In November 2006, at NATO’s summit in Riga, Latvia, tensions over national caveats had become acute. France, Germany, Spain, and Italy remained reluctant to send their troops to southern Afghanistan. These four nations said they would send help to trouble zones outside their areas only in emergencies. But it was unclear whether and when these commanders would have to request permission from their civilian governments to do so. Countries agreeing to ease the restrictions on deployment against the Taliban insurgency included the Netherlands, Romania, and smaller nations such as Slovenia and Luxembourg.
U.S. commanders referred to the refusal to become involved in combat operations as “national caveats,” which were triggered by at least two concerns. First, several NATO countries had a different philosophy about how to operate in Afghanistan and how to conduct counterinsurgency operations. They were particularly adamant that development and reconstruction efforts were the recipe for success and convinced that combat operations were likely to alienate the Afghan population, especially if they led to civilian casualties. Second, political leaders were reluctant to deploy their forces into violent areas because of low domestic support for combat operations.
A British House of Commons investigation discovered: “In Madrid, we were told by politicians and academics that while Spanish public opinion supported troops working on reconstruction projects in Afghanistan, it would not support a war-fighting role. In Berlin, we were told about the constitutional restrictions on Germany’s military operating abroad.”40 In a German Marshall Fund poll in 2007, for example, 75 percent of Germans, 70 percent of Italians, and 72 percent of Spanish did not support the deployment of their troops for combat operations in Afghanistan.41 “Our domestic political situation certainly restricts our activities,” noted German General Markus Kneip in 2006, commander of NATO forces in Regional Command North.42
The result was that countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, and Turkey held restrictive views of the NATO mission and repeatedly balked at providing troops for counterinsurgency operations in the south. Their hesitation created two tiers within NATO: those involved in ground combat (United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Netherlands) and those who were not (everyone else). To be clear, those countries involved in combat also participated in reconstruction efforts. The two were not mutually exclusive.
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld spoke for a number of Americans, frustrated by NATO’s inaction, when he likened the situation to “having a basketball team, and they practice and practice and practice for six months. When it comes to game time, one or two say, ‘We’re not going to play.’”43 But the Americans weren’t the only ones upset; the two-tiered structure also created significant friction among other nations. Several British and Canadian military and diplomatic officials I interviewed became increasingly frustrated. “The national caveats are a source of extraordinary tension within NATO,” noted Canadian Ambassador David Sproule.44
Germany, which had been reluctant to commit troops in the first place, was frequently singled out as an egregious violator. The German Parliament did not allow the Bundeswehr—the German armed forces—to take part in combat operations against the Taliban in the south and east, except in emergencies. Indeed, German political leaders were extremely risk averse in Afghanistan. On my repeated trips to visit German troops in Kunduz and Mazar-e-Sharif, I noted several restrictions. German forces were generally prohibited from participating in offensive military operations. In addition, German forces initially were permitted to patrol in armored vehicles only during the day; some patrols were limited by the Bundeswehr regulation that military ambulances had to accompany all German patrols outside of Kunduz; and PRT commanders were usually unwilling to have their troops patrol in areas that were not secure. In response to a deteriorating security environment in the north in 2006 and 2007, the German reaction was often to establish more defensive measures, such as limiting the scope and range of patrols. This caused frustration among conventional German soldiers. It also angered some German Special Forces, who complained that they were not allowed to fight against terrorist and insurgent groups, for which they had been trained.45
Others questioned the German military’s ability to conduct sustained counterinsurgency operations. German army units, such as mechanized infantry and airborne brigades, had extensive experience in peacekeeping. But they lacked sufficient trained personnel, combat equipment, and supporting communications and intelligence gear necessary to perform offensive attacks, raids, and reconnaissance patrols. While Germany had approximately eighty Tiger attack helicopters, none were deployed to Afghanistan during the first several years of the mission; the German government refused to authorize their use in combat. The Germans also had some Tornado multipurpose combat aircraft, but reconfiguring them for close air support would have been challenging. The German Parliament would have needed to issue a new mandate to arm the aircraft for ground-attack missions, pilots would have required more combat training, and logistics-support systems would have necessitated enhancements—none of which were possible in Germany’s antiwar political climate.
Several other countries lacked adequate enabler forces—including attack and lift helicopters, smart munitions, intelligence, engineers, medical staff, logistics, and digital command and control—to fully leverage and sustain their ground-combat power.46 But, more important, there was no unity of command. In previous nation-building missions, such as the one in Bosnia, the international community had created a team (headed by the High Representative) tasked with overseeing reconstruction and stabilization. This did not happen in Afghanistan on either the civilian or the military side. The result was several external forces operating in the same area with different missions and different rules of engagement.
