Remember Afghanistan?
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KATE BROOKS/POLARIS FOR TIME
ON GUARD: A U.S. soldier with the 10th Mountain Division patrols in Kandahar, former Taliban country |
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Hamid Karzai is lonely. He is huddled, as always, deep inside his presidential palace in Kabul, protected by towering stone walls, growling dogs and U.S. bodyguards. Visitors to the palace must undergo three separate body searches before passing through the arched gates, all under the gaze of trained marksmen standing sentry in a watchtower.
On this day in February, a driving blizzard has made Karzai's lair seem even more forbidding. Only one person gets through unchallenged: Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. Inside Karzai's office, the two men converse in English and Dari, one of Afghanistan's two official languages. Karzai, who out of fear of assassination rarely leaves the palace, asks Khalilzad how things look in the country he governs but almost never sees. Khalilzad unfurls a large map and points out various reconstruction projects marked in red and green ink—a network of roads and schools and irrigation canals that will be built, he says, as soon as the U.S. and NATO bring order to Afghanistan. Karzai nods impatiently but brightens when he locates the one major rebuilding achievement of his tenure: a 300-mile road linking Kabul to Kandahar. "Do you know how long it took to reach Kandahar before?" he asks. "Twelve hours, sometimes 18. Now I had a delegation that made it there in 3 hours and 45 minutes." He laughs. "Of course," he says, "we have no speed limits."
For Karzai and for the Bush Administration, there is no time to waste. Two years have passed since several hundred U.S. ground troops and 15,000 Northern Alliance fighters ousted the Taliban in retaliation for the Sept. 11 attacks, ending the mullahs' oppressive rule and destroying the sanctuary from which Osama bin Laden directed his murderous minions. Having scored a blockbuster opening victory in its war on terrorism, the Bush Administration committed itself to winning the peace—pledging billions of dollars in aid, deploying 11,000 troops to hunt for remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and pinning its credibility on Karzai, the regal President who the U.S. hoped could manage the country's combustible ethnic mix and rein in its notorious warlords. Making Afghanistan a stable democracy friendly to the West would not just deal a blow to bin Laden and the brutes who once ruled the country but also help win over hearts and minds across the Islamic world. Says Khalilzad, the Afghan-American who took charge of the U.S. embassy in Kabul last November: "The reputation of the Bush Administration is associated with Afghanistan."
The White House says Afghanistan is on the right track. "The men and women of Afghanistan are building a nation that is free and proud and fighting terror," President George W. Bush said in January's State of the Union address. But that optimistic picture obscures the depths of the country's woes. In interviews with Afghans, diplomats and military commanders across the country, TIME has found that while Afghans have been freed from the Taliban's depraved strictures, their daily lives remain blighted by violence and fear. Because of the paltry number of foreign peacekeepers—about 20,000, in contrast to 130,000 troops in Iraq—and Karzai's inability to extend his grip outside Kabul, most of Afghanistan is under the sway of truculent warlords who in many cases finance armed militias through a resurgent opium trade. The Taliban show signs of a comeback, with forces loyal to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar—believed to be hiding in Afghanistan or Pakistan—now controlling nearly one-third of the country's territory.
So another military showdown is looming. U.S. military officials believe that Taliban fighters are preparing to launch an offensive against the U.S. and its Afghan allies this spring. "As the weather gets better and as people are better able to travel in the rougher terrain, we expect an increase in violence," says General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A senior U.S. military official told TIME that U.S. forces will soon mount a spring offensive of their own, in the tribal areas along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The goal is to flush out bin Laden from his lair and capture or kill him. The U.S. is not expected to openly announce the true intent of the offensive, which will focus on an area stretching from Jalalabad, near Afghanistan's eastern border, to Kandahar, a former Taliban stronghold in the south. The official says a small contingent of special-operations troops taken out of Afghanistan for the war in Iraq—including members of the elite Joint Task Force 121, which helped track down Saddam Hussein—will be reinserted for the offensive. While the U.S. pushes east along a broad front, Pakistani forces will push west, flooding the tribal areas in what Lieut. General David Barno, commander of U.S.-led coalition forces in Afghanistan, calls a "hammer and anvil" strategy. "The idea is to come up with O.B.L. in the bargain," says a senior military official. "They are not going to say that's the goal, but it's the goal."
The hunt for bin Laden is intensifying at a time when the Administration is struggling to pull off its other major goal in Afghanistan: the holding of the country's first free elections, scheduled for June. So far, the U.N. has managed to register just 9% of the country's 10.5 million eligible voters. Taliban rebels have threatened to kill U.N.-sponsored election teams and burn down schools and mosques where Afghans are signing up to vote. Karzai said last week that the elections may be postponed because of lagging voter registration. Despite the Bush Administration's desire to trumpet the birth of Afghan democracy, a delay is almost inevitable. "We should have five years to pull off these elections, not four months," says a U.N. official. Lieut. Colonel Christopher Bentley, U.S. commander for security in Kandahar, concurs: "The country is not ready. [The election] will probably have to be pushed back. We've still got a long road to go."
Does the U.S., consumed by another conflict 1,400 miles to the west, have the will to see it through? In general terms, the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan has been less costly than the war in Iraq. The military spends $900 million a month on Afghan operations, in contrast to $4 billion a month in Iraq. While U.S. soldiers in Iraq are dying at a rate of about one a day, in Afghanistan the U.S. suffers an average of one casualty a week. But in both countries, the U.S. has attempted to nation-build on the cheap, limiting the numbers of troops committed to postwar tasks, and in both places, the military has been undermined by the challenges of trying to keep peace where it doesn't yet exist. Only now are U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan starting to make up for lost time. The U.S. recently moved 40-soldier platoons into villages along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where they live among the locals and glad-hand tribal leaders in exchange for intelligence on the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
As long as bin Laden and his lieutenants remain on the loose, the fate of Afghanistan and its 28 million people will remain inseparable from the security of the U.S. Both American and Afghan officials say that if the U.S. fails to stabilize Afghanistan and establish conditions for democracy, the country could quickly slide into the kind of chaos that bin Laden and his ilk would no doubt love to exploit. "If the U.S. military pulls out," Karzai tells TIME, "al-Qaeda would be back within six months, plotting attacks against America."
Where is bin Laden?
U.S. military and intelligence officials are cautiously optimistic
that their prey is within reach. The U.S.'s military spokesman in
Afghanistan, Lieut. Colonel Brian Hilferty, said in January he was
"sure" bin Laden and Omar would be captured this year. The deployment
of special-forces teams to border villages has produced a spike in
intelligence from locals about possible al-Qaeda hideouts. A U.S.
officer in Afghanistan says American forces are employing techniques
similar to those used to capture Saddam, combing bin Laden's network
of contacts and interrogating anyone with information about the
people who might be giving him shelter. The drive to snare bin Laden
has been bolstered by improved cooperation with Pakistan, which has
dispatched a 70,000-man force to the tribal region.
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