CHAPTER 47
On December 7, 2004, I had arrived in Kabul as a member of the U.S. delegation led by Vice President Cheney for President Karzai’s inauguration. The frigid Afghan air was no match for the warmth shared by millions that day as they celebrated their first democratically elected leader in the country’s long history. In a repudiation of the restrictive, repressive Taliban rule, Afghan women were given prominent roles in the ceremony. They were even allowed to sing again. Some choked back tears as they did so. A stirring sight that day was children flying kites—a practice that had been banned by the Taliban. It was a wonderful moment, filled with promise and potential, justifying what our forces had fought for.
Three months earlier, in the country’s first-ever free national election, Afghans had turned out at polling stations to vote for their nation’s president. There were reports that women in Bamiyan province awoke at 3:00 a.m. the day of voting. Because the Taliban had threatened to kill any women who cast ballots, they began their day with a ritual wash and cleansing as if they were preparing to die. In Konar province, the Taliban launched an attack on election day. Although it was one hundred yards from the polling place, the Afghan voters stayed in line. Not one person left.
I thought that the initial success could be attributed to the modesty of our goals. The strategy was based on the idea of letting Afghans solve Afghan problems, assisting them and amplifying their successes where we could—such as helping to build a national army and train a police force—and executing light footprint counterinsurgency operations to protect strategic towns from Taliban influence. There were fewer than fifteen thousand American troops in the country until 2004 and fewer than twenty-five thousand through 2006.1
Afghanistan experienced relatively few incidents of violence until the summer of 2005. Intelligence collected from around the country indicated that after the October 2004 elections, the successful vote had so demoralized the enemy that many Taliban were prepared to give up the fight. Aside from a few major engagements, such as Operation Anaconda in the spring of 2002, coalition troops skirmished with Taliban forces only occasionally. There was a visible Afghan government in place early and quickly, led by Hamid Karzai. He persuaded many former warlords to put down their arms and join his government in pursuit of an agenda of peace.2 Afghan technocrats, many of them Western educated, advised the nation’s leaders. We accelerated the buildup of the Afghan National Army (ANA) and the police force, knowing that ultimately they would need to be the ones securing their nation.3 We encouraged the Karzai government to consolidate and build its country’s institutions while recognizing that ultimately much of the state’s power would be wielded by tribal leaders and power brokers at the provincial and local levels, as it had been for centuries.4
My position was that we were not in Afghanistan to transform a deeply conservative Islamic culture into a model of liberal modernity. We were not there to eradicate corruption or to end poppy cultivation. We were not there to take ownership of Afghanistan’s problems, tempting though it was for many Americans of goodwill. Instead, Afghans would need to take charge of their own fate. Afghans would build their society the way they wanted. With our coalition allies we would assist them within reason where we were able.
Some political opponents of the administration claimed that the war in Iraq “distracted” the Bush administration from what was referred to as the “good” and “right” war in Afghanistan.5 Yet it was precisely during the toughest period in the Iraq war that Afghanistan, with coalition help, took some of its most promising steps toward a free and better future. In my visits to the country every few months, I felt a palpable energy and excitement. Women were beginning to claim their place in society: starting businesses, serving in the parliament, and once again receiving education and medical aid. Afghan presidential and parliamentary elections in October 2004 and September 2005 took place essentially without incident and were heralded as free and fair. A vibrant media—many dozens of radio and television stations and newspapers—was free to comment on and criticize the coalition presence and Afghanistan’s new leaders. By 2006, nearly four million Afghan refugees had returned to their homeland.6
An Afghan “face” on the effort was enormously beneficial. Though most of the participant nations had failed to deliver fully on reconstruction pledges made at the 2001 Bonn conference, members of the international community were finding it harder to ignore the pleas of a legitimate Afghan government they had earlier offered to support. Levels of violence remained relatively low, in part because would-be insurgents seemed reluctant to challenge the popularly supported Afghan government. I did not think Afghanistan had suddenly shed centuries of ethnic strife and endemic corruption, but it did seem Afghans might be finding their way to managing their problems without our permanent assistance.
