Once again, back to Af-Pak and this time, for 688 pages. The book is named after the Directorate S buried deep within Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency. They were the group that covertly provided funds for the Taliban and other Islamic radicals. "Our failure to solve the riddle of ISI and its interference in Afghanistan would prove to be our greatest strategic failure."
There was no surprise at the C.I.A. when the Sept.11 attacks came. The question the US posed to President Musharraf of Pakistan immediately after 9/11 was whether Pakistan was with the US, and would help with our actions against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, or against us. There were seven specific requests and Musharraf answered yes to all, but clearly the Pakistani's would view the issues through their own lens and act in their own best interests. The continuing issues for the Pakistanis were a need to maintain peace along the shared border region with Pashtuns on both sides, the desire to have a friendly Muslim neighbor to the north and their ongoing fear and hatred of India. The Pakistanis and the Americans were involved in a very awkward partnership. When Mullah Mohammad Omar, Taliban emir, would not turn over Bin Laden as requested by the Pakistanis, the US began its pursuit of the two men, and began the air war in Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001. It was over very quickly. Before year-end, the Taliban left Kabul and Bin Laden and 2,000 of his men escaped to Pakistan. Hamid Karzai and a coalition government were soon in place. One of the issues second-guessed ever since was the decision made by Sec. of Defense Rumsfeld to not put troops on the ground in Tora Bora to capture or kill Bin Laden or Omar. Although at the time all seemed well, the truth is that Afghanistan, after thirty years of war and turmoil, was not able to stand on its own feet and the 2,000 members of Al Qaeda who escaped to Pakistan would further destabilize an already unstable country.
The CIA's mission in post-Taliban Afghanistan was to find the surviving members of AQ. There were a few thousand American and NATO troops there to assist in the process. Fear of a recurrence of 9/11 haunted everyone in the war on terror. Concurrently, the US was desirous of establishing a stable government, but put little time and less money into the effort. Under Karzai, the country reverted to its racketeering tribal past, and finding no AQ jihadis left, the US started shooting suspected Taliban members. Finding no one from AQ and gleaning virtually no intelligence about it, the Americans in Afghanistan began to torture and abuse anyone they thought might have information. The US made a commitment to support Karzai's newly elected government in 2004, but the Pakistanis renewed their old habits of trying to destabilize the Pashtun dominated border areas by assisting the Taliban. They feared the US would leave just as we had in the 1990's. They were also concerned that Karzai would be friendly with India. The 2006 US accord with India and the decision to turn over most of the ground work to NATO forces further complicated relations and put the two countries at cross purposes. The Taliban took the offense in 2006 and successfully began to re-occupy their country. By 2007, it was apparent that we had accomplished very little, if anything, in Afghanistan. The Taliban had not only re-taken most of the southern part of the country, but they had destabilized the border lands within Pakistan. The Taliban was growing so quickly in Pakistan that there was fear they could topple the secular government. The US's frustration with the ISI and the entire Pakistan government led to US drone attacks on Pakistan soil. In the waning days of the Bush administration, seven years on, a strategic assessment confirmed that the Taliban needed to be defeated in order to make certain that AQ, then safely operating out of the Pakistani Tribal Areas, did not have a fallback safe haven in Afghanistan. This tortured logic led to consideration of a substantial troop increase in Afghanistan the following year. Obama had campaigned criticizing the Iraq war as the wrong place to fight AQ. The Afghanistan war was the one to be pursued, so he approved the Pentagon's request, but only for half of the troops they desired. Those troops found a landscape in which the Taliban, well-funded by the UAE and Saudi Arabia, were welcome in the countryside because of the corruption and perceived indifference of the northerners in Karzai's government. The new American military team decided to deploy their recently used counterinsurgency practices from Iraq in key areas in order to clear-hold-build-transfer. Transferring to the Afghanistan government was a delusional dream. The Generals asked for an additional 80,000 men. Obama gave them 30,000 and announced that they would start leaving in 2011. Once again the US decided to not abandon Afghanistan, and to pursue AQ, but would not confront ISI and acknowledged that the Taliban could not be defeated. The plan of the Obama team was to allow the Afghans to build up the capacity to rule and police their own nation.
In 2010, prospects for a political settlement were in the air. The Taliban reached out to the US by contacting a colleague of Richard Holbrook, special US envoy for Afghanistan, while at he same time ISI was talking to the Karzai government. Meanwhile, Gen. Petraeus prepped a major effort in and around Kandahar, featuring the 101st Airborne. Reminiscent of Westmoreland in Vietnam, he heralded body counts. Late in the year, low level representatives of the US and Taliban met in Germany. As the year closed though, new clouds were darkening the horizon. The Pakistanis were fed up with being blamed for our failure and Hamid Karzai had come to despise the US for many reasons, the paramount one being our investigations into the rampant corruption at the top of the country, particularly amongst his family. Relations with Pakistan plummeted after our May, 2011 killing of Osama Bin Laden, while it gave President Obama the political cover to start the troop drawdown. As the fighting dragged on, the US, Pakistan and Afghanistan continued to mistrust and blame each other for the endless deaths. Karzai refused to believe the Taliban was an indigenous insurgency. He considered them a tool of the ISI. The Pakistanis characterized the Bin Laden raid as their biggest national embarrassment since losing Bangladesh over forty years earlier, and no one in the US trusted anyone in either country. 2014 saw a fraudulent, violent election go to Mohammad Ghani to succeed Karzai. Ghani was a southern Pashtun and may or may not have actually defeated the northern candidate. That year also saw the handover of most of America's and NATO's equipment and bases to the Afghans. Obama declared US combat operations to be over in December.
This book was reviewed for the NYTimes by a military historian with experience and extensive knowledge about our wars in the Middle East. He calls it "a book of surpassing excellence that is almost certainly destined for irrelevance". In December of 2017, this administration's VP told American troops in Afghanistan "We're here to stay until freedom wins. I believe victory is closer than ever before."
This is an extraordinarily discouraging tome to read because of the delusional decision making that led to the loss of 2400 American lives, countless Asians and an estimated trillion dollars. One comes away incredulous at the thinking that went, and still, goes into endless attempts to quell the Taliban and shore up one of the most incompetent, of the many incompetent, regimes we've backed over the last seventy years. It is heartbreaking to read this. Amazingly, almost seventeen years after we started in Afghanistan, today's newspapers carry a story about the Taliban handing a resounding defeat to the central government.
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