Throughout this extensive area he was able, as British Representative, to settle outstanding quarrels, allay animosities, and make tribal warfare cease—winning, at the same time, the affection of the Khan and chiefs and tribesmen, over whom he exercised commanding influence till his death.
—Thomas Henry Thornton, description in Colonel Sir Robert Sandeman, 1895
The Taliban now controls more territory than at any time since 2001.
—Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, Quarterly Report to the United States Congress, 2016
The British successfully ruled the tribes along the edge of the North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan for a hundred years, from 1848 to 1947. The regions of direct rule were known as the Settled Areas. Just beyond, in the true border regions where the British had influence but no direct control, lay the so-called tribal areas, which even today are outside the full control of the Pakistani government and hotbeds of extremism. Four British officers who spent their lives on the frontier stood head and shoulders above the rest: John Nicholson, James Abbott, John Jacob, and Robert Sandeman. Two Pakistani towns still retain the names of these officers, Abbottabad and Jacobabad, as testaments to the enduring influence of the men.
Each officer improved his area of the frontier and altered its very nature. They settled disputes among the tribes and dispensed justice. They collected taxes and built roads and canals. They created a government that worked. To do this they relied upon the power of persuasion rather than the sword. Backed by small security forces, each one built a culture that rested on predictability and the rule of law, replacing feuds and isolation with prosperity and trade.
James Abbott quelled the Hazara areas north of Peshawar by mediating between rival clans. Robert Sandeman settled decades of strife between the khan of Khelat and his subordinate chiefs in Baluchistan by negotiating a lasting compromise between them. Once John Jacob and John Nicholson had stamped out highway robbery, trade flourished and towns grew. Villagers were so impressed by Nicholson that they started a religion that took him as their god. He whipped the adherents for this offense against his own strong Christian belief.
In Afghanistan the central truism of counterinsurgency is that you cannot kill your way to victory. Despite years of killing, the official numbers on the Taliban battle rolls hardly changed at all: between twenty-five thousand and thirty thousand. Nor was killing the goal. Better security, paid for by the hard fighting that went with it, provided a breathing space into which the government could step and become effective. That in turn improved security in a virtuous circle.
This dynamic worked both ways, and without an effective Afghan government our efforts were doomed to fail. People would turn away from the authorities and security would steadily erode, making government even less a part of people’s lives.
From the perspective of the average Afghan, the occupation since 2001 has failed. In some respects the average person’s life is better. There are schools in some areas, the ring road is drivable, and medical clinics operate in almost all districts.
Each of these achievements has its dark side. Almost half of children receive no education at all. Schools are typically open for only three hours a day. Thousands of ghost teachers on the books do not teach, wasting millions of dollars. Those who do teach give lessons at a level that will not afford students sufficient learning to boost their job prospects.1
Lacking maintenance, the ring road is deteriorating, with potholes seldom fixed and security incidents proliferating. Nor does the highway yet extend around the entire country. Clinics operate in districts, but many districts have a single clinic for seventy-five thousand or a hundred thousand residents, and the health-care system is fragile, even though it is farmed out and administered by NGOs (and thus is not quite a government achievement). That is the story of U.S. “wins” in Afghanistan.
The failures include a predatory justice system of the police and judiciary, the nonperforming system of local and provincial governments that fail to affect the lives of rural people in a meaningful way, and a security situation that deteriorates with each passing year, with rising numbers of attacks and civilian casualties and more territory lost to insurgents.2 The economy stagnates, with a lack of real trade access to India and other partners, which pushes the unemployment rate to levels Americans would consider another Great Depression.3
Despite these problems, the people have no great love of the Taliban, which they perceive to be a creature of Pakistan and a cruel movement bent on tearing their country apart. People are suffering with little hope for the future. How did this happen after $1 trillion in assistance?
In many respects we were behind the eight ball from the very beginning. When the Karzai government took over in 2002, aid trickled down sporadically to the districts, affecting too few villages. Instead of seeing an improvement in their daily lives people saw lawless police and corrupt officials running roughshod over them, their elders, and their future. This legacy effectively doubled the task the Americans faced, because years of ineffective governance and high-handed official brigandage steadily eroded public support. By 2009 a good government that provided security and responsive civilian officials was the best, and possibly only, way out of what had steadily become a quagmire of our own creation.
