Maj. Robert Rodock, a military policeman in the U.S. Army who served as a liaison to the Afghan police, said they functioned more like a private militia serving as muscle for a warlord or tribal chief. He had to teach them basic concepts of public service and law enforcement.
“It was, ‘Here’s what handcuffing is,’ ” Rodock said in an Army oral-history interview. “ ‘You can’t walk down the middle of the market and steal something because you believe it’s yours.’ It’s at that level.”
Army Lt. Col. Scott Cunningham, a National Guard officer who served in Laghman province from 2009 to 2010, said many Afghan police officers spent their days idling in shipping containers that they set up as checkpoints—or “cop in a box” as the Americans called them. “There was no patrolling, there was no crime-solving, there was nothing,” he said.
One day the Afghan police did a good thing: They pulled over a dump truck loaded with several tons of homemade explosives. Cunningham estimated the cargo might have had the same blast power as the truck bomb that blew up the nine-story Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people.
But Cunningham grew anxious when the policemen insisted on hauling the truck away and disposing of the explosives themselves. “We didn’t trust them with it one bit,” he said. A standoff ensued, so a U.S. soldier took matters into his own hands. He grabbed an explosive charge with a time fuse and—in full view of the Afghan police—tossed it onto the back of the truck. “They had nothing to do but run,” Cunningham recalled. The blast echoed for miles but nobody got hurt.
In Lessons Learned interviews, U.S. officials heaped special scorn on units known as the Afghan Local Police, a separate entity from the national police force. With about 30,000 personnel, they were militias organized at the local level and established in 2010 at the behest of the United States. The U.S. military trained the local police but the Afghan officers quickly earned a reputation for brutality and drew complaints from human rights groups.
One unidentified U.S. soldier said Special Forces teams “hated” the Afghan Local Police, calling them “awful—the bottom of the barrel in the country that is already at the bottom of the barrel.” In a separate interview, an unnamed U.S. military officer estimated that one-third of local police recruits were “drug addicts or Taliban.”
Scott Mann, an Army lieutenant colonel, said in a Lessons Learned interview that the local police training expanded too rapidly between 2011 and 2013. “If you use surrogates or take shortcuts, you get what you pay for,” Mann said. “You get unaccountable militias that prey on the population.”
Capt. Andrew Boissonneau, an Army civil-affairs officer, worked alongside Afghan Local Police units in Helmand province in 2012 and 2013. In an Army oral-history interview, he recalled one Afghan commander who suffered from a case of post-traumatic stress disorder so severe that he led his forces into combat with imaginary enemies.
“He held the checkpoint that was the closest to the Helmand River and every once in a while he would get in firefights with the Helmand River—meaning, he was seeing attacks that no one else was seeing and would order his guys to return fire,” Boissonneau said.
Somehow, U.S. troops had to find a way to train such haunted souls and mold them into a proficient force that could defeat the rising insurgency and take control of their shell-shocked country. It was mission impossible.
I. Foreign troops were not the only targets. An Afghan police commander shot two Associated Press journalists while they were reporting in Khost province in April 2014, killing photographer Anja Niedringhaus and wounding correspondent Kathy Gannon.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN The Grand Illusion
President Obama had promised to end the war, so on December 28, 2014, U.S. and NATO officials held a ceremony at their headquarters in Kabul to mark the occasion. A multinational color guard paraded around as music played. A four-star general gave a speech and solemnly cased the green flag of the U.S.-led international force that had flown since the beginning of the conflict.
In his remarks, Obama called the day “a milestone for our country” and said the United States was safer and more secure after thirteen years of war. “Thanks to the extraordinary sacrifices of our men and women in uniform, our combat mission in Afghanistan is ending, and the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion,” he declared.