If some later contended that we never had a plan for full-fledged nation building or that we under-resourced such a plan, they were certainly correct. We did not go there to try to bring prosperity to every corner of Afghanistan. I believed—and continue to believe—that such a goal would have amounted to a fool’s errand. It struck me that sending U.S. servicemen and-women in pursuit of an effort to remake Afghanistan into a prosperous American-style nation-state or to try to bring our standard of security to each of that nation’s far-flung villages would be unwise, well beyond our capability, and unworthy of our troops’ sacrifice.
Our more modest goal was to rid Afghanistan of al-Qaida and replace their Taliban hosts with a government that would not harbor terrorists. We were willing to let Afghan traditions and processes determine the political outcomes. Our objectives reflected a healthy sense of the limitations of what we could achieve in a country suspicious of foreign influence.
I also did not see more U.S. troops as the solution to Afghanistan’s many challenges. “I am persuaded that the critical problem in Afghanistan is not really a security problem,” I wrote President Bush in August 2002. “Rather, the problem that needs to be addressed is the slow progress that is being made on the civil side.”7 Hamid Karzai’s government needed help building his country’s institutions so he could show the Afghan people that a life of freedom offered more prosperity and security than life under the Taliban. With the exception of Afghanistan’s national army, building these institutions required first and foremost assistance from the non-military departments and agencies of the U.S. government and the coalition countries.8 Sending more troops to the villages and valleys of Afghanistan would not resolve the country’s long-term problems. In fact, they could exacerbate them by fostering resentment among a proud population and providing more targets for our enemies to attack.
The interim government of Hamid Karzai had to deal with a fundamental question of what role the nation’s former warlords, the titans who had dominated Afghan politics and effectively ruled different parts of the country since the 1970s, would have in his government and in Afghanistan’s future. The warlords commanded sizable militias and patronage networks that could be used in the service of an Afghan state; their considerable resources could just as well be used to tear the country apart if they decided it was in their interests to return to the civil strife of the 1980s and 1990s. A government dominated by warlords risked alienating the Afghan people, the majority of whom did not want a reprise of the lawlessness, factionalism, and brutality that had marked the previous two decades. On the other hand, Karzai could neither confront them militarily nor ignore them altogether. The result would be more internal conflict and very likely the fall of Karzai’s government.
To assist the fledgling Afghan leadership, it helped that we had outstanding American leadership on the ground from 2003 to 2005, led by Ambassador Zal Khalilzad and General David Barno. Khalilzad had a charm, confidence, and casualness about him that was appealing and effective. He was a tenacious negotiator and loyal to the presidents he served. Lieutenant General Barno was the widely respected commander of the American military forces in Afghanistan. When he arrived there, Barno moved his office into the U.S. embassy in Kabul and lived in a trailer on the compound, eschewing more official trappings. Every morning Khalilzad and Barno held a country-team meeting with their senior advisers to ensure the closest possible coordination of civil and military activities across Afghanistan. This tight linkage between the State and Defense Departments was a model of how civil-military relations should work.
Khalilzad and Barno worked with Karzai to enlist the warlords’ support for the central government and reached out to Afghan tribal leaders to bring security to the country’s far-flung provinces. The tribes had contributed greatly to stability throughout Afghanistan’s history. Most of the country was too remote and ethnically diverse to be effectively controlled by a centralized government. Though it was much different than our American notions of government, Afghanistan’s tribes had been the ribcage of governance at the local level for millennia. This was one Afghan practice the United States wasn’t going to change.
The agreed-upon warlord strategy called for building up the capacity of Afghan national institutions, such as the army and police. Karzai managed to rebalance his government through the selection of new personnel for key positions, broadening popular support. That strategy was successful in bringing about the disarmament and demobilization of the warlord militias and in promoting conciliation with some lower-level Taliban fighters. Karzai brought in Tajik leader Fahim Khan to head the new Ministry of Defense and Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum as the military’s chief of staff. I argued that we should train as many Afghans as we could so they could begin to take over the security responsibilities for their country.* By late 2003, there were more recruits from every ethnic group and every corner of Afghanistan signing up for spots in the Afghan National Army than there were slots to fill.