This is what General Stanley McChrystal reported to the president. In his words we had “an urgent need for a significant change to our strategy” that would “improve the effectiveness of the Afghan National Security Forces and elevate the importance of governance.”4
A government that ruled effectively could allow the U.S. forces to exit with honor, while an ineffective one would doom the country to more war and a return to chaos. Nothing in the character of the Afghan people predetermined the outcome of this struggle. The future hinged on our performance working with the Afghans to create a government that functioned.
For years the United States made all of the right noises. Security patrols were nominally “Afghan-led,” when even a casual observer could clearly see they were not. Trying to get a few Afghan police patrolmen or soldiers to accompany Americans as they walked through a few villages could be comical. Over time this situation improved, especially with the Afghan army. But the sham persisted for more than a decade.
But the United States failed to make an equivalent effort on the civil side. There, too, we made the right noises. We spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the districts and made it appear that the Afghans handled the money and decided which projects went to which village. In reality we offered them a narrow palette of projects from insufficiently flexible programs designed in Washington. We controlled the money. Starved of responsibility, resources, and often of any choice in the matter, Afghan local government at the district level existed on handouts from the Americans. When we left and U.S. money dried up, the system already rotten from the inside withered to a husk. Because security went hand in hand with projects, that too faltered. In September 2015 the Taliban captured its first city, Kunduz, and held parts of it for two weeks.
We could have pulled out all the stops to institute a vibrant system of local government that could support itself and function at an acceptable level. Whether doing so meant sending small block grants to the districts (as our federal government sends block grants to U.S. counties and states, and states send block grants to cities and towns), nothing in our civilian effort ensured the lowest level of government in the districts did not fall apart once the Americans left. Instead we instituted half-baked ideas such as the District Delivery Program, which delivered items to the district center if the Afghan staff went through sixteen different steps, including getting competing bids from three different vendors for each item. Expectations were out of sync with reality. Advice from the embassy regarding DDP concluded, “If the DST doesn’t engage in this it is NOT going to work”—as if the DST could force the Afghans to follow rules that would be unworkable anywhere else.5
A basic problem: many, if not most, districts possessed too few resources to ever pull themselves up to an acceptable level of operation. Unlike Dand but similar to Maiwand (or worse), the districts lacked the security forces and the money to do much more than hunker down behind the walls of the district center and hope their periodic supply runs would arrive on time. In 2015 these runs often didn’t arrive at all. Far-flung district centers were being overrun by Taliban massing outside. This bunker mentality was seen by the embassy as proof that the Afghans were not capable of governing. But that analysis was self-fulfilling; no district governor could govern with no resources.
Our policy toward the districts stemmed from our rock-bottom expectations of them. It assumed most would fail if they did try to help the people and instead relied upon a bureaucratic, top-down official system that was clearly failing by 2011 and 2012. Under this policy it was helping the national, provincial, and city officials who counted. It didn’t matter if the system worked badly in the districts or not at all. We never tried to alter our strategic course, despite the warnings that the districts would likely fail once we left, even though they were the only thing keeping the rural people on the side of the government.
One of the great tragedies of our intervention is how we deluded ourselves for so long that districts could survive after we left, with projects parceled out at a tiny rate from a palsied national system. As General Creighton Abrams warned when commanding in Vietnam, the graphs that showed progress took precedence over the reality, and we stopped asking ourselves if the important things were really getting done. Our military and financial might was obvious, so we thought we couldn’t lose, when in the countryside we were weaker than we imagined. So it happened that even where we won, such as in Dand, we then began to lose when we left, because we failed to give the government the tools it needed to maintain a political bargain with its people for years to come.
***
To understand the American mindset requires only that one stroll across KAF at night. To do so is to step into a science fiction movie. Dust hangs in the air, kicked up by thousands of vehicles constantly crisscrossing the vast base. Few streetlights exist, while the beams of headlights of cars bouncing along the roads jerk sharply and skitter through the dirty air.
