Descent Into Chaos

by Ahmed Rashid

  The biggest failure of “accelerated success” was that it was implemented without any coordination with European countries, the UN, or even the Afghan government, as the Americans remained excessively secret about their plans and isolated from the rest of the world. Their plan floundered due to lack of coordination, overlapping projects, and a resulting waste of funds, which the American media were to highlight two years later. U.S. consultancies and construction firms, rather than local NGOs, won the contracts to implement the projects. Louis Berger alone won contracts to build ninety-six new clinics and schools in time for the Afghan elections, but a year later, at the end of 2005, only nine clinics and two schools had been completed.37 Designs for school buildings drawn up in California did not take into account the excessive snowfall in Afghanistan, which buckled roofs. Some roofs were designed with so much steel that they could be put in place only with cranes, which were unavailable.38 A report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office published in July 2005 stated that the projects were having little impact on reconstructing the country. The report stated that while the NGO CARE had built forty schools in 2004, costing between ten thousand and twenty thousand dollars, USAID contractors had built eight schools costing four times as much.39

  By early 2004 there was visible frustration among Afghans about the lack of reconstruction as stories about corruption, incompetence, and overcharging by U.S. contractors, Western NGOs, and government ministers multiplied. Every Afghan in Kabul had a scandalous story to tell. BearingPoint won a contract from USAID to revamp the Finance Ministry worth $98 million. According to Anwar-ul-Haq Ahady, who succeeded Ashraf Ghani as finance minister, the company appointed some fifty advisers who each cost five hundred thousand dollars a year if their expenses and security detail were taken into account. After a long battle with USAID, Ahady cut the number of advisers by half.40 Such scandals became a major political issue. During the parliamentary elections prospective candidates gained instant popularity by lampooning this kind of waste. Ramazan Bashardost, a demagogic former minister who accused “a mafia” of foreigners and government officials of pocketing reconstruction funds, was elected to parliament with the third highest vote total in Kabul.

  Ghani wanted the private sector to be a driver of growth, but with a cash economy there was neither a capital market nor the means to raise financing for industrial projects. The extraordinarily large population movements that had eaten up so much of the humanitarian aid earlier on now aggravated urban life as refugees poured into Kabul and other cities that lacked the infrastructure to cope with the deluge. Kabul had grown from 400,000 people in 1978 to 1.7 million in 2001 to an estimated 3.6 million in 2005. There was no electricity or water for the vast shantytowns that sprang up on the hillsides beyond the main city. Discontent and anger escalated as people believed the stories about the wasted aid. Experts stated that Afghanistan needed to generate a 9 percent annual growth rate in the next decade to raise annual per capita income from two hundred dollars to just five hundred, but that would be impossible if the country lacked an infrastructure that could in turn stimulate the economy.

  Yet Afghanistan still averaged an annual growth rate of 15 percent during the 2002-2004 period, excluding the money generated by the drug trade. The country was so poor that anything—the expenditures of the foreign forces and organizations, the end of the drought, and the small capital sums returning refugees or expatriate Afghans brought back home—resulted in substantial growth. There were important models of successful businessmen, such as Habib Gulzar, a trader who had settled in Dubai in 1991 and returned home after 2001 to set up nine trading houses in Kabul and then invested $25 million in the country’s first Coca-Cola bottling plant. While the Iraqi economy had collapsed after the U.S. invasion, Afghanistan flourished simply because of its previous dire poverty. The real concern was not how much development took place according to the conditions in 2001, but whether sufficient development occurred that would lift the country out of the cycle of civil war and violence.

