The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014

WELL-WRITTEN JOURNALISMGall has used strong journalism skills to render a compelling discussion of the U.S. experience in Afghanistan since the 9/11 Jihad. The reader quickly understands that there are truths about our War in Afghanistan that we have not learned in the Mainstream Media. We all have heard countless times that our enemy is al Qaeda and its enabler, the Taliban. But what Gall teaches us is that the Taliban is not just some organic organization left over from the Soviet occupation. The Taliban owes its founding and continued existence to the Pakistan Government, more specifically the ISI (Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence).Gall's story is mostly linear so it is easy to follow. It is replete with details of her fact finding over a dozen years in Afghanistan and Pakistan and years before in that part of the world. Gall gives eyewitness accounts of the collapse of the Taliban crushed on the ground by the Northern Alliance and the United Front and completely decimated by U.S. bombing.Gall spends some time describing Hamid Karzai and Mullah Omar. Karzai quickly rose to the top the U.S. list of trusted Afghans and then was elected President. Omar was an Afghan and the long-time leader of the Taliban. Gall contradicts the standard wisdom that has evolved over the years about the ineptness of Karzai. She maintains that Karzai is a skilled politician and effectively bonded together the War Lords into an Afghan State and has tried to get the U.S. and the Media to understand that the real enemy lies in Pakistan. His great failing, however, is his ineptness at administration and his micromanaging. Toward the end of the book, Gall relates that one of Karzai's greatest failures is in not seeing the value of distributing the police power to the districts. Had he effectively trained and armed local police forces instead of holding the power centrally in Kabul, the districts might have been able to stand up to the legions of Taliban fighters pouring into Afghanistan from Pakistan. This was the movement that Generals McChrystal and Patreaus began in 2010, though with no support from Karzai."The Wrong Enemy" guides the reader through the maze of characters on both sides of the border in making the case against the ISI. Gall does project a ray of hope in the last chapter. Chapter 14, "Springtime in Zangabad," describes the popular uprising in southern Afghanistan by a group of villagers who finally had enough persecution by the Taliban and, importantly, also had a competent and aggressive local police force. This combination, even in the heartland of the Taliban, was enough for the people to exercise their own initiative and drive the Taliban thugs away.In the words of Gall: <<"What had changed in Panjwayi was the shift in the balance of power. The surge had routed the Taliban in much of Kandahar province in 2010, and it had taken another two years for the secondary and tertiary phases of the counterinsurgency strategy, the "hold and build" stages to keep the Taliban out and build a security and administrative system in the area, to take effect. A watershed moment came in 2012 in neighboring Zhare district, according to the American commander in southern Afghanistan in that period, Major General Robert B. Abrams. The Taliban had declared their intention to regain lost territory in Zhare in 2012 but failed to do so. Instead, they had steadily ceded ground and by 2013, had fallen back across the river, making southern Panjwayi their last stronghold. They were forced to retreat because of the newfound strength of the Afghan security forces, people told me. The surge had not only flooded the southern provinces with thousands of American troops, but also with twice their number of Afghan soldiers and police. By 2013, there were 17,000 American and coalition troops in the four provinces of Regional Command South, as well as 52,000 Afghans across various agencies of police, army, and intelligence. Kandahar had two Afghan army brigades and 10,000 police manning checkpoints on virtually every road in the province, and another 2,000 local police in the villages.">>The lesson is that this could happen across Afghanistan with properly trained--and armed--local police. This harkens to the American Revolution when the local militias, which were self armed, were able to be organized to defeat the strongest army on earth. After this glimmer of hope, reality sets in when we realize that, with the U.S. forces due to withdraw this year (2014), the popular uprising is probably too little and/or too late. [p.s. 4-14-2014--The second sentence of this paragraph is incorrect. A reader (johnc) was kind enough to point out that the militias had little effect on the outcome of our Revolutionary War. Read his comments at the end for details.]DISARMING THE PEOPLEThis leads to a deficiency in Gall's narrative. In an interview with Wudood, the leader of the popular uprising, he said: "They came by force. We could not say anything to them. We did not have weapons." In other words, the farmers were unarmed. Gall's only other reference to this condition of being disarmed prior to 2001 was in Chapter Four: <<"Through murderous methods and with Pakistani help, the Taliban took power in the south. ... but they did deliver law and order, gaining a monopoly of force and disarming the population.">>Disarming the people is a critical and classic strategy in subduing a population. It has been used countless times by monarchs and dictators throughout history. It prevented the people from defending themselves and deserves much more consideration in this book than these two minor references.ISLAMIC JIHADNow let's get to the real reason why I am critical of this otherwise fine and vital book. It's hard to imagine a book about Jihad in Afghanistan and Pakistan without at least some discussion of Islam. The political and religious ideology of Islam is at the very heart of the war in Afghanistan. Since human nature is so complex, there are, of course, many other power, money, and tribal issues that muddy up the waters. But make no mistake that Islam is at or near the core of all the problems in the region. One of my motives for picking up the book was to see if the principles of Jihad and the Caliphate are the same there as what I know of them in the Arabic regions.Since the Quran (the absolute and eternal word of Allah) and the Hadith (the teachings and traditions of Muhammad, the perfect model for all men) are written in Arabic and are spread to believers throughout the world as much by the spoken word as by the written word, there may be differences in emphasis from place to place. The Quran says: "And fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is all for Allah." (Surah 8. Verse 39) Remember that one meaning of "persecution" to Muhammad was having his demand to convert and submit to Islam rejected by someone. Is this what Afghans and Pakistanis believe? Is this what is taught in the madrassas?The closest Gall comes to this is in the Foreword: <<"I came across international jihadis in the Pakistani city of Peshawar then, too. We called them Wahhabis, after the fundamentalist Islamic sect that has its roots in Saudi Arabia. ... I saw Wahhabis turn up in Chechnya in 1995 and watched how they transformed the Chechens' deserving cause for self-determination into an extremist Islamist struggle. ... They wrought even greater havoc in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They dreamed of creating an Islamic caliphate stretching across South and Central Asia, home to some 500 million Muslims. Pakistan, the first nuclear-armed Muslim state, would be at its core.">>Wahhabism is the aggressive form of Islam that dominates North America, Europe, and the Middle East, where Islam is mostly Sunni. Thus I would suppose that Islam in Afghanistan and Pakistan is leaning toward Saudi Arabia. What the madrassas teach is important, as is the motivation of a young person or their parents to attend or send their children to them. This should be discussed.SUNNI vs. SHIAGall also does not treat the important Sunni/Shia split. Since Wahhabism, al Qaeda, and the Taliban are Sunni, and I assume many in Afghanistan's northern districts are Shia, this must create significant friction. Gall also mentions "emirate" as if it is the same as "caliphate." An emirate is a physical Muslim state, whereas THE caliphate is the capitol of the worldwide body of believers. Islam has been without a caliphate since the Caliphate of Istanbul was terminated at the end of WWI.One final issue is maps. It is important for me to have a sense of place when studying history. Thus I was frequently consulting my atlas maps, however many of the place names were not on my maps, probably because the places were so small. A few maps in the book showing the places discussed would have been very helpful.THE FUTUREDespite these critiques, I found the book very well written and absorbing. I also consider it to be essential information for understanding Afghanistan and especially Pakistan and for putting America's huge human and financial investment into perspective.I will close with a quote from Gall: <<"America should have selected to crush al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan, rather than go to war in Iraq," the former senator and leader of the Baloch National Party in Quetta [Pakistan], Habib Jalib Baloch, told me in May 2003. He warned that the Taliban were being reorganized with funding from Arab countries, and that Mullah Omar and the top Taliban commanders were all in Pakistan, protected by their links to the Pakistani establishment. "You need to cut the funding," he said. "You will not kill them with a hammer. You must cut the funding and the connection.">>That wisdom still applies eleven years later.

