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

million Afghans had been killed, more than five million had fled abroad, and as many as three million people were forced to leave their homes to avoid the bloodshed.²²

After the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban regime, British military forces in Afghanistan were given a pointed reminder of their country’s role in Afghanistan’s history. British soldiers in Helmand Province, a hotbed of the insurgency in southern Afghanistan, occupied a cluster of dusty, crudely constructed forts, on the banks of the Helmand River, which their forebears in the British military had built more than a century earlier. “You can’t hold it against them for wanting to repel the invaders,” said British Warrant Officer 2 Jason Mortimer, who manned a sandbag-lined bunker in the ruins of one of these old forts in 2008. Afghan fighters, he recalled, sent the British “packing with a bloody nose” after the Anglo-Afghan Wars.²³

U.S. military and diplomatic officials were also well aware of Afghanistan’s history. In late 2001, General Tommy Franks, head of U.S. Central Command, said, “Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld and I agreed that we should not flood the country with large formations of conventional troops…. We don’t want to repeat the Soviets’ mistakes.”²⁴ Nevertheless, U.S. policymakers gravely underestimated the gritty resolve of the Afghans. Though most of the landscape is barren and parched, and though its people appear unobtrusive and primitive, this region has nurtured a proud warrior culture that has repelled invading armies for more than two thousand years. Indeed, the central tragedy of the American experience in Afghanistan is the way this history was disregarded. The United States began its operations with a good plan, competent people, and significant support from local Afghans, but it was unable to take advantage of the opportunity. The “light footprint,” as it was known, was a blessing during the overthrow of the Taliban regime, but it became a curse once the insurgency began to overwhelm what few U.S. resources existed on the ground. As one senior U.S. administration official told me, “We seized defeat from the jaws of victory.”²⁵

Debating Afghanistan

So why did an insurgency occur? There are two common schools of thought. Some argue that Afghanistan’s ethnic makeup was largely responsible for the insurgency. Afghanistan has four major ethnic groups: Pashtun, Uzbek, Tajik, and Hazara, as well as a range of minor ethnic groups. The long-standing ethnic fissures in Afghanistan, says this camp, made violence inevitable. The last decade of fighting had pitted Pashtun groups from southern Afghanistan against Uzbek, Tajik, and other groups from northern Afghanistan, fueling long-held grudges and sparking further conflict. Others have argued that Afghanistan’s insurgency was caused by a series of economic developments broadly subsumed under the umbrella term greed. Building on a body of economic literature, this argument assumes that violence generates profits for opportunists, making insurgents indistinguishable from bandits or criminals. Afghan insurgent groups were motivated by the potential for profit from the cultivation, production, and export of poppy, much like the way that cocaine profits fueled the rise of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). After the U.S. invasion, Afghanistan cornered the global opiate market. In 2007, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) announced: “No other country in the world has ever produced narcotics on such a deadly scale.”²⁶

A careful examination of Afghanistan since 2001, however, shows that these arguments are fundamentally flawed. None of them can adequately explain why an insurgency developed. Rather, two factors were critical.

One was weak governance, which provided an important precondition for the rise of an insurgency. The inability of the Afghan government at all levels to provide key services to local Afghans, especially in rural areas, gutted support for the national government and forced citizens to look elsewhere for security. Governance, as used here, is defined as the set of institutions by which authority in a country is exercised. It involves the ability to establish law and order, effectively manage resources, and implement sound policies. By all accounts, Afghan leaders at all levels failed to provide good governance. Riddled with corruption and incompetence, institutions such as the Afghan National Police were unable to secure a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence, while national and local officials were unable to effectively manage resources and implement sound policies. In addition, insurgent groups were able to tap into a broad array of resources from individuals in neighboring governments and the international jihadi community.²⁷ Perhaps most important, outside actors helped undermine the provisional Afghan government. Many looked to the United States for help, but American and other international assistance was among the lowest of any state-building mission since World War II, a startling statistic, given that the Afghan mission was launched on the heels of the September 2001 terrorist attacks.

