Authors: Matthew M. Aid
In November 2007
, a widely respected London-based nonprofit organization, the Senlis Council, issued a study based on the reporting they were receiving from their personnel on the ground in Afghanistan. Its central conclusion was that the Taliban guerrillas had extended their operations into 54 percent of the 398 districts in Afghanistan and were also “enjoying increasing control of several parts of southern, south-eastern and western Afghanistan, ever more complicating the NATO-ISAF stabilization mission in the country.”
The report came under attack almost instantly, both publicly and privately, from a host of senior NATO defense officials and military commanders, including the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, General Dan McNeill, all of whom disputed the report's conclusions and claimed that the Taliban held only a small sliver of largely desolate and sparsely populated rural districts in the southern part of the country, and as such posed no meaningful threat to security or the ongoing reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan.
According to General McNeill's spokesman
, Brigadier General Carlos Branco, the Taliban controlled only five of the fifty-nine districts in southern Afghanistan, and the territory they did control consisted only of “very small pockets without territorial continuity.”
On the other hand, the U.S. intelligence community's Afghan specialists generally agreed with the conclusion of the Senlis report because it matched almost exactly what they had been saying for two years. In early 2008, the national intelligence officer for South Asia, Dr. Peter R. Lavoy, sent to policymakers a classified paper, which, in essence, came down on the side of the Senlis Council, concluding that security conditions in Afghanistan were indeed deteriorating. Instead of the five districts General McNeill's staff argued the insurgents held, Lavoy's paper concluded that the Taliban largely controlled about 10 percent of the country; and in the territory that they controlled they had established “shadow governments,” including fully functional civil administration, police, and judicial systems, that were far more efficient and efficacious than the legitimate but corrupt and inefficient Afghan government.
A Dutch military intelligence officer with over a decade of experience gained in hellholes like Bosnia, Kosovo, and Eritrea, Jaap Maartens (pseudonym) was one of the more than 870 officers, enlisted men, civilians, and contractors from twenty-six NATO countries who worked on the staff of the International Security Assistance Force, the combined U.S.-NATO headquarters in downtown Kabul that commanded all 52,000 U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan.
The ISAF headquarters compound where Maartens worked was located in the heart of the heavily guarded section of downtown Kabul known as the “Green Zone,” a 300-acre island of relative serenity surrounded by twenty-foot-high whitewashed walls topped by barbed wire, security cameras, and imposing guard towers that were manned twenty-four hours a day. The American commander of ISAF, General David D. McKiernan, and his fifty-man command staff had their offices on the second floor of the “Yellow Building,” a battered two-story mustard yellow structure that formerly housed the Afghan Military Sports Club until the Soviet invasion in 1979. In and around the Yellow Building were a number of first-class dining facilities, fast-food outlets, a modern fitness center complete with racks of free weights and Stair Masters, a baseball field, and a host of other modern amenities, including a pizza parlor, seven bars, and even a German beer garden in a Muslim country where the consumption of alcohol is strictly forbidden.
A member of the ISAF intelligence staff's “Red Cell,” Maartens was tasked with keeping track of the Taliban's senior leadership, constantly trawling the intelligence databases that were available to him looking for new snippets of information about the men who were leading the insurgency in Afghanistanâwho they were, their backgrounds, names of wives and children, education, prior military experience, and even trying to divine their motivations by what they told friends, family, and the occasional reporter. In short, his job was to put himself in the shoes of his enemy to try to figure out what made them tick.
Like the vast majority of his colleagues, Maartens personally loathed the Taliban. He thought that everything the Taliban stood for was abhorrent, and their extreme interpretation of Islam morally repugnant. He was convinced that if the Taliban should win the war, they would return Afghanistan to exactly the same kind of extremist form of government that had existed when Mullah Omar ran the country from 1996 to 2001. Regardless of his personal feelings, though, Maartens was a consummate professional and he had a job to do, which was to try to assess the military strength and capabilities of the Taliban insurgency without passion or prejudice.
