Australia and Canada in Afghanistan: Perspectives on a Mission

Contributors

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AFGHANISTAN AND ITS CHALLENGES

William Maley and Jack Cunningham

Afghanistan is a long way from both Canada and Australia, but from 2001, fate conspired to bring the three together. As a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally of the United States, Canada was immediately engaged following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington D.C., and Australia moved swiftly to affirm its responsibilities under the 1951 Australia, New Zealand, United States (ANZUS) alliance to stand with the Americans in their time of need. Once it became clear that the attacks had been orchestrated by al-Qaeda from safe operating bases in Afghanistan under the Taliban, it was only a matter of time before robust military action was taken to smash the al-Qaeda network and displace the Taliban regime that had provided it with a home. Operation Enduring Freedom, an integrated military operation to bring this about, began on October 4, 2001, and by mid-November the Afghan capital, Kabul, was back in the hands of the anti-Taliban forces that had been driven from the city in September 1996. Yet this was only the beginning of a much longer engagement in Afghanistan for both Canada and Australia, with a legacy much more ambiguous than the initial campaign had seemed to leave. One reason for this was that Afghanistan was no blank page on which a new history could be written. Rather, its population was haunted by the effects of over two decades of high-intensity conflict on political structures, communities, and patterns of social interaction within and among the different components of Afghan society.

This book sets out to contextualize and analyze the Canadian and Australian experiences in Afghanistan. The individual chapters explore the many dimensions of these experiences, and demonstrate that much of the story is more complex than transient electronic or print reporting would suggest. In part this is because Afghanistan itself is marked by exceptional complexity, posing a challenge not only to reporters seeking to understand it, but also to policymakers attempting to act in an unpromising environment. This introductory chapter is designed to provide the reader with a sense of Afghanistan’s extreme complexities, both historical and contemporary, so that the challenges with which Australia and Canada had to struggle make more sense. It therefore begins with some history to help broaden our picture of the problems that confronted Western policymakers in 2001; it goes on to identify some of the difficulties that surfaced after 2001 and made the task of fostering reconstruction in Afghanistan more demanding; and it concludes with an overview of the chapters in the book and links them to some of the difficulties noted earlier in the chapter.

SOME HISTORY

Afghanistan is a landlocked state in West Asia, sandwiched between Iran to the west, Pakistan to the east, China to the northeast, and Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan to the north. Its position as a crossroads accounts in large part for the diversity of its population, which, while overwhelmingly Muslim, comprises a Shiite Muslim minority alongside a Sunni Muslim majority, and contains many different ethnic groups (the largest being Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras), although none makes up an absolute majority of the population.1 Its emergence as a distinct territorial unit was a product of both progressive internal consolidation from the time of Ahmad Shah Durrani (1747–1772), and the convenience, in the nineteenth century, of having a buffer state to separate the expanding Russian empire and British India.2 Of particular importance were the last two decades of the nineteenth century, when the so-called Iron Amir, Abdul Rahman Khan (1880–1901) consolidated the Afghan state by enhancing its taxing and coercive capacities,3 often using extreme violence to achieve his objectives.4

Afghanistan in the early part of the twentieth century coped rather well with a complex geopolitical environment. It maintained its neutrality during both the First and Second World Wars, and was even a recipient of refugees following the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the subsequent obliteration of the Basmachi movement in Central Asia. Indeed, it experienced a rather dramatic phase of state-led modernization in the 1920s, when King Amanullah Khan (1919–1929) sought to emulate some of the reforms occurring in Turkey under Atatürk.5 Ultimately, Amanullah’s reforms were thwarted in a set of uprisings which forced him to leave the country in 1929. Nonetheless, belying its reputation for turbulence, Afghanistan for nearly fifty years thereafter proved to be one of the most stable countries in Asia, avoiding major upheaval and having just one head of state, King Zahir Shah, from 1933 to 1973. With the onset of the 1970s, however, things began to change for the worse. In the early years of the decade, a severe famine struck parts of the country. In 1973, the king was overthrown by his cousin Mohammed Daoud, who established a republican regime. The new regime had shallow roots and little claim to legitimacy; it depended for its survival on a higher level of coercion than its immediate predecessor; its elite was fragmented; and it was dangerously dependent on rentier income in the form of foreign aid and asset sales.6 All these problems set the scene for the Communist coup of April 1978, which led Afghanistan into an abyss from which, arguably, it has not fully emerged.

