Descent Into Chaos

by Ahmed Rashid

  Fischer desperately wanted to find a way to continue Germany’s close ties with the United States. He proposed sending additional German troops to Afghanistan, who would carry out peacekeeping outside Kabul. However, Fischer refused to do so until the current UN Security Council mandate for ISAF was extended beyond the capital. He wanted a UN resolution that would mandate German troops to operate as part of a formal NATO presence in Afghanistan. The German army mapped out a deployment in one of the safest parts of Afghanistan—the northeast, where there was no fighting—making it easier for Fischer to sell the idea to the German parliament and the Greens. Hamid Karzai and the UN’s Lakhdar Brahimi had long been advocating just such an ISAF deployment outside Kabul. By now Rumsfeld, who had so vehemently opposed any deployment outside Kabul, was now also in favor. The Europeans had smarted at the contemptuous manner in which Rumsfeld dispensed with NATO’s offer of help after 9/11 to topple the Taliban.

  Fischer was using German troops as bait for a new NATO role with a new UN mandate in order to hook many reluctant European nations that were not at all keen on expanding their commitment to Afghanistan. NATO itself was ill prepared for its first deployment outside the European continent. However, Fischer’s timing was perfect and made good sense. The smaller European countries did not want to lose U.S. support because of their opposition to the Iraq war. And in Kabul, the crisis within ISAF was becoming hugely detrimental. Every six months ISAF-contributing countries struggled to find a nation willing to take over command of ISAF headquarters. In late 2002 Britain had handed over command of ISAF to Turkey, which was followed by a joint German-Dutch command and later a Canadian command. Each handover was marred by haggling, compromises, and interminable delays. “The unseemly scramble to find a country to command [the force] in Kabul gives neither the Afghans, their neighbors nor the remnants of the Taliban and al Qaeda the sense we are there for the long haul,” said a sarcastic George Robertson, NATO secretary-general, in February 2003.1

  Germany was taken seriously in Afghanistan. In the late 1990s, Berlin had tried to end the civil war in Afghanistan by hosting a series of unofficial dialogues between the UN, the Taliban, and the Northern Alliance. It hosted the Bonn talks in December 2001 and had taken on the task of rebuilding the Afghan police force while contributing a thousand troops to ISAF in Kabul. Germany’s limitation was that under its constitution it could not deploy troops in an offensive role, but it had already helped out with peacekeeping in the former Yugoslavia.

  Six months after the first discussions, on August 8, 2003, NATO took command of ISAF, while a UN Security Council resolution authorized ISAF to expand beyond the capital. Two hundred German troops and forty civilian advisers set up a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Kunduz, in the northeast. There were now two separate command structures for foreign forces in Afghanistan—the NATO-ISAF command was responsible for peacekeeping in Kabul and the provinces; while the hunt for terrorists would continue to be carried out by the U.S.-led Coalition under Operation Enduring Freedom. “Afghanistan will be . . . tough but it has to be a success . . .” Robertson warned. “Nations will have to waken up to what they have taken on.”2

  In September, I, along with other experts, was invited to brief NATO ambassadors in Brussels. We stressed how important it was to expand NATO forces into the provinces to help stabilize the country, improve governance, and send a forceful message to the Taliban. A halfhearted NATO response would only give the Taliban a propaganda coup. Some of the NATO ambassadors were clearly disinterested in or nervous about an increased deployment or they did not take the Taliban resurgence seriously. Privately some criticized Fischer, whom they blamed for steamrolling NATO into Afghanistan when NATO was unprepared to go there.

  NATO had no standing army or ready-to-go equipment and aircraft. It had no central budget; deployments were paid for by individual countries. Troops, aircraft, helicopters, and artillery had to be extracted from each country after endless meetings and then matched up with other donations. All this had been difficult enough to carry out in the former Yugoslavia. NATO urgently needed heavy airlift, special training, large numbers of helicopters, and culturally sensitized troops—a tough checklist for European governments that had chronically underspent on their militaries since the end of the cold war. In 2005 the total military budget of the twenty-six NATO member states was just $265 million, compared with the U.S. defense budget of $472 billion. NATO countries were expected to spend at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense, but only six out of the twenty-six members met that goal.

