When campaigns grind to an end, books and articles begin to appear, not in ones and twos, but in a veritable flood. The commentary on the Coalition’s efforts in Afghanistan is almost entirely critical. It is now an article of faith that the campaign failed to live up to the expectations that were once heaped upon it. It was, in fact, never possible that a Westernized, democratic, wealthy Central Asian Switzerland would emerge from the efforts of the United States and its 41 partner nations, but it is against the failure to achieve these overinflated aims that much of the criticism is now directed. In the general blood-letting and finger-pointing, the shortcomings of the military, particularly the forces of the United States and Britain, have been subjected to a level of analysis that is apparently forensic.
Much of this analysis focuses on the adoption of a counterinsurgency “strategy” in 2009. Former American and British ambassadors to Kabul such as Karl Eikenberry and Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, academics such as Tim Bird, Alex Marshall, Vanda Felbab-Brown, Whitney Kassell, and Anthony King, ex-service personnel such as Evan Munsing and Frank Ledwidge, and journalists such as Matthew Paris, have all argued with varying degrees of vehemence that counterinsurgency, the much vaunted “silver-bullet” that was going to save the Coalition’s mission, proved just as illusory as all the other approaches.1 According to these analyses counterinsurgency was destined to fail because none of the components for a successful campaign were in place. There was an absence of legitimate government at both the national and local levels, there was an all pervasive corruption, there were incompetent security forces that could not protect the population, there was a failure to produce development, which might have succeeded in winning hearts and minds, there was the terrain—among the most forbidding in which Western soldiers have ever had to operate—and there was a long common border with Pakistan, impossible to seal, which allowed insurgents easy access to safe base areas in the tribal border lands.
In the path of this onslaught, it is easy for more nuanced voices to be lost: the analysis of an aid worker such as Astri Suhrke, the British Territorial Army officer Mike Martin, or that extraordinary reincarnation of a nineteenth-century British political officer, Carter Malkasian, all of whom developed a knowledge of Afghanistan produced by years of continuous service.2 These authors do not attempt to deny that extraordinary errors were made, that the Coalition suffered from a level of strategic incoherence that made the objectives of the Third Crusade a model of clarity, and that there was always a mismatch between aims and means that would have had Carl von Clausewitz rolling in his grave. But coalitions, by their nature, are often prone to strategic incoherence, even when the enemy is as clear as the Axis during World War II or the Central Powers during World War I. Earlier counterinsurgency campaigns, the British in Malaya and the Americans in Vietnam, were made easy by comparison because they were fought against an ideologically and organizationally unified enemy. Even in Iraq, there was a degree of coherence about the conflict, essentially five overlapping campaigns against enemies who disliked each other almost as much as they disliked the Coalition forces. Trying to understand the opposition in Afghanistan is like trying to describe the shapes made by the particles in a kaleidoscope, and all one has to do is shake the kaleidoscope a little and an entirely new pattern emerges.
Each province in Afghanistan is different. In some, particularly north and west of the Hindu Kush, there are small terrorist bands and occasional terrorist attacks but no deep-seated insurgency, even among the descendents of the Pashtun tribes Abdur Rahmin forced north in the late nineteenth century. Cities such as Mazar-e-Sharif and Herat are obviously prosperous, their economies benefiting from close ties to Uzbekistan and Iran, respectively. The same is true for Kabul, a bustling city of traffic jams, wedding halls, gymnasiums, petrol stations, and modern supermarkets, very much like an Indian city of 30 years ago, just before that country’s economic take-off, and the Kabul Valley, where some 5.5 million of Afghanistan’s 30 million live. There are terrorist attacks, and the Kabulis regard them as such; there is no single area in the city where the Afghan National Police (ANP) and the National Directorate of Security (NDS) do not have control. The life of the Haqqani operatives in Kabul is often nasty, brutish, and short, and it would be shorter still if a would-be suicide bomber were to fall into the hands of a crowd of Kabulis.
This leaves the east and the south, where there are insurgencies. But even here, as Malkasian and Martin point out, counterinsurgency operations had as many successes as it had failures. Critics point to the failure of a large-scale operation to bring security to the Marjah district to the east of Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital of Helmand, in mid-2010, and the less-than-satisfactory results attained by Operation Hamkiri to eliminate the Taliban infrastructure in and around Kandahar. They attribute the abandonment of large-scale COIN operations in the summer of 2010 by General David Petraeus to the failure of these operations, but that is hardly fair, given that the timetable set by the Obama administration meant that there was scarcely enough time for large-scale operations to begin to have an effect. It is largely for this reason that Petraeus placed renewed emphasis on counterterror operations, which is not an alternative to counterinsurgency but often an essential element.3
It is not, of course, true that there were no counterinsurgency operations carried out before the arrival of General Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan in the summer of 2009. History is filled with examples of commanders claiming that they were the ones who alone had the vision to introduce a new war-winning strategy. It is often the case in conventional operations—Montgomery, for example, claiming to have transformed the British Eighth Army virtually overnight in the summer of 1942—but it can also be found in counterinsurgency operations. Sir Gerald Templer claimed this in Malaya in 1952 when he was in fact standing on the shoulders of Harold Briggs, and David Petraeus himself would claim this in Iraq when it was actually the product of a number of task force commanders, such as H. R. McMaster and Sean MacFarland.4
While it was true that the U.S. Army had abandoned counterinsurgency after the withdrawal from Vietnam, several of the formations that deployed to Afghanistan at the beginning of operations, the British, the Australians, and the French, had their own very distinctive counterinsurgency cultures, and other national contingents, particularly the Dutch and the Danes, adapted very rapidly. Other contingents, for example, the Germans in Mazar-e-Sharif and the Italians and Spanish in the west, were in areas where there was little or no evidence of insurgency, and hence no need for the development of an appropriate doctrine.
Any attempt to give an objective history of the evolution of counterinsurgency in a country as large and as complex as Afghanistan in a single chapter is bound to be so superficial as to be almost meaningless. This account will therefore center on the operations of the British (Op HERRICK) and U.S. armies in Helmand and Kandahar. The author was twice deployed to the Helmand Valley as an embedded operational military historian, tasked with capturing the realities of operations in the field, and bringing them back to the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, so they could be incorporated into the curriculum with little or no delay.5 Both deployments were with elements of 1 Royal Anglian Regiment, the first in the Sangin area in the summer of 2007 and the second in the Nad-e Ali district in the summer of 2012.6
The senior officers of the regiment and the senior NCOs were all hugely experienced in counterinsurgency and peace-keeping, in Northern Ireland, in the Balkans, and in Iraq, and many of the junior officers and NCOs had experienced at least one tour of Iraq. In addition, all had received a basic education in the history and principles of counterinsurgency, either at Sandhurst as cadets, on the Junior Staff and Command Course, or at the old Army Staff College at Camberley. They well understood the importance of intelligence, had the services of a number of excellent Pashto-speaking interpreters, and, Frank Ledwidge to the contrary, had a sophisticated understanding of the tribal dynamics of the upper Helmand Valley. They were only too aware that they were part of a much larger inter-tribal dispute, and that their erstwhile allies, the Alizai, were trying to use them to discomfort a rival Pashtun tribe, the Ishaqzai.7
They had one overriding problem. Their area of responsibility covered territory that was roughly half the size of Wales, with a population of more than 100,000, and the entire task force deployed in the upper Helmand Valley numbered fewer than 1,200. They had, too, very few Afghan forces. The reconstituted Afghan National Army was still in its infancy, and the units available in the Sangin area—two platoons that were in effect a warrior band under the command of a Pashtun chieftain, Rizal Khan, who looked as though he had come straight from a page of Kipling—were an unknown quantity.
In a series of operations conducted along the upper reaches of the valley, the companies of the task force frequently engaged numerically superior forces. Operation Ghartse Ghar (Mountain Goat), for example, conducted in late June and early July 2007, saw five under-strength platoons of A and B companies and two platoons of Rizal Khan’s militia, a total of no more than 140 British and Afghan soldiers, trap at least twice their number of Taliban in a complex double-envelopment. There was heavy fighting for two days, the Taliban counterattacked, and a tactical withdrawal across the valley by the two platoons of B Company to evacuate casualties, a distance of only 1,500 yards, took six hours, with heavy fighting all the way. The outcome of the fighting was assured, at least in part, by superior tactical skills, but the British also had substantial quantities of firepower on call: 105-mm guns and mortars, and even more impressively Harrier GA aircraft, Apache attack helicopters, and a B1 bomber that flew up the valley in mid-morning June 30, looking as though it had come from the set of a science fiction film. All this ordnance carried its own costs. Even the most skilled forward air controllers sometimes have to take an educated guess as to the coordinates of a target, and there were almost certainly some civilian casualties, although not as many as some critics claim.