The 1978 coup was not rooted in societal crisis. It was very much driven by contingent events (a crackdown by the regime following a large turnout at the funeral of an assassinated leftist ideologue) and by the crude philosophies of the factions of the Marxist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), which one observer accurately characterized as a party of teahouse political talk.7 Nonetheless, it proved to be the trigger for decades of crisis for ordinary Afghans. The new rulers, most notably Nur Muhammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin of the PDPA’s Khalq (Masses) faction embarked on an attempt at widespread, rapid social transformation along lines determined by ideology rather than by any grasp of Afghan realities.8 These reforms addressed issues of land ownership, gender relations, and education, but in ways that were disempowering even for those they were intended to assist. Given the relative weakness of the state, especially in rural areas,9 it was hardly surprising that the new regime rapidly encountered opposition, or that it began to splinter internally over the pace of change.

The combination of these factors set the scene for the development that was to shape the trajectory of Afghan events for nearly two decades, namely the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on December 27, 1979. The Soviet leadership under Leonid Brezhnev, the aging general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, had watched with alarm the failings of the regime that it had been swift to recognize and support after the April 1978 coup. In September 1979, the rivalry between Taraki and Amin had come to a head. The Soviets had conspired with Taraki to eliminate the radical Amin and blame him for the regime’s excesses, but things did not work out as planned. Instead, Amin succeeded in liquidating Taraki, and embarked on an ever more ferocious campaign of repression. Brezhnev was beside himself at the slaying of someone who only a short time before had been his guest in Moscow. Preparation for a Soviet invasion began, and the final decision to invade was taken on December 12, 1979. In the first instance, the invasion proved remarkably effective. Amin, who had retreated to the Tajbeg Palace in the south of Kabul, was killed by Soviet commandos, and a loyal client of the Soviets, Babrak Karmal of the PDPA’s Parcham (Banner) faction was installed as the new Afghan leader.

The Soviets’ joy proved to be short-lived, and several factors conspired to turn Afghanistan into a quagmire. First, the Soviets had hoped that Karmal would prove popular compared to the despised Amin; what they entirely overlooked was that the means by which he had been brought to power would de-legitimate him in the eyes of ordinary Afghans. Karmal could not survive without Soviet assistance, yet his dependence on Soviet assistance meant that he would never secure the popularity to survive on his own. Second, the Soviet presence in Afghanistan turned a sequence of uncoordinated revolts into a full-fledged insurgency. Yet Soviet counter-insurgency doctrine was notably underdeveloped, creating real difficulties for the Soviet Union as it sought to deal with resistance on the ground.10 Third, the Carter administration in Washington, as well as the Thatcher government in London and the rulers of China, reacted very strongly to the Soviet invasion, which they saw as a fatal blow to détente. These governments responded not just with verbal condemnation; they moved to support resistance groups that had emerged to challenge the Communist regime and the Soviet presence.

The Afghan resistance movement had multiple components and pursued uncoordinated tactical objectives. At the most basic level, it was sustained by community hostility to the Soviet Union and its clients. Within Afghanistan, much of the resistance that the Soviets encountered from Sunni Muslims came either from local commanders, many of them former conscripts from the Afghan army, or from figures of military significance in wider regions such as Ismail Khan in Herat, Abdul Haq in the Kabul area, and Ahmad Shah Massoud in the Panjsher Valley to the north of Kabul. They, in turn, tended to be linked to political parties based in the vicinity of Peshawar in Pakistan, operating under the gaze of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) of the Pakistan Armed Forces. The commanders in Afghanistan were not necessarily subservient to the party politicians, especially in an ideological sense, but they did rely to a degree on these networks to keep them supplied with arms and ammunition that the United States was increasingly disposed to fund.

Seven main Sunni parties operated in this way, with the most important being the Jamiat-e Islami led by Burhanuddin Rabbani (to which Ismail Khan and Massoud were attached), and the Hezb-e Islami headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (which lacked a strong support base in Afghanistan, but was favoured by the ISI because its commitment to Islamic radicalism made it an unlikely candidate to revive purely territorial disputes, which had blighted Pakistan-Afghanistan relations during the time of Zahir Shah).11 Afghanistan’s Shiite minorities had their own political parties, a number of them inspired by the 1979 Iranian revolution, but since many of the Shia lived in the remote Hazarajat region of central Afghanistan, they proved to be marginal players in the wider struggle against Soviet power.

The Sunni parties proved congenitally incapable of co-operating with each other for any great length of time, and Hekmatyar in particular proved a divisive figure who was not squeamish about stockpiling U.S.-funded weapons for future use against fellow members of the resistance. Furthermore, since the resistance parties lacked control of a state, their poli­tics was very much based on patronage, networking, and alliance-building, rather than on policy development and implementation. This was to have very significant ramifications in the twenty-first century when a number of key figures from the resistance period found themselves occupying state office in Kabul.