Like many Americans, I have supported our nation's response to 9/11, including our now 13 year adventure in Afghanistan. My heart goes out to those families who have sacrificed the most in prosecuting this war against Al Qaeda and to a limited extent, its affiliates. I use the words limited extent because, as we learn from Carlotta Gall, our campaign to destroy Al Qaeda stopped, apparently, at the border to Pakistan, our nominal ally in that war. Our strategy instead found its way to Iraq in 2003. The role of Pakistan in funding, enabling, and fueling the conflict in neighboring Afghanistan is the central theme in The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014, by Carlotta Gall of the New York Times. Her gripping first hand account is must reading for anyone who seeks to understand how America got to where we are today in our war to eradicate militant Islam. Gall lays out the history and timeline of our war in Afghanistan, the triumphs and defeats, the advances and setbacks. In particular, she chronicles the suffering of the Afghan people in living with three decades of continuous war. The book ends with the Obama surge led by Gen. Petraeus, and the broader context of the raid to kill Bin Laden who found safe haven in Pakistan. The emergent theme of the book is the duplicity and deceit of the Pakistani government and their role in orchestrating the Taliban campaign to restore its brutal occupation of Afghanistan, terrorize the Afghan people, and kill coalition soldiers. The Gall account puts the previous book I read, The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor, by Jake Tapper, into larger context as well. The Tapper book gives the tragic account of Outpost Keating, and the horror visited upon our soldiers in trying to defend this country. We now know what many long suspected, the slaughter visited upon our soldiers at Keating and elsewhere was funded and directed by the Pakistani ISI security apparatus in a proxy war against the U.S. military. We know that President Bush promised the American people that we would carry the fight to Al Qaeda and to all those that harbor and support it. The Gall book clearly indicates that was not the case. And I say this as a Bush voter and supporter. I am not an expert in diplomacy or geopolitical strategy. But I am old enough to remember Vietnam and the handcuffs our military wore to not carry the fight into Laos or Cambodia. Just as the Vietcong used those countries to marshal and arm its forces against us, Pakistan played a similar though far more active role in the current war on militant Islam, exploiting its status as our ally. Some ally. It is chilling to consider the hundreds of millions of U.S. taxpayers dollars we poured into Pakistan over the years, and how many of our dollars were used to fund the militants that Pakistan harbored and supported and unleashed against us. The very same militants who brought so much suffering to the Afghan people and the families of our soldiers. It's very difficult to read The Wrong Enemy without imagining U.S. laser guided bombs raining down on the HQ of the Pakistani ISI and the so-called madrassas that Pakistan used to brainwash waves of cannon fodder militants sent to Afghanistan drunk on jihad and wholesale slaughter. To some extent, the perverse calculus of Secy. Rumsfeld as it relates to the war on terror was spot on. Can we kill these militants at faster rate than the Pakistan ISI can manufacture them?

