In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

gender.”⁵⁶ Over the next several years, the U.S. government and President Karzai consciously worked to establish ethnic balance at the level of ministers and deputy ministers, who were ordered in turn to consider ethnic diversity when appointing governors and police chiefs.⁵⁷

Insurgent leaders were primarily motivated by religious ideology, rather than by ethnic grievances or profits from drugs or other commodities. An ideology is an organized collection of ideas—or, as the French Enlightenment philosopher Count Antoine Destutt de Tracy once noted, it is the “science of ideas.” For insurgents, an ideology provides a normative vision of how society should be structured, including its political system.⁵⁸

As has been noted, the Taliban were motivated by a radical interpretation of Sunni Islam derived from Deobandism. The leaders of most other insurgent groups—from the Haqqani network to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami, al Qa’ida, and Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammad—had strong religious motivations to fight. A Taliban field manual titled Military Teachings: For the Preparation of Mujahideen lucidly argued that “in a situation where infidels and their crooks are ruling the world, it is the prime duty of all the Muslims to take arms and crush those who are bent upon crushing the Muslims throughout the world…. This is the best time to take on the usurpers and occupants of our holy land.⁵⁹ Together, the leaders of these and other groups wanted to overthrow Hamid Karzai’s government and replace it with a regime that adopted their own extreme version of Sunni Islam.

In short, there was a supply of disgruntled locals because of the collapse of Afghan governance, and a demand for recruits by ideologically motivated insurgent leaders. This combination proved deadly for the beginning of Afghanistan’s insurgency. Over time, too little support to the government from the United States and its allies, and too much support to insurgents from outside states and the international jihadi community, contributed to these problems.

The Need for Effective Police

Each of these insurgencies, from the Philippines to Afghanistan, necessarily begs the question of who should have kept order in these countries in the first place. While military and paramilitary forces play a key role in maintaining safety and security for society, the police are perhaps the most critical component for ensuring the safety of the people. They are the government’s primary arm focused on internal-security matters. Unlike the military, the police usually have a permanent presence in cities, towns, and villages; a better understanding of the threat environment in these areas; and better intelligence. This, of course, makes them a direct target of insurgent forces, who often try to kill or infiltrate them.⁶⁰ Nevertheless, an effective police force is critical to establishing law and order. Government military forces may be able to penetrate and garrison an insurgent area and, if well sustained, may reduce guerrilla activity. But once the situation in an area becomes untenable for insurgents, they will simply transfer their activity to another area and the problem will remain unresolved.⁶¹ A viable indigenous police force with a permanent presence in urban and rural areas is a critical component of counterinsurgency.

Without a strong local police force, warlords and political entrepreneurs often flourish and finance their private militias through criminal activity, including trafficking in arms and drugs. Simple banditry—fueled by military desertion, the breakdown of social structures, and demobilization of government forces—may be endemic and crime will increase.⁶² In Afghanistan, too little outside support for the Afghan government and too much support for insurgents further undermined Afghan governance. This combination proved deadly for the onset—and continuation—of the insurgency. Among the first Afghan institutions to teeter, much like during the Soviet period, were the police and the other security services.

CHAPTER TEN Collapse of Law and Order

BEGINNING IN 2005, Afghanistan’s fragile national-security architecture began to crumble. The Taliban and other insurgent groups began to mount more aggressive offensive operations, and Afghan forces proved incapable of counterattacking and protecting the population. To better understand this development, Amrullah Saleh, the head of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), commissioned a study on the state of the insurgency. Saleh was a Panjshiri Tajik who had been a trusted protege of Ahmed Shah Massoud and had worked closely with the CIA before the September 11 attacks. He spoke excellent English and wore neatly pressed Western suits. Barely thirty years old in 2004, when Karzai appointed him to run Afghanistan’s spy agency, Saleh was a reformer with a reputation for great efficiency. He “had a real impact” on NDS, recalled the CIA’s Gary Schroen, “moving it forward with reorganization and restructuring, instituting training at all levels, establishing a recruitment program based on talent rather than ethnic or family background, and dramatically improving morale and performance.”¹

Saleh based the study, titled Strategy of Insurgents and Terrorists in Afghanistan, on intelligence reports from NDS stations across Afghanistan, reports from informants in Afghanistan and Pakistan, detainee interrogations, meetings with Taliban leaders, open-source information, and interviews with Afghan National Army commanders and a variety of national and local officials. It was designed to be the most comprehensive study of the current situation yet assembled. The study found that the Afghan police and army forces were failing in their primary mission on a monumental level. “When villagers and rural communities seek protection from the police, either it arrives late or arrives in a wrong way.” U.S. forces, still operating at “light- footprint” levels, could not fill the vacuum. The lack of security began to undermine local support, and many who had cooperated with the government were killed, intimidated into silence, or fled. “Those who are collaborating with the government or coalition forces are now forced to move their families to the cities fearing attacks from the Taliban. This exodus of government informants and collaborators from the villages is a welcome development for the Taliban, insurgents and terrorists.”

The result was that increasing amounts of territory fell into the hands of the Taliban or allied groups. Saleh’s report continued: “The villages are gradually emptied of pro-government political forces and individuals. These rural areas become sanctuaries for the Taliban and the population is left with no choice but to become sympathizers of the insurgents.” In these pockets, he found exactly what we might expect: The Taliban had begun to establish a shadow government, including an administrative structure and courts. Lamenting these disturbing results, Saleh wrote:

I wish to be contradicted in my analysis of the situation and our perspective of what is going on and what is going to happen. Unfortunately, everybody I have so far talked to agrees with this picture in general terms. It is unfortunate because it is no longer only terrorism. It is insurgency. It is not about which individual is hiding where but about a trend which is undermining us in the rural areas. I still hope that I am wrong.²

A Monopoly of Force?

It was no surprise that the police weren’t living up to expectations. Afghan police had not received formal training for at least two decades.³ Germany, which had sent special forces to Afghanistan in late 2001 and had hosted the Bonn Conference, had volunteered to assess and rebuild the police. The initial German fact-finding mission in January 2002 discovered that “the police force is in a deplorable state just a few months after the dissolution of the Taliban regime” and that “there is a total lack of equipment and supplies. No systematic training has been provided for around 20 years. At least one entire generation of trained police officers is missing.”⁴ The first team of German police advisers arrived in March 2002 to train police instructors at their academy in Kabul. Officers, mostly inspectors and lieutenants, started a three-year course, taking classes in human rights, tactical operations, narcotics investigations, traffic, criminal investigations, computer skills, and Islamic law.⁵

By 2003, however, officials at the U.S. State and Defense Departments and the White House became increasingly agitated about the German approach. Many argued that it was far too slow, trained too few police officers, and was seriously underfunded. As one high-level U.S. official told me: “When it became clear that they were not going to provide training to lower-level police officers, and were moving too slowly with too few resources, we decided to intervene to prevent the program from failing.”⁶ German assessments of progress in rebuilding the police noted that a paltry “17 German police officers—men and women from both our federal and state police forces—are advising the Afghan Transitional Authority on this challenging task of crucial importance for the country’s democratic future.”⁷ One can hardly blame U.S. government officials for thinking the Germans were not serious about training. In 2003, Donald Rumsfeld wrote to CPA Administrator Paul Bremer and General John Abizaid, commander of U.S. Central Command, scoffing, “Colin Powell told me this morning that the