by Ahmed Rashid
Similarly, the sixteen hundred Dutch troops based in the southern province of Uruzgan were prepared to fight, but their mission was defined by the Dutch government as limited to peacekeeping and reconstruction. In mid-June 2007, after three days of intense fighting in Uruzgan between the Taliban and Dutch troops in which fifty Taliban and nearly one hundred Afghan civilians were killed, the Dutch public began to take serious umbrage at the deployment. By August 2007, only 45 percent of the Dutch supported the Afghan mission, and by December 3 the government had announced that it would pull back its troops by 2010. The public and media debates in Canada and the Netherlands were also about the huge cost of such military missions for these small countries. The Dutch deployment to Uruzgan for two years cost $1.4 billion. From 2001 to late 2007, Canada had spent a total of $6.3 billion on its deployments in Afghanistan. Both governments were also spending large sums on aid projects for the Afghan people.29
There were also tensions within NATO’s fighting forces. As a result of the heavy fighting in Helmand, borne largely by the 7,800 British troops deployed there, tensions arose between the British and the Americans on strategy and tactics. The U.S. military resented Britain’s secret dealings with and attempts to divide the Taliban, as well as the British refusal to accept U.S. requests to carry out aerial spraying of the opium crop. U.S. military officers began privately to disparage their British counterparts, while British officers blamed the Americans for their shoot-from-the-hip philosophy. The biggest bone of contention was why the British had allowed the Taliban to keep control of Musa Qala, a key terrorist training center and drug-producing city. Musa Qala was held by the Taliban for a year and then finally retaken by British and U.S. forces in December 2007.
In fact, the real problem was that Helmand province was critical to the war effort and affected all other NATO forces. It was the center of Taliban activity, a major Taliban gateway into southern Afghanistan for manpower, food, and ammunition from their bases in Pakistan and for the all-important flowering drug trade that provided growing income for the Taliban and al Qaeda war chest. In 2007 there was a 45 percent increase in production of opium in Helmand—the total opium harvest increased from 6,100 tons in 2006 to 8,200 tons in 2007, while the cultivated land area for opium increased by 17 percent across the country. The British were responsible for drug control across Afghanistan, so the lack of progress in Helmand was acutely embarrassing, especially when thirteen provinces in the north were declared drug-free by the UN, compared to only six in 2006.
By December 2007, Robert Gates became more belligerent, telling the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee that NATO had failed to deliver three battalions of troops, twenty helicopters, and thirty-five hundred trainers for the ANA, as it had promised to do. He called for overhauling NATO’s Afghan strategy over the next three years, shifting NATO’s focus from one primarily of rebuilding to one of waging “a classic counterinsurgency” against a resurgent Taliban. “I am not ready to let NATO off the hook in Afghanistan at this point,” Gates told the committee.30
He could not have been more serious. Taliban attacks were up 27 percent from 2006, and there had been a 60 percent increase in attacks in Helmand despite the large British presence, which seemed to attract rather than deter Taliban strikes. However, the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan remained far less than that to Iraq. Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admitted in the same hearing that “in Afghanistan, we do what we can. In Iraq, we do what we must. There is a limit to what we can apply to Afghanistan.” This message was pounced on by Afghans and Europeans to show that as far as the United States was concerned, Afghanistan came a distant second to Iraq. Nevertheless, Poland promised to send four hundred troops in addition to the twelve hundred soldiers already in Paktika province, while the United States said it would make up the shortfall by sending three thousand U.S. Marines for a short duration, including one thousand trainers for the ANA. There were now fifty-six thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Nobody, however, offered to help out the Canadians or the Dutch.
NATO was not the only problem. The international community was failing to coordinate its military and security strategy with its development architecture, and there had been a breakdown in relations with the Afghan government and Karzai. Nobody seemed to know what the other was doing, even though several bodies had been set up ostensibly to coordinate strategy between all the players. In July 2006 the Policy Action Group, composed of leading donors and generals in Kabul and chaired by Karzai, had been established to meet every month and decide upon policy priorities, but it became increasingly ineffective. London’s Afghanistan Compact had set up the Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board, or JCMB, which was tasked with overseeing that the Compact’s targets, both from the Kabul government and the international community, were met. However, the JCMB failed to hold anyone accountable for shortcomings or for targets not met.
The problems in Kabul were compounded by the sheer number of actors there. Thirty-nine countries were now involved in contributing troops to ISAF in Kabul. More than sixty large donor institutions and dozens of small NGOs were supposed to be coordinating with the Afghan government, but frequently were not. Three heavyweight civilian ambassadors, representing the UN, NATO, and the European Union, were supposed to coordinate their assistance and strategy with the government. Instead, coordination was noticeable only by its absence.31 Things were getting worse, not better, and nobody seemed to be able to find a way out of the morass.
