by David Loyn
For his part, Petraeus saw an Afghan president at the end of his tether, who believed the U.S. was “part of the problem rather than part of the solution,” and the accumulation of bad news bubbled over the top from time to time. “Leaders are like a vessel and the bad news is poured in at the top and there are holes in the bottom that allow it to drain, but it can only drain so fast.” Karzai now had few friends on the American side. He refused to meet the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, unless Petraeus asked for the meeting and was in the room. And invariably, when the Kabul ambassador Karl Eikenberry came with Petraeus to meet the president, there would come a moment when Karzai would turn to the ambassador and say, “Well, you’re the guy that tried to defeat me in the election, tried to force the runoff, that tried to undermine me and get Dr. Abdullah elected.”
BAD DAYS AND GOOD DAYS
As a commander, Petraeus knew the cost of war to all sides. He went to many, many ramp ceremonies, and they were physically and mentally wearing. While on a trip to the UK, he spoke personally to the Scottish father of a kidnapped aid worker, Linda Norgrove, killed by a U.S. grenade in a failed rescue attempt. He watched large, angry crowds protesting on the streets of Kabul when a Florida pastor, Terry Jones, threatened to publicly burn a copy of the Quran. To keep fit, he ran half a dozen times round the small base every morning through the mazes of shipping containers that had grown since 9/11 as offices and living quarters, and back to his corner of Florence Village, an enclosed courtyard of shipping containers stacked on top of each other. He had one container for meetings and another for sleeping quarters. Late one night, in May 2011, he slipped out of the container wearing just his running shorts and a T-shirt, crossed the small rose garden, and took the three-minute walk past the volleyball court on the right-hand corner, and the long, low concrete Milano building, with its Thai restaurant and makeshift cinema on the other side of the narrow road. He was ignored by the few soldiers using the free Wi-Fi in the garden that McChrystal had failed to close.
Crossing the small open space surrounded by flagpoles, with its stone memorial to the fallen, Petraeus went up the two shallow steps and pressed the code to open the wooden door of the yellow building. Turning left along the corridor and crossing the large SAR, he went into the smaller control room at the back, where screens filled the walls. The night shift were tracking nine different operations—but not the most important event happening in the region that night. Petraeus told everyone to leave except the most senior officer, and at midnight Kabul time, “Zero Dark Thirty” in Pakistan, which was half an hour ahead, he told the colonel that the raid against Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad was on the ground.
Petraeus had heard that the raid was likely when he was in Washington the week before. And while he did not have any command responsibility for it, as it was directed by the president through the CIA, he would need to respond if things went wrong. The special operators carrying out the raid were Navy SEALs, defined for the night as CIA operatives, “sheep-dipped” in the jargon, a legal fiction to get round the government’s prohibition on regular forces entering Pakistan. With no visual feeds coming in, he kept in touch through a secure online chat room and had the confirmation forty minutes later that “Geronimo,” the code name for the main target, bin Laden, was dead, after living in secret, close to major Pakistani military bases for almost a decade. Petraeus had flown over Abbottabad just the week before. When analysts went through the treasure trove of documents in the house, they uncovered an order to kill Petraeus, along with President Obama. Petraeus was said to be the “man of the hour … and killing him would alter the war’s path.”53
The main cause of the Afghan intervention may have been resolved, but the long war went on. The political justification remained to “stop terrorist attacks on the homeland,” but while nation-building was as ill-begotten and lacking in form as ever, there was clearly a political and economic project alongside the military fight, and it was increasingly threatened by corruption, which Petraeus saw as something he needed to confront. His challenge was how to fight corruption without pulling down the frail Afghan state.
10
THE COUNTERINSURGENCY DILEMMA
Corruption is not just a problem for the system of governance in Afghanistan.
It is the system of governance.
—Dr. Rangin Spanta, Afghan national security adviser, October 2, 20101
STROKING THE FAT
“I am warning you. I will come to your house, and you will disappear.” The woman kept up a torrent of threats to customs officers as cellophane bags of white heroin powder emerged one by one from under her dress to be stacked neatly on a desk. Their hiding place strapped to her stomach, back, and thighs would not have passed the most cursory check. She thought her protection strong enough. “Don’t you know who I am? I make six men like you disappear in a day. Bring my phone. You must be new.” She kept her biggest insult to the end. “I will take off your trousers and put them on your head”—ridiculous sounding, but meant as a humiliation in this repressed society. The head of customs at the airport, General Aminullah Amerkhel, sighed as he showed the video. He had heard it all before. He knew her claims of powerful protection were probably true. After he handed her over to the police, she was released without charge by nightfall. Another futile day on the front line against the corruption that engulfed the country.
