The Afghan capital of Kabul was once called ‘the city of a thousand gardens’. Three decades of war had devastated the city by 2001. (Photo by author)
Robert Grenier, CIA station chief in Pakistan, on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan in April 2002. (Photo courtesy of Robert Grenier)
Captain Jason Amerine guided Hamid Karzai from fugitive guerrilla leader all the way to his appointment to become the country’s first leader after the Taliban. (Photo courtesy of Jason Amerine)
Osama bin Laden hid in the Tora Bora mountain range after 9/11 and managed to escape US and Afghan forces when they confronted him. (Photo by Specialist Ken Scar)
Karzai appointed Sher Mohammed Akhundzada to run the opium-rich province of Helmand on his first day in office. (Photo by author)
In response to Afghanistan’s poverty, many in the aid world advocated a nation-building effort similar to that carried out in the Balkans in the 1990s. (Photo by author)
Villagers vote to elect a council to manage a small government grant. (Photo courtesy of Samantha Reynolds)
A poppy crop grows along the Baghran River valley in northern Helmand in 2005. (Photo courtesy of Jim Hogberg)
Drawing sketched by Thomas V. Curtis, a reserve MP sergeant, showing how detainees were tortured at Bagram air base in 2002.
The Afghan minister Ashraf Ghani advocated a more limited role for western agencies in reconstructing the country and insisted that Afghans knew best regarding their country’s priorities. (Photo courtesy of Staff Sergeant Ryan Crane)
Tom Praster helped set up the first Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan in the eastern town of Gardez. (Photo courtesy of Tom Praster)
Lieutenant General Rob Fry was the British strategist who conceived of the UK deployment to Helmand as a way to get British forces out of Iraq while maintaining the reputation of the British military and the UK’s special relationship with America. (Photo courtesy of Rob Fry)
The British Ambassador Rosalind Marsden explains British intentions for Helmand province to a room of dignitaries in Lashkar Gah in June 2005. (Photo courtesy of Jim Hogberg)
The Afghan government burned large quantities of seized opium stores, but that did little to stop the rampant trade, which was the country’s largest source of income other than aid money. (Photo courtesy of Jim Hogberg)
US Major General Ben Freakley opposed the NATO deployment to southern Afghanistan in 2006 on the grounds that the international force was not prepared to tackle a counterinsurgency. (Photo courtesy of Ben Freakley)
Abdul Waheed Baghrani was a staunch supporter of Taliban leader Mullah Omar in 2001. (Photo courtesy of Jim Hogberg)
US Colonel John Nicholson was an early pioneer of counter insurgency tactics in eastern Afghanistan and went on to play a key role in deciding the direction of the surge. (Photo courtesy of Sergeant Amber Robinson)
The United Nations diplomat Tom Gregg revived the art of fly-fishing in eastern Afghanistan, last practiced in the region during the days of the British Empire. (Photo courtesy of Tom Gregg)
Brigadier Ed Butler was the senior British military official in Afghanistan when NATO forces deployed to the south of the country in 2006. (Photo by Heathcliffe O’Malley)
A day after arriving in Sangin, Major Will Pike held the first British shura in Sangin and was politely asked to leave by the elders. (Photo courtesy of Will Pike)
The British NATO commander Lieutenant General David Richards realized that UK forces in Helmand were overstretched and sought to de-escalate the fighting. (Photo courtesy of Tom Tugendhat)
The Canadian Brigadier David Fraser sought to take on the Taliban outside Kandahar during Operation Medusa. (Photo courtesy of David Fraser)
General Dan McNeill commanded American forces in Afghanistan twice. On his second tour, he urged his NATO allies to confront the Taliban. (Photo by Staff Sergeant Michael Andriacco)
A boy receives medical attention from US special forces after being caught in an attack. (Photo courtesy of Jim Hogberg)
Brigadier Jerry Thomas sought to withdraw British forces from northern Helmand but was opposed by his chain of command. (Photo courtesy of Jerry Thomas)
The British Ambassador Sherard Cowper-Coles argued for tribal engagement and negotiations with the Taliban but was opposed by the US. (Photo courtesy of Sherard Cowper-Coles)
The Education Minister Hanif Atmar sought to build government-run madrassas across Afghanistan to offset Islamic militancy in the region, but he struggled to get funding. (Photo courtesy of Sergeant Brandon Aird)
Kael Weston pictured with children in a village outside Khost. (Photo courtesy of Kael Weston)
General David Petraeus turned around American fortunes in the Iraq war and sought to do the same in Afghanistan using counterinsurgency tactics. (Photo by Staff Sergeant Brent Powell)
The American Major General Larry Nicholson and the British Brigadier Tim Radford forged a partnership for tackling Helmand and easing tensions between their respective chains of command. (Photo by private contributor)
United Nation’s deputy envoy to Afghanistan, Peter Galbraith, and his boss, the Norwegian diplomat Kai Eide, had a fractious relationship over the fraudulent Afghan elections in 2009. (Photo courtesy of Peter Galbraith)
General Stanley McChrystal led the US surge in Afghanistan that sought to defeat the Taliban for good. (Photo by PO1 Mark O’Donald)
