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

by Seth G. Jones

  Given the wide-ranging nature of ISI involvement, [the ISI] would need to endorse any talks with the Taliban. Anyone negotiating without their sanction would have to do so covertly, or face heavy consequences. It was not clear President Musharraf could be persuaded to control the ISI in this regard, which was not even obviously in his interest. His direction to the formal side was explicit, but forward and informal elements, retired generals with extremist views (e.g. Hamid Gul, Aziz Khan, Ehsan), retired Taliban liaison staff (e.g. Imam, Afridi) and many in a variety of services below the rank of major were more difficult to make accountable.32

  The U.S. government found that Pakistan largely refrained from conducting operations against the Taliban leadership structure.33 As one Pakistani journalist pointed out, the Pakistan government “plunges into action when they know they can lay their hands on a foreign militant but they are still reluctant to proceed against the Taliban.”34 The reluctance was even true of some key Taliban leaders who were arrested by Pakistani security forces. For example, Mullah Ubaidullah Akhund, who was captured by Pakistani forces in February 2007, continued to communicate with Taliban leaders even after his capture.35

  The Pakistani government negotiated several agreements with tribal leaders, including those allied with—or even members of—the Taliban. In April 2004, the government established an agreement, known as the Shakai Agreement, with the Taliban and local tribal leaders, including Nek Muhammad. Nek Muhammad was an upstart jihadi born in 1975. He had a youthful handsomeness, a thick black beard, and long, wavy hair, but it was his extraordinary confidence and tribal mien that catapulted him to power in South Waziristan. “Nek never had an intellectual mind but some other traits of his personality became evident during his stay at the Darul Uloom” seminary, recalled one of his teachers. “He showed himself to be a hard-headed boy, endowed with an impenetrable soul and an obstinate determination to carry out his will no matter how mindless it might be.”36 He was mercurial and cavalier but also extremely charismatic, and the Pakistan government made a deal with him.

  The Shakai Agreement included several provisions: Pakistan Army troops would not interfere in internal tribal affairs and agreed to stay in their cantonment areas; local insurgents would not attack Pakistan government personnel or infrastructure; and all foreigners would have to register with the government.37 But Nek Muhammad quickly violated the agreement and refused to hand over any foreigners, while also publicly humiliating the Pakistan government, boasting to reporters, “I did not go to them, they came to my place. That should make it clear who surrendered to whom.”38 He ultimately paid a hefty price. In June 2004, he was killed by a CIA Predator strike near Wana.39 His successor, Maulvi Abbas, agreed not to attack Pakistani government positions if the government allowed him to run the affairs of his tribe without interference.

  In September 2006, the governor of the North West Frontier Province, Lieutenant General (ret.) Ali Muhammad Jan Orakzai, reached an agreement in Miramshah with a tribal grand jirga whose members were drawn from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. As part of the agreement, the Taliban promised that it would not use the area to conduct attacks against the Afghan or Pakistani governments; it would stop targeted killings of pro-government maliks (tribal elders); and it would not impose its lifestyle on others by force. It also permitted the Taliban to retain their administrative and political position, allowed them to retain their weapons, and permitted foreigners to remain without any registration on promise of good conduct. In return, the Pakistan Army agreed to withdraw from most areas.40

  But the agreement had the exact opposite impact: It strengthened the power of the mullahs at the expense of the maliks. A Pakistan Ministry of Interior document informed President Pervez Musharraf that “Talibanisation has not only unfolded potential threats to our security, but is also casting its dark shadows over FATA and now in the settled areas adjoining the tribal belt. The reality is that it is spreading.” The document summarized the situation by affirming that there was “a general policy of appeasement towards the Taliban, which has further emboldened them.”41 A U.S. government assessment came to a similar conclusion, arguing that cross-border infiltration increased by 300 to 400 percent in some districts after the 2006 agreement in Miramshah. It found that the “Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) constitute an active sanctuary, along with Quetta and other parts of Baluchistan.”42 Local Taliban groups gradually became a parallel government in the tribal areas and a sanctuary for insurgent groups operating in Afghanistan. The traditional jirga was formally banned by the Taliban. In its place, aggrieved parties had to seek the intervention of their village Taliban representative, who performed the functions of police officer, administrator, and judge. The Taliban banned music stores, videos, and televisions and issued edicts that men had to grow beards. In 2005, the Taliban and other militants carried out a sustained campaign and killed more than 100 pro-government tribal elders. Other maliks fled from the tribal areas.43