Amerkhel filmed everything on a small video camera. Every day, he faced abusive encounters like this. On one of his videos, a man accused as a people trafficker complains with contempt, “You’re treating me like a Jew.”2 Amerkhel’s customs compound was rebuilt in an international effort to improve airport security and customs revenues. The roof leaked, there was no water in the bathroom, and he stabbed a pencil through the wall to show it was so badly built. “They were supposed to use cement, but this is not cement, just dust,” he said. “It is falling apart already.” No more than 10 percent of the $1 million contract was actually spent on the building—the rest taken by subcontractors in the chain. “This poor country,” he said. “Other countries come to help, and these people just put the money in their pocket and disappear.”3
Across town in the central park, behind the cinema where the Taliban once made a bonfire of Bollywood films, a former minister, Ramazan Bashardost, set up a tent to hear stories about corruption. It was never empty. People lined up daily to share their stories of lands seized, jobs taken, demands for bribes made. A revenue collector from the northeast said things were worse than when the Taliban were in power. In 1995, when the Taliban took his area, he offered his resignation, but they told him to remain in his post if he were an honest man. After their fall, the warlord who replaced them demanded a cut. When the revenue collector refused, he was fired, losing his house and his car with the job. A Congress report in 2011 found that half of the potential customs revenues of $2 billion were stolen in this way.4
From a hidden pocket deep inside folds of tribal robes, another elder brought out ancient title deeds—evidence of what had been taken. The government was still demanding taxes from him although his land had been seized by a thug, who took the opportunity of insecurity after international intervention drove out the Taliban. “Once that man did not even have a donkey to ride,” he said. “Now he drives a Land Cruiser.” Poetry is held in high regard in Afghanistan, and the elder was respectfully heard as he declaimed a poem about the warlord takeover, including the line that Karzai was “stroking the fat on their backs. But beware. The anger of Afghans will be followed by a storm.”5 The anger in the tent was palpable. They felt let down by international intervention.
Bashardost was an unusual tour guide, stopping on the way south to Ghazni to point out how the ring road, the showcase project of the early years, was crumbling. In Ghazni, he railed about how corruption meant nothing was done properly: a bridge rebuilt with U.S. funding collapsed in a flood, while two bridges built in Soviet times withstood it. The cause of the flood was the
breach of a nearby dam—again renovated with international funding since 9/11, but not well enough to withstand winter storms.
There were too few public servants like Amerkheil and Bashardost who stood up against corruption. Stop in any village and you could hear the same story—the government was corrupt, there was no functioning justice, the police were predatory, and international intervention had brought nothing. Time and again when the Taliban were cleared from an area, the first request of civilians would be to ensure the corrupt police did not return. The Afghan countryside was littered with the detritus of good intentions. In one village in Logar Province, three unfinished school buildings stood side by side up a hill. The first was begun by a fund set up to remember some of the 9/11 victims but abandoned for lack of cash, the second abandoned through corruption. The third was a building site for a school funded by the Japanese, who started fresh, as the previous attempts did not fit their exacting earthquake standards.
Corruption had eaten so deeply into the fabric of society by 2010 that extreme depravity could go on as if normal. In the Soviet-built “Four-Hundred-Bed” military hospital, a place where Afghanistan’s war wounded should have been tended with all care, American investigators discovered scenes so shocking, a congressional inquiry put out a warning before displaying images. In scenes described as “Auschwitz-like,” patients were dying of starvation, with open bowls of blood under untreated wounds and feces on the floor. Operations were done without anesthesia in smoke-filled rooms. Staff stole money that should have gone to buy food. Drugs were sold and replaced by defective alternatives, and more than $150 million was believed stolen.6 That this was allowed to happen in the best hospital in the country, across the street from the U.S. embassy and largely funded with U.S. money, reveals the extent of the failure of financial oversight. Without fundamental reform of the Afghan state and better management of international spending to ensure it was not fueling corruption, counterinsurgency would always be flawed.
WARLORD PROTECTION RACKET
It took several years before corruption was recognized as a strategic threat to the campaign.7 It was initially seen as an Afghan issue, part of the fabric of the country and the cost of doing business, to be tolerated and managed by governance projects and tackling narcotics. By 2009, General McChrystal recognized this had the problem the wrong way around. Corruption was causing insecurity. In his strategic assessment in September 2009, he saw the “unpunished abuse of power by corrupt officials” as one of two main challenges facing coalition troops, the other being the insurgency itself. If corruption was a cause of insecurity, then the aperture of military responses needed widening, as in Petraeus’s Anaconda strategy. Dealing with corruption became a military priority, and that meant looking at the way the military spent money as well as problems in the Afghan state.
Petraeus brought in one of the army’s rising stars, Brigadier General H. R. McMaster, to head a new initiative against corruption—Task Force Shafafiyat (meaning “transparency” in both Afghan languages). He rejected the idea that corruption was deeply ingrained in the culture, part of the Afghan social fabric, as “bigotry masquerading as cultural sensitivity.”8 It was not part of the social norm but an aberration caused by the long war. He mapped the relationship between organized crime and politics, and amid a number of high-profile court cases in the U.S., for the first time military contracting came under scrutiny as a cause of corruption. He set up a series of task forces—TF-Spotlight, to find missing equipment, TF-2010 to tighten up contracting, TF-Nexus for organized crime links, working with a vendor-vetting cell at CENTCOM to attempt to prevent funds going to warlords.