  Yet it was still difficult to understand why with two million soldiers, NATO countries could not find the troops for Afghanistan. European governments won support from their parliaments and people by promising that their troops would be carrying out risk-free peacekeeping and reconstruction—a military mission that would build hospitals and schools and promote democracy, rule of law, and development, in the best traditions of European liberalism. No European leaders dared mention the possibility of war, combat deaths, or having to fight a counterinsurgency against the Taliban. To further reassure their publics at home, every European country set down its own caveats—restrictions on what its troops could and could not do. These caveats would soon come to paralyze the entire NATO effort.

  Despite these problems, NATO set itself ambitious targets. It promised to undertake a four-phase expansion across Afghanistan, starting with the deployment of German troops across the entire north by June 2004 with headquarters in Mazar-e-Sharif. Phase two, to be completed three months later, would see NATO deploy to Herat and western Afghanistan after setting up new Provincial Reconstruction Teams. In Phases three and four NATO would deploy to the turbulent south and east, for which no timetable was set. When NATO defense ministers met in Munich in February 2004, they pledged to install a PRT in every one of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces.

  NATO missed its very first deadline, failing to man the five PRTs in the north on time, which then delayed completion of phase two. Countries did not come up with enough troops and equipment on time. For the first six months of 2004, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the new NATO secretary-general and its supreme commander, Gen. James Jones, could not find three helicopters to send to Kabul, prompting a frustrated Jones to tell the U.S. Senate that “the alliance has agreed, the donor countries have been identified, and yet we find ourselves mired in the administrative details of who’s going to pay for it, who’s going to transport it, how it’s going to be maintained.”3 There was further cynicism in the Pentagon, where Paul Wolfowitz told me in February 2004, “We needed some helicopter support, and NATO did not come through. There’s a tendency to talk very boldly about the European security structure and then not make available any of the funding necessary to make them happen.”4

  NATO’s inability to complete phase one on time deeply frustrated Karzai, who had asked for even more troops to be temporarily deployed for the upcoming 2004 presidential elections. NATO promised an “over the horizon” deployment—troops who would not leave their base in Italy but who in theory would be ready to go to Afghanistan. It was an absurd arrangement that angered Karzai and buoyed the Taliban. “I don’t mind taking out my begging bowl once in a while. But as standard operating procedure, this is simply intolerable,” Scheffer said.5

  By now the United States was bogged down in Iraq and desperately needed NATO to take up more responsibility in Afghanistan so that it could withdraw some of its own troops. In February 2005, at a meeting in Nice, France, NATO defense ministers discussed the idea of creating a single unified command by merging the NATO-ISAF command with Operation Enduring Freedom. Predictably, France, Germany, and others objected because it would mean getting involved in fighting the Taliban. “NATO is not equipped to do counter-terrorism missions,” said the French defense minister Michèle Alliot-Marie.6 Those at the Nice meeting did agree on Italy’s heading the deployment to Herat, and phase two was finally completed eight months late.

  Rumsfeld’s intentions i
n speeding up a merger became clearer after he dropped the bombshell that Washington would cut its nineteen-thousand -strong troop level in Afghanistan by 20 percent by the spring of 2006.

