In a Lessons Learned interview, an unidentified NATO official said he was given the task of trying to secure financing for the generators from international donors but got nowhere. “Anyone who looked at this more closely could see that the math didn’t add up, that it was all nonsense,” he said. “We went to the World Bank [and] they didn’t want to touch it… People look at it and they think it’s crazy.”
By December 2018, the U.S. government had spent $775 million on the dam, the diesel generators and other electrical projects in Kandahar and neighboring Helmand province, according to a federal audit.
Power generation at the dam nearly tripled, but the project never made sense economically. In 2018, USAID admitted that the Afghan public utility for Kandahar would always need foreign subsidies.
Jeffrey Eggers, a Navy SEAL who served in Afghanistan and worked as a White House staffer for Bush and Obama, said that such projects failed to achieve their objective. In a Lessons Learned interview, he raised what he called the “bigger” question: “Why does the U.S. undertake actions that are beyond its abilities?” he said. “This question gets at strategy and human psychology, and it is a hard question to answer.”
Under both Bush and Obama, U.S. officials steadfastly avoided the term “nation-building.” Everybody knew they were doing it, but there was an unspoken rule against admitting it in public.
One of the few who did was Gen. David Petraeus.
Six months after Obama’s West Point speech, Petraeus appeared before the House Armed Services Committee to answer questions about how the war was going. Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, a Democrat from New Hampshire, asked the general point-blank whether the United States was nation-building in Afghanistan.
“We are indeed,” Petraeus replied.
The congresswoman sounded taken aback by the confession. “Well, let me just say that I’ve heard over and over again that we are not nation-building, that we are here, you know, in Afghanistan for a different reason,” she said.
But Petraeus stood his ground. He said a key part of the strategy “clearly can be described as nation-building. I’m just not going to evade it and play rhetorical games.”
The U.S. military’s counterinsurgency doctrine treated money—the most important ingredient in nation-building—as a powerful weapon of war. Battlefield commanders thought they could win support from Afghans by funding public-works projects or hiring locals through cash-for-labor programs.
In 2009, the Army published a handbook titled, Commander’s Guide to Money as a Weapons System. The introduction quoted a remark by Petraeus when he was a two-star general fighting in Iraq: “Money is my most important ammunition in this war.”
From a commander’s perspective, it was better to spend that ammunition quickly than wisely. Normally, USAID studied project proposals for months or years to ensure they would bring long-lasting benefits. But the U.S. military could not afford to wait that long. It was trying to win the war. “Petraeus was hell-bent on throwing money at the problem,” an unnamed U.S. military officer said in a Lessons Learned interview. “When Petraeus was around, all that mattered was spending. He wanted to put Afghans to work.”
In a Lessons Learned interview, Petraeus acknowledged the spendthrift strategy. But he said the U.S. military had no choice given Obama’s order to start reversing the troop surge after eighteen months.
“What drove spending was the need to solidify gains as quickly as we could knowing that we had a tight drawdown timeline,” he said. “And we wound up spending faster than we would have if we felt we had forces longer than we did.”
The nation-building campaign depended on military and civilian personnel from the U.S. government, as well as private subcontractors, working together to coordinate projects. In practice, the different groups clashed constantly.
The Pentagon’s insistence on speed put it at odds with USAID and others in the State Department, which struggled to find enough staffers willing to go to Afghanistan. In the field, military commanders often viewed USAID personnel and contractors as slow-moving bureaucrats who were content to collect a paycheck while the troops did most of the work.
In Khost province in eastern Afghanistan, Army Col. Brian Copes led a team of Indiana National Guardsmen that worked on agribusiness projects and taught villagers modern techniques for pruning their fruit trees. He said the Afghan farmers were a century behind the times but that the pushback, resistance and criticism he received from U.S. civilian aid workers frustrated him more than anything.
“Some of them just had a certain elitist bias, really looked down their noses at people in uniform as a bunch of knuckle-dragging Neanderthals,” he said in an Army oral-history interview.
The civilians complained that the military stereotyped them as timid paper pushers who didn’t understand the urgency of the mission. “We were always chasing the dragon—always behind, never good enough in the military’s eyes,” an unidentified senior USAID official said in a Lessons Learned interview.
They also grumbled that people in uniform dismissed their views about the value of specific projects. An unnamed former State Department official said he got “the shit kicked out of me” by military officials after he questioned the wisdom of building a highway in a hostile district in Kandahar. “So we’d go see it and we’d fly in and get shot at,” he said in a Lessons Learned interview. “Think about that. We were supposed to build roads in an area so dangerous that armed U.S. military helicopters could not even land near it.”
Afghan officials said they were also baffled by military commanders’ insistence on building projects in hard-to-reach areas that remained under Taliban influence.
Barna Karimi, a former Afghan deputy minister for local governance, said the Americans badgered him to send teams of Afghan civil servants to Garmsir, a district in Helmand, after U.S. Marines cleared the area of insurgents. He said the Marines didn’t care that the Taliban still controlled the main roads leading into the district.
