organizations.46 A number of Afghan Muslim clerics publicly supported the Afghan government and called the jihad un-Islamic.47 Moreover, the Ulema Council and some Afghan
But religious ideology was not a sufficient condition for the rise of Afghanistan’s insurgency. Local Afghans were generally not motivated by religion to support insurgent groups and oppose the Afghan government. Rather, they were motivated by poor or nonexistent governance. In most cases, the Taliban and other insurgent groups were not necessarily popular; the Afghan government was simply unpopular. Support for the Taliban would undoubtedly have been greater had they not run Afghanistan with an iron fist in the 1990s. As Ambassador Ronald Neumann remarked to me, “The Taliban conquest of Afghanistan in the 1990s had a silver lining: it gave Afghans a chance to see what they were really like.”49
Yet despite these challenges, the Taliban and other groups mounted increasingly effective operations across Afghanistan’s south and east in 2006 and 2007. They were met by NATO forces that struggled mightily to keep pace.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN National Caveats
STANDING NEXT TO Canada’s command headquarters at Kandahar Airfield when I visited it in 2007 was a makeshift war memorial. The faces of fallen Canadian soldiers were etched in chiseled marble. There were no obelisks or ostentatious monuments, just faces. Corporal David Robert Braun. Private Blake Neil Williamson. Warrant Officer Richard Francis Nolan. The list went on. Each face stared back at those who paid tribute, usually fellow Canadian soldiers shuffling into and out of the command headquarters. Some of the faces smiled sheepishly from the blackened marble, while others stared intently. All had served their country and paid with their lives. Next to each face were their names, biographical data, and units. 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (Shilo, Manitoba). 1st Battalion, The Royal Canadian Regiment (Petawawa, Ontario). 2nd Battalion, Royal 22e Regiment (Valcartier, Quebec).
The inscription on the memorial read: “Dedicated to those Canadians who gave their lives in the service of peace while serving in Afghanistan.” Visitors placed flowers and photographs of their fallen comrades across the nameplates. Amid the daily commotion of Canada’s headquarters and the constant roar of fighter jets overhead, the memorial was strangely serene.
Unlike the war in Iraq, which was largely unilateral, the war in Afghanistan was at first fought by a true multinational coalition. NATO eventually became engaged as a full partner in combat operations and reconstruction. But it didn’t start off that way. Following the September 2001 attacks, NATO invoked for the first time Article V of the 1949 Washington Treaty, its founding document. Article V embodied the allies’ collective-security commitment to one another, stating that the “Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.”1 Since the United States had been attacked, they felt obliged to step in.
Within months of the U.S. invasion, a number of NATO countries made Special Forces and intelligence assets available. Many went to Afghanistan, but U.S. policymakers chose to use most NATO assets in the United States. NATO fighter aircraft flew combat air patrols over some thirty U.S. cities and key infrastructure, with continuous patrols over Washington, DC, and New York City. U.S. Air Force and NATO air crews flew more than 13,400 fighter, tanker, and airborne early warning sorties over the United States. There were more sorties flown in the United States than during the war in Afghanistan up to mid-2002, when the continuous air patrols in U.S. cities ended.2
By 2006 and 2007, NATO began to play a more significant role in counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, especially in the violent south. Despite a growing list of NATO countries that deployed forces to Afghanistan, however, many countries refused to allow their forces to engage in combat operations. One senior NATO official acknowledged, “It was like fighting with one hand tied behind our backs.”3
“Lead Nation” Strategy
Beginning in 2002, there were few non-U.S. NATO forces in Afghanistan; Secretary Rumsfeld had opposed the deployment of a stabilization force outside of Kabul. With rare exceptions, the 4,000-member International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) did not venture beyond the capital. Its purpose was to protect the Afghan interim administration and help provide security in the capital. Rather than deploy troops for combat operations, several NATO countries volunteered to help the Afghan government rebuild its depleted security sector. The effort was referred to as the “lead nation” approach. The United States volunteered to lead the construction of the Afghan National Army; Germany was responsible for training the Afghan National Police; the United Kingdom led the counternarcotics effort; Italy was the lead for rebuilding Afghanistan’s decrepit justice system; and Japan (with UN assistance) was the lead for the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of former combatants. In theory, each lead nation was supposed to contribute significant financial assistance, coordinate external aid, and oversee reconstruction efforts in its sector.
In practice, this approach was a disaster. Assessments from the Pentagon were scathing. “This ‘lead nation’ strategy produced mixed results, but overall it was a failure,” acknowledged Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, specifically calling attention to the “efforts of the British, Germans, and Italians.”4
Afghans were equally critical. Daoud Yaqub, the director for security sector reform at the Afghanistan National Security Council, bemoaned the challenges of coordination. To get everything done, officials had to negotiate along four tracks: between Afghan government ministries, between international donors, between donors and the Afghan government, and within donors’ own agencies. “When disagreements broke out between the donors and us, the donors would come to me and say quite matter-of-factly: ‘It’s our money. We’ll do with it what we want.’ There was little I could do.”5
The justice system was perhaps the most significant challenge. To be fair, no formal justice system existed in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion in 2001. The United Nations Development Program announced shortly after the overthrow of the Taliban regime that “the physical infrastructure of [the justice] institutions has been destroyed.” Even more critically, it fretted that “the country’s legal ‘software’—the laws, legal decisions, legal studies, and texts of jurisprudence—are largely lost or scattered across the world.”6 The December 2001 Bonn Agreement called for the interim Afghan government to establish a judicial reform commission to “rebuild the domestic justice system in accordance with Islamic principles, international standards, the rule of law, and Afghan legal traditions.”7 Consequently, Karzai’s government established the Judicial Reform Commission to oversee and coordinate reconstruction of the justice system.8
As the lead nation for justice-sector reform, Italy had the job of helping to establish a body of laws; train prosecutors, lawyers, and Ministry of Justice officers; build physical infrastructure; and improve detention and prison capacity. But assistance was fractured and Italian policymakers had difficulty coordinating the disparate range of aid pouring in from nations, the UN, the World Bank, and nongovernmental organizations. One study concluded that the “overall coordination and cooperation in the justice sector [was] lacking.” The Italian government also “maintained distance from the Afghan institutions. Rather than support Afghan-led decision-making, the Italian effort…preferred to choose and implement its projects with limited consultation.” 9
Even if the Italians had done everything right, they still needed to overcome severe divisions among the Afghan justice departments. President Karzai had created the Judicial Reform Commission to coordinate reforms, but by empowering the commission, Karzai also removed authority and control of foreign assistance from the permanent institutions. The commission was meant to set policy and priorities for the justice sector, and, in practice, to determine where donor funds would be directed. From the start, the commission had no capacity, funding, or political cover to manage this significant task. Without intervention from the presidency, a turf war raged among the Supreme Court, the Ministry of Justice, the Office of the Prosecutor General, and the commission.
Under Secretary Feith and other Pentagon officials complained incessantly about the Italians. “Italy made the underperforming Germans look good,” Feith noted sarcastically, referring to the German effort to train the Afghan National Police. “For well over a year the Italians failed to send to Afghanistan a team of experts; in fact, they did not send a single person. When I raised the problem with Italy’s Defense Minister, Antonio Martino—as thoughtful