Petraeus issued counterinsurgency contracting guidance soon after his arrival in command in 2010 and recalled it quickly. The revision emphasized that it was for the Afghan side to own the problem of corruption. It was necessary to “help” them confront corruption—not for coalition troops to own it themselves.9 “Make sure the people we work with work for the people,” Petraeus wrote, with the specific aim of ensuring money did not empower “malign or corrupt individuals or organizations.” It was a hard knot to untie after ten years of looking the other way and signing the checks.
America’s fatal embrace with the warlords began with the CIA’s payments of $1 billion in the first year of the war when chasing al-Qaeda was the only priority, with no thought of the distorting effect such payments in a fragile economy.10 The cardboard boxes full of millions of dollars that Gary Schroen’s Jawbreaker team used as a coffee table in 2001 were the first ripple in a rolling surf of cash that crashed against the Afghan shore. The warlords revived after containment in the Taliban years, mutated to run private security firms, and were ready to pick up lucrative logistics contracts as more troops came in with the surge. Across the U.S. system, there continued to be a preference for working with contractors rather than through the Afghan state. General Karimi said the state was not trusted to manage the money. “Defence Minister Wardak in my presence talked to many Americans and said, ‘Please trust us. We can do it for half of the money you are doing it.’”11
It took a report in The Nation in November 2009 to sound the alarm about how serious things had become.12 American tax dollars were literally funding the enemy, paying protection money for passing through land controlled by the Taliban. Around 70 percent of what was needed for a force of 150,000 international troops came overland—fuel mostly from the north, and food, construction supplies, and ammunition mostly from Pakistan. The warlords ran the trucking contracts but needed to pay groups, including the Taliban, for not being attacked.
The Taliban were profiting to a staggering amount, around 10 percent of the $2 billion–a-year contracts, in what a congressional inquiry called a “warlord protection racket.”13 Corruption was an inevitable corollary of a large army that contracted out its needs in an insecure environment with few checks. The bribes fueled the insurgency, worsening insecurity in a negative feedback loop, and if the aim of international intervention were to bolster the Afghan government, Congress found that “U.S. reliance on warlords for supply chain security has the effect of dramatically undermining that objective.”
Trucking contracts were a small part of military spending. The military were now heavily involved in road-building, jobs schemes, school-building, and other activities traditionally associated with the civilian side of government. Most U.S. reconstruction spending in Afghanistan did not go through State but the Pentagon. The peak year of U.S. military contracting was 2012, at $19 billion, just $1 billion less than Afghan GDP,14 and there was little coordination between the military and civilian efforts. Commanding in 2012, General John Allen said if there was a joint civil-military development plan, he was not told about it.15
Military units had fistfuls of cash to spend through the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP). The program had a curious origin in the discovery of $650 million in uncirculated $100 U.S. bills from the Federal Reserve of New York, in boxes stacked in a bricked-up shed in Baghdad in 2003. A further haul of $112 million was found in a nearby dog kennel. President Bush decided that the money belonged to the Iraqi people, and disbursing it became the forerunner of CERP, giving commanders the ability to spend on development and reconstruction.16 Civil affairs capacity across both the marines and the army was rudimentary at the time, so they were literally making it up as they went along. By the time of the Petraeus-Mattis counterinsurgency doctrine, using “money as ammunition” had become an established idea. The CERP program was run under a scheme called MAAWS, Money as a Weapons System, and it was a response to the desire of commanders for quick impact—delivering development behind military action.
In the right hands, CERP bought at least short-term stabilization gains, but unless linked to Afghan government programs or longer-term internationally funded projects, it was not value for money. Cash-for-work projects or contracts to deliver gravel for military bases had no lasting impact. Built into CERP were “perverse incentives” that led to the “e
xpenditure of millions of dollars with almost no insight or alignment with other U.S. government efforts,”17 according to a somber analysis by a military investigation under General Joe Dunford, commanding in Afghanistan in 2014. Officers were graded on “the number of CERP projects they could get obligated,” said a member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting. “Of course, they got a whole bunch of CERP projects; none of which were completed and most were barely under way when that commander rotated.”18
Worse, there is evidence that CERP money destabilized areas rather than the other way round. As warlords captured the new funding flows, it looked to people in villages as if international troops had sided with them. The large aid flows in quick impact projects tended to increase corruption, lowering confidence in the state and allowing the Taliban to portray international troops as on the side of the warlords—the opposite of the intention of squeezing out the Taliban by connecting citizens to the state.
