by Steve Coll
She continued, “To the man who murdered my father: You have caused so many people so much deep grief, pain, and agony. You cannot possibly imagine the pain I have endured and continue to endure because of your actions. I would never wish these feelings upon anyone.”
Holly’s younger daughter, Camille, had turned fifteen since Saboor’s arrest. She had been ten when her father was murdered. She composed a five-paragraph statement for the court. “My Dad believed that we all worship the same God,” she wrote. “We are all just trying to live our lives in service of God, always trying to be the best person we can be.” She continued, “Some people may think it outrageous for me to offer my forgiveness to someone who has changed my life in such an irreparable way, but I can say only this: God forgives us, and he has commanded his people to forgive each other and to live to be more like him. That does not mean I believe there should be no consequences. One may be forgiven, but one must still receive consequences for one’s actions. In order to receive forgiveness, one must express remorse. So, my forgiveness will come to you if you are qualified to accept it. . . . I say all this in remembrance of my father.”
In her statement, Holly described her long journey with Darin, including their time as Peace Corps volunteers in Papua New Guinea, before her husband joined the Air Force. “In our country, we marry for love,” she wrote, “and Darin was the love of my life, my best friend, the person I could trust most in the world, and also the smartest person I know.” He held three master’s degrees “and wanted to get a Ph.D. as well. He had studied the history and culture of Afghanistan, and he spoke Pashto and Dari. He respected the Afghan people and culture.” She quoted a letter Darin had written to his daughters when he deployed to Afghanistan the first time:
My reasons for going to Afghanistan include an honorable sense of duty to help others. If I had stayed home and not volunteered to go, I would have always wondered what I could have contributed. I don’t want to sit around wondering if I could have done something to help their children go to school, their sick people get better, or their poor people have a better life. I don’t want to be in the situation where I wonder how I could have helped, and so that’s why I’m going to Afghanistan. I know this is the honorable thing to do, and that’s why I have to be away from you for a while.
Holly’s statement concluded, “I wish to thank General Salangi and the Afghan National Police for continuing to search for the shooter, for never giving up over the last four years, and for bringing this murderer to justice. I also wish to thank the Honorable Chief and Members of the National Security Branch of the Parwan Province Primary Court for hearing my statement and for ensuring that justice be done.”4
Saboor’s trial opened on October 5, 2016. The Afghan prosecutor rose to introduce facts about the defendant. Saboor had a ninth-grade education. He had worked at the Ministry of Education before joining the Ministry of Interior. At one point, he had traveled to Pakistan and studied the Koran at a madrassa in Peshawar. In 2012, after he learned from news reports about the burning of the Korans at Bagram, he carried food to a local mullah and discussed the provocation. He decided that he should act. At the ministry a few days later, he loaded a pistol in the bathroom. He knocked on the door of the office where Loftis and Marchanti worked. He pretended to have a stomach illness and said he needed to get some medicine from a locker. Then he shot the two men to death. As he walked out of the building, he told an Afghan he passed that the sound of gunshots was from the Americans fighting with each other. He dropped his pistol in some trash, traveled to Herat Province, and then on to Iran.
The prosecutor detailed Saboor’s confessions after his arrest and presented ballistics evidence about the shootings. Saboor interrupted the proceedings from time to time by reciting verses and parables from the Koran.
Saboor’s lawyers denied his guilt and presented several defenses. They said his confessions had been coerced by torture, that members of his family had been wrongfully detained to intimidate him, and that he was not in adequate health to stand trial.
Two American captains read out Victim Impact Statements from the Marchanti and Loftis families.
The prosecutor, in rebuttal of the defense case, played Saboor’s confessions on video, where he admitted readily to the shootings.
“What of the video statements you made?” the judge asked the defendant. “You were not being intimidated then, when you made that confession. What do you want this court to do?”
Saboor said that he had done nothing wrong. “God is unblemished,” he added.
