The Surge That Failed

A bit past midnight on a balmy night in late August, Hedayatullah awoke
to a deafening blast. He stumbled out of bed and heard angry voices
drawing closer. Suddenly, his bedroom doors banged open and dozens of
silhouetted figures burst in, some shouting in a strange language.

The intruders blindfolded Hedayatullah and, screaming with fury, forced
him to the ground. An Afghan voice told him not to move or speak, or he
would be killed. He listened for sounds from the next room, where his
brother Noorullah slept with his family. He could hear his nephew,
eight months old, crying hysterically. Then came the sound of an
automatic rifle, after which his nephew fell silent.

The rest of the family -- 18 people in all, including aunts, uncles,
and cousins -- was herded outside into the darkness. The Afghan voice
explained to Hedayatullah's terrified mother, "We are the Afghan
National Army, here to accompany the American military. The Americans
have killed one of your sons and his two children. They also shot his
wife and they're taking her to the hospital."

"Why?" Hedayatullah's mother stammered.

"There is no why," the soldier replied. When she heard this, she
started screaming, slamming her fists into her chest in anguish. The
Afghan soldiers left her and loaded Hedayatullah and his cousin into
the back of a military van, after which they drove off with an American
convoy into the black of night.

The next day, the Afghan forces released Hedayatullah and his
cousin, calling the whole raid a mistake. However, Noorullah's wife,
months pregnant, never came home: She died on the way to the hospital.

Surging in Afghanistan

When, decades from now, historians compile the record of this Afghan
war, they will date the Afghan version of the surge -- the now trendy
injection of large numbers of troops to resuscitate a flagging war
effort -- to sometime in early 2007. Then, a growing insurgency was
causing visible problems for U.S. and NATO forces in certain pockets in
the southern parts of the country, long a Taliban stronghold. In
response, military planners dramatically beefed up the international
presence, raising the number of troops over the following 18 months by
20,000, a 45% jump.

During this period, however, the violence also jumped -- by 50%. This
shouldn't be surprising. More troops meant more targets for Taliban
fighters and suicide bombers. In response, the international forces
retaliated with massive aerial bombing campaigns and large-scale house
raids. The number of civilians killed in the process skyrocketed. In
the fifteen months of this surge, more civilians have been killed than
in the previous four years combined.

During the same period, the country descended into a state of utter
dereliction -- no jobs, very little reconstruction, and ever less
security. In turn, the rising civilian death toll and the decaying
economy proved a profitable recipe for the Taliban, who recruited
significant numbers of new fighters. They also won the sympathy of
Afghans who saw them as the lesser of two evils. Once confined to the
deep Afghan south, today the insurgents operate openly right at the
doorstep of Kabul, the capital.

This last surge, little noted by the media, failed miserably, but
Washington is now planning another one, even as Afghanistan slips away.
More boots on the ground, though, will do little to address the real
causes of this country's unfolding tragedy.

Revenge and the Taliban

One day, as Zubair was walking home, he noticed that the carpet factory
near his house in the southern province of Ghazni was silent. That's
strange, he thought, because he could usually hear the din of spinning
looms as he approached. As he rounded the corner, he saw a crowd of
people, villagers and factory workers, gathered around his destroyed
house. An American bomb had flattened it into a pancake of cement
blocks and pulverized bricks. He ran toward the scene. It was only when
he shoved his way through the crowd and up to the wreckage that he
actually saw it -- his mother's severed head lying amid mangled
furniture.

He didn't scream. Instead, the sight induced a sort of catatonia; he
picked up the head, cradled it in his arms, and started walking
aimlessly. He carried on like this for days, until tribal elders pried
the head from his hands and convinced him to deal with his loss more
constructively. He decided he would get revenge by becoming a suicide
bomber and inflicting a loss on some American family as painful as the
one he had just suffered.

When one decides to become a suicide bomber, it is pretty easy to
find the Taliban. In Zubair's case he just asked a relative to direct
him to the nearest Talib; every village in the country's south and east
has at least a few. He found them and he trained -- yes, suicide
bombing requires training -- for some time and then he was fitted with
the latest model suicide vest. One morning, he made his way, as
directed, towards an office building where Americans advisors were
training their Afghan counterparts, but before he could detonate his
vest, a pair of sharp-eyed intelligence officers spotted him and
wrestled him to the ground. Zubair now spends his days in an Afghan
prison.

A poll of 42 Taliban fighters by the Canadian Globe and Mail
newspaper earlier this year revealed that 12 had seen family members
killed in air strikes, and six joined the insurgency after such
attacks. Far more who don't join offer their support.

