The Other War

http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?040412fa_fact

THE OTHER WAR
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Why Bush’s Afghanistan problem won’t go away.
Issue of 2004-04-12
Posted 2004-04-05

In December, 2002, a year after the Taliban had been driven from power in
Afghanistan, Donald Rumsfeld gave an upbeat assessment of the country’s
future to CNN’s Larry King. “They have elected a government. . . . The
Taliban are gone. The Al Qaeda are gone. The country is not a perfectly
stable place, and it needs a great deal of reconstruction funds,” Rumsfeld
said. “There are people who are throwing hand grenades and shooting off
rockets and trying to kill people, but there are people who are trying to
kill people in New York or San Francisco. So it’s not going to be a
perfectly tidy place.” Nonetheless, he said, “I’m hopeful, I’m encouraged.”
And he added, “I wish them well.”

A year and a half later, the Taliban are still a force in many parts of
Afghanistan, and the country continues to provide safe haven for members of
Al Qaeda. American troops, more than ten thousand of whom remain, are
heavily deployed in the mountainous areas near Pakistan, still hunting for
Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. Hamid Karzai, the
U.S.-backed President, exercises little political control outside Kabul and
is struggling to undercut the authority of local warlords, who effectively
control the provinces. Heroin production is soaring, and, outside of Kabul
and a few other cities, people are terrorized by violence and crime. A new
report by the United Nations Development Program, made public on the eve of
last week’s international conference, in Berlin, on aid to Afghanistan,
stated that the nation is in danger of once again becoming a “terrorist
breeding ground” unless there is a significant increase in development aid.

The turmoil in Afghanistan has become a political issue for the Bush
Administration, whose general conduct of the war on terrorism is being
publicly challenged by Richard A. Clarke, the former National Security
Council terrorism adviser, in a memoir, “Against All Enemies,” and in
contentious hearings before the September 11th Commission. The Bush
Administration has consistently invoked Afghanistan as a success story—an
example of the President’s determination. However, it is making this claim
in the face of renewed warnings, from international organizations, from
allies, and from within its own military—notably a Pentagon-commissioned
report that was left in bureaucratic limbo when its conclusions proved
negative—that the situation there is deteriorating rapidly.

In his book, Clarke depicts the victory in Afghanistan as far less decisive
than the Administration has portrayed it, and he sharply criticizes the
Pentagon’s tactics, especially the decision to rely on airpower, and not
U.S. troops on the ground, in the early weeks. The war began on October 7,
2001, but, he wrote, not until seven weeks later did the United States
“insert a ground force unit (Marines) to take and hold a former al Qaeda and
Taliban facility. . . . The late-November operation did not include any
effort by U.S. forces to seal the border with Pakistan, snatch the al Qaeda
leadership, or cut off the al Qaeda escape.”

Clarke told me in an interview last week that the Administration viewed
Afghanistan as a military and political backwater—a detour along the road to
Iraq, the war that mattered most to the President. Clarke and some of his
colleagues, he said, had repeatedly warned the national-security leadership
that, as he put it, “you can’t win the war in Afghanistan with such a small
effort.” Clarke continued, “There were more cops in New York City than
soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan. We had to have a security presence
coupled with a development program in every region and stay there for
several months.”

In retrospect, Clarke said, he believes that the President and his men did
not respond for three reasons: “One, they did not want to get involved in
Afghanistan like Russia did. Two, they were saving forces for the war in
Iraq. And, three, Rumsfeld wanted to have a laboratory to prove his theory
about the ability of small numbers of ground troops, coupled with airpower,
to win decisive battles.” As of today, Clarke said, “the U.S. has succeeded
in stabilizing only two or three cities. The President of Afghanistan is
just the mayor of Kabul.”

Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Joseph Collins, a Pentagon expert on
Afghanistan, acknowledged that it was only in the past several months that
“significant money began to flow” into Afghanistan for reconstruction and
security. “We found in the security area we were doing the right thing, but
not fast enough,” he told me. The resurgence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda,
Collins said, did not begin until early last year. “They began to realize at
the end of 2003 that the key is not to fight our soldiers but U.N. officials
and aid workers.” In the long run, Collins added, “these tactics are
self-defeating—in Afghanistan and in Iraq.”

