My Share of the Task(189)
Additionally, as I sought to make our force more mindful of civilian casualties, I also wanted to dissuade a myopic focus on insurgent deaths. Thus, shortly after taking over, I directed that all of the units cease reporting, in their public affairs releases, tolls of insurgents killed. While these units were not using insurgent deaths as an official metric, I knew that forces performed according to what was measured and scrutinized. So I wanted to take away any incentives that might drive commanders and their men to see killing insurgents as the primary goal.
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We were, of course, not alone in trying to fight smarter and learn from the mistakes of the past eight years. So too were our enemies. That summer, the Taliban’s senior leadership—the rahbari, or Quetta, shura—released an updated version of the layha, the rule book that ostensibly governed how its insurgent ranks could conduct themselves. The Taliban had distributed the layha internally since 2006. But that summer they revised it, and then leaked it to the media as part of their campaign to counteract our counterinsurgency. The new layha aimed to rein in the conduct of insurgents—or at least appear to do so—so as to make the insurgency more acceptable to the Pashtun population.
“Mujahedin,” Mullah Omar instructed that summer, “are obliged to adopt Islamic behavior and good conduct with the people and try to win over the hearts of the common Muslims,” by which he meant ordinary Afghans. The sixty-seven sections of that summer’s layha regulated a range of behavior—from smoking cigarettes to cutting off Afghans’ noses or lips, both “fiercely” forbidden. They reiterated rules for taking prisoners and managing funds—likely worried that their “brand” would be tarnished if their fighters ran kidnapping rings or other criminal enterprises under the guise of holy resistance. The Taliban in Helmand, however, were allowed to continue financing operations through drug trade.
We took most notice of the provisions that mirrored our own directives: The layha advised all fighters to take all precautions not to unnecessarily kill Afghan civilians. Significantly, to this end, the directive appeared like an effort to limit the use of suicide bombing. “A brave son of Islam should not be used for lower and useless targets,” it said, “The utmost effort should be made to avoid civilian casualties.” The Taliban leadership was reckoning with the mixed legacy of Mullah Dadullah Lang, the one-legged commander whom British special forces killed in 2007. Through his personal sadism and his success integrating suicide bombings into the Taliban’s repertoire of tactics, Dadullah had made the insurgency appear more radical and less pious to many Afghans. Suicide bombings were not just scandalous among Afghans, but remained highly controversial among Islamic extremists, clerics, and fighters. (Throughout the entire 1980s, the Afghan mujahideen never used a suicide attack against the Soviets.) The Taliban leadership knew this. And they had taken notice of the blunders made farther afield in Iraq: They knew of the damning criticism of Zarqawi—his sympathizers complained that his default use of suicide bombing, particularly against fellow Sunnis, had turned Iraq into a “crematorium” of young Muslim men—that had undercut his movement.
But the fact remained that in many cases the Taliban’s leaders now had only tenuous supervision over their dispersed units and local commanders, who were often obsessed with making short-term gains to the detriment of the strategic contest. Omar’s efforts with the layha were, thus, mixed—and mostly for show. The Taliban continued to forsake the rules of war on nearly every battlefield in the country. And while the insurgency killed fewer Afghans through suicide blasts the year following the book’s release, they started killing more civilians through targeted assassinations.
But they also continued to selectively mitigate their fanaticism in order to win the support of the people, and to avoid looking ridiculous or draconian. The Taliban, for example, soon began working with Karzai’s government and the United Nations—whom they branded as slaves and infidels, respectively—to run polio vaccination programs. Mullah Omar’s signature appeared at the bottom of a letter that vaccinators carried in order to gain safe passage into Taliban-controlled areas (local commanders had sworn an oath to Omar), and showed to Afghan villagers to persuade them to participate. This ensured that the villagers knew the Taliban had allowed these vaccinators in.