The Afghanistan Papers

by Craig Whitlock

  Other U.S. diplomats tried but failed to persuade Dostum to become less belligerent. Thomas Hutson, a Dari speaker who served as a political officer in Mazar-e-Sharif in 2003 and 2004, made a point of seeing Dostum every two weeks. He brought cigars to build a rapport with the man he described as “a babyface Stalinesque Tito.”

  Hutson hoped he could entice Dostum to leave Afghanistan voluntarily and floated an assortment of half-baked ideas. He offered to hire him as the executive producer for a couple of movies the diplomat was involved in. When that didn’t fly, he suggested that Dostum—a noted hypochondriac—travel to the island of Grenada for medical treatment, hoping the warlord would find the Caribbean climate to his liking and never come back.

  On other occasions, Hutson took a harder line and told Dostum he needed to think realistically about what happened to others like him who had once been allies of the United States, such as the Shah of Iran and the president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

  “Dostum had never heard of Aristide, or Haiti for that matter. I pointed out that he had made a deal with the U.S., which enabled him to survive. I would then suggest that he, Dostum, also consider making a deal which would enable him to leave the warlord business,” Hutson recalled in a diplomatic oral-history interview. “I don’t think he considered any of my suggestions very seriously, but I kept telling the embassy people and to some degree the people in Washington to make Dostum an offer he could not refuse.”

  In April 2004, U.S. officials lost patience with Dostum when his militia defied the government in Kabul and briefly took control of the northern province of Faryab, forcing Karzai’s appointed governor to flee. U.S. military commanders ordered a B-1 bomber to make several low passes over Dostum’s home in Sheberghan, a warning that he had crossed a line.

  Still, several months later, the Americans couldn’t resist throwing a lifeline to their old friend. In winter 2004, one of the warlord’s aides placed a panicky phone call to Army Col. David Lamm, the chief of staff at U.S. military headquarters in Kabul. Dostum was very sick and his doctors thought he was dying. Could the Americans help?

  Lamm thought about saying no. He knew Dostum’s death might solve a lot of problems. Instead, he agreed to fly Dostum from Mazar-e-Sharif to the U.S. medical trauma center at Bagram Air Base for tests. A colonel at Bagram called Lamm with the results: The warlord’s heavy drinking had damaged his liver. He was dying. The only hope was to transport him to an advanced hospital. The colonel at Bagram recommended Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

  “And I said, ‘He’s going to Washington? We’ve got to treat a warlord at Walter Reed? The ambassador isn’t going to go for that,’ ” Lamm said in an Army oral-history interview. They settled on an alternative: Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a premier U.S. Army hospital in Germany. “And so we sent Dostum to Landstuhl, and they cured him. They fixed him, and they worked out the equipment he would need to stay alive.”

  When Dostum returned home, he invited Lamm and other U.S. officials to his Kabul home for a celebratory banquet and thanked them for saving his life. But he reverted to his troublemaking ways before long and remained a destabilizing force in Afghan politics for years to come.I

  In Lessons Learned interviews, senior Bush administration officials defended their warlord policy and said they played a difficult hand as best they could.

  After defeating the Taliban in 2001, they said their toughest task was to persuade the warlords to disband their militias and pledge allegiance to the new government headed by Karzai. The warlords’ armies and arsenals were their source of power and key to their personal survival.

  The disarmament campaign largely succeeded but took years of cajoling. The Bush administration did not want to forcibly disarm the warlords because it would have required a huge influx of U.S. troops and torn Afghanistan further apart.

  The warlords “had thirty years of civil war behind them. They were not about to turn everything in because the Americans said that this would be a good idea,” said Robert Finn, the U.S. ambassador from 2002 to 2003.

  The approach carried a stark downside. In exchange for disarmament, the United States and Karzai had to guarantee the warlords a role in the new government and give them political legitimacy.

