The Long War

by David Loyn

  In the event, it was Ashraf Ghani who came through the Pashtun pack. Brought up in Kabul, he spent most of his life in the U.S. as an academic and then with the World Bank. He was one of a group of reformist ministers who gathered around the first Karzai government in 2002, but within two years, he had resigned and traveled the world as an adviser to failed states, writing a manual, Fixed Failed States, with Clare Lockhart, a British lawyer who spent some years in Afghanistan working in development. He first ran for president in 2009, receiving a derisory number of votes in a two-horse race between Karzai and Abdullah. Ghani had a higher public profile in 2014, as he had spent the previous two years running the Inteqal—transition—process, going district to district to reestablish Afghan sovereignty as international troops handed it over.

  The second round of the election was set for June 10, but Obama was not going to wait for the Afghan election process to deliver a final result before moving forward with his own plans to cut troops. America did not have a strong negotiating hand to try to get a signature on the BSA allowing them to stay, since the threat for not signing was that troops would leave, which was what the negotiating partner, Karzai, wanted. American public opinion too was weary of the long war. In February 2014, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was planning for the “zero option”—all troops out by the end of the year—a “prudent step” since there was no movement on signing the BSA,21 although both Ghani and Abdullah said they would sign if they took power. Dunford did not see the zero option as a bluff. “I think it was very much on the table if we couldn’t get an acceptable agreement.”

  In the last week of May, Obama announced his decision on the future of American involvement. He began a series of carefully choreographed Afghan events with a Memorial Day weekend visit to Bagram Air Base. Karzai snubbed him, saying he would not go to the air base but would meet the president only “in Afghan tradition in Kabul.” But the Afghan president was not the audience for a visit designed to tell the American people that the long war would end. To loud cheers from troops gathered in a hangar, Obama said, “For many of you, this will be your last tour in Afghanistan.”

  Back in Washington, the president set a quicker departure date than Dunford had wanted for the post-combat phase, halving troops to five thousand during 2015 and drawing all troops out, to “embassy level” cover by the end of 2016. This was taken to mean around two thousand. The announcement was made in a businesslike statement in the Rose Garden, so he could focus on a wider foreign agenda in a major set piece speech to cadets at West Point the following day. “This is how wars end in the twenty-first century,” he said in a classic Obama performance—elegiac, hopeful, idealistic—and as it turned out, wishful thinking. He wanted to “turn the page” on the period of America’s military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, but another phrase in the speech that “it’s harder to end wars than to begin them” was more prophetic. Karzai will have been happy to hear him say Americans would “no longer patrol Afghan cities or towns, mountains or valleys.” But even that turned out not to be true, as the counterterrorist struggle went on and troops would stay in Afghanistan well beyond Obama’s end date of 2016.

  PRISONER RELEASES

  Early on a cold February morning in 2014, sixty-five men walked along the half-mile-long grilled corridor to exit Bagram Air Base dressed in identical white shalwar kameez pajamas, black waistcoats, and round white hats. The long corridor, with tight turnstiles a man could just squeeze through at each end, were a security feature to survey Afghans coming in and out of the base. At the far end, there was a narrow slit between blast walls, and the men, Taliban suspects, released from the Parwan detention center on the base, were out on an Afghan street. They were released by Karzai rather than being put on trial, against American advice, once he finally secured full control of the jail. To Karzai, Parwan was a Taliban factory, a place where innocent Afghans “learned to hate.” He had already released more than five hundred detainees—this last tranche was the hard core. Negotiations over Parwan had taken days of Dunford’s time, and he saw that it had a “symbolic value” to the Afghan leadership. “That was a physical manifestation of sovereignty.” Dunford’s communications team put out a list of the evidence against the men, calling the release “a major step backward” in developing the rule of law in Afghanistan. The suspects were connected to the deaths of dozens of ISAF troops, and the evidence against them included fingerprints on bomb-making equipment, incriminating literature, and positive tests for explosives residue.

