The entirety of 2007 was spent with the United States demanding more troops and equipment from NATO countries, and NATO stalling. In January 2007, at a meeting in Brussels, the United States asked for more troops from NATO countries, especially troops that could be used on the front against the Taliban. Once again, European nations refused to oblige. The Germans and the French, with the largest armies in Europe, were the worst offenders. Both had large troop contingents in safe areas in Afghanistan—the Germans in the north, and the French around Kabul. After much browbeating, Germany finally agreed to allow six Tornado aircraft to carry out reconnaissance surveys in the south.
When NATO members met again, in Quebec in April, just as the Taliban summer offensive started, Robert Gates was even blunter about demanding more troops and helicopters. He reminded his European counterparts that at a time when the U.S. military was overstretched because of Iraq, it still had fifteen thousand troops as part of the ISAF-NATO force, plus another eleven thousand troops deployed as part of Operation Enduring Freedom hunting down terrorists. On the other hand, twenty-six NATO countries and eleven other allies were contributing a total of thirty-five thousand troops.
The lack of an overall NATO response to helping out in Afghanistan led those countries fighting in the south to react as they saw fit. In the space of one week, in April 2007, Canada’s twenty-five-hundred-strong forces in Kandahar province lost nine soldiers. The opposition Liberal Party leader Stéphane Dion demanded that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his minority Conservative government commit to withdrawing all Canadian troops by the scheduled February 2009. The Canadians had lost fifty-four soldiers, a quarter of all foreign troops killed in Afghanistan and third only to the United States and Britain in number of casualties. Public anger in Canada against the deployment was rising daily. An independent team commissioned by the Ottawa government recommended in January 2008 that if no NATO forces were prepared to join Canada in Kandahar, then all Canadian troops should be withdrawn and redeployed to a more peaceful zone by February 2009. By then, Canada had lost seventy-eight soldiers. For several weeks Harper tried to persuade European nations to help Canada, but failing to raise any attention, he declared on February 21, 2008, that Canada would withdraw its troops from Kandahar by 2011.
Similarly, the sixteen hundred Dutch troops based in the southern province of Uruzgan were prepared to fight, but their mission was defined by the Dutch government as limited to peacekeeping and reconstruction. In mid-June 2007, after three days of intense fighting in Uruzgan between the Taliban and Dutch troops in which fifty Taliban and nearly one hundred Afghan civilians were killed, the Dutch public began to take serious umbrage at the deployment. By August 2007, only 45 percent of the Dutch supported the Afghan mission, and by December 3 the government had announced that it would pull back its troops by 2010. The public and media debates in Canada and the Netherlands were also about the huge cost of such military missions for these small countries. The Dutch deployment to Uruzgan for two years cost $1.4 billion. From 2001 to late 2007, Canada had spent a total of $6.3 billion on its deployments in Afghanistan. Both governments were also spending large sums on aid projects for the Afghan people.
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There were also tensions within NATO’s fighting forces. As a result of the heavy fighting in Helmand, borne largely by the 7,800 British troops deployed there, tensions arose between the British and the Americans on strategy and tactics. The U.S. military resented Britain’s secret dealings with and attempts to divide the Taliban, as well as the British refusal to accept U.S. requests to carry out aerial spraying of the opium crop. U.S. military officers began privately to disparage their British counterparts, while British officers blamed the Americans for their shoot-from-the-hip philosophy. The biggest bone of contention was why the British had allowed the Taliban to keep control of Musa Qala, a key terrorist training center and drug-producing city. Musa Qala was held by the Taliban for a year and then finally retaken by British and U.S. forces in December 2007.
In fact, the real problem was that Helmand province was critical to the war effort and affected all other NATO forces. It was the center of Taliban activity, a major Taliban gateway into southern Afghanistan for manpower, food, and ammunition from their bases in Pakistan and for the all-important flowering drug trade that provided growing income for the Taliban and al Qaeda war chest. In 2007 there was a 45 percent increase in production of opium in Helmand—the total opium harvest increased from 6,100 tons in 2006 to 8,200 tons in 2007, while the cultivated land area for opium increased by 17 percent across the country. The British were responsible for drug control across Afghanistan, so the lack of progress in Helmand was acutely embarrassing, especially when thirteen provinces in the north were declared drug-free by the UN, compared to only six in 2006.
