In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

by Seth G. Jones

  The book then moves to the rise of Afghanistan’s insurgency and the collapse of Afghan governance. It outlines Afghan difficulties in establishing law and order in rural areas as well as challenges in delivering essential services to the local populations. Weak governance, it turns out, has been a critical factor in the rise of most insurgencies over the past fifty years. The next chapters explore the proliferation of violence beginning in 2006, catalyzed by what Lieutenant General Eikenberry referred to as a “perfect storm” of crises. The book also explores the role of outside actors in aiding insurgent groups, including al Qa’ida and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate and Frontier Corps.

  To better appreciate Afghanistan’s complex history, which has seen the ruthless destruction of foreign armies, our story begins with Alexander the Great’s audacious sojourn into Afghanistan—one of the most notable failed attempts to conquer the region. What becomes eerily apparent, however, is how quickly the United States ran into challenges similar to those faced by past empires. “Ambushes, assassinations, attacks on supply convoys, bridges, pipelines, and airfields, with the avoidance of set piece battles; these are history’s proven techniques for the guerrilla,” wrote Mohammad Yousaf, who ran Pakistan’s ISI operations in Afghanistan during the Soviet War.32 Indeed, Afghanistan’s rich history serves as a springboard for understanding the American experience in a country that since antiquity has been called a graveyard of empires.

  IN THE GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES

  FIGURE 1.1 Map of Afghanistan

  CHAPTER ONE Descent into Violence

  AFGHANISTAN’S STRATEGIC LOCATION, wedged between Persia, the weathered steppes of Central Asia, and the trade routes of the Indian Subcontinent, has long made it alluring to great powers. When Alexander the Great began his march into Afghanistan around 330 BC, locals witnessed a forbidding sight. Riding ahead of the invading force were scouts armed with sarisas—pikes up to twenty feet long, weighted at the base and projecting fifteen feet in front of the mounted cavalry. Agile soldiers armed with javelins surveyed the heights on both flanks. The core of Alexander’s army was a thick column of horsemen and foot soldiers that snaked along Afghanistan’s windswept roads. Some soldiers wore plumed helmets, purple tunics, and glistening armor. Alexander had begun his Asia campaign four years earlier, and the invasion of Afghanistan was a key part of his quest. His army had already swept through what is now Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Iraq, and Iran before arriving at the edge of Afghanistan.1

  One of the most interesting accounts of the campaign was provided by the Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus. He described Alexander gathering his soldiers together before their march into Afghanistan and addressing them with bravado:

  In a new, and if we wish to confess the truth, insecure empire, to whose yoke the barbarians still submit with obdurate necks, there is need of time, my soldiers, until they are trained to milder dispositions, and until better habits appease their savage temper. Do you believe that so many nations accustomed to the rule and name of another, united with us neither by religion, nor customs, nor community of language, have been subdued in the same battle in which they were overcome?

  It is by your arms alone that they are restrained, not by their dispositions, and those who fear us when we are present, in our absence will be enemies. We are dealing with savage beasts, which lapse of time only can tame, when they are caught and caged, because their own nature cannot tame them. Then you will hurry to recover what is yours, then you will take up arms. But how much better it is to crush him while he is still in fear and almost beside himself.2

  Rufus wrote that the address was received with great enthusiasm by Alexander’s soldiers.3 The great Hellenic army entered Afghanistan from what is today Iran. They paused to found a garrison city, Alexandria-in-Areia, near Afghanistan’s western city of Herat, then marched south to the lower Helmand River Valley. The Helmand River, the longest in Afghanistan, stretches more than 700 miles from the Hindu Kush mountains in the north to the Helmand Valley in the south. Its waters, used by local farmers for irrigating crops, left behind rich soil to feed the orchards and date-palm groves that lined its banks. In this period, the valley was fertile and well populated, and Alexander’s army halted there to await the end of Afghanistan’s bitter winter before proceeding north. In the early spring, the army marched to the Kabul Valley, trekking across melting snow and ice, but the persistent, biting cold took its toll.