  I interviewed a senior official at the White House just after Rumsfeld’s statement and asked what had prompted him to say such a thing at such a sensitive time. The official looked at the ceiling, as if to say that Rumsfeld’s decisions were his own and could not be questioned even by the White House. Yet at the same time Rumsfeld was arguing just the opposite for Iraq, saying the United States could defend the homeland only if its forces stayed in the Middle East. “If we left Iraq prematurely, the enemy would tell us to leave Afghanistan and then withdraw from the Middle East. And if we left the Middle East, they’d order us . . . to leave what they call the occupied Muslim lands from Spain to the Philippines.”7

  On December 19, 2005, Rumsfeld signed orders pulling out three thousand U.S. troops from the south, reducing the total number to sixteen thousand. It was the worst possible moment, as the largest Taliban offensive was about to unfold, but Rumsfeld refused to accept that the Taliban insurgency was expanding. To demonstrate that it would maintain its presence, Washington announced the building of a new $83 million runway at Bagram air base and the improvement of fourteen military airfields across the country. The American pullout speeded up agreement on creating a joint command. All NATO forces and half the U.S. force in Afghanistan would come under NATO-ISAF command, while the remaining eight thousand American troops would continue to carry out counterterrorism operations under a separate U.S. command.

  Meanwhile, British and Canadian forces were preparing to deploy to Helmand and Kandahar provinces, respectively, as part of phase three. They were desperately trying to persuade the Dutch to take command of neighboring Uruzgan province. The Dutch government was keen, but there was a strong left-wing opposition in the Dutch parliament, which blocked any deployment to Afghanistan. Britain told NATO that it would lead the deployment in the south as long as it could raise sufficient numbers of troops to take on the Taliban and received adequate backing from NATO allies, the Dutch deployed in Uruzgan, and funds were available for development and reconstruction. It was already clear to the British that unlike the NATO deployments in the north and west, phase three in the south would involve heavy fighting with the Taliban.

  Yet even as phase three got under way, the list of caveats about what countries would and would not do grew to the size of a telephone directory. General Jones called the seventy-one listed caveats in 2006 “NATO’s operational cancer . . . a sign of weakness and an impediment to success.”8 Some troops could not attack the Taliban; they were unauthorized to help in poppy eradication or interdiction of drug convoys; they could not engage with Afghan warlords or separate them if they fought each other, and they could not protect NGOs, schools, government buildings, or major infrastructure projects. Neither could they help with UN voter registration or UN disarmament programs.

  The Germans had the most bizarre list of caveats. Their troops could not operate after dark; Afghan soldiers could not travel on German helicopters; and an ambulance had to accompany every patrol, thereby making it impossible to conduct foot patrols in the mountains. The first camp the Germans set up in Kunduz was in a poppy field, but their officers pretended not to see it. Self-protection reached extraordinary proportions. When they built their headquarters at Mazar-e-Sharif airport to house fifteen hundred troops at a cost of $70 million, German engineers erected a military city that used seventy-five thousand tons of steel and three hundred thousand tons of concrete.

  To Western and Afghan aid workers on the ground, these NATO troops acted like scared rabbits rather than professional soldiers. Aid workers cynically commented that the first ones into a dangerous region were the aid agencies, followed by the UN and other international organizations, while the last ones in were the heavily armed NATO soldiers, who were then disallowed from protecting any of the above. Even after forty thousand NATO troops were deployed around the country and a full-scale Taliban offensive had erupted, the NATO mandate continued to be the “maintenance of security” in the interests of “reconstruction and humanitarian efforts.”9

  As Taliban leaders in Quetta spent the winter preparing for their spring 2006 offensive, the international community spent the winter negotiating a new Afghanistan Compact with the Afghan government. The Compact would commit international development funding for the next five years and would become the successor to the 2001 Bonn Agreement. Its most significant feature was setting mutually agreed deadlines and targets that would force Kabul and the international community to complete projects on time. While Karzai was deeply frustrated at the lack of aid going through government ministries, Western donors were equally frustrated at the corruption and nepotism within his government. The Compact took five months to negotiate between the government, the UN, the World Bank, and a large number of donor countries and agencies.

