But the explosion turned out to be a one-day wonder and had no lasting impact on the war. The Pentagon did not drop any more MOABs during Trump’s term in office.
In contrast with the publicity around the bomb, the U.S. military started to hide important indicators that the war was backsliding. In September 2017, the Pentagon stopped releasing data on casualties suffered by the Afghan security forces. U.S. officials said they agreed to classify the figures at the request of the Afghan government.
The truth was that Afghan officials feared the high mortality rates were hurting recruiting and morale. Casualty figures had spiked as the Afghan security forces replaced U.S. and NATO forces on the front lines. By some estimates, thirty to forty Afghan soldiers and police were killed daily.
In comparison, the insurgents found it easy to recruit. By 2018, the Taliban’s ranks had swollen to about 60,000 fighters, up from 25,000 seven years earlier, according to U.S. military estimates.
U.S. military commanders began to suppress other statistics they had once heralded. For years, they had closely tracked how much territory the Afghan government controlled compared to the Taliban. Analysts surveyed each of the country’s administrative districts and adjusted the figures by population density.
General Nicholson, the war commander, called it “the metric that’s most telling in a counterinsurgency.” During his back-to-back November 2017 news briefings, he said that about 64 percent of Afghanistan’s population lived in districts controlled by the government, 24 percent lived in contested areas and 12 percent lived in the Taliban’s zone.
Saying the war had “turned the corner,” Nicholson predicted that the Afghan government would expand its control to 80 percent of the population within two years. At that juncture, he said, the Afghan government would secure “a critical mass” and “drive the enemy to irrelevance.”
But the Afghan government got no closer to the mark. Instead, subsequent surveys showed the Taliban expanding its reach. Rather than confront the reality of what was happening, U.S. military leaders changed their minds about the value of the data and stopped tracking territorial control altogether by fall 2018.
In a July 2018 news conference in Kabul, Nicholson downplayed the relevance of the territory statistics—even though he had emphasized their importance just eight months earlier. He said the U.S. military had shifted its focus to another indicator: the willingness of the Taliban to engage in peace talks. “These were not the metrics you were talking about a year ago,” he conceded, but called them “perhaps more important than some of these other measures that we traditionally use.”
Other evidence piled up suggesting that the Taliban had gained the upper hand despite the massive U.S. bombing campaign. After agreeing to a partial, three-day ceasefire in June 2018, the Taliban rejected Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s request for another ceasefire in August. That month, the Taliban briefly seized control of the city of Ghazni and overran Afghan military bases in Faryab and Baghlan provinces.
The Trump administration endured another embarrassing moment in June when the Senate Armed Services Committee held a confirmation hearing for Army Gen. Scott Miller, the president’s nominee to command U.S. forces in Afghanistan. A decorated commando, Miller had led the secretive Joint Special Operations Command and served in combat in Somalia, Bosnia and Iraq. He was also one of the first U.S. soldiers to deploy to Afghanistan after 9/11.
Downplaying the recent setbacks in Afghanistan, Miller painted a guardedly optimistic picture and repeated many of the talking points other generals had used over the years. “There is progress there,” he said.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, challenged Miller, saying she had heard enough rosy talk. She ticked off example after example of military leaders saying the war had reached “a turning point”—dating back to 2010.
“General Miller, we’ve supposedly turned the corner so many times that it seems now we’re going in circles,” Warren said. “So let me just ask you: Do you envision turning another corner during your tenure as commander? After seventeen years of war, what are you going to do differently?”
Caught off guard, Miller struggled to give a coherent reply.
“Senator, first off, I—I acknowledge the seventeen years,” he said. “I—I can’t guarantee you a timeline or an end date. I know that going into this position or—or offer necessarily a turning point, unless there is—unless there’s something to come back and—and report back that something has—something has changed. And that’s where I anticipate—anticipate being.”
