A Dangerous Backslide
Age-old problems-and a new Taliban surge-are dragging the Afghans down
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN-If Iraq has been the self-destructive problem child of American intervention, Afghanistan seemed to be the model sibling. Ostensibly less demanding, it was, as far as most could tell, on its way to one day assuming a solid position in the world community.
But five years after U.S. troops swept away the Taliban and brought promises of a better life, Afghanistan's future is, at best, touch and go: Suicide bombers are striking in the capital, while once routed Taliban fighters have regrouped to take on NATO troops-mostly British and Canadian soldiers-in the Pashtun "tribal belt" villages. Throughout the country, corruption is rampant, courts are nonexistent, and infrastructure remains abysmal in a nation where the average life expectancy is just 43 years.
President Hamid Karzai, whose 2004 election provided an electric moment (in a nation in which less than 10 percent of the population has access to electricity), is now widely seen as failing to confront issues of corruption and insecurity. The most prominent economic success, unfortunately, is opium production, which is at record highs this year and provides a cash windfall for insurgents and criminal gangs. On the drug front, says NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, U.S. Gen. James Jones, "we're losing ground."
The Taliban resurgence forced the Bush administration to shelve summer plans to bring home some 3,000 of the 20,000 American troops here. Last week, NATO expanded its security responsibility throughout Afghanistan to 32,000 soldiers, taking command of 12,000 U.S. troops in the eastern part of the country. (Others are assigned to anti-terrorism missions, including hunting Osama bin Laden.)
What has gone wrong? At a minimum, it is clear that Afghanistan is a land of missed opportunities. Shockingly poor-poorer than all but a few countries in sub-Saharan Africa-Afghanistan drew foreign aid for new roads, clinics, government buildings, and schools, including those that for the first time provide education for more than 1.5 million girls. But analysts are in widespread agreement that the United States was slow and ambivalent about taking on nation building. "The U.S. position after we went into Afghanistan was, 'We don't do nation building. We don't do roads. We don't do peacekeeping,'" says Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert at New York University's Center on International Cooperation. "That meant we didn't do anything to provide security for Afghans-and people noticed that."
With all the heralding of democracy, Afghans were impatient to see meaningful improvement in their daily lives. One of the more popular Pashtun proverbs makes just that point: "Don't show me the palm trees; show me the dates." Aid from the United States and elsewhere has ramped up, but the benefits lag behind expectations-and the security situation deteriorates. Although the 30,000-strong Afghan Army gets good reviews from U.S. military officials, it remains underequipped.
And while there is a growing recognition that force alone won't stop the violence-today the mantra of Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, the top U.S. commander in the country, is "Where the road ends, the Taliban begins"-there remains the stark reality that the land has long been, to put it mildly, a governing challenge. In a country 33 percent larger than Iraq and 15 percent more populous, people living in large swaths of territory remain alienated and vulnerable to Taliban control. "We don't have any major water project, any major power project, and we just recently started to build rural access roads in some areas," says Rubin.
This fact has not gone unnoticed among American troops. During a recent breakfast meeting with soldiers in the 10th Mountain Division at Bagram Air Base, Spc. James Wright asked visiting Secretary of the Army Francis Harvey whether "there's any way we can generate more money towards Afghanistan." Harvey replied that Wright was echoing the concerns of Afghan President Karzai as well, that reconstruction funds were patched together in "pieces and parts." In the months to come, the Bush administration is likely to be seeking significant increases in U.S. funding for the Afghan Army, police, and reconstruction efforts, according to a senior State Department official. In the meantime, however, with things getting no better, people have started to hedge their bets. "They plan for the day that we leave,"says Rubin, "and that makes things much more difficult for us."
Nowhere is that more difficult than in southern Kandahar province, the crossroads of the Taliban's former heartland and the opium trade, which has been the site of some of the most tenacious Taliban fighting. It is in this region that insurgents have capitalized expertly on the fears of the Afghan population, says Seth Jones, a Middle East analyst at Rand. They may not hold territory in a conventional sense, but they wield influence in other ways. "They tell villagers, 'Karzai can't protect you; he can't promise you central services. The Americans have broken their promises.'" What's more, the Taliban has set up shadow governments "in most if not all of the provinces in the south," adds Jones. "And they're trying to convince the people to go to these shadow governments when there's trouble."
Last month, NATO's International Security Assistance Forces-which included most of the combat units from Canada's 2,200-strong contingent-fought back with an offensive dubbed "Operation Medusa." It was what commanders call the NATO alliance's first test of "ground resolve." The U.S. military reported more than 1,000 Taliban killed as they fought in a surprisingly conventional campaign. The offensive was widely considered a success for the alliance, but the U.S. military estimates that somewhere around 4,000 Taliban-about one tenth of whom have some sort of formal military training-remain. And despite tactical successes, there are still tensions within the 37-country coalition about restrictive rules of engagement-so-called national caveats. Jones ticked off a few during an address last week to the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington: countries that don't allow their forces to be used at night, for example, or to be used in any fight that involves the Taliban-the later elicited gales of laughter at the council meeting.
