Taliban (21 page)

‘You know how it works,’ he said.

On the news, the toll from the attack was still climbing. Dozens were injured and at least seventeen dead, including an Italian, a Frenchman and nine Indians. The word at the airport had been that this was another Taliban ‘spectacular’. The fact that the attack had happened at 6.30 a.m. on a Friday, the beginning of the weekend when there were fewer people on the streets, suggested that some thought had been given to minimizing ‘civilian’ casualties, which since 2009 was supposed to be a hallmark of Taliban suicide attacks. A local TV news presenter was now speculating that others could be responsible, however. It all depended on who was intended as the target: foreigners in general, or Indian ones in particular? If the latter – and the high proportion of dead Indians was obviously suggestive – then the attack could have been carried out by one of the ISI-backed militant organizations with an axe to grind in the long-running Indo-Pakistani border dispute in Kashmir, such as Lashkar-e-Toiba. This was the same terror group that had attacked the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai in 2008, going from room to room in a hunt for foreigners to kill, and from the reports on the television, the Safi Landmark attack bore some of the hallmarks of the horror in Mumbai.

No one knew, of course, but it certainly mattered to me if foreigners in general were the target. My hotel, the Gandamak Lodge, was a favourite with visiting British journalists. Its bar was also very popular with the city’s swollen community of foreign diplomats, aid workers and contractors: one of perhaps a dozen Western watering holes in the whole of Kabul. I knew the place well. It was
owned and run by Peter Jouvenal, the former cameraman who had married an Afghan and set up the business a decade before. He was a keen collector of the old British weaponry which can still be found in the country’s bazaars, the scattered legacy of the wars of the nineteenth century. The entrance was guarded by a rickety old field gun; the hall was lined with racks of Martini-Henry rifles, the standard-issue British rifle of the 1870s. The Flashman theme was carried into the dining room, which was decorated with more guns and maps and other militaria, while up in the storeroom by the bedrooms, piles of vintage bayonets vied for space with camera tripods, bullet-proof vests and other modern bric-a-brac left behind by itinerant war correspondents over the years.

The hotel took its name from Gandamak village, 35 miles west of Jalalabad, where the remnants of a 16,500-strong British army were annihilated in 1842: the worst defeat the Empire had ever known. The redcoats’ tragic last stand was commemorated in 1898 by the artist W.B. Wollen, a copy of whose painting naturally hung alongside the Martini-Henrys in the entrance hall. Watching that morning’s news, I couldn’t help wondering if it was tempting providence to stay in a hotel named after so famous a massacre of the British.

It was mid-afternoon before the cordon was lifted and I was able to complete my journey. Arriving at the hotel at last I found I was not alone in my nervousness about security. The old field gun had been reinforced by a posse of armed guards, an escape route from the compound had been organized in the event of a frontal attack, and one of the guests said she had hidden a Makharov pistol beneath her pillow. Apart from that, British sang-froid seemed intact. It was surreal to hear that a full English breakfast had been served as usual in the restaurant that morning. Even so, there was
no escaping the tension in the streets outside. Uncertainty hung in the air like the swirling mist that now obscured the Koh-i-Asmai, a transmitter-topped mountain ridge that separated the city centre from the University district, and an important point of orientation for every Kabuli city-dweller – at least, when it was in view.

The West’s war against the Taliban had changed gear once again as it entered its ninth year. In September 2009, General Stanley McChrystal made public an earlier report to the White House that recommended sending in 40,000 more foreign troops: a ‘surge’ that would replicate the tactics that helped defeat the insurgency in Iraq. It was a controversial move. Who was in charge of US policy in Afghanistan: the politicians or the military? Congressman Dennis Kucinich thundered – presciently, it would later turn out – that generals were supposed to be ‘subordinate to the President, who is the commander-in-chief. He’s the boss. And when generals start trying to suggest publicly what the president should do, they shouldn’t be generals anymore.’
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But McChrystal kept his job. After months of internal debate at the White House, Obama finally agreed to a surge. Critics accused him of dithering, though in fairness the decision was not an easy one. He was in exactly the same position as Mikhail Gorbachev soon after he became leader of the Soviet Union in 1985. Gorbachev, too, had inherited a counter-insurgency that was in danger of stagnating – and he also agreed to his generals’ request for a troop surge in order to force a result. Soviet troop levels subsequently rose to 108,800 in 1985 – which turned out to be the bloodiest year of the whole ten-year occupation.

