AS THE FOCUS SHIFTED to Iraq in 2003, the U.S. Army needed its most experienced and well-armed troops heading to Baghdad-meaning that those sent into Afghanistan to train the new Afghan National Army were mostly reservists formed into small ad-hoc teams. Most of those courageous but inexperienced soldiers had never before left American shores; it would take time for them to understand what kind of army operations were needed in the unforgiving terrain of Afghanistan. Making matters worse, they were being teamed with experienced Afghan fighters and were expected to advise the Afghans on complex combat tasks that many of the reservists themselves had never performed. Not surprisingly, these deficiencies slowed the creation of the new Afghan force, a central part of the American effort to stabilize the country.
“Competing Iraq requirements almost certainly led to a decision to utilize reserve forces to perform the mission of training the Afghan National Army,” one Pentagon official who was involved in the triage told me later. “There was a cost.”
He laid out the math. In recent years, he noted, NATO and American forces have not even come close to providing the number of troops that, by their own estimates, are needed in Afghanistan. Given the size and population of the country, classic counterinsurgency doctrine would have called for a force of about 400,000. By 2006 or so, “we worked that down to about 160,000,” General McNeill recalled as he neared the end of his time as commander in Afghanistan.1
But even that revised number was unattainable, owing largely to ballooning requirements in Iraq. By the end of 2007, there were 41,000 American and NATO troops in the country—more than half of them Americans—and maybe 60,000 Afghan soldiers and police. (The police were trained so poorly that many American officials said they should not be counted at all.) At best, some of McNeill's aides calculated, Afghanistan needed 60 percent more troops than it had in place to hold the country together. At worst, it needed 300 percent more.
The Army's math was different from Rumsfeld's math. The Rumsfeld Doctrine called for minimizing the American presence, not increasing it. That became clear during the spring of 2003, as Rumsfeld traveled to Afghanistan just as White House officials put together plans for President Bush to land on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and declare the end of major combat operations in Iraq.
Clearly, one couldn't make a declaration like that about Iraq unless there was a similar, if less dramatic, announcement about the other war that had been under way for a year and a half.
So on May 1, hours before Bush stood beneath the infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner, Rumsfeld held a press conference with Karzai in Kabul's threadbare nineteenth-century presidential palace. Seated at a table adorned with a bouquet of flowers and two small Afghan and American flags, Rumsfeld announced that major combat operations had ended in Afghanistan, too.
“We clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction activities,” Rumsfeld said, as Karzai sat by his side. “The bulk of the country today is permissive, it's secure.”2
The Afghanistan announcement was largely lost in the spectacle surrounding Bush's speech. But the declaration of relative stability in Afghanistan proved no less detached from events on the ground than Bush's premature victory lap in Iraq.
Three weeks after Rumsfeld's triumphant announcement, Afghan government workers who had not been paid for months held street demonstrations in Kabul. An exasperated Karzai threatened publicly to resign. In an angry speech at the country's supreme court, he announced that his central government had virtually run out of money because warlords were hoarding customs revenues. “There is no money in the government treasury. The money is in provincial customs houses around the country. Millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars.”3
Eighteen months after the fall of the Taliban, warlords continued to rule vast swaths of Afghanistan.
Rumsfeld understood Karzai's problem, but his focus had turned to a different issue—Iraq. Months earlier he had called on a trusted aide to oversee Afghanistan: Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon's comptroller. A slight, intense man, he was among the original “Vul-cans,” the foreign policy team set up for the 2000 campaign by Con-doleezza Rice and named for the Roman god of fire, whose statue stands in Rice's hometown, Birmingham, Alabama. Zakheim, who was close to Vice President Cheney, came to the Bush administration a true believer. He left deeply disillusioned.
To Zakheim's surprise, Rumsfeld asked him to serve as the Pentagon's reconstruction coordinator in Afghanistan. It was an odd role for a comptroller, whose primary task is managing the Pentagon's $400-billion-a-year budget.
“The fact that they went to the comptroller to do something like that was in part a function of their growing preoccupation with Iraq,” said Zakheim, who left the administration in 2004. “They needed somebody, given that the top tier was covering Iraq.”
Zakheim quickly discovered that Afghanistan was the land of great promises and little follow-through. In January 2003, he traveled to the country with Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense and one of the chief architects of the Iraq War. Wolfowitz's one-day mission to the country was meant to assure the Afghans that they would not be forgotten. The streets of Kabul were cleared for his visit, and he gave a speech in which he promised more help, more forces, more aid. “We are here to keep helping,” he told Afghan Army recruits. “We are not walking away.” And while it was no secret Washington was gearing up for war in Iraq, Wolfowitz insisted that Afghanistan would not suffer as a consequence. “We are regulating our deployments here based on the needs here in this country. Big enough to do the job, but no bigger than necessary, and we have more than adequate forces to do what's necessary.”4
No one believed him—even some members of his own delegation. “Then we went back to Washington,” Zakheim recalled, “and everything returned to normal—that is, very little action.”
A MONTH AFTER Rumsfeld's announcement in Kabul, his aides presented a strategy to the White House aimed at weakening warlords and engaging in state-building in Afghanistan. In some ways it was the very approach Rumsfeld had rejected right after the invasion.
Pentagon officials said that Rumsfeld's views began to shift after a December 2002 briefing by Marin Strmecki, an Afghanistan expert at the Smith Richardson Foundation, who argued that Afghanistan was not ungovernable and that it could be turned into a moderate, Muslim state.
