The Wrong Enemy

by Carlotta Gall

  Yet under the pressure of the surge and the drone war, the fight had become particularly grim, and I sensed the Taliban movement was rotting at the core. The ISI had maintained an iron grip on the Taliban, but in order to do so, had had to detain scores of mid-level and senior members who showed dissent, or were found to have cultivated ties with Kabul. Such harsh treatment of senior Taliban members, in particular the detention of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar in 2010 and the deaths of Mullahs Obaidullah and Yassar in detention, angered many in the ranks. The ISI’s refusal to hand over their bodies to their families was an added callousness that won no supporters.

  Then came a spate of assassinations of senior Taliban figures in Quetta and the surrounding areas in the first months of 2013. Thirteen were killed in typical Taliban style: gunned down by two men on a motorbike. The man behind the assassinations was caught when one of his victims survived. He was a senior Taliban commander himself, named Mastana, a former favorite of Mullah Omar. He admitted to conducting the assassinations for the Afghan government before he and his son were executed. The Taliban slaughtered his son like a sheep, slitting his throat on the grave of one of the assassinated clerics. The Taliban rounded up forty of Mastana’s followers after that. They were all Achakzai tribesmen. The Taliban now had serious tribal divisions within its ranks.

  The U.S. added pressure by killing one of Pakistan’s loyal Pakistani Taliban commanders, Mullah Nazir, an important supporter of the insurgents fighting in Afghanistan, in a drone strike in January.

  The collapse of the Taliban from within had long been an aim of the U.S. military. General Petraeus’s rejection of peace talks early on made sense by 2013, since all along he had never intended to give in to the Taliban or to Pakistan. Despite talk of peace, the bloodletting promised to continue, at least from the Taliban side, the elder from Quetta said. “They are so used to killing. For them killing a human is the same as killing a pigeon.”

  NATO countries, weary of the high cost of the campaign in blood and treasure, had agreed to hand over security to Afghan forces in 2014 and to withdraw NATO troops. In another example of Western bureaucratic miscalculation, Afghanistan now faced a perfect storm of difficult transitions all in the same year: the election of a new president and appointment of a new government (which last time had taken months to resolve), the handover of security to Afghan forces, and the withdrawal of tens of thousands of NATO forces in the middle of the summer fighting season. It is a punctuation mark that closes a chapter in Afghanistan’s bloody history—and it closes this book. But what will remain?

  When I remember the beleaguered state of Afghanistan in 2001, I marvel at the changes the American intervention has wrought: the rebuilding, the modernity, the bright graduates in every office. Yet after thirteen years, a trillion dollars spent, 120,000 foreign troops deployed at the height, and tens of thousands of lives lost, the fundamentals of Afghanistan’s predicament remain the same: a weak state, prey to the ambitions of its neighbors and extremist Islamists. The United States and its NATO allies are departing with the job only half done. Counter­insurgency is slow work. A comprehensive effort to turn things around only began in 2010. The fruits were only starting to show in 2013, and progress remains fragile.

  Meanwhile the real enemy remains at large. The Taliban and al ­Qaeda will certainly seek to regain bases and territory in Afghanistan upon the departure of Western troops. Few Afghans believe that their government and security forces can keep the Taliban at bay. I believe they can, but they will need long-term financial and military support.

  The cost in lives to reach this unfinished state had been painfully high. There is no complete count of how many Afghans have died since the American intervention began in October 2001. My own rough estimate places it between 50,000 and 70,000 Afghans. By the end of 2013, over 3,400 foreign soldiers have died in the campaign, 2,301 of them American.

  Civilian deaths in the war had been running between two and three thousand a year since 2006.7 Casualties among Afghan security forces have been between one and two thousand a year, and rising, as their forces have grown and they have taken up the frontline fighting.8 Thousands of young Afghan and Pakistani men have died in the ranks of the Taliban, too, many of them villagers and madrassa students, used as so much cheap cannon fodder. They are referred to as “potato soldiers” by their Pakistani recruiters.

