War in Iraq
The gains made by Khalilzad, Barno, and their Afghan allies looked especially promising compared to Iraq, which had quickly deteriorated into a bloody insurgency. Ronald Neumann had gone to Iraq in 2004 as part of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). He went on to serve as the U.S. Embassy’s principal interlocutor with the Multi-National Command in Baghdad, where he was deeply involved in coordinating the political part of military operations in Fallujah, Najaf, and other areas. With great dismay, Neumann watched the situation deteriorate in Iraq. In an informational memo to CPA Administrator Paul Bremer, he described the growth of coordinated “attacks across the country, primarily aimed at police forces in various locations.” Neumann explained that “enemy cells, associated with the Zarqawi group, were moving out of Syria that possibly had the Green Zone on their target list,” referring to the location in central Baghdad that housed the CPA and much of the international personnel.30
In fact, security in Iraq had been deteriorating since the summer of 2003. While senior U.S. government officials publicly assured Americans that the situation was not as bad as press reports indicated, internal CPA documents showed growing alarm. In a June memo to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, as they prepared to brief President Bush, Bremer noted that the threat to U.S. forces had become multifaceted.
First, elements of the former regime, such as Ba’athists, Fedayeen Saddam, and intelligence agencies had focused their attacks on three targets: Coalition forces, infrastructure, and Iraqi employees of the Coalition. “To date,” Bremer wrote, “these elements do not appear to be subject to central command and control. But there are signs of coordination among them.”31 Former officers of the Mukhabarat, Iraq’s intelligence service, were active in a number of ways, including making radio-detonated bombs. They used money channeled through radical Islamic clerics, who had been funded by wealthy donors in the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf countries. 32 Second was Iranian subversion: “Elements of the Tehran government are actively arming, training and directing militia in Iraq. To date, these armed forces have not been directly involved in attacks on the Coalition. But they pose a longer term threat to law and order in Iraq.” Third, international terrorists—especially jihadists from Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen—had arrived in Iraq to target the United States.33
In a briefing to President Bush at a July 1, 2003, National Security Council meeting, Bremer stated bluntly that “security is not acceptable.” The threat, he continued, was from a conglomeration of Ba’athists, terrorists, Iranians, and criminals. The Iranian focus “is on Shias using several political parties.”34 U.S. security assessments also suggested an increasing tempo of attacks against Coalition forces using small arms, mortars, rocket grenades, and improvised explosive devices (IEDs). According to a CPA analysis, the “attack patterns show emerging regional coordination in: Baghdad, Karbala, Fallujah, Mosul, and Tikrit.” In response, the Coalition conducted a series of offensive operations to pressure insurgent groups and disrupt their activities.35
Reports of the deteriorating security environment began to resonate with the Iraqi public. One of the first public-opinion polls in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein confirmed that Iraqis were “unhappy” with their country.36 A Gallup poll shared among CPA staff indicated that 94 percent of Iraqis in Baghdad believed the city was a more dangerous place to live after the U.S.-led invasion. Majorities also said they were afraid to go outside of their homes during the day (70 percent) and night (80 percent). And anti-American sentiments in much of Iraq were extremely high.37
By 2004, the security situation had become even worse in Iraq. Insurgents mounted attacks on the oil pipelines, denying the government petroleum revenues. A CPA assessment of critical infrastructure declared that “the Former Regime Elements demonstrate some agility in switching their attacks between Oil, Power and Rail—but greater ruthlessness should be anticipated. Damage to pylons, oil pipes and rail track is unacceptable but relatively easily repaired; sabotage of a power plant or refinery (Critical Infrastructure) is catastrophic.” At one point there was an average of two attacks per day on infrastructure.38 With more than 12,000 miles of infrastructure to protect, the Coalition and Iraqi security forces stood no chance of securing the entire system. Instead, they focused on critical infrastructure, developed intelligence-directed patrolling and air-surveillance capabilities, and invested in rapid repair techniques.39
Most alarmingly, reports from the CPA’s regional offices suggested a spreading insurgency. “A number of incidents have occurred which have served to reinforce that this is a dangerous place,” wrote Regional Security Coordinator Bill Miller in March. “We have had numerous attacks, bombings, rocket attacks, and improvised explosive devices.”40 After the assassination of CPA members Fern Holland, Salwa Oumashi, and Bob Zangas, staffers began wearing more protective equipment, varying times and routes of travel, increasing the presence of Gurkhas to provide security at camps, and taking State Department counterthreat classes. Bremer became sufficiently concerned about the security situation that he postponed U.S. congressional visits to Iraq, though not all members of Congress complied. Military convoys were being attacked so regularly that on April 17 Bremer seriously considered ordering food rationing at the CPA.41
Warning Signs
The levels of violence and sheer brutality continued to increase in Iraq, with the introduction of grisly suicide bombings and a string of beheadings in 2004. Afghanistan, by comparison, was relatively quiet. The Taliban and other insurgent groups, bolstered by the American preoccupation in Iraq and America’s unwillingness to target them in Pakistan, began to conduct small-scale offensive operations to overthrow the Afghan government and coerce the withdrawal of U.S. and Coalition forces.42 In April 2002, insurgents orchestrated a series of offensive attacks in Kandahar, Khowst, and Nangarhar Provinces. In 2003 and 2004, the Taliban continued a low-level insurgency from bases in Pakistan. Perhaps the most significant event was the September 2004 rocket attack against President Hamid Karzai in the eastern Afghan city of Gardez.
