On my first day back from a late vacation, on September 11, 2001, I was supposed to appear on the dais of the Council on Foreign Relations along with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Annan was to present his report on preventing violent conflict to a meeting chaired by retired General John W. Vessey, chairman of the Council’s Center for Preventive Action. As CPA’s founding director, I was to offer a few comments on the subject.
The previous day, as I was driving with my wife, Susan Blum, to the airport in Nice, a brief report on the radio announced, “En Afghanistan, le commandant Massoud, chef de l’alliance du nord anti-taliban, a été légèrement blessé dans un attentat” (“In Afghanistan, Commander Massoud, head of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, has been lightly wounded in an attack”). That afternoon, as soon as I arrived at my apartment in New York, journalists calling from Kabul, London, and Washington told me that Massoud was most likely dead. They asked me what would happen in Afghanistan.
A few days earlier, still on vacation, I had finished checking the page proofs of Blood on the Doorstep, the book I had written about preventing violent conflict, based on my experience as the director of CPA. The title came from a poem by the classical Persian poet Saadi, which I had memorized when I started learning that language in order to study Afghanistan:
I said, with tricks and spells I will hide my inmost secret.
It will not stay hidden, for blood flows over the doorstep.
The poem expressed the overflow of suffering beyond the confines where we try to keep it. “The world has become so linked,” I argued, “that no threat to human security is unconnected to our own.” Written between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers, this book argued that global security depended on preventing and managing armed conflicts seemingly on the margins of great strategic issues. For most of those concerned with foreign policy in the United States, these wars, the prevention of which was the goal of the report Kofi Annan was to present on September 11, seemed to be:
Marginal diversions from the big business at hand—managing the breakup of the Soviet Union and the decline of Russia, integrating or deterring China as it becomes an economic and military power, creating a new North Atlantic relationship between the United States and a uniting Europe, reaffirming and strengthening the security relationship with Japan, creating a financial and trading architecture to safeguard prosperity, and defending the nation’s land and people from the terrorism or ballistic missiles of outlaw regimes and movements.1
Neither the public nor the foreign policy establishment intuitively understood the causes or the potential consequences of these “spectacles of atrocity that appeared intermittently on the television screen.” Were these due to eruptions of irrational fanaticism, or to “the manipulations of a few evil men—Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Usama Bin Laden?” My research and experience not only in Afghanistan but in Central Asia, Central Africa, West Africa, and the Southern Balkans had led me to a different conclusion:
What is most difficult to convey about foreign conflicts is not the foreign cultures, beliefs, or hatreds that make others different from us; it is rather the radically different circumstances that make people just like us behave differently. It is those situations—desperate impoverishment, fear for one’s life, collapse of institutions that once made sense of existence and gave a sense of security, the threat that not using violence will leave one prey to the violence of others—that propel people into bloody conflict. And these situations are not as far from us as we sometimes think. Often enough, when tracing back the links that lead to violence, one finds global institutions—arms dealers, banks, markets, corporations, intelligence agencies, governments, international organizations—whose immense power and resources form the context for the decisions of local actors. Opportunism and evil exist, but they find their openings when people become desperate and lack alternatives.2
I had planned to present such ideas about the sources of violence in my comments on the secretary-general’s report. I had developed them by extending the work I had done on Afghanistan to other parts of the world. A few years before I had summarized my previous conclusions as I finished the manuscript of The Fragmentation of Afghanistan. At that time, in 1994, the country had again descended into civil war, even as the United States, the UN, and the entire “international community” abandoned any effort to stabilize or rebuild it. In early January 1994, I was supposed to travel from Islamabad to Kabul on a UN flight, which was then considered the only relatively safe way to reach the capital. As the warlords who controlled the capital shifted their allegiances and launched new attacks, the flight was canceled. Instead I drove with a few companions up the Khyber Pass from Peshawar.
An hour into Afghanistan, as we approached Jalalabad, we found six hundred families who had fled fighting in Kabul camped by the road:
Across the road, a chalkline marks the ground. Men in olive fatigues move methodically along the rectangles with metal detectors, searching for mines and unexploded munitions (they have already found two thousand pieces) before expanding the refugee camp. Something disturbed by the wind that sweeps down from the mountains explodes in the middle distance, raising a pillar of white smoke beyond the deminers.
On a plot of barren ground by the camp, men unload a truck that has just arrived from Kabul. Brightly dressed women with children in rags squat in the sun with small bundles of belongings. They swarm around us recounting their stories. I record these fragments:
Twenty-five families from Kabul came here by private car. It cost Af 10,000 per person. We left the houses with all our property still in them. Families left the bodies of their family members killed in the fighting. The bodies are still there. If you can help us, then give us help. Otherwise, don’t write anything. We spent last night in the cold with no shelter. For one week the children have had no food. We left the bodies and locked the doors. There is no protection for our property. What are we doing here? What should we do here? We have no way to get food. They were attacking on the ground and from the air. There were many kinds of ammunition. Everyone who had a Kalashnikov took what he wanted. Last Saturday, the first day of fighting, the fighting was inside the houses. They fired on and bombarded the houses. People were asleep when the fighting started. They were just taking property, and they had no other purpose. All the big stores and markets were looted. Shahzada market, the big money bazaar, was first looted and then burned.
The parties attacked the houses and even took the food from the houses by force. One family was kicked out of their house, and the house was occupied. You see all we have taken with us. We have nothing with us but the children. No medicine, no shelter. We never had to leave our houses while the communists and Soviets were there, but now we do. When the Soviets were there, there was no fighting.
