The Wrong Enemy

by Carlotta Gall

  General Eikenberry was the father of the Afghan National Army. He describes himself as arriving a skeptic about the task of building a national, multiethnic army from scratch in 2002, but he became an ardent supporter. A national army, he believed, was the answer to Afghanistan’s years of strife.

  It was a painstaking business. The first Afghan battalion was deployed outside Kabul in 2003.11 A year later, 2,500 Afghan soldiers were deployed around the country.12 By 2006, 14,000 combat troops had been trained, but they were still thinly stretched in a country the size of Afghanistan. Moreover, by focusing on the army, the United States missed entirely the need for a provincial police force not to mention trained civil servants for the regions. The Bush administration was averse to expensive, time-consuming nation-building, and persuaded its NATO partners to share responsibility for different sectors of the reconstruction of Afghanistan. The British took counternarcotics; Germany, the police; and Italy, justice. The United States took the army.

  The Germans sent forty police trainers to the Kabul police academy to run a three-year police officer’s course for three hundred men. That was the limit of police training in Afghanistan for the first three years after 2001. The United States did not contribute to police training until 2004, when the Bush administration began to understand the security vacuum at the provincial level, starting a $1.1 billion regional training program. The first program, managed by the U.S. State Department and run by U.S. contractor DynCorp International, sent thirty American police advisors to work in pairs in the provinces to run two- to four-week training courses. It was insufficient. Afghan police barely seemed to improve. By 2005, the Defense Department, which had been training the police in Iraq since 2004, took over and expanded the program to hundreds of trainers. The delays, bureaucratic and political, had been disastrous.13

  In May 2006 the Taliban returned to their offensive along the Arghandab River Valley, southwest of Kandahar city. The districts of Panjwayi and Zhare14 had been a favorite fighting ground for the mujahideen during the Soviet occupation, and now became a favorite of the Taliban. The area is intensively cultivated, a warren of narrow lanes and walled fruit gardens, fabled for their twenty-eight varieties of grapes and their lush pomegranates. Vines are grown on serried banks of earth, three feet high, fed by irrigation ditches that were ready-made trenches—ideal cover for guerrilla fighters. The vineyards are enclosed by twelve-foot-high walls and dotted with tall, mud-walled barns used for drying grapes. The barns are perforated with narrow air vents to allow air to circulate and to provide props for the drying racks inside. Similar to arrow slits on a medieval tower, the air vents also provided ideal lookouts.

  The Arghandab River Valley sits on an infiltration route that crosses the Registan Desert from Pakistan. Insurgents used it to move through the green cover of Panjwayi and Zhare to within striking distance of Kandahar, the prize for many a conqueror of the region since Alexander the Great founded the city in 330 B.C. It was from the villages of Panjwayi and Zhare that the Taliban first organized their bid for Kandahar in 1994. They were set on reassuming control.

  A large group camped in the vineyards on the edge of the village of Zangabad and ambushed a police patrol, sparking off a week of fighting. Taliban fighters swarmed in from all directions to join battle against Afghan police and newly deployed Canadian troops, and then dispersed as quickly through the vineyards. As fighting intensified, a force of Taliban pulled back into the large village of Talokan and occupied some of the houses. Canadian troops called in airstrikes. American bombers hit a number of houses, killing Taliban fighters but also thirty-five civilians.15 It was the second case of aerial bombardment in two months in the area, and it shook residents. Hundreds of villagers fled their homes and headed for the city. The episode marked the beginning of a catastrophic eight years of war for the two districts that would render them largely uninhabitable and turn their fertile vineyards to dust.

  By June, coalition forces were clashing daily with Taliban somewhere in Afghanistan’s five southern provinces. The Taliban fielded as many as six thousand fighters, about the same as the coalition forces deployed in the south by then. Although each firefight usually ended with heavy losses to the Taliban, they seemed irrepressible. U.S. and NATO special forces troops reported that the fighters were younger, braver, and more adaptable than before.16 Reinforcements kept arriving. Reports from Pakistan suggested that hundreds of madrassas in Pakistan’s border areas had emptied as students were dispatched to fight jihad. Scores of local Afghans joined the Taliban too, sometimes serving as part-time scouts and guides. Villagers gave them shelter and local assistance.

  Afghans were pessimistic. “We told the government for months the situation was bad, that the Taliban were coming and killing people, and that it would get difficult if they became too numerous,” a former member of the mujahideen and landowner in Panjwayi told me. He asked not to be named for fear of reprisals. The Taliban were already powerful in his area, and it was dangerous to be seen talking to foreigners. By this time, the Taliban were scanning the international press on the Internet. The landowner came to see me in my guesthouse only because a mutual friend asked him to.

  This man, like many villagers, had left his farm and brought his family to the city. “The Taliban could get into the city, if the government continues to sleep,” he said. He had seen members of the Taliban he knew walking around in the city center. “I don’t think the government can turn it around now.”

  The Canadian general in command in southern Afghanistan, Brigadier General David Fraser, played down the threat. “The Taliban have this great ability to blend into the villages and towns,” he told me in an interview at his headquarters at the Kandahar Airbase in June 2006. “But they are not the superstars people make them out to be. They are capable fighters but defeatable.”