Command-and-control arrangements had been challenging from the beginning. In December 2001, the commander of Task Force Dagger (essentially the 5th Special Forces Group plus supporting units) was in direct contact with General Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command. The subordinate elements of Task Force Dagger had the most current and accurate intelligence about the situation on the ground. But this changed when the 1t Mountain Division assumed operations in Afghanistan in March 2002, and again when the XVIII Airborne Corps took over control of the Afghan theater in June 2002. By late 2002, the bureaucracy had become so oppressive that a request by a Special Forces unit to conduct an operation potentially had to be processed through six levels of command before being approved. One general officer said there was simply “too much overhead” to get anything done.47 These challenges persisted over the next several years, especially as NATO began to take a more active role in 2006 and 2007.
In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee in December 2007, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates sharply criticized NATO countries for not supplying urgently needed soldiers and other aid as violence escalated. He stated: “NATO still has shortfalls in meeting minimum requirements in troops, equipment, and other resources,” and the “Afghanistan mission has exposed constraints associated with interoperability, organization, critical equipment shortfalls, and national caveats.”48 For Gates and other senior U.S. policymakers, it was unconscionable that some NATO countries refused to deploy troops to southern Afghanistan as violence skyrocketed. In a broadside to America’s partners a month later, Gates later criticized most of the allies for failing to understand and prepare for counterinsurgency warfare. “Most of the European forces, NATO forces, are not trained in counterinsurgency; they were trained for the Fulda Gap,” he observed, referring to the region on the former East German-West German border where a Soviet ground invasion of Western Europe hypothetically might have occurred.49
Clearing, but Not Holding
The national caveats and light-footprint approach had a debilitating impact on NATO’s counterinsurgency operations and put undue strain on a select group of countries that chose to pursue combat and development. In previous counterinsurgencies, success had been achieved by defeating ins
urgent forces and their political organization in a given area, holding it, and implementing reconstruction projects.50 This has been called a “clear, hold, and build” strategy. Military forces set up secure zones and then slowly expand them outward like ink spots on blotting paper. Since only small numbers of U.S., Coalition, and Afghan forces were available, this strategy could be applied only in a few sectors of the country. Forces were assigned to contested areas to regain government presence and control, after which they conducted military and civil-military programs to expand the control and edge out insurgents. Counterinsurgency forces were supported with civil-affairs and psychological operations personnel.51
International forces in Afghanistan cast a wide net of operations outside their force-protection zone to disrupt and interdict insurgent operations. Units were required to live among the local population for significant amounts of time to gain their trust and support. Then they would proceed with patient intelligence work to ascertain the location of insurgents’ weapons caches, safe houses, and transit support systems. Once the hostile zones had been cleared, the force was to move to outer zones, where the population was neither friendly nor hostile to the counterinsurgency unit’s efforts. Occasional operations were conducted in these areas to keep the population “neutral” to the idea of supporting the insurgents. Battalion-size sweeps and clearing operations involving several hundred soldiers generally reaped far less than the effort required because of the difficulty of finding and fighting elusive insurgents.52 U.S., British, Dutch, and Canadian forces were sometimes successful at clearing territory through armed reconnaissance and specialized raiding. Individual units patrolled suspected insurgent areas. AC-130 Spectre gunships, Predator unmanned aerial vehicles, and other remote-reconnaissance tools helped support the patrols to keep insurgents off balance and disrupt their timing.53
The “clear, hold, and build” strategy seemed straightforward, but low levels of troops made it virtually impossible to hold territory in Afghanistan’s violent south. As one Western ambassador remarked to me: “We can clear territory, but we can’t hold it. There aren’t sufficient numbers of NATO or Afghan forces.”54 During Operation Medusa in 2006, for example, Canadian and other NATO forces had cleared Panjwai district from Taliban forces, but the Canadians and Afghans couldn’t hold the district. The Canadian military established a forward operating base in Panjwai and worked with local Afghan National Police, Afghan National Auxiliary Police, and some Afghan National Army soldiers to prevent a Taliban return. But their numbers were insufficient, and the Afghan police were unwilling to confront Taliban forces as they gradually reinfiltrated. By the summer of 2007, the Taliban were back in Panjwai at levels comparable to when Operation Medusa began.55
Reinfiltration was a persistent problem, especially across the south, where one NATO general told me that in mid-2007, “NATO and Afghan forces control at most 20 percent of the southern provinces of Nimroz, Helmand, Kandahar, Oruzgan, Day Kundi, and Zabol. The rest are controlled by Taliban, groups allied to the Taliban, or local commanders.”56
Writing on the Walls
By 2007, there were growing signs of NATO’s distress. Too few NATO forces and crippling national caveats impacted the organization’s ability to stem the rising violence, especially in southern Afghanistan. In December, Paddy Ashdown, a former member of the British Parliament and High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, who was being considered to head civilian reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, wrote to Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Foreign Secretary David Miliband, warning: “We do not have enough troops, aid or international will to make Afghanistan much different from what it has been for the last 1,000 years…. And even if we had all of these in sufficient quantities, we would not have them for sufficient time…to make the aim of fundamentally altering the nature of Afghanistan, achievable.”57
If Afghanistan was supposed to be NATO’s first opportunity to show its new raison d’être, the result was underwhelming. “One of the lessons of NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan,” General Eikenberry told me, “is the need to fulfill minimal requirements before deploying forces. If minimal requirements are not filled, then perhaps NATO shouldn’t go in.”58 There were other lessons as well. One of the most salient was the lesson of securing neighboring countries. The history of recent insurgencies demonstrates that the ability of insurgents to gain sanctuary and support in adjacent states significantly increases their probability of success over the long run. This brings us to Pakistan.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Water Must Boil
SEPTEMBER 22, 2005, was a crisp night in Shkin, Afghanistan, a small Pashtun village four miles from the Pakistan border in the eastern province of Paktika. With the exception of a few apple orchards, there is little agricultural activity because the soil is too poor. Several dirt roads snake through the area, but virtually none are paved. The landscape is strangely reminiscent of Frederic Remington or C. M. Russell’s paintings of the American West. Gritty layers of dust sap the life from a parched landscape. Shkin lies just south of the setting for Rudyard Kipling’s “Ballad of the King’s Jest,” which notes:
When spring-time flushes the desert grass,
Our kafilas wind through the Khyber Pass.