One of the criticisms that have been made of British operations during this period is that the soldiers were “trigger-happy,” and were prone to engage Afghans on the slightest pretext. During his time in the valley this author saw nothing of the kind. If anything, it was quite the reverse, with nearly superhuman restraint being displayed. For example, after one major night attack when Taliban could be seen quite clearly through night vision goggles carrying their dead away, the commanding officer of B Company ordered his men not to engage because they were a burial party and not carrying long-barreled weapons.
In 2007 the British were able to “clear” but they were unable to “build and hold” in accordance with that well-known tenet of counterinsurgency. The problem was quite simply lack of manpower. It was not a new problem. Much criticism has been leveled at the first contingent, 3 Para (3rd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment), for not concentrating in a small area around the provincial capital. Several explanations have been offered for this supposed mal-deployment, including an extraordinary thesis by sociologist Anthony King, that the Paras were programmed to do it by their “can do,” “crack on” culture.8 In arguing this case, King fails to recognize the difference between the “crack” of regimental anecdote and the cold sober reality with which officers such as Ed Butler and Stuart Tootal made their decisions. It was not simply the political pressures placed on them by the Afghan administration, but the strategic geography of the valley. Lashkar Gah and the immediate vicinity was not the only vital ground—so too was the Kajaki Dam complex, the fords across the Helmand River west of Sangin, the choke point at Garmser, and several other points besides. Much of the criticism directed at the officers of the first deployment, in fact, might well be an attempt to divert blame from those upon whose shoulders it more truly lies—those who gave them an unworkable plan with too few resources.
Lack of manpower was to bedevil operations in the valley until the last months of 2009. It is extraordinary that a senior civil servant in the MoD could write at this time that “there is no evidence that any increase in forces in Helmand would have a significant effect on the success of operations.”9 In the summer of 2007 lack of manpower affected every aspect of operations. For example, it meant that there was one intelligence officer in Sangin, Captain Kathy Freeman, a remarkable territorial army officer, the only woman in Sangin at the time, who was also responsible for female engagement. Frequently people were burdened with two or three major, but distinctly different, responsibilities. An Education and Training Service officer, Major Craig Terblanche, who had a degree in geography, and the author, who had been educated as a military historian and had once been an intelligence officer in the Australian Army, took it upon themselves to help Captain Freeman by identifying and mapping the houses and shops in Sangin, visiting the bookshops and talking to the proprietors, and picking up waste paper in the street—bills, receipts, notes—which were then translated and cataloged, from which a picture of the economic life of the town was slowly built up.
The Royal Anglian’s tour of 2007 became the subject of regimental legend. The officers and men of the battalion were awarded a Distinguished Service Order and six Military Crosses, one of them posthumously. On the evening of June 30, 2007, after witnessing the opening phases of Ghartse Ghar, this author wrote in his diary, in a parody of General Pierre Bosquet’s comment on the charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava, “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la COIN.”
Five years later this author rejoined the Royal Anglian Regiment, this time based in Shawqat, the administrative center for the Nad-e Ali District. As recently as the summer of 2009 Nad-e Ali had been under the firm control of the Taliban, the center from which a number of attacks had been launched against Lashkar Gar, the provincial capital. The BBC’s Caroline Wyatt had come to know the area well over the years. In a broadcast from Shawqat in early July 2012 she expressed her astonishment at the transformation she observed. Walking through the bazaar on Sunday, July 1, she commented on the sheer amount of commercial activity in the densely packed streets with stalls selling everything from water melons to radios and automotive parts.
A few days later, this author had exactly the same impression, when visiting the studios of Radio Nad-e Ali, while District Governor Habibullah was conducting a phone-in program. The great majority of the callers were women, asking questions about the availability of health services, educational facilities, job opportunities in nursing and teaching, or complaining about the rising price of cooking oil, the noise young men made at night revving their motorcycles through the streets, or problems in registering their children to take the Konkar (matriculation) exam. There was a comforting familiarity about these conversations. They could have been heard on virtually any phone-in program in Britain or the United States.
The impression of quotidian normality was confirmed shortly thereafter thanks to several trips from the western extremity of the district, the villages along the Burgha Canal, to the provincial capital. The roads, once little better than farm tracks, and difficult to traverse in winter except on a tractor or a donkey, and been widened and macadamized, and ran straight alongside the canals for mile upon mile. Every couple of kilometers check points manned by a mixture of the Afghan local and national police—there were no Coalition soldiers in evidence—provided a level of security that might have been considered oppressive, had not this society recently emerged from a neo-Hobbesian nightmare. The entire district now seemed peaceful and prosperous, fields filled with ripening corn standing well over six feet in height, pomegranate trees drooping under the weight of their fruit, and stands of marijuana shrubs the size of medium-sized trees. In the blazing July heat the fields were empty, but children and young men played and swam in the road-side canals, and waved to the passing vehicles.
On the outskirts of Lashkar Gah the lieutenant colonel ordered his vehicle to pull over, while he and a number of his soldiers helped pull an Afghan truck from a ditch into which it had rolled. His efforts soon attracted a large crowd, some of whom lent a hand, while others clapped and shouted encouragement. Maybe the same crowd would have shot at the British on another day, but it did not seem likely. The journey from the outskirts of the city to the military compound took nearly an hour, weaving in and out of dense traffic, past market stalls, open-air showrooms packed with scores of motorcycles, and even a parking lot with tractors, SUVs and other utility vehicles for sale. It was near midday and suddenly there were hundreds of children in the streets, the morning shift leaving school, not just boys but large crowds of girls, their hair demurely covered in white scarves, all chattering excitedly.10
The difference between the operations of 1 Royal Anglian in the summer of 2007 and 2012 could not have been greater. In 2007, in a six-month tour the battalion fired some one million rounds of small arms ammunition; in 2012 there was scarcely a shot fired in anger. It is always dangerous to talk of transformation—as we have seen the British in 2006 and 2007 were steeped in the lore of counterinsurgency—for the problem was they lacked the resources to put it into effect. All this changed in the spring of 2009, when after months of debate between a counterterror faction, supported by Vice President Joe Biden, and a powerful counterinsurgency lobby headed by General David Petraeus and the hugely influential retired General Jack Keane, the Obama administration decided to try to repeat the strategy, which at that time was still paying dividends in Iraq. In a speech on March 27 Obama declared that “for six years, Afghanistan has been denied the resources that it demands. Now we must make a commitment that can accomplish our goals.”11
By the summer of 2009 substantial reinforcements were arriving, and with them came a new commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), General Stanley McChrystal, fresh from the success of the Iraq surge. McChrystal’s office in HQ ISAF, colocated with that of British General Nick Parker, deputy commander, ISAF, meant that American and British staffs worked closely together on a new comprehensive plan for operations in Afghanistan. Petraeus’s counterinsurgency manual was, in any event, the product in large part of a highly selective reading of previous British campaigns. The military buildup was to be accompanied by the arrival of substantial numbers of civilians, many from the U.S. State Department and other government departments or experts and technicians working on contract, who would advise Afghan ministries and provide staff for an expanded number of Provincial Reconstruction Teams.
It was easy enough to secure the agreement of the British but McChrystal also had to convince the American civilian establishment in Kabul, which was headed by Karl Eikenberry, a retired general, who was now U.S. ambassador to Kabul. Eikenberry had severe doubts about the ability of the United States to sustain two counterinsurgency campaigns simultaneously, particularly in view of the financial crisis that had broken in New York the previous autumn and was then spreading to all the financial capitals of the world. War weariness, too, was beginning to set in. Now in their eighth year of supporting military operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the “will” of a significant minority of the American population was beginning to fade, a process Carl von Clausewitz, writing two centuries earlier, had identified as potentially fatal to a nation’s ability to achieve its objectives. It was not just in terms of material resources but also will, in the sense that Clausewitz used the term. Eikenberry was more aware than McChrystal, who had spent most of his career well beyond the politics of the Washington “Beltway,” that Obama’s timetable for withdrawal had been dictated by the United States’ electoral cycle, not by the situation that might then exist in Afghanistan. His concern was that McChrystal might be pursuing a chimera, the illusion that he would be able to get the president to extend his deadline.12
The ambassador was also concerned that a counterinsurgency campaign that aimed to win the Afghan people over to the Afghan government would fail if that government was regarded by the majority as illegitimate. The period August to November 2009 saw Afghanistan in a political crisis, as the elections of August 20 attracted less than a third of the electorate, and was characterized by widespread ballot stuffing, with one prominent American diplomat, Peter Galbraith, declaring the entire process fraudulent.
It was clear from the beginning that there were deep-seated tensions between McChrystal and Eikenberry, but for the moment the general and the ambassador papered over their differences by producing a document entitled “United States Integrated Civilian–Military Campaign Plan for Support to Afghanistan,”13 in effect a blueprint for nation building, one of the most ambitious statements of intent since the Briggs Plan in Malaya nearly 60 years earlier. The document began by listing the problems faced by Afghanistan: a multifaceted insurgency supported by the Deobandi and Wahabist madrassas in Pakistan and elements within the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI); an incompetent government riddled with corruption; widespread criminality, particularly in those areas designated the “narco-state”; low levels of investment and education, coupled with high unemployment, particularly among young men in the 18 to 30 age group; and a general lack of infrastructure, which ranged from poor roads to frequently interrupted transmission of electricity. The plan went on to outline 11 transformative effects that the campaign was designed to produce, the provision of security by the expansion of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), the creation of an accountable and transparent system of government, the establishment of a system of justice based on equality before the law, and the development of the economy, with the establishment of viable markets for agricultural produce.