Clarke’s view of what went wrong was buttressed by an internal military
analysis of the Afghanistan war that was completed last winter. In late
2002, the Defense Department’s office of Special Operations and Low
Intensity Conflict (solic) asked retired Army Colonel Hy Rothstein, a
leading military expert in unconventional warfare, to examine the planning
and execution of the war in Afghanistan, with an understanding that he would
focus on Special Forces. As part of his research, Rothstein travelled to
Afghanistan and interviewed many senior military officers, in both Special
Forces and regular units. He also talked to dozens of junior Special Forces
officers and enlisted men who fought there. His report was a devastating
critique of the Administration’s strategy. He wrote that the bombing
campaign was not the best way to hunt down Osama bin Laden and the rest of
the Al Qaeda leadership, and that there was a failure to translate early
tactical successes into strategic victory. In fact, he wrote, the victory in
Afghanistan was not, in the long run, a victory at all.

Last month, I visited Rothstein in his office at the Naval Postgraduate
School, in Monterey, California, where he is a senior lecturer in defense
analysis. A fit, broad-shouldered man in his early fifties, he served more
than twenty years in the Army Special Forces, including three years as the
director of plans and exercises for the Joint Special Operations Command, at
Fort Bragg, before retiring, in 1999. His associates depicted him as
anything but a dissident. “He puts boots on the ground,” Robert Andrews, a
former head of solic, told me, referring to Rothstein’s missions in Central
America, for which he earned a decoration for valor, and in the former
Yugoslavia. Rothstein agreed to speak to me, with some reluctance, only
after I had obtained his report independently, and he would not go into
details about his research. “They asked me to do this,” he said of the
Pentagon, “and my purpose was to make some things better. All I want people
to do is to look at the paper and not at me. I’ll tell you the good and the
bad.”

The report describes a wide gap between how Donald Rumsfeld represented the
war and what was actually taking place. Rumsfeld had told reporters at the
start of the Afghanistan bombing campaign, Rothstein wrote, that “you don’t
fight terrorists with conventional capabilities. You do it with
unconventional capabilities.” In December, the Taliban and Al Qaeda
retreated into the countryside as the armies of the Northern Alliance,
supported by American airpower and Special Forces troops, moved into the
capital. There were many press accounts of America’s new way of waging war,
including well-publicized reports of American Special Forces on horseback
and of new technologies, like the Predator drones. Nonetheless, Rothstein
wrote, the United States continued to emphasize bombing and conventional
warfare while “the war became increasingly unconventional,” with Taliban and
Al Qaeda fighters “operating in small cells, emerging only to lay land mines
and launch nighttime rocket attacks before disappearing once again.”
Rothstein added:

What was needed after December 2001 was a greater emphasis on U.S. special
operations troops, supported by light infantry, conducting counterinsurgency
operations. Aerial bombardment should have become a rare thing. . . . The
failure to adjust U.S. operations in line with the post-Taliban change in
theater conditions cost the United States some of the fruits of victory and
imposed additional, avoidable humanitarian and stability costs on
Afghanistan. . . . Indeed, the war’s inadvertent effects may be more
significant than we think.

By the end of 2001, the Afghan war had essentially become a
counterinsurgency. At this point, it was important to turn to a specific
kind of unconventional warfare: “The Special Forces were created to deal
with precisely this kind of enemy,” Rothstein wrote. “Unorthodox thinking,
drawing on a thorough understanding of war, demography, human nature,
culture and technology are part of this mental approach. . . .
Unconventional warfare prescribes that Special Forces soldiers must be
diplomats, doctors, spies, cultural anthropologists, and good friends—all
before their primary work comes into play.”

Instead, Rothstein said, “the command arrangement evolved into a large and
complex structure that could not (or would not) respond to the new
unconventional setting.” The result has been “a campaign in Afghanistan that
effectively destroyed the Taliban but has been significantly less successful
at being able to achieve the primary policy goal of ensuring that al Qaeda
could no longer operate in Afghanistan.”

