate, similarly wrote that the U.S. government should “accept defeat” and “withdraw its forces from Afghanistan.”⁶ In September 2009, U.S. State Department employee Matthew Hoh, a former U.S. Marine captain, resigned from his post as the senior civilian representative for the U.S. government in Zabol Province. In his letter of resignation, he warned that “we are mortgaging our Nation’s economy on a war, which, even with increased commitment, will remain a draw for years to come.”⁷

These are serious arguments from thoughtful, experienced individuals. But they are ultimately misleading and unrealistic. First, they fail to grasp the close relationship between al Qa’ida and Afghan insurgent groups, which make the prospect of a Taliban victory in Afghanistan perilous for America’s national interest. It would mean playing Russian roulette with U.S. security. Take the Taliban. The al Qa’ida–Taliban relationship has deep historical roots going back to the personal links that Mullah Mohammad Omar developed with Osama bin Laden in the 1990s. The relationship strengthened after the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban regime, and senior al Qa’ida and Taliban officials regularly communicated and coordinated efforts to overthrow the Karzai government in Afghanistan.

In southern Afghanistan, there are pockets of al Qa’ida and other foreign fighters in Helmand and several neighboring provinces, such as Kandahar and Zabol. Taliban leaders, including Helmand shadow governor Mullah Naim Barech, offer protection to al Qa’ida and other foreign fighters. During a November 2009 trip to Helmand Province, U.S. and British forces detailed for me the networks of foreign fighters in such areas as Marjeh, which lies southwest of Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province. Marjeh is a small agrarian community near the Helmand River that is a hotbed for the drug trade, and it has long been a strategic location for the Taliban. From Marjeh they are able to launch attacks on Lashkar Gah and the surrounding region. “The foreigners are involved in helping local fighters conduct suicide attacks and other improvised explosive devices,” said one U.S. Army major, who had led several operations in the Marjeh area. “Some also bring video cameras with them to take footage of insurgent operations and use it for propaganda.”⁸ In eastern Afghanistan, there are several small pockets of al Qa’ida and other foreign fighters in the area beginning around Khowst Province and reaching north to Kunar Province. In July 2008, at least one Arab was involved—and ultimately killed—in the insurgent attack on a U.S. vehicle patrol base in Wanat Village, Kunar Province. A U.S. Army After Action report on the attack described him as wearing “traditional Afghan clothing over a set of woodland camouflage military fatigues.”⁹

The Haqqani network has also developed close ties with al Qa’ida. Jalaluddin Haqqani, the organization’s founder, picked up on al Qa’ida themes in his propaganda, equating the United States with “Crusader” forces. “The financial expenses that the United States spends in Afghanistan as well as the killing of dozens of the U.S. forces at the hands of the mujahidin every day reflect the victory of the mujahidin and the defeat of the aggressive Crusader forces,” he wrote in Al-Samud, a monthly jihadist magazine.¹⁰ Jalaluddin even married an Arab woman as a symbol of his support. Jalaluddin’s son Sirajuddin, who was given the title “khalifa” as the leader of the Haqqani network, developed a close relationship with al Qa’ida leaders in Pakistan, who helped him orchestrate a range of audacious terrorist attacks in Afghanistan.¹¹ One of the most spectacular was the September 17, 2009, attack in Kabul, for which some al Qa’ida operatives from Peshawar helped build the IED that killed six Italian soldiers.¹²

Second, proponents of a withdrawal overstate the effectiveness of drone strikes using MQ-1 Predators and MQ-9 Reapers. Drones can have a short-term impact, as they did in the 2008 and 2009 attacks on al Qa’ida operatives such as Abu Khabab al-Masri, a chemical and biological expert; Khalid Habib al-Masri, a commander in Afghanistan; and Abu Jihad al-Masri, an external operations planner. But drones don’t offer a long-term solution. One U.S. intelligence official told me, “They are lethal in targeting foreign fighters. But using them as a long-term strategy would be like playing whack-a-mole.”¹³

