Anybody willing to help the United States fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban qualified as a good guy—morals notwithstanding. Dangling bags of cash as a lure, the CIA recruited war criminals, drug traffickers, smugglers and ex-communists. While such people could be useful, they often found the Americans easy to manipulate.
One of the few Americans who possessed more than a passing familiarity with Afghan culture was Michael Metrinko, a legendary Foreign Service officer. He first visited Afghanistan in 1970 when he was in the Peace Corps, “basically getting stoned at the time as a hippie,” as he described it in a diplomatic oral-history interview. He served for several years as a political officer in neighboring Iran, and he was posted to the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 when he and dozens of other Americans were taken hostage by revolutionaries.
In January 2002, the State Department sent the 55-year-old Metrinko to Kabul to help reopen the U.S. embassy there and serve as head of the political section. Fluent in Farsi—similar to Dari, one of Afghanistan’s national languages—from his service in Iran, he was the rare American diplomat who could converse with Afghans in their native tongue.
Metrinko said Afghans learned that if they wanted to eliminate a personal rival in a power struggle, land grab or commercial dispute, all they had to do was tell the Americans that their foe belonged to the Taliban.
“Much of what we call Taliban activity was really tribal or it was rivalry or it was old feuding,” he said. “I’d had this explained to me over and over and over again by tribal elders, you know, the old men who had come in with their long white beards and would sit and talk for an hour or two. They would laugh about some of the things that were happening. What they always said was you American soldiers don’t understand this, but you know, what they think is a Taliban act is really a feud going back more than one hundred years in that particular family.”
Metrinko especially disdained CIA operatives who flooded into the country and tried to blend in. “They had a lot of people who couldn’t speak a word of the language and ran around in beards and funny clothes and thought they had a grasp of what was happening. I would dismiss all—99 percent—of them as amateurs,” said Metrinko, who served two separate tours in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003. “As far as any real knowledge of what was happening, where they were, what they were trying to get done, the past, the present, the future, [it] was zero.”
In the field, U.S. troops often couldn’t tell friend from foe either. In Army oral-history interviews, they said defining and identifying the enemy was a problem that persisted for the entirety of the conflict.
Maj. Stuart Farris, an officer with the 3rd Special Forces Group who served in Helmand province in 2003, said his unit’s mission was to capture and kill “anti-coalition militia,” a vague, catchall description for the enemy. But his soldiers often could not tell who qualified for the label.
“There was a lot of crime. It was hard to determine if folks were actually no-joke Taliban or just criminals,” he said. “That’s where a lot of the problems were. We had to figure out who the bad guys were, whether they were in the scope of our mission and who we were there to target versus just being criminals and thugs.”
Maj. Thomas Clinton Jr., a Marine officer who served in Kandahar, guessed that he probably spoke with a dozen or so Afghans every week without realizing they were Taliban fighters.
“At any given moment you could find yourself in the middle of the Wild West,” he said. “Guys would say that the Taliban were shooting at us. Well, how the hell do you know it’s the Taliban? It could just be some pissed-off local, for all you know.”
Maj. Gen. Eric Olson, who deployed to southern Afghanistan as commander of the 25th Infantry Division, said many of the hostile forces his troops encountered were really just “hillbillies” from small towns and villages. “I’m not sure they were Taliban,” he said. “These people had spent their whole lives, I think, opposing the central government and protecting their turf.”
In a Lessons Learned interview, an unnamed combat adviser to an Army Special Forces team said even elite soldiers, who were supposed to have a nuanced understanding of the battlefield, were unsure who to fight.
“They thought I was going to come to them with a map to show them where the good guys and the bad guys live,” the combat adviser said. “It took several conversations for them to understand that I did not have that information in my hands. At first, they just kept asking: ‘But who are the bad guys, where are they?’ ”
The view was no clearer from the Pentagon.
“I have no visibility into who the bad guys are,” Rumsfeld complained in a snowflake almost two years after the war started. “We are woefully deficient in human intelligence.”