The court recessed for half an hour. When the judge returned, he found Saboor guilty and sentenced him to twenty years in prison.5
Saboor appealed but lost a second hearing; his sentence was upheld. He had one remaining avenue of appeal, to the Supreme Court. Holly realized the case was like a scab that was going to be picked at for a while. She shared the news of the verdict and sentence with her daughters. They did not have much of a reaction. Holly thought that Darin would be satisfied that the sentence was a long prison term instead of the death penalty. It was impossible to speak for him now that he was gone, but he would have said, she thought, that it did not make sense for one more person to die.
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During the seven months between March 2016 and the opening of Abdul Saboor’s trial, more than 4,500 Afghan soldiers and police died in combat against the Taliban and the Islamic State, and more than 8,500 others were wounded. The casualties were so heavy that within the police forces, at least, they outpaced recruitment of fresh volunteers.6 Taliban guerrillas threatened the provincial capital of Kunduz in the north and Lashkar Gah, in Helmand, in the south. All of the country’s major cities remained in the government’s hands but the roads and countryside between them were often controlled or influenced by Taliban guerrillas. The Afghan state Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah presided over (when they weren’t fighting with each other over prerogatives and power) resembled an archipelago of urban islands supplied by hopping airplanes and helicopters, engulfed by a sea of guerrilla country. The state’s geometry resembled the archipelago of Communist-controlled cities the Soviet Union had left behind in 1989, when C.I.A.-backed mujaheddin rebels ruled the countryside, before they finally took Kabul in 1992.
Somewhere between a thousand and three thousand fighters in the armed opposition to Ghani’s government now fought under the banner of the Islamic State, mainly in eastern Nangarhar Province. They constituted no more than 10 percent of the country’s guerrilla forces; nearly all the rest remained officially loyal to the Taliban. The Islamic State strengthened in Afghanistan after N.A.T.O.’s withdrawal from combat operations at the end of 2014 in part because its recruiters exploited confusion over whether Mullah Mohammad Omar was alive or dead. The Taliban’s media operation kept insisting that Omar was alive and well and issued statements in his name. But in July 2015, Uthman Ghazi, the leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the terrorist organization long affiliated with Al Qaeda, put out a statement declaring that Mullah Mohammad Omar was dead and that the I.M.U. would now pledge allegiance to the Islamic State. When Uzbek and allied fighters attacked Taliban-held villages, they used loudspeakers to lure defectors, shouting, “Mullah Omar is dead!” Where they managed to take control of villages and districts near the Pakistan border, they imitated the ruthless methodology of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Fighters beheaded Afghan Hazaras, who followed the Shia sect of Islam, en masse. They executed other hostages by bomb and distributed digital videos of their carnage online.7
In August, to shore up their position, the Taliban—or I.S.I.—at last admitted publicly that Mullah Mohammad Omar had died in April 2013, more than two years before. After a brief succession struggle, a Taliban shura appointed Omar’s deputy, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, as the new emir. It had been Mansour who directed Tayeb Agha’s secret negotiations with the Obama administration, and it was he who had apparently coordinated wit
h Ashfaq Kayani and I.S.I. to produce draft statements under Omar’s name at a time when the Taliban’s founding leader lay dying in a Karachi hospital.
In May 2016, less than a year after he officially took charge of the Taliban, Mullah Mansour was killed by an American drone in Baluchistan, Pakistan, as Mansour returned from Iran in a small convoy of sport utility vehicles. It wasn’t clear why the Taliban’s new emir had been visiting Iran. The Taliban’s Deobandi creed of Sunni Islam is anathema to Iran’s Shiite theologians; in 2000, the Taliban and Iran grew so hostile toward one another that they almost fought a war. After 2001, Iran improved relations with the Taliban, however, to help the movement defeat the United States. Iran’s evident motive was to hasten the withdrawal of American troops and aircraft from bases located so close to Tehran. More recently, a new wrinkle had entered into Taliban-Iranian relations. Both the Taliban and Tehran feared the rise of the Islamic State. It would make sense if Mansour had visited Iran to receive support or even plan joint operations against this shared enemy, just as they had collaborated against Washington. In any event, after American intelligence officers tracked Mansour and eliminated him, a hard-line cleric from Kandahar, Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada, succeeded to power as the Taliban’s third emir.
