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

The Research Approach

My goal in Afghanistan was specific: to understand the motivations of key actors and to assess what factors contributed to the rise of Afghanistan’s insurgency. I chose to examine Afghanistan because it is a case of such intrinsic importance to the United States. The attacks in Washington, New York, and Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, were planned in Afghanistan, and many of the hijackers went through training in Afghanistan. Even after the overthrow of the Taliban regime, core al Qa’ida leaders continued to reside along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier.

It is also important to understand what this book does not try to do. It is not a broader effort to build and test a theory of why insurgencies begin. Rather, it is a study of the specific aspects of insurgency in Afghanistan. This book also does not pretend to offer a comprehensive analysis of Afghanistan across such areas as politics, economics, education, and health care. Many nations, international organizations such as the United Nations, and nongovernmental organizations logged countless hours trying to build Afghanistan’s fragile infrastructure and institutions. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has argued, many of these areas are interrelated: “Political freedoms (in the form of free speech and elections) help to promote economic security. Social opportunities (in the form of education and health facilities) facilitate economic participation. Economic facilities (in the form of opportunities for participation in trade and production) can help to generate personal abundance as well as public resources for social facilities.” 28These aspects are certainly important, but the focus in this book is on the deteriorating security situation and the key factors that contributed to it.

Discovering Afghanistan proved a fascinating journey. Afghanistan sometimes gets an unnecessarily bad rap. In James Michener’s novel Caravans, for instance, the main character, Mark Miller, was stationed in Kabul at the U.S. Embassy in the aftermath of World War II. His description of the city was overwhelmingly negative: “Kabul provided positively nothing for foreigners: no hotels that we could use, no cinema of any kind, no newspapers, no radio with European programs, no restaurants available to visitors, no theaters, no cafés, no magazines.” 29Michener, who had traveled through Afghanistan in 1955, hit on the perfunctory, stereotypical image of Afghanistan, which was sometimes repeated by foreigners after the U.S. invasion. But I found it a mesmerizing and deeply complicated country.

Over the course of several years’ research, I combed through thousands of primary and secondary sources. I visited Afghanistan multiple times every year between 2004 and 2009, and I conducted thousands of interviews in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, the United States, and other NATO countries. Within the Afghan government, for example, I interviewed officials in the Presidential Palace, National Security Council, Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Defense, and National Directorate of Security (Afghanistan’s intelligence service). Within the United States government, I interviewed individuals in the White House, Department of State, Department of Defense, Central Intelligence Agency, Drug Enforcement Agency, U.S. Agency for International Development, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other government agencies with a presence in Afghanistan. I spent time with soldiers and civilians from virtually all NATO countries in Afghanistan, from the Canadians and British in the south to the Germans and Norwegians in the north. I also conducted interviews with staff from the United Nations and a variety of nongovernmental organizations.

The book includes information from original interviews with key U.S. policymakers, such as Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, CIA Station Chief in Islamabad Robert Grenier, Commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ronald Neumann, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, Commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan Lieutenant General David Barno, and countless others. It also includes original interviews with key Afghanistan policymakers, such as Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, Minister of Interior Ali Jalali, and Afghan Ambassador to the United States Said Jawad.

In addition to interviews, I compiled and reviewed thousands of government documents from the United States, Afghanistan, and Coalition countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom, as well as transcripts and videos from the Taliban, Hezb-i-Islami, al Qa’ida, and other insurgent groups. I was fortunate to have access to a trove of documents that have not yet been published, such as the Afghan National Directorate of Security’s Strategy of Insurgents and Terrorists in Afghanistan, the Afghanistan National Security Council’s National Threat Assessment from various years, and the Afghanistan Ministry of Defense’s The National Military Strategy. 30The book also includes recently released declassified material from the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, State Department, Soviet Politburo, and other sources about Afghanistan’s descent into war from the 1970s through 2001. The use of such material helps capture more accurately the course of events—and their causes—over the past several decades.

A Road Map

This book proceeds somewhat chronologically. It follows the gradual collapse of governance in the late 1960s and 1970s that culminated in the Soviet invasion of 1979, which led a band of Americans such as U.S. Congressman Charlie Wilson to increase U.S. assistance to the Afghan mujahideen as they drove the Red Army out of the country. In June 1993, CIA Director James Woolsey told a small gathering at CIA headquarters that honored Charlie Wilson, “The defeat and breakup of the Soviet empire is one of the great events of world history.” 31This book continues with an examination of CIA and other U.S. government assessments of the bloody Afghan civil war in the early 1990s, the rise of the Taliban regime in the late 1990s, and the Taliban’s fateful alliance with Osama bin Laden and al Qa’ida.

With the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, the story transitions to the overthrow of the Taliban regime that year by an eclectic mixture of Northern Alliance forces, CIA operatives, U.S. Special Forces, and staggering U.S. airpower. It follows the discussions in the U.S. government about establishing a “light footprint” in Afghanistan, as Pentagon, State Department, CIA, and White House officials debated whether or not to engage in nation-building. It also tracks the exodus of Taliban and al Qa’ida fighters into neighboring Pakistan, and the establishment of a sanctuary for many of these fighters in Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province, Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and North West Frontier Province.

The book then moves to the rise of Afghanistan’s insurgency and the collapse of Afghan governance. It outlines Afghan difficulties in establishing law and order in rural areas as well as challenges in delivering essential services to the local populations. Weak governance, it turns out, has been a critical factor in the rise of most insurgencies over the past fifty years. The next chapters explore the proliferation of violence beginning in 2006, catalyzed by what Lieutenant General Eikenberry referred to as a “perfect storm” of crises. The book also explores the role of outside actors in aiding insurgent groups, including al Qa’ida and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate and Frontier Corps.

To better appreciate Afghanistan’s complex history, which has seen the ruthless destruction of foreign armies, our story begins with Alexander the Great’s audacious sojourn into Afghanistan—one of the most notable failed attempts to conquer the region. What becomes eerily apparent, however, is how quickly the United States ran into challenges similar to those faced by past empires. “Ambushes, assassinations, attacks on supply convoys, bridges, pipelines, and airfields, with the avoidance of set piece battles; these are history’s proven techniques for the guerrilla,” wrote Mohammad Yousaf, who ran Pakistan’s ISI operations in Afghanistan during the Soviet War. 32Indeed, Afghanistan’s rich history serves as a springboard for understanding the American experience in a country that since antiquity has been called a graveyard of empires.