Army Gen. John Campbell, the 57-year-old commander of U.S. and NATO forces, also hailed the purported end of the “combat mission” and embellished some of its achievements. Since the start of the war, he asserted, life expectancy for the average Afghan had increased by twenty-one years. “You times that by about 35 million Afghans represented here in the country, that gives you 741 million years of life,” he added, crediting U.S., NATO and Afghan forces for what sounded like a remarkable improvement.I
But for such a historical day, the event seemed strange and underwhelming. The president didn’t actually attend; Obama issued his remarks in a written statement from Hawaii while he relaxed on vacation. The military ceremony took place in a gymnasium, where several dozen people sat on folding chairs. There was little mention of the enemy, let alone an instrument of surrender. Nobody cheered.
In fact, the war was nowhere near a conclusion, “responsible” or otherwise, and U.S. troops would fight and die in combat in Afghanistan for many years to come. The bald-faced claims to the contrary ranked among the most egregious deceptions and lies that U.S. leaders spread during two decades of warfare.
Obama had scaled back military operations over the previous three years but he failed to pull the United States out of the quagmire. At the time of the ceremony, about 10,800 U.S. troops remained in Afghanistan, a decrease of almost 90 percent from the surge’s high-water mark. Obama promised to withdraw the rest of the troops by the end of 2016, coinciding with the end of his term in office, save for a residual force at the U.S. embassy.
He knew most Americans had lost patience. Only 38 percent of the public said the war had been worth fighting, according to a December 2014 Washington Post–ABC News poll, compared to 90 percent who supported the war at the start of the conflict.
Yet the president faced countervailing pressures to stay put from the Pentagon and hawks in Congress. Obama had tried a similar staged approach to end the war in Iraq, where the U.S. military ceased combat operations in 2010 and exited entirely a year later. But those moves soon backfired.
In the absence of U.S. troops, the Islamic State—an al-Qaeda offshoot—swept through the country and seized several major cities as the U.S.-trained Iraqi army put up scant resistance. To counter the Islamic State and prevent Iraq from falling apart, Obama reluctantly ordered U.S. forces to return, starting with a campaign of airstrikes in August 2014 and followed by 3,100 personnel on the ground. They would remain stuck there for years.
Obama wanted to avoid the same fate in Afghanistan, but he needed to buy more time for U.S. forces to build up the shaky Afghan army so it would not collapse like the Iraqi forces had. He also wanted to create leverage for the government in Kabul to persuade the Taliban to negotiate an end to the conflict.
To make it all work, Obama conjured up an illusion. His administration unveiled a messaging campaign to make Americans think that U.S. troops still in Afghanistan would stay out of the fight, with duties that relegated them to the sidelines. As the flag came down during the December 2014 ceremony in Kabul, Obama’s commanders emphasized that the Afghan army and police would take full responsibility for their country’s security from that point forward, with U.S. and NATO forces restricted to “non-combat” roles as trainers and advisers.
But the Pentagon carved out numerous exceptions that, in practice, made the distinctions almost meaningless. In the skies, U.S. fighters, bombers, helicopters and drones continued to fly air combat missions against Taliban forces. In 2015 and 2016, the U.S. military launched missiles and bombs on 2,284 occasions, a decline from previous years, but still an average of more than three t
imes a day.
On the ground, the Pentagon created another combat exception for troops carrying out “counterterrorism operations,” or raids on specific targets. Those rules of engagement permitted Special Operations forces to capture or kill members of al-Qaeda and “associated forces,” a vague term that could also apply to the Taliban or other insurgents. The rules also allowed U.S. troops to come to the aid of Afghan forces to prevent the fall of a major city or in other circumstances. In other words, the U.S. military would continue to play an indispensable role and remain in the fight.
Still, after thirteen years of lackluster results, many U.S. leaders harbored doubts about what they had really accomplished and whether Obama’s new approach could work any better than his previous one had. In a Lessons Learned interview, a senior U.S. official who served as a civilian in Afghanistan said it was fast becoming obvious that Obama’s surge strategy had been a mistake. Instead of flooding the country with 100,000 U.S. troops for eighteen months, he said it would have been better to send one-tenth the number—but leave them in Afghanistan until 2030.