When a new Soviet leadership emerged in March 1985 under Mikhail Gorbachev, one of the issues that it moved promptly to address was that of Afghanistan. In 1986, Karmal was replaced as Afghan leader by the former head of the Communist secret police, Dr. Mohammad Najibullah, and in November 1986, the Soviet Politburo took the decision in principle to withdraw from Afghanistan. This withdrawal was finally accomplished by February 1989.12 Contrary to the expectations of many observers, Najibullah’s regime did not collapse immediately. The resistance proved divided in their tactical responses to the Soviet withdrawal, and the Soviet leadership continued to supply Najibullah with resources with which he purchased the prudential loyalty of militias in different parts of the country. All this changed with the failed coup attempt against Gorbachev in August 1991. This was followed by a bilateral U.S.-Soviet agreement to discontinue support to the various parties in Afghanistan. Najibullah’s regime unravelled as a result, finally collapsing in April 1992.13 More seriously, the state largely collapsed as well.

The consequences of this were grave. Instead of inheriting a functioning state, the Afghan resistance inherited the symbols of one, above all a capital city, but not the instruments required to provide security, mobilize re­sources, or regulate behaviour. Furthermore, the Hezb-e Islami of Hekmatyar declined to join the new Afghan government, and instead, with backing from elements of ISI, acted as a spoiler, shelling and rocketing Kabul in order to deny anyone else the ability to rule peacefully. This proved a shattering experience for the people of the capital, thousands of whom perished in this period of violence. Alas, they were hardly the period’s only casualties. Between 1978 and 1987, over 876,000 people died of unnatural causes in Afghanistan.14 At the beginning of the 1990s, over 6.2 million Afghans were refugees outside the country’s borders, a total close to half of the estimated pre-war population.15 And within Afghanistan itself, countless numbers of internally displaced persons (IDPs) were seeking to eke out a living in an environment that had been systematically devastated by years of high-level conflict. As one observer put it, it was as if someone had dropped a bomb in the garden of Eden.16

Despite the misery caused by his spoiler tactics, Hekmatyar was notably unsuccessful in his efforts to occupy and control territory: he was simply too unpopular in Afghanistan to have much hope of success. This proved to be the trigger for the emergence of the Taliban movement, which has been a blight on Afghanistan for the two previous decades. Taliban is a plural form of the word Talib, or religious student, and Talib fronts existed in parts of southern Afghanistan from as early as 1985. The Taliban movement, however, was a different phenomenon. It emerged as a military force in 1994,17 having been adopted by the interior minister of Pakistan, General Naseerullah Babar, as a new tool of Pakistan’s geopolitical strategy. Babar even went so far as to refer to the Taliban as our boys.18 Pakistan remained the principal backer of the Taliban until September 11, 2001. As a Human Rights Watch report put it in 2001:

Of all the foreign powers involved in efforts to sustain and manipulate the ongoing fighting, Pakistan is distinguished both by the sweep of its objectives and the scale of its efforts, which include soliciting funding for the Taliban, bankrolling Taliban operations, providing diplomatic support as the Taliban’s virtual emissaries abroad, arranging training for Taliban fighters, recruiting skilled and unskilled manpower to serve in Taliban armies, planning and directing offensives, providing and facilitating shipments of ammunition and fuel, and on several occasions apparently directly providing combat support.19

With such backing, it is not surprising that the Taliban succeeded in taking over Kandahar in 1994, Herat in 1995, and finally Kabul in September 1996. However, its extremist policies on gender issues won it international condemnation,20 and it managed to secure diplomatic recognition only from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Afghanistan’s U.N. seat remained under the control of the anti-Taliban Rabbani government. With few friends among states, the Taliban looked to non-state actors for friends, and it was in this context that it embarked on its destructive relationship with al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

AFGHANISTAN AFTER 2001

The overthrow of the Taliban regime following the September 11, 2001 attacks led to dramatic departures in Afghan political life. This was in part because of political and social reforms upon which the new leaders of the country embarked, but also because the removal of the Taliban opened the country to the influence of globalization in a way that had never previously been the case. With Afghan demography marked by a notable youth bulge, the long-term effects of this experience are likely to be considerable.

Institutionally, Afghanistan’s process of change was the product of an elite settlement, the Bonn Agreement, that was struck in December 2001 between a range of non-Taliban Afghan political actors. This provided for the establishment of the Afghan Interim Administration, which Hamid Karzai was a consensus choice to head. After the holding of an emergency loya jirga (grand assembly), this was to be raised to the status of the Afghan Transitional Administration, which would oversee the drafting of a new constitution and free and fair elections for new governing institutions. These benchmarks were broadly achieved, with a new constitution being adopted in January 2004, and Karzai being elected president of Afghanistan later that year with 55.4 percent of the vote, in an election in which Afghans participated in large numbers. But two main factors conspired to undermine the performance of the Afghan government, and also popular confidence in Karzai and his associates.

