In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (18 page)

Finally, the Taliban resettled in Pakistan and began to reestablish political, military, and religious committees in the vicinity of Quetta. This city was critical because it allowed easy access to Afghanistan’s southern provinces, including Kandahar, a key front in the insurgency. The State Department realized the Taliban were attacking on two fronts, and one report said, “Quetta is the hinge, enabling communication between fronts and providing safe haven for Taliban leadership, logistics and information operations (IO). Dislocating this hinge would severely disrupt Taliban strategy, but would require a much greater degree of commitment and activity from Pakistan than we have seen to date.”
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The Taliban sited propaganda and media committees in various locations, but most prominently in Peshawar, as well as in North and South Waziristan. They created a variety of Websites, such as www.alemarah.org (now defunct), and they used al Qa’ida’s production company, Al-Sahab Media, to make videos. They also established a radio outlet, Voice of Sharia, with mobile transmitters in several provinces. Some Taliban fighters even took video cameras onto the battlefield to videotape improvised-explosive-device (IED) attacks and offensive operations, which were useful for propaganda.
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Indeed, the Taliban’s strategic information campaign significantly improved after September 11, 2001, thanks in part to al Qa’ida. After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban’s videos became notably better in quality and clarity of message, and its use of the Internet dramatically increased to spread propaganda and recruit potential fighters. The Taliban also published several newspapers and magazines, such as
Zamir, Tora Bora,
and
Sirak.
Finally, the Taliban began to relocate much of their financial base to Karachi, Pakistan’s financial and commercial center on the Arabian Sea.

Over time, the Taliban began to link up with a number of Pashtun tribes, especially Ghilzais. Special arrangements allowed border
tribes freedom of movement between Afghanistan and Pakistan—they were not subjected to any scrutiny and were allowed to cross the border merely on visual recognition or identification. A number of these tribes had lands that had been divided by the Durand Line, such as the Mashwani, Mohmands, Shinwaris, Afridis, Mangals, Wazirs, and Gulbaz. Pashtun military prowess has been renowned since Alexander the Great’s invasion of Pashtun territory in the fourth century BC. When asked about his identity, Abdul Wali Khan, a Pakistani politician, confidently responded: “[I am] a six thousand year old Pashtun, a thousand year old Muslim and a 27 year old Pakistani.”
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The southern front also boasted a number of criminal groups, especially drug-trafficking organizations, which operated on both sides of the border. Farther north, there were Russian, Tajik, Uzbek, and Turkmen drug-trafficking organizations. Tajikistan served as a primary transshipment locale for opiates destined for Russia. Drug traffickers in Afghanistan used produce-laden trucks as a cover for drugs sent north toward Tajikistan, where the goods were handed off to other criminal organizations. Tajik criminal organizations were the primary movers of this contraband. Approximately half of the heroin that passed through Tajikistan was consumed in Russia. The rest transited Russia to other consumer markets in Western and Eastern Europe.
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In light of this regrouping, it seems the overthrow of the Taliban regime was Janus-faced. The sheer alacrity with which United States and Northern Alliance forces overthrew the Taliban regime was awe-inspiring. It took less than three months and cost America only twelve lives—surely one of the most successful unconventional operations in modern history. But many senior Taliban and al Qa’ida leaders had not been killed or captured—they had escaped across the border into Pakistan. This haunting reality was not lost on many U.S. military and CIA officials on the ground at the time. Hunting them down, especially the Taliban, would be shelved for another day as U.S. policymakers turned to stabilizing Afghanistan.

“PANAMA WAS a good model for stabilizing Afghanistan,” Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage observed, echoing the views of Secretary of State Colin Powell. “We believed an international force outside of Kabul was important. And it didn’t necessarily have to be a U.S.-led force.” Armitage thought that an international force would be helpful in tracking events outside of Kabul. “If you’re not out there, you don’t know what is going on.”
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In 1989, while Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the U.S. military had launched an invasion of Panama, code-named Operation Just Cause, to remove dictator Manuel Noriega from power. The operation, which began on December 20, lasted for two weeks and culminated in Noriega’s capture by U.S. forces on January 3, 1990. To secure Panama, Powell pointed out, the United States military had deployed an additional division to patrol streets and establish order.
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But even with Panama as a model, there were massive differences in 2001 within the U.S. government—and among key allies—about how to stabilize Afghanistan. Perhaps the most acrimonious debate was between senior State Department officials, who favored a peacekeeping force in Afghanistan that could stabilize key urban areas, and Pentagon officials, who vehemently opposed any pretense of nation-building.

