Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  At his confirmation hearing, McChrystal told Congress he was going to pursue a new strategy in Afghanistan, which he called a counterinsurgency approach. Counterinsurgency meant he would focus on bringing the Afghan people over to the American side by giving them good government and a sense of security, and he would achieve this by attacking the Taliban head-on, right in their strongholds, right in Helmand and Kandahar and adjacent provinces—clear the territories, hold them, and call in the civilians. He would measure success not by how many terrorists were killed but by how many Afghan civilians felt safer. He would also impose strict rules of engagement to make sure American forces did not keep killing civilians by mistake. He warned, however, that his approach might lead to more American casualties initially because it would involve American soldiers, unprotected by body armor, interacting face-to-face with more Afghans, any of whom might be intent on killing Americans. The public should brace itself to stay the course.

  Vice President Biden opposed this strategy. He favored the more pinpoint strategy known as the counterterrorism approach. Biden wanted to remove most of the combat troops and reduce the American military footprint in Afghanistan to a handful of highly trained Special Forces who would focus strictly on identifying, hunting down, and killing key militants. His approach guaranteed that most Afghans would never have direct contact with American troops, which, ideally, would keep them from turning against America. His approach would also entail fewer American casualties, thereby keeping the American public from turning against the war—which in turn would give the administration breathing room to pursue its goals in Afghanistan as long as necessary.

  Biden also favored expanding the use of drones—remotely guided pilotless vehicles operated from video game–like consoles in Arizona that could fire rockets at precise targets on the ground. Drones would really reduce American casualties.

  Obama weighed these two approaches and liked them both. He authorized more troops for McChrystal—another thirty thousand, but he also sent in more specialists. Thereafter, arrests of suspected Taliban went up. NATO typically used the “night raid” method to arrest Taliban suspects. The team would hit a suspect’s house in the dead of night when least expected, with minimum warning and maximum noise. Wearing bulletproof body armor and night-vision goggles, they would sweep in, grab the suspect, bag him, and get out at lightning speed. Sometimes they acted on erroneous information and arrested an innocent man, but such mistakes occurred only rarely, it seems. But, even when the night raid netted a bona fide insurgent, it traumatized the rest of his social cluster—wives, children, relatives, others living with him, people whose involvement in the insurgency might have been peripheral up to that point.

  Bismillah Iqbal, who worked as an interpreter for the American military, described going on a night raid to me once.

  You can’t go in the daytime. If they know you’re coming, forget it. They start shooting. Even if you reach the front door, they’re gone, they have ways. But when you come in the middle of the night, you burst in, people are asleep all over the floor, bodies in the dark—children, teenagers—no one knows who you are or why you’re there—before they can move, you’ve dragged out some guy. One time, I remember seeing this kid cringing in a corner, wrapped in blankets. He must have been about ten. He’d been dreaming, and now he was awake and he was in a nightmare. We had our goggles on, so he couldn’t see our faces. I don’t know what we looked like to him! We dragged away whoever it was—his father maybe? His older brother? I don’t know. Women were hollering, children screaming, babies crying—you wouldn’t believe the commotion! And this kid blinking into the lights, I saw his eyes, and I thought, “Whoa. We’ll be back for him someday.”

  The Obama administration increased its use of drones dramatically. In 2008, the US military had carried out about 35 drone attacks. In the first year of the Obama administration, the United States conducted 140 drone attacks, killing nearly two hundred people. Inevitably, disputes arose about who they were killing. US and NATO officials insisted they were killing only terrorists; the villagers who had been attacked usually claimed they had nothing to do with insurgency and had suffered random civilian casualties for no reason. The truth, I’m guessing, lay somewhere in between.