  Rufus wrote: “The army, then, abandoned in this absence of all human civilization, endured all the evils that could be suffered, want, cold, fatigue, despair. The unusual cold of the snow caused the death of many, to many it brought frost-bite of the feet, to very many blindness of the eyes.”4

  But in the Kabul Valley, the army finally found sustenance. Alexander’s Afghan campaign continued until the spring of 327 BC, when the army crossed the Hindu Kush into India. The Hindu Kush mountains form part of a vast alpine zone that stretches across South Asia. To the east, the mountains intersect with the Pamir range near the borders of China, Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, and Afghanistan. They then continue southwest through Pakistan into Afghanistan, where they eventually descend into a series of minor ranges in western Afghanistan. Historically, the high passes of the Hindu Kush have been of great military significance, providing access to the northern plains of India for such conquerors as Alexander, as well as invaders such as Genghis Khan, Timur, and Babur. And they inspired the British travel writer Eric Newby, who wrote, during his trek through the Hindu Kush, “Here on the Arayu, one of the lonely places of the earth with all the winds of Asia droning over it, where the mountains seemed like the bones of the world breaking through, I had the sensation of emerging from a country that would continue to exist more or less unchanged whatever disasters overtook the rest of mankind.”5

  Afghanistan was one of the most difficult campaigns that Alexander the Great ever fought. His adversaries were not conventional European armies but tribesmen and horse warriors who inhabited the steppes and mountains of the region. Both sides fought barbarously. Alexander’s army was technically superior to the local forces they faced, but it needed to clear and hold an expansive territory. The solution was to fight on multiple fronts in a constant war of attrition against the local Afghans, and to deal ruthlessly with the locals. The army sacked rebellious cities, killed or enslaved their inhabitants, and doled out savage reprisals. If not genocide, it was certainly mass killing. 6 Despite the bloodletting, his army failed to subjugate Afghanistan’s population, and his tenuous grasp on the region collapsed after his death in 323 BC.

  Alexander’s march was eventually followed by the Islamic conquest of Afghanistan, which began around 652 AD, two decades after the death of the prophet Muhammad in Medina, when Arab armies from the Middle East captured Herat. But they failed to convert the recalcitrant mountain tribes, and their revolt preserved the loose conglomerate of Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Hindus, and others that had dominated before the rise of the Caliphate. In 122 AD, Genghis Khan and his Mongol army swept through Afghanistan and northern India, leaving behind a trail of devastation and creating an empire that stretched from China to the Caucasus. They depopulated territory, slaughtering civilians in an attempt to eliminate the possibility of rebellion, and they decimated cities such as Herat.

  Marco Polo, the Venetian trader and explorer, trekked across Afghan mountains later in the century, remarking that “this kingdom has many narrow passes and natural fortresses, so that the inhabitants are not afraid of any invader breaking in to molest them. Their cities and towns are built on mountain tops or sites of great natural strength. It is a characteristic of these mountains that they are of immense height.”7 In 1383, the conqueror Timur began his Afghan conquest, again with the capture of Herat. He was the last of the mighty Mongol rulers to achieve a vast empire with territory stretching from present-day India to the Mediterranean Sea. The poverty, bloodshed, and desolation caused by his campaigns gave rise to haunting legends t
hat inspired such works as Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great. Early in the sixteenth century, the Mughal emperor Babur left present-day Iran and crossed the Amu Darya River, which would later serve as the border between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan. Babur, a descendant of Genghis Khan, captured Kabul in 1504 at the age of twenty-one. In 1522, he captured Kandahar and repeatedly tried to invade India, but he was never able to establish a firm foothold. He left behind traces of Persian culture—from language to music, painting, and poetry—that one can still see in Afghanistan.

