The Long War

by David Loyn

  Barno proposed a series of guidelines to ensure that if American troops needed to raid a house, they would do it with least offense—using local troops, getting permission from elders, not separating women unless there were American women in the raiding party. These became known as the Karzai Twelve, although Karzai complained they were “never implemented.”43 To Barno, changing the mission 180 degrees from chasing terrorists to a counterinsurgency was like “tuning the car while you’re going down the highway.”44 Visiting a battalion close to the Pakistan border, he asked, “How did you get your platoon leaders and company commanders and first sergeants and platoon sergeants to be able to shift gears here midstream and go from one to the other?” The colonel replied, “Easy, sir: booksamillion.com.” They were reduced to sourcing what they could find on the internet, as they had had no training for the new kind of warfare.

  Barno began to make the first real inroads into the tanks and artillery still held in some force by warlords across the country. Renewed conflict between the two northern warlords, Dostum and Nur, had been looming since Nur had taken the main town Mazar-e-Sharif. A total of 20,000 troops faced each other, supported by tanks and artillery pieces. A small force of 150 British soldiers in two PRTs succeeded in talking them down and persuaded Nur to hand over his heavy weapons, leaving him in control of the province—a result their commanding officer, Colonel Dickie Davis, said gave the PRTs “almost rock star status,”45 leaving Dostum bruised but still armed. A similar robust approach by U.S. troops in the west reduced the arsenal in the hands of Ismail Khan, and by 2005, Fahim was persuaded to hand over some of his tanks and artillery as well, although disarmament still had a long way to go.

  To ensure a coordinated strategy, Barno set up an office inside the U.S. embassy within twenty feet of the ambassador and spent part of every day there. This was welcomed by the new American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, who arrived in Kabul soon after Barno in the fall of 2003. “Zal” is an imposing figure, with a large head and aquiline nose, and the demeanor of a senator in ancient Rome, updated in a charcoal-gray suit. He has deep brown eyes and a ready smile, and a reputation for finding a way through intractable situations, useful when he was appointed to do a peace deal with the Taliban in 2019.

  Khalilzad has a unique place in the modern history of Afghanistan. Born and brought up in Kabul, he had a scholarship to the American University of Beirut—moving to the U.S. before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. As a young academic, he wrote papers that were influential in hardening the resolve of the Reagan administration to support the mujahideen and was a State Department official in the peace talks in Geneva in 1988 to end that war. He was a hawk on Iraq, closely connected to neocons Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, and was sent to Iraq days after the fall of Saddam Hussein but was pulled out soon afterward to serve as ambassador to the country of his birth. He spoke the two main Afghan languages, knew many of the key players from childhood, and had more nation-building ambition than some in the Bush administration. Coordinating with the U.S. military commander fitted his agenda.

  Khalilzad saw progress as most likely coming through the private sector, bringing over a group of business leaders to improve coordination of development efforts. It was not seamless. Khalilzad’s “cabinet” were given lead responsibility in areas such as energy, banking, governance, and infrastructure, duplicating the effort of USAID officials in his own embassy, who complained that none of the cabinet had been to Afghanistan before and would hold meetings with Afghan ministries without telling USAID colleagues. The ambassador’s new team focused their “efforts on criticizing USAID rather than providing constructive advice,” according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, which went on with straight-faced understatement, “As a result animosity developed.”46

  There were some in USAID who wanted to do the big infrastructure spending requested by Ashraf Ghani, but they were overruled. Afghanistan had a number of dams and hydroelectric schemes from prewar days, all needing substantial repair. Insecurity and poor contracting decisions meant that it would take nine years after the fall of the Taliban before new turbines were in place for Kajaki—the power station in northern Helmand that supplied the south. Twenty years later, the power station was still not delivering full capacity, after $750 million had been spent on it. Meanwhile, a World Bank proposal for a $1 billion scheme to bring power lines from the north in 2002 was not funded, with the consequence that Kabul continued to rely on expensive diesel generators. USAID attempted to buy one-megawatt generators to power villages, but when the Iraq war started, they were not available, so they leased them instead at inflated prices—leaving no capacity behind when they pulled out.47 Like the food aid that crashed wheat prices, the best intentions of longer-term development programs faced unintended consequences.

  NATO LEANS IN

  Other forces as well as the Americans were beginning to move beyond Kabul. After Britain set up in the main northern city Mazar-e-Sharif, a month later, Germany opened a PRT at Kunduz in the northeast.48 By the end of 2003, there were seven PRTs across the country, and another twelve opened the following year.49 Germany wanted to repair relations with the U.S. badly torn by Iraq, and this fitted Rumsfeld’s view that stabilization was what Europe and Canada did.50 Old Europe leaned into the good war. There was never a coherent military decision to make a long-term commitment. It developed piecemeal, building one short-term decision on another, with rapid turnovers of people, until the Afghan campaign became a matter of organizational routine, built into the planning cycle across NATO.51

  In handing over ISAF command from Turkey to Germany in February 2003, Lieutenant General Hilmi Akin Zorlu made a comment repeated often in the many handovers to come. He could see the time when troops could pull out of Afghanistan, but not for “two or three more years.”52 This was a plausible horizon, just beyond reach, requiring another rotation of troops, so that rather than decisive action at the start, a series of gradual increases built a huge military force, always there for “two or three more years.”

