by David Loyn
Watching Kabul from his dusty bunker in the embassy, Dobbins saw the takeover by the militias as inevitable, as there were no international boots on the ground. This was unprecedented in his long experience. “The idea that Afghans could adequately secure their country after a twenty-three-year civil war struck me as naive and irresponsible.” He had been the senior U.S. representative in Clinton-era interventions—Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, and Somalia—and had never previously encountered “a mind-set that excluded local security as a post-conflict mission for U.S. forces.”42
Fahim maintained that his troops should still be able to occupy all the military land they held. After all, he argued, when they met over a large map of the city, Dobbins could not be suggesting that the Afghan army should abandon the Bala Hissar, the ancient citadel of Kabul.43 There was an uncomfortable atmosphere in the room as Fahim’s power grab was against the international agreement that “all military units” should be withdrawn from Kabul. For residents of the capital, Fahim did not represent the Afghan army; he was just another warlord. They had suffered as he fought the rival warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar for control of the Bala Hissar in the early 1990s, before the Taliban came.
Fahim’s takeover was inevitable, as there were no international troops to stop him even if there had been the political will. International amnesia about the years before the Taliban was total. The Bonn meeting that nominated Hamid Karzai to head an interim Afghan administration described in unusually florid and sentimental terms those in the pre-Taliban government as brave Afghan mujahideen “who over the years have defended the independence, territorial integrity and national unity of the country and have played a major role in the struggle against terrorism and oppression, and whose sacrifice has now made them both heroes of jihad and champions of peace, stability and reconstruction of their beloved homeland, Afghanistan.” The mujahideen president before the Taliban, Burhanuddin Rabbani, was allowed to return to the palace ahead of the handover to Karzai’s interim administration.
This was a one-sided interpretation of a vicious civil war. The mujahideen had indeed defended Afghanistan and successfully repelled the 1979 Soviet invasion, taking a decade, and at a cost of more than a million lives, an extraordinary achievement. But with the Soviet forces defeated, they fought among themselves until pushed back by the Taliban. Far from being universally acclaimed as the beloved leader of a nation, cruelly deposed by the Taliban, Professor Rabbani was a deeply divisive figure—an Egyptian-educated Islamist, close to the Muslim Brotherhood, who played a significant role in the radicalization and spread of extremist thinking among Kabul students in the 1970s. He initially fled the country for Pakistan in 1973 in a crackdown against Islamists, emerging as the leader of one of the mujahideen factions after the Soviet invasion in 1979.
After the Soviet military withdrawal in 1989, it took the mujahideen three years to oust the Najibullah government, which remained propped up by Soviet money. Fighting between rival mujahideen groups took precedence over defeating Najibullah. When they finally took Kabul in 1992, they signed the Peshawar Accord, which installed Rabbani as interim president, after an initial two-month transition under another leader. The aim was a revolving presidency, with each of the mujahideen factions having their turn. The accord stated Rabbani would hand over power four months later. For clarity, the agreement read, “The above mentioned period will not be extended even by a day.” In 2001, he remained “president” only because vicious fighting between the mujahideen factions that broke out soon after the agreement made any hand-over impossible and destroyed much of Kabul. Rabbani’s troops were as bad as any in this wanton destruction.
The Russians had hardly touched Kabul during their occupation, but the city was shattered amid rape and lawlessness in the civil war years in the early 1990s in fighting between those described at Bonn as “champions of peace.” I first came to Kabul at this time, sleeping in the basement with a shovel, as there was random rocketing and we might need to dig ourselves out at any time. Fahim’s occupation of the Bala Hissar reminded Kabul residents of those dark days.