McChrystal’s plan was to use the extra US troops, more than 100,000 of whom were expected to be in theatre by the end of 2010,
to secure the main population centres at the expense of small villages and the countryside. The logic seemed sound enough. As McChrystal said, ‘the people are the prize’ in counter-insurgency warfare, not the insurgents, so it made sense to focus on the places where most of them lived. The goal was to drive the Taliban from the main population centres and to re-establish – or in some cases, to establish for the first time – the writ of the central government. In theory, support for the Taliban would drain away when the locals saw the advantages of better services, good governance, proper law and order. Attacks such as that morning’s on the Safi Landmark hotel looked designed to challenge ISAF in the places the Americans had declared were most important to them. In the capital, Taliban spectaculars were now being mounted about once every six weeks. Resident foreigners had begun to compare Kabul to Baghdad – a spurious comparison for now, though not entirely far-fetched, particularly if you happened to work for the United Nations. Just four months earlier, a suicide bomb and gun attack on a nearby UN guest house had killed five.

Down in Helmand, even as I arrived in Kabul, the McChrystal theory was being put into practice. Operation Moshtaraq, involving some 15,000 ISAF troops, the biggest offensive of the war, was under way in the farming community of Marjah. ‘Clear, hold and build’ was the new military mantra. McChrystal boasted that, once the military had done the clearing and holding, he had a ‘government in a box, ready to roll in’ to do the building bit, the key part of the battle for local ‘hearts and minds’. It all looked good on paper: a strategy from the US’s new
Counterinsurgency Field Manual
published in 2007 under the direction of David Petraeus, and of which McChrystal was a devoted follower. But there were serious doubts from the outset that it would actually work.

The first one concerned the people selected to man McChrystal’s ‘government in a box’. The man appointed to run the district council, Abdul Zahir, had lived in Germany for fifteen years before returning in 2000, and was little known locally even though he was a member of the influential Alizai tribe. The subsequent revelation that Zahir had served part of a five-year sentence for the attempted manslaughter of his son in 1998
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caused derision in Marjah, and acute embarrassment at Nato headquarters in Kabul.

Then there was the question of troop numbers. There was essentially no difference between ‘clear, hold and build’ and the ‘comprehensive approach’ adopted by the British in Helmand since 2006. The undermanned British had struggled to hold the territory they cleared, but did McChrystal really have enough men to do the job now? It was well known in Kabul that he had initially asked his President for an additional 80,000 troops, yet had ended up with only half that number. What was worse, the psychological impact of the surge was diluted from the outset by Obama himself, who for domestic political reasons found it necessary to declare that his troops would start coming home again in 2011, even as he announced their deployment. The surge in Iraq had never been time-limited in this way. The State Department, among others, tried hard to row back from Obama’s announcement, arguing that any troops returning home in 2011 would be doing so only as a part of the ordinary rotation system, and that America’s military commitment would not end until the job was finished. Among ordinary Afghans, however, the damage was already done. ‘You may have the watches, but we have the time,’ as their old saying went. Once planted, it was impossible to uproot the idea that for the Taliban to win, all they had to do was to wait.

Operation Moshtaraq was supposed to showcase the new
McChrystal approach, yet even its codename was bungled.
Moshtaraq
has an Arab root but is essentially a Dari word for ‘together’. For a hearts and minds operation in a province where 92 per cent of the population are Pashtuns,
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this was not a clever choice: ‘Like sticking two fingers up at the people of Marjah,’ as one Pashtun living in Kabul later told me. Perhaps, he joked, the war-planners had rejected the perfectly good Pashto word for ‘together’ –
gaad
– on the grounds that it would sound too much like ‘God’ on the lips of US Marines, and were anxious to avoid any suggestion of a crusade.