  Because the problem was said to be centered in Af-Pak, the drones not infrequently fired rockets at targets on the Pakistan side of the line. This infuriated Pakistanis of all walks of life, forcing the Pakistan government to protest the drone attacks. Ironically, the Pakistan government was busy purchasing drones from the United States and deploying them against the same insurgents in the same areas at the very time that it was issuing diatribes about US use of drones.3

  In short, by the end of 2009, the United States and NATO were carrying out both a broad counterinsurgency campaign and a pinpoint counterterrorism campaign in Afghanistan (and Af-Pak). NATO had well over a hundred thousand combat troops stationed in the country, and there were also 107,000 private contractors there, of whom 26,000 were foreigners. (The other 81,000 were Afghans working for the United States or one of the other NATO nations.) The whole force far exceeded what the Soviets had deployed in Afghanistan at their peak. Even so, the insurgency kept spreading.

  In 2010, McChrystal organized the biggest pitched battle of the war in Marjah, a small town twenty miles from Lashkargah, the capital of Helmand Province. McChrystal called Marjah the headquarters of the insurgency and said that taking this town would break the back of the Taliban. The battle was fierce, the outcome inevitable: NATO won in a week. As soon as all “the Taliban” had been killed or driven underground, McChrystal’s troops unloaded a so-called government in a box. In short order, Marjah’s schools had reopened, clinics were operating, police were patrolling the streets, infrastructure was being maintained, and life looked good.

  The only problem was that isolated episodes of violence kept troubling the town and its environs—no pitched battles, no militia attacks, nothing the police and military couldn’t handle: it was more like crime than like war, but still, the bottom line was, violence kept happening and happening and happening.... Lady Sale’s book A Journal of the Disasters in Afghanistan gave a similar picture of the situation the British experienced in Kabul in 1841. McChrystal triggered an uproar a few months later when he called Marjah a “bleeding ulcer,” but he wasn’t far wrong. The real problem for NATO was that its troops couldn’t distinguish the people they were fighting against from the people they were fighting to protect. This wasn’t their fault. One had to be on the inside to know the difference, and even there the boundaries were often blurred.4

  Whatever momentum McChrystal built up, he broke it in July 2010 by consenting to a strange interview with Rolling Stone magazine in which he expressed blatant contempt for President Obama.5 He told the reporter the president had looked “intimidated” when he met with his own military commanders. He derided Vice President Biden even more severely, pretending not to know his name and allowing his aide to suggest the name might be “Bite me.” The general was called to Washington by his commander in chief for further instruction in military protocol, and the legendary General David Petraeus was installed in his place.

  Conventional wisdom saw Petraeus as the man who had made “the surge” work in Iraq—surge meaning the sudden deployment of many additional troops. Petraeus endorsed McChrystal’s fight-the-Taliban-in-their-strongholds strategy, but he let up on the tight rules of engagement. The rules had, in any case, been honored more in the breach than in the observance, and Petraeus said he could not in good conscience add to the dangers his own troops faced. The day he took charge, a NATO air strike killed thirty-nine civilians, mostly women and children, near the city of Kandahar. That fall, General Petraeus launched an even bigger battle than the one in Marjah. He decided to conquer Kandahar itself, the country’s second-biggest city and the very birthplace of the Taliban.

  During early skirmishes in the suburbs of Kandahar, American forces dropped twenty-five tons of bombs on a village c
alled Tarok Kolache, erasing it from the face of the earth. (The residents had been warned to evacuate beforehand; official sources said there were no civilian casualties.) 6 Finally, after about two months of fighting, the United States claimed victory in the battle for Kandahar. Unfortunately, the gains made in Marjah had largely eroded by that time, and the insurgency was spreading virulently north.

  Even in Kandahar, the extent of NATO control came into question on the night of April 25, 2011, when some eight hundred prisoners escaped from the main prison there. They left through a tunnel they had been digging for several months without anyone noticing. So many prisoners escaped that they were streaming out for four hours, also without anyone noticing. They came up in the compound across the street from the prison. From there, cars took them to more distant locations, where at least some of them completed their getaway in taxicabs. Only after all of them were gone did the alarm sound.7