Major General Nick Carter helped conceive of Provincial Reconstruction Teams in 2002 and played a key role during the US surge. (Photo by Robert Thaler)
During the operation to capture Marja, Captain Matt Golsteyn led Afghan forces into the south of the town, a largely successful operation, but one that won only grudging acceptance from local Afghans. (Photo courtesy of Matt Golsteyn)
Phil Weatherill was a British adviser in Sangin who came close to striking a peace deal that might have spared the lives of many US Marines. (Photo by Nick Pounds)
Second Lieutenant Martin Lindig debated with a religious leader in Sangin the reasons behind the US Marines’ decision to clear the city of Taliban and tribal militants. (Photo courtesy of USMC)
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Jack Fairweather
List of Illustrations
Regional view of Afghanistan
Southern Afghanistan
Eastern Afghanistan
Tribal/Ethnic Afghanistan
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Note on text
Prologue: The Mask of Anarchy
PART I: THE MISSING PEACE 2001–2003
1. The Wrong Kind of War
2. Bloody Hell
3. Good Taliban
4. The Man Who Would Be King
5. At the Gates
6. Warlords
7. National Solidarity
8. A Convenient Drug
9. Homecoming
PART II: A DANGEROUS ALLIANCE 2004–2007
10. Imperial Vision
11. PRTs
12. A Special Relationship
13. Eradication
14. Friendly Advice
15. Fly-Fishing in the Hindu Kush
16. A New War
17. Medusa
18. Bad Guests
19. All the Way
20. Salam
PART III: THE BLOOD PRICE 2008–2014
21. An Education
22. The Switch
23. Ghosts
24. A Cruel Summer
25. Elections
26. Political Expediency
27. A Reckoning
28. The Futility of Force
29. Endgame
Epilogue: Containment
Notes
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index
Copyright
A War of Choice: Honour, Hubris and
Sacrifice: The British in Iraq
For my girls,
Chrissy, Amelie and Marianna
‘UNLIKE OTHER WARS, AFGHAN WARS BECOME SERIOUS ONLY WHEN THEY ARE OVER.’
—Olaf Caroe
Quotations attributed to individuals are from their own recollections, except where endnotes indicate another source. Subsequent quotations from the same individual without footnotes indicate that the same source is being used.
I have sought to protect the identities of special forces personnel and intelligence officials except when their names are already in the public domain or they are no longer serving. For Pashtu and Dari names and places I have sought to use the most common transliterations.
A foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and the Washington Post, Jack Fairweather is currently Middle East editor and correspondent for Bloomberg News. He lives in Istanbul, Turkey.
In its earliest days, the American-led war in Afghanistan appeared to be a triumph – a ‘good war’ in comparison to the debacle in Iraq. It has since turned into one of the longest and most expensive wars in recent history. The story of how this good war went so bad may well turn out to be a defining tragedy of the twenty-first century – yet, as acclaimed war correspondent Jack Fairweather explains, it should also give us reason to hope for an outcome grounded in Afghan reality.
In The Good War, Fairweather provides the first full narrative history of the war in Afghanistan, from the 2001 invasion to the 2014 withdrawal. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, previously unpublished archives, and months of experience living and reporting in Afghanistan, Fairweather traces the course of the conflict from its inception after 9/11 to the drawdown in 2014. In the process, he explores the righteous intentions and astounding hubris that caused the West’s strategy in Afghanistan to flounder, refuting the long-held notion that the war could have been won with more troops and cash. Fairweather argues that only by accepting the limitations in Afghanistan – from the presence of the Taliban to the ubiquity of poppy production to the country’s inherent unsuitability for rapid, Western-style development – can we help to restore peace in this shattered land.
A timely lesson in the perils of nation-building and a sobering reminder of the limits of military power, The Good War leads readers from the White House Situation Room to Afghan military outposts, from warlords’ palaces to insurgents’ dens, to explain how the US and its British allies might have salvaged the Afghan campaign – and how we must rethink other ‘good’ wars in the future.
HAMID KARZAI OFTEN walked around the circle of his small garden in the palace grounds. Most evenings he could be found, head down, his hands clasped behind his back, striding in measured paces. He liked to keep fit, to ease the tension of a hundred meetings, to dwell on the past. This evening in early 2014 was no different.
The palace itself was a sweeping complex of hulking stone structures, round houses and even a quaint Victorian mansion set in eighty acres of grounds protected by high walls and barbed wire. Karzai had opted to live in a humbler concrete building, constructed by one of Afghanistan’s former princes in the 1960s, that contained its own courtyard. His guards usually stood to one side under the foliage of a cypress tree, trying not to intrude on these private moments as Karzai paced the worn earth. In the final years of his presidency his walks had become longer than usual as he worked through a particular source of angst.