From the witness table, Miller looked over his shoulder at an Army second lieutenant sitting behind him who had been a toddler when the war started. It was Miller’s son, Austin. “This young guy sitting behind me, I never anticipated that this cohort would be in a position to deploy as I sat there in 2001 and—and looked at this,” he said.
Despite Trump’s promises of victory and his exhortations to fight to win, Miller and other U.S. military leaders kept trying to prod the Taliban into peace talks with the Afghan government. The Taliban, increasingly confident in their position, showed less interest. But the generals’ optimism in public remained undimmed.
During a visit to Kabul in July 2018, Army Gen. Joseph Votel, the chief of U.S. Central Command, cited the recent limited, three-day ceasefire as cause for hope. He said the ceasefire “demonstrated the increased desire for peace, not only from the Afghan people, but from the belligerents of the conflict as well.” Votel added, “I think our efforts here in Afghanistan are showing progress.”
In September, Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon that he also had grown more hopeful that the Taliban would agree to talk. “For the first time, we have some semblance of strength to the reconciliation effort,” he said. The war, he added, was “going in the right direction.”
But the Taliban kept exposing the hollowness of the Americans’ claims.
On October 18, several weeks after General Miller took command in Afghanistan, he visited Kandahar to confer with local leaders in the provincial governor’s compound. As the late-afternoon meeting ended, Miller and the U.S. delegation walked outside, exchanged a few final words with their Afghan hosts and prepared to board helicopters to fly back to Kabul. Before they reached their aircraft, however, an Afghan soldier carrying a crate of pomegranates—a gift for the Americans—dropped the fruit and opened fire on the group with an AK-47.
The rogue soldier killed Gen. Abdul Raziq, a warlord who served as the provincial police commander, as well as the local intelligence chief, Abdul Mohim. The gunman also wounded Kandahar governor Zalmay Wesa, who had been walking alongside Miller.
Miller drew his pistol as he scrambled for cover, escaping injury.
Within seconds, the gunman was shot and killed. But the calamitous security breach rattled the whole country and strained U.S–Afghan relations. Afghan investigators determined the shooter had not been subjected to a background check when he enlisted as a guard for the Kandahar governor two months earlier.
The Taliban immediately claimed credit for the insider attack. As proof, they posted a video online of the gunman training with insurgents in Pakistan. Taliban officials said the plot was originally intended to kill General Raziq—a longtime foe—but that the infiltrator was also instructed to kill Miller once they learned he would be visiting the compound that day.
U.S. military officials downplayed the assertion that Miller was a target, saying he had just been caught in the crossfire. They also tried to cover up the fact that another senior officer, Army Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Smiley, the commander of U.S. forces in southern Afghanistan, had been shot and wounded in the attack. The U.S. military command in Kabul waited three days to disclose the information, doing so only after The Washington Post broke the news that Smiley had narrowly escaped death.
CHAPTER TWENTY The Narco-State
In November 2017, military commanders in Afghanistan launched Operation Iron Tempest, a storm of airstrikes by some of the U.S. Air Force
’s most powerful warplanes. The main target: a clandestine network of opium-processing labs that U.S. officials said helped generate $200 million in drug money for the Taliban.
In a publicity blitz, the Pentagon released videos of long-range B-52 Stratofortress bombers—built to carry nuclear weapons—dropping 2,000-pound and 500-pound conventional munitions on suspected drug labs in Helmand province. F-22 Raptor stealth fighters pulverized targets with satellite-guided bombs after flying all the way from a U.S. Air Force base in the United Arab Emirates to join the attack.
U.S. commanders called the operation a turning point in the sixteen-year-long war, saying it was the first time they had deployed such fearsome airpower against Afghanistan’s drug kingpins. After three weeks of strikes, they bragged they had eliminated twenty-five opium labs that otherwise would have cooked up $80 million in narcotics revenue to finance the insurgency.
“The new strategy highlights that this is a new war and that the gloves are off,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Lance Bunch said during a press briefing from Kabul. “It’s definitely been a game-changer and the Taliban is definitely feeling it.” He added, “This will be a very long winter for the Taliban, as we will continue to disrupt their revenue sources again and again and again…. The war has changed.”