Naïve and Irresponsible

There were two main camps. The first included those who believed that a peacekeeping force was necessary to ensure security across the country over the long run. One proponent was Powell, who argued that the U.S. strategy needed to involve taking “charge of the whole country by military force, police or other means.”
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Another proponent was James Dobbins, the Bush administration’s special envoy to the Afghan opposition. According to Dobbins, it was “naïve and irresponsible” to believe that “Afghanistan could be adequately secured by Afghans in the immediate aftermath of a twenty-three-year civil war.”
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A small NATO presence in Kabul, Dobbins believed, would be helpful for establishing security and luring Afghan leaders back to their national capital. Kabul was peaceful, and there was no large-scale looting, as would occur in April 2003 in Baghdad after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s government. However, Dobbins argued that international forces were necessary in key Afghan cities to ensure security across the country. He was supported by Zalmay Khalilzad, then serving on President Bush’s National Security Council (NSC) staff.
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Other proponents included Hamid Karzai, the interim Afghan leader, as well as such Afghan officials as Muhammad Qasim Fahim and Abdul Rashid Dostum. Fahim, the defense minister of the Northern Alliance, worked with the CIA and U.S. Special Operations Forces to liberate the Afghan capital from the Taliban. Dostum had returned from exile in Turkey in April 2001 and had worked with CIA and U.S. Special Operations Forces to overthrow the Taliban from Mazar-e-Sharif.

Lakhdar Brahimi, former Algerian foreign minister and longtime confidant of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, also supported an international peacekeeping force outside of the capital. Brahimi served as the special representative of the UN Secretary-General for Afghanistan and played a leading role during the Bonn negotiations in 2001. The Bonn Agreement called for an international security force in Kabul with the explicit possibility of expansion:

On February 6, 2002, when briefing the UN Security Council on factional clashes in the countryside and the relative safety of the capital, Brahimi appealed for extending the force beyond Kabul: “This has led to increasingly vocal demands by ordinary Afghans, as well as by members of the Interim Administration and even warlords, for the expansion of ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] to the rest of the country,” he argued. “We tend to agree with these demands, and we hope that these will receive favorable and urgent consideration by the Security Council.”
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There were also supporters in the United Kingdom, such as Robert Cooper, the British representative at the Bonn negotiations who was assigned to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s staff in the Cabinet Office. Cooper argued that a NATO peacekeeping presence outside of Kabul was critical for establishing security. One possibility he suggested was a British-led force. Other than the United States, Great Britain was the only country able to deploy the needed force quickly enough. British troops were already operating in Afghanistan in small numbers, and the United Kingdom had begun to establish the logistics network necessary to sustain them. How many international troops were necessary? U.S., British, and Afghan officials had discussed the possibility of perhaps 25,000 peacekeeping forces deployed to Kabul and key Afghan cities. In December 2001, for example, Dobbins met with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld asked what to expect in his upcoming meetings with Afghan officials.

“They will ask that ISAF be deployed beyond Kabul to cover the country’s other major population centers,” Dobbins noted.

“How many men would that take?” Rumsfeld asked.

“The British believe a force of five thousand adequate to secure Kabul. Given that the next four or five cities are all considerably smaller, perhaps another 20,000 men might suffice,” Dobbins responded.
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The second camp included those who supported a peacekeeping force in Kabul but generally opposed extending its reach outside of the capital. They included many in the U.S. and British militaries, as well as key individuals in their political establishments. Pentagon officials, such as Secretary Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, head of U.S. Central Command, were particularly adamant that there should be no international peacekeeping force outside of Kabul, especially one involving U.S. forces. Some, like Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, were not necessarily averse to sending peacekeeping forces outside of Kabul, but they were strongly opposed to having U.S. forces involved in peacekeeping. “We couldn’t put U.S. forces in ISAF,” said Feith, “because other countries might conclude that the United States would bail them out if they got into trouble. The State Department answer to stabilizing Afghanistan was to expand ISAF. We wanted to allow the Afghans to establish their own security.” In a series of NSC meetings, for example, Rumsfeld made it clear that he wanted U.S. forces out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible.
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The logic, one senior U.S. official told me, was that “the U.S. military was already thinking about moving on to Iraq.” He added that the military was primarily intent on “targeting bad guys and cleaning up after the overthrow of the Taliban regime. Ultimately, they believed that cleaning up Afghanistan was not the U.S.’s responsibility—it was Afghanistan’s responsibility.”
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“Nation-building is not our key strategic goal,” Feith told Rumsfeld in a classified memo in late 2001. “The term ‘nation-building’ had baggage,” he noted, since the Clinton administration’s policies “in Bosnia in 1996 and in Kosovo in 1999” had “effectively turned those areas into long-term wards of the international community. Large
numbers of U.S. and other outside forces were involved for many years in both places.” The implication was clear, Feith felt: “We did not want the Afghans to think we intended to take the same approach to their country.”
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In fact, during the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush had repeatedly made the bold statement that nation-building and peacekeeping were not roles for American troops.
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Key U.S. officials, starting with the president, did not want American troops involved in nation-building in Afghanistan, and they did not want to bail out other countries if they ran into trouble. As President Bush put it: “Better yet than peacekeepers…let’s have Afghanistan have her own military.”
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White House spokesman Ari Fleischer reiterated this view several weeks later: “The President’s position is unchanged about the use of the United States combat forces. The President continues to believe the purpose of the military is to be used to fight and win wars, and not to engage in peacekeeping of that nature.”
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U.S. policymakers argued that what the Bonn Agreement had called an “international security force” for Afghanistan should be renamed the “International Security Assistance Force” ISAF. The word
assistance
was inserted to eliminate any suggestion that international soldiers might provide security for the Afghan population. As far as Washington was concerned, public safety was an Afghan responsibility.