The aircraft were bombing. I hid underground. My niece here was injured. Her whole body was injured, because she was buried when the bombs fell. Four members of my family were martyred. Please pay attention to our lives here….3
Not far from there, eleven months earlier, two European UN officials and two Afghan UN employees had been found murdered, probably by some of the Arab extremists who had come to fight the Soviets and stayed on to help the radicals fighting the government at the behest of Pakistan. On my first visit to this area, in January 1989, with mujahidin who were debating what to do on the eve of the end of the Soviet occupation a month later, I had heard a lot about these Arabs. In a short note published by Human Rights Watch, I tried to pass on the warnings from the Afghans but found little interest.4
The mujahidin then felt many pressures. The Soviet-supported communist government still held the city of Jalalabad. The mujahidin were in contact with the garrison, hoping, according to Afghan tradition, to reach an agreement to end the fighting. Pakistani officers supported by the CIA, however, were pressing them to launch a conventional frontal attack on the city, for which these guerrilla fighters were ill prepared. Though as we sat in the Ghaziabad State Farm in January 1989 we did not know it, U.S. and Pakistani officials had already decided on this offensive at a meeting in Islamabad. Among those eager for the fight were the radical Arabs who had established several bases in the border region. As the Soviets withdrew, the Afghans increasingly protested about these Arabs, who slaughtered Afghan civilians living in government-controlled areas and condescendingly tried to teach the Afghans, who had lost a million martyrs, to be better Muslims.5 Many of them, including Usama Bin Laden himself, later participated in the battle of Jalalabad, a major military and political defeat for the mujahidin.
A few months later, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, a reporter named Jamal Khashoggi gave me copies of his articles about these Arab “mujahidin.” Khashoggi later became the media advisor to Prince Turki al-Faisal, when the former intelligence chief was the Saudi ambassador to the United States. Subsequently he became a reformist newspaper editor who lost his job for his outspoken articles. Khashoggi showed me a photo published in the English language paper Arab News, in 1988. It depicted him inside Afghanistan, standing with a tall, young, Kalashnikov-wielding Saudi named Usama Bin Laden.
A few months after my 1994 visit to Jalalabad, thinking back over these and other scenes, I composed the final section of The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, entitled, “The Ruins of Empire”:
The day the Berlin Wall fell, in November 1989, I had dinner with other fellows and officers of the United States Institute of Peace at the home of a senior State Department official in the Washington suburbs. Each of us spoke in turn on the heretofore unimaginable events of the day. Among the well justified rejoicing, I remembered a line from the Urdu poet Ghalib, who witnessed the final days of the Mughal Empire: “Because of my tears, I was expelled from your feast.”
I certainly did not mourn the fall of the Soviet and Russian empires. I had seen Afghan men and women break down and weep as they relived the tortures of KhAD [the Soviet-trained Afghan secret police]. I had seen children without arms and legs, paralyzed and burned by Soviet bombs and mines. But I had also seen a photograph of the bloodied corpse of Sayd Bahauddin Majrooh, my teacher and mentor, assassinated with weapons U.S. taxes may have purchased, weapons that were supposed to defend our security….
The great powers showered weapons, cash, and attention on the protagonists of this struggle. The principals in neither Washington nor Moscow could make “their” Afghans into reliable agents, but the resources they supplied shattered much of what the peoples of Afghanistan had preserved from their past. The Afghans had to find new ways to survive and interpret their often devastated environment.6
With the breakdown of the political agreement that had led both the United States and the USSR to support the Afghan state until 1978, that state itself shattered. Armed networks linked to the intelligence agencies of neighboring countries, drug traffickers, and radical movements took their place, as the global establishment, the “international community,” treated Afghanistan as a charity case, a humanitarian emergency. I concluded:
Without a global struggle to give strategic value to corners of the world where some of its poorest people live, those people seem to be left to fend for themselves with the legacies of colonialism and superpower competition. But the international impact of domestic conflicts can be as far-reaching as the domestic impact of international conflicts. The continued turmoil in Afghanistan has already contributed to the civil war in Tajikistan, to authoritarianism in Uzbekistan, to growing Russian aggressiveness prompted by fear of Islam along Russia’s southern frontier, and to the dissemination of military skills to radical Islamists in South Asia and the Arab world. If the international community does not find a way to rebuild Afghanistan, a floodtide of weapons, cash, and contraband will escape that state’s porous boundaries and make the world less secure for all.7
By the morning of September 11, 2001, I already knew that Massoud had been killed by two of these radical Islamists from the Arab world. One of Massoud’s oldest companions, Muhammad Eshaq, who had helped Massoud organize an abortive uprising in Panjshir in 1975, was representing the Northern Alliance government in Washington. When I had called him the evening before to offer my condolences, he accepted them, despite his superiors’ attempt to keep the news from leaking out. The next morning, I forced myself to vote in the primary election for mayor of New York, thinking that at least it was better to choose leaders this way than by assassinating your opponents.
I got on the downtown subway at 96th and Broadway and transferred to the N train at Times Square. Just before 9:00 a.m., the train reached Union Square, the northern edge of downtown Manhattan. As the doors opened, an announcement came over the loudspeaker: “If you are traveling below Fulton Street, please transfer at Canal Street to the J, M, or Z trains. This train will not travel below Fulton Street, because of a plane crash at the World Trade Center.”
On Thursday, September 20, I received a terse e-mail from Craig Karp, an old friend and Afghan hand in the State Department: “Subject: URGENT. Can you come to a meeting in DC at State at 5PM on Monday? Future of Afghanistan.”
My worst fear had not come to pass. Late in the morning of September 11, soon after the collapse of both towers, I was standing on the roof of an apartment house in Greenwich Village with a friend from graduate school and an acquaintance of hers. We watched the burning wreckage send a pillar of smoke over Manhattan and speculated on how many people’s deaths we were watching. Unaware at that point of the heroic work of the NYPD and FDNY in hurrying people out of the buildings before they collapsed, I thought the toll might be ten thousand, even twenty thousand. I said that Usama Bin Laden was probably responsible, and that I feared reprisals against Afghanistan, like a carpet bombing of Kandahar. As far as my new acquaintance was concerned, however, “they” should all be bombed as thoroughly as possible.
A few days after September 11, when I was able to concentrate enough to think, I put together some thoughts on this subject in an article that appeared on the New York Times Op-Ed page on September 22 under the title “Afghans Can Be Our Allies” (the article introduces Part II of this volume). I argued that Afghans would accept a U.S. and international presence as long as they saw it was there to help them, to rescue them from misgovernment, nongovernment, and destitution. We could not just use their country to pursue our own objectives.
