But there were ominous signs that the new order was teetering. At 10:20 a.m., a piercing noise shattered the morning lull. A suicide bomber had driven a dark Toyota Surf into a convoy of U.S. soldiers. I was in the vicinity of the attack, which occurred near Massoud Square, bordering the main gate of the U.S. Embassy. The square had been named for Ahmed Shah Massoud, military leader of the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan (or Northern Alliance), who was assassinated by al Qa’ida suicide bombers two days before September 11, 2001.
The attack wounded twenty-nine people and killed sixteen. Two of the dead were American soldiers. One was Staff Sergeant Robert Paul, an Army reservist from The Dalles, Oregon, who was part of the 364th Civil Affairs Brigade. In an obituary, his grieving family wrote, “He never turned down an opportunity because he always wanted to make a difference in everything he did.”2 The other American killed was Sergeant 1st Class Merideth Howard, an Army reservist from Waukesha, Wisconsin, whose husband mourned her death by blasting her remains skyward in two fireworks displays. A few months earlier, an Army crew filming a segment on U.S. reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan showed Sergeant Howard handing out hundreds of backpacks. “Most of the kids are in school, even if it’s just a few hours a day,” she said. “And that’s what we’re trying to do, is just help them out as much as we can.”3
The rest of the dead were Afghan civilians unfortunate enough to be in the blast zone. One was an elderly man selling used clothing from a dilapidated, rusty pushcart. Among the others were a half-dozen municipal street sweepers finishing their morning cleaning, and two gangly boys selling water. At the bomb site, I could see thick black smoke curling up the charred trees nearby. The blast had torn a six-foot-wide crater in the road and left scattered over a wide area a gruesome and disquieting collection of items: Muslim prayer caps, khaki-colored military hats, shoes, and body parts. The explosion, which also had ripped apart an armored Humvee, was the largest suicide bombing in the capital up to that point. I tried not to be discouraged, but the trends suggested a growing insurgency.
Two days later, on September 10, another suicide bomber assassinated Hakim Taniwal, governor of Paktia Province. I had been scheduled to visit him later that week. He was a genteel, bespectacled sociology professor who had fled from Afghanistan to Pakistan in 1980, moved to Australia in 1997, and then returned home to Afghanistan in 2002 to help rebuild his shattered country. Afghan President Hamid Karzai had asked his close friend Taniwal to come to Paktia, a rugged province in the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains in eastern Afghanistan, which had become a hotbed of insurgent activity. Australia’s minister of foreign affairs, Alexander Downer, who knew Taniwal, described him as a scholarly, soft-spoken man of integrity, and “a good man, with a reputation as a highly capable administrator.” 4
Taniwal’s family had begged him not to return to Afghanistan, but he felt an overwhelming sense of patriotism and couldn’t miss the opportunity to help rebuild his homeland. Ghulam Gul, the suicide bomber, crept up to Taniwal’s car and blew himself up as the car pulled away from the governor’s office in Gardez. The next day, nearly a thousand mourners attended Taniwal’s funeral, including the Afghan ministers of interior, refugees, communications, and parliamentary affairs. The outpouring of grief and the admiration for Taniwal were palpable. But in a shocking display of irreverence, another suicide bomber blew himself up at the funeral, killing at least seven people and wounding up to forty. Five of the dead were policemen and two were children. The Taliban decision to target a funeral, one of the most solemn occasions in Islam, defied basic human dignity. President Karzai denounced the attack as a “heinous act of terrorism…against Islam and humanity.”5
Afghanistan, one U.S. soldier remarked to me at the time, was beginning to feel like Iraq in 2003. Kabul—and indeed Afghanistan more broadly—had a strange fin de siècle air. What had happened? Why did an insurgency develop in Afghanistan?
Downward Spiral
As horrible as they were, the September 11, 2001, attacks provided the United States with an opportunity to eliminate al Qa’ida from Afghanistan. And the United States jumped at the chance, launching within weeks the most significant and expensive counterterrorism effort in the history of the United States. In an emotional address to a joint session of Congress nine days after the attacks, President George W. Bush pledged to begin a global “war against terror”: “The leadership of al Qa’ida has great influence in Afghanistan and supports the Taliban regime in controlling most of that country. In Afghanistan, we see al Qa’ida’s vision for the world.” Afghanistan would be the first battleground. “Our war on terror begins with al Qa’ida, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”6
Overall, the United States spent more than $430 billion for military and diplomatic efforts over the first five years and deployed military forces to the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.7 This amount was larger than the annual gross domestic product of 89 percent of the world’s countries.8 Afghanistan was where much of the planning and training for the September 11 attacks took place and, at least initially, it was the central front of America’s “war on terror.” And rightly so. Following his capture, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, head of al Qa’ida’s military committee and Osama bin Laden’s principal operative for the attacks, boasted: “I was Emir [commander] of Beit al Shuhada [the Martyrs’ House] in the state of Kandahar, Afghanistan, which housed the 9/11 hijackers. There I was responsible for their training and readiness for the execution of the 9/11 operation.”9
In 2001, U.S. Special Operations and CIA forces, along with Afghan indigenous troops backed by U.S. airpower, combined to overthrow the Taliban regime in less than three months while suffering only a dozen U.S. fatalities.10 Some argued that the operation revitalized the American way of war.11 Indeed, it was a remarkably effective campaign. Approximately 100 CIA officers, 350 Special Forces soldiers, and 15,000 Afghans—running as many as 100 combat sorties per day—defeated a Taliban army estimated at 50,000 to 60,000 plus several thousand al Qa’ida fighters.12
Despite the idealism of the initial campaign and the success of military operations, the United States squandered this extraordinary opportunity. America was a global superpower with the resources and talent to effectively overthrow governments and replace them with new ones. But it failed to seize the moment. By 2006, tensions had escalated dramatically and Afghanistan was leveled by a perfect storm of political upheaval in which several crises came together: Pakistan emerged as a sanctuary for the Taliban and al Qa’ida, allowing them to conduct a greater number of operations from bases across the border; Afghan governance became unhinged as corruption worked its way through the government like a cancer, leaving massive discontent throughout the country; and the international presence, hamstrung by the U.S. focus on Iraq, was too small to deal with the escalating violence. The simultaneous pressures came to a head in 2006, when the Taliban, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami, the Haqqani network, foreign fighters, criminal groups, and a host of Afghan and Pakistan tribal militias began a sustained effort to overthrow the U.S.-backed Afghan government.