Moyar Mark. A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq
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204 e War in Afghanistan
2006, “It is very dicult to make progress when people are appointed based
on personal connections. We try to hire professional police based on merit but
we are not able to. ere is political pressure from senior ocials to hire their
relatives and friends.”35
In response to pressure from NATO countries, Karzai red several provin-
cial leaders in the south and replaced them with more reputable individuals.
Some of the new leaders, however, turned out to be as inept as their prede-
cessors had been corrupt. And as usual, some of the unsavory ocials whom
Karzai relieved ended up in positions of authority elsewhere. Karzai did make
a major step forward when he red the chief justice of the Afghan Supreme
Court, Fazel Hady Shinwari, an atrociously corrupt man whom Karzai had
appointed as part of a political deal with an Islamic leader. During the ensuing
six months, the new chief justice, Abdul Salam Azimi, red or imprisoned
eight judges and four clerks on grounds of corruption and investigated 6,000
questionable cases. Karzai also appointed a new attorney general, who prose-
cuted corrupt government ocials and red corrupt prosecutors.36 On the
other hand, Karzai’s Anti-Corruption and Bribery Oce, which had a sta of
140 people, did not convict a single person in 2006. Karzai failed to prosecute
or remove any of the numerous drug trackers in his cabinet and parliament.
Among those widely believed to be involved in corruption was Karzai’s own
brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, a government ocial in Kandahar. Western o-
cials repeatedly advised the president to send his brother out of the country, to
no avail.37
In 2006, foreign governments, the United Nations, and international
charities poured money into social and economic programs aimed at miti-
gating the problems of poverty and isolation in the hope that they would make
the people less receptive to the neo-Taliban. But no amount of spending could
make up for the poor quality of the Afghan administrators and policemen in
the provinces. “Schools or clinics are useless if people hate the district level ad-
ministration,” an Afghan civil society representative said.38 Nor could it make
up for the inability of the government to protect them from insurgents, crimi-
nals, and wicked policemen. As an Afghan researcher in southern Afghanistan
remarked, “People don’t care if the roads built are paved with gold. ey would
rather have security.”39 Afghans wanted to support the side that could bring
order and defeat its armed rivals—and oen that side was the neo-Taliban.40
NATO military forces were more visible in 2006 than in past years, al-
though many labored under severe restrictions from their governments, pre-
e War in Afghanistan 205
venting them from participating in combat or operating in areas of insurgent
activity. NATO commanders received ten pages listing all the restrictions, and
they had to obtain clearance from home capitals before employing NATO
forces in certain types of missions.41 Still, NATO was able to put its least re-
stricted forces—those of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and
the Netherlands—in the places where they could be most useful. ousands
of Canadian and British troops moved into southern Afghanistan to com-
bat the neo-Taliban insurgents where they were strongest. Dispersing among
the population, the Canadians and British weakened the neo-Taliban’s grip
through military operations and community development. In the middle of
2006 insurgent forces in the south responded with large attacks, compelling
the Canadians and British to concentrate their forces for major combat. Al-
though this concentration of troops undermined Canadian and British control
of the population, it led to big battles that produced heavy insurgent casualties,
frustrated an insurgent plan to seize the city of Kandahar, and ultimately per-
mitted Canadian and British forces to return to population control operations
under more favorable circumstances than those prevailing when they le.42
Lieutenant Colonel Ian Hope, commander of Canada’s Task Force Orion
in Kandahar from January to August 2006, recorded the leadership lessons he
learned during the neo-Taliban oensive. “Operational tempo and eective-
ness were almost entirely dependent upon the personalities of the command-
ers,” Hope wrote. “I trusted the subordinate commanders to demonstrate an
aggressive spirit and maintain operational initiative through oensive action.
Not all people are equal in this regard and the Army must learn that robustness
and determination are not nice-to-have qualities in manoeuvre commanders;
they are core qualities, and we must work hard to select the few who have
the tenacity to sustain a high level of resolve in the face of danger.” Summing
up the unit’s experience, Hope stated, “Under the baking Afghan sun we are
rediscovering, by way of pain, that the rst determinants in war are human.