As he paced, he could see an American surveillance blimp overhead, one of the helium-filled balloons with an array of cameras that had proliferated across the city, and which provided the US contractors operating them with the remarkable ability to peer into nooks and crannies. Some Afghans ascribed near-magical powers to the balloons. One rumour in the south was that the Americans had trained mice to run up the cable connecting the balloon to the surveillance station, make notes on what they saw, then run back down to tell their US overlords.1 Others feared the blimps were emitting harmful rays that filled their heads with Western fantasies while they slept, and that women were particularly susceptible.
Karzai knew the balloons were in the sky in part to protect him, and there was a time when he would have been reassured by their presence. It was he who had brought the Americans to the country, knowing that they alone possessed the wealth and power to rebuild Afghanistan. He had always seen himself as the father of the nation, a bold reformer who could transform his shattered country. Indeed, Karzai’s most frequent complaint throughout the thirteen-year war was that the West wasn’t doing enough to fulfil their shared vision.
The war, Karzai had freely professed to the world in the early days, was a righteous struggle against the forces of chaos and disintegration. The same evil that had perpetrated the attacks in New York and Washington was responsible for tearing apart his own country in the preceding years. He wanted more troops, more aid experts and development consultants, and more defence contractors and NGO workers. Poor and benighted countries like his, he had publicly argued, needed this paraphernalia of nation-building to join the modern world. Karzai’s call to drag Afghanistan into the light, establish a democracy and uphold the rule of law had captured the mood in Washington after 9/11.
Yet when the money had flowed and the soldiers surged, they had not quelled the deadly violence gripping the country. American forces battled a resurgent Taliban, and the Afghan civilians Karzai believed he was helping were caught in the crossfire. Over the course of 2007 there were at least 1,633 casualties, a threefold increase on the year before.2 By 2013 two hundred Afghan civilians were dying each month in the fighting, and thousands more had fled their homes or had their livelihoods destroyed.3 The refugee camps outside the Afghan capital of Kabul were overflowing.4
At first Karzai had been sure he was somehow to blame for not doing enough to temper American firepower or steer the reconstruction process.5 In the long, grinding middle stretch of the war he fell into what appeared to be a fog of depression. US diplomats who worked alongside him noticed a change in his countenance, mood swings and erratic behaviour. Rumours spread in the Western press that he was addicted to heroin or was on serious medication. According to those who knew him, he became susceptible to real and imagined maladies and increasingly locked himself away in the palace.6 He appeared to be waging an inner battle to prove to himself and his countrymen that he wasn’t to blame for the past thirteen years of bloodshed and mayhem.7
Only in the long perambulations at the end of his presidency did Karzai recognise what he saw as an incontrovertible truth: the blame for the mounting pile of war dead lay with the outsiders. Karzai hadn’t wrecked the country; rather, the Westerners had betrayed the ideals of the Good War they had subscribed to together. The West had never seen him as a genuine partner, he now understood. How else to explain their high-handed treatment of him? When he demanded that the US stop its aerial bombing, he was defied. When he asked to be informed of all American military operations, generals sometimes briefed him, but frequently he was ignored. Washington continued to side with Pakistan – even though that country appeared to support the insurgency – and President Barack Obama presumed to conduct negotiations with the Taliban without involving Karzai. The Afghan president came to believe that he was no more than a tool to service the real aim of the West: permanent instability in his country, so that Afghanistan’s natural resources could be plundered.8
The thought of being a puppet of the US and its British allies seemed to gnaw at him.9 At times, he wished he could smile and dismiss their obsequious blue-eyed ambassadors and generals with their proud talk of the war dead.10 In darker moments, he told advisers, he dwelled upon his predecessors’ success at driving out invaders at the tips of their soldiers’ spears. A favourite poem of his was Shelley’s ‘Mask of Anarchy’, a cry for freedom against the bonds of tyrannous overlords, which he cited to one visiting journalist.11
But if this narrative frustrated him it also lent him a new sense of purpose. He told his confidants that he should have stood up to the West sooner.12 He began to see himself not as the leader who had allowed the foreigners in, but as the man who had extracted from them what he could and was now pushing them out. At the end of his presidency, Karzai was a man reborn. He seemed to bound into meetings with visiting dignitaries, tribal chiefs, even American diplomats. They might accuse his government of corruption or his family of controlling the opium trade and stealing almost a billion dollars from Kabul’s national bank, but he told colleagues he no longer cared.13
Instead, at every opportunity he took delight in denouncing the West’s betrayal of Afghanistan. The Americans hadn’t come to fight al-Qaeda, he would intone. They had sought to wage war against the country and its people. ‘The West wanted to use Afghanistan,’ Karzai told the New York Times in November 2013, ‘to have bases here, to create a situation whereby in the end Afghanistan would be so weak that it would agree to a deal in which Afghanistan’s interests will not even be secondary, but tertiary and worse.’14
Now that he could see – and speak – clearly, Karzai appeared intent on redeeming himself in the eyes of his people by ridding Afghanistan of these foreign powers. He had refused to sign an agreement with the US military that would let them stay beyond 2014. It would be one of the final acts of his presidency. Yet even this gesture of independence had a hollow ring.
