My Share of the Task(169)
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When I arrived at the Pentagon, I found, as I had six years earlier, the nation’s energy and resources shifting from the theater I’d left to a war I’d soon rejoin. When I joined the Joint Staff from Afghanistan in 2002, I was surprised to find the Pentagon’s focus on Iraq. Now, returning from Iraq in August 2008, I was less surprised to find a growing focus on Afghanistan. From the day I became the DJS I sensed that Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan would dominate our energy. In 2003, there had been a troubling velocity to the decision making. Now, with rising war fatigue and an impending change in administrations, I sensed the opposite.
As we knew better in 2008 than immediately following the 9/11 attacks, our war in Afghanistan did not begin in 2001. The fighting reflected forces brewing in Afghanistan for centuries, and the conflict’s modern roots dated back to 1973. That year, after a forty-year reign, King Zahir Shah was unseated in a bloodless coup (he was vacationing in Europe) by his former prime minister and brother-in-law Daoud. Daoud’s soft entrance belied his authoritarian reign, which soon prompted a group of eager Afghan communists to overthrow him in 1978. As these communists’ early attempts to rule faltered and provoked a violent backlash that showed signs of an impending insurgency, the Soviet union intervened on Christmas 1979.
For the next ten years, the Afghan government and ever more Soviet troops fought against a collection of diverse opposition movements. They were eventually subsidized by Saudi Arabia and the United States, but largely manipulated by Pakistan, which dispensed the funds as it saw fit. The long struggle polarized Afghanistan’s many ethnic groups, and turned the mujahideen resistance more extreme. The perennial warring catapulted into positions of power a group of nontraditional leaders like Abdul Rashid Dostum, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and Ahmad Shah Massoud, whose talents ranged from military acumen to cold-blooded murder. Ultimately, the Soviets withdrew their military forces in 1989, but the government they left behind, under President Mohammed Najibullah, survived for three years. When the Soviet union fell in 1991, however, Najibullah’s regime lost funding, credibility, and was weakened by infighting. The amassing opposition movements soon took control of the nation, advanced toward Kabul, and began fighting one another in civil war.
The year the civil war had begun, 1992, wasn’t that long ago, and adults in Afghanistan remembered well the behavior of the groups that had struggled for wealth and power. Alliances arose and shifted quickly. Fortunes were amassed and used to construct garish homes or private fiefdoms. The traditional relationships that balanced local and national interests, and formal and informal power brokers, struggled to reemerge from the wreckage of war. In the chaos, Afghans retreated to relationships most familiar and trustworthy to them: family, tribe, and ethnic group. A cadre of well-educated elites labored to stitch together structures on which to build the future, but most were upended with each new spasm of violence and turmoil.
In 1994, the Taliban rose to power. They emanated from the Pashtun south and were populated by young Afghans often schooled in madrassas, or religious schools—talib means “student”—across the border in Pakistan. These idealistic, religiously inflexible young men seemed at first like a summer rain that would wash away the excesses of “warlords” who had robbed, raped, and terrified Afghans living under them. The Taliban’s personal piety and quick punishment of pederasts and thieves appeared, at first, a welcome respite for a people weary of conflict. They skillfully advertised it as such. Of course it was too good to be true. Quickly, the Taliban exhibited administrative incompetence and displayed a stunning propensity for draconian violence and intolerance. Their cruel and tone-deaf actions, like public executions for adultery, and the destruction of ancient Buddhist statues, eventually earned them the contempt of the international community. So too did the sanctuary they gave to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, who helped the Taliban lay siege to the few remaining holdouts of resistance in northern Afghanistan.
For many Afghans, the tragedy of 9/11 and the American response represented an opportunity. With Afghanistan again the attention of the world, they had a chance to remove the Taliban and reshape their country. For a short period it would be possible to leverage the presence of international peacekeepers and donations to establish a government dominated by neither extremist ideologues nor the predatory warlords who’d haunted the country. Nearly seven years later, their vision remained unfulfilled.