First, the presidential system that was put in place by the 2004 Constitution did not serve Afghanistan well. In a country that is ethnically diverse, such a system risks leaving one group with the feeling that it is a winner, and many groups feeling that they are losers. Furthermore, the presidential system seriously overburdened the occupant of the president­ial palace. President Karzai was forced to function as symbolic head of state, executive head of government, and a one-man interagency liaison for resolving tensions between different parts of the bureaucracy, which the Bonn process had left under the control of different political groups. This bureaucratic complexity proved to be a serious problem, although one that received less attention than it deserved. With boundaries between different ministries poorly defined, a great deal of rivalry and competition occurred, often pursued in poisonous ways.

President Karzai, too, was to prove disappointing. In his early years as president, his role was largely symbolic, since the Afghan state scarcely existed and policy development was not a central part of his responsibilities. But as the state developed, and particularly after the 2004 election, the expectations that he would take the lead in policy began to mount. Yet, he had grown up politically in a state-free environment, working with a small Afghan resistance party in Peshawar in Pakistan in the 1980s. The conception of politics that he had developed was one very much based on alliance-building, networking, and patron-client relations, and he lacked a dynamic vision of state-building. Unfortunately, in presidential systems if the president does not take the lead in such activities, it is very difficult for anyone else to do so, and this led to drift after 2004. Instead, the system increasingly moved in the direction of neopatrimonialism, where formal institutions became intertwined with informal networks of power and patronage.21 One consequence of this is that the rule of law has remained extremely weak in Afghanistan, and justice is seen as something available only at a price, or for the powerful.22

Second, reconstruction proved to be a serious challenge.23 Of course, the scale of damage that Afghanistan had experienced through the 1980s and 1990s was simply enormous, and any hope that the problems created by this damage could be swiftly overcome was naive in the extreme. In some respects, what was achieved was striking. Afghanistan in 2014 is a very different country from what it was in 2001. Annual economic growth rates have been substantial, and a small but growing stratum of entrepreneurs is not only generating employment, but also consuming luxury goods, at least by Afghan standards. The advent of mobile phones has allowed social networking on an unprecedented scale, and radio and television now make their presence felt in the daily lives of a large proportion of the population. But there is also a sense that reconstruction activities undertaken by international actors have often miscarried or produced unintended and unwelcome consequences.

Here, the combination of large amounts of aid money flowing in, bureaucratic complexity, and weak systems of accountability proved to be toxic. Corruption began to flourish, in tandem with a surge in opium poppy cultivation, which the U.S. military was initially reluctant to confront lest it compromise its operations against al-Qaeda.24 Corruption has intruded into the everyday lives of ordinary Afghans: Integrity Watch in 2010 reported that one in seven Afghans had been involved with direct bribery, and that the average value of bribes was US$156 — a huge figure in a country where average annual income was only $502.25 While no evidence ever surfaced that Karzai was personally corrupt, he proved not­ably ineffectual in doing anything about corruption, and on a number of occasions intervened to protect associates about whom credible suspicions were in circulation.26 The worst example was the 2011 collapse of the Kabul Bank, which was run as a Ponzi scheme and described by one observer as a personal piggy bank for many of Afghanistan’s most influential power brokers and highest government officials including President Karzai’s brother Mahmoud.27

It is likely that associates of the president were also involved in the episode of corruption that most severely undermined Karzai’s personal position, namely the gargantuan electoral fraud that contaminated the 2009 presidential election.28 In a presidential system, when a president goes down he typically takes a lot of other people with him, and they have a strong incentive to avoid such a fate. At the time of the 2009 election, confidence in the direction that Afghanistan was taking had slipped notably, making it very likely that the election, if cleanly run, would produce a much closer result than was the case in 2004. So, Karzai’s friends and supporters were nervous. It is hardly surprising, then, that of the 5.7 million votes allegedly cast, some 1.2 million were invalidated as fraudulent, with the vast majority of the fraudulent votes having favoured the incumbent. This did not in any sense show that ordinary Afghans were somehow unready for democracy. Rather, it highlighted the dangers of elite manipulation of electoral processes at the expense of both accountability and the hopes of ordinary people to be able to rid themselves of unappetizing leaders without bloodshed.29