The Americans were already scaling back their presence and dismantling their vast war machine. The flow of money was ebbing, and the troops were going home. Beyond the palace walls, Kabul was emptying of Westerners; their mansions, once the scenes of lavish parties, were shuttered and quiet. Outside the city, soldiers were packing up their patrol bases for the last time. Karzai would not get to oust the Americans and their allies; they were doing that themselves.
The West has reached its own conclusions about the nature of its intervention in Afghanistan. By 2014 the war was already one of the most costly in American history.15 While there had been significant improvements in Afghans’ lives, including greater access to basic health care and a sevenfold increase in the number of children attending school, the costs in blood, money and political capital far outpaced these gains: $100 billion had been spent on American aid. Yet only an estimated 15 per cent of this money had reached its intended recipients.16 The rest was siphoned off by Western agencies, warlords, local contractors, petty criminals and, at times, even the Taliban. Thousands of projects from power plants to turbines to refrigerated food depots had been abandoned, left half finished, or destroyed as Western forces withdrew.
The Afghan people had suffered greatly: 32,000 had perished in suicide bombings, missile strikes, mortar attacks and shootings with more dying each week. The United Nations estimated that the fighting had forced at least 600,000 from their homes, many to end up in refugee camps and shanty towns outside Kabul and other major cities.17 In southern Afghanistan, a third of all children were acutely malnourished, with famine-like conditions affecting much of the area.18 Hanging over the country was the prospect that the Taliban would return and reignite the country’s civil war. Then there were the Western casualties: 3,400 – mostly soldiers – had died in Afghanistan by the beginning of 2014.19
The Good War had gone badly. The question was what, if anything, could be salvaged of the shattered ideal that Western military intervention had promised to deliver to Afghanistan and other dark corners of the world. When US soldiers had arrived in October 2001, their mission in President George W. Bush’s War on Terrorism was simple: punish those responsible for the worst attack on American shores since Pearl Harbor and ensure that they couldn’t harm the nation again. The enemy, in their eyes, was clearly defined: al-Qaeda and the Taliban government, which had refused to hand over Osama bin Laden and dismantle the shadowy terrorist group’s training camps in southern Afghanistan. As Bush famously divided the world in his speech to Congress on 20 September 2001, justifying the war: ‘Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.’
The US quickly routed al-Qaeda and threw the Taliban from power in December 2001. With the war seemingly over, US special forces mopped up the remnants of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the mountains. Washington then turned its attention to Iraq. The United Nations was left to assemble an interim government in Kabul and lead a cohort of aid agencies that wanted to spend billions on rebuilding the country. Many in the international community saw the Taliban not just as a security threat but as an affront to those closely held ideals of human rights, democracy and the free market. Images of Afghan women clad in full-body veils became symbols of the past that the aid world was sure the country was leaving behind. Afghanistan’s status as one of the poorest nations on earth was frequently cited as further evidence of the need to act. The Good War, in the soaring rhetoric of this idealism, was more than a necessary act of retaliation; it was a test case for humanitarian intervention, and aid workers’ ability to transform the lives of oppressed people in the developing world.
These aims were little more than rhetoric at first, but they contained the seeds of almost certain failure. To begin with, the Americans – from their political leaders down to their soldiers – had dangerously conflated al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The two groups had similarities, of course, but they differed in vital ways. Al-Qaeda was primarily made up of Arab nationals who believed in global jihad to advance their fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. By contrast, the Taliban’s ambitions were strictly limited to controlling their communities. They drew their values from the conservative mores of the Pashtun tribes of southern Afghanistan, and thus they could not be defeated by force of arms alone. A long and subtle process of education would be needed to change the mindsets of those who supported them.
In addition, America and its allies, who until that point had played a limited role in the international reconstruction effort, came to believe that to eliminate the terrorist threat and alleviate Afghans’ suffering, the West needed to play a more activist role in creating a strong, democratic state. At the same time this nation-building agenda needed to be backed by more forces to combat the returning Taliban. This approach at once sidelined Afghanistan’s post-Taliban political leaders and threatened to overwhelm their fragile government with aid projects the country could not support or realise.
The warriors and liberals responsible for managing the war and its aftermath were critically out of touch with the political reality of the country they were attempting to pacify and the nature of the people they were attempting to help. Only as the conflict smouldered and slowly began to reignite did it become clear to the Americans and their chief allies, the British, that they had misconceived their intervention in this complex and unforgiving country.
The result of America’s failures in Afghanistan, following the debacle in Iraq, has been to fundamentally shift how Washington and allied nations view their relationship to the developing world, thus completing a cycle that began with defeat in Vietnam in the 1970s. The lesson from that bloody war in South-East Asia – to steer clear of military action overseas – was largely observed. During the first Gulf War, the US was prepared to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait but not to seek Saddam Hussein’s removal. Washington also avoided intervention in the Balkans and Rwanda until public outcry over the slaughter in those countries prompted a rethink.
Yet after the Kosovo conflict in 1999 and particularly after 9/11, politicians and the army showed a growing readiness to intervene in the name of values rather than national interest, an urge that became overwhelming when the two strands ran together. Both the Left and the Right united in the first decade of the twenty-first century to rid the world of bin Laden’s aberrant strain of Islam and save Afghanistan from its own fundamentalist adversaries.
