A Rope and a Prayer

by David Rohde

Later that day, he finally promises to protect all three of us. “I give you my promise,” he says, as I lie in the back of the station wagon. “I will not kill any of the three of you.”

  Then he says, “Let’s kill Asad first,” and laughs. I have no idea what to believe.

  On the second night of our drive across rural Afghanistan, we arrive in a darkened village. Its dirt streets are deserted and the cold air suggests we are at high altitude. A spectacular array of stars that is the brightest I have ever seen blazes overhead.

  Atiqullah, Tahir, Asad, and the other Taliban get out of the car and go to sleep in a mosque. Under the Taliban’s strict interpretation of Islam, I am not allowed in a mosque because I am a kafir, or nonbeliever. In the past, moderate Muslims have welcomed me in mosques.

  I stay in the car with Akbar, the guard who speaks broken English and brought us food and clothes. Akbar whispers that Atiqullah has told him we will be exchanged within ten to fifteen days. I feel enormous relief. My patience, faith in Atiqullah, and statements about our worth appear to have paid off. Later that night, in another positive sign, I am brought into the mosque. Tahir has convinced the Taliban that it is wrong under Pashtunwali to make a guest sleep in the cold. After spending nearly twenty-four hours straight lying in the back of the car, I am exhausted.

  On the third morning of our drive, Tahir’s car breaks down. Atiqullah sells it and buys a second station wagon. Tahir is furious but powerless to stop him. During the wait for the new vehicle, Akbar and the guards hold an impromptu machine gun marksmanship competition. Akbar wins.

  At dusk, we drive through a barren mountainous area and are met by another Taliban commander. A bone-thin man with a long beard and one arm, he gets into the driver’s seat and guides us through barren, rock-strewn territory, steering the car and shifting gears with lightning-quick movements of his one hand.

  I will later realize that we are making our way across rural Afghanistan with the help of a network of local Taliban fighters. They escort us from remote district to remote district. As we cross a particularly deserted area with no villages in sight, Atiqullah is so confident of the security vacuum that he allows me to walk outside at dusk. I stretch my legs as he and his men pray. Deserted, dirt-covered mountains surround us in every direction. We have crossed dozens of miles of Afghan government territory. I have not seen any signs of Afghan government or American forces in days.

  I knew the vast security vacuum Atiqullah took advantage of was the product of years of American and Afghan government missteps. In 2002 and 2003, early decisions made by officials in Washington severely handicapped the effort to create a strong new Afghan government and national army. And then as Iraq unraveled in 2004 and 2005, Afghanistan was relegated to an afterthought.

  A saying I first heard in postwar Bosnia—“Law and order first”—proved true in Afghanistan. Without a basic degree of security, political and economic reforms will all be handicapped. Local corruption as well will stymie reform.

  For months in the spring of 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld clashed with Secretary of State Colin Powell over what role American troops should play in Afghanistan. The outcome of the debate was critical. The number of American troops initially deployed—and their marching orders—would set the tone for the international effort for years to come.

  In a February 2002 White House meeting, Powell called for American troops to participate in the expansion of a 4,000-soldier international peacekeeping force then patrolling Kabul. In addition to hunting Taliban and Al Qaeda members, the expanded force would patrol Afghanistan’s other major cities and enforce the decisions of Karzai’s fledgling government.

  Powell told me in a 2008 interview that he believed that all other reform efforts would fail in Afghanistan if adequate security was not established. “This would be the number one thing,” he said, “You’ve got to have order in society.”

  Richard N. Haass, the former director of policy planning at the State Department, told me that informal conversations with European officials led him to believe the United States could recruit a force of 30,000 peacekeepers, half European, half American.

  Rumsfeld and his aides were skeptical. Douglas J. Feith, then the Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy, told me they feared European countries would not provide enough troops. They also wanted to avoid the Clinton administration approach of having United Nations officials administer a postconflict country, arguing it would breed passivity and anger in the local population.