  Throughout 2006, NATO forces were behind the curve of the Taliban resurgence. Canada deployed 2,200 troops to take charge of Kandahar province but had to send some to Helmand for a clearing operation. Colonel Ian Hope, the Canadian commander of forces in Kandahar, conceded that his forces were too thinly spread there. “It will not occur again, it’s dangerous for people to lose confidence in us,” he said.17 But confidence was ebbing fast.

  By August, the Taliban had set up a headquarters in Panjwayi and massed one thousand fighters, including hundreds of men from Helmand and a few hundred from Pakistan. The senior commander, Mullah Abdul Rauf, taunted the American military. “Where is the American power? Why couldn’t they capture the Taliban and mujahideen in their caves?” he said in an interview with Al Jazeera television network. He predicted the Afghans would break the American superpower. “These people have a history of jihad. You will see this jihad will break [the Americans].”18 A battle was brewing, but for all his bravado, Abdul Rauf skipped back to Pakistan before it began.19

  For weeks Kandahar was rife with rumors that the Taliban were going to storm the city. Afghan officials gathered tribal elders and people from the community, urging them to resist. But Afghans had learned how to survive. Many were leaving the districts for the safety of the city, and merchants were already reaching out to the Taliban to ensure protection of their goods if the insurgents stormed the city.

  It was not until September 2, 2006, that NATO finally gathered a force against the Taliban and mounted Operation Medusa. The new overall commander of ISAF, the 16,000-strong NATO force, was the British four-star general David Richards. He was determined to show the Taliban that NATO was not a soft touch. “We had to show that NATO can fight,” he told me later. “We killed a lot of insurgents and continue to do so—sad in some respects, but that’s what the locals, if I have a discussion with the elders, that’s what they most want from us at one moment. Followed by proper improvements.” He reckoned that 70 percent of Afghans were sitting on the fence, not with the Taliban, but unwilling to support the government either. “That’s my main focus at the moment, getting those visible improvements, in security, governance, and
reconstruction and development to start happening in the south so that we can persuade that 70 percent that we will win.”

  Operation Medusa did not go as planned. Canadian forces led a pincer movement on the village of Pashmul, which they knew was a hotbed of the Taliban, but their troops immediately ran into trouble crossing the river. Hit by mines and rocket fire, they called for air support—only to be struck by friendly fire from American planes. Within hours, most of the Canadians were wounded and out of action.

  As the Canadian attack floundered, an American unit was brought in to help. Colonel R. Stephen Williams put together a larger combined American, Canadian, and Afghan force for another attempt against Pashmul on September 12. Williams, a forty-six-year-old ranger from Anchorage, Alaska, injected a new style. He blasted the Taliban with rock music across the river valley for six days and pounded them with artillery and airstrikes anywhere enemy movement was spotted. Playing his favorite hard rock tune, AC/DC’s “Back in Black”—to hide the sound of the armored vehicles, he said—he crossed the river and drove through the cornfields from the northeast, taking the Taliban by surprise. The fighting was nevertheless intense. The Taliban were well dug in, using irrigation channels and the high mud-walls for cover. “It was Normandy invasion tactics with bunker systems and trenches,” Williams said as he walked a few journalists through a battlefield tour a week later. “We found a lot of bunkers, with metal roofs and air-holes with metal pipes running up for ventilation,” he added, standing over one bunker that had been blown up by his forces. “They used the canals as trenches and then would pull back to the bunker.” The village school, a cluster of white painted classrooms built with American government assistance after 2001, was destroyed from repeated air- and artillery strikes. The colonel estimated they had killed 150 to 200 Taliban fighters in the battle, including a number of commanders.

  Colonel Williams tramped around the deserted fields and orchards of Pashmul describing a coalition victory, but Operation Medusa was far from that. The Taliban had been pushed out of Panjwayi, but they escaped west into Helmand province to fight another day. American special forces blocked their route out to the south with some ferocious fighting, but French and Dutch troops failed to set blocking positions to the west, according to the American attorney Gary Bowman, a U.S. Army reservist who wrote a classified military history on the war in southern Afghanistan.20

  The challenge from the Taliban, with several thousand men massed so close to Kandahar city, had been far more serious than many in the country realized. Kandahar came close to falling that summer, General McNeill told me later. General Richards, his successor, saw that not only was the Afghan government at risk of losing the south, but that NATO risked failure too. Within a month of taking over, Richards had ordered Operation Medusa to establish NATO’s authority in Kandahar. But as the battle unfolded, it became clear that NATO commanders had underestimated the Taliban’s strength. “The real story of Medusa is the utter intelligence failure—it is the best example that the coalition did not understand the residual Taliban influence in the south,” Bowman told me.

  For the inhabitants of Panjwayi, Medusa was just one of a series of heavy battles that summer. The civilian toll from the fighting was high. The United Nations said later that forty civilians had been killed, and Kandahar hospital took in twenty-four wounded civilians. NATO announced the operation as successfully concluded, yet the next day, four Canadian soldiers were killed when a suicide bomber cycled up to their foot patrol and blew himself up. The Canadians had been handing out pencils and notebooks to the village children at the time. Nine children were wounded in the explosion. From that moment, Canadian troops struggled to hold the district and make it secure. Most of the Taliban had departed, but they had left small cells of local fighters who laid mines, set ambushes, and enlisted the help of the local population and so dragged them into the fight. NATO and Afghan units came under repeated ambush and sniping.

