by Steve Coll
Which side was Musharraf on? Even after Amrullah Saleh’s tetchy encounter with General Kayani, the C.I.A. continued to press Saleh to hand over evidence to I.S.I. so that Pakistan could round up suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban fugitives. The assumption was that the Pakistanis would make honest use of the N.D.S. intelligence. Kayani said so. Around the time of his study tour, N.D.S. and the C.I.A.’s Kabul Station jointly provided to I.S.I. “a list of known locations, addresses, fund details, last known position of a number of senior Taliban folks,” as a senior Bush administration official involved described it. Some of the Taliban were under active surveillance. Within forty-eight hours, all of them moved. The Americans watched them disappear—they knew what had happened. Yet the Pakistanis just told them that their information was wrong.13
Kilcullen drove to Peshawar and then flew on a Pakistan Army helicopter to Waziristan. He traveled local roads in an armed convoy. His escorts included Frontier Corps paramilitaries drawn from local Pashtun families. When he returned, a C.I.A. officer called Kilcullen in. The officer showed him transcripts of intercepted phone calls his Frontier Corps escort had made to Al Qaeda leaders. “The American diplomat will be in your valley tomorrow if you want to kidnap them,” his escort had reported.14
The Bush administration did not interpret the hostility of such local Pashtun enlisted men as evidence of high-level Pakistani collaboration with the Taliban, however. Because F.C. soldiers came from villages and tribes thoroughly infiltrated by the Taliban, their sympathies could not be relied upon—that was a historical problem that could not be fairly laid at Musharraf’s feet, the thinking went. Indeed, the unreliability of the Frontier Corps was one reason Kilcullen wanted to equip Musharraf to increase regular Pakistan Army operations in the tribal areas.
Kilcullen’s view of Pakistani complicity darkened, however. Even if one took the maximally generous view that Musharraf was merely a victim of his state’s historical weakness in the tribal areas, the army’s willingness to accept sanctuaries there and in Quetta was undeniable. Yet when Kilcullen first voiced concerns similar to Saleh’s inside the administration, “People laughed at me.” They thought he had gone native during his visits to Afghanistan, traveling out with Afghan security forces, absorbing their conspiracy theories about I.S.I. The conventional wisdom in the Bush administration remained that the Pakistani position was one of weakness and ineptitude, not malice toward the American project in Afghanistan.15
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The way to defeat terrorism in the short run is to share intelligence and to take action.” It was March 2, 2006, and President George W. Bush stood bathed in sunshine in the Moghul Garden of Hyderabad House in New Delhi, beside Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh. Bush had flown to India to ratify in public “a strategic partnership based on common values” that had emerged between the United States and India.16
The U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement provided the clearest evidence that an alliance between America and India, one that might contain China’s rise as a great power, had progressed beyond rhetoric. Under the accord, the Bush administration set aside objections to India’s clandestine atomic bomb program and agreed to supply fuel and technology to support civilian nuclear power production. Bush signaled the end of any pretense of equivalence in American policies toward India and Pakistan. The latter would not be eligible for such nuclear assistance because “Pakistan and India are different countries,” as a White House fact sheet put it, and “Pakistan does not have the same nonproliferation record as India,” a reference to the Pakistani nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan’s global nuclear smuggling enterprise.17
Bush flew from India to Islamabad, despite the threat of terrorist attacks. To fool assassins, the Secret Service sent a decoy motorcade down Islamabad’s broad streets, with Bush’s protocol director, Donald Ensenat, in the president’s seat. Bush and his wife flew secretly by Black Hawk helicopter. The president’s decision to trust Pakistani security at all signaled his genuine faith in Musharraf. Yet when he arrived, Bush pressured Musharraf to do more against terrorism and to accelerate a transition toward full democracy. Musharraf fumed over the Indian nuclear deal. Privately, he warned that it would alienate the generals in Pakistan’s high command from the United States.18
“We understand your geostrategic relationship with India,” Musharraf told Republican senator Chuck Hagel that spring. Yet the Indian nuclear accord was “vastly unpopular” inside the Pakistani military. Pakistan “would now be grappling with the prospect of a nuclear arms race,” Musharraf complained, and this would inevitably affect his cooperation with the United States. He “cherished” his friendship with Bush: “I say he is a friend. He is sincere and open. . . . And we are together in fighting terror.” Yet the India deal had created a strategic divide from Washington more significant than personal trust and affection.19
Musharraf also took note of the Bush administration’s decision to hand peacekeeping operations in Afghanistan over to British, European, and Canadian forces. The plan dated to 2003 but was now being implemented. The International Security Assistance Force, or I.S.A.F., was a N.A.T.O.-deployed military distinct from America’s terrorist-hunting task forces around Afghanistan. I.S.A.F. troops remained mostly confined to Kabul and cities in Afghanistan’s north. The idea now was to spread out first to the north, then to the west, then to the south and east. If Afghanistan was a clock face, that is, the international forces would move from the top of the dial counterclockwise around, fully deploying in Helmand, Uruzgan, and Kandahar by mid-2006.20
Musharraf and Karzai reacted similarly to this transition. The handover only affirmed what they had feared and predicted. The United States, the world’s most powerful military, would not stay the course in Afghanistan. None of the British, Canadian, or Dutch forces planned for aggressive combat against the Taliban. They would support peace and reconstruction in the manner of U.N. peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations in Africa or the Balkans.
