than trying to win support for the Afghan regime. This allowed the United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and other governments to exploit the resentment by providing military and financial assistance to the mujahideen.79 In short, the problem with the Soviet approach was not a heavy footprint. Rather, the Soviets were unprepared to fight a counterinsurgency that required them to focus on garnering the support of the local population. The Soviet footprint was, in reality, light. In January 1984, for instance, CIA Director William Casey informed President Ronald Reagan that the Afghan mujahideen, with backing from the U.S., Pakistan, and Saudi intelligence services, controlled two-thirds of the countryside. He argued that the Soviets would have to triple or quadruple their deployments in Afghanistan to put down the rebellion. Rather than being overcommitted, they were underresourced.80
Was the light-footprint approach a wise one? In one of his final reports before leaving Kabul as the European Union’s special representative to Afghanistan, Francesc Vendrell poignantly remarked in 2008 that the “UN decision to adopt a ‘light’ footprint deprived the organization of the tools to undertake the kind of reforms the Afghans desired.” In addition, he contended that the “U.S. obsession with Iraq diverted energies from Afghanistan, while the decision to limit the deployment of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to Kabul…limited its effectiveness.”81 The rest of this book argues that while the light footprint may not have been the direct cause of the Afghanistan insurgency, it certainly played an important role. The low levels of international assistance—including troops, police, and financial aid—made it difficult to stabilize Afghanistan as the insurgency began to worsen. And it strengthened the role of local warlords. Despite these challenges, however, the initial engagement in Afghanistan had some early successes.
CHAPTER EIGHT Early Successes
IN SEPTEMBER 2004, Zalmay Khalilzad flew to the western Afghan city of Herat to meet with the Tajik warlord Ismail Khan. With his bushy white beard, Khan had a reputation for running the best fiefdom in Afghanistan. At the request of President Bush, Khalilzad had left Washington in November 2003 to become the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. He was going to see Ismail Khan on a sensitive mission, and he had the support of Washington and President Karzai.
“We had been encouraging the removal of several governors who were weakening the power of the central government,” Khalilzad told me. So he flew to Herat, met with Ismail Khan, and, standing next to him, announced that Ismail Khan had agreed to move to Kabul.1
This brazen act—putting Ismail Khan on the spot by offering him a position in Karzai’s cabinet, which he reluctantly accepted—was vintage Khalilzad. He was the only senior White House official in the Bush administration who had lived in Afghanistan, and he had a visceral feel for the country’s social, cultural, and political intricacies. As an Afghan, he understood the people of Afghanistan and their warrior spirit, and his familiarity with Pashtun culture, including his fluency in both national Afghan languages, Dari and Pashto, made him a tremendous asset. His influence among Afghan officials was unparalleled among U.S. diplomats in the country. Behind his thick, six-foot frame was a charming, almost unassuming, personality. But Khalilzad could also be an imposing figure. He exuded an extraordinary sense of confidence and authority when he walked into a room, but his true metier was the face- to-face meeting.
Herat, in the fertile Hari River Valley, lies seventy miles from the Iranian border, along the ancient trade routes that linked Europe with the Middle East, India, and China. The city was later used by the British, Soviet, and Taliban armies, each of whom conquered the city and constructed key military installations. Ismail Khan had been a staple figure in Herat for several decades, participating in the Soviet War in the 1980s and the Afghan civil war in the early 1990s, until he was captured by the Taliban later in the decade. He escaped from a Taliban prison in 2000 and assisted United States forces during the 2001 invasion.
