Authors: Matthew M. Aid
The U.S.-government-run reconstruction effort in Afghanistan was both underfunded and horrendously mismanaged. Tens of millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money intended to help rebuild Afghanistan was being stolen from right under the noses of the U.S. government agencies that were supposed to oversee these programs. A British aid official interviewed in 2010 recalled one particularly egregious example in which the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) paid some politically connected Afghan construction contractors $600,000 to build a grammar school in downtown Kabul that should have cost only $30,000. The remaining $570,000 ended up in the Dubai bank accounts of the contractors and their patrons in the Afghan government.
A March 2010 report
estimated that every weekday, couriers carrying $10 million in stolen financial aid left on the daily Ariana Airlines flights from Kabul International Airport bound for offshore banking centers in Dubai, Turkey, Yemen, and even the United States.
But corruption was only a small part of the problem. Another factor driving the Taliban insurgency forward was that Afghanistan economically was a basket case. The United Nations still ranked Afghanistan as the fifth-poorest nation on the face of the earth, despite the billions of dollars of U.S. financial aid that had been poured into the country since the 2001 U.S. invasion. More than 41 percent of the Afghan populace still lived below the poverty line, and unemployment stood at a staggering 40 percent. Food shortages were widespread, and malnutrition was pervasive. Seventy-two percent of all Afghans could not read or write, the lowest literacy rate in the world. The average life expectancy of an Afghan was still only forty-two years, and twenty-six out of every hundred Afghan children died before they reached the age of five, the worst infant mortality rate in world.
The efforts of the U.S. government and the international community to reduce the illegal narcotics trade in Afghanistan had been an abysmal failure. Almost seven years' worth of eradication efforts had been for naught, and billions of dollars wasted with little to show the effort. As of the summer of 2008, 2 million Afghan farmers were still openly growing opium poppies, and nobody wanted to do anything about it because opium farming and cultivation accounted for a staggering 30 percent of the Afghan gross domestic product.
Even the Pentagon's
“emphasize the positive” 2008 annual report to Congress had to admit that “the overall counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan have not been successful.”
Socially, the already weak threads that bound Afghanistan together as a nation were fraying. Organized crime was pervasive everywhere, and armed robbery and prostitution, all but unheard of during the Taliban regime, were now widespread problems in Kabul and the other big Afghan cities. Drug addiction had reached epidemic proportions, with a 2009 United Nations study estimating that there were at least 900,000 drug addicts in Afghanistan.
A report prepared by
the ISAF Rule of Law adviser revealed that in Helmand Province alone, “provincial officials believe nearly 60% of Helmand's police force abuse drugs and that there are at least 70,000 addicts now living in Helmand.”
Security conditions in “the Lumpy Suck,” the less than affectionate nickname given to Afghanistan by American GIs, had become so bad that the country had replaced Iraq as the most dangerous on the face of the planet. Taliban attacks across the country had jumped by one third, clearly indicating that the Afghan insurgents had become far more aggressive than had been the case in previous years. Declassified Department of Defense statistics show that as of June 2008, there were more combat incidents taking place in Afghanistan than in Iraq. And in the fall of 2008, another grim milestone was reached. According to the authoritative casualty database compiled by icasualties.org, beginning in May 2008 and continuing for the rest of the year, more Americans were killed every month in Afghanistan than in Iraq.
In southern Afghanistan, the Taliban had managed to consolidate their stranglehold on significant parts of four key provinces that were garrisoned by troops from Great Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, and Romania. The Dutch general commanding the NATO forces in southern Afghanistan, Major General Mart de Kruif, reported that the 23,000 soldiers under his command controlled, at best, 60 percent of the territory he was responsible for, and this was an optimistic assessment. And in the American-controlled sector in southeastern Afghanistan, the Taliban had managed to advance almost to the gates of Kabul, capturing large parts of three provinces (Logar, Wardak, and Ghazni) to the south and west of the Afghan capital, and had made significant inroads into the two provinces northeast of the city (Kapisa and Laghman provinces).
