Killing Machine (19 page)

By the end of March that assertion was already out of date. Wali Karzai had become essential because he had sources of intelligence that were critical for the success of the night raids. The Marja experience had demonstrated, moreover, that it was unlikely Kabul would come up with new local leaders capable of running a much bigger show in Kandahar. “There isn’t time for risky experiments in Kandahar,” said a
Washington Post
correspondent with inside sources in the Pentagon.
⁴⁰

But Wali Karzai was himself a risky strategy and a symbol of the inability of the American agencies involved to develop and agree on a strategic plan, particularly since he could use his intelligence sources to pinpoint personal enemies and political rivals. On the other hand, the American military had stopped using the term “offensive” to describe planned operations for Kandahar. In other words there would be no “clear, hold, transfer” progression. Instead, the military would work around the Taliban to start projects, and continue using special ops raids to take out specific targets. It was described to the press as a “civilian surge” accompanied by a “quiet increase of American troops to provide security for them.” The
operation, originally to be called Moshtarak Phase III, was renamed Operation Hamkari (meaning “cooperation”).

This change resulted in part from a visit President Karzai had made to Kandahar in early April, where he solicited advice from the crowd that had gathered to hear him, and promised them there would be no broad-scale military advance. “You don’t want an offensive, do you?” he called out to general acclamation. “There will be no operation until you are happy.” He did this flanked by American military brass, who, it appeared, were on board with the Afghan president, if only because there was no other choice. Yes, agreed General Nick Carter, Karzai had taken away the impression that people did not want to see another Falluja “on the streets of Kandahar, and I think we all said ‘Amen’ to that.” What was coming to the Kandahar region instead was a surge of $90 million. “It’s huge,” said one official. “We’ve employed 40,000 people in cash for work.”
⁴¹

The new strategy envisioned wrapping “Kandahar City in a circle of assistance and development projects,” but the risk was always the same as with earlier troubles. The ones administering all this aid were the old power brokers who were not trusted by the people, or new ones from Kabul also not trusted. Secretary of State Clinton declared that there would be no “tanks rolling into the city.” Whatever the strategy, care would be taken so that the effort “doesn’t destroy Kandahar in the effort to save Kandahar.” Her words were taken (and meant to be taken) from a scene in Vietnam in the aftermath of the Tet offensive when an American military commander said that it had been necessary to destroy a city to save it. General McChrystal added a rueful note that captured the mood of the moment perfectly: “I actually think the U.S. military would love to find an enemy that was dug in on a piece of terrain, that we could establish a D-Day and we could attack with no civilians around, because that would play to every strength that the coalition has.”
⁴²

But Afghanistan was not Vietnam with lessons learned, let alone World War II in Europe.
Washington Post
writer Rajiv Chandrasekaran talked about the perils of soft power when applied to the situation confronting American policy makers. It had unleashed
“unintended and potentially troubling consequences . . . sparking new tension and rivalries. . . . It is also raising public expectations for handouts that the Afghan government will not be able to sustain once U.S. contributions ebb.” Buying victory was thus also a mirage. “Those cash-for-work men—half of them used to be Taliban,” said a district governor. “If the Americans stop paying for them to work, they’ll go back to the Taliban.”
⁴³

The “cash surge” in Afghanistan was based on two doubtful assumptions beyond the matter of whether any government in Kabul could afford to continue supplying the money. One was the recent experience in Iraq where cash payments to the “Sunni awakening” had been a big part of the Petraeus “success story” in turning around the critical situation there. The second was the more theoretical arguments made in Field Manual 3-24 that only a minority of insurgents were true believers, while the great majority were simply soldiers for hire in a situation in which there were few opportunities. The problem with both assumptions was, as the district governor said, what happens when the money dries up?

