How We Lost the War We Won : (Afghanistan) Rolling Stone
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- afghanistan
- , Rosen
- , withdrawal
- , COIN
- , surge
- , Taliban
- , opposition
- , terrorism
- , 911
- , democracy
- , failure
- , bush
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Saved by 3 people (0 private), first by anonymouse user on 2008-10-18
- Openanthropology on 2009-10-14 - Tags Afghanistan , opposition , withdrawal , failure , COIN , Rosen , Taliban , surge
- Triple_t on 2008-10-18 - Tags afghanistan
- Cburell on 2008-10-18 - Tags terrorism , democracy , bush , 911
Public Sticky notes
By May 2003, only 18 months after the beginning of the war, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld all but declared victory in Afghanistan.
"We are at a point where we clearly have moved from major combat
activity to a period of stability and stabilization and
reconstruction," Rumsfeld announced during a visit to Kabul. The
security situation in Afghanistan, in his view, was better than it
had been for 25 years.
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But even as Rumsfeld spoke, the Taliban were beginning their
reconquest of Afghanistan.
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The Pentagon, already focused on
invading Iraq, assumed that the Afghan militias it had bought with
American money would be enough to secure the country. Instead, the
militias proved far more interested in extorting bribes and seizing
land than pursuing the hardened Taliban veterans who had taken
refuge across the border in Pakistan.
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he parliamentary elections
in 2005 returned power to the warlords who had terrorized the
countryside before the Taliban imposed order.
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"The American
intervention issued a blank check to these guys," says a senior aid
official in Kabul. "They threw money, weapons, vehicles at them.
But the warlords never abandoned their bad habits — they're
abusing people and filling their pockets.
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By contrast, aid for rebuilding schools and clinics has been
paltry. In the critical first two years after the invasion,
international assistance amounted to only $57 per citizen —
compared with $679 in Bosnia. As U.S. contractors botched
reconstruction jobs and fed corruption, little of the money
intended to rebuild Afghanistan reached those in need.
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Even worse,
the sudden infusion of international aid drove up real estate and
food prices, increasing poverty and fueling widespread
resentment.
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The Taliban — once an isolated and impoverished
group of religious students who knew little about the rest of the
world and cared only about liberating their country from oppressive
warlords — are now among the best-armed and most experienced
insurgents in the world, linked to a global movement of jihadists
that stretches from Pakistan and Iraq to Chechnya and the
Philippines.
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Attacks on coalition and Afghan
forces are up 44 percent since last year
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By October, 135 American troops had been killed in
Afghanistan this year — already surpassing the total of 117
fatalities for all of 2007
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The Taliban are also intensifying their
attacks on aid workers: In a particularly brazen assault in August, a group of Taliban
fighters opened fire on the car of a U.S. aid group, the
International Rescue Committee, killing three Western women and
their Afghan driver on the main road to Kabul.
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Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
offered a sharply different assessment. His prepared testimony,
approved by the secretary of defense and the White House, read, "I
am convinced we can win the war in Afghanistan." But when Mullen
sat down before Congress, he deviated from his prepared statement.
"I am not convinced we are winning it in Afghanistan," he testified
bluntly.
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But those closest to the chaos in Afghanistan say that throwing
more soldiers into combat won't help. "More troops are not the
answer," a senior United Nations official in Kabul tells me. "You
will not make more babies by having many guys screw the same
woman."
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It is a point echoed in dozens of off-the-record interviews I
conducted in Kabul with leading Western diplomats, security
experts, former mujahedeen and Taliban commanders, and senior
officials with the U.N. and prominent aid organizations. All agree
that the situation is, in the words of one official, "incredibly
bleak."
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the Taliban have cut Kabul off from the rest of the country and
established themselves as the only law in many rural villages.
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According to the diplomat, military solutions are simply no
longer viable. "The analysis of our intelligence people is that
things are getting worse," he says. "CIA analysts are extremely
gloomy and worried. You have an extremely weak president in
Afghanistan, a corrupt and ineffective ministry of the interior, an
army with no command or control, and a dysfunctional international
alliance."
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As one top official with a Western aid organization put it,
"We're simply not up to the task of success in Afghanistan. I'm
increasingly unsure about a way forward — except that we
should start preparing our exit strategy."
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Midlevel
Taliban leaders like Ibrahim move freely about the capital, like
any other Afghan: U.S. forces lack the intelligence and manpower to
identify enemy commanders, let alone apprehend them. (To protect
Ibrahim's identity, I agreed to change his name.)