By December 2007, Robert Gates became more belligerent, telling the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee that NATO had failed to deliver three battalions of troops, twenty helicopters, and thirty-five hundred trainers for the ANA, as it had promised to do. He called for overhauling NATO’s Afghan strategy over the next three years, shifting NATO’s focus from one primarily of rebuilding to one of waging “a classic counterinsurgency” against a resurgent Taliban. “I am not ready to let NATO off the hook in Afghanistan at this point,” Gates told the committee.
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He could not have been more serious. Taliban attacks were up 27 percent from 2006, and there had been a 60 percent increase in attacks in Helmand despite the large British presence, which seemed to attract rather than deter Taliban strikes. However, the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan remained far less than that to Iraq. Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admitted in the same hearing that “in Afghanistan, we do what we can. In Iraq, we do what we must. There is a limit to what we can apply to Afghanistan.” This message was pounced on by Afghans and Europeans to show that as far as the United States was concerned, Afghanistan came a distant second to Iraq. Nevertheless, Poland promised to send four hundred troops in addition to the twelve hundred soldiers already in Paktika province, while the United States said it would make up the shortfall by sending three thousand U.S. Marines for a short duration, including one thousand trainers for the ANA. There were now fifty-six thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Nobody, however, offered to help out the Canadians or the Dutch.
NATO was not the only problem. The international community was failing to coordinate its military and security strategy with its development architecture, and there had been a breakdown in relations with the Afghan government and Karzai. Nobody seemed to know what the other was doing, even though several bodies had been set up ostensibly to coordinate strategy between all the players. In July 2006 the Policy Action Group, composed of leading donors and generals in Kabul and chaired by Karzai, had been established to meet every month and decide upon policy priorities, but it became increasingly ineffective. London’s Afghanistan Compact had set up the Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board, or JCMB, which was tasked with overseeing that the Compact’s targets, both from the Kabul government and the international community, were met. However, the JCMB failed to hold anyone accountable for shortcomings or for targets not met.
The problems in Kabul were compounded by the sheer number of actors there. Thirty-nine countries were now involved in contributing troops to ISAF in Kabul. More than sixty large donor institutions and dozens of small NGOs were supposed to be coordinating with the Afghan government, but frequently were not. Three heavyweight civilian ambassadors, representing the UN, NATO, and the European Union, were supposed to coordinate their assistance and strategy with the government. Instead, coordination was noticeable only by its absence.
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Things were getting worse, not better, and nobody seemed to be able to find a way out of the morass.
In 2007 the Taliban had mounted fewer human wave assaults on secure NATO positions than they had in 2006. Instead, they had stepped up suicide attacks—in 2007, 137 suicide attacks led to 1,730 casualties, compared to 141 such attacks and 1,100 casualties in 2006. In 2007, there were 42 suicide attacks in Kandahar province alone. Some of the deadliest attacks took place in Kabul; in one such incident, a suicide bomber boarded an Afghan army bus in late September 2007 and killed 31 ANA recruits. One of the worst bombings took place in Baghlan, on November 6, when a suicide bomber killed 72 people, including 5 members of parliament and Syed Mustafa Kazemi, the brilliant former commerce minister who had opened trade links through Iran. Fifty-nine of the victims were the children who had been waiting to receive him.
The Taliban brought the war into the heart of the Western policymaking process when a group of suicide attackers stormed into the Serena Hotel in Kabul on January 14, 2008, and killed six people, including a Norwegian journalist; the Norwegian foreign minister, Jonas Garh Soere, escaped the massacre by hiding in the basement. Such tactical successes emboldened the insurgency, further cowered the population, who were in awe of the Taliban, and forced NATO and Afghan security forces to deploy more static guards rather than go after the insurgents.