The second motivating factor for insurgent leaders was religious ideology. Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar and al Qa’ida leaders such as Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden advocated jihad to recover “occupied” Muslim lands. They demanded a return to a radical interpretation of Islam stripped of local customs and cultures. The Taliban leaders saw themselves as the cleansers of a social and political system gone wrong in Afghanistan, and an Islamic way of life that had been compromised by corruption and infidelity to the Prophet. Al Qa’ida leaders were motivated by an ideology grounded in the works of Sayyid Qutb, a leading intellectual in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and other Islamist thinkers, and they advocated the establishment of a radical interpretation of sharia (Islamic religious law). In sum, there was both a “supply” of rural villagers disgruntled by a failing government and a “demand” for recruits by ideologically motivated leaders. Afghanistan’s insurgency was caused by the synergy of collapsing governance and a virulent religious ideology that seemed to fill the void. But understanding this phenomenon required getting out into rural areas and talking to local Afghans and international and Afghan forces operating there. The insurgency in Afghanistan, it turned out, was much more about what happened in local villages and district centers than what happened in Kabul.

The Research Approach

My goal in Afghanistan was specific: to understand the motivations of key actors and to assess what factors contributed to the rise of Afghanistan’s insurgency. I chose to examine Afghanistan because it is a case of such intrinsic importance to the United States. The attacks in Washington, New York, and Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, were planned in Afghanistan, and many of the hijackers went through training in Afghanistan. Even after the overthrow of the Taliban regime, core al Qa’ida leaders continued to reside along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier.

It is also important to understand what this book does not try to do. It is not a broader effort to build and test a theory of why insurgencies begin. Rather, it is a study of the specific aspects of insurgency in Afghanistan. This book also does not pretend to offer a comprehensive analysis of Afghanistan across such areas as politics, economics, education, and health care. Many nations, international organizations such as the United Nations, and nongovernmental organizations logged countless hours trying to build Afghanistan’s fragile infrastructure and institutions. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has argued, many of these areas are interrelated: “Political freedoms (in the form of free speech and elections) help to promote economic security. Social opportunities (in the form of education and health facilities) facilitate economic participation. Economic facilities (in the form of opportunities for participation in trade and production) can help to generate personal abundance as well as public resources for social facilities.”²⁸ These aspects are certainly important, but the focus in this book is on the deteriorating security situation and the key factors that contributed to it.

Discovering Afghanistan proved a fascinating journey. Afghanistan sometimes gets an unnecessarily bad rap. In James Michener’s novel Caravans, for instance, the main character, Mark Miller, was stationed in Kabul at the U.S. Embassy in the aftermath of World War II. His description of the city was overwhelmingly negative: “Kabul provided positively nothing for foreigners: no hotels that we could use, no cinema of any kind, no newspapers, no radio with European programs, no restaurants available to visitors, no theaters, no cafes, no magazines.”²⁹ Michener, who had traveled through Afghanistan in 1955, hit on the perfunctory, stereotypical image of Afghanistan, which was sometimes repeated by foreigners after the U.S. invasion. But I found it a mesmerizing and deeply complicated country.

Over the course of several years’ research, I combed through thousands of primary and secondary sources. I visited Afghanistan multiple times every year between 2004 and 2009, and I conducted thousands of interviews in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, the United States, and other NATO countries. Within the Afghan government, for example, I interviewed officials in the Presidential Palace, National Security Council, Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Defense, and National Directorate of Security (Afghanistan’s intelligence service). Within the United States government, I interviewed individuals in the White House, Department of State, Department of Defense, Central Intelligence Agency, Drug Enforcement Agency, U.S. Agency for International Development, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other government agencies with a presence in Afghanistan. I spent time with soldiers and civilians from virtually all NATO countries in Afghanistan, from the Canadians and British in the south to the Germans and Norwegians in the north. I also conducted interviews with staff from the United Nations and a variety