Strmecki delivered a private briefing on Afghanistan to the Defense Policy Board, a group of former government officials that advised Rumsfeld on defense matters. Richard Perle, a leading neoconservative who chaired the board, invited Strmecki to speak because he feared that senior American officials knew too little about Afghanistan.
“I was concerned that we really didn't understand it very well,” Perle recalled. “And so I looked for people who did.”
For two hours Strmecki told the likes of Henry Kissinger, former defense secretary James Schlesinger, and former House speaker Thomas Foley, among others, that Afghanistan was not an anarchic morass. The United States, he said, needed to better integrate Pashtuns—Afghanistan's largest ethnic group and historically the Taliban's base of support—into the country's new government and mount a “serious state-building effort” across Afghanistan. His analysis was, in essence, an effort to implement the policy Bush had announced in his April 2002 speech that had never materialized. Rumsfeld was so impressed by Strmecki's emphasis on training Afghans to run their own government—the solution Rumsfeld was looking for—that he hired him.
Soon Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American who was a senior National Security Council official and the administration's leading expert on Afghanistan, returned from Iraq. As the administration's special envoy to Iraqi exiles, Khalilzad had championed the invasion and had pushed hard for local empowerment in Iraq. He clashed frequently with L. Paul Bremer III, who had been made the head of the American occupation in Iraq. Upon Khalilzad's return to Washington in May 2003, Rice—who was still the national security adviser—asked him to develop a new American effort in Afghanistan with Strmecki.
In July, Khalilzad met privately with Bush and agreed to become American ambassador to Afghanistan. But he insisted on one condition: that the scope of the American effort there be vastly increased. Khalilzad knew that he needed support from the president if he had any hope of overcoming opposition from the Office of Management and Budget to increasing aid to Afghanistan.
“We had gotten the president to [agree to] a significant increase,” Khalilzad recalled. “He said, ‘You have it.’”5
Khalilzad had the sway within the administration he needed. He could get Rice or —if need be—Bush on the phone in short order. He had headed the Bush-Cheney transition team at the Defense Department and served as a counselor to Rumsfeld. During Bush's first term, he was the director of the National Security Council's Office of Middle East and Southwest Asian Affairs. He may also have been the first Afghan George Bush ever really got to know.
“Zal could get things done,” recalled Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, a former American military commander in Afghanistan.6
But it was now clear that the United States would need help from its allies. It went out to drum some up.
JUST TWO YEARS after the Taliban fell to the American-led coalition, a group of NATO ambassadors landed in Kabul to survey what appeared to be a triumph, a fresh start for a country ripped apart by years of war with the Soviets and brutal repression by religious extremists.
At the head of the pack was a youthful-looking, mustachioed American diplomat, R. Nicholas Burns, who led the crowd from Brussels as they thundered around the country in American Black Hawk helicopters. They had little to fear on the streets; with the Taliban routed, Afghanistan seemed eerily peaceful. The ambassadors casually strolled through the quiet streets of Kandahar. They sipped tea with tribal leaders and talked about roads and schools and how to close down the madrassas that turned out young extremists, teaching them both the Koran and the art of setting off car bombs.
Burns, always disposed to find the best news in dire places, told his tour group that Afghanistan's allergy to a foreign presence had not materialized; polls showed that the Afghans wanted Westerners to stay and their aid to flow to the far reaches of the country. The American-installed government of Hamid Karzai was still standing, even though, back in Washington, White House officials derisively called the smooth-talking, Westernized Karzai the “emperor of Kabul” because he was incapable of extending his power beyond the Afghan capital. As Burns and his fellow diplomats traveled around the country they saw that life was coming back, schools were opening, marketplaces were jammed. More important, a rudimentary democracy was taking hold—and the Afghans themselves appeared to be embracing it. It all played to Burns's argument: This was the time for NATO to embrace the Afghan cause. They could go into the country as peacekeepers, with little fear of taking the kinds of casualties that the European public could not stomach, while the Americans focused on the next hard target.
But privately, even Burns, usually the cheerful master of spin, was taken aback by assertions made in the briefing the ambassadors received that day at the United States Central Command's heavily guarded base. With exhaustive PowerPoint presentations ticking off one accomplishment after another, the ambassadors were reassured that the Taliban was a “spent force,” so thoroughly destroyed it could never return.
“Some of us were saying, ‘Not so fast,’” recalled Burns, who went on to become the undersecretary of state for political affairs, and inherited the fallout from that misplaced optimism. “I mean, we are dealing with Pashtun loyalties that go back centuries.”7
Those loyalties, Burns knew, meant that al Qaeda and the Taliban had not been vanquished, they had merely relocated. Walking east, they retreated to their traditional refuge, the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan, high in the mountains along the unguarded border between the two countries. There they regrouped and retrained, as “guests” of the tribal leaders, many of whom sympathized with their cause, or whose sympathies could be bought.
