CHAPTER 3
Afghanistan—A Final Chance to Learn History Applies to America
America is her own mistress and can do what she pleases.
Thomas Paine, 1778
America is a new character in the universe. She started with a cause divinely right.
Thomas Paine, 1782
The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind.
Thomas Paine, 1776
Paine thought more than he read.
Thomas Jefferson, 1824
Thomas Paine was one of the most incisive and decisive writers of the American revolutionary era. He wrote with startling clarity and rare brevity and in most cases with a historically informed mind. Paine’s brilliant essay Common Sense resonates with American readers to this day. And unfortunately, so does Paine’s blind spot about America and its place and role in the world. Paine’s arguments that America is “a new character in the universe” and can “do what she pleases” are ahistorical in the extreme, but they have been adopted wholesale by the post–World War II U.S. governing elite. In 1998, for example, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright echoed Paine and her peers in both parties when she said: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.” Our elite’s allegiance to the most ill-informed aspect of Paine’s legacy has caused the United States to incur endless troubles and costs because it conceals the reality that history’s lessons do apply to America—and painfully so.1
The continuing negative impact of Paine’s lapse from common sense struck me forcefully on October 22, 2006, when I was driving home from Mass with my teenage son and listening to C-SPAN’s simulcast of Washington Journal on the radio. The call-in program—a species of broadcast at which C-SPAN excels—featured a commentator who the host described as an expert on Afghanistan. In the course of answering callers, the expert said that the resurgence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda since the fall of 2005 had “sharply surprised” everyone, and that U.S. generals, NATO commanders, and the government of Afghan president Hamid Karzai were scrambling to cope with and eventually defeat it. She also told her listeners across the country that no one had expected to see either the number of fighters the Taliban is now fielding or the range of effective military training and plentitude of ordnance they were displaying.2 My son, as is his wont, was taking his post-Mass snooze in the passenger seat and gave no sign of hearing me when I turned to him and said that C-SPAN’s expert was dead wrong, and that I and dozens of other members of the U.S. Intelligence Community had predicted that the Taliban was not defeated and would eventually return (to paraphrase what was once said of Richard Nixon) tanned, rested, and ready for jihad.
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I was glad my son was dozing. To his ears they would have had an arrogant “I told you so” sound, which was not my intent. What caused my snappish words was simply the fact that C-SPAN’s expert was giving Americans the impression that the now-evolving disaster for U.S. and Western interests in Afghanistan had come as a complete surprise, that U.S. leaders and their Western and Afghan allies had done their best but were caught short by a resiliency in the Taliban and al-Qaeda that no human being could have predicted. What made the C-SPAN expert’s commentary even worse was that it echoed precisely what U.S. political leaders from both parties, U.S. general officers, and their counterparts in NATO and the Kabul regime were telling their electorates.
Clearly, what is happening today in Afghanistan was predictable and had been predicted. And making the prediction required nothing more than a reading of history and a review of the U.S. government’s CIA-led covert-action program (1979–92) that supported the Afghan mujahedin. I made the prediction in two books,3 and individuals much smarter and more experienced than myself in both Afghan history and covert-action operations, such as Sir John Keegan4 and Milt Bearden,5 made the same prediction, the former with more erudition and better prose, and the latter with insight from in-the-field experience. The bottom line is that the U.S. governing elite must not be let off the hook for the approaching calamity for U.S. interests in Afghanistan. Rather than a surprise, the pending defeat is the direct result of their shortsightedness, willful historical ignorance, political correctness, and inability to change patterns of thought created for and nurtured by the Cold War. As Jefferson wrote about Paine, the leaders of America’s bipartisan governing elite think and speak without reading enough history. They try to make history without bothering to understand it.
Going to War
Now well past his thirtieth year as the premier court historian for both Democratic and Republican administrations, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward did Americans an inestimable service by writing his book about the Afghan conflict, Bush at War.6 One can almost see the White House–authorized troop of CIA officers and other U.S. government officials climbing the stairs to Mr. Woodward’s home, ready to disgorge state secrets in support of the Bush administration’s cynical manipulation of Woodward to disseminate its distorted first-cut of history. The White House–sanctioned leaking allowed the publication of a book that made Messrs. Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Tenet, Franks, Powell, and Wolfowitz, as well as Ms. Rice, appear to have designed and run a near-perfect war, one that reflected their clear brilliance and mastery of the world stage and the ballet of politics occurring thereon. The book’s publication, moreover, came even before all guns were silenced, so certain were senior U.S. officials that the war was irreversibly won. This timing, in itself, says much about the administration’s ignorance of their foe and Afghanistan’s history and geography. The insurgent forces of the Taliban and al-Qaeda had not stood and fought to the death; they had rather done what all successful insurgents throughout history have done—they dispersed into the almost impenetrable topography of South Asia to fight another day. While the administration mistook this interlude for victory and rushed to get its glittering but faux triumph published under Mr. Woodward’s imprimatur, the Taliban and al-Qaeda were pursuing the traditional—and well-documented—Afghan strategy that was described by the senior al-Qaeda commander Sayf al-Adl. “We say to those who want a quick victory,” al-Adl explained in March 2003, “that this type of war waged by the mujahedin employs a strategy of [the] long-breath and the attrition and terrorization of the enemy, and not the holding of territory.”7
The amateurish ad hoc’ery of the U.S. military’s going to war in Afghanistan was also painfully apparent, and it underscored the truth of Dr. Richard K. Betts’s pithy but all-too-gentle comment: “Only in America could the nation’s armed forces think of direct defense of national territory as a distraction.”8 Notwithstanding al-Qaeda’s 1996 and 1998 declarations of war on the United States,9 at least three major attacks on U.S. targets since 1996, and repeated Intelligence Community warnings of a pending al-Qaeda attack in the first half of 2001, the U.S. military had no retaliatory or expeditionary plans on the shelf to present to President Bush on 9/11 or any of the next few days. Stuck in the Cold War mindset that non–nation-state threats can be handled when America is ready to do so, the Pentagon’s negligence cost America the chance of destroying any significant segment of al-Qaeda and Taliban forces before they dispersed.10 So inadequate were the U.S. military’s plans to attack America’s attackers that even stationary targets in Afghanistan stood unmolested until the aerial bombardment began on October 7, 2001. By the time U.S. military personnel were ready to hit the ground in Afghanistan, CIA officers had cleared landing zones, recruited Afghan proxies, set up tents, and had the coffee brewing.