“You can create stability with boots and money, but the question is, will it hold when you leave?” he said. “Given our desire to ramp up quickly and leave quickly, there was no reasonable threshold we could reach where we could leave behind good governance.”
When Richard Boucher, the senior U.S. diplomat who oversaw South Asia policy during the Bush administration, sat down for a Lessons Learned interview in 2015, he found a succinct way to illustrate the failure of the biggest nation-building project in U.S. history.
“If you look at it after fifteen years, we could have taken a thousand [Afghan] schoolchildren in first grade—well, not quite first, but fifth grade—and taken them to get educated and trained in Indian schools and colleges,” he said. “Then we could have brought them back on an airplane by now and said, ‘Okay, you guys run Afghanistan.’… Better than having a bunch of Americans going in and saying, ‘We can build it for you.’ ”
Obama had based his aspirations for ending the war on a rickety political calendar. Given the unlikelihood of a Taliban surrender, he needed the Afghan government to commit to take over the fight so U.S. forces could leave.
After Karzai cheated his way to reelection in 2009, U.S. diplomats lobbied the Afghan president’s aides to slip a line in his inauguration speech about accepting responsibility for the country’s security on a specific timetable. The text promised that Afghan forces would take the lead “in ensuring security and stability across the country” within five years—by the end of Karzai’s second term in office.
But the old warmth and trust in Karzai’s relationship with the Americans dried up. Instead of working with the Obama administration to smooth the transition, Karzai impeded negotiations over a U.S.–Afghan security agreement that would have authorized the United States to keep troops in Afghanistan after 2014.
Washington wanted to maintain a small force so it could continue to train and equip the Afghan army and conduct counterterrorism strikes against al-Qaeda. But Karzai wanted to bar U.S. soldiers from raiding Afghan homes, a longstanding sore point. He also objected to a provision that immunized U.S. forces from prosecution under Afghan law.
The Obama administration refused to budge on either demand. Assuming Karzai would fold, U.S. officials threatened to close their bases and pull out entirely if he didn’t sign the agreement by the end of 2013. But Karzai held firm and called Obama’s bluff, guessing the Americans didn’t really mean it.
He was right. U.S. officials backed off and had to wait until Karzai left office. His successor, Ashraf Ghani, signed the agreement in September 2014.
James Dobbins, the diplomat who helped run the Bonn conference in 2001, came back to serve as Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2013 to 2014. He said the spat over the security agreement exemplified a paradox that Obama never resolved. The president wanted the Afghans to think the United States was a steadfast ally that would not abandon them against the Taliban. Yet he was simultaneously telling war-weary Americans that it was time to leave. “There was a continuous tension in both our messaging and our actual behavior,” Dobbins said in a Lessons Learned interview.
To maintain the “end of combat” fantasy for Americans at home, the Pentagon continued to deliver upbeat reports from the front.
In February 2015, Ashton Carter, a longtime Defense Department official appointed to serve as Obama’s fourth defense secretary, visited Afghanistan for the first time in his new job. He kicked off his trip by repeating some of the same lines that his predecessors had recited since the start of the war. “A lot has changed here, so much of it for the better,” Carter said in Kabul at a press conference with Ghani, the Afghan president. “Our priority now is to make sure this progress sticks.”
But during a visit to Kandahar Air Field, he briefly wandered off script and admitted that the Afghans had been woeful and inept until recently—contradicting the glossy assessments U.S. officials had presented to the public for more than a decade.
“It’s not that the Afghans aren’t good at fighting. They are. But just a few years ago there really was no Afghan National Security Force at all,” Carter said. “They’re getting on their feet now, and they’re beginning to do the things alone that we used to do for them.”
For a few months, the Obama administration’s tenuous plans seemed to hold. News from Afghanistan quieted down and U.S. troops stayed out of the spotlight. But as the Afghan security forces labored to hold their own against the Taliban, Americans resumed paying with their lives.
