In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (24 page)

In the Philippines, the weak state under Ferdinand Marcos contributed to the insurgency beginning in 1972. The army was “rotten to the core” and rampantly corrupt.
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Marcos himself was notorious for his graft. He dismantled the democratic structures bequeathed to the country by the United States and reduced an already-poor country to near-insolvency.
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In Lebanon, a delicate sectarian balance led to the emergence of a weak state in the 1970s, which fueled competition among the three leading religious communities—the Maronites, Sunnis, and Shi’ites—triggering an insurgency that lasted from 1975 1991.
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There are dozens of examples—from Bosnia and Georgia in Europe to Mozambique in Africa. In many cases, the states were so weak that they could not establish order in peripheral geographic areas. In each case, these gaps were filled by insurgents. In Cuba, Fidel Castro and his guerrillas used the Sierra Maestra Mountains as a base of support
to train new recruits, rearm and regroup, and prepare for forays into the countryside.
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Again, in Peru, Shining Path units formed in Ayacucho, a rural area that had historically received little government attention and control. In Ayacucho, a Peruvian newspaper editor said, “There are no liberated areas, only abandoned areas.”
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In Congo, the insurgency that began in 1960 in Katanga Province was based on fundamental structural weaknesses inherited from Congo’s Belgian colonial legacy. To the degree that any state structure existed, it was “virtually improvis[ed] from scratch” and essentially a replica of the Belgian constitution that had been revised for the Congo only five months earlier.
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The constitutional framework of the government collapsed less than three months after independence. When Angola became independent in 1975, it inherited a weak state structure that suffered from a lack of adequate governmental capacity, bureaucratic structures, and governmental experience. Nearly all of the skilled labor in the country was Portuguese, and 90 percent of the Portuguese fled the country before independence. This loss of skilled labor led to plummeting agricultural exports and the collapse of the service sector.
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These structural weaknesses directly contributed to the rise of an insurgency.

The reverse is also true: strong governance can prevent insurgencies. There was a good possibility of an insurgency in Kenya in the 1980s because of intense ethnic antagonisms, electoral violence, and a coup attempt in August 1982. But the relative strength of the state helped avert major violence.
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Despite deep concerns about insurgencies arising in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were none. One factor was the rise of strong, though undemocratic, governments that were able to control their minority (and majority) populations.

