push them back,” he said. “It was the weakness of the government and the strength of the Taliban.” He explained that Logar was an important center for religious education in Afghanistan, with perhaps more Islamic schools than any other province. “In the south there are not many official Islamic schools, so you can deal with tribes,” he said. But Logar was producing new Talibs in its schools. A waiter at my hotel in Kabul told me that he had been at a wedding in the town of Warajan in Logar on August 17 when suddenly about fourteen Talibs came in with AKs and RPGs. They didn’t say anything but simply checked to see if there was music being played. Like most of the country, Kunduz province, in the far north, was also declining. “Kunduz was very safe last year,” a senior humanitarian official told me. “I drove up there and spent Christmas there. Now there have been NGO staff killed, threats of kidnapping.” The German contingent there was attacked every night and had recently accidentally killed Afghan civilians.
As I saw on the road to Ghazni, the Taliban were cutting off Kabul from the rest of the country. The road southwest to Kandahar was lethal. “The Kabul-to-Ghazni road is gone,” the intelligence officer told me. “The Ghazni-to-Gardez road is exceedingly bad, the Wardak road is shitty, the Jalalabad road is sliding, and there is a sustainable deterioration in rural areas around the road—you run the risk of abduction. It’s routine ambushes now, so they have a routine capability.” In May and June 2007, the officer explained, there was a major shift in Wardak: “Within an eight-week period it went from nighttime ambushes to daylight roadblocks.” He told me that warnings had been issued about the Sarobi district of Kabul and the Qarghai district in the province of Laghman, which borders Kabul to the east. There was also an IED cell in the Puli Khumri junction, which was a key road for anything going from the north to Kabul. Even Badakhshan at the extreme northeast of the country was beginning to have problems. In the last three months the northern Parwan province, which borders Kabul, had also become more dangerous. It was mostly Tajik, but the main road was under pressure there as well. “All of a sudden we see IEDs in Parwan on the main road, attacks on police checkpoints,” he said. “It’s the last remaining key arterial route connecting Kabul to the rest of the country.” Hizb-e-Islami clerics were sent to Parwan to preach against the government, and an increase in violence soon followed. “Given the ethnicity of the area, it’s not a permissive environment, but there are effective IED cells operating there,” he said.
On August 13 the international community in Kabul and most Afghans were shocked when three Western female NGO workers from the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and their Afghan driver were ambushed on a road in Logar’s Puli Alam district in the morning and shot to death. The initial Taliban statement claimed the targets were legitimate because they were ISAF soldiers. In the past the Taliban said they would not attack NGOs, including international NGOs, which were free to work throughout the country. At first the Taliban statement seemed to imply that they had relied on bad intelligence and that they thought the victims were military people using civilian vehicles. “The IRC attack was a big watershed,” the intelligence officer told me, summarizing the final Taliban statement as “Yes, we killed them, and we’re proud of it—screw you.” He explained that the Taliban claimed they didn’t believe the IRC’s projects had merit or were in the interest of Afghanistan. In effect, the Taliban spokesman legitimized attacks on NGOs. On previous occasions the Taliban had admitted that similar attacks were mistakes, such as when they targeted organizations that disposed of land mines. “The IRC incident changed the whole rules of the game,” a senior UN official told me. “In the past, when de-miners were taken hostage and killed, they have issued statements that it’s Taliban policy not to attack de-miners,” the intelligence officer said. “That’s the story in Afghanistan with the Taliban, internal squabbling. They free de-miners in one place, and pick them up in another place.” In June 2008 there were twenty-one security incidents against NGOs, and the IRC attack in August brought NGO deaths in 2008 to twenty-three. “In Darfur we had thirteen killed in one year, and the international community went ballistic,” one senior Western NGO official told me. “Here there hasn’t been much of an outrage.”