Within the U.S. government, the most notable fissure existed between the State and Defense Departments. The national media picked up on this almost immediately. Michael Gordon of the
New York Times
asked Rumsfeld whether there was any truth to reports that peacekeepers might be dispatched to other cities in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld argued that deploying a peacekeeping force outside of Kabul would be unnecessary and would divert resources from the broader American campaign against terrorism. He preferred to spend the money on training an Afghan national army.

“The question is, do you want to put your time and effort and money into the International Security Assistance Force—take it from, say, 5,000 to 20,000 people?…Why put all the time and
money and effort in that? Why not put it into helping them develop a national army so that they can look out for themselves over time?”

Gordon then called James Dobbins, who said: “What the State Department is suggesting is that there are a few other places outside of Kabul where the international force could assist the Afghans in providing security. As a result the Afghans would do a better job and would be less likely to fall into conflict with each other in doing so.”
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Dobbins would later be chastised by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice for going public with his comments and for exposing divisions between the State and Defense Departments. She had one of her deputies, General Wayne Downey, call Dobbins to complain.

Eventually the issue came to a head. In February 2002, a meeting of National Security Council principals was called to decide whether or not to expand the NATO mission outside of Kabul. In preparation for the meeting, NSC staffer Elliott Abrams had circulated a paper arguing that peacekeeping was a concept that never worked in practice, as demonstrated by the Clinton administration’s forays into Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. The principals met in the White House Situation Room. Powell and Dobbins attended for State. Rice chaired. Others present included Rumsfeld, CIA Director George Tenet, and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. Powell and Rumsfeld were at loggerheads. Tenet argued that there had been some skirmishing among commanders who were theoretically under Karzai’s authority, and there was some possibility that this fighting could escalate. A peacekeeping force might not be a bad idea. In theory, the CIA was supposed to provide intelligence and analysis, not policy advice. But it had played such an unusually direct role in overthrowing the Taliban regime that Tenet sometimes offered advice rather than just intelligence.

After several inconclusive exchanges between Powell and Rumsfeld, Rice asked all the backbenchers to leave the room. This allowed the principals to discuss the matter in private, which they did for another fifteen minutes. In the end, everyone agreed that Afghanistan’s warlords were likely to resume fighting if left to their own devices. But Rumsfeld
was adamantly opposed to the deployment of peacekeepers. Rather, he proposed that U.S. military teams working with Afghan commanders should use their influence to ensure peace among them. Powell relented and Rice agreed. So there would be no call for more international troops or peacekeepers, no additional forces, and no public-security duties for American soldiers. But an effort would be made to discourage fighting among Afghan commanders. Powell told Dobbins after the meeting: “It’s the best I could do. Rumsfeld said he would take care of the problem. What more could I say?”
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Armitage summarized it more bluntly: “Rumsfeld simply steamrolled the decision through.”
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In the end, the United States deployed 8,000 troops to Afghanistan in 2002, with orders to hunt Taliban and al Qa’ida members, and did not engage in peacekeeping. The 4,000-member international peacekeeping force in Kabul did not venture outside the capital.

Out of this debate emerged the watchword of American and international involvement in Afghanistan: a “light footprint.” In hindsight, this would prove to be a serious misstep that contributed to the collapse of governance in Afghanistan. Low troop levels made it extremely difficult to establish law and order throughout the country. And there was almost no chance to revisit the decision. Once the United States began planning the war in Iraq, the light-footprint plan was virtually impossible to alter; the United States could not deploy additional forces to Afghanistan because they were committed elsewhere. Under the light footprint, U.S. and other NATO forces could clear territory occupied by Taliban or other insurgent groups but could not hold it. This was especially true in the south, the traditional heartland of the Taliban. In addition, the U.S. and other countries could not provide sufficient development assistance in rural areas of Afghanistan, where the bulk of the fighting occurred.
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