Adventures in Correspondentland

by Nick Bryant

  There was sharing and, occasionally, there was over-sharing. On an embed in northern Afghanistan, we ended up in a billet for the weekend with a group of British soldiers, one of whom had an unhealthy fixation with how frequently we masturbated. ‘Have you banged one out yet?’ he asked in a thick Welsh accent before every meal, nodding eagerly as he waited for our answers. ‘Have you? Have you banged one out?’ What else could we call him but Onan the Barbarian?

  There were other undoubted benefits to the embed system. Had we not been with the US military, the Bermel Valley would have remained little more than a place on a map. Had we not been given such free access to the medivac choppers, we would never have encountered Kamila and been able to bring much-needed attention to the problem of unexploded mines (many of which had been manufactured in America and Britain, as well as the former Soviet Union).

  Granted such unfettered access, we also inevitably ended up with a much more nuanced view of the American military. Inevitably, we spent time with the buzz-haired grunts and jarheads who fitted the stereotype of the trigger-happy gunslinger with more bravado than brains. ‘We should reduce this country to glass,’ I recall one of them telling me.

  But often the behaviour of troops was far from stereotypical. We saw how young and frightened many of the GIs could be. How, when out on foot patrols in the oppressive heat of the Afghan summer, they would wilt under the weight of their weapons. How, in the computer rooms back at base, they would stare lovingly at wives and children, whose bleary and stuttering images appeared on the screens via sluggish broadband. We had access to the top brass on the ground – the colonels and commanders with all the ‘chest candy’, as their multicoloured rows of medals were called. It meant we could press them on why US military operations so often ended up killing civilians, which, arguably more so than anything else, severely undercut the war effort. Certainly, the embed system never stopped us from making critical judgements, and I would like to think we were self-conscious enough not to fall prey to any subconscious feelings of alignment.

  Unquestionably, embeds came with annoyances and frustrations. It was notoriously difficult to get access to the Special Forces soldiers trying to hunt down Osama bin Laden, who avoided the chow halls, slept in separate quarters and operated outside the normal military hierarchies. Sharing helicopter rides on occasions, they would rarely speak or engage in any way, other than to make doubly sure we were not filming their faces. Clearly, they hated us being there. They maintained this strict code of anonymity, one sensed, not only to protect their identity but also to guard their elite status. Similarly, their gruffness – like the long beards they were allowed to grow to blend in more with local tribesmen – was worn almost as a status symbol.

  Occasionally, we would be aboard the Black Hawks that dropped them into the remote US outposts right on the mountainous border, from where we assumed they launched covert incursions into Pakistan. The official line from Washington was that US forces refrained from mounting such operations because they violated Pakistani sovereignty. But that just sounded like another post-9/11 falsehood. The working assumption was that bin Laden was hiding out in Pakistan’s lawless tribal regions not far over the border – the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, to give them their official name. The diplomatic niceties of respecting another country’s sovereign soil surely offered him little in the way of protection.

  What those helicopter rides along the border also rammed home was the vastness and inhospitableness of the terrain, where mountain ranges seemed almost to be superimposed on each other, one after the other, as if reflected in some giant hall of mirrors. Combined with Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, FATA covered some 40,000 square miles, which was the size of New England. It also harboured a population the size of Australia’s, providing useful human camouflage. Whenever I was asked by friends about the hunt for bin Laden, I started by trying to describe this most unyielding of landscapes. Once, it had served as the perfect staging post for the CIA-backed mujahideen in their fight against Soviet occupation. Now, it offered a haven for al-Qaeda.

  When it came to discussing the whereabouts of bin Laden, the reticence of the Special Forces was shared by their senior commanding officers. Nobody wanted to speak about him, and instead they pursued a deliberate policy of downplaying his significance. They had taken their lead from the US commander-in-chief, George W. Bush, who strongly implied that the famed Wild West poster ‘DEAD or ALIVE’ no longer loomed so large in his mind. ‘Who knows if he’s hiding in some cave or not?’ the president said from the lectern of the White House briefing room in March 2002. ‘I truly am not that concerned about him.’ Thereafter, bin Laden became a taboo, since his name reeked of mission failure. In any case, the suspicion always was that the Americans preferred him dead or dead.