I had seen both the destruction of the country and Afghans’ desire for a way out firsthand in 1998, when I traveled across southern and eastern Afghanistan and visited both Kandahar and Kabul. Lakhdar Brahimi, then the personal representative of the UN secretary-general for Afghanistan, asked me to examine what the UN was doing in Afghanistan. In June I spent several days in the Taliban’s center, Kandahar, not realizing that I was nearly crossing paths with Prince Turki al-Faisal, then the head of the Saudi intelligence agency, who was trying to convince Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Umar to hand over Usama Bin Laden.
With just my driver and no security, I drove west from Kandahar, past the vineyards of Panjwai, stopping in tea houses in Dil Aram (Heart’s Rest) and Girishk, where the road crossed the Helmand River. I proceeded to Lashkargah, center of Helmand Province, where I spent the night in the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) guest house, a 1950s-style suburban residence built for the American engineers who designed the Helmand Valley Project. When I asked the elderly cook what was for dinner, he pulled himself erect to his full six feet and announced, “Spaghetti and meatballs.” To my amazement, it was just what Harriet might have served to Ozzie and Rickie Nelson during the Eisenhower administration.
The next day I proceeded through the Registan Desert to Farah in the far southwest, where I spent another night. The UN flight from Farah to Islamabad was canceled, as the plane was needed for earthquake relief in the far northeast, so I drove back to Kandahar. During our stopover in Lashkargah, my driver and I ate kebabs in the bazaar and watched local youths play soccer. Back in Kandahar, I took the UN flight to Islamabad. The eight-seater plane, on which I was the only passenger, was diverted to Kabul for an emergency medical evacuation. We had to land outside the “window,” a few hours per day when all sides promised the UN not to attack the airport. Red Cross personnel loaded an unconscious Afghan deminer whose leg had been blown off while clearing unexploded ordinance from a destroyed neighborhood in Kabul. His bare chest heaved above his mutilated lower body, entirely wrapped in bandages, as his nurse (bearded, like all Afghan men under the Taliban) adjusted the IV. We dropped them in Peshawar to be hurried to the hospital of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and I returned to Islamabad.
A few days later I flew to Kabul, where I saw the wreckage visited on the city by the militias. My flight back was canceled again, as the earthquake emergency worsened. I therefore had to drive back to Islamabad by way of Jalalabad and Peshawar, retracing the route I had taken in 1994. I got a fuller look at the country’s devastation this time. I could hardly find words to describe the destruction of what Michael Ignatieff later called the “Dresden of post-Cold War conflict.” In a Newsweek article that now introduces Part I of this volume, I wrote, “Exhausted after two decades of war, Afghans longed to end the fighting, reunite their nation, rejoin the international community, and invest in their future.”
In a report I wrote for the UN, I recounted:
While it might be wrong to generalize from a few conversations with UN Afghan national staff, people encountered in teahouses, and a few others (all male), it is quite striking the extent to which continued war appears to lack a constituency, even in core areas of Taliban support. Conversations continually returned to the theme “everything has been destroyed” in twenty years of war, that there was no reason to fight with Afghans in other regions of the country, that the war continued because of foreign interference, and that energy and resources should be spent on reconstruction. People encountered in teahouses spontaneously offered ideas for development projects (e.g., building new irrigation works on the Helmand river to cultivate fruit and vegetables) that could be carried out if resources were not wasted on war. People constantly criticized Afghans for fighting with each other and destroying the nation’s resources. The lack of education for children—including girls, though this distinction was not always made—was also a constant preoccupation. Everywhere Afghans are pursuing private courses, home schooling—whatever they can do to assure education for their children, with or without the consent of the authorities. It appears, strangely enough, that Kabul University has even managed to award 10 Ph.D.s in the past year….
Equally strong appears to be the sense of Afghan national identity, over and above ethnic group, that was emphasized by all interlocutors. When speaking to foreigners Afghans (like others) do tend to play down signs of disunity, especially ethnic, or blame any problems on foreign manipulation or evil leaders. Whatever sense of unity and national identity Afghans express does not negate the reality of a conflict largely structured on ethnic lines and characterized by some ugly inter-ethnic violence. Nonetheless, the sense of national identity, and the belief that Afghan national identity is inherently both Islamic and multi-ethnic, seems sincere, widespread, and deeply rooted.
The Taliban leaders could not satisfy these aspirations, which were shared by many who were working with their regime on September 11. The Taliban leaders were intent on pursuing the war, defeating and even terrorizing Afghans in the north and the Central Highlands, and limiting education and development to what they could keep under their strict control. In my New York Times Op-Ed I tried to explain to an American audience, traumatized by violence and hungry for action against the “evildoers,” that all those now with the Taliban need not be our enemies.
Some Taliban members and allies were trying to protect themselves, by joining with the winning side. Afghans and others in the region saw how the United States and other major powers had turned away from Afghanistan, while Pakistan used whatever resources it could to establish a weak, pro-Pakistani government in Kabul by supporting the Taliban. As the world, looking with renewed interest to Afghanistan, turned against the Taliban, Afghans’ perception of who was the winning side could shift.
Pakistan, I argued, “terrified by the consequences to itself of a possible American attack on Afghanistan,” has said it would withdraw support, leading some Taliban supporters to put “their fingers to the wind.” In a speech to the nation on September 19, General Pervez Musharraf, who had taken power in a coup in October 1999, announced that the United States had asked for intelligence, use of airspace, and logistical support. In his speech, Musharraf made clear that he was acting mainly to protect Pakistan from India, which had offered all facilities to the United States and wanted Pakistan to be declared a “terrorist state.” Therefore to secure Pakistan and retain the ability to pursue its objectives in Kashmir, Pakistan would help the United States. Nonetheless, Musharraf argued that he was “more concerned about Taliban and Afghanistan” than those who demanded that he resist the United States. He had argued against sanctions and for engagement, saying: “I would like to ask how we can save Afghanistan and Taliban from being harmed or how we can reduce their losses. Can we do it by isolating ourselves from the international community or by moving along with them?”
