The Afghanistan Papers

by Craig Whitlock

  “We were always debating and discussing it,” Greentree said in a diplomatic oral-history interview. “But at the level of policy, it was a contradiction that was left unmanaged.”

  Dozens of counter-narcotics programs, many in competition with one another, existed within the State Department, the Pentagon, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies. The Afghan government, NATO allies and the United Nations lobbied for their own ideas and operations. A consensus never emerged. Because no single person or agency was in charge, the problem festered.

  Mohammed Ehsan Zia, a former Afghan cabinet minister in charge of rural development programs, said the United States and other NATO members just threw money at the opium problem. In a Lessons Learned interview, he said they constantly changed policies and relied on a carousel of consultants who knew nothing about Afghanistan.

  As they did with other nation-building programs, Obama administration officials cared more about spending money quickly than they did about helping Afghans, Zia said. Small loans intended for farmers were wasted on overhead or ended up in the pockets of foreign agricultural advisers. The unintended message: “Reduce poppy now but disregard what needed to be done to reduce it.”

  “Foreigners read Kite Runner on [the] plane and believe they are an expert on Afghanistan and then never listen,” Zia added, referring to the best-selling novel about an Afghan boy haunted by oppression and ethnic strife. “The only thing they are experts in is bureaucracy.”

  Some Obama administration officials said the failures represented another example of how the U.S. government fundamentally misunderstood Afghanistan. Unrelenting warfare since the Soviet invasion in 1979 had destroyed traditional agricultural practices, markets and trade routes. More than donated wheat seed and pomegranate-processing plants, Afghanistan needed peace so it could begin to repair the damage.

  “Afghanistan is not an agricultural country; that’s an optical illusion,” Barnett Rubin, the academic expert who served as an adviser to Holbrooke, said in a Lessons Learned interview. The “largest industry is war, then drugs, then services.” Agriculture, he added, “is down in fourth or fifth place.”

  In another Lessons Learned interview, an unnamed State Department official said it should have been obvious that none of the ideas to discourage Afghans from producing opium would succeed as long as the country remained unstable and global demand for the narcotic stayed high.

  “When a country is at war, there is not much that can be achieved,” the State Department official said.

  * * *

  Between 2002 and 2017, the U.S. government spent $4.5 billion on drug interdiction in Afghanistan—raids, seizures and other law-enforcement operations—with little to show for it.

  The Obama administration more than doubled the number of interdiction operations in the country between 2010 and 2011. Finding opium was easy. The U.S. military and Afghan anti-narcotics officials, with the help of the DEA, confiscated or destroyed tens of thousands of kilos annually. But the seizures amounted to less than 2 percent of what Afghanistan produced each year.

  Washington helped the Afghan government create a judicial system from scratch, building courthouses and prisons, training judges and prosecutors. Yet none of it could compete with Afghanistan’s informal system of justice, which relied on political connections, tribal affiliations and rampant bribery.

  Because drug money contaminated the political system, holding opium barons accountable was almost impossible. U.S. officials methodically compiled dossiers of evidence against suspected kingpins, only to watch their Afghan counterparts sit on the files.

  “The issue is political will,” an unnamed Justice Department official, who served in Kabul during the Obama years, said in a Lessons Learned interview. “After all how many major traffickers have actually been arrested let alone successfully prosecuted?”

  Another senior U.S. official added: “If an Afghan got prosecuted for corruption he had to be incompetent or pissed a lot of people off.”

  The few who were prosecuted could buy their way out. In 2012, Afghan counter-narcotics agents captured Haji Lal Jan Ishaqzai, an opium trafficker who ran a network centered in Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

  Ishaqzai had long operated under the protection of Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s half-brother. The two men lived on the same street in Kandahar and played cards together. But Ishaqzai lost his security blanket in the summer of 2011 when Karzai was assassinated. Around the same time, the Obama administration officially designated Ishaqzai as a foreign narcotics kingpin, subjecting him to U.S. sanctions.

  After Ishaqzai’s arrest, an Afghan court in 2013 convicted and sentenced him to twenty years in prison. But Ishaqzai quickly worked the system. He allegedly bribed multiple judges with millions of dollars to approve his transfer from a prison in Kabul to another detention center in Kandahar. Once on his home turf, he persuaded local court officials to authorize his release in April 2014—nineteen years early. By the time authorities in Kabul found out, he had fled to Pakistan.

  The Afghan government’s unwillingness to punish influential traffickers infuriated U.S. officials, but there was not much they could do. The U.S. military could not legally target drug lords unless there was hard evidence that they represented a direct threat to Americans.

  “In the terror model you kill the leader because he is against the government,” an unnamed senior DEA official said in a Lessons Learned interview. But when it came to battling Afghan drug networks, “you can’t kill the leader [because] he is part of the government patronage system.”

  Because Washington and Kabul lacked an extradition treaty, bringing opium bosses to the United States to stand trial was extremely difficult. In rare cases when kingpins did make appearances in a U.S. courtroom, things still went awry.

