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

the office of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, she asked him whether he would be interested in serving as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. Without hesitation, he said yes.

He later recalled: “It was the only time I was asked directly by the Secretary of State to serve as an ambassador.” Neumann, who had served as U.S. ambassador to Algeria and Bahrain, didn’t leave his Baghdad position until several months later. His final recollections were poignant. “I remember driving up Route Irish in a sandstorm in a convoy,” he recalled, referring to the excruciatingly dangerous road to the Baghdad Airport. “We couldn’t get a helicopter out because of the sandstorm, but we were able to hitch a ride with General Casey,” the commanding general of Multi-National Force—Iraq.¹ It was an ironic twist of events. Neumann was leaving Iraq during a sandstorm and entering Afghanistan during what Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry would eventually call “the perfect storm.” The Afghan insurgency was about to explode.

Eikenberry recalled, “Several things came together. The Taliban and al Qa’ida had sanctuary in Pakistan and conducted operations from bases in Pakistan. Local governance was not taking hold. Narco-trafficking and associated criminality were emerging as significant threats to security. The planning and implementation of critical economic infrastructure projects—roads, power, and water management—were lagging.” As these problems became more acute, however, the United States neglected to respond with sufficient resources. “There were too few international and Afghan National Security forces. In the case of the U.S. forces,” said Eikenberry, “we had one less infantry battalion in the summer of 2006 than in the summer of 2005. All these factors—a complex mix of security, governance, and economic elements—combined to make for a perfect storm as NATO began its enlargement into southern Afghanistan in June 2006.”² Senior Afghan officials had also become increasingly alarmed. Dr. Abdullah, Afghanistan’s foreign minister, worried that the United States and the broader international community mistakenly believed that the Taliban and al Qa’ida were finished. “Our intelligence estimates,” he repeatedly warned U.S. officials, “show quite the reverse.” In his final meeting with Secretary Rice in March 2006 before he left the Afghan government, Dr. Abdullah warned her not to let Afghanistan continue to slip into conflict. “I am deeply worried about the rising insurgency,” he said. “People are beginning to lose hope in their government. We are losing the support of our population.”³

But there was some disagreement among the U.S. policymakers about the severity of the insurgency. “My take on the situation in Afghanistan,” said General James Jones, the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, in early 2006, “is that the Taliban and al Qa’ida are not in a position where they can restart an insurgency of any size and major scope.”⁴ Jones was a steely Marine who would become President Barack Obama’s national security adviser. He also became outspoken in his assessment of the insurgency in his 2008 Afghanistan Study Group Report, which concluded that the progress in Afghanistan was “under serious threat from resurgent violence, weakening international resolve, mounting regional challenges and a growing lack of confidence on the part of the Afghan people about the future direction of their country.”⁵ The day after General Tommy Franks, head of U.S. Central Command, had been battered by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on his war plan for Afghanistan in their conference room (known as “the Tank”), Franks had confronted Jones and Admiral Vern Clark of the U.S. Navy and told them: “Yesterday in the Tank, you guys came across like a mob of Title X motherers, not like the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”⁶ The reference was to Title X of the U.S. Code, which outlines the role of the armed forces, including the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force. Whatever the staff disagreements may have been in the armed services, the writing in Afghanistan was on the wall by the end of 2006. Levels of violence had reached their highest levels since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001.

Upbeat Assessments

The year 2006 did not begin so badly, at least among many policymakers in Washington. Estimates in some sectors were upbeat. According to the World Bank, for example, Afghanistan’s economy grew an estimated 14 percent in 2005 and 5.3 percent in 2006.⁷ Annual end-period inflation, as measured by the consumer price index for Kabul, decreased to 4.8 percent. Annual end-period “national” inflation, covering Kabul and five other cities, was 3.9 percent.⁸ In addition, construction was booming in some Afghan cities, several major roads were built, markets were full of goods, small and large shops had sprouted up, and several large telecommunications companies and commercial airlines were operating and competing for business.