Many did not perceive this ambiguity in Pakistani policy and thought that Islamabad had turned against the Taliban, but I continued to receive reports from UN officials, journalists, and NGO workers in the field of movements of weapons and fighters from Pakistan to the Taliban.
Mindful of the dangers of foreign occupation of Afghanistan, I warned against “actions that stir up Afghan nationalism that will only bolster the Taliban leadership and the foreign extremists to whom it has given safe harbor.” A purely military approach would fail to close the bargain with the Afghan people. An Afghan-led political transition backed up with credible commitments to reconstruction could attract defecting Taliban and work with “two other focal points of Afghan politics: the United Front, the armed resistance led by Ahmed Shah Massoud until his recent assassination, and exiles working with the former king, Zahir Shah, now in Rome, who are trying to convene a loya jirga, or a traditional Afghan assembly.” Though the UF, commonly known as the Northern Alliance, was mainly non-Pashtun, some of Zahir Shah’s supporters might be able “to raise troops, including recruits from the predominant Pashtun ethnic group in whose territory Mr. Bin Laden’s followers are largely based.”
I had doubts about both of these groups. Although some Afghans, especially Pashtuns, did long for the return of the king at least as a symbolic transitional leader, neither he nor the group of mostly elderly exiles, long resident in the West, who formed the factionalized court around him in Rome had shown much aptitude for governance even when they were in power. The king had come to the throne at the age of nineteen when his father, a formidable autocrat, was assassinated in 1933. First his uncles and then his cousin Daoud ruled the country in his name until 1963. During the next ten years, the king presided over an experiment in constitutionalism, so-called New Democracy, during which the government changed hands four times, inflation and unemployment spiraled up, and rival groups of leftists and Islamists took to the streets. When Daoud ousted him in a coup in 1973, while the king was relaxing at an Italian resort, crowds greeted the change in the streets. No one in the country lifted a finger to protest. Only one person died in the coup, a luckless soldier whose tank overturned in the Kabul River. Daoud was killed in the communist coup in 1978, and for most of the time since then the king had stayed on the sidelines, issuing occasional statements. Some of his advisors had drawn up plans for a loya jirga (great council), but, as Pakistan refused the former king and his family access to its territory for most of the time right up to September 11, and most of his advisors showed little initiative in countering those strictures, he had little presence on the ground.
The Northern Alliance commanders had stayed and fought, most in the jihad against the Soviets, some as militias for the communist government, and some, of course, as both. Some had also done double duty for the Taliban. Their best-known leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud, commander of the Panjshir Valley, and founder of the Supervisory Council of the North, was a gifted guerrilla strategist and a charismatic and media-savvy leader who had gained a considerable following in the West. But inside Afghanistan his charisma never extended far beyond his fellow Panjshiris and some other Tajiks. He seized Kabul in 1992 when the communist regime fell to an internal mutiny launched by unpaid regime militia commanders led by Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek from Jauzjan Province in the north. Iran brokered the original “Northern Alliance” among the disparate non-Pashtun groups that took control of the capital, with Massoud in the lead. Rather than support a UN plan for a technocratic transitional government, Massoud invited the exiled leaders of the mujahidin parties to take power in Kabul.
Pakistan supported the ethnic Pashtun extremist, Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, and his Arab allies, who made an alliance of convenience with Pashtun former communists to stage a failed offensive against Massoud and then keep him under attack. In the ensuing years of ethnically and regionally fueled civil war, Massoud, against his own inclination, remained a Tajik and Panjshiri leader, hated by many for his role in the destruction of Kabul, the killing of thousands of civilians, and, to many, the humiliation of Pashtuns. Ismail Khan, who ruled Herat in the West, had brought a degree of security and relative prosperity to the area, but he was often embroiled in feuds with factional rivals and commanders outside the city, who eventually brought about his downfall. The other leaders were worse. Afghans had hoped that the fall of the communists would lead to a stable national government, but they were bitterly disappointed. Most remembered the period of mujahidin and militia rule as a reign of thieves and a time of war and chaos.
I witnessed the difference between Taliban time and mujahidin rule. In January 1994, I rode from Peshawar to Jalalabad, through territory “controlled” by the former mujahidin. We passed a post where the UN staff had been murdered the previous year. We saw masses of people displaced by the furious warfare in Kabul, and most told of being robbed and expelled by Massoud’s men. Our Afghan hosts would not let us walk outside the door of our compound in the city of Jalalabad without a security escort. There was too great a danger of a kidnapping or killing, whether by a greedy criminal or an extremist fanatic, perhaps an Arab “Wahhabi,” as the Afghans then called the members of al-Qaeda.
In January 1996, together with Anthony Richter of the Open Society Instute, the writer David Rieff, and the photographer Susan Meiselas, I took a ferry across the Panj river from Tajikistan to mujahidin-ruled northern Afghanistan, where we visited camps of refugees from Tajikistan. We stayed in the compound of the UNHCR in the city of Kunduz, where we met Amrullah Saleh, later the head of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency. He was then a young emissary from Massoud. All UN international staff had been evacuated under threats from the Arab radicals who were training guerrillas for Tajikistan in the refugee camp we visited outside the city. The Afghan officials would not let us leave the compound without an armed guard. Signs of recent fighting between the local shura, or council, and Dostum’s forces were visible in rocket craters by the road to the airport. Driving in a UN vehicle for hours past villages leveled by Soviet bombing, we passed unidentified groups of armed men. Fortunately, none of them disturbed us. One evening, we drove north from Baghlan toward Mazar-i Sharif, along a road that passed through a narrow defile lined with the wreckage of Soviet armored vehicles. As darkness fell, Richter asked our Soviet-trained driver in Russian if he was afraid. “Nyet problema,” came the answer. “Nobody’s out here at this time of night. It’s much too dangerous.”
