A One-Year War Twenty Times Over: America’s South Asian Fantasy
Every principle must have its vanguard to carry it forward, while forcing its way into society, endure enormous heavy tasks and costly sacrifices . . . Al-Qaeda al-Sulbah [the solid base] constitutes the vanguard for the expected society.
—ABDULLAH AZZAM1
WHEN I arrived at the White House in February 2017, the reluctance to discuss Afghanistan reminded me of the reluctance to discuss Vietnam when I was a cadet at West Point about three decades earlier. Vacancies across the government in positions with responsibility for Afghanistan seemed to reflect America’s lost interest in its longest war. Few Americans understood what our soldiers were still doing in that remote, mountainous landlocked country. Other issues took precedence, such as determining what to do about North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs and the need to frame a China strategy in advance of Chairman Xi’s upcoming visit to Mar-a-Lago. And why prioritize Afghanistan given President Trump’s predisposition to withdraw? Those in favor of getting out did not want to provide the president with alternative options. Those who wanted to correct deficiencies in our strategy and continue supporting Afghan forces in their fight against the Taliban and other terrorist organizations were afraid to bring up the topic because it might trigger the president to order a precipitous disengagement. Would it not be preferable to let the war muddle along as it had for the previous sixteen years rather than ask for a presidential decision that might cut against U.S. interests?
To help the president fulfill his wartime leadership responsibility to the American people, we needed to develop options on Afghanistan that fit into a comprehensive strategy for South Asia. The region encompassed two nuclear powers, India and Pakistan, that viewed each other as enemies. India, the world’s largest democracy, presented tremendous opportunities. But mainly because of the hostility between India and Pakistan, South Asia was the least integrated region in the world economically. Twenty foreign terrorist organizations were active in Afghanistan and Pakistan alone.2 South Asia contained vast potential, grave dangers, and daunting challenges that were important to American security and prosperity.
Decades of war had traumatized Afghan society. American policy makers and strategists failed to appreciate how protracted conflict had divided and weakened the country. After the military successes of 2001, a complex competition ensued with an unseated, but not defeated, Taliban; an elusive Al-Qaeda; new terrorist groups; and supporters of those terrorist organizations, including elements of the Pakistan Army, a supposed ally. Plans did not anticipate political drivers of the violence in Afghanistan, especially how enemy organizations would capitalize on tribal, ethnic, and religious competitions. Paradoxically, a short-war mentality lengthened the conflict. The war had lasted nearly two decades, but the United States and its coalition partners had not fought a two-decade-long war. Afghanistan was a one-year war fought twenty times over.
By 2017, the Afghan war effort seemed like a plane crashing on autopilot. No one was paying attention. Years of incoherent policy and ineffective tactics had left our troops vulnerable while the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and other terrorist organizations, often with the assistance of Pakistan, had become resurgent. I viewed the absence of a viable strategy in Afghanistan as more than a practical problem; it was an ethical failure. As in the Vietnam War, our nation’s soldiers were taking risks and making sacrifices without understanding how those risks and sacrifices contributed to a worthy outcome. If the objective was withdrawal, why were soldiers still in harm’s way? In the thirteenth century, Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote that to be just, war had to meet the criterion of right intention—that is, it must aim to reestablish a just peace.3 Based on our fundamentally flawed and constantly shifting strategies, the Afghan War, I believed, no longer met that test. I thought it important to get the president options before the United States lost the war by default.
I planned a trip to South Asia for April to hear assessments of the situation and use what we learned to inform those options. Representatives from the relevant departments and agencies, including the Directorate of National Intelligence and the Departments of State, Defense, and Treasury, traveled with me and members of the NSC staff to foster collaboration and common understanding of problems and opportunities in the region. I had just hired a new senior director for South Asia, Lisa Curtis, a regional expert with an impeccable reputation, who would join us on the Pakistan leg of the trip. I would come to rely heavily on Lisa, who had two decades of experience on South Asia as a diplomat, intelligence officer, and think tank analyst. She had served in India and Pakistan where, in her mid-twenties, she met Jalaluddin Haqqani, whom the United States called a freedom fighter during the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s and who would later turn his organization against the United States and the Afghan government. The acting senior director for South Asia and director for Afghanistan was Fernando Lujan, an Army Special Forces officer. Lujan, a graduate of West Point with a master’s in public policy from Harvard, had the combination of education and experience needed in that job during a period of transition between administrations. As an acting senior director on the national security staff, Fernando sometimes ran afoul of hierarchy-minded officials in the Department of Defense who resented a lieutenant colonel convening meetings with military and civilian officials more senior in rank. Fernando had been due to leave the White House and depart for Afghanistan, but I asked him to stay until Lisa took over the effort.
Since 2009, the Obama administration and Department of State had been trying to negotiate an acceptable peace agreement with the Taliban while executing an announced withdrawal. As I read my background papers on the plane, I concluded that some officials in Washington had convinced themselves that the Taliban was a relatively benign organization that, with the promise of power sharing in Afghanistan, could be persuaded to renounce support for jihadist terrorist organizations. It was an extreme case of strategic narcissism based in wishful thinking and a false premise that the Taliban was disconnected from terrorist organizations and open to a power-sharing agreement consistent with the Afghan Constitution. As usual with strategic narcissism, policy makers had created the enemy they wanted in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
We took off from Andrews Air Force Base on April 14, 2017. Our team met in the large office that doubled as a bedroom at the back of the plane. During our discussion, I described the Taliban as a reactionary, ruthless, inhumane, and misogynistic organization that was intertwined with Al-Qaeda and other jihadist terrorist organizations. The stakes were high because the terrorist ecosystem in Afghanistan and Pakistan could produce powerful organizations with access to a lucrative drug trade in relatively inaccessible territory in which they are able to plan, resource, organize, and train for attacks. The drug trade is a source of strength for terrorists, putting hundreds of millions of dollars per year into their coffers. It is also a source of weakness for the Afghan government and institutions, as many officials are unable to resist the lure of easy money. I suggested that we heed the advice of the Chinese philosopher of war Sun Tzu, who observed 2,500 years ago that “If you know your enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained, you will also suffer a defeat.”4
I quickly realized that some members of our team had become so emotionally invested in the withdraw-and-talk strategy that fantasy had overwhelmed reality. They imagined a reformed Taliban that would forswear its goal of establishing an Islamic Emirate under brutal Sharia law. Additionally, talking with the Taliban had become a cottage industry in which academics and think tank analysts got a crack at wartime diplomacy. But they were talking with the enemy of their imagination rather than the barbarous terrorists who had aided and abetted Al-Qaeda in the murder of nearly three thousand Americans on September 11, 2001, and who were perpetuating violence against the long-suffering Afghan people. I hoped that our trip might foster a higher degree of strategic empathy for the situation across South Asia and a better understanding of our enemies and adversaries in the region. For too many years, we had suffered a defeat for every victory gained.
