Descent Into Chaos

by Ahmed Rashid

  After 9/11, Karimov had launched another major crackdown on Islamists and anyone opposed to his regime. Hundreds of people were arrested and tortured. For the first time ever, antigovernment protests were staged by women whose male relatives had been arrested. In April 2002, wives and mothers had demonstrated in Tashkent and the Ferghana Valley for several days before being arrested and charged with belonging to HT. That month the ICRC had announced that it would withdraw its delegation from Uzbekistan because the government had failed to fulfill its obligations on torture or to respect an agreement the two sides had concluded in January 2001 giving the ICRC access to political prisoners.

  The human rights situation in Uzbekistan had worsened considerably. Its jails held more than ten thousand political prisoners, who were tortured, abused, and beaten as a matter of course. Many were innocent citizens. The most embarrassing case had involved the deaths in August 2002 of Muzafar Avazov, thirty-four, and Khusniddin Alimov, thirty-five, who were held at the notorious Jaslyk jail. After the two were tortured to death, their bodies were returned to their families, who found that they had been forcibly drowned in boiling water. They had been punished for refusing to stop saying their prayers—guards at Jaslyk prevented prisoners from praying, fasting, or reading the Koran. Just after the two men died, Colin Powell reported to the U.S. Congress that Uzbekistan had made substantial progress in improving human rights, in order that Congress would release an additional $45 million in aid for Uzbekistan. Eleven prisoners died under torture in Uzbekistan the first fifteen months after 9/11, according to human rights groups.

  Two further U.S. bases were established in Central Asia, in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, in 2002. The United States rented thirty-seven acres outside the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, alongside the Manas International Airport, where it established the Ganci Air Base, named after a New York City firefighter who had died in the World Trade Center attack. Several European countries and Canada contributed to building the base. An enormous tent city had sprung up by the spring of 2002, capable of housing three thousand troops and some two dozen aircraft, including French Mirages and U.S. F-15 and F-18 fighter bombers. At the end of April, when Rumsfeld toured the base, only half of the two thousand troops there were American. Eleven nations were to contribute either planes or troops. Spain, Holland, and Denmark ran massive cargo planes to Europe, always taking off at night, while the U.S.-run KC-135 tanker aircraft provided in-flight refueling for bombers and surveillance flights over Afghanistan.46 The United States agreed to provide Kyrgyzstan $92 million in aid for 2002, of which more than half went into building capacity in the country’s poorly equipped twelve-thousand-man army.

  The presence of the Ganci (or Manas) Air Base convinced the Russians that the Americans and NATO countries planned to stay on in Central Asia. Putin responded with his own base diplomacy, leaning on the Kyrgyz to provide Russia with an air base. In June 2002 the Kyrgyz were forced to oblige, giving the Russians an air base at Kant, ten miles from Bishkek and almost eyeball to eyeball with the Americans. The Kant base would deploy what Russia considered its answer to NATO, a rapid-deployment force aimed at countering IMU threats to Central Asia. In December 2002, when President Vladimir Putin arrived to sign the Bishkek Declaration with Kyrgyz president Askar Akayev, he said Russia would deploy twenty fighter bombers and some seven hundred troops to Kant. The Russian media lavished praise on Putin for reestablishing Russia’s influence in its former colonies and not leaving the region to the Americans. Russia was now openly competing with the United States in Central Asia.

  In January 2002, Tajikistan had signed an agreement with France for the use of Dushanbe Airport by French aircraft and air crews. France had agreed to help the Americans in Afghanistan with its own air power. For Tajik president Emomali Rakhmonov it was a risky venture. Russia maintained a large military force in southern Tajikistan, where eleven thousand Russian and Tajik troops guarded the porous border with Afghanistan. The Russian 201st Division also had a base in Dushanbe. However, Rakhmonov agreed to the presence of the base and joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace program—the last Central Asian nation to do so apart from Turkmenistan. Tajikistan also received $125 million in American aid. At the end of the year, Rakhmonov was granted a visit to Washington, where he met with Bush and appealed for more help to deal with terrorism and the country’s chronic economic crisis.