The contrast in security in the Taliban heartland was remarkable. Afghan UN staff in Farah recounted instances of highway robbery and death threats they had experienced during the mujahidin period. Now, however, I could go anywhere with just a driver. The guards at Taliban checkpoints, festooned with flags made of unwound cassette tapes of banned music confiscated from drivers whose puritan religiosity fell short of official standards, waved us through. Overloaded trucks piled high with vehicle parts imported from Dubai for sale in smugglers’ markets in Pakistan slowly bumped across the rutted roads and the nearby (and flatter) deserts. They lined up to refuel at petrol stations along the way. Fields of poppy stalks harvested a few weeks earlier dried by the side of the road. In Farah and Helmand, good rains—the last for four years—had left the wheat fields green, though farmers rushed to show me the low yields from each stalk, and asked for improved varieties.
In my report to the UN, I analyzed the sources of this achievement:
The Taliban are the only group that appears to have an effective national state building strategy. The areas under the domination of the Taliban are controlled, though unevenly, by a single central authority that enjoys something close to a monopoly of armed force in those areas. While the Taliban are as driven by factionalism, personal rivalries, and disagreements as any other group, these differences have so far been pursued within a unitary, centralized structure. This gives them a decisive advantage in mobilizing the resources under their control. The groups composing the northern alliance, however, have each maintained their own military formations and commands, and factional disputes have led to their split into competing military groups…. The Taliban have developed a surprisingly strong national project and organizational framework for carrying it out, and outsiders have consistently underestimated them.
Later that summer, the Taliban’s superior organization, together with support from Pakistan delivered in a more coherent and effective way than the Northern Alliance’s aid from Iran, Russia, India, and Central Asian countries, enabled them to capture much of northern and central Afghanistan. In those areas, inhabited by Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras (a Shia group), the Taliban not only favored the Pashtuns who had been settled in the area by the Afghan monarchy but carried out ethnic massacres and expulsions in some areas. In part these were reprisals for the massacres of Taliban prisoners in Mazar-i Sharif in May 1997. Uzbek commander Abdul Malik Pahlawan had plotted to bring the Taliban to Mazar-i Sharif to take revenge on Abdul Rashid Dostum, who he believed had assassinated his brother. A Pakistani delegation led by Foreign Minister Gohar Ayub flew to Mazar to proclaim complete Taliban victory and ask the world to recognize the regime. They barely escaped before Malik turned on his Taliban allies. He and the Shia militia, Hizb-i Wahdat, then massacred hundreds of Taliban soldiers whom they took prisoner. UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi pressed the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, to investigate these killings, which would have demonstrated the UN’s evenhandedness and helped open a dialogue with the Taliban at a time when the country was divided more or less in half. Although Robinson sent an expert to do a preliminary survey, she never focused on the issue, and the opportunity was lost. The arguments made by Usama Bin Laden, that the international community was inherently biased against an Islamic organization, were becoming more and more convincing.
When the Taliban returned to the north, they took the harshest measures against the Shia, whom they considered heretics. They killed thousands of both Hazaras and Uzbeks in the north. A Pakistani Sunni extremist group fighting under Taliban command massacred Iranian diplomats captured in Mazar-i Sharif, nearly provoking a war, which was averted only by Brahimi’s preventive diplomacy.
In 2002, when I returned to Afghanistan, I was able to see how the Taliban had destroyed areas where their opponents were based. As a guest of the new government for the first Nawruz (March 21, the Persian Solar New Year) after the Taliban’s defeat, I visited the Shamali plain north of Kabul. The well-watered rich land of this plain and the hills around it have for centuries been a garden and orchard, where mainly Tajik peasants tended vineyards watered by poplar-lined streams and canals. Orchards of almond, pomegranate, apples, pears, apricots, walnuts, mulberries, and other fruits lined the hills that led up to scenic resort of the village of Istalif, famous for its blue-glazed pottery. Here the Taliban, together with al-Qaeda, had tried to create a ruin as desolate as the neighborhoods of Kabul leveled in fighting among militias. They burned every building and removed the roofs, beams, and windows. They forced Hazara prisoners to labor in the vineyards and orchards, cutting each vine at the root and each tree at the trunk. The people of the area, some of whom were summarily executed, fled in all directions, some to Pakistan, some to the resistance bastion of Panjshir, and some to Kabul, where they huddled in the wreckage of the former Soviet Embassy.
For the United States after September 11, the problem was, I thought, how to eliminate the haven the Taliban had granted to al-Qaeda without returning Afghanistan to the chaos it had known before, under rule by the same commanders the United States was about to fund and arm. One approach would have been to negotiate with the Taliban, placing them under as much pressure as possible, until Pakistan made them deliver al-Qaeda or orchestrated an internal coup to remove Mullah Umar and the small group of leaders closely allied to the foreign extremists. This approach might make possible gradual transformation of the Taliban state to one more inclusive and open to development, without destroying its capacity to maintain a degree of public order. Treating the issue as one of law enforcement held no hope for redress, however, as the Taliban would not recognize the non-Islamic legal grounds under which the United States would seek extradition of al-Qaeda leaders and members. No one knew what other attacks might be planned in the near future, and no U.S. leader could risk delay in preventing them. There was little or no scope for patience and no penalty for what might turn out in retrospect to be overly hasty action.
The UN Special Mission had been working on this problem. Under Lakhdar Brahimi in 1997–1999, it had focused on trying to develop a consensus among the neighboring countries, the United States, and Russia on how to stabilize the country through the so-called six-plus-two process. Brahimi suspended his actions in July 1999, when Pakistan openly backed a Taliban offensive while Brahimi was in Islamabad to follow up on a just concluded “six-plus-two meeting” in Tashkent, where all Afghanistan’s immediate neighbors, plus the United States and Russia, had pledged to work for a peaceful solution and use their influence to convince the Afghan parties to refrain from warfare. Brahimi’s successor, Francesc Vendrell, had also worked to support restoration of the former king and the loya jirga process. He had worked to bring the factionalized Rome group together and to bridge the gaps between the former king’s camp and the Northern Alliance.