Foundational to strategy formation is the willingness to unearth and challenge assumptions. I asked the team to use discussions in Kabul to challenge four assumptions foundational to America’s fantasy in South Asia:
AS OUR plane touched down in Kabul, I was happy to be back. I had departed the country five years earlier after a twenty-month-long tour of duty. When he was named commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus had asked me to join him and help take on one of the greatest obstacles for success in Afghanistan, corruption and organized crime. In the job I left as I deployed, chief of concept development and learning for the army, I studied closely the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The two years in Afghanistan confirmed the principal lesson I had identified: the United States military and its civilian counterparts had failed to direct efforts toward achieving sustainable political outcomes. I was grateful for the opportunity to organize an effort that might, finally, develop a realistic strategy for Afghanistan. It was past time to act on the hard-won lessons of America’s longest war.
Although the distance from the Kabul airport to the embassy was only 2.5 miles, we loaded onto helicopters and flew to a landing zone at the sprawling secure area that contains the U.S. Embassy and the headquarters for the U.S.-led military coalition. The fact that the city had become too unsafe for routine ground movement of U.S. officials was used by advocates for withdrawal as a sign of the war’s futility rather than as an indication of a deficient strategy. The U.S. chargé d’affaires Hugo Llorens, our ranking diplomat in Kabul until the president appointed a new ambassador, greeted us as the Black Hawks touched down. We walked together to the embassy. Hugo was our tenth chargé d’affaires in Afghanistan since 2001.
Llorens was an experienced diplomat who, after thirty-five years of working mainly on U.S. relations in the Western Hemisphere, had decided to retire. Hugo was energetic; he looked much younger than his sixty-two years. He had told me in Washington two weeks earlier that his concerns were growing. It was neither the Taliban’s mass murder attacks in Afghan cities, nor Taliban gains in the countryside, nor even large-scale offensives such as the September 2015 attack on Kunduz or the September 2016 attacks on Tarinkot that most concerned the ambassador. Rather, it was the lack of clearly stated U.S. goals and the ambiguity of U.S. strategy. Ambiguity emboldened the Taliban and shook the confidence of the Afghan government and people. Moreover, doubts about the future impeded reforms necessary to harden Afghan institutions against the regenerative capacity of the Taliban—regenerative capacity hidden across the mountainous border with Pakistan. The ambassador also worried about the depletion of U.S. will due to unrealistic expectations. Although the Afghan government needed to reduce the corruption that perpetuated state weakness, Afghanistan never would become, nor did it need to become, Switzerland.
Since my first visit to Afghanistan in 2003, I had felt the emotional impetus behind Afghan policy shift from over-optimism to resignation and even defeatism. Hugo agreed that we needed a realistic strategy based on an honest appraisal of the situation and of the degree of influence that the United States and its partners could exert to ensure that South Asia never again became a base for terrorist organizations that aimed to attack the U.S. homeland, U.S. allies, or our citizens abroad. And we needed a sustainable strategy that could be pursued over time at a cost acceptable to the American people. As with understanding the challenges posed by Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China, the appraisal of the present and what was needed in the future had to begin with an understanding of the recent past.
AS WE walked out of the embassy compound on our way to the military headquarters, I reflected on the history of the place I had first visited seventeen months after Afghan militias and U.S. forces drove the Taliban out of Kabul. In December of 2001, U.S. Marines reoccupied the embassy building that their predecessors had abandoned in January 1989 as the last Soviet troops pulled out of the country. In a locked vault in the basement, the marines found a folded American flag and a handwritten note addressed to “Marines” from Sgt. James M. Blake who had led the last marine detachment. Afghan caretakers had kept the old embassy like a time capsule, taking care of the grounds but never entering the building. In 2001, Hamid Mamnoon, one of those caretakers, remembered that cold winter of 1989. He was “very unhappy that the international community forgot Afghanistan.” He told a reporter that he was “happy now that the international community is with us and they do not forget us anymore.”5 By 2017, the modest 1960s-era embassy building was dwarfed by large, gleaming structures. The scene reminded me of the classic children’s book The Little House, by Virginia Lee Burton. At a construction cost of nearly eight hundred million dollars, the embassy compound should have been a tangible symbol that America would see the war through; the United States was not going to forget Afghanistan again. But instead, the extravagant embassy seemed to belie America’s grave doubts about the mission in Afghanistan and the near-constant announcements of imminent military disengagement. It had come to symbolize the many inconsistencies and contradictions in U.S. policy that perplexed Americans and Afghans alike.
The secure area that contains the U.S. embassy, various headquarters, and the Arg, home to Afghan leaders since 1880, is a museum of Afghanistan’s troubled recent history. In 1989, as the last Soviet troops departed and the Soviet Union began to collapse, support for their client government in Kabul dried up. In 1992, after anti-communist mujahideen militias unseated the last pro-Soviet leader, Mohammad Najibullah, a brutal civil war broke out. Najibullah and his brother fled from the Arg and were granted sanctuary in the United Nations compound. During the civil war, the Afghan people suffered as warlords and thugs preyed on them with impunity. Many Afghan tribes were led by criminals who not only extorted the population, but also engaged in murder, torture, rape, and egregious child abuse. The Taliban’s appeal was based on its pledge to end the chaos and criminality. In 1996, the Taliban, with Pakistani support, took over Kabul. Fighters secured the Arg palace for their leader, the one-eyed cleric, Mullah Omar. After declaring Afghanistan a “completely Islamic state” in which a “complete Islamic system will be enforced,” Omar gave his first order: seize Najibullah. A Taliban death squad dragged him and his brother from the UN compound, tortured them, murdered them, and hung their bloated bodies from a lamppost in the traffic circle outside the walls of the Arg.6 The Afghan people wanted order, but the Taliban would inflict on them a new form of brutality based on a ruthless purity agenda.