* * *
In December 2001, the United States bungled two golden opportunities that might have brought the war to a quick and favorable end.
At the start of the month, a critical mass of intelligence reports indicated that Public Enemy Number One—bin Laden—had sought refuge with an estimated 500 to 2,000 al-Qaeda fighters in a large complex of fortified tunnels and caves at Tora Bora, about thirty miles southeast of the city of Jalalabad.
The mountainous district near the Pakistani border was a natural and obvious hideout for the al-Qaeda leader. Bin Laden had financed the construction of roads and bunkers at Tora Bora during the 1980’s war against the Soviets, and he spent time there after he returned to Afghanistan in 1996.
On December 3, Army Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, ordered a bombing campaign against the al-Qaeda fighters in Tora Bora that continued around the clock for two weeks. A small force of about one hundred U.S. commandos and CIA operatives guided the airstrikes from the ground and recruited two Afghan warlords and their militias to pursue the al-Qaeda force on foot.
The Afghan hired guns proved unreliable and reluctant to fight, however, and the bombs failed to find their most-wanted target. Fearing that bin Laden might escape over the unguarded border to Pakistan, CIA and Army Delta Force commanders pleaded with Central Command to send reinforcements.
Insistent on sticking with his light-footprint war strategy, Franks refused. “You say, ‘Why didn’t you?’ Look at the political context in America at that time. What was the appetite to have positioned… another 15,000 or 20,000 Americans in Afghanistan? Why would we do that?” he said in a University of Virginia oral-history interview.
Yet nobody had asked for that many troops. CIA and Delta Force commanders said they were hoping for 800 to 2,000 Army Rangers, Marines and other personnel. Regardless, help of that magnitude never arrived and bin Laden and his surviving al-Qaeda confederates slipped away.
During the apex of the fighting at Tora Bora, Army Maj. William Rodebaugh, a logistics officer with the 10th Mountain Division, was about one hundred miles away at Bagram Air Base monitoring radio traffic of the battle. On December 11, he heard radio chatter about a major development—a reported sighting of bin Laden—and became surprised when his unit wasn’t called upon to rush to the scene.
“We were ready if they asked us,” he said in an Army oral-history interview. “I always wonder what would have happened if they had found him that night or if they had asked our battalion to go and help, which never happened.”
There is no guarantee that more U.S. forces at Tora Bora would have led to bin Laden’s death or capture. The altitude and terrain made maneuvering difficult and a large-scale ground assault posed many risks. But there is also no question that his escape prolonged the war in Afghanistan. Politically, it was impossible for the United States to bring its troops home as long as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks roamed the region.
In response to criticism that they had blown their best chance to get bin Laden, Franks and Rumsfeld tried to sow doubt with the public that the al-Qaeda leader had actually been at Tora Bora in December 2001—despite later, conclusive findings to the contrary by the U.S. Special Operations Command, the CIA and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
W
hen the issue arose as a vulnerability for Bush during his 2004 reelection campaign, Franks wrote an op-ed in The New York Times declaring that “Mr. bin Laden was never within our grasp.” Eight days later, with Rumsfeld’s blessing, the Pentagon distributed a dubious set of talking points, claiming that “the allegation that the U.S. military allowed Osama bin Laden to escape Tora Bora in December 2001 is utterly false and has been refuted by the commanders of that operation.”
Years later, in his oral-history interview, Franks continued to dismiss evidence that bin Laden had been at Tora Bora.
“On the day that someone first told me, ‘Tora Bora is the deal, Franks. He’s in Tora Bora.’ Literally on that same day I had an intelligence report that bin Laden had been seen yesterday at a recreational lake northwest of Kandahar and that bin Laden had been positively identified someplace in the ungoverned western areas of Pakistan,” he said.
After the Battle of Tora Bora, it would take a decade before the United States could pinpoint bin Laden’s location again. By then, the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan had soared to 100,000—forty times the number in December 2001.
