Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (17 page)

As minimal as was Mr. Clinton’s post-
Cole
planning, however, the new Bush administration, in its first of many acts of self-immolating arrogance, threw out the Clinton-era target list before day’s end on 9/11, thereby voluntarily abandoning the only well-prepared basis for immediate U.S. retaliation. When the new Rumsfeldian target list appeared, the heroin factories were not included. Much to the relief of the world’s richest and most militarily adept heroin traffickers—and to the chagrin of our British allies, whose country’s crime problem is mostly driven by Afghan heroin entering its borders—Mr. Rumsfeld left in place the cultivated fields and production infrastructure that has made Afghanistan in 2008 the largest heroin manufacturer in the history of mankind. And in a case of tragic poetic justice, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency reported in January 2007 that Afghan heroin is for the first time beginning to enter the United States in significant quantities.
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A final element that did not seem to cross the minds of U.S. leaders and policymakers as they undertook the invasion of Afghanistan was that the country is but one part of a bigger whole known as the Islamic world. This had not always been the case. Prior to the 1979 Soviet invasion, Afghanistan was on the periphery of the Islamic world—and was perceived so by Arabs; it practiced an easygoing brand of Islam that was heavily informed and moderated by tribal traditions and mores. The Afghan-Soviet war changed that, however, and the practice of Islam in Afghanistan today has moved closer to the Arab model; as important, both Afghans and non-Afghan Muslims see Afghanistan as a much more integral part of the Islamic world than ever before. While in no way comparable to the centrality of a heartland Muslim country like Iraq in the minds, imagination, and historical consciousness of Muslims, Afghanistan is still seen as an important part of the ummah (the community of believers), one that, having given all Muslims hope by defeating the invading atheist Soviets in 1989, is once again occupied and oppressed by infidel invaders. Thus, Washington should have been aware at some point soon after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan that the Muslim world’s view of that action would transition quickly from a grudging tolerance of it as a perhaps necessary act of self-defense to a conclusion that its prolonged and open-ended nature is another example of malignant U.S. intent toward Islam and Muslims.
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Waging the Afghan War, a Macro View: Time, Topography, and Democratic Fantasies

One central, vital, and unavoidable fact is essential for any non-Muslim military force planning to invade Afghanistan to keep in mind—the welcome you receive will be limited and will begin to decay from the moment the first soldier’s boot touches Afghan soil. The welcome, moreover, will be beguiling because those who most warmly welcome the non-Muslims will be those whose only chance of gaining and keeping power depends on being installed by foreign bayonets and being protected by the invaders as they evolve into occupiers. This group of infidel-welcoming Afghans has never been large or ruthless enough to hold and administer the country after the invaders were defeated and sent packing by their countrymen. The very fact that we remain in Afghanistan seventy-five months after our arrival underscores our ignorance on this point and, more important, shows that our leaders still believe we can operate on Cold War time, taking whatever time we need to work things out to our satisfaction and secure our intended accomplishments and implicitly assuming that our enemies will allow us that time. The best example of this thinking, of course, was the decision by U.S. generals that resulted in bin Laden’s 2001 escape from Tora Bora. In making that decision, they stuck hard to the Cold War script: U.S. casualties are unpopular at home so do not risk troops; protect U.S. troops by using Afghan mujahedin proxies to go into the mountains after bin Laden, and employ Pakistani military proxies to close the border and block bin Laden’s escape; and try to get him, but if you fail another chance will occur.
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Then, too, we have conducted the Afghan war with a startlingly cavalier disregard for geographic realities. Look at the map of Afghanistan. It is a country that is as big as Texas, hosts many of the highest mountains on earth, and shares borders of varying length with five nations whose populations are overwhelmingly Muslim, some militantly so. A good deal of the topography along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border—from Konar in the north to Baluchistan in the south—is incompletely mapped, a fact that makes planning military or clandestine operations extraordinarily difficult. During the 1979–92 CIA covert-action program to support the Afghan mujahedin against the Soviets, for example, we were forced to use U.S. military maps that were more than twenty years old and incomplete, captured Russian military maps, and sketch maps made by the Afghan insurgents whose talents bore no resemblance to those of Rand-McNally. When we invaded Afghanistan in 2001, we were using the same U.S. military maps, a more modern set of Russian-made maps, and maps drawn in the nineteenth century by British and Indian military engineers and clandestine cartographers—the legendary
pandits
—working for the Viceroy of India. The latter, not surprisingly, are the best of the lot. Satellite photography does, of course, help U.S. personnel to understand the topography, but there is no adequate substitute for reliable topographic maps for the military or clandestine-service officer operating there on the ground.

And how many troops do the United States and NATO have in Afghanistan to defeat an accelerating insurgency and install a Western-style secular democracy? About fifty thousand at this writing. Yes, no kidding, fifty thousand. And in that total there are contingents—Germans and Danes, for example—whose rules of engagement make their primary tasks school-building, police-training, and well-digging, not combat meant to kill insurgents. Even among the national contingents most aggressively fighting the Taliban—Americans, Canadians, British, and Australians—one has to be concerned about the number of fighters that can actually be fielded. In this era of the increasing electronic sophistication of conventional military forces—computers, communications gear, precision weapons, etc.—the number of support personnel today must be a larger percentage of the total force than was the case with the 120,000-man contingent that the Soviet Union fielded in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989. This is especially the case because Moscow’s forces were equipped with small arms, rocket-launchers, tanks, artillery, and armored vehicles that were first produced during and just after World War II. It always has surprised me that no one in the U.S. media ever asks the U.S. secretary of defense or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff what the “tooth-to-tail ratio” is for U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, or in Iraq for that matter. I suspect that the number of actual combat troops that can be fielded on any given day is only a fraction of the fifty-thousand-man total and smaller than the reciprocal total for the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and their allies. A truthful answer to this question would, I think, shock Americans with how much their leaders are asking to be done by so few U.S. and NATO soldiers.

