The wrong enemy America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014

IN DECEMBER 2006, Carlotta Gall visited Quetta in Pakistan, close to the border with Afghanistan, to trace the families of Taliban suicide bombers. Her investigations were not welcome to the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the main intelligence arm of the Pakistan military, which was determined to hide its close relations with the Taliban. Plainclothes intelligence agents smashed open the door of her hotel room and seized her notebooks, computer and cellphone. She protested when one of the agents grabbed her handbag, and he promptly punched her twice in the face, knocking her down. The officer in charge accused her of trying to interview Taliban members, which he said was forbidden. She learned later that her rough treatment had been ordered by the head of the ISI press department to discourage her from reporting ISI-Taliban links. It is these links that are the central subject of this highly informed book by Gall, who was Afghanistan bureau chief and correspondent for The New York Times between 2001 and 2011. The title of "The Wrong Enemy" is a quotation from Richard C. Holbrooke, the United States special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, who said: "We may be fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country." He was suggesting that America's real opponent was the ISI and the Pakistan Army. This is not a new thesis. For all the efforts of the ISI to hide Pakistani intervention in Afghanistan, some of it was too blatant and large-scale to be concealed. In November 2001, the sudden collapse of the Taliban in northern Afghanistan under the weight of American air attacks backed by local militiamen left thousands of Pakistanis trapped with the Taliban in the town of Kunduz. For about 15 days, one or two Pakistani flights a day rescued Pakistani military advisers, specialists, trainers and ISI members. Equally revealing about the ISI's continuing connection to Al Qaeda was the discovery 10 years later that Osama bin Laden was a long-term resident of Abbottabad with a house close to the Kakul Military Academy, Pakistan's equivalent of West Point. Gall makes clear the absurdity of imagining that nobody in the ISI, one of the most powerful and suspicious intelligence services in the world, knew he was there. She quotes Ejaz Shah, a former Pakistani domestic intelligence chief, as saying: "In a Pakistani village, they notice even a stray dog." What makes Gall's book so convincing is the way in which her long experience of Afghanistan and Pakistan enables her to marshal the evidence for the Pakistan military being in control of the Taliban. Demonstrating a connection between the two is easy enough, but proof that the Taliban are essentially under orders from the ISI is more difficult, not least because Pakistani intelligence has operated through proxies and witnesses who are either too frightened to speak or are dead. The assault on Gall in 2006 was nothing compared with the punishment Pakistani journalists commonly receive for similar inquiries. "Saleem Shahzad, who wrote extensively about militancy and the ISI, was found dead in 2012 after being detained by intelligence agency personnel," she says. "He was killed on the orders of Pakistan's most senior generals." At times Gall may seem to labor the point about how Pakistan has masterminded the insurgency in Afghanistan since 2001, but it needs all the laboring it can get because Pakistan's covert role was and is so central to developments there. It was never adequately realized in Washington that without confronting Pakistan, the American intervention in Afghanistan could not succeed. Gall writes that "for years American officials failed to recognize the huge investment in time, money and military effort that Pakistan had put into the Taliban from 1994 to 2001." This changed for a couple of years after 9/11, but the Pakistani security and military establishment was still determined to dominate Afghanistan. The United States never faced up to the fact that its most powerful ally in the region was also its most powerful enemy. As a result, it fought a war that it could never win in which Gall estimates between 50,000 and 70,000 Afghans have died, as well as 3,400 foreign soldiers, including 2,300 Americans. Between 2001 and 2013 Pakistan received more than $20 billion in aid from Washington, most of which went to the military. The refusal of the Bush and Obama administrations to treat Pakistan as anything but a loyal ally in the war on terror seems as extraordinary in retrospect as it did at the time. Gall writes that "support for the relationship with Pakistan became a mantra" for American officials. They made only low-key demands for Pakistan to do something about crossborder infiltration. And only in 2007 did the United States begin keeping tabs on the links between the ISI and the Taliban; previously the C.I.A. had concentrated wholly on Al Qaeda. But by then religious schools in Pakistan were a common starting point for suicide bombers. When Gall asked the brother of a Pakistani bomber if he blamed the Taliban or the ISI for the bombings, he said: "All Taliban are ISI Taliban. It is not possible to go to Afghanistan without the help of the ISI." A former Taliban commander, who had fled to Pakistan after being arrested in Afghanistan, said that ISI agents had threatened to send him to prison unless he returned to fight Americans. Did American officials really underestimate Pakistani involvement or did they simply believe there was nothing much they could do about it? Pakistan calculated correctly that as the American Army became bogged down in a guerrilla war in Iraq, it would be unable to conduct a second counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. In 