Under the Bombs

In the muddied outskirts of Kabul, an impromptu neighborhood has been
sprouting, full of civilians fleeing the regular Allied aerial
bombardments in the Afghan countryside. Sherafadeen Sadozay, a poor
farmer from the south, spoke for many there when he told me that he had
once had no opinion of the United States. Then, one day, a payload from
an American sortie split his house in two, eviscerating his wife and
three children. Now, he says, he'd rather have the Taliban back in
power than nervously eye the skies every day.

Even when the bombs don't fall, it's quite dangerous to be an Afghan.
Journalist Jawed Ahmad was on assignment for Canadian Television in the
southern city of Kandahar when American troops stopped him. In his
possession, they found contact numbers to the cell phones of various
Taliban fighters -- something every good journalist in the country has
-- and threw him into prison, not to be heard from for almost a year.
During interrogation, Ahmad says that American jailors kicked him,
smashed his head into a table, and at one point prevented him from
sleeping for nine days. They kept him standing on a snowy runway for
six hours without shoes. Twice he fainted and twice the soldiers forced
him to stand up again. After 11 months of detention, military
authorities gave him a letter stating that he was not a threat to the
U.S. and released him.

Starving in Kabul

If you're walking his street, there isn't a single day when you won't
see Zayainullah. For as long as he can remember, the 11 year-old has
perched on the sidewalk at one of Kabul's busiest intersections.
Zayainullah has only one arm; the Taliban blew the other one away when
he was a child. He uses this arm to beg for handouts, quietly in the
mornings, more desperately as the day goes on. Both his parents are
dead so he lives with his aunt, a widow. Given the mores of modern-day
Afghanistan, she can't work because a woman needs a man's sanction to
leave the house. So she puts young Zayainullah on the street as her
sole breadwinner. If he comes home empty-handed she beats him,
sometimes until he can no longer move.

He sits there, shirtless, with a heaving, rounded belly -- distended
from severe malnutrition -- as scores of other beggars and pedestrians
stream by him. No one really notices him though, because poverty has
become endemic in this country.

Afghanistan is now one of the poorest countries on the planet. It takes
its place among desperate, destitute nations like Burkina Faso and
Somalia whenever any international organization bothers to measure. The
official unemployment rate, last calculated in 2005, was 40% percent.
According to recent estimates, it may today reach as high as 80% in
some parts of the country.

Approximately 45% of the population is now unable to purchase enough
food to guarantee bare minimum health levels, according to the
Brookings Institution. This winter, Afghan officials claim that hunger
may kill up to 80% of the population in some northern provinces caught
in a vicious drought. Reports are emerging of parents selling their
children simply to make ends meet. In one district of the southern
province of Ghazni last spring things got so bad that villagers started
eating grass. Locals say that after a harsh winter and almost no food,
they had no choice.

Kabul itself lies in tatters. Roads have gone unpaved since 2001.
Massive craters from decades of war blot the capital city. Poor Afghans
live in crumbling warrens with no electricity and often without safe
drinking water. Kabul, a city designed for about 800,000 people, now
holds more than four million, mostly squeezed into informal settlements
and squatters' shacks.

Washington spends about $100 million a day on this war -- close to
$36 billion a year -- but only five cents of every dollar actually goes
towards aid. From this paltry sum, the Agency Coordinating Body for
Afghan Relief found that "a staggering 40 percent has returned to donor
countries in corporate profits and salaries." The economy is so
underdeveloped that opium production accounts for more than half of the
country's gross domestic product.

What little money does go for reconstruction is handed over to U.S.
multinationals who then subcontract out to Afghan partners and cut
corners every step of the way. As a result, the U.N. ranks the country
as the fifth least-developed in the world -- a one-position drop from
2004.

The government and coalition forces may not bring jobs to Afghanistan,
but the Taliban does. The insurgents pay for fighters -- in some cases,
up to $200 a month, a windfall in a country where 42% of the population
earns less than $14 a month. When a textile factory in Kandahar laid
off 2,000 workers in September, most of them joined the Taliban. And
that district in Ghazni where locals were reduced to eating grass? It
is now a Taliban stronghold.

Biking in Kabul

A spate of suicide bombings and high-profile attacks in recent years
have turned Kabul into a sort of garrison state, with roadblocks and
checkpoints clogging many of the city's main arteries. The traffic is,
at times, unbearable, so I bought a new motorbike, an Iranian import
that can adroitly weave through traffic. I was puttering along one day
recently when a police commander stopped me.

"That's a nice bike," he said.

"Thank you," I replied.

"Is it new?"

"Yes."

"I'd like to have it. Get off."

