The Longest War

by Peter L. Bergen

  By 2006 in the south and east of Afghanistan, the Taliban were back with a vengeance, propelled in part by suicide attackers like Imdadullah. Suicide attacks went up more than fivefold, from seventeen in 2005 to 123 a year later, while IED attacks doubled; attacks on international forces tripled; Afghan civilian deaths at the hands of the insurgents reached a record seven hundred; and American and NATO military deaths were at their highest levels since the Taliban were ousted.

  On September 11, 2006, as the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was commemorated with the mournful dirge of a bagpiper on the small U.S. base of Bermel, a few miles from the Pakistani border, incoming rockets forced the 150 soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division’s Bravo Company gathered together to observe a minute of silence to run for cover. Bravo Company fired back long-barreled 105 mm howitzers, which rocketed off with an earsplitting report. Captain Jason Dye, who commanded Bravo Company, explained that “we used to get a rocket attack once a week. Now it’s every other day.”

  This was an interesting observation because just a week before, the Pakistani government had signed a peace deal with the militants in North Waziristan, a tribal area of Pakistan just across the border from the Bermel base. While the peace agreement might have lowered the tempo of militant attacks inside Pakistan, the deal brought more attacks into Afghanistan. Up in the steep hills high above the Bermel base, Dye’s men found cross marks and horizontal slashes cut deep into the trees, reference points the Taliban used for calibrating and bracketing the rocket attacks on the American base below them.

  The movement of religious warriors had regrouped substantially since their seeming defeat five years earlier. A key to the resurgence of the Taliban could be summarized in one word: Pakistan. After 9/11 the Pakistani government was either unwilling or incapable of clamping down on the Taliban. According to a U.S. military official, between 2001 and 2006 not a single senior Taliban leader was arrested or killed in Pakistan. This was despite the fact that the leaders of the Taliban mostly lived in Pakistan. Amir Haqqani, the leader of the Taliban in Zabul province in 2006, for instance, never came across the border into Afghanistan.

  General James Jones, then the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO (and later President Obama’s national security advisor), testified in 2006 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that it was “generally accepted” that the Taliban maintained their headquarters in Quetta, a city of one million that is the capital of Baluchistan province, in southwestern Pakistan. A senior U.S. military intelligence official said of the Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s location: “At one point we had it down to a particular section of Quetta.” The official explained that Mullah Omar continued to supply “high level guidance” to his movement of religious warriors, although he was not involved in day-to-day military operations.

  In 2007 Abdul Haq Hanif, a lanky, bearded, twenty-six-year-old former spokesman for the Taliban, serving a six-year prison sentence in a jail in Kabul, confirmed that the Taliban leadership had settled across the border in Pakistan. “I was dealing with provincial Taliban leaders,” he explained. “They were calling from Pakistan.”

  Despite its general acquiescence in allowing its old Taliban allies to operate from its territory, the Pakistani army would sometimes act against them. A U.S. military official characterized Pakistani cooperation on the Taliban as “schizophrenic.” The official pointed to the case of Mullah Osmani, a leading Taliban commander killed by a U.S. airstrike inside Afghanistan on December 19, 2006, as an example of what Pakistan’s government could do when it wanted to: “We would not have got him without Pakistani information.”

  In the years after 9/11 the Pakistani government routinely denied that it provided a haven for the Taliban leadership. An explanation for the seeming dichotomy between the fact that U.S. military and intelligence officials universally held the view that the Taliban were headquartered in Pakistan and the government denial of this, is that the Pakistani government has never completely controlled its own territory. And ISI, the Pakistani military intelligence agency, at some levels continued to tolerate and/or maintain links with certain Taliban leaders throughout the “war on terror.”

