by David Loyn
There were other national myths too that informed the American way of war. Officers taught history at West Point and Annapolis, living in a nation with a right to bear arms and memory of the minutemen are far more likely than their European counterparts to encourage local militias in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. European officers were uncomfortable with the idea and preferred to rely instead on Weber’s construct, that to have legitimacy, the state must have a monopoly on the use of force. But Europeans too have their own myths that defined the way they operated. Areas of Afghanistan under Italian control felt more stable than others because deals and accommodations, including payments, would be made with local power brokers.
German troops, schooled since 1945 not to make war, were wary of using force and limited by caveats that restricted their action. The consequence was that when they did need to act—to stop a fuel tanker seized by the Taliban—they could not go out on the ground to investigate since they were restricted from traveling at night. Instead, they called in an air strike, killing dozens of Afghan villagers who had gathered to siphon off the fuel as the tanker was stuck in a riverbed.
British forces were the second largest in the coalition in Afghanistan for most of the war, and while they claimed to be as deployable as Americans, in practice it was more complicated. There were effective caveats on their movement too. General David Petraeus found himself unable to deliver on what he thought a relatively simple request by the U.S. Marine two-star who commanded in Helmand in 2010 to move British troops into two villages. He thought it a tactical decision that did not even need a headquarters sign-off, but it ended up the subject of a late-night conversation with Prime Minister David Cameron, visiting Kabul at the time. British troops went into Iraq and Afghanistan with a confident swagger, believing that centuries of imperial experience made them uniquely well suited to do the complex work required. They were sure of their preeminence in counterinsurgency, buoyed by folk memories of success in Malaya, Dhofar, and Northern Ireland as well as more recent operations in Bosnia and Kosovo. In fact, the U.S. Army was a far more impressive organization in learning lessons and adapting to the new wars.
But they learned from a standing start. Victory was made more difficult by a lack of clarity of how to do military intervention, which led to improvisation throughout. For two decades after Vietnam, U.S. forces had reverted to training for massive armored warfare divisions to take on Russia. McChrystal’s father, Colonel Herbert J. McChrystal Jr., served in Vietnam, and McChrystal watched the lessons learned in that conflict being thrown out as the army was remade “culturally, morally, equipment-wise” in the 1970s to face Russia again—constantly exercising with heavy armor configured for symmetrical warfare. Nonconventional conflicts were dismissively known in the jargon as Military Operations Other Than War—the acronym was pronounced moot-wah. “Real men don’t do moot-wah,” said General John Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1993 to 1997.7
The bloodbath in Iraq that began in 2003, and the collapse of Libya into chaos in 2011—both wrought by U.S.-led attacks—laid bare the myth that the U.S. arriving as a “liberator” would be enough. Could it have been different in Afghanistan? It was always going to be hard. Karl Eikenberry, who uniquely served in Afghanistan in senior roles on the military and civilian side, twice in uniform and then as ambassador, clearly defined the twin challenges. Firstly, Pakistan’s support for the Taliban; and secondly, the mercurial President Karzai. “It was not at all clear what sport Karzai was playing, or indeed whether he was even in the same stadium as the Americans.”8 These were precisely the same problems that had bedeviled Vietnam—support for the insurgents across a porous border and an unreliable partner in government.
In Afghanistan, by the time there was a counterinsurgency strategy in place, the U.S. and its allies faced a more intractable problem than when the Taliban fell in 2001. The mistakes were made at the start, when commanders found themselves making it up as they went along, with little understanding by the politicians who had sent them there.
ILLUSION OF VICTORY
The size of the invasion force was too small to stabilize the country. The Bush administration had no doubt about their capacity to take Afghanistan with a small force, but misunderstood what they had done. In April 2002, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice declared the Taliban “eliminated,” and in July, George W. Bush was already moving on to Iraq, job done: “In Afghanistan we defeated the Taliban regime, but that was just the first step.”
Victory was an illusion. Airpower did most of the work in defeating the Taliban, with only a small number of special operations forces in support on the ground, but with no follow-up. General David Petraeus saw this as the founding mistake of the war. “We had not fully exploited the considerable opportunities available in the early years after the invasion in late 2001, before the Taliban and other insurgent and extremist elements regrouped, and returned to Afghanistan, while maintaining sanctuaries in Pakistan. And after they began to return, we always seemed to be shooting behind the target.” After the initial operation, the main aim of the war remained the pursuit of the remnants of al-Qaeda, rather than securing Afghanistan. Just as in Iraq two years later, when the country imploded as the U.S. did not replace Saddam Hussein’s security apparatus with anything in the early months, so in Afghanistan there was a naive belief that somehow, with the Taliban out of the way, order would emerge.
The policy was a fundamental mistake and prolonged the war by many years. There could have been a different outcome with a larger international force at the start, with zero tolerance of corruption, configured to hold the line and prevent the return of the warlords, and not resistant to nation-building. But neither America nor the allies who rallied round its flag after 9/11 had the capacity, will, knowledge, or forces to fill the gap long enough to stabilize a country.
