4 October 2016

15 Years in the Afghan Crucible

By CARLOTTA GALL
OCT. 1, 2016 

Residential apartments in a gated community in Kabul. CreditShah Marai/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

KABUL, Afghanistan — There is an end-of-an-era feel here these days. Military helicopters rattle overhead, ferrying American and Afghan officials by air rather than risk cars bombs in the streets. The concrete barriers, guarding against suicide attacks, have grown taller and stronger around every embassy and government building, and whole streets are blocked off from the public.

It has been 15 years since American forces began their bombing campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda on Oct. 7, 2001, and sometimes it feels as if we are back to square one, that there is nothing to show for it.

The recent American military drawdown has been drastic — from over 100,000 troops a few years ago to a force of 8,500 today. Thousands of Afghans have been made jobless as bases and assistance programs have closed. Meanwhile tens of thousands of Taliban are on the offensive in the countryside, threatening to overrun several provincial towns and staging huge bombings here in the capital.

Afghan forces have been bearing the brunt, suffering unsustainable casualties. Communities talk of hundreds of coffins returning from the front line. Civilians have suffered no less — thousands of families have been displaced anew by fighting, and aid workers warn that their access is deteriorating. Business executives have been leaving, selling off their property, and whole families have swelled the refugee columns heading to Europe.


The political mood is shifting, too, as Afghans sense the declining American influence and start casting around for new patrons or renewing old alliances. The politicking is intense: “Hot, very hot,” as a former minister described the political climate.

For Afghans, and for many of us who have followed Afghanistan for decades — I have been visiting the country since the early 1990s — the times are reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s withdrawal in 1989 after a 10-year occupation. The Communist government and army that the Soviets left behind survived only three years before they were overthrown by the mujahedeen in 1992.

The Taliban, supported by Pakistan, seem intent on repeating that scenario, hoping to seize control of a section of territory along the Pakistani border and declare once more their Islamic Emirate. Since the Taliban temporarily overran the town of Kunduz last fall, many Afghans have lost confidence that the government can protect them.

Over the years, Afghanistan has received one of the highest amounts of foreign assistance per capita, on a par with the West Bank and Gaza and Liberia. The United States alone has spent close to $500 billion on its Afghanistan mission since 2002, most of it on military operations but roughly a fifth — $113 billion — on reconstruction, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

Yet it remains one of the poorest countries in the world — more than 10 million people live below the poverty line, and three-quarters of the population is illiterate, according to the World Bank.

It looked easy enough at the beginning. The Taliban were swiftly defeated in 2001 and fled in disarray, as did Al Qaeda’s forces. I saw thousands of their fighters — including hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters — surrender in northern Afghanistan, and there was no doubt they were at the end of their strength and had lost popular support.

But they were allowed to regroup just over the mountains in Pakistan, and from there they still menace Afghanistan and the wider region. In Pakistan they started teaching young men how to build pressure-cooker bombs filled with ball bearings and suicide belts, and later truck bombs, and sent them out by the hundreds against targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

They are still recruiting and training bombers, including Ahmad Khan Rahami, the suspect in a series of bombings last month in New York City and New Jersey, who spent months in a madrasa in a Taliban stronghold near the Pakistani frontier town of Quetta.Photo
A burial ceremony in the aftermath of a suicide bombing in July that killed 80 people.CreditAdam Ferguson for The New York Times

Despite years of denials from Pakistan, it is now widely understood that the Taliban has all this time been mentored and equipped by the Pakistani intelligence agency. Yet President Obama has failed, as did his predecessor, President George W. Bush, to end Pakistan’s long flirtation with Al Qaeda and its brand of terrorism.

Osama bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahri, is still believed to be living in Pakistan, alongside the top Taliban leaders — and continues directing mayhem through his adherents across the Middle East, Africa and Asia. American Special Operations forces have been raiding Al Qaeda groups infiltrating back into Afghanistan over the last two years.

And the Pakistani military is ever more brazen in its support for the insurgents, even flying in retired military officers to train the Taliban by chartered helicopter — one crash-landed in a Taliban-controlled area of eastern Afghanistan in August bearing six retired military personnel and a Russian pilot.

Watching so many deadly attacks continue over the years with little done to prevent them at their source has been one of my hardest experiences as a reporter. And it is increasingly difficult to answer Afghans when they wonder how America could have been so blind or careless to ignore Pakistan’s role in sponsoring terrorism.

“For a long time America did not understand Afghanistan,” Commander Gadda, a grizzled jihadi commander and long opponent of the Taliban, told me. “Now they are beginning to, but after how long?”

In America and Europe, I detect general weariness with the Afghanistan campaign. I often hear people describe it as the “Afghan disaster.” Certainly there have been many blunders: the corruption, the poor leadership and the unremitting casualties. But I would never term it a disaster.