Rothstein wrote that Rumsfeld routinely responded to criticism about
civilian casualties by stating that “some amount” of collateral damage “is
inevitable in war.” It is estimated that more than a thousand Afghan
civilians were killed by bombing and other means in the early stages of the
war. Rothstein suggested that these numbers could have been lower, and that
further incidents might have been avoided if Special Forces had been allowed
to wage a truly unconventional war that reduced the reliance on massive
firepower.

The Administration’s decision to treat the Taliban as though all its members
identified with, and would fight for, Al Qaeda was also a crucial early
mistake. “There were deep divisions within the Taliban that could have been
exploited through a political-military effort which is the essence of
unconventional warfare,” Rothstein said. “A few months of intensive
diplomatic, intelligence and military preparations between Special Forces
and anti-Taliban forces would have made a significant difference.”

Instead, Rothstein wrote, the American military campaign left a power
vacuum. The conditions under which the post-Taliban government came to power
gave “warlordism, banditry and opium production a new lease on life.” He
concluded, “Defeating an enemy on the battlefield and winning a war are
rarely synonymous. Winning a war calls for more than defeating one’s enemy
in battle.” He recalled that, in 1975, when Harry G. Summers, an Army
colonel who later wrote a history of the Vietnam War, told a North
Vietnamese colonel, “You never defeated us on the battlefield,” the colonel
replied, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”

Rothstein delivered his report in January. It was returned to him, with the
message that he had to cut it drastically and soften his conclusions. He has
heard nothing further. “It’s a threatening paper,” one military consultant
told me. The Pentagon, asked for comment, confirmed that Rothstein was told
“we did not support all of his conclusions,” and said that he would soon be
sent notes. In addition, Joseph Collins told me, “There may be a kernel of
truth in there, but our experts found the study rambling and not terribly
informative.” In interviews, however, a number of past and present Bush
Administration officials have endorsed Rothstein’s key assertions. “It
wasn’t like he made it up,” a former senior intelligence officer said. “The
reason they’re petrified is that it’s true, and they didn’t want to see it
in writing.”

The high point of the American involvement in Afghanistan came in December
of 2001, at a conference of various Afghan factions held in Bonn, when the
Administration’s candidate, Hamid Karzai, was named chairman of the interim
government. (His appointment as President was confirmed six months later at
a carefully orchestrated Afghan tribal council, known as a Loya Jirga.) It
was a significant achievement, but there were major flaws in the broader
accord. There was no agreement on establishing an international police
force, no procedures for collecting taxes, no strategy for disarming either
the many militias or individual Afghans, and no resolution with the Taliban.

Then came Iraq. In interviews with academics, aid workers, and
non-governmental-organization officials, I was repeatedly told that, within
a few months of the Bonn conference, as the United States began its buildup
in the Gulf, security and political conditions throughout Afghanistan
eroded. In the early summer of 2002, a military consultant, reflecting the
views of several American Special Forces commanders in the field, provided
the Pentagon with a briefing warning that the Taliban and Al Qaeda were
adapting quickly to American tactics. “His decision loop has tightened, ours
has widened,” the briefing said, referring to the Taliban. “He can see us,
but increasingly we no longer see him.” Only a very few high-level generals
listened, and the briefing, like Rothstein’s report, changed nothing. By
then, some of the most highly skilled Americans were being diverted from
Afghanistan. Richard Clarke noted in his memoir, “The U.S. Special Forces
who were trained to speak Arabic, the language of al Qaeda, had been pulled
out of Afghanistan and sent to Iraq.” Some C.I.A. paramilitary teams were
also transferred to Iraq.

Meanwhile, the United States continued to pay off and work closely with
local warlords, many of whom were involved in heroin and opium trafficking.
Their loyalty was not for sale but for rent. Warlords like Hazrat Ali in
eastern Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border, and Mohammed Fahim had been
essential to America’s initial military success, and, at first, they had
promised to accept Karzai. Hazrat Ali would be one of several commanders
later accused of double-crossing American troops in an early, unsuccessful
sweep for Al Qaeda, in 2002. Fahim, now the defense minister, is deeply
involved in a number of illicit enterprises.

