American Cipher

by Matt Farwell

  “When I said no negotiations, I meant no negotiations,” Bush told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House after a weekend with his war cabinet at Camp David. The next phase of the war was a ground invasion with a twist: Rather than send in huge columns of tanks and armored vehicles as the Soviets had, the U.S. would rely on small teams of Special Forces soldiers—Green Berets—entering Afghanistan from Pakistan to the east and Uzbekistan from the north alongside CIA paramilitary units.

  Even at the height of its power in the 1990s, the Taliban never controlled all of Afghanistan. In the opening days of the new war, with the American public desperate for an ally in its quest for vengeance, the Northern Alliance became Washington’s first partner. Five hundred miles south, in the Pashtun tribal belt, tribal strongmen had been communicating with American teams throughout the fall; they were ready to cut ties with the Taliban as well. CIA officers worked with the most persuadable warlords who could provide manpower and political support. The quid pro quo was access to U.S. air power, equipment, and so much cash it was shipped over on cargo pallets—American greenbacks shrink-wrapped in neat stacks.

  Once the CIA secured their cooperation, Special Forces would train the warlords’ gunmen and lead them in combat. Multiple Green Beret teams, paired with CIA officers, were assigned to these “Jawbreaker” operations. Some were sent to the north to coordinate with warlords from the Northern Alliance, including the Uzbek General Abdul Rashid Dostum and Tajiks avenging the death of their longtime leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, who had been assassinated by al-Qaeda operatives on orders from bin Laden on September 10. Additional teams were sent into the south and east.

  On November 14, 2001, an Operational Detachment Alpha team of Green Berets (ODA-574) boarded a helicopter in Pakistan with two CIA officers and an exiled Pashtun leader who lived in Pakistan but had traveled extensively in the West to gather support for a post-Taliban government. Hamid Karzai’s relatives lived and worked in the U.S., and his American handlers thought he would be an ideal partner to unite Afghanistan under a new government in a way the Tajiks and Uzbeks had failed to do during the decade of post-Soviet civil war. Karzai could rally the southern Pashtuns against the Taliban, whose spiritual home and traditional power base was anchored in Kandahar, the ancient city named after an earlier foreign conqueror, Alexander the Great. Take away that safe space and the Taliban would have no sanctuary.

  Karzai had spent October lining up support from Pashtun leaders in the south. At the time of Karzai’s insertion in mid-November 2001, the Taliban founder and leader Mullah Omar was bunkered inside his Kandahar compound. It took little more than a week of attacks by local warlords paid off by the CIA and U.S. Special Forces directing bombs from American aircraft to send Omar fleeing. But as the American bombs fell in what Washington believed were Taliban strongholds throughout the south and east, many local tribes didn’t understand why they were under assault. Four days after ODA-574 brought Karzai into Afghanistan, a tribal elder in Loya Paktia—comprising the eastern border provinces of Khost, Paktika, and Paktia—spoke to a BBC reporter. “Don’t the Americans realise even though we wear turbans and grow our beards long, we’re not Taliban?” the elder said.

  Though the Taliban’s movement had begun in Kandahar in the mid-nineties, and though Loya Paktia was deeply conservative and resistant to outside pressure, not all of Afghanistan’s Pashtun leaders were ready to die defending Omar’s government. Several saw an opportunity to take control of their own affairs, and if that meant working with the Americans and the incoming NATO-backed government, so be it. The pragmatism even extended to the Taliban itself; several former ministers and mullahs began cooperating. In the south, Omar’s exodus had left a power vacuum, which was quickly filled by Mullah Naqibullah and Haji Bashir Noorzai, a former mujahideen and a third-generation opium dealer and heroin trafficker who seized the opportunity by working for American military units throughout the opening months of the war.

