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

saved the day.” Just as the Russians had relied heavily on helicopter support, the Apache attack helicopter was deployed fairly often by the United States against insurgents operating in rural areas. It could lay down a dizzying display of fire from 30-millimeter automatic cannons that could shoot 625 rounds per minute, Hellfire antitank missiles, and rockets. The Hellfire thermobaric missiles carried by some Apaches were particularly ruthless. “The effect of the explosion within confined spaces is immense,” one CIA report noted. “Those near the ignition point are obliterated. Those at the fringe are likely to suffer many internal and thus invisible injuries.”⁶¹

Afghan National Army soldiers began to earn a reputation as tenacious fighters in battle. By all accounts, they were more proficient in tactics, techniques, and procedures for fighting counterinsurgency warfare after their U.S. training. When asked to perform crowd control, deliver humanitarian assistance, gather intelligence about insurgents and their support network, and assist in other civil-action projects, the ANA impressed many observers.⁶² They were also effective in gathering intelligence about insurgents, their support network, and weapons caches. Some argued, however, that the emphasis on quality had had too high a price tag. A World Bank study found that the “ANA salary structure, determined apparently without reference to fiscal constraints or pay elsewhere in the civil service, has set a precedent which the police and other sectors aspire to and which will be fiscally costly.”⁶³

Despite increasing levels of competence, however, Afghan Army forces still suffered from a lack of indigenous air support and the absence of a self-sustaining operational budget. They relied on embedded international forces and U.S. air support during combat, and their weapons were shoddy. As with the police, many soldiers had little ammunition and few magazines. Afghan Army units had few mortars, machine guns, MK-19 grenade machine guns, and artillery. They had almost no helicopter or fixed-wing transport, and no attack aviation. They had little or no body armor or blast glasses, Kevlar helmets, up-armored Humvees, or light-armor tracked vehicles with machine- gun cupolas and slat armor.⁶⁴ This impacted their ability to conduct sustained operations on their own against well-equipped Taliban raiding forces, who possessed rocket-propelled grenades, recoilless rifles, and antiaircraft artillery such as the Russian-made DShK 12.7-millimeter machine gun.⁶⁵

Protecting the Local Population

The inability to establish law and order in rural areas of Afghanistan pushed local communities into the hands of the Taliban. Afghan intelligence admitted, “We have not been able to provide policing and protection for the villages against the insurgents or the negative elements in general.”⁶⁶ Other internal Afghan documents reiterated this problem. There “is a perception amongst the population that not enough is being done to improve their security and that widespread criminality and corruption contribute to a situation not dissimilar from that which led to the rise of the Taliban [in the early 1990s].”⁶⁷ This was a striking conclusion. As one senior Afghan official told me: “The Afghan National Army goes into a town, clears it of insurgents, stays for a few days, and then leaves. But it doesn’t provide long-term security. This causes significant unhappiness among the local population.” He continued: “Much of the local ‘support’ for the Taliban is passive. People fear for their lives if they oppose the Taliban.”⁶⁸

A public-opinion poll conducted for Combined Forces Command—Afghanistan acknowledged that approximately 50 percent or more of most respondents in the east and south had no weekly contact with the Afghan National Police. The same poll found that less than 20 percent of local respondents in most eastern and southern provinces trusted the police.⁶⁹ This had a ripple effect on rural villagers. Afghans who cooperated with the government, or even openly supported it, often faced grave danger from Taliban and other insurgent forces across the south and east of the country.

By late 2005, a growing number of villages in these rural areas were emptied of pro-government political forces and supporters, and they gradually fell into the hands of the Taliban and other insurgent groups. This process was not entirely different from the approach that Afghan mujahideen took during the Soviet War, focusing most of their efforts on rural areas. The population was left with little choice but to become active or tacit supporters of the insurgents. A study for NATO forces in Afghanistan discovered that support for the Taliban was positively correlated with rural areas, partly because they had little or no government security presence. “The capacity of the government to protect people is more limited outside the centre of the province,” it acknowledged. “A majority of people in provincial centres believe that the government can protect them from insecurity, compared to a minority outside the centres.”⁷⁰

While the United States had committed sufficient attention and resources to building the Afghan National Army, it took a pass on the police. It handed over the police program to Germany, which failed to seriously fund or manage the program. Initial U.S. efforts to salvage the police floundered, as the State Department relied on DynCorp International, which lacked the capacity to rebuild a broken police force from scratch in a tribal society. By the time the U.S. military tried to bail out the police program in 2006, incalculable damage had already been done. These challenges might have been mitigated had the Afghan government not begun to come apart at the seams in other areas.

CHAPTER ELEVEN A Growing Cancer

A FEW YEARS after the fall of the Taliban regime, a joke began to work its way through Afghan intellectual circles. An Afghan goes in to see the minister of interior. “Minister,” he pleads, “you need to fix the growing corruption problem in our government. The people are becoming increasingly frustrated with government officials who are corrupt and self-serving.” After listening carefully, the minister responds: “You have convinced me there is a problem. Now how much money will you give me to fix it?”

Afghan faith in their government waned as they became concerned about skyrocketing corruption and incompetence. Senior U.S. officials were acutely aware of these problems. Lieutenant General David Barno argued that a critical pillar in counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan was “good governance,” which included the provision of essential services to the population.¹ International organizations such as the World Bank were equally keen to support governance. One World Bank assessment emphasized “investments in physical infrastructure (especially roads, water systems, and electricity), agriculture, securing land and property arrangements, creating a healthy business climate with access to skills and capital, good governance, health, and education.”²

The problem was not that Afghan and international leaders failed to understand the importance of governance and its impact on the insurgency. Virtually everyone paid lip service to governance. Rather, it was prioritizing governance over other efforts and translating this into reality. “Most people complained about policy,” explained Ronald Neumann, reflecting on his tenure as U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan over coffee one day in downtown Washington, DC. “But what we lacked was an ability to implement [it].”³ The challenge, he told me, was like Aesop’s fable “Belling the Cat.” A group of mice called together a committee to consider how to protect themselves from a cat that was harrassing them. The best solution, one mouse proposed, was to bell the cat, which was met with general applause. But this left one key question: Who would put the bell around the cat’s neck? “This was a question of implementation,” argued Neumann. “Since there were no volunteers, the policy was useless.”⁴

In a 2004 public-opinion poll conducted by the Asia Foundation, Afghans responded that two of the biggest problems in their local areas were the lack of jobs and the lack of electricity.⁵ Over the course of the next two years, jobs and electricity would remain the most significant infrastructure problems, in addition to access to water.⁶ U.S. government polls—most of which were not released publicly—showed similar results. In one survey conducted between August 30 and September 9, 2006, by the U.S. State Department, Afghans who supported the Taliban complained that they had little access to clean water and employment.⁷

There was international assistance to fix these problems, but it didn’t always reach its intended targets. One study found that the primary beneficiaries of assistance were “the urban elite.”⁸ This triggered deep-seated frustration and resentment among the rural population. There’s no doubt that the Afghan government suffered from a number of systemic problems and had difficulty attracting and retaining skilled professionals with management and administrative experience. Weak administration and lack of control in some provinces made tax policy and administration virtually impossible. In many rural areas, the government made no effort to collect taxes. In 2004, the World Bank warned of “a distant and hostile central administration that cannot provide pay or guidance to its staff in the provinces and districts in a timely manner.” It concluded that Afghan government personnel “at the provincial and district levels urgently need the resources and support necessary to do their jobs. In turn,