While McChrystal and Eikenberry cobbled together a comprehensive plan, ISAF’s new director of intelligence, Major General Michael Flynn, conducted a thoroughgoing analysis of intelligence gathering. While there were some honorable exceptions, for example, the holistic procedures adopted by the British analysts, the bulk of ISAF intelligence gathering was enemy centric, and was conducted in discreet departments, with little or no cross-fertilization. A huge amount of information was being gathered, but not utilized to any great effect. Reorganizing both collection and analysis, Flynn established teams of experts, for example, not just military intelligence assessors, but historians, economists, anthropologists, linguists, political scientists, sociologists, virtually every discipline that could shed some light on the workings of dynamics of Afghan life at local level, and formed them into teams tasked with reporting on the politics, culture, and economy of entire provinces. This reorganization was designed to provide ISAF with information about the sea in which the Taliban “fish” swam. Once ISAF had a clear picture of the political and social dynamics of a particular area, military force and aid packages could be targeted much more effectively than had hitherto been the case.14
In the late summer and autumn of 2009 substantial Western reinforcements began arriving in Afghanistan, a process that was accompanied by a rapid expansion of the ANSF. The new plan envisaged two major offensives against the Taliban in the south of the country, the first against areas under Taliban control in Helmand and the second against Kandahar. Both operations were to be followed quickly by the establishment of an effective local government—some wits called it “government in a box”—and it was, in effect, the establishment of something very like a colonial administration though it was never called that. It had many of the hallmarks of the lists of “good things to do,” which were being produced by numerous conferences on Afghanistan then taking place within the Washington Beltway and at Wilton Park and Chatham House in Britain. The result was a process that was manpower intensive and very expensive, but for the moment that was of little account.
In Helmand operational planning for the coming offensive was carried out by the Headquarters of Regional Command South West under the command of General Nick Carter. The British already had a master plan for Helmand, an outgrowth of the so-called Helmand road map produced two years earlier, which had since grown into an immensely complex but supposedly integrated series of military and civilian activities, but which dovetailed quite neatly with the McChrystal-Eikenberry “Integrated Civilian–Military Campaign Plan.” By the autumn the forces available for operations in Helmand had grown to three brigade groups, the British 11th, the U.S. Marine Corps 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade (MEB), and the ANA’s 3rd brigade of the 205th Corps, a total of some 15,000 troops, a far cry from the 1,200 who had tried to control the valley as recently as the summer of 2007.
The key to the development of Helmand was the Lashkar Gah area, the population and economic hub of the province, but it was threatened by two Taliban strongholds, one some 20 miles due west in the Nad-e Ali district, the other 24 miles to the south west, in the area of Marjah. Both areas had been developed in the 1950s by the American-funded and -managed Helmand Valley Authority, which had constructed a network of irrigation canals, opening up thousands of new acres of land for farming, and attracting thousands of immigrants from other areas of Afghanistan, who had settled in ethnically distinct villages, though the original Pashtun inhabitants remained the majority in both areas.15
The British and Americans decided to attack simultaneously, with 11th Brigade concentrating on Nad-e Ali and the 2nd MEB concentrating on Marjah, with the assets of the ANA’s 3rd Brigade divided between the British and the Americans, in order to give the Afghans experience at the conduct of complex operations at formation level. In order to emphasize the joint nature of the enterprise, the operation was code-named Moshtarak, the Dari for “together.” It was to be conducted in a logical sequence, that of “shape, clear, hold, and build,” and it was in the shape phase that the two operations diverged dramatically.
Both the commander of 11th Brigade, Brigadier James Cowan, and Major General Nick Carter, were concerned that an area to the east of the Nahr-e Bughra Canal known as the Chah-e-Anjir triangle would provide a safe haven for Taliban who might be driven south by Operation Moshtarak. Since first coming into the Helmand British knowledge of the tribal structures and politics of Helmand had increased enormously. A TA officer, Captain Mike Martin, who was researching a doctoral thesis on the politics of Helmand, had identified 37 different tribes and ethnicities, had mapped their political allegiances, the pattern of landownership, the class structures, and the differences between discontent that arose from issues such as landownership and access to water and that which was inspired by the Islamist propaganda of the Taliban. It was detailed work of this sort that allowed the brigade to develop strategies that would separate the hardcore Taliban from those whose concerns were essentially reconcilable.
Before Operation Tor Shpah, Pashto for “Dark Night,” the codename given to the seizure of the Chah-e-Anjir triangle, could begin the brigade was hit by a tragedy, which for a time threatened to derail all the plans, but turned out to be pivotal to future success. On November 5, 2009, at a police post code-named “Blue 25,” one of the worst “green-on-blue” incidents, of the entire campaign occurred when an Afghan policeman shot and killed five soldiers of the Grenadier Guards, including the regimental sergeant major. The effect not just on the regiment but on the entire brigade was depressing in the extreme. To the north, No 2 Company Grenadier Guards ambushed and killed a squad/section strength unit of Taliban, which resulted in a series of company strength Taliban attacks against their positions, which the Grenadiers annihilated in a series of bloody actions. Though they had not intended to do so, No 2 Company had in effect wiped out the Taliban’s operational reserve in this area. The second outcome concerned the police. Because the ANP in the area were clearly unreliable, the entire force was stood down, and new personnel drafted in, including a highly trained unit of the elite Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP).16
By early December Lieutenant Colonel Roly Walker commanded the strongest battle group the British had hitherto deployed, Battle Group Centre South; though it had absorbed so many other assets it was nicknamed “Battle Group Centre of the World.”17 In addition to three company groups of the Grenadier Guards, Walker commanded company groups from 1 Royal Anglian, 1 Royal Welsh and 2 Lancs (2nd Battalion, The Lancashire Regiment), along with Tiger Teams of Afghan Territorial Force 444, elements of ANCOP and the ANA, and the American counter-IED unit, Task Force Thor. Of equal importance to the military assets were the contacts that Walker was able to develop thanks to District Governor Habibullah, who had been a police captain in Garmser at the time of the Soviet occupation. Habibullah had excellent relations with the head of the local NDS. Together they made contact via cell phone with the elders in a number of the key villages such as Zorabad, Baluchan, and Kakaran, which were the principal villages in Chah-e Mirza, and brokered a meeting in the district center in Shawqat. Thanks to these contacts Walker was able to develop a deeper understanding of the political complexities of the area, which helped considerably in targeting military operations. The British now knew where the insurgents and their supporters lived, how they moved through the area, and how they were supported. In poor villages such as Noorzo Kalay and Zorobad, the Taliban had been running protection rackets, demanding food, fuel, and accommodation from the inhabitants in exchange for not beating them, or worse. As a consequence the Taliban were loathed in these locations. In other villages, the homes of more substantial landowners, who were often making a considerable profit from growing opium in the semi-desert areas beyond the canal, the Taliban had greater support, in exchange for the protection they could provide in moving and marketing the crops. With information of this sort to hand, British fighting patrols could move into the key locations, drawing insurgent bands into ambushes, or trapping them in cross-fires as they attempted to withdraw.18
By mid-December a combination of No 2 Company’s battles at Loy Mandah and the deep penetration raids into Chah-e Mirza had fractured Taliban command and control and considerably degraded their combat effectiveness. The battle group now signposted its intention of occupying Nad-e Ali in the near future by placing posters on walls, distributing leaflets, and having Habibullah announce the plan at shuras (consultative assemblies, usually of local elders and leaders), relying on word of mouth to do the rest. Walker was anxious that “the local population stay inside their compounds, that is what the governor wanted and what the police wanted, everyone to stay at home whilst we did this,” sentiments echoed by No 2 Company commander, Major Richard Green, who thought that “the worst thing we could have done was to come in and fight the Taliban around their homes, destroying their property.”19
The battle group struck on the night of December 27–28. A Company1 Royal Welsh assaulted by helicopter into Norzoo Kalay, while British special forces landed in Baluchan, where a Taliban HQ had been identified, both attacks dislocating any Taliban attempt at coordinated resistance. At first light the CVRTs (combat vehicle reconnaissance [tracked]) of the Royal Anglians rolled north across the district from Shin Kalay, to link up with the Royal Welsh. The commander of the spearhead, Captain Graham Goodey, recalled that people stood at the side of the roads looking in amazement, overwhelmed by what looked like columns of tanks. To the west, a company of the ANA moved into heavily populated Chah-e Mirza, while 2 Company of the Grenadier Guards advanced from the south to link up. By 1500 hours Goodey’s CVRTs were just to the west of Noorzo Kalay when at least a dozen men on motor bikes drove at considerable speed out of the village, and headed southeast as rapidly as the muddy roads would allow. They were obviously Taliban but Goodey chose not to engage. He said later that the incident was “a small example of what the operation was trying to do. It was aimed at compelling the enemy not to fight …”20 Lieutenant Colonel Walker summarized the operation as “an armed ramble across wet farmland, which reminded us of our pre-deployment training in Thetford.”21
Walker now exploited his success. In the next 24 hours the battle group established a frontline running south east from Noorzo Kalay. North of this line, the Taliban regrouped between Naqulabad Kalay and Showal. They soon attempted to infiltrate south, but were stopped in a series of ambushes. Moving to the west beyond the Bughra Canal, they attempted to infiltrate in the southeast between Noorzo Kalay and Chah-e Mirza, but were once again detected. The frontline held throughout January, while the reconnaissance platoons of 1 Grenadier Guards and 1 Royal Anglian conducted fighting patrols onto Taliban-controlled areas, breaking up potential insurgent concentrations.