Finally, there remain small numbers of al Qa’ida operatives and other foreign fighters in Afghanistan, and the al Qa’ida fighters in Pakistan tend to be clustered along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Few actually recognize the border, and insurgents cross regularly with ease. Beginning in October 2009, the Pakistan army launched Operation Rah-e-Nijat against militants in South Waziristan, which triggered an exodus of foreign fighters across the border into Afghanistan. Indeed, Pakistani militants, including Wahad Shah, facilitated the movement of foreign fighters out of South Waziristan and into the Afghan province of Paktika. In addition, senior al Qa’ida leaders have repeatedly claimed the war in Afghanistan as their raison d’être. “The mujahideen [in Afghanistan] are hopeful and high spirited,” remarked Abu al-Yazid, al Qa’ida’s chief of operations, in a 2008 interview with Pakistan’s GEO TV. “They are now expanding their areas of operations and carrying out actions in northern provinces too. And by the will of God, we will be able to wrestle Afghanistan free of foreign occupation very soon.”¹⁴

A related contention is that it is pointless to focus on Afghanistan because al Qa’ida can easily find other sanctuaries in Somalia, Yemen, or numerous other locations.¹⁵ Yet this argument fails to understand the origins and development of al Qa’ida in the Pashtun areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, which have taken nearly three decades to hone. “It is simply not true that all potential al Qaeda sanctuaries are of the same importance, now or potentially,” wrote journalist Steve Coll, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Ghost Wars, which documented the CIA’s activities in Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion to September 11, 2001. “Bin Laden and his No. 2, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, have a 30-year, unique history of trust and collaboration with the Pashtun Islamist networks located in North Waziristan, Bajaur, and the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan.”¹⁶

It is important to recognize the link between al Qa’ida and Afghan insurgent groups. A policy focused on targeting al Qa’ida—and not the Taliban, Haqqani network, or other groups—would ignore one of the most egregious lessons from September 11, 2001: Taliban-controlled areas will likely be used as a sanctuary for al Qa’ida and other jihadist groups targeting the United States. These groups have close links with al Qa’ida, and there is no evidence—just wishful thinking—that senior Taliban or other leaders would break those links if they controlled more territory in Afghanistan, including Kabul itself. Taliban leaders permitted al Qa’ida and other militant groups to establish training camps in Afghanistan in the 1990s, and a similar development would likely occur again because their relationship is even stronger today.

A Shadow Government

The al Qa’ida connection is significant because the Taliban and other groups continue to push into rural Pashtun areas and are desperately trying to get a permanent foothold in northern parts of the country. As I visited Pashtun villages in southern and eastern Afghanistan, I saw the Taliban strategy at the grassroots level.

At its core, their strategy is designed to co-opt or coerce local tribes and other communities at the village and district levels. The insurgency is organized along both vertical and horizontal lines. The inner shura, based out of Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province, exerts some authority over lower-level Taliban fighters inside southern Afghanistan through a series of subordinate shuras, shadow governors, and military commanders. Some of the most influential figures include Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, his principal deputy Abdul Ghani Berader, and military commander Abdul Qayum Zakir. Berader is particularly important because he tends to run most of the shuras involving senior Taliban commanders. “Omar is reclusive and unpolished,” one Taliban leader told me, “and has preferred to confide in a small number of trusted advisors rather than address larger groups.”¹⁷ The two are close, however, and Omar is apparently married to Berader’s sister. Berader, whose name means “brother” in Pashto (making it a nom de guerre), is a devout Muslim from the Popalzai tribe, the same tribe as President Hamid Karzai. His body has paid the price of years of jihad: he has a scar on his shoulder from a bullet wound and a scar on his leg from shrapnel. Like many senior Taliban leaders, Berader lives in Baluchistan Province, Pakistan, where he cannot be reached by U.S. operations and can coordinate with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) and other organizations.

