by David Loyn
In the summer, the Taliban put intense pressure on the strategically important town of Ghazni—halfway between Kabul and Kandahar. It took four days of hard fighting to recover. The war was taking a toll on the government. The highly experienced national security adviser Hanif Atmar resigned soon afterward, along with the head of the intelligence service, the NDS, Muhammad Masoom Stanekzai. Both had been reformers with Ghani since the early days of post-Taliban Afghanistan. And Farkhunda Naderi, a former MP Ghani brought into his team to liaise with the UN, also resigned, as she found herself constantly sidelined in meetings and faced problems getting her team paid. Atmar was replaced as national security adviser by a reformer, Hamdullah Mohib, as Ghani’s options narrowed and he brought his most loyal followers into key roles.
In August, Ghani again put out his hand to the Taliban, making an offer of a pause in hostilities for the second Eid holiday, again unconditional, and was willing to extend it for three months. But Taliban leaders were wary—concerned about the battle readiness of their fighters if they once again came into cities. Fighters had been instructed to stay at their posts for the cease-fire, not stream into the cities for selfies and ice cream. Mullah Omar’s son Muhammad Yaqoob was recorded saying fighters had “totally disobeyed the terms of the ceasefire.”15
Across the country, there were reports of Taliban fighters not going back to the fight after the first cease-fire. They had seen they were not the decadent Western places they had been told. “I went to the city and the mosques were full of people,” one fighter, Muhammadullah, told The Guardian. “I did not notice anything against the Islamic rules. After the sweet three days of peace, going back to bloodshed looks strange. How can you even compare peace with war?”16 Taliban commanders would not take the risk again. They reverted to their consistent position that they wanted a peace deal with the “occupiers,” not their “puppet government.” But the relentless U.S. bombing since Trump had allowed it in 2017 was having its effect.
GENERATIONAL CONFLICT
On September 2, 2018, General Mick Nicholson handed over to General Austin Scott Miller. In a low-key ceremony in bright sunshine, under the larch trees in front of the yellow building, in the country where he had spent so much of his life, Nicholson said, “It’s time for this war to end.” He appealed to the Taliban to stop listening to Pakistan and instead to listen to “the voices of your own people who are encouraging you to peace.”17
Miller’s whole career had been as a special operator. He was wounded twice—when ground commander in the Black Hawk Down firefight in Mogadishu in 1993, and in Fallujah in Iraq. At the time of his promotion to the Kabul command in 2018, he had been the commander of Joint Special Operations Command for two years. Inevitably, he had spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, where he was one of the first special operators on the ground in 2001. His son, Lieutenant Austin Miller Jr., four months out of West Point, was at his confirmation hearing in the Senate. Acknowledging “this young guy sitting behind me,” Miller called the Afghan conflict “generational.” He said, “I never anticipated that his cohort would be in a position to deploy as I sat there in 2001.”
Senator Elizabeth Warren mocked the number of senior generals and administration officials who had come to the Senate Armed Services Committee hailing “turning points” in the Afghan conflict. “We’ve supposedly turned the corner so many times that it seems now we’re going in circles.” She called the war an “impossible task.” Miller did not offer a turning point, nor did he “guarantee a timeline or end date.” The flexibility afforded by the Trump administration meant the military presence in Afghanistan was now based on conditions, not an arbitrary timeline. Critics like Warren were concerned that it meant the U.S. was now “heading further down a path that does not have success at the end.” It was still not clear what success looked like.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joe Dunford, was instrumental in the appointment, describing himself as a “very big Scott Miller fan.” Dunford called Miller to see if he was interested before putting him forward. “I think Scott Miller is one of the most professionally mature, thoughtful individuals that we have in uniform,” he said. “His nuanced approach to developing relationships with the Afghans, his understanding of how to balance issues such as civilian casualties with prosecuting the mission, I think was tailor-made for a really complex environment that we found ourselves in in Afghanistan.” When Dunford commanded in Kabul, Miller was for a year the commander of the Special Operations Command for Afghanistan, who had a role in training local forces. Dunford watched Miller create a “deep partnership with the Afghans.”
