TIME: Losing Control?
Monday, November 18, 2002
By TIM McGIRK and MICHAEL WARE
If the U.S. has won the war in Afghanistan, maybe
somebody should tell the enemy it's time to
surrender. The bad guys are still out there,
undetectable in the rocky, umber hills of eastern
Afghanistan--until they strike, which they do with
growing frequency, accuracy and brazenness. These
days American forward bases are coming under rocket
or mortar fire three times a week on average. Apache
pilots sometimes see angry red arcing lines of tracer
bullets rising toward their choppers from unseen
gunners hidden in Afghanistan's saw-blade ridges.
Roads frequented by special forces are often mined
with remote-controlled explosives, a new tactic
al-Qaeda fighters picked up from their Chechen
comrades fighting the Russians. With phantom enemy
fighters stepping up attacks and U.S. forces making
little headway against them, General Richard Myers,
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, felt compelled
to acknowledge last week, "We've lost a little
momentum there, to be frank."
Is Afghanistan slipping out of America's control?
It's an especially relevant question at a time when
Pentagon planners are holding up Afghanistan as a
template for possible "regime change" in Iraq.
Failure to pacify Afghanistan could make it tougher
for the Bush Administration to sustain support for a
new war against Saddam Hussein. "If Afghanistan
falls," says an Army officer in Washington, "Iraq
just got that much harder."
The fear of failure in Afghanistan has lately
prompted some hard new thinking in both Washington
and Kabul. General Myers' candid remarks to the
Brookings Institution suggests the Pentagon is trying
to be more creative in its pursuit of stability in
Afghanistan. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, for his
part, flashed some atypical steel last week when he
fired 15 provincial officials, all of them connected
to powerful warlords, on charges of abusing
authority, corruption and drug trafficking. Until now
Karzai has avoided conflict with the various local
potentates, who often ignore the national government.
Diplomats in Kabul say Karzai can enforce his
announced purge only if the U.S. backs him. After
all, two men on Karzai's list of wrongdoers--the
intelligence chiefs of Kandahar and
Mazar-i-Sharif--are tough characters whom the U.S.
has used as proxies in the war against al-Qaeda. U.S.
policy had been to avoid involvement in what it calls
"green on green" fighting in Afghanistan: conflicts
between militias at least theoretically loyal to the
new government. But lately U.N. officials in
Afghanistan say they have witnessed a sea change in
the American attitude. The new stance was illustrated
most vividly last month when U.S. paratroopers seized
an enormous cache of weapons and ammo--42 truckloads
full--belonging to Pacha Khan Zadran, a chieftain in
eastern Afghanistan. Zadran was supposed to be a U.S.
ally, but U.S. intelligence officers say Zadran was
selling weapons on the side to al-Qaeda. U.S.
officers suspect that some of the al-Qaeda rockets
now careering into American forward bases near Khost
came from Zadran's fire sale. The Americans destroyed
many of the weapons they seized and gave the rest to
the nascent Afghan national army.
Even without Zadran's stores, al-Qaeda and Taliban
survivors clearly have the capacity to keep fighting.
U.S. forces have managed to uncover a number of arms
depots in the eastern part of Afghanistan, where the
enemy is still active, still the weapons flow has not
ceased. Says a senior Afghan military figure in
Paktika province on the border: "Here, the Taliban
and al-Qaeda have no shortage of weapons; they're
channeling them in from Pakistan." Afghan
intelligence officials believe the Taliban and
al-Qaeda have set up a network along the border of
what the military calls "enablers," those who provide
money, hide weapons and spy on U.S. troop movements.
The Taliban, they say, have secretly re-established
councils throughout most of Paktika province.
Lately the enemy has grown better and bolder. A
bunker at a U.S. base in Lawara was hit last month by
an incoming rocket. There were no casualties, but it
was the first time such a hit-and-run attack had
scored. Six days later, a rocket was launched at the
U.S. special forces' Chapman Army airfield at 10 a.m.