This is the story of how the world’s most powerful leaders plotted to build a new kind of nation in Afghanistan that was pure fantasy. It is the story of how those leaders pinned their hopes on a marginal tribal leader and failed to heed his prescient advice, and how he in turn outplayed them. It is the story of why the long-suffering Afghan people rejected salvation from a global army of would-be rescuers. And finally it is the story of how the promise of a new military doctrine was ended by the Good War in Afghanistan and what it means for the future of Western military action in the developing world.
THE GAPING HOLE in the Pentagon was still smouldering when Air Force One landed in Washington DC late on the afternoon of 11 September 2001. Businesses throughout the capital were shuttered and the streets were deserted. The few people who ventured outside had a hurried, feral look.
Hours earlier, two planes had crashed into the Twin Towers in New York and a third had slammed into the Department of Defense headquarters, just across the Potomac River from the National Mall. A fourth had ploughed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing everyone on board but sparing its target, which was presumed to be either the White House or the US Capitol. By the time President George W. Bush returned to the capital from an appearance in Sarasota, Florida, the immediate threat of another attack seemed to have passed, but fear and shock lingered throughout the country.
For an hour, Bush locked himself away in a small study with his chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, to prepare for a televised address that evening. Bush knew that what he said before the cameras would define his presidency.
As soon as Bush had heard about the second plane that morning in a Sarasota kindergarten classroom, he had reached a conclusion that was to have profound consequences: he must declare war to unite a grieving nation and to give the administration the broadest possible mandate to respond to this act of terrorism.1
Speaking from the Oval Office that evening, Bush explained to his fellow Americans that the country was now at war against both ‘terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbour them’. The announcement would lead quickly and inexorably to the war in Afghanistan. And the result of Bush’s decision, though seemingly reasonable to many on the evening of 11 September, would be a far more sweeping and bloody war than he and his supporters expected.
At the time, critics noted that no one in Bush’s inner circle had vetted this crucial speech except National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. As Matthew Waxman, Rice’s special assistant, later reflected, ‘What was incredible was how momentous a decision this is, to say we’re in a state of war with al-Qaeda, because it set us on a course not only for your international response, but also in our domestic constitutional relations. You’d expect that the cabinet would have met, and that different options would have been developed, and they would have debated the pros and cons, and that allies would have been consulted.’2 An alternative approach would have been to regard the attack as a crime, just like Omar Abdel-Rahman’s bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 or Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.
Bush didn’t hold with such legalistic thinking, which he considered to be part of the problem with his predecessor’s long-winded approach to the terrorist threat.3 As president, Bill Clinton hadn’t gone all out to kill Osama bin Laden; instead his administration had spent years trying to get the Taliban regime in Afghanistan to hand over bin Laden. America had been sending the wrong message, Bush felt, and it was time for drastic action. He was not alone in this opinion. After his television address, Bush met with his principal advisers in the oak-panelled situation room beneath the White House’s West Wing, where they expressed broad agreement with his views.4 Far less clear was how to prosecute a war against a shadowy terrorist organisation like al-Qaeda.
Bush naturally turned to US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who had prepared a shotgun list of questions that he rattled off with his usual crispness: Who are the targets? How much evidence do we need before going after al-Qaeda? How soon do we act? Rumsfeld then explained that the US army would not be ready for at least sixty days. After a moment of awkward silence, Rumsfeld promised to pressure the army, and the meeting broke up.5
In fact, the time it would take to deploy the army was hardly a surprise to those in the room, least of all Rumsfeld’s counterpart in foreign affairs, Secretary of State Colin Powell. As former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s top army job, Powell had spent much of his time ensuring that America could not rush into war. Like most officers of his generation, Powell had witnessed defeat in Vietnam and had concluded that the US army should avoid being drawn into another quagmire at all costs.
In the 1980s, Caspar Weinberger, a US Defense Secretary to whom Powell served as a special assistant, introduced conditions that must be met before sending troops to war: vital national interests had to be identified; clear political and army objectives formulated; and force used only after all diplomatic options had been exhausted. Weinberger’s preconditions removed the decision to go to war from the whims of politicians and placed the determination back in the hands of the army. His goal was to protect the military from another fiasco like Vietnam and to ensure that America entered only those fights it couldn’t avoid. In the context of the Cold War, the one conflict that could meet these conditions was a doomsday battle against the Soviet Union in Europe, the prospect of which, though terrifying, was receding.
The Weinberger Doctrine rapidly dominated how the army viewed its role by placing an emphasis on large mechanised forces and firepower. When Powell became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1989, he added further stipulations: US forces would fight only when they could be assured of having overwhelming force. Furthermore, before even launching an attack, the army must also plan its exit from the conflict.