Insurgents also began to target international aid workers. Afghans organizing or otherwise involved in election work were attacked or killed. So were nongovernmental organization (NGO) workers and Afghan citizens believed to be cooperating with Coalition forces or the Afghan government. In October 2004, three UN staff members were abducted in Kabul. Attacks occurred throughout the country, though most were in the south and east, in such provinces as Nangarhar, Paktia, Paktika, and Khowst.43
The result was a decrease in security for Afghans and foreigners, especially those living in the east and south, but “the level of criminal activity—characterized by increasing numbers of armed robberies, abductions, and murders even in areas controlled by the ANA and police patrols—[was] still high.”44 Interfactional fighting continued among regional commanders in Herat, Nangarhar, Nuristan, Lowgar, Laghman, and Badghis Provinces.45 The withdrawal in July 2004 of the NGO Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders), which had been in Afghanistan for nearly three decades, was a sobering testament to the deteriorating security environment. A month earlier, five Médecins sans Frontières workers had been ambushed and shot in the head in the northwestern province of Badghis.
“We began to get concerned about the insurgency in late 2003 with the shift in tactics,” noted Afghan National Security Council official Daoud Yaqub. “There was an increase in the number of improvised explosive devices, and soft targets were increasingly attacked.” But the U.S. position was different, he contended. “U.S. officials in Afghanistan didn’t see the Taliban as a strategic threat then”.46
Indeed, Lieutenant General Barno believed that “the Taliban were a fairly amateurish organization. There were only a few Arabs from al’Qaida present in Afghanistan, and we killed most of them. In 2004, we killed insurgents video-taping helicopter take-offs near Jalalabad. Most of the insurgent deployments we were seeing were in the 10s and 20s, not in the 100s of fighters. It was a ragt
ag group.”47 Nonetheless, there was thinning patience with the slow pace of killing or capturing insurgents in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Secretary Rumsfeld wrote a memo in October 2003 to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and several top-level officials expressing frustration that “we are having mixed results with Al Qa’ida, although we have put considerable pressure on them—nonetheless, a great many remain at large.” The United States had made some progress in capturing top Iraqi insurgents, but it “has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban—Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.”48
Bitter Irony
Despite these concerns, the levels of violence in Afghanistan were relatively low. Fewer than 300 Afghans died in 2004 because of the insurgency, which paled in comparison with the tens of thousands who died in Iraq in 2004.49 Most Afghans believed the security situation was somewhat better than under Taliban rule. An opinion poll conducted by the Asia Foundation indicated that 35 percent often or sometimes feared for their personal safety, a decline from 41 percent during the Taliban period.50 And another poll showed that 84 percent of Afghans believed that their living standard had improved since the end of the Taliban government.51
Yet fate took a strange twist. In 2005, Zalmay Khalilzad replaced John Negroponte as U.S. ambassador in Iraq. It was a move symptomatic of the U.S. government’s tunnel vision on Iraq. The State Department had taken one of its most seasoned and effective ambassadors, who spoke Afghanistan’s two main languages and had a special rapport with its political leaders, and moved him to Baghdad during an extraordinarily fragile period in Afghanistan’s history. Lieutenant General David Barno was replaced by Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, effectively shattering the military-civilian coordination Khalilzad and Barno had painstakingly fashioned during their tenure together. Perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Iraq had taken center stage as America’s most important foreign-policy concern. Proven staff were in great demand and Khalilzad and Barno had thus far been among the best. Still, it was a dangerous gamble.
The rise of an insurgency in Afghanistan was a serious and unfortunate development. Insurgencies frequently lead to the death of thousands—and sometimes millions—of civilians. To paraphrase Princeton history professor Arno Mayer, if war is hell, then insurgency belongs to hell’s darkest and most infernal region.52
CHAPTER NINE The Logic of Insurgency
ONE OF THE twentieth century’s most successful insurgents, the Chinese leader Mao Zedong, wrote that there is an inextricable link in insurgencies “between the people and the troops. The former may be likened to water and the latter to the fish who inhabit it.”1 Insurgencies require a motivated leadership but, more important, they can only form amid a disillusioned population. Mao had both. He led China’s beleaguered peasants, who had been harshly oppressed by the feudal landowners, in a violent insurgency that toppled the government and Chiang Kai-shek’s National Revolutionary Army in 1949.