Of course, not only foreign experts and diplomats worried about how to remove the Taliban without destabilizing Afghanistan. So did Afghans. After his 1996 retreat from Kabul, Massoud had realized he needed to create alliances with others. He worked to form a government led by a Pashtun prime minister, Abdul Rahim Ghaffurzai, a diplomat who had denounced the Soviet invasion in the UN General Assembly and then sought refugee status in the United States. Ghaffurzai’s death in a plane crash along with forty of his colleagues in August 1997 effectively ended that effort. The Rome group, supported by Vendrell, was working to create a political framework for a national transition through the institution of the loya jirga, or great council. Some of the younger members of the Rome group who were trying to organize support for a loya jirga inside Afghanistan, in particular commander Abdul Haq and Hamid Karzai, had started contacts with the United States after the August 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Karzai’s father, Abdul Ahad, had been assassinated in Quetta in July 1999, not long after his son and I had testified in the U.S. Senate together. At that hearing, Hamid Karzai memorably said that what Afghanistan needed was not a “broad-based government,” a coalition of armed factions, but a “national government,” a political authority to control and build the much-weakened state as the representative of the people.
Abdul Haq, a mujahidin commander whom I met in the 1980s, and with whom I had testified before the Joint Congressional Task Force on Afghanistan in January 1985, had left Pakistan for Dubai after losing part of his foot to a landmine and falling out with Pakistan’s intelligence agency, which did not like commanders having their own strategic vision. Like Karzai, Abdul Haq had worked with Zahir Shah’s group in favor of a loya jirga; unlike Karzai, he saw himself as a competitor with Ahmad Shah Massoud and wanted the former king to designate him his military chief. Most of Abdul Haq’s immediate family had been murdered in a still-unexplained incident in Peshawar during the Taliban period.
The CIA helped the Rome group establish contacts with Massoud, who managed his external relations through the Afghan embassy in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. When I met Massoud’s foreign minister, Dr. Abdullah, in New York in July 2001, he told me rather sarcastically that members of the Rome group had come to Dushanbe and said that “now they were really serious.” What were they before? Still, Rome was split between those who wanted to form a partnership with the Northern Alliance, as Massoud proposed, and those who insisted that such an alliance would reduce the king to merely another faction, rather than an overarching symbol of national unity and continuity.
Given the geography of landlocked Afghanistan, and the relations between the United States and Iran, after September 11 Pashtun leaders such as Abdul Haq and Karzai could work to replace the Taliban and in favor of a loya jirga process only through the territory of Pakistan. I therefore argued in my Op-Ed that the United States should press Pakistan “to guarantee full freedom of action to Afghan leaders who appear capable of establishing a stable government that will meet minimal international standards.” I emphasized “minimal” international standards, because I knew firsthand how damaged, divided, and destitute the country was. Once involved, the “international community” seemed to have no way to define achievable goals in Afghanistan, instead piling on objectives, though not the resources to achieve them.
Soon after September 11, Hamid’s brother, Qayum, a Baltimore-area businessman with whom I kept in regular contact, told me that Pakistan had refused to renew Hamid’s visa, forcing him to choose between removing himself from the scene and entering Taliban-controlled Afghanistan without adequate preparation. Abdul Haq had returned to Peshawar, where he was trying to raise forces to take on the Taliban and opposing any campaign of bombing by the United States.
For Pakistan to support anti-Taliban Afghans would require a reversal of long-standing Pakistani policies. I did not think that pressure alone, no matter how aggressively applied, could bring about a durable change in Pakistan’s policy, which was based not on support for anti-American terrorism but on durable national interests. President Musharraf had spelled out Pakistan’s interest in preventing “a change in Afghanistan and the establishment of an anti-Pakistan government there.” I therefore advocated incentives for Pakistan that lessened the likelihood of Pakistan perceiving a post-Taliban government to be its enemy. I wrote: “Afghans should acknowledge Pakistan’s concerns by, for instance, settling the two countries’ longstanding border dispute. The United States could also accede to Pakistani requests for economic aid and debt relief in exchange for agreeing to these and other conditions, like those relating to American military access.”
More important than aid to Pakistan, I noted later while appearing on the Charlie Rose show, would be quotas for the import of Pakistan-made textiles into the United States, which would create employment and show we were trying to help the people in Pakistan, not just strike a deal with the military, receiving basing rights in return for selling them F-16 fighter planes. Still, I vastly underestimated the complexity and difficulty of transforming Pakistan’s relations to Afghanistan.
Thus far I had seen no recognition by the administration that Afghanistan was a nation, not just a terrorist base. The discussions of the Afghan groups were all oriented around how to assemble a coalition to eliminate al-Qaeda and topple the Taliban, not how to build a stable Afghanistan that would give Afghans—and their neighbors, first of all Pakistan—a real stake in guaranteeing that such threats would not return. The revelations of high-level discussions published since that time have borne out that for at least two weeks after September 11, more than a week after approval of the war plan, the NSC had not considered any plan for political succession and reconstruction of Afghanistan.
The evening of Thursday, September 20, when I received the email inviting me to the State Department, the president issued an ultimatum to the Taliban in his speech to the Congress:
Deliver to United States authorities all the leaders of al Qaeda who hide in your land. (Applause.) Release all foreign nationals, including American citizens, you have unjustly imprisoned. Protect foreign journalists, diplomats and aid workers in your country. Close immediately and permanently every terrorist training camp in Afghanistan, and hand over every terrorist, and every person in their support structure, to appropriate authorities. (Applause.) Give the United States full access to terrorist training camps, so we can make sure they are no longer operating.
These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion. (Applause.) The Taliban must act, and act immediately. They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate.
The President assured the Afghans that the United States did not consider them targets:
Afghanistan’s people have been brutalized—many are starving and many have fled. Women are not allowed to attend school. You can be jailed for owning a television. Religion can be practiced only as their leaders dictate. A man can be jailed in Afghanistan if his beard is not long enough.
The United States respects the people of Afghanistan—after all, we are currently its largest source of humanitarian aid—but we condemn the Taliban regime. (Applause.) It is not only repressing its own people, it is threatening people everywhere by sponsoring and sheltering and supplying terrorists. By aiding and abetting murder, the Taliban regime is committing murder.