As the Taliban took control of Kabul and most of the country, Ahmad Shah Massoud and thousands of militiamen, comprised mainly of ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras, hung on to territory in the north of the country and continued to resist the Islamist regime’s attempts to subjugate them. The Taliban and Al-Qaeda tried for years to assassinate Massoud. But Massoud inspired fierce loyalty. His image is still ubiquitous in Kabul on billboards, taxis, and in government offices. Osama bin Laden knew that once the United States traced the 9/11 murderers back to Al-Qaeda’s safe haven in Afghanistan, the combination of U.S. forces and Massoud’s Northern Alliance would be potent. So, on September 9, 2001, two Al-Qaeda terrorists disguised as Arab television journalists entered a concrete bungalow used as a Northern Alliance office on the pretext of interviewing Massoud. The terrorists detonated explosives hidden in their camera equipment, inflicting fatal injuries on him and serious injuries on his longtime political aide Massoud Khalili.7
Osama bin Laden’s plan backfired. Instead of neutering the Northern Alliance, Massoud’s martyrdom rallied fighters determined to inflict retribution on the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Forty-nine days after CIA operatives and U.S. Special Forces soldiers arrived in the Northern Alliance’s camp in the Panjshir Valley, they liberated Kabul. U.S. casualties were low. It seemed that the “light footprint” approach, which combined special forces and CIA operators with U.S. airpower and anti-Taliban militias, had worked. The war, however, soon entered a new phase. To paraphrase Sun Tzu once again, that which depends on me I can do; that which depends on the enemy cannot be certain.8
The initial campaign removed the Taliban, but in December 2001, Osama bin Laden and approximately five thousand terrorists and Taliban fighters escaped to Pakistan. The commander of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Tommy Franks, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, had decided to conduct a swift, economical campaign to unseat the Taliban and destroy Al-Qaeda. Their unwillingness to deploy the troops required, which was based on the belief that larger numbers of troops could immerse the United States in a protracted insurgency, set conditions for what they hoped to avoid as bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, and the Taliban began to reconstitute with the assistance of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).9 From 2001 to 2017, inconsistent, inadequate U.S. strategies gave Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other jihadist organizations the time and space needed to regain strength. When strategies did attempt to isolate the enemy from sources of support and harden Afghanistan against the Taliban’s regenerative capacity, those strategies were resourced inadequately or abandoned prematurely.
In truth, the United States had been behind in the effort to stabilize post-Taliban Afghanistan from the very beginning. Paying little attention to the history of previous military interventions, U.S. planners did not prioritize the establishment of a replacement government as essential to preventing Afghanistan from becoming, once again, a terrorist sanctuary. Under the auspices of the United Nations, participants in a December 2001 conference in Bonn, Germany, planned a new constitutional order and elections for Afghanistan. A Loya Jirga, a grand assembly of representatives from all Afghanistan, chose Hamid Karzai as interim president. As the new government formed, U.S. officials kept the mission in Afghanistan focused narrowly on terrorism—military forces were there to hunt down Taliban and Al-Qaeda leaders.10 As we drove to the headquarters, I reflected on my first visit to Afghanistan, in 2003, just after Secretary Rumsfeld, the principal architect of the “light footprint” approach that left commanders with insufficient troops to block Al-Qaeda’s escape routes, had ordered further reductions that left fewer than one army combat brigade split between bases at Bagram and Kandahar. Rumsfeld stood with Commander of Coalition Forces Gen. Dan McNeil and Afghan president Hamid Karzai to announce that “we’re at a point where we clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction activities.”11 The war in Iraq, launched two months earlier, was receiving the preponderance of the George W. Bush administration’s attention at that point. The Iraq War would preoccupy the Bush administration and preclude the development of an effective strategy in Afghanistan and South Asia. Despite an international coalition that eventually grew to fifty-one nations, the war in Afghanistan remained under-resourced in those early years, even as the Taliban and Al-Qaeda were regenerating.
But after an anemic and fragmented effort on reconstruction in the war’s early years, the Bush administration did an about-face and initiated large-scale programs and investments to help establish a functioning state. Money poured in from seemingly innumerable national, international, and nongovernmental organizations, but at unsustainable rates beyond the absorptive capacity of Afghanistan’s economy; much of the assistance was stolen or wasted. The effort to build state institutions was erratic, with different NATO nations sponsoring individual ministries. Development programs were ill-conceived; many sought to create centralized national-level systems incompatible with the traditionally decentralized form of governance in Afghanistan.12 The lack of transparency strengthened criminalized patronage networks that looted the assistance efforts, profited from the wartime economy, and preyed on the Afghan people. U.S. officials often averted their eyes from criminal activity, such as the theft of salaries for “ghost” soldiers and police, even though the diversion of aid and the extortion enriched not only corrupt leaders, but also the Taliban and terrorist organizations. In the absence of strong security forces and rule of law, many Afghans had no choice but to seek protection from powerful warlords, criminal networks, and militias, further fragmenting society and frustrating efforts to develop a common postwar Afghan identity and vision for the future. All were hedging against a return of civil war or the Taliban. So were some U.S. officials.
From summer 2010 to spring 2012, I encountered many U.S. officials who believed that efforts to strengthen Afghan state institutions were unnecessary, impossibly hard, and even counterproductive. As an army brigadier general, I commanded a multinational intelligence, law enforcement, and military task force with the mission of reducing the threat of corruption and organized crime to a level that was no longer fatal to the Afghan state. But in Kabul and Washington, U.S. officials tended to view corruption as immutable and endemic to Afghanistan rather than as a product of political competition among factions and weak institutions. That view sometimes seemed like bigotry masquerading as cultural sensitivity—Afghans were not culturally predestined to corruption and criminality.13 Differences of opinion often reflected a false choice between unrealistic goals and doing nothing to encourage incremental reform. Afghanistan was not going to become corruption-free, but it was still possible to constrain corruption and the criminal actors that posed the biggest threats to a fragile state. The lack of U.S. action to do so often left Afghans perplexed. Some concluded that American officials were incompetent, complicit, or both.