  As a result of the civil war in the 1990s, Tajikistan was by far the poorest of the Central Asian states. Although GDP growth had jumped from 1.7 percent in 1997 to 10.0 percent in 2002, the economy was still less than half the size it was in 1991, when Tajikistan became independent. There was a huge unchecked population explosion, while some 50 percent of children were undernourished. The UN estimated that 80 percent of the population lived below the poverty level, while 60 percent of workers were unemployed. A staggering 1.0 to 1.5 million workers out of a total population of 6.5 million were forced to migrate to find work in Russia. Tajikistan was also vulnerable to crime, as it had hosted the IMU for several years in the late 1990s and had become a major exit point for Afghan heroin, which fueled corruption.

  The real challenge to both the United States and Russia would now come from China, whose borders lay only two hundred miles from the Manas Air Base. China was angry and nervous about the U.S. military presence so close to its mainland. During the cold war the United States had tried to encircle China using proxies; now it was on China’s doorstep. China’s first response was to strengthen ties with all the Central Asian regimes and provide them military aid and training as a counter to U.S. influence. In January 2002, China called an urgent meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization—the security association Beijing had forged with Central Asian states and Russia—to demand that U.S. forces stay in the region only as long as was necessary.

  China held large-scale military exercises along its borders with Central Asia involving thousands of troops and also stepped up the resolution of border disputes with Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan. China’s greatest fear was the penetration of its predominantly Muslim province of Xinjiang by Uighur extremists, who had found refuge in Afghanistan and Pakistan and might now slip back into Central Asia or even Xinjiang to escape the U.S. dragnet. At least a dozen Uighurs caught in Afghanistan were being held in Guantánamo Bay prison, while others were taking shelter in Pakistan tribal areas.

  The U.S. bases in Central Asia were to prove a gold mine for those in power. Just as Gul Agha Sherzai had become rich by being the main provider for U.S. troops in Kandahar, so the sons and daughters of Central Asia’s ruling elites made millions of dollars by maintaining a monopoly over who provided what to the U.S. bases. In Kyrgyzstan it was an open secret that President Akayev’s own family had the contract to sell fuel to the Manas base—corruption allegations that became better known after Akayev was overthrown in 2005. For their part, the Americans did little to implement fair practices in issuing contracts for supplies. In fact they found that their access to the ruling families was considerably enhanced by encouraging these contracts. Far from pursuing democracy and encouraging reform, the American presence was to make already corrupt ruling elites even more powerful and corrupt, much to the anger of the people.

  PART THREE

  THE FAILURE OF NATION BUILDING

  CHAPTER NINE

  Afghanistan I Economic Reconstruction

  When the war against the Taliban began, my desk in Lahore was flooded with economic papers and plans. Governments, UN agencies, multinational lending institutions, universities, and NGOs were preparing concept papers on how to start reconstructing Afghanistan, but nobody had a clue about the country. None of the agencies had the capacity or the contacts to be able to consult Afghans about their basic needs or development priorities. Since 1978 no comprehensive census had been taken and no economic data gathered. Most of the plans were “guesstimates.” Still, the aid agencies wanted to know how they could help.

  Afghanistan had been more comprehensively destroyed af
ter twenty-two years of continuous war than any country since World War II apart from Vietnam. Tragically, the Afghans had done more damage to their own country than had the Soviets. Whereas the Soviets had fought much of their war in the rural Pashtun belt, the Afghanistan civil war in the 1990s had destroyed the cities and infrastructure as warring factions bombarded Kabul and destroyed or looted the infrastructure—right down to selling off telegraph wire and road fences in Pakistan. Roads, power and telephone lines, water and sewer pipes, houses, shops, schools, and hospitals—everything looked like burned-out shells or upturned carcasses. When the Taliban arrived they had no interest in rebuilding the country nor the money to do so. Their only contribution was rebuilding some mosques and petrol pumps.