The kind of force needed would ideally have included troops or civil order police trained in urban stabilization; coast guards to manage the frontier, the main source of legitimate revenue through customs dues, and a potential source of instability through incursion; more ISR assets (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance—the “eye in the sky”); water engineers to fix the shattered irrigation systems that brought snowmelt down from the Hindu Kush; electrical engineers to fix the power grid; liaison units that could join up civilian and military efforts across government and with other international governments; police mentors to ensure the Afghan police did not prey on the people; lawyers to stand up the justice system; large cargo planes, to move these resources around; engineers to quickly restore bridges and do basic road repairs; and so on and so on.
This force, perhaps twenty-five thousand strong, would need protection and the capacity to project a threat, so some paratroopers would be needed, and all of these specialist forces would have the capacity for offensive and defensive operations. Ideally, the core would be units from several nations, with a headquarters equipped and trained to manage international forces engaged in stabilization.
Instead of delivering security themselves, the small initial international force at the start armed and funded warlords opposed to the Taliban. It is not hindsight to criticize this rehabilitation of a warlord elite. A number of foreign correspondents and analysts who had spent time in Afghanistan before 9/11 were surprised at the support for the old warlords, knowing that they were the very people whose corruption and banditry during the civil war of the early 1990s provoked the rise of the Taliban.
The term warlord refers to those who rose up in the 1980s, financed mainly by U.S. and Saudi cash, to defeat the Soviet invasion, and then fought among themselves over the spoils of war. Their return to center stage was not inevitable. They were in awe of U.S. power, and were surprised themselves. They expected to face war crimes trials; instead, they were paid to run private militias. The Afghan president Hamid Karzai and Zalmay Khalilzad, the influential U.S. ambassador in the early years (and later peace envoy), were known as the “
two Jesuses” for bringing the warlords back to life.9
The troops who came into Afghanistan did not immediately identify the type of war that was being fought or the nature of the country. Not only were there not enough troops, but they were not trained for the task. They lacked language skills, understanding of the country, and the ability to operate to make the population the center of gravity of the campaign—the key to successful stabilization.
And when more troops did arrive, they were not necessarily equipped for the task. Managing an unwieldy coalition was another factor in why Afghanistan was so hard to stabilize. Those national caveats restricted the capacity of commanders to employ force in the flexible way they would have wanted. Asked how many nations had troops on the ground that he could deploy anywhere in the country, General David McKiernan put up the fingers of one hand. Many were willing to commit troops to the headquarters and no further, and the numbers in the offices at ISAF swelled out of control, up to 1,200 troops on different rotations, so teams faced a constant churn of different people.10 General Dan McNeill exploded in a videoconference with Defense Secretary Robert Gates to Washington, “Please no more flags, sir,” referring to the dozens of flags across an Afghan map on the screen showing international units. “Unless it’s a critical capability like helicopter support, we don’t need every country on the map sending a dozen soldiers on four-month rotations so they can tell you that they have contributed to the war … If I can be frank, Mr. Secretary, it’s becoming more of a burden than it’s worth to us out here.”11
One part of the campaign where ISAF was soundly defeated by the Taliban was in information warfare—a significant failure given the preeminence of strategic communications in modern military thinking.12 The U.S.-led mission did not communicate itself well to troop-contributing nations, let alone outside, while after 2001, the Taliban were transformed, with messages in three languages across social media, in contrast to their early days when they boycotted all electronic communication. Videos celebrating suicide bombings were slickly produced and widely distributed. The Taliban lied fast and often, while NATO was slow to catch up with the truth.
And beyond the blast walls of military bases, the international intervention itself was not well understood by the donors who poured billions of dollars into the country. There was too much of the wrong sort of aid. This was a reverse problem to the security issue, where there were too few of the wrong sort of troops. This failure was fundamental. Too much aid went outside the state—to international contractors and NGOs. A senior World Bank official talked of an “aid juggernaut”13 descending on the country, leaving nothing behind. It was as if all that was constructed was elaborate scaffolding. And when the music stopped in 2014 and aid programs wound down at the same time as the troop presence—as they took away the scaffolding they did not leave a building behind.
The large international NGO community built a parallel state. They paid higher salaries to locals than the actual state could, so well-qualified Afghans who returned from abroad found they could earn more as a driver or security guard for an international body than in a senior job in the Afghan civil service. This aid failure made security harder to deliver.
There were deep cultural gulfs across the international presence in Kabul, whose people were drawn from different tribes. Military contractors would stride around the base bearing sidearms, confident in their red-state worldview, keen on making quick impacts on the ground, harnessing development with security, with easy money to spend from the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP*) funds. In the embassy next door, USAID officials worried about the stray cats, tended to vote Democrat, and be unarmed. They knew that stabilizing Afghanistan would take longer than the timescale of the quick-impact projects demanded by soldiers.