In 2009, working with Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal in the Pentagon, Miller had developed the AfPak Hands program, where officers were taken out of their mainstream careers for five years, trained in Dari, Pashtu, or Urdu, and sent on multiple tours to the region. McChrystal had been the only commander who had really cared for the program. The Hands had found themselves shunted into jobs in Afghanistan that did not call on their specialist skills. When it started, Miller envisaged that those on it would be people likely to progress to senior command positions. But it did not work. Hands found they were losing promotions, and the quality of recruits went down, as genuine volunteers were replaced by many who were “voluntold.” Ten years after creating the program, Miller saw it wound up under his command. “The institutional bureaucracy of the military promotion system does not support the survival of programs like the [AfPak] Hands,” said retired navy captain James Muir, who ran it in Afghanistan in its early years.18
THE ROCK IN THE POND
Trump paid little attention to Afghanistan. He allowed the Afghanistan/Pakistan special representative role, originally founded for Holbrooke, to wither, and never met Nicholson. But three days after Nicholson left, September 5, 2018, with just the kind of disruptive flourish that marked his presidency, he threw a rock in the pond, appointing the evergreen Afghan envoy Zalmay Khalilzad to negotiate a peace deal with the Taliban. Khalilzad had a limited mandate—to bring the troops home with honor. Instructing his new envoy to talk to the Taliban about U.S. withdrawal, without the consent of the Afghan government, President Trump tore up the received wisdom of the “geometry” of peace talks, not the Afghan government talking to the Taliban, but a separate U.S. deal with the Taliban. And all the time Khalilzad was operating under what Rubin called “the Tweet of Damocles,” the likelihood of an abrupt withdrawal of U.S. forces being announced by tweet by the restless occupant of the White House.19
Khalilzad planned first to negotiate the withdrawal of U.S. troops in return for the Taliban agreeing to sever links with al-Qaeda and allow safe passage for the pullout, followed by a cease-fire and negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan administration. The Taliban were skeptical, holding preliminary meetings with Khalilzad in Dubai to see if he could really deliver a withdrawal of U.S. troops, before they would agree to engage in talks in Doha. According to Taliban sources, Khalilzad made assurances in those early meetings that he could secure the release of the Kandahar landowner Haji Bashir Noorzai, in jail in the U.S. for drug-running.20 This was just one of the plates that Khalilzad kept spinning as he moved tirelessly from capital to capital, keeping a lot of ideas up in the air, all the time with the Tweet of Damocles hanging over his head.
Khalilzad worked to build as wide a consensus as he could for a peace deal, traveling frequently to Afghanistan’s neighbors, as well as European capitals, between nine rounds of talks with the Taliban. The process left the Kabul government out in the cold. The Afghan president had known the American envoy, since they were just two years apart in the same Kabul school in the 1960s and ’70s. When Khalilzad first came to Kabul to report in his new role, there were no niceties. Without even offering tea or a seat, Ghani looked at Khalilzad and said, “Well?” waiting for a report. One observer said he had the manner of a headmaster with an errant student.
In March 2019, Ghani’s frustrations came out into the open.
On a visit to the U.S., the Afghan national security adviser, Hamdullah Mohib, publicly accused Khalilzad of wanting to set up a transition government in Kabul and setting himself up as a “Viceroy”—a loaded term in South Asia from the days of the British Empire. The comments were not just behind closed doors but in a TV interview with CBS News21 and background meetings with think tanks. The response was icy. “Attacks on Ambassador Khalilzad are seen as attacks on the State Department, and only serve to hinder the bilateral relationship and the peace process.”22 The U.S. cut off contact with Mohib for several months. Mohib’s wife, Lael, is American, and he had served in Washington as ambassador, so his temporary banishment came as a personal blow as well as a significant rift in the relationship with Afghanistan’s most important ally.