The insurgency also includes loosely aligned horizontal networks of full-time and part-time guerrillas, criminal groups, tribes, local powerbrokers, and support networks. Few are motivated by ideology; the majority of insurgents are driven by money, grievances against the government, or coercion. The Taliban’s primary goals remain expanding their territory, instituting sharia law, and creating an Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Taliban leaders describe their struggle as a “confrontation between Islam and apostasy” and have created a shadow government in areas they influence or control.¹⁸ This focus on Islam explains why so many of the Taliban’s shadow governors are mullahs, including Mullah Aminullah (Kandahar), Mullah Naim Barech (Helmand), Mullah Ismail (Zabol), Mullah Rasul (Farah), and Mullah Salam (Kunduz). Historically, the Taliban have attempted to enforce a strict dress code for men, forcing them to grow beards and avoid Western haircuts or dress. But in some areas they have temporarily relaxed their insistence on a strict interpretation of Deobandi Islam to secure popular support. They released an updated code of conduct before Afghanistan’s August 2009 presidential elections, noting that the “mujahideen should strive to win the hearts and minds of Muslims by treating them with justice and good faith.”¹⁹ And senior Taliban leaders created an accountability commission to relieve members involved in corruption or unwarranted brutality toward the local population.

Not surprisingly, Taliban commanders have developed a fairly sophisticated understanding of the tribal dynamics in their areas. It is impossible to generalize about the Taliban’s overall tribal strategy because of their adaptability to conditions and shifting tribal dynamics. In broad terms, however, they aim to take advantage of grievances against the government or international forces, conducting targeted assassinations against collaborators, and capitalizing on Taliban momentum (and the perception of a domino effect) to increase their appeal to locals. In April 2009, the Taliban announced the beginning of Operation Nasrat (Victory), noting that they would continue to use “ambushes, offensives, explosions, martyrdom-seeking attacks and surprise attacks.”²⁰ Taliban commanders being knowledgeable of Pashtun tribes, sub-tribes, clans, and qawms, can convince local leaders that resistance is futile, prompting them to either disband or join them. The Taliban sometimes appoint commanders who come from local tribes to more effectively reach out to the population. And they have recruited tribes that are the majority in their districts but have been marginalized by ruling minority tribes, such as the Popalzais or Barakzais, who are favored by the central government. The Taliban’s tribal engagement strategy is perhaps best summarized in Mullah Omar’s 2009 code of conduct, or La’iha, which provided guidance that “Taliban will constructively engage tribal leaders” and “commanders should, where possible, be reassigned to their ancestral, tribal area” to better engage tribal leaders at the local level.²¹

The ultimate goal of any insurgent movement is to become the government. While I was visiting Paktia Province in October 2009, tribal leaders explained to me that local Taliban were involved in trying to resolve a land dispute between the Chamkani and Moqbil tribes in Chamkani District. “The government has failed to resolve the land dispute,” noted one local, “and the Taliban has moved in to broker it. They are trying to play the role of the government.”²²

A Local Strategy

The Taliban’s tribe-and community-based strategy is a purposeful, grassroots effort to take advantage of a government vacuum in rural areas—especially Pashtun areas. The Afghan and international governments have failed to counter the Taliban at that level. The war will be won in Afghanistan’s rural villages, not in the cities. The reality is that the United States is stuck in Afghanistan and Pakistan because it is not in America’s national security interests to abandon the region. But as violence levels continue to increase, Afghanistan is at a critical juncture. Rather than banking on stability entirely from the top down, as Amanullah Khan and the Soviet-backed regimes tried and failed to do, it would be more prudent to develop a bottom-up strategy.

What would such a strategy look like? General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has already indicated that it should be predicated on a core tenet of counterinsurgency: protecting the local population.²³ Both insurgents and counterinsurgents need the support of the population to win. As the last chapter argued, protecting the Afghan population will require building more competent Afghan army and police forces, countering corruption at the local and national levels, and targeting Taliban and other insurgents in Pakistan.