“They started shouting, ‘We have cleared Garmsir, come here and establish the government administration,’ ” Karimi said in a Lessons Learned interview. “I used to tell them that I am not coming, because I cannot travel there by road. You are going there by helicopters. I cannot take all my staff there by plane. How is my clerk able to go [there]? He will be kidnapped on his way in.”
Safiullah Baran, an Afghan who worked for USAID as a project manager, said the Americans were so intent on building things that they paid little attention to who was benefiting. He said the Taliban once sabotaged a bridge in Laghman, a rural province in eastern Afghanistan. U.S. officials were eager to replace it. Within a week they hired an Afghan construction firm to erect another one.
It turned out that the owner of the construction firm had a brother who was in the local wing of the Taliban. Together, they had built a thriving business: the Taliban brother blew up U.S. projects, and then the unwitting Americans paid his sibling to rebuild them.
USAID officials blamed the U.S. military for being in a rush and said its whole approach was backward. They said it would have made more sense to focus first on projects in peaceful provinces to solidify their allegiance to the central government, and then gradually expand the work into more turbulent areas.
“Why not make an example of stable areas to make others envious?” one unidentified U.S. official asked in a Lessons Learned interview. “Afghans are some of the most jealous people I’ve ever met, but we didn’t take advantage of that or leverage it. Instead, we built schools in areas that are too dangerous for kids to leave the house.”
Mammoth civic works contributed to the failure of the nation-building campaign. But smaller projects also fueled the frenzy of spending. Many originated with a military program called the Commanders’ Emergency Response Program, or CERP.
Authorized by Congress, CERP allowed military commanders in the field to bypass normal contracting rules and spend up to $1 million on infrastructure projects, though the cost of most projects was
less than $50,000 each.
Commanders were under so much pressure to spend that they blindly copied CERP paperwork from past projects, knowing that it was unlikely anyone would notice. One military officer said a photo of the same health clinic appeared in about a hundred different project reports for clinics around the country.
An Army civil-affairs officer who served in eastern Afghanistan said in a Lessons Learned interview that he often saw CERP proposals that referred to “sheikhs”—a giveaway that they were cut-and-pasted from reconstruction projects in Iraq. “Sheikh” is an Arabic title of respect but is generally not used in Afghanistan.
At one point, the Army officer recalled telling soldiers in his brigade that if they could not show that a CERP project would be beneficial, “then the smartest thing to do is nothing.” In response, he said: “I got crickets. ‘We can’t build nothing,’ they said. I told them we might as well throw our money away.”
Copes, the Indiana National Guard officer who served as a civil-affairs commander in Khost province in eastern Afghanistan, likened the flood of aid to “crack cocaine,” calling it “an addiction that affected every agency.” In a Lessons Learned interview, he said he came across a U.S.-built greenhouse that cost $30,000 and had fallen into disuse because the Afghans could not maintain it. His unit built a replacement greenhouse out of iron rebar that worked better and cost only $55—despite pressure to spend far more.
“Congress gives us money to spend and expects us to spend all of it,” Copes said. “The attitude became, ‘We don’t care what you do with the money as long as you spend it.’ ”
Despite its best efforts, the U.S. military spent only two-thirds of the $3.7 billion that Congress funded for CERP, according to Defense Department figures. Of the $2.3 billion it did spend, the Pentagon was able to provide financial details for only about $890 million worth of projects, according to a 2015 audit.
In Lessons Learned interviews, officials from other agencies were appalled by the waste and mismanagement. “CERP was nothing but walking-around money,” said Ken Yamashita, the USAID mission director for Afghanistan from 2011 to 2014, likening the payments to cash handouts for votes. An unidentified NATO official called the program “a dark pit of endless money for anything with no accountability.”
Of all the flaws with the Afghanistan nation-building campaign—the waste, the inefficiency, the half-baked ideas—nothing confounded U.S. officials more than the fact that they could never tell whether any of it was actually helping them win the war.
An Army officer assigned to U.S. military headquarters in Kabul during the surge said it was hard enough to track whether CERP projects were really built. “We wanted hard quantitative metrics that would tell us that X project is producing the desired outcomes, but we had a hard time defining those metrics,” he said in a Lessons Learned interview. “We had no idea how to measure if [a] hospital’s existence was reducing support for the Taliban. That was always the last ten yards that we couldn’t run.”
The U.S. government’s unfamiliarity with Afghan culture doomed even the most well-intentioned projects. Tooryalai Wesa, who served as governor of Kandahar province from 2008 to 2015, said U.S. aid workers once insisted on carrying out a public-health project to teach Afghans how to wash their hands. “It was an insult to the people. Here people wash their hands five times a day for prayers,” Wesa said in a Lessons Learned interview. “Moreover, hand wash project is not needed.”
He said a better program would have provided jobs or a skill to earn money. But those kinds of projects could backfire too. For one project in Kandahar, U.S. and Canadian troops paid villagers $90 to $100 a month to clear irrigation canals, according to Thomas Johnson, a specialist on Afghanistan and a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School who served as a counterinsurgency adviser to the Canadians.