Karzai’s flirtations with a negotiated settlement took a new turn in early June when he fired two officials who were favorites of the Pentagon and CIA. The firings occurred after explosions and a rocket attack near the place where Karzai had summoned a peace jirga. After the excitement died down, the Afghan president refused to hear any evidence that the Taliban had been responsible. “He treated it like a piece of dirt,” said one of those who brought the information to him. Instead, he blamed the two men for not preventing the attacks, or secretly encouraging them because they opposed negotiations. One of these was the interior minister, Hanif Atmar, who, it was said, opposed the Karzai policy of “reintegration” of former Taliban into the national police. Here again the confusion between “reintegration” and “reconciliation” surfaced, because Washington was not happy about Karzai doing much of either. Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Atmar and national director of security Amrullah Saleh were both “people we admire and whose service we appreciate.” Saleh was an ethnic Tajik, a member of the Northern Alliance, which had helped the United
States drive out the Taliban during the 2001 invasion. Karzai apparently saw him as an obstacle to any effort at serious negotiations. A member of the parliament confirmed that impression: “Intel has a very important role in reconciliation. Saleh was not the right person for this job. No Taliban would ever trust this man.”
⁴⁴

Saleh was convinced that the president’s motivations stemmed from a belief that the West could not defeat the Taliban and that it was up to him to make a deal with them, operating through contacts with Pakistan. He believed as well that the assertions he stole the election all had to do with a desire to get rid of him. American commanders had given Karzai an alternative explanation for the attacks on the jirga—it had been organized by the Haqqani network, which, of course, they insisted was acting for elements of the ISI in Pakistan. Karzai did not believe that assertion, either. But above all, said an Afghan general, “he doesn’t think the Americans can afford to stay.”
⁴⁵

Almost on cue, it seemed, a new Pentagon release described a great discovery in Afghanistan: there was nearly $1 trillion in mineral deposits in the country, “enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself.” A small team of “Pentagon officials and American geologists” had discovered the vast scale of this mineral wealth, and then briefed President Hamid Karzai. The implications of this discovery suggested that American subsidies would not be necessary over the long haul, while for the immediate future what was needed was a little more patience. “There is stunning potential here,” Gen. Petraeus said in an interview. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think it is hugely significant.” An Afghan minister chimed in, “This will become the backbone of the Afghan economy.” The Pentagon had already started trying to set up a system for mineral development. International accounting firms had been hired to help oversee mining contracts, and technical data were being prepared, to be turned over to “multinational mining companies and other potential foreign investors.” Finally, the Pentagon was helping Afghan officials arrange bids for mineral rights—starting as early as the fall of 2011 (when American troops from the surge were to start coming home).
⁴⁶

It turned out that the Americans had not exactly been the first ones to latch on to the vast mineral deposits in Afghanistan, which included “huge veins” of iron, copper, cobalt, gold, and lithium—a veritable treasure house of minerals essential to modern industry. The Russians had collected preliminary data during their occupation in the 1980s before they withdrew. But in any event, the Pentagon would play the role of overseer to manage a new mining and extraction branch of the Afghan government. (This was not exactly new either, as the Pentagon had had a task force in Iraq that created business development firms before the task force was transferred to Afghanistan.)
⁴⁷

Then it turned out that American geologists had not been in the dark about Afghanistan’s mineral deposits before the Pentagon’s sudden announcement after all. Accounts of the mineral resources had been published by both American and British geological surveys three years earlier. It took very little time for various reporters to start making connections between the report and worried policy makers’ concern that there was very little time left for political leaders in the United States and NATO countries to convince their publics, as Defense Secretary Gates admitted to a Brussels conference, that the McChrystal/Petraeus strategy for reversing Taliban momentum was working.
⁴⁸

McChrystal was at the Brussels meeting, and both he and Gates insisted that progress was slow but steady; the important thing was to keep up a sense of urgency. Yet the attendees in Brussels, including the press, learned that whatever offensive was being planned for Kandahar had now been postponed for at least three months. “The key,” said Gates, “is not that there’s going to be some end state by the end of December where we suddenly declare victory or say that Kandahar is done. Kandahar is a project that will take a number of months.” McChrystal implied that Karzai himself was behind the delay, telling reporters, “When you go to protect people, the people have to want you to protect them.” This was both counterinsurgency dogma as well as an admission that so far it hadn’t worked because the Afghan president had not done his job.
⁴⁹