But after several months, Operation Iron Tempest fizzled. An independent analysis by a British researcher found that many of the targets were abandoned, mud-walled compounds. Others were makeshift labs that typically processed small batches of opium worth thousands of dollars, not millions.
After more than 200 airstrikes, the Pentagon concluded that blowing up primitive targets with such devastating weapons was overkill and a waste of resources; the B-52s and F-22s each cost more than $32,000 to operate, per hour, not counting the expense of the munitions. After the initial rush of publicity, U.S. military officials gradually stopped talking about Iron Tempest and finally called it off. Public notification came in two paragraphs, buried in an eighty-four-page report to Congress.
The demise of Iron Tempest mirrored other oversold, high-dollar anti-drug campaigns in Afghanistan, including Operation River Dance, the Bush administration’s 2006 attempt to eradicate fields of opium poppies in Helmand with tractors and weed whackers. In both instances, eleven years apart, U.S. and Afghan officials made a big show of marshaling their forces and promising victory, only to surrender quietly months later.
Of all the failures in Afghanistan, the war on opium ranked among the most feckless. During two decades, the United States spent more than $9 billion on a dizzying array of programs to deter Afghanistan from supplying the world with heroin. None of the measures worked. In many cases, they made things worse.
Between 2002 and 2017, Afghan farmers more than quadrupled the acreage devoted to growing opium poppies, according to estimates by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. During the same period, the production of opium resin—the raw ingredient for heroin—nearly tripled, from 3,200 metric tons to 9,000. Harvests and production tailed off in 2018 and 2019, but the U.N. attributed the decreases to market factors and growing conditions instead of actions taken by U.S. or Afghan officials.
By then, the opium industry had emerged as the unrivaled winner of the longest war in American history. It suffocated other sectors of the Afghan economy, gained a stranglehold over the Afghan government and became indispensable to the insurgency.
“We stated that our goal is to establish a ‘flourishing market economy,’ ” Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the White House war czar under Bush and Obama, said in a Lessons Learned interview. “I thought we should have specified a flourishing drug trade—that is the only part of the market that’s working.”
Arid, rural Helmand province—about the size of West Virginia—powered the drug economy more than any other part of Afghanistan. The more violent and unstable the province became, the more the opium industry thrived.
Besides their unmatched profitability, poppies were easier to cultivate than other crops amid all the fighting. Farmers and traffickers could store opium resin as long as necessary without it losing value. The product took up little space. Transportation was simple and inexpensive, making it ideal for smuggling. Demand stayed reliably strong.
Afghan elites in Kabul often looked down on Helmandi poppy farmers and traders as illiterate clodhoppers. But Air Force Maj. Matthew Brown, who served in the province in 2011, came away impressed by their ingenuity. Helmand “is dirty, filthy and hot,” he said in an Army oral-history interview. But, he added, “these guys have a history of smuggling and growing drugs that’s second to none. They’re really, really good at it. I mean, our smugglers would probably be able to learn a thing or two from these guys.”
Brown, who served on a team that tried to reintegrate former Taliban fighters into society, also said, “When someone says Afghanistan doesn’t have the capacity to do something, I usually respond with, ‘Well, they’ve got the capacity to provide the entire world’s worth of opium.’ ”
Along with its NATO and Afghan allies, the U.S. government hatched all sorts of schemes to tackle the problem. But Afghan poppy farmers and drug traffickers outfoxed every attempt by Washington to coax, wheedle or compel them to stop.
The Bush and Trump administrations both wielded the stick. Under Bush, the State Department and Drug Enforcement Administration punished farmers by eradicating their fields of poppies, but that only encouraged them to side with the insurgency. Under Trump, the government ignored the farmers and bombed the opium processors, but new drug labs sprouted overnight and production continued unabated.