A journey by foot is tortuous, with many dead ends and turnarounds. Shipping containers ringed with chicken wire and large concrete T-walls topped with razor wire form individual yards. For mile after mile the pedestrian dodges and weaves, cutting this way and that, trying to find paths between the thousands of self-contained compounds that carve up the base. The base is constantly being reconstructed; a pathway open yesterday is closed today. Thousands of massive concrete T-walls protect metal accommodation sheds and office blocks from rocket fire.
T-walls symbolize of the mighty U.S. effort here in Afghanistan. T-walls are poured in a factory near Kandahar City, loaded four or five to a truck, and delivered by the thousands to bases across the province. T-walls come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and the utilitarian concrete is often transformed by amateur artists taking a break from their day job. Units paint medieval knights, attack helicopters, rifles, and shields on them.
T-walls are throwaway items to Americans. Like guardrails on an American highway, you see them but they don’t register. But they are emblematic of the American effort. In 2011 the average Afghan person’s share of the national economy, or GDP per capita, was $1,000, according to the CIA. A single gaily painted T-wall cost $900. One of these throwaway items is worth almost as much as an Afghan person’s work for an entire year.
On KAF, with its enormity and solidity, the prospect of actually losing seemed remote. On a firebase in a remote valley such as in Daechopan District in Zabul Province, on a hill once occupied by the Soviets, where thirty Americans and seventy Afghan soldiers and police constitute the sole authority over a district of forty thousand people, the prospect of losing is much more real, especially when the previous unit tells you the Taliban attacked for two days straight and the soldiers almost ran out of ammunition because choppers couldn’t fly through bad weather to resupply them.
The American effort is massive. Most of the trillion dollars the United States has spent in Afghanistan paid for security—T-walls and bullets, along with pens, tents, and the salaries of U.S. soldiers, all serving to keep the Americans in the game. It costs between $500,000 and $1 million to keep a single American soldier in Afghanistan for one year.6 In fiscal year 2011 the United States spent $118.6 billion in Afghanistan, mostly on its own forces.
With this massive capability and outlay, how could we lose? The prospect seemed inconceivable. Our instinct defied our own perceptions. As Ambassador Ronald Neumann told us in training at the Foreign Service Institute in April 2011, every three-year plan that he’d seen had failed. Yet we always assumed the next one would succeed.
We could have altered course, but we didn’t. We passed the buck. When Afghans complained about the system the United States helped to build, we told them it was their fault for building such a lousy system in the first place, as if we had no hand in it. Many Americans forgot that foreign advisors originally arrived in 2002 to help set up a national system. In the words of a British ambassador to Kabul, spoken only half in jest, the constitution was “designed by a Frenchman and imposed by an American.”7
Foreign advisors promised the system would be bottom-up. A key advisor to the Afghan finance minister from mid-2002 onward was British national Clare Lockhart. She said the system they created was a good one that would restore the faith of the people in their government. “We designed national programs as the key instrument for fostering citizen trust in its capacity to govern,” she later wrote.8 The Afghan finance minister she advised, Ashraf Ghani, was elected president in 2014 and began trying to dismantle large parts of the faltering system he helped to create.
Already we see the Afghan government trying to reform itself. More anticorruption governors are being appointed. The broken budget system is being cast aside where it doesn’t work, and new approaches are being tried, such as sending block grants to the provinces. What the Americans hesitated to do—wholesale reform of a system that didn’t work—is being forced upon the Afghans, who cannot continue to settle for a nonfunctioning government if they hope to avoid oblivion. At its heart the national government is finally trying to empower the people at the lowest levels—something we failed to do all along because we lacked the awareness to admit it was both necessary and possible.
Afghans are a hardy, fierce, smart, and patriotic people. If they learned anything from the Americans, they learned cynicism. They learned that the powerful are rewarded with what they can grab and their enemies (Pakistan) are rewarded by their friends (the United States). There is no sign the Taliban will let up their attacks for years, until the government proves it can survive under pressure. But it must adapt to survive.
After the Afghans spent years preparing to take over a system that failed to work as soon as the switch was pulled, they must now and in the future rely on the resilience of their own people. This is the surest path to success. The Afghans are now adapting in order to stave off a determined enemy. We could blame the precarious nature of the current situation on the failings of the national government or the culture, but any reasonable reading of the record suggests that it is we outsiders, just as much as they, who should shoulder the blame for the current chaotic state of affairs in Afghanistan.