This is a very good book that should rank high in those lists of publications explaining the perennial wars and crisis of the Middle East. The author knows very well her grounds after having reported from Afghanistan for over ten years (plus being the daughter of a long time correspondent in the same country).So Ms Gall makes clear where the problem lies from the very title. "The Wrong Enemy" refers to the invasion and long (the longest in the American history) war that the USA still 19 years later fights in Afghanistan. The overall theory of the book is that America rather foolishly bit the bait that the Taliban and Bin Laden threw at them and entered in the country like an elephant in a china shop. It was the wrong enemy because the actual enemy was Pakistan, the safe haven for the Taliban, as well as their training grounds and laboratory. Yet a war against Pakistan, with its 180 million population and its nuclear bombs, would have had results beyond anyone's imagination. So the war has been futile and far from fixing things in a tumultuous region has worsen them, and much.So America invaded Afghanistan by late 2001, right in the aftermath of the 9/11 and all the Taliban had to do was drive a few miles to cross the border into Pakistan, Bin Laden included. The enemy was already elsewhere.And another, perhaps bigger, mistake was how to fight that was. As one character says in the book, "it needed more spies and less soldiers". Bombing villages did little, if at all, to help America towards a victory, and it provoked resentment, if not anger, in the local population. And in the 13 years narrated in the book, the way into victory eluded two American Presidents (then three counting the current one), equally unable to finish, let alone winning, the war.A mess, and well told. Why not 5 stars? A few minor things.The book sometimes reads as a personal chronicle, too personal. The author tells her interviews, trips, tea times and climbing around the rough Afghan mountains. All well and good, but the personal odysseys, interesting as they are, should have been a tad more distant of the main narration.Linked to the previous, there's certain indecisiveness in the, say, "spirit" of the book. It is not completely clear if it is a personal tale or a war chronicle. Perhaps trying to be both, it remains in the end in doubt and it shows.Lastly, it is sometimes a bit messy with the dates, events, places and names of players. The digressions are frequent and to explain the reasons behind something that's happening in 2007, the author goes to 2001 and then back to 2005 and then we recover the main thread where we left it. It doesn't help that the names of places and people are alien and difficult for the reader. But it could have used, to these eyes, a bit of precision and a stronger and more straight story core.All and all, while not flawless, it is a very good book and after we finish it we do know much more about one of the greater disgraces, and its consequences, of our times: the almost 40 years in which the Afghan soil has been the scenario of contemporary, useless and tragic wars.

A damning account of 'blow hot and cold' western interventionism in Afghanistan and the apparently remorseless double-dealing by its powerful neighbour. The book suggests that the Afghans may have the strength and resilience to determine their own future but it also highlights the desperately fragile state of the country in the wake of decades of fighting.

Illuminating account of an area that has been dogged by interference trying to impose foreign, supposedly modern, values and systems on a tribal society arrogantly thinking they(we) know best, instead of helping them secure their own civilisation.This should be prescribed reading for all Diplomats and Members of Parliament.

Good to read

Good read, made you think!