The trouble with Weinberger and Powell’s approach was that while shielding the military from politicians’ whims, it also made the military impervious to the changing world around it. As the army confronted the break-up of the Soviet Union, its instinct was to do nothing, to the exasperation of even Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s former Secretary of State, who complained to Powell in 1993: ‘What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?’6
In 2001, Rumsfeld had taken the top job at the Pentagon for the second time in his career, vowing to rid the US military of its inertia. He wasn’t a neoconservative like some in the Bush administration but he shared with them a belief that America needed to project power to ensure its pre-eminent status. During his first stint as Defense Secretary – in Gerald Ford’s administration of the mid-1970s – he had developed a distrust of the generals, whom he regarded as obsessed with building their own empires within each branch. To change the army, Rumsfeld knew he would have to shake up some of these fiefdoms – and sure enough, the generals opposed his efforts.
Like Robert McNamara, another Defense Secretary who had promised to radically change the military, upon his second appointment Rumsfeld surrounded himself with a cadre of civilians. McNamara had his ‘Whizz Kids’; disgruntled military brass dubbed Rumsfeld’s advisers – most of them as old as the sixty-nine-year-old Defense Secretary – the ‘Wheeze Kids’.7
One of these advisers was seventy-three-year-old Andrew Marshall, head of the Pentagon’s obscure Office of Net Assessment. In the 1990s, Marshall had pondered how advances in smart missiles, spy satellites and drones could be used to develop new and deadly weapons systems better suited to the post-Cold War world. The result would be a streamlined military, capable of deploying rapidly and with devastating force. The generals hated Marshall’s ideas, which he had dubbed the ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’. The top brass correctly saw them as a threat to the status quo, which threatened to make the generals’ formations of tanks and planes obsolete. They went public with their discontent in the summer of 2001, and Rumsfeld backed down.
Rumsfeld had been thwarted but he didn’t drop his reform agenda, the need for which was underscored by the two options the army developed to attack al-Qaeda and its allies. One was for a cruise missile strike at al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, a suggestion Rumsfeld dubbed the ‘Clinton option’ in mockery of the previous administration’s attempts to destroy the organisation in 1998; a US cruise missile strike that year had blown up a few deserted training camps in the country, missing the terrorist leader.8 The other option was to mount a major assault that would take months to organise, and seemed to evoke the Soviet Union’s ill-fated invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s that resulted in its defeat at the hands of Afghan rebels.
Rumsfeld told his staff to go back to the drawing board. There had to be a better plan for Afghanistan. And to Rumsfeld’s intense frustration, it belonged not to him but to the Central Intelligence Agency.
On 13 September 2001, CIA Director George Tenet and Cofer Black, the CIA’s coordinator for counterterrorism, briefed President Bush on their plan to attack al-Qaeda – both in Afghanistan and anywhere else its members might be lurking.
The CIA had been badly shaken by the attacks, not least because the agency had missed the opportunity to prevent them. Since becoming director of the agency in 1996 under Clinton, Tenet had been warning of the dangers al-Qaeda posed. A former staff director on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Tenet had spent much of his career putting a polish on the grimy world of espionage for his political masters. He was a natural people pleaser – warm, blunt and deferential. But those qualities had not always served him or his country well in fighting terrorism.
In 1999, Tenet had presented Clinton with an opportunity to kill bin Laden – what turned out to be the best chance to eliminate the al-Qaeda leader before he started plotting the 9/11 attacks. Afghan informants had spotted the terrorist leader at a hunting camp in the barren hills of Helmand, a large province in southern Afghanistan. Mike Scheuer, the CIA station chief tracking bin Laden, urged his superiors to launch a missile strike. The Saudi had been in America’s sights since the early 1990s, when he’d first started preaching global jihad; in 1997 Clinton had issued an executive order authorising the CIA to capture bin Laden and use lethal force if necessary. Now the administration had its chance to eliminate the terrorist leader with an air strike that would avoid the complexities of trying to capture him.