Insurgent Motivations

If weak and ineffective governance served as a precondition, what motivated insurgent groups to fight? Some have argued that the ethnic grievances averted in some former Soviet republics were responsible for
insurgent motivations. Ethnic ties, it is claimed, are stronger, more rigid, and more durable than the social ties in ordinary social or political groups.
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Consequently, ethnic combatants are more committed than other groups and less likely to make negotiated concessions. The Afghan insurgency seems to sustain the theory that ethnic violence is U-shaped. In other words, it is less likely to occur in highly homogeneous and highly heterogeneous countries and more likely in countries (such as Afghanistan) with an ethnic majority and numerous small ethnic minorities.
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In addition, hypernationalist rhetoric and real atrocities can harden identities to the point that cross-ethnic political appeals are unlikely to be made and even less likely to be heard. As a result, restoring civil politics in multiethnic states shattered by war is difficult because the war itself destroys the possibilities for cooperation.
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Following the overthrow of the Taliban government in 2001, Afghanistan’s ethnic mix was approximately 50 percent Pashtun, with smaller percentages of Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and other ethnic groups.
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Such diversity, this argument assumes, created competing ethnic power centers, even among Northern Alliance forces.
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As early as 2001, the CIA had “detected serious rifts and competition between the Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks.” One assessment reported: “Afghanistan truly is a zero sum game. Anytime anyone advances all others consider this to be at their expense.”
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Consequently, many have assumed that the insurgency was caused by interethnic grievances, especially among Afghanistan’s Pashtuns, who believed they were being marginalized by northern ethnic groups.
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The United States and Afghan governments, according to Afghanistan expert Thomas H. Johnson, inevitably faced “an extremely difficult challenge of unifying a fragmented society and fostering the development of a national identity because each ethnic group [attempted] to gain a foothold in government often at the expense of other groups.” Since the “attempt at entering government is taken from an ethnic approach, rather than a national one, the fragmentation of society will continue until either one dominant ethnic group controls all of the governmental power or ethnic politics makes way for increased internal conflict.”
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But there is little evidence to support this argument. The Taliban and its network were not motivated to fight because of ethnic concerns. Nor did the population support the Taliban and other groups because of ethnic ties. In fact, there were deep divisions among the Pashtun ethnic majority about the Taliban. The Taliban had support from a number of Pashtun Ghilzai tribes, as well as such Durrani tribes as the Nurzai and Ishaqzai in southern Afghanistan. But most Durrani Pashtuns did not support the Taliban, nor did a number of other eastern and southern Pashtun groups. Nor was ethnicity a major factor in how Afghans voted. Hamid Karzai won the 2004 presidential elections with support in Pashtun provinces as well as in non-Pashtun northern provinces such as Balkh and Kunduz.
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In a 2004 Election Day survey during the presidential elections, only 2 percent of Afghans said they voted for a candidate based on ethnicity.
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In addition, public-opinion polls conducted in Afghanistan suggested that ethnic grievances were not a major concern of the Afghan population. An opinion poll conducted by the U.S. State Department, for example, found that most Hazaras, Pashtuns, Tajiks, and Uzbeks did not view ethnicity as a dividing factor. Instead, a large majority (85 percent) thought it was essential for Afghanistan to remain one nation. The data show that most Afghans did not see “their country headed toward an irresolvable ethnic clash” but rather endorsed a “unified, multi-ethnic state.”
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Other opinion polls found that most people identified themselves as Muslims and then Afghans, but rarely by ethnicity.
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Even among disaffected Afghans most likely to support the Taliban, ethnicity does not seem to have been a major concern. In a 2004 public-opinion poll conducted by the Asia Foundation, for example, Afghans reported being most concerned about governance failures.
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This finding was supported in later Asia Foundation polls.
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Rather than exacerbating tensions, the Afghan government successfully balanced the country’s ethnic groups through representation in the national government. Even though Tajik and Uzbek military forces were the leaders in the victory over the Taliban in 2001, Afghan representatives at the December 2001 Bonn Conference chose Karzai, a Pashtun,
as their interim leader. James Dobbins, the U.S. envoy at the Bonn Conference, recalled that negotiators made a concerted effort to compose “a balanced cabinet, balanced among political factions, ethnicities, and gender.”
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Over the next several years, the U.S. government and President Karzai consciously worked to establish ethnic balance at the level of ministers and deputy ministers, who were ordered in turn to consider ethnic diversity when appointing governors and police chiefs.
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Insurgent leaders were primarily motivated by religious ideology, rather than by ethnic grievances or profits from drugs or other commodities. An ideology is an organized collection of ideas—or, as the French Enlightenment philosopher Count Antoine Destutt de Tracy once noted, it is the “science of ideas.” For insurgents, an ideology provides a normative vision of how society should be structured, including its political system.
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As has been noted, the Taliban were motivated by a radical interpretation of Sunni Islam derived from Deobandism. The leaders of most other insurgent groups—from the Haqqani network to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami, al Qa’ida, and Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammad—had strong religious motivations to fight. A Taliban field manual titled
Military Teachings: For the Preparation of Mujahideen
lucidly argued that “in a situation where infidels and their crooks are ruling the world, it is the prime duty of all the Muslims to take arms and crush those who are bent upon crushing the Muslims throughout the world…. This is the best time to take on the usurpers and occupants of our holy land.
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Together, the leaders of these and other groups wanted to overthrow Hamid Karzai’s government and replace it with a regime that adopted their own extreme version of Sunni Islam.

In short, there was a supply of disgruntled locals because of the collapse of Afghan governance, and a demand for recruits by ideologically motivated insurgent leaders. This combination proved deadly for the beginning of Afghanistan’s insurgency. Over time, too little support to the government from the United States and its allies, and too much support to insurgents from outside states and the international jihadi community, contributed to these problems.

