Nir Rosen - Aftermath

Outside the school the men pointed to villages only one kilometer away. Everything outside the provincial capital was in Taliban hands, they said. In the same town I attended a meeting of the National Solidarity Program, an Afghan-run, foreign-funded development program that gave grants to communities to develop local projects. I spoke to Muhamad Nasir Farida, the local government official in charge of the program in Wardak. “Many problems are created by the Americans,” he said. “The Americans raid homes at nights, land helicopters, and whoever they see they kill them or arrest them.”

Fazel Rabie Haqbeen was a former mujahid who worked as a senior official for the Asia Foundation, an American development NGO, in Kabul. He had twenty years of experience as an aid worker. He too wanted to talk about the deaths in Qarabagh. “Two hundred villagers are protesting with the dead bodies in Qarabagh,” he said. “Villagers are crying and blocking the road for two days. Where are the hearts and minds of these villagers? The two hundred villagers are a casualty. It’s not just the physical dead. Let me walk you through Kabul and ask a little child what he thinks of Americans. They are not winning hearts and minds.”

Fazel was originally from the village of Miakhel in southern Kabul’s Musahi district. In 2006 American Special Forces raided his village. “They killed a sleeping farmer,” he said. “They dragged women and held them, they beat four villagers and detained four villagers. From that day Musahi district is not secure. The villagers don’t care if the Taliban intrude into villages. After the raid the local Italian commander was killed, two district council members were killed. I am also a council member, but I don’t go back much. The district police chief was killed, a local road construction company had its machines burned, and since then every day there is something.”

The gap between the people and government was enormous, Fazel said. “Between the people and the international presence it’s much more huge, and between the people and the Americans even more, and with the Special Forces much, much more.”

When people compared the two evils of the Americans and the Taliban, they chose the lesser evil. “At least people can communicate with the Taliban,” he said. “The elders can have influence; they are from the same culture. People are not progovernment or pro-Taliban, but they prefer the Taliban. The government isn’t in a position to deliver any services.”

The Americans relied on their own analysts, who didn’t have in-depth knowledge of the Afghan context, he told me. “Our culture varies from village to village, tribe to tribe, region to region. As an Afghan I am not in a position to have in-depth knowledge; my knowledge will be superficial. Afghans don’t trust you, so they won’t tell you what’s in their hearts and minds. They will say you are doing a great job.”

He mocked the notion that the Americans could use Pashtunwali to their advantage. “The Americans are against Pashtunwali,” he said. “They are carrying out house raids. Are you Pashtun so that you can do Pashtunwali with Pashtun? Before the war, if you were a foreigner or American, you could go everywhere safely. Today that is not the case. The whole situation is stirred into chaos, and everyone is provoking mistrust. The McChrystal plan is more troops, more casualties, more victims, more civilian dead. The wrong policies, the wrong approaches. If you come at 2 a.m. and kill my father, how will you expect me not to go mad?”

In late June a Rolling Stone magazine profile of General McChrystal revealed the contempt he and his men felt for their civilian counterparts and leadership. President Obama seized the opportunity to dismiss McChrystal and replace him with General Petraeus. McChrystal had opposed Obama’s eighteen-month deadline. He had wanted “to win.” Obama merely wanted to “halt the Taliban’s momentum.” COIN was a long-term strategy and a stable extremist-free Afghanistan was an open-ended commitment, but the president seemed determined to leave as soon as he could. McChrystal and Obama had always been mismatched. Afghanistan policy seemed subordinate to domestic political considerations. The Democrats did not want to appear weak and reinforce the belief that Republicans were stronger on defense, especially as the November elections approached. Petraeus promised to reconsider the restrictions placed on the military meant to reduce civilian casualties. He announced a plan for “local police forces” or local militias. Just before Petraeus made his announcement Afghan President Karzai met with leaders from Kandahar and promised them that he would never agree to the American plan to create more militias.

Local militias had been created before and given different names. Previous attempts to use militias led to cooptation by the Taliban and other abuses. The new militias would not receive any training. The plan risked further destabilizing Afghanistan for the sake of expedience. Unlike the Awakening groups that began in the Iraqi Anbar and spread throughout that country, the militias in Afghanistan are not the result of a strategic shift in the insurgency and are not composed of former insurgents. Afghanistan dose not have anything resembling the Sunni-Shiite divide and inter-Sunni conflict with al Qaeda that led insurgents in Iraq to temporarily ally with the Americans. In Afghanistan the creation of more militias can lead to a return to the chaos of the post-Soviet withdrawal. Decentralization is a good idea on the political level but not when it comes to security and the state’s monopoly on violence. Creating militias means choosing sides in local tribal and inter-ethnic conflicts. According to one Afghan Army brigade commander in Helmand: “A militia empowers a man, an Army and Police force protect a people and empower a nation.” Senior Afghan security officials worried that so-called local defense forces were the first step towards the return of the regionalism and warlordism that tore the country a part in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal. After 1989 small, local militias continued to fight against the central government. After the government was overthrown larger militias fought between themselves for control of Kabul. In a country torn by fighting, the Americans thought that more fighting was the solution. Meanwhile as Petraeus settled in the governor of Marja in Helmand was fired only months after the Americans helped install him.

With Petraeus, Obama had appointed the one general with the clout to ask for more troops and more time, but also the one sufficiently respected by all parties to be able to declare Afghanistan a lost cause. The Americans had won in Afghanistan when it was merely a punishment campaign. Once they lingered following the flight of bin Laden they began to flounder. And when they turned it into a war against the Taliban, an indigenous movement, they lost.

IT WAS IN THE SPRING OF 2009 THAT I BEGAN TO REALIZE THAT THINGS were changing in Iraq. The civil war was over. There was no group that could overthrow the government. The Iraqi Security Forces had monopolized power, even if it wasn’t pretty. I felt this most intensely one day when I was driving down Baghdad’s Saadun Street with Captain Salim from Washash and a couple of friends. Salim was dressed in civilian clothes, with a pistol tucked under his shirt. A man in a black sedan tried to cut us off, but my friend behind the wheel aggressively sped up and prevented him from doing so. A war of angry faces and waving hands ensued until we were stopped in traffic just before Tahrir circle, at a checkpoint manned by armed men. The driver of the sedan emerged and blocked our path. He was tall, with thick shoulders, a big belly, and a mustache—the Iraqi security look. He had a shaved head and a pistol on his waist. He demanded that we get out of the car. Salim told him to leave us alone, that he was an officer. Where was he an officer? the bald man insisted.