The cultural gulf extended into how they saw the challenge, as if using different calendars. Development officials like to say that while they plan for three years, the military think in terms of thirty days, while for diplomats it’s thirty years. “To bring us all down to thirty days is not fair to the country,” said one senior worker at USAID in Kabul. “Yes, I want to see immediate results, but when they don’t fit into each other, we end up with a bunch of ad hoc half-a-megawatt diesel generators all over the country with no fuel.” To her, the large sums available to U.S. commanders through CERP, not coordinated with other development interventions, were “ridiculous overnight spending.”
Aid delivered with short-term horizons fueled corruption, and from the beginning, there was a failure to establish the rule of law and institutions accountable to the people that might have checked it. There was a belief that freedom from the Taliban would somehow deliver virtue without any of the checks and balances built into Western systems. Elections alone were not enough without building the institutions of a functioning democracy—courts, legislatures, a civil service—financed by taxation. The system remained dependent on international subsidies. Without institutional architecture giving accountability to the people, elections entrenched the elites in power, a powerful driving force of corruption and instability at the heart of the state. The view that this was a binary war—the government against the “Taliban”—was misplaced. Misplaced aid instead facilitated the rise of a corrupt elite, formed not just from the old warlords but a new generation of business leaders living outside the law, many wrapped into the country’s biggest earner, the opium poppy.
Not all aid was wasted. There was a fundamental restructuring of the Afghan government, building of schools and hospitals, and capacity building that delivered new generations of professional people and government officials. But getting the right programs started late. One leading British official said, “We hit on the right strategy in Afghanistan as our patience began to run out.”14
Afghanistan is in a tough neighborhood that includes China, Iran, and Pakistan—with Russian influence bearing down across Central Asia to the north, just as it did during the days of the nineteenth-century Great Game, when Afghanistan was crushed between Russia and British India. Russia has seen the last two decades as a chance to take revenge for American support of the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s. And as has been seen in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is not squeamish about having a bleeding wound close to his border. He would fund the Taliban if that’s what it took to give America trouble. America’s failure to normalize relations with Iran has had consequences for its conduct of campaigns in both of Iran’s neighbors, Iraq and Afghanistan. And throughout the long war, Pakistan wanted a compliant Taliban on the other side of the porous northwest frontier military, so continues to support them. “They were not our allies,” McNeill said of Pakistan simply. “They were actively working against us.”
A key political failure contributing to lost victory in the long war was unwillingness to talk to the Taliban. At the beginning they were willing to surrender. But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld did not want that. And it would take a long time before the realization emerged that victory in this complex insurgency would not be as simple as winning battles. After a failed attempt at a peace process for a couple of years from 2010, it was not until 2019 that President Trump’s emissary Zalmay Khalilzad opened direct talks with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar. And by then, they were entrenched across large swathes of the Afghan countryside.
AFGHANISTAN BEYOND THE BLAST WALLS
North of the international military headquarters lie 1970s concrete houses, with large gardens, in the symmetrically gridded streets of Wazir Akbar Khan, where many of the streets are now closed to normal traffic by checkpoints mounted to protect the new elites who live there. And to the northwest, on the steep slopes of TV mountain, named for the aerials on its summit, thousands of new houses have been built for the millions of people who have poured into Kabul since 2001. They face constant scrutiny from the large white blimp that sits over the city most days, the eye in the sky that watches through cameras that can see everything, vacuuming electronic material from phones and tablets. But the international c
ommunity that can see and hear so much knows so little.
There is a new world out there not represented by the old warlord elites or the Taliban but by a population where at least 70 percent are under twenty-five. In an unsettling reminder of the ever-present threat of violence, in 2015, a young woman called Farkhunda was beaten to death, and her body set on fire after an argument with a seller of charms in a mosque. Tragically, it was Farkhunda who was arguing a more orthodox Islamic view, complaining that the man was selling false hopes with his charms. But he was a man, and when he appealed to men outside the mosque, claiming she had violated the Quran, a wave swept in and destroyed the life of this ambitious, principled woman. In the days of outrage and grief that followed, it was a new young civil society who led the protests and filled Afghan social media with the rare openly anti-Islamic statements. The following Friday, when traditional Islamic leaders, including the ayatollah of Kabul, sought to regain the initiative by holding an open-air meeting, they had only a half-hour slot in bookings, which included street theater groups and other young nontraditional protests. It is a new Afghanistan when mullahs are lining up with street actors to take their turn.
Farther north in Kabul, beyond the airport, in apartment blocks that have sprung up since 9/11, a new generation live more or less as young professional people do in the West, not committed to arranged marriages but looking to a different world and sharing a glass of wine behind locked gates. They meet not in the traditional kebab shops, where women are never seen without their husbands, but in new cafés and bowling alleys, and their music and lifestyle is transforming urban life. An inspiring art organization, Artlords, has pioneered a simple stencil technique to cover the monotonous lines of blast walls with color. One of their most arresting projects was to paint a single massive eye on the wall, with a slogan saying that corruption would be found out. The failed aid, constant presence of foreign troops, threat of the Taliban, and old warlord elites hold no interest for this new generation.