“Cell phones are a wonderful boon in this city,” said one Afghan in Kabul to me, gripping his bright yellow phone and his Roshan calling card. “I don’t know what I’d do without mine.” Roshan, which means “light” in both Dari and Pashto, was one of Afghanistan’s largest telecommunications companies. In February 2005, Roshan won the Best Marketing Award at the Mobile World Congress, the mobile-phone industry’s leading annual event. In September 2006, it won the Best Brand Award at the CommsMEA Awards Ceremony in Dubai. This marked a breathtaking change.

In 2002, more than 99 percent of the Afghan population had no access to telecommunications services. Only five major cities had telephone services, and Kabul accounted for about two-thirds of the country’s 57,000 functioning lines. The country had little or no access to the Internet, and postal services were still recovering from years of conflict. By 2006, the number of telephones in Afghanistan had increased to 2.16 million, and all provinces were connected to a national telecommunications network. Mobile-phone prices dropped from about $400 in 2002 to less than $50 in 2006, and calling costs fell dramatically. The telecommunications sector attracted more than $300 million in private investments—60 percent of all foreign direct investment in Afghanistan.⁹

Robert Gates, who replaced Donald Rumsfeld as U.S. secretary of defense in 2006, argued that “notwithstanding the news [the American people] hear out of Afghanistan, the efforts of the United States, our allies, and the Afghan government and people have been producing solid results.” He noted that, contrary to the situation during the Taliban era, when few Afghans had access to health care, 670 clinics and hospitals were built or refurbished and nearly 11,000 doctors, nurses, and midwives were trained. Fewer than a million children were in school in 2001. “Now more than five million students—at least one and a half million of them girls—are enrolled in school.” He also pointed out that the country’s central bank had been rebuilt and supported with more than $2.5 billion in reserves—a remarkable feat, since there was no commercial banking under the Taliban.¹⁰

Reading the Tea Leaves

But all was not well, and violence in 2006 reached the highest levels since U.S. forces had invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Observers who hadn’t visited Afghanistan, or who hadn’t traveled outside of major urban areas, could be forgiven for thinking there was security and a viable government. The truth, however, was that governance did not extend into rural areas of the country. As former Taliban commander and Afghan Parliament member Abdul Salam Rocketi told me over lunch one day in 2006, “we have created a government that looks good on paper but is very weak in reality. Most Afghans in rural areas never see or hear anything from it.”¹¹

Key metrics of violence showed a disturbing increase. The number of suicide attacks increased from one in 2002 to two in 2003, six in 2004, 21 in 2005, 139 in 2006, and 140 in 2007. Between 2005 and 2006, the number of remotely detonated bombings more than doubled, from 783 to 1,677, and armed attacks nearly tripled, from 1,558 to 4,542.¹² In 2007, insurgent-initiated attacks rose another 27 percent from the 2006 levels, and Helmand Province witnessed among the highest levels of violence, rising 60 percent between 2006 and 2007.¹³ The Taliban and other groups assassinated Afghan government supporters in district and provincial centers. Key targets included police, Afghan intelligence agents, judges, clerics, NGO workers, and any others believed to be collaborating with the government.¹⁴

Public-opinion polls showed that Afghans had noticed the trend. In 2006, just under 50 percent of Afghans said the biggest problem in their country was the lack of security, including from the Taliban and warlords. Concerns were most acute in the south and east.¹⁵ A public-opinion poll for U.S. Central Command indicated that 41 percent of Afghans said they felt less safe in 2007 than in 2006, compared with only 28 percent who said they felt safer. Support levels for the Taliban doubled during the same time period. “The largest increases in Taliban support,” the report concluded, “are among rural people, women, and in Pakistan border regions.”¹⁶ While a bare majority of Afghans continued to believe the country was moving in the right direction, the percentage had decreased from 77 percent in 2005 to 55 percent in 2006 and 54 percent in 2007.¹⁷

In a press conference with President Bush at Camp David in August 2007, Afghan President Hamid Karzai optimistically reported that the Taliban was “a force that’s defeated.”¹⁸ But this was plainly not the case. In private, the Afghan government’s own security assessments had been getting progressively more alarming.