In conversations with intelligence officials, I sensed nostalgia for the excitement of earlier campaigns. In the 1980s, CIA officers had supported mujahideen groups’ resistance to Soviet occupation, delivering that support mainly through a local ally, Pakistan’s ISI. In 2001, CIA officers were again on the front lines alongside U.S. special operations forces advising the Northern Alliance and other militias, including the militia of Hamid Karzai. They forged close relationships with mujahideen groups whom they empowered with money, weapons, intelligence, and air power.14 Years later, some of those same officers prioritized close relationships with militia leaders over incentivizing the reforms necessary to counter corruption and strengthen the Afghan state. It was a complicated dynamic—making assistance conditional on anticorruption measures might jeopardize relationships with those groups that could provide the intelligence we might need to fight the terrorists if the Afghan state did collapse. As we drove up to the headquarters, I wondered how our conversation would compare to conversations of five years earlier.
THE MILITARY headquarters, known by then as Resolute Support, was in a building with large Georgian columns that evoked its history under Mohammed Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan, who reigned from 1933 until he was deposed in 1973. The building served as the Army Club. Officers gathered in its well-appointed salons, where the military band often entertained them and their families. Officers’ children used to swim in the pool, which had been filled in to support the many temporary aluminum-sided buildings needed for the coalition staff under U.S. general John “Mick” Nicholson.
We met Mick at the front steps. He was an old friend and one of the finest officers with whom I had served. When I entered West Point as a “plebe,” or freshman, in the class of 1984, Mick, a “firstie,” or senior cadet, was the “First Captain of the Corps.” He had an easy-going demeanor and a good sense of humor. And he was unflappable, having commanded multiple times in hotbeds of the Taliban insurgency from the agriculturally rich lowlands of Kandahar and Helmand, inhabited mainly by Durrani or lowland Pashtuns, to the steep mountains and lush valleys of the eastern highland region historically inhabited by Ghilzai or highland Pashtuns.
Mick understood the complex tribal dimension of the struggle for power in Afghanistan. Durranis consider themselves the rightful rulers of Afghanistan. They were the tribe of the monarchs since Emir Ahmad Shah Durrani founded the modern Afghan state in 1747. The Ghilzai Pashtuns, known mainly for their prowess as fighters, jealously guard tribal autonomy and challenged the Durrani claim to leadership. Divisiveness between those confederations and among the tribes within them caused shifts in loyalties between the government and the Taliban. Competitions within the Pashtun tribes and with other ethnic groups such as the Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazara were not a new feature of the Afghan social and cultural landscape.15 But this factionalism had intensified in recent decades, especially as foreign fighters flooded into Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight the Soviet Army, bringing with them an extreme Islamist ideology from Saudi Arabia and the Deobandi school from Pakistan. Among them was Osama bin Laden, the seventeenth son of a Yemeni who had immigrated to Saudi Arabia and built a billion-dollar construction company in the kingdom.
Osama bin Laden preferred holy war to the family construction business. He got his break in the war against the Soviets by using construction equipment from his family’s company to fortify guerrilla positions. He took part in selective battles to build his reputation as a mujahed. He was particularly skilled at raising money and providing logistical support, skills that would prove helpful after he and Palestinian cleric Abdullah Azzam founded the group he named Al-Qaeda (meaning “the base”) in 1988.16
Perhaps most important, bin Laden and his fellow jihadists brought with them an extreme and perverted interpretation of Islam. In Pakistan, proselytizing Islamist extremists found a sympathetic audience among those of the Deobandi school, an orthodoxy with roots in nineteenth-century northern India. Deobandis joined Arab jihadists to promote religious intolerance and brutal enforcement of Sharia law. A growing number of Afghan refugees in Pakistan and those who lived in the mountains along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border were susceptible to their demagoguery.
Bin Laden built Al-Qaeda on hatred of those who did not adhere to its extremist interpretation of Islam. The hatred was directed at Sunni Muslims, or “apostates,” who did not support Al-Qaeda’s sanctioned cruelty and misogyny. Later, under Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and other terrorist organizations such as ISIS, hatred expanded to include Christians and Jews, or “unbelievers”; Shia Muslims, or “rejectionists,” who regarded Ali, the fourth caliph, as Muhammad’s first true successor; and Sufis, who reject violence in favor of introspection and spiritual closeness with God. Al-Qaeda’s “near enemies” were governments in Muslim-majority countries that did not adhere to a severe form of Sharia law. Its “far enemies” were Israel, Europe, and the United States. Al-Qaeda believed that members of these groups had only two choices: either surrender and convert, or else be killed. Al-Qaeda was to serve as the vanguard for an Islamic revolution that would establish the caliphate.
Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were a match made in hell. Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden shared complementary missions and ideologies as well as an affinity for extreme brutality. Bin Laden urged the ummah (Muslim community) to unite behind the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (the Taliban) as “the seed” of global jihad. After U.S. Navy SEALs killed bin Laden in 2011, his successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, repeatedly swore allegiance to the Taliban’s emir, Mullah Omar. Al-Zawahiri stated that many Al-Qaeda terrorists had heeded bin Laden’s call and joined “together around this Islamic Emirate” to create “an international jihadist” alliance stretching from Central Asia to the Atlantic Ocean. In August 2015, after it was discovered that Mullah Omar had been dead for over two years, al-Zawahiri pledged his fealty to Omar’s successor, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour.17
Mick walked me to his office for a one-on-one meeting and a video telephone conference with the commander of Central Command, Gen. Joe Votel. Mick was on his sixth tour of duty in Afghanistan. In 2006, as a brigade commander in the mountainous border region in the east, he and his fellow soldiers saw up close the Taliban’s brutality.18 And after serving on the border of Pakistan, they knew that South Asia was a geographic epicenter in our effort to defeat terrorist organizations that threatened the United States and the world. Mick highlighted the connection between counterterrorism and the need for Afghan institutions to be strong enough to withstand the regenerative capacity of the Taliban. He and Votel agreed that counterterrorism from afar was problematic. Access to intelligence would evaporate as terrorists hid among the population, and a lack of pressure on their organizations would allow them to plan, organize, train for, and execute attacks as they had prior to September 11, 2001. Terrorist control of the narcotics trade had given them the financial strength to grow their organizations and improve the sophistication and lethality of their methods. Without a viable Afghan government and security forces, another large-scale terrorist attack might force the United States and coalition troops to return to Afghanistan in large numbers. Mick pointed out that Afghan forces were doing most of the fighting and making the preponderance of the sacrifices. If Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were to collapse the Afghan government, they would control territory that, like the Fertile Crescent of Ancient Mesopotamia, had great spiritual significance. Our conversation made clear that a narrow counterterrorism strategy using intelligence collection to cue long-distance raids or strikes was flawed.
