The excuse the international community gave was that the Afghans would not tolerate a foreign military presence for long, just as they had not tolerated the British or Soviet occupations. Yet this was not an occupation, and the Afghan people were literally on their knees begging for a greater international presence so that their benighted country could be rebuilt. Afghans were savvy. They knew that more foreign troops meant greater security, and also a greater commitment to reconstructing the country. Moreover, the UN had pledged through the Bonn Agreement that a political process would put an elected Afghan government into the driver’s seat. Yet the lack of a larger Western military presence meant that the warlords rather than the government remained empowered. Afghans understood well enough that without security there could be no economic development, and if the West was refusing to provide that security, and was instead depending on warlords, then it was also insincere about rebuilding the country.
Security in the era of failed states meant more than just issues of life and death. People had to be given a chance to hold jobs, go to school, and feed their families without warlords stopping them. Providing this “human security” was just as important as winning the war against terrorists. At the same time, failed states such as Afghanistan and Somalia lacked the institutions of modern states—for example, an army, police, a bureaucracy, and a judiciary. This process of state building, as opposed to nation building, would take much longer and demand an even greater commitment from the West. Afghanistan had always had a weak, decentralized state where the ruler governed through consensus over a confederation of tribes and ethnic groups. Now a modern state system had to be created on the ruins of a destroyed country.
When the first G8 meeting on security-sector reform in Afghanistan was held on the sidelines of the Tokyo conference in 2002, the U.S. delegation was instructed by Washington to say that it would not get involved in nation building or peacekeeping except to help build a new Afghan army. The United States wanted nothing to do with rebuilding Afghanistan’s police or justice system. The European and Afghan leaders could not believe what they were hearing. Here was a superpower that had just conquered another country refusing to take responsibility for it. (The United States would do exactly the same in Iraq.) Even in building the army, the United States had to be constantly dragged to the table to speed up the process.
The most urgent issue in early 2002 was the need to deploy International Security Assistance Force troops outside Kabul. A crescendo of voices in Afghanistan and around the world, including the U.S. Congress, the British and European parliaments, and the UN, demanded an expansion of ISAF.
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They said the Karzai government was faltering because security outside Kabul was deteriorating due to warlordism, crime, and drugs. Lt.-Gen. Dan McNeill, the head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, grappled with the conundrum of how to extend a U.S. military presence outside Kabul without the need for too many troops or resources and, more important, without annoying Rumsfeld.
Tall, taciturn, difficult to fathom, and intellectually sharp, McNeill argued for a U.S. presence that would “produce the ISAF effect”—facilitate reconstruction and give people a sense of confidence, but without deploying thousands of soldiers.
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Thoughtful and a good listener, he was a thinking man’s general, fully aware of his own limited knowledge about Afghanistan. He held discussions with all the concerned foreign and local players, especially Brahimi. “We had nothing in any textbook that this is the way to do it—it’s all new for us,” McNeill told me in Bagram. It took months of discussion in Kabul and a prolonged debate within the Pentagon before his ideas won out.
As eight thousand U.S.-led Coalition soldiers began to celebrate the 2002 Christmas holiday season in their tented city at Bagram Air Base, an intense training exercise was under way that would see U.S. forces undertake their first redeployment since the end of the war. Their precooked Christmas lunch had been flown in from Germany, and the soldiers were entertained by movie stars, including comedian Robin Williams. In the giant tent holding McNeill’s office and command center, dozens of U.S. officers sitting at wooden trestle tables stared at computer screens through which they kept in touch with every U.S. Army base, foot patrol, and plane in the sky. In another tent a group of seventy soldiers, civil affairs officers, engineers, medics, and a State Department official was being trained to form the first Joint Regional Team, which would be deployed to Gardez in eastern Afghanistan. These teams, later renamed Provincial Reconstruction Teams, or PRTs, were to provide “the ISAF effect” outside Kabul.