The Need for Effective Police

Each of these insurgencies, from the Philippines to Afghanistan, necessarily begs the question of who should have kept order in these countries in the first place. While military and paramilitary forces play a key role in maintaining safety and security for society, the police are perhaps the most critical component for ensuring the safety of the people. They are the government’s primary arm focused on internal-security matters. Unlike the military, the police usually have a permanent presence in cities, towns, and villages; a better understanding of the threat environment in these areas; and better intelligence. This, of course, makes them a direct target of insurgent forces, who often try to kill or infiltrate them.
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Nevertheless, an effective police force is critical to establishing law and order. Government military forces may be able to penetrate and garrison an insurgent area and, if well sustained, may reduce guerrilla activity. But once the situation in an area becomes untenable for insurgents, they will simply transfer their activity to another area and the problem will remain unresolved.
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A viable indigenous police force with a permanent presence in urban and rural areas is a critical component of counterinsurgency.

Without a strong local police force, warlords and political entrepreneurs often flourish and finance their private militias through criminal activity, including trafficking in arms and drugs. Simple banditry—fueled by military desertion, the breakdown of social structures, and demobilization of government forces—may be endemic and crime will increase.
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In Afghanistan, too little outside support for the Afghan government and too much support for insurgents further undermined Afghan governance. This combination proved deadly for the onset—and continuation—of the insurgency. Among the first Afghan institutions to teeter, much like during the Soviet period, were the police and the other security services.

BEGINNING IN 2005, Afghanistan’s fragile national-security architecture began to crumble. The Taliban and other insurgent groups began to mount more aggressive offensive operations, and Afghan forces proved incapable of counterattacking and protecting the population. To better understand this development, Amrullah Saleh, the head of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), commissioned a study on the state of the insurgency. Saleh was a Panjshiri Tajik who had been a trusted protégé of Ahmed Shah Massoud and had worked closely with the CIA before the September 11 attacks. He spoke excellent English and wore neatly pressed Western suits. Barely thirty years old in 2004, when Karzai appointed him to run Afghanistan’s spy agency, Saleh was a reformer with a reputation for great efficiency. He “had a real impact” on NDS, recalled the CIA’s Gary Schroen, “moving it forward with reorganization and restructuring, instituting training at all levels, establishing a recruitment program based on talent rather than ethnic or family background, and dramatically improving morale and performance.”
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Saleh based the study, titled
Strategy of Insurgents and Terrorists in Afghanistan,
on intelligence reports from NDS stations across Afghanistan, reports from informants in Afghanistan and Pakistan, detainee interrogations, meetings with Taliban leaders, open-source information, and interviews with Afghan National Army commanders and a
variety of national and local officials. It was designed to be the most comprehensive study of the current situation yet assembled. The study found that the Afghan police and army forces were failing in their primary mission on a monumental level. “When villagers and rural communities seek protection from the police, either it arrives late or arrives in a wrong way.” U.S. forces, still operating at “light-footprint” levels, could not fill the vacuum. The lack of security began to undermine local support, and many who had cooperated with the government were killed, intimidated into silence, or fled. “Those who are collaborating with the government or coalition forces are now forced to move their families to the cities fearing attacks from the Taliban. This exodus of government informants and collaborators from the villages is a welcome development for the Taliban, insurgents and terrorists.”

The result was that increasing amounts of territory fell into the hands of the Taliban or allied groups. Saleh’s report continued: “The villages are gradually emptied of pro-government political forces and individuals. These rural areas become sanctuaries for the Taliban and the population is left with no choice but to become sympathizers of the insurgents.” In these pockets, he found exactly what we might expect: The Taliban had begun to establish a shadow government, including an administrative structure and courts. Lamenting these disturbing results, Saleh wrote:

A Monopoly of Force?