We walked from Mick’s office into the command center that, in the time of the king, had served as the large dining room. Now it was full of flatscreen televisions broadcasting video feeds from drones and digital maps superimposed with military symbols. The wide range of camouflage patterns on the uniforms in the room indicated that officers from many of the thirty-nine coalition member nations were present. The uniforms symbolized broad support for stabilizing Afghanistan and fighting jihadist terrorists, but they also represented wide variance in coalition members’ willingness to take risks and engage in combat. Some nations were happy to train Afghan forces but unwilling to accompany them in battle. Many others fought courageously in difficult conditions only to leave the battlefield reluctantly after their nations were no longer willing to pay the price in blood. Inconsistencies in U.S. policy made the Coalition’s incoherence worse. Nations were reluctant to make long-term commitments and share burdens if they doubted America’s staying power. The experience in Afghanistan had validated Winston Churchill’s observation that “there is only one thing worse than fighting with allies and that is fighting without them.”19
Our team was welcome. The Americans and Coalition members present were hoping that the new administration might provide a sound and sustainable strategy to breathe new life into the effort. Some in the command feared that the war had been forgotten. Reporting on the war in U.S. and European media was scarce and shallow. Media business models, including newspapers, no longer supported professional, sustained coverage of wars. In the United States, television shows rarely cut to foreign correspondents in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Cable networks’ news programs found they could save money and maximize profits by replacing foreign correspondents with pundits paid to sit around tables and talk with (or at) each other, mainly about White House intrigue, partisan politics, or popular culture.
But the Afghan war was never well understood by Americans. Most strained even to name the Taliban and other terrorist groups we were fighting there, let alone describe their goals and their strategy. The war garnered attention only sporadically, and then usually only after a spectacular enemy attack. Details about the numbers of troops deployed or casualties suffered appeared without context—what the United States and its allies should try to achieve in Afghanistan, why the outcome was important, and what strategies were that might deliver that outcome at an acceptable cost. Coverage portrayed American and Coalition warriors as passive recipients of enemy action. Casualties were mourned, but combat prowess and battlefield achievements went uncelebrated. The Afghan people and Afghan soldiers fighting to preserve their freedom from Taliban oppression were unknown to Americans. Some saw the problem as media bias, but the Afghan war seemed to be the most underreported and, therefore, least understood war in recent history.
I wished that the American people could have heard the briefing from Nicholson’s staff that day. His intelligence officer explained how the terrorist ecosystem in Pakistan has global reach. As of 2019, there were twenty terrorist groups based in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. Operations against a particularly brutal and well-trained terrorist organization, ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K), demonstrated how those jihadist terrorist organizations were intertwined and thrived in the terrorist ecosystem in Pakistan and Afghanistan. ISIS-K was a branch of the terrorist group that had, in the summer of 2014, conducted a murderous offensive in Syria and Iraq that left it in control of territory larger than the state of Maryland. As ISIS lost control of its wilayets, or provinces, there, ISIS-Khorasan became more important to the global jihad.20 Although it competed with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, those organizations shared common goals and many of the same people.
One powerful ISIS ally is Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a group waging jihad against the Pakistani government. Around 2004, TTP began absorbing portions of thirteen terrorist organizations (many of which had been created by the Pakistan ISI’s Directorate S) to fight against the U.S.-led coalition and Afghan security forces.21 The TTP was one of ISI’s Frankenstein’s monsters; the organization turned on its creator, killing tens of thousands of Pakistanis from 2007 to 2014. On December 16, 2014, in what may have been its most heinous act, six TTP terrorists attacked the Army Public School in Peshawar, Pakistan, murdering 149 innocents and injuring 114 more, the vast majority of them schoolchildren between the ages of eight and eighteen. The attack demonstrated not only TTP’s brutality, but also how it and other groups had evolved from an international network that breeds terrorists in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. The murderers included a Chechen, Egyptian, Saudi, Moroccan, and two Afghans. TTP and Al-Qaeda trained together in Pakistan. They and other groups shared resources and expertise in the terrorist ecosystem astride the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.22
If given the opportunity, many of the groups based in South Asia would commit mass murder in the United States. For example, TTP-trained Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistan-born U.S. citizen, aimed to set off a car bomb in Manhattan’s Times Square. On May 1, 2010, the bomb malfunctioned, in part because Shahzad had had only superficial training in Pakistan. U.S. intelligence collection and strike capabilities based in Afghanistan had forced Shahzad and his trainers to stay on the move.23 It was the effectiveness of the U.S. intelligence facility in Khost that led TTP on December 30, 2009, to use a Jordanian doctor to infiltrate the base and detonate a suicide vest, killing three security contractors, four CIA officers, and a Jordanian intelligence official.
Ensuring that terrorists remain preoccupied with surviving rather than plotting attacks on innocents requires a sustained effort against determined, adaptive, and ruthless enemies. Nicholson’s staff summarized Afghan operations in mountainous Nangarhar and Kunar Provinces against ISIS-K with U.S. air power, Special Forces, and Army Rangers in support. A U.S. drone strike killed ISIS-K’s first emir, Pakistani national Hafiz Saeed Khan, on July 26, 2016.24 His successor, Abdul Hasib, had masterminded a heinous attack on Afghanistan’s military hospital in Kabul a few weeks before my visit, killing thirty defenseless hospital personnel and patients and wounding over fifty more.25 Two weeks after my visit, Afghan special security services and U.S. Army Rangers would hunt Hasib down and kill him.