So, faced with a waning welcome, hamstrung by geographical ignorance, and using a combat force probably not large enough to occupy and control a country the size of South Carolina, the U.S.-led coalition then proceeded to behave as if it were fighting a traditional nation-state: it invaded, took Kabul and the other major Afghan cities, and declared victory. Western leaders mistakenly interpreted the joy of Kabulis over the arrival of their occupiers (Kabul is the least representative Afghan city; it was a haven for Western hippies in the 1960s and was Communist-run in the 1970s and 1980s) and projected that belief over the rest of the country and settled in to reconstruct and democratize the country.
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Meanwhile the Taliban and al-Qaeda evacuated across open borders at all four points of the compass to fight another day, and the rural Afghan population—that is, the poorest and most religious of the country’s people—began to feel the deterioration of law and order that accompanied the temporary overthrow of the Taliban regime. The truth is that Afghans missed the Taliban almost before they were gone because of the postinvasion resurgence of banditry in rural Afghanistan.

Believing that the Afghan war was over, the U.S.-led coalition began holding elections, rebuilding damaged structures and roads, and fielding Provincial Reconstruction Teams to build schools, inoculate children, and refurbish irrigation systems. In addition, hundreds of Western NGOs raced to get to Kabul and then to the countryside, thereby reinforcing a growing perception among Afghans that their country was again in the hands of non-Muslim conquerors. At this point we again run into one of those quaint and always-wrong assumptions that the West operates on when it intervenes in a Muslim country. Whether in Washington, London, or The Hague, the most basic assumption of nation-building is that if poor, illiterate, unhealthy Muslims are given potable water, schooling, prenatal care, and voting booths, they will abandon their faith, love Israel, demand visits by Salman Rushdie, and encourage their daughters to be feminist with a moral sense alien to most of the Islamic world—that is, they will try to become Europeans.

This, of course, has never occurred in the wake of a Western intervention in a Muslim country. Islam invariably becomes more, not less, important to the inhabitants of an invaded Muslim country, and while improvements in water, disease resistance, and schoolbooks are appreciated, they are not religiously transforming. We simply end up with Muslims who are better educated, healthier, and more militantly Islamic. This has happened in countries (Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and several of the Balkan states) and in prison camps; in Guantanamo Bay, for example, we are building a truly dedicated and virulently anti-U.S. mujahedin battalion, the members of which will have the best-cared-for teeth in the Islamic world. But through it all, U.S. and Western leaders, the UN, and untold numbers of NGO spokespersons continue to sell shopworn lies to Western electorates—that nation-building will yield secularists who will desire only to live in peace with their Western conquerors. This type of thinking will ultimately prove calamitous for the United States and Europe because it assumes Muslims can be bribed from their faith by imposed material improvements and because it continues to ignore the source of Muslim animosity toward the West: the impact of our foreign policies and our increasing military presence in the Islamic world. In essence, Muslims see the secular Western mores brought to the poor and illiterate of the Islamic world as the baggage of infidel invaders, and it is more likely to produce Islamist enemies than postmodern, European-like atheistic hedonists.
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Ask yourself, for example, how much the comprehensive system of social-welfare benefits in the European Union has stopped or even slowed the growth of Islamist militancy across Europe.

Waging the Afghan War, a Micro View: If Only U.S. Leaders Knew History!

Since I resigned from the CIA in November 2004, the question I have been most often asked is “Why have we not captured or killed bin Laden?” My answer is seldom fully satisfactory to the questioner, as I try to explain that bin Laden takes advantage of mountainous terrain; stays with welcoming and protecting tribes that regard him as a guest and an Islamic hero; has nearly a quarter-century of experience living and fighting in the region; has a record of standing by the Afghans in their war against the USSR; and has scarce U.S. forces on the ground looking for him. I sometimes add that America is paying the price for its Republican and Democratic leaders’ decisions not to kill bin Laden when they had repeated chances to do so. This last comment, however, often leads to acrimony, as some questioners assume I am either a Clinton-basher or a Bush-detractor (I am both on their failure to defend America) and that such partisanship makes me a shill for one or the other party, or an intelligence officer trying to find political scapegoats to blame for the CIA’s failure to collect intelligence good enough to allow bin Laden to be eliminated.
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The best answer to the question, however, would be that we have not captured or killed bin Laden and are losing the war in Afghanistan because U.S. leaders and generals here blithely ignored that country’s two-plus millennia of history. As noted, scholars and retired intelligence officers far smarter than I am have explained that Afghan history teaches that the country cannot be successfully invaded and controlled. In advice meant for the Bush administration and U.S. military leaders, the eminent British historian and great friend of the United States Sir John Keegan wrote on September 20, 2001, that Afghanistan is “unstable, fractious, and ultimately ungovernable” and urged Washington to steer well clear of a “general war and of policies designed to change the society or government in Afghanistan.”
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Sir John was not arguing that America should refrain from attacking Afghanistan—9/11 was an act of war—but rather that its focus should be on its only true objective: to quickly kill bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, Mullah Omar, and as many of their lieutenants and foot-soldiers as possible. History, Sir John said, held the key for the United States.