  The toll in the rural districts of Afghanistan has been disastrous. In Panjwayi district, in just the six months prior to January 2013, three hundred people were killed and four hundred wounded by mines and bombs laid by the Taliban. Assassinations and targeted killings have been an increasing danger too for Afghans who were working for or connected with the government and anyone near them. Nearly seven hundred civilians died in 2012 in targeted killings by insurgents, according to United Nations figures.

  A tribal elder in just one small district of Kandahar, Zhare, told me that forty-two council members were killed in the last six years by Taliban insurgents.9 The men had worked variously on the district council, the development council, and the peace council. They were targeted for their collaboration with the government. The Taliban tried to eliminate local Afghan leadership in a systematic drive to control the populace. They struck at community leaders across the country, including women working in the governmental department of women’s affairs; police; mujahideen commanders, elders, and clerics working on the peace council; senators; schoolteachers; and interpreters. A dozen influential Northern Alliance figures, men who had fought against the Taliban and retained powerful positions in the government and their communities, were killed in suicide bombings.

  Kandahar suffered heavily too, with an estimated three hundred tribal elders killed since 2001. Some of those killed undoubtedly had their own enemies and were victims of local power struggles, or of Ahmed Wali Karzai’s desire for political dominance. But the Taliban were behind most of the bloodletting as they pursued a strategy to remove any resistance to their aims. I thought of the Taliban commander’s explanation to me a year earlier: “We just have to kill two people, and the village is in our hands.” Even as the Taliban lost territory in the surge, it demonstrated an urgent desire to wipe out all potential opponents ahead of 2014.

  The cost of the last twelve years of fighting has not just been in lives. The disruption, dislocation, and damage to the soul of the Afghans have been incalculable. While the ten-year Soviet occupation was far more catastrophic for the population—an estimated one million Afghans died, and five million fled the country—by the time of the American intervention, Afghans were in their third decade of continuous war and were that much more vulnerable, impoverished, fearful, and disillusioned.

  Two years after the surge in Zhare, for example, even after American troops had cleared the area and compensated people for the destruction, villagers were too destitute to move back home. “The village is still all destroyed. People are too poor to go back,” councillor Mohammad Sarwar told me. “People are living on the edge of the city, and in the desert. Some are in tents.” The majority had not been able to rebuild their homes because the compensation had been inadequate. In some cases, the Taliban had seized the money from the villagers. “The people feel that nothing has improved in ten years. Their houses and gardens have been destroyed, and they don’t have money to send their children to school. They cannot afford to buy them notebooks. It is because we used these ten years like this.” The man who led the uprising in Zangabad, Abdul Wudood, noted bitterly that with almost twenty years of consecutive Taliban rule in his village, not one of his eight sons had been to school.

  These men wanted to see a strong continued U.S. commitment to Afghanistan, not necessarily with troops on the ground but with assistance, training, and security support. They warned that the United States and NATO were withdrawing their forces too early, before Afghan communities had been able to gather their strength and before Afghan forces could consolidate. Even opponents of the foreign forces said they should not leave hastily,
as the Russians had, and allow the country to collapse under internal and external strains.

  For me it seemed America was turning its back on Afghanistan because it was tired but also because it saw Afghanistan as a lost war. As one former diplomat put it: the war was essentially unwinnable, and that win, lose, or draw, Afghanistan was not worth the effort.10 That is the wrong way to look at the problem. Militant Islamism is a juggernaut that cannot be turned off or turned away from. Pakistan is still exporting militant Islamism and terrorism, and will not stop once foreign forces leave its borders. The repercussions of the U.S. pullout are already inspiring Islamists, who are comparing it to the withdrawal of the Soviet Union after its ten-year debilitating war in Afghanistan. They are the real enemy in this war and they have not finished fighting. They fully intend to reclaim Afghanistan and have set their sights on horizons beyond. The United States has already paid heavily in blood, treasure, and prestige over a decade and more. Yet it is not in danger of collapsing as the Soviet Union did after that war, as al Qaeda leaders frequently predict. And it still has much work to do before leaving to bring Afghanistan and Pakistan into better shape to resist the tyranny of militant Islamism, or be responsible for even more blood and destruction. Pakistan, for its part, has to stand up to its responsibilities as a nuclear power and one of the world’s largest Muslim countries and stop spreading terrorism and fanaticism around the world. The United States and its NATO allies cannot walk away until that is ensured.