  “There is a way to do nation building where the UN or someone else takes responsibility out of the hands of the local people and runs the place as a colony,” Mr. Feith told me. “We were going against that model.”

  Feith said Pentagon officials hoped to train Afghan security forces, but not create such a large American troop presence in the country that it stoked what they saw as Afghans’ historic resentment of foreigners.

  Ali Ahmed Jalali, the country’s interior minister from 2002 to 2005, told me in an interview that Afghan resentment of American troops was “a myth.” After ten years of internecine civil war fueled by neighboring counties that funneled cash and weapons to each warring faction, he said, Afghans yearned in 2002 for the United States to step in. He said Afghans saw Americans as neutral because they had not strongly backed a side in the bloody civil war as had Pakistan, India, Russia, and Iran.

  “They could not help themselves,” he argued, referring to Afghans. “They were at war with themselves.”

  The deadlock dragged on for months.

  In the late spring of 2002, Powell’s proposal died. “The president, the vice president, the secretary of defense, the national security staff, all of them were skeptical of an ambitious project in Afghanistan,” Haass said. “I didn’t see support.”

  Powell said the United States did not make the sweeping commitment needed in Afghanistan. “We never quite bit the bullet that it was going to take all it could,” he told me.

  President Bush, though, remained skeptical. During the 2000 presidential election, he had said he opposed using U.S. troops for “nation-building.” Following the 9/11 attacks and postinvasion chaos in Iraq, his views gradually shifted. He slowly accepted that if the United States toppled a regime it had to help create a new government and security force to fill the ensuing vacuum. By the time the shift in Bush’s thinking occurred in Afghanistan, though, it was too late. In the end, the Bush administration deployed 8,000 troops to Afghanistan in 2002, with orders to hunt Taliban and Qaeda members and not to engage in peacekeeping or reconstruction. The 4,000-member international peacekeeping force did not venture beyond Kabul.

  As an alternative, the United States and its allies hatched a loosely organized plan for Afghans to secure the country themselves. The United States would train a 70,000-member army. Japan would disarm some 100,000 militia fighters. Britain would mount an antinarcotics program. Italy would carry out reforms in the judiciary. And Germany would train a 62,000-member police force.

  But that left no one in overall command. On the ground, holes quickly emerged in the American and European security effort.

  The training of a new Afghan army proved difficult. When Robert Finn, the U.S. ambassador, reviewed the first Afghan National Army troops trained by the Americans in the summer of 2002, he was dismayed.

  “They were illiterate,” Finn told me. “They were at a much lower level than people expected.”

  American military officials told him that local Afghan commanders sent them their worst conscripts. In 2004, three years after the fall of the Taliban, the new force had only 21,000 soldiers. By comparison the United States had trained five times as many Iraqi soldiers three years after the fall of Baghdad.

  The police were even more challenging. Seventy percent of the existing 80,000 officers were illiterate. Eighty percent lacked proper equipment, and corruption was endemic. Afghan police did not patrol. They set up checkpoints and waited for residents to report crimes. Afghans said they had to bribe th
e police, in fact, simply to report a crime.

  Yet Germany, the country responsible for police training, dispatched only forty advisers in 2002 and 2003. They reopened the Kabul police academy and began a program designed to graduate 3,500 senior officers in three years. German officials said developing a core of skilled commanders was the key to reform, frustrating American officials who backed a large, countrywide training effort. Some American and European military units conducted ad hoc, two- to six-week training sessions around the country, but no comprehensive instruction occurred outside Kabul.

  James Dobbins, the administration’s former special envoy for Afghanistan, said Defense Department hopes that Afghans could quickly take responsibility for their own security proved unrealistic.

  “The reason we are there is that these are failed states,” said Dobbins, who had also served as special envoy to Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Somalia. “The thought that this can be quickly remedied has proved unjustified in most cases.”