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Shafiq, who fought the Soviets with the mujahedeen, now commands
Taliban fighters in the Andar district of Ghazni. "Andar is a very
bad place," an intelligence officer in Kabul tells me. "The Taliban
show a lot of confidence and freedom of movement there." While
coalition forces have focused on driving the insurgents from the
south, they failed to maintain a buffer in central regions like
Ghazni, where the Taliban now routinely pull people off buses and
execute them. "They have that level of control right on Kabul's
front door," the officer adds. "Environments regarded as extreme
two years ago are much worse now. There has been a staggering
intensification."
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As we head south, Shafiq tells me that fighters from Saudi
Arabia, Pakistan and Uzbekistan have come through the Andar
district.
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Despite their extremely conservative views on religion, most
Taliban are fundamentally nationalist and Afghan-centric.
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They
accept the support of Al Qaeda, but that doesn't mean they approve
of its tactics. "Suicide attacks are not good because they kill
Muslims," Shafiq says.
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The practice
is haram — one of many traditions banned by the Taliban, who
consider it forbidden under Islam. The fact that it is being
tolerated is the first indication I have that the Taliban are not
as doctrinaire as they were during their seven years of rule.
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He seems less motivated
by religious ideals than by defending his homeland: He took up
jihad, he tells me, because foreigners have come to Afghanistan and
are fighting Afghans and poor people.
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The U.S. campaign in Afghanistan has not been helped by its rash
of misguided bombings. This year, according to the United Nations,
1,445 Afghan civilians were killed by coalition forces through
August — two-thirds of them in airstrikes. On July 6th, a
bombing raid killed 47 members of a wedding party — including
39 women and children — near the village of Kacu. On August
22nd, more than 90 civilians — again mostly women and
children — were killed in an airstrike in Azizabad.
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Once the foreigners leave, he insists, the Taliban
will negotiate peace with the Afghan army and police: "They are
brothers, Muslims."
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Yusuf makes it clear that it is only the Americans he has a
problem with.
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What's more, he says, girls will be allowed to
go to school, and women will be allowed to work. It is a stance I
will hear echoed by many Taliban leaders. In recent years,
recognizing that their harsher strictures had alienated the
population, the Taliban have grown more tolerant. To improve their
operations, they have even been forced to adopt technologies they
once banned: computers, television, films, the Internet.
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the
Taliban are not fighting merely to restore the hard-line government
they had before but are prepared to move forward with a greater
degree of flexibility and pragmatism than they have shown in the
past.
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Yusuf points to a police checkpoint. The police know him, he
says, but do nothing to stop him. "Every night I go on patrol, and
they don't fight me," he says. "They don't have guns, and they are
afraid."
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Shafiq
recently bought two jeeps from the police, who later told the
Interior Ministry that the vehicles were destroyed in an attack.
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The police, in fact, often defect to the Taliban.
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"The police are highly corrupt," a senior U.N. official in Kabul
tells me. "They are at the center of the collapse of the Karzai
government — their corruption makes people support the
Taliban." The cops have even taken to robbing U.S. contractors.
"The police will raid foreign companies and just steal everything
— iPods, money, weapons, radios," says an intelligence
officer. "People might hate the Taliban, but they hate the
government just as much. At least the Taliban have rules. This
government, they're just parasites fucking with you."
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In the village of Khodzai
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"The Americans do not
come here," their commander says proudly. "We control this area.
The Taliban is the government here."
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As we leave the mosque, Shafiq tells me of the trials that the
Taliban frequently hold to prosecute collaborators. The suspects
are given a hearing by a qazi, or judge, who orders those convicted
to be beheaded.
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"The leadership is totally fragmented," a senior
U.N. official says. "There is a lot of criminality within the
Taliban." With the targeting of civilians now sanctioned by the
Taliban, top commanders compete for prize catches, stopping cars in
broad daylight and checking the cellphones of foreigners to
determine if they are worthwhile captives.
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Unfortunately, as young Taliban fighters have
substituted their own authority for tribal customs, more and more
insurgents now ignore the code. "All the old rules have broken
down," an aid official who has spent two decades in Afghanistan
tells me. The guarantees of safety that once protected civilians
have been replaced by a new generation removed from traditional
society — one for whom jihad is the only law.
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After everyone prays, the Doctor orders the others to leave the
room, except for Yusuf. His voice is low and gruff. We sit on the
floor. "Deir Obekhi," I say, apologizing for entering his territory
without permission. He accuses me of being a spy for the Afghan
army. He asks how I got a visa to Afghanistan. I tell him I am here
to write about the mujahedeen and tell their story. If I like them
so much, he sneers, why don't I join them?