2004 Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, considered the ablest Pakistani general by Western diplomats, became head of the ISI and three years later chief of army staff. Gall notes that it was during his tenure that "the Taliban received consistent protection and assistance from Pakistan, and came to threaten the entire U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan." A reason for Western ignorance or self-deception was that Pakistani involvement in Afghanistan was largely invisible or unprovable. By way of contrast, the failings of Prime Minister Hamid Karzai and the Afghan government were glaring and demonstrable. Corruption was pervasive, as shown by the gargantuan fraud at Kabul Bank and, at another level, by the deployment of nonexistent policemen whose pay was pocketed by their commanders. There was a vacuum of authority in Afghanistan that the Taliban were quick to fill. The presence of a heavily armed foreign occupation army exacerbated the problem, and Gall gives vivid accounts of wedding parties torn apart by American airstrikes. Still, on the future of Afghanistan, she is (with reservations) unexpectedly optimistic. The Afghan government is not inevitably going to collapse as foreign troops depart, she says, because a majority of Afghans detest the Taliban, even if they are often too frightened to say so. All the same, she admits that the United States and its allies leave Afghanistan much as they found it, with "a weak state, prey to the ambitions of its neighbors and extremist Islamists." Was it possible no one in the Pakistani military knew where Osama bin Laden was hiding? PATRICK COCKBURN is a Middle East correspondent for The Independent of London. His latest book, written with Henry Cockburn, is "Henry's Demons: A Father and Son's Journey Out of Madness."

Gall (Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus) pulls no punches in criticizing U.S. ally Pakistan, who, she writes, "has proved to be perfidious, driving the violence in Afghanistan for its own cynical, hegemonic reasons." In her travels, she encounters Taliban recruits in seminaries in Quetta and stiff-necked mujahideen in Kandahar as she chronicles the missteps and failures that exacerbated the violence in Afghanistan, namely that the U.S. grossly underestimated the extent to which the Taliban and other militant groups are influenced by the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI. She also documents how Pakistan arrested and executed the more moderate elements of the Taliban, with whom peace negotiations would have been possible, while providing for the more extremist leaders, and how the wave of suicide attacks in Kabul in 2008 had the dual mission of striking fear in the heart of the capital and eliminating Indian and Baluch targets, who were incidental to the Taliban but sworn enemies of the ISI. In particular, Gall decries the decision to disarm Afghanistan's regional and ethnic militias in the hopes of creating a national army, which she calls "as grave an error as the policy of de-Baathification and the demobilization of the Iraqi army in 2003." (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Foreword I arrived in the town of Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan on a cold evening in November 2001, just days after the Taliban had fled. Two months had passed since the attacks of 9/11 and one month since America had gone to war in Afghanistan. The U.S. Air Force had been bombing Afghanistan since October 7, set on chasing down al Qaeda and toppling the Taliban government that harbored its leaders. I had crossed the strictly controlled border from Uzbekistan thanks to an Afghan friend. I had not seen him for six years, but he had helped my father travel into Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation and decided to help his friend's daughter cover this war. It was one of the reasons I came to love the Afghans. Friendship and loyalty mattered. I had visited Mazar-i-Sharif several times in the 1990s and knew it as a busy trading town, its streets spanning out from the glorious turquoise dome and tiled walls of the Shrine of Hazrat Ali in its central square. I was shocked at how impoverished the city and its inhabitants had become. They had suffered two terrible massacres in four years under the Taliban and lived under virtual blockade. Thousands of families, displaced by the war and Afghanistan's worst drought in decades, had moved to the city in search of work and food. The streets were clogged with horsecarts, street stalls, and laborers pulling loads through the potholes. Families carrying children in their arms stepped through the mud to the central hospital. Scores of women begged on the mud-slicked streets, their faces hidden behind the lattice screen of the burqa, the head-to-toe pleated veil that turned women into soulless beings. The only part of their body visible was a calloused hand stretched out to passersby. Everyone was cold and hungry. The restaurants and tea shops were empty because of Ramadan. Street stalls sold imported fruit juice and stale biscuits, but there was not an egg to be had in the whole city. I was reporting for the New York Times, one of two dozen correspondents scrambled and sent to the region in the weeks after 9/11. I would end up staying for over a decade, engrossed in America's struggle in Afghanistan. The Afghans would overthrow the Taliban and embrace peace, only to falter and slip back, dragged into a fight that few of them wanted. I packed up and left my previous post in the Balkans and went to live in Kabul, staying with the story even as the world's attention was drawn away to Iraq. For me, Afghanistan was always the most important news story of the time. It was where 9/11 began