  The UN-sponsored Afghan leadership council in Bonn, Germany, named Karzai interim president of Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda was not the Taliban and they could, and would, do what they wanted. For al-Qaeda, that simply meant escaping and regrouping, but the Taliban delegation wanted to bargain. They told Karzai that if he allowed Mullah Omar and the rest of the senior Taliban officials to retire to their home villages and quietly live out the rest of their lives “in dignity,” then the Taliban would lay down their arms and accept his new government. They gave Karzai and the Americans forty-eight hours to decide.

  The decision didn’t take long. On December 7, 2001, the Bush administration rejected the conditional offer. The Taliban could run, or they could fight, but they would never live in peace again. The Northern Alliance, after years of bitter civil war against the Taliban, finally had the upper hand. Under pressure from the Americans, Karzai walked back his earlier offer of a general amnesty for the Taliban. The remaining CIA officers and Green Berets took over Omar’s compound in Kandahar, which the CIA renamed Camp Gecko and quickly turned it into a black site—an officially unacknowledged facility. The head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, Cofer Black, had told Bush before the bombing kicked off that “When we’re through with them they will have flies walking across their eyeballs,” and so far, they had kept their promise, dropping bombs and killing every mass formation of Taliban that resisted the invasion. Why would they need to negotiate a separate peace with Mullah Omar and senior Taliban officials when they could just kill them instead? This approach didn’t bode well for long-term reconciliation.

  The 2002 State of the Union Address was President Bush’s second major speech in the Capitol since the 9/11 attacks; the first had resulted in a war. In four short months, Bush said, the United States and their allies in Afghanistan had made incredible progress. They had “captured, arrested, and rid the world of thousands of terrorists, destroyed Afghanistan’s training camps, saved a people from starvation, and freed a country from brutal oppression.” But had they? To some Afghan eyes, they had merely exchanged one oppressive government for another. In November 2001, two Taliban leaders in the north, Mohammad Fazl and Norullah Noori, surrendered themselves and their men to Dostum and cooperated with CIA officers to pacify pockets of Taliban support. Dostum was brutal to his prisoners. Some were left in oven-hot shipping containers until nature took its course and they baked to death, while others were consolidated into the former Taliban prison at Qali-i-Jangi. But after a decade of bloody civil war, Dostum was ready for peace, and he accepted Fazl and Noori’s surrender. “We should not wash blood with blood,” he said.

  In exchange for their surrender, Noori and Fazl expected amnesty and safe passage to their homes in the south; they had been told that they could work with the new government. Fazl even vowed to help track down bin Laden for the Americans.

  But in the north, as in the south, the Taliban didn’t get what they wanted. Word came back from Washington: It is useless to work with these men. Bring them in and sweat them. Fazl and Noori were bound for Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. On December 20, they were transferred to U.S. custody. By January 11, 2002, Fazl and Noori were in orange jumpsuits at Guantanamo’s Camp X-Ray. It would be more than twelve years before the prisoner exchange that freed them in 2014.

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  IN 2002, the first full year of Operation Enduring Freedom, the United States spent $36 billion on Afghanistan and forty-nine service members died. Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, resources and personnel were diverted to the new war, and Afghanistan was quickly forgotten, its budget slashed to a scant $17 billion the next fiscal year. Afghanistan was left with a skeleton force of U.S. troops—around twenty thousand to secure a country of nearly thirty million. The official mission statement remained “to deny sanctuary to the enemy, disrupt the ability of al-Qaeda and the Taliban to plan and execute operations, and destroy enemy forces when in contact.” The longer-term American strategy remained nebulous.

  T
he rush to judgment on victory was premature. The Taliban hadn’t been eliminated nor had their sanctuary been denied. After the United States and Karzai refused to negotiate, Omar and his inner circle had merely retreated over the border into Pakistan, where they licked their wounds and, with guarantees of support from the ISI, prepared to fight back using the strategies and tactics perfected by the mujahideen against the Soviets. Now in its fourth decade of war, Afghanistan was devastated, the population torn apart, families spread asunder, infrastructure so destroyed that U.S. pilots joked they were just making rocks bounce when they bombed the country.