The briefers’ explanation of the ecosystem that sustained TTP, ISIS-K, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other terrorist organizations exposed flawed assumptions that our policymakers had made about the enemy. U.S. leaders often imagined bold lines between terrorist groups—lines that simply did not exist. Although the Taliban and numerous terrorist organizations in Afghanistan and Pakistan sometimes clashed with one another, they more often formed alliances or shared resources to pursue their common cause. But the desire to simplify and shorten the war perpetuated self-delusion. Self-delusion about the enemy was the basis for America’s South Asian fantasy, in particular regarding the Taliban and Al-Qaeda as completely separate organizations. An extreme version of this delusion, created during the Obama administration and initially debunked but resurrected later in the Trump administration, sustained the forlorn hope that conciliation with the Taliban could provide an easy way out of Afghanistan. The false hope was also based in a failure to realize that the terrorist ecosystem along the Afghan-Pakistan border had not developed organically; it was a creation of the Pakistani military to keep ethnic Baluch and Pashtun populations suppressed and to prevent them from seeking either independence or finding common cause with their kinfolk across the 2,430-kilometer-long “Durand Line” drawn by a British diplomat and Afghan Abdur Rahman Khan to delineate British and Afghan spheres of influence. Paradoxically, the effort to simplify the enemy to shorten the war not only obscured the stakes in Afghanistan and diminished the will necessary to sustain the mission, but also complicated and prolonged what had become America’s longest war.
The first day’s meeting reinforced my belief that narrow counterterrorism efforts focusing exclusively on Al-Qaeda would prove insufficient to protect the United States from jihadist terrorists based in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and other terrorist organizations were interconnected both ideologically and physically, in the mountainous region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
The briefings also revealed that, despite the Obama administration’s 2014 declaration that the war was over, American soldiers, alongside Afghan armed forces, were still fighting against ruthless enemies that were determined to establish control of territory, people, and resources. Their twisted aim was to establish an Islamic Emirate based on a distorted interpretation of Islam. It was clear to me that time was running out. The Department of Defense was executing the Obama administration’s policy of withdrawal. U.S. troop strength fell from a high of 100,000 in the spring of 2011 to 9,800 at the end of 2014 to roughly 8,400 in March 2017.26 The “troop cap” had no connection to what military forces were meant to achieve. Restrictions on how the military fought limited its effectiveness and created opportunities for the Taliban and its terrorist allies. Moreover, military and diplomatic efforts were completely disconnected. Since 2009, the Department of State had tried to negotiate an acceptable peace agreement with the Taliban while executing an announced withdrawal.27 The Obama administration even declared that the Taliban was no longer an enemy force, which meant that the U.S. military stopped offensive operations against the Taliban and was unable to bring its considerable intelligence and airpower capabilities to bear offensively unless hostile actions were taken against them. Without U.S. advisors, airpower was less responsive; bombs directed from remote headquarters often fell far from intended targets and sometimes inflicted unintended losses on civilians caught between the Afghan Army and the Taliban. Emboldened, the Taliban stepped up attacks on Afghan National Security Forces and U.S. forces. “Insider attacks,” in which Taliban infiltrators opened fire on Afghan or U.S. forces from within what were supposed to be secure locations, were meant to erode trust among Afghan soldiers and between Afghan and U.S. forces. The Taliban and associated terrorist networks also expanded mass murder attacks against Afghan civilians, often with the assistance of the Pakistan Army’s intelligence arm, the ISI.28 In 2015 and 2016, the Afghan National Security Forces lost at least 13,422 killed and 24,248 wounded. In those two years, the Taliban and other terrorist organizations murdered 4,446 innocent civilians.29 Battlefield gains, insider attacks, and the murder of civilians were meant to exhaust the will of the Afghan people and the American public. It was working. Meanwhile, the Taliban gained control of more territory, intensified attacks, and inflicted more losses on U.S. forces and especially on Afghan forces and the civilian population.
As we left General Nicholson’s headquarters, I was even more determined to provide the president with options, including a strategy based on strategic empathy rather than narcissism. Effective strategies require a clear-eyed understanding of the enemy and a harmonizing of the ends (or what is to be achieved) with the ways (the methods and tactics) and the means (the resources applied). If the aim was to ensure that Afghanistan could never again harbor terrorists who could attack the United States and our interests abroad, there was not only a persistent mismatch in South Asia strategy between ends, ways, and means, but also inconsistencies across all three over time.
THE SECOND day in Kabul started early, with the familiar drive past the headquarters and then down the tree-lined road to the Arg. The palace, constructed in the late nineteenth century, sat behind high walls on eighty-three acres in the center of Kabul city. The grounds contained gardens, a mosque, offices, and the official and private residences of the president.30 I visited the palace and the National Security Council building many times from June 2010 to March 2012. I often accompanied U.S. ambassadors Karl Eikenberry and, later, Ryan Crocker, as well as commanders of the International Security Assistance Force, first Gen. David Petraeus and later Gen. John Allen, for meetings with then-President Hamid Karzai. The meetings were touchy. They dealt with the problem of how to reduce the threat of corruption and organized crime to Afghan institutions and key sectors of the Afghan economy.
Karzai was usually in a bad mood. By 2010, the days of amicable cooperation between him and U.S. leaders were gone; the relationship had succumbed to a combination of inept diplomacy, incoherent strategy, Karzai’s exhaustion, and a successful ISI psychological operation to make Pakistan the irreplaceable power broker in the war-torn country.31 A lack of trust and the tendency of Afghan and American leaders to suspect the worst of one another had contributed to the ineffective and inconsistent strategies. The lack of trust reinforced flawed assumptions, including that “counterterrorism only” was a viable strategy and that the Taliban could be easily separated from Al-Qaeda and would negotiate in good faith, allowing the United States an easy exit from the war.
Karzai had doubts about the dependability of the United States from the beginning. When President George W. Bush met with him in the Oval Office just three months after 9/11, Karzai told Bush that “the most common question I hear from my ministers and others in Afghanistan is whether the United States will continue to work with us.”32 Despite Bush’s reassurance, over the next seven years, the United States consistently gave the impression that its forces were on the verge of departure. When, on May 1, 2003, Rumsfeld announced an end to major combat operations in Afghanistan, Gen. Dan McNeill stated that the small U.S. force of seven thousand soldiers would soon shrink to an even smaller force, one focused exclusively on training the Afghan Army. It was the same day that President Bush announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq on board the USS Abraham Lincoln with a “Mission Accomplished” banner as the backdrop. Of course, neither the Taliban nor insurgents in Iraq complied. When Rumsfeld gave his speech, the Taliban had already initiated offensive operations along the border.33 The vast majority of casualties suffered in both Afghanistan and Iraq were yet to come. And American partners in both countries, confronted with the U.S. aversion to so-called “nation building” and an associated denial of the need to consolidate initial military successes into sustainable political outcomes, hedged against an American withdrawal.