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When we
reach Shafiq's house, he carries a television into the guest room
and turns on the generator. Reading the English titles on the
program guide, he finds Al-Jazeera, the Arabic news channel. We
watch coverage of the attacks we drove by the day before. Shafiq
switches to an Afghan channel, and we watch an Indian soap opera
dubbed in Dari. The women are dressed in revealing Western attire.
I am amazed that Shafiq would watch something so anathema to the
Taliban. It's OK, he tells me — "it's a drama about a
family." Later he puts on a satellite channel devoted to
Iranian-American pop music. We watch as a portly singer with
stubble and long hair imitates bad Eighties rock, but in Farsi. The
next video features an Iranian pop singer dressed in leather fringe
and a tank top, like a cross between Davy Crockett and Richard
Simmons. The Taliban commander watches, mesmerized.
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To return to Kabul from a feudal province
like Ghazni is to experience a form of time travel. The city is
thoroughly modern, for those who can afford it: five-star hotels,
shiny new shopping malls and well-guarded restaurants where
foreigners eat meals that cost as much as most Afghans make in a
month, cooked with ingredients imported from abroad. If you can
avoid falling into the sewage canals at every crosswalk, and evade
the suicide bombers who occasionally rock the city, you can enjoy
the safety of Afghanistan's version of the Green Zone.
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But the barbarians are at the gate, and major attacks are
getting closer and closer to the city each day. Upon my return to
Kabul, I discover that the Taliban have fired rockets at the
airport and at the NATO base; the United Nations has been on a
four-day curfew; and President Karzai has canceled his public
appearances. The city is being slowly but systematically severed
from the rest of the country.
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The Bush administration is placing its hopes on presidential
elections in Afghanistan next year, but everyone I speak with in
Kabul agrees that the elections will be a joke. "The Americans are
gung-ho about elections," a longtime nongovernmental official tells
me. "But it will only exacerbate ethnic tensions." In Pashtun areas
controlled by the Taliban, registration would be virtually
impossible, and voting would invoke a death sentence —
effectively disenfranchising the country's dominant ethnic group.
"You can't fix the insurgency with an election," a senior U.N.
official tells me. "It's a socioeconomic phenomenon that goes well
beyond the border of Afghanistan." Real elections would require the
cooperation of the Taliban — and that, in turn, would require
negotiations with the Taliban. The war, in effect, is already
lost.
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The Bush administration is placing its hopes on presidential
elections in Afghanistan next year, but everyone I speak with in
Kabul agrees that the elections will be a joke. "The Americans are
gung-ho about elections," a longtime nongovernmental official tells
me. "But it will only exacerbate ethnic tensions." In Pashtun areas
controlled by the Taliban, registration would be virtually
impossible, and voting would invoke a death sentence —
effectively disenfranchising the country's dominant ethnic group.
Highlighted by openanthropology
You can't fix the insurgency with an election," a senior U.N.
official tells me. "It's a socioeconomic phenomenon that goes well
beyond the border of Afghanistan." Real elections would require the
cooperation of the Taliban — and that, in turn, would require
negotiations with the Taliban. The war, in effect, is already
lost.
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"This can't be solved other than by talking to the Taliban,"
says a top diplomat in Kabul. A leading aid official adds that it
is important to understand the ideological goal of the Taliban:
"They don't have an international-terrorist agenda — they
have an Afghanistan agenda. We might not agree with their agenda
for the country, but that's not our war." Former Taliban leaders
agree that only talks will end the war. "If the U.S. deals with
Pakistan and negotiates with higher-level Taliban," says one, "then
it could reach a deal."
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Negotiating with the Taliban would also enable the Americans to
take advantage of the sharp divisions within the insurgency. Mullah
Omar, the Taliban leader, has been openly criticized by a rival
named Siirajudin Haqqani, who has called for Omar to be replaced.
In provinces like Ghazni, the Taliban leadership is now divided
between commanders loyal to Omar and men who follow Haqqani. A
recent meeting between supporters of the two men in the Pakistani
city of Peshawar reportedly descended into fighting when an Omar
official threw his tea glass at a Haqqani man. The internal split
provides an opening — if U.S. intelligence is smart enough to
exploit it.
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"The U.S. should try to weaken the Taliban," a former Taliban
commander tells me. "They should make groups, divide and conquer.
If someone wants to use the division between Haqqani and Omar, they
can."
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The Bush administration believes it can stop the Taliban by
throwing money into clinics and schools. But even humanitarian
officials scoff at the idea. "If you gave jobs to the Viet Cong,
would they stop fighting?" asks one. "Two years ago you could build
a road or a bridge in a village and say, 'Please don't let the
Taliban come in.' But now you've reached the stage where the
hearts-and-minds business doesn't work."