  ISAF command was handed over to General Rick Hillier from Canada in 2004, who, like Barno, believed international forces should be nation-builders. While preparing for the post, he met President Karzai, who told him the biggest threat was not the Taliban or al-Qaeda but Afghanistan’s inability to function as a state. Karzai had seen plans come and go and complained of the incoherence of international assistance, telling Hillier, “The greatest way to help us overcome the threat to us is to help us build our ability to govern ourselves.”53

  Hillier liked to draw diagrams to find solutions, and on the way home, on an enforced layover of six to seven hours at the U.S. transit base in Uzbekistan waiting for delayed transport, he found a whiteboard and worked with his closest staff to draw up a plan that would become the Strategic Advisory Team. His idea was to task twenty, mostly Canadian, officers to work across the Afghan government, giving technical support to help them to write laws and construct budgets—“basically teaching them the ABCs of responsible government.”54 He had no permission from NATO to do this, although it differed wildly from the street-patrolling that General Gerhard Back, the German head of NATO Joint Force Command at Brunssum in the Netherlands, thought was all they should do. Hillier derided Back as a “typical Cold War bureaucrat,” and boasted of shouting matches with him on the phone.55

  As Hillier saw it, the military should respond to the demands of the leader of the nation they were supporting. But with no coordination, the effect was limited. While Hillier was putting in his team, the UN was building links across the Afghan government for their reconstruction approach, and the U.S. government had a series of overlapping schemes, often with as little coordination within the American system as with outside agencies.

  These initiatives lasted only as long as the commander who brought them in, as they were not part of an overarching plan. The straight-talking Canadian Hillier found that the Strategic Advisory Team did not survive his time in off
ice; the French, Turkish, and Italian ISAF commanders who succeeded him had no interest in it. Hillier visited Kabul again the following year as Canada’s chief of defence staff, and Karzai asked him to reboot the idea, which he did, using Canadian officers, with the support of an enthusiastic Canadian ambassador, Chris Alexander. But it was finally closed in 2008 when Ottawa pulled the plug and said they did not want the military doing what looked like civilian work. Hillier encountered one other obstacle in his command that all the commanders would face, and would worsen as the fighting intensified. Troops from individual countries, even his own, were not really under his command. He referred to the Canadian Battalion, code-named CANBAT, as Can’t Bat.56 If he asked Canadian troops to carry out a task, they sometimes needed seventy-two hours for approval from Ottawa. In Hillier’s experience, only the UK and Norway were willing for him to use their troops flexibly.

  The weak Afghan government system had now faced two activist, politically engaged military commanders in Kabul in Hillier and Barno, a U.S. aid system that was mostly contracting for its own ends, outside the state, with an ambassador’s “cabinet” running different policies, and a myriad of other consultants writing assessments of need. Other big donors, Japan, the UK, and the World Bank had their own schemes and reporting structures, while there were various fiefdoms in the UN with contracting authority. The consequence was that in those early years the Afghan bonanza did more to perpetuate the warlord elite than build the state. Issues that really mattered to ordinary Afghans, in particular justice and property rights, deteriorated as corruption took hold. This gave an opening to the Taliban, who promoted themselves in reaction to the corrupt elite and began to recruit again with the promise of swift justice, clean government, and a nation free of foreign troops—a consistent message over many years to follow.

  BACK TO BASICS

  The crucial decision that regularized command and control of the Afghan war, and the role of its commanders, was taken at NATO’s Istanbul summit in June 2004. It put most forces in the country, including much of the U.S. combat strength, under ISAF command. The decision was taken in the face of American concern over the quality of NATO nations, seen as unwilling and ill equipped to fight. Retired general Barry McCaffrey, visiting Kabul to report progress to Abizaid, had a grim warning, referring to the worst moment in recent NATO history, when eight thousand Bosnian men and boys were murdered by Serb fighters in 1995 after a small Dutch force were disarmed and failed to defend them. “NATO-ISAF expansion to include the West and the South of Afghanistan would pose the immediate and real risk of another Srebrenica disaster with the population unprotected by an incapable or incompetent NATO force.”57

  Even after ISAF took over, there remained significant exceptions to this unified command, in the continued deployment of Special Forces and the twelve thousand conventional U.S. troops in Operation Enduring Freedom, on missions against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. This perpetuated an opaque military structure, and the public image of these different entities were never resolved for the whole of the long war. It would not be until four years later, under General David McKiernan in 2008, that all U.S. troops would come under ISAF. CIA operations remained unaccountable to the commanders in Afghanistan even then. Two commanders after McKiernan, General David Petraeus said “Lines of authority were confused in some cases … when you’re looking at SOF [special operations forces], and you’ve got black SOF, white SOF, coalition SOF, some U.S.-only SOF, it actually matters. You have to know what hat a guy is wearing at a particular time.” This had a damaging effect when special operating forces carried out raids on the ground, leaving conventional forces to pick up the pieces although they had no control over the raids.