I stared at him in disbelief, not quite grasping at first that he was
deadly serious. Then I began threatening him, saying I'd call a certain
influential friend if he laid a finger on the bike. That finally hit
home and he stepped back, waving me on.

Journalists may have influential friends, but ordinary Afghans are
usually not so lucky. Locals tend to fear the neighborhood police as
much as the many criminals who prowl Kabul's streets. The notoriously
corrupt police force is just one face of a government that much of the
population has come to loathe.

Police are known to rob passengers at checkpoints. Many of the
country's leading members of parliament and cabinet officials sport
long, bloody records of human rights abuses. Rapists and serious
criminals regularly bribe their way out of prison. Warlords and militia
commanders run wild in the north, regularly raping young girls and
snatching the land of villagers with impunity. Earlier this year
newspapers revealed that President Hamid Karzai pardoned a pair of such
militiamen accused of bayonet-raping a young woman.

What Karzai does hardly matters, though. After all, his government
barely functions. Most of the country is carved up into fiefdoms run by
small-time commanders. A U.S. intelligence report in the spring of 2008
estimated that the central government then controlled just 30% of the
country, and many say even that is now an optimistic assessment.

Drive a few miles outside Kabul and the roads are controlled by
bandits, off-duty cops, or anyone else with a gun and an eye for a
quick buck. The Karzai government's popularity has plummeted to such
levels that, believe it or not, many Afghans in Kabul wax nostalgic for
the days of Dr. Mohammad Najibullah, the country's last Communist
dictator. "That government was cruel and indifferent, but at least they
gave us something," an Afghan friend typically told me. The Karzai
government provides almost no social services, expending all its
efforts just trying to keep itself together.

Shadow Government

Power abhors a vacuum, and so, in those areas where central government
rule has crumbled, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan -- the Taliban
government -- is rising in its place. In Wardak, a province bordering
Kabul Province, the Taliban has a stable foothold, complete with a
shadow government of mayors and police chiefs. In Logar, another of
Kabul's neighboring provinces, some "government-controlled" areas
consist of the home of the district head, the NATO installation down
the road -- and nothing else.

With the rise of the Taliban in these areas comes their notorious brand
of justice. Shadow courts now dispense Taliban-style draconian
judgments and punishments in many districts and ever more locals are
turning to them to settle disputes, either out of fear or because they
are far more efficient than the corrupt government courts. The Taliban
recently chopped off the ears of a schoolteacher in Zabul province for
working for the government. They gunned down a popular drummer in
Ghazni simply for playing music in public. Even the infamous public
executions are back. The Taliban recently invited journalists to watch
the execution of a pair of women on prostitution charges.

The Taliban are as uninterested in social services and human rights as
the Karzai government or the international forces, but they know how to
turn a world of poverty, insecurity, and death from laser-guided
missiles to their advantage. This is how the Islamic Emirate spreads,
like so many weeds at first, poking out of areas where the government
has failed. As the central government spins towards irrelevancy, the
whole south and east of Afghanistan is becoming a thicket of Taliban
before our very eyes.

A War to be Lost

One night the Taliban raided a police check post near my Kabul home,
killing three policemen. The following morning, when a police
contingent arrived on the scene to investigate, a bomb that the rebels
had cleverly hidden at the site exploded and killed two more of them. I
arrived shortly afterwards to find pieces of charred flesh littering
the ground and a mangled, burnt out police van sitting overturned on a
pile of rubble.

The raid didn't make much news at the time, but it was actually the
deepest the insurgents had penetrated the capital since they were
overthrown seven years ago. They have dispatched many individual
suicide bombers into the capital and rocketed it as well from time to
time, but never had they marched in as an attacking force on foot. When
I told an Afghan colleague that I couldn't believe the Taliban were
coming into Kabul this way, he responded: "Coming? They've been here.
They were just waiting for the government and the U.S. to fail."

Failure is a notion now preoccupying the Western leadership of this
war, which is why they are scrambling for yet another "surge" solution.

Of course, the Taliban won't be capturing Kabul anytime soon; the
international forces are much too powerful to topple militarily. But
the Americans can't defeat the Taliban either; the guerrillas are too
deeply rooted in a country scarred by no jobs, no security, and no
hope. The result is a war of attrition, with the Americans planning to
pour yet more fuel on the flames by throwing in more soldiers next
year.

This is a war to be won by constructing roads, creating jobs, cleaning
up the government, and giving Afghans something they've had preciously
little of in the last 30 years: hope. However, hope is fading fast
here, and that's a fact Washington can ill afford to ignore; for once
the Afghans lose all hope, the Americans will have lost this war.