Even in the Afghan capital of Kabul the situation was perilous. Customs officials at Kabul International Airport admitted to visitors that they saw flak jackets and Kevlar helmets in almost all of the checked baggage that they inspected coming off incoming flights. All of the Western-style luxury hotels in Kabul had their own private security force, bomb squad, and SWAT team equipped with heavy weaponry that would be the envy of any Third World army. Guests at hotels in Kabul were frisked and their baggage searched upon checking in. Once they got to their rooms, they found on the nightstand next to their beds detailed instructions on what to do in case the hotel was bombed or attacked by Taliban gunmen. But these extraordinary security measures are little more than window dressing, as was proved by the bloody Taliban attack on the InterContinental Hotel in Kabul on June 29, 2011, which killed at least ten guests and wounded dozens more.
Even the 2008 edition of the
Lonely Planet
tourist guidebook for Afghanistan urged visitors to memorize how to say “Help!” (
Komak!
), “Is it safe?” (
Khatar day?
), “Are there landmines?” (
Dalta nazhde kum mayn sha?
), “bomb” (
bam
), “rifle” (
topak
), “rocket” (
raket
), “soldier” (
askar
), and “fighting” (
jang
).
As of the summer of 2008, the U.S. intelligence community had been trying for six years to warn the White House and the Pentagon that the security situation in Afghanistan was headed in the wrong direction, but no one in Washington was listening or seemed to want to hear what the spies were saying.
In September 2002, as the U.S. military prepared for the invasion of Iraq, the CIA issued a National Intelligence Estimate which expressed the concern of the U.S. intelligence community that all was not well in Afghanistan. In the year since the downfall of the Taliban regime, armed clashes among and between warring Afghan ethnic and tribal groups had increased. Organized crime and narcotics trafficking, absent during the Taliban regime, had returned. And roving bands of Taliban guerrillas were once again operating in southern Afghanistan, attacking isolated American outposts and killing Afghan government officials and policemen.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked U.S. Central Command commander in chief General Tommy Franks to write a rebuttal. Voicing the view of the White House and the Pentagon, in October 2002 Franks issued his own estimate, which asserted that “
the CIA assessment overstates
the immediate risks to stability and security, and understates the positive developments underway to bring stability to Afghanistan.” For the next six years this was to be the position of the White House and the Pentagon whenever the intelligence community raised concerns about the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan.
Six years later, no one in the White House was paying attention to what the intelligence analysts were saying. The U.S. intelligence community was still being blackballed because many senior Bush administration officials believed that CIA officials had tried to undermine the White House and pin the blame for the 2002â3 Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) intelligence fiasco on President George W. Bush and his senior advisers. In retaliation, CIA director George J. Tenet was stripped of his access to the Oval Office and eventually forced to resign in June 2004. In his memoirs published after he left office, Tenet openly criticized a number of Bush's advisers, among them Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, for what he described as “cherry picking” intelligence to support their desire to invade Iraq. Four years after Tenet's resignation, the White House and the intelligence community had still not patched up their differences. Much of what the intelligence community was reporting to the White House about Afghanistan was, according to a former CIA official, still being “shit-canned.”
This was not the first time that the CIA had been blackballed by the White House. In 1964, CIA director John A. McCone had incurred the wrath of President Lyndon B. Johnson by disagreeing with the White House's plans to expand the U.S. role in the war in Vietnam. President Johnson punished McCone by shunning him and denying him access to the White House, leading to McCone's resignation in April 1965.
As a declassified CIA history put it
, “McCone found resignation preferable to being ignored.”
In the rarefied climes of the U.S. intelligence community, being ignored by the Oval Office is nothing short of a catastrophe. Without access to the president, and with senior policymakers either refusing to read its reports or openly questioning the veracity of their contents, by 2008 the U.S. intelligence community's ability to effectively perform its principal mission of informing and advising the executive branch of the U.S. government had been reduced to a very low order.
