by Ahmed Rashid
Despite the existence of a document setting forth what were to be their goals, there was to be no nationwide strategy for setting up the PRTs, nor any means to assess their performance. Each PRT would set its own priorities and goals in consultation with the local authorities and warlords.3 The success of the PRTs would depend on the Afghan government’s providing well-trained Afghan administrators who could work alongside the PRTs and improve local governance. However, Karzai failed to plan for the training of competent Afghan administrators, while the U.S. military failed to push him sufficiently. As a consequence, the PRTs fell back on relying on local warlords for security and administration.
Once this happened it was clear that the PRTs could not provide security to the Afghan population. They would not carry out any peacekeeping or peacemaking role, unlike ISAF in Kabul. PRT commanders were not allowed to mediate in conflicts between Afghans, or “green on green” conflicts. Western aid agencies and NGOs objected, fearing that while the military’s involvement in development activities blurred the principles of humanitarian relief, PRTs were offering no security to them or the population, and they did not want to be seen by the local people as helping the U.S. military, which would make them targets for the Taliban. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which according to its charter is forbidden to seek protection from the military, declined to work with the PRTs. Other international NGOs followed suit.
Despite these problems, by the summer of 2003 the PRTs expanded to six more locations—Bamiyan, in central Afghanistan; Mazar-e-Sharif and Kunduz, in the north; Herat, in the west; and Jalalabad and Kandahar, in the sensitive Pashtun belt. I visited several PRTs to see their worth. What they achieved in each location depended largely on how secure that region was and what kind of relationship the PRT commander had with the local warlord and the Afghan administration. In Bamiyan, the mountain stronghold of the Hazara people, the PRT had made a huge difference. It rebuilt schools, including Bamiyan University, which I had visited in the midst of the civil war in the 1990s, when it was housed in a couple of mud huts. The PRT was handed over to New Zealand soldiers in September 2003.
In the summer of 2003, British forces established a PRT in Mazar-e-Sharif that covered five provinces—an area the size of Scotland. The team mediated between Generals Atta and Dostum, trying to end their feuding, which had claimed two thousand Afghan lives since the end of the war. The British won the trust of many Afghans and showed the Americans that mediating “green on green” was not impossible, and was in fact essential if the PRTs were to be genuinely useful.
The U.S.-led PRTs in the Pashtun areas faced enormous local problems—envy, tribal feuds, land disputes, the drug trade, and competition among tribal elders to win the ear of the American officer. However, the U.S. commander had no mandate to help resolve local disputes, so he could do nothing except listen to the complaints. The Pentagon’s funding for the PRTs was inadequate, allocating just $18 million a year in reconstruction funds for all U.S. PRTs deployed—a drop in the bucket compared with what was needed and with what was being spent in Iraq. A U.S. PRT that arrived in October 2004 in the Taliban- and drug-infested Helmand province spent just $9.5 million in two years. A U.S. officer in Helmand told me that it took him three months of paperwork to get even the smallest project passed by the Pentagon.
PRTs should have been staffed by the best and the brightest in the U.S. military. Instead they were manned almost entirely by U.S. Army Reservists whose short tours of duty—six months or less—kept them from getting to know their region before they were on their way home. There were so many different models of PRTs that any overall control became difficult. U.S. PRTs comprised 79 soldiers and 3 civilians, but only 16 out of those 79 soldiers were allowed “outside the wire” to strike up a relationship with the local administration and people. The European countries varied their PRTs enormously. The Germans, for example, deployed as many as 375 men in Kunduz. Despite this, the UN considered the German PRT the least effective because of its lack of contact with the local population and its refusal to patrol the region at night.
When General McNeill handed over his command in May 2003 to Gen. John Vines, Washington declared, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that PRTs were the only acceptable means to expand U.S. authority around the country. Rumsfeld waxed lyrical about PRTs, saying he would establish them in Iraq as well. In fact, PRTs became the symbol of stability, and no U.S. official talked about the need for more troops even as the Taliban began their resurgence. On May 1, 2003, just hours after Bush stood under the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner on a U.S. warship signifying that the Iraq war was over and won, Rumsfeld was in Kabul declaring victory in Afghanistan. “If one looks at Afghanistan and even Iraq today, it’s very clear that we are and have been in a stabilization operation mode for some time,” said Rumsfeld. “We clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction activities. The bulk of the country today is permissive, it’s secure.” He criticized those demanding an expansion of ISAF as people “mostly on editorial boards, columnists and at the UN.”4 In the next few weeks, Rumsfeld was to eat his words as the Taliban launched their attacks.
By early 2005 there were nineteen PRTs in Afghanistan—fourteen of them manned by U.S. forces and the rest by ISAF and NATO countries. NATO assumed command of the ISAF force in Kabul in August 2003 and then took over from U.S. forces in the north, followed by the west, south, and east. In 2006, NATO promised to place a PRT in all of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces. However, the establishment by every European government of “national caveats” stipulating what its PRT force could and could not do was to paralyze NATO’s effectiveness in combating the Taliban.