It was no surprise that the police weren’t living up to expectations. Afghan police had not received formal training for at least two
decades.
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Germany, which had sent special forces to Afghanistan in late 2001 and had hosted the Bonn Conference, had volunteered to assess and rebuild the police. The initial German fact-finding mission in January 2002 discovered that “the police force is in a deplorable state just a few months after the dissolution of the Taliban regime” and that “there is a total lack of equipment and supplies. No systematic training has been provided for around 20 years. At least one entire generation of trained police officers is missing.”
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The first team of German police advisers arrived in March 2002 to train police instructors at their academy in Kabul. Officers, mostly inspectors and lieutenants, started a three-year course, taking classes in human rights, tactical operations, narcotics investigations, traffic, criminal investigations, computer skills, and Islamic law.
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By 2003, however, officials at the U.S. State and Defense Departments and the White House became increasingly agitated about the German approach. Many argued that it was far too slow, trained too few police officers, and was seriously underfunded. As one high-level U.S. official told me: “When it became clear that they were not going to provide training to lower-level police officers, and were moving too slowly with too few resources, we decided to intervene to prevent the program from failing.”
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German assessments of progress in rebuilding the police noted that a paltry “17 German police officers—men and women from both our federal and state police forces—are advising the Afghan Transitional Authority on this challenging task of crucial importance for the country’s democratic future.”
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One can hardly blame U.S. government officials for thinking the Germans were not serious about training. In 2003, Donald Rumsfeld wrote to CPA Administrator Paul Bremer and General John Abizaid, commander of U.S. Central Command, scoffing, “Colin Powell told me this morning that the Germans have offered to help train police in Iraq. I mentioned that I thought they had a done a pretty slow job in Afghanistan.”
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After supplementing German efforts, the United States reorganized the program to train recruits at a central facility in Kabul, as
well as at regional centers in Kandahar, Mazar-e-Sharif, Gardez, and Jalalabad. The State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) oversaw the entire program. Since the end of the Cold War, INL had played an increasingly prominent role in civilian police efforts abroad. It had some administrative, budgetary, and managerial capacity to organize and run a policing program, but it had no police to deploy and no significant operational capabilities. Consequently, it contracted the private security firm DynCorp International, headquartered in the leafy Washington suburb of Falls Church, Virginia, to build facilities and help train the police in Afghanistan.
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DynCorp emerged out of two companies formed in 1946: California Eastern Airways and Land-Air, Inc. In 1951, California Eastern acquired Land-Air, and over the next several decades the company changed its name several times, settling on DynCorp in 1987. They were largely involved in providing mission support and repair to U.S. military aircraft. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the increase in U.S. stability operations in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, DynCorp broadened its scope to police training and security protection. DynCorp was not alone. With military costs rising and an increased number of operations abroad, the U.S. government began to rely on a growing list of companies—including Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI) and Blackwater—to provide such security functions as police training, protective security, convoy protection, border enforcement, and even drug eradication in failing states.

For their mission in Afghanistan, DynCorp recruited retired U.S. police officers, as well as some active members of state and local police forces, to serve as the U.S. contingents of civilian police teams. From the beginning, senior U.S. military officials had worried that the INL program was not doing a good job of creating more competent Afghan police, and others were concerned that many of the DynCorp advisers had had little experience training police from a Third World tribal society such as Afghanistan. This led to growing tension
between the Defense and State Departments in Washington and Afghanistan. The relationship became so bad at times that key INL personnel were not allowed without an escort onto Camp Eggers in Kabul, the headquarters of U.S. police training efforts.

Afghan government officials also began to grow increasingly concerned about the shoddy state of the police and the unwillingness of the international community to make police training a priority. For example, Minister of Interior Jalali met with National Security Adviser Rice in Washington to push for police reform. He pleaded with her, arguing that the police “should be the front line in protecting highways, borders, and villages.” In September 2003, during Donald Rumsfeld’s five-day swing through Afghanistan and Iraq, Jalali lobbied the secretary to focus on the police. In a 2004 meeting in Berlin with Zalmay Khalilzad and German Interior Minister Otto Schily, Jalali suggested that the international community “should adopt the Balkans model of policing,” which would require the use of competent, high-level police such as the
carabinieri
and the
gendarmerie
to train and mentor Afghan police, as they had done in Bosnia and Kosovo.
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But U.S. policymakers were more interested in building the Afghan National Army than in training police. And German policymakers were reluctant to increase their commitment to police training.