The Bush Administration, facing a major war in Iraq, seemed eager to put the
war in Afghanistan behind it. In January of 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy
Secretary of Defense, made a fifteen-hour visit to Kabul and announced,
“We’re clearly moving into a different phase, where our priority in
Afghanistan is increasingly going to be stability and reconstruction.
There’s no way to go too fast. Faster is better.” There was talk of
improving security and rebuilding the Afghan National Army in time for
Presidential and parliamentary elections, but little effort to provide the
military and economic resources. “I don’t think the Administration
understood about winning hearts and minds,” a former Administration official
told me.

The results of the postwar neglect are stark. A leading scholar on
Afghanistan, Barnett R. Rubin, wrote, in this month’s Current History, that
Afghanistan today “does not have functioning state institutions. It has no
genuine army or effective police. Its ramshackle provincial administration
is barely in contact with, let alone obedient to, the central government.
Most of the country’s meager tax revenue has been illegally taken over by
local officials who are little more than warlords with official titles.” The
goal of American policy in Afghanistan “was not to set up a better regime
for the Afghan people,” Rubin wrote. “The goal instead was to get rid of the
terrorist threat against America.” The United States enlisted the warlords
in its war against terrorism, and “the result was an Afghan government
created at Bonn that rested on a power base of warlords.”

One military consultant with extensive experience in Afghanistan told me
last year, “The real action is at the village level, but we’re not there.
And we need to be there 24/7. Now we are effectively operating above the
conflict. It’s the same old story as in Vietnam. We can’t hit what we can’t
see.” He added, “From January, 2002, on, we were in the process of snatching
defeat from the jaws of victory.”

Last summer, a coalition of seventy-nine human-rights and relief
organizations wrote an open letter to the international community calling
for better security in Afghanistan and warning that the Presidential
elections there, now scheduled for September, were imperilled. The letter
noted, “For the majority of the Afghan people, security is precarious and
controlled by regional warlords, drug traffickers or groups with terrorist
associations. The situation is getting worse, and there is no comprehensive
plan in place to halt the spiral of violence.” Statistics compiled by care
International showed that eleven aid workers were murdered in four incidents
during a three-week period ending early last month, and the rate of physical
assaults on aid workers in Afghanistan more than doubled in January and
February compared with the same period in the previous year. Such attacks, a
care policy statement suggested, inevitably led to cutbacks in Afghan
humanitarian and reconstruction programs. In early 2003, for example,
according to the Chicago Tribune, there were twenty-six humanitarian
agencies at work in Kandahar, the main Afghan city in the south. By early
this year, there were fewer than five.

Even one of the most publicized achievements of the post-Taliban government,
the improvements in the lives of women, has been called into question. Judy
Benjamin, who served as the gender adviser to the U.S. Agency for
International Development mission in Kabul in 2002 and 2003, told me, “The
legal opportunities have improved, but the day-to-day life for women, even
in Kabul, isn’t any better. Girls are now legally permitted to go to school
and work, but when it comes to the actual family practice, people are afraid
to let them go out without burkas.” Conditions outside Kabul are far worse,
she said. “Families do not allow females to travel—to go to jobs or to
school. You cannot go on many roads without being held up by bandits. People
are saying they were safer under the Taliban system, which is why the
Taliban are getting more support—the lack of safety.”

Nancy Lindborg, the executive vice-president of Mercy Corps, one of the
major N.G.O.s at work in Afghanistan, had a similar view. Outside of Kabul,
she said, “everywhere I go, from Kunduz to Kandahar, I see no change for
most women, and security for everybody has fallen apart since November of
2002.” The Pentagon’s announcements of increased commitments to security and
reconstruction were increasingly seen “as a big charade,” Lindborg said.
“The United States has left Afghanistan to fester for two years.”

The humanitarian community is not alone in its concern. In February,
Vice-Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency,
acknowledged during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that the growing
Taliban insurgency was targeting humanitarian and reconstruction
organizations. Over all, he said, Taliban attacks had “reached their highest
levels since the collapse of the Taliban government.”