  The killing of Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011, should have marked a turning point, given that when the United States went into Afghanistan in 2001, capturing Bin Laden and defeating al Qaeda were the avowed purpose of the war. The Taliban came into it only because they had abetted Bin Laden. As for the Afghans in general, they were defined as the intended beneficiaries of the intervention. Bin Laden’s mysterious escape in 2001 and his subsequent silence left the War on Terror in Afghanistan without a marker that could define a victory. What would winning consist of? Other than Bin Laden and al Qaeda, there was no ruler to topple, no organization to bust up, no capital city to take. In Bush’s war, the other side was never going to say “we surrender” because the “other side” in Afghanistan was not a “we,” not a state, syndicate, or fixed entity of any kind, but a condition: a brew of poverty, impotence, resentment, humiliation, and aggression cooked into a movement by an angry ideology that had come to permeate the Islamic world. Anything the United States did to break the insurgency tended only to add to the humiliation and thus fuel the fires of resentment: fighting the war became the thing that was causing the war. Fighting it harder only made the fires burn hotter. Over the years, the “jihadism” of al Qaeda and its ilk melted into the enduring older dramas of Afghan history, including that long struggle between outward-looking Kabul and the inward-looking world of the Afghan countryside, a conflict the United States and NATO could not possibly solve. Instead, their attempts to “fix” Afghanistan devolved into a campaign that many Afghans now perceive as a war on Afghan culture.

  Until May 2011, political considerations made it difficult for any US president to simply end the war and bring the troops home. His domestic political rivals would have accused him of accepting a defeat. But when a small team of Navy Seals dropped into a compound in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, less than a mile from the Pakistan Military Academy, and shot Osama Bin Laden dead, they achieved the only definable objective of the war. Surely now it would be possible to declare victory and go home. But, as it turned out, it was too late for that. The United States was too thoroughly embroiled in Afghanistan to disengage so easily, even though the Obama plan to train an Afghan national army and police force and hand the country over to them remained on the books.

  After Bin Laden’s death, the Afghan insurgency demonstrated seemingly growing power with a series of strikes. In June 2011, gunmen and suicide bombers launched a five-hour attack on the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, where foreign dignitaries were meeting to discuss the future of Afghanistan. That September, insurgents fought an all-day battle in the capital, raining rockets on the US embassy and detonating four suicide bombs simultaneously in disparate parts of the city. One week later, assassins killed Burhanuddin Rabbani, head of the Northern Alliance and former president of the country, who was serving as leader of an ineffectual “peace council” commissioned by Karzai to negotiate with the Taliban. In April 2012, insurgents carried out another series of attacks in Kabul, another all-day battle. One month later, they assassinated another leading member of “the peace council.” And so it went.

  Ominously, more and more attacks were carried out by men in Afghan police or Afghan army uniforms. One suicide bomber blew himself up in the very heart of the Ministry of Defense. In 2012, killers dressed as policemen murdered two American officers in the most heavily secured area of the Ministry of Interior. This was no passion killing but a carefully plotted crime by someone made up to look like “one of ours.” Were the insurgents stealing uniforms, or were they infiltrating the Afghan army and police forces that NATO was trying to build up? Which would be worse? Hard to say. The government, in any case, responded by forbidding tailors to make military uniforms.

  As the ferocity of the insurgency mounted, US and NATO forces kept pouring fuel on the fire with a string of crimes and blunders that reinforced among Afghans a sense of the West as an invader at war with them. In the summer of 2011, the trial of the Stryker Brigade “kill team” began. These were a dozen soldiers who had formed a murder club in Kandahar to hunt and kill Afghan civilians for sport and who had kept (and traded) fingers and other body parts of their victims—details that emerged during the trials. In January 2012, a video of four US Marines urinating on the corpses of Afghans went viral on YouTube. In February, American troops at Bagram incinerated copies of the Qur’an in a trash fire, echoing another episode a year earlier, when a pastor in Florida burned Qur’ans as a deliberately provocative act that sparked deadly riots throughout Afghanistan. In March 2012, an American soldier went on a rampage in Kandahar and massacred sixteen random Afghan civilians.