The area had been shaped and cleared, and was now being held. While the frontlines were still being consolidated, the task force commenced the build phase. The Taliban had isolated the district by seeding the roads with networks of mines and IEDs, the clearing of which might have taken months, but for the arrival of Task Force Thor, whose huge futuristic machines used steel claws attached to cranes, to tear up IEDs from the roads and ditches, and detonate them. Thor’s machinery was compartmentalized, “so if you blow a bit up it’s just replaced, and you keep going … their vehicles are blown up every day, day in and day out, and they crack on with it … absolutely incredible.”22 Behind Thor came bulldozers, gravel trucks, road- and bridge-building equipment, steam rollers, and bitumen tankers, giving the district a network of sealed roads. And behind them came logistic convoys, bringing blankets and food, a foretaste to the population of what the government could do for them.
When the district governor held his first shura in Baluchan on December 28, only a small number attended. They were grateful for the blankets and the food, but they doubted he would still be able to visit a few days hence. Only the continued presence of their own security forces would convince the local population to come off the fence. Walker, Cowan, and Carter worked furiously to ensure that ANCOP, ATF444, and the ANA remained in the area, eventually succeeding, but only after enlisting high-level support in Kabul. But the district governor needed to be able to offer people more than security to win their support, and he had few resources of his own. By an incredible stroke of good fortune—neither Carter nor Cowan knew they were coming—a team from Afghanistan Vouchers for Increased Production in Agriculture (AVIPA) arrived at the beginning of the operation. They brought with them the resources needed to kick-start an agricultural economy, from seed and fertilizer to money, which they now channeled into Nad-e Ali through the district governor. As the days passed the numbers attending shuras grew steadily, so that by January 19, 2010, enough people were attending for Governor Mangal, the provincial governor, to chair a shura in Chah-e Mirza. By the end of January, thanks to aid from AVIPA and DST, more than 1,000 locals were employed in construction projects, clearing canals, building and mending wells, repairing sluice gates, and mending roads.23
The shura was the traditional Afghan way of exchanging ideas, but the numbers who could attend were limited, and were only ever adult males. The battle group’s influence officer, Captain Richard Jakeman, a member of the Honourable Artillery Company, whose civilian career was working as a marketing manager for Sky Television, knew that for local government to take hold in the district, it had to be given a human face, and that face would be Habibullah. Since December Jakeman had been working to set up a local radio station, Radio Nad-e Ali, but had found the British logistic system unresponsive to his requirements. It took nearly a month to accumulate all the necessary equipment, some borrowed from the Americans and other Coalition partners, and some brought back by officers in their Bergens returning from R&R in Britain. In the meantime Habibullah’s officials had handed out more than 7,000 wind-up radios at shuras, which proved to be hugely popular, particularly in areas without mains supply and where shortage of fuel meant that generators could be run for only an hour or two each day.24
One of the most important technological developments the Coalition had brought to Afghanistan was a mobile phone network that by 2009 covered the Nad-e Ali district of Helmand. Cheap mobile phones costing only two or three thousand Afghani ($4.00 to $5.00) were also widely available. At shuras the district governor handed out business cards with the new radio station’s telephone number printed on them, with sim and top-up cards attached. Meanwhile Jakeman had been conducting market research, had hired and coached local presenters, and had put together a program schedule, which interspersed religion, education, music, news and current affairs, and, most important of all, phone-in programs. Hitherto only accessible at shuras, the district governor had a regular slot in the schedule, during which he would take calls, and deal with people’s problems on air. By the end of January the district governor’s program was receiving more than 300 calls a day, although Habibullah was hard pressed to deal with more than a dozen or so in any one program. Many of the calls came from women, hugely important within the Afghan home, but until now virtually impossible to influence directly. Radio Nad-e Ali allowed the district governor to become a “personality.” A measure of the name recognition this gave Habibullah was attendance at shuras, which went from about 40 people per meeting in late December to more than 500 per meeting by late January.25
Tor Shpah was a hugely successful example of what a properly conducted counterinsurgency operation built around carefully phased shape, clear, hold, and build sequences could achieve. Possibly because it was so successful it has received very little attention. The media are rarely interested in success stories, and the British, while happy to publicize glorious defeats, rarely write about their real achievements. This lack of public attention is not true about Operation Moshtarak, widely publicized as the cornerstone of McChrystal’s counterinsurgency campaign, in part to consolidate support in the United States, in part to shape the perceptions of the people in the areas in eastern Helmand that were going to be the scene of action: northern Nad-e Ali and Marjah. Both operations, but particularly the latter, have been subjected to considerable scholarly analysis and media coverage, including a 90-minute documentary film, the Battle of Marjah, hugely popular in the United States, which has served to help form the perceptions of the American people about the war in Afghanistan. The film is sympathetic to the Marines—they are skillful, brave, and humane—but they are lost in an environment that they don’t understand, and which will eventually defeat them. Broadcast in early 2011, it helped to contribute to the growing negative perceptions of the Marjah operation, at the very point when the battle was turning in America’s favor.26
In Moshtarak the British possessed many advantages the Americans lacked. They had been in theatre for several months, Tor Shpah had served as a very useful rehearsal, and their intelligence as to the disposition of the people and the location of the Taliban was excellent. The dominant tribe was the Noorzais, who coexisted uneasily with the Taliban, who had widespread support among the Ishaqzai tribes, so that the removal of the Taliban infrastructure would not be entirely unwelcome. As in the earlier operation, in late January and early February special forces and fighting patrols began disrupting Taliban command and control networks, and removing key leaders.27
By contrast, most of the Americans had been in the Nad-e Ali area for only a few weeks, and had little or no information about the Marjah district. It was superficially like northern Nad-e Ali, a network of canals, compounds, and a sprawling town, built around five bazaars. Its population was estimated to be anywhere between 50,000 and 100,000 people, the descendants of immigrants who had arrived in the 1950s from all over Afghanistan. It was assumed that no one tribal group would be dominant, although it was subsequently discovered that the Ishaqzai were major power brokers.28
What the Americans didn’t know at this time was that the Taliban had been welcomed into the area in 2007 as liberators. Until that time the Marjah district had been under the control of Abdur Rahmin Jan, a warlord masquerading as a chief of police, who had controlled the growing and harvesting of opium, had taxed villages heavily, and had meted out punishments in the form of severe beatings and executions, usually by beheading. The Taliban, under the command of a popular and charismatic leader, had forced Jan and his henchmen to flee to the relative safety of Lashkar Gah, where they waited for the tide to turn. The great majority of the population feared that the arrival of the Coalition would herald the return of Abdur Rahmin Jan, a prospect they regarded with dread.29
The Taliban leadership, while they were prepared to abandon areas of peripheral importance, such as northern Nad-e Ali, was prepared to fight for Marjah, which was the center of opium production, and which had workshops in which IEDs could be manufactured and weapons repaired. With the support of the majority of the population the Taliban constructed a sophisticated defense of the Marjah area, lacing the approach routes with mines and IEDs, which bore all the hallmarks of assistance from professional military officers. The complex of thick mud-brick walls, canals, and irrigation ditches provided almost unlimited possibilities for the defenders, while deep cisterns furnished both protection and concealment.30
At 0400 on February 13 scores of troop-carrying helicopters landed at key points in both northern Nad-e Ali and Marjah, depositing 1,200 troops in the middle of Taliban-held areas, the first of more than 15,000 committed to the operation. It was raining and very cold, conditions that the Coalition hoped would keep all but the most dedicated Taliban huddled around their fires. In Nad-e Ali there was little or no resistance. At the sound of the helicopters dozens of men were seen leaving the area as fast as their motorcycles could carry them. Within a matter of days the sequence already demonstrated in Tor Shpah was put into effect, with mine clearance, road construction, supply convoys, shuras, and local elections, and then the enrolment of the local police, to provide a permanent security presence.31
In Marjah it was very different. The first waves of Marines found themselves engaged in prolonged urban combat against an estimated 2,000 Taliban fighters, organized into a loose confederation of some 470 three- or four-man squads, ideal for defensive operations, involving hit-and-run attacks, in this type of environment. Some commentators at the time said it was as heavy as the Fallujah battles of 2004—but it was not. There was no employment of main battle tanks or massed artillery. The emphasis was on the avoidance of unnecessary material destruction or civilian casualties. To this extent it was much more like the prolonged battle the Americans fought for Ramadi in Al Anbar Province throughout the summer and autumn of 2006.32 The problem was that ISAF’s media operations had already raised expectations of a speedy victory, and when the fighting dragged on public opinion began to swing against the operation, to the extent that the operation in northern Nad-e Ali was largely ignored.