In combat, the power of personality, intellect and intuition, determination,
and trust outweigh the power of technology, and everything else. is stark
reminder comes aer 30 years of the Canadian Army following obediently the
lead of our allies in combat development and falling victim to the seduction of
the microchip.”43
e counterinsurgents killed an estimated 3,500 neo-Taliban in 2006, yet
the insurgents appear to have replaced all of their losses through recruitment
in Afghanistan and inltration of insurgents from Pakistan. ey entered 2007
206 e War in Afghanistan
with an armed strength estimated at 7,000 to 12,000. Insurgent attacks in 2007
outpaced those of the previous year, with most coming in the form of guer-
rilla warfare or terrorism—the insurgents had learned the futility of provoking
large battles. e neo-Taliban continued to enlarge the area under their con-
trol in the south while simultaneously expanding their presence in the north,
northeast, and west.44
In 2007 the Afghan National Army improved further under the guidance
of Defense Minister Wardak and the inuence of U.S. military advisers. e
police continued to ounder, even though the United States ponied up $2.5
billion for the police and shied hundreds of U.S. advisers from the army to
the police. Coalition forces and the Afghan army did not have enough troops
to stay in large areas on a permanent basis, so once they cleared an area they
usually had to turn it over to Afghan policemen, who were likely to lose it
again. e pay of police ocers was raised to seventy dollars per month, but
it was still too meager to curb corruption or undermine the attractiveness of
neo-Taliban salaries. According to one estimate, 80 percent of the police force
was complicit in the drug trade during 2007. e government prosecuted sev-
eral hundred small-time drug dealers and seized several heroin labs, but it
convicted none of the drug-tracking kingpins—the few dozen individuals
who controlled the majority of the drug trade. Opium production increased
by 34 percent over the previous year.45
Insurgent activity rose again in intensity in 2008, creeping further into
northern and western Afghanistan even as the number of international troops
increased to nearly 70,000, of whom 32,000 were Americans. e full extent
of the neo-Taliban’s growth was dicult to ascertain because the NATO forces
in northern and western Afghanistan, still shackled by restrictions from their
national governments, were not actively combating the insurgents. eir de-
tachment notwithstanding, the Afghan counterinsurgents in the north fought
doggedly against the neo-Taliban because the Afghan corps commander was
an excellent leader, but the counterinsurgency languished in the west, where
the corps commander was weak.46
Despite the ongoing improvements in the Afghan National Army, lack of
initiative among army commanders remained a major problem in 2008. As in
years past, U.S. advisers kept urging the Afghans to reduce the centralization
of authority, but their words oen bounced o their counterparts. Afghan eld
commanders remained reluctant to act without authorization from higher au-
thorities, and senior commanders made critical decisions that should have
e War in Afghanistan 207
been made by the ocers on the scene. In terms of personnel changes, po-
litical and ethnic considerations remained major obstacles. Colonel Jerey M.
Haynes, head of the U.S. Marine advisory group in Afghanistan in 2008, re-
marked, “e number one challenge for the Afghan National Army is the fact
that corps and brigade commanders cannot readily make ocer personnel
moves without having to consider ethnic group and the Ministry of Defense
approval process. is makes it very dicult for the corps commander to put
the most qualied ocers in command positions.”47 Only one of the Afghan
National Army’s forty-nine battalions was deemed capable of conducting all
of its functions independently. Another eighteen were considered capable of
performing all functions with foreign assistance, usually in logistics, intelli-
gence, or planning, while een were considered competent at some functions
with foreign support.48
At the highest levels, the United States was giving the Ministry of the In-
terior the attention that the Ministry of Defense had received in prior years,
with American diplomats and military ocers lling advisory roles where
Europeans had performed inadequately in times past. e Americans be-
seeched and pressured Karzai and the minister of the interior to relieve bad
police chiefs, and they did obtain some replacements. With the assistance of
the United States and other foreign allies, the Ministry of the Interior orga-
nized a program called Focused District Development, in which the ministry
temporarily inserted elite police forces into an area and withdrew the exist-
ing police for vetting and training. Most of the leaders were ousted from the
existing forces because they were incompetent or abusive or had shown par-
tiality toward their own tribes in enforcing the law. e central government,
not the provincial governors or other local power brokers, selected the new