  Just about the only thing US commanders would tell us was that they thought bin Laden was somewhere in Pakistan and that the trail had gone cold. It became their default response. In the end, I heard that answer from so many officers over so many years that I believed it to be true.

  If a corrective were ever needed after an embed with the Americans or the British, normally all it took was a dinner party back in Kabul. Over cheap Australian wine and meals prepared by Afghan chefs using recipes from Delia Smith cookbooks, the conversation among off-duty diplomats, UN officials, NGO workers and other journalists invariably came round to how a good war had gone bad.

  Rarely was there much debate over the failure of the Americans to devote more forces at the start of the conflict. It was a given. From the outset, Donald Rumsfeld was determined to fight a small-scale conflict with the fairly narrow aims of toppling the Taliban and rooting out bin Laden. As a matter of principle, he showed no interest in remedying over a decade of international neglect that had started in 1989 with the withdrawal of Soviet forces.

  The defence secretary was also determined to prove that the Powell Doctrine, which relied on overwhelming force, was a relic of twentieth-century warfare. He therefore committed just 316 Special Forces personnel to overthrowing the Taliban, with the CIA providing an additional 110 field officers. Rigid and doctrinaire, Rumsfeld continued to insist thereafter that a small force could maintain the peace, and that Kabul should be the main focus of its operations.

  Although Colin Powell argued for a repeat of the Panama Model, where American troops fanned out across the country after ousting the Noriega government in 1989, Rumsfeld remained determinedly Kabul-centric in his thinking. Not until September 2003, almost two years after the fall of the Taliban, did he allow the UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to expand its remit beyond the capital, thus preventing it from establishing much-needed bridgeheads in regional centres earlier on.

  He also placed strict limits on the size of the troop presence, and, as a result, the multinational force was just 8000-strong. In Bosnia, by comparison, there were 40,000 peacekeepers. In terms of international donor money, Afghanistan also received significantly less assistance per capita than Bosnia or Kosovo, even though the challenges were arguably much greater. Four months after the liberation of Kabul, in a set-piece speech at the Virginia Military Institute, George W. Bush spoke boldly of a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan modelled on the US-financed reconstruction program that rebuilt post-war Europe. However, Rumsfeld blocked it.

  His insistence on ‘light footprint’ military missions was also widely blamed for Osama bin Laden’s escape in December 2001 from Tora Bora, the network of caves adjacent to the Pakistan border – another great juncture of the post-9/11 years. Believing he was surrounded and fearing he was about to be killed, the al-Qaeda leader had even written his own will, in which he enjoined his wives never to remarry and apologised to his sons for pursuing a life of jihad.

  On the express wishes of Donald Rumsfeld, however, fewer than a hundred US commandos were deployed in the operation, despite calls for reinforcements. Instead, the Pentagon relied primarily on air strikes – at one point a massiv
e 15,000 lb bomb that had to be rolled out of the back of a C-130 transport plane was dropped on the caves complex – and untrained local militiamen. Had the Americans performed a classic sweep and block manoeuvre, involving the marine units and sniper teams that remained on the sidelines, bin Laden might not have escaped. As it was, he slipped through the mountains into Pakistan completely unimpeded.

  Just as there was general consensus that Washington had not committed anywhere near enough troops or reconstruction money, diplomats and aid workers rued the diversion of resources and attention to Iraq. In December 2001, even as the siege of Tora Bora continued, President Bush had ordered General Tommy Franks, the commander of the US Central Command and the soldier tasked with liberating Kabul, to draw up war plans for Iraq. Soon after, Special Forces units and the CIA’s most experienced field agents were ordered to concentrate on overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Much of the US military’s heavy airlift capability, along with the new Predator spy planes rolling off the production lines in America, were sent to the Gulf. Even the Afghan-born US ambassador in Kabul, Zalmay Khalilzad, who was uniquely well qualified to deal with the problems of his homeland and often called ‘the second president’, was reassigned to Baghdad.