The transition plan “makes us nervous and angry,” Karzai told American visitors privately. Afghanistan’s stability “is a journey still in progress.”21
In Pakistan, Musharraf and the corps commanders concluded, “The Americans . . . are out the door,” as Colonel Tom Lynch, a special adviser at Central Command who served as a military assistant to Zalmay Khalilzad in Kabul during 2004, put it. Therefore, the thinking of Pakistani officers went, as Lynch summarized it, “We need our proxies,” meaning the Taliban, “in as best condition we can [manage] without being fingered as state sponsors of terrorism.”22
The blindness to Pakistan’s intentions in Washington, London, Ottawa, and The Hague would have devastating consequences. The victims included British, Canadian, and Dutch soldiers who encountered fierce combat their politicians and intelligence services had not predicted. And they included many villagers in Helmand and Kandahar who were soon caught up in shocking, often indiscriminate trench and artillery battles from late 2006, a war sometimes fought at close quarters in thick marijuana, poppy, and grape fields, at other times by assassins, suicide bombers, and Taliban roadside bombing crews.
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Just as Gul Agha Sherzai’s self-enriching tour as Kandahar’s governor after 2001 had set local conditions for the Taliban’s revival there, Helmand’s government of strongmen, narco-traffickers, and opportunists eased the Taliban’s return. Karzai’s appointed representatives in Helmand included some of the very thugs whose abuses had fueled the Taliban revolution in the first instance.
The provincial governor, Sher Mohammad Akhundzada, had ties to the opium trade. Dad Mohammad Khan, a local militia leader from the Alokozai tribe, ran the provincial National Directorate of Security forces. Abdul Rahman Jan, a warlord from the Noorzai tribe, ran the provincial police. They returned to their ways. The strongmen fought with one another and “attempted to fool U.S. Special Forces into targeting the others’ militias as ‘Taliban,’ with some success.” And they preyed on villa
gers. “Day by day, the situation got worse,” as a member of a local Helmand council described it. “There was lots of extortion and stealing and people were killed.” Gradually, “people got fed up with the Afghan government and welcomed the Taliban back into their districts.”23
Through interviews and surveys with about 150 Taliban commanders and unaffiliated tribal elders in Helmand, the researchers Theo Farrell and Antonio Giustozzi constructed one of the most detailed portraits of the Taliban comeback in southern Afghanistan between 2004 and 2006. The Taliban first infiltrated the area with “vanguard” teams of two or three people who secretly contacted villagers and elders. As one resident described it, “They told the people that they were coming back to the district to fight against the government.” The Taliban assassinated Afghans holding government offices. By 2005 they had returned in force to control rural areas, but they did not call attention to themselves by seizing district centers. These Taliban forces included a heavy contingent of Punjabi speakers—that is, Pakistani nationals from that country’s eastern and southern breadbasket. There were also Arabs and Iranians.24
Since 2004, the United States had deployed barely one hundred soldiers to Helmand on counterterrorism and minor reconstruction missions. They had no orders or ability to collect intelligence on the Taliban infiltration. They were “marauding companies of Alabama National Guardsmen and Ranger Squads” who would “charge into villages all guns blazing and AC/DC blasting out of the speakers on the PsyOps Hummer,” as Patrick Hennessey, a young British officer who served in Helmand on training missions during this period, put it acidly.25
In London, “there was little genuine intelligence available about how benign or hostile an environment” Helmand might present when 3,300 British troops arrived there during 2006, according to a researcher who interviewed army and intelligence officers, as well as cabinet officials. MI6 and British military intelligence “seem to have” warned in classified channels that Taliban leaders in Quetta had “decided to target the British in particular as they arrived in theater.” Britain’s history as an invader of Afghanistan during the nineteenth century provided an obvious narrative for Taliban recruitment and mobilization. Yet Tony Blair’s then minister of defense, John Reid, said publicly in April 2006, “We would be perfectly happy to leave in three years and without firing one shot.”26
That spring, about two hundred thousand seasonal poppy harvesters migrated into Helmand—many of them young men ripe for recruitment against the British. Guns, drugs, and jihad: The essence of war against international forces in southern Afghanistan had not changed much since the Soviet occupation.
Poppy production exploded in 2006—the area under cultivation in Helmand more than doubled compared with the year before, according to the United Nations. That upped local incentives to capture the opium trade. To advance clean government, Britain pressured Karzai to dump Governor Akhundzada. The deposed warlord promptly “aligned with the Taliban” and attacked government posts. All this quickened the coming British fiasco.
Hamid Karzai and Akhundzada’s successor, Mohammad Daoud, pressured Brigadier Ed Butler to rapidly send British forces to retake territory from the Taliban. “If the black flag of Mullah Omar flies over any of the district centers, you may as well go home,” Daoud pleaded.27
Butler rapidly deployed small British units to isolated “platoon houses” in Now Zad, Sangin, Garmsir, and Musa Qala. By the end of May 2006 they were “fighting for their lives” in a “series of Alamos,” as Lieutenant General Rob Fry put it. The British Gurkha forces in Now Zad held off Taliban who called out to one another in Urdu, Pakistan’s national language.