  Waiting for the men as they were released into the cold February dawn, his woolly hat low over his brow, was the squat figure of Mahfouz Zubaide, pretending to be a taxi driver. He had a four-wheel drive and small Toyota saloon car, and he filled the cars with as many of those who were released as he could, offering a ride to Kabul. Once inside the cars, Mahfouz, who was a BBC producer, lent them his phone to call families and offered them breakfast. I was waiting in a restaurant next to the Kabul River, with piles of kebabs and bread, taking the chance to interview the ex-detainees before they disappeared back into Afghanistan. They all proclaimed their innocence. One, Nurullah, was a commander said to have ordered an attack that killed one U.S. soldier and injured four others. He had dark eyes and a watchful air. He claimed he was working as a plasterer when arrested. The former detainees said they had been tortured and held in solitary confinement and that some of those held were children, while others were very old.22

  While Karzai’s clearing of the cells was seen by the American military as a threat to security, they too were releasing some dangerous men without due process. The last wing of the jail held foreign detainees, and in an effort to avoid another Guantánamo, where men taken on the battlefield could not be released or tried, several were released. They included Latif Mehsud, a leading figure in the TTP, the Pakistani Taliban, who had been picked up a year previously in highly contentious circumstances. When arrested, he was being driven from the Pakistani border to Kabul by the NDS, the Afghan security service. He had come to discuss peace terms with Karzai. The TTP are a relatively new phenomenon, mainly operating against the Pakistani state, but also hitting American targets through links with al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The leader Hakeemullah Mehsud, killed in a drone strike in November 2013, was believed to have been responsible for the failed Times Square bomb plot in 2010.

  The arrest of Latif Mehsud was one of the few occasions when Dunford saw Karzai in a real rage. He was being prevented from running his own operations, including potential peace tracks; it made a mockery of American claims that he was now sovereign. And rather than handing Mehsud over to Karzai as they emptied the jail, he was given to Pakistan. At the same time, America was running its own negotiations with the Taliban, with no reference to Karzai. A week after Obama’s choreographed visit to Afghanistan announcing, “This is how wars end,” Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, the only American military captive in the long war, walked free. Karzai volubly complained that he had not been consulted and claimed the release of the Guantánamo Five, high-value Taliban prisoners in exchange, was against international law.23

  The Taliban put out a video of the release: a Black Hawk circles the site before landing, wary of Taliban fighters carrying rocket-propelled-grenade launchers on the slopes around; Bergdahl, beardless and shaven-headed, sits blinking in unaccustomed light in the back of a four-wheel drive, dressed in a white shalwar kameez, with an Afghan scarf on his shoulders; the helicopter lands, and he walks forward, helped by two Taliban fighters carrying a white flag; three special operators come out of the helicopter and approach; they put out left hands when the Taliban want to shake hands, keeping their right arms ready to shoot at all times; one walks forward with Bergdahl to the helicopter, while the other walks backward, watching all the time; they pat Bergdahl down twice, once when they meet the Taliban for the handover, and more thoroughly before boarding the helicopter, deliberately dropping a small bag he is carrying before they take off in case it carried a bomb. Twice in the video, a
caption flashes up across the screen in black letters: Don’come back to afghanistan. The Black Hawk is on the ground for less than a minute. Questions about it have not stopped since.

  The immediate response from the chain of command was relief that America had honored its promise never to leave anyone behind. But there was ambivalence about the five-for-one exchange. A jubilant statement put out in the name of the Taliban leader Mullah Omar, calling it a great victory, strengthened the hand of Republicans who thought the price paid too high.

  COMBAT FIT

  General Joe Dunford was the only American ISAF commander to go on to another four-star command in uniform, succeeding General James Amos as commandant of the Marine Corps who retired in 2014.24 Just four months before the “end of combat operations” in Kabul, he handed over the command to General John Campbell—whose Afghan experience went back to Kandahar in 2002. Once back in the Corps, Dunford completed the Marine Corps Combat Fitness Test at age fifty-nine, which includes pushing a thirty-pound ammunition can overhead for several repetitions, and carrying another marine through obstacles for seventy-five yards. A year later, he was appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with Obama praising his “unvarnished military advice” from Afghanistan. His first National Security Council meeting as chairman was on Afghanistan, and his intimate knowledge meant it would not be forgotten as other security concerns took more attention from the administration. As chairman, Dunford unveiled a memorial to the Battle of Chosin Reservoir. His father, Joe Dunford Sr., was in pride of place at the front of the audience with his surviving shipmates from the battle.