Heroin is among the most immediate—and the most intractable—social,
economic, and political problems. “The problem is too huge for us to be able
to face alone,” Hamid Karzai declared last week in Berlin, as he appealed
for more aid. “Drugs in Afghanistan are threatening the very existence of
the Afghan state.” Drug dealing and associated criminal activity produced
about $2.3 billion in revenue last year, according to an annual survey by
the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, a sum that was equivalent to
half of Afghanistan’s legitimate gross domestic product. “Terrorists take a
cut as well,” the U.N. report noted, adding that “the longer this happens,
the greater the threat to security within the country.”

The U.N. report, published last fall, found that opium production, which,
following a ban imposed by the Taliban, had fallen to a hundred and
eighty-five metric tons in 2001, soared last year to three thousand six
hundred tons—a twentyfold increase. The report declared the nation to be “at
a crossroads: either (i) energetic interdiction measures are taken now . . .
or (ii) the drug cancer in Afghanistan will keep spreading and metastasise
into corruption, violence and terrorism—within and beyond the country’s
borders.” Afghanistan was once again, the U.N. said, producing
three-quarters of the world’s illicit opium, with no evidence of a cutback
in sight, even though there has been a steady stream of reports from
Washington about drug interdictions. The report said that poppy cultivation
had continued to spread, and was now reported in twenty-eight of the
nation’s thirty-two provinces.

Most alarmingly, according to a U.N. survey, nearly seventy per cent of
farmers intend to increase their poppy crops in 2004, most of them by more
than half. Only a small percentage of farmers were planning any reduction,
despite years of international pressure. Many of the areas that the U.N.
report identified as likely to see increased production are in regions where
the United States has a major military presence.

Despite such statistics, the American military has, for the most part,
looked the other way, essentially because of the belief that the warlords
can deliver the Taliban and Al Qaeda. One senior N.G.O. official told me,
“Everybody knows that the U.S. military has the drug lords on the payroll.
We’ve put them back in power. It’s gone so terribly wrong.” (The Pentagon’s
Joseph Collins told me, “Counter-narcotics in Afghanistan has been a
failure.” Collins said that this year’s crop was estimated to be the second
largest on record. He added, however, that the Afghan government is planning
to “redouble” its efforts on narcotics control, and that the Pentagon is
“now putting more money into it for the first time”—seventy-three million
dollars.)

The easy availability of heroin also represents a threat to the well-being
of American troops. Since the fall of 2002, a number of active-duty and
retired military and C.I.A. officials have told me about increasing reports
of heroin use by American military personnel in Afghanistan, many of whom
have been there for months, with few distractions. A former high-level
intelligence officer told me that the problem wasn’t the Special Forces or
Army combat units who were active in the field but “the logistical guys”—the
truck drivers and the food and maintenance workers who are stationed at the
military’s large base at Bagram, near Kabul. However, I was also told that
there were concerns about heroin use within the Marines. The G.I.s assigned
to Bagram are nominally confined to the base, for security reasons, but the
drugs, the former intelligence officer said, were relayed to the users by
local Afghans hired to handle menial duties. The Pentagon’s senior
leadership has a “head-in-the-sand attitude,” he said. “There’s no desire to
expose it and get enforcement involved. This is hard shit,” he added,
speaking of heroin. The Pentagon, asked for comment, denied that there was
concern about drug use at Bagram, but went on to acknowledge that
“disciplinary proceedings were initiated against some U.S. military
personnel in Afghanistan for suspected drug use.” Asked separately about the
allegations against marines, the Pentagon said that some marines had been
removed from Afghanistan to face disciplinary proceedings, but blamed
alcohol and marijuana rather than heroin.

The drug lords traditionally processed only hashish inside the Afghan
borders, and shipped poppies to heroin-production plants in northern
Pakistan and elsewhere. A senior U.N. narcotics official told me that in the
past two years “most of the heroin has been processed in Afghanistan, as
part of a plan to keep profits in-country.” Only a fraction of what is
produced in Afghanistan is used there, the officer said. Nonetheless, a U.S.
government-relief official told me, the “biggest worry” is that the growth
in local production will increase the risk of addiction among G.I.s. A
former C.I.A. officer who served in Afghanistan also said that the agency’s
narcotics officials have been independently investigating military drug use.