  The Taliban also had deep roots in Pakistan. Many members of the movement of religious warriors had grown up in refugee camps there. Not only that, but the Taliban, an almost entirely Pashtun organization, drew strength from the fact that, at some 40 million, the Pashtuns are one of the largest ethnic groupings in the world without their own state. They straddle both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border, a line that was drawn by the British in 1893 and that many Pashtuns don’t recognize; there are almost twice as many Pashtuns in Pakistan as there are in Afghanistan. And after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban were increasingly seen by some Pashtuns as the defender of their rights. That’s why when pollsters asked Afghans of all ethnic groups their view of the Taliban, in any given year after 9/11 no more than 10 percent viewed them favorably, but in Kandahar and Helmand provinces, in the Pashtun-dominated south of Afghanistan, one survey found favorable numbers as high as 27 percent by 2007.

  One of the key leaders of the Taliban as it surged in strength was Mullah Dadullah, a thuggish but effective commander who, like his counterpart in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, thrived on killing Shia, beheading his hostages, and media celebrity. In interviews in 2006, Mullah Dadullah said that Taliban forces numbered some 12,000 fighters. That was larger than a U.S. military official’s estimate the same year of between 7,000 and 10,000, but a number that likely had some validity given the numerous part-time Taliban farmer/ fighters. Dadullah also conceded what was obvious as the violence dramatically expanded in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2006: that the Taliban had increasingly morphed together tactically and ideologically with al-Qaeda. “Osama bin Laden, thank God, is alive and in good health. We are in contact with his top aides and sharing plans and operations with each other.”

  A U.S. military official estimated that in 2006 there were several hundred foreign militants tied to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, mostly Uzbeks, but also some North Africans, Saudis, and Egyptians. “They won’t be taken, though we have captured some,” said the official. Those foreign militants helped the Taliban become a more effective military force. A Taliban member explained: “The Arabs taught us how to make an IED by mixing nitrate fertilizer and diesel fuel and how to pack plastic explosives and to connect them to detonators and remote-control devices like mobile phones. We learned how to do this blindfolded so we could safely plant IEDs in the dark.” Another recounted that “Arab and Iraqi mujahideen began visiting us, transferring the latest IED technology and suicide-bomber tactics they had learned in the Iraqi resistance.” Small numbers of al-Qaeda instructors embedded with much larger Taliban units functioned something like U.S. Special Forces do—as trainers and force multipliers.

  The Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah explained that bin Laden himself had supervised the suicide operation targeting Vice President Cheney at Bagram Air Base during his visit to Afghanistan on February 27, 2007, an attack that killed nearly two dozen, including an American soldier. The U.S. military dismissed that claim but said that another al-Qaeda leader, Abu Laith al-Libi, was behind the operation, which seemed more of a confirmation than a denial of al-Qaeda’s role in the attack.

  Militants based on the Afghan-Pakistan border also traveled to Iraq for on-the-job training. Evidence for the migration of al-Qaeda members to Iraq from Afghanistan can be found in the stories of Hassan Gul, an al-Qaeda courier from Pakistan who was arrested while entering northern Iraq in January 2004, and in the case of Omar al-Farouq, a high-ranking al-Qaeda official who escaped from American custody at Bagram Air Base outside of Kabul in 2005 and was killed in Iraq a year later. Similarly, in late 2006 the Pentagon announced that Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, an al-Qaeda leader based on the Afghan-Pakistan border, had been captured as he was making his way to Iraq. Hamid Mir, the Pakistani journalist, said that militants he had interviewed had traveled from Afghanistan to Iraq. “I met
a Taliban commander, Mullah Mannan, in Zabul in 2004 who told me that he was trained in Iraq and subsequently he set up his own training camp in Zabul.”

  In 2009, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, one of al-Qaeda’s founders, described his group’s rapport with the Taliban during an interview with Al Jazeera in Afghanistan. “We are on a good and strong relationship with them,” he explained, “and we frequently meet them.” He also said that his organization continued to regard Mullah Omar as the “Commander of the Faithful”—in effect acknowledging that the Taliban leader is al-Qaeda’s religious guide, a position he had enjoyed for more than a decade.

  When the Taliban had ruled Afghanistan they were a provincial bunch. Mullah Omar rarely visited Kabul in the five years that he ran the country and made a point of avoiding meeting with most non-Muslims and journalists. Omar, whose education was not more than that of a village mullah, was far from worldly; when the Taliban leader was given a toy camel by visiting Chinese diplomats, he recoiled in horror as if they had handed him a piece of red-hot coal because he believed all representations of living beings to be against Islam.

