My Share of the Task(170)
For the first few years following the Taliban’s overthrow, Afghanistan appeared under control. But after a period of waiting to see how the Karzai government would perform, and treat former Taliban, an insurgency soon gestated. To the degree that the insurgency had a central command, the Taliban regime’s former leaders dominated it. Most decamped to Quetta, Pakistan, eighty miles from southern Afghanistan, and the city became the rallying point for turning the now-exiled Taliban government into an insurgent movement to contest the Karzai government. Theirs was a natural reinvention. Although they had largely fought costly conventional campaigns in the civil war of the 1990s, many of the movement’s elders had cut their teeth in the guerrilla war against the Soviets. The structures they’d used to govern Afghanistan—shuras, or councils—were reconstituted, populated by leaders who’d survived the initial salvo of war as well as new up-and-comers.
They led heavy recruitment efforts throughout Pakistan’s madrassas, and began to root themselves into the country by dispatching small bands of fighters. Primarily in the south and east, these mobile units pestered NATO forces but, more important, waged blanket assassination campaigns against any Afghans—government officials, civilians, NGO workers—who collaborated with NATO or the Afghan government. The memory of these fatal visits by roving bands ensured that Afghans did not regard future Taliban threats as empty. Larger bands of fighters, and more distinct military commands, followed.
The Taliban benefited heavily from the weakness and predatory behavior of the Afghan government. Frustration, then rage, at the inability or unwillingness of the government, despite its clear progress in certain sectors like education, to provide basic justice and economic opportunities yielded fertile ground into which the Taliban planted the seeds of resistance. Worse still than the disappointing nondelivery of goods were the predations of the warlords, who gained political sway, entrenched themselves economically, and built up military clout in their corners of Afghanistan, which they often ruled as corrupt autocrats.
It was a dynamic we’d exacerbated. For years, seeking to maintain a light footprint in the country, the NATO approach had largely been to remain in Kabul and use local power brokers—too often the corrupt and despised warlords—whom we paid handsomely. An effort to extend a greater NATO presence into the provinces had begun in 2004, creating regional commands in the north, west, south, east, and in Kabul, but a lack of both Afghan and ISAF forces limited their ability to influence events on the ground. As the Taliban made inroads, sometimes without firing a shot, they sought to compete with the Afghan state. Particularly appealing to many Afghans were the Taliban’s rudimentary but swift courts. In 2005, they had “shadow governors” who sought to institute a parallel government to compete with the Afghan government in eleven of the country’s thirty-four provinces. Now, three years later, they were established in thirty-one provinces.
In May 2008, shortly before leaving TF 714, I’d spent an afternoon with ISAF commander Dan McNeill, my old boss and mentor. In a series of briefings and discussions, Dave Rodriguez, then commanding the 82nd Airborne Division in eastern Afghanistan, Dan, other key leaders, and I had reviewed the war. As always, indicators were mixed and often contradictory, but both empirical data and the anecdotal observations of my strike forces convinced Rod and me that trends were negative. More Americans—and more Afghan civilians—were dying each year. The insurgency was laying bigger IEDs, and more of them—four times as many as they had implanted in 2005.
Now, in September 2008, it looked even worse. So I was not surprised when General Dave McKiernan, who had led ground forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and replaced Dan McNeill at ISAF in June, requested additional forces in order to reverse Taliban gains in southern Afghanistan and improve security in advance of the Afghanistan’s upcoming 2009 presidential elections. Improving security would be essential to achieving durable improvements in governance and development.
Also in September, after several years largely fixated on the crisis in Iraq, President Bush launched what would become the first in a new round of assessments on Afghanistan and Pakistan, conducted by Central Command, the Joint Staff, and the National Security Council in order to align current policy with on-the-ground reality. The reviews were each fairly comprehensive but ultimately identified no silver-bullet solutions to seemingly intractable problems. The obvious options—do more, do less, or do the same—were unappealing.