The Obama administration tried incentivizing farmers to switch crops, an approach that demanded more time and patience. That, too, fell flat.
Richard Holbrooke, the blustery diplomat who served as Obama’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, had publicly derided the Bush administration’s tactics. Upon taking his post in 2009, he immediately brought poppy eradication to a halt.
“The Western policies against the opium crop, the poppy crop, have been a failure,” he said during a conference on Afghanistan in Trieste, Italy, in June 2009. “They did not result in any damage to the Taliban, but they put farmers out of work and they alienated people and drove people into the arms of the Taliban.”
The Obama administration shifted its focus and money to programs that tried to promote legal forms of agriculture. Holbrooke prodded the State Department, USAID and the Agriculture Department to send small armies of experts to persuade Afghan poppy farmers to switch to other crops, such as wheat, saffron, pistachios and pomegranates.
In Helmand, the U.S. government supplied farmers with seeds, fertilizer and small loans. They paid Afghan laborers to expand the province’s network of canals and ditches so farmers could irrigate apple trees, grapevines and strawberry plants. They placed a huge emphasis on pomegranates and juice for export, even though the fruit required cold storage in a country with unreliable electricity.
For a while, it looked like the strategy might work. In 2009, opium poppy cultivation dropped to its lowest level in four years and stayed flat in 2010, according to the U.N.’s annual survey. Obama administration officials began to boast. “This is really paying off,” Holbrooke told a House subcommittee in July 2010, referring to the inducements to grow legal crops. “This is our most successful program in the civilian side.”
But the improvements were a mirage. In reality, other factors—including weather conditions and the fluctuating global demand for opium—had depressed the numbers. U.S. and European officials also knew the influential U.N. surveys could be unreliable. The surveys relied on sketchy data from satellite images and field inspections in one of the most unstable parts of the world. Officials had only a hazy idea of how many human beings lived in Helmand—estimates ranged from 900,000 to 2 million—so it was unrealistic to expect that they could calculate the acreage set aside for opium poppies each year with precision.
A former senior British official said the U.N. Offi
ce on Drugs and Crime privately admitted in 2010 that field workers had falsified its yield surveys for the previous two years. In a Lessons Learned interview, the British official criticized the U.N. for “ineptitude and lack of capacity,” saying the errors were “unforgivable.” But U.N. officials hid the mistakes from the public.
Sure enough, after dropping between 2008 and 2010, the U.N.’s poppy-growing figures resumed their rapid climb. Throughout the next four years, the U.N. estimated that poppy cultivation soared by more than 80 percent, reaching a new high.
Though well intentioned, many U.S. programs designed to nurture other forms of agriculture backfired. The refurbished canals and irrigation ditches in Helmand, intended to boost production of fruit and specialized crops, also made it easier and more profitable to grow poppies. And while U.S. subsidies induced Helmand farmers to start growing wheat, they often did it on the side and relocated their poppy fields to other parts of the province.
Some federal entities ignored the Obama administration’s new approach and pushed to destroy poppy plants anyway. The State Department allocated tens of millions of dollars to a law-enforcement fund for Afghan governors, which they used to eradicate poppy fields on their own. In 2010, Marine Corps units in Helmand paid farmers near the town of Marja to stop growing poppies, an idea that had been discredited years earlier after British officials flubbed a similar program.
In a Lessons Learned interview, the former senior British official said his government, the State Department and Gen. David Petraeus—the war commander at the time—opposed eradication programs. “But no one could stop the Marines,” the British official said. “It was generally understood that it wouldn’t work but the program went ahead anyway.”
Todd Greentree, a State Department official who served as a political adviser to the U.S. military from 2008 to 2012, said it proved impossible to develop a coherent strategy for all arms of the U.S. government. Opium served as the cornerstone of the economy in many rural areas. Drug revenue also oiled the political machinery across most of Afghanistan. As a result, any actions the Americans took to disrupt the opium trade risked undermining the military’s counterinsurgency strategy.
The Afghanistan Papers Page 26