and would finally be answered. It was where my reporting life had started, and from where rose this great wave of Islamism that has powered many of today's wars. By 2001, I had been reporting on wars for nearly eight years: five in Russia where I covered the war in Chechnya closely, and three in the Balkans, chronicling the war in Kosovo and the fall of Slobodan Milosevi for the New York Times. At the time of 9/11, I was reporting on NATO's most pressing concern, an incipient guerrilla movement in Macedonia on the border with Kosovo. I watched the attack on the twin towers with fellow journalists in a hotel bar in Skopje. I knew immediately that Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks. I knew the story would lead back to Afghanistan, and I felt dread for the Afghans. Afghanistan had featured large in my life for nearly twenty years, ever since the early days of the Soviet invasion. As a Russian language student, I had met drunken Red Army soldiers back from Afghanistan in a Soviet bar. The war was never officially acknowledged, but those conscripts told hair-raising stories of Afghan guerrillas mutilating soldiers caught on the battlefield. I heard the other side of the story from my father, a British television journalist who was in Afghanistan with the mujahideen, and brought back pictures of refugees pouring out of the country along donkey trails, villagers taking up arms against Soviet jets and helicopters, and Russian prisoners talking about drug-taking and hazing in the ranks. It was the Soviet Union's Vietnam -- I was fascinated. In the 1990s, I traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan and saw for myself the harsh mountains and emerald valleys of the Hindu Kush, and met the Afghans, resilient and gracious even in the destitution of the refugee camps. I came across international jihadis in the Pakistani city of Peshawar then, too. We called them Wahhabis, after the fundamentalist Islamic sect that has its roots in Saudi Arabia. They were rough fighters, Arabs and North Africans who would run us off the roads, and Egyptian and Kuwaiti doctors who showed a hostile arrogance to us Westerners. We did not realize then, but they were the beginnings of bin Laden's al Qaeda. They were often a menace to the Afghans with their militaristic ambitions. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, they were looking for a cause. I saw Wahhabis turn up in Chechnya in 1995 and watched how they transformed the Chechens' deserving cause for self-determination into an extremist Islamist struggle. Determined to spark a greater conflagration across the Muslim North Caucasus, the Arabs set Chechens against each other and helped provoke the second war in the republic in 1999, bringing more disaster and destruction down on the small territory. They wrought even greater havoc in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They dreamed of creating an Islamic caliphate stretching across South and Central Asia, home to some 500 million Muslims. Pakistan, the first nuclear-armed Muslim state, would be at its core. Some of us saw and wrote about the extremist trend as it unfolded, but no Western government seemed concerned. Now, by going to war in 2001, the United States was walking into the Islamists' trap. It was just what al Qaeda wanted: for Afghanistan again to serve as a battleground for Muslim fighters against a superpower. The Afghans once more were their unlucky pawns. It would become America's longest overt war. Thirteen years later, there is no swift resolution in sight, and support at home has waned. Few Americans seem to care anymore about Afghanistan, and I decided I owed it to all those caught up in the maelstrom of Afghanistan to put down a record of events as I had seen them from the ground. The war has been a tragedy costing untold thousands of lives and lasting far too long. The Afghans were never advocates of terrorism yet they bore the brunt of the punishment for 9/11. Pakistan, supposedly an ally, has proved to be perfidious, driving the violence in Afghanistan for its own cynical, hegemonic reasons. Pakistan's generals and mullahs have done great harm to their own people as well as their Afghan neighbors and NATO allies. Pakistan, not Afghanistan, has been the true enemy. The U.S. and NATO response has always been behind the curve, "trailing" the insurgency, as the military terms it, and ignoring it to wage war in Iraq. It was a fatal error to allow the insurgency to grow so strong that defeating it would be brought into question and cost so many lives. Politicians and diplomats, barring the exceptional few, were mealymouthed, pleading that they had no leverage over Pakistan, and downright negligent. I watched the resurgence of the Taliban with mounting alarm and, ultimately, great sorrow since it could have been prevented. I witnessed many of the scenes in this book, met most of the participants, and heard their accounts firsthand. In retelling these events, I am offering a first brush of history. It is a partial record, as war reporting always is, but it is as I and many Afghans saw it. I lived in Kabul, with a foothold in Islamabad, from 2001 to 2011, traveling all over Afghanistan and through much of Pakistan too. I returned for nine months, from 2012 to 2013, to write this book. Over twelve years, I lost friends and acquaintances in suicide bombings and shootings, and saw others close to me savagely maimed. I do not pretend to be objective in this war. I am on the side of the victims. The human suffering has been far too great, and we have a duty to ponder the reasons for such a calamity. Kabul, Afghanistan May 2013 Excerpted from The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 by Carlotta Gall All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.