Marjah was heavily populated, and although the population had been warned of the impending operation, most had not left, either because of Taliban intimidation and the dangers of trying to pass through extensive mine-fields or because they were actually committed to resist any attempts to reimpose the rule of Abdur Rahmin Jan. The inevitable result was a number of civilian casualties, which were seized on by those elements of the Western media who were hostile to the Afghan intervention. There were undoubtedly some very unfortunate accidents, but there were also occasions when Taliban fighters fired from buildings crowded with women and children, usually from tribes who had given the Taliban less than wholehearted support.
The flexibility afforded the Taliban by fighting in small squads meant that when the Americans declared they had cleared an area, fighting would erupt only a few days later. In northern Marjah, for example, the Marines bribed some twenty shopkeepers to open their shops, only to find a few weeks later that all but five had been shut down. Attempts at co-opting military age males into money-for-work schemes were also short-lived. The men who took part were either dragged out of their homes at night and severely beaten or executed.
Having spent much of his career in special operations General McChrystal was less adept in dealing with the media than some others who had lived in the glare of publicity. In a discussion with General Nick Carter on the progress of the campaign McChrystal said that although ISAF forces were slowly winning the battle for Marjah, the perception among American’s allies was that it was “a bleeding ulcer.” It was this comment that a respected journalist used as his headline, at which point it went “viral.” McChrystal’s media cell attempted to publish the real comments but it was like shouting into a hurricane. The public perception was that the battle was either stalemated or had been lost.33
The irony was that it was at this point that the tide had begun to turn in the Americans’ favor, with the leaders of a small tribe who had long been oppressed by the Ishaqzai and their allies approaching the Americans and offering their services as local police. Over the next few weeks as word got out that Abdur Rahmin Jan would not be returning an increasing number of the more marginal tribes began to change allegiances, being co-opted into the Afghan local police, so that the conflict began to assume the character of an inter-tribal war, with the Americans as the very powerful allies of a confederation of the formerly dispossessed. It was not quite what had happened in Iraq with the Al Anbar awakening, but it was very close.34
The battle of Marjah had been intended as the prelude for an offensive against the Taliban in Kandahar, Operation Hamkiri. Kandahar was a very different prospect from Marjah, a city that had grown to a population of around 800,000, with perhaps another one million living in sprawling suburbs, which was of immense cultural and historical significance to all Afghans, but particularly Pashtuns. It was here that many of the great figures of Afghan history were commemorated: the shrines to Hotak and his mother, who had liberated the Pashtuns from Persian overlords, and of Ahmed Shah Durrani, the founder of the Durrani empire, the precursor of the modern Afghan state.35
It was not simply the size or cultural significance of Kandahar that made operations difficult. The city was virtually the fiefdom of Ahmed Wali Karzai, half-brother of the president, Hamid. Since 2001 Ahmed Karzai and his allies had established a political and economic stranglehold on Kandahar, helped greatly by lucrative ISAF contracts and by the CIA, which had found him a useful ally. Ahmed Karzai had a controlling interest in two security companies, employing some 10,000 men, and a number of logistic and trucking concerns, his security companies providing protection for the truck convoys.
In addition, he had a controlling interest in a vast modern gated community being built to the north of Kandahar, some 10,000 houses designed for the commercial and administrative elite of the city. While there was nothing objectionable about such an enterprise, it was widely believed throughout Afghanistan that he had acquired the land as a result of some questionable real estate deals.
What set Ahmed Karzai apart from successful businessmen like him in North America and Europe was his control not just of his security companies—in effect private armies—but also of the Kandahar Strike Force. Although under the control of the CIA, Ahmed Karzai had been instrumental in recruiting all 500 members of the force, which was based just to the west of the city in Camp Gecko, the name the Americans had given to the palace complex once occupied by Mullah Omar, who, despite his advocacy of a life of ascetic simplicity, had developed a taste for the finer things of life once he had taken power.
To the Americans Ahmed Karzai was a very recognizable type—a cross between Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall, Mayor Rizzo of Philadelphia, and Al Capone of Chicago, in short, a corrupt, urban warlord. The American ambassador regarded Ahmed Karzai as a huge liability to any attempt to effect population-centric COIN in Kandahar. The State Department’s aim was the establishment of a functioning bureaucracy answerable to a democratically elected government. Under Ahmed Karzai any semblance of normal provincial or city government had virtually ceased to exist. Polls conducted under the auspices of the State Department indicated a growing level of resentment toward Ahmed Karzai, a sentiment that was leading to an increase in support for the Taliban. In November 2009 Eikenberry had proposed that Ahmed Karzai be removed from Kandahar, a demand vigorously resisted by his half-brother, Hamid Karzai, the president.36
The tensions inherent in the relationship between Eikenberry and McChrystal now became overt. The general regarded the maintenance of a working relationship with the Afghan president as central to his counterinsurgency strategy, and found the State Department’s insistence on political probity a distraction. To many in the military, State was putting the cart before the horse. One could not have any degree of political or administrative probity until one had security, and to achieve this, one had to work with the grain of the country. Even with the surge in forces, ISAF would be light on the ground, and would not be able to reach the force densities required to achieve security without the assistance of allied war lords.37
Much to the irritation of the U.S. embassy, on April 9, 2010, McChrystal and President Karzai visited Kandahar, where as guests of Ahmed Karzai they addressed a carefully vetted shura of some 2,000 elders and other community leaders, during which the general explained the purposes and timetable of Operation Hamkiri. Initially intended for the spring of 2010, the unexpectedly heavy fighting in Marjah delayed the start of the operation, McChrystal and Karzai returning to Kandahar on June 13, to reassure local leaders that Hamkiri was indeed going to take place.38
Over the previous two years areas to the west and southwest of Kandahar along the Arghandab Valley, namely the districts of Arghandab, Zhari, and Panjwai, had been steadily infiltrated by the Taliban, and in some cases tribes opposed to the Barakzai ascendency represented by President Karzai and his brother Ahmed, particularly the Ghilzai and their allies, had decided to make common cause with the Taliban. Intelligence estimated total enemy strength along the Arghandab at around 4,000 Taliban, well equipped with 82-mm mortars, recoilless rifles, heavy machine guns, RPG rocket launchers, and AK-47 automatic rifles. The Arghandab was like the Helmand, heavily canalized, with numerous mud-walled compounds and villages, linked together by narrow footpaths, affording the insurgents almost unlimited possibilities for defense, which the Taliban enhanced by laying down dense networks of IEDs.
Like the British in Helmand, in 2008 and 2009 the Canadians had attempted to clear parts of the Arghandab, but had never had sufficient forces to hold any territory. Indeed, by 2009 the Canadians were forced very much onto the defensive, concentrating on their own force protection and the protection of their resupply routes. The situation in the Zhari district was particularly serious. Highway One, the main route from Kandahar to Lashkar Gah, skirted parallel to the Arghandab for about 20 miles, which exposed convoys to regular attacks. Though the Taliban could never cut the route for more than a day or so, the fact they could do it at all added to a general sense of insecurity that was becoming all pervasive.39
In the city of Kandahar, the situation was very different. The built-up area was oblong in shape, some 10 kilometers from east to west, and 5 kilometers north to south, with the old eighteenth-century city, a maze of alleys and courtyards, occupying an area of some 2 square kilometers in the south center of the city, home to some 80,000 people. To the north of the old city there was a complex of cemeteries, covering an area about 2,000 meters east to west, and 500 meters north to south, which created a large open space separating modern urban development in the north from the old city. There was more modern urban development to the west, connected to the old city by three wide boulevards running more or less parallel.
The Taliban controlled only one area of the city, the suburb of Maljat, lying to the southwest of the city, which was used as a supply depot and a rest and recreation center for the forces in the Arghandab. But Kandahar was by no means secure. The Taliban could operate from a number of safe houses, particularly in the rabbit warren of lane ways in the old city. From these locations they conducted hit-and-run operations, assassinations, IED strikes, and, increasingly, suicide bomber attacks. They could, too, pull off the occasional headline-grabbing spectacular. In 2008, for example, the Taliban put in a platoon-size attack on Sarpoza prison on the western outskirts of Kandahar, which enabled over 1,100 inmates to escape, including at least 400 Taliban.