  Acknowledgments

  I hardly ever worked or traveled alone in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and so this book, and all my reporting from the region, comes thanks to many collaborators along the way: translators, local reporters, photographers, fixers, and drivers who shared many of these events with me. When I write “we,” it is often because a translator or local reporter was relaying the conversation or there were several of us traveling and reporting together in a team. In some cases, Afghan and Pakistani reporters would elicit more information than I could as a foreigner. Some of them have to remain anonymous because of continued threats, but they know who they are and my special thanks goes to them for their bravery and integrity.

  All those who helped me over more than a decade are too numerous to mention, and I will forget some, so forgive me for that. Extra special thanks goes to Ruhullah Khapalwak, translator and reporter in southern Afghanistan for the New York Times, who guided me indefatigably through the Pashtun heartlands for the most part of a decade, ultimately at great personal risk. His work is present on almost every page of this book. Another longtime collaborator at the New York Times was Abdul Waheed Wafa, the most tenacious of reporters with a sharp political brain, who helped me with interviews for this book. I was lucky over the years to have many terrific partners at the New York Times Kabul and Islamabad bureaus: Sultan Munadi first among equals; Sangar Rahimi, whose humor lightened some hard times, including the horror of Azizabad; Taimoor Shah, who never faltered in reporting a litany of sorrows in southern Afghanistan; Aziz Gulbahari; Arif Afzalzada; and Sharif and Saboor, early companions who kept me safe in northern Afghanistan in 2001. Thanks in Pakistan go to Salman Masood, our anchor in Islamabad who has ridden through many ups and downs; Ismail Khan, who saw early on danger brewing in the tribal areas; Pir Zubair Shah, who dug deep under the Pakistani Taliban and its ISI connections; Ihsanullah Tipu, who is following his standard; in Lahore, Waqar Gillani for his energy for a story; Najam Sethi and Ahmed Rashid for wise counsel; Mubasher Bukhari for his good company and principled reporting; Shahzada Zulfikar for some memorable journeys. The Quetta journalists and photographer remain nameless for their own safety, but they should be proud of their work. So too Baluch and Karachi journalists who worked with me.

  Afghans and Pakistanis are world-famous for their hospitality, and the list is long of all those who opened their homes and their hearts to me over more than two decades. Many of the interviewees in this book gave me hours and hours of their time; many more, not mentioned, went to great pains to help me understand events past and present, and the spirit and sensibility of the people of the region. My first contacts came through my father, who brought Afghanistan into our family life in the 1980s and set up a charity for disabled Afghans. The assistance Afghans showed me was often in respect for my father, so I am doubly indebted. Some I have known for thirty years, since I was a student and they were refugees in London from the Russian invasion: the Gailani family and their best ambassador and spokeswoman, Fatima Gailani; the brothers of Ahmed Shah Massoud, Ahmed Wali, Yahya, and Zia Massoud; Naser Saberi; and the late Noor Akbari, killed by the Taliban in 2013, whose brother Yunus, Afghanistan’s first nuclear physicist, was killed at the beginning of it all by the Communists. Valuable instructors since my first trips to Peshawar and Afghanistan have been Massoud Khalili, Rustam Shah Mohmand, Amir Shah at AP, Sayed Salahuddin, Abdullah Abdullah, Muslem Hayat, Hashem, as well as Nancy Dupree, Anders Fanger, Jolyon Leslie, Peter Jouvenal—all honorary Afghans for their expertise. During my twelve years’ reporting in Afghanistan, special thanks for their willingness to explain: Engineer Amin, Mir Wali, Mohammad Ayub, Faiz Mohammad and family, Nader Nadery, Jawed Ludin, Khaleeq Ahmad, Amrullah Saleh, Rahmat Nabil, Asadullah Khaled, Mullah Rocketi, Hanif Atmar, Hafizullah Khan, Mohammad Lal and family, and many more. Thanks to Rahim Faiez at AP for his casualty lists; ambassadors Francesc Vendrell, Christopher Alexander, Sherard Cowper-Coles, Ronald E. Neumann, William B. Wood, Anne Patterson, generals Dan McNeill, Ron Helmly, Karl Eikenberry, David Petraeus, David Richards, Nick Carter, and Mick Nicholson and Afghan experts Vali Nasr, Rina Amiri, Reto Stocker, Michael Semple, Barnett Rubin, and Tom Gregg for making extra time for me. In Pakistan, special thanks to Siraj ul Mulk and his venerable late father Colonel Kush, and Reza and Ali Kuli Khan, whose gracious hospitality and friendship made me love Pakistan. As a reporter I found stalwart collaborators and colleagues: Ishaq Khakwani, General Talat Masood, Afrasiab Khattak, Brigadier Mahmood Shah, Farah Ispahani, Husain Haqqani, Omar Waraich, Declan Walsh, Bard Wilkinson, and Kathy Gannon. Thanks to Commander Zafar for always taking my calls. Thanks to Ministers Tariq Azeem and Sherry Rehman for unscrambling things for me. There are many more I have missed.