Nevertheless, all these problems, serious as they undoubtedly were, might have proved manageable had it not been for the re-emergence of a brutal insurgency of which the Taliban were a central element, assisted by Hekmatyar’s forces, and a vicious terrorist grouping known as the Haqqani Network.30 It is a mistake to see this recrudescent insurgency as a response to perceived failures of governance. On the contrary, the first signs of renewed insurgency came in 2003, when Afghans remained broadly optimistic about the direction the country was taking. The trigger was, rather, the enduring commitment of Pakistan’s military to use surrogates to block the emergence of Indian influence in Afghanistan, combined with the opportunity for Pakistan created by the drift of American attention from the Afghan theatre of operations to Iraq.31 It was growing concern about the insurgency, combined with the pinning down of U.S. forces in Iraq, that led Washington to seek the assistance of key allies to contribute new forces to plug the security and development gaps that had emerged in Afghanistan. Yet with Washington unwilling to confront Pakistan’s perfidy, given its dependence on Pakistani co-operation for the delivery of arms and materiel to the Afghan theatre, the position in which U.S. allies found themselves verged on the Kafkaesque.

The initial impetus for international military action in Afghanistan was to confront the specific terrorist threat posed by al-Qaeda, and to displace the Taliban regime that declined to sever its links with al-Qaeda and bin Laden himself. It was this that underpinned Operation Enduring Freedom, a short, sharp, and very effective operation that saw the Taliban ousted from Kabul by mid-November and retreating in disarray to Pakistan. It was widely recognized, however, that something would need to be done to address the security vacuum in large tracts of Afghanistan. The response came in the form of a request in the Bonn Agreement for the establishment of an International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Afghans hoped to see the force spread around the country, and if such deployments had occurred in early 2002, they would have done much to stabilize Afghanistan quickly. This was recognized in the U.N. Security Council, which authorized the establishment of ISAF in Resolution 1386 of December 20, 2001, with an enforcement mandate under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations. Unfortunately, ISAF expansion in 2002 was blocked by the Bush administration,32 which was already seeking to preserve key military assets for use against Iraq. By the time ISAF expansion ultimately was authorized, by Security Council Resolution 1510 of October 13, 2003, critical momentum had been lost.

In August 2003, command of the ISAF contingent, which continued to operate in parallel with U.S. forces serving in the ongoing Operation Enduring Freedom, was taken over by NATO, in its first major out of area deployment. A substantial literature has emerged to explore and explain the overall performance of NATO members and NATO forces, and it is fair to say that it paints a mixed picture of high aspirations but serious challenges in coordination.33 Nonetheless, the involvement of NATO became the trigger for innovative approaches to stabilization. Fully aware that there was ground to be made up, NATO leaders and planners came up with the idea of the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) as a framework for the activities of NATO forces. While there was never a single PRT model,34 the idea drew on U.S. experiences in South Vietnam and anticipated conjoint efforts by military and civilian personnel to support reconstruction activities undertaken by local Afghan officials. An inkspot theory of social development implied that the positive effects of a PRT’s work would spread out like ink on a blotter, showing to wavering Afghans that there were benefits to supporting the post-Taliban dispensation. The real world proved more complex. International forces varied greatly in their ethos, military skills, and resourcing; some found themselves targeted by the insurgents; and resentment developed in the quieter parts of Afghanistan that aid funds seemed to flow to unstable areas rather than the provinces and districts where competent officials were striving to provide an enabling environment for reconstruction. This was the context within which Canadian forces deployed to Kandahar, and Australian forces to Uruzgan.

CANADA AND AUSTRALIA IN AFGHANISTAN

The chapters that make up this collection are designed to cast light on the vicissitudes experienced by Canadians and Australians in Afghanistan.

William Maley provides an overview of Australia’s involvement in Afghanistan, noting that Australia is not only closer to Afghanistan than is Canada, but even before the September 2001 terrorist attacks had been a significant recipient of refugees fleeing the Taliban. He outlines the ways in which the Australian-American alliance shaped Australia’s response to the terrorist attacks, and notes that an elite consensus ensured that Afghanistan did not become the subject of partisan political competition. He also shows how Australia’s involvement had military, development, and diplomatic dimensions, and concludes that the deterioration in the situation in Afghanistan after 2014 could have significant ramifications for Australian interests.

Bill Graham, former Canadian foreign and defence minister, provides a unique insight into the formulation of Canada’s approach to Afghanistan, and identifies some of the challenges of making a whole-of-government approach work in the Afghan context. He also examines in detail the controversies relating to detainees in Afghanistan, and shows how debate in the House of Commons affected public support for the mission. He concludes with reflections on where Canada now finds itself with respect to Afghanistan and the use of force more