How We Won and Lost the War in Afghanistan: Two Years in the Pashtun Homeland
288
How We Won and Lost the War in Afghanistan: Two Years in the Pashtun Homeland
288Hardcover
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Overview
Douglas Grindle provides a firsthand account of how the war in Afghanistan was won in a rural district south of Kandahar City and how the newly created peace slipped away when vital resources failed to materialize and the United States headed for the exit. By placing the reader at the heart of the American counterinsurgency effort, Grindle reveals little-known incidents, including the failure of expensive aid programs to target local needs, the slow throttling of local government as official funds failed to reach the districts, and the United States’ inexplicable failure to empower the Afghan local officials even after they succeeded in bringing the people onto their side. Grindle presents the side of the hard-working Afghans who won the war and expresses what they really thought of the U.S. military and its decisions. Written by a former field officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development, this story of dashed hopes and missed opportunities details how America’s desire to leave the war behind ultimately overshadowed its desire to sustain victory.
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781612349541 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Potomac Books |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2017 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Douglas Grindle is an analyst and former freelance journalist whose work has appeared in scores of media outlets, including CSPAN, Fox News Radio, and numerous television stations across the country. He spent six years as a war correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq, two years as a field researcher for the Department of Defense in Afghanistan, two years as a district advisor with USAID, and, most recently, five months in Kabul as a civilian researcher for the U.S. Army.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Train-Up
But if you intend to keep India, you must manage to train up men in the spirit of your Malcolms, Elphinstones, and Metcalfes of times past, and of Sir George Clerk in later days; — men who by their character and the confidence the natives have in them, can hold their own without the immediate presence of battalions and big guns.
— Sir Bartle Frere, Afghanistan and South Africa, 1881
I gripped the steering wheel and twisted my head back over my shoulder. The instructor sat beside me, his beefy arm draped loosely across the back of my seat as the speedometer of the old Ford Crown Victoria wound up, passing 25, 35, and 40 as we accelerated down the racetrack in reverse. We bounced tail-first along the speedway. I eased off the gas as we approached the corner. My eyes followed the grass along the edge of the track as I turned the wheel and we circled around the bend and accelerated hard down the next straightaway.
People headed to Afghanistan were expected to know how to drive themselves out of danger in the unlikely event they blundered into an ambush. Reversing at speed and driving through solid objects was designed to give us the confidence to drive ourselves out of dicey situations in the dangerous world we were about to enter.
Despite this danger, most trainees would never actually use these skills. The only driving I would do would be in a minivan on Kandahar Airfield or in the back of an armored military vehicle out on patrol. The high point of the days at the speedway involved ramming through a car that blocked the road, using the heavy Crown Vic as a battering ram. Tips from our burly and brainy instructor included, "Slow down before hitting the blocking vehicle," "leave enough room to accelerate hard through it," and even more to the point, "hit the wheels, which are attached to axles; this the most solid part of the opposing car."
Lots of fun but not very useful for my destination.
It contrasted to our first week of training in Washington DC, where we'd trooped from room to room in USAID headquarters, gathering ID cards, attending security briefings, and completing life insurance forms.
Tedious stuff, but I appreciated being back in the United States. I had just spent sixteen straight months in Afghanistan as a civilian researcher for the Department of Defense working on a human terrain team. I visited villages in the farthest-flung districts in southern Afghanistan and wrote reports for the military. Almost every month I went to a new district, conducted fifty or sixty interviews with the local people, and reported back to the U.S. Army commander on what the people thought about security, how they made a living, what they thought about the Afghan government, and how to improve the situation. My recommendations would end up as projects, in new ways for the soldiers to talk to the people, or new ideas on where best to commit resources.
Three weeks before I arrived in DC I wrapped up my last study in Shamulzai District in Zabul Province near the Pakistan border. I briefed the brigade, delivered a thirty-page paper, stopped at Kandahar Airfield to pick up my transit paperwork, and flew on to Kuwait, Atlanta, Fort Benning, Fort Leavenworth, and finally Boston, where I took a three-week break.