  Marin Strmecki, the civilian adviser to Rumsfeld, said the Pentagon and State Department held no illusions about how awful the warlords could be and recognized that they posed “a mortal threat to the legitimacy of the regime that we were helping to establish.”

  “I think people who diminish what was achieved in this phase are a little unfair. The elimination of private armies was an important political milestone to normalizing the country’s politics,” Strmecki said. Dostum and other warlords, he noted, had “serious armories of stuff,” including Soviet-built short-range missiles. “When they don’t have their private armies that is good in and of itself. You can then deal with them if they continue to misbehave.”

  But by welcoming them into the government, the Americans made the warlords a permanent fixture of the new political system—as well as a perpetual problem. Many warlords generated huge streams of revenue by illicit means, such as drug trafficking and collecting bribes, which escalated as they became high-ranking officials. As a result, corruption soon became a defining feature of the government.

  By 2005, some U.S. officials started to realize that they had helped to create a Frankenstein monster. In September, Ronald Neumann, the U.S. ambassador, sent a classified cable to Washington warning that Afghanistan faced a “corruption crisis” that posed “a major threat to the country’s future.” Neumann admitted the U.S. government was partly to blame because of its “engagement with some unsavory figures,” but he wanted Karzai to “take the moral high ground” and fire “some of his government’s most notoriously corrupt officials.”

  Topping Neumann’s most-notorious list were Ahmed Wali Karzai, a Kandahar power broker who happened to be the president’s half-brother, and Gul Agha Sherzai, a former mujahedin commander known as “the Bulldozer.”

  Both men, however, were politically untouchable. Besides being the president’s sibling, Ahmed Wali Karzai worked closely with the CIA and received lucrative contracts from the U.S. military.II

  Sherzai helped U.S. forces capture Kandahar in 2001 and later served as governor of Nangahar, an eastern province that included the key city of Jalalabad. As governor, he amassed a fortune by skimming taxes and receiving kickbacks, but he also maintained a network of boosters within the U.S. government.

  His supporters included Neumann’s boss at the State Department: Richard Boucher, the former chief spokesman who had become assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia. Boucher admired Sherzai for the way he kept the peace in his province by doling out patronage jobs and government contracts. He recalled visiting Jalalabad once and asking Sherzai whether he needed more aid for construction projects.

  “He said, ‘I need five schools, five colleges, five dams, and five highways,’ ” Boucher said in a Lessons Learned interview. “I said, well, okay, but why five? He said, ‘I got this tribe, this tribe, this tribe, this tribe, and one for everybody else.’ I thought that was one of the funniest things I ever heard and now I think it is one of the smartest things I ever heard.”

  Boucher said it was better to funnel contracts to Afghans who “would probably take 20 percent for personal use or for their extended families and friends” than give the money to “a bunch of expensive American experts” who would waste 80 to 90 percent of the funds on overhead and profit. “I want it to disappear in Afghanistan, rather than in the Beltway,” he said. “Probably in the end it is going to make sure that more of the money gets to some villager, maybe through five layers of corrupt officials, but still gets to some villager.”

  But others said the United States and its allies were foolish to lionize warlords like Sherzai and encourage corrupt behavior. In a Lessons Learned interview, Nils Taxell, a Swedish anti-corruption expert who served
in Afghanistan, mocked foreign officials for justifying Sherzai as “a benevolent asshole” because “he didn’t take or keep everything for himself, he left a little for others.”III

  Like they did with Sherzai, U.S. officials had a love-hate relationship with another warlord: Sher Mohammad Akhundzada, the governor of Helmand province from 2001 to 2005. Dubbed “SMA” by Americans, he was renowned for ruthlessly enforcing order, but equally famous for his role in Helmand’s thriving opium industry.

  Marine Lt. Col. Eugene Augustine, who served in Helmand in 2004 and 2005, said suspicions about whether SMA and his top security aides were involved in drug trafficking made it difficult for U.S.-sponsored reconstruction projects to move forward. “There was always a question of corruption, and with all of the drugs and poppy production going on in Helmand, these guys always had that in there as a question mark behind them, not just from me but from higher headquarters, intel,” Augustine said in an Army oral-history interview. “Everybody else was always like, ‘Are these guys involved in drugs?’ That was always the thing behind every conversation—this ongoing chess game of corruption, who’s making money.”