Early on, the United States also missed a diplomatic opportunity to end the war. While bin Laden burrowed into the mountains at Tora Bora, an eclectic assortment of Afghan power brokers met in Bonn, Germany, to haggle over the future of their country with diplomats from the United States, Central Asia and Europe. Led by the United Nations, the gathering took place at the Petersberg, a hotel and conference center owned by the German government that was perched on a forested ridge overlooking the Rhine River.
The Petersberg served as the headquarters of the Allied High Commission for Germany after World War II and hosted numerous summits, including talks in 1999 to end the war in Kosovo. The United Nations invited the Afghans to Bonn to discuss an interim power-sharing agreement. The idea was to end Afghanistan’s long-running civil war by bringing all potential troublemakers, internal and external, to the table.
Attending were two dozen delegates from four different Afghan factions—a mix of warlords, expatriates, monarchists and former communists—plus their aides and hangers-on. Officials from Iran, Pakistan, Russia, India and other countries in the region also participated.
Because the conference was held during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, most delegates fasted during the day and negotiated late into the night. The hotel assured its guests that it had removed pork from the menu, though alcohol was still available upon request.
On December 5, the delegates reached an accord that was hailed as a diplomatic triumph. It named Hamid Karzai as Afghanistan’s interim leader and laid out the process for writing a new constitution and holding national elections. But the Bonn Agreement had a fatal flaw that was overlooked at the time: It excluded the Taliban.
At that point in the war, most U.S. officials saw the Taliban as a vanquished foe, a misjudgment they would come to regret. Some Taliban leaders had indicated a willingness to surrender and engage in the discussions about Afghanistan’s future. But the Bush administration and its warlord partners in the Northern Alliance refused to negotiate, labeling the Taliban as terrorists who deserved death or prison.
“A major mistake we made was treating the Taliban the same as al-Qaeda,” Barnett Rubin, an American academic expert on Afghanistan who served as an adviser to the United Nations during the Bonn conference, said in a Lessons Learned interview. “Key Taliban leaders were interested in giving the new system a chance, but we didn’t give them a chance.”
While the Taliban was easy to demonize because of its brutality and religious fanaticism, it proved too large and ingrained in Afghan society to eradicate. The movement emerged in Kandahar in 1994 and drew support, especially from Pashtuns, for restoring a measure of order to Afghanistan and marginalizing hated warlords who had torn apart the country for the sake of preserving their own power and fiefdoms.
“Everyone wanted the Taliban to disappear,” Rubin said in a second Lessons Learned interview. “There was not much appetite for what we called threat reduction, for regional diplomacy and bringing the Taliban into the peace process.”
Todd Greentree, a Foreign Service officer who spent years in Afghanistan, said it was another example of the United States’ ignorance of the country. “One of the unfortunate errors that took place after 9/11 was in our eagerness to get revenge we violated the Afghan way of war. That is when one side wins, the other side puts down their arms and reconciles with the side that won. And this is what the Taliban wanted to do,” he said in a diplomatic oral-history interview. “Our insistence on hunting them down as if they were all criminals, rather than just adversaries who had lost, was what provoked the rise of the insurgency more than anything else.”
Lakhdar Brahimi, an Algerian diplomat who served as the chief U.N. representative during the Bonn conference, admitted later that it had been a major blunder to shut out the Taliban from the negotiations, calling it “the original sin.”
James Dobbins, a veteran U.S. diplomat who guided the Bonn talks with Brahimi, acknowledged in a Lessons Learned interview that Washington failed to realize the gravity of the error. “I think there was a missed opportunity in the subsequent months when a number of Taliban leaders and influential figures either did surrender or offered to surrender including, according to one account, Mullah Omar himself,” Dobbins said. He added that he was among those who erroneously assumed that the Taliban “had been heavily discredited and was unlikely to make a comeback.”
Another opportunity for reconciliation wouldn’t present itself for years. It would take more than a decade of deadlocked warfare before the United States and the Taliban would finally agree to hold face-to-face talks.