In April 2015, Specialist John Dawson, a 22-year-old Army medic from the village of Whitinsville, Massachusetts, died in an insider attack in Jalalabad. An Afghan soldier opened fire on coalition troops at a government compound, killing Dawson and wounding eight others.
Two months later, Krissie Davis, a 54-year-old civilian with the Defense Logistics Agency, died in a rocket attack on Bagram Air Base.
In August, First Sgt. Andrew McKenna, a 35-year-old Green Beret on his fifth deployment to Afghanistan, was killed in a firefight when Taliban fighters attacked a Special Operations forces camp in Kabul. The insurgents blew their way past the gate with a car bomb, killed eight Afghan guards and critically wounded another U.S. soldier. McKenna was posthumously awarded the Silver Star—the military’s third-highest decoration for valor in combat—for helping to repel the attack while he was mortally wounded.
Nineteen days later, Air Force Cpt. Matthew Roland, 27, and Staff Sgt. Forrest Sibley, 31, were killed in another insider attack at an Afghan police checkpoint in Helmand province. Roland was posthumously awarded the Silver Star for sacrificing his life to save other Special Operations forces in the ambush.
In late September, the illusion that U.S. troops were no longer serving in combat disappeared entirely. After a long siege, insurgent forces seized Kunduz, Afghanistan’s sixth biggest city, about 200 miles north of Kabul. The fall of Kunduz shocked the country; it was the first time since 2001 that the Taliban controlled a major urban area. U.S. Special Forces teams rushed to Kunduz to help the Afghan army retake the city over several days of heavy fighting.
In the early morning darkness of October 3, 2015, a U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunship—with the call sign “Hammer”—repeatedly strafed a Kunduz hospital with cannon fire, killing forty-two people. The hospital was run by the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders. In an attempt to safeguard the trauma center, the group had provided U.S. and Afghan forces with the GPS coordinates of the site several days earlier, so there was no excuse for the attack.
Obama and other U.S. officials apologized for the catastrophe. A U.S. military investigation subsequently blamed the “fog of war,” human error and equipment failures for what it called the “unintentional” destruction of the hospital. The Pentagon said sixteen U.S. service members received administrative punishments for their role in the attack. None faced criminal charges.
But in
stead of curtailing U.S. military operations, Obama dug in deeper. Twelve days after the Kunduz debacle, Obama ordered a halt to the slow withdrawal of U.S. troops and extended their mission indefinitely to prevent the Taliban from overrunning more cities. Breaking his promise to end the war, he said at least 5,500 troops would remain in Afghanistan after he left office in January 2017.
“I do not support the idea of endless war and I have repeatedly argued against marching into open-ended military conflicts,” Obama announced from the Roosevelt Room in the White House. “Yet given what’s at stake in Afghanistan… I am firmly convinced that we should make this extra effort.”
Despite the enormous advantages that the Afghan military held in manpower, equipment and training, U.S. officials feared their allies would lose to the Taliban if the Americans left the battlefield. In a fleeting moment of candor, Obama conceded that “Afghan forces are still not as strong as they need to be.”
To make the endless war more palatable to the public, Obama perpetuated the fiction that U.S. troops were only bystanders in the fight. In his remarks from the Roosevelt Room, he again insisted the combat mission was “over,” though he qualified his statement slightly by specifying that Americans were not engaged in “major ground combat against the Taliban.”
To the troops, the distinction made no difference. To them, Afghanistan was a combat zone. They all carried weapons. They all earned combat pay. Many were awarded combat decorations. More would die.
* * *
As 2015 drew to a close, the insurgency gained power and U.S. military leaders began to reveal rare flashes of pessimism.
During a return visit to Afghanistan in December, Ashton Carter damned the Afghan security forces with faint praise. In remarks to U.S. troops at a base near Jalalabad, he said the Afghan army and police “are getting there,” but suggested he had limited confidence in the Pentagon’s proxy force.
The Afghanistan Papers Page 24
