by David Loyn
This is not a failed nation but a nation that has been failed. Afghans yearn for a different life, proud of a national cricket team that now plays at the highest international level and a soccer team whose victory over India in the South Asian Football Federation Championship in 2013 led to a wild night of celebration. One foreign correspondent encountered a group of Tajik youths whose vehicle was in a headlong collision with Pashtun youths. Both sides were armed, and any other night, there would have been a fight. But the night of the soccer success, they were all Afghans and shook hands instead.
The day before the Afghan soccer league final in 2017, there was a suicide bomb at the national stadium. The final still went ahead—the first floodlit evening game in the history of the country, and crowds, undeterred by the threat of violence, filled the stadium to capacity. A massive national flag was carried across the pitch by soldiers—the black, red, and green tricolor rippling in the evening breeze. This is a nation proud of its flag, army, sports teams, and a new place in the world not mediated by warlords. A video of a well-known female singer set to pictures of the evening game had a massive social media following. She sang the national anthem, which is a recitation of the fourteen acknowledged tribal groups.
This disparate nation, with its many tribes, and complex customs is however a nation,
This land is Afghanistan—It is the pride of every Afghan
The land of peace, the land of the sword—Its sons are all brave
This is the country of every tribe—Land of Baluch, and Uzbeks
Pashtoons, and Hazaras—Turkman and Tajiks with them,
Arabs and Gojars, Pamirian, Nooristanis
Barahawi, and Qizilbash—Also Aimaq, and Pashaye
This Land will shine for ever—Like the sun in the blue sky
In the chest of Asia—It will remain as the heart forever.
The Taliban’s hold on the nation, though, was profound, and it is a failure of the foreign and military policy of the U.S. and other Western powers that this remains the case. Most of the mistakes were made at the beginning, and the commanders who came later were handed a war that was hard to end because of these failures.
Lacking a doctrine of intervention, obsessed that there should be no nation-building, America was drawn into a long war by the lure of a quick victory. Why was there no course correction? Barbara Tuchman in The March of Folly would see this as the nature of humanity—when in a hole, it is very hard to stop digging.15 Even the searching inquiry by the incoming Obama government that took all of 2009 did not call a pause, or plan for the longer term, but instead announced a surge of troops, more foreign advisers, more aid—it was always the same answer. And optimism bias on the part of those writing reports for consumption at home meant they tended to ignore inconvenient facts.16 The Washington Papers, more than six hundred interviews by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, released in 2019, showed this clearly. With hindsight, many said they had always tended to put a more optimistic line on official reports than they felt. It was never going to be easy, but it was made harder by mistakes at the start. “There is, at the end of the day, very little that is quick, easy, or inexpensive in the conduct of a comprehensive civil-military counterinsurgency campaign in a context that features the myriad challenges of Afghanistan,” said General Petraeus, “though it sure would have helped had we done much more early on than we did.”
I have had a ringside seat on the events in this book, as a reporter with the BBC, and later (full disclosure) as a U.S.-funded Afghan government strategic communications adviser. I always found it surprising that Americans—whether military or media—saw this as the “Middle East,” putting Afghanistan in the same basket as Iraq and Iran. It was a category error. Afghanistan is the gateway between Central and South Asia, a nation struggling to find a new role in a hostile region. Lumping it together with Iraq in the war on terror was a mistake from the start. Afghanistan deserves better.
PHASE ONE
2001–2006
THE DIE IS CAST
1
NOT BUILDING A NATION
We are in and out of there in a hurry.
—General John M. “Jack” Keane, vice chief of the army, 2002
“NO MORE BONDSTEELS”
September 11, 2001, Brigadier General Stanley A. McChrystal, chief of staff of XVIII Airborne Corps, was on a routine practice parachute drop at Pope, the airfield at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. They were hooked up and ready to jump when the loadmaster leaned over to tell the commander of XVIII Airborne, Lieutenant General Daniel K. McNeill, that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. McNeill is a compact, solid, square, physically tough, all-American soldier with a reputation for sticking to the rules. Leading from the front, he would be first man out of the plane. “All I could think of was some pilot not doing right.” They went on through their countdown and were about a minute away from the jump when low clouds prevented a clear enough view of the drop zone. They remained standing and hooked up, and set off around again until visibility improved enough for a jump.
The aircraft door was already open for the second run, and McNeill had yelled, “All okay, jumpmaster!” meaning his first stick of jumpers was ready, each having tapped the shoulder of the soldier in front to signal he was hooked on, when the loadmaster leaned over again to say a second plane had hit the World Trade Center. It was clear this was no accident.
The role of XVIII Airborne was to be ready to deploy anywhere in the world at any time; they knew they would be called on. The pilot planned to abort the exercise and fly back, but McNeill said the quickest way to the office was down, and jumped out of the plane. McChrystal was close behind him. By the time they hit the ground, mobile phone calls were blocked as the United States entered a new age. “Our feet landed on a nation at war,”1 said McChrystal. Back at Fort Bragg, Colonel John F. Campbell, the commander of 1st Brigade, 82nd Airborne—the main fighting element in the division—was just coming out of the showers after physical training. Seeing what was happening on TV, he yelled to his sergeant major, and they dressed in the office, watching the events unfold. Campbell, McNeill, and McChrystal would all command at the highest level in the long war that was to come.