  In the nineteenth century, the British fought three brutal wars in Afghanistan to balance Russian influence in the region. Britain had drawn the line against Russia at the Amu Darya River, and its leaders made clear they would contest any Russian move to the south. But Britain paid a heavy price for its interest in Afghanistan. The first Anglo-Afghan War, which lasted from 1839 to 1842, ended in a humiliating British defeat. The departing British force, numbering 16,000 soldiers, was systematically reduced to one as British forces were ambushed in biting cold and knee-deep snow. William Brydon, the lone survivor, later recalled: “This was a terrible march, the fire of the enemy incessant, and numbers of officers and men, not knowing where they were going from snow-blindness, were cut up.”8

  In 1878, the British invaded again, launching the second Anglo-Afghan War. Roughly 33, 500 British troops began a swift assault on three fronts, but cholera shredded the British ranks and many were felled by heat; daytime temperatures in the shade rose to over one hundred degrees. Some British commanders did not even visit their soldiers in the hospital to avoid the utter shock of what they would see.9 On July 27, 1880, Afghans loyal to Ayub Khan defeated the British army during the Battle of Maiwand. Despite a decisive victory at the Battle of Kandahar in September 1880, however, the British pulled out of the country following intense domestic opposition to the war. After the fighting ended, Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Roberts remarked: “It may not be very flattering to our amour propre, but I feel sure I am right when I say that the less the Afghans see of us the less they will dislike us. Should Russia in future years attempt to reconquer Afghanistan, or invade India through it, we should have a better chance of attaching the Afghans to our interests if we avoid all interference with them in the meantime.”10 His words were prophetic.

  In 1917, however, the Russian civil war triggered the collapse of Nicholas II’s regime, ensuring that Russia would pose no strategic threat for the foreseeable future. British leaders began the third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919 and later that year signed the Treaty of Rawalpindi, which recognized Afghan independence on August 8, 1919. British policymakers had long seen Afghanistan as a strategically important buffer state to protect British interests in India from Russian expansion. During the eighty years of hostility, the British had grappled with a growing revolt from Pashtuns in southern and eastern Afghanistan, who took power once Afghanistan became independent. Characterized by their own language (Pashto) and the practice of Pashtunwali—a legal and moral code that determines social order and responsibilities and governs such key components as honor, solidarity, hospitality, mutual support, shame, and revenge—the Pashtuns would play a major role in Afghan history in the twentieth century.

  In 1919, King Amanullah Khan tried to modernize the country, but he was overthrown in 1929 by Habibullah Kalakani, a Tajik. Kalakani was ousted a few months later after Pashtuns rebelled, and members of the Pashtun Musahiban family then founded a dynasty that would rule Afghanistan for nearly five decades, from 1929 to 1978. The first of their leaders was Muhammad Nadir Shah, who had grown up in British India, served as a general in the army, and spent part of his adult years living in southern France before becoming king. But he was assassinated in 1933, and his son, Muhammad Zahir Shah, took his place at the age of nineteen. For several years Zahir Shah remained in the background while his relatives ran the government. One of the most prominent was Daoud Khan, a cousin and brother-in-law of Zahir Shah, who was educated in France and became prime minister in 1953. Daoud Khan was an advocate of Pashtun irredentism, including the creation of a greater “Pashtunistan” in the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. But Zahir Shah eventually took control of the government in 1963 and catapulted the country into a new era of modernity and democratic freedom.

  Collapse of the State

  In 1967, Ronald Neumann left the University of California-Riverside with a master’s degree in political science and headed to Afghanistan, where his father, Robert Neumann, was the U.S. ambassador. The elder Neumann had been a tenured professor at the University of California when President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated him to the post. “My father had a profound impact on my interest in foreign affairs,” Ronald Neumann later recalled. “Because of him, I made up my mind in the tenth grade to go into the Foreign Service.”11

  It was Ronald Neumann’s first trip to Afghanistan, and the last he would take before following in his father’s footsteps as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan nearly four decades later. With his wife, Neumann traveled the country. They drove from Herat to Kabul, along part of the same route that Rory Stewart would later memorialize in his 2001 best seller The Places in Between.12 Neumann went on a hunting expedition for the famous Marco Polo sheep in Badakhshan, Afghanistan’s mountainous northeast in the heart of the Hindu Kush. After returning from his trek across the region in the late thirteenth century, the Italian explorer had described these 300-pound beasts as “wild sheep of enormous size” with horns “as much as six palms in length.”13 “It was an exotic adventure, a throwback in time,” said Neumann.14

  He also drove through the Salang Tunnel, linking northern and southern Afghanistan through the Hindu Kush mountains. In 1955, the Afghan government and the Soviet Union signed an agreement to build the tunnel, which was opened in 1964. The tunnel was the highest road tunnel in the world until 1973, when the United States built the Eisenhower Memorial Tunnel—just slightly higher and slightly longer—in the Rocky Mountains. For travelers at this time, the tunnel was one of the marvels of the country, if not all of Central Asia.