  Confusion, infighting, and a failure to grasp the depth of Afghanistan’s problems hampered the American reconstruction effort as well. After privately rejecting a large American troop deployment in Afghanistan, Bush publicly announced a vast American reconstruction effort. The move surprised Dobbins, who had lost the fight for more troops. In April 2002, Dobbins received a phone call as he sat in his State Department office. Mr. Bush, he was told, was planning to proclaim America’s commitment to rebuild Afghanistan.

  “I got a call from the White House speech writers saying they were writing a speech and did I see any reason not to cite the Marshall Plan,” Dobbins recalled, referring to the American rebuilding of post-World War II Europe. “I said, ‘No, I see no objections,’ so they put it in the speech.”

  On April 17, Bush traveled to the Virginia Military Institute, where General George C. Marshall had trained a century before. In a speech that received scant media attention in the United States but raised hopes in Afghanistan, Bush promised a sweeping reconstruction effort.

  “Marshall knew that our military victory against enemies in World War II had to be followed by a moral victory that resulted in better lives for individual human beings,” Bush said. He called Marshall’s work “a beacon to light the path that we, too, must follow.”

  Aware that Afghans felt his father’s administration had abandoned the country following the 1989 Soviet withdrawal, he vowed to avoid the syndrome of “initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure.”

  “We’re not going to repeat that mistake,” he said. “We’re tough, we’re determined, we’re relentless. We will stay until the mission is done.”

  Within hours of Bush’s speech, Rumsfeld announced his own approach at a Pentagon news conference. Again, he called for the Afghans to help themselves.

  “The last thing you’re going to hear from this podium is someone thinking they know how Afghanistan ought to organize itself,” Rumsfeld said. “They’re going to have to figure it out. They’re going to have to grab ahold of that thing and do something. And we’re there to help.”

  At the same time, the American government had nowhere near the personnel needed to carry out such a sweeping reconstruction effort. By 2001, the agency that had spearheaded the Lashkar Gah project decades back had stopped mounting construction projects. USAID officials initially opposed road building and other large infrastructure programs. They said they feared they would consume too much of their agency’s limited staff and budget.

  The end of the Cold War, complaints from Congress of tax dollars being poured down “foreign rat holes,” and the failure of some foreign infrastructure projects prompted massive cuts at USAID. Criticism of failed foreign projects and a drive to privatize aid work by the Reagan and Clinton administrations had shrunk the agency from 3,000 Americans posted abroad in the 1980s to 1,000.

  In the fall of 2003, sixteen months after the president’s Marshall Plan speech, USAID had seven full-time staffers and thirty-five full-time contract staff members in Afghanistan, most of them Afghans. Sixty-one agency positions were vacant. Slashed in size, USAID had no experts to field.

  Overall, from 2001 to 2005, Afghanistan received less assistance per capita than did postconflict Bosnia and Kosovo, or even desperately poor, postcoup Haiti in the 1990s. At the same time, reports began to emerge of endemic corruption in the Karzai government.

  The invasion of Iraq only intensified the shortage of troops, civilian experts, and high-level focus. As Washington turned its attention to Baghdad, a massive troop imbalance emerged. In 2003, the United States had 250,000 troops in Iraq and 20,000 in Afghanistan. At the same time, Washington spent half as much money in Afghanistan as it did in Iraq—even though the countries are roughly the same size.

  Former CIA officials told me that the agency’s best, most experienced officers were shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq in late 2002 and early 2003. That reduced the United States’ influence over powerful Afghan warlords who were refusing to turn over to Karzai’s weak central government tens of millions of dollars they had collected in border crossing customs payments. The military’s elite special operations units were also diverted to Iraq, along with remotely piloted drones.

  “We were economizing in Afghanistan,” a former military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told one of my colleagues in 2007. “Anyone who tells you differently is blowing smoke.”

  With a growing insurgency overstretching American forces in Iraq in 2005, Bush further reduced the American commitment in Afghanistan. He asked European officials to have NATO forces take over responsibility for securing southern Afghanistan. Condoleezza Rice, then secretary of state, cut American assistance to Afghanistan by $200 million.