McChrystal has sharp features and piercing blue eyes. He is a good listener, with an innovative relentless intellect. He cultivated a mystique for ascetic commitment to duty, pushing himself and his troops hard. Eight months after that parachute drop, he sat at the center of a web of makeshift plywood tables with military-grade laptops open around the hangar at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan—a world he would re-create time and again, deploying abroad for all but seven months of the next seven years. The first base at Bagram was the most austere, deliberately so, for U.S. troops were not staying. That, at least, was the plan. The small headquarters staff, just three hundred at the start, were not set up for war fighting. The way McChrystal saw it, “It wasn’t clear whether there was any war left.”2
Until their arrival in 2002, Bagram was an unconventional base, its culture determined by the shaggy beards and irregular clothing of the small bands of special operators, who had landed soon after 9/11, and were still chasing al-Qaeda, “bear-hunting” they called it. McNeill changed all that. Uniforms had to be worn and officers saluted. “How many people were killed at the Pentagon?” he asked anyone who opposed the change. “We haven’t stopped saluting at the Pentagon.”3 He was given one simple order for Afghanistan: “No more Bondsteels,” a reference to the enormous permanent base in Kosovo, housing seven thousand U.S. troops, built in 1999 after Kosovo’s independence struggle with Serbia.
Troops were housed in tents, sleeping bags covered by the fine talcum-powder dust that blew into everything across the shattered landscape—rudimentary accommodation for a temporary mission. Before first light every day, lines of fifty to a hundred men and women formed for the few showers. The only intact building was the yellow-painted square stump of the control tower, and even that was damaged in the last stand
of the Taliban. The airstrip was crudely patched with matted metal strips, left by Soviet forces after their invasion in 1979 at the start of Afghanistan’s long wars. They were not the first foreign forces in the area. Alexander the Great’s winter quarters on his way to conquer India were nearby at Charikar, in the harsh splendor of the Shomali Plain, between Kabul and the forbidding barrier of the Hindu Kush mountain range to the north, flanked by endless snow-covered peaks to the frontier with Pakistan to the east.
The Taliban held the airfield during their five years of rule. Just north of it, broken shipping containers marked the front line between the 90 percent of the country under the Taliban, and the small area in the northeast that held out against them. War made this a dangerous landscape. A couple of years before the American arrival, while walking with Taliban fighters to that front line, I heard a small explosion, like a firework, and a farmer emerged from the bushes, his leg shredded by an antipersonnel mine near the path we had just walked down.
Afghanistan was to be a short war. “We are in and out of there in a hurry,”4 General Jack Keane, the army vice chief of staff, told McNeill. General Tommy Franks, commander at Central Command (CENTCOM) in Tampa, Florida, was obsessed by the Soviet experience in Afghanistan—more than 600,000 men, armored divisions bogged down for a decade, before an ignominious departure costing 15,000 Soviet dead. “There’s nothing to be gained,” he told Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “by blundering around those mountains and gorges with armor battalions chasing a lightly armed enemy.”5 Rumsfeld set the initial ceiling at 5,200 U.S. troops.6 He was pioneering a new way of doing war: massive use of precision airpower with special operators as the only boots on the ground. In and out quickly, and definitely no nation-building.
This meant plans were improvised in a way McChrystal felt “dangerously ad hoc.”7 The mission needed many more troops to succeed.8 Because of the troop cap, they had to leave behind some logistics staff in Uzbekistan, so they were stretched on the ground.9 But already by the time they arrived in 2002, the Afghan war was seen as “mission accomplished”—a sideshow while the Bush administration concentrated on Iraq. Only half of XVIII Airborne’s headquarters staff came to the Afghan theater, the others staying behind at their home base, Fort Bragg, to prepare for the impending war against Saddam Hussein. Franks was asked to prepare an Iraq war plan as early as November 2001, before the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar in the south had fallen.10
McNeill saw that Iraq was consuming all available oxygen in Washington in his only meeting with President Bush during this first command in Afghanistan. He had little notice, first briefing the defense secretary and senior generals. “That’s fine,” Rumsfeld said. “Keep it to forty minutes when you do it for the president tomorrow.” All Bush wanted to know when they met was whether McNeill could keep a lid on Afghanistan so he could concentrate on Iraq. When Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, visited Bagram and found officers talking about building for the longer term in Afghanistan, he told them, “You don’t get it. Iraq is what we’re after.” Afghanistan was to be “an economy of force operation.”11 Across the administration, and at CENTCOM, where it was treated as part of the same war, Iraq already had the best people working on it, a year before the Iraq war started.12
This meant that instead of a force large enough to provide stability as well as firepower, Afghanistan had a half-strength headquarters with an unclear mandate. Ironically, a policy designed to be short term meant the war was prolonged by many years. If America were willing to stay in such locations for five years, knowing it might be up to ten, that would be far better than believing “We are in and out in a hurry” and then staying twenty years.