  For that, Karzai and Ghani promoted the idea of Afghanistan as a trading and energy hub. Afghanistan had played such a role during the Silk Road era. The years of war after 1979 created a vast vacuum in the heart of the natural trading routes linking Central Asia to the Middle East, Iran, and the Indian subcontinent via Afghanistan. If Afghanistan could rehabilitate its roads, its natural geographic location would allow it to become a major trading hub. Since the 1950s, the Karachi port had serviced trade for landlocked Afghanistan, but after 2001, the NA leaders, with their traditional antipathy to Islamabad, directed trade toward Iranian ports. A series of trade deals signed between Afghan commerce minister Syed Mustafa Kazemi and Iran, India, and the Central Asian states in the winter of 2002-2003 created new geopolitical possibilities.41

  As a result of the deals, Iran drastically reduced transit rates and port charges to encourage the use of Iranian ports. India, barred from trading directly with Afghanistan across Pakistani territory because of tensions between the two rivals, supported the Iran entry point for Afghanistan. It funded new roads between the Iranian port of Chabahar and the Afghan border and to Dilaram, in southwest Afghanistan, via the border post of Zaranj. The new route through Zaranj would shorten the distance to Iranian ports and open up one of the poorest regions of Afghanistan. Existing road networks linking Dilaram to Turkmenistan via Herat and to Uzbekistan via Kabul were now being rebuilt, thereby giving Iran access to Central Asia. “We have no preferences, no favorites, as long as Afghanistan can benefit all round from multiple trade routes,” Karzai told me.

  Initially Pakistan reacted angrily, increasing its rail freight charges from Karachi to the Afghan border and refusing to sign a new transit agreement with Kabul. However, with the traditional strong links between the Pashtun populations on both sides of the border and the new business links brought home by returning Afghan refugees, Pakistan could not ignore for long the competition from the Iranian ports. Official trade between Pakistan and Afghanistan had leaped from $20 million in 2001 to $700 million in 2004, and Islamabad had to acknowledge that its own economic recovery was now heavily dependent on demand from Afghanistan. Businessmen from Lahore and Karachi were clamoring to sell their consumer goods in Kabul. The competition between Iranian or Pakistani ports proved positive, because eventually both ports were needed as volumes of trade increased.

  There was competition between Pakistan and Iran to attract Central Asia’s trade with the Arabian Gulf countries to their respective ports. Iran offered to dedicate the port of Bandar Abbas to Central Asian trade, while Pakistan developed Gwadar, a port on the Balochistan coast, with Chinese help.42 This competition benefited Afghanistan because all routes passed through Kabul. If only Afghanistan could offer good roads, power, cold storage, and other facilities, trade and customs revenues for Kabul would increase dramatically.

  New roads allowed neighboring countries to play a major role in providing adjacent Afghan regions with infrastructure support. Iran began to electrify Herat and western Afghanistan, while Turkmenistan pledged to supply natural gas to Herat city. In the north, General Daud, the military commander of Kunduz, opened up trade with Tajikistan, which agreed to provide electricity to the province. Additional bridges were built across the Amu Darya River, which runs along the border between Afghanistan and Central Asia. General Dostum tied up similar deals with Uzbekistan, increasing trade, reducing tariffs, and importing Uzbek electricity to Mazar-e-Sharif along a power line that would be extended to Kabul by the World Bank.

  Khalilzad’s “accelerated success” program was sufficient to see through Afghanistan’s successful presidential and parliamentary elections in 2004 and 2005 and to help reelect Bush for a second term, but in the long term it was a failure There were insufficient resources to convince the alienated Pashtuns in the south or the jobless youth in Kabul that their lives had changed. The Taliban offensive escalated dramatically in 2005, heroin production increased, and riots were to grip Kabul. Moreover, once Bush
was elected in 2004, U.S. funding dropped significantly and did not increase again until 2007, by which time the situation had again become dire. “Accelerated success” never addressed the structural deficiencies of U.S. policy. In June 2004, just nine months into “accelerated success,” the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a report that said the State Department lacked a full operational strategy for Afghanistan or “an annual consolidated budget” that would show all U.S. assistance to the country. “Expenditure data was not available and consequently, it is difficult to determine the extent to which U.S. assistance dollars are being used to achieve measurable results on the ground in Afghanistan,” the report said.43

  The U.S. embassy in Kabul became more isolated from the reality beyond its walls. One World Bank official described it as “so secure and cut off that it may as well be in Washington.”44 “Accelerated success” also failed to build the much-vaunted “capacity” in the Afghan ministries. Even in 2005 the government could spend only 44 percent of the money it received for development because it had no capacity to plan and monitor projects. The successful National Solidarity Program run by Hanif Atmar accounted for nearly half of the government’s spending.