But the military briefers seemed to be describing a dreamland in which the enemy simply evaporated. Burns said later that even then he did not buy the argument. “While not a strategic threat, a number of us assumed that the Taliban was too enmeshed in Afghan society to just disappear,” he told me in the summer of 2007.*
Astoundingly, it took years for that skepticism to take hold back in Washington, and this painfully slow process was the root cause of what may have been the largest failure in strategic thinking, nation-building, and counterterrorism strategy after 9/11. The intelligence reports circulating through Washington between 2001 and 2003, I was told by senior intelligence officials, reported that the Taliban were so decimated they no longer posed a threat to either American forces or Karzai's government. Those assessments fueled the confidence—many who worked in the West Wing in 2003 now call it arrogance—that Donald Rumsfeld's “light footprint” strategy had remade the rules of modern warfare. It seemed possible to use superior American technology, intelligence, and covert forces to knock off a government and withdraw as fast as politically palatable, leaving the locals to carry on. The Powell Doctrine—the caution that a nation should go to war reluctantly but, once committed, must use overwhelming force—was all but declared dead. Rumsfeld's rules ruled.
When Khalilzad arrived in Kabul on Thanksgiving 2003, he brought nearly $2 billion in additional funding—twice the amount of the previous year—as well as a new military strategy and a bevy of private-sector experts known as the “Afghan Reconstruction Group” charged with intensifying reconstruction efforts.
They began an ambitious new reconstruction plan dubbed, with characteristic Bush White House enthusiasm, “Accelerating Success.” Its centerpiece was exactly the kind of nation-building once dismissed by the administration. General Barno, commander of forces in Afghanistan from November 2003 to May 2005, breathed new life into eight military “Provincial Reconstruction Teams” responsible for building schools, roads, and wells and winning the “hearts and minds” of Afghans. The teams amounted to a much smaller version of the reconstruction forces that Powell had proposed eighteen months earlier.
By January 2004, Khalilzad and United Nations officials had crafted a new Afghan constitution. In September 2004, Khalilzad used the threat of American military force to persuade Ismail Khan, one of the country's most powerful warlords, to accept Karzai's order that he resign as governor of the western province of Herat. The following month, Karzai was elected president in a surprisingly violence-free campaign. At the White House, the biggest worry about Khalilzad was that he was proving more popular in Afghan opinion polls than Karzai himself.
“You know it's time to pull your U.S. ambassador,” one White House official told me, “when his poll numbers are higher than the [host country's] president's.” (In 2008, with Karzai's popularity plummeting, there were renewed rumors that Khalilzad would run for president. By then, Khalilzad was the U.S. representative to the United Nations, living in the ambassador's official residence in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, and the prospect of taking the helm of a collapsing state may have seemed less than appealing.)
At the same time, NATO countries steadily deployed more troops into Afghanistan, and soon Rumsfeld—pressed for troops in Iraq—proposed that NATO take over security for all of Afghanistan. After initially balking, NATO officials began to negotiate.
By the spring of 2005, Afghanistan seemed to be moving toward the vision that Bush had promised to achieve. But then, fearing that Iraq was spinning out of control, the White House asked Khalilzad to become the new American ambassador to Baghdad. Soon, Afghanistan again paid the price for being a second priority.
Before departing Afghanistan, Khalilzad fought a final battle within the administration—one that revealed the depth of the divisions within the American government over Pakistan's role in aiding the Taliban. There was no subject more delicate as the administration tried to coax Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, to cooperate.
In a farewell interview on Afghan television, Khalilzad noted that Pakistani journalists had recently interviewed a senior Taliban commander in Pakistan. He questioned Pakistan's claim that it did not know the whereabouts of senior Taliban commanders. It was an expression of skepticism forbidden in Washington, where the administration's position had long been that Musharraf was doing everything he could.
“If a TV station can get in touch with them, how can the intelligence service of a country, which has nuclear bombs and a lot of security and military forces, not find them?” Khalilzad asked.8
Pakistani officials publicly denounced Khalilzad's comments and denied harboring Taliban leaders. But, deliberately or not, Khalilzad had exposed the growing rift between American officials in Kabul and Islamabad. The diplomats and the CIA station in Afghanistan were becoming increasingly alarmed by the threat emanating from the Pakistani sanctuary. When their American counterparts in Pakistan downplayed that threat, Khalilzad's colleagues accused them of “drinking the Kool-Aid” and accepting Pakistani assurances that played down the problem.9 It was the first shot in a battle that would rage for years.
“Colleagues in Washington at various levels—including the highest—did not recognize that there was the problem of sanctuary and that this was important,” Khalilzad said later, measuring his words carefully because he was still serving in the administration, as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “I favored a stronger effort clearly in Pakistan against al Qaeda, but also a strong effort on the Taliban issue.”10
But with Bush increasingly preoccupied with Iraq, he expended little energy pressuring Musharraf to take action against the militants in the tribal areas. Personal phone calls to the Pakistani general, designed by Bush's aides to force Musharraf into action, backfired. Two former U.S. officials told the Times that they were surprised and frustrated when Bush repeatedly thanked Musharraf for his continued cooperation in the war on terrorism, rather than demanding swift action against al Qaeda and Taliban elements operating within Pakistan's borders.
“He never pounded his fist on the table and said, ‘Pervez, you have to do this,’” recalled one former senior intelligence official who saw the transcripts of the phone conversations.11
It was a pattern I saw with Bush time and time again: He talked far tougher in public than in private, and was often susceptible to the pleas of other presidents and prime ministers that leadership is difficult, and that the rest of the world didn't understand the pressures of the top job. “It's classic Bush,” I was told by one leading member of the Iraq Study Group who had examined some of these interactions. “Whether it's Maliki in Iraq or Karzai in Afghanistan or Putin in Russia, Bush always feels like he has to build them up— he's really allergic to acknowledging any real divergence of views.”