The president said nothing about what the United States would offer the Afghans other than humanitarian aid. Perhaps, I hoped, this was because, until he decided the moment had come to move from ultimatum to war, he could not discuss the postwar plans in public.
But it turned out that there wasn’t any postwar plan. Richard Haass was trying to come up with one. That’s why he asked Craig Karp to organize the meeting.
On the afternoon of September 24, I took the train to Washington. Most airports had reopened, but the shuttle flights between New York and Washington were still grounded. After meeting us in the lobby of the State Department, where a new level of security had been hastily erected, officials ushered us visitors into a windowless conference room on the seventh floor, near the office of the secretary of state and his policy planning staff. Besides me, the outside advisors included Thomas Gouttierre, an outgoing and affable Midwesterner, head of the Center for Afghanistan Studies (and dean of the Center for International Studies) at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Tom had coached the Afghan national basketball team as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s and later earned an M.A. in anthropology. His Center for Afghanistan Studies had won lucrative contracts from the CIA-USAID program of cross-border aid to the mujahidin in the 1980s, producing school textbooks that praised jihad and used Kalashnikov rifles in arithmetic lessons. In the 1990s Tom had spent six months serving with the UN Special Mission for Afghanistan based in Islamabad, a job that took advantage of his personal diplomacy skills and fluent Dari. Another participant had also worked for UNSMA: Arnold Schaffenburger, a retired Foreign Service officer who had worked on Afghan issues in the U.S. mission to the UN during the early Clinton administration. Haass had also invited Daoud Yaqub, a young Afghan-American lawyer who had worked for the Afghanistan Foundation and was now coordinating relations with the U.S. government for Zahir Shah in Rome.
As I looked around the room, I saw some familiar faces: people like Karp; Marvin Weinbaum, a University of Illinois specialist on South Asia who had become an intelligence analyst for the State Department after retirement; and the South Asia team. I recognized David Champagne, an army Special Forces officer I had met in the 1980s who trained the Special Forces at Fort Bragg in the cultural and political knowledge they would need to operate on the ground in Afghanistan. Others came from the National Security Council (NSC), Department of Defense (DoD), or other government agencies.
The meeting opened with Haass telling us that the meeting was off the record, and that he didn’t want to read about it in the newspapers. Although Yaqub, representative of an Afghan group, did not stay for the discussion about U.S. policy, Haass asked him to start the meeting with a report on discussions between the Rome Group and the Northern Alliance. Yaqub, a strong supporter of Rome’s cooperation with the Northern Alliance, told us that Massoud’s last words after being wounded by his suicide assassins were, “Work with Zahir Shah.” Amrullah Saleh, who was present at the killing, later told me that Massoud had died instantly, but this myth served a function at that tense moment. The two groups had reached agreement in principle on forming a Supreme Council of Afghanistan with about 150 members, with half appointed by each. The Supreme Council would in turn elect a transitional government.
Despite this general agreement that Yaqub reported, Zahir Shah’s followers and the Northern Alliance were deeply divided. Rather than explore these political problems, however, we spent several minutes listening to a State Department official query Yaqub on when the U.S. would receive the accounts for $800,000 that it had granted to Zahir Shah’s office.
As we were sitting in Washington, other agencies of the U.S. government were disbursing money in Afghanistan in a quite different manner. The day after our meeting in Washington, CIA operative Gary Schroen carried $3 million in cash into the Panjshir Valley. That evening, he met with Engineer Arif, the late Massoud’s intelligence chief. Schroen informed Arif of the U.S. intention to overthrow the Taliban. In order to act as an “honest broker in a post-Taliban Afghanistan,” Schroen claimed, the United States would disburse money directly to commanders, rather than work through the more centralized structures that Massoud had painstakingly established in the years since 1998, when I had reported on the Northern Alliance’s inability to coordinate strategically. Just as the ISI had done in the 1980s, the CIA would control the purse strings to ensure that Afghans followed a strategy made in Washington. Schroen recounts:
Arif reluctantly accepted that fact, but the issue would return to plague our relationship for weeks to come.
As promised, I produced the backpack in which I had placed the $500,000 and passed it to Arif. He hefted the bag but did not look into it, then handed it to Mumtaz. I told him the amount and said that this money was the first payment I would make to the Northern Alliance…. I said I was sure that General Fahim would utilize some of the money to secure supplies for his forces, but I asked Arif to stress to Fahim that much more money was available for purely military purposes.
The next day General (later Marshall) Muhammad Qasim Fahim, who had succeeded Massoud as military commander, arrived, together with Dr. Abdullah. In anticipation of the meeting, Schroen “went back to the black suitcase and got $1 million wrapped and ready.” Schroen recounts a discussion in which he insisted on the U.S. policy of funding and arming commanders separately through small CIA teams, effectively placing them under U.S. command. Finally:
I produced the backpack with the $1 million and explained to Fahim that these funds were to assist in preparing his military forces for the coming battle. I said I had given Arif $500,000 the night before and hoped those funds would be used primarily to strengthen Arif’s organization [intelligence]. I stressed that other money was available if and when specific needs were identified. I placed the money on a small table in the center of our semicircle of chairs, but no one made a move to pick it up. When the meeting ended, and we stood with handshakes all around, still no one made a move to pick up the backpack, even as we all began to leave the room. For a second I had the foolish thought that they might not take the money. Then Arif motioned to Mumtaz, who casually picked up the backpack with one hand, then strained against its weight, almost dropping the bag. He looked at me and smiled, and I said, “Yes, a million dollars is heavier than you think.”
According to one participant in the meeting, Fahim and Dr. Abdullah told Schroen they would use the funds to build a stable Afghanistan under a multiethnic, national government including the former king, rather than seek power for themselves, but Schroen did not mention such a discussion in his memoir.