  In 2006, President Musharraf acknowledged that the Pakistani tribal agreements “didn’t prove effective” and contributed to “the spread of Talibanization” in Pakistan’s tribal areas.44 This had been the Taliban’s intention all along, and they did not hesitate to reinforce it in public statements.45

  Strategic Rationale

  A group of U.S. officials, including General David Barno, thought that one reason Pakistan increased support to the Taliban was that the United States was discussing downsizing forces in Afghanistan. The trigger point was in 2005, when discussions had become intense about a U.S. drawdown and a handover to NATO. Pakistani and Afghan government officials interpreted this as a signal that the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan was waning. It encouraged Afghan government officials increasingly to look toward India as its long-term strategic partner, which in turn encouraged Pakistani government officials to support the Taliban.46

  In February 2007, General Barno testified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. “It is my personal opinion,” he said, “that since mid-2005, Pakistan has also calculated its position vis-à-vis Afghanistan in light of concerns for a diminished and less aggressive U.S. presence in the nation that lies in Pakistan’s backyard.”47 Barno continued:

  In mid-summer 2005, shortly after my departure from Afghanistan, the U.S. announced that NATO was assuming control from the U.S.-led coalition for the entire Afghan mission—and shortly thereafter, we also announced we were withdrawing over 1,000 U.S. troops from the combat zone. This, in my personal estimation, sent a most unfortunate and misinterpreted signal to friend and foe alike—that the U.S. was leaving and turning the mission over to some largely unknown (in that part of the world) organization of 26 countries directed from Europe. Tragically, I believe that this misunderstood message caused both friends and enemies to re-calculate their options—with a view toward the U.S. no longer being a lead actor in Afghanistan. The truth, of course, is much different but many of the shifts in enemy activity and even the behavior of Afghanistan’s neighbors, I believe, can be traced to this period.48

  The Indian Angle

  The Indian threat was much more important for the Pakistani government than its commitments to the United States. An Indian intelligence official told me: “After the fall of the Taliban, India took advantage of a window of opportunity to develop close ties with Hamid Karzai’s government in Afghanistan and counter Pakistan in the region.”49 Of course, Pakistan and India have long been involved in a balance-of-power struggle in South Asia; both laid claim to the Kashmir region and they have fought three major wars over Kashmir since 1947.

  After September 11, 2001, India provided hundreds of millions of dollars in financial assistance to Afghanistan and sent money to Afghan political candidates during the 2004 presidential elections and 2005 parliamentary elections. India also helped fund construction of the new Afghan Parliament building, as well as provide financial assistance to elected legislators.50 India built roads near the Pakistan border—projects that were run by Indi
a’s state-owned Border Roads Organisation, whose publicly acknowledged mission was to “support the [Indian] armed forces [to] meet their strategic needs.”51 When India established consulates in the Afghan cities of Jalalabad, Kandahar, and Herat, Pakistan accused India of using these consulates as bases for “terrorist activities” inside Pakistan, especially in the province of Baluchistan. One Pakistani Army official argued that these Indian consulates soon became a “hub of intelligence activities. Indian covert activities—under the guise of intelligence gathering and sharing information with the Coalition Forces—have been rampant along the Durand Line in Pashtun dominant areas.”52

  India pushed other projects that were clearly provocative. In the eastern Afghanistan province of Kunar, India built several schools within spitting distance of Pakistan. The Indian government signed a subnational local governance initiative with the minister of reconstruction and rural development in Kabul. Kunar Governor Sayed Fazlullah Wahidi—a man with a plump build, a bushy white beard, and a striking resemblance to Santa Claus—joked that he should start a bidding war between Pakistan and India to build infrastructure in the province.53