Some NGO officials were not surprised. In 2006 Mullah Omar had issued a twenty-nine-article order that did not prohibit attacks against NGOs, which meant that in practice it allowed them. A former Taliban government official from Logar explained to me that if the Taliban abducted Afghans working for NGOs, then surely they would abduct internationals. Abductions were used to help finance their operations or for prisoner exchanges with jailed Taliban members. In the case of the IRC women, he said, “they were foreigners, that’s reason enough.” He explained that the Taliban had cars with armed men on standby. When they heard that a high-profile SUV with tinted windows was coming, they waited on the main road to ambush them and then simply returned to the villages. The same thing had recently happened in Logar’s Muhammad Agha district, which was even closer to Kabul, on its southern border. The Taliban ambushed a police convoy and simply drove into their villages afterward, and the police didn’t dare follow them “because everyone likes their life.” The government remained in control of the main urban centers. But the Taliban had little need to take Kabul; it wasn’t relevant, and it never fell even in the Soviet days. “But once you leave the city, how safe do you feel?” a senior UN official asked.
During this visit to Afghanistan I spoke with Western diplomats, security experts, former mujahideen commanders, former Taliban officials, NGO officials, and senior UN officials. All agreed that “things are not going well,” that the situation was “incredibly bleak.” Many told me that “what we’ve got to try and make happen is a fresh start” or “we have to start from zero again.”
“I’m not optimistic,” a longtime NGO official told me. “You can’t help getting this increased uncomfortable feeling that you are waiting for something terrible to happen.” Taliban confidence reminded him of the mujahideen he had known in the Soviet days. Another senior Western NGO official who had recently left Afghanistan with his family spoke of a “loss of hope” and told me that “Afghans with money want to move their families to Dubai or India—they’re looking at an exit strategy. I’m increasingly unsure about the way forward except that we should start preparing our exit strategy. We’re not up to the task of success in Afghanistan.”
“At the center is an extremely weak president,” said a European ambassador, “a corrupt and ineffective Ministry of Interior, an army that will fight but has no command or control, a dysfunctional international alliance.” The “enlightened” Afghan elite who lead the government have little in common with the majority of rural Afghans, who are the sea where the Taliban swim. There had been small successes in health, education, rural development, roads, bridges, dams, and wells, but these were ephemeral, a senior development official told me, and it would be easy to blow them up. “From the beginning I’ve been very worried and negative,” the European ambassador told me. “The analysis of our intelligence people is that things are getting worse. CIA analysts are extremely gloomy and worried. The administration in Washington is not fit for the purpose.” But there was a divide between the analysts and the trigger pullers. The British army did not accept the negative prognosis provided by that country’s intelligence and continued to insist that things were not getting worse.
“Last month was the worst ever and the month before that was the worst ever until then,” a senior UN official told me in August 2008. “The UN has 50 or 55 percent access in this country—in some parts we have zero.” UN maps divided the country into green areas for safety and red areas for danger. But the maps were misleading, he said: “Herat is green, but only essential staff are allowed there and only in the capital of the province. It’s actually 97 percent off-limits. In Kandahar we have plenty of international staff, but they are all hiding behind the doors.” The UN had declared Afghanistan to be in phase three out of its five phases of safety, with five being the worst. But in practice it was treated as phase four. “It’s a political decision,” he said. “They cannot say it’s phase four because ‘we are winning the war, we are controlling the situation. ’ We are thinking things will get much worse. There is a political interest in not acknowledging the situation. If they recognize that there are humanitarian issues, then they have failed.”
Following the Taliban’s speedy defeat by the Americans in 2001, there was a wholesale handover of government to the warlords and no institution building. NATO forces were restricted to Kabul, and the focus of the mission was counterterrorism. The Americans built up the warlords and let them become entrenched. They would find weapons caches and give them to the warlords. Those who had been responsible for atrocities in the past were given renewed legitimacy. The parliamentary elections of 2005 then legalized the legitimacy the Americans had bestowed upon the warlords. The Parliament was led by warlords; they served as governors and ministers. “The American intervention issued blank checks to these guys,” one longtime NGO official told me. “They threw money, weapons, vehicles at them. Anyone willing to work with the Americans was welcome. The warlords haven’t abandoned their bad habits. They’re abusing people and filling their pockets.” When President Karzai appointed governors and police chiefs, his options were limited. American-backed warlords were already in charge in many places, and Karzai had no choice but to appoint these same people—and he began to lose credibility.
“I thought the Americans and international community could succeed in 2001,” a former mujahideen commander and Taliban government official told me. “I thought we would get rid of all these warlords, but in the first six months they supported the warlords and put them in power. Then there was hope for the elections, but