  On January 31, 2006, seventy foreign ministers and heads of international aid agencies met in the palatial rooms of Lancaster House in London at a sumptuous event put on by the British government. The Afghan government launched its Interim National Development Strategy, which required $4.0 billion in funding every year for the next five years. At the meeting, donors pledged $10.5 billion in aid to Afghanistan over the next five years. The United States was the largest single donor, giving $1.1 billion, followed by Britain with $800 million. The donors and the Afghan government made a series of pledges to one another. While the international community promised to recognize “Afghan ownership” and “build lasting Afghan capacity,” Kabul promised to “combat corruption and ensure public transparency and accountability.” The donors promised to create an Afghan army, border security, and a police force by 2010, as well as to provide electricity to 65 percent of all households in urban areas.

  To many Afghans, the Compact was just a list of more unfulfilled promises and more grandstanding by foreign dignitaries talking about basic Afghan needs that should have been provided for already. Kabul still had insufficient electricity or clean water. Yet such thoughts were far from the minds of the well-heeled diplomats who crowded into Lancaster House that day. Even further from their minds was the prospect of a Taliban offensive, which was to relegate the Compact to the history books. The Taliban and al Qaeda, after all, were flush with cash from the drug trade.

  NATO troops began to deploy in the south, but the task was immediately fraught with difficulties. The south had been a war zone since 2003, yet NATO failed to articulate a counterinsurgency strategy. All three countries deploying in the south—Canada, Britain and the Netherlands, which had agreed to deploy to Uruzgan—knew they would have to fight but did not declare so, as they all faced continued political opposition at home. Much rested on Britain, which would command NATO forces in the south, deploy the largest number of troops (more than 5,700), and had pledged to curb opium production.

  However, compared with its influential role in 2002—when Gen. John McColl had stood up the first ISAF force and when Tony Blair’s advice to Bush on Afghanistan was critical—Britain now found its political credibility hitting rock bottom. Blair had been the first foreign leader to visit Afghanistan in January 2002, but he did not visit again for another four years, and the issue seemed to have disappeared from his agenda. Instead, he followed the Americans so unquestioningly and blindly into Iraq that he lost his influence in the White House. The neocons now saw Blair as their poodle, someone who could easily be bullied and told what to do. Blair lost his ability to change Bush’s mind on anything, including policies for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  Attempts by Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to prop up Colin Powell to take on the neocons were constantly undermined by Blair. “Not only did we fail ourselves to exert any recognizable influence over the conduct of US policy, we also reduced the influence of those we might have regarded as like-minded internationalists in Washington,” said the conservative politician Chris Patten. Former president
Jimmy Carter bemoaned how Blair was too “compliant and subservient” to Bush, adding that he was “extremely disappointed by Tony Blair’s behavior.”10 The British were at a loss as to why Bush had ceded so much power to Cheney, who had a huge staff to deal with foreign policy and often overruled the State Department.11

  In late 2005 in London, I was invited to brief British officers to give them a taste of what Helmand would be like. Although they were enthusiastic about their deployment, the officers were disturbed by Blair’s failure so far to give them a clear and concise mandate. They asked many questions. Why had Britain chosen the most volatile and drug-infested province in Afghanistan to send underresourced British troops? Why was the government still unclear as to what British troops would do there? What should be done about Pakistan’s support to the Taliban? And was their mandate to be reconstruction or counterinsurgency? Could they do both? Meanwhile, the British army was vastly overstretched and received only 2.5 percent of British GDP in 2006—the smallest proportion of GDP since 1930.12

  None of these questions was answered by the government, even after the deployment had taken place. British officials admitted that Blair’s office was increasingly cut off from reality. There was infighting between the Ministry of Defense and the Foreign Office over the terms of the deployment. Like the Pentagon, Defense refused to allow its soldiers to get their hands dirty by doing drug control. It demanded heavy air support to protect the troops, while the Foreign Office and the Treasury wanted the operation done on the cheap. Blair just wanted the troops to do anything he asked and to stop asking questions. As London dithered on deciding the mandate, the troops’ deployment was delayed. Soldiers were trained, and then sat on their haunches in a state of limbo. British container ships packed with military equipment idled off Karachi port, waiting to know if they should dock or not. The start of the deployment was already proving to be massively demoralizing for the army.