The choice of codename was supposed to illustrate ISAF’s solidarity with the local military who accompanied them on the mission (and helped to make up the numbers needed to make it a success): the Afghan National Army. Instead, ISAF had inadvertently pointed up the fledgling ANA’s greatest drawback: its dire lack of ethnic balance. More than 40 per cent of its rank and file were Dari-speaking Tajiks,
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who account for about a quarter of the country’s population. Worse still, fully 70 per cent of its battalion commanders were Tajiks too.
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The ANA, therefore, was arguably not a ‘national’ army at all but a kind of ethnic supermilitia, trained and armed by the West. This was the institution that was supposed to keep the peace once ISAF withdrew: the very foundation of the Western exit strategy from Afghanistan. Nato was in the process of rapidly expanding the ANA from 90,000 to a planned 250,000, with the overall security forces of the country, including the police, eventually supposed to number more than 400,000. But without the proper proportion of Pashtuns in its ranks, wasn’t there a risk that it would not keep the peace in the event of future conflict, but would take sides?

The loyalty of the army was already worryingly uncertain.
Matthew Hoh, the senior US civilian in Zabul province until he resigned in protest against the war in September 2009, recalled attending an Afghan Independence Day event at a military base that was attended by hundreds of ANA and national police. The large photograph beneath which they paraded, he observed, was not of President Karzai but of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the mujahideen leader assassinated by al-Qaida in 2001, and who is still lionized by Tajiks. ‘It is already bad now,’ Hoh remarked, ‘but unless US policy changes we could see a return of the civil war of the 1990s.’
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ISAF’s planners did not repeat their ‘moshtaraq’ mistake. The next phase of the campaign, the investment of Kandahar city, had already been codenamed Operation Omid, a Pashto word this time, meaning ‘hope’. But it would take more than presentational tinkering – and more than wishful thinking – to fix the underlying problems of the ANA. A United Nations report in January 2010 revealed that nine out of ten ANA soldiers were illiterate, three in ten were drug addicts, and that a quarter of them deserted, every year. Bringing such an army up to scratch will likely require foreign troops to train and mentor them for decades to come.
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Many reputations had been staked on the success of the surge. In a briefing to journalists at Camp Leatherneck in Helmand, American military officials described Marjah as ‘a town of 80,000 people’, a crucial cog in Helmand’s mighty opium industry, as well as the Taliban’s last significant stronghold in the province. But were these claims really true? Few had ever heard of the place before Operation Moshtaraq. And if it was so important, why had they taken so long to get around to tackling it? Marjah was barely 20 miles from the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, yet high-intensity military operations had been going on in Helmand for four and a
half years. The suspicion in Kabul was that ISAF had deliberately exaggerated Marjah’s significance to a compliant media for propaganda purposes. Three weeks after the briefing at Camp Leatherneck, the
New York Times
ran a story with a Marjah dateline describing it as ‘a city of 80,000’. The truth was that ISAF had invested tens of thousands of troops in what really amounted to just another Helmandi patchwork of fields and farming villages.

McChrystal brandished a carrot for the insurgents, in the shape of a reintegration programme supported by a special new billiondollar fund. At a conference arranged by Prime Minister Gordon Brown in London in January 2010, it was announced that any fighter who agreed to lay down his arms and abide by the Constitution of Afghanistan would be entitled to a job, housing assistance, and anything else he might need to return to the fold of civil society. McChrystal was convinced that the great majority of the insurgency’s foot soldiers, perhaps as many as 70 per cent, were fighting ISAF not from ideological conviction but because there was no other work available.
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He reckoned that the easiest and cheapest way to defeat these so-called ‘ten-dollar-a-day Taliban’ – also sometimes described as ‘Tier Three’ insurgents – was simply to buy them off. It was true that unemployment was rife: 40 per cent nationally and as high as 70 per cent in parts of the south, including Helmand.

The problem was that the reintegration programme offered nothing to those ‘ideological’ Taliban who were not fighting for a salary. These obviously included the Quetta leadership, whose preconditions for reconciliation – the withdrawal of foreign troops, a constitution based exclusively on Sharia – had not wavered in eight years. In 2008, ISAF intelligence officers estimated there were a total of 7,000 to 11,000 insurgents, of whom just 5 per cent were
what they called ‘Tier One Taliban’, the ‘hard core’ of the insurgency who would probably never reconcile.
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McChrystal was effectively gambling on the accuracy of this assessment, arguing that it would be easy to deal with the Tier One Taliban once their Tier Three foot soldiers had been stripped away. But how accurate were ISAF’s figures, and what did they really mean?