The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

In February 2007, a suicide bomber detonated an explosive at Bagram Air Force Base, where Vice President Dick Cheney was visiting at the time. Officials insisted that Cheney was nowhere near the blast, but he was much closer than they let on, revealing that fresh information concerning his whereabouts must have leaked to the Taliban. This was one episode in a broader pattern of outright lying about the war in Afghanistan as conditions worsened. Taliban violence spiked in 2006 to five times the previous year’s total (93). However, President Bush was preparing to send even more troops to Iraq, a country on the brink of civil war. The obvious crisis of one war made it necessary to paint the other as a great success, with commanders insisting that the Taliban was “panicking” (94). Internally, there was concern of a bad situation on the brink of becoming worse and that Iraq had taken away critical resources from Afghanistan, but their public statements were sunny to the point of absurdity, such as suggesting that increased violence was entirely the result of “taking the fight to the enemy” (97).

Retired General Barry McCaffrey undertook an independent review that recognized the Taliban as both resurgent and highly capable. Yet coalition forces still struggled to understand their motives, having no knowledge of the anticolonial struggles that shaped previous generations or the differences in motives among various Taliban factions. Some were in fact hardened radicals and others opportunistic profiteers, while still others were “poor and ignorant, who [were] simply influenced by the other two groups” (102). Separating that third group from the first two could have potentially made a serious dent in the Taliban’s efforts.

By the end of 2006, Bush was done with the combative Rumsfeld and ready to bring a steadier hand to the Pentagon. Robert Gates, who had led the CIA under President Bush’s father, thought that a more security-centered strategy that eased off on national reconstruction could put the US in a position to win. With NATO taking a more direct role in combat operations, they would undertake a counterinsurgency strategy to “target specific districts, clear out the guerrillas and help the Afghans stabilize the area with reconstruction projects” (105). In addition to their scant resources, NATO had to incorporate the interests of 37 different coalition members, most of whom were in the country for three to six months. Washington criticized its allies for not contributing enough, and the allies in turn complained that “Washington took them for granted and disparaged their contributions” (108).

Even after Rumsfeld left office, Bush insisted that Afghanistan was well on its way to becoming a fully functional modern democracy, without outlining a clear strategy for accomplishing that lofty goal. Many officers predicted that the war would drag on for years with no clear outcome, but the administration did not know enough about its own ignorance about Afghanistan to develop real plans or commit substantial resources. When the president finally approved a slight increase in forces in January 2008, commanders insisted that it was a mark of success. Infighting among countries and within the various arms of the American operation (including special forces, the CIA, and advisors to the Afghan army) caused these groups often to work independently of one another, further scrambling any strategic coherence. By the end of 2008, the new commander of US and NATO forces was more candid regarding potential problems and the need for more troops. Nearing the end of his term, Bush maintained an optimistic tone for the sake of the Republican candidate John McCain and punted any further decision-making to the winner of the election.

When Human Rights Watch called for an investigation into abuses by many top-ranking figures within the new Afghan government, the US rushed to their defense. Men like Abdul Rashid Dostum stood accused of killing hundreds of prisoners by suffocating them in shipping containers, along with many other brutal acts. However, the CIA had ties with him and other warlords dating back to the 1980s, when the agency helped coordinate resistance to the Soviet invasion. Many of these groups were no less brutal than the Taliban, but as long as they were reliably opposed to the Taliban, their loyal militias were a priceless asset. But even as the US sought to cultivate Dostum as a key ally, he was feuding with allies of the Afghan government for control over territory. President Karzai called him an “outlaw” (120), and the US came to recognize the problem once Dostum seized outright control of a northern province. When Dostum fell ill shortly thereafter, the US made the remarkable proposal of shipping him to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC. They settled on a US Army hospital in Germany instead.

The warlords presented the US with a painful dilemma. Keeping them armed would help shift the burdens of combat away from US forces but would empower those militias to oppress locals. Yet they would only accept disarmament in exchange for political power, making them “a permanent fixture of the new political system” and thereby enabling them to pursue corruption on a national rather than local scale (122). When it became clear that certain political figures were engaged in corruption, such as Karzai’s half-brother, they had already made themselves indispensable to the Americans. Even those openly involved in the opium trade were seen as valuable for having “kept other bad guys at bay” (125). The US preferred to keep them inside the tent of the government and thereby discourage them from plotting directly against it. In the meantime, the heads of each major government ministry staffed it with their ethnic confederates and political loyalists, turning them into fiefdoms vying for wealth and power with no sense of common loyalty to a central authority.

In March 2006, the US began a campaign to stem the opium trade by stamping out poppy plants before they could be harvested. Afghanistan was by far the world’s principal source of opium, and the trade helped finance the Taliban’s revival, so halting production was seen as a vital aspect of the war effort. In addition to mechanical failures and immense logistical difficulties, US forces struggled mightily to secure the support of Afghans who “discovered they could earn far more harvesting opium for the farmers than killing the plants for the Afghan government” (131). Afghans grossly exaggerated the amount of opium being destroyed, and US officials knowingly passed the fake data to Washington so that the illusion of success would secure more Congressional funding. The policy enraged Afghan farmers whose livelihoods were dependent on the crop, especially when they saw wealthier or better-connected farmers paying off government officials to leave their farms untouched. Dwindling supplies of opium made those farmers even more vulnerable to the Taliban, who flooded into Helmand province (the center of opium growing) “to protect their own financial interest and to win favor with the local population by ‘protecting’ the poppy crops” (133).

The Taliban was the only force in recent Afghan history that had proven capable of limiting the opium trade, as they had in 2000. The British developed a program of paying Afghan farmers to destroy their own crops, to which farmers responded by growing more of it so as to increase their own pay while keeping enough in reserve to sell. Counternarcotics did not fall squarely within anyone’s purview, and so various agencies claimed pieces of it without anyone imposing a streamlined approach. In the meantime, government officials profited immensely from the illicit trade, making it so that any effort to crack down could bring down the government itself. Plans to drop herbicides from the sky, as the US had done in Colombia, was met with fierce resistance from the Afghan government and skepticism among Americans fearful of further alienating the countryside. Karzai was able to stop the program, and by the end of 2006, the year the most intense effort to date to root out opium harvesting, the crop was up 59% from the previous year (140).