A few days later, Schroen traveled to Charikar, just outside the southern end of Panjshir, and gave $100,000 in cash to Abdul Rabb Rasul Sayyaf, who had been close to Usama Bin Laden in the 1980s: “Unlike the money I had passed to the Northern Alliance, I had left this bundle in the original clear plastic wrapping so that Sayyaf could see what it was.” Sayyaf handed the money to an aide. Schroen soon was running short, and the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center delivered $10 million more a few days later. Schroen left the four cardboard boxes containing the cash in a corner of the office that Arif gave him. He had a good laugh with Arif one time when he gave him $22,000 for two trucks of helicopter fuel that somehow never arrived.
The total amount of cash given to commanders by the CIA in this manner ultimately amounted to several hundred million dollars. Commanders, or those they paid with the money, had to change the hundred-dollar bills into local currency rapidly in order to obtain usable denominations, and as they did so and more CIA dollars flooded the money market, the value of dollars fell rapidly. The exchange rate of the dollar with Afghanistan’s currency was halved in two months, according to statistics gathered by the International Monetary Fund. The rapid devaluation of the dollar created incentives to unload the greenbacks as quickly as possible, first into other currencies and then into profitable investment, for which there were few outlets in Afghanistan. As the price of opium had increased tenfold as a result of the Taliban ban on cultivation, and as the U.S. offensive occurred during the opium planting season, many of the dollars were quickly recycled by commanders and money changers into loans to farmers to finance the next spring’s poppy crop, enabling the farmers to rebound quickly and profitably from the losses suffered because of the Taliban ban.
In Washington, however, the day before Schroen arrived in Panjshir with the first black bag of $3 million in cash, the State Department was demanding receipts from the office of the former king. When Daoud Yaqub finally promised that the required financial reports would be produced, the State Department let him go, so we could proceed to deliberate on the “Future of Afghanistan.”
Haass first asked the outside experts how the U.S. government should follow up on any military victory in Afghanistan. As we each spoke, a clear consensus emerged: the United States had helped create the current situation by its actions after the withdrawal and collapse of the Soviet Union. We claimed a victory and walked away. We treated Afghanistan as a humanitarian issue and provided no leadership or support for stabilization or reconstruction. The reaction after the embassy bombings was similarly one-dimensional: we focused on al-Qaeda, the direct security threat to the United States, not on the problems of Afghanistan. If we did not want to repeat the same mistakes, the United States had to engage, mobilize the United Nations, and lead an effort to establish legitimate government and reconstruct the economy.
Haass asked for reactions. Two people from the National Security Council staff, whom I did not recognize, immediately objected, “That’s nation-building! We don’t do nation-building.” They were correctly representing the position on which President Bush had run. In the second debate with Vice President Al Gore, he had said, “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war.” The moderator followed up:
MODERATOR: some people are now suggesting that if you don’t want to use the military to maintain the peace, to do the civil thing, is it time to consider a civil force of some kind that comes in after the military that builds nations or all of that? Is that on your radar screen?
BUSH: I don’t think so. I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I’m missing something here. I mean, we’re going to have kind of a nation building corps from America? Absolutely not. Our military is meant to fight and win war. That’s what it’s meant to do. And when it gets overextended, morale drops.8
The young conservative activists from the White House understood what their boss wanted. But there were other people in the room with different experiences. David Champagne took the floor. I remembered him over the years as a military professional well versed in Afghanistan. Like me, he was in his fifties. He had gone through the experience of supporting the U.S. aid to the mujahidin in the 1980s and witnessed the collapse of the country afterward.
He said, “We did this to the Afghan people.” He looked around the room, catching several people by the eye. “Nearly everyone here was involved.” He concluded: “And we have a responsibility to assure that this never happens again.”
At least in that room, that was the end of the discussion as to whether the United States should do as President Bush had advocated in the debate less than a year before.
At the end of the meeting, I became concerned that an overly ambitious agenda was developing, focused on making Afghanistan into a democracy. The central task was helping Afghans reestablish a state that could provide security to eliminate the hole in the global social fabric that threatened both the Afghans and us. I said, “We’re not saying that we should turn Afghanistan into a stable democracy in two years. We are just saying that we need to help Afghans establish a legitimate state that can police the territory to provide security for both them and us. Then an Afghan political process can continue, with all the problems it will entail, but without posing a threat.”
Haass seemed to like that formulation. “OK,” he responded with a small smile, “Nation building lite!”
With that the meeting adjourned, and I spent the subsequent decade commuting between New York and Kabul, with many other stops. As the works collected in this book attest, I oscillated between protesting against the inadequacy of the resources allocated to Afghanistan and the excessive ambition of the goals enunciated. I was swept up into events and practice to the extent that I never wrote the comprehensive book I promised to so many. Instead, in the course of my work for the UN, the Afghan government, and my home institution, the Center on International Cooperation of New York University, I produced both analysis and advocacy. I have collected some of these works here, editing them for anachronisms but trying not to conceal my differences of opinion with myself, my changes of views, and my errors.
In 2009, after the inauguration of President Barack Obama, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke became the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan and asked me to join him in the State Department as a senior advisor. The responsibilities of that post, which I continue to hold under Holbrooke’s successor, Ambassador Marc Grossman, preclude me from writing about U.S. policy toward Afghanistan since I joined the government. Nonetheless the views presented in this collection have informed my work and defined how I have tried to shape U.S. policy. The results on the ground are sufficiently humbling that I do not need to make any claims for this work, other than that I tried, and sometimes managed, to devote my best efforts to bringing a measure of peace to Afghanistan. Only God knows the whole truth.
1. Barnett R. Rubin, Blood on the Doorstep: The Politics of Preventing Deadly Conflict (New York: Century Foundation Press, 2002), p. 3.
2. Ibid., p. 8.
3. The Search for Peace in Afghanistan: From Buffer State to Failed State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 5.
4. “Policies of the Pakistani Military Toward the Afghan Resistance: Human Rights Implications,” News from Asia Watch, February 27, 1989.
5. Ibid.
6. Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 278–79.
7. Ibid., p. 280.
8. Second Gore-Bush presidential debate, October 11, 2000, http://www.debates.org/pages/trans2000b.html.