As in Iraq, there was a glaring deficiency in our training of local security forces: the police.10 Germany had agreed to train Afghanistan’s police in early 2002 at the Bonn conference. It sent forty police advisers to Kabul, which was enough to train only several hundred for the capital city.11 In light of the modest efforts by our coalition partner, the State Department took over the effort a year later. State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) had the statutory responsibility for police training by the United States. Unfortunately, they lacked the resources and expertise to fulfill it and so sought help from contractors. Their eight-week basic training course did not include weapons training, and only thirty-nine hundred of the thirty-four thousand “trained” police officers had even been through the eight weeks of training.12
I tried to have the police training responsibilities transferred from State to Defense, where the crucial mission could be given the attention, resources, and focus it needed, and where our trainers had backgrounds in training for counterinsurgency.13 I had worked out an agreement with Colin Powell in 2004, only to have his turf-conscious deputy scuttle it with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.14 Without a viable Afghan police force, U.S. forces would be taking on the policing duties at an inordinately high cost in taxpayer dollars and American lives.15 I wrote to NSC Adviser Steve Hadley:
It is costing the US taxpayers a fortune as long as the US, instead of the Afghans, continues to provide for Afghan security. . . . I don’t think it is responsible to the American taxpayers to leave it like it is. We need a way forward. I’ve worked on it and worked on it. I am about to conclude that it is not possible for the US Government bureaucracy to do the only sensible thing. If anyone has an idea as to what can be done about it, I’d like to hear it. I’m ready to toss in the towel. The only solution I can see is to fashion an old-time decision memo and have the President decide it. If that is necessary, please draft the memo; or, if you prefer not to do it, tell me and I’ll do it.16
Months later, I was finally able to get permission for the Defense Department to assume responsibility for the police training. Over the next two years, we invested more than $1. 5 billion in the mission.17 An institutional fix to the underlying problem took even longer—over the continued objections of some in the State Department bureaucracy and members of congressional oversight committees who did not want to relinquish budgetary control over their failing State Department foreign police training programs.18 It was not until January 2006 that we managed to realign our country’s authorities for training foreign forces when Congress passed Section 1206 of the National Defense Authorization Act.*
On the military side of our coalition effort, General Barno and Ambassador Khalilzad recommended shifting the strategic emphasis from counterterrorism to counterinsurgency, since most of the remaining al-Qaida and Taliban had fled into the tribal areas of Pakistan.20 Our forces would still pursue terrorists when and where they found them, but coalition forces would move to strategically located outposts in key population centers outside of Kabul and the main base at Bagram airfield to help to defend the population from enemy infiltration and intimidation. This approach to counterinsurgency didn’t require tens of thousands of U.S. troops. It used Afghan army and police to bolster the small American presence and the twenty-two Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT) we had established, supposedly comprised of experts from different agencies and bureaus of the U.S. government. The PRT was a well-conceived idea. It was a decentralized way of enabling Americans to work with local Afghan (and Iraqi) leaders on reconstruction projects—but the teams proved difficult to staff with the needed non-military experts able to help Afghans in agriculture, education, civil society, and building local government institutions. Ninety-eight percent of the U.S. contingent in our PRTs ended up being military personnel.*
In June 2005, the tours of Khalilzad and Barno were over. Khalilzad was sent to Baghdad to become the new U.S. ambassador there. Five months before Khalilizad’s departure, I had asked the President that I be involved in the decision on his replacement. Typically deciding on diplomatic representation was a matter between the White House and the State Department, but to my thinking, Afghanistan was a different matter given the Defense Department’s deep involvement there. “We suffered not getting Zal in earlier than we did,” I wrote, referring to the unfortunate selection of Khalilzad’s predecessor, a career Foreign Service officer who had had little success in advancing the political process for much of 2002 and 2003. “We need to have someone who can carry [Khalilzad’s] level of representation forward without a hitch.”22
For forty-five days after Khalilzad left Kabul for Baghdad, the United States was without an ambassador in Afghanistan. Rice and the State Department eventually announced the selection of Ronald Neumann, a career Foreign Service officer, to replace Khalilzad, without any discussion with the Defense Department. I expressed my displeasure to Steve Hadley.23 In the months after Khalilzad’s departure, ominous signs began to appear on the horizon.
By early 2006, a reorganized Taliban insurgency had emerged in Afghanistan’s east and south. Increasing numbers of Taliban fighters traveled into Afghanistan from Pakistan and retreated back across the border whenever coalition forces tried to engage them. It was likely the Taliban would be mounting an offensive in the summer months of 2006 against coalition and Afghan forces.