Bad news continued to pour in from Afghanistan with stories about how NATO convoys guarded by Afghan mercenaries were paying bribes to Taliban insurgents along the way to let them pass. The amounts paid, investigators asserted, had mounted up to tens of millions of dollars. Some of this money was being funneled into the hands of Afghan officials. “People think the insurgency and the government are separate, and that is just not always the case,” said a NATO official in Kabul. “What we are finding is that they are often bound up together.” The U.S. was supporting both sides in the war, said the official. There were literally thousands of private guards involved, with more than fifty security companies allegedly providing protection to the convoys. Hanif Atmar, the former interior minister Karzai fired, told Dexter Filkins, the top
New York Times
reporter in Afghanistan, that there were thousands of these guards running around in Kandahar and other places, not in uniform and with no identification, operating virtually under no government control. Hashmat Karzai, a cousin of the president, controlled one of these security companies.
⁵⁰

When the surge was announced, Obama had said the troops would start coming home in the summer of 2011. His cabinet officials and the Pentagon immediately jumped in to say there would be no rush to the exits, but a gradual transition phase. By June 2010 the Taliban’s momentum had been slowed down in some areas—but nobody had really expected they could take Kabul. Columnist Bob Herbert suggested that the real issue had become “the courage to leave”: “There is no good news coming out of the depressing and endless war in Afghanistan. There once was merit to our incursion there, but that was long ago. Now we’re just going through the tragic motions, flailing at this and that, with no real strategy or decent end in sight.”
⁵¹

The Return of General Petraeus

The cascade of bad news from Afghanistan caused Capitol Hill to stir uneasily, like a heavy sleeper who hears noises out in the hallway and finally has to get up to see what the matter is out there. As
the number of dead in the Afghan War passed one thousand, the headlines spoke of a dysfunctional and corrupt government in Kabul not worthy of American support. Summoned to a Senate hearing to explain what actually was going on, Pentagon officials took their turns providing explanations. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy, a strong defender of counterinsurgency from the outset, cited the number of times Afghans reported to Americans where IEDs had been placed along roadsides. This development, she asserted, indicated that there were “growing pockets of confidence” among local Afghans and increasing willingness to support ISAF efforts to establish security and governance. It was true that insurgent attacks had resumed in Marja, but they were less effective in terms of casualties per incident, indicating a “possible reduction in some of their operational capacity.”
⁵²

Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell pled for greater recognition of the fact that this would be a tough fight and that casualties would increase as progress was made. Then he said part of the problem was that reporters wished to be embedded in the worst trouble spots and not with military units in the north, where conditions were more stable. The result was a skewed picture of the overall war effort. “While Helmand and Kandahar are important provinces,” he said, “they do not comprise the entirety of Afghanistan. There are many places where security is improving and life is getting better. . . . Let’s at least allow them the next six months to prove that General McChrystal’s strategy will work.”
⁵³

Whatever had happened to the pre-Marja campaign assurance that thirty thousand troops were enough because only some provinces needed to be cleared of Taliban? Morrell’s plea suggested that reporters should go only to less dangerous places and report on the measurable progress there. Even before the hearings, Defense Secretary Gates had told reporters that he was unhappy with their coverage. “I, frankly, get a little impatient with some of the coverage because of the lack of historical context. So as far as I’m concerned, this endeavor began in full, and reasonably resourced, only a few months ago.”
⁵⁴
Gates’s plea was a familiar one; he had made it several times. And again at the hearings he complained about press
coverage being “too negative.” The man everyone wanted to hear from, however, was David Petraeus. His testimony came in two parts. On the first day, shortly after giving his opening statement, he collapsed—a result, it was said, of dehydration. He recovered within thirty minutes and asked to continue, but his testimony was put off until the next day.