government was dominated by Tajiks, many of whom had battled the Taliban. In 2002 a
I had first come to Afghanistan in 2004, after my time in Falluja, seeking respite from the war. It was an idyllic time for me. Afghanistan was still the forgotten war; the mood in the country was optimistic. I drove up to Bamiyan in the north and went swimming in lake Bandi Amir. South of Kabul, I took road trips through villages in Logar and Paktiya all the way to the Pakistani border. I watched the first presidential elections in Gardez. But by 2008 the distance between Iraq and Afghanistan seemed to have closed. It was as if Afghanistan had become Iraq’s neighbor. The foreign military occupation was now killing and arresting innocent civilians, always denying initial reports that turned out to be accurate. The insurgency was increasingly sophisticated, learning from Iraq; its IEDs and suicide bombings were devastating.
The alleged success of the surge in Iraq seemed to confirm the notion that more American troops could solve other problems. For American politicians and the complacent news media, the U.S. was on the verge of victory in Iraq, even if it had taken five years, the destruction of the country, a civil war, hundreds of thousands of dead, millions displaced, communities divided by concrete walls, and the creation of new militias to reduce the violence from its highest points. As I showed in previous chapters, this is not the case, and the reduction of violence, falsely attributed to the increase in American troops, was leading many to draw the wrong lessons from Iraq and then apply them to Afghanistan.
Seven years after the Americans overthrew the Taliban, the movement was gaining confidence, able to control territory right up to Kabul’s backyard, while the American-backed government was weaker than ever. President Hamid Karzai was unable to extend his control beyond the capital. CNN was calling Afghanistan the “forgotten war,” and it had indeed received less attention than Iraq from the international media and even from the Bush administration. The 2008 presidential campaign changed that.
For Republicans the military has traditionally been the chief tool of foreign policy, but Afghanistan became a much more central issue for Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama than it did for John McCain. Obama wanted to legitimize his call for a withdrawal from Iraq by increasing troops in Afghanistan. The Democratic narrative was that the United States should have stayed in Afghanistan and needed to swivel the cannons back to the original target. The Democrats worried about appearing weak. They wanted to prove that they too could be bellicose and tough, and kill foreigners. But calling the war in Iraq wrong didn’t necessarily mean that expanding the war in Afghanistan was right.
By September 2008 there were already about thirty-three thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan and a total of sixty-five thousand troops in the international coalition. They were facing more resistance than ever, and by September 2008 the 2007 total of 111 dead troops had already been surpassed. Speaking at the National Defense University on September 9, President Bush announced a modest troop increase in Afghanistan, which he described as a “quiet surge” to help “stabilize Afghanistan’s young democracy.” He would not allow the Taliban to return to Afghanistan, he said, unaware that they already had, and that only negotiation with the Taliban could bring any hope of stabilizing Afghanistan. “Iraq, Afghanistan, and parts of Pakistan pose the same challenge to our country, and they are all theaters in the same struggle,” he said, proclaiming his “faith in the power of freedom.” But the Taliban had their own faith, and so far they were winning.
There was a glitch in the matrix when, on September 10, 2008, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the House Armed Services Committee. In his prepared testimony, which he submitted after it was approved by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and President Bush, Admiral Mullen stated, “I am convinced we can win the war in Afghanistan.” His oral testimony was different. “I am not convinced we are winning it in Afghanistan,” he said. In a war, if you are not winning, then you are usually losing.
BEFORE LEAVING KABUL I bought several pairs of kala, or
Pashtu was not exactly in high demand, and the book the language school gave me was pretty basic and clearly designed for the military. It had a list of ranks, such as “general of the Air Force” and “private first class.” It also gave me a list of weapons such as land mines and bullets. It provided the Pashtu translation for important phrases like “You are a prisoner,” “Show me your ID card,” “Hands up,” “Surrender,” and “Let the vehicle pass.” If I wanted to arrest an Afghan, I was now prepared. Interestingly, in the list of foods the book included hummus, which is eaten in the Arab world but not in Afghanistan (unless some fastidious Al Qaeda volunteer brought some with him). The book provided essential advice such as “Don’t burp or fart in public,” “Don’t call everyone Hajji,” “Don’t trust everyone,” “Don’t use the same route every time,” and “Don’t offer pork to any Muslim.” It also advised me not to whistle or make catcalls toward any woman and not to insult “a native” in public.
Ghazni fell to the Taliban in 1995, early in their campaign to seize Afghanistan from the warlords. I was told it fell without a fight, almost overnight, soon after Kandahar. There were many subcommanders allied with various mujahideen parties. Alliances shifted often, and it was easy for the Taliban to co-opt these commanders, who just put on turbans, flew the white flag of the Taliban, and said, “Okay, we’re Taliban.”
In the last few years of their reign the Taliban even succeeded in gaining the cooperation of Ghazni’s Shiite Hazara community. So the area was fertile ground for the neo-Taliban, whose control was spreading once again. Tribal leaders were weak in Ghazni while religious leaders were strong, making it easier for the Taliban to embed themselves with the population. The neo-Taliban also seized upon the population’s many grievances. Police would release prisoners in exchange for bribes, while Afghan soldiers looted people’s homes and government officials took goods from shops without paying for them. In 2006 forty policemen quit, and some joined the Taliban, because their salaries were many months late. Police chiefs had to buy supplies with their own money, so they extorted from the population. More and more clerics started supporting the Taliban. In 2006 the former governor of Ghazni was assassinated after announcing he was taking over security in the Andar district so that he could defeat the Taliban there. By 2006, in Andar alone dozens of government officials and others viewed as collaborators had been killed by the Taliban; soon there was no government presence in most of Ghazni’s countryside. When the Americans distributed cash to villagers, they would hand it over to the Taliban, and as soon as the Americans visited a village the Taliban would follow and seize anything that had been distributed. Former mujahideen commanders in Ghazni joined the Taliban. A 2006 military operation called Mountain Fury was said to have “dealt Taliban and foreign fighters a string of sharp defeats” in Andar. The U.S. Army claimed that “large swaths of southern and central Ghazni Province, described as ungovernable as recently as late August, embraced the allies and the reemerging provincial government.” But things continued to worsen. Twenty-three South Korean missionaries were captured by the Taliban in Ghazni in 2007. That year eighteen Afghan de-miners were kidnapped from their base in Andar three weeks after a military operation attempted to remove the Taliban’s “shadow government” there, and when President Karzai gave a speech in Andar, the Taliban fired fifteen rockets at the event. One month before I arrived, Afghan broadcasters showed clips of Taliban kidnapping and executing two Afghan women on charges of