It is critical to neutralize senior Taliban leaders in Baluchistan Province, where most of the senior Taliban officials reside, since neither the United States nor Pakistan governments have conducted serious operations there. It is telling that many Taliban leaders have moved their families to such Baluchistan cities as Quetta. The Pakistan government leaves them alone and, in a number of cases, elements of the government provide active support. The Pakistan government would almost certainly respond unfavorably to capturing or otherwise targeting senior Taliban officials in Baluchistan. In October 2009, Pakistan Frontier Corps forces halted the movement of nearly eight hundred trucks along Highway 4 from Quetta, Pakistan, to Spin Boldak, Afghanistan, because of the possibility of U.S. airstrikes in Baluchistan. “I interpreted this as a signal from the Pakistan government that it was demonstrating leverage over the United States, and wasn’t afraid to use it,” one senior U.S. military official told me. “What better way to show it than halting logistics supplies going to NATO military bases.”²⁴ In previous weeks, there had been some unconfirmed media reports that U.S. president Barack Obama supported targeted strikes in Baluchistan.²⁵

Instead, a more effective counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan needs to “go local,” as one Afghan government cabinet minister put it to me.²⁶ Since late 2001, the United States has crafted its Afghanistan strategy on the assumption that stability will be achieved by building a strong central government. While this is an admirable long-term objective, as a strategy it is fatally flawed.

In many countries where the United States has engaged in state-building, such as Germany and Japan after World War II, U.S. policy makers inherited a strong central government that allowed them to rebuild from the top down.²⁷ Even in Iraq, Saddam Hussein amassed a powerful military and intelligence apparatus that brutally suppressed dissent from the center. But Afghanistan is different. Power has often come from the bottom up, especially in Pashtun areas of the country, the focus of today’s insurgency. It is striking that when considering Afghanistan’s recent history, we often turn to the failed military exploits of the British or the Soviet Union. Just look at the list of books that many newly deployed soldiers to Afghanistan are urged to read, such as Lester Grau’s The Bear Went Over the Mountain and Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin’s The Bear Trap, which document some of the searing battlefield lessons that contributed to the Soviet defeat. A better—or at least equally relevant—focus needs to be spent on understanding what factors have contributed to Afghanistan’s stable periods.

The Musahiban dynasty, which included Zahir Shah, Nadir Shah, and Daoud Khan, ruled Afghanistan from 1929 to 1978. It was one of the most stable periods in modern Afghan history, partly because the Musahibans understood the importance of local power. Many U.S. policy makers have not grasped this reality. Even Afghans have had to learn this lesson the hard way. Amanullah Khan, who ruled Afghanistan from 1919 to 1929, tried to create a strong central state in the image of Ataturk’s Turkey and Reza Shah’s Iran. This proved disastrous. The central government’s attempt to push into rural areas sparked social and political revolts, first in Khowst in 1923 and then in Jalalabad in 1928. By 1929, local rebellions became so serious that Amanullah was forced to abdicate, and Afghanistan deteriorated into several months of anarchy.²⁸ Masses of rural Afghans today still reject a strong central government actively meddling in their affairs. In southern and eastern Afghanistan, which are dominated by Pashtuns, many consider the central government a foreign entity.

“My allegiance is to my family first, then to my village, sub-tribe, and tribe,” one tribal elder from Kandahar told me earlier this year. The government played no meaningful role in his daily life.²⁹

I have often been struck by the disconnect between the center and periphery when traveling through areas where, as recently as this year, some villagers had never heard of President Hamid Karzai, who has led the country since 2001. In a few cases, they even thought the U.S. military forces I was traveling with were Soviets, not realizing that the Soviet army withdrew in 1989. The lessons of Amanullah Khan were not lost on the Musahibans. While they managed to build a strong army and competent government technocrats, they exempted many Pashtun tribes from military service and established a fairly effective tribal engagement strategy in southern and eastern Afghanistan. Zahir Shah supported village-level defense forces, called arbakai, to establish order in eastern Afghanistan. These village-level forces were used for defensive purposes and organized under the auspices of legitimate tribal institutions.

