by Oliver Stone
Internal government reviews made clear that building such a force was a daunting, if not impossible, task. After years of training, few Afghan army or police units could function independently, and leadership was lacking at all levels. Lieutenant General William Caldwell, the American who headed the NATO effort to train Afghan forces, reported in 2011 that 30 percent of Afghan soldiers deserted every year with the highest rates in the combat areas where they were most needed. A comparable percentage left the police each year. Caldwell put the literacy rate of army recruits at around 10 percent. Corruption ran rampant. Conditions were deplorable. Afghan soldiers damaged new buildings by tearing sinks off the walls to wash their feet before praying or building fires on barrack floors for cooking and heating in buildings that already contained kitchens and furnaces. Repairs were time-consuming and costly.137
Another issue was motivation. As Thomas Friedman observed in chiding Obama for not having the courage to reject a war that neither he nor his advisors wanted: “You know you’re in trouble,” he wrote, “when you’re in a war in which the only party whose objectives are clear, whose rhetoric is consistent and whose will to fight never seems to diminish, is your enemy: the Taliban.” “Why,“ he asked, “do we have to recruit and train our allies, the Afghan army, to fight? . . . If there is one thing Afghan males should not need to be trained to do, it’s to engage in warfare. That may be the only thing they all know how to do after thirty years of civil war and centuries of resisting foreign powers. After all, who is training the Taliban? They’ve been fighting the U.S. Army to a draw—and many of their commanders can’t even read.”138
Those who wondered what government forces were doing if not reading or fighting got some disturbing insight in January 2011, when the Afghan government signed an agreement with the UN to stop recruiting children into the police force and to ban the common and, according to the Washington Post, growing practice of using young boys as sex slaves. The New York Times reported that “as part of the Afghan tradition of bacha bazi, literally ‘boy play,’ boys as young as nine are dressed as girls and trained to dance for male audiences, then prostituted in an auction to the highest bidder. Many powerful men, particularly commanders in the military and the police, keep such boys, often dressed in uniforms, as constant companions for sexual purposes.” In Afghanistan, bacha bazi had actually become rampant among the insurgent mujahideen during their U.S.-backed campaign to oust Soviet forces. It was most openly practiced around Kandahar, where, the Times noted, the “Taliban originally came to prominence . . . when they intervened in a fight between two pedophile warlords over the possession of a coveted dancing boy.” The Taliban had banned this practice when they were in power.139
While Afghan commanders cavorted, American troops were paying a tremendous price, both physically and psychologically. A study by doctors at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where most wounded troops stopped before returning to the United States, found a dramatic increase in the percentage of injured troops who had lost limbs between 2009 and 2010 due to the widespread use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). In 2010, 11 percent of the casualties had undergone amputations. Thirty-eight percent of the amputees had undergone multiple amputations.
Among the most gruesome were injuries to the genitals and urinary tract, the number of which almost tripled in just one year. Retired Army Colonel Dr. John Holcomb, who had had extensive combat medicine experience, called the findings of the study “unbelievable.” “Everybody was taken aback by the frequency of these injuries: the double amputations, the injuries to the penis and testicles,” said Holcomb. “Nothing like this has been seen before.”140
Some injuries were going underreported. By mid-2010, the military reported 115,000 troops had suffered mild traumatic brain injuries from shock waves from roadside bombs. The injuries could cause long-term mental and physical damage. An investigation by ProPublica and National Public Radio discovered that such injuries were far more pervasive than the military indicated and that tens of thousands of other sufferers had gone uncounted.141
The psychological toll was also profound. In November 2009, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Erik Shinseki noted that “more veterans have committed suicide since 2001 than we have lost on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.”142
Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard public policy professor Linda Bilmes reported in 2010 that 600,000 of the 2.1 million who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan had sought medical treatment from the Department of Veterans Affairs and that 500,000 had applied for disability benefits, which was approximately 30 percent higher than initially estimated. With treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other health issues only increasing over time and life expectancy rising, they estimated that the real cost of both wars could top $4 trillion. Considering that 9/11 cost Al-Qaeda approximately $50,000, the multitrillion-dollar U.S. response was indeed playing into bin Laden’s goal of bankrupting the United States.143
Given the fundamental illogic of fighting a decade-long and immensely costly war in Afghanistan in order to defeat a debilitated enemy that was based in Pakistan, some concluded the United States must have an ulterior motive. They found a possible answer in 2010, when the Pentagon announced that its team of geologists and other investigators had confirmed the existence of vast Afghan mineral resources. The Pentagon projected that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a crucial ingredient in batteries for various electronic devices. London banker Ian Hannam, a mining expert with JPMorgan, went further, drooling over the prospect that “Afghanistan could be one of the leading producers of copper, gold, lithium, and iron ore in the world.” Petraeus, who would shortly replace McChrystal as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, agreed. “There is stunning potential here,” he said. Afghan officials estimated mineral worth at $3 trillion, a truly staggering figure for a country whose gross domestic product was around $12 billion and whose economy consisted largely of narcotics and foreign aid.144
Despite all the hoopla surrounding this “discovery,” Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was hardly a surprise. In January 1911, the Chicago Daily Tribune reported that Afghanistan “is rich in natural resources. It produces copper, lead, iron, and even gold.”145 In 1928, the newly formed Afghan-American Trading Company announced that it had acquired exclusive concessions to exploit Afghanistan’s oil and minerals.146 Little had been done to extract these resources in subsequent years, but both Afghans and foreign investors knew that day would eventually arrive.