  There was no panacea or quick fix for nation building. Nobody had a plan you could take off a shelf. Other attempts at nation building with far more resources than were ever given to Afghanistan also failed spectacularly. The former Yugoslavia was still struggling despite all the attention of the European Union. East Timor, which gained its independence in 1999 after a bloody struggle with Indonesia lasting twenty-five years, had garnered huge reconstruction funds, and the UN ruled the country for three years. However, violence erupted there in May 2006, and the capital, Dili, was nearly burned to the ground by rampaging mobs. If East Timor, with a population of just 1.1 million, could not be rebuilt, then the fate of much larger failed states were even more in doubt.

  With all its wealth, resources, and expertise, the United States seemed to have a distinguished record of repeating the same mistakes again and again. The failure in Afghanistan would be spectacularly repeated in Iraq, which was conceived on a mammoth scale by Washington as compared with Afghanistan. Without adequate security and law and order, reconstruction was crippled from the start. Condi Rice admitted in 2005 that in Iraq “we didn’t have the right skills, the right capacity to deal with a reconstruction effort of this kind.”45 Her confession came after the four years of U.S. government experience in Afghanistan and two in Iraq. In both countries the failure to reconstruct led to intensified insurgencies and the spread of al Qaeda. In 2006, with the Taliban on the offensive, Washington increased aid to Afghanistan to $3.2 billion—double the sum given in 2003 for “accelerated success.” The following year, in 2007, aid was doubled once again as the insurgency got worse.46

  In Iraq, the United States committed too much money for reconstruction when stability had not been established. In Afghanistan, the United States committed too little money for reconstruction. As a result, security worsened and the Taliban found an excuse to restart their insurgency. While the Pentagon expanded its personnel dealing with civil affairs, Condi Rice appeared determined to destroy USAID, which was merged into the State Department. USAID’s total budget for 2008 was gutted, its program cut by 31 percent and its operations by 15 percent. More than one hundred senior USAID officers had resigned since 2005. The only arm of the U.S. government devoted to poverty alleviation would soon be no more.

  The larger tragedy was the Bush administration’s failure to convince the American public about the need for reconstruction. Bush and Cheney continued to treat nation building as something dirty that should be swept under the carpet, even as American soldiers died trying to improve sanitation in Baghdad or build schools in Afghanistan. There was no attempt to mobilize greater American public support for rebuilding the countries Washington had invaded. Cheney is not known ever to have made a statement supporting U.S. aid for poor countries. The United States remained at the bottom of the list of developed countries that gave aid to the developing world, and the American public remained largely ignorant of the humanitarian crises escalating everywhere.47

  CHAPTER TEN

  Afghanistan II Rebuilding Security

  The United States and the international community could not hope to rebuild Afghanistan without more troops, a wider and deeper Western military presence that could offer greater security for the Afghan people against the Taliban and the warlords and allow for reconstruction to start. None of this was possible because the war in Iraq took precedence, and Afghanistan, the home of al Qaeda and the planning for 9/11, was considered a sideshow by a White House that had gotten its priorities seriously wrong.

  The excuse the international community gave was that the Afghans would not tolerate a foreign military presence for long, just as they had not tolerated the British or Soviet occupations. Yet this was not an occupation, and the Afghan people were literally on their knees begging for a greater international presence so that their benighted country could be rebuilt. Afghans were savvy. They knew that more foreign troops meant greater security, and also a greater commitment to reconstructing the country. Moreover, the UN had pledged through the Bonn Agreement that a political process would put an elected Afghan government into the driver’s seat. Yet the lack of a larger Western military presence meant that the warlords rather than the government remained empowered. Afghans understood well enough that without security there could be no economic development, and if the West was refusing to provide that security, and was instead depending on warlords, then it was also insincere about rebuilding the country.