By 2006, enemy gains compounded Karzai’s concerns over the staying power of his American ally. Between 2006 and 2009, the Taliban gained control of territory in the southern part of Afghanistan, including Karzai’s native province of Kandahar, which was also the birthplace and spiritual home of Mullah Omar and the Taliban. NATO forces, mainly from Canada, the United Kingdom, and Denmark, expected peacekeeping duty similar to operations in the Balkans in the 1990s. Instead, they found themselves in fierce combat. By 2008, the security situation in Kandahar and neighboring Helmand Province was dire. President Bush, recognizing that overconfidence based on initial military success against the Taliban had “left us short of the resources we needed” to stabilize Afghanistan, authorized an increase in the troop level to 45,000 as he left office.34 But the earlier announcements of withdrawal had already undermined Karzai’s trust, and as the security situation in his tribal homeland deteriorated, so did his relationship with the United States.
Between 2010 and 2012, it was clear to me that Karzai’s stress made him susceptible to conspiracy theories. Pakistan’s ISI took full advantage of the opportunity to drive a wedge between Karzai and the new Obama administration. During my visits to the palace, Karzai’s chief of staff, Abdul Karim Khoram, a short, rotund, unfriendly man, lurked in the background in the president’s office. Khoram had been imprisoned under Najibullah and later fled to Paris, where he received a master’s degree in international law and diplomacy. He seemed to be under the influence of the ISI.
The Taliban and the ISI used Khoram and other agents in the palace to convince Karzai that the United States had ulterior motives in Afghanistan beyond defeating jihadist terrorists.35 Khoram and others would bring Karzai initial, often inaccurate, reports of civilian casualties caused by U.S. and Afghan forces while soft-pedaling reports of Taliban atrocities. Karzai gradually began to oppose Coalition and Afghan military operations, especially night raids, which were designed to minimize risk to U.S. and Afghan troops as well as innocent civilians. By 2012, the relationship was irreparable. The commanders I accompanied to the meeting in the palace, Generals Petraeus and, later, Allen, did their best to control the damage.
The United States began to see the Afghan government as part of the problem rather than as an essential element of the solution. U.S. leaders made an already bad situation worse. President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton assigned the Afghanistan and Pakistan portfolio to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, a man whom many saw as imperious and condescending. The relationship with Karzai spiraled downward.36 Holbrooke actively opposed Karzai in the run-up to the 2009 Afghan presidential election. After the election, he suggested a second round, which, along with reports of fraud, led to two months of post-election turmoil. In April 2010, Karzai exploded: “If you and the international community pressure me more, I swear that I am going to join the Taliban.”37 By the time I arrived in Afghanistan to form a countercorruption task force, Karzai viewed U.S. complaints about corruption as another effort to undermine his presidency.
Oddly, despite the difficult subject matter, Karzai and I had a good relationship. I had listened to Afghans and learned about the internal tribal, ethnic, and political competitions that drove corruption and perpetuated state weakness. Karzai seemed to enjoy our discussions, which were based on mutual understanding that the political settlement in Afghanistan had become dependent on unchecked corruption and organized crime. In exchange for their loyalty, Karzai had given mujahideen-era elites, including some of the most rapacious warlords, what amounted to a license to steal. They enriched themselves, grew their power bases, and controlled state institutions and functions, often extorting citizens at checkpoints, borders, and airports. We discussed how unchecked criminality perpetuated state weakness and dependence on international assistance while frustrating donors, who were less willing to underwrite corrupt enterprises that wasted their money. Despite our rapport, Karzai and I made only halting progress. Stabilizing Afghanistan, I had concluded, would take not only a better relationship with Afghan leaders, but also a sustained effort to convince those leaders to undertake reforms essential to the state’s survival. But the poor relationship with Karzai convinced some that reform of Afghan institutions and reduction of the threat from corruption were impossibilities. The lack of confidence in reform reinforced the alternatives: a narrow counterterrorism strategy and a deal with the Taliban.
During those meetings with Afghan leadership, I remember thinking that Khoram was playing the treacherous Iago to Karzai’s Othello. Just as Iago convinces Othello that his most loyal captain is having an affair with Othello’s wife, so Khoram (and Pakistani leaders) convinced Karzai that the United States was not a trusted partner. Like Karzai, Othello wins over audiences early in the play, but then, based in part on Iago’s web of lies, makes poor decisions that lead to his eventual undoing. Othello kills his wife, Desdemona, in the final act. Karzai left the presidency before he killed the partnership with the United States, NATO, and the international community. However, afterward, he continued to undermine the U.S.-Afghan relationship from his new home, adjacent to the palace grounds.38 The damage he did was significant, especially the impetus he gave to Americans’ flawed assumptions concerning the nature of the war, assumptions he would help revive later in the Trump administration.
It was in 2009 that our strategic narcissism in Afghanistan seemed to morph into Stockholm syndrome, or at least what psychologists call reaction formation, the superficial adoption and exaggeration of ideas and impulses dramatically opposed to one’s own. Disenchantment with Karzai and desperation for an easy way out of the war led to a strange phenomenon in which the Taliban was viewed as a partner in ending the war. Once U.S. leaders assumed that the Taliban (even as it continued to kill innocent civilians and Afghan, U.S., and Coalition soldiers) was not the problem, the Afghan government filled a newly available role in what was becoming a Shakespearian tragedy: the enemy. And once the Afghan government was portrayed as the problem, some Americans began to perceive the war as a popular resistance to U.S. occupation rather than a broad multinational effort to support a representative government against a terrorist organization that had brutalized the Afghan people. As the rift between the U.S. and Afghan governments grew, it was time for Pakistan to take advantage of the situation.