  American presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, reacting to the massacre and the subsequent unrest, said the United States should withdraw from Afghanistan posthaste because it was not going to “fundamentally change Afghan culture”8—reifying the assumption that the point of all these troops and firepower had all along been to “fundamentally change Afghan culture.”

  35

  All That Glitters

  THESE DEVELOPMENTS PROBABLY MAKE AFGHANISTAN LOOK HOPELESS. Whoever the Taliban might be, they’re on the march, and nothing can now stop them from plunging Afghanistan back into the darkness of the late nineties . . . or so it seems.

  That judgment, however, may be premature. The other side is pushing forward full throttle as well, fueled partly by the fact that big money is at stake now. In July 2010, right after McChrystal was fired, a major piece of good news began competing with all the awful war reports coming out of unhappy Afghanistan. It began with a New York Times piece revealing that this country has at least $1 trillion worth of undeveloped mineral wealth. The report was based on geological surveys commissioned by the Pentagon in 2009, but it wasn’t really news: Alexander the Great knew of Afghanistan’s copper. Marco Polo mentioned its mineral wealth. I first heard that mining would save Afghanistan in 1978, from an Afghan Ministry of Mines official visiting the Asia Foundation, where I worked at the time. Later, the Soviets mapped the minerals. According to the Times, however, few realized how rich these lodes were until the recent survey.

  Afghanistan has the world’s second-largest unexploited deposits of copper at a place called Mes Aynak. It has one of the largest deposits of unexploited high-grade iron ore in all of Asia. It has gold and precious gems, cobalt and phosphorus, barium, strontium, and uranium. It has plenty of natural gas and even a small quantity of oil.

  Most interesting of all is the abundance of “rare earth minerals,” including lithium, lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, and thirteen other metals that I confess I never heard of until they were discovered in Afghanistan. “Rare earth” minerals are actually no more rare than tin, but normally they are so thinly dispersed through layers of rock and soil that extracting commercial quantities of them is difficult. Extracting them is well worth the effort today, however, because technologies such as fiber optics, computer displays, hard drives, cell phone batteries, laptop batteries, low-energy lighting, solar conversion cells, hybrid car engines, and satellite communications would be impossible without them. Rare earth minerals also
figure in a host of advanced military devices, such as guidance and control systems for smart bombs, drones, precision missiles, laser weaponry, signal-jamming devices, and military radar. The technologies essential to power and prosperity over the next century will depend on rare earth minerals, so you can bet those minerals will be as much the basis of wealth in the near future as oil was in the recent past. And poor Afghanistan is located right on the line of scrimmage again between the many powers that will be fighting for those riches.

  China has the world’s largest known reserves of rare earth minerals, about thirty-six million tons. Russia is next with nineteen million tons, and then comes the United States with thirteen million. No one knows how much Afghanistan has, but US military geologists have estimated that less than one square mile of the Helmand Valley contains about 1.5 million tons. If that is the sum total of rare earth minerals in Afghanistan, it’s still a lot for one small country. There might be much more, though it’s hard to tell right now, because the rare earth minerals are located exactly where the insurgency is raging most ferociously—in Kandahar and Helmand provinces.

  Coincidence?

  Yes, I’m pretty sure it is. Sorry, conspiracy theorists, but the factors that make these provinces so truculent predate the technologies that make rare earth minerals so precious. Most of the inhabitants of Helmand and Kandahar know nothing of the wealth they’re standing on—yet. That will change.

  I called the mineral wealth of Afghanistan good news, but really it’s a good news/bad news situation. The minerals would be an unmitigated boon for a country with the technical know-how to develop its own resources, the strength to hold hungry outsiders at bay, and the social institutions needed to ensure that the wealth benefits the whole society and not just a favored few. As matters stand, foreign companies are the ones in line to develop these resources. Afghans will get something out of them through leases and partnerships, but they have yet to develop the political and social mechanisms to absorb even this portion of the wealth equitably and without conflict. Sadly, such mechanisms might not develop in the pressure cooker of great-power contention that has always put the squeeze on Afghanistan and will go on doing so.