  What little humanitarian aid did flow to Afghanistan in the last years of the Taliban regime became more and more problematic. The UN, Red Cross, and a handful of NGO relief agencies kept millions of Afghans alive with food supplies and ran the few hospitals and schools that still functioned. Farmers had been crippled by a five-year drought and many had moved to the cities in anticipation of free food. Nearly one million Afghans were displaced inside the country, and a new flow of refugees was arriving in Pakistan and Iran. The Taliban had no concern for the public, nor any sense of responsibility toward them—rather, they created roadblocks for the UN, determined to make it as difficult as possible for international agencies to operate there. Osama bin Laden persuaded the Taliban to expel all Western aid agencies and impose such restrictive laws on Western aid workers that it became virtually impossible to work in Kabul. The Taliban imposed restrictions on providing health care, education, and food to women and then tried to force the UN to discriminate against women. This led to calls from within the UN system to stop all aid to Afghanistan. Just before the attacks of 9/11 the entire international aid program for keeping millions of Afghans alive was on the verge of collapse and a humanitarian and political crisis was clearly brewing.

  After the war, Bush could not avoid the issues that confronted the Coalition and the enormous expectations of the Afghan public. The task of nation building also posed a major political dilemma for the United States. It was not that Washington lacked experience; since the end of the cold war the United States had helped nation-building operations in Somalia, Haiti, Cambodia, East Timor, and the former Yugoslavia. And the United States had been responsible for the most successful nation-building exercise the world had ever seen: the rebuilding of Germany and Japan after World War II under the Marshall Plan. In fact, Marshall became a byword for success. U.S. aid had helped rebuild the former Axis powers’ army and police, revived the economy, rebuilt the infrastructure, and created a new political structure and constitution. “The cases of Germany and Japan set a standard for post conflict nation-building that has not since been matched,” said James Dobbins, the most experienced American official engaged in nation building.1 Scholars and diplomats now argued for a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan. The problem was that the Bush neocons had simply no interest before or after the war in doing anything like this.

  Luckily it was not just up to the United States. The international community designated the UN as the main coordinator for peacekeeping and reconstruction in Afghanistan, although it had avoided deploying bluehelmeted troops on the ground. The UN had carried out forty peacekeeping operations since the end of the cold war and all had involved some aspects of nation building. In 2007 the UN had twenty such operations running worldwide, costing over $6 billion and deploying 100,000 soldiers and 15,000 civilians. While it cost $200,000 to deploy one NATO soldier in the former Yugoslavia, it cost only $45,000 to deploy a UN peacekeeper.2 Kofi Annan described the link between peacekeeping and nation building: “UN peacekeeping operations are now increasingly complex and multidimensional, going beyond monitoring a cease-fire to actually bringing failed states back to life, often after decades of conflict. [They] . . . organize elections, enact police and judicial reform, promote and protect human rights, conduct mine-clearance, advance gender equality, achieve the voluntary disarmament of former combatants, and support the return of refugees and displaced people to their homes.”3

  A hesitant Bush blew hot and cold over nation building, while Rumsfeld refused to involve U.S. troops in any such task. He could not make the connection that the army’s “full-spectrum dominance” on the battlefield could be achieved only if it also had the capacity to rebuild the countries it invaded.4 The State Department was under pressure from its allies to show leadership in rebuilding Afghanistan, but no arm of government was dedicated to nation building, and Bush declined to elevate the task into a part of U.S. foreign policy.

