NOTES
Introduction
1. Central Intelligence Agency, CIA World Factbook 2007 (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2006).
2. Edward Walsh, “Staff Sgt. Robert J. Paul Killed Sept. 8 in Afghanistan,” The Oregonian, September 12, 2006, p. B1.
3. Cecilia Rasmussen, “Army Reserve Sgt. 1st Class Merideth Howard, 52, Alameda, Killed in Blast,” Los Angeles Times, October 1, 2006, p. 14.
4. Alexander Downer, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Australia, Address to the 61st Session of the United Nations General Assembly, September 21, 2006 (New York: Australian Mission to the United Nations, 2006).
5. President Karzai Calls the Terrorist Attack on the Funeral Ceremony of Hakim Taniwal an Animosity Against Islam and the People of Afghanistan (Kabul: Office of the President, Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, September 11, 2006).
6. President George W. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, United States Capitol, Washington, DC, September 20, 2001 (Washington, DC: White House Press Office, 2001).
7. David M. Walker, Global War on Terrorism: Observations on Funding, Costs, and Future Commitments (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2006), p. 7.
8. Central Intelligence Agency, CIA World Factbook 2007 (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2006). Figures were in purchasing-power parity. Only 27 out of 229 countries had a gross domestic product over $430 billion.
9. Transcript of Combatant Status Review Tribunal Hearing for ISN 10024 (Khalid Sheikh Muhammad), March 10, 2007, U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, pp. 17–18.
10. On the overthrow of the Taliban regime, see Gary Schroen, First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005); Stephen Biddle, Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, November 2002); Gary Berntsen and Ralph Pezzullo, Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al Qa’ida (New York: Crown Publishers, 2005); Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002).
11. Henry A. Crumpton, “Intelligence and War: Afghanistan 2001–2002,” Jennifer E. Sims and Burton Gerber, eds., Transforming U.S. Intelligence (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005), p. 177.
12. Berntsen and Pezzullo, Jawbreaker, p. 312.
13. On the definition of insurgency, see Central Intelligence Agency, Guide to the Analysis of Insurgency (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, n.d.), p. 2; Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, Joint Publication 1–02 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, 2001), p. 266.
14. I use insurgency as roughly synonymous with what is often called civil war, which can be defined as “armed conflict that pits the government and national army of an internationally recognized state against one or more armed opposition groups able to mount effective resistance against the state.” Michael W. Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, Making War and Building Peace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 31. Also see, for example, Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 5; James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” American Political Science Review, vol. 97, no. 1, February 2003, pp. 75–90.
15. RAND-MIPT Terrorism Incident Database. Following are the yearly figures on insurgent-initiated attacks in Afghanistan: 2002 (65 attacks); 2003 (148 attacks); 2004 (146 attacks); 2005 (207 attacks); 2006 (353 attacks). Following are the fatalities during the same period: 2002 (79 deaths); 2003 (133 deaths); 2004 (230 deaths); 2005 (288 deaths); 2006 (755 deaths). A comparison of the RAND-MIPT data with U.S. and European government data shows that the RAND-MIPT data significantly understate the number of attacks and deaths, since most improvised-explosive-device and armed attacks were never reported in the press. Nevertheless, the trend in the RAND-MIPT data is consistent with U.S. and European government data.
16. Pamela Constable, “Gates Visits Kabul, Cites Rise in Cross-Border Attacks,” Washington Post, January 17, 2007, p. A10.
17. The data come from Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. See, for example, Ed Johnson, “Gates Wants NATO to Reorganize Afghanistan Mission,” Bloomberg News, December 12, 2007.
18. Sarah Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 105–6.
19. Amrullah Saleh, Strategy of Insurgents and Terrorists in Afghanistan (Kabul, Afghanistan: National Directorate of Security, 2006), p. 4.
20. Rudyard Kipling, Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Inclusive Edition, 1885–1926 (New York: Doubleday, 1931), p. 479.
21. Winston S. Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1901), p. 274.
22. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 13; Barnett R. Rubin, The Search for Peace in Afghanistan: From Buffer State to Failed State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 7; Lester Grau, ed., The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1996), p. xix.
23. Ann Scott Tyson, “British Troops, Taliban in a Tug of War over Afghan Province,” Washington Post, March 30, 2008, p. A1.
24. General Tommy Franks, American Soldier (New York: Regan Books, 2004), p. 324.
25. Author interview with senior U.S. cabinet official, January 15, 2008.
26. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Afghanistan Opium Survey 2007: Executive Summary (Kabul: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2007), p. iv.
27. For other variants of the weak-state argument, see Antonio Giustozzi, Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan (London: Hurst & Company, 2007), pp. 7, 15–21.
28. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), p. 11.
29. James Michener, Caravans (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1963), p. 7.
30. See, for example, Saleh, Strategy of Insurgents and Terrorists in Afghanistan; Afghanistan National Security Council, National Threat Assessment (Kabul: Afghanistan National Security Council, 2005); Afghanistan Ministry of Defense, The National Military Strategy (Kabul: Afghanistan Ministry of Defense, October 2005).
31. George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003), p. 4.
32. Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin, Afghanistan—The Bear Trap: The Defeat of a Superpower (Havertown, PA: Casemate, 1992), p. 1.
Chapter One
1. Stephen Tanner, Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the Fall of the Taliban (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002), pp. 17–18.
2. Quintus Curtius Rufus, History of Alexander, book 2, vol. 6, translated by John C. Rolfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946), pp. 25–29.
3. Rufus, History of Alexander, book 2, vol. 6, p. 29.