  Security in the era of failed states meant more than just issues of life and death. People had to be given a chance to hold jobs, go to school, and feed their families without warlords stopping them. Providing this “human security” was just as important as winning the war against terrorists. At the same time, failed states such as Afghanistan and Somalia lacked the institutions of modern states—for example, an army, police, a bureaucracy, and a judiciary. This process of state building, as opposed to nation building, would take much longer and demand an even greater commitment from the West. Afghanistan had always had a weak, decentralized state where the ruler governed through consensus over a confederation of tribes and ethnic groups. Now a modern state system had to be created on the ruins of a destroyed country.

  When the first G8 meeting on security-sector reform in Afghanistan was held on the sidelines of the Tokyo conference in 2002, the U.S. delegation was instructed by Washington to say that it would not get involved in nation building or peacekeeping except to help build a new Afghan army. The United States wanted nothing to do with rebuilding Afghanistan’s police or justice system. The European and Afghan leaders could not believe what they were hearing. Here was a superpower that had just conquered another country refusing to take responsibility for it. (The United States would do exactly the same in Iraq.) Even in building the army, the United States had to be constantly dragged to the table to speed up the process.

  The most urgent issue in early 2002 was the need to deploy International Security Assistance Force troops outside Kabul. A crescendo of voices in Afghanistan and around the world, including the U.S. Congress, the British and European parliaments, and the UN, demanded an expansion of ISAF.1 They said the Karzai government was faltering because security outside Kabul was deteriorating due to warlordism, crime, and drugs. Lt.-Gen. Dan McNeill, the head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, grappled with the conundrum of how to extend a U.S. military presence outside Kabul without the need for too many troops or resources and, more important, without annoying Rumsfeld.

  Tall, taciturn, difficult to fathom, and intellectually sharp, McNeill argued for a U.S. presence that would “produce the ISAF effect”—facilitate reconstruction and give people a sense of confidence, but without deploying thousands of soldiers.2 Thoughtful and a good listener, he was a thinking man’s general, fully aware of his own limited knowledge about A
fghanistan. He held discussions with all the concerned foreign and local players, especially Brahimi. “We had nothing in any textbook that this is the way to do it—it’s all new for us,” McNeill told me in Bagram. It took months of discussion in Kabul and a prolonged debate within the Pentagon before his ideas won out.

  As eight thousand U.S.-led Coalition soldiers began to celebrate the 2002 Christmas holiday season in their tented city at Bagram Air Base, an intense training exercise was under way that would see U.S. forces undertake their first redeployment since the end of the war. Their precooked Christmas lunch had been flown in from Germany, and the soldiers were entertained by movie stars, including comedian Robin Williams. In the giant tent holding McNeill’s office and command center, dozens of U.S. officers sitting at wooden trestle tables stared at computer screens through which they kept in touch with every U.S. Army base, foot patrol, and plane in the sky. In another tent a group of seventy soldiers, civil affairs officers, engineers, medics, and a State Department official was being trained to form the first Joint Regional Team, which would be deployed to Gardez in eastern Afghanistan. These teams, later renamed Provincial Reconstruction Teams, or PRTs, were to provide “the ISAF effect” outside Kabul.

  The military PRTs was an attempt to institutionalize the joint CIA-SOF A teams that had spread out across the country and linked up with warlords to hunt for Osama bin Laden. Once the war was over, U.S. Army civil affairs officers had joined these A teams to carry out small reconstruction projects to win hearts and minds. For a time these teams were the only source of information and intelligence regarding what was going on outside Kabul. By the summer of 2002, 450 U.S. Army civil affairs officers were operating around Afghanistan, but it was an informal arrangement. Made up of 100 or more soldiers and civilians, the PRTs would carry out small reconstruction projects, help train the local Afghan administration, and create sufficient local security for Western and Afghan NGOs to work in the area. They would also gather intelligence about al Qaeda.