The Pentagon had been stuck with the task of building a new Afghan army, but it seemed extremely reluctant to get on with the job. Rumsfeld was certainly not keen on the idea. He expected General Fahim to create an army, so why should the United States bother to invest in a new one?5 Fahim continued to be fêted by the Pentagon, while the CIA continued to pay lavish salaries to warlords and their militias. There was little incentive from either side to change this cozy relationship and build a professional Afghan army. The officer who tasked himself with the job of persuading the Pentagon to take its responsibility seriously was Maj.-Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, the head of the Office of Military Cooperation at the U.S. embassy in Kabul.6
As tall as a bean pole, Eikenberry tended to lean into you as he talked, as though a strong wind were blowing at his back. He had a surprisingly soft demeanor and abundant common sense, as a result of his expertise and time spent in China, about the problems of the developing world. At his urging in February 2002, Gen. Tommy Franks sent an assessment team from CENTCOM, led by his chief of staff, Maj.-Gen. Charles Campbell, to report on how a new Afghan army could be built. Campbell’s report stated bluntly that the U.S. reliance on warlord militias was impractical and insufficient. Eikenberry helped persuade the Pentagon to train a brigade-size infantry unit of eighteen hundred Afghan soldiers to be ready for the June meeting of the Loya Jirga. One hundred American trainers arrived to start the training, while Fahim and the Ministry of Defense were tasked with selecting the recruits. Meanwhile, ISAF began separately to train a six-hundred-man battalion that would “act as a Presidential Guard, the central symbol of a new Afghanistan and its security structure,” according to Gen. John McColl.7
The key to building a new army was making sure that no single ethnic group was overrepresented in it. General Fahim, the Tajik warlord, was tasked by the United States to provide recruits from all ethnic groups, but instead he sent in only his own Tajiks, and many of those failed to turn up. On the first day of ISAF’s training program, only 69 out of 630 recruits were present. Eikenberry knew that to rely on Fahim would prove to be a disaster and would create major ethnic tensions with the Pashtuns, who were being completely left out. Eikenberry persuaded both ISAF and the United States to recruit soldiers directly, with due regard for
ethnic balance. Under new guidelines, 38 percent of all new recruits were to be Pashtun, 25 percent Tajik, 19 percent Hazara, 8 percent Uzbek, and 10 percent minority groups.8 The slow work of training the battalions then began.
Fahim wanted an army of two hundred thousand men. Eikenberry politely informed him that nobody would pay for such a large army and that sixty thousand was more realistic. It took six months for the UN and Eikenberry to convince Fahim. In June 2002, at a conference in Geneva on security-sector reform, the international community agreed to a plan for an army of sixty thousand men, twelve thousand border guards, and an air force of eight thousand. The army would be divided into seven corps stationed around the country, with a quick-reaction corps based in Kabul. The Ministry of Defense would undergo restructuring to achieve professional and ethnic balance—in other words, dozens of Panjsheri officers would be removed.9 The United States would be responsible for training the army, while the initial costs of $75 million, plus the cost of building new barracks ($80 million), would be met by a UN-run trust fund for security sector reform to which all nations were asked to contribute. The Germans took on the responsibility to train a new Afghan National Police (ANP), a force of sixty-two thousand men. Fahim grudgingly accepted these plans.
UNAMA now went ahead with the collection of heavy weapons from the warlords, such as tanks and artillery, and prepared for disarming some one hundred thousand militia. Fahim was one of the last to give up his tanks and heavy guns. Brahimi stressed that training the ANA had to run parallel to disarming the militias, but the Pentagon refused to help in this task. “We have to phase out the armed militias and ensure that we are not just creating another army in a country that has too many already,” Brahimi said.10 The United States, however, was still recruiting militiamen to protect its bases, thereby increasing militia numbers even as the UN was trying to disarm them. Yet U.S. officials insisted that there was “no contradiction” in its strategy.
Khalilzad’s “accelerated success” program in 2003 pumped in more money and speedier training for the ANA. Finally Washington began to take seriously its responsibilities toward the new Afghan army, although it still refused to help the UN disarm the militias. U.S. expenditure on the ANA for 2004 was $797 million, the following year $788 million, and in 2005-2006 it rose to $830 million. Few other countries contributed, so the cost burden was almost wholly on the Americans.11 The first units of the ANA deployed in 2003 and generated enormous pride among ordinary Afghans. U.S. trainers were embedded with the units, living and sleeping with their Afghan troops as the units were used to maintain law and order or fight the Taliban in the south.
By the spring of 2006, when NATO deployed in the south to counter a major Taliban offensive, the ANA numbered 37,000 men. With its 650 embedded U.S. officers, it was outperforming the police and gaining the confidence of the Afghan population. In the summer of 2006 the United States began to provide the ANA with $2 billion worth of heavy weapons, vehicles, and other equipment. Yet problems persisted. Between 20 to 40 percent of troops in a battalion were illiterate. The desertion rate was extremely high—around 25 percent in 2005 and 13 percent in 2006. Soldiers went absent without leave, partly because they were not used to serving so far from their villages and could not send their salaries home because there was no nationwide banking system. Soldiers now received basic pay of seventy dollars a month and a hardship allowance when on the front line.12 Despite the initial reluctance of the Pentagon and interminable delays, the ANA has become the most successful U.S.-led nation-building exercise in Afghanistan.