Like previous operations in Nad-e Ali and Marjah, Operation Hamkiri began with a prolonged shaping phase, as ISAF maneuvered its forces into position. In mid-June engineers began constructing the first of a ring of 16 block houses around Kandahar, which were designed to inhibit easy Taliban movement to and from the city. Manned by combined platoons of U.S. Army MPs, ANCOP, and ANP, they were a challenge to the Taliban, who responded predictably with rocket and mortar attacks. Simultaneously, the Taliban stepped up its program of intimidation. In late June a suicide bomber attacked the wedding party of a prominent member of the Afghan Local Police, killing 37 and maiming many more. Assassinations rose steadily throughout the summer, ISAF intelligence recording at least 397 between mid-June and mid-September, a rate of around 4 to 5 per day.
American and Afghan Special Forces were equally active, raiding into the Arghandab and Kandahar, in an effort to disrupt Taliban command and control. By late July the build-up was nearing completion, with at least a dozen American and Afghan battalions, and a force of Afghan Border Police, essentially the Achakzai tribe of Spin Boldak, under the command of their charismatic leader, Abdul Razak. On the night of July 25 Afghan commandos, accompanied by their American advisors, launched a helicopter-borne assault on the heavily fortified village of Khastawe Sufla in the Arghandab. The Taliban quickly recovered from their surprise, put on a series of determined counterattacks, and after sustaining substantial casualties the commandos were forced to withdraw on July 27. Angered by this initial reverse, on July 30 the Americans and Afghans put in a full scale ground assault, spearheaded by 1/320 Field Artillery Regiment but eventually involving 2/508th Airborne, 1/66th Armored (acting as infantry), the 3/3 ANCOP Battalion, the 1st Battalion of the 1st Brigade of the ANA’s 205th Corps, and a battalion of the Afghan Border Police. This attack, the largest concentration of force yet achieved in the Arghendab, steadily drove the Taliban from the northern part of the valley.
By late August ISAF had concentrated three American and three Afghan battalions for the next phase of Hamkiri, the clearing of Zhari and Panjwai, an operation codenamed Dragon Strike. It was a slow, systematic advance, clearing dense fields of IEDs, while frequently under harassing fire. Unlike Marjah, once the Taliban had been cleared from an area ISAF found that hundreds of elders were attending shuras, and that up to 6,000 young men were participating in cash for work programs by early October. In order to provide permanent security, ISAF implemented a local community watch program called “Sons of the Shura,” and began recruiting for an Afghan Local Police force.40
From August onwards ISAF and Afghan success in the Arghandab pushed increasing numbers of Taliban into Kandahar, where they participated enthusiastically in the program of assassination and intimidation. On August 18 they murdered Mahammad Rasul Popalzai, the Dand district police chief and a close ally of Ahmed Karzai, and brought the wrath of Kandahar’s boss down upon their heads. Spearheaded by the Achakzai of the Afghan Border Police, and supported by the Kandahar Strike Force and three companies of the U.S. 504th Military Police Battalion, on August 27 a Coalition force pushed into Maljat, systematically clearing IED ambushes, driving the Taliban from their stronghold, and detaining more than 100, who were imprisoned in Sarposa.41 The loss of Maljat was a serious blow to the Taliban. They continued a campaign of bombing and assassination, but were also the targets for NDS and U.S. Special Forces night raids, which steadily eroded their effectiveness. Fearing their influence was diminishing, in late October, 30 Taliban rode on motorcycles in a defiant procession through the streets of central Kandahar, which was generally regarded as the product of desperation, rather than a display of strength.
Apart from advisors and contractors, the Americans kept their forces out of Kandahar, in an effort to make security in the city an overtly Afghan responsibility. There was, however, considerable development work, the most important of which was the installation of the first of eight huge generators, costing a total of $225 million, which were intended to provide 10 megawatts of electricity to Kandahar industrial park.42 The provision of these generators represented the high water mark of American counterinsurgency operations, and would be the last aid package on such a scale. Having already had one experience with the damage the media could do, in the misinterpretation of his remarks about the progress of the Marjah operation, on June 23 General McChrystal was relieved of command by Obama, ostensibly as a result of remarks he had made to a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine. In fact, McChrystal’s removal suited the White House’s reelection strategy for 2012, in that it allowed the president to appoint his most dangerous rival for the presidency, General David Petraeus, to Kabul in McChrystal’s place.
Petraeus had been portrayed as the general who had reeducated the U.S. Army in counterinsurgency, but he was by no means fanatically devoted to such operations. In consultation with Eikenberry, he quickly decided that Obama’s timetable, which dictated that U.S. forces would begin to withdraw in 2011, well before the 2012 elections, made the conduct of classical counterinsurgency utilizing American forces all but impossible. Petraeus therefore modified policy. American forces would dramatically increase Special Forces raids and drone strikes, essentially counterterror operations, while the recruitment and training of the Afghan National Army and other forces would be accelerated. There would still be counterinsurgency but increasingly it would be the preserve of the Afghan and not the Western armies.43
The results of the COIN campaign of 2010 were not immediately apparent. The Quetta Shura were able to strike back into Kandahar with a series of spectacular operations. On April 15, 2011, the Taliban assassinated Khan Mohammad Mujhaid, the Kandahar police chief. Nine days later 400 prisoners, almost all dedicated Taliban fighters, escaped from Sarposa prison through a tunnel dug under Highway One from an apparently abandoned compound on the south side of the road. Some were soon recaptured, but most joined in the Taliban’s summer offensive, which began on May 7 with an attack by 18 insurgents on the governor’s heavily defended compound. On July 12 the Taliban claimed their most spectacular success to date, with the assassination of Ahmed Wali Karzai, though it was by no means clear whether the Talban were in fact instrumental in his murder.
Elsewhere there appeared to be no diminution in the frequency of Taliban attacks. On September 13, 2011, for example, the Haqqani network launched a complex attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, which left 9 dead and 23 wounded. On April 15 the following year, the Taliban launched its spring offensive, simultaneous attacks on embassies, NATO bases, and parliament and government buildings throughout Kabul and the eastern provinces. Two months later Haqqani struck at the Spozhmai Hotel on Lake Qargha to the west of Kabul, a luxury resort for the elite of Afghanistan. And on September 14, 2012, in an incident that caused huge embarrassment to ISAF, 15 Taliban dressed in American uniforms penetrated the defenses of Camp Bastion. In the ensuing battle, all but one of the Taliban was killed, while Coalition forces lost two killed and nine wounded. There was also considerable damage to material, including the destruction of eight Harrier aircraft, making this raid comparable to anything British Commandos or American Rangers had achieved during World War II.
The impression of a campaign that was teetering on the edge of failure was reinforced throughout this period by the more or less constant attacks on small, isolated American outposts in Kunar and in Nuristan, where the tribes had resisted not just the Russians but also the Taliban. Although these posts were of little strategic significance, and required substantial amounts of artillery fire and air power to keep tribesmen at bay, they were politically impossible to abandon. The spectacular scenery, and the tragically heroic narrative that could be constructed from the experiences of any of these garrisons, was a documentary maker’s dream. Tim Hetherington’s Restrepo, the story of the gallant defense of a fire base on the Korengal Valley, was broadcast in June 2010, the same month McChrystal was dismissed by Obama, and provided a framework into which millions of Americans and British placed the news they heard from Afghanistan. A few months later the Battle of Marjah, mentioned earlier, although portraying a very different part of Afghanistan, seemed to suggest that the battle was equally hopeless. Thereafter there came a steady stream of documentaries, the UK’s Channel Four’s Our War: The Ten Year War in Afghanistan (2011–12), Ben Anderson’s This Is What Winning Looks Like (May 2013), and Korengal (May 2014), the latter a compilation of unused footage from Restrepo, produced as a tribute to Tim Hetherington, who had been killed three years earlier covering the war in Syria. The overall effect of these documentaries was best summed up by Ben Anderson in the conclusion of This Is What Winning Looks Like: “All is now about getting out and saving face. We’re not leaving because we achieved our goals. We’re leaving because we’ve given up on achieving these goals.”