  The Indian-Afghan axis left Pakistan isolated and exposed in South Asia. In 2001, Pakistan had a close relationship with the Taliban government in Afghanistan, which it had nurtured since the Soviet War. But after the September 11 attacks, India’s growing relationship with the Afghan government shifted the balance of power in Afghanistan. Some Pakistan government officials discerned that India had several objectives in Afghanistan: destabilize Pakistan as a quid pro quo for Pakistan’s actions in Kashmir by supporting Baluch and other insurgents; create a two-front threat scenario for Pakistan; deny Pakistan direct economic, trade, and energy linkages to Central Asia; and prevent the rise of a radical Sunni regime in Kabul that would permit sanctuary for jihadi groups who threatened India.54 Feroz Hassan Khan, brigadier general in the Pakistani Army, noted: “Pakistan perceives India seeking a “strategic envelopment,” a policy of manipulating events in Afghanistan and Iran to elicit anti-Pakistan responses so as to cause political and security problems for Pakistan. The foremost objective of Pakistan has been to establish a friendly government in Kabul that at the minimum does not pose a second front in the event of a war with India.”55

  Consequently, assistance to insurgents in Afghanistan was a way for some Pakistani officials to counter the growing Indian influence in Afghanistan. At the very least, it maximized Pakistan’s strategic depth. As President Musharraf had explained in 2001 to U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin, Pakistan needed “strategic depth” in Afghanistan to protect its western flank.56 But Pakistan also knew that the United States and NATO eventually would withdraw from Afghanistan, just as the United States had done after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. During the 1990s, Pakistani support to the Taliban was extensive. In the absence of Soviet resistance and U.S. support, Pakistan provided arms, training, intelligence, vehicles, ammunition, fuel, and spare parts. In the back of every Pakistani official’s mind was the possibility that they once again would have to pick up the pieces in the region after the inevitable U.S. withdrawal.

  Other State Supporters

  In addition to Pakistan, U.S. and other NATO troops had to contend with interference from Iran. Iranian interest in Afghanistan, especially in the west, dated back thousands of years. Part of the ancient Persian Achaemenid Empire became Afghanistan, and the Persian Samanid dynasty reincorporated Afghanistan as a Persian-ruled domain in the ninth century. In the fifteenth century, Jahan Shah briefly established Herat as the capital of his Iranian domains. In the early sixteenth century, the Safavid Shah Tahmasp drove the Uzbeks from Herat for a short time, but by the turn of that century, Shah Abbas had reasserted Iranian dominance over the city and all of western Afghanistan. In the early nineteenth century, the Qajar dynasty ruler Muhammad Shah tried to reassert Iran’s claim to Herat by marching on the city in 1837, but the international landscape had changed.

  British policymakers, who believed India was vulnerable to an overland invasion from Russia, worried that the Iranian shah might welcome Russian transit, so they resolved to keep Afghanistan under informal British influence. Pressured by the British, Muhammad Shah withdrew his army, and Iranian troops seized Herat in October 1856. A few weeks later, British authorities in Bombay dispatched forty-five ships carrying almost 6,000 troops, seized the Iranian port of Bushehr, and pushed inland. The shah sued for peace and, in the 1857 Treaty of Paris, he relinquished all claim to Afghanistan. In return, the British forces withdrew.57 But western Afghanistan has always remained an area of strategic interest to Iranian leaders.

  After the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001, the Iranians employed what was known as a “hedging strategy” in Afghanistan. The logic was that if Iran could demonstrate an ability to undermine U.S. efforts on a variety of fronts, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States might be deterred from conducting an attack against Iranian nuclear facilities. On top of an array of patron-client relationships with powerful Shi’ite groups in Lebanon and Iraq, Tehran developed partnerships with some Sunni jihadists across the region, including the Taliban. General Dan McNeill, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan until mid-2008, acknowledged that NATO forces had tracked supply convoys from Iran into Afghanistan.