Today the major issue is how to sustain the army, which at full strength will have a recurrent cost of $1 billion a year, or 4 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product. Afghanistan is not going to be able to pay for its own army for many years to come—perhaps never—so there will have to be long-term international funding for this, though it is still a bargain compared with the deployment of Western troops in the country, which cost ten times as much. (It cost the Pentagon $1 billion a month to maintain fifteen thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan.)
Training a police force proved to be far more difficult. The UN has determined that rebuilding the police force in a failed state is even more important than rebuilding an army. The police are on the front line of public security, law and order, and extending the writ of the government. A police force is critical to helping build a democracy because it has the capacity to generate trust between the government and the people. However, the international community failed to grasp early on the centrality of law enforcement and justice-sector reform in helping stabilize Afghanistan. Law enforcement was left for last, was given the least funding, and commanded the least attention of Western donors. Unlike the ANA, the Afghan national police was not rebuilt from scratch. Instead the government constructed it piecemeal, using corrupt officers from the warlords.
During the civil war in the 1990s police stations were nothing more than an extension of the power of local commanders and warlords, and they continued to be so under Karzai. Justice was rarely meted out, and the police—lacking salaries or facilities—lived off the land by exploiting the public rather than serving it. They were heavily involved in the drug trade, land grabbing, kidnapping, and extortion. The Ministry of Interior, which ran the police after 9/11, became a center for drug trafficking, with police posts in opium-growing regions being auctioned to the highest bidder—sometimes for as much as a hundred thousand dollars for a job that had a salary of seventy dollars a month. Without police and judges, Afghans could hope for neither justice nor crime prevention.
In 2002 Germany had been given the task of training a new Afghan police force, but it was unwilling to provide sufficient funds and resources. Germany set up a police academy in Kabul to teach officers, but sent out only 41 trainers to train 3,500 Afghan officers over three years. There was no plan for the countrywide training of 62,000 policemen and almost no equipment handed out to police stations, which lacked radios, vehicles, and even weapons. Berlin spent a paltry $89 million between 2002 and 2006, a stinginess that angered the Americans, Afghans, and other European nations.13 Germany’s pathetic, next-to-useless performance in rebuilding the police and Italy’s apathy in rebuilding the justice system became the two weakest points in the international community’s efforts to rebuild state institutions in Afghanistan.
Washington decided to take over police training in 2003, but again there were interminable delays. The U.S. government had no organization through which it could help failed states develop police forces. USAID’s Office of Public Safety, which was responsible for training police forces during the cold war, was abolished in 1974 and never replaced. Police training fell to the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, whose core job was to counter narcotics, not train police.14 As the United States has no national police force—only state police forces—the State Department subcontracted police training in Afghanistan to DynCorp International, a private corporation that hired retired American police officers with no knowledge of Afghanistan to train Afghan police. (DynCorp had earlier been contracted to provide American bodyguards to protect President Karzai.)
The United States brought about a major change in the Interior Ministry by introducing Ali Ahmad Jalali into the government. In January 2003, Jalali, age sixty-two and a Pashtun, became the new interior minister and in effective control of police reform. An American-trained former Afghan army colonel who had settled in Washington, D.C., Jalali wrote military books and became head of the Afghan language section of the Voice of America radio service. He persuaded Karzai to sack several corrupt police chiefs and governors and joined up with other Pashtun reformers in the cabinet, such as Hanif Atmar and Ashraf Ghani, to put pressure on Karzai to sideline the warlords and drug traffickers. As a result, Jalali made many enemies, who eventually forced his ousting from office two years later.
The State Department had given DynCorp $24 million to set up seven regional training centers a
cross Afghanistan. However, its three-week training courses were too short and they had no follow-up or mentoring, and there were no funds for equipment such as radios and vehicles. Between 2003 and 2005, the United States was to spend some $860 million in training forty thousand policemen, but the results were almost totally useless. DynCorp was training the police to fight an insurgency rather than win hearts and minds in their localities. The trained Afghan policemen returned home and continued acting in the same rapacious ways as before.15
“Having the police in the trenches fighting the Taliban is not a successful sign of counterinsurgency and means that army and police roles are being mixed up, which leaves the population bereft of law and order,” said Chris Alexander, the deputy head of UNAMA in 2006.16 The dynamic Alexander, the first Canadian ambassador to Kabul after 9 /11, was seconded to the UN, where he became the most outspoken advocate of the need to train a police force. The failure of DynCorp in training an effective police force led to enormous criticism of U.S. policy objectives. “The US training program [for the police] under DynCorp is an appalling joke . . . a complete shambles,” warned Richard Holbrooke, the former U.S. ambassador to the UN.17 The Pentagon proposed embedding U.S. military trainers with the police, just as it had done with the ANA. This suggestion resulted in a turf war between the Pentagon and the State Department, which objected to military officers training the civilian police structure. The Pentagon won out in 2005, and U.S. trainers were slowly embedded with the police.