  I would never have managed to put this book together without the golden opportunity of a fellowship at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard; thanks to Bob Giles and Ann Marie Lipinski, curators old and new, and their staff, for offering both a respite and a stimulating sabbatical; and my editors at the New York Times who gave me leave of absence to take up the fellowship and then another to write the book. Special thanks to Paige Williams, narrative journalism instructor, for encouraging me to write and helping with early chapters, and Nieman fellows of 2012 for their companionship and support.

  Thanks to Bruce Nichols, who commissioned and edited this book, and who trusted me to tell the story as I wanted; Gloria Loomis, my agent, for her unswerving patience and guidance; Jane Perlez for matching me up with Gloria; Martin Beiser, a master line editor; and Margaret Hogan, the smoothest of copy editors.

  Thanks to Diana Soler and her family for the loan of their house in Segur de Calafell in Spain; Hiromi Yasui for such a warm welcome at the Silk Road Hotel in Bamiyan and her home in Kabul; Ansa Zafar and her family for beautiful, reflective days in Gulberg, Lahore; Sima Natiq and family, friends for so many years in Peshawar and Kabul. Thanks, too, to Sabrina Tavernise and Rory MacFarquhar for welcoming me so often in Washington, D.C., and for being the most enthusiastic supporters when this book was only an idea; Thomas de Waal and Georgina Wilson also for their hospitality and encouragement; and Gretchen Peters for making space for me in her house and giving me enough ideas to write a whole second book.

  Good colleagues in difficult times: Chris Chivers, Tyler Hicks, David Rohde, Pamela Constable, and Hiromi Yasui.

  To the many photographers, good companions all, who followed this story with me and shared their photos.

  Special admiration and love to my colleague, photographer Joao S
ilva, and his wife, Viv, and children, for their courage and determination to pull through Joao’s injuries. Joao, more than anyone, reminded me to keep following the Afghan story.

  Finally, thanks to my family for their combined love of Afghanistan: my parents for their unfailing belief that I had a book in me that was worth reading; my sisters, Fiona and Michaela, always willing to discuss Afghanistan, who read and advised on the manuscript and photos; my brother-in-law, Dr. Philippe Bonhoure, for his solidarité and cuisine, and all the staff and supporters at Sandy Gall’s Afghanistan Appeal, who became like a second family.

  And to all my Afghan friends, too many to mention, and sadly too many departed, for their incomparable dignity and generosity of spirit.

  Notes

  All quotations that are not specifically cited are drawn from my interviews with the people quoted.

  PROLOGUE

  1. Elizabeth Rubin, Roots of Impunity: Pakistan’s Endangered Press and the Perilous Web of Militancy, Security and Politics, special report for the Committee to Protect Journalists, May 2013, p. 19, http://www.cpj.org/reports/CPJ.Pakistan.Roots.of.Impunity.pdf.