In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (32 page)

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

These efforts had mixed success in Afghanistan, but more success in Pakistan. Since mosques historically served as a tipping point for major political upheavals in Afghanistan, Afghan government officials focused their attention on the mosques. One Afghan intelligence report stated: “There are 107 mosques in the city of Kandahar out of which 11 are preaching anti-government themes. Our approach is to have all the pro-government mosques incorporated with the process and work on the eleven anti-government ones to change their attitude or else stop their propaganda and leave the area.”
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Another major factor was a public campaign by Afghan religious figures. For
example, the Ulema Council of Afghanistan called on the Taliban to abandon violence and support the Afghan government in the name of Islam. They also called on the religious scholars of neighboring countries—including Pakistan—to help counter the activities and ideology of the Taliban and other insurgent organizations.
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A number of Afghan Muslim clerics publicly supported the Afghan government and called the jihad un-Islamic.
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Moreover, the Ulema Council and some Afghan
ulema
issued
fatwas
that unambiguously opposed suicide bombing. They argued that suicide bombing did not lead to an eternal life in paradise, did not permit martyrs to see the face of Allah, and did not allow martyrs to have the company of seventy-two beautiful maidens in paradise.
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But religious ideology was not a sufficient condition for the rise of Afghanistan’s insurgency. Local Afghans were generally not motivated by religion to support insurgent groups and oppose the Afghan government. Rather, they were motivated by poor or nonexistent governance. In most cases, the Taliban and other insurgent groups were not necessarily popular; the Afghan government was simply unpopular. Support for the Taliban would undoubtedly have been greater had they not run Afghanistan with an iron fist in the 1990s. As Ambassador Ronald Neumann remarked to me, “The Taliban conquest of Afghanistan in the 1990s had a silver lining: it gave Afghans a chance to see what they were really like.”
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Yet despite these challenges, the Taliban and other groups mounted increasingly effective operations across Afghanistan’s south and east in 2006 and 2007. They were met by NATO forces that struggled mightily to keep pace.

STANDING NEXT TO Canada’s command headquarters at Kandahar Airfield when I visited it in 2007 was a makeshift war memorial. The faces of fallen Canadian soldiers were etched in chiseled marble. There were no obelisks or ostentatious monuments, just faces. Corporal David Robert Braun. Private Blake Neil Williamson. Warrant Officer Richard Francis Nolan. The list went on. Each face stared back at those who paid tribute, usually fellow Canadian soldiers shuffling into and out of the command headquarters. Some of the faces smiled sheepishly from the blackened marble, while others stared intently. All had served their country and paid with their lives. Next to each face were their names, biographical data, and units. 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (Shilo, Manitoba). 1st Battalion, The Royal Canadian Regiment (Petawawa, Ontario). 2nd Battalion, Royal 22
^e
Régiment (Valcartier, Québec).

The inscription on the memorial read: “Dedicated to those Canadians who gave their lives in the service of peace while serving in Afghanistan.” Visitors placed flowers and photographs of their fallen comrades across the nameplates. Amid the daily commotion of Canada’s headquarters and the constant roar of fighter jets overhead, the memorial was strangely serene.

Unlike the war in Iraq, which was largely unilateral, the war in Afghanistan was at first fought by a true multinational coalition.
NATO eventually became engaged as a full partner in combat operations and reconstruction. But it didn’t start off that way. Following the September 2001 attacks, NATO invoked for the first time Article V of the 1949 Washington Treaty, its founding document. Article V embodied the allies’ collective-security commitment to one another, stating that the “Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.”
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Since the United States had been attacked, they felt obliged to step in.

Within months of the U.S. invasion, a number of NATO countries made Special Forces and intelligence assets available. Many went to Afghanistan, but U.S. policymakers chose to use most NATO assets in the United States. NATO fighter aircraft flew combat air patrols over some thirty U.S. cities and key infrastructure, with continuous patrols over Washington, DC, and New York City. U.S. Air Force and NATO air crews flew more than 13,400 fighter, tanker, and airborne early warning sorties over the United States. There were more sorties flown in the United States than during the war in Afghanistan up to mid-2002, when the continuous air patrols in U.S. cities ended.
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By 2006 and 2007, NATO began to play a more significant role in counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, especially in the violent south. Despite a growing list of NATO countries that deployed forces to Afghanistan, however, many countries refused to allow their forces to engage in combat operations. One senior NATO official acknowledged, “It was like fighting with one hand tied behind our backs.”
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“Lead Nation” Strategy