In late 2016, there were still about 8,400 American troops stationed in Afghanistan. About a quarter of them were counterterrorist forces engaged in direct attacks against any groups officially designated as terrorists by the United States. According to the Pentagon, there were thirteen Foreign Terrorist Organizations, as they were officially labeled under U.S. law, with followers in Afghanistan. There were another seven in Pakistan—altogether, this stew of twenty or so groups amounted to about a fifth of all the Foreign Terrorist Organizations worldwide. Early in 2016, President Obama expanded this aspect of the American war in Afghanistan. He added the local Islamic State affiliate to the counterterrorist mission and authorized direct American strikes against its guerrillas. The rest of the 6,000–plus U.S. forces in Afghanistan provided “advise and assist” support to Afghan forces against the Taliban, or delivered logistics, intelligence, and transport to both military campaigns.8
The Pentagon estimated that the Taliban and the Islamic State together controlled about 10 percent of Afghan territory outright. The C.I.A. estimated that it was more like one third. Either way, it was clear that more than half of the Afghan population, mainly in cities, lived under the government’s writ, however shaky that writ might be. Kidnapping gangs menaced Kabul and abducted Westerners for ransom or to sell them to the Haqqani network in Waziristan. Hundreds of thousands of urbanized young Afghan men voted with their feet after 2014 and undertook perilous migrations overland to Europe.
It was possible to make a case that this stalemate required—and might eventually reward—continued investments of American support. For one thing, a full withdrawal would all but assure the Taliban’s triumph. The arguments made by Pentagon commanders who advocated for remaining in the Afghan war and possibly even expanding American involvement held that a stalemate might be good enough for now. They argued that the Afghan forces’ fitful progress and the continued American counterterrorist mission there should be evaluated in a worldwide context. There were many dangerous, ambitious terrorist groups in the Afghan region; the United States required forward bases to check them. The Afghan state was weak, corrupt, and politically paralyzed, it was true, but so were the governments of other emerging nations racked by internal violence. The military stalemate in Afghanistan, these commanders argued, resembled Mexico’s struggles with narco-traffickers or Colombia’s long war with the F.A.R.C. or Nigeria’s internal conflicts with Boko Haram and southern oil smugglers. These had been or remained long, messy, shifting wars, but conflicts where the state, however fragmented and corrupt, remained more or less intact, cooperated with the United States and Europe, received development aid, and repressed terrorists. If the United States remained committed to Afghanistan, these Pentagon commanders would tell President Donald Trump, the government in Kabul might never eliminate armed guerrillas or the Taliban’s leadership, but it might achieve an acceptable state of equilibrium and slow progress that would keep the country free from reign by the Taliban or the Islamic State and prevent any rekindling of Al Qaeda or its ilk on Afghan territory. Eventually, the war might yield peace negotiations, as in Colombia. Trump had advocated for withdrawal from Afghanistan, but in August 2017, he accepted the arguments of his generals and announced that his administration would stay committed to the Afghan war.9
It was a long way from the modernizing, transforming visions for Afghanistan that had characterized the hubristic heights of the Good War, but even as a template for realism, the Pentagon’s vision strained credulity. The rates of casualties and attrition in Afghan forces had already weakened them badly; if this cycle of combat and casualties went on for a few more years, the forces were likely to break down. Also, the Afghan army, the police, and the N.D.S. increasingly were politicized, influenced by Kabul factions and ethnic polarization, and undermined by the paralysis between Ghani and Abdullah. It was hard to imagine how another Afghan presidential election, scheduled for 2019, could improve matters, given the record of the previous two elections. President Ghani’s initial plan had been to reduce the war’s violence through reconciliation talks with the Taliban and Pakistan, but these efforts had proved to be as treacherous and unproductive for his administration as they had been for the Obama administration’s Conflict Resolution Cell.