Eventually, the troops realized their program was indirectly disrupting local schools. Teachers in the area earned much less, only $60 to $80 a month. “So initially all the schoolteachers quit their jobs and joined the ditch diggers,” Johnson said in a Lessons Learned interview.
In eastern Afghanistan, one gung-ho Army brigade was so determined to improve public education that it promised to build fifty schools—but inadvertently ended up helping the Taliban, according to an officer involved in the project. “There weren’t enough teachers to fill them, so buildings languished,” the unnamed U.S. military officer said in a Lessons Learned interview, “and some of them even became bomb-making factories.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN From Friend to Foe
Wearing a green-and-blue silk Uzbek cape and a gray lambskin hat, Hamid Karzai looked splendid as usual for his November 19, 2009, inauguration at the presidential palace in Kabul. His closely trimmed beard had gone wholly gray since his last swearing-in, five years earlier. But the 51-year-old sounded like the same model statesman in his acceptance speech as he extolled good governance, women’s rights and his country’s friendship with the United States.
“The people of Afghanistan will never forget the sacrifices made by American soldiers to bring peace to Afghanistan,” he said. “With the help of the Almighty God, Afghanistan will be in the possession of a strong democratic order for the next five years.”
About 800 diplomats and other VIPs gathered in the palace to applaud the historic moment. Once again, millions of Afghans had defied the threat of violence to cast ballots for a democratic government.
In the front row, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton looked elegant herself, wrapped in an embroidered black-and-red floral coat she had purchased in Afghanistan. Beaming, she nodded in approval when Karzai bowed toward her at the close of his speech. Afterward, Clinton told reporters she was “heartened” by Karzai’s remarks. “So many brave Americans are serving here because we believe that we can make progress,” she said.
But the smiles and good feelings were all a show. Behind the scenes, Karzai and the Americans had angrily turned on one another.
As everyone attending his inauguration knew, Karzai had stolen the election three months earlier. Though Washington once celebrated him as a paragon of liberty and freedom, his supporters had committed fraud on an epic scale by stuffing ballot boxes and fixing vote totals. A U.N.-backed investigative panel determined that Karzai had received about one million illegal votes, a quarter of all those cast.
The rupture between Karzai and the United States jeopardized the alliance and came at the worst possible time in the war: just as Obama prepared to send 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan.
After eight years of fighting, it was difficult enough to justify an expansion of the conflict. Now Obama wanted U.S. troops and American taxpayers to make further sacrifices for a resentful foreign leader who had cheated his way to reelection.
But Obama and his administration had helped create the election debacle.
By the time Obama took office in January 2009, many U.S. officials from both parties had soured on Karzai. They faulted the Afghan leader for allowing corruption to fester and belittled him as weak and indecisive.
Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, particularly disliked Karzai and barely concealed his contempt from the start. “Richard Holbrooke hated Hamid Karzai. He thought he was corrupt as hell,” Barnett Rubin, the Afghan academic expert whom Holbrooke had hired as an adviser, said in a Lessons Learned interview.
Karzai retained broad popular appeal in Afghanistan and was favored to win reelection. But Holbrooke and other U.S. officials stirred things up by openly meeting with Karzai’s rivals and encouraging them to run for president as well. Holbrooke hoped a large field would prevent Karzai from winning a majority and force him into a runoff, where he would be more vulnerable against a single challenger.
The U.S. scheming galled Karzai, who saw it as treachery. Realizing he could no longer trust the Americans, he scrambled to expand his political base and cut deals with old foes from different ethnic groups.
Much to the dismay of h
uman-rights groups, Karzai tapped Gen. Mohammed Fahim Khan, the giggling Tajik warlord, as his vice-presidential running mate. He negotiated an endorsement from Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, the accused war criminal, who controlled a large bloc of Uzbek votes. As further insurance of victory, Karzai stacked Afghanistan’s election oversight commission with his cronies.
Some U.S. officials said the Obama administration should have realized that its gamesmanship with Karzai would backfire. “The reason Karzai made deals with the warlords and engaged in fraud in the election was that, unlike the previous election, when we had supported him, he knew we’d walked away from him, so he basically said the hell with you,” Robert Gates, the defense secretary, said in his University of Virginia oral-history interview.
One month after Karzai’s inauguration, Gates attended a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels. He sat next to Kai Eide, a Norwegian diplomat who served as the U.N. Secretary-General’s special representative to Afghanistan. The pair were friendly and had known each other for years. Before Eide delivered his status report on Afghanistan, he leaned over and whispered a message to Gates: “I am going to tell the ministers that there was blatant foreign interference in the Afghan election,” Eide said. “What I will not say is it was the United States and Richard Holbrooke.”
* * *
In the beginning, Washington’s affinity for Karzai seemed limitless.
The son of an Afghan parliamentarian, Karzai belonged to the Popalzai tribe, a clan from the scrublands in Kandahar province. He attended high school in Kabul with other Afghan elites in the 1970s and furthered his education in India, where he polished his English. He became involved in politics and served briefly as a deputy foreign minister during the early 1990s, but the slight, balding, poetry-loving intellectual largely avoided the battlefield during Afghanistan’s civil wars.
The Afghanistan Papers Page 18
