In stops across Afghanistan, over countless cups of steaming golden tea, I met with Afghan political leaders, tribal elders, soldiers, and shopkeepers. All were polite, but I sensed a wearied frustration from people whose inflated expectations in the fall of 2001 for political stability and economic progress had been largely unmet. In 2003, “How can we help?” or “What do you need?” still elicited detailed, hopeful answers. By 2009, the questions evoked polite nods but little excitement. They’d been asked too many times with little to show for it. Governance was weak, security was deteriorating, and our apparent ineffectiveness had disappointed once optimistic Afghans.
To be sure, Afghans were the architects and engineers of many of their problems, which they would reluctantly admit. But too often, ISAF and our civilian counterparts seemed disconnected from their lives, unwilling or unable to bridge the gap. To convince the population that we could, and would, win, we needed to engage dramatically more Afghans at every level.
I had hopes for a program first hatched by Scott Miller, Mike Flynn, and me in my office at the Pentagon earlier that spring. Watching from afar, I’d grown frustrated by what I thought was an unserious national approach to the war. As one solution to that, we decided to field a cadre of several hundred American military officers and NCOs—“Afghan Hands,” after the “China Hands” of the 1930s and 1940s—who would be trained in the languages, history, and cultures of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then employed there over a five-year period. On rotations in country and back in the United States, their focus would be the same region or topic. We would send them back to the same districts each time, so that they would maintain relationships with the Afghans with whom they worked. Despite enthusiastic support from Chairman Mullen, the military services’ reluctance to contribute personnel slowed the program. It would be early 2010 before the first Afghan Hands arrived and quickly dispersed throughout the country.
The listening tour ended on June 26. That night, the final leg home was in a Chinook helicopter. Earlier that day I’d asked Charlie Flynn to write down his impressions from the last eight days of moving around Afghanistan. As we sat next to each other, leaning close to talk over the rumble of the aircraft engines, Charlie said he’d already recorded his initial impressions. I told him I’d look at them tomorrow, but then told him what was weighing most heavily on my mind.
“It seems like we’re fighting five very different wars, not one coherent plan.”
He smiled. Pointing with the small headlamp he wore so he could take notes on night flights, Charlie opened his notebook to show me the first point on the page. It matched my concern exactly: “5 Regional Wars—Not One Fight.”
As we flew on in darkness I thought how it was even more complex than that. While ISAF was fighting five distinct, uncoordinated campaigns we were actually facing something more like twenty-five wars, and scores of insurgencies. The monolithic image of the Taliban personified by the ominous image of one-eyed Mullah Omar was in fact a loosely connected collection of local insurgencies that were energized by local grievances and power struggles. The largely local nature of the insurgency gave it certain advantages, but also revealed its inherent weaknesses and, I thought, fundamental limitations.
During the Taliban’s first big coordinated offensives in 2006 and 2007, the Taliban’s senior leadership had dispatched trusted commanders—like the one-legged Dadullah—and delegated the campaign to them. These commanders had managed dispersed but responsive units. But when many of these commanders died or defected, the tethers between the Quetta-based headquarters and the field units grew weaker. Since 2007, the movement had become less hierarchical, less centrally controlled.
As that trend had continued, by the summer of 2009 the Taliban was a heavily local phenomenon. While the senior leadership desired to overthrow the Karzai regime and institute a Pashtun-dominated Sunni theocracy, few Afghans who called themselves Taliban did so explicitly to bring this about. Affinity for the movement’s ideology and vision for the country were not the primary motivations, though a sense of Islamic duty was inextricable. Rather, the Quetta-based leadership attempted to swell its ranks by leveraging Afghans’ fear of recent experience—with bad government, warlords, foreigners, and, to some degree, modernity itself. In other cases, young men went to fight, and hopefully command, because doing so offered a chance at prestige in the world they knew, a world that offered little else. Others sought a place in the movement to carve out local political power, so that what on the surface appeared like antigovernment insurgent violence was in fact score settling, or clashes over criminal enterprises.