  In Afghanistan, deprived of troops and resources, the Bush administration continued to rely heavily on proxies. This meant vesting an inordinate amount of power in the hands of the warlords. In the fight to liberate Kabul, the Americans had relied on the anti-Taliban warlords from the Northern Alliance, whose main commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the famed Lion of Panjshir, had been killed on 9 September 2001 by an al-Qaeda hit team disguised as a television crew. After the fall of the Taliban, Washington called on them to maintain the peace.

  Proud of getting good bang for his buck, George W. Bush boasted of the great ‘bargain’ in handing out over $70 million in $100 notes to the warlords who headed up the private militias: men such as General Mohammed Fahim, Ustad Atta Mohammad and Ismail Khan. But it was Faustian in the extreme. Of all the warlords, none was more notorious than General Abdul Rashid Dostum, a formerly pro-Soviet warlord famed for continually switching sides, whose Uzbek militiamen were not averse to dealing with enemies by fastening their heads to their Russian-made tanks then driving them around in circles to crush their skulls. During the war against the Taliban, his men had also been accused of locking up hundreds of captured Taliban fighters in shipping containers then leaving them to asphyxiate.

  Investing in these warlords had the effect of devaluing Hamid Karzai. Not only did Karzai have to accommodate them in the first Cabinet – General Dostum served as deputy defence minister – it meant his writ rarely extended beyond the capital.

  To get a sense of who was truly in the chair in post-war Afghanistan, all one had to do was spend a morning with the police chief of Mazar-i-Sharif, the major city in the north of the country some 40 miles from the border with Uzbekistan. A heavily bearded man, who looked like the potentate of a small Latin American republic when dressed in his olive-green uniform with its outsized crimson epaulets, Akram Khakrezwal was one of Karzai’s close associates. Yet the patronage of the interim president was pretty much worthless across much of the north, which had always been the bailiwick of the Northern Alliance. The new police chief was determined to change this and seized a consignment of illegal opium to mark out his turf.

  So furious were the local warlords that they retaliated by effectively keeping him under house arrest for weeks on end. If he ventured outside, they would kill him. And neither the Afghan Government, a nearby contingent of British soldiers nor even the Americans were able to gain his quick release. Eventually, the warlords relented, but with conditions. Just about the only journey the police chief was allowed to make was from his heavily fortified home to his heavily fortified police compound. Even then, his morning commute became a mad scramble of blaring sirens, screaming tyres and protruding AK-47s, for fear that he might be assassinated en route.

  Inside his police headquarters, he showed us where the warlords’ gunmen had broken open the locks and seized his investigative files – a raid his officers were powerless to stop. ‘Without disarming the warlords,’ he told us, in frustration, ‘we can’t have security, legality or a fair and democratic election.’

  The following day, we interviewed the man who had effectively kept the police chief imprisoned, the Tajik warlord Ustad Atta Mohammad, who now gloried in the title of the governor of Balkh province. At his plush governor’s mansion, Atta seemed to be enjoying the perks of his new office, and as we arrived workers were putting the finishing touches to his swimming pool.

  Once inside, after his security guards had checked that our camera had not been booby-trapped with some kind of gun, we were ushered into a gigantic office, which had a small Afghan flag on the coffee table and a much larger one behind the governor’s throne-like armchair. Then came Atta himself, a hulking man dressed in a suit and tie, his civvy-street garb.

  Interviewing Afghan warlords is always something of a delicate dance. To mildly upset them runs the risk of being ejected. More serious aggravation runs the risk of something altogether worse. So I lobbed up the mandatory softballs about the challenges and progress of reconstruction, before turning to the business at hand: why had he bullied the local police so mercilessly, and why were warlords still acting like gangsters?