For the man who would lead those negotiations, the war had come full circle. An Afghan-American, Zalmay Khalilzad was born in Mazar-e-Sharif and grew up in Kabul before arriving in the United States as a teenager. He served as a National Security Council staffer in the Bush White House during the Bonn conference and as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005. Thirteen years later, the Trump administration called him back into government service, appointing him as special envoy for talks with the Taliban. All told, he would spend more time in the presence of the Taliban than any other U.S. official.
In a Lessons Learned interview, Khalilzad said America’s longest war might have instead gone down in history as one of its shortest had the United States been willing to talk to the Taliban in December 2001. “Maybe we were not agile or wise enough to reach out to the Taliban early on, that we thought they were defeated and that they needed to be brought to justice, rather than that they should be accommodated or some reconciliation be done,” he said.
CHAPTER THREE The Nation-Building Project
When U.S. dignitaries visited Kabul in late December 2001 for the inauguration of Afghanistan’s interim government, they found overflowing toilets in the presidential palace. Outside, a thick haze of smoke hung over the ruins of the capital; most Afghans burned wood or charcoal to stay warm. The few public buildings still standing had been stripped of their window glass, copper wiring, telephone cables and lightbulbs. Not that it mattered much. Phone and electrical service in Kabul had not worked in years.
Ryan Crocker, a 52-year-old Arabist in the Foreign Service, arrived days later to help reopen the long-shuttered U.S. embassy and serve as acting ambassador. Because Kabul lacked a functioning airport, he landed at the U.S. military air base in Bagram, thirty miles away.
Crocker rode into Kabul, “driving through mile after mile of basically lifeless lug” and forging a river because the bridge was out. The scenes reminded him of photographs depicting the rubble-clogged boulevards of Berlin, circa 1945. He discovered the U.S. embassy compound had survived years of shelling in Kabul, though its broken plumbing was in no better shape than the clogged pipes at the presidential palace. In one building, about a hundred Marine guards had to share a single toilet. In another part of the compound, fifty civilians had to make d
o with one working shower.
When Crocker sat down for a series of introductory meetings with Hamid Karzai, he realized Afghanistan faced bigger challenges than repairing the physical devastation inflicted by years of war. “Here was a leader of the interim authority, who had no real authority and nothing to work with, no military, no police, no civil service, no functioning society,” Crocker said in a Lessons Learned interview.
After the United States invaded Afghanistan, President George W. Bush told the American people that they would not get stuck with the burden and expense of “nation-building.” But that presidential promise, repeated by his two successors, turned out to be one of the biggest falsehoods uttered about the war.
Nation-building is exactly what the United States tried to do in war-battered Afghanistan—and on a colossal scale. Between 2001 and 2020, Washington spent more on nation-building in Afghanistan than in any country ever, allocating $143 billion for reconstruction, aid programs and Afghan security forces. Adjusted for inflation, that is more than the United States spent in Western Europe with the Marshall Plan after World War II.
Unlike the Marshall Plan, the nation-building project for Afghanistan went astray from the start and spun further out of control as the war persisted. Instead of bringing stability and peace, the United States inadvertently built a corrupt, dysfunctional Afghan government that depended on U.S. military power for its survival. Even under best-case scenarios, U.S. officials projected Afghanistan would need billions more dollars in aid, annually, for decades.
During two decades of American patronage, the star-crossed campaign to transform Afghanistan into a modern nation swung from extreme to extreme in terms of funding. At the beginning, when Afghans most needed help, the Bush administration insisted on a miserly approach even as it pushed Afghanistan to build a democracy and national institutions from scratch. Later, the Obama administration overcompensated by flooding the country with more aid than it could possibly absorb, creating a new set of insolvable problems. Throughout, the endeavor was hobbled by hubris, incompetence, bureaucratic infighting and haphazard planning.
The Afghanistan Papers Page 4
