I did two tours of duty in Afghanistan at ISAF headquarters in Kabul, but both times I tried to get out in the field when I could to compare the reality on the ground. Eventually I realized the real problem in Afghanistan had to do with the very structure of their government. It went back to the early days of our intervention. We failed to truly understand the history of the region and the Soviet intervention. Rumsfeld thought it best to have a light footprint, unlike the Soviets. But that was a misreading of the Soviet intervention which also was meant to be a light footprint and sensitive to their Islamic culture, which in turn was a misreading of the American experience in Vietnam.
When we went in, we decided to let the Afghans have the lead, we were just going to support them and help them rebuild. It made sense at the time. We wanted to be sensitive to local culture. It’s a mantra we hear repeated ad nauseum: Why are we trying to impose our culture on these poor indigenous people? The problem is that if you don’t change the culture, you can’t win the war. All war is cultural. When we overran Germany in 1945 we didn’t say we respected their culture of militarism and anti-semitism. We didn’t say to the Japanese that we respected their warrior code. We shoved change down their throats at the barrel of a gun. But we also didn’t go in and start hanging and firing everyone who worked for the Nazi regime. We co-opted leaders to our side who in turn realized quickly who buttered their bread. We only hung those guilty of serious war crimes and very senior leaders, often the same thing. Denazification simply meant renouncing fascism. We then pretty much rewrote the Constitutions of both Japan and Germany. In Germany specifically, we built local government first, often a few minutes after combat forces ended. We then built regional government structures, then state governments and finally a government for the federal republic.
We never did that in Afghanistan. Instead, shortly after helping the Afghan resistance drive out the Taliban, we let the Afghans have a large Shura where they decided the future constitution of Afghanistan. They created a controversial Constitution that concentrated power in Kabul and failed to allow for the development of locally controlled governments. The President appointed the governors, who in turn owed their allegiance to the President and not the people they were supposed to serve. The central government health minister appointed the provincial health ministers. And so on. It was a flawed model guaranteed to fail, and designed to be utterly corrupt. A provincial health official had no interest in local health for example. He often lived in Kabul instead of the province and would beg the Americans to buy him a car so he could visit his province. Of course he just wanted a free car. Other plum positions were also controlled by Kabul. If you wanted to be a district police chief, the price was $50,000 paid up front to various entities. Don’t worry, it was a profitable investment.
The Afghan military was also a corrupt kleptocracy run by warlords who were used to running things their own way with no control. In one case, the commanding general of the hospital in Kabul was taking medicines meant for wounded soldiers and selling them on the black market. If you wanted treatment for your wounds, your family had to pay him. We kept trying to put a band aid on these things. Never realizing that the problem was structural. It is hardly surprising that the Afghan Army refuses to fight for their kleptocratic commanders.
In this milieu, our reconstruction efforts were bound to fail. We tried to establish Western contract ideals on them. In one case, we contracted with a contractor to build a road. He did so, pocketed the money and ran off to Abu Dhabi. He never paid the workers. Numerous other projects we did were useless and pointless. Commanders just wanted to build things in order to pacify the population. It was what I called the myth of Lyautey, the French Marshal who came up with the famous oil drop counterinsurgency theory. It’s utter crap. He failed in both Vietnam and Algeria.
But often our projects were just bizarre. I visited two dams near Ghazni. One had no water behind it and was cracking and the other was filled with silt. In one provincial capital we built an elaborate hospital my first tour. When I returned a few years later, I wanted to find out what happened. It was basically idle. We had built it on the wrong side of town away from the central market where everyone in the province would come to shop and where the doctors could build a business.
We did a lot of things right, too, building local schools, small hydro plants that could power a small village and a few other projects. But large scale reconstruction was a failure. Kandahar Power and the Kajaki dam were eternal issues we never figured out. Many Afghans, often with dual citizenship in other countries that they had long ago fled to, made millions of dollars from western aid and then, with suitcases filled with cash, fled the country.
The border issues were also an obvious problem. The Afghanistan border was designed by the British in the 1890’s to protect India. It cut right through Pashtun heartland and they have never recognized it. The Pakistan ISI was in league with the Taliban, while milking the Americans for money. We often were hit with RPG’s fired from near the border and the insurgents would just dash back there before we could counter fire. In my first combat experience, I saw us use an F-15 Strike Eagle to go after some group that had launched an RPG at our FOB. We had no eyes on any insurgents though, just blowing up rocks where we thought they had launched from. I suspected that the attack actually came from the local Afghan Army base next door to us. They hit us the next night, and the third night we put some of our guys in with their guard house and curiously, nothing happened.
In the end, we failed because we bought into the myths of Afghanistan, that it has never been conquered, that they will always resist foreigners, that it is full of ignorant and backwards people, that it is the graveyard of empires. None of these are really true. But they resonate and make people hesitant to try very hard. Neither the British in the 19th Century, nor the Soviets in the 20th truly tried to conquer the area, and there was no reason for them to try. We didn’t either. But in failing to do that, we fed the myth of Afghan invincibility. We need to return to the Powell Doctrine to an extent. Go in heavy and hard first. Defeat the enemy completely and utterly destroy their will to resist. That may seem harsh, but war isn’t a fun game. Only then can you start to rebuild. And you rebuild locally first. Only later do you re-establish a national regime.
I am saddened by what has been happening, but like a lot of veterans, I just shrug my shoulders and realize that it was inevitable by the time I first went there. I had hopes that maybe the Taliban would stay in the countryside and the government would control the cities and they’d reach a sort of friendly accord over time. But they couldn’t even do that much. The real question is whether the Taliban though has learned its lesson. We can easily return if they dare use the area as a base to attack us again. And this time we can do it right.