Lean are the camels but fat the frails,
Light are the purses but heavy the bales,
As the snowbound trade of the North comes down
To the market-square of Peshawur town. 1
There was an Afghan National Army observation post in Shkin. Four miles away was a U.S. firebase, which that night housed fewer than a dozen Americans, including two U.S. Marines and a handful of CIA personnel. It looked like a Wild West cavalry fort, ringed with coils of razor wire. A U.S. flag rippled above the three-foot-thick mud walls. In the watchtower, a guard scanned the expanse of ridges, rising to 8,000 feet, that marked the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. At 1 a.m., approximately forty insurgents came over the mountain passes from Pakistan and assaulted the Afghan observation post. Pakistani military observation posts to the east and southeast, at distances of a quarter-and a half-mile, provided supporting fire of heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. RPGs from the Pakistani posts struck the Afghan post and hit an ammunition storage area, igniting an uncontrollable fire. The compound was quickly surrounded. An Afghan Army Quick Reaction Force had already been dispatched to move into an assault position a thousand feet from the compound and retake it with support from artillery fire located at Firebase Shkin.
CIA personnel at the firebase worked furiously to contact Pakistani military authorities, who successfully reduced the artillery barrage coming from the Pakistani military posts. The small CIA and U.S. Marine contingent then began to direct artillery fire at the insurgent forces, shooting thirty-eight 105-millimeter rounds and scoring several direct hits. The insurgents made a hasty retreat. Using their Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor (JLENS), an aerostat with radars to provide over-the-horizon surveillance for defense against air threats, U.S. forces tracked the insurgents retreating across the Pakistan border. Although the insurgent assault was eventually repelled, it succeeded in killing two Afghan National Army soldiers, seriously wounding three others, and destroying an ammunition dump that housed machine guns, AK-47s, recoilless rifles, radios, and ammunition rounds.
Earlier that day, a 5th Special Forces Group operational detachment had departed from the Afghan observation post after conducting training with indigenous forces. The timing of the nighttime attack thus was suspicious, suggesting that the Pakistani military, the insurgents, or both had monitored their departure. The U.S. military after-action report noted that the Pakistani military’s direct engagement was an integral part of the insurgent attack. “The Pakistani military actively supported the enemy assault on the [observation post] despite past assurances of cooperation with Afghan and Coalition forces…. major damage to the [observation post] and friendly casualties would likely have been avoided had the enemy maneuver element
been acting alone.” Moreover, it concluded that “[t]he past reluctance of U.S. forces to fire on Pakistani checkpoints when American personnel are not directly engaged likely emboldened the Pakistani military to blatantly support the enemy assault.”2
This incident was not isolated but rather part of a much broader pattern of attacks along Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan. Many of these attacks were supported directly or indirectly by Pakistan agencies—especially the ISI and the Frontier Corps. “The border is our albatross,” one 82nd Airborne officer lamented.3 Pakistan’s leaders had long been motivated to become involved in Afghanistan’s affairs—including through military engagement—to promote its national-security interests. As Pakistani dictator General Zia-ul-Haq remarked in 1979 to the head of the ISI, Lieutenant-General Akhtar Abdul Rehman Khan, “the water in Afghanistan must boil at the right temperature.”4
One of the major reasons why the insurgency began and strengthened in Afghanistan was that insurgent groups were able to acquire outside support. After the Taliban overthrow, surviving senior leaders from the Taliban and other groups relocated to Pakistan. Over the next several years, they received increasingly large amounts of support from a variety of state actors. While Afghan government officials had a tendency to blame all of Afghanistan’s ills on Pakistan, the ability of insurgent groups to operate from Pakistani soil was integral to their success.
In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan Page 30