  In 2005, U.S. and Afghan narcotics agents raided Akhundzada’s offices and found an enormous stash—nine tons—of opium. He denied wrongdoing. But under international pressure, Karzai removed him as governor. In the absence of SMA’s iron hand, the province quickly became a magnet for insurgents, and its drug-trafficking problem exploded. Some U.S. officials came to regret his departure.

  McNeill, the two-time U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, described SMA as “a simple-minded tyrant” but said he was effective as governor because he “kept other bad guys at bay.” In a Lessons Learned interview, he called Akhundzada’s removal a “huge mistake.” He said the British demanded SMA’s removal before they took over responsibility for security in Helmand as part of a new NATO command structure.

  “SMA was dirty but he kept stability because people were afraid of him,” McNeill said. “It’s not good and I’m not advocating dancing with the devil, but maybe one of his disciples, and that was SMA.”IV

  Perhaps the most powerful and challenging warlord for the Americans to deal with was Mohammed Qasim Fahim Khan, a Tajik militia commander. As the senior general in the Northern Alliance, Fahim Khan played a critical role in helping the U.S. military overthrow the Taliban in 2001. Afterward, he secured the job of defense minister in Afghanistan’s new government.

  In public, the Bush administration treated Fahim Khan as a VIP and welcomed him to the Pentagon with an honor cordon. In private, U.S. officials saw him as a corrupt, destabilizing presence and feared he would try to launch a violent coup.

  The black-bearded warlord had a tense history with Karzai. In 1994, Fahim Khan oversaw the Afghan government’s secret police and ordered the arrest of Karzai—the deputy foreign minister at the time—on suspicion of spying. Karzai was captured and interrogated, and his fate looked grim. But in a providential moment, a rocket crashed into the building where he was detained, enabling his escape.

  As defense minister from 2001 to 2004, Fahim Khan installed his loyalists in the Afghan army and controlled security forces in Kabul. U.S. officials were so worried that he might try to knock off Karzai, who had no militia of his own to protect him, that they supplied the Afghan leader with American bodyguards.

  * * *

  Fahim Khan enjoyed his fearsome reputation and did little to hide his involvement in drug trafficking. Russell Thaden, a retired U.S. Army colonel who served as intelligence chief for NATO forces in Kabul from 2003 to 2004, said the defense minister once blew his stack upon learning U.S. and British forces had jointly bombed a large drug lab in northern Afghanistan.

  “Fahim Khan was really upset about it until he learned which drug lab,” Thaden said in an Army oral-history interview. “It wasn’t one of his, so he was okay with it.”

  Ryan Crocker, who served as acting U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan in early 2002, recalled a bloodcurdling encounter when Fahim Khan nonchalantly informed him that another Afghan government minister had been murdered by a mob at the Kabul airport.

  “He giggled while he related this,” Crocker said in a Lessons Learned interview. “Later, much later, it emerged, I don’t know if it was ever verified or not, it emerged that Khan himself had the minister killed. But I certainly came out of those opening months with the feeling that even by Afghan standards, I was in the presence of a totally evil person.”

  Crocker returned to Afghanistan years later to serve a second stint as ambassador during the Obama administration. By then, Fahim Khan had returned to power as Afghanistan’s vice president—and he still made Crocker’s skin crawl. “When I came back, my sense of him was that he was not directly involved in major strategy or operational decisions, that he was more interested in making even more illicit millions, but that Karzai had to handle him with real care, because he could be dangerous and no question in my mind, he could be dangerous,” Crocker said. “I would have considered him capable of any iniquity.”

  Fahim Khan died of natural causes in 2014. But in his Lessons Learned interview two years later, the ambassador said he was still haunted by memories of the warlord.

