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America is fighting a forever war in Afghanistan

By going after Taleban instead of singling out Al Qaeda in the early days of calm following Kabul's collapse in late 2001, the Americans took off, after the wrong target.

The local and foreign press went into a frenzy after the publication of Spy Chronicles, an unlikely joint venture between former ISI and RAW chiefs, spilling the beans about some of the most controversial intelligence operations, and debacles, of recent years and decades. But nobody, at least in the subcontinent, seemed to notice another bestseller that came out earlier this year. Directorate S is Steve Coll's sequel to Ghost Wars, the Pulitzer Prize winner that chronicled the Great Soviet Jihad from Christmas Day 1979, when Russian tanks rolled into Afghanistan, to just before September 11, 2001.
Directorate S named after an alleged secret, deeply compartmentalised cell within Pakistani intelligence, tasked with underwriting Kashmiri and Afghan insurgencies - begins with the assassination of charismatic Northern Alliance commander Ahmad Shah Masood (codename: Khalid) two days before 9/11. And it dissects the American war effort through two two-term administrations as the State Department and Pentagon begin with a similar vision, only to walk all over each other, assume distinctly contradictory positions and end up nowhere, even as the CIA ran a different, parallel war, with its own aims, objectives and methods.
Arguably the biggest mistake - one which the Americans did not realise till a good decade into the war (and that too half-heartedly) - was lumping Taleban and Al Qaeda together as the principal enemy in the early days. When locals alluded to this fact they were dismissed, often arrested, as Taleban sympathisers.
And when Pakistan brought up the matter, it was attacked for trying to preserve its foothold in a completely changed Afghan environment, for still trying to hold on to its so-called strategic depth doctrine that required a large proxy footprint across the Afghan Border.
Yet Defence Secretary Rumsfeld's hubris, and little understanding of Afghan demographics, quickly ruled out winning hearts through reconstruction ("We are not nation builders," he said) and a working alliance with the majority Pashtuns through an arrangement with whatever little Taleban influence was left on the periphery. By turning their guns on the Taleban, the Americans extended the war to local Pashtuns, instead of keeping it focused on foreign, Al Qaeda troops. And in doing so they made sure, just like the Soviets and British invaders in centuries before, that almost every fruit seller, cloth merchant and shoe shiner was a skilled guerilla warrior by night; another small part of the growing, indigenous fighting machine known for bleeding superpowers 'by a thousand cuts'. Years later, when the Rumsfelds of the war had long since slid into oblivion, the Americans were bending over backwards to engage the Taleban in negotiations - directly and through Pakistan.
Even the notorious Haqqani Network, that "veritable arm of the ISI," as Gen Mullen put it years later, was talking to the CIA in good faith when another arm of the agency sabotaged the talks. The hunt for Taleban commanders naturally took special forces deep into Afghan villages, on mid-night door-breaking hunts that further humiliated Afghan pride and invited reprisal attacks. And this, in turn, sparked yet more Taleban violence.
As early as late 2002, the CIA had 'lost interest in the war'. General Counsel Scott Muller is quoted saying he had "no idea who is responsible" for the operation.
This, of course, was when the agency was about to be split between the Iraq and Afghan wars, and also when its 'enhanced interrogation programme' was being first tested on Al Qaeda and far more Afghan suspects. By October 2003, when Gen David Barno took over in Afghanistan, he discovered "there was not a campaign plan . indeed, not a plan, period."
By 2007, when drug production had temporarily replaced Al Qaeda and Taleban as the chief concern, the Americans were again paralysed about methods of curtailing poppy cultivation. Karzai stopped CIA plans of aerial spraying, but CIA thought he was trying to protect his corrupt brother's fields in the south, and that is where things stayed indefinitely.
In 2009, a clueless Panetta proved okay for his new job as new head of CIA, which was, it turns out, defending the agency at the White House and in Congress despite the war's downward spiral. Worse, they were still arguing about their core mission, was it really Taleban or just Al Qaeda? Eventually, they decided, the war was about finishing off Al Qaeda and protecting Pakistan's nuclear weapons, even though both were inside Pakistani territory and the US war in Afghanistan continued against the Taleban.
As late as 2010, the Pentagon was fighting based on clear-hold-build-transfer principles, the State was looking to talk to the Taleban and CIA was ratcheting up its drone campaign in Pakistan's FATA, a strategy which Coll said required 'feats of mental gymnastics' to be called synchronised.
By going after Taleban instead of singling out Al Qaeda in the early days of calm following Kabul's collapse in late 2001, the Americans took off, though strongly, after the wrong target. After all these years, they are like a marathon runner, at his prime and fittest in the race, but running in the wrong direction.
Shahab Jafry is a journalist based in Pakistan