While western investors waited for the security situation to stabilize before descending on the region, the resource-hungry Chinese pounced. A Chinese state-owned firm secured the rights to a copper mine in eastern Afghanistan. The Afghan minister who negotiated the deal, Mohammad Ibrahim Adel, was ousted after being accused of accepting a $30 million bribe from the Chinese.147 He had been appointed by President Karzai in March 2006, when his predecessor refused to privatize the Ghori cement factory, Afghanistan’s only operating cement plant, when approached by Mahmoud Karzai. Adel’s first act was selling the factory to Karzai’s Afghan Investment Company. His last was accepting the bribe from China’s Metallurgical Group Corporation.148
Investors also salivated over the potential energy resources in Central Asia. Atop that list was natural gas in Turkmenistan, which had potentially the fifth largest gas field yet discovered. Regional governments envisioned transporting that gas via a pipeline running through Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the Pakistanis were maneuvering to undercut both the United States and India and make Pakistan the principal player in Afghanistan. They decided to exploit the growing rift between the United States and Karzai, who said he no longer felt the United States and NATO could win militarily and would eventually withdraw. Top Pakistani officials met repeatedly with Karzai, offering to deliver key Taliban leaders, including Sirajuddin Haqqani, Mullah Muhammad Omar, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, for a power-sharing arrangement that would end the conflict. Karzai’s ouster
of intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh and interior minister Hanif Atmar, both of whom had opposed such negotiations with Taliban fighters, showed that he too was interested, as was most of the country’s Pashtun population.149 However, such negotiations were fiercely opposed by the country’s more pro-American Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara communities, who constituted almost half the population. Having suffered the most during the reign of the Pashtun Taliban, they now constituted the most aggressive fighters in the ANA and their adamant opposition to such a deal raised the specter of civil war.150
After a decade of wasting blood and treasure, the American people had finally wearied of this futile war. In March 2011, an ABC News–Washington Post poll indicated that two-thirds of Americans did not believe the Afghanistan war was worth fighting. One year later, CNN reported, opposition had jumped to 72 percent.
Among the fiercest critics were the nation’s mayors, who had seen their cities undergo draconian cuts due to declining revenues and shrinking federal aid. When they gathered in Baltimore in June 2011 for the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, they let the administration know how they felt. They called for a speedy end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for using the $126 billion annual savings to rebuild the nation’s cities. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles said that the notion “that we would build bridges in Baghdad and Kandahar and not Baltimore and Kansas City absolutely boggles the mind.”151
The pressure to leave had increased dramatically on May 1, 2011 when Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, who was living comfortably in a home in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in the shadow of Pakistan’s premier military academy. Believing Pakistani officials must have known of bin Laden’s whereabouts, many Americans demanded that aid be cut off. Mistrust of Pakistani leaders ran so deep that the United States did not alert them that they had found bin Laden or were planning the attack, fearing that they would tip him off.
The raid proved to be a huge embarrassment to Pakistan, whose government was only a notch more stable than that of neighboring Afghanistan. U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson had reported in early 2010, “Pakistan’s civilian government remains weak, ineffectual and corrupt.” President Asif Ali Zardari, America’s principal ally, had earlier confided to Biden that the army and ISI, Pakistan’s real power brokers, might “take me out.”152 Army Chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani was also in a tenuous position, facing a challenge from officers objecting to his ties to the United States. Under pressure, Kayani announced that Pakistan would no longer cooperate with U.S. drone attacks against insurgents operating from within Pakistan and would greatly restrict the latitude of U.S. intelligence operatives within the country.
Relations between the “allies” were dealt a further blow in November 2011 when a NATO air attack killed 24 Pakistani troops. When U.S. officials refused to apologize, the Pakistani government shut down supply routes to Afghanistan, forcing NATO to rely upon slower and more costly alternatives. The following May, a Pakistani court convicted a Pakistani doctor of treason for assisting the CIA in tracking down bin Laden and sentenced him to thirty-three years in prison. The U.S. Senate immediately retaliated by voting to cut $33 million in military aid on top of the $1.2 billion it was already withholding. Pakistan finally reopened the routes in early July 2012 after extracting an apology from Secretary of State Clinton.
In Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike used bin Laden’s assassination to press for rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan. Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, argued that it was “no longer clear why we’re there” and rejected the idea that the United States should be involved in “such grand nation-building.”153 Senator Dick Durbin, the Democratic Party whip, concurred. “If you believe that resolution of this conflict by military means is highly unlikely and not a realistic basis for US policy, how can we send one more American soldier to fight and die in Afghanistan?” he asked.154
The rift between the United States and the Karzai government also continued to widen. In mid-June 2011, Karzai denounced coalition forces in an address to the Afghanistan Youth International Conference. “You remember a few years ago I was saying thank you to the foreigners for their help; every minute we were thanking them,” he said. “Now I have stopped saying that . . .” “They’re here for their own purposes, for their own goals, and they’re using our soil for that,” he complained in the nationally televised broadcast. Karzai cited not only the mounting civilian casualties caused by NATO bombing but also the environmental damage, singling out the effect of depleted uranium weapons.155 A few weeks earlier, Karzai had expressed outrage at a NATO bombing that killed several children and other civilians and threatened to take “unilateral action” against NATO if it continued to bomb Afghan homes. “If they continue their attacks on our houses. . . .” he warned, “history shows what Afghans do with trespassers and with occupiers.”156 U.S. officials were taken aback by such ingratitude. Outgoing Ambassador Eikenberry responded, “When we hear ourselves being called occupiers and worse, and our generous aid programs dismissed as totally ineffective and the source of all corruption, our pride is offended and we begin to lose our inspiration to carry on.”157
Obama and his national security team gather in the White House Situation Room to receive updates on the mission to assassinate Osama bin Laden.
Chastened by the angry response to his indelicate remarks, Karzai watched his words more carefully for a few months. But in October, he again infuriated his U.S. backers by telling a Pakistani journalist that “if war ever breaks [out] between Pakistan and America, we will side [with] Pakistan. I don’t want any American soldier entering Afghans’ homes anymore.”158
Nor, as Senator Durbin suggested, was a military solution in the offing, troop surge or no troop surge. In July and August 2011 alone, the Taliban assassinated 181 high-ranking Afghan government officials, including Ahmed Wali Karzai. Other recent victims included Kandahar’s mayor, the head of Kandahar’s religious council, one of President Karzai’s close advisors, and peace negotiator and former president Burhanuddin Rabbani.159 In late July 2012, NATO released data showing that the number of insurgent attacks over the past three months had actually increased by 11 percent over the previous year, exposing the hollowness of repeated claims of success in defeating the insurgency.160
Bad news kept pouring out of the country. In September, Human Rights Watch reported that U.S.-trained and -funded members of the Afghan Local Police (ALP) forces and militias known as arbakai had been abusing the villagers they were supposed to be protecting. Documented abuses included murder, rape, abductions, arbitrary detention, and forcible land grabs. Building up such forces was key to U.S. plans to stabilize the country. Petraeus had told the U.S. Senate that the ALP is “arguably the most critical element in our effort to help Afghanistan develop the capability to secure itself.”161
The other pillar of future stability—the Afghan National Police (ANP)—was just as bad. Less than a month after the devastating Human Rights Watch report appeared, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan found “compelling” evidence that the Afghan intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, and the ANP were subjecting detainees, including children under the age of eighteen, to “systematic” torture during interrogation. Among the abuses highlighted in the report were twisting prisoners’ genitals until they passed out, suspending them by their wrists and beating them with cables and rubber hoses, removing their toenails, subjecting them to electric shock and stress positions, and threatening them with sexual assault.162
The United Nations drug control agency reported that NATO efforts to slow the Afghan drug trade were failing. Opium poppy cultivation was up in 2011 for a second straight year, despite a 65 percent increase in antidrug efforts in 2011. Seven percent more land was under cultivation and, due to soaring prices, the expanded crop was bringing in $1.4 billion—double what it had the previous year. Cultivation, like the insurgency itself, had spread to the northern and ea
stern provinces from which it had previously been absent. Attacks on eradication teams had quadrupled from the previous year.163
Foreshadowing what would eventually be a miserable end to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, in October 2011 Obama announced that U.S. troops would be out of Iraq by year’s end. The December 31 departure date had actually been negotiated by George W. Bush in 2008. Still, Obama took credit for fulfilling his campaign promise, and the majority of Americans applauded the end of the Iraq debacle.
Many within the Pentagon, however, found the announcement infuriating. After earlier insisting that a force of between 10,000 and 20,000 remain, military leaders had lowered their sights to between 3,000 and 5,000. They joined Obama and Clinton in pressuring the Iraqis to grant immunity from prosecution to U.S. troops remaining in the country. But, unmoved, the Shiite bloc in Parliament, led by Muqtada al-Sadr, refused and the final drawdown began.
To be sure, that would not entirely end U.S. presence in Iraq. The State Department estimated that as many as 16,000 or 17,000 U.S. personnel might remain, including 5,500 armed military contractors. The world’s largest U.S. embassy, a 104-acre walled compound in Baghdad, and consulates in Basra and Irbil would remain as constant reminders to Iraqis of U.S. invasion, devastation, conquest, and occupation. Colonel John S. Laskodi, commander of an army brigade that was assisting the State Department during the transition period, noted that “the Department of State is establishing its largest mission in its history.” Senator John Kerry worried that the United States was “replacing a military presence with a private mercenary presence.” The smaller number of remaining troops would oversee the $10 billion in U.S. contracts to arm the Iraqi military with tanks, fighter jets, and other weapons, $3 billion of which the U.S. government was paying for. The United States was also spending close to $1 billion per year to train the Iraqi police.164