Beginning in 2002, there were few non-U.S. NATO forces in Afghanistan; Secretary Rumsfeld had opposed the deployment of a stabilization force outside of Kabul. With rare exceptions, the 4,000-member International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) did not venture beyond the capital. Its purpose was to protect the Afghan interim administration and help provide security in the capital. Rather than deploy
troops for combat operations, several NATO countries volunteered to help the Afghan government rebuild its depleted security sector. The effort was referred to as the “lead nation” approach. The United States volunteered to lead the construction of the Afghan National Army; Germany was responsible for training the Afghan National Police; the United Kingdom led the counternarcotics effort; Italy was the lead for rebuilding Afghanistan’s decrepit justice system; and Japan (with UN assistance) was the lead for the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of former combatants. In theory, each lead nation was supposed to contribute significant financial assistance, coordinate external aid, and oversee reconstruction efforts in its sector.

In practice, this approach was a disaster. Assessments from the Pentagon were scathing. “This ‘lead nation’ strategy produced mixed results, but overall it was a failure,” acknowledged Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, specifically calling attention to the “efforts of the British, Germans, and Italians.”
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Afghans were equally critical. Daoud Yaqub, the director for security sector reform at the Afghanistan National Security Council, bemoaned the challenges of coordination. To get everything done, officials had to negotiate along four tracks: between Afghan government ministries, between international donors, between donors and the Afghan government, and within donors’ own agencies. “When disagreements broke out between the donors and us, the donors would come to me and say quite matter-of-factly: ‘It’s our money. We’ll do with it what we want.’ There was little I could do.”
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The justice system was perhaps the most significant challenge. To be fair, no formal justice system existed in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion in 2001. The United Nations Development Program announced shortly after the overthrow of the Taliban regime that “the physical infrastructure of [the justice] institutions has been destroyed.” Even more critically, it fretted that “the country’s legal ‘software’—the laws, legal decisions, legal studies, and texts of jurisprudence—are largely lost or scattered across the world.”
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The December 2001
Bonn Agreement called for the interim Afghan government to establish a judicial reform commission to “rebuild the domestic justice system in accordance with Islamic principles, international standards, the rule of law, and Afghan legal traditions.”
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Consequently, Karzai’s government established the Judicial Reform Commission to oversee and coordinate reconstruction of the justice system.
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As the lead nation for justice-sector reform, Italy had the job of helping to establish a body of laws; train prosecutors, lawyers, and Ministry of Justice officers; build physical infrastructure; and improve detention and prison capacity. But assistance was fractured and Italian policymakers had difficulty coordinating the disparate range of aid pouring in from nations, the UN, the World Bank, and nongovernmental organizations. One study concluded that the “overall coordination and cooperation in the justice sector [was] lacking.” The Italian government also “maintained distance from the Afghan institutions. Rather than support Afghan-led decision-making, the Italian effort…preferred to choose and implement its projects with limited consultation.”
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Even if the Italians had done everything right, they still needed to overcome severe divisions among the Afghan justice departments. President Karzai had created the Judicial Reform Commission to coordinate reforms, but by empowering the commission, Karzai also removed authority and control of foreign assistance from the permanent institutions. The commission was meant to set policy and priorities for the justice sector, and, in practice, to determine where donor funds would be directed. From the start, the commission had no capacity, funding, or political cover to manage this significant task. Without intervention from the presidency, a turf war raged among the Supreme Court, the Ministry of Justice, the Office of the Prosecutor General, and the commission.