Adding to the lethargy of the going-to-war effort was Washington’s controlling Cold War impulse: build a coalition to join America in waging war. While the unprepared U.S. military prepared, President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Vice President Dick Cheney directed, like carnival barkers, cries at the international audience: “Come on down! Join us for Operation Enduring Freedom!”11 Becaus
e of the shocking nature of the 9/11 attack, the old Cold War juju worked, and allies galore came forward to sign up in the context of the glib and silly French headline “We are all Americans now.” Even Colin Powell—he of the surround-and-kill-the-Iraqi-army doctrine of 1990–91—turned into what Claude Rains would have called a “rank sentimentalist,” telling President Bush that the 9/11 attack “is not just an attack on America, this is an attack on civilization and an attack against democracy.”12 Buried amid weepiness, behind-the-scenes coercion,13 and the confident expectations of a quick victory that drove the rapid growth of the nascent coalition, several key facts were forgotten: that it was the United States that had been attacked, that the U.S. military could and should have taken care of al-Qaeda by itself, and that the motley group of allies that signed up for the Hindu Kush adventure would do only two things: limit the amount of savagery America could use to annihilate its foe, and agitate for leaving before the job was done. We surely needed access to Afghanistan from Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and the Persian Gulf, but the only place where a genuine need for on-the-ground military partners existed was in our leaders’ Cold War–dominated imaginations.14
Another consequence of Cold War thinking on America’s Afghan War was, of course, the irony that the George W. Bush administration found itself confronted with the necessity of fighting it. The war would not have had to be fought if the Clinton administration had not been so palsied by its Cold War hangover that it failed to kill bin Laden when it had multiple chances to do so. Former President Clinton injected this issue into the 2006 congressional elections by telling Fox News’s Chris Wallace that his administration had taken every opportunity presented to it to eliminate Osama bin Laden and the threat he posed.15 Mr. Clinton lied in this regard16 but correctly admitted that he failed. He then added, however, that his national-security team had left the incoming Bush administration a complete master plan for the invasion of Afghanistan, the defeat of the Taliban, and the elimination of bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Mr. Clinton described this plan as “a comprehensive anti-terrorism strategy.”17 Now, intelligence officers like myself are always acutely aware that there are things they do not know, even in areas for which they are directly responsible. They are trained, moreover, not to question the veracity of the commander in chief. In this case, however, I believe that America heard that rarity—a deliberate, knowing lie from Mr. Clinton. To the best of my knowledge, there was no master plan left behind by the Clinton administration for the incoming Bush administration.18
After the October 12, 2000, al-Qaeda attack on the USS Cole, the National Security Council ordered the CIA and other appropriate IC components to establish and maintain an up-to-date list of Taliban and al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan that could be struck by the U.S. military if bin Laden again attacked U.S. interests. You will note that the NSC directive was predicated on the concept of “if al-Qaeda attacks U.S. interests again,” which clearly suggests that the members of Mr. Clinton’s NSC team who dealt with counterterrorism at least recognized al-Qaeda’s culpability for the Cole attack. I can say with confidence that CIA working-level officers had no doubt about who had authored the attack on the Cole—al-Qaeda’s fingerprints were visible from the moment the water-borne bomb was detonated. Whatever the reason Mr. Clinton decided not to militarily respond to the near-sinking of the Cole, it was not due to a lack of intelligence pointing to al-Qaeda’s culpability. It may well have been that DCI Tenet and senior FBI officials who were dealing with Mr. Clinton and his staff on the issue sensed that the White House did not want to attack Afghanistan in the midst of the presidential election and so those officials maintained a false sense of ambiguity through Election Day. If so, however, their motivation could only have been sycophancy, not genuine uncertainty.19
In any event, at the time of the Cole bombing I was the chief of counternarcotics operations in Southwest Asia, and several of my officers were assigned to be part of the team that was drawn from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the NSA, and U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) to create and maintain the NSC-mandated target list that existed from late October 2000 to 9/11. The target list included airfields, training camps, military storage facilities, infrastructure targets, heroin factories,20 and other physical assets of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. So far as I know, this target list was the full extent of the master plan for the annihilation of the Taliban and al-Qaeda left behind by Mr. Clinton and his advisers for Mr. Bush’s team. Obviously, such a list was not meant to serve as the basis for an invasion that would put paid to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Rather, it was designed for the kind of operation so beloved of our Cold War–addled governing elite, particularly those of the Democratic persuasion: a punitive air attack with precision weapons, which is always ineffective and indecisive but allows us to preempt most international criticism of a disproportionate and indiscriminate response and that reduces the domestic political problems that would be caused by American battlefield casualties.
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.21
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.22
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.23
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.
Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) Page 14