  In early 2013, soon after arriving in Kabul, Dunford had written his judgment of the situation. “The Afghan forces were capable of securing the majority of the Afghan population, were capable of securing the elections and were capable with some enabling support of providing security to Afghanistan.” But even if this upbeat take was right, Dunford thought troops needed to remain until at least 2018, to give Afghan forces support at the right level, not the two years allowed by Obama after 2014. In any event, the president’s hope of finishing America’s military involvement in Afghanistan by the end of his term would not be realized. Toward the end as at the beginning of the long war, there was no clear sense of the long-term view. And beyond the transactional prisoner swap, there was still no route to talk to the Taliban or agreement in Washington that there should be a negotiated end to the war.

  13

  TALKING TO THE TALIBAN—I

  Success often starts with crazy ideas and comes in unexpected bursts. And failure can happen regardless of your best efforts.1

  —Norwegian peace negotiator Alf Arne Ramslien

  FIVE FOR ONE

  Sunday, May 31, 2014, was a bright, clear early summer’s day in Washington, D.C. Bowe Bergdahl’s parents, Bob and Jani, were in town for the annual Rolling Thunder demonstration, when black-clad bikers take over the Mall in a show of solidarity for soldiers who never came back from Vietnam and have no known grave—keeping a flame alive in the face of what they see as a long-term government conspiracy of silence. During the five years Bergdahl had been held, the bikers had taken up his cause. Bob and Jani were called in their hotel by Special Operations Command, who put the president on the line. “We got him,” he said simply.2

  A few hours later, they were embraced in a Rose Garden appearance, the president putting his eloquent shine onto the moment, calling the release a “reminder of America’s unwavering commitment to leave no man or woman in uniform behind on the battlefield.” A series of communications missteps that day would reduce the political space for deals to be done with the Taliban in the future. Details of the five-for-one prisoner exchange were tweeted by a Washington Post reporter seven minutes ahead of the first White House statement on Bergdahl’s release. But the White House statement made no reference to the exchange or that five Taliban prisoners were now on their way to freedom in Doha.3 It made it look as if the administration had something to hide. In the Rose Garden appearance, Bob Bergdahl, wearing a beard he had grown to appeal to the Taliban, spoke three words in Pashto, which he had learned to try to communicate to the kidnappers, and the briefest Muslim prayer in Arabic in what was otherwise a personal and moving expression of gratitude to the rescuers. He said no more than a blessing and “I am your father,” but this became the headline of the day.

  When National Security Adviser Susan Rice, ahead of any investigation, said that Bergdahl had served with “honor and distinction,” she compounded the sense of a White House that badly misjudged the public mood. Congress had passed a law to prevent any further releases from Guantánamo Bay without their approval, and Republican disapproval of the exchange was intense. Rumors were circulating of discontent at a Republican fundraiser some months before when Bob Bergdahl offered prayers for the families of those holding his son.

  After five years in captivity, Bergdahl thought he had valuable intelligence information to share, but faced court-martial as a deserter. It would be impossible for him to get a fair hearing, as he had already been found guilty in the court of public opinion, on the evidence of a Taliban disinformation campaign claiming he had gone over to their side, complaints (never substantiated) that soldiers had died looking for him, and his father’s demeanor—judged un-American. Donald Trump, campaigning for president, called him a “dirty rotten traitor” and said he should be shot, offering to drop him out of a helicopter over Afghanistan himself.