  Atta looked at me with exquisite disdain and delivered what he thought was a bullet-proof justification. ‘We fought for the freedom of Afghanistan, and our soldiers became heroes,’ he growled. ‘They fulfilled their human and Islamic obligation.’ He did not have to finish the thought. It was the mantra of triumphant warriors down the ages: to the victor, the spoils. Then, we were shown the door.

  After the fall of Kabul, the warlords had entered into a tacit agreement with the Americans: in return for the maintenance of order, the drugs trade could continue and even flourish. All part of the same Faustian deal. By far the country’s most profitable business, it was thought to account for 60 per cent of the economy and to employ 2.3 million Afghans. With American efforts focused on preventing Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for terrorists, it was in danger of becoming a narco-state that was a safe haven for drug traffickers. Already, it was the source of 93 per cent of the world’s opium, the raw ingredient of heroin. Only when reports emerged that the Taliban was also making more than $100 million a year from narcotics, the profits of which bankrolled the insurgency, did the Americans pay more attention to disrupting the trade.

  One of the few genuinely hilarious sights in Afghanistan at the time was the madcap efforts of the US-trained eradication teams who toured the countryside, like marauding armies, scything down the thin stems of the opium poppies. They screamed, laughed and hollered as they sprinted through the fields hurling their wooden batons, as if they themselves were high on drugs. Yet for all the efforts of eradication teams, poppies were being grown in 28 out of the country’s 34 provinces.

  Certainly, it was doing little to disrupt the supply chain of a local opium dealer, whose back-street drug den was reached with little effort – a few mobile calls from our local fixer – and minimum subterfuge. Inside, bulging translucent sacks of thick, sticky black-tar heroin awaited shipment to nearby processing plants. If the bags had been full of wheat, they would have been worth about 50 cents each. Stuffed with black-tar heroin, they commanded a price of $800. So uneven were the economics that they made a mockery of one of the central pillars of the eradication program: the promise to farmers of alternative incomes from crops such as pomegranates if they shunned the drug trade. ‘You figure it out,’ said the opium dealer, as one of his young charges slowly scraped globules of heroin off his blackened fingers with a blunt knife.

  Again, the openness of the operation was astonishing. Often, we agree to hide the identities of interviewees – a technique that involves shooting into a bright light so as to blacken their faces. Here, however, the dealer happily spoke on camera, with his craggy face in open view. He had the bac
king of the warlords, and the warlords could usually rely on the Americans averting their gaze.

  As if to underscore the hazards of conducting a national election in the midst of a civil war, Hamid Karzai’s first campaign swing outside of Kabul suddenly became a panicked scramble back to the comparative safety of the capital. With just a couple of weeks to go before polling day, the plan had been for him to address a rally attended by tribesmen and local schoolchildren in Gardez, a town in the south-east of the country. As his American Chinook started to land, however, it came under rocket attack from Taliban insurgents on the ground.

  After his chopper banked violently and started its hurried journey homeward, Karzai pleaded with his DynCorp personal-protection detail to allow him to land. But he was no more in charge of the pilot than he was of the country. Thereafter, his electioneering was restricted to one solitary rally outside of Kabul’s city limits. Although his American sponsors were determined for him to win the election, their first priority was to keep him alive until polling day. (There was an irony in this. Karzai had almost been killed by a stray American missile on the day in December 2001 when he found out the Bush administration had selected him to become interim president.)

  It meant that his first major campaign event outside of the capital, just four days ahead of the poll, also doubled as his last. At a public park in the town of Ghazni, some 5000 of Karzai’s fellow Pashtun tribesmen gathered in their turbaned and often toothless glory. With the streets of Ghazni placed in virtual lockdown, truckloads of soldiers were drafted in to provide an outer rim of protection, while everyone was frisked as they entered the park – a novelty for Afghans unused to airline-style security.