On the other side of the war, I.S.I.’s support for the Taliban remained steadfast. Ashfaq Kayani finally retired as chief of army staff at the end of November 2013. General Raheel Sharif, his successor, extended the army’s influence over Pakistani media and foreign policy. During Sharif’s tenure, American commanders in Afghanistan detected no change in Kayani’s policies of support and sanctuary for the Taliban. By 2016, Major General Muhammad Waseem Ashraf reportedly ran I.S.I.’s Directorate S. On the Afghan front of external operations, his bureaus seemed to follow a policy of providing as much support for the Taliban as I.S.I. could get away with—just enough to keep the war broiling, while avoiding aid so explicit that it might provoke the international community to impose sanctions on Pakistan or withdraw military sales. The new Pakistan Army regime also continued Kayani’s post-Abbottabad policy of probing the possibilities for peace talks with Kabul and increasing reliance on China for economic, military, and nuclear aid.
In August 2016, a helicopter crashed in Logar Province, Afghanistan, in Taliban country to the south of Kabul. The helicopter was painted white, apparently to resemble the helicopters flown by contractors supporting the Kabul government. A Russian pilot and Pakistani military officers were aboard, by some accounts, although there were reports as well that the pilot was a Pakistani-educated British citizen. Taliban commanders facilitated the crew’s return to Islamabad within days and burned the helicopter. It was not fully clear whether its supplies were meant for the Taliban or rival Islamic State factions. Pakistan put out an absurd story that the helicopter was on its way to Central Asia for repairs. The area where the aircraft went down has been a supply corridor since the early 1990s from Pakistan for I.S.I. officers aiding guerrillas attacking Kabul. A series of valleys shielded by mountains and gorges provide relatively safe passage for helicopters. Still, I.S.I.’s apparent willingness to defy N.A.T.O. by sanctioning direct covert helicopter supply flights to the Taliban or the Islamic State provided striking evidence of the service’s sense of impunity.10
For his part, Ashfaq Kayani retired in the Islamabad area, kept a modest profile, and occasionally turned up in civilian dress for conferences about military and foreign policy. Reportedly, some of his family moved to Australia. His former partner at I.S.I., Ahmed Pasha, considered writing a book about his experiences in the military but in the meantime wrote in Urdu about early Pakistani history. Maleeha Lodhi, Kayani’s political adviser, became Pakistan’s ambassador to the Unite
d Nations. Following a conflict with Pasha and I.S.I. that saw him placed under a form of house arrest for a time, Husain Haqqani moved back to the United States and wrote forthrightly in opposition to the Pakistan Army’s political influence and I.S.I.’s coddling of extremists.
The American specialists who shaped and debated the country’s longest war moved on. Cofer Black joined Blackwater after retiring from government and later joined another C.I.A. contractor as an executive. Rich Blee retired and went into security consulting with Hank Crumpton. Steve Kappes also worked with a private firm involved in intelligence analysis and software. Greg Vogle remained at the C.I.A., was promoted into the Senior Intelligence Service, and ran the C.I.A.’s paramilitary division during the second Obama term. He eventually retired and joined former general Stan McChrystal’s consulting firm. In 2015, Chris Wood, also now the equivalent of a three-star general, worked alongside Vogle after succeeding Mike D’Andrea as chief of the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center. He retired about two years later.
Some of the Bush administration’s architects of Afghan policy remained involved with the country during the Obama years. Zalmay Khalilzad formed a business with offices on K Street in Washington, D.C., from which he invested in the Middle East and Afghanistan; he also published a memoir. Robert Finn became a lecturer in Turkish history and studies at Princeton University. Following a Taliban attack on the American University of Afghanistan in the late summer of 2016, David Sedney agreed to serve as acting president of the university; he also joined an effort to shore up international commitments to Afghanistan, through a group called the Alliance in Support of the Afghan People. During the Obama years, Steve Hadley worked with John Podesta, the Democratic strategist who would become Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman, on a program by the United States Institute for Peace to support democratic Afghan politics and the 2014 Afghan presidential election. Eliot Cohen returned to Johns Hopkins University; David Kilcullen started a consulting firm and published several books; Brian Glyn Williams also published several books while remaining on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.