It was not until 2006, after ordering yet another study on Afghanistan's future, that Bush began to press Musharraf hard on the Taliban. By then it was too late.
Despite Musharraf's assurances, the administration was concerned that the Pakistani military and intelligence service's historical ties to the Taliban had never been cut. The Pakistanis, one senior American commander said, were “hedging their bets.”
“They're not sure that we are staying,” he added. “And if we are gone, the Taliban is their next best option” to remain influential in Afghanistan.
So the Taliban leadership remained in hiding in Pakistan, waiting for an opportunity to cross the border. Soon they would have one.
IN SEPTEMBER 2005, NATO defense ministers gathered in Berlin to complete plans for NATO troops to take over security in Afghanistan's volatile south. It was the most ambitious operation in NATO history, and across Europe leaders worried about getting support at home. Then American military officials dropped a bombshell.
The Pentagon, they said, was considering withdrawing up to 3,000 soldiers from Afghanistan, roughly 20 percent of total American forces in the country at the time.
“It makes sense that as NATO forces go in and they're more in numbers,” Gen. John P. Abizaid, the head of the United States Central Command at the time, said in an interview. “We could drop some of the U.S. requirements somewhat.”12 At the defense minister's meeting, Rumsfeld urged NATO countries to go beyond traditional peacekeeping, to mount combat operations, and eventually to take over security in eastern Afghanistan, the scene of some of the country's fiercest fighting.
“Over time, it would be nice if NATO developed counterterror-ism capabilities,” Rumsfeld said with characteristic diplomacy, “which don't exist at the present time.”13
British, French, and German leaders immediately balked at the idea. The German defense minister, Peter Struck, said that shifting NATO's mission from peacekeeping to combat “would make the situation for our soldiers doubly dangerous and worsen the current climate in Afghanistan.”14
In Kabul, the NATO takeover of the south and the proposed American troop reduction alarmed Afghan officials. Said T. Jawad, the Afghan ambassador to Washington, told me the proposed withdrawal was seen as the first stage of a long-term shift of American troops to Iraq.
“When there were indications the troop numbers might be reduced,” said Jawad, “it raised a lot of concerns about whether the U.S. would stay.”
NATO's secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, protested to Rumsfeld that a partial American withdrawal would discourage others from sending troops. “I had a lot of telephone calls with him, making the case,” de Hoop Scheffer told me in the spring of 2007, in his office in Brussels. “But have you ever tried arguing with Rumsfeld?”
In the end the planned troop reduction was abandoned, chiefly because Karl Eikenberry, the American ground commander at the time, and his team concluded that the Taliban were returning. In retrospect, it was Eikenberry who was the first to recognize how bad things were getting. He told Washington he needed to reinforce NATO efforts in the south and generate more combat power in the east to counter the Taliban. But the announcement had already sent a signal of a wavering American commitment. The warning sign was not missed by the people of Afghanistan, who feared that they would once again be forgotten by the Americans, as they had been after the defeat of the Soviets in the 1980s.
“They had been abandoned once,” said Ronald E. Neumann, who replaced Khalilzad as the American ambassador in Kabul. “They are super, super sensitive about it happening again.” Eiken-berry put it more directly: “The Afghan people,” he said, “still doubt our staying power.”15
To sell their new missions at home, British, Dutch, and Canadian officials portrayed deployments to Afghanistan as safer and better than sending troops to Iraq. Other NATO countries, led by Germany and Italy, saw their mission in Afghanistan as traditional peacekeeping, and their national parliaments imposed restrictions to keep their forces out of combat missions in the volatile south and east. Those regions were to be left to the Americans, Canadians, British, and Dutch.
The White House meanwhile quietly reduced its financial commitment to Afghanistan. In December 2005, three months after the proposed troop withdrawal was announced, the Office of Management and Budget slashed aid to Afghanistan by a third.
I asked Rice and Hadley how they could make the case that they were more committed than ever to rebuilding Afghanistan, while cutting the funds for reconstruction. They argued that much of the money allocated to Afghanistan the previous year had not been spent, which was true. The Afghan bureaucracy was so inefficient that it could not spend what it had received.
“There was an absorption problem,” Rice said.
But Americans in Afghanistan knew the danger that was created by the perception that American funding was being cut. Neumann said he had argued against the decision. Even so, a study by the Congressional Research Service concluded that American assistance to Afghanistan had dropped by 38 percent, from $4.3 billion in fiscal year 2005 to $3.1 billion in fiscal year 2006.16
Neumann said that Rice asked him to redirect $350 million in existing funds to meet “essential priorities.” The result was that plans to expand the rebuilding of the country's power system, to extend agricultural development programs into drug-producing areas, and to increase the budgets of Provincial Reconstruction Teams were delayed.
By February 2006, Neumann was so concerned about the situation that he sat down in his office and composed a cable to his superiors in Washington. In a series of meetings with his staff and American military commanders over the previous several weeks, Neumann had come to the conclusion that the Taliban were planning a major spring offensive.
“I had a feeling that the view was too rosy in Washington,” recalled Neumann, who retired from the State Department after serving as ambassador. “I was concerned.”17
Neumann's cable proved prophetic. In the spring and summer of 2006, taking advantage of the ongoing transition in the south from battle-hardened experienced U.S. and coalition troops to newly arrived NATO forces, the Taliban carried out their largest offensive since 2001, attacking British, Canadian, and Dutch forces.