Target: Canadians. The Taliban militias are well aware of the rifts, say military analysts, and plan to exploit them with further attacks throughout the winter, traditionally a timeout when snow blocks the mountain passes to sanctuaries in Pakistan. "It's part of an overall strategy to break the alliance," says Jones. "What you see in communiquÃÂés is that they view the NATO takeover as a very important window of opportunity." For Canada, which has lost 31 soldiers this year, antiwar sentiment at home is growing, and a measure to extend troop presence in Afghanistan was passed by only a thin majority of the national legislature."We've seen specific targeting of Canadians," says Jones. (The United States has lost 82 soldiers this year, and Britain 35.) And increased violence makes it tougher to persuade partner nations to contribute more troops to the cause.
Another source of contention is concern among ISAF officials that "there is still too much focus on kinetic operations," according to a senior Pentagon official-military speak for too many sticks, not enough carrots. The military is now rushing in emergency aid for residents of villages affected by Operation Medusa. "It's important that we understand that the way ahead in Afghanistan is to link any successful operation with visible, tangible demonstration of aid and relief available to the local population," said Jones shortly after the two-week offensive concluded last month. He added last week that NATO's job is often to "harmonize" the aftermath of military strikes with rebuilding. "You could call that cleaning up the mess," added a senior State Department official.
But soldiers note, too, that the capacity for construction is limited by lack of security. For their part, soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division in the eastern city of Jalalabad build schools and battle Taliban forces moving across the porous 1,500-mile-long border with Pakistan. In keeping with their roots as the division that once traversed the mountains of Italy on skis, soldiers departing Fort Drum, N.Y., got lessons in how to pack mules, too, from the Department of the Interior. But despite the preparation, they have encountered some considerable challenges. Climbing to elevations of 13,000 feet, carrying 70 pounds of equipment for days "is a shocker" even for troops in peak health, says Sgt. Maj. Jimmy Carabello.
Troops have also found that reconstruction is often tough without local knowledge. Some soldiers report that upon learning a school was burned down, they assumed it was the Taliban, only to learn that it was a tribal elder, upset that he had not been consulted on the use of his land. The key, says Maj. Gen. Benjamin Freakley, is convincing the locals that they will not be abandoned. Troops recognize the risk that once they leave, people can be killed for cooperating, says Freakley, who is commanding general of both the 10th Mountain Division and Combined Joint Task Force 76, responsible for reconstruction in the south and east.
But as they clear villages of Taliban, Freakley and others remain concerned about how to hold such vast territory without a viable local security force. The problem, Freakley says, is "generating local police that aren't corrupt." That's no easy feat, notes Rubin, when the Ministry of the Interior "is the most corrupt institution in the country, and it's utterly penetrated."
And police can do very little without being backed by judicial reform. U.S. State Department representatives are beginning a push to establish courts that integrate local tribal laws into a national judicial system as an antidote to the Taliban courts and criminal networks that have replaced the state as primary arbiters of law and order. Coalition officials are also working to establish an "auxiliary" police force that they hope will be a bridge between the Afghan National Police and local tribal elders-and in the process discourage the formation of private militias.
Jones advocates increasing pay, too, for government prosecutors, who currently earn $65 a month (interpreters for U.S. forces are paid $650). ISAF troops in the poppy center of Helmand, a province southwest of Kandahar, have had to step up economic incentives to match those offered by the Taliban, who pay part-time fighters between $12 and $14 a day, triple the $4 a day they make in the Afghan national Army.
Porous border. In the months to come, military officials will be closely monitoring the results of a peace agreement that the Pakistani government made with tribal leaders in the mountainous region of northwest Pakistan called Waziristan, an area about half the size of New Jersey. Throughout Afghanistan's south and east, incursions of insurgents along the border with Pakistan remain a constant concern. By most estimates, the agreement has provided the Taliban with a secure rear for fighting from Pakistan-with the support of Pakistan's Pashtun tribes. The failure of the agreement thus far to stop insurgent incursions across the border has done little to decrease tensions between Karzai and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
And while Karzai struggles to retain his legitimacy among an increasingly disillusioned populace, there are signs that even in the capital city of Kabul, Afghans continue to hedge their bets and nurture considerable resentment. In Kabul, 4 million to 5 million people live without water or sewage. More women in the capital's streets have returned to wearing burkas amid a reversion to stricter Islamic customs.
Such poverty and fear among Afghans remain a stark reminder that there is another enemy that challenges coalition forces. "That enemy," says Combined Security Transition commander Maj. Gen. Robert Durbin, "is time."
With Thomas Omestad in Washington
This story appears in the October 16, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.