LONDON — In the postcards of the mind, it is the starkest of all the images of Kandahar, dating back more than 20 years to the period immediately after Soviet troops withdrew from the city, and standing ever since as a grim warning of the folly of foreign military adventures in Afghanistan: hundreds of acres of rubble, whole quarters of the city reduced to fields of blasted concrete and steel, and further out, in the poorer districts, a shattered chocolate-box of a landscape formed by ragged mud walls that had once been home to tens of thousands of people seeking refuge from the war raging in the Afghan hinterland.
Outfought by the mujahedeen fighters of the 1980s, and desperate to hang on in the city that more than any other symbolizes Afghanistan's history of national resistance, Soviet forces had resorted, like the Americans in Vietnam, to obliteration by bombing. That was as good as an admission that they had lost, and when they finally pulled back across the Hindu Kush, they left behind little by way of a memorial to the 14,000 Soviet troops who lost their lives, or to the Kremlin's tens of billions of wasted rubles, beyond the scrap of blasted helicopters, tanks and armored vehicles that litter Afghanistan to this day.
The images of that dismal time came rushing back last week when the Taliban, legatees of the mujahedeen, sent a suicide bomber in a vehicle loaded with nearly a ton of high explosives to attack a NATO convoy in western Kabul, killing at least 18 people, among them five NATO soldiers, four of them officers. In the grisly calculus of the current conflict, the attack was a Taliban triumph, and photographs from the scene pressed the message home. Behind the carnage, like a forbidding sentinel, stood the artillery-blasted ruins of the old royal palace at Darulaman, another monument to the Soviet disaster.
When I walked through the Kandahar rubble in the spring of 1989, the Soviet Union's collapse, hastened by the imperial overreach in Afghanistan, was barely three years away. Now, like others with experience of that time, I find recollections of the Soviet debacle sounding like a tocsin in the mind, warning of the miseries that await America if the war's trajectory remains as it is, toward expanding influence for the Taliban and their Al Qaeda cohorts, and mounting signs, for the corrupt Kabul government and its frustrated allies, that the war against the Islamic militants may ultimately be unwinnable.
In the summer of 2010, Kandahar, again, is at the heart of the matter. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the American commander, has been signaling for months that the crucial engagement of the war, aimed at loosing the tentacles the Taliban have wound around the city and its outlying districts, would begin sometime this spring or summer. True to the form he set since taking command in Kabul last year, when he warned that the war was on its way to being lost unless radical new strategies were adopted, the general has left no room for illusion. In effect, he has said, the struggle for Kandahar may determine the outcome of the war.
That judgment reflects the lessons learned in Iraq, where, with other reporters, I spent years listening to the illusionism of generals "putting lipstick on a pig," as Gen. David H. Petraeus expressed it was his time to retrieve what he could from the disaster unfolding there. No less, the sense that the battle for Kandahar has brought America to a watershed in the war acknowledges the historic, political and strategic importance of the city, and of the province.
Though Kabul has been the capital for 250 years, Kandahar has been the main crucible of power in Afghanistan since the mid-18th century, when a Kandahari tribal chief, Ahmad Shah Durrani, unified the country and established himself as the first of the Durrani kings, a dynasty that endured until the last monarch, Zahir Shah, was overthrown in 1973. The Communists who ruled until 1992 regarded their competition with the mujahedeen for support from the Kandahari tribes as crucial to their survival, and the two governments since the 1990s — the Taliban, ousted by the American-led invasion after 9/11, and the current administration of President Hamid Karzai — have had their roots in Kandahar.
In a country of perhaps 30 million people, Kandahar's importance goes beyond numbers. The province is thought to have fewer than two million people, perhaps half in Kandahar city and its outlying districts. Most belong to a cluster of powerful tribes — the Popolzai, Barakzai, Achakzai, Alokozai, Alizai, Ishaqzai, Noorzai and Ghilzai, among others — who are part of a confederacy known as the Pashtun. They are the politically dominant ethnic group who live, mostly, in the lands between the Hindu Kush mountains and the 1,200-mile border with Pakistan.
Strategically, Kandahar is critical. It lies at a junction of historic trade routes that served as infiltration routes for the mujahedeen, and now for the Taliban. It is the main entrepot for the opium-and-heroin trafficking that is Afghanistan's economic mainstay and a source of financing for the Taliban, as well as for corrupt tribal leaders who nominally, at least, support the Kabul government — among them many Afghans and, American officials say, President Karzai's younger half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, president of Kandahar's provincial council.
Most of the 30,000 additional American troops agreed to by President Obama last year have been assigned to the south, and Pentagon officials have acknowledged that what happens in Kandahar is likely to be decisive when Mr. Obama reaches the July 2011 deadline he has set for reassessing America's role in the war.
