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

percent said corruption was a major problem in their neighborhoods. Moreover, most Afghans believed that the corruption problem was getting worse. Approximately 60 percent of respondents believed that corruption had increased over the past year at the national level, and 50 percent believed that it had increased at the provincial level. Many had been directly involved in bribery, such as providing cash to a government official. Thirty-six percent said they had been involved in bribery with a police officer, 35 percent with a court official, and 34 percent with officials when applying for work.⁵⁹ Things were much worse in the areas of greater Taliban presence. People in southern and western Afghanistan were most likely to say they had personally experienced corruption, and those in central and northern Afghanistan were the least likely.⁶⁰

Much of the blame was leveled at the top echelons of the Afghan government. A 2006 State Department poll found that more than 50 percent of Afghans thought President Karzai and his administration failed to combat corruption. This tended to fuel support for the Taliban. According to the same State Department poll, 71 percent of Taliban backers said there was corruption among the police, 66 percent said there was corruption in the local government, and 68 percent said there was corruption in the courts.⁶¹

A number of sensitive Afghan national security documents expressed growing alarm at the link between poppy and government corruption. The Afghanistan National Security Council’s annual National Threat Assessment, for example, argued in 2004 that the “continued growth of the heroin and opium- producing poppy remains a major threat to the security of Afghanistan. The corruption and crime association with the drug trade will proliferate in and around Afghanistan, discouraging international investment and assistance in rebuilding Afghanistan.”⁶² The following year’s National Threat Assessment went even further, noting that the “corruption and crime associated with the drug trade will proliferate in Afghan society and the government administration.”⁶³

The cost of corruption, according to numerous Afghan and international assessments, was increased support for the Taliban and other insurgent groups. One joint European Union and United Nations assessment found that the Taliban “exploit certain sentiments that resonated within the general population,” such as the “corrupt state.”⁶⁴ An Afghan intelligence report concluded: “The propaganda effort of the enemy in rural areas is massive and strong. The theme is corruption in the government…. Their main target population is rural Afghanistan…. only good governance and sound leadership at the local level can counter this effectively and strongly.”⁶⁵ The Taliban and other insurgent groups pointed out in their propaganda the growing Afghan corruption on the district, provincial, and national levels. A joint paper produced by the Government of Afghanistan, the U.S. government, and other key international actors more boldly concluded: “The appointment of unprofessional, corrupt and ineffective government officials has reduced the trust and confidence of the people, especially in the provinces.”⁶⁶

A Cancer in the Government

Reflecting on his term as Afghan foreign minister, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah told me in 2007 that his government had made some mistakes. “Where are the state institutions?” he asked. “There aren’t any.” We were sitting in his flat in Kabul, which was comfortably furnished with plush chairs and Western amenities, including a flat-screen television. Since it was Ramadan, Abdullah was fasting, but he thoughtfully offered me a glass of cold water. He said, ruefully, that “people are losing hope in their government. Villages cannot be protected. If villagers say something against the Taliban, they could be beheaded. We are losing the support of our population.”⁶⁷

Abdullah was an ophthalmologist and a protege of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the charismatic Northern Alliance military leader. Well organized and smartly dressed, with a neatly trimmed beard, often preferring Western suit and tie to native Afghan clothes, he spoke excellent English with a slight accent. During the Bonn negotiations in late 2001, Abdullah impressed U.S. and other Western diplomats by joining them at meals during the month of Ramadan, even though he was fasting. “He always said he felt no pangs of hunger,” recalled U.S. Special Envoy James Dobbins, who worked with Abdullah. Dobbins described him as someone who “would speak with controlled passion about the travails his country had experienced over the past several decades.”⁶⁸ Abdullah’s comments about Afghan governance were a sobering and brutally frank admission of the challenges his government faced. They were seconded by a former Afghan provincial governor who complained: “The government has essentially collapsed. It has lost its meaning in the provinces, it has lost the security situation and lost its grip on civil servants. Corruption is playing havoc with the country.”⁶⁹

After Operation Mountain Thrust in the summer of 2006, during which American, Canadian, British, and Afghan forces conducted offensive actions in southern Afghanistan, Ambassador Ronald Neumann was briefed by the U.S. military on the results of the interrogations of more than 100 Taliban and other fighters. “We found that the critical reasons why these fighters supported the Taliban had little to do with religious ideology. Rather, they had to do with bad government and economics. The government could not protect them or deliver services, and they were often simply paid better by the Taliban.”⁷⁰

This was consistent with the findings of Afghan and NATO officials. As one senior Afghan intelligence official told me, the results of detainee interviews and intelligence assessments showed that “neither Afghan police, army, or NATO can protect villages and districts from the Taliban. This forces people to support the Taliban, even if they don’t like them. The other option, which was death,” he noted wryly, “was not palatable for most villagers.”⁷¹ One Afghan summed up the dilemma: “In the daytime, this government is coming to us, and in the nighttime the Taliban are coming to us. We are stuck in the middle.”⁷²

When the Taliban was overthrown in 2001, Afghanistan was an underdeveloped country whose levels of basic services and social indicators were near the bottom of the world. Afghanistan’s health indicators were among the worst on earth: it had an under-five mortality rate of 172 per 1,000 live births, infant mortality rate of 115 per 1,000 live births, maternal mortality rate of 16 per 1,000 live births, and 50 percent rate of chronic malnutrition. Life expectancy was estimated at 43 years, and only 9 percent of rural households reported a health facility in their village.⁷³

But Afghanistan’s underdevelopment was not the reason an insurgency began. Rather, the prevailing condition was the inability of that government to improve life in rural areas of the country. An internal memo from the UN and the European Union was deeply pessimistic: “Afghanistan’s current trajectory was negative: there was burgeoning disillusionment with government. Even officials were fed up, with governors voicing scathing criticism at the lack of tangible support for their work.” It went on to say that the “government was losing prestige; its image and influence were waning. Without a change in approach, Afghanistan and its international partners would lose ground: their fortunes were now linked. Civilians would be more likely to fight their ‘disgusting government’ both because they detested it and because they feared the consequences of not fighting.”⁷⁴

The damage was done. The government was unable to provide key services or protect the local population, especially in rural areas, and the government was widely viewed as corrupt. To make matters worse, the United States and its allies had focused almost entirely in a top-down strategy to stabilize the country by creating a strong central government. Not only was a strong Afghan state ahistorical, but U.S. policymakers spent little time trying to co-opt Pashtun tribes, subtribes, clans, and other local institutions in the south and east. There was little bottom-up strategy to complement top-down efforts. Storm clouds had been gathering for several years, waiting to burst. In 2006, they finally did.

CHAPTER TWELVE The Perfect Storm

RONALD NEUMANN was reaching for the light switch in his hotel room at the Crowne Plaza in Amman, Jordan, when the phone rang.

“Hello?” he asked, somewhat perplexed. It was 2005, and he was on a brief layover on his way back to the United States from Iraq, where he had been serving as a senior political-military officer and the U.S. Embassy’s principal interlocutor with the Multi-National Command.

It was Robert Pearson, director general of the State Department’s Foreign Service: “I understand you are arriving in Washington tomorrow,” he said.

“I am,” Neumann replied.

“The Secretary of State would like to see you about where you’re going next,” Pearson noted. “But it’s not where you think.” That was it. He said nothing else.

Neumann could barely sleep that night, anxious about what awaited. Two days later, when he walked into