Virtually no one in official Washington, except perhaps for a few senior officials in the State Department, was paying much attention to what the intelligence community was reporting about Afghanistan in the summer of 2008. A former official who was then involved in the Afghan policymaking process admitted in a 2010 interview that Afghan president Hamid Karzai “could have run through the West Wing [of the White House] with his hair on fire and nobody would have paid much attention.”
Once the Washington bureaucracy becomes fixed in a herd mentality, nothing short of a major catastrophe can shake it.
According to Paul R. Pillar
, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005 and a thirty-year intelligence veteran, “Experience has shown that major policy changes tend to come only from actual disasters.”
For example, the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam laid bare for everyone to see all of the fallacies of the Johnson administration's Vietnam War strategy. The disastrous two-day battle in Mogadishu, Somalia, in October 1993 made famous by the book
Black Hawk Down
and the film of the same name, which resulted in eighteen American soldiers killed and seventy-three wounded, led the Clinton administration to accept that the war was not winnable and pull U.S. forces out of Somalia. But nothing comparable had yet happened to wake the somnolent Washington bureaucracy up to what was happening in Afghanistan.
What is now referred to as the “Taliban resurgence” began in February 2006, when thousands of newly recruited Taliban guerrillas swarmed across the border from Pakistan into southern Afghanistan and launched their first nationwide offensive. Their timing could not have been better. On February 22, 2006, just as the Taliban's offensive was kicking off, Iraqi insurgents bombed the al-Askari mosque in the city of Samarra, one of the holiest shrines for Iraqi Shiites. In the months that followed, Iraq was swallowed up in wave after wave of sectarian violence, which produced carnage on a scale never seen before in Iraq. As this was happening, the Taliban overran huge portions of four key provinces in southern Afghanistan, including Helmand Province, the heart of the Afghan illegal narcotics industry.
The 2006 Taliban nationwide offensive took the U.S. intelligence community, and virtually every senior U.S. military commander and diplomat in Kabul, by surprise. Nobody in the U.S. government or intelligence community then thought that the Taliban were capable of mounting a nationwide offensive, much less capturing huge chunks of the southern part of Afghanistan. During the summer of 2006, the CIA station chief in Kabul, John C. “Chris” Wood, sent a number of cables to Washington warning that the military situation in Afghanistan was now deteriorating. Wood's cables were ignored by the White House and the Pentagon, who were focused on the rapidly escalating cycle of violence in Iraq.
A small number of Pentagon officials were alarmed by what was taking place in Afghanistan. In
August 2006, Defense Policy Board official
Marin Strmecki wrote a memo to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warning that “the deteriorating security situation in 2006 was principally the result of the combination of two factors: A decision by the Taliban and its external supporters to escalate the scope and character of enemy operations; and weak or bad governance, particularly in southern Afghanistan, that created a vacuum of power into which the enemy moved.” But Strmecki's memo was ignored.
It did not help that the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Ronald E. Neumann, was telling Washington the exact opposite of what Wood and Strmecki were reporting, telling Washington that the war was still being won and that the rise in Taliban attacks was only a temporary phenomenon.
According to Neumann
, “The violence does not indicate a failing policy; on the contrary we need to persevere in what we are doing ⦠We are on the right track.”
In November 2006, the office of the director of national intelligence (DNI) had issued a classified National Intelligence Estimate on the security situation in Afghanistan, the first that had been published on this subject in over three years. Written under the supervision of Dr. Nancy Jo Powell, a career diplomat who was the national intelligence officer for South Asia in the office of the DNI, the report took serious issue with Ambassador Neumann's rosy prognosis, warning that the Taliban had made substantial progress on the Afghan battlefield over the preceding nine months, capturing the vast majority of the strategically important Helmand Province and large parts of neighboring Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan. The report also noted that the Taliban guerrilla forces were not only larger and more capable but becoming far more aggressive, and that the escalating numbers of insurgent attacks were threatening to destabilize the entire southern part of the country and bring the already stalled reconstruction effort to a complete halt.