police chiefs, and it purposefully chose men who did not have local connec-
tions in order to prevent tribal favoritism. In many instances, the entire police
force was replaced. Policemen were no longer paid through the governor but
received their paychecks directly, ending the governors’ regular practice of
keeping cuts of policemen’s pay for themselves. e preliminary results of the
Focused District Development program were mixed, with some reports indi-
cating that it had improved police leadership and performance and others that
the new police leaders and units were little better than the old. Projected to
take ve years to cover the country, the program was progressing gradually as
of mid-2008.49
Numerous civil servants in the provinces remained as guilty of corruption
208 e War in Afghanistan
and incompetence as the police despite new exhortations from Kabul to insti-
tute meritocracy and end abuses in the civil service.50 Sarah Chayes, a former
National Public Radio reporter who took up residence in Afghanistan and be-
came a condante of top Afghan ocials, noted that provincial ocials from
a variety of ministries were creating enormous discontent through their mis-
conduct. For example, health ocials routinely gave the stamp of approval to
bad pharmaceuticals from Pakistan in exchange for bribes. When donors sent
good medicines to hospitals, the hospital ocials sold them at the local bazaar
and used the bad Pakistani versions to treat the hospital patients. With ocials
from the Education Ministry, it was commonplace to retain for personal use
the food that relief agencies had sent for local schoolchildren. According to
Chayes, “Every time any person has to interact with any government depart-
ment, to get a driver’s license, a death certicate, to register a cooperative, to
get goods out of customs, to run a business, you name it, a ‘bribe’ is extracted
at every step of the way. en the person who got the lower-level agents their
jobs will come around at the end of the day to pick up his cut.” Chayes believes
that Afghanistan has reservoirs of people outside government who could, with
foreign mentoring, provide the leadership required to set the country aright,
although she doubts that many will be willing to serve in the government as
long as the leadership in Kabul remains the same.51
Most of the government ministries in Kabul were still in the hands of
individuals without the necessary integrity or experience, who had received
their positions because of familial, tribal, or political connections. Doctor Sul-
tana Parvanta, who resigned as planning director of Afghanistan’s Ministry of
Urban Development and Housing because of disillusionment with the Karzai
government, blamed the leadership of the ministries for much of the ram-
pant corruption. “e Afghans have a saying that no one can ask for bribes
and practice corruption in an oce or institution if the boss is not approving
the deals and also taking a cut,” she remarked. “ese ministers are allowing
predatory practices.” e West, Parvanta believes, ought to wield its inuence
to bring better leaders into the central government. “We need competent, cou-
rageous, and honest leaders who have a vision and love for the country. is
dedication to the welfare of the people and the country must outweigh the love
for self, money, power, and benets to a small group of people.”52
Hamid Karzai’s ascension to power aer the fall of the Taliban illustrates
several leadership perils that may spring up elsewhere, in some other dis-
e War in Afghanistan 209
tant land where the West believes its interests to be at stake. Karzai was the
sort of gure with whom Western diplomats and journalists felt comfort-
able—English-speaking, cultured, conciliatory, and gentle. But qualities that
appealed to those cosmopolitan elites were not the qualities required to rule
Afghanistan. As in South Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s, the central gov-
ernment faced challenges to its authority from factions more concerned with
self-aggrandizement than national solidarity, and taming these factions oen
required confrontation rather than conciliation, aggressiveness rather than
gentleness.
Karzai, in league with Western countries that understood Afghanistan’s
elites only supercially, empowered warlords whose criminal tendencies and
inability to govern opened the door to insurgency. e United States and its
NATO allies belatedly identied the damage caused by warlord leadership and
spent years coaxing Karzai and his ministers to dislodge the warlords from the
government. Convincing the Afghans to re leaders was exceeded in diculty
only by the task of identifying leaders who deserved to be hired. In a country
ravaged by decades of cruelty and death, with only a faint heartbeat of nation-
alism, the supply of integrity and dedication was short, not merely in the war-
lord class but in all classes of society. Replacement leaders were oen no better
than their predecessors and, in many cases, were merely bad leaders who had
been shued over from other jobs.