Frustrations with Karzai also contributed to the Obama administration’s doubling down on the Bush administration assumption that Pakistan, if offered a long-term relationship, would change its behavior. In a 2009 phone conversation, Karzai warned Obama that “the military and political dimensions of achieving peace in Afghanistan can’t be addressed unless the issue of sanctuary in Pakistan is made explicit and is a priority in the new strategy.”39 But shortly after that call, Obama’s NSC deliberately leaked to the press a “shift in thinking” designed to rationalize fewer troops than Gen. Stan McCrystal, the new American commander in Kabul, had recommended. Because the administration’s “reframe” of its war strategy included the self-delusions that the Taliban was separate from Al-Qaeda, and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was weak, it chose to focus efforts on Al-Qaeda in Pakistan rather than on the Taliban in Afghanistan.40 But the administration took self-deception to a new level with the assumption that Pakistan, whose army supported not only the Taliban but also a range of terrorist organizations, would be a willing partner in a counterterrorism campaign against Al-Qaeda.
MANY OF the analysts and bureaucrats who regarded the Taliban and the Pakistan Army as partners and the Afghan government as a foe clung to that bizarre formulation even after presidential elections that resulted in a contested but peaceful transition of power from Hamid Karzai to President Ashraf Ghani in 2014. The election, beset by charges of corruption between the two leading opponents, brought the new secretary of state, John Kerry, to Afghanistan to broker an arrangement between Ghani, a Ghilzai Pashtun from the mountainous southeast, and Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, the primary Northern Alliance candidate and former foreign policy advisor to Ahmad Shah Massoud. Ghani reluctantly agreed to place Abdullah in an unprecedented and extraconstitutional position of chief executive officer. The hope was to create at least the veneer of unity between north and south, as well as between Pashtuns, Tajiks, and other ethnic groups.
In pursuit of a negotiated settlement, the Obama administration had encouraged Qatar to sponsor the opening of a Taliban political office in Doha comprised of high-ranking Taliban members.41 Through the negotiations, the Obama administration actually helped the Taliban retain a cohesive identity rather than fragment and weaken the organization. Administration and Department of Defense lawyers placed restrictions on how U.S. forces could target Taliban leadership and fighters. U.S. leaders deceived the Afghan government as well as themselves, speaking of any potential negotiation as Afghan-led while deliberately concealing negotiations from Afghan leadership. The effect was to give the enemy freedom of action while undermining the Afghan government’s legitimacy. Holbrooke bypassed the Afghan government to establish contact with Tayeb Agha, who served as head of the Taliban’s financial commission. Barnett Rubin, a New York University political scientist, was enlisted by Holbrooke to establish contact with Taliban leadership.
After attempts at negotiation foundered, the United States, in May 2014, released five Taliban detainees from the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in exchange for the release of a U.S. Army deserter. The subsequent effort to use the so-called Taliban Five to start effective negotiations appeared as an act of desperation.42
AS WE drove through the arched sally port and entered the well-manicured grounds, I thought of the history of the Arg and the fact that until Karzai transferred power to Ghani in September 2014, Afghanistan had not seen a democratic, peaceful transition. Former prime minister Mohammed Daoud Khan ended the monarchy in 1973 by seizing power while his cousin King Mohammed Zahir Shah was visiting Italy. Five years later, Afghanistan’s decades-long wars began with an act of horrific violence in the same home in which Ghani now lived. After Daoud initiated a strategic opening to the United States and its allies, including Pakistan, the Soviets and their Afghan Communist clients decided that he had to go.
After seizing control of Bagram Airfield, the coup leaders executed thirty air force officers and seized Soviet MiG fighters to support a tank offensive against the Arg. The palace guard surrendered. Daoud had gathered twenty-four of his family members in the living room in the hope that they might be spared. It was not to be. Soldiers gunned down Daoud and all but seven of his family, then transported the bodies in a palace truck to the grounds surrounding the notorious Pul-e-Charki Prison, outside Kabul city. The officer in charge ordered his men to dump them into a ditch that an army bulldozer had readied.43 The bodies were discovered and given a proper burial only in 2009. Afghan leaders had a reason to feel insecure. I thought of how the compounded stress of historical memory and doubts about America’s commitment must have weighed on Karzai and were weighing on Ghani.
I met Hanif Atmar, Afghanistan’s national security advisor, outside the Arg. An honor guard in dress uniforms lined the walkway to the palace entrance. Atmar’s calm demeanor masked the trials of a turbulent life in which service in the Karzai and Ghani governments was only the latest chapter. Born to an ethnically Pashtun family in Laghman, Afghanistan, in 1968, Atmar served in the KHAD (Afghan secret police) in the 1980s. He used a cane and had to kick his prosthetic right leg ahead of him. He’d lost his leg in the lead-up to the seven-month-long Battle of Jalalabad in 1989, in which Afghan forces defeated a combined assault of mujahideen and Pakistan Army forces on the eastern city. Following the Soviet withdrawal, he went to Britain, where he earned two degrees from the University of York. He had served for years as a staff member in a Norwegian nongovernmental relief organization. In 2008, Atmar was appointed minister of the interior and tasked with reform of a ministry regarded by some as “the most corrupt of all government organizations.”44 I first met him after he resigned from the Karzai government in 2010. We spent hours together discussing the cauldron of Afghan politics, involving as it does avarice, historical animosity, deep distrust, and ever-shifting alliances.
Over the years, discussions with Atmar, Ghani, Abdullah, and other Afghan leaders convinced me that U.S. policy and strategy in Afghanistan was the opposite of what was needed. Afghanistan required a long-term commitment; the U.S. constantly announced its withdrawal timetable. Diplomatic and military efforts should be aligned; instead, they cut against each other, such as President Obama’s announcement of U.S. withdrawal while negotiating with the enemy. Pakistan and other regional actors must play a less destructive role; the U.S. sent mixed signals and increased aid to Pakistan while the ISI increased support to the Taliban and other terrorist organizations. Reforms to strengthen Afghan institutions were critical; anticipated U.S. withdrawal incentivized corruption that weakened those institutions.
Atmar and I walked through the cordon of soldiers, entered the building, and walked slowly up the staircase. He would leave me with President Ghani, and I would see him later in the day. I had looked forward to the meeting with Ghani. We had a shared understanding of how the war had evolved and the flawed assumptions that had underpinned failed policies. I hoped that our discussion might crystalize the outline of the first sound, long-term, and sustainable strategy for the war.