  The reality seen by those who met Bergdahl had no traction in this atmosphere. His first debriefer after his arrest, Terrence Russell, told the reporter Sean Langan that Bergdahl resisted arrest from the beginning and was tortured for escaping twice. “It’s absolutely crazy that anybody would consider him to be a traitor, when in captivity he was an honorable soldier.”4 After the second escape attempt, he spent three years in a cage, which his captors would pack up and reassemble every time they moved. The cage was suspended from the floor, and the bars cut into his feet. “I ended up having permanent nerve damage,” Bergdahl told Langan, who had himself been kidnapped by the Haqqani network, and held for twelve weeks. “After the first winter in the cage,” said Bergdahl, “I lost the feeling in my feet.”5 The release of Bergdahl did not lead to a wider negotiation with the Taliban. Even by 2014, it was not universally recognized across the U.S. administration that the war might end only with a peace settlement.

  “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED”

  It took the U.S. a long time to realize they would need to talk to the Taliban. “Mission accomplished,” the Bush boast, was a significant policy error at the beginning of the war. The Taliban were out of power but not destroyed and could not be wished away by the U.S. president declaring, “The Taliban no longer exists in Afghanistan.” The illusion lingered in Washington that there was a military solution that could be prosecuted to the end without talks. Unmatched physical power was deceptive, bringing an unquestioned sense that America could prevail, that against the historical trend, this would be the guerrilla war where the more powerful conventional force could win.

  Even discussion of negotiation was seen as weakness—a distraction from the business of war. Before the end of the first year of Bergdahl’s long ordeal, a handwritten letter arrived at a U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan, brought by an intermediary trusted by both sides, purporting to come from Mullah Sangeen Zadran, the leader of the gang known to be holding Bergdahl. He requested talks in flawed English, saying, “I have something with me from the Americans.” The response from the U.S. side was a letter back in Pashto, threatening to kill him and all his men if they did not surrender, and soon afterward, a bomb was dropped on the intermediary to close the channel down permanently.6

  The pattern of not negotiating was set at the beginning of the long war when opportunities to pursue a settlement were ignored as America believed military victory was enough. After the Taliban were ousted from Kabul in November 2001, it was some weeks before they were defeated in the south. In the fast-moving ev
ents in December that included the international conference in Bonn, where Hamid Karzai was appointed as interim Afghan leader on the day he was nearly killed by a misdirected American bomb, he also met senior Taliban figures who said they wanted to hand over Kandahar peacefully.7 In retrospect, it looks like a missed opportunity for a cheap peace deal—they would lay down their weapons and withdraw from further conflict in return for immunity from prosecution, and the freedom to return home. The Taliban group who met Karzai included Khairullah Khairkhwa, later one of the Guantánamo Five released in exchange for Bergdahl.

  In the summer of 2002, after twenty-three years of war, the big tent of the supposedly all-Afghan Loya Jirga should have been big enough to include some Taliban delegates. Many of those who came to power then with international support had more blood on their hands than the Taliban but had not harbored al-Qaeda, so had a free pass. The former Taliban foreign minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil failed to persuade American diplomats in Kabul to engage in peace talks. Instead of heading a negotiating team, Muttawakil spent eighteen months in the Parwan detention center at Bagram.

  The difference, of course, between the former warlords who the U.S. empowered after 9/11 and those they opposed was that the Taliban harbored America’s enemies. “We will make no distinction,” said President Bush, “between those who planned these acts and those who harbor them.”8 But in favoring the likes of Gul Agha Sherzai in Kandahar, America destabilized the south of Afghanistan. The aim of Bush’s war on terror was to stop further terrorist attacks. But the narrow policy focus on hunting down the Taliban and al-Qaeda targeted the symptoms; it did not cure the disease. “Entire tribes were systematically targeted and denounced as Taliban members, leading to their arrest,” wrote Felix Kuehn and Alex Strick van Linschoten, analysts who lived in Kandahar at the time.9 The CIA’s active promotion of southern warlords created the very conditions the Taliban needed. “Individuals and communities who saw themselves marginalized,” wrote Kuehn and Strick van Linschoten, “reached out to the Taliban leadership that was regrouping across the border from Kandahar, in Quetta, Pakistan.”10