As U.S. forces withdrew to Iraq and international support withered, Ismail Khan became the de facto ruler of Herat. A decade earlier, the city’s western suburbs had been a sea of ruins littered with burned-out tanks and land mines, a far cry from the city that Mountstuart Elphinstone had described two centuries earlier as the most stunning city in Afghanistan, with its “beauty and variety from the mosques, tombs, and other edifices, intermixed with numerous trees and gardens, with which it is embellished, and from the lofty mountains by which it is surrounded.”2 After coming to power, Ismail Khan began a major architectural refurbishing of this once-beautiful city. He orchestrated a flurry of new construction projects, including modern apartment blocks and tree-filled parks, and ensured a regular supply of electricity. Streetlights with energy-efficient bulbs gave the city an eerie, almost modern glow.3
But there was a problem. Ismail Khan had established security with his own militia forces and had retained most of the customs revenue from the trade that flourished between Herat and Iran and Central Asia. Other Afghan warlords were doing the same, but Ismail Khan posed one of the greatest challenges to Hamid Karzai and U.S. officials, including Khalilzad, who were trying to establish a strong, viable central government. Fighting involving tanks and mortars had erupted in March 2004 between Khan’s forces and Afghan National Army units under General Abdul Zahir Nayebzadeh. Gunmen killed Ismail Khan’s son, Mirwai Sadeq, the minister of civil aviation and tourism in Karzai’s cabinet. On March 22, the Afghan government dispatched a force of 1,500 soldiers, headed by Defense Minister Muhammad Fahim, to restore order in Herat. But tensions continued, so Khalilzad made his trek to the city.
This period was, in many ways, a high-water mark of the U.S. experience in Afghanistan. Within the first two years of U.S. engagement, Afghanistan made significant gains on the political front. It held presidential and parliamentary elections, and the levels of insurgent violence stayed relatively low. But this hopeful opportunity for peace would eventually be squandered, as Khalilzad—ironically because of his success—was later moved to become U.S. ambassador to Iraq, and the United States increasingly shifted its attention and resources away from Kabul and the war in Afghanistan.
Important Strides
Even before Khalilzad’s trip to Herat, the Afghan government had made extraordinary progress. In late 2001, James Dobbins had been appointed the U.S. envoy to the Afghan opposition; he was tasked with leading U.S. efforts to establish an Afghan government. Dobbins had no experience in Afghanistan, but he had performed admirably as U.S. special envoy to four major hotspots in the 1990s: Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. He was, he told me, “the State Department’s handyman of choice in the increasingly busy craft of nation-building.” Dobbins’s goal was to broker an interim government among Afghan political leaders. While the United States would be deeply involved in this process, Dobbins admitted that the United States wanted to avoid “any appearance of occupying Afghanistan or selecting its new government.” Consequently, the United States asked the United Nations to take the lead. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan assigned the job to Lakhdar Brahimi.4
In late November 2001, Brahimi, Dobbins, Khalilzad, and senior officials from India, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and a number of European countries hammered out an agreement with Afghan leaders. The negotiations were fraught with difficulties. One delegate, Haji Qadir, abandoned the conference in a well-publicized huff, claiming that his ethnic group, the Pashtuns, was underrepresented. His tense departure raised the specter of further defections, which threatened to undermine the credibility of the whole process. Perhaps the most rancorous debates occurred during the choices of a leader and key cabinet ministers. Hamid Karzai was the leading candidate of the Iranians, Indians, Russians, and many of the European delegates. Pakistan’s ISI also suggested Karzai as a candidate, something they undoubtedly regretted several years later. But the Afghans could not agree. Many wanted Abdul Sattar Sirat, a respected scholar of Islamic law who had been teaching in Saudi Arabia for several years. Finally, after intense pressure from Brahimi, Dobbins, and ultimately the Russians, the delegates agreed to an interim constitution and cabinet.
As Dobbins recalled: “The critical moment came when the Russian Ambassador in Kabul interrupted a meeting of the Northern Alliance top leadership to deliver a message from Moscow. The Russian government wanted the Northern Alliance leadership to understand that if they did not accept the package which was on the table in Bonn, they should expect no further Russian aid.”5
On December 5, 2001, Afghan leaders officially signed the Bonn Agreement, and the UN Security Council endorsed it the following day.6 The parties at Bonn had also asked the United Nations to “monitor and assist in the implementation of all aspects” of the agreement. UN Security Council Resolution 1401, passed on March 28, 2002, established the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).7