Most of all in those early days, the forces who arrived in Afghanistan lacked knowledge. McChrystal recognized that for Western diplomats and military forces, “Afghanistan was a maze of mirrors, and we too easily framed actions through our own lenses.”13 The belief that if the Taliban were removed, somehow order would be restored without further stabilization forces, was the fatal flaw in Rumsfeld’s light-footprint plan—and the main reason this became America’s longest war. The plan required a local partner, and those backed with cash and weapons by the small teams of CIA officers and special operators who dropped into the country after 9/11 were the very forces whose criminal excesses in the early 1990s had provoked the rise of the Taliban in the first place.
The American intervention did not promote an anti-Taliban opposition with widespread support. Rather, it took a side in a vicious civil war. The Taliban had brought a reign of terror on Afghanistan, imposed a social order that restricted women, enforced ignorance, and harbored international terrorists. They were small-minded and brutish. But they were not an alien force from outer space. They were formed in reaction to the chaos and banditry of mujahideen fighters, who fought each other after defeating Soviet invaders in the 1980s, backed by America and Saudi Arabia.
Before the Taliban, mujahideen warlords destroyed much of Kabul in vicious street-fighting, including random attacks with rockets. And it was not the Taliban who first insisted on burkas being worn by women but these mujahideen.14 They became America’s allies in the first conflict after 9/11.
THE WAR IN THE NORTH: OCTOBER–DECEMBER 2001
In the makeshift office in a mud-walled house for Operation Jawbreaker, the first CIA move into northeast Afghanistan after 9/11, were four large cardboard boxes. “They became a bench to sit on or a place to rest a coffee cup or water bottle,” wrote the team leader, Gary Schroen. “They also proved to be an ideal spot to stretch out for a nap or relax and read.”15 Handwritten on the duct tape sealing each box was a figure of around $2 million. Bills totaling a further $2 million were kept in a nondescript black suitcase. This was the second delivery of cash a month after the arrival of the Jawbreaker team who landed in Afghanistan just two weeks after 9/11. They had already burned through $3 million, handed out to potential allies in the fight against the Taliban. On the night of October 7, they sat on the roof watching “a bright yellow flash in the clouds in the direction of Kabul.” Schroen pulled out cigars and handed them round. The bombing had begun.16
There was no one better than Schroen to reestablish links with the mujahideen leadership. He had been the last station chief in Kabul before the embassy closed in 1989, and had seen Ahmed Shah Massoud, the main leader of the anti-Taliban opposition, as recently as March 2001. Massoud said he was distancing himself from some of the worse elements of the old mujahideen to build a broader-based political alliance. His death, at the hands of two Arabs with a bomb in a TV camera two days before 9/11, deprived the anti-Taliban opposition of one of its most effective commanders. It was Massoud’s hold of the narrow sliver of land in the northeast, from Bagram airfield to the northern Tajik border, that gave the ground war against the Taliban a launchpad. The Jawbreaker team set up base there.
Instead of Massoud, America was faced with his replacement, a more sinister manipulator of raw power, Muhammad Qasim Fahim, a stocky bull of a man with a neck as wide as his head. Under the rolled-wool hat, the pakhool, he always wore, Fahim had an unbroken line of thick eyebrows across his forehead, and a squat broken nose. He was known as Marshal Fahim, Afghanistan’s only field marshal, and was a big backer of buzkashi, the wild Afghan game where horsemen fight for possession of the carcass of a calf. Schroen gave him $1 million at the beginning, as well as large sums to other commanders.
Fahim led an unruly coalition of factions known as the Northern Alliance. There was a dispute within the CIA over how much backing to give them. On the ground, Schroen was impatient for progress and wanted relentless bombing of Taliban positions to assist Northern Alliance operations. But the station chief in Islamabad, Robert Grenier, argued that if Fahim’s Tajik troops, with Uzbeks and other allied tribes, seized Kabul, it would unite fighters from the Pashtun south and east against them, making it harder to tackle the Taliban. He thought the Taliban could be fractured, allowing negotiation with “moderates.”
&
nbsp; Grenier had another concern. Strengthening the Northern Alliance would upset Pakistan. Until 9/11, Pakistan gave little help to the U.S., even after al-Qaeda threats became real with the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa. Only two days before the attacks of 9/11, General Mahmud Ahmad, the head of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, was in Washington telling the Americans they had misunderstood the Taliban, who were Afghan nationalists and no danger to women’s rights. After lunch with the ISI chief, CIA director George Tenet wrote, “The guy was immovable when it came to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. And bloodless, too.”17
The attacks on America changed all that. The military dictator Pervez Musharraf agreed to all of America’s demands, and the ISI did make a few arrests of prominent Taliban, although not touching their massive support structure across Pakistan. The U.S. needed Pakistan as an ally for overflights, landing rights, and access to bases, although it was unreliable, duplicitous, and occasionally dangerous as a partner. Grenier recommended the U.S. should work with Pakistan to build a broad-based “government-in-exile,” leave the Taliban front line north of Kabul untouched, “and go slowly with our bombing over the next several weeks,”18 until they had a government ready to take over.