  There would be one more American commander before the U.S. handed over strategic ownership of the Afghan war to NATO. Karl Eikenberry, who had been tasked with training the Afghan army in 2002, returned to Kabul, now with his third star as a lieutenant general, and took a very different view to Dave Barno. On arrival, he took one look at the Five Pillars and said, “That is ridiculous. That is like the Soviet Five-Year Plan.”58 He went back to basics, moved his office out of the embassy, tried to fire three heads of PRTs, and dismantled many Barno initiatives that went outside the conventional military lane.

  This ended one of the most promising attempts to harness customs revenues for the state. Like many undeveloped economies, the biggest Afghan taxation stream was from customs revenues. There were seven main customs posts, much of whose revenue was captured by regional warlords. In an effort to reach a compromise as finance minister, Ghani pleaded to have access to the revenues from just two for the center, but was rejected.59

  The border area at Herat between Afghanistan and Iran should be the most lucrative customs post in the country, because of a trade in used Japanese cars, shipped to the Gulf and then traveling overland across Iran and Afghanistan, toward Pakistan. In the early years after the fall of the Taliban, it was a lawless zone of bazaars. Ismail Khan, the warlord restored in the west in 2001 with U.S. support, had captured much of the revenue collection. Trucks driving through had to drop fuel into an underground tank, which was Ismail Khan’s personal slice. Barno’s British deputy, Major General Peter Gilchrist, ran a simple scheme to rebuild border fences, close down the bazaars, empty the fuel tank, and crucially to replace the border guards with a trained team from another province. Revenue collection immediately doubled. He wanted to roll it out nationwide, which could have transformed the revenue-earning capacity of the government, but it was scrapped by Eikenberry.

  Back in Washington, Barno found his experience ignored. Although he had been the youngest lieutenant general of his generation, Afghanistan marked the effective end of his career. He was given a relatively mundane job and left the army a year later.60 The relatively permissive security environment in the early years was deceptive. The Afghan conflict was about to enter its bloodiest phase: casualties among international troops were relatively light, but the Taliban were actively targeting development workers, killing eighty-one in 2005, mostly in isolated rural projects.61 The West had backed the losing side in an ugly civil war. The winners of that civil war in the 1990s, the Taliban, had not gone away.

  THE PLACE OF THE SOLDIERS

  Lieutenant Colonel Henry Worsley‡ stood in the Helmand town of Lashkar Gah in January 2006 and said quietly, “We’ve come here to police aid, but there’s no aid to police.” There were more reporters than soldiers on the street outside the base, as Britain wanted to signal its move into a wider role in Afghanistan; every soldier on this choreographed first street patrol was wearing a remote microphone. Britain never publicly acknowledges its special operators, but Worsley was a commander in the Special Air Service—the SAS.62 He had been in Afghanistan for some months, gauging the temperature ahead of the arrival of British troops for the first time in the south and outlining the triple aim of providing security, governance, and development to village meetings, shuras. But from the beginning, he could see that governance and development would be starting from scratch. The presence of British soldiers would be like “stirring up a hornets’ nest.”63

  Helmand is Afghanistan’s largest province, about the size of West Virginia, with mountains in the north and a giant arid desert bordering Pakistan to the south—and always an unruly place. Although bordering the Taliban spiritual home in Kandahar to its east, they found it hard to control, only securing it in their last two years in power. During Taliban rule, their grip on order meant it was safe to travel across most of Afghanistan, except Helmand. Local rivalries between warlords meant that in the Taliban’s early years, this was the only province you still needed local armed guards in the car, changing at a checkpoint every twenty miles or so, and that “protection” of course came at a price. That’s one of the reasons they could not outlaw poppy growing until close to the end of their regime, when they secured enough control of Helmand, the source of most of the world’s illegal heroin. The main populated zone runs down the center of
the province—a wide cultivated area on either side of the Helmand River, extended by the complex canal system built by U.S. engineers in the 1960s. The water from 40 percent of the landmass of Afghanistan drains through this area.64

  That first platoon was the advance guard of a deployment of more than three thousand troops as the UK took over the PRT in Lashkar Gah. The name of the town means “Place of the Soldiers.” They were coming to a place with a long history of warfare.

  Worsley was struck by the forcefulness of the elders he met. One said they did not want development but security. “I want to be safe, I want to be able to go to my local policeman and tell him I have a problem, because my house has been robbed … and I want a safe country.”65 The old man remembered Russian forces coming and they too promised development; he demanded to know if the British had the patience to see it through. The policy loop connecting security to development and diplomacy was about to be tested to destruction.

  PHASE TWO

  2006–2009

  THE TALIBAN RETURN

  3

  THE BIGGEST WARLORD

  What would Haji Nazar Muhammad think of it?

  —President Karzai’s appeal to remember the typical Afghan tribal elder

  THE BREEZE OF CHANGE