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Officials on the ground in Afghanistan say it is foolhardy to
believe that the Americans can prevail where the Russians failed.
At the height of the occupation, the Soviets had 120,000 of their
own troops in Afghanistan, buttressed by roughly 300,000 Afghan
troops. The Americans and their allies, by contrast, have 65,000
troops on the ground, backed up by only 137,000 Afghan security
forces — and they face a Taliban who enjoy the support of a
well-funded and highly organized network of Islamic extremists.
"The end for the Americans will be just like for the Russians,"
says a former commander who served in the Taliban government. "The
Americans will never succeed in containing the conflict. There will
be more bleeding. It's coming to the same situation as it did for
the communist forces, who found themselves confined to the
provincial capitals."
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on 2008-10-18 by cburell
It's worth remembering that the US supported Afghan and Islamic "freedom fighters" against the Soviet occupiers, and among those with US/CIA support was Osama Bin Laden.
Officials on the ground in Afghanistan say it is foolhardy to
believe that the Americans can prevail where the Russians failed.
At the height of the occupation, the Soviets had 120,000 of their
own troops in Afghanistan, buttressed by roughly 300,000 Afghan
troops. The Americans and their allies, by contrast, have 65,000
troops on the ground, backed up by only 137,000 Afghan security
forces — and they face a Taliban who enjoy the support of a
well-funded and highly organized network of Islamic extremists.
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"The end for the Americans will be just like for the Russians,"
says a former commander who served in the Taliban government. "The
Americans will never succeed in containing the conflict. There will
be more bleeding. It's coming to the same situation as it did for
the communist forces, who found themselves confined to the
provincial capitals."
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Simply put, it is too late for Bush's "quiet surge" — or
even for Barack Obama's plan for a more robust reinforcement
— to work in Afghanistan. More soldiers on the ground will
only lead to more contact with the enemy, and more air support for
troops will only lead to more civilian casualties that will
alienate even more Afghans. Sooner or later, the American
government will be forced to the negotiating table, just as the
Soviets were before them.
Highlighted by cburell
Simply put, it is too late for Bush's "quiet surge" — or
even for Barack Obama's plan for a more robust reinforcement
— to work in Afghanistan. More soldiers on the ground will
only lead to more contact with the enemy, and more air support for
troops will only lead to more civilian casualties that will
alienate even more Afghans. Sooner or later, the American
government will be forced to the negotiating table, just as the
Soviets were before them.
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"The rise of the Taliban insurgency is not likely to be
reversed," says Abdulkader Sinno, a Middle East scholar and the
author of Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond. "It will
only get stronger. Many local leaders who are sitting on the fence
right now — or are even nominally allied with the government
— are likely to shift their support to the Taliban in the
coming years. What's more, the direct U.S. military involvement in
Afghanistan is now likely to spill over into Pakistan. It may be
tempting to attack the safe havens of the Taliban and Al Qaeda
across the border, but that will only produce a worst-case scenario
for the United States. Attacks by the U.S. would attract the
support of hundreds of millions of Muslims in South Asia. It would
also break up Pakistan, leading to a civil war, the collapse of its
military and the possible unleashing of its nuclear arsenal."
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on 2008-10-18 by cburell
Anybody want to place bets on this scenario?
"The rise of the Taliban insurgency is not likely to be
reversed," says Abdulkader Sinno, a Middle East scholar and the
author of Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond. "It will
only get stronger. Many local leaders who are sitting on the fence
right now — or are even nominally allied with the government
— are likely to shift their support to the Taliban in the
coming years. What's more, the direct U.S. military involvement in
Afghanistan is now likely to spill over into Pakistan. It may be
tempting to attack the safe havens of the Taliban and Al Qaeda
across the border, but that will only produce a worst-case scenario
for the United States. Attacks by the U.S. would attract the
support of hundreds of millions of Muslims in South Asia. It would
also break up Pakistan, leading to a civil war, the collapse of its
military and the possible unleashing of its nuclear arsenal."
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In the same speech in which he promised a surge, Bush vowed that he would never allow the Taliban to return to power in Afghanistan. But they have already returned, and only negotiation with them can bring any hope of stability. Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan "are all theaters in the same overall struggle," the president declared, linking his administration's three greatest foreign-policy disasters in one broad vision. In the end, Bush said, we must have "faith in the power of freedom."
But the Taliban have their own faith, and so far, they are winning. On my last day in Kabul, a Western aid official reminds me of the words of a high-ranking Taliban leader, who recently explained why the United States will never prevail in Afghanistan.
"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."
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But the Taliban have their own faith, and so far, they are
winning.
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"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we
Taliban have time."
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