  “I check just about every other day, and as far as I know, he is still dead,” Crocker said.

  I. In 2014, The Washington Post reported that Dostum had been receiving about $70,000 a month in CIA funds routed through the Afghan presidential palace. In an interview with Post reporter Joshua Partlow, Dostum denied receiving such payouts, as well as a variety of other allegations against him. “This is just propaganda against me,” he said.

  II. In July 2011, Ahmed Wali Karzai was assassinated by a member of his security detail in Kandahar.

  III. Sherzai remained active in Afghan politics and denied allegations of wrongdoing when he ran, unsuccessfully, for president in 2014. “There is no evidence against me,” he told NBC News. “If I was involved in corruption, I would have high-rise buildings in Dubai and would have millions of dollars in foreign banks!”

  IV. Akhundzada, who went on to become a provincial senator, was unapologetic about his ruthless tactics. In an interview with the British news outlet the Telegraph, he said that after he was fired as governor, 3,000 of his followers switched sides and joined the Taliban “because they had lost respect for the government.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN A War on Opium

  In March 2006, a fleet of Massey Ferguson farm tractors fanned out across the arid plains of Helmand province, home of the most fertile opium poppy fields in the world. Dragging heavy metal sleds, the tractors crushed rows of tender green poppy plants that had grown calf-high but were still weeks away from harvest. A small army of stick-wielding laborers covered terrain the Massey Fergusons couldn’t reach, trudging through canal-irrigated fields and whacking poppy stems one by one.

  The invasion of the poppy fields marked the start of Operation River Dance, touted by the United States as a major escalation in its war on opium. On paper, the two-month eradication campaign was a joint mission by the U.S. and Afghan governments. But the work and costs were not equally divided. Afghan security forces and private contractors attacked the poppies and dirtied their boots while U.S. military advisers and agents from the State Department and Drug Enforcement Administration stood watch and provided guidance. U.S. taxpayers, meanwhile, covered the operational expenses.

  Afghan poppies—the plant from which opium is extracted to make heroin—had dominated global drug markets for decades. But production reached new heights after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. Hardscrabble farmers took advantage of the collapse of Taliban rule and sowed as much of the cash crop as they could. By 2006, U.S. officials estimated that poppies were powering one-third of Afghanistan’s entire economic output and supplying 80 to 90 percent of the world’s opium.

  The drug boom paralleled the Taliban’s revival and the Bush administration concluded that narcotics revenue was underpinning the insurgency’s comeback. As a res
ult, the administration pushed for an opium crackdown in Helmand, the southern province where farmers grew most of Afghanistan’s poppies.

  As soon as Operation River Dance started, U.S. and Afghan officials publicly proclaimed it a tremendous success. Mohammed Daud, the newly installed governor of Helmand, promised that within two months “there will be no opium in this province.” Maj. Gen. Benjamin Freakley, the 10th Mountain Division commander, called River Dance “very encouraging” and said “this bodes well for the future.”

  John Walters, the Bush administration’s drug czar, visited Afghanistan while Operation River Dance was underway. Upon his return to Washington, he told reporters at the State Department that the country was “making enormous progress” and that “the scene there is getting better every day.” He lauded Helmand’s governor for being “in the forefront” of the war on opium and claimed that all farmers, religious leaders and local officials in the province supported the eradication campaign.

  None of it was true.

  Operation River Dance backfired in every regard. In diplomatic cables and Army oral-history interviews, U.S. officials described it as a poorly planned calamity that faltered from the start. “They say it was very successful. I think that’s just plain B.S.,” said Lt. Col. Michael Slusher, an officer with the Kentucky National Guard who advised Afghan soldiers during the campaign. The whole operation, he added, was not “worth a damn.”

  Tractors got stuck in ditches and mired in fields. Bulldozers and military vehicles frequently broke down. The stick-whacking approach proved so inefficient that leaders soon wrote it off as a useless exercise.