From the summer of 2010 it became difficult to find anything but negative reporting in the Anglo-American press. Much had been expected of the Obama surge and the introduction of the “new” counterinsurgency policy, but McChrystal’s reference to Marjah as “a bleeding ulcer” and his subsequent dismissal by Obama was the signal for a sustained assault on the counterinsurgency policy. One of the most devastating critiques came from Eikenberry in an article in the widely respected journal, Foreign Affairs in the autumn of 2013, in which he denounced COIN as utterly misconceived. He declared COIN a “semi-colonial” policy that had alienated Karzai and his administration, and which was both “breathtakingly expansive and expensive.” American commanders, “intellectually arrogant and cognitively rigid,” had so overused the term they had “become almost a parody of faithful Red Guards chanting Maoist slogans during the Cultural Revolution.” In their arrogance U.S. military leaders had insisted that there was no alternative to “simultaneously improving Afghanistan’s security, governance, judicial system, economy, educational standards, health care delivery, and more.” Eikenberry was particularly scandalized by the provision of the eight generators to Kandahar, at a cost of $225 million, an enormously expensive macro-economic project in pursuit of some “vaguely defined COIN effects.” The adoption of COIN policy had led the United States into strategic overreach, a point Eikenberry emphasized by quoting Sun Tzu: “There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited.”44
An important aspect of COIN operations concerns the management of perceptions. It was quite clear that both the Haqqani network and the Quetta Shura had a more effective system for messaging than ISAF, where the organization tended to be overly bureaucratic and reactive. Indeed, so great was the fear of negative publicity that on occasions quite junior media officers alienated respected international correspondents, resulting in stories that were at best lukewarm.45
The perception of inevitable collapse and defeat did much to hamper the work of the High Peace Council. This organization, established as the result of a Peace Jirga, a meeting of tribal leaders from all over Afghanistan held in Kabul in June 2010, was designed to reach out to various Taliban leaders and facilitate the process of reconciliation, if not reintegration. But if one side sensed it was winning, there was little incentive to negotiate, and most efforts proved to be fruitless.
To people who had served in Afghanistan over the last four years, the most frustrating thing was that all the evidence pointed to the fact that the COIN campaign of 2010 actually worked. By the summer of 2014 not a single district center, let alone a provincial capital, was under Taliban control. It was true that operating from their sanctuaries across the border with Pakistan they could launch terrorist attacks that were sometimes spectacular, but these were as much a symptom of weakness as of strength. Insurgencies that control territory, and can command the loyalty of an entire population, do not have to conduct suicide bombings and assassinations.
By the last week of June 2014 there was fighting in parts of Kandahar and Helmand, where the Ishaqzai, with the support of foreign fighters from Pakistan and some Arab states, were attempting to regain control of Sangin, Kajaki, Nowzad, and Musa Quala. The performance of the Afghan National Security Forces exceeded all expectations. Fighting without Coalition air support, they inflicted more than 400 casualties on battalion-strength insurgent forces, so that by early July not a single district center had fallen. Throughout much of the rest of the country, the situation was stable, and the Taliban had little or no support. This was particularly true of Kabul and the Kabul valley, home to some 5.5 million Afghans, about one in six of the population. Kabul was a city of traffic jams, supermarkets, gymnasiums, and huge wedding halls. It was also a city whose people hunger for education, with private universities and colleges proliferating at what seems like every intersection. It was a city with 34 television channels, with radio stations dedicated to rock music, with the Internet, and where every citizen had a cell phone. The two million people who live in Kandahar and its surrounding districts were similarly circumstanced, as were another million or so who live in Mazar-e Sharif and Herat.
One might have expected a degree of security in the cities, where terrorist attacks enraged and disgusted the population rather than intimidated them, but the majority of rural areas were also secure. This situation had always existed in places such as Bamiyan and the Panjshir Valley, but it was equally true of south-central Helmand, the area of Lashkar Gah, Nad-e Ali, and Marjah, once the scene of some very heavy fighting, but which had now become a refuge for people fleeing the depredations of the Ishaqzai in the north of the province.
The assertion that COIN died in 2010 betrayed a misunderstanding of what COIN actually entailed. It was true that a particular manifestation of COIN, which was synonymous with nation-building, still anathema to many Americans, had come to an end in many areas. But COIN was about influencing populations, an activity that can take many forms, not just the construction of hugely expensive generator plants. When Petraeus and his team studied earlier counterinsurgency campaigns, particularly the British in Malaya, they were misled to a certain extent by the British propaganda of the time that deliberately underplayed the purely military aspects of COIN, while overemphasizing those aspects that were synonymous with nation-building. In fact, counterterror operations were hugely important in smashing the communist insurgency in Malaya—something every veteran knew, but rarely articulated, so great was the public perception that the British had discovered a way of defeating an insurgency by being nice to people. A generation later, British veterans of the “troubles” in Northern Ireland often compared their own experiences of a sometimes nasty counterterror war to what they imagined had been the situation in Malaya 30 years earlier, and lamented their own fall from a state of military grace.
Counterterror operations had always been a feature of ISAF’s campaign, but with McChrystal’s departure and Petraeus’s arrival, night raids, Special Forces operations, and drone strikes began to increase dramatically. The change of policy was roundly condemned in many quarters, not least by President Karzai, who frequently called for an end to such attacks, as a means of distancing himself from a program that was killing a significant number of people, not all of them insurgents. Within Kabul’s diplomatic community there was support for the Karzai’s position, most spectacularly so by the British representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, who resigned his position and returned to Britain, where he denounced the counterterror policy as “murder on an industrial scale.”46
Sir Sherard and other diplomats deplored the fact that entire tranches of the Taliban leadership were being killed, men with whom they believed they could negotiate, though the lack of success attending the efforts of the High Peace Council indicated a degree of wishful thinking in this regard. They also deplored their replacement by an ever younger and more radicalized generation, who were more prepared to commit atrocities in the name of their religion. To ISAF high command their behavior was not entirely an unwelcome development. Increasingly fanatical, inexperienced, and ill-educated, these young men proceeded to alienate the very people whose support they wished to gain. This process had already been witnessed five years earlier in Al Anbar, where the depredations of al Qaeda had progressively alienated the Sunni tribes, and now it was happening again in parts of Helmand and Kandahar.
In tandem with the counterterror campaign, the size of the Afghan National Security Forces was steadily increased, and training programs reinforced. The Afghan army’s Officer Candidate School on the eastern outskirts of Kabul had been training platoon commanders since 2004. In 2009 the first batch of academically well-educated officers were commissioned at the National Military Academy of Afghanistan, an institution based on West Point, and in July 2012 Britain’s prime minister signed a memorandum of understanding with President Karzai, undertaking to construct yet another academy, this one based on Sandhurst.
The Taliban attempted to disrupt the surge in training missions by instigating a series of “insider attacks,” known colloquially as green-on-blue incidents, as mentioned earlier. ISAF’s response was to put in place a variety of force protection measures, including the deployment of armed soldiers with each training mission, known as “Guardian Angels.” The Taliban’s tactics achieved a degree of success initially, but increasingly effective background checks, supplemented by biometric registration, significantly reduced the danger. There were still occasional green-on-blue incidents, but these were usually caused by personal disputes boiling out of control. There were an increasing number of ISAF personnel who wished to dispense with the force protection measures entirely, arguing that the best form of protection was to integrate as closely with the Afghans as possible, a policy followed by the Soviets in the 1980s, when they had suffered only two “insider attacks” in the entire campaign.47 Western governments, however, fearing that their populations had a very low tolerance for casualties of this sort, were prepared to sacrifice a degree of operational effectiveness in order to prevent further erosion of an increasingly fragile national “will.”
By 2013 the ANSF had grown to about 350,000 personnel. That summer when the ANSF became responsible for security throughout Afghanistan, the Taliban launched a series of attacks, which ANSF weathered well. A handful of isolated forward operating bases were overrun, but were quickly recaptured, and the Taliban’s much publicized boasts to take over district centers and even provincial capitals failed to materialize.48 Even greater success was to follow in the spring of 2014, when the ANSF prevented any major Taliban disruption of the national elections, in which nearly seven million voted, including more than three million women, a turnout of about 60 percent of the electorate, which was more than twice the number that had voted in 2009. More impressive still were the 105,000 who voted in Helmand, more than three times the number that had voted five years earlier. Early on polling day, April 5, the streets of Lashkar Gah filled up with men who marched through the streets singing the Afghan national anthem, holding up Taliban night letters that threatened death if they voted with their left hands, while they extended the ink-stained index fingers of their right hands to indicate that they had defied the insurgents.49
Humiliated by the huge turnout, the Taliban reorganized, appointed new commanders, and announced their intention to disrupt the runoff election, made necessary because neither of the leading candidates had achieved an overall majority, which was scheduled for June 14. Already very tired from their protracted periods on duty, the ANSF had to face yet another period without leave, followed by the certain knowledge that some of them would come under attack, and that some would die. This time the Taliban were much more active, in one incident stopping a busload of elders outside of Herat, and cutting off the index fingers of more than 20 who were carrying voter registration cards. Widely reported on national television, this incident had quite the reverse effect to that the Taliban intended. On election day, the white-bearded elders were filmed voting, the bandaged stumps of their index fingers next to their ink stained forefingers. One old man growled into the camera: “They can cut off all my fingers—I’m still going to vote—come on—come out and vote—show these cowards they can’t frighten us!” And the Afghans voted, this time more than seven million, with increased votes in Helmand and Kandahar.