ISAF IN KABUL
President Bush made opposition to prolonged military intervention part of his election campaign in 2000, when he ruled out “having some kind of nation-building corps from America.”44 His first national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, wrote contemptuously about the use of U.S. soldiers to protect children on their way to school in the Balkans. She said the U.S. military should not engage in nation-building. “It is not a civilian police force. It is not a political referee. And it is most certainly not designed to build a civilian society.”45
This was moral failure. Military intervention is a drastic step that comes with the obligation to manage its consequences. After the fall of the Taliban, there were interventions made by troops on the ground that had a profound impact, altering what happened next. But unlike the Iraq war two years later, there was no hesitancy over the Afghan intervention, no “Pottery Barn Rule” for Afghanistan—the shorthand used by the media to explain Secretary of State Colin Powell’s caution over war against Saddam Hussein: “You broke it, you own it.” Instead of shouldering the responsibility to deliver stability, the decision to support the old warlords was, literally, irresponsible. It was also shortsighted—creating conditions that meant there were still U.S. troops on the ground nearly twenty years later.
Politicians resolutely opposed to nation-building missed the history of America. Stabilization is after all the norm not the exception. Only eleven of the hundreds of conflicts since the foundation of the Republic have been “conventional” state-on-state wars—the others were all stabilization operations. In the 1990s, the decade before 9/11, the U.S. was engaged in a stabilization role somewhere in the world on average every two years.46 This was acknowledged in the manual that emerged to deal with the insurgencies of Afghanistan and Iraq. “Contrary to popular belief, the military history of the United States is one characterized by stability operations, interrupted by distinct episodes of major combat.”47 The new manual came out in 2006, but by then, the challenges were far greater than at the start. Forest fires were raging in both Afghanistan and Iraq that would be hard to extinguish, and with different policies may not have been lit in the first place.
While political understanding of the stabilization task may have been absent, there were some in the military who could see that both the shape and scale of the commitment were wrong from the start. General David McKiernan, who commanded the advance into Iraq in 2003 and would later command in Afghanistan, believed that the failure to mobilize the right-size force at the start after regime change in both countries was a fundamental mistake. His sweep across Iraq—one thousand miles in sixteen days, the longest and fastest armored assault ever seen—was an outstanding success in delivering its task of defeating the Iraqi army and ending the rule of Saddam Hussein. But his armored divisions were not configured for stabilization, nor followed up with a different force. There was no plan for what to do on the second day after the fall of Saddam Hussein. McKiernan could see that the same mistakes had been made in Afghanistan:
The argument that I’m not sure has been accepted among political leadership is, sometimes it takes more ground presence after major kinetic operations, than it did during the major kinetic operations. When you want to control the environment, when you want to protect population, when you want to restore services, when you want to protect infrastructure, when you want to get basic conditions, and some form of government back on its feet … somebody has to do it. Usually, those are people in a uniform for an extended period of time until security conditions allow it to be transferred to a civilian presence.
The Bonn agreement approved an international security force for Afghanistan, but the Pentagon watered this down to rename it the International Security Assistance Force, to avoid any suggestion that international troops would provide security themselves.48 And so ISAF was born, amid U.S. opposition to any extension of its initial mandate to patrol i
n Kabul. The U.S. military mission at Bagram in Operation Enduring Freedom remained focused on chasing the remnants of al-Qaeda and the Taliban leadership. There was even a question over whether they would come to the aid of ISAF troops if in trouble. The UK was the most enthusiastic nation for the peacekeeping operation, and Prime Minister Tony Blair talked personally to President Bush to secure a guarantee of support.
American concerns about being bogged down by the logistical demands of a large ISAF force were legitimate. Few countries had the expeditionary capacity to engage in such a remote location. The U.S. had 250 long-range transport planes; the UK had four. At the time, no other NATO member had any.49 Even by the end of 2003, when German troops moved to the north, ISAF had only three helicopters of its own in the country and leaned on what was by then a far larger U.S. war machine for support. When NATO secretary-general George Robertson appealed for NATO countries to send more helicopters, none responded.