The previous sixteen months in Afghanistan had taught me a lot about what the Afghans thought and how to influence them. I arrived in Washington DC for pre-deployment training for USAID in late February 2011.
USAID's building was modern and impressive, with a quiet hum of activity and long carpeted hallways lined with hundreds of doors to open-plan offices. It felt good to reconnect with a nine-to-five office environment.
Afghanistan felt a world away when contrasted with healthy-looking Americans dressed in business attire. Yet here we were, part of the expansion of U.S. civilian presence in Afghanistan, our numbers increasing from 320 to almost four times that total in under three years. We trod a well-worn path from office to office, clutching our paperwork. Our in-processing class was tiny, with only six people. All of my fellow classmates were gracious, funny, and smart, and we soon became a happy and close-knit group.
By our second week the flow of in-processing paperwork ceased and we started to really learn in a weeklong seminar. The all-day classes were taught by an experienced Afghanistan hand who had lived and worked there for twenty years and was married to an Afghan man, as well as by a USAID manager who knew the ropes. We learned how to interact with the Afghans, how to identify the most important individual in a house (only lackeys sit beside the door), and how not to insult the Afghans.
We soon moved to formal State Department training, held at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) in Arlington, Virginia. Here we spent two weeks in large classrooms, crammed in with about fifty people from other agencies. Lecturer after lecturer came in to tell us about the arcane nature of the bureaucracy and our place in it. Unfortunately the lecture material repeated much of the information we had already learned about the culture of Afghanistan, including how the Afghan government worked.
We acquired background information instead of what we wanted: the specifics of what we would be doing. Details were sparse. We asked what we might be doing once we reached Afghanistan. A presenter explained, "One of the most important things we can do is influence the master narrative, especially among the young people." This sounded awfully smart, but did it mean anything?
Training was supposed to prepare us for the next year or two abroad. The previous October, in 2010, a report by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) noted that trainees received "limited information on their roles and responsibilities before arriving at their assigned locations." The State Department assured the inspectors they were working to fix the problem.
Annoyingly the instructors insisted on answering our questions with one correct "book" answer. Despite fifty experienced people in the room, this practice killed any chance for real discussion. Other students had worked in places across the globe and implemented innovative ideas, but they received no encouragement to explain them.
Much of the second week at FSI repeated the first week's lectures with a few variations. In my notes from early April are scrawled the words, "Training hits rock bottom. Seeing the same COMISAF [Commander of International Security Assistance Force] slide three times today, plus four times previously."
Then one day a dapper-looking man came and spoke to us for about forty-five minutes. He wore the kind of highly polished brown shoes that are seen only in British Parliament or investment banks. Former ambassador Ronald Neumann, who had recently finished leading the U.S. embassy in Kabul for almost three years, said America had simply not devoted the time and effort to winning the war, because it was distracted by Iraq and had let the Taliban back in.
In his experience short-term cycles of three-year plans had failed. And he noted that now, in 2011, America was again embarking on a three-year plan (2011–14) that would probably fail, because American planning was still too focused on the short term. Clearly trying to tell the truth, Ambassador Neumann was a marvel of forthrightness, clarity of vision, and depressing realism.
To finish up our training we flew to Indiana, where the National Guard runs a military-style camp. Here trainees are supposed to learn how to interact with real Afghans in contrived scenarios. Unfortunately the students were ill prepared for the ordeal. Despite our many lectures at FSI, we received no clues on how to deal with Afghans in meetings. Despite our cultural training, we remained ignorant of the cultural and political nuances that would affect our ability to run meetings effectively. The sole advice given to us in the FSI lecture halls was to never promise more than you can deliver or, even better, never promise anything at all.
Indiana was fraught with these unanswered questions. Should we take a hard or soft approach to get Afghans to agree to do the right thing? Which negotiating skills would work best? Indiana would be trial by fire.