The military PRTs was an attempt to institutionalize the joint CIA-SOF A teams that had spread out across the country and linked up with warlords to hunt for Osama bin Laden. Once the war was over, U.S. Army civil affairs officers had joined these A teams to carry out small reconstruction projects to win hearts and minds. For a time these teams were the only source of information and intelligence regarding what was going on outside Kabul. By the summer of 2002, 450 U.S. Army civil affairs officers were operating around Afghanistan, but it was an informal arrangement. Made up of 100 or more soldiers and civilians, the PRTs would carry out small reconstruction projects, help train the local Afghan administration, and create sufficient local security for Western and Afghan NGOs to work in the area. They would also gather intelligence about al Qaeda.
Despite the existence of a document setting forth what were to be their goals, there was to be no nationwide strategy for setting up the PRTs, nor any means to assess their performance. Each PRT would set its own priorities and goals in consultation with the local authorities and warlords.
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The success of the PRTs would depend on the Afghan government’s providing well-trained Afghan administrators who could work alongside the PRTs and improve local governance. However, Karzai failed to plan for the training of competent Afghan administrators, while the U.S. military failed to push him sufficiently. As a consequence, the PRTs fell back on relying on local warlords for security and administration.
Once this happened it was clear that the PRTs could not provide security to the Afghan population. They would not carry out any peacekeeping or peacemaking role, unlike ISAF in Kabul. PRT commanders were not allowed to mediate in conflicts between Afghans, or “green on green” conflicts. Western aid agencies and NGOs objected, fearing that while the military’s involvement in development activities blurred the principles of humanitarian relief, PRTs were offering no security to them or the population, and they did not want to be seen by the local people as helping the U.S. military, which would make them targets for the Taliban. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which according to its charter is forbidden to seek protection from the military, declined to work with the PRTs. Other international NGOs followed suit.
Despite these problems, by the summer of 2003 the PRTs expanded to six more locations—Bamiyan, in central Afghanistan; Mazar-e-Sharif and Kunduz, in the north; Herat, in the west; and Jalalabad and Kandahar, in the sensitive Pashtun belt. I visited several PRTs to see their worth. What they achieved in each location depended largely on how secure that region was and what kind of relationship the PRT commander had with the local warlord and the Afghan administration. In Bamiyan, the mountain stronghold of the Hazara people, the PRT had made a huge difference. It rebuilt schools, including Bamiyan University, which I had visited in the midst of the civil war in the 1990s, when it was housed in a couple of mud huts. The PRT was handed over to New Zealand soldiers in September 2003.
In the summer of 2003, British forces established a PRT in Mazar-e-Sharif that covered five provinces—an area the size of Scotland. The team mediated between Generals Atta and Dostum, trying to end their feuding, which had claimed two thousand Afghan lives since the end of the war. The British won the trust of many Afghans and showed the Americans that mediating “green on green” was not impossible, and was in fact essential if the PRTs were to be genuinely useful.
The U.S.-led PRTs in the Pashtun areas faced enormous local problems—envy, tribal feuds, land disputes, the drug trade, and competition among tribal elders to win the ear of the American officer. However, the U.S. commander had no mandate to help resolve local disputes, so he could do nothing except listen to the complaints. The Pentagon’s funding for the PRTs was inadequate, allocating just $18 million a year in reconstruction funds for all U.S. PRTs deployed—a drop in the bucket compared with what was needed and with what was being spent in Iraq. A U.S. PRT that arrived in October 2004 in the Taliban- and drug-infested Helmand province spent just $9.5 million in two years. A U.S. officer in Helmand told me that it took him three months of paperwork to get even the smallest project passed by the Pentagon.
PRTs should have been staffed by the best and the brightest in the U.S. military. Instead they were manned almost entirely by U.S. Army Reservists whose short tours of duty—six months or less—kept them from getting to know their region before they were on their way home. There were so many different models of PRTs that any overall control became difficult. U.S. PRTs comprised 79 soldiers and 3 civilians, but only 16 out of those 79 soldiers were allowed “outside the wire” to strike up a relationship with the local administration and people. The European countries varied their PRTs enormously. The Germans, for example, deployed as many as 375 men in Kunduz. Despite this, the UN considered the German PRT the least effective because of its lack of contact with the local population and its refusal to patrol the region at night.
