This is an interesting, and very lengthy, account of C.I.A. activities in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It also details their cooperation with I.S.I., Pakistan’s main spy agency. One of the purposes of the book is to address questions about how worthwhile this invasion has been and “why the seemingly successful lightning-strike American-led war of late 2001 had failed to vanquish the Taliban and Al Qaeda for good.” It picks up where volume one, Ghost Wars, ended – September 10, 2001. The author’s purpose is to also provide “a reliable history of how the C.I.A., I.S.I., and Afghan intelligence agencies influenced the rise of a new war in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, and how that war fostered a revival of Al Qaeda, allied terrorist networks, and, eventually, branches of the Islamic State.”
We learn that the region’s endless conflicts are not innate to its history. It is actually an outgrowth of specific misrule and violent interventions. The author lists political maneuvering, hubristic assumptions, intelligence operations, and secret diplomacy at the highest levels in Kabul, Islamabad, and Washington. All of these are contributing factors that have led us to what we see today in Afghanistan.
Part One covers the start of the war in 2001. He calls it “blind into battle.” Buried in the bureaucracy of the I.S.I. was a series of directorates, and in this “lay units devoted to secret operations in support of the Taliban, Kashmiri guerillas, and other violent Islamic radicals.” It was referred to as Directorate S by American intelligence. We come to see the I.S.I. as an institution practiced in manipulating the C.I.A. and the Taliban simultaneously. Considering the length and cost of this war it is interesting to note that no Taliban or other Afghans participated in the September 11 attacks. It was interesting to note that the Taliban, early on, wanted to negotiate an end to the war, but Donald Rumsfeld would have nothing to do with it. In hindsight, maybe he should have considered it. We didn’t get very far in Afghanistan before Rumsfeld was drumming up support for an Iraq invasion. The author saw this as a repeat of an old story: “not only complacency but also inexplicable strategic judgment, fractured decision making, and confusion.”
Part Two shows us “losing the peace,” and covers the time period from 2002 to 2006. Are we still there? Here we learn about Operation Anaconda, the largest U.S. military operation since the Gulf War of 1991. Despite this, we see a squandered opportunity to manage a post-conflict environment properly. We go in, overthrow the government, then chaos. It appears that after 2002, Special Forces discovered that there weren’t many Al Qaeda left in Afghanistan. It appears they migrated to Pakistan, yet we continued to fight the Taliban – because they were there. As the author notes, “By our words and actions we destroyed the opportunity to take advantage of the Pashtun mechanism for accommodation and reconciliation.” The Taliban faced war without compromise because of their alliance with Al Qaeda. We also see that I.S.I.’s counterterrorism directorate, though cooperating with the U.S. may have had other directorates that simultaneously supported Pakistan’s indigenous jihadi clients, including the Taliban. It was a complicated situation. Was it really winnable? We see now that the U.S. is resorting to something called “extraordinary rendition,” resulting in extensive human rights abuses against prisoners. We see the C.I.A. departing from Army Field Manual practices into a “science fiction-tinged dystopia of intimidation and dominance over prisoners.” We see these things happening out of a sense of desperation to get some information, any information, because we had so little. By 2004 we see the adoption of a new constitution, mobilization for a presidential election and a new parliament. We also see evidence of a Taliban comeback. In time, we see a both wars deteriorating and a struggle to win the loyalty of the populations. There is a movement now away from counterterrorism operations and towards counterinsurgency against local commanders via the drone program. By 2006, we see a significant increase in the Taliban and more of the workload being turned over to the British, European, and Canadian forces. Soon people were getting fed up with the corrupt new government and welcoming the Taliban back into their districts. Indiscriminate bombing, because of a lack of men and equipment, resulted in enough collateral damage – think civilian lives and property – that the Taliban were sure to exploit. Not only that, but the war in Iraq was becoming a cause celebre for jihadist recruitment.
Part Three now covers the period from 2006 to 2009. We now see a significant uptick in suicide bombing increasing to about two to three a week. Spending on security in 2007 was now at $8 billion a year – more than all the previous years combined. By 2006, poppy cultivation in Afghanistan rose sufficiently to provide over 90 percent of the world’s annual heroin supply. One can understand this poppy cultivation in the light of Soviet and US destruction of infrastructure over the years. As money flowed in to encourage farmers to eradicate their poppy fields, we see instead “corruption, agricultural market distortions, and confusion.” You just can’t throw money at some problems, but we see this happen again and again in both Iraq and Afghanistan. By this time, some had felt that the US had not applied enough military force to suppress Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and we see a serious, violent domestic rebellion against the Pakistani state by Islamist forces the state had long nurtured. There was gaining traction for a larger counterinsurgency mission in Afghanistan, and by the time Obama takes office, the conclusion is that we are not losing the war, but we are not winning either. Again we see a marginalization of diplomacy according to Holbrooke (special envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan). He noted that American policy in the country was becoming a runaway car steered mainly by the Pentagon. And then there was also the rising Afghan anger over civilian casualties, and the popular disgust at the predatory Afghan government and police. What I found intriguing was the fact that fund-raising for the Taliban was sourced to Saudi Arabia and the UAE among other places. These were allies of the US – not?
Part Four covers the years 2010 to 2014. It is entitled “The End of Illusion.” At this point, all the Taliban wanted was to find some independence from I.S.I. (Pakistani intelligence) and relief from international sanctions and blacklists. Yet we see Obama dispatching tens of thousands more US troops. Chapter 26 covers some of the down on the ground grunt work and dangers encountered by US troops. As the author put it, referencing 2010, “The gossamer illusions of American partnership with Pakistan and with Hamid Karzai would be exposed in the coming year as never before.” It was during this period that negotiations were attempted to arrange an exit from America’s longest war. By early 2012, negotiation’s had collapsed. We also witness in increase in what was called fratricide killing, where Afghan soldiers were killing their American trainers in large numbers. This insider killing spree had no precedent in the history of modern counterinsurgency. At its worst, “Afghans attempted to kill Americans or Europeans they worked alongside about once every other day.” By 2013, another attempt at peace was attempted in Qatar; this too resulted in “an episode of remarkable diplomatic incompetence” and failure. It was beginning to seem that by this time, “any forecast of the durability of the Afghan forces had to account for the willingness of Congress, European governments, Japan, and others to write large checks to subsidize Kabul indefinitely.” We were looking at a decades-long, South Korea-like commitment. The mission had been to destroy Al Qaeda. Now after all these years of effort, the organization remained active, lethal, and adaptive, and not only that but the Al Qaeda branch seeded into Iraq to challenge the US invasion, and then morphed into the Islamic State, according to the author. It seems that the Iraq invasion was a stumbling block to stabilization in Afghanistan, because it inflamed and mobilized deeper resistance to American counterterrorism policy. Other inflammatory actions were the Guantanamo prison and the C.I.A.’s torture of Al Qaeda suspects. After September 11, the author thus concludes that “The complex wars and the political strategies that followed were often reactive, improvised, and informed by illusions.” It seems that the American war machine just wasn’t well equipped to “build good governance in deeply impoverished, violent landscapes or to win asymmetric conflicts with ideological, media-savvy guerrillas on short time lines.” Let history provide lessons learned.
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Un ottimo reportage giornalistico ricco di informazioni
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