The result was clear: Law and order were established by a combination of local institutions and a central government. When rebellions occurred, as they sometimes did, the government could temporarily move into rural areas and crush them. The Soviet-backed regimes never learned the Musahiban secret, and they tried to establish order entirely from the top down. The United States and much of the international community made a similar mistake beginning in 2001, conceiving of success as emanating only from a powerful central government. But this reflects a quintessentially Western understanding of the nation-state. “I’m afraid we are still looking for the solution only in Kabul,” a senior U.S. government official recently told me. “It is a false hope.”³⁰

After the overthrow of the Taliban regime, the United States and its allies began building an Afghan national army and police force. They also supported presidential elections in 2004, parliamentary elections in 2005, and presidential elections in 2009. The 2009 elections were marred by substantial fraud in which nearly one million votes for President Karzai and another one hundred thousand for Abdullah Abdullah were thrown out. But there were no systematic efforts to engage tribes, sub-tribes, clans, and other local institutions as the Taliban were doing.

Community Defense

The United States must beat the Taliban at the local level. Tribal, religious, and other local leaders in Afghanistan best understand their community needs, but they are often under-resourced or intimidated by the Taliban and other insurgents. Yet some Afghan officials still cling to a solution that involves only the central government. “Effective development and governance cannot happen apart from credible security,” wrote Mohammad Ehsan Zia, Afghanistan’s Minister of Rural Rehabilitation and Development. “Security is the precursor to the government’s ability to deliver essential services, which ultimately leads to winning the trust of the population…. Afghans need a viable national police force in which the legitimate use of force is firmly, and solely, in the hands of the government.”³¹ But many others disagreed, including the head of Afghan police. “We need to subcontract security in some areas to local villagers,” Minister of Interior Mohammad Hanif Atmar told me. “And then let Afghan and coalition forces target insurgents in between.”³²

A review of local security forces in Afghanistan provides several important lessons. The first is that community defense forces need to be tied to legitimate local institutions, especially village-level shuras, which include tribal, religious, and other leaders. This means empowering legitimate institutions that have historically contributed to local security and the rule of law. It also means preventing local forces from becoming hijacked by warlords. The last three decades of warfare in Afghanistan have been littered with efforts to establish forces under the control of warlords, whose fighters are loyal to them and not to local communities. Another lesson is that local forces need to be small, defensive, and geared toward protecting local villages. In some areas of eastern Afghanistan, Zahir Shah even provided land to communities that established arbakai.

A final lesson is that the Afghan government needs to manage the process. The objective should be to help tribes, sub-tribes, and communities provide security and justice. When tribes rebel against the government or fight each other, government and coalition security forces can mediate the disputes or disrupt uprisings. Ultimately, a successful Afghan strategy will require building more competent Afghan army and police forces that can provide order in urban areas and along key roads, as well as finding ways to reintegrate insurgents into Afghan society. But it will also require effectively building and managing community defense forces in rural Afghanistan.

In some areas, local tribes and villages have already tried to resist the Taliban but have been heavily outmatched. They should be carefully supported, especially when it comes to security and providing justice for grievances. In areas of eastern Afghanistan, such as Kunar and Nangarhar provinces, some tribes have lost faith in local police forces that they perceive as corrupt and incompetent. In such northern provinces as Kunduz and Baghlan, locals have created forces because they fear a spreading Taliban insurgency and seek additional protection. “I haven’t seen the potential for such a backlash against the Taliban since 2001, when they were overthrown,” one U.S. government official told me recently on a visit to southern Afghanistan. “But we need to monitor this carefully and properly to have a chance of turning this war.”