By the summer of 2008, Maartens had become convinced from his reading of classified intelligence reporting that all the talk emanating from senior U.S., Canadian, and European politicians and generals that the coalition forces were winning the war in Afghanistan was, in the words of his supervisor, a British Army officer with long experience in Afghanistan, akin to “trying to put lipstick on a pig.”
In the opinion of Maartens and his fellow intelligence analysts in Kabul, the Taliban were prevailing because they were fighting a smarter war than the U.S. and NATO forces, who were trying to fight a counterinsurgency campaign with a badly flawed military strategy, very limited resources, and little public support back at home.
The biggest problem was that U.S. and NATO troop levels in Afghanistan were far below what was needed to combat the growing number of Taliban guerrilla attacks in the south.
Dr. Thomas Johnson
of the Naval Postgraduate School, one of the leading scholars of the war in Afghanistan, has written that “the minimal U.S. troop presence in the south [of Afghanistan] means that the rugged, porous, and often ill-defined 2,450 km border between Pakistan and Afghanistan does not even constitute a speed bump to groups such as the Taliban and Al Qaeda seeking to increase their influence among the Pashtun tribesmen in the region.”
Everyone agreed that poor leadership of the coalition war effort in Afghanistan was also a huge problem. Since 2002, a series of conventionally minded American generals, none of whom had any experience in counterinsurgency warfare, had tried and failed to beat the Taliban guerrillas using the same “search and destroy” tactics that the U.S. Army had used in Vietnam forty years earlier, and that the Soviets had repeated during the 1980s with the same disastrous results. Some American officers serving in Afghanistan who had studied military history at West Point or in college wondered how the generals in Kabul could be so stupid as to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Marine Corps Lt. Colonel Chris Nash
, who served a tour of duty as an adviser with the Afghan National Army in 2007 and 2008, later caustically wrote that the U.S. military in Afghanistan was “stealing pages from the Russian playbook one by one.”
The parallels with the Soviet military's
disastrous experience in Afghanistan in the 1980s were striking. The U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, under strict orders from the risk-averse ISAF command staff in Kabul to keep casualties to a minimum, had reverted to what a U.S. Marine Corps After Action Report not meant for release to the public described as a “forward operating base mindset.” Just like the Soviet military twenty years earlier, 90 percent of all U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan were holed up behind the walls of 150 heavily fortified forward operating bases and smaller outposts trying to protect the country's cities and towns.
In Helmand Province
in southwestern Afghanistan, which the Taliban had controlled since 2006, British commanders admitted to American vice-president-elect Joe Biden in January 2009 that their four thousand troops were essentially being held captive inside their firebases by the Taliban, who roamed at will outside the gates of the bases.
In the summer of 2008, the British Army garrison
in the town of Sangin in Helmand Province found itself surrounded by hundreds of Taliban fighters and cut off from the rest of the British forces in the province. The garrison in Sangin, belonging to Lt. Colonel Ed Freely's 1st Battalion of the 1 Royal Irish Regiment, was unable to move more than a mile or two beyond the town's outskirts without coming under attack by the Taliban. When Freely's troops opened an outpost south of Sangin called Patrol Base Armagh, the Taliban immediately cut it off, blocked the only road between the base and Sangin with dozens of IEDs (improvised explosive devices), and tied down the outpost's garrison with relentless RPG and AK-47 fire. Fearing that the Taliban might overrun the isolated and lightly manned outpost, the British evacuated it less than a month after it was established.
When the U.S. and NATO troops did venture out of their bases, they tended not to stray far from the beaten track, staying close to the roads because their heavy armored vehicles had very limited off-road capacity. For example, the six-ton MRAP mine-resistant vehicles used by the U.S. Army and Marines, which broke down frequently, were so heavy that they could not be used off road.