The trainees included USAID development people, State Department political officers hired temporarily for Afghanistan, law-enforcement types, and bodies from a bevy of agencies, including the Office of the Inspector General. The training assumed we already knew what made Afghans tick. Most of us had never been to Afghanistan. This wishful thinking broke down almost immediately when the scenarios began.
In Indiana the training kicked off on a somber note. During a video teleconference from the U.S. embassy in Kabul we learned that we would be arriving in an atmosphere of declining resources. One embassy staffer bluntly advised, "We are ramping down our work." And we discovered that most of the development work would be done at the provincial level, not in the districts where a number of us were headed.
We lived in an encampment composed of steel-sided trailers, a large sheet-metal central meal hall, and a similar classroom building. Every day we traveled via military Humvees to an unused mental institution redesignated as the staging area for our meetings. American mentors accompanied us into the rooms where we would meet Afghan Americans pretending to be Afghan government officials. The trainees needed to discern the individual's problem and offer a solution as we fumbled through each forty-five-minute meeting.
Before and after each session the instructors told us to never promise anything to any Afghan, not ever. We were advised to "promise less" and push the Afghans to use money from their own budget. This advice inevitably flew in the face of our real jobs as USAID field officers, which called for us to guide the disbursement of hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single district in a matter of months. It also ignored the reality that the Afghan government had almost no money to fix anything, because its own budgetary funds rarely reached the countryside. No matter; we were to press on within the rules.
As the meetings progressed, the advice given by the American mentors and the Afghan American "players" rarely meshed. The week culminated in a helicopter ride, a traditional Afghan supper and dancing in the old mental institution facility, and a van ride to the airport the next morning. Our little group headed to the bar at the airport and tried to forget the puzzling advice.
We received a course in countersurveillance during which we drove around suburban Washington in a van and tried to learn to detect "terrorists" who were observing us. We managed a detection rate of about 5 percent in spotting lurking watchers, suggesting we had a lot to learn if our eyes and ears were actually needed in our future high-threat environments.
Then it was on to the speedway with high-speed driving in reverse and then firing guns. The weapons instructors, rugged ex-military types, seemed embarrassed by the lack of know-how among the trainees, the majority of whom would be working at the embassy anyway. They advised us that once in Afghanistan we should avoid anything to do with a gun. "Just unload any weapons you happen to see lying around on the ground," they urged soothingly. This was a far cry from my previous U.S. Army job, in which we were issued rifles or handguns and expected to use them.
Four days later our little group of six boarded a packed United Airlines Boeing 777 for a fourteen-hour flight to Dubai. We stayed overnight in a luxury hotel, spent some government cash on beers and chicken wings as we overlooked Dubai's grand canal, and the next day flew to Kabul, where we faced another week of paperwork and lectures while cooped up inside sterile concrete walls. With twelve hundred staff housed in tower blocks and temporary trailers, the embassy boasted all the modern conveniences: an American-style bar, a pool, dining facilities, a shop selling low-priced liquor, a coffee shop, and the same chancery building that had housed the embassy back in the 1970s when the Soviets invaded.
Five days later we scattered, three of us taking a flight to Kandahar. We regretted splitting up our group, but we were glad to be leaving those high embassy walls. I felt bad for the permanent inmates of the U.S. mission, the same relief and regret one feels when leaving a poorly run zoo. The small turboprop roared down the runway in Kabul, bounded into the air, and bounced in turbulence over Kabul's hilltops. The embassy receded behind us, though the hangover caused by our final night's celebrations lingered.
Kabul was past. The Afghan capital represents the strategic and commercial center of the country, and whoever controls Kabul also controls Afghanistan. Ahead of us lay Kandahar, the heart of the Pashtun belt and the center of the insurgency. I'd left Kandahar just fourteen weeks earlier.