Afghanistan is regaining the Bush Administration’s attention, in part
because the worsening situation in Iraq has increased the need for a
foreign-policy success. State Department and intelligence officials who have
worked in Kabul said that it is widely understood that Afghanistan’s
Presidential and parliamentary elections, which had already been
rescheduled, must be held before the American Presidential elections, on
November 2nd. The upside to the political timetable has been a new
commitment of American reconstruction funds—more than two billion dollars, a
fourfold increase over the previous year—for schools, clinics, and road
construction in Afghanistan. Richard Clarke wrote in his memoir that
initially the aid funds were “inadequate and slowly delivered,” and far
below the thirteen hundred and ninety dollars per capita that was spent in
the first years of the rebuilding effort in Bosnia and the nearly twenty
billion dollars now earmarked for Iraq. At one point in 2002, American aid
funds for Afghanistan came to only fifty-two dollars per person. “Why are we
getting aid money now?” the U.S. government-relief official said to me, with
a laugh. “We’ve been asking for two years and no one in their right mind
thought about getting all this.”

In insisting on holding elections by the fall, the Administration is
overriding the advice of many of its allies and continuing to bank heavily
on Hamid Karzai. (As of this spring, an estimated ten per cent of eligible
voters were registered.) Last week, the international conference in Berlin
bolstered Karzai’s regime, and his election prospects, by promising to
provide more than four billion dollars in aid and low-cost loans in the next
year—although that figure includes more than a billion dollars previously
pledged. Half of the contributions came from the Bush Administration.
Secretary of State Colin Powell praised Karzai for having turned Afghanistan
from “a failed state, ruled by extremists and terrorists, to a free country
with a growing economy and emerging democracy.”

Nonetheless, in interviews for this article, Hamid Karzai was consistently
depicted by others as unsure of himself and totally dependent on the United
States for security and finances. One of Karzai’s many antagonists is his
own defense minister, Mohammed Fahim. Last year, the Bush Administration was
privately given a memorandum by an Afghan official and American ally,
warning that Fahim was working to undermine Karzai and would use his control
over money from illegal businesses and customs revenue to do so. Fahim was
also said to have recruited at least eighty thousand men into new militias.

The United States’ continuing toleration of warlords such as Fahim and
General Abdul Rashid Dostum—an alleged war criminal and gunrunner who, after
being offered millions of dollars by Washington, helped defeat the Taliban
in the fall of 2001—mystifies many who have long experience in Afghanistan.
“Fahim and Dostum are part of the problem, and not the solution,” said Milt
Bearden, who ran the C.I.A.’s Afghan operations during the war with the
Soviet Union. “These people have the clever gene and they can get us to do
their fighting for them. They just lead us down the path,” Bearden said.
“How wonderful for them to have us knock off their opposition with American
airplanes and Special Forces.”

The wild card in the election planning may be the Taliban. The former
Taliban foreign minister, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, who spent months in
American custody, has repeatedly offered to open a channel to the Taliban
leadership for extended talks. “But the Administration only wants to get
help in finding Osama bin Laden,” a Democratic Senate aide said. “Its only
concern is tactical information.” Meanwhile, the Taliban’s influence has
grown throughout the south and east of Afghanistan, in defiance of—or,
perhaps, because of—continued American air and ground assaults, which
inevitably result in civilian casualties.

In an effort to strengthen Karzai, the American military command has tried
to reduce its own reliance on some regional warlords. The most recent target
was Ismail Khan, the popular independent governor of Herat, a large province
in western Afghanistan, adjacent to Iran. Khan, a bitter enemy of the
Taliban, supported the initial American invasion of Afghanistan after
September 11th. He has since defied the central government and refuses to
hand over to Kabul most of the tax and customs revenue. (Herat is an ancient
trade center.) Kahn personifies how difficult it is for the U.S. to separate
its enemies from its allies in Afghanistan. “If Mohammed Fahim is a
government minister and Ismail Khan is a warlord,” one American official
told me, “you’re abusing the language.” The official’s point was that Khan
has provided better security and more stability for the local population
than is found in other Afghan provinces, and international observers believe
that he would probably win a provincial election. But he treats Herat as a
private fiefdom, and has alarmed many in the Bush Administration with his
vocal support of Iran; last fall, he was quoted as calling it “the best
model of an Islamic country in the world.”