“How the hell did we get ourselves into this position?” a British cabinet minister asked a colleague. “How did we go charging up the valley without it ever being put to the cabinet?”28
The answers included Butler’s autonomy as field commander, poor coordination within N.A.T.O., and poor intelligence. The failures cascaded. Without enough men, armored vehicles, or helicopters for this unpredicted war, Butler relied on close air support—aerial bombing—to protect his stranded men from Taliban sieges. The British platoon house at Musa Qala called in 249 bombs onto enemy positions in a single ten-day period, just one example of a prolonged barrage that took civilian lives and property. The Taliban exploited the ensuing collateral damage—homes destroyed, women and children killed and wounded—to recruit local fighters.29
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The forward element of Canada’s commitment of more than two thousand soldiers to Kandahar Province, which arrived early in 2006, was called Task Force Orion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Ian Hope. His domain covered twenty thousand square miles of junglelike irrigated agricultural fields, mountains, stark deserts, mud-walled villages, and the smoky sprawl of Kandahar City. Hope was unprepared by intelligence or political reporting for the widespread Taliban infiltration he encountered.
“Where are they?” he would ask Afghan intelligence counterparts.
“Everywhere.”
“What villages?”
“All of them.”
“When?”
“Every day.”
“What about the mountains?”
“In the mountains too.”30
The only way to pinpoint Taliban positions was through reconnaissance by force, which meant driving around until “somebody shoots at you,” as a Canadian officer put it. That spring Canadian patrols shot up small Taliban units. They found in abandoned encampments propaganda calling on all Afghans to wage jihad against the United States, Britain, and Canada. They also found concentrated opium paste so powerful “that if you touch it it’ll absorb into your skin and really fuck you up.”31
The Canadian plan emphasized “whole of government” approaches to assist Afghanistan, a “3-D” strategy of defense, diplomacy, and development. Canada’s defense history included bloody combat at D-Day and in Korea, but since then the country had emphasized peacekeeping. Canada’s development-first assumptions suffered on contact with the Taliban that spring. The guerrillas massed clandestinely in the lush, irrigated green zone to the west of Kandahar.
Brigadier General David Fraser, the top Canadian commander, judged that the Taliban intended to threaten Kandahar, “to demonstrate the weakness and the inability of the national Government to come after them with a conventional force. This also indicated to us that the Taliban were actually progressing . . . to the next stage where they thought they were capable enough to go and challenge the national government and coalition forces in a conventional manner.” This was what Amrullah Saleh reported in his classified paper that spring.32
Fraser also thought that the Taliban wanted to draw Canadian troops into the green zone “in a battle of attrition” intended to inflict “as many casualties as possible” to weaken Canadian resolve and undermine public opinion at home. Fraser’s commanders carried around dog-eared copies of Lester Grau’s The Bear Went over the Mountain, a history of Soviet military experience in Afghanistan, which made clear that as the Taliban dug in during 2006 along the walled, vine-thickened fields beside the Arghandab River, they were only following a plan with a successful precedent.
Canadian forces launched Operation Mountain Thrust on May 15 “to defeat the Taliban in their traditional areas.” Canadian forces took casualties but inflicted many more. Their officers interpreted the campaign as a decisive triumph. On June 4, the Canadian journalist Graeme Smith, who had moved to Kandahar, joined a convoy summoned by Canadian military public relations specialists to declare victory. Suicide bombers struck the convoy en route. “Charred pieces of human flesh stuck to the armor.” The journalists assumed the victory ceremony would be canceled but it went ahead. “Four successive strikes against the Taliban broke the back of their insurgency here,” Colonel Hope pronounced.33
By September the Canadians had come to realize that every time they pulled back from a firefight to refit on their b
ases, Taliban reinforcements slipped in to take up the positions vacated by their departed martyrs. It “was like digging a hole in the ocean,” Fraser reflected.34
American Special Forces reconnaissance units patrolling the vast, unpopulated Registan Desert on the southern flanks of the Canadian deployments found evidence of why Taliban supply lines were so resilient. One patrol stopped a convoy of trucks manned by civilians in local dress who claimed they were gasoline smugglers trafficking with Iran. In fact, they were smuggling arms. The Americans found a current Pakistani military identification card that a driver had hidden under his truck’s dashboard.35
Operation Medusa followed during the first seventeen days of September, the largest N.A.T.O. land battle in the alliance’s sixty-year existence. Canadian forces rolled into the green zone and won violent dismounted firefights with Taliban fighters who were protected by vineyard structures and irrigation ditches.
Fraser estimated there were about five hundred Taliban fighters embedded in the green zone and that only two hundred of them were hard core. But a Special Forces linguist assigned to listen to Taliban radio chatter soon concluded that there were a thousand or more. Four Canadians died in the initial assault and casualties mounted in the withering heat.