Western pressure caused the Afghans to adopt merit-based hiring and
promotion systems, but these systems could work only with the cooperation of
top Afghan leaders, and most of those leaders cooperated only partially or not
at all. Karzai and his ministers steered friends, relatives, and political allies into
leadership jobs, making cunning use of subterfuge to conceal their dishonesty
from foreign onlookers, and they seldom rewarded ocers who had distin-
guished themselves at lower levels of command by appointing them to higher
positions of authority.53 Although political considerations deserved to trump
merit in some leadership appointments, merit could not be discounted too
oen without jeopardizing the viability of the state, which is what occurred
under Karzai.
e Afghan National Police became a black hole for Western money and
training programs. By paying minimal attention to leadership quality, the U.S.
government and private security contractors ensured that the police would
prey on the population and cower before the enemy. Bad police leadership
210 e War in Afghanistan
also translated into high rates of desertion and absenteeism and the disap-
pearance of equipment.54 e princely sums of money thrown at social and
economic development programs were largely squandered, too, because poor
police leadership and poor administrative leadership resulted in corruption,
mistreatment of civilians, lawlessness, and free rein for the insurgents to de-
stroy development projects and kill government employees. e Focused Dis-
trict Development program has, in its early stages, achieved improvement in
a portion of the targeted districts by replacing bad police chiefs with centrally
selected ocers lacking local tribal connections. Whether it will transform the
police across the country has yet to be determined.
Over the course of the war, the United States and its allies have made much
more headway with the Afghan National Army than with the police, princi-
pally because of Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak, a shrewd man with a
strong commitment to the betterment of the army’s leadership. Foreign insis-
tence on ethnic diversication of the ocer corps has had a salutary eect as
well, though of less importance. Breaking the Tajik stranglehold on the mili-
tary leadership reduced Pashtun alienation with the government and attracted
Pashtun military-age males to the armed forces, men who might otherwise
have sided with the insurgents. In terms of leadership quality, the eects were
mixed, for commands went not only to competent non-Tajiks who had been
unfairly excluded but also to non-Tajiks who were less capable than the Tajiks
they replaced.
Although the Afghan government managed to conceal some of its chi-
canery, the Americans were well aware that it regularly outed the ideals of
meritocracy in selecting its leaders. American personnel on the ground saw
an urgent need to oust bad Afghan commanders—a startling 96 percent of
the Afghanistan veterans surveyed in the 2008 Counterinsurgency Leadership
Survey believed that the United States needed to do more to get the right Af-
ghans into leadership positions.55 In theory, the United States could have used
its position as Afghanistan’s principal benefactor to bully Karzai into enforc-
ing merit-based personnel policies or to achieve Karzai’s removal by means of
a coup or forced resignation. But in reality the United States lacked the nec-
essary leverage to compel Karzai to change, and it was unwilling to force him
out. Countless pledges by the U.S. executive and legislative branches to pro-
tect Afghanistan had shown Karzai that the Americans would not make good
on a threat of withdrawing aid, and countless professions of commitment to
democracy and national sovereignty had shown that the United States would
e War in Afghanistan 211
not remove him from oce. e United States now must ask itself whether
punctilious respect for democracy and national sovereignty is worth the death
and destruction that ow from poor Afghan leadership. If it is not worth the
cost, then the United States must seek new ways of bringing better national
leadership to power in Kabul’s loy heights.
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213
T
he United States had not yet perceived the gravity of the neo-Taliban
menace when it embarked on another war that would make an unex-
pected turn into counterinsurgency. Extremely sensitive to terrorist
threats aer the 9/11 catastrophe, the Bush administration became convinced,
from largely erroneous intelligence, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass de-
struction that could be transferred to Al Qaeda or other anti-American ter-
rorists. Administration ocials believed, moreover, that overthrowing Presi-
dent Saddam Hussein and holding elections for new Iraqi leaders would start a
wave of democratization across the Middle East that would end governmental
repression, an alleged catalyst of terrorism. is vision of a democratic Iraq
had momentous and unintended consequences for the subsequent counter-
insurgency.
e planning for the invasion of Iraq likewise held unseen ramications
for the counterinsurgents of the future. Because expeditionary military forces
take many months to mobilize and transport across the world, the number of
troops assigned to the invasion force would put a ceiling on how many forces
could be assigned to occupation duty immediately aer the war. Believing that
technological advances had reduced the need for ground troops, Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sought to minimize the number of American
troops sent to Iraq in order to hold down American costs and limit the Ameri-
can commitment. Aer haggling with the uniformed military, the Oce of the
Secretary of Defense settled on 145,000 ground troops, most of them Ameri-
can or British.
CHAPTER 10
e Iraq War