When the first ISAF troops arrived in January 2002, under the command of a British general, John McColl, they had to negotiate access to the city with Fahim, insisting they would patrol without an escort from his forces. McColl thought he would need five thousand troops to secure Kabul, with a further twenty thousand for the rest of the country. When Dobbins proposed these figures to Rumsfeld, “his manner indicated his displeasure at the notion.”50 President Karzai had been requesting more boots on the ground since Bonn, a demand widely supported across the country as reassurance against the predatory warlords who had returned. McColl said, “Every week delegations were coming to Karzai to request that ISAF deploy outside Kabul.”51 Bush’s appointee as coordinator of the Afghan campaign, Richard Haass, lost the argument for more troops. He wanted a force of up to sixty thousand, half from the U.S. and half from other countries.52 What Afghanistan had instead was a small expeditionary war-fighting force, with a half-strength headquarters, and an unclear mandate.
WAR OF THE CAVES: DECEMBER 2001 AND MARCH 2002
The light-footprint plan failed its biggest test in the one chance to capture or kill Osama bin Laden after 9/11 in Afghanistan. Intelligence reports placed him, with up to three thousand al-Qaeda fighters, in the Tora Bora cave complex he built during the Soviet war. The caves were in the high northern wall of a ridge at the top of a square valley, six miles wide and deep, close to the Pakistan border. Mountains rising to fifteen thousand feet made air support difficult, so there would need to be a significant ground force.53 The light footprint demanded they find local militias to do the ground fighting, backed by small CIA and Special Forces teams. Schroen had now been replaced as head of Operation Jawbreaker, by Gary Berntsen who was given one clear instruction by Crumpton. “I want you killing the enemy immediately.” Berntsen had been tracking bin Laden as long as anybody in the U.S. system. He was sent to Tanzania in 1998 and walked through the charred remains of the American embassy destroyed by an al-Qaeda bomb.54
It was clear to Berntsen that they needed a significant U.S. ground force to assault Tora Bora. He had a stand-up row with the head of Special Forces in Afghanistan, Major General Dell Dailey, who said too many U.S. soldiers might offend their allies. “I don’t give a damn about offending our allies,” said Berntsen. “I only care about eliminating al-Qaeda and delivering bin Laden’s head in a box!”55 Ground troops could have conducted a block-and-sweep operation, dropping troops at al-Qaeda’s back door then pushing them from the front.
But the orders were that this was a war of Afghan liberation, backed up by special operators. Two local commanders were found for the assault on Tora Bora, drawn by significant payments. The more effective, Hazrat Ali, had been a commander in Massoud’s forces in the mujahideen. The other, Haji Zaman Ghamsharik, who had also fought in the mujahideen, was a drug dealer the CIA persuaded to return from France when the Taliban fell. “The thinking was that this would show Afghans fighting their own war,” wrote Mattis,56 who watched frustrated from Kandahar airfield. He had 1,000 marines on the ground, the largest formation of international troops in the country, and another 3,500 on ships a short flight away.
The marines bore the code name Task Force 58, the same as the force that took island after island in the defeat of Japan in 1945. Mattis had Harrier attack jets and enough CH-53 helicopters to drop troops forward, equipped with cold-weather clothing. As the days passed before the offensive, he became more impatient that they were not called. “At one point in early December, I was blunt; some described my presentation as highly obscene … But I was shouting against the wind.”57 Because of their size and particular history, the marines sat outside the standard CENTCOM reporting lines, and Mattis could not penetrate Franks’s obsession with fighting only with local allies. Even an appeal to Bush failed. Crumpton, the CIA counterterrorism chief, told the president, “We’re going to lose our prey if we’re not careful.” Bush asked him about the Afghan forces. “Are they up to the job?” Crumpton replied, “Definitely not, Mr. President.”58
Rather than calling on the nearby marines, or flying in Rangers from the U.S., the decision meant there were fewer than one hundred international troops on the ground—outnumbered by journalists. Reliance on local militias cost the battle of Tora Bora. They did not have the same motivation as those who had already defeated the Taliban in the cities in the north, Kabul, or Kandahar. Instead, they were being asked to fight in December, high in the snow-covered mountains, in an area where there was considerable local support for al-Qaeda, including among the fighters on the American side.59 There was fighting between the two militias. It was also the fasting month of Ramadan. The small bands of special operators fighting with them could not persuade them to stay and hold ground they took in the evening, as they needed to come down and break their fast, meaning the same ground had to be retaken every day. There was certainty that bin Laden was there; his voice was clearly heard on a captured al-Qaeda radio. When word came that he was cornered in the late afternoon on December 10, four days into the battle, special operators moved up for the kill, only to find that their local allies had abandoned the position to return to eat, leaving two Americans surrounded by al-Qaeda.