General Petraeus, responsible for both wars as head of Central Command, has warned against drawing too many analogies. But to reporters who have covered the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are some compelling similarities. Kandahar and its tribes present some of the same challenges and opportunities as Iraq's Anbar province, where an American outreach to Sunni tribal leaders marked the beginning of a new arc in that war that made an honorable American exit seem thinkable.
Another similarity has been the American command's readiness, after years of false starts, to honor the military's doctrine of "lessons learned" — in Afghanistan, not only from the mistakes made by earlier American commanders but from the Soviet blunders. Thus, in Kandahar, there will be none of the Stone Age tactics the Soviets used, and probably little bombing at all. General Petraeus and General McChrystal have been reluctant even to call what they plan an offensive, describing it as classic counter-insurgency that relies as heavily on political innovation as on military force. In effect, Kandahar will be the laboratory for warfighting doctrines forged from nearly a decade of fighting in both wars, and from the experience of two generals who have served side by side in both.
Not that firepower will be irrelevant. General McChrystal, a former Special Forces commander in Iraq, has already had American and British commandos striking fast and hard at selected targets in and around Kandahar, in a bid to "reduce" the Taliban's leadership cadres. More American strikes can be expected in outlying districts and on infiltration routes; in the city, fighting will be entrusted mainly to Afghan forces. But the crucial element of the plan will be the pursuit of a political settlement between tribal factions in the city, once they see the losses inflicted on the Taliban.
If it works, it will be a historic victory. But it is a long shot, as the American generals acknowledge. Not the least of the challenges facing them is the fact that the Taliban have shown signs of becoming, for many Afghans, the lesser of two evils. Loathed as they have been for their medieval brutalities and obscurantism, from their public beheadings to their banning of women from jobs to their ban on almost all forms of public recreation, their directness — some would say their primitive kind of honesty — has made for a stark contrast with the Karzai brothers, who are widely despised for their perceived determination to turn government into a machinery for personal power and profit.
In many of the areas that the Taliban control or decisively influence — a Pentagon report to Congress in April estimated that 48 of 92 districts it assessed were supportive of the Taliban in March this year, up from 33 in December — the insurgents have succeeded in establishing at least a facsimile of government. They have named shadow governors, raised taxes and set up courts. Relying on their own lessons learned, they have relented on some of their harsher measures; now they allow children to fly kites and villagers to play soccer, and they have banned, in a decree issued by Mullah Muhammad Omar, who was one of the founders of the Taliban in a village outside Kandahar in 1994, public beheadings for alleged miscreants. (His preference: firing squads.)
All of that represents a traverse from the Kandahar I returned to in 1996, the year the Taliban completed their sweep of all of Afghanistan south of the Hindu Kush. Having experienced the back-to-the-future of Taliban rule in Kabul, where a group of fighters imprisoned me briefly in a suffocating shipping container for having stubble that failed the test of a six-inch steel strip they used to measure compliance with the Islamic standard for untrimmed beards, I set out for Kandahar to — well, beard the lion in his den. The city I found was one where a frenzied crowd had gathered to watch as a young widow forced into marriage with an elderly man was taken to the main mosque and stoned to death — by one of her own children, among others — for alleged adultery with her husband's 38-year-old son.
Mullah Omar would not see me, considering American reporters to be infidels. But one of his deputies, a gracious man with a missing eye and leg from his days with the mujahedeen, invited me for a talk at the old royal palace. Over delectable glasses of fresh pomegranate juice, we talked into the night, until he eventually asked me, intently, to offer some advice on an issue vexing the Taliban's ruling council.
The issue, he said, was what to do with the incidence of homosexuality among Taliban fighters, much of it involving older men and young boys. Should the offenders be buried alive, or taken atop the old city wall and cast down? The question carried me back across the centuries to a time when similar barbarisms were an everyday occurrence in the Christian West. But when I asked my host why the Taliban would resort to such violence, he replied, as if surprised that anybody wound wonder, "Why not?"
At that moment, I understood what remains so hard for many in the West to grasp, as our troops fight to secure freedoms for Afghans that we have long enjoyed at home: that for many in Afghanistan, if not the more cosmopolitan, secular class we have chosen as our principal allies, our world and theirs are, indeed, centuries apart, separated by the ancient verities of the Koran, the rhythms of Afghan traditional life, and the absence, in Afghan experience, of anything like the Enlightenment that broadened the liberties of our forebears in the 18th Century. For American commanders seeking an ending in Afghanistan that spares the United States the humiliation visited on the Soviet Union, that could yet prove an impossible divide to cross.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/weekinreview/23burns.html
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