At nightfall, following the protocol laid down by the generals in Kabul, the patrols retired to the safety of their firebases, relinquishing control of the countryside to the Taliban. In the morning, the process repeated itself all over again, with one Marine Corps officer sarcastically characterizing this practice as “
Clear ⦠go back to FOB
. Clear ⦠go back to FOB,” a repeat of what the U.S. military in Vietnam had done more than forty years earlier. Over time the U.S. and NATO troops wearied of their Catch-22 predicament and abandoned to the enemy's control the rural towns and villages around their bases that they were unable to protect, which is also exactly what the Russian military had done in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
The situation maps in the heavily guarded joint operations center at Kandahar International Airport, from where the military activities of all NATO forces in southern Afghanistan were controlled, looked like a post-Surrealist painting, consisting of dozens of blue inkblots, representing the firebases manned by NATO forces, surrounded by a sea of red, which represented the areas that were controlled or contested by the Taliban.
Major Fred Tanner
, who was the military assistant to Brigadier General John W. Nicholson, the American deputy commander of forces in southern Afghanistan, recalled that “there were areas where we had absolutely no presence, that we had ceded control to the Taliban. That was shocking to me.”
There was near unanimity among intelligence analysts that the U.S.-NATO strategy of depending on air power to make up for lack of “boots on the ground” was also not working.
According to declassified data
, in 2008 U.S. and NATO warplanes were flying ninety bombing missions a day in Afghanistan. More bombs were being dropped in Afghanistan than in Iraq. U.S. and NATO commanders in Afghanistan wasted no opportunity to publicly crow about the staggering body count that these air strikes inevitably produced, forgetting the lesson learned the hard way in Vietnam that in a guerrilla war, the body count means absolutely nothing.
Classified U.S. Army and Marine Corps intelligence assessments confirmed that the bombing attacks in Afghanistan were having little, if any, effect on the Taliban's ability or willingness to fight.
A restricted-access Marine Corps
intelligence briefing revealed that while the air strikes were indeed killing hundreds of Taliban field commanders and thousands of their fighters, the attacks were not disrupting the Taliban's military operations in any meaningful way.
The air strikes were actually helping the Taliban by indiscriminately killing thousands of innocent Afghan civilians. Every errant air strike that ended up killing civilians handed the Taliban propaganda machine a victory and led to dozens of angry young Pashtun men flocking to join the Taliban's banner. U.S. and NATO intelligence analysts at the time estimated that for every civilian killed by an air strike, the Taliban got as many as twenty new recruits seeking revenge for the death of their relatives.
On April 13, 2010
, General Stanley A. McChrystal, former commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, admitted something that the intelligence analysts had been saying for yearsâdependence on air strikes was self-defeating: “Because of civilian casualties I think we have just about eroded our credibility here in Afghanistan. The constant repeat of civilian casualties is now so dangerous that it threatens the mission.”
The Taliban, on the other hand, have never aspired to win the war in Afghanistan by force of arms. Borrowing a page from the playbook utilized by the Viet Cong during the early stages of the Vietnam War, the Taliban's strategy has always been to outlast the U.S. and NATO forces, trading the lives of their fighters for time while wearing down their larger and better-armed opponents with a ceaseless campaign of ambushes, suicide bombings, and IED attacks.
According to a senior Pakistani intelligence official, Mullah Baradar, the Taliban's military chief who was captured in Karachi, Pakistan, in February 2010, told his interrogators that the Taliban's strategy was predicated on the belief that if they could hold on long enough, eventually public support in the West for the war would dissipate and force the United States and allied governments to pull their troops out of Afghanistan, just as the Russians had done in February 1989. In short, the Taliban viewed the war in Afghanistan as a battle of wills.
There was no questioning that the Taliban's commitment to their cause was very real. They had demonstrated their determination to win by the willingness of their mostly illiterate fighters to absorb massive numbers of casualties and endure extreme hunger and privation over a span of ten long years.
According to a restricted-access
Marine Corps intelligence study, the Taliban guerrillas are “simply the ones committed enough to live in misery in order to win.”