NON-FICTION: THE PRICE OF STRATEGIC BLUNDERS
Noted British historian A.J.P. Taylor once wrote that human blunders usually do more to shape history than human wickedness.
Three months after the gruesome 9/11 attack on American soil, the United States forces in Afghanistan had pummelled Al Qaeda bases, dislodged the Taliban government, installed Hamid Karzai as the head of government in Kabul and had the Al Qaeda leadership on the run, seeking to flee to Pakistan.
Sixteen years later — after spending nearly a trillion dollars and losing close to 2,500 of its own soldiers in addition to killing over 175,000 in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including Osama bin Laden — Washington, despite military surges and withdrawal announcements, is still embroiled in what is the longest war in its history. So much so that in 2014, at a ceremony marking the end of a phase of US combat in Afghanistan, the programme noted that “attendees should lie down flat on the ground in the event of a rocket attack.”
A Pulitzer-winning author details the lack of coherence and consistency that have characterised US military involvement in Afghanistan since 2001
In order to understand how Washington found itself in such an inextricable and unenviable position, one has to read Steve Coll’s well-researched book Directorate S: The CIA and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan 2001-2016. The title is based on the Inter-Services Intelligence’s (ISI) supposedly most secret division, Directorate S, which controls covert operations “in support of the Taliban, Kashmiri guerrillas, and other violent Islamic radicals.” The book criticises the questionable methods and motives of Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency and discusses the ambitions and anxieties of the ISI’s various chiefs.
It is a worth-reading sequel to Coll’s majestic and magisterial Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, which deals with the first episode of US involvement in Afghanistan from 1979-2001. Combining an investigative journalist’s unerring eye for detail with a natural storyteller’s gift for narrative, Coll, a former South Asia correspondent for The Washington Post and staff writer on the New Yorker, won a Pulitzer Prize for Ghost Wars and displays the same impressive talents in his latest book.
The main focus of Directorate S, however, is the incoherent and inconsistent policy and covert war pursued by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other American agencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan during the last 16 years. As such, the subtitle would have been a more appropriate title for the book.
Coll writes a detailed and definitive account of Washington’s missteps, misjudgements and mistakes under two American presidents — George W. Bush and Barack Obama — in their Afghanistan war from 2001-2016. The inconclusive US campaign in Afghanistan, in the author’s words, is a humbling case study of the limits of American power.
By the last week of November 2001, Washington became distracted as then Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld ordered Gen Tommy Franks, who was preparing to launch Tora Bora operations in Afghanistan, to immediately start preparing for the invasion of Iraq. Both Karzai and the US envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, argued with Washington to approve negotiations with the Afghan Taliban, months after the attack on Afghanistan, to drive a wedge between different factions and to wean them away from hardcore and mainstream Taliban factions. Washington rejected the proposal.
One of the early turning points in the Afghan war was in December 2001 when high-level Al Qaeda leadership was trying to escape from the Tora Bora mountains into Pakistan following severe aerial attacks by Allied forces. Pakistani generals asked for help from the Americans to airlift troops high into the Hindu Kush mountains to close the backdoor escape route of Al Qaeda militants, but Washington refused to extend any help to the Pakistani generals. This would prove to be a costly mistake as not only did Al Qaeda militants pour into hideouts in Pakistan, but also wreaked havoc — in collaboration with local militants — in Pakistan’s cities and borderlands with Afghanistan.
Further blunders by the Americans included keeping both Pakistan and Afghanistan in the dark about their talks with the Taliban in Qatar, an effort which ended in embarrassing failure. By 2012, a quarter of the soldiers killed in the US-led alliance were killed by the very Afghan soldiers they were training. Additionally, American agents were actually still negotiating with representatives of Mullah Omar — nearly a year after he had died in a Pakistani hospital.
The goal posts for the US forces in Afghanistan changed many times. US forces have failed in their twin objectives of nation-building and counterterrorism in Afghanistan. Obama’s 2009 decision to beef up the US military presence by 30,000 troops was followed by the announcement that, after 18 months, they would start coming home. With insurgents and militants of all hues — the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and now Islamic State (ISIS) — gaining strength again, current American president Donald Trump recently seems to have reversed the earlier decision to pull out of Afghanistan.