Under Secretary Feith and other Pentagon officials complained incessantly about the Italians. “Italy made the underperforming Germans look good,” Feith noted sarcastically, referring to the German effort to train the Afghan National Police. “For well over a year the
Italians failed to send to Afghanistan a team of experts; in fact, they did not send a single person. When I raised the problem with Italy’s Defense Minister, Antonio Martino—as thoughtful and reliable an ally as one could hope for—he said he would try to help, but judicial matters were not handled by his ministry.”
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Needless to say, the Italian reforms did not earn Afghanistan’s justice system high marks. The World Bank ranked Afghanistan in the top 2 percent of most corrupt countries worldwide every year between 2002 and 2006, with little difference between the late Taliban years.
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And Transparency International, a nongovernmental organization based in Berlin that monitored corruption, ranked Afghanistan almost at the bottom—172 out of 179—of its corruption index. Only a few countries, such as Haiti, Iraq, and Somalia, were more corrupt than Afghanistan.
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In fact, the World Bank judged that Afghanistan’s justice system had
worsened
over the period of Italy’s tenure. By 2007, for example, Afghanistan ranked in the top 99.5 percent of most ineffective justice systems worldwide. It compared poorly even with other countries in the region, such as Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
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There was little improvement in other areas, including the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of former combatants. The United States, the UN, and the Afghan government, with Japanese funding, collected a significant number of heavy weapons. But Afghanistan was still awash in weapons and ammunition, and there was an
increase
in the number of insurgent and other illegal groups. Warlords such as Abdul Rashid Dostum and Atta Muhammad retained large militia forces. Even Ismail Khan, who was brought to Kabul by President Karzai to serve as minister of water and energy, still commanded a formidable militia force in western Afghanistan. “The disarmament program was not successful,” remarked NSC staffer Daoud Yaqub; it only “went after low-hanging fruit.” The more powerful leaders refused to disband their militias. Since Coalition forces offered rewards for disbanding militias, commanders frequently demobilized “ghost soldiers” who never existed. This
was one of many monetary inducements that proved counterproductive. An Afghan could turn in an AK-47 and get as much as $200 from the government. Some entrepreneurial Afghans realized that this was “profitable since AK-47s could be purchased in Pakistan for less than half that price.”
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NATO’s Expansion

With the lead-nation approach stumbling, it seemed NATO would be given a second chance to play a more serious part. The United States had occasionally discussed an increased NATO role in Afghanistan in the early years after the overthrow of the Taliban regime. On a trip to Gardez in 2003, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had told senior U.S. military officials in Afghanistan, including General Eikenberry, that he was tired of being blamed for preventing NATO from expanding its mission in Afghanistan. Now he wondered whether it was worth putting NATO to the test.
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In 2003, General James Jones, who had recently become NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, was at an ambassadors’ lunch at the British Embassy in Brussels. He had prepared extensively to answer questions on a range of NATO issues, especially Bosnia and Kosovo. But he was surprised to hear one question repeatedly from the group: “How do we get NATO to Afghanistan?” After the meeting, he went back to his staff and began to put together an operational plan for Afghanistan. In August 2003, NATO officially took command of the International Security Assistance Force. It was based in Kabul, with its chain of command extending directly to NATO headquarters in Brunssum, Netherlands, and Mons, Belgium. In October 2003, the UN Security Council authorized the expansion of the NATO mission beyond Kabul.
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On October 24, 2003, the German Bundestag voted to send German troops to the quiet, northern province of Kunduz. A stronghold of the Taliban in northern Afghanistan during the late 1990s, the region was remarkably diverse. Tajiks, Uzbeks, Pashtuns, and Hazaras lived in relative peace, farming wheat, rice, and
millet. About 230 additional soldiers were deployed by NATO, marking the first time that ISAF soldiers operated outside of Kabul.
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General Jones presented a detailed operational plan to NATO defense ministers in February 2004. The plan that was eventually developed, illustrated in Figure 14.1, called for a series of phased expansions beginning in Kabul and then working counterclockwise to the north, west, south, and the east. Over the next eight months, NATO completed Stage 1 of its expansion to the north. On June 28, 2004, NATO proclaimed the creation of four new Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in northern Afghanistan: in Mazar-e-Sharif, Meymaneh, Feyzabad, and Baghlan. Stage 1 was completed in October 2004. NATO’s takeover had begun.
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With the Iraq insurgency worsening, senior U.S. policymakers decided to hand off more responsibility to NATO in Afghanistan, thus freeing up U.S. forces to go to Iraq. In 2005, during a series of video teleconferences with senior U.S. military officials, including Lieutenant General David Barno, Secretary Rumsfeld argued that the
United States needed to “reduce the amount of money it was spending in Afghanistan and the number of troops it had deployed there.” With losses mounting in Iraq, Rumsfeld said these numbers were “not sustainable.” At the time, the United States was spending between $600 million and $1 billion per month in Afghanistan and had roughly six battalions of infantry soldiers stationed there. NATO was a perfect organization to fill in the gaps left by redirected U.S. troops. NATO was looking for a twenty-first-century mission, and Afghanistan would suit the bill.
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Other senior military officials supported the secretary.