  There was little to work with to rebuild. Rural Afghanistan’s demographics were an inverted bell curve; there were little children and there were old men—spinghira, Pashto for graybeards, elders. A glimpse of a young, partially veiled woman was rare. So, too, was a glimpse of a young man. Once old enough to fight, they were recruited (often by force and threats of violence) to join the fighting ranks in Pakistan, just as their mujahideen elders had been before them. Starkly beautiful the land may be, but little grew in Paktika but timber in the hills and violence in the valleys.

  The timber market in Paktika wasn’t a viable job market, given that it was strictly controlled by the Haqqani Network, an armed mafia-militia syndicate that did off-the-books work—assassinations, terror attacks, bombings—for Pakistani intelligence. Jalaluddin Haqqani had been the heavyweight in Loya Paktia and North Waziristan since the mid-seventies, when he first set up training camps to wage jihad against the secularist Afghan president Mohammad Daud Khan. But it wasn’t until Operation Cyclone—which courted, armed, and funded Haqqani as Washington’s favorite mujahideen commander—when his legend was made and his power solidified. When Osama bin Laden settled in Peshawar in the mid-eighties, it was Haqqani who permitted him to build al-Qaeda’s first training camps in the Pakistani mountains. And in the chaos that followed the Soviet withdrawal, both the Taliban and bin Laden sought his allegiance.

  In the mid-nineties, Haqqani joined Mullah Omar’s government as the Taliban’s minister for tribal affairs and minister of borders. Given the porousness of the border he controlled, it was a logical appointment. Known as the Durand Line, Afghanistan’s eastern border was named after Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, the British foreign secretary who had drawn it up in a one-page treaty with the Afghan king whose tribal territories had dealt Queen Victoria’s armies their worst colonial catastrophes. To the people who had lived there for centuries, the 1893 border was little more than an abstraction. By design, the Durand Line had disempowered the Pashtuns. By accident, it had given generations of militants a conveniently ill-defined, mountainous redoubt.

  Following al-Qaeda’s 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, Haqqani agreed to a meeting at the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, where the Americans pressed him on extraditing bin Laden. Haqqani replied that the Taliban had thought about it, but asked the Americans where they would like to see him go. “Iran? Iraq? Sudan? Would that help you?” he asked. Maybe the best solution, Haqqani said, was for bin Laden to remain in Afghanistan, where the Taliban could keep an eye on him.

  After 9/11, Haqqani once again stepped up as bin Laden’s protector, ensuring his safe passage out of Tora Bora and through the FATA. Karzai made repeated attempts to court Haqqani into joining his government, each time losing out to the far better arrangement the famed commander enjoyed with the Pakistani government. From his redoubt in Miran Shah, North Waziristan, Haqqani had turned his network into the Taliban’s most effective and ruthless fighting force. Thirty years after the CIA chose him as its best proxy, Haqqani would become one of Washington’s worst enemies.

  To fight him, the United States used cash and contracts to rent their own proxy armies in Paktika. Paying minor warlords protection money and renting their gunmen was cheaper and easier than training indigenous forces from scratch. Over the course of the war, this led to Washington’s own Soviet-esque profligacy: American money bought security on American-funded roads by paying middlemen who in turn paid Haqqani. At Forward Operating Base Orgun-E, one of the largest U.S. bases in Paktika, the practice led to financing a warlord named Zakeem Kahn, and his militia of soldiers who did not exist.

  Kahn was a truck driver, criminal, and murderer who’d recruited a small army of enforcers before the U.S. war had begun. After the fall of the Taliban, Zakeem rented his gangsters to the Americans, who paid him on a per soldier basis. Sensing a business opportunity, Zakeem padded his ranks with large numbers of “ghost soldiers,” men who never showed up to formations but were cut Department of Defense paychecks nonetheless. One month in 2003, Zakeem’s money never arrived; the CIA had cut off funding with no warning or explanation. According to one CIA officer who worked in Paktika, it was standard operating procedure. But it also put Zakeem’s actual gunmen back on the job market. Concerns that these militiamen—trained by the CIA and Green Berets—would now earn their living by freelancing for the Taliban, Haqqani Network, or al-Qaeda, went unheeded. It was a microcosm of the entire war: After training and funding Zakeem’s soldiers, the Pentagon abandoned them to become mercenaries hired by the enemy.