CHAPTER 2
KAF World
The Quetta Shura Taliban has made Kandahar province and its capital, Kandahar City, primary objectives of their campaign in southern Afghanistan. Kandahar is also the birthplace of the Taliban movement, and the historical powerbase of the family of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
— Carl Forsberg, The Taliban's Campaign for Kandahar, 2009
The twin-engine turboprop steadily descended out of the flawless blue sky on our approach to Kandahar City. Scattered clouds streaked the sky above. Gradually the mountains of Uruzgan and Zabul Provinces fell behind, and the hills of Kandahar, jagged and wind worn, rose from the flat desert floor. The land reflected infinite shades of brown, dashed with rectangles of green where fields clustered near streambeds and canals.
A large blue lake flashed by. Pooled behind the Dahla Dam, the lake provides water for almost a million people in Kandahar Province. Then Kandahar City slid past the right wing, tiny cars and motorcycles filling the main streets that cut through neighborhoods of compounds, each nestled behind thick walls. The city is flanked to the west by a line of hills that divide the urban area from the rural western districts of the province.
The plane lowered its flaps, dropped its landing gear, and lined up for Kandahar Airfield. Visible beyond the left wing, forty miles to the east, Pakistan lay behind another line of hills jumbled like a mass of waves rolling in from the Himalayas.
We descended the last few thousand feet over green grape vineyards and fallow fields. The plane swept low over a highway that led to Pakistan. We thumped hard onto the runway, the plane braking as we rolled past lines of dusty military helicopters, fighters, and transport planes on adjoining aprons.
Kandahar Airfield, better known as KAF, holds the distinction of being the world's busiest military airfield. A kind of civilization of its own, it lay fifteen kilometers southeast of Kandahar City. It rivaled the Afghan metropolis, being a very American city covered in thick Afghan dust. The airfield was built around Kandahar International Airport, a grand title for a dusty runway and terminal building built in the 1960s as a way station for propeller airliners on the Tehran-to-Delhi route. Even before its completion the airport was obsolete, modern jets passing miles above.
Settling into dusty irrelevance, the airport was resurrected by the American invasion in 2001. During the seven years previous to our team's arrival it had become a metropolis, a boomtown, and testimony to the ever-expanding war effort. KAF was a sprawling monstrosity of modular housing, domed metal workshops, dusty asphalt roads, tents, and the bustle of tens of thousands of people running and servicing the war in southern Afghanistan.
We stepped off the plane and into 85-degree sunshine on a ramp owned by the U.S. embassy. The State Department maintained its own air fleet. Vietnam-era Hueys lined up with rotors pointing crookedly at the sky beside a Russian-built Mil transport helicopter and two old CH-46 Sea Knight twin-rotor helicopters painted in State's special gray-and-blue livery, also Vietnam vintage.
We and our bags were whisked by minivan to the government civilian compound, past military crews laboring over helicopters in various stages of loading and unloading, some with their cowlings open and engines exposed for maintenance. Hundreds of helicopters baked in the sun, most closed up and empty.
At the civilian office we checked in with staff. Regional Platform South, which accommodated civilian government employees who lived and worked in three prefabricated, two-story buildings, was tucked inside a tall wire fence.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "How We Won & Lost the War in Afghanistan"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Douglas Grindle.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Prologue Introduction List of Abbreviations Part One. Into Afghanistan 1. The Train-Up 2. KAF World Part Two. Into Dand 3. Settling In 4. Ousting the Taliban 5. Nazak’s Grand Bargain 6. Priming the Economy 7. Waiting to Work 8. Kick-Starting the Staff 9. Outpost Life 10. Security Holds 11. Women’s Work Part Three. Dand in the Balance 12. Stealing from Women 13. Still Starved of Money 14. Corruption of Many Kinds 15. Holding Back the Taliban 16. The Economy Misses 17. Solutions Made in Washington 18. Dand in the Balance Part Four. On to Maiwand 19. Two Districts 20. Security Failing in Maiwand 21. Drugs, Not Jobs Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index