In the White House situation room, Clinton, Tenet and the president’s counterterrorism adviser, Richard Clarke, stalled. Satellite imagery and mobile phone intercepts confirmed the presence of bin Laden’s entourage at the Helmand camp but, in an era before drones, there was no way of knowing for certain that the al-Qaeda leader was there. The reasons against attacking were also considerable. The 1998 strike had been an embarrassing failure after what were thought to be al-Qaeda facilities in Sudan and Afghanistan turned out to be a pharmaceutical factory with no links to the terrorist group; the training camp in Afghanistan had been largely deserted following a possible tip-off from Pakistan. The fear of another high-profile mistake was exacerbated by the fact that bin Laden’s hunting companions turned out to be wealthy princes from the United Arab Emirates, the Gulf state with which Clarke had negotiated an $8 billion arms contract the year before. The moment passed.9
Clarke later blamed the CIA for failing to eliminate bin Laden before 9/11. From Clarke’s point of view, the president’s executive order gave the CIA clear authorisation to take action against bin Laden. And Clarke felt there was much more the agency could have done to take him down.10
There was some truth to Clarke’s accusation. The CIA had become excessively hidebound, more interested in covering its own ass than in killing terrorists, according to Scheuer and other agents.11 However, the CIA’s meekness also stemmed from the Clinton administration’s outright scepticism towards the spy agency. The White House acted as if the end of the Cold War had made the CIA obsolete. Its budget had been slashed, its stations closed, its agents and their prized assets quietly mothballed. At one point in 1994, Congress had even debated whether the agency should be disbanded. In this climate of suspicion, many in the CIA felt Clinton’s directive for bin Laden to be deliberately soft: The president had backed away from ordering them to simply assassinate bin Laden, and had instead given the agency the nearly impossible task of capturing him. ‘If Clinton wanted them to kill him, then he should have just said so,’ said Scheuer.12
After the missed opportunity in Helmand in 1999, and with growing awareness of the danger al-Qaeda posed, the CIA tried a more aggressive approach. As one part of this new strategy, Tenet brought in Cofer Black – the former CIA station chief in Sudan with first-hand experience tracking al-Qaeda – to run the National Counterterrorism Center. For years the organisation had been a bureaucratic backwater, rife with infighting and petty squabbles with the FBI, with which it shared the job of tracking al-Qaeda operatives. Black tried to change the centre’s office culture. In his late forties, Black looked like an overeager scoutmaster, with flabby jowls, an owlish squint and an aggressive buzz cut that suggested a military career (though he’d never been more than a volunteer in the air force reserves). He liked to exhort his staff with rallying cries like ‘Be tough! This is no time to go introspective!’13
His results were mixed, but he did develop an outlandish new plan to eliminate bin Laden that involved supporting the Northern Alliance, a loose confederation of Afghan warlords and tribes. Assembled by the national leadership that had been unseated in 1996 by the Taliban, the Northern Alliance had since been fighting a rearguard action against the Islamist movement, which now controlled the Afghan capital of Kabul and vast swathes of the country, including the mountainous region where al-Qaeda had its training camps. If Taliban control over Afghanistan were loosened, Black thought, the CIA might be able to get close enough to al-Qaeda to strike at it with something other than long-range missiles.
This new approach amounted to taking sides in Afghanistan’s long-running civil war, and the Clinton administration had baulked at such a radical shift in policy towards the country. The Alliance’s warlords were a less than savoury bunch, the State Department pointed out, with several accused of human rights abuses and drug trafficking. There was no way the US could overtly support such men. The incoming Bush team had fewer qualms about Black’s plan. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage approved the scheme and its $125 million budget on 4 September 2001 – too late to stop 9/11, but just in time to provide a blueprint for a limited war in Afghanistan.
Tenet now presented this plan to Bush, starting with a list of fearful provisos. The CIA estimated that the Northern Alliance had 20,000 irregular fighters to the Taliban’s 45,000. The Alliance was poorly equipped and lacked supplies, electricity and running water. Just getting to their territory in the high mountain valleys of northern Afghanistan in winter could be a challenge. There was no airport, and any helicopters used for delivering troops and supplies would have to negotiate 24,000-foot-high snowbound passes as they crossed the Hindu Kush. Once there, any Americans would be at the mercy of the Alliance, a fractious, back-stabbing bunch. Al-Qaeda had assassinated the one figure of national standing, defence minister turned Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, the day before 9/11.
If there was a bright side, Tenet said, it was that the Taliban was just as unruly. Some of the Pashtun tribes upon whom the Taliban relied for support could be bought, although a core of bearded zealots remained around the movement’s spiritual leader, Mullah Omar. The Taliban might be persuaded to part ways with al-Qaeda if the regime’s survival depended upon it, but Tenet feared that the harsh brand of Islam that had brought together Mullah Omar and bin Laden would not be broken. The CIA paramilitary teams who would exploit the rollback of the Taliban under Black’s scheme had to expect they would be fighting all the way to bin Laden’s lair, in the middle of a brutal winter, with unreliable Afghan allies and an entrenched foe.
Bush looked suitably daunted as he listened to Tenet’s presentation that September morning. Black took that as his cue for a little bombast. He leaped from his chair as he started to talk about the coming battle, throwing down markers on the floor to represent the two sides.
‘Mr President,’ he said, ‘we can do this. No doubt in my mind . . . But you’ve got to understand, people are going to die. And the worst part about it, Mr President, Americans are going to die – my colleagues and my friends.’
‘That’s war,’ Bush said.14
Black concluded his presentation with a ghoulish claim: ‘You give us the mission – we can get ’em. When we’re through with them, they will have flies walking across their eyeballs,’ he said. He promised to bring victory within weeks.
Bush lapped it up. Black became a regular at the president’s morning intelligence briefings. In the White House Black became known, with a certain awe, as ‘the flies-on-the-eyeballs guy’.15
Under normal circumstances Black would not have shaped US policy single-handedly, but the turmoil within government agencies presented powerful opportunities for those with strong convictions. The ambiguous nature of 9/11 – more than a crime but not a conventional act of war – had created a grey area where the CIA’s leadership should have trodden carefully given its history of overreaching at the whim of earlier presidents. Instead the organisation embraced its role at the heart of what a week later Bush would call the ‘War on Terror’.