  In 2008, U.S. officials lured an alleged Afghan trafficker, 54-year-old Haji Juma Khan, to Jakarta where Indonesian authorities arrested him and extradited him to New York. A federal grand jury indicted Khan, whose network was based in Helmand and Kandahar, on charges of selling massive amounts of heroin and morphine on international markets in support of the Taliban.

  But the Justice Department’s prosecution of Khan immediately ran into obstacles. The drug lord had served as a valuable paid informant for the CIA and the DEA. The agencies had secretly flown him to Washington for meetings two years earlier and allowed him to take a side trip to New York to go sightseeing and shopping.

  When Khan’s defense lawyer raised those connections in open court, a federal judge cut her off and warned her against disclosing classified information. The judge later sealed the legal proceedings, closing the case to the public.

  The Obama administration designated Khan as a foreign drug kingpin in 2009, but his U.S. criminal charges vanished into a black hole. Though he was never convicted, he remained in federal custody for a decade. Federal prison records show he was released in April 2018. U.S. officials never explained their handling of his case.

  As the U.S. military scaled back its presence in Afghanistan between 2011 and 2014, combating the opium trade became even harder. The Obama administration cut spending on agricultural programs and justice reform. Interest waned among U.S. ambassadors and generals, who saw the knotty drug problem as impossible to untie.

  Constant staff turnover at the U.S. embassy in Kabul made matters more difficult. Mid and low-level officials assigned to tackle the issue often had little experience or knowledge of the opium trade. “We spent so much time swatting bad ideas down,” an unnamed former legal attaché said in a Lessons Learned interview.

  In 2016, new embassy staffers began to float some familiar-sounding ideas, like spraying herbicides on poppy fields and eradicating crops with tractors, according to an unnamed State Department contractor who had worked in Afghanistan for years on anti-narcotics programs. Because the war had dragged on for so long, the new staffers didn’t realize those tactics had been tried before, to no avail.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Talking with the Taliban

  Anastasia, a young blonde expatriate wearing a sleeveless black dress and stiletto heels, exhibited perfect posture as she played the baby grand piano. Her honeyed renditions of “Moon River” and “A Whole New World” drifted through the lobby of a five-star hotel in Qatar. Outside the lobby, overlooking the shoreline of the Persian Gulf, women in bikinis savored alcoholic drinks and flirted with bare-chested men in poolside cabanas. Back in Afghanistan, such licentiousness would have incurred the wrath of the mullahs.

  But for two weeks in February and March 2019, a Taliban delegation to Qatar put aside its qualms and peacefully coexisted with the other guests at the Middle Eastern luxury resort. The ascetic Afghans tolerated Anastasia each afternoon when her piano tunes reverberated into their conference room, even though they had outlawed music when they held power and beaten offenders for daring to play such an instrument.

  Inside the conference room, the social dynamics were no less awkward. A dozen bearded and turbaned Taliban leaders sat impassively behind one row of tables. On the other side of the room, their longtime enemies—the Americans—sat behind another row of tables and stared right back.

  The man in the middle of the U.S. lineup was Army Gen. Scott Miller, whom the Taliban had tried to assassinate in Kandahar a few months earlier.

  The Taliban negotiators bore their own personal grudges. Five of them had spent twelve years locked up at Guantánamo Bay, without trial, before the United States released them in a 2014 prisoner swap.

  In the conference room, the Americans hoped both sides could set aside their accrued enmities and work out a deal to stop fighting. Just by meeting with the Taliban, U.S. officials had finally admitted the futility of the seventeen-and-a-half-year war.

  Despite Trump’s public promises to deliver a clear-cut victory, the president had ordered the State Department and the Pentagon to engage in formal, face-to-face negotiations with the Taliban and find a way to extricate U.S. troops from Afghanistan without making it seem like a humiliating defeat.

  U.S. officials had said for a decade that brokering a political settlement between the Afghan government and the insurgents was the only feasible way to end the war. They knew a lasting military defeat of the Taliban was highly unlikely. Unlike al-Qaeda, whose shrinking membership consisted of a few Arabs and other foreign fighters, the Taliban was a Pashtun-led mass movement that represented a significant portion of the Afghan population and continued to gain strength.

  “There has to be some reconciliation,” Army Gen. David Petraeus said during a talk at Harvard University in 2009. “You cannot kill or capture your way out of an industrial-strength insurgency. The question is: How to do that?”

  But the Bush and Obama administrations made only half-hearted attempts to find an answer. They squandered multiple opportunities to reach out to the Taliban when the United States and its allies held maximum leverage. They deferred to the Afghan government and allowed it to paralyze the diplomatic process. They unsuccessfully tried to divide and conquer the Taliban leadership, and insisted on unrealistic conditions for talks.

  The United States missed its first chance to talk peace with the Taliban in 2001, weeks after the war began. The Bush administration, its allies in the Northern Alliance, and the United Nations, excluded the Taliban from the Bonn conference that drew up plans for a new Afghan government and constitution.

  Another opportunity presented itself three years later, when Afghanistan held its first democratic presidential election and more than eight million Afghans turned out to cast ballots. Karzai won easily and the Taliban looked weak after its threats to derail the vote fell flat. But Karzai and the Bush administration failed to press their political advantage and made no concerted effort to reach out to the Taliban leadership.