Disturbed, I asked Dr. Marin Strmecki, an erudite and longtime student of Afghanistan whose previous analysis in the Pentagon’s policy shop had impressed me, to return to the country on a fact-finding mission in early spring and report back to me.24 That August, Strmecki briefed me. He didn’t sugarcoat anything. The bottom line, he told me, was we faced a “deteriorating security situation” caused by a Taliban escalation and weak or bad governance in southern Afghanistan that created “a vacuum of power into which the enemy moved.”25 The Taliban had in fact created a shadow government in towns across southern Afghanistan. If we did nothing, it was possible that the southern city of Kandahar could return to Taliban control.
I made an effort to get Strmecki’s report circulated around the administration and encouraged my colleagues to get his briefing. As I noted in a memo to Vice President Cheney and Steve Hadley, “Given the new level of the insurgency there, [Strmecki] has a new strategy for Afghanistan, which I think merits our careful thought and attention.”26 After four years of relative dormancy, the Taliban was poised to mount a serious offensive. Strmecki’s recommendation was that if we were to meet the Taliban’s escalation, we needed to mount a counterescalation. It would “not require more U.S. or international military forces but does require new diplomatic initiatives visà-vis Pakistan, renewed energy and urgency in shaping the U.S. partnership with the Afghan government, and more resources for security and development programs,” Strmecki advised.27
The central problem was the sanctuary Pakistan provided for the insurgents. I had repeatedly pressed Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf on the issue. Pakistan’s largely autonomous western regions were home to many Islamist radicals, some influential in its government’s intelligence organization—the ISI—and the military. The thought of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal falling under the control of Islamist extremists or their terrorist allies was nightmarish.
We were also still working to dispel the suspicions that many Pakistanis and their leaders had about the United States, after our Congress had imposed damaging sanctions on their country in the 1990s. Our job was to rebuild the relationships between our two countries to win Pakistani cooperation against al-Qaida and Islamist terrorists and help reduce their nuclear tensions with India.
We had seen some hopeful signs. We successfully pressured Pakistan to shut down its nuclear proliferation operation run by A. Q. Khan, widely regarded as the father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb. Musharraf’s government had been helpful in providing intelligence on senior al-Qaida operatives. With Pakistani intelligence, we often mounted sensitive special operations missions into their territory and conducted UAV drone strikes against terrorist targets. Musharraf had ordered Pakistani forces into western Pakistan to attack Taliban and al-Qaida strongholds and, as a result, lost hundreds of his soldiers.
To be sure, Pakistan was less forthcoming with intelligence on the Taliban networks in the country. Some in the Pakistani intelligence services believed they needed to fund and train the Taliban as a hedge against Indian influence in Afghanistan. Musharraf had made some unhelpful truces and arrangements with governors in western Pakistan, which had the effect of allowing the Taliban to regroup. It was clear by 2006 that the Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan were directly contributing to an insurgency and the destabilization of neighboring Afghanistan.
To blunt the insurgency, I had concluded we needed to expand and accelerate the Afghan National Army well beyond the seventy thousand troops originally planned. Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, the commander who had replaced David Barno, had recommended we cut back the size of the ANA to fifty thousand in the fall of 2005, but we soon reversed the decision. I was disappointed to learn that Eikenberry had moved his military headquarters out of the U.S. embassy in Kabul, reversing the close civil-military linkage that Barno and Khalilzad had forged.
Strmecki recommended we develop a “multi-year COIN [counterinsurgency] plan” utilizing Afghan troops to defend key towns and villages against Taliban infiltration.28 “While the past three years have seen progressive improvements in the counterinsurgency techniques of the Coalition, there are opportunities to undertake additional innovations,” Strmecki wrote.29 Without deploying tens of thousands of U.S. military forces, we could use a parallel structure of civil, nonmilitary support teams to help Afghans stabilize their towns and villages, offering viable livelihoods rather than succumbing to the Taliban. This of course would require yet another effort, building on our earlier attempts, to get other departments and agencies of our federal government to send support teams of civilian experts.
I had sought to increase the NATO alliance’s involvement in Afghanistan to lessen the burden on our troops as well. Eventually all of the alliance’s forces were placed under one command—the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) led by an American general—to achieve an integrated effort.30 It was a major step for NATO that promised a new relevance for the Alliance in the twenty-first century.