The following day one young Afghan, a university lecturer, appalled to find that the Western press had either ignored or relegated the news of his country’s elections to the back pages, sent a blog to the Huffington Post, which was placed on the front pages of both the American and British editions. He asked the Anglo-Americans if they had become so used to defeat they no longer recognized a victory when one stared them in the face. What did victory look like? Victory was when more than seven million Afghans were able to defy the Taliban, thanks to the fact that the ANSF was strong enough to provide the population with protection. He finished with an impassioned appeal to President Obama not to pull out entirely in December 2016, which might mean throwing away yet another victory.50
The young Afghan’s blog stuck in the craw of many of the campaign’s critics, but he was right. A combination of classic counterinsurgency and counterterror operations, combined with the raising of large and moderately efficient indigenous forces, had created a situation in which something approaching democratic elections could take place, which ensured a peaceful change of government. Afghanistan no longer needed large numbers of Coalition soldiers, but it did require a residual force of perhaps 10,000 to conduct training missions, and to ensure the maintenance of high technology equipment until the Afghans themselves were ready to assume this role. The Taliban continued their terror attacks, which served to alienate the population even further, and attempted to take district centers in the south, in an attempt to reassert some credibility, left at an all-time low by their inability to disrupt the elections of 2014. Humiliated by these failures, the time when there was a possibility that Taliban convoys would once more drive through the center of Kabul was long past. This was not to say that there were not dangers ahead. There was still the possibility, fortunately increasingly unlikely, that the army could split on tribal and ethnic lines and the country descend into civil war, but the dreadful fate that overwhelmed Iraq served to concentrate minds in this regard. The one thing that would not happen was that Afghanistan would once more fall to a Taliban insurgency, even one with the full backing of Pakistan’s ISI. The Afghan security forces were now too strong and were supported by a political system that was proving to be surprisingly robust. In certain aspects it resembled that of the United States, not in normative sense, but in the way political machines like those of Cook County or Tammany Hal had, historically, actually wheeled and dealt. As in parts of the United States, in Afghanistan city bosses controlling substantial parts of the economy negotiated with so-called war-lords who could deliver the votes of particular ethnic blocs, to construct a coalition that would represent most interest groups. The deals were struck in shuras rather than in “smoke-filled rooms,” but the end result was the same, the gradual emergence of a government that had a fair chance of functioning. Skilful diplomacy and an Afghan foreign minister who could balance the interests of Pakistan against those of Iran, India, the Central Asian states, and China would do the rest. In answer to the question Ben Anderson asked in his documentary, this is what was meant by “winning.” It was not perfect, but it was very far from a defeat.
1. Tim Bird and Alex Marshall, Afghanistan: How the West Lost Its Way (London: Yale University Press, 2011); Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, Cables from Kabul: The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign (London: Harper, 2011); Vanda Felbab-Brown and Bruce Riedel, Aspiration and Ambivalence: Strategies and Realities of Counterinsurgency and State-Building in Afghanistan (New York: Brookings Institution Press, 2012); Frank Ledwidge, Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan (London, Yale, 2011).
2. Carter Malkasian, War Comes to Garmser: Thirty Years of Conflict on the Afghan Frontier (London: Hurst, 2013); Mike Martin, An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict (London: Hurst, 2014); Astri Suhrke, When More Is Less: The International Project in Afghanistan (London: Hurst, 2011).
3. Bird and Marshall, How the West Lost Its Way, 243.
4. Colonel H. R. McMaster had conducted a successful counterinsurgency operation in Tel Afar in 2005. The following year Colonel Sean MacFarland achieved an even greater success in Ramadi, which led to the Al Anbar “Awakening.” It was the success of these operations that led General Jack Keane, the retired but still hugely influential vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army to convince President Bush to authorize the surge of American forces in Iraq. The author of this chapter was attached to McFarland’s headquarters in Ramadi during the summer of 2006. Interview with General Jack Keane, November 2010.
5. Between June 2007 and June 2014 I conducted more than 60 interviews with American, British, and Afghan personnel. I have cited the British, Americans, and senior Afghan interviewees, but have withheld the identity of junior Afghan personnel, not wishing to expose them unnecessarily to the possibility of attack.
6. The most detailed account of 1 Royal Anglian’s operations in Afghanistan in 2007 is Richard Kemp, Attack State Red (London: Penguin, 2009).
7. Interviews conducted in Sangin June–July 2007 with Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Carver, Major Mick Aston; Major Dominic Biddick, Lieutenant Graham Goodey, Lieutenant Nick Denning, Lieutenant Bjorn Rose, 1 Royal Anglian Regiment; Captain Kathy Freeman, Royal Engineers (acting intelligence officer, 1 Royal Anglian).
8. Anthony King, “Understanding the Helmand Campaign,” International Affairs 86, no. 2 (2010): 311–32.
9. Personal knowledge.
10. Interviews conducted in Nad-e Ali District July–August 2012: District Governor Habibullah; Andy Venus, head, Provisional Reconstruction Team (PRT); John Moffatt, deputy head, PRT; Lieutenant Colonel Mick Aston, Major Bev Allen, Major Graham Goodey, Captain Nick Denning, Lieutenant Ben Thompson, 1 Royal Anglian; Major Naim Moukarzel, Lieutenant Alex Budge, Welsh Guards, Sergeant Bradley Ricks, Light Dragoons.
11. “Remarks by the President on a New Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan,” White House Press Release, March 27, 2009.
12. A heavily edited account of the Eikenberry–McChrystal relationship can be found in Karl W. Eikenberry, “The Limits of Counterinsurgency Doctrine in Afghanistan: The Other Side of the COIN,” Foreign Affairs (September–October 2013).
13. “United States Integrated Civilian–Military Campaign Plan for Support to Afghanistan.”
14. Major General Michael T. Flynn, Captain Matt USMC Pottinger, and Paul D DIA Batchelor, “Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan” (Centre for a New American Security, January 2010), accessed March 5, 2014.
15. Interview with Captain Mike Martin, Sandhurst, 2011.
16. Interview with Colonel Roly Walker, Major Richard Green, Grenadier Guards, London, 2011. Interview with Sergeant Major Boek, Grenadier Guards, Qargha, Kabul, 2014.
17. Walker interview.
18. Walker interview.
19. Green interview.
20. Interview with Major Graham Goodey, Sandhurst, 2011.
21. Walker interview.
22. Green interview.
23. Interviews with General Nick Carter, Warminster, 2011, Brigadier James Cowan, London, 2011, District Governor Habibullah, Shawqat, 2012.
24. Interview with Captain Richard Jakeman, London, 2011.
25. Jakeman interview.
26. HBO Documentary: The Battle of Marjah, broadcast February 15, 2011.
27. Carter interview; Cowan interview; Martin interview.
28. Martin interview.
29. Habibullah interview; John Moffat interview; Shawqat, August 2012.
30. Martin Interview; “Operation Moshtarak” ISAF Joint Command Press Release, February 13, 2010, accessed May 5, 2014.
31. Carter interview; Cowan interview.
32. A large number of the U.S. Marines who conducted the assault were veterans of the Ramadi battle of 2006.
33. Dion Nissenbaum, “Afghan Town a Bleeding Ulcer,” McClatchy News Service, May 24, 2010, accessed April 5, 2014.
34. Interview with Afghan interpreters deployed with USMC in Marjah operation (names withheld), Qargha, 2014.
35. Carl Forsberg, “Counterinsurgency in Kandahar: Evaluating the 2010 Hamkari Campaign,” Afghanistan Report 7 Institute for the Study of War, December 2010, accessed March 10, 2014.
36. Interview with Dr. Carter Malkasian, ISAF HQ, Kabul, July 2013.
37. Malkasian interview.
38. Forsberg, “Counterinsurgency in Kandahar,” 47.
39. Forsberg, “Counterinsurgency in Kandahar,” 29–31.
40. Ibid. Interview with General Sher Mohammad Karimi, chief of staff, ANA, Kabul, April 2013.
41. Forsberg, “Counterinsurgency in Kandahar,” 34–35; Karimi interview; interview with Abdul Rahim Wardak, Afghan minister of defense (2004–12), Kabul, April 2014.
42. Forsberg, “Counterinsurgency in Kandahar,” 43.
43. Malkasian interview.
44. Karl W. Eikenberry, “The Limits of Counterinsurgency Doctrine on Afghanistan: The Other Side of the COIN,” Foreign Affairs (September–October 2013), accessed March 5, 2014.
45. For example, Christina Lamb, The Sunday Times (London), February 16, 2014.
46. Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, Statement made by Sir Sherard at “Changing Character of War” seminar, All Souls College, Oxford, March 2011.
47. Artemy Kalinovsky, “The Blind Leading the Blind: Soviet Advisors, Counter-Insurgency and Nation-Building in Afghanistan,” Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, January 2010, 15–16.
48. Karimi interview.
49. Interviews with Afghan National Army officers deployed to Helmand for election period (names withheld), April 20–22, 2014, Qargha.
50. Huffington Post: blog by Mohammad Subhan, June 14, 2014.