The Taliban also targeted the police in 2007, killing some nine hundred. Nearly forty aid workers were killed that year, while another seventy-six were abducted. Such attacks began to have a major impact on education, as nearly six hundred schools in the south were closed down, sending three hundred thousand children home on account of the lack of security.
The Taliban also seemed to be winning the propaganda war. Tens of thousands of tapes and DVDs produced by the Taliban media outlets Omat [Nation] Productions and Manbaul-Jihad (Source of Jihad) were sold for a few pennies in the bazaars of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Al Qaeda’s own production company, al-Sahab, issued eighty-nine messages in 2007, one every three days, or double the rate it had issued them in 2006.
In the short term there seemed to be some improvement in intelligence sharing among Pakistan’s ISI and NATO and U.S. intelligence. Several key Taliban commanders based in Balochistan were killed. Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Usmani, the former commander of the Taliban’s Second Corps, was killed in a targeted British air strike in Helmand on December 23, 2006, as he traveled from Pakistan. In March 2007, Mullah Obaidullah Akhund, one of the two senior deputies of Mullah Omar, was arrested in Quetta. It was later reported that the ISI had freed him in a hostage exchange for Pakistani soldiers being held by Baitullah Mahsud.
Mullah Dadullah, the much-reviled commander of southern Afghanistan who had kicked off the insurgency in 2003 by killing a Red Cross worker and who had committed multiple atrocities since then, was finally killed on May 13, 2007, in a firefight in Garmser, in Helmand province. He had been tracked by Britain’s Special Boat Service in Quetta and killed after he left the city. On August 30, 2007, Mullah Barader Akhund, the former Taliban deputy defense minister, was killed in Sangin, in Helmand province. Some of these commanders had fallen out with Mullah Omar and the ISI, and it was rumored in Taliban circles in Quetta that in fact they had been “delivered up,” or betrayed, by the ISI so that they could be killed by NATO, allowing Pakistan to show its sincerity about catching Taliban commanders. The truth is not known, because privately and publicly, the Americans praised the ISI for being more cooperative.
NATO kept boasting that it won every battle its soldiers fought. This was true because of the overwhelming firepower NATO forces could bring to bear in a single theater. However, NATO had no overarching strategy for winning or for transforming military victories into development, reconstruction, good governance, and political strategies. Nobody had yet come up with a solution to the major problem of how to reconstruct a nation in the midst of an insurgency—something that was most evident in the south. Admiral Mullen described the NATO-ISAF command as “plagued by shortfalls in capability and capacity, and constrained by a host of caveats that limit its ability.”
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It was this lack of strategy that Gates was trying to get NATO to address, but it was not certain if the Europeans were refusing to listen or were just plain tired of another lecture by the now lame-duck and much-disliked Bush administration.
The Taliban were seeking to outlast NATO, and they were succeeding; for as in Iraq, as long as the Afghan government failed to create effective governance and provide services to the people, the Taliban were winning by default. The outcome of the fighting was becoming less relevant because, even when faced with a string of tactical defeats, the Taliban were expanding their influence and base areas and cowing more of the population. Corruption alone was creating enormous misgivings among the people and making Karzai hugely unpopular. “If nothing is done about corruption, Afghanistan’s development prospects will be severely threatened and undermined,” warned William Byrd of the World Bank. “Corruption is profoundly inimical to state building.”
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Moreover, even in 2008 the World Bank estimated that up to 30 percent of all aid was being wasted by the donors.
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However, the economy was not entirely moribund. The U.S. Geological Survey showed that Afghans were sitting on a gold mine of natural resources, with huge deposits of copper, iron, gold, coal, gemstones, gas, and oil. Undiscovered petroleum resources in northern Afghanistan range from 3.6 to 36.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, while estimates of oil range from 0.4 to 3.6 billion barrels.
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In November 2007 the government finalized the first mineral deal, with a Chinese company, to exploit the Aynak copper reserves outside Kabul, which could yield some $400 million in revenue per year—equivalent to the total government revenues in 2007— and provide more than five thousand jobs. However, if corruption continued to prevail at every level of the government, then it would be impossible for such projects to raise living standards.