In 2007 the Taliban had mounted fewer human wave assaults on secure NATO positions than they had in 2006. Instead, they had stepped up suicide attacks—in 2007, 137 suicide attacks led to 1,730 casualties, compared to 141 such attacks and 1,100 casualties in 2006. In 2007, there were 42 suicide attacks in Kandahar province alone. Some of the deadliest attacks took place in Kabul; in one such incident, a suicide bomber boarded an Afghan army bus in late September 2007 and killed 31 ANA recruits. One of the worst bombings took place in Baghlan, on November 6, when a suicide bomber killed 72 people, including 5 members of parliament and Syed Mustafa Kazemi, the brilliant former commerce minister who had opened trade links through Iran. Fifty-nine of the victims were the children who had been waiting to receive him.
The Taliban brought the war into the heart of the Western policymaking process when a group of suicide attackers stormed into the Serena Hotel in Kabul on January 14, 2008, and killed six people, including a Norwegian journalist; the Norwegian foreign minister, Jonas Garh Soere, escaped the massacre by hiding in the basement. Such tactical successes emboldened the insurgency, further cowered the population, who were in awe of the Taliban, and forced NATO and Afghan security forces to deploy more static guards rather than go after the insurgents.
The Taliban also targeted the police in 2007, killing some nine hundred. Nearly forty aid workers were killed that year, while another seventy-six were abducted. Such attacks began to have a major impact on education, as nearly six hundred schools in the south were closed down, sending three hundred thousand children home on account of the lack of security.
The Taliban also seemed to be winning the propaganda war. Tens of thousands of tapes and DVDs produced by the Taliban media outlets Omat [Nation] Productions and Manbaul-Jihad (Source of Jihad) were sold for a few pennies in the bazaars of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Al Qaeda’s own production company, al-Sahab, issued eighty-nine messages in 2007, one every three days, or double the rate it had issued them in 2006.
In the short term there seemed to be some improvement in intelligence sharing among Pakistan’s ISI and NATO and U.S. intelligence. Several key Taliban commanders based in Balochistan were killed. Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Usmani, the former commander of the Taliban’s Second Corps, was killed in a targeted British air strike in Helmand on December 23, 2006, as he traveled from Pakistan. In March 2007, Mullah Obaidullah Akhund, one of the two senior deputies of Mullah Omar, was arrested in Quetta. It was later reported that the ISI had freed him in a hostage exchange for
Pakistani soldiers being held by Baitullah Mahsud.
Mullah Dadullah, the much-reviled commander of southern Afghanistan who had kicked off the insurgency in 2003 by killing a Red Cross worker and who had committed multiple atrocities since then, was finally killed on May 13, 2007, in a firefight in Garmser, in Helmand province. He had been tracked by Britain’s Special Boat Service in Quetta and killed after he left the city. On August 30, 2007, Mullah Barader Akhund, the former Taliban deputy defense minister, was killed in Sangin, in Helmand province. Some of these commanders had fallen out with Mullah Omar and the ISI, and it was rumored in Taliban circles in Quetta that in fact they had been “delivered up,” or betrayed, by the ISI so that they could be killed by NATO, allowing Pakistan to show its sincerity about catching Taliban commanders. The truth is not known, because privately and publicly, the Americans praised the ISI for being more cooperative.
NATO kept boasting that it won every battle its soldiers fought. This was true because of the overwhelming firepower NATO forces could bring to bear in a single theater. However, NATO had no overarching strategy for winning or for transforming military victories into development, reconstruction, good governance, and political strategies. Nobody had yet come up with a solution to the major problem of how to reconstruct a nation in the midst of an insurgency—something that was most evident in the south. Admiral Mullen described the NATO-ISAF command as “plagued by shortfalls in capability and capacity, and constrained by a host of caveats that limit its ability.”32 It was this lack of strategy that Gates was trying to get NATO to address, but it was not certain if the Europeans were refusing to listen or were just plain tired of another lecture by the now lame-duck and much-disliked Bush administration.
The Taliban were seeking to outlast NATO, and they were succeeding; for as in Iraq, as long as the Afghan government failed to create effective governance and provide services to the people, the Taliban were winning by default. The outcome of the fighting was becoming less relevant because, even when faced with a string of tactical defeats, the Taliban were expanding their influence and base areas and cowing more of the population. Corruption alone was creating enormous misgivings among the people and making Karzai hugely unpopular. “If nothing is done about corruption, Afghanistan’s development prospects will be severely threatened and undermined,” warned William Byrd of the World Bank. “Corruption is profoundly inimical to state building.”33 Moreover, even in 2008 the World Bank estimated that up to 30 percent of all aid was being wasted by the donors.34
However, the economy was not entirely moribund. The U.S. Geological Survey showed that Afghans were sitting on a gold mine of natural resources, with huge deposits of copper, iron, gold, coal, gemstones, gas, and oil. Undiscovered petroleum resources in northern Afghanistan range from 3.6 to 36.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, while estimates of oil range from 0.4 to 3.6 billion barrels.35 In November 2007 the government finalized the first mineral deal, with a Chinese company, to exploit the Aynak copper reserves outside Kabul, which could yield some $400 million in revenue per year—equivalent to the total government revenues in 2007— and provide more than five thousand jobs. However, if corruption continued to prevail at every level of the government, then it would be impossible for such projects to raise living standards.