  McNeill, a stockily built man with gray hair and slight southern accent, described an incident in 2007 in which several vehicles were monitored crossing from Iran into western Afghanistan. A straight shooter who spoke bluntly in both public and private, McNeill said that NATO forces, after engaging the vehicles, found that one contained small-arms ammunition, mortar rounds, and more than 300 kilograms of C4 demolition charges. Other convoys from Iran carried rocket-propelled grenades, 107-millimeter rockets, and improvised explosive devices.58

  Some of these shipments may have come from international arms dealers. But NATO and Afghan officials claimed that elements of the Iranian government, especially the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, provided small arms and limited advanced-technology weapons to the Taliban and other insurgent groups.59 One of the most disturbing trends was the export of a handful of explosively formed penetrators (EFPs), which send a semimolten copper slug through the armor of a Humvee and then create a deadly spray of hot metal inside the vehicle. EFPs were used against Israeli forces in Lebanon in 2006 and against U.S. forces in Iraq beginning in 2005.60 In addition, there is some evidence that units of the Iranian government may have assisted—or knowingly allowed—the transit of jihadists moving between the Pakistan-Afghanistan front and the broader Middle East, especially Iraq.61

  Though Iran had a strategic motive, its support for the Taliban was somewhat surprising, since Iran’s historical relationship with the Taliban was not a good one. Iran, which is predominantly Shi’ite, viewed with deep concern the rise of the Sunni Taliban in the 1990s. In October 1998, for instance, nearly 200,000 regular Iranian troops massed along the border with Afghanistan, and the Taliban mobilized thousands of fighters to thwart an expected Iranian invasion. Only a last-minute effort by the United Nations prevented a war between the Taliban and Iran. Despite those tensions, however, Iran had a fairly close relationship with the Afghan government.62 Iran and Afghanistan cooperated on drug enforcement across their shared border and conducted trade, energy, investment, cultural, and scientific exchanges. Iran also played a helpful role at the 2001 Bonn Conference. According to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the UN worked well with Iran in Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban regime.63

  But the prospect of conflict with the United States appeared to temporarily change Iran’s strategic calculations. And there was some precedent for Iranian support to Sunni extremist groups. According to Defense Intelligence Agency estimates, for example, Iran joined the United States in providing rifles, land mines, shoulder-fired antitank rockets, heavy machine guns, and nonlethal assistance to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and other Sunni leaders against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.64 Former U.S. Under Secretary
of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns was quoted as saying that there was “irrefutable evidence” of arms “from the government of Iran.”65 In addition, the Iranian government provided aid to Tajik, Hazara, and Uzbek commanders in northern, central, and western Afghanistan, as they had done during the 1980s and 1990s.

  But Iran and Pakistan weren’t the only external supporters of the insurgency. There were reports that China sent arms to the Taliban, including ammunition and small arms.66 The EFPs that seem to have arrived from Iran also may have included Chinese technology. Yet the Chinese government’s role was not entirely clear. One NATO soldier, who specialized in information operations, told me that China’s most important role in Afghanistan was more accidental than purposeful. “Virtually every soccer ball or toy that I purchase and hand out to Afghan kids,” he noted, “says ‘Made in China.’ How’s that for information operations?”67 China’s historical role in Afghanistan was minimal compared with that of many of Afghanistan’s other neighbors, though China did provide small arms such as AK-47s and 60-millimeter mortars to Afghan mujahideen during the 1980s.68

  Finally, there were reports that wealthy donors from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and other Gulf states provided support to insurgents and other militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan, though it was not entirely clear to what degree these governments were directly involved. At least one European Union and UN assessment held that “[c]urtailing Taliban financing—from Saudi Arabia and UAE—was also key.”69 Saudi Arabia had been among the first countries to recognize the Taliban regime in May 1997, despite the fact that Osama bin Laden, a committed enemy of the Saudi regime, had returned to Afghanistan a year earlier.70 But after the Saudi government’s fallout with Osama bin Laden and then the Taliban in the late 1990s, its support for Taliban fighters dwindled. After the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001, zakat (almsgiving) was a key funding source for the Taliban and its allies. Saudi money was especially important for the Taliban because it helped fund mosques and madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the most important centers of community support and recruitment for the Taliban.