  Maj. Gen. Eric Olson, the commander of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry Division at the time, said U.S. officials recognized the moment as a strategic turning point for the Afghan government because the Taliban was “on the ropes.” But they vacillated over what to do.

  “We never figured out, I don’t think, how to use military forces to support the reconciliation effort with the Taliban. In the end, that’s got to be the national government who actually does it,” Olson said in an Army oral-history interview. “I don’t ever think we gave the Karzai government either the lead that they needed, or the support that they needed, to make reconciliation go.”

  Maj. Gen. Peter Gilchrist, a British officer who served as the deputy commander of coalition forces from 2004 to 2005, said the military set up a program to entice Taliban fighters to switch sides. But it struggled to obtain guidance from the State Department and approval from Afghanistan’s many political factions.

  “It was an interesting bit of spaghetti to untangle,” Gilchrist said in an Army oral-history interview. “There was no point in doing something that was good with the Pashtuns and not good with the Tajiks or Hazarans.”

  Just coming up with a name for the program was tricky. Afghan officials were allergic to the term “reconciliation” because communists had used it during Soviet times. Eventually, they named it the Strengthening Peace Program. Gilchrist said about 1,000 insurgents enrolled, but the process was painstaking and failed to attract any “of the really key players.”

  After Obama took office, the president said the United States would try again to reach out to the Taliban. “There will also be no peace without reconciliation among former enemies,” he said in a speech in March 2009.

  But the Obama administration defined “reconciliation” narrowly. It created a new version of the Strengthening Peace Program with the Afghan government but limited eligibility to low-level fighters. U.S. officials pointedly excluded Taliban commanders and mullahs, labeling them as “irreconcilables” and saying they had no options except to surrender or die.

  Pentagon officials felt confident taking a hardline approach because Obama and Washington’s NATO allies had agreed to flood the war zone with more troops. They assumed their superior forces would give them the upper hand.

  “As we regain the initiative, we will support an Afghan-led reconciliation process that’s designed to essentially flip the foot soldiers, to bring low- and mid-level leaders to the side of the government,” Michèle Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in April 2009. “If this process is successful, the senior leaders, the irreconcilables, should be more easily isolated and we should be better able to target them.”

  As Obama’s troop surge unfolded, military commanders ratcheted up the tough talk.

  “We’re going to have to break them, irreconcilable from reconcilable,” Marine Gen. James Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee in July 2010. “If they’re irreconcilable, we will neutralize them. If they’re reconcilable, if they’ll put down their weapons, if they’ll work with the government and work within the constitution, then there’s going to be a home for them. All wars come to an end, and we’ve got to make sure we give them a way to end early.”

  U.S. military officials showed little understanding—or curiosity—about what motivated the Taliban to fight. In her congressional testimony, Flournoy asserted that the insurgency was rooted in “socio-economic crises” and predicted the rebellion would fade as the Afghan government became more established.

  Many Afghans despised the Taliban for their brutal tactics. But a substantial percentage of the population—especially among the Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group—sympathized with or actively supported their jihad against the foreign soldiers from the United States and Europe. Their affinity was based more on shared ethnicity, religious beliefs and tribal allegiances than “socio-economic” factors. Unlike the Afghan security forces, which were beset by desertion and corruption, the Taliban had no trouble recruiting fighters who believed in the insurgents’ cause.

  A few Obama administration officials wanted to push harder for genuine peace talks with the Taliban. Among them were Richard Holb
rooke, the State Department envoy, and Barnett Rubin, the academic expert on Afghanistan who maintained unofficial contacts with Taliban figures.

  “Our argument was that we only have the insurgency because we don’t have a political settlement. And if we don’t address it, the military won’t be able to,” Rubin said in a Lessons Learned interview. But he said officials at the Pentagon and the CIA saw little reason to negotiate with the Taliban and defined reconciliation as “we’ll be nice to people who surrender.”

  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also resisted pursuing talks with the Taliban. Clinton feared that any attempt to bring the Taliban back into the fold could jeopardize the progress the Afghan government had made on human rights—women’s rights in particular. According to Rubin, Clinton didn’t want to be seen as soft on the Taliban as she contemplated another run for the presidency.

  “Women are [a] very important constituency for her and she couldn’t sell making a bargain with the Taliban,” Rubin said. “If you want to be the first woman president you cannot leave any hint or doubt that you’re not the toughest person on national security.”

  But Clinton and other heavyweights in Obama’s cabinet had other reservations. They viewed the Taliban and al-Qaeda as inseparable and doubted the Taliban would ever cut all ties with bin Laden’s network.

  * * *

  In public, the Obama administration portrayed their reconciliation programs for Taliban foot soldiers as methodical and productive. But Army officers who were directly involved described them as slapdash and ill-conceived.

  Army Maj. Ulf Rota, a planning officer who served at U.S. and NATO headquarters in Kabul from 2010 to 2011, said a military bureaucracy called the Force Reintegration Cell oversaw the process. The cell was supposed to provide job training to former insurgents in exchange for promises never to take up arms against the government again. But he said program organizers rarely followed through.