  In 1997 President Clinton had signed Presidential Decision Directive 56, which established an interagency planning and training process for handling “complex contingency operations” abroad—in other words, nation building. The order expired and was not renewed by Bush, leaving a legal vacuum in the U.S. foreign policy system. Meanwhile, before 9/11, Rumsfeld had shut down the army’s Peacekeeping Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania—its only training institute for nation-building tasks. There was no institution in the U.S. arsenal to deploy for nation building. In a report after 9/11, the Council on Foreign Relations was blunt about the situation: “The stark reality is that the United States does not have the right structural capability to stabilize and rebuild nations. Responsibility is diffuse and authority is uncertain. The proper roles of the military and civilian agencies have not been articulated. And civilian players desperately need a ‘unified command’ structure to align policies, programs and resources. ”5 The Pentagon’s own Defense Science Board asked that “the Secretary of Defense should designate stabilization and reconstruction operations as core military tasks.”6 Rumsfeld ignored all such requests.

  In the weeks after 9/11, I met with development officials from around the world, including Andrew Natsios, the head of USAID. Natsios was charming, and a heartfelt humanitarian. An expert on famine in North Korea, he had written a book about it and was now desperately keen to get USAID do the right thing for Afghanistan, but he had no idea where to start.

  Moreover, USAID was not the organization I knew growing up as a child in Pakistan, when it had water engineers and agronomists in the field. Its total experience of Afghanistan in the past two decades was handing out large and generous checks to the UN’s World Food Programme to buy wheat to feed Afghans. There was nobody in USAID who spoke the language or knew the country.

  USAID had shrunk from thirteen thousand staff members during the Vietnam War to just twenty-three hundred in 2001. After 9/11 its budget was doubled, to $14 billion, but it hired only one hundred more people, barely enough for the huge rebuilding operations required in Afghanistan and later Iraq. In 2002 its Kabul office had just twelve staff members, a number that rose to thirty-nine the following year.7 It hired Afghans who were not quite qualified but who could operate in the field. They were to suffer badly at the hands of the Taliban. More than one hundred Afghan staff members of USAID were killed between 2001 and 2006.8 It was a sad epitaph for a once-vital organization, even though there had always been rumors that USAID was a CIA front. During the cold war, it planned and managed projects, deploying its own experts. Now it was just a glorified bureaucracy that wrote checks and implemented projects by hiring contractors—the notorious Beltway bandits, consulting companies with big offices inside the Beltway in Washington. After he retired, U.S. ambassador Robert Finn commented that “USAID is doing nothing itself now, it has become a contracting agency with layers of bureaucracy that did not exist in the past and too much of the money comes back to the US through consultancies.”9

  I knew none of this in those early weeks after the war was won and had high hopes. I urged Andrew Natsios and people at other agencies to invest in agriculture as a surefire way to win public support and get the economy moving. Although only 12 percent of the total land area was arable, and only 30 percent of that was irrigated, 80 percent of the population lived off agricultur
e. One good crop cycle would revive public morale in the countryside and convince people of the worthlessness of the Taliban. From this there would be other benefits. Millions of returning refugees would be encouraged to return to their villages rather than gravitate to the cities looking for work. Agriculture would provide jobs to the militiamen who would soon be demobilized and offer farmers alternatives to growing poppies for opium, a business that was certain to boom again. There was also an urgent need to rebuild key roads between the major cities and link them to neighboring countries so that aid could flow. Later Natsios told his senior staff that “our first task is to rebuild the agricultural system . . . reconstruction has to be done in such a way to get the economy moving.”10

  Natsios was quickly overruled by Rumsfeld at the Pentagon and Tenet at CIA, who were determined to ignore if not undermine USAID if such programs contradicted their own strategy. The CIA wanted every U.S. aid program to be used to help capture bin Laden and strengthen the warlords rather than to rebuild the country. The few USAID officials at the U.S. embassy in Kabul were seen as a mere nuisance. The U.S. military arbitrarily determined that all U.S. officials had to have a military escort when they ventured out, but because there were never enough soldiers to escort them, USAID officials rarely left the building. One official told me that the Pentagon did not want them to go outside and see how the warlords were being helped by the CIA. They complained that in the former Yugoslavia and other war zones, they were on the ground even during combat operations in order to direct aid. Only in Afghanistan were they forbidden to deploy by their own government.