When General McNeill handed over his command in May 2003 to Gen. John Vines, Washington declared, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that PRTs were the only acceptable means to expand U.S. authority around the country. Rumsfeld waxed lyrical about PRTs, saying he would establish them in Iraq as well. In fact, PRTs became the symbol of stability, and no U.S. official talked about the need for more troops even as the Taliban began their resurgence. On May 1, 2003, just hours after Bush stood under the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner on a U.S. warship signifying that the Iraq war was over and won, Rumsfeld was in Kabul declaring victory in Afghanistan. “If one looks at Afghanistan and even Iraq today, it’s very clear that we are and have been in a stabilization operation mode for some time,” said Rumsfeld. “We clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction activities. The bulk of the country today is permissive, it’s secure.” He criticized those demanding an expansion of ISAF as people “mostly on editorial boards, columnists and at the UN.”
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In the next few weeks, Rumsfeld was to eat his words as the Taliban launched their attacks.
By early 2005 there were nineteen PRTs in Afghanistan—fourteen of them manned by U.S. forces and the rest by ISAF and NATO countries. NATO assumed command of the ISAF force in Kabul in August 2003 and then took over from U.S. forces in the north, followed by the west, south, and east. In 2006, NATO promised to place a PRT in all of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces. However, the establishment by every European government of “national caveats” stipulating what its PRT force could and could not do was to paralyze NATO’s effectiveness in combating the Taliban.
The Pentagon had been stuck with the task of building a new Afghan army, but it seemed extremely reluctant to get on with the job. Rumsfeld was certainly not keen on the idea. He expected General Fahim to create an army, so why should the United States bother to invest in a new one?
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Fahim continued to be fêted by the Pentagon, while the CIA continued to pay lavish salaries to warlords and their militias. There was little incentive from either side to change this cozy relationship and build a professional Afghan army. The officer who tasked himself with the job of persuading the Pentagon to take its responsibility seriously was Maj.-Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, the head of the Office of Military Cooperation at the U.S. embassy in Kabul.
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As tall as a bean pole, Eikenberry tended to lean into you as he talked, as though a strong wind were blowing at his back. He had a surprisingly soft demeanor and abundant common sense, as a result of his expertise and time spent in China, about the problems of the developing world. At his urging in February 2002, Gen. Tommy Franks sent an assessment team from CENTCOM, led by his chief of staff, Maj.-Gen. Charles Campbell, to report on how a new Afghan army could be built. Campbell’s report stated bluntly that the U.S. reliance on warlord militias was impractical and insufficient. Eikenberry helped persuade the Pentagon to train a brigade-size infantry unit of eighteen hundred Afghan soldiers to be ready for the June meeting of the Loya Jirga. One hundred American trainers arrived to start the training, while Fahim and the Ministry of Defense were tasked with selecting the recruits. Meanwhile, ISAF began separately to train a six-hundred-man battalion that would “act as a Presidential Guard, the central symbol of a new Afghanistan and its security structure,” according to Gen. John McColl.
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The key to building a new army was making sure that no single ethnic group was overrepresented in it. General Fahim, the Tajik warlord, was tasked by the United States to provide recruits from all ethnic groups, but instead he sent in only his own Tajiks, and many of those failed to turn up. On the first day of ISAF’s training program, only 69 out of 630 recruits were present. Eikenberry knew that to rely on Fahim would prove to be a disaster and would create major ethnic tensions with the Pashtuns, who were being completely left out. Eikenberry persuaded both ISAF and the United States to recruit soldiers directly, with due regard for ethnic balance. Under new guidelines, 38 percent of all new recruits were to be Pashtun, 25 percent Tajik, 19 percent Hazara, 8 percent Uzbek, and 10 percent minority groups.
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The slow work of training the battalions then began.