Seth Jones - In the Graveyard of Empires - America's War in Afghanistan

Despite the idealism of the initial campaign and the success of military operations, the United States squandered this extraordinary opportunity. America was a global superpower with the resources and talent to effectively overthrow governments and replace them with new ones. But it failed to seize the moment. By 2006, tensions had escalated dramatically and Afghanistan was leveled by a perfect storm of political upheaval in which several crises came together: Pakistan emerged as a sanctuary for the Taliban and al Qa’ida, allowing them to conduct a greater number of operations from bases across the border; Afghan governance became unhinged as corruption worked its way through the government like a cancer, leaving massive discontent throughout the country; and the international presence, hamstrung by the U.S. focus on Iraq, was too small to deal with the escalating violence. The simultaneous pressures came to a head in 2006, when the Taliban, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami, the Haqqani network, foreign fighters, criminal groups, and a host of Afghan and Pakistan tribal militias began a sustained effort to overthrow the U.S.-backed Afghan government.

This book has much to say about insurgencies. For our purposes, an insurgency is a political-military campaign by nonstate actors seeking to overthrow a government or secede from a country through the use of unconventional—and sometimes conventional—strategies and tactics. 13Insurgencies can involve a wide range of tactics and forms of protest, from small-scale marches to large-scale conventional violence. 14The Afghan insurgency quickly made the leap to extreme violence. Insurgents in both Afghanistan and Pakistan imported suicide bombing, improvised explosive technology, and global communications strategies from Iraq and other battlefields, such as Hizbullah in Lebanon. Al Qa’ida succeeded in reestablishing its base by skillfully exploiting the weakness of the Pakistani state in the Pashtun tribal belt. Instead of defeating al Qa’ida and the Taliban in 2001, the U.S.-led Coalition merely pushed the core leadership of al Qa’ida and the Taliban out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan. This outcome was not inevitable. Rather, it was the result of America’s inability to finish the job it had started and to provide the requisite attention and resources.

By 2006, a full-bodied insurgency had developed in Afghanistan. The overall number of insurgent-initiated attacks increased by 400 percent from 2002 to 2006, and the number of deaths from these attacks increased more than 800 percent during the same period. 15Many of the attacks were against Afghan government officials, though others targeted civilians and Coalition forces. The increase in violence was particularly acute between 2005 and 2006. The number of suicide attacks quadrupled, remotely detonated bombings more than doubled, and armed attacks nearly tripled between 2005 and 2006. 16The following year would bring more of the same, as insurgent-initiated attacks rose another 27 percent. 17

The rapid growth of Afghanistan’s insurgency led to a series of recriminations by U.S. soldiers and their NATO allies. Some U.S. soldiers began referring to NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) by a range of derogatory names such as “I Suck at Fighting,” “I Saw Americans Fight,” or “I Sunbathe at FOBs.” The latter was a reference to the small, heavily fortified forward operating bases (FOBs) established in rural areas. American soldiers dismissed many of their NATO allies for hunkering down in their FOBs and blamed the escalation of violence at least partly on the reluctance of NATO countries to fight.

I had spent time with soldiers and civilians from most NATO countries in Afghanistan while conducting research on the security situation in the country, examining the state of the Afghan police, army, justice system, and insurgent groups. In the early years after the U.S. invasion, I could travel around the country fairly easily by vehicle, since the security situation was relatively stable. While I sometimes wore local dress and grew a beard, I felt safe in most areas. The American journalist Sarah Chayes, who had been a correspondent for National Public Radio in Afghanistan during the 2001 war, put it eloquently: “Kandahar, in those days, shimmered with a breathless hope. Afghans, even there in the Taliban’s former den, were overcome by the possibilities opened up by this latest ‘revolution,’ as they referred to it…. They were hungry to participate again in the shaping of their national destiny, the way they had back in the golden age before the Communist coup and the Soviet invasion.” 18But by 2006, security for foreigners—and even local Afghans—in rural areas of the east, south, and central regions began to deteriorate, making it more difficult to move around by car. I increasingly used airplanes or helicopters to travel from Kabul to dangerous parts of the south and east.

As road travel became more dangerous, crime also developed into a major problem. Interfactional fighting arose among warlords. The deteriorating security situation was worst at the local level, where Afghan security forces could not protect rural villagers. A report by the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, concluded that Taliban cells knew who was collaborating with NATO and Afghan government forces: “Individuals who flirt with the government truly get frightened as the Afghan security forces are currently incapable of providing police and protection for each village…. When villagers and rural communities seek protection from police either it arrives late or arrives in a wrong way.” 19

These challenges were somewhat predictable. To paraphrase Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, the longtime Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, all politics in Afghanistan are local. Past empires that have dared to enter Afghanistan—from Alexander the Great to Great Britain and the Soviet Union—have found initial entry possible, even easy, only to find themselves mired in local resistance. Aware of this history, the United States had the resources, manpower, and strategic know-how to create a new order. And it was on the right track, at least initially. But the moment was fleeting. Despite the impressive gains in security, infrastructure, and democracy, the United States shifted resources and attention to Iraq and allowed the Taliban, al Qa’ida, and other insurgent groups to rebuild in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The lessons from past empires provide a stark lesson.

Graveyard of Empires

Around 330 BC, Alexander the Great and his army suffered staggering losses in fierce battles against Afghan tribes. His astonishing conquest of Eurasia became bogged down in Afghanistan and India. Over the next two thousand years, the region was deeply problematic for major empires from the West and the East—from the Arab armies to such legendary conquerors as Genghis Khan, Timur (more commonly known as Tamerlane), and Babur.

The modern Afghan state was founded in the mid-eighteenth century by Ahmed Shah Durrani, who united the region’s disparate Pashtun tribes and conquered major portions of modern Afghanistan, Pakistan, northeastern Iran, and western India. By the nineteenth century, Russia and Britain became intimately intertwined in what would become the Great Game, using Afghanistan as a buffer state in the struggle between their empires. Between 1839 and 1919, the British fought three brutal wars in Afghanistan to counter Russian influence in the region. Rudyard Kipling’s searing experience in Afghanistan and British India inspired his poem “Young British Soldier,” which echoes the din of battle:

When shakin’ their bustles like ladies so fine,

The guns o’ the enemy wheel into line,

Shoot low at the limbers an’ don’t mind the shine