warlords won. In 2002 the warlords were nervous about the justice process. Now they are in Parliament, ministers, deputy ministers. The main mistake was the agreement between the Northern Alliance and the U.S. before Bonn and the fall of the Taliban. In Kandahar drug gangs were appointed police chiefs and district administrators.”
The UN, the U.S. embassy, and Karzai undermined justice and refused to take the warlords on because it would threaten stability. They ended up fundamentally undermining the process of creating a government that would be legitimate in the eyes of the population, who at best had an ambivalent view of a government that had done nothing to protect them. At the same time the American-led coalition dropped bombs on Afghans and shot them on the roads at greater and greater numbers.
“The amnesty bill gave all members of Parliament and warlords immunity from prosecution,” the intelligence officer said. “Karzai was under pressure from the UN and international community to block it. I felt the ambience of Kabul change after the bill. There was increasing cockiness and a sense of impunity, corruption increased, there were more cash-in-transit robberies.” But many of these warlords had violated the terms of the amnesty by maintaining their private militias. “The issue isn’t who the combatants are,” he said. “It’s the elders and government members who have secret handshakes with local Taliban. That corruption is the absolute way of life here, from your smallest villager dealing with his melon crop to your minister.” As the situation worsened, “there is desperation setting in among the government: ‘Let’s shove this into our pockets, because it won’t last.’ Government departments demand bribes.”
The intelligence officer singled out the general who headed the Interior Ministry’s Criminal Investigation and Terrorism department. The increased abuses coincided with the general’s rise, he said. “He’s a psychopath, that’s the only way I can put it. He’s a mafia don, a mini Al Capone, a nasty piece of work, the scum of the earth, a fucking hoodlum.” Police harassment of foreigners also increased, he said. “The international community proved to be a paper tiger. The police will raid foreign companies, even security companies, and just steal everything: iPods, money, weapons, radios. They even tried arresting foreigners for not having passports on them, which is not illegal. Afghans connected to the government who have security companies wanted them out, they wanted their business. Afghan security teams were moonlighting as bank robbers. There is no respect for laws in this country whatsoever—it’s meaningless. In my view this whole governance piece is the most critical part, but you have utterly disgusting people in power. People might hate the Taliban, but they hate the government just as much. At least the Taliban have rules. This government, they’re parasites fucking with you on a deal. If you go through the legitimate process, you haven’t got a chance.”
A senior UN official agreed. “The police are highly corrupt,” he said. “They are at the center of the collapse of the state and the Karzai government. They are involved in everything from corruption to harassment. Locals feel alienation from police, and they have been the best promoters of the Taliban. The police make them support the Taliban.”
“The Afghan National Police are corrupt and parasitic on the population partly because they are not well paid or trained,” according to Nathaniel Fick of the new Washington-based think tank the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). “It’s corruption from need, not from greed. At three hundred dollars a month, a family with a couple of kids can live in rural Afghanistan. The average minimum monthly salary is three hundred a month; we pay them one hundred and twenty a month.” Fick added that the salary was set to increase to a paltry two hundred a month, but one way or another, “the police always get paid.” Logistics were also a problem. “We need paved roads,” he said. “These guys get paid when the paymaster travels down a gravel road with an American escort with the money. So guys in rural outposts don’t get paid, so they become parasitic, and the circle goes around.”
Fick is a former Marine officer who served in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002 and in Iraq in 2003. In 2007 he was an instructor at the counterinsurgency academy in Kabul. He was also portrayed in a positive light as the platoon leader in
The Americans and their allies arrogantly presumed they could create a state out of nothing in a fissiparous country with barely any roads linking different regions to one another, and then tried to make it a strong centralized state at that. In the beginning, overcome with a sense of victory, they ignored the Taliban and Pakistan. The Taliban were not part of the peace process in Bonn because the Americans didn’t want them there. Pakistan’s role was neglected at the beginning of the power-sharing arrangement. Most of the members in Karzai’s first cabinet had close to ties to India, archenemy of Pakistan, or to Iran, and there were too few Pashtuns. The Pakistanis felt alienated, and they invested in the Taliban to regain influence and power.
“The way people are treated in Afghanistan makes you feel disgusted about your own existence,” a senior UN humanitarian official told me. “For almost thirty years, Afghans lived in extreme flux. They are the most resilient and courageous population. They are skilled survivors. I can see the return of symptoms I saw before the fall of the Taliban: uncertainty, you are with several sides at once. This is everywhere—Kabul too.” A European ambassador added that even though Afghans don’t want the Taliban to rule, they will back a winner. “They don’t want to back the government, and in eighteen months’ time, the Taliban will ride back into the village and behead anybody who has made a deal with the coalition,” he said.
Living in a country with few resources and a legacy of thirty years of war has made Afghans the ultimate survivors. Pashtun elders have to negotiate competing claims and obligations as well as competition for resources and complex identities—their tribe, their region, the governor. (Is his tribe allied or at odds with ours? Was he with the Taliban before or opposed to them? Which party was he with in the ’80s?) The elders can get resources from the government, the Americans, the Taliban, drug lords, and neighboring countries. If an elder meets with the Americans, he will have to answer to the Taliban that night. If he refuses to meet with the Americans, the Americans will perceive his village as hostile and might bomb it. There could be a blood feud with a neighboring town or tribe because somebody was killed as a result of competition over land or water resources.
Even the reform of the Afghan army, of which the Americans were so proud, was fraught with problems. The army was still predominantly Tajik, so when it went to the south it was confronted with serious linguistic problems that may cause ethnic tensions in the future. The Afghan army relies on the support of U.S. forces and airpower; it will always require an American presence. It cannot function on its own. The Americans decided to expand the Afghan army from eighty thousand to one hundred twenty thousand, but this would take another five years (time they don’t have).
In August 2008 the American-led coalition, the UN, and the Karzai government were pinning their hopes on the 2009 presidential elections in Afghanistan. But a senior UN official told me, “You can’t fix the insurgency with an election. It’s a socio-economic phenomenon that goes well beyond the border of Afghanistan.” A British intelligence officer told me, “The Taliban are only too happy to keep Karzai in power. He’s impotent in every single way. He made a lot of deals to get in power and stay in power, he’s all about his own political survival, he’s a weak man who refused to stand up to the bullies. We need a clean individual who these other individuals can’t nipple-tweak. We need a guy who can say, ‘All the old deals are off.’”
Often very little distinguishes a tribe or village that decides to align itself with the government from one that decides to join the army or support the Taliban and send its sons to fight the Americans. It might be a contract, a personal dispute, a relative on one side or the other. “A lot of this is about power and local influence,” the intelligence officer said. “Parts of society will be poor and powerless if they accept Karzai’s order. They want to achieve status and influence. If they accept legitimate structures, they’re accepting their doom. A lot can be explained in Darwinian terms. Across nature you see alternative strategies. Fighting is an alternative strategy: you can be Mr. Big in your community.”
In 2006 the Taliban fought the Americans in conventional engagements. “The Taliban were being wiped out in huge numbers,” the intelligence officer said. “They were going at it jihad-style. So the Taliban went for asymmetry.” The Taliban were not experienced in insurgent warfare at the beginning of the occupation, but they showed themselves able to learn and adapt and even use technologies they had previously abhorred. They had a harder time accessing urban areas, so they made deals with criminal gangs. “The saving grace will be the winter,” said one senior NGO official. “They can’t move in the winter.” But in January 2008 the Taliban attacked the five-star