Black would play a key role in shaping the objectives of this broader war and in distorting the administration’s thinking about Afghanistan for years to come. While he was drawing up plans for Afghanistan, Black also envisaged the CIA conducting global covert operations against terrorist organisations. He wanted a free hand to create paramilitary teams to assassinate suspects and detain and interrogate others – whatever it took to stop the next attack. What Black was describing were counterterrorism operations that were ultimately limited in their scope (albeit employing unprecedented levels of violence). Yet in Afghanistan, Black’s covert means against a terrorist group were being employed for a very overt objective: a war to overthrow a government and install a new one, carrying with it grave and ill-discerned implications.
ON 15 SEPTEMBER 2001, four days after al-Qaeda attacked America, Bush brought together his advisers at Camp David, the president’s country retreat in rural Maryland. Much of the morning’s discussion was dominated not by talk of Afghanistan but by the subject of Iraq. There was no clear link between Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaeda, but some top officials saw the opportunity to target a country that had routinely provoked America since the first Gulf War in the early 1990s. The Pentagon’s number two, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, went as far as suggesting that the US skip a potentially difficult campaign in central Asia in favour of toppling Hussein.
Bush eventually grew irritated with the digression and asked the group to stay focused on Afghanistan. ‘What are the worst cases out there? What are the real downside risks?’ he asked them at one point.1
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice had already looked at a map of Afghanistan spread out on a conference table and recoiled. The country evoked every negative association in her: distant, remote, treacherous. She wondered aloud whether America would make the mistake of being drawn into such a nest of vipers.
Rice was right to be cautious about Afghanistan. There was the country’s most recent, bloody history. There were the two decades of war – starting in 1979 with the Soviet occupation and ending with the desperate civil war of the 1990s – that had turned the country into one of the poorest on earth. Yet the nation’s history of conflict stretched back to its origins. Afghanistan was defined by its mountains, which covered four-fifths of its land, and fractured the country along ethnic and tribal lines. The Pashtuns in the south were the largest ethnic group, representing a little over half the country’s 30 million inhabitants. Afghanistan’s rulers had traditionally come from its highly conservative tribes as did the Taliban. The country’s second-largest group were the Tajiks in the north and west, whose members spoke Dari, a version of Persian, and opposed Pashtun hegemony. They formed the bedrock of the Northern Alliance’s support. On one level, the recent civil war was a sectarian conflict between the two groups, with the country’s Uzbek and Hazara minorities siding with the Alliance against the Pashtun majority. There were plenty of other reasons to fight besides ethnicity, however; each group had a brittle sense of tribal honour, which often led to clashes within each clan and family. As a young Winston Churchill observed while stationed in one Pashtun valley in 1897, ‘a continual state of feud and strife prevails through the land . . . Every man’s hand is against the other, and all against the stranger.’2
The complexities of Afghanistan’s tribal culture had repeatedly thwarted powerful foreign invaders throughout history. The British were among the more recent, arriving in Afghanistan in 1839 near the height of their empire. Members of the jodhpur-wearing ruling class were unhinged by the thought of Russia, which was expanding rapidly across central Asia, seizing Afghanistan and thereby threatening British holdings in India and present-day Pakistan. A few on the British side voiced their concerns about the venture. For example, veteran diplomat William Elphinstone warned that victory over the Afghans might be swift, but the idea of imposing a puppet ruler and garrisoning such a poor and remote country would be ‘hopeless’.3
But the British had talked themselves into the necessity of occupying Kabul, and were soon pleasantly surprised by the salubrious setting they found. American adventurer Josiah Harlan, who arrived in Afghanistan in 1827, the country’s first visitor from the US, later recalled that ‘Kabul, the city of a thousand gardens, in those days was a paradise’. In the heat of the summer, the evenings were often cooled by air blowing off the Hindu Kush mountains. The winters were frigid but the snows melted rapidly in the spring, as daisies, forget-me-nots and purple gromwell blossomed on the hillsides, and beds of roses, hyacinths and narcissi filled the compounds of notable families.
Harlan was not impressed by the arrival of ‘senseless stranger boors’, as he called the British, whom he accused of being ‘vile in habit, infamous in vulgar tastes, callous leaders in the sanguinary march of heedless conquests’.4 There was plenty of evidence to support Harlan’s views. Having installed themselves in Kabul and with a hapless former king, Shah Shuja, on the throne, the British set about recreating a peculiar colonial idyll, consisting of the starched formality of military parades, manly endeavour on the cricket pitch and, more dangerously, amorous abandon with the locals. Kabul had long had a red-light district, in the town’s Indian quarter, but the arrival of the 5,000-strong army sent demands soaring, and Afghan women in their full-length burkas were soon spotted entering the British camp, lending another meaning to Harlan’s complaint of ‘heedless conquests’.
British Deputy Envoy Alexander Burnes was ‘especially shameless’ and kept a harem of local and Kashmiri women, wrote Mirzat Ali, an Afghan chronicler of the period. ‘In his private quarters, he would take a bath with his Afghan mistress in the hot water of lust and pleasures, as the two rubbed each other down with flannels of giddy joy and the talc of intimacy,’ wrote Ali, adding that, ‘Two memsahibs, also his lovers, would join them.’5