  But in the decade after their fall from power, this was no longer your father’s Taliban. They began courting the press and Taliban spokesmen were available at any time of the day or night to discuss the latest developments, even publishing their cell phone numbers on jihadist web sites. The Taliban’s public statements were now filled with references to Iraq and Palestine in a manner that mirrored bin Laden’s. They had also adopted the playbook of the Iraqi insurgency wholesale, embracing suicide bombers and IED attacks on U.S. and NATO convoys. The Taliban only began deploying suicide attackers in large numbers after the success of such operations in Iraq had become obvious to all. Where once the Taliban had banned television, now they boasted an active video propaganda operation named Umar, which posted regular updates to the Web. Hundreds of dollars were paid to the cameramen who successfully recorded the Taliban’s suicide operations. Those videos were then distributed on DVDs for purchase for the equivalent of fifty cents in city markets or were posted to jihadist websites.

  A typical sequence in one of those videotapes shows a smiling young man getting into one of Afghanistan’s ubiquitous white and yellow Toyota taxis. He sits down in the driver’s seat and the camera pans to the ignition switch next to him, which is in turn connected to a series of homemade bombs. The driver may wave at the camera, or he may not. It’s his call; after all, this is going to be the suicide bomber’s first and only fifteen minutes of fame. Jihadi chants swell in the background (but not actual music because that is haram, forbidden). The camera follows the taxi as it drives out of frame. And then the video cuts to an intersection filmed on a long zoom lens several hundred yards from the cameraman’s position. The taxi speeds toward the intersection, gathering speed as it hits a NATO convoy. A plume of smoke goes up first; then, a few moments later, you hear the sound of the explosion because sound travels slower than light. The cameraman shouts “Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar!” and the sequence ends. By 2007 there were literally scores of videos like this in circulation in Afghanistan.

  The Taliban also offered something concrete to ordinary Afghans, which was rough and ready justice. The Afghan judicial system remained a joke long after the Taliban had fled Kabul, and so farmers and their families—the vast majority of the population—looking to settle disputes about land, water, and grazing rights could find a swift resolution of these problems in a Taliban court. In some areas the Taliban even set up their own parallel government, appointing shadow governors as well as judges. By late 2008 the Taliban were running two dozen law courts in southern Afghanistan. They were regarded as fairer than the central government’s courts.

  By 2006, NATO, at least on paper, had taken over military operations in much of Afghanistan. But in practice, of the twenty-six countries that made up the alliance, few would do any real fighting. A senior NATO commander in Kabul in December 2005 explained that he had fourteen pages of “national caveats” to contend with. German forces, for instance, would only operate in the relative safety of northern Afghanistan. Three years later, a U.S. military official griped that “only a handful of countries are doing the real work,” such as the British and Canadians then fighting in the south.

  The military chain of command in Afghanistan passed through a spaghetti bowl of acronyms—ISAF, CENTCOM, and the many countries that made up NATO—that was so bewildering that only five people in the world could have possibly explained how it was all supposed to work together, and they would have had to do it in French because they all lived in Brussels at NATO headquarters. “Unity of command,” in which authority is vested in one commander, is a basic principle of counterinsurgency, indeed of warfare in general, yet once NATO took over it was never really clear who was in charge of military operations in the country. That problem lingered on for three years, until finally, in the summer of 2008, General McKiernan, who had led the ground invasion of Iraq, was made the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in the country. (American Special Forces retained their own chain of command.)

  The Taliban had banned poppy growing in 2000, but half a decade later they started killing government forces eradicating poppy fields, and were profiting handsomely from the opium trade. It is no coincidence that opium and heroin production, which by 2007 was equivalent to one-third of Afghanistan’s licit economy, spiked at the same time that the Taliban staged a comeback. Afghanistan was the source of more than 90 percent of the world’s heroin. Individual donations from the Middle East were also boosting the Taliban’s coffers. These twin revenue streams—drug money and Mideast contributions—allowed the Taliban to pay some of their fighters $100 or more a month, which compared favorably to the $70 salary of an Afghan policeman. Kidnappings also fueled the Taliban, who could make millions of dollars abducting a foreigner, as they did with Daniele Mastrogiacomo, an Italian journalist kidnapped in 2007.