Hundreds of Taliban swarmed into the south, setting up road checkpoints, assassinating government officials, and burning schools. Suicide bombings quintupled, to 136. Roadside bombings doubled. All told, 191 American and NATO soldiers died in 2006, a 20-percent increase over the 2005 toll. For the first time it became nearly as dangerous, statistically, to serve as an American soldier in Afghanistan as it was in Iraq. (By the spring of 2008, it became far more dangerous to serve in Afghanistan, and after the “surge” in Iraq, American casualties in Afghanistan actually exceeded those in Iraq, even though there were a quarter of the number of American troops serving in the Afghan theater.)
Neumann said that while suicide bombers came from Pakistan, the vast majority of Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan were local Afghans. Captured insurgents said they had taken up arms because the local governor favored a rival tribe, or because corrupt government officials provided no services, or because their families needed money. Ideology was not a major factor.
In retrospect, Neumann now believes the failure of the United States to support Karzai's fledgling government with serious reconstruction and large numbers of troops in 2002 and 2003 opened the door to the Taliban resurgence. Neumann credited the administration with eventually changing its approach, but noted that crucial time was lost and that the approach appeared episodic and driven from the bottom up. Given the rapid turnover of personnel on the ground, a steady top-down approach was required, but never materialized.
“The idea that we could just hunt terrorists and we didn't have to do nation building, and we could just leave it alone,” he said, “that was a large mistake.”18
The Taliban's spring offensive was successful not only in Afghanistan but in Pakistan, where pro-Taliban militants inflicted heavy casualties on the Pakistani Army in the tribal areas. The army was humiliated; if it couldn't take on these tribal groups, how could it hope to pose a deterrent to India?
Under pressure, Musharraf agreed in September 2006 to strike a “peace deal” with militant groups along the border with Afghanistan. The Pakistani leader had fallen under the spell of Gen. Ali Mohammad Jan Aurakzai, the commander of the Pakistani forces based in northwestern Pakistan. A tall, commanding figure who was raised in the tribal areas, he argued that the American warnings about new sanctuaries for al Qaeda and the Taliban were overblown. He told the Times that American warnings were based on “guesswork” and that his soldiers “found nothing” when they went to sites identified by the Americans. He told Musharraf that the most important thing was to avoid triggering a rebellion among the tribes. At one point in 2006 Musharraf brought Aurakzai to the White House for a meeting with Bush, where he made a detailed case that there was no problem in the region.19
Bush's counterterrorism team was horrified. “You just knew this was going to be a disaster,” Fran Townsend, the head of the Homeland Security Council, said to me later. “But what could we do? Tell Musharraf he couldn't sign a truce inside his own country?”
The deal was simple: In exchange for Musharraf's agreement to remove troops and military checkpoints from the area, the local tribes would guarantee Taliban forces did not attack Pakistani soldiers. There was a vague agreement that the militants would not go into Afghanistan, but that was unenforceable. If the Pakistanis could monitor their borders, they wouldn't have needed a peace deal at all. Many U.S. officials were critical of the agreement, stating that the deal empowered the militants, allowing them to consolidate their position in Pakistan.20 “They are taking territory,” one Western ambassador in Pakistan reported. “They are becoming much more aggressive in Pakistan.”21
The contentious issue of the peace agreements was also clearly visible during a private dinner at the White House attended by Karzai and Musharraf in September 2006. In the days before the dinner, Karzai had told a group of reporters at the Times that “the terrorism problem is in Pakistan, not Afghanistan,” and accused Musharraf of turning his back on the problem. Then Musharraf got into the spat. Making the rounds on television shows to promote his forthcoming autobiography, Musharraf called Karzai “an ostrich with his head in the sand,” accusing his counterpart of unfairly blaming the Taliban attacks on Pakistan.22 Clearly this relationship was not working out the way Bush intended.
Now the two were sitting across the table from each other in the White House residence. Bush kept it small; Rice attended, but the idea was to get the two leaders to work together. Clearly, though, their relationship was ice-cold. The leaders avoided eye contact and refused to shake hands. Bush sat in between them, refereeing the meeting, which he later called, in a stretch, “a constructive exchange.”23 It wasn't. The two leaders went home, and cross-border attacks increased.
EVERY WEEK, according to intelligence officials I interviewed over the past two years, Bush began his meeting with the CIA director with a question about the hunt for bin Laden. And every week he got some version of the same answer: We're working on it, boss, but the trail is pretty cold.
In 2006, four years after the start of the war, and at the worst moment in Iraq, Bush came to the conclusion that Musharraf was never going to deliver. He signed off on a secret plan code-named Operation Cannonball, allowing the CIA to target al Qaeda operating in the tribal areas, specifically looking for bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, his deputy. U.S. intelligence officials, however, say that the operation was consistently undermined by disagreements within the Bush administration—and inside the CIA—over whether to take the risk of launching into the tribal areas.24 There was a parallel debate among the CIA, the State Department, and the military's Joint Special Operations Command over how to get the job done, and how to manage the inevitable backlash when the wrong house was blown up, or American forces were captured.
The terrorist sanctuary in Pakistan was one of the hardest problems the Bush administration confronted. But like so many debates inside the Bush White House, this one never ended. Fran Townsend, who rose from a job at the Coast Guard to become Bush's most trusted adviser on homeland security, got a wake-up call about the magnitude of the problem one day in 2006 when she went to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the home of the Joint Special Operations Command, the military's most secretive combatant command.
