Incidentally, the planning and coordination process served to force the ISAF-Afghan partnership Rod and I wanted to materialize. In a series of marathon meetings and video teleconferences with our Afghan partners, we hammered out point after point. Afghan leaders I had barely known before, like Wardak, Atmar, and chief of the army General Bismullah Mohammedi, first became operational partners, then friends.
Among the Afghan leaders with whom we worked most closely, a young Tajik named Amrullah Saleh stood out. I’d first met Saleh on September 9, 2004, when he took me to the Panshir Valley for a memorial service at the old headquarters of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the legendary mujahideen leader. At that spot three years earlier, Massoud had been assassinated by Al Qaeda operatives posing as cameramen. As we watched the memorial, surrounded by a hillside of bearded, serious-looking men, Massoud’s former fighters, Saleh, still only thirty-three that day, explained how he’d served Massoud as a deputy. His crisp, fluent English, intimidating intellect, and fervor against the Taliban made an immediate impression. Since then, he had risen to be the director of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS), and he remained in that role when I arrived in 2009.
I realized that for many in ISAF, true partnering was new and uncomfortable, but that couldn’t dissuade us from it. Just about the time we got everyone comfortable, we would have lost.
That same day, with elections nearing, I spoke to the Afghan National Security Force Partnering Working Group. “Looking for a decisive battle is our instinct. We’re in it now,” I said. “Elections are about what is in people’s minds, and that is what will ultimately determine success.”
* * *
The enemy was surely thinking the same. On the morning of Saturday, August 15, five days before the election, the headquarters staff sat assembled in the tiered rows of our operations center for our morning update. Suddenly, a loud explosion shook the small ISAF compound. A voice on the sound system immediately directed the briefing to end and all personnel to depart the operations center. Mike Hall leaned over to me. “And where are we going to go, to the bunkers? What are we going to accomplish there?” he asked. “I suggest we let the people responsible for securing the compound do their jobs, and we stay here and do ours.”
It was sage advice that I transmitted as an order. The evacuation of the command center stopped abruptly, people settled back into their seats, a few with obvious nervousness, and the briefing continued. We weren’t noncombatants disconnected from the fight; we were going to command it. Within minutes, it was reported that a car bomb had detonated just outside our main gate. The explosion had burst the cinderblocks lining the street, spraying chunks of cement into a large group of Afghans queued up outside our gate. The tall concrete slabs lining our compound had withstood the blast, which sent shock waves reverberating back across the street toward the unshielded Afghan buildings on the other side, blowing out the glass windows. Those first on the scene came to find the bomber’s sedan, charred but coursing thick orange flames out of its windows and up from its carriage. The blast waves had shot up through the tree limbs overhanging the usually quiet street, sending leaves fluttering down over the tops of the pavement and parked cars. Half obscured beneath the green spread of leaves lay the motionless bodies of Afghans. The blast killed seven people, and wounded ninety-one others. It was never entirely clear whether ISAF was the bomber’s primary target. But it was a jolt to everyone in the command, and a reminder of the stakes.
Election preparations continued. Challenge after challenge surfaced, from transporting the more than ninety-five thousand ballot boxes, which moved on trucks, helicopters, and even on the backs of some three thousand donkeys, to finding ways to put enough security in embattled areas to allow voting. The election was a significant undertaking for the Afghan government, and the IEC recruited a temporary staff of more than 120,000 for the day of the vote. (Although 40 percent of them were women, there were not enough to staff the women-only voting stations.) The IEC planned to open 27,000 polling stations, for which the U.N. procured 58,000 plastic chairs, 116,000 voting screens, and 180,000 tunics for poll workers. The Afghans were remarkably transparent in admitting that they were making accommodations with insurgents in selected areas in order to facilitate the election. But I sensed there was a genuine effort to secure the polls as well as possible. With the Afghans’ limited capacity and the Taliban trumpeting their intent to violently disrupt the vote, the outcome would be imperfect at best. Yet from a security standpoint, a clear failure by the Taliban to derail the process would be a win. However, for the elections to have real credibility, they would have to be judged sufficiently fair. That judgment would be an imprecise, but critical, metric.