  In his jail cell in Kabul, the Taliban spokesman Abdul Haq Hanif acknowledged the linkage between the Taliban and the drug trade, conceding what pretty much every Afghan and U.S. official in Afghanistan has been saying for years, that the Taliban was, in part, a drug cartel. Hanif explained: “The Taliban said to people to cultivate poppies in your lands and we will protect you.”

  “First, do no harm” is a sensible injunction in combating any insurgency, but the United States adopted a counterproductive poppy eradication strategy in Afghanistan. That policy was championed by William B. Wood, the American ambassador in Afghanistan from April 2007 to January 2009, who was known locally as “Chemical Bill” because of his preference for the eradication of poppy fields by chemicals dispersed from the air. This idea did not sit well with Afghans who still retained unpleasant memories of the Soviets spraying napalm and other defoliants from the air. Wood told Karzai that the chemicals that would be used to eradicate the poppy fields were so safe that he was willing to go to Massoud Circle, a major traffic intersection in Kabul, and jump into a fifty-five-gallon drum of the chemicals in his Speedos to prove just how safe they were. This argument proved unpersuasive and the Afghan government rejected aerial spraying.

  Poppy eradication was a particularly hard sell in the south of Afghanistan. In April 2007, General Mohammed Daud, who headed his government’s eradication efforts, traveled down to Uruzgan, an isolated, poverty-stricken province that retained a strong Taliban presence. Tarin Kowt, the dusty, fly-blown provincial capital, was devoid of any women, its central market peopled by fierce Pashtun tribesmen wearing the black turbans favored by the Taliban. General Daud met with Uruzgan’s deputy governor to discuss how and where eradication efforts might proceed. During a break in the meeting, one of Daud’s aides stepped out onto a balcony in the governor’s mansion and was greeted by the sight of a sea of lush poppy fields stretching from the walls of the governor’s mansion to a range of mountains several miles away. Already the distinctive red flowers of the mature poppy plants could be seen in some of the fields. The Afghan counternarcot
ics official said, “Uruzgan is a very beautiful place.” Smiling, he added, “And a very dangerous place.”

  According to the UN, Uruzgan in 2007 had the fifth-largest poppy harvest of any of the thirty-four provinces in Afghanistan, making eradication efforts distinctly unpopular locally. No wonder the governor of the province had some pressing business elsewhere and was out of town for General Daud’s visit with his eradication force, the first high-level delegation from Kabul to spend any time in Tarin Kowt in years.

  One morning Daud and his aides drove out to a scrubby, desert flatland area several miles out of Tarin Kowt, where they met up with what looked like a large traveling circus, albeit a heavily armed one. Two hundred policemen trucked in from Kabul had set up large green tents to live in during the two-week eradication program that was planned for the province. The policemen were members of the Afghan Eradication Force, which traveled around the country destroying poppy fields if the locals didn’t have the will or ability to do it for themselves, as was obviously the case in Uruzgan.

  Large trucks disgorged some twenty all-terrain vehicles, powerful, four-wheel-drive mini-tractors with large tires. The ATVs were brought in because Afghan peasants would sometimes flood their fields to prevent ordinary tractors from doing the eradication. On the back of the vehicles workmen affixed long metal bars that would be dragged over the poppy stalks to break them down. The entire operation, nominally an Afghan one, was directed by employees of DynCorp, a large American contractor. The DynCorp guys were easy to spot, as they were wearing the uniform of the American contractor in Afghanistan—Oakley shades, goatees and beards, baseball caps, T-shirts, tan pants, and work boots.

  Three days into the eradication effort, Taliban fighters, some disguised in burqas, sprang a series of ambushes on the eradication force, pinning them down in an intense several-hour firefight that seriously injured four policemen.