Further humiliation for Ghani came in a series of meetings between Khalilzad in 2019 in Moscow and Beijing. In previous years Russia had brought together Taliban representatives with a broad cross section of the Afghan elite—including former President Karzai, and the old warlords, the 1980s mujahideen leaders. To Ghani, it looked like a deliberate Russian attempt to confuse and disrupt the process, and he would not send government representatives. Until 2019 the U.S. ignored the Russian negotiations, but in agreements with Russia and China, Khalilzad agreed that all would work together for peace in Afghanistan, engaging a wider representation of Afghans than just the government. The deal signed in Beijing in July pushed for talks between the “Taliban, Afghan government, and other Afghans.”23 As president, Ghani thought he represented all Afghans and saw this as another snub. He felt his leadership usurped, especially when it became clear that Khalilzad was offering the Taliban an interim government to replace him ahead of peace talks. The Khalilzad process was a long way from being Afghan-owned and Afghan-led.
The U.S. was also courting Pakistan’s support. Given Pakistan’s continuing support for the Taliban, this was seen in Kabul as further provocation. President Trump sent a letter to Pakistan’s new prime minister, Imran Khan, requesting Islamabad’s assistance in facilitating U.S. talks with the Taliban. In March 2019, General Joe Votel, the outgoing commander of the U.S. Central Command, told Congress, “We’ve seen Pakistan play a more helpful role in helping to bring Taliban representatives into negotiations.”24 Pakistan was invited to the Beijing summit in July, a move that further angered the Kabul government.
But Ghani’s government did not take the available opportunities. Early in the process, Khalilzad requested that Kabul nominate a negotiating team to be ready for the second phase, recommending it should be broadly representative. The peace process may not have been sequenced as Ghani wanted it, but he could have engaged more constructively from the start. Instead, he appointed his low-profile chief of staff, Abdul Salam Rahimi, as minister for peace—whom I had previously watched blocking reformers as he played petty palace politics. His first attempt at an “inclusive” negotiating team was greeted with derision on Afghan social media and quickly abandoned. The incapacity of the government side to put forward a credible team reached farcical levels when a list of 250 names went to Doha—leading the Taliban spokesperson, Zabiullah Mujahid, to tweet that the “Afghan elite are treating the peace talks like a wedding at Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel.”
By September 2019, Khalilzad believed he had a deal ready to sign with the Taliban, principally concerning the withdrawal of U.S. and other international troops. But just as Trump had kicked off the process with a disruptive tactic the year before, so he abruptly tweeted the cancellation of a summit meeting at Camp David, even before it was public knowledge. His stated reason was the death of an American soldier in Afghanistan, so he could not sign a peace deal with his killers. But it emerged that he had invited President Ghani to the summit, perhaps hoping to broker a settlement, trusting in his wizardry in the “art of the deal.” When the Taliban heard this, they pulled out, as they did not want face-to-face talks with the Afghan government, leaving him with no option but to cancel. The Afghan presidential election had been postponed twice already in 2019 in the uncertainty over the peace deal, but went ahead in September, putting the peace process on hold.
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ELECTION AND AFTER
The United States has rarely accomplished long-term goals after any conflict without an extended American military presence to ensure proper results from the peace.
—U.S. Army historian Dr. Conrad C. Crane1
THE GERMANZAIS
September 28, 2019. Election day in Kabul. Haris Helmand made breakfast like the boxer he is—a box of eggs, chopped peppers and tomatoes, and a whole packet of sliced cheese, all thrown into a pan. “There is nowhere I would rather be,” he said. “I am so excited to be here.” A large, well-built man, he is a worryingly good shot, talking while splitting a ballpoint mounted on a block at the bottom of the garden some thirty yards away with an air-rifle slug. A banker as well as a boxer, he was one of a small group of Afghan-origin Germans who took leave from senior jobs to put something back into the country they left as children, when Daud Noorzai, the reformer who had been forced out of the government two years before, called them to oil the wheels of Ashraf Ghani’s election campaign. Among the hundreds of young volunteers in the campaign headquarters, they were known as the “Germanzais,” a new Afghan tribe.