Mao’s experience was comparable to that of countless other insurgencies, virtually all featuring poorly trained and badly equipped guerrillas overwhelming a much more powerful opponent. In the American Revolutionary War, Francis Marion, better known as the “Swamp Fox,” organized a disheveled band of fighters in South Carolina against the British. Operating with great speed and elusiveness from inaccessible bases, and taking advantage of local hatred against the British, Marion’s troops struck isolated garrisons, convoys, and other targets in rapid succession. The British, unable to effectively counter Marion, complained that he fought neither “like a gentleman” nor “like a Christian.” His actions inspired the “Song of Marion’s Men,” by the American poet William Cullen Bryant, which hailed the geographical advantage held by the Americans:
Our fortress is the good greenwood,
Our tent the cypress-tree;
We know the forest round us,
As seamen know the sea. 2
Bryant’s poem highlights a practice that Afghan insurgents would mimic several centuries later: the use of guerrilla tactics against a better-equipped conventional military. This chapter seeks to understand insurgencies at a systematic level in order to explain the situation in Afghanistan. Why do insurgencies begin? The first question to ask is: What exactly is an insurgency?
Understanding Insurgencies
An insurgency is a political-military campaign by nonstate actors who seek to overthrow a government or secede from a country through the use of unconventional—and sometimes conventional—military strategies.3 Insurgent actions also cover a range of unconventional tactics, from small-scale ambushes and raids to large-scale, lethal violence. 4 They usually involve four principal actors.
The first are insurgents, those hoping to overthrow the established national government or secede from it.5 In Afghanistan after the 2001 fall of the Taliban, key insurgent forces included the remnants of the Taliban, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami, the Haqqani network, al Qa’ida and other foreign fighters, criminal groups, and a host of Afghan and Pakistani tribal militias. The second is the local government, which includes the government’s security forces, the army and police, as well as key national and local political institutions. In states with weak central governments, such as Afghanistan, tribal militias may also serve these purposes. The third group consists of outside actors: external states and other nonstate entities, which might support either side. Outside actors can tip the balance of a war in favor of either insurgents or the government, but they can rarely win it for either side. There were two sets of external actors in Afghanistan. The United States, NATO forces, and the United Nations supported the Afghan government; the international jihadi network and some individuals from neighboring states—such as Pakistan and Iran—supported the insurgents.
Finally, the local population is the most important group; it is for their hearts and minds that the war is being fought in the first place. The support of the population is the sine qua non of victory in counterinsurgency warfare.6 As one study of the insurgency in El Salvador concluded: “The only territory you want to hold is the six inches between the ears of the campesino.”7 Each side needs money, logistics, recruits, intelligence, and other aid to achieve its objectives.8 Support is especially critical for insurgents, who must fight asymmetrically. Political scientist Daniel Byman writes,
Pity the would-be insurgent. He and his comrades are unknown to the population at large, and their true agenda has little popularity. Indeed, most countries around the world oppose their agenda. Many of the fighters are not experienced in warfare or clandestine operations, making them easy prey for the police and intelligence services. Their families are at the mercy of government security forces. The government they oppose, in contrast, is relatively rich, has thousands or even millions of administrators, policemen, and soldiers, and enjoys considerable legitimacy.9
If insurgents manage to separate the population from the government and external forces, however, and acquire its active or passive support, they are more likely to win the war. In the end, the exercise of political power depends on the tacit or explicit agreement of the population—or, at worst, on its submissiveness.10
While outside actors often play an important role, they rarely stay for the duration of the conflict, and the result of the war is almost always a function of the struggle between the local government and insurgents.11 My analysis of insurgencies since 1945 shows that successful counterinsurgency campaigns last for an average of fourteen years, and unsuccessful ones last for an average of eleven years. Many also end in a draw, with neither side winning. Insurgencies can also be brutal, drawn-out affairs: more than a third of all insurgencies last more than twenty years, with the incumbent governments winning slightly more than twice as often as the insurgents.12 Again, only a few of these conflicts are fought—and won or lost—by foreign armies. Most countries quickly tire of having their troops deployed abroad, as the Soviets did during their Afghan campaign. Moreover, most local populations view foreign armies as occupiers, which impedes success.13 A le
ad indigenous role, on the other hand, can provide a focus for national aspirations and show the population that they—and not foreign forces—control their destiny.
Research on past cases suggests that two factors correlate strongly with the beginning of an insurgency: weak governance and a well-articulated cause from insurgent leaders. Competent governments that can provide services to their population in a timely manner are rarely beset with insurgencies. But there are also uncontrollable factors: countries with low per-capita incomes are at a greater risk of insurgency. Geographical factors are important too. Mountainous terrain can have a compounding effect on the grievances of a restive population.14 David Galula, a French military officer and counterinsurgency expert, wrote that the ideal location for insurgents is a landlocked country with mountains along the borders, a dispersed rural population, and a primitive economy.15 If ever a country matched this description, it surely would be Afghanistan.
Governance Collapse
Weak and ineffective governance—the ability to establish law and order, effectively manage resources, and implement sound policies—is a necessary precondition for the rise of insurgencies.16 It creates a supply of disgruntled locals eager to find other ways of governing themselves. Political scientist Stathis Kalyvas explains:
Insurgency can best be understood as a process of competitive state building rather than simply an instance of collective action or social contention…. State building is the insurgent’s central goal and renders organized and sustained rebellion of the kind that takes places in civil wars fundamentally distinct from phenomena such as banditry, mafias, or social movements.17
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