Townsend enjoyed her reputation as a renegade; there were not many short, female White House officials who were sent off for secret meetings with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and, in one confrontation that became the source of a lot of White House humor, a one-on-one with the Libyan strongman Muammar el-Qaddafi. Her diplomatic missions inspired a lot of resentment among the White House staff, but Bush trusted her, and the secret missions continued until she left in early 2008.
Townsend was too smart to ask permission before she took up Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal's standing offer to talk to the very unhappy Special Forces officers who had just returned from Afghanistan; she knew that Donald Rumsfeld, then about to get the ax as secretary of defense, would block the encounter. So without telling anyone she appended her drop-by at Fort Bragg to another, more innocuous trip.
“People will talk to me in a way they won't talk to a lot of others from the White House,” she said to me one day after she had left the administration, “because I don't look quite so intimidating.”
She started the session by telling the officers, “It is impossible to offend me.” They took her at her word and, according to several who were present, years of frustration and anger poured out. As Townsend stood in the middle of a horseshoe-shaped conference table, one officer began with a simple demand: If someone asked her who was in charge of the search for bin Laden, what would she answer?
She said it was the CIA's job. But, she admitted, “they can't execute the mission” because they do not have sufficient paramilitary forces, “so they don't have this one by themselves.” For that, the CIA needed the Special Forces—the elite group she was facing.
The officers responded that the search was being run by a two-headed hydra, each headed off in different directions. “What's the strategy to get these guys?” one officer demanded. “What's the campaign plan?” The reality, she had to admit, was that there was no real campaign plan, just a series of tactics and approaches that evolved over time. She asked them, “Why aren't you having this conversation with the CIA?” After she left, she called Stephen Kappes, the longtime director of operations at the CIA who returned in 2007 as the deputy director of the entire agency, a signal that long-trusted operatives were back in charge. Kappes was headed down to Fort Bragg for his own visit.
“Prepare yourself,” she told him. “Brother, you are walking into a world of hurt.”25
When she got back to the White House and reported that the men sent out to kill bin Laden thought there was no strategy, Steve Hadley had an urgent question for her: “What were you doing at Fort Bragg?”
IN JULY 2006, NATO formally took responsibility for security in the south of Afghanistan, and by the end of the year for the east, as well. To Americans and Europeans, NATO is the vaunted alliance that won the Cold War. To Afghans, it is little more than another strange new acronym. To the soldiers on the ground—and to the fractious politicians in Europe and the United States—one thing was obvious: NATO and the Americans never came up with a common strategy for winning in Afghanistan. By 2008, that division turned into a nightmare.
Like the Afghanistan War itself, the struggle between Washington and NATO started as a low-intensity conflict that quickly got out of hand. All through 2007, President Bush and Robert Gates, the former CIA director Bush turned to when Rumsfeld was fired in late 2006, escalated the pressure on NATO nations whose commitment to Afghanistan was about to expire. With the Taliban resurgent, Bush and Gates pressed them not only to stay, but to move their troops where they were most needed—to the south, where the confrontations were worst, but where the risks of casualties were also the greatest.
To make up for smaller numbers, Americans turned to their advantage: air power. When the fighting with the Taliban got intense, they called in airstrikes. Inevitably, a blunt instrument like air power causes major civilian casualties. When I visited NATO headquarters in the middle of 2007, one of those strikes had killed twenty-one civilians. And in the NATO cafeteria, where European officers balance espresso cups on their knees at 4:00 p.m.—creating the tableau of a force that doesn't quite look up to taking on the Taliban—there were complaints that the American tactics were turning the Afghans against the West. Still, as one senior NATO official said as the Americans were trying to smooth things over after the bombing that went bad, “Without air, we'd need hundreds of thousands of troops [in the country].”26
The argument is about far more than just a difference on proper tactics. At its core, the American mission in Afghanistan is one of counterterrorism. The Americans’ first instinct is to hunt down the Taliban and eliminate them. The Europeans, in contrast, want to focus on reconstruction—the task they thought they signed up for when Burns persuaded them to come to Afghanistan. But by 2007, it became clear that those reconstruction projects could not proceed at a time when the Taliban were retaking villages and burning schools as fast as the West could build them. Trying to pressure the NATO allies to increase support for military operations, Gates, in testimony to Congress in December 2007, criticized the NATO commitment in Afghanistan. Voicing “frustration” at “our allies not being able to step up to the plate,” he added that “I am not ready to let NATO off the hook in Afghanistan at this point.” He ticked off vital requirements—about 3,500 more military trainers, twenty helicopters, and three infantry battalions.27
“Clearly, the Europeans do not see Afghanistan the way we do,” said one former key commander of American forces. “They see it in terms of national reconstruction. We see Afghanistan as forward defense, and we are the only country willing to absorb significant casualties.”
That difference of view reflects a badly divided command structure, one in which General McNeill commanded the NATO troops but not the Special Forces, or over the effort to build the Afghan forces who are key to any successful counterinsurgency. There is also no overall civilian responsibility for reconstruction—that is a job the Afghan government is supposed to be doing, but cannot.