What the country still needed was an effective security apparatus and a functioning judicial and policing system that could face up to the Taliban and deal with local issues such as land disputes and criminality. The Americans were speeding up the building of the ANA and also focusing on revamping the police. In 2007 the United States furnished $10.1 billion for the ANA and the police, providing them with much-needed equipment and increasing their salaries. This was more than double what had been spent in any previous single year since 2001, and it reflected a recognition that past NATO and U.S. priorities had been misplaced.
Yet for ordinary Afghans, how much had life really changed? Seven years on, Afghanistan was still listed fifth from last on the UNDP’s Human Development Index in terms of education, longevity, and economic performance. Its position of 174 out of 178 placed it only above the poorest countries in Africa.36 One third of Afghans did not have enough to eat, and only 12 percent of women were literate, compared to 32 percent of men. Life expectancy was just a miserable forty-three years, half of that in the United States.
However, the Taliban are now expanding in Pakistan much faster than anyone could have imagined. It has not been their successful strategy as much as the failed policies of the army and Musharraf that have created this crisis. The world’s terrorist leaders were already living on the Pakistan side of the border, but with the creation of the Pakistani Taliban, they are now able to expand their influence, base areas, and training camps at will across northern Pakistan. The 2008 election offers a panacea, but it will bring relief only if the army, the politicians, and the international community come together to help the new Pakistan government tackle its myriad problems. Success depends on the army and the ISI being pressured or persuaded to give up their twisted logic of insecurity, national pride, and expansion in the region, to help sort out the country’s problems, and to be good friends to Pakistan’s neighbors, instead of constantly trying to undermine them. The army’s insecurity, which since 1947 has essentially bred a covert policy of undermining neighbors, has now come full circle, for Pakistan’s very future is at stake as extremists threaten to undermine Pakistan itself.
The past three periods of prolonged military rule in Pakistan coincided with large U.S. aid flows to the country, but never in such quantities as the Bush administration undertook to provide Musharraf. Between 1954 and 2002, the United States provided a total of $12.6 billion in economic and military aid to Pakistan, of which $9.19 billion was given during twenty-four years of military rule, while only $3.4 billion was provided to civilian governments over a nineteen-year period. Between 2001 and 2007, the United States gave more than $10.0 billion to the Musharraf regime. Yet what has been the gross profit of this aid?
Today, seven years after 9/11, Mullah Omar and the original Afghan Taliban Shura still live in Balochistan province. Afghan and Pakistani Taliban leaders live on farther north, in FATA, as do the militias of Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hikmetyar. Al Qaeda has a safe haven in FATA, and along with them reside a plethora of Asian and Arab terrorist groups who are now expanding their reach into Europe and the United States. The United States and NATO have failed to understand that the Taliban belong to neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan, but are a lumpen population, the product of refugee camps, militarized madrassas, and the lack of opportunities in the borderland of Pakistan and Afghanistan. They have neither been true citizens of either country nor experienced traditional Pashtun tribal society. The longer the war goes on, the more deeply rooted and widespread the Taliban and their transnational milieu will become.
The Bush doctrine has been overburdened with lies, omissions, and spin—all of which has done little to increase global confidence in the United States. It is going to take a generation before the world begins to see America in a different light, and the next U.S. president is going to have a very hard time cultivating a new image of America—quite apart from the immediate problem of what to do about Iraq and Afghanistan.
The enormous cost of these wars has crippled the United States and world economies, the military deployments have shattered the U.S. and British armies, and the death and destruction have bled civilian populations and worsened the humanitarian crisis for neighboring countries. According to one estimate, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will eventually reach $3.0 trillion.37 In 2008 Iraq cost $12.5 billion a month and Afghanistan $3.5 billion a month. That is already double the cost of the Korean War and costlier than the twelve-year-long Vietnam War. Today’s wars have been financed almost entirely by borrowing, with no new taxes being raised. As a consequence, Americans for generations will be paying off these debts. Meanwhile, al Qaeda continues to expand and there is the danger that one day it
will wreak more havoc in the West.
The West’s failure to follow through on nation building has disillusioned millions of people and made too many Muslims ready recruits for al Qaeda. It is ironic that finally, in 2008, the new U.S. Army doctrine stipulates that stabilizing war-torn countries is just as important as defeating the enemy.38 If only that had been considered important in 2001. For those in organizations such as the UN, who try to do the best they can even under worsening circumstances and with smaller funds, the business of peacekeeping, peacemaking, and nation building is becoming harder. “The problem is that our expectations and agendas are not becoming any more realistic,” says Lakhdar Brahimi, the wise old Afghan peacemaker. “Instead, they have become more ambitious and multifaceted, seeking to promote justice, national reconciliation, human rights, gender equality, the rule of law, sustainable economic development, and democracy, all at the same time, from day one, now, immediately, even including in the midst of conflict.”39
Bush promised a great transformation in 2001, and he has certainly transformed the world, but not in the way that any of us could ever have imagined. We now all have to live with the consequences, pick up the pieces, and help improve the world we are left with by tilting the earth’s axis back to where it should be.
