easily repaired; sabotage of a power plant or refinery (Critical Infrastructure) is catastrophic.” At one point there was an average of two attacks per day on infrastructure.38 With more than 12,000 miles of infrastructure to protect, the Coalition and Iraqi security forces stood no chance of securing the entire system. Instead, they focused on critical infrastructure, developed intelligence-directed patrolling and air-surveillance capabilities, and invested in rapid repair techniques.39
Most alarmingly, reports from the CPA’s regional offices suggested a spreading insurgency. “A number of incidents have occurred which have served to reinforce that this is a dangerous place,” wrote Regional Security Coordinator Bill Miller in March. “We have had numerous attacks, bombings, rocket attacks, and improvised explosive devices.”40 After the assassination of CPA members Fern Holland, Salwa Oumashi, and Bob Zangas, staffers began wearing more protective equipment, varying times and routes of travel, increasing the presence of Gurkhas to provide security at camps, and taking State Department counterthreat classes. Bremer became sufficiently concerned about the security situation that he postponed U.S. congressional visits to Iraq, though not all members of Congress complied. Military convoys were being attacked so regularly that on April 17 Bremer seriously considered ordering food rationing at the CPA.41
Warning Signs
The levels of violence and sheer brutality continued to increase in Iraq, with the introduction of grisly suicide bombings and a string of beheadings in 2004. Afghanistan, by comparison, was relatively quiet. The Taliban and other insurgent groups, bolstered by the American preoccupation in Iraq and America’s unwillingness to target them in Pakistan, began to conduct small-scale offensive operations to overthrow the Afghan government and coerce the withdrawal of U.S. and Coalition forces.42 In April 2002, insurgents orchestrated a series of offensive attacks in Kandahar, Khowst, and Nangarhar Provinces. In 2003 and 2004, the Taliban continued a low-level insurgency from bases in Pakistan. Perhaps the most significant event was the September 2004 rocket attack against President Hamid Karzai in the eastern Afghan city of Gardez.
Insurgents also began to target international aid workers. Afghans organizing or otherwise involved in election work were attacked or killed. So were nongovernmental organization (NGO) workers and Afghan citizens believed to be cooperating with Coalition forces or the Afghan government. In October 2004, three UN staff members were abducted in Kabul. Attacks occurred throughout the country, though most were in the south and east, in such provinces as Nangarhar, Paktia, Paktika, and Khowst.43
The result was a decrease in security for Afghans and foreigners, especially those living in the east and south, but “the level of criminal activity—characterized by increasing numbers of armed robberies, abductions, and murders even in areas controlled by the ANA and police patrols—[was] still high.”44 Interfactional fighting continued among regional commanders in Herat, Nangarhar, Nuristan, Lowgar, Laghman, and Badghis Provinces.45 The withdrawal in July 2004 of the NGO Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders), which had been in Afghanistan for nearly three decades, was a sobering testament to the deteriorating security environment. A month earlier, five Medecins sans Frontieres workers had been ambushed and shot in the head in the northwestern province of Badghis.
“We began to get concerned about the insurgency in late 2003 with the shift in tactics,” noted Afghan National Security Council official Daoud Yaqub. “There was an increase in the number of improvised explosive devices, and soft targets were increasingly attacked.” But the U.S. position was different, he contended. “U.S. officials in Afghanistan didn’t see the Taliban as a strategic threat then”.46
Indeed, Lieutenant General Barno believed that “the Taliban were a fairly amateurish organization. There were only a few Arabs from al’Qaida present in Afghanistan, and we killed most of them. In 2004, we killed insurgents video-taping helicopter take-offs near Jalalabad. Most of the insurgent deployments we were seeing were in the 10s and 20s, not in the 100s of fighters. It was a ragtag group.”47 Nonetheless, there was thinning patience with the slow pace of killing or capturing insurgents in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Secretary Rumsfeld wrote a memo in October 2003 to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and several top-level officials expressing frustration that “we are having mixed results with Al Qa’ida, although we have put considerable pressure on them—nonetheless, a great many remain at large.” The United States had made some progress in capturing top Iraqi insurgents, but it “has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban—Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.”48
Bitter Irony
Despite these concerns, the levels of violence in Afghanistan were relatively low. Fewer than 300 Afghans died in 2004 because of the insurgency, which paled in comparison with the tens of thousands who died in Iraq in 2004.49 Most Afghans believed the security situation was somewhat better than under Taliban rule. An opinion poll conducted by the Asia Foundation indicated that 35 percent often or sometimes feared for their personal safety, a decline from 41 percent during the Taliban period.50 And another poll showed that 84 percent of Afghans believed that their living standard had improved since the end of the Taliban government.51
Yet fate took a strange twist. In 2005, Zalmay Khalilzad replaced John Negroponte as U.S. ambassador in Iraq. It was a move symptomatic of the U.S. government’s tunnel vision on Iraq. The State Department had taken one of its most seasoned and effective ambassadors, who spoke Afghanistan’s two main languages and had a special rapport with its political leaders, and moved him to Baghdad during an extraordinarily fragile period in Afghanistan’s history. Lieutenant General David Barno was replaced by Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, effectively shattering the military-civilian coordination Khalilzad and Barno had painstakingly fashioned during their tenure together. Perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Iraq had taken center stage as America’s most important foreign-policy concern. Proven staff were in great demand and Khalilzad and Barno had thus far been among the best. Still, it was a dangerous gamble.
The rise of an insurgency in Afghanistan was a serious and unfortunate development. Insurgencies frequently lead to the death of thousands—and sometimes millions—of civilians. To paraphrase Princeton history professor Arno Mayer, if war is hell, then insurgency belongs to hell’s darkest and most infernal region.52
CHAPTER NINE The Logic of Insurgency
ONE OF THE twentieth century’s most successful insurgents, the Chinese leader Mao Zedong, wrote that there is an inextricable link in insurgencies “between the people and the troops. The former may be likened to water and the latter to the fish who inhabit it.”1 Insurgencies require a motivated leadership but, more important, they can only form amid a disillusioned population. Mao had both. He led China’s beleaguered peasants, who had been harshly oppressed by the feudal landowners, in a violent insurgency that toppled the government and Chiang Kai-shek’s National Revolutionary Army in 1949.
Mao’s experience was comparable to that of countless other insurgencies, virtually all featuring poorly trained and badly equipped guerrillas overwhelming a much more powerful opponent. In the American Revolutionary War, Francis Marion, better known as the “Swamp Fox,” organized a disheveled band of fighters in South Carolina against the British. Operating with great speed and elusiveness from inaccessible bases, and taking advantage of local hatred against the British, Marion’s troops struck isolated garrisons, convoys, and other targets in rapid succession. The British, unable to effectively counter Marion, complained that he fought neither “like a gentleman” nor “like a Christian.” His actions inspired the “Song of Marion’s Men,” by the American poet William Cullen Bryant, which hailed the geographical advantage held by the Americans:
Bryant’s poem highlights a practice that Afghan insurgents would mimic several centuries later: the use of guerrilla tactics against a better-equipped conventional military. This chapter seeks to understand insurgencies at a systematic level in order to explain the situation in Afghanistan. Why do insurgencies begin? The first question to ask is: What exactly is an insurgency?