The United States has essentially lifted the entire country from the dark ages. Afghans are still grateful to America for ending Taliban rule, and the terror, poverty and backwardness that it entailed. “We are tired of always running with our children on our backs,” one father told me.

There was barely a paved road or an undamaged government building back in 2001, and widespread hunger after a seven-year famine. I remember a village elder weeping as he told me that American food aid had saved the village from starvation.

Half of Kabul was in ruins and uninhabited. I used to ride horses in western Kabul because it was mostly deserted and we could canter through broken compounds and ruined gardens. Now the whole area is rebuilt and thick with people. The campus of the American University of Afghanistan stands across from a new Parliament building (built by India) and across the street from the renovated Kabul museum and government compounds. Much of the public building has been done with American money.

The capital was dark and cold for years, but the World Bank helped bring electricity from Central Asia, turning on the lights in Kabul. Suburbs sprawled in every direction, and the small houses that climb the steep, craggy hills were repaired and painted. You could see people had work and were building and renovating.

Reconstruction was frustratingly slow at first — even now, most of the country still does not have electricity — but has grown steadily. For years the roads were an agonizing trial of bumping and jolting, but these days journeys that used to take several days can now be completed in hours. In the provinces, administration buildings, schools, hospitals, clinics, police stations and even prisons have sprouted.

Over time I began to notice a new generation of trained professionals working in government offices: Young men with degrees in charge of district offices, teenage women teaching classes to the younger students, female graduates working in private universities, and officials in the ministries and embassies returning from abroad with master’s degrees and doctorates.Photo
An Afghan soldier entering Kabul after the Taliban were routed from the city in 2001.CreditTyler Hicks/The New York Times, via Getty Images

Afghanistan once had only two provincial universities, and now it has more than 30, offering graduate courses for the first time. Scores of private schools and universities are filling the thirst for education. “The young people have found their voice and are speaking out like never before,” says Nancy Dupree, a former American diplomat who founded the Afghan Center at Kabul University, which holds a vast digital archive of research material.

After a lifetime in Afghanistan, she is racing to complete a bundle of projects — collating the anthropological slides of her husband, Louis Dupree, reopening a royal palace and seeking to digitize Afghanistan’s Foreign Ministry archive.

“They do not know their own history,” she laments of the young Afghans who have traveled little outside their homes. “They have no sense of belonging and what it means to be Afghan. And they do not know what a beautiful country they have.”

Foreign funding has saved much of Afghanistan’s endangered heritage, repairing the mosques and townhouses of the old city that were ruined in the civil war, for example, and renovating the gardens and tomb of Emperor Babur in Kabul, the citadel in Herat and the Buddhas’ niches in Bamiyan that were blown up by the Taliban. Even with security as it is, archaeologists are quietly at work around the country.

When I ask foreign professionals working in Afghanistan about the American era, they tend to say that far too much money was wasted and that it was a mistake to expect change quickly.

Yet Afghan friends and acquaintances rarely hesitate when asked whether the American intervention was worth it: “No question” is the usual response. There have been many painful mistakes, of course, but the building, the education, the defense and diplomatic support have all helped Afghanistan rise from the ashes.

Women especially have gained confidence. A friend laughingly recounted how she recently called relatives in Germany who had always boasted about their sauna to tell them she was enjoying the hotel sauna during a working trip to Bamiyan, in central Afghanistan.

There is still a great disparity between the city and countryside, and in many areas women are struggling to feed their children. Nearly a quarter of the country’s districts — 90 out of a total of nearly 400 — are under Taliban sway.

Yet there is a new awareness among Afghans that the boom years created by so much American assistance did not occur organically, and that now they have to find an organic way to grow the economy. They talk of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, its talent for trade and its ideal position as a transit route for energy and goods from China and Central Asia to the Persian Gulf.

There is a sense that if, in the early years, the Americans were making the decisions in Afghanistan, now the Afghans are. And the mistakes and disputes will be for them to work out, too. Despite many complaints about the dysfunctional government, there is still hope that President Ashraf Ghani has the ideas to lift the economy.

Most Afghans say they will need American support in defense and diplomacy to counter the continuing threat of terrorism and to protect them from predatory neighbors beyond the 2017 deadline that President Obama has made for the drawdown. There is a real danger the Afghan Army could collapse next year if the fighting and casualties remain as intense, and so a continued United States military commitment will remain essential.

If the United States could go a step further and redouble efforts to secure peace in Afghanistan with the Taliban and with Pakistan — a process started in 2009 by Richard C. Holbrooke, the special envoy to Afghanistan under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and still sputtering along — it would avoid a gigantic failure of having the country relapse into Taliban control.

Peace will be a tall order and require a high level of American commitment for years more. But the result would be welcomed overwhelmingly by Afghans who have endured decades of war, and serve as a lasting tribute to the families of the American soldiers who died there.


Carlotta Gall, a senior foreign correspondent for The New York Times, spent nearly 12 years reporting in Afghanistan since 2001.

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