  The term for it was “blowback”: when secret operations came back to bite the nation that initiated them. The CIA first used the term in a 1954 report on Operation Ajax, the covert operation that overthrew Iran’s Mohammed Mossadegh. Agency analysts cautioned that the operation—then viewed as a wild success—would haunt the United States. It would take twenty-five years, and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution, until history proved them right.

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  THE UNITED STATES Central Command is headquartered in Tampa, Florida, across the bridge from the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg. Things are surreal on both ends of the bridge. CENTCOM commanders ran two desert wars from a massive headquarters visible to boats in the emerald-tinted Hillsborough Bay and briefed the commander in chief once a week via an hour-long secure video teleconference (VTC). As Iraq spiraled into chaos, Afghanistan faded almost to black. In 2006, the president’s hour-long weekly briefings were devoted almost entirely to the situation in Baghdad; just five minutes, at the end, were set aside for Afghanistan, a five-year-old conflict that was already America’s forgotten war.

  It was also a time of crucial transition in the war as NATO began to play a more prominent role. By the end of 2006, most American troops in-country—except for the special operators—were serving under NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which American soldiers joked stood for “I Suck at Fighting.” By this point ISAF, the CIA, and the State Department had become the shadow government of Afghanistan, a troika of rivals seeking to manage a population of thirty million that had not known a stable central government in more than a quarter century, and a Western-backed regime in Kabul that the majority of Afghans did not trust or respect.

  Counterinsurgency (COIN) was the new buzzword in Washington, the new path to victory. It was marketed less as a specific way of fighting a war against an unconventional foe and more as an intellectual framework for transforming a whole country. Chairman Mao described guerrillas as fish and the population that supported them as the water in which they swam. In Paktika, that water easily sustained Haqqani and Taliban guerrillas. But in the logic of American counterinsurgency, the local population could be persuaded through a variety of incentives to flip allegiances and support Karzai’s government. The Afghan counterinsurgency campaign would be won only with a hybrid warfare-meets-welfare strategy: a combination of combat, diplomacy, civil affairs, and propaganda intended to destroy opposition on an organizational, physical, and mental plane.

  It was easier to talk about than it was to execute. “Counterinsurgency places great demands on the ability of bureaucracies to work together, with allies, and increasingly, with nongovernmental organizations,” stated the State Department’s Counterinsurgency Guide, published in January 2009. In order to win in Afghanistan, t
he U.S. needed to know what counterinsurgency mavens called the “human terrain”—the needs of their friends and the weaknesses of their enemies. Then they simply needed to wait for it all to work and “have the patience to persevere in what will necessarily prove long struggles.”

  From Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the Old West frontier base that held the military’s largest prison, two generals, David Petraeus and James Mattis, had directed the writing and publication of a joint manual, FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency, published in late 2006. It was the first military publication to focus on counterinsurgency since Vietnam. It was intended as a guidebook for soldiers in the field but was hard to read and even harder to implement. There was nothing new about what the United States was doing. The techniques were older than America and had been practiced during the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, the Apache wars in the American West, and the Spanish-American War: Bring in guns and bags of food from half a world away, carried by men without knowledge of the language or culture, who would squeeze, coerce, or cajole the local population into going along with the American-backed government. “We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way” went the implied message of counterinsurgency. In Paktika, all ISAF gun trucks had to be spray-painted with the acronym on turrets and doors before rolling outside the wire. ISAF was written in Latin script rather than the Arabic-derived Pashto or Dari alphabet. Thus, only the few literate Afghans who also knew the Western alphabet could read it. As a public relations gesture, it was as puzzling as the billboard at the traffic circle by Sharana’s district center that proclaimed, in English, “Welcome to Afghanistan.”