The southern front also boasted a number of criminal groups, especially drug-trafficking organizations, which operated on both sides of the border. Farther north, there were Russian, Tajik, Uzbek, and Turkmen drug-trafficking organizations. Tajikistan served as a primary transshipment locale for opiates destined for Russia. Drug traffickers in Afghanistan used produce-laden trucks as a cover for drugs sent north toward Tajikistan, where the goods were handed off to other criminal organizations. Tajik criminal organizations were the primary movers of this contraband. Approximately half of the heroin that passed through Tajikistan was consumed in Russia. The rest transited Russia to other consumer markets in Western and Eastern Europe.68
In light of this regrouping, it seems the overthrow of the Taliban regime was Janus-faced. The sheer alacrity with which United States and Northern Alliance forces overthrew the Taliban regime was awe-inspiring. It took less than three months and cost America only twelve lives—surely one of the most successful unconventional operations in modern history. But many senior Taliban and al Qa’ida leaders had not been killed or captured—they had escaped across the border into Pakistan. This haunting reality was not lost on many U.S. military and CIA officials on the ground at the time. Hunting them down, especially the Taliban, would be shelved for another day as U.S. policymakers turned to stabilizing Afghanistan.
CHAPTER SEVEN Light Footprint
“PANAMA WAS a good model for stabilizing Afghanistan,” Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage observed, echoing the views of Secretary of State Colin Powell. “We believed an international force outside of Kabul was important. And it didn’t necessarily have to be a U.S.-led force.” Armitage thought that an international force would be helpful in tracking events outside of Kabul. “If you’re not out there, you don’t know what is going on.”1 In 1989, while Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the U.S. military had launched an invasion of Panama, code-named Operation Just Cause, to remove dictator Manuel Noriega from power. The operation, which began on December 20, lasted for two weeks and culminated in Noriega’s capture by U.S. forces on January 3, 1990. To secure Panama, Powell pointed out, the United States military had deployed an additional division to patrol streets and establish order.2
But even with Panama as a model, there were massive differences in 2001 within the U.S. government—and among key allies—about how to stabilize Afghanistan. Perhaps the most acrimonious debate was between senior State Department officials, who favored a peacekeeping force in Afghanistan that could stabilize key urban areas, and Pentagon officials, who vehemently opposed any pretense of nation-building.
Naive and Irresponsible
There were two main camps. The first included those who believed that a peacekeeping force was necessary to ensure security across the country over the long run. One proponent was Powell, who argued that the U.S. strategy needed to involve taking “charge of the whole country by military force, police or other means.”3 Another proponent was James Dobbins, the Bush administration’s special envoy to the Afghan opposition. According to Dobbins, it was “naive and irresponsible” to believe that “Afghanistan could be adequately secured by Afghans in the immediate aftermath of a twenty-three-year civil war.”4 A small NATO presence in Kabul, Dobbins believed, would be helpful for establishing security and luring Afghan leaders back to their national capital. Kabul was peaceful, and there was no large-scale looting, as would occur in April 2003 in Baghdad after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s government. However, Dobbins argued that international forces were necessary in key Afghan cities to ensure security across the country. He was supported by Zalmay Khalilzad, then serving on President Bush’s National Security Council (NSC) staff.5
Other proponents included Hamid Karzai, the interim Afghan leader, as well as such Afghan officials as Muhammad Qasim Fahim and Abdul Rashid Dostum. Fahim, the defense minister of the Northern Alliance, worked with the CIA and U.S. Special Operations Forces to liberate the Afghan capital from the Taliban. Dostum had returned from exile in Turkey in April 2001 and had worked with CIA and U.S. Special Operations Forces to overthrow the Taliban from Mazar-e-Sharif.
Lakhdar Brahimi, former Algerian foreign minister and longtime confidant of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, also supported an international peacekeeping force outside of the capital. Brahimi served as the special representative of the UN Secretary-General for Afghanistan and played a leading role during the Bonn negotiations in 2001. The Bonn Agreement called for an international security force in Kabul with the explicit possibility of expansion:
Conscious that some time may be required for the new Afghan security and armed forces to be fully constituted and functioning, the participants in the UN talks on Afghanistan request the United Nations Security Council to consider authorizing the early deployment to Afghanistan of a United Nations mandated force. This force will assist in the maintenance of security for Kabul and its surrounding areas. Such a force could, as appropriate, be progressively expanded to other urban centers and other areas.6
On February 6, 2002, when briefing the UN Security Council on factional clashes in the countryside and the relative safety of the capital, Brahimi appealed for extending the force beyond Kabul: “This has led to increasingly vocal demands by ordinary Afghans, as well as by members of the Interim Administration and even warlords, for the expansion of ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] to the rest of the country,” he argued. “We tend to agree with these demands, and we hope that these will receive favorable and urgent consideration by the Security Council.”7
There were also supporters in the United Kingdom, such as Robert Cooper, the British representative at the Bonn negotiations who was assigned to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s staff in the Cabinet Office. Cooper argued that a NATO peacekeeping presence outside of Kabul was critical for establishing security. One possibility he suggested was a British-led force. Other than the United States, Great Britain was the only country able to deploy the needed force quickly enough. British troops were already operating in Afghanistan in small numbers, and the United Kingdom had begun to establish the logistics network necessary to sustain them. How many international troops were necessary? U.S., British, and Afghan officials had discussed the possibility of perhaps 25,000 peacekeeping forces deployed to Kabul and key Afghan cities. In December 2001, for example, Dobbins met with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld asked what to expect in his upcoming meetings with Afghan officials.
“They will ask that ISAF be deployed beyond Kabul to cover the country’s other major population centers,” Dobbins noted.
“How many men would that take?” Rumsfeld asked.
“The British believe a force of five thousand adequate to secure Kabul. Given that the next four or five cities are all considerably smaller, perhaps another 20,000 men might suffice,” Dobbins responded.8
The second camp included those who supported a peacekeeping force in Kabul but generally opposed extending its reach outside of the capital. They included many in the U.S. and British militaries, as well as key individuals in their political establishments. Pentagon officials, such as Secretary Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, head of U.S. Central Command, were particularly adamant that there should be no international peacekeeping force outside of Kabul, especially one involving U.S. forces. Some, like Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, were not necessarily averse to sending peacekeeping forces outside of Kabul, but they were strongly opposed to having U.S. forces involved in peacekeeping. “We couldn’t put U.S. forces in ISAF,” said Feith, “because other countries might conclude that the United States would bail them out if they got into trouble. The State Department answer to stabilizing Afghanistan was to expand ISAF. We wanted to allow the Afghans to establish their own security.” In a series of NSC meetings, for example, Rumsfeld made it clear that he wanted U.S. forces out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible.9 The logic, one senior U.S. official told me, was that “the U.S. military was already thinking about moving on to Iraq.” He added that the military was primarily intent on “targeting bad guys and cleaning up after the overthrow of the Taliban regime. Ultimately, they believed that cleaning up Afghanistan was not the U.S.’s responsibility—it was Afghanistan’s responsibility.”10
“Nation-building is not our key strategic goal,” Feith told Rumsfeld in a classified memo in late 2001. “The term ‘nation-building’ had baggage,” he noted, since the Clinton administration’s policies “in Bosnia in 1996 and in Kosovo in 1999” had “effectively turned those areas into long-term wards of the international community. Large numbers of U.S. and other outside forces were involved for many years in both places.” The implication was clear, Feith felt: “We did not want the Afghans to think we intended to take the same approach to their