  Canadian troops camped in a field in the village of Pashmul and set about securing the surrounding area and providing assistance to the farming community. They decided to carve a new road straight down from the main ring road. It would provide Canadian troops with a safer route and allow them to avoid the village road, which snaked through high walls and homesteads where insurgents ambushed them at every turn. It meant destroying houses, farm buildings, and property walls, tearing up orchards and cutting off irrigation channels, which would anger many farmers and landowners. I saw it time and again in Afghanistan: foreign troops taking actions for their own protection, alienating the local population, and thus undermining their security.

  A few weeks after Operation Medusa, on October 3, a group of American and Canadian soldiers were working to clear the road. Staff Sergeant Gregory Robinson, a twenty-seven-year-old combat engineer from Rosiclare, Illinois, was standing on the road as his team’s bulldozer moved in to demolish a raisin barn and an adjoining wall. The wall was six feet high. As it came down, it was as if the soldiers had cracked open a hornet’s nest. The Taliban had been lying in wait and opened fire on the road crew with a hail of bullets, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). Within a minute, they hit army vehicles and a trailer of demolition explosives, killing two Canadian soldiers and wounding five others. An RPG slammed into a Humvee near Sergeant Robinson, and the explosion threw him into the air. He was injured in the leg, and he lay on the ground as a friend bound up his wounds.

  The battle raged over their heads for forty-five minutes until the unit pulled back to Forward Operating Base (FOB) Wilson, still under fire. Two Black Hawk helicopters and an Apache answered the call. Robinson lay on a stretcher on the ground amid the shouting and chaos as the crew ripped out the seating from the Apache to fit in all the wounded. Dead and wounded were loaded up together. “We were packed like sardines,” he said. “There was one dead Canadian soldier next to me and when they banked he kind of fell on me. His arm kept falling on me.”21 Robinson’s leg was amputated, and he was flown from the U.S. medical center at Landstuhl in Germany back to the United States on a cavernous troop carrier packed with military casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan. The wounded were stacked in berths four rows high for the flight. Medical personnel passed down the aisles among them, stopping to administer medication and change dressings in the hushed gloom. Sergeant Robinson kept floating in and out of consciousness, oppressed by the sense of men close to death all around him. “There was this whole eerie feeling, hearing and seeing people way worse than you,” he told me. “That was one of the roughest times.”22

  His ordeal went largely unseen in the turmoil of 2006. American casualties from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were hidden from the public since photographs and film of dead and wounded soldiers were restricted by the Bush administration. The war in Iraq had descended into a spasm of civil violence in 2006, and October of that year was the deadliest month for U.S. soldiers since 2001. In Iraq, 111 U.S. servicemen were killed, along with 17 in Afghanistan. If not entirely forgotten, Afghanistan was certainly the lesser concern. The Taliban were close to taking back their spiritual capital of Kandahar and much of southern Afghanistan, and America was looking the other way.

  Left in charge of Kandahar province for the next four years, Canadian forces failed to prevent the buildup of the Taliban around Kandahar city. Like the British in Helmand, they were undermanned for the task and quickly forced into a defensive posture. At one point, General Fraser infuriated the provincial governor, Asadullah Khaled, by suggesting his NATO forces pull back into defensive positions and focus on guarding only the city. The implication was they would leave the rest of the province to the Taliban.

  Khaled, who had fought with the mujahideen since the age of fourteen when he succeeded his father, a famous commander, as the tribal leader in his native Ghazni, had been urging the Canadians to be more aggressive. He was so incensed by what he heard that he walked out of the room, leaving the general mid-speech. An independent review of the Canadian deployment in Afg
hanistan, known as the Manley Panel report, concluded in 2008 that at least another one thousand troops—in addition to the force of two thousand Canadians in place—were needed to secure Kandahar province.23 Canada could not provide that number, and no other NATO force stepped in until the U.S. surge in 2009 and 2010. By then, the Taliban presence was so well entrenched that a combined force of seventeen thousand soldiers and security personnel was needed to clear Kandahar.

  The calamities continued. A herders’ camp was bombed killing thirty-five men, women, and children. I could feel the frustration mounting in many districts that summer. The mood vacillated as the local populace waited for a sign of strong leadership from the government. I interviewed a nineteen-year-old farmer, Lala Jan, from Deh Rawud in Uruzgan province. “We are going mad now,” he said in agitation. “From one side we have the government and Americans, and on the other side the Taliban. When the Taliban come in they enter without asking, and it’s the same with the Americans. We cannot tolerate any of them.” He said that Taliban forces had entered their village a few weeks before and savagely beaten people they accused of supporting the government. “Half of the people like them, half the people don’t,” he said of the militants. “Whoever can bring security should do it. One side should be finished, the Taliban or the government, we don’t care which.”