It was the first daytime rocket attack since the
Taliban's collapse.
The enemy is even contracting out jobs. In Kandahar,
U.S. forces recently figured out that a rocket attack
on their Bagram base in June was carried out by one
of their own Afghan allies. The Americans had fallen
behind with the payroll, and al-Qaeda offered the
turncoat quick cash, according to Taliban figures
connected with the commander. He now resides,
according to an aide to the governor of Kandahar, in
a prison cage in the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba.
Catching the perpetrators of such assaults after the
fact is usually all but impossible. After enduring a
barrage of wildly aimed rockets on their Camp Salerno
base last month, commanders of the 82nd Airborne
Division decided to mount a helicopter-and
artillery-backed assault of 520 infantrymen on a high
mountain valley rumored to be used as an al-Qaeda
staging post. Up in the valley, this massive invasion
force encountered only a lone man, who popped off a
few rifle shots and then fled. He was never caught.
General Myers, in his assessment of the situation in
Afghanistan, gives Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants
credit for responding well to U.S. tactics, for
instance, by improving their ability to communicate
and move money undetected. "They've adapted their
tactics," he says, "and we've got to adapt ours." In
particular, Myers argues, "intelligence flow has to
be a lot more exquisite than it's been." He says that
in the early months of the war, the U.S. kept the
enemy off balance with "bold" actions that carried "a
large element of risk." Now, he says, "we've got to
get back to the point where we can ... act ... faster
than they can."
Of course, pursuing enemy elements more aggressively
carries the risk of further alienating innocent
Afghans who invariably get hassled during security
sweeps. "No one ever forgets that American soldiers
came into their house and trawled through their
women's clothing. Nor do they forgive," says Mullah
Mohammed Khaksar, who despite having served as the
Taliban deputy interior minister, is a relative
moderate. "Doesn't the U.S. realize that with every
one of these operations, their enemy is not
decreasing but increasing with fresh, embittered new
recruits?"
Ideally, the U.S. would like to see Afghanistan
pacified by the Afghan national army. But building
that force is proving a slow, arduous project.
Because regional warlords are loath to contribute
soldiers and weapons to a military force that could
be used against them later, the national army so far
consists of only about 1,200 raw, poorly armed
recruits. Says a State Department official, with
understatement: "They are not yet ready to take the
field." Given the vacuum of authority, Washington
seems to be coming around to the idea that
Afghanistan is a long-term project for the U.S.
"We're going to have to be there for the long haul,"
says David Johnson, the Bush Administration's
coordinator for U.S. policy on Afghanistan.
General Myers also suggests there is growing
consensus in Washington that Afghanistan's needs
require a greater commitment from the U.S. In the
strip of Afghanistan stretching from Kabul eastward
to the Pakistan border, where al-Qaeda and the
Taliban are still potent, the principal mission of
the U.S. must for now remain military, Myers says.
But in the remaining three-quarters of the country,
it might be time to "flip our priorities," he says,
and make reconstruction paramount. "That's what we're
debating right now inside government." Myers says
rebuilding Afghanistan would not be "a U.S.-only
effort" and would require "a lot of help from the
international community." But given that the war was
driven by Washington, the initiative for a global
effort to reconstruct Afghanistan will likely have to
come from there too.
Repairing Afghanistan's infrastructure and economy
might have the secondary benefit of improving
security by reducing the ranks of malcontents and
extremists. Mullah Khaksar says he has just returned
from Kandahar, where young men fill the teahouses
talking of their hatred for America. "I asked, 'Why
are you here?' They answered that there was no work
and no jobs; what else did they have to do?" He adds,
"It's the only time they talk politics, when they are
without work. Every unemployed man is the President
of Afghanistan." Or a possible recruit for the enemy.
--With
reporting by Massimo Calabresi and Mark
Thompson/Washington and Kamal
Haider/Maidanshah