By 2004, there was growing impatience in the White House and the Department of Defense that the State Department effort was failing in the police effort. Rumsfeld wrote a series of “snowflakes”-short, pithy memos that he frequently sent to senior Pentagon officials—expressing concern that the police program was undermining U.S. and broader NATO counterinsurgency efforts. His letters expressed a profound lack of confidence in the State Department’s police-training capability.

In 2004, Lieutenant General David Barno held a series of video teleconferences (VTCs) with Secretary Rumsfeld, telling him that “police training needed to be done more systematically. They needed a strategy, he said, for what the end state needed to look like, and what
kind of resources were needed to get there.”
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According to Barno, Secretary Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, by then the secretary of state, finally agreed to get the Defense Department more directly involved in police training, but only in the spring of 2005. This process had taken at least a year. Barno, Khalilzad, Rumsfeld, and other U.S. officials, including Under Secretary Douglas Feith, were supportive of this shift. But Robert Charles, assistant secretary at INL, who had developed a reputation as hardheaded and abrasive among those who worked with him inside and outside the State Department, blocked the shift. Turf concerns between State and Defense may have partly caused the resistance, since INL was the lead U.S. agency for training foreign police. Whatever the cause, the Department of Defense only became involved after Charles departed.
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Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, who succeeded Barno in May 2005 as commander of Combined Forces Command—Afghanistan, is a strikingly intelligent career soldier who earned master’s degrees from Harvard University in East Asian Studies and Stanford University in political science. He also served as a National Security Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Nora Bensahel, who later went on to Harvard University’s John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and the RAND Corporation, was in the same PhD class at Stanford University before Eikenberry was called back to the Pentagon in 1994. “He was very smart,” Bensahel recalled, “and brought a tremendous amount to the program. Not only could he talk international relations theory, he was a practitioner as well.”
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But some of his staff also found him confrontational. In a meeting with Afghan Minister of Defense Abdul Rahim Wardak in 2005, for example, he capped a testy conversation by saying: “Minister Wardak, I know your army better than you do.”

Eikenberry appointed Major General Robert Durbin in late 2005 to head the office in charge of training the Afghan police and army, which was saddled with an unwieldy name: Combined Security Transition Command—Afghanistan. Durbin had a reputation as a tough soldier who could also be thoughtful and reflective. Arriving in Kabul
in January 2006, he found the police in terrible shape; the United States had people with the wrong skill sets in key positions, and their tours were only four to six months. “I honestly believed I could change the police force in a few months,” noted Durbin. “After a number of months, however, I began to realize that it would take over a decade. The amount of institutional change needed was immense.”
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It took Durbin until March 2006 to put together a plan to staff, equip, and train the Afghan National Police. By then, he had concluded that the United States needed to implement a program for the police similar to the one they had put in place for the Afghan National Army.

Durbin continued to develop the police plan until June 2006, when he was asked to put a price tag on this effort. After going back and forth with Eikenberry, the two agreed to request a total of $8.6 billion for the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police: $5.9 billion for fiscal year 2007 and $2.7 billion for fiscal year 2008. Roughly two-thirds of the money they requested was for new equipment for the police. The amount was astounding, more than the gross domestic product of about fifty countries.
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Through dogged efforts over several months, Durbin finally managed to get the budget approved, despite the initial displeasure of Secretary Rumsfeld.

Durbin also ramped up efforts to build an effective Ministry of Interior. He secured the assistance of the private contractor MPRI, which helped build personnel and logistics systems. MPRI helped the ministry formulate the budget, pay the soldiers, and perform other basic functions, but they also made sure the system was “Afghanized” by working with key Afghans in the ministry. Durbin’s plan envisioned three years to build what he called “base functionality” in the Ministry of Interior, since it was starting from scratch. In August 2006, he identified fifteen key systems and focused on the top five: personnel, finance, logistics, training management, and communications. Durbin told me, “We started at the top of the ministry and worked our way down.” His goal was to create full operating capacity within a year.
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