“I never thought,” McNeill said, “that I'd be wishing to create bureaucrats. But that's what I'm desperately wishing for.”28
By the fall of 2007, the Bush administration came up with yet another plan to kick-start the reconstruction effort. Having given up hope that Karzai's government was capable of organizing the building of roads and schools and storage areas for farmers to bring their crops to market, they proposed creating an all-powerful czar who would manage the international effort on the ground in Afghanistan. And they had a man in mind: Lord Paddy Ashdown, a former commando turned British politician, who was widely credited for organizing efforts in Bosnia a few years before. Months of diplomacy went into getting the secretary general of the United Nations, Ban Ki Moon, to endorse the idea of a UN “coordinator” who could force countries to work together on the projects each was sponsoring.
By the end of 2007, an announcement seemed imminent. Karzai met with Ashdown during a trip to Kuwait in December and soon signed off on the whole idea. Not surprisingly, news of the upcoming announcement was leaked. And then trouble came: The press in Kabul, which often reflects the government's view, began comparing Ashdown to another famous Briton who showed up in Kabul: Sir William Macnaghten.
As historical analogies go, this was not a kind one. British schoolchildren learn Macnaghten's story as a cautionary tale in the cost of imperialist ventures: Sir William was murdered in 1841 in an uprising during the British occupation of Afghanistan. His body, minus the head and limbs, was hung from a pole in the bazaar. The following year the British withdrew from the country.
In the end, Karzai dragged his feet, and ultimately rejected the plan. In January 2008, meeting Rice and Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, at the annual Davos conference, he said that Afghanistan had “major problems” with bringing in a reconstruction czar. The problem was that Ashdown is British, and Karzai thought that the whole thing sniffed of British imperialism in a country that already had its share of colonial masters. Rice thought that Karzai feared that Ashdown would be far too powerful, a viceroy who controlled all the aid money, and therefore could make decisions for the Afghan government. Of course, that was part of the point. But when Karzai rejected the choice, the proposal died.
It didn't come as a surprise to anyone who had dealt with Karzai. While Bush publicly portrayed him as an indefatigable champion of democratic values, the rest of Bush's administration fumed that behind the sheen of Western urbanity, Karzai was a tool of the drug lords.
In 2006 and 2007, opium production mushroomed, and the country became the source of 93 percent of the world's heroin—not a statistic Bush was likely to cite in public. By some estimates, opium was now generating half of Afghanistan's GDP. Half of the production was in Helmand Province in the southwest, and it was no accident that the Taliban was strongest in the same place—they were being financed by the drug trade.
“Karzai was playing us like a fiddle,” Thomas Schweich, a former State Department narcotics official, wrote in a New York Times Magazine article that also charged that the Afghan president's brother was in the middle of the trade. Schweich charged that when Karzai's attorney general gave the Afghan president a list of twenty corrupt officials, many with links to the narcotics trade, Karzai told him not to prosecute any of them. (Karzai insists he has fired many corrupt officials.)
Schweich summarized Karzai's strategy this way: “The U.S. would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the U.S. and its allies would fight the Taliban; Karzai's friends could get rich off the drug trade; he could blame the West for his problems; and in 2009, he would be elected to a new term.”29
Schweich's assessment may be too black-and-white; in a country plagued by corruption, Karzai was probably the best the United States could do. But Schweich's description of the Bush administration's own failings are more damning than anything he could say about the Afghan president. The Pentagon, the State Department, and the Justice Department all had different philosophies about how to deal with the corrupting influence of the drug trade. When Schweich arrived in his job and asked for a copy of the interagency strategy to deal with the problem, he was told there was none. Once again, the Bush administration could not decide: As Bush left office, a semblance of a counterinsurgency strategy was coming together—but it differed from the strategy of our NATO allies.
UNTIL LATE 2007, Afghanistan was still what Gen. James Jones, a retired American officer and a former NATO supreme commander, called the “forgotten war.” Washington was focused on the surge in Iraq. Afghanistan was the afterthought.
Across the border in Pakistan, the Taliban's resurgence became indistinguishable from al Qaeda's resurgence. Their relationship was a two-way street. The Taliban provided a safe haven and a support network; al Qaeda paid them in training, expertise, and financing. At least officially, the Bush administration denied that the situation in the tribal areas had spun out of control. So did Musharraf, who wrote in his autobiography, published in 2006, that “Pakistan has shattered the al Qaeda network in the region, severing its lateral and vertical linkages. It is now on the run and has ceased to exist as a homogeneous force.”30
That was dubious spin when Musharraf wrote it. By July of 2007, it was farcical. That is when the American intelligence agencies released their assessment that the American strategy along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border had failed, partly blaming Musharraf's hands-off approach. “It hasn't worked for Pakistan,” Townsend admitted to us. “It hasn't worked for the United States.”31
The report confirmed the obvious: Bush and Musharraf might convince each other that the middle management of al Qaeda had been decimated, but the facts suggested otherwise. In plain language, the report concluded that al Qaeda had reorganized its command structure and was once again planning attacks against the United States. When I asked Townsend how Bush could keep arguing that Iraq was the “central front” in the war on terror—the front absorbing so much of our money, troops, and attention—she fell back to the argument that bin Laden had talked about Iraq as the central front, and therefore the White House had to do the same. Townsend, of course, did not believe that for a second—within the White House, she had been arguing for a far greater shift of resources.
Historians may argue for years whether a fuller commitment to Afghanistan could have prevented that safe haven from being formed across the Pakistan border. But many Americans with long experience in the region believe that President Bush's insistence that Iraq was the “central front” in the war on terror was more than wrong—it raised the cost of solving the problem later.