  The country that Ronald Neumann toured in 1967 had enjoyed several decades of stability and a relatively strong government. American and European tourists poured into Kabul each year. The Afghan capital was the Central Asian hotspot for young backpackers, who flocked to the city’s coffee and carpet shops. King Zahir Shah had introduced a representative form of government, for which he received mostly high marks from the U.S. government. In a secret Eyes Only 1970 memo to President Richard Nixon after meeting with the king, Vice President Spiro Agnew described him as “a quiet, rather intense person, with great dedication to his country” who “appears to be very well versed in world affairs.”15 He was in his mid-fifties, and mostly bald, with a neatly trimmed mustache, and he often felt more comfortable donning a pressed Western suit rather than wearing traditional Afghan clothes.

  The king had summoned a loya jirga (grand assembly) in 1964, one of the freest and most influential ever convened by the Afghan state. The loya jirga wrote a constitution that set up a bicameral legislature and an independent judiciary. It also established a system of checks and balances based on the separation of executive, legislative, and judicial powers. U.S. State Department reports lauded Zahir Shah’s “blueprint for democracy” and noted that he had effectively maintained stability throughout the country.16 While the central government was weak, Zahir Shah’s regime was nonetheless able to establish law and order by dividing up responsibilities. In urban areas, such as Kabul, the government provided security and services to the Afghan population. But in rural areas, tribes, subtribes, clans, and other local entities ensured order. In cases where major disputes arose in rural areas, the government’s security forces would sometimes intervene. Consequently, the formula for peace and stability involved a power-sharing arrangement between the center and the periphery.

  By the early 1970s, however, there were signs of growing economic and political instability. In August 1971,
Ambassador Robert Neumann held a tense meeting with Zahir Shah. Responding to rising tensions, Neumann “decided to hit him hard re lack of progress in country, particularly deteriorating economic conditions.” He warned Zahir Shah that the political environment was becoming venomous and Afghans were becoming restless. “In my four and one-half years here I had never heard so many exp ressions at all levels of society about a feeling of hopelessness that [the] new government could accomplish any thing.”17 There were also reports of corruption in the government and tribal unrest, which were undermining popular support.18 Public opinion began to turn against Zahir Shah, who was increasingly perceived as overly discrete and out of touch. In his end-of-tour memo, Ambassador Neumann reflected on the king:

  The adjectives—indirect, cautious, furtive, clever, et al—which come to mind when one thinks of the King well represent the difficulty which observers here, both Afghan and foreign, face in trying to assess both the man and his creature. He has written no memoirs or autobiography, his public pronouncements are infrequent and generally anodyne, and in his contacts with a wide cross section of Afghan society, he prefers to listen rather than to declaim, a preference which frequently leads to confusion about his views.19

  In 1972, U.S. officials in Afghanistan and their intelligence contacts began hearing about a possible coup. In one meeting, Wahid Abdullah, director of information in the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, asked Ambassador Neumann how the United States would respond to a takeover by Muhammad Daoud Khan. Daoud, who had been Afghanistan’s prime minister from 1953 to 1963, was known for his progressive policies, especially in regard to women’s rights. Wahid Abdullah was eager to gauge the U.S. reaction, and he remarked somewhat cryptically that “[Daoud] knows I am here.”20 A takeover seemed imminent. In April 1972, the State Department received word that a possible coup might occur within a “couple of weeks,” possibly led by Daoud.21 Throughout 1972 and 1973, both American and Soviet intelligence services collected information about a possible coup.22