Giving NATO a leading role in Afghanistan was not without its challenges. One was that NATO, though a military alliance, operates as a committee by consensus, and it’s difficult to conduct a war by committee. The command arrangements between NATO headquarters in Brussels, ISAF headquarters in Kabul, and the different commanders across the country were complex. NATO military forces were also under widely differing instructions from their home governments. If fired on, some forces could only engage in defensive maneuvers. Though I had hoped that NATO’s involvement would bring in more international contributions for Afghan reconstruction, it became a pattern for President Karzai to be promised more assistance than he received from the international community.
Most Afghan ministries were not getting the experts and staff support they needed from the State Department and other U.S. agencies.31 While I respected those who did volunteer to deploy, the staff at the embassy tended to be junior in both age and experience. Moreover, their tours were often too short for them to learn enough to make a substantial contribution. For example, four of the nine political and economic positions in the embassy during Khalilzad’s tenure in Afghanistan were left vacant.32
In cabinet meetings I asked all of the departments to expedite sending the people we needed. While there were never enough civilian experts, those who did go to Afghanistan and Iraq contributed greatly to the coalition effort. Nonetheless, military officials complained frequently that other government departments were letting them down. On one occasion, when lawmakers came to the White House to meet with President Bush and the NSC, they inquired about the modest numbers of Foreign Service officers being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. Rice responded that she did not have the power to compel Foreign Service officers to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Secretary of State technically does have the authority to send Foreign Service officers wherever the President deems necessary. However, as Rice pointed out, there was considerable opposition within the career ranks against her using that authority. Military officers expected to be deployed to war zones, which was not the case in our civilian departments or agencies. It was disturbing that we were spending billions of dollars to provide security, but we could not properly staff the U.S. embassy with the needed civilian advisers.
In a meeting on May 26, 2006, President Bush called the NSC together to try to increase civilian support for our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rice updated us on the numbers of Foreign Service officers who were going to Iraq. The number was below what had been expected and well below what had been promised. General Casey, speaking from Iraq on secure video, remarked that the number of diplomats was inadequate.33
Rice, who was unaccustomed to being questioned in front of the President, took issue. “You’re out of line, General!” she snapped.34 This was the first time in the nearly six years I had been in the Bush administration that this type of underlying tension between State and Defense had boiled to the surface in an NSC meeting. I told Rice that if she thought a general officer needed calibration, she should tell me and I would attend to it if I agreed.
In the Situation Room, discussion would often turn to which needed to come first: security or the diplomatic and economic tracks. Defense officials sought more political and economic progress. Officials from State would express concerns about the security situation. The reality was that all three—security, diplomacy, and the economy—had to be closely linked. If progress was absent in one, the others would be hindered. But from the Defense Department’s standpoint, we knew that while our military would not lose a battle, it was also true that we could not win strategic success by military means alone, particularly in irregular warfare and counterinsurgency.35 Because of the various committee and subcommittee jurisdictions, Congress hampered our ability to engage more non-military support in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our non-military institutions were bound by outdated regulations and statutes, slowed by bureaucratic inertia, and in large measure kept away from the action by a government culture that did not promote and reward individuals willing to deploy abroad.
There were encouraging signs of progress alongside harbingers that the real fight for Afghanistan’s future was yet to come. With an elected government under Karzai, the Afghan people were taking charge of their destiny. NATO was involved with thousands of troops on peacekeeping, security, and reconstruction missions.
At the same time, there was a growing awareness of a threat to the nascent stability we had strived to create. The Taliban had established strongholds in Pakistan. They were quietly infiltrating Afghan towns and villages along the border. Still, my efforts to turn the NSC’s attention to Afghanistan in 2006 were only marginally successful, as Afghanistan still seemed to be going reasonably well—at least in contrast to Iraq—and was gaining far less notice in the media.36 Nonetheless, I was concerned that we were missing opportunities to consolidate the successes that had been achieved—missed opportunities that could prove costly later. If left unchallenged, the Taliban could threaten the stability of the region and again welcome terrorists into areas under their control. Given our country’s inability to adequately staff the embassy and the civilian support teams to buttress any fragile victories over a new, aggressive Taliban enemy, the glass was looking half empty. As daunting as our challenges in Afghanistan were, by the spring of 2006 Iraq teetered on the edge of something even darker.