  The president and other senior officials saw Afghanistan as a success. They cited improvements in health care, roads, education, and the economy, as well as the quality of life in the cities and the holding of parliamentary elections. President Bush saw President Karzai as a more skilled leader than critics contended and saw no Afghan leader who could replace him. Reports of corruption by Karzai’s brother surfaced, but no evidence emerged of Karzai’s personal involvement

  The then American ambassador in Kabul, Ronald Neumann, bluntly demanded that the $200 million in funding be restored and warned of a Taliban resurgence. In a February 2006 cable to his superiors, he predicted that the cut would handicap U.S. counter-narcotics programs, slow the training of the Afghan army, and make the “Taliban’s role easier.”

  Neumann’s warnings fell on deaf ears in Washington. President Bush and his top aides left Afghanistan to European troops and reduced aid levels. Troops from Britain—the historic enemy of the Pashtuns—led the NATO takeover of security in Helmand. Rumors that the West wanted to occupy Afghanistan, not rebuild it, gained credence among Afghans.

  In the spring of 2006, the Taliban carried out their largest offensive since 2001. Suicide bombings quintupled to 136, roadside bombings doubled, and Taliban fighters seized control of large parts of southern Afghanistan. NATO forces—many of whom were barred from engaging in combat by their government—were overmatched. American and NATO casualties rose by 20 percent. For the first time it became nearly as dangerous, statistically, to serve as an American soldier in Afghanistan as in Iraq.

  In southern Afghanistan, many rural Pashtuns took up arms against corrupt officials appointed by the Karzai government and joined the Taliban. In eastern Afghanistan, the Taliban mounted cross-border attacks from Pakistan, the United States’ purported ally.

  As the Taliban confidently ferried us across the Afghan countryside in November 2008, it confirmed what I already knew. The haphazard, eight-year American effort in Afghanistan was a failure.

  At sunset, the car stops and Atiqullah announces that we will have to hike through the mountains. A large American base blocks the path in front of us, he says. We protest, but he insists that we must walk. He promises that he will carry me on his back if I am unable to complete the journey.


  The Afghan sandals I have been wearing since we were kidnapped will not be strong enough for a trek. The one-armed commander gives me a pair of worn loafers with the words “Made in East Germany” printed on the insole. A guard gives me his jacket.

  As we walk, I understand why Western journalists grew enamored of anti-Soviet Afghan resistance fighters in the 1980s. Under a spectacular panorama of stars, we wind our way along a steep mountain pass. Emaciated Taliban fighters carry heavy machine guns with little sign of fatigue. Their grit and resilience seem boundless. I think about making a run for it but have not been able to freely talk with Tahir and Asad. If I run without warning, all three of us could be shot.

  As the hike continues, I grow skeptical of Atiqullah’s boasts. The man who has promised to carry me if needed proves to be in poor shape. On one of the steepest parts of the ascent, he stops, sits on a rock, and pants for air. Until now, I have only seen him seated on the floor or behind the wheel of a car. As we hike through the mountains, I see that Atiqullah is chubby, fat even, and does not have the same strength as his men.

  Nine hours after we set out, the sun rises and the hike drags on. We are walking through low hills covered by orange dirt, an Afghan version of scrub brush, and the occasional tree. The landscape is lifeless. At dawn, we silently pass through a village and our guards ready their weapons for any problems. No one emerges from the houses.

  Asad approaches me when the guards lag behind, points at the way ahead and whispers “Miran Shah.” Miran Shah is the capital and largest town in North Waziristan, a Taliban and Al Qaeda stronghold in Pakistan’s tribal areas. North Waziristan is the home of some of the Taliban’s most hard-line members. If we are headed there, we are doomed.

  Inside Afghanistan, the American military and Afghan government can carry out raids and put other pressure on our captors. In Pakistan’s tribal areas, the Afghan Taliban have free rein. No American combat troops are present, the Pakistani government opposes American raids, and the Pakistani army turns a blind eye to the Afghan Taliban. In Pakistan, our captors can hold us as long as they please.