THE DEBATE over how the 2001 victory in Afghanistan turned into the current struggle is well under way.
“Destroying the al Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan was an extraordinary strategic accomplishment,” said Robert D. Blackwill, who was in charge of both Afghanistan and Iraq policy at the National Security Council, “but where we find ourselves now may have been close to inevitable, whether the U.S. went into Iraq or not. We were going to face this long war in Afghanistan as long as we and the Afghan government couldn't bring serious economic reconstruction to the countryside, and eliminate the Taliban's safe havens in Pakistan.”32
Between the summer of 2007 and the summer of 2008, a clear consensus emerged from my conversations with current and former officials: A consistent, forceful American effort could have helped to prevent the Taliban and al Qaeda's leadership from regrouping. But Bush himself, and those closest to him, could not bring themselves to that conclusion.
General Jones, the former NATO commander, said the invasion of Iraq caused the United States to “take its eye off the ball” in Afghanistan. He warned that the consequences of failure “are just as serious in Afghanistan as they are in Iraq.”33
“Symbolically, it's more the epicenter of terrorism than Iraq,” he told me. “If we don't succeed in Afghanistan, you're sending a very clear message to the terrorist organizations that the U.S., the UN, and the thirty-seven countries with troops on the ground can be defeated.”
It is not that Bush did nothing to turn back the Taliban's advances. As part of the “surge” effort in Iraq in 2007, he ordered an increase in the number of troops to Afghanistan, and pressured the NATO allies to follow suit in order to prevent a resurgent Taliban from launching a spring offensive. By the end of 2007, White House officials insisted that the additional troops had succeeded; they pointed to evidence that attacks were beginning to recede. Once again it was wishful thinking.
But in an interview just days before Christmas that year, General Lute, the coordinator for Iraq and Afghanistan, freely acknowledged that to hold villages in Afghanistan, the United States and its allies needed far more. “We've seen what we can do with just an extra battalion or two floating around the south,” he said. “But we're still retaking ground that we won weeks ago, or months ago, and then could not hold.” He spoke almost exactly six years to the day since the Taliban was ousted. The United States and its allies had defeated both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in less time. Fighting wars of counterinsurgency, it turned out, was something even the world's greatest superpower was not prepared for.
It took years before it was clear to many in Washington that the premature declaration of victory over the Taliban, and the subsequent decision to move on to Iraq without looking back, amounted to one of the biggest miscalculations by the country's leadership in modern American military history. Washington had it backward. The Afghans were interested in seeing the United States stay; they had listened to Bush's Marshall Plan speech and assumed that cargo planes full of supplies would soon be arriving in Kabul, with aid to be disbursed throughout the country. An era of economic re-vitalization would follow, the way spring follows winter in the high passes. It never happened. By the summer of 2008, Condoleezza Rice was asking what had happened to the Provincial Reconstruction Teams she had created.
It is impossible to know how long American troops would have been required to stay in Afghanistan had Washington concentrated fully on finishing the task it started with such success. But since the Taliban has been allowed to regroup, and developed a symbiotic relationship with its al Qaeda neighbors and other insurgents in the tribal areas, it will take years, maybe decades, before America can leave without risk that the country could collapse, and revert to its pre-9/11 status as a Petri dish for terrorists.
As the 2008 presidential campaign heated up, Barack Obama argued that the central front in the war on terror was along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, and in the towns in Afghanistan that the Taliban were retaking. Many of his supporters cringed whenever they heard Obama talk about increasing the American force in Afghanistan; after all, they had been drawn to him as the antiwar candidate. But Obama needed to provide his defense credentials, and for him Afghanistan was the right war.
For McCain it was more complicated. “I agreed with both General Petraeus and Osama bin Laden, who both said that Iraq was the central battleground in this struggle,” McCain insisted. “And I also believe that Afghanistan is going to be a longer struggle in some respects.”
As they were packing up to move out of the White House, the Bush administration recognized as well that America would be in Afghanistan for years—but Bush never acknowledged it. Instead, he talked about the big increase in troops that would be needed in 2009, after he left office. He was not interested in entertaining questions about why those troops were not sent years before. Stephen Hadley, who had argued so strenuously to me in 2007 that the White House had never held back on sending needed troops to Afghanistan, acknowledged that another big increase would be necessary after Bush left office. That was quite a shift for an administration that thought it had the war won in 2002.
Yet by the fall of 2008, the United States was still not deployed to face the threat. There were still four times more forces in Iraq than in Afghanistan. Violence was soaring. Some months the number of American casualties in Afghanistan exceeded the number in Iraq. The once-quiet streets of Kandahar, where the NATO ambassadors had once sipped tea with the tribal leaders, became the site of regular suicide bombings and a wave of kidnappings, aimed at further eroding public support in Europe for the NATO mission.
“When you look back on it now, it's blindingly obvious we never defeated the Taliban and we never finished the Afghan war,” David Kilcullen told me one night after he had just returned from a long visit to Iraq—and on his way to survey the damage in Afghanistan. In six years, he said, “We just shifted our problem to the east,” just over the Pakistani border.
“It sounds harsh,” said Kilcullen, who left the State Department a frustrated man, “but that's what we accomplished.”34
* By 2008, it became clear to many in the U.S. government, and particularly in the U.S. intelligence community, that the Taliban could become a “strategic threat,” dividing the country into several parts, leaving an American-backed “rump” government in an increasingly isolated Kabul.