The following day, the former drug dealer Ghamsharik said he had persuaded al-Qaeda to surrender, and there should be a pause in the bombing to allow them to emerge. The air assault had been around the clock, including the first use since Vietnam of a fifteen-thousand-pound daisy cutter bomb, so large it had to be rolled out of the back of a plane. It had a devastating impact, one radio intercept revealing the horror as the wounded were brought out, before the cry came, “Cave too hot, can’t reach others.” Because of this, Ghamsharik said, the remaining fighters would give up. Special operators were suspicious, but finally allowed an overnight pause, resuming bombing in the morning when no one surrendered. Hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters are believed to have escaped that night, having paid a bribe to Ghamsharik to order the pause. Even after that betrayal, bin Laden was still there and wrote a new will, sensing the end. He was overheard on the radio, gathering fighters together for a prayer. The CIA then intercepted “the sound of mules and a large ground of people moving about. Then the radio went dead.”60 When the reluctant commander Ali was finally persuaded to leave his men in place overnight, and special operators could move on the caves twelve days after the fighting started, bin Laden was not among the twenty or so fighters who were taken captive. He had made his escape.
The battle for Tora Bora revealed the basic flaw in Franks’s war plan. Even when the political stakes were as high as killing bin Laden, he would not change his mind, despite the presence in Mattis’s marines of a highly motivated U.S. force large enough to do the job.
There was one other battle in the caves of the east three months later, when a valley in Paktia Province, on the Pakistan border south of Tora Bora, was discovered to be a stronghold of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters, but intelligence officers had “only the vaguest idea of the enemy situation,” according to one official account.61 There were believed to be 150–200 fig
hters, and the expectation was that they would flee when attacked. But there turned out to be more than 1,000, with reinforcements pouring in, dug into a complex cave system with entrenched firing positions, and willing to fight. The intelligence failure to discover the scale of the threat was just one of the weaknesses exposed by the ad hoc operation, with a force drawn from the improvised, supposedly temporary nature of the Afghan intervention.
Operation Anaconda was planned to last three days, but it took two weeks of tough fighting that left eight Americans dead. Unlike at Tora Bora, conventional forces were employed for this operation. It was planned and executed by the 10th Mountain Division, who had initially deployed to the transit base in Uzbekistan and were scrambled into Afghanistan in mid-December 2001 to be the eyes on the ground for the main command headquarters in Doha, Qatar. They “found themselves planning Anaconda, the largest U.S. military operation since Desert Storm,”62 according to a U.S. Naval War College investigation. The mission was titled CJTF-Mountain, a combined joint task force—combined meaning multinational, and joint employing land, sea, and air assets. Only three people in Lieutenant General Franklin Hagenbeck’s headquarters had been in a joint environment before; they were far away from their original mission of providing base security. It was “hardly the proper size” for the staff of a CJTF,63 “not properly trained, manned or equipped” to handle the operation involving more than 1,400 troops from nine nations, and lacked intelligence and logistics functions that had been left behind. Some key components were not told they were involved until too late. The aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis played no part in the first day of fighting, as it was not given the plan. All flights had been canceled that day, and the warplanes stowed away, as the flight deck was full of sailors enjoying a “steel beach” picnic.64