The contours of their lives had been shaped by Afghanistan’s long wars. Helmand’s family left their ancestral home in Lashkar Gah, Helmand, in 1985, when the area was under relentless attack from Soviet forces. His father, a wealthy landowner, stashed money on staging points along the route east to Pakistan and took sixteen members of his family on a perilous journey. They had to slip across the border evading checks, walking alone, carrying nothing. They spent a year not far from Quetta, while his father secured fake passports for $50,000 each. Helmand was struck by the austere religious practice demanded of the boys his age in school in the Pakistan desert; ten years later, they would be the Taliban. The family ended up in Germany after a circuitous route flying from Karachi via Singapore, Bangkok, and Kuala Lumpur. Ripping up their fake passports on the last leg of the flight, they arrived to seek asylum.
Traditional Afghans do not have a last name in the Western sense, and this family were named after their province for immigration papers. Many of those around the president had similar stories and were named for where they came from—Helmand, Maiwandi, and Mirwais Farahi, the director of international relations for the Ghani administration—a refugee nation returning home. Navigating the cultural tides of their lives was complex; the Germanzais were treated as Afghans in Germany, although they had lived there for forty years, and were seen as Germans on this brief return to serve in Afghanistan. They had successful jobs in German businesses, so lived a Western lifestyle, but most married into the Afghan community in Germany, holding to tradition.
The Afghan presidential election, originally scheduled for March 2019, then July, could finally be held in September, close to the last time there could be nationwide voting without disruption by winter snow. The delays were partly caused by uncertainty over Zalmay Khalilzad’s peace track, which proposed putting elections on hold while the country was governed by an interim administration during peace talks. The president’s cousin Ajmal Ghani accused Khalilzad of a “pathetic attempt to sell the republic,”2 by allowing every prominent Afghan to think they would lead the interim government. “Zal did such a great job for Karzai,” he said. “Zal has misled the Americans, misled our neighbors, when he guaranteed to them that there would be no election.”
The delay stalled the campaign of one of Ghani’s strongest rivals, his former national security adviser Hanif Atmar, who emerged in the spring of 2019 as the effective leader of the opposition, marshaling support from other presidential candidates to push for an election on the timetable that year. Despite his background as a Communist, losing a leg fighting on the Soviet side against the mujahideen in the worst battle of the war at Jalalabad in 1989, Atmar constructed an election platform that included th
e main mujahideen factions. Afghanistan’s politics without parties ensured there was no effective democratic counterweight to the power brokers of the 1980s and 1990s, so these deals still needed to be done. But Atmar’s platform proved too broad to hold together, facing the well-resourced campaigns of Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, through the year of delayed elections, and he withdrew from the race.
Tribal heritage and wartime experience remained more important than any policy differences between candidates. When advising in Ashraf Ghani’s office in 2017, I wrote a paper reminding his staff of the success of Emmanuel Macron in putting together a party from nowhere that succeeded both in parliamentary and presidential elections in France. With an Afghan parliamentary election then coming up in 2018 and the presidential poll a year later, perhaps this could be a model. If Ghani ran a recognizable slate of candidates for parliament, that could be the springboard, providing a machine for the presidential poll. But opposition to political parties in Afghanistan runs deep, and the proposal had no traction. The reform-minded Daud Noorzai did try to run one hundred candidates in the parliamentary election who would be acknowledged as a Ghani bloc, but he quickly pulled out when it became clear that the election was more mired in corruption even than previous polls.
As incumbent, the 2019 election was Ghani’s to lose. In a traditional society, people asked why he needed to be replaced if he had not died, and voted accordingly. But he was vulnerable to attack. The rumor grew that his was a Pashtun-centric administration. A popular insult was that you had to be “LLE” to get on in the Arg—from the Pashtun provinces of Laghman or Logar and speak English. It was never true; even among senior staff, there was a balance of tribal identities. But the Arg were not proactive at combating falsehoods and telling their own story.