One regional expert told me that Karzai—who was always apprehensive about
Ismail Khan—raised the question of how to remove him last spring, during a
brief visit by Donald Rumsfeld to Kabul. “He asked Rumsfeld for his
support,” the expert recalled. “Rumsfeld wished him good luck but said the
United States could not get involved. So Karzai got cold feet.” The issue
was revisited again in February, a former C.I.A. consultant told me, by the
American military command at Bagram. Sometime that month, the American
command put out a request to its intelligence components for a new
operational plan for Khan. The former C.I.A. consultant learned from within
the intelligence community that there was agreement that Khan had to be
neutralized. Asked what that meant, he said that he was told “Khan had to be
eliminated—we’ve got to end his influence.” (The Pentagon denied that there
was such a plan.)

On March 21st, an armed conflict erupted in Herat between Khan’s forces and
those loyal to the central government. Accounts of what happened vary
widely; it was not immediately clear who started what. According to an
account by U.N. workers in Afghanistan, filed to headquarters in New York,
tensions had been mounting between Khan and one of his bitter rivals,
General Abdul Zaher Naibzadah, over control of the Afghan military’s Herat
garrison. Khan’s son heard reports that there had been an assassination
attempt on his father, and drove to the General’s house, where Naibzadah’s
bodyguards gunned him down, along with others. According to the U.N.
dispatch, Ismail Khan took violent revenge on his attackers, burning down
the local headquarters of the Afghan militia and killing scores. Some press
accounts put the death toll of the subsequent daylong battle at a hundred or
more; other accounts, emanating from Kabul, said that fewer than two dozen
were killed. The U.N. account included reports that a personal phone call
from Karzai to Khan was necessary to defuse the situation. In the next days,
a division of the Afghan National Army, sent by the central government,
moved into Herat to restore order.

There is no evidence that the American commanders were involved in any
attempt on Khan’s life, the former C.I.A. consultant told me. But, according
to some officials, Americans were attached to Afghan military units that
were present in Herat. “We clearly had embedded American trainers and
advisers with the Afghan troops,” the consultant said. “They knew what was
going on.” The result, the U.N. reported, was that Khan “may become even
more intractable in his dealing with the central government.” The
American-endorsed plan to challenge Khan’s leadership and strengthen
Karzai’s national standing inside Afghanistan, it seemed, had served to make
Khan a more determined enemy.

The U.S. government-relief official told me of spending weeks last year
travelling through Afghanistan—including the south and the east, areas with
few ties to the central government in Kabul. “They’d say, ‘We don’t like the
Taliban, but they did bring us security you haven’t been able to give us,’”
the official said. “They perceived that we were allied with the bad guys—the
warlords—because of our war on terrorism.” The official recalled being asked
constantly about the American war in Iraq. “They were concerned about Iraq,
and wanted to know, ‘Are you going to stay?’ They remembered how we
left”—after the American-sponsored defeat of the Soviet Union in
Afghanistan. “They’d say, ‘You guys are going to leave us, like you did in
1992. If we had confidence in the staying power of America, we’d deal with
you.’” The official concluded, “Iraq, in their mind, meant that America had
bigger priorities.”

One U.N. worker who is helping to prepare for elections in Afghanistan told
me that American aid funds now headed into Afghanistan, whatever the
Administration’s motives, are essential for the country’s future. “We’ve got
a golden window of opportunity that will close on November 2nd.” It’s a
cynical process, he added. “A key factor in holding the election will be the
non-interference of the various drug-dealing warlords around the nation, and
stemming the drug trade will not be a priority.” The message he’s getting
from the warlords, the U.N. worker said, was that if the U.S. attempted a
“hard and heavy” poppy-eradication program, the warlords would disrupt the
elections.

The U.N. worker said that President Karzai was perceived as “a weak leader
with very little street credibility.” He told me that, again and again, when
he met with village elders, as part of his work, “the old people say, ‘Hamid
is a good man. He doesn’t kill people. He doesn’t steal things. He doesn’t
sell drugs. How could you possibly think he could be a leader of Afghanistan?’”


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