How we Lost the Good War

AFGHANISTAN WAS THE BATTLE EVERYONE AGREED NEEDED TO BE FOUGHT. WHAT WENT SO TERRIBLY WRONG.AND WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

* * * * OBSERVATIONS FROM INSIDE THE WAR ZONE * * * *

abul is an overgrown village of 5 million, a drab, smog-choked place that seems not even to be auditioning for the role of a capital city. Open sewers line the streets. Donkey carts and aging vehicles slow traf­fic to a crawl. When I visited last fall, the snow-frosted peaks of the Hindu Kush mountains that surround Kabul were perpetually shrouded in auto exhaust and smoke from burning tires, a common source of fuel. The foulest assault on the senses, however, is invisible: Sewage deposited out­doors dries up and gets swirled around by the wind, producing fecal dust, a common cause of eye infec­tions. A recent environmental study for the Afghan government concluded that "a breath of fresh air can­not be purchased for any price in most days of the year" and that, viewed from afar, the city's landscape "looks like it has caught fire."

Yet for most of the past 11 years, Kabul was insulated from the worst of the war in Afghanistan. While the U.S.-led coalition conducted military operations in re­mote villages and forbidding mountain passes where Taliban insurgents and their allies were based, in parts of the capital the war could feel as far away as it did in the United States. This unlikely oasis was dubbed the "Kabubble," and as the conflict dragged on it be­came home to legions of expats—military contrac­tors, aid workers, journalists and sundry other misfit adventurers—and a small circle of Afghans flush with wartime contracts or posts in the new, internationally baclged government.

Inside the Kabubble you could walk to the Fin­est superstore—Afghanistan's answer to Target—and select from imported cheeses and a dozen varieties of . body'wash. At the famous Sufi restaurant, the under-, worked security guards killed themselves with the same • tire,d joke. ("Do you have a gun?" they'd ask when I 'entered. "No."'"Why not?") One journalist had a brick

pizza oven built into his patio; another installed an in­door sauna. There were house parties galore, fueled*-by liquor acquired from one of the handful of boot­leggers who skirted the Islamic republic's ban on alco­hol. A Blues Brothers-themed bash last year—thrown by a nonprofit group that teaches young Afghans to skateboard—promised "the blues, fried chicken, RayVJ Bans [fake], toasted white bread and copious amounts of home brew." Such was the lifestyle that a foreign cor­respondent who'd spent years reporting from locked-down, bombed-out Baghdad told a friend after moving to Kabul, "I covered the wrong war!"

But a summer ago—just after President Obama or­dered U.S. forces to begin a gradual withdrawal from Afghanistan—a spate of spectacular violence pierced the Kabubble. Last June, Taliban insurgents blasted through security checkpoints and killed a dozen peo­ple in a raid on the hilltop Intercontinental Hotel, then thought to be one of the city's safest. In the following weeks, the Taliban and their allies carried out more bra­zen attacks: assassinating the Afghan government's top peace negotiator in his home, paralyzing the American embassy with a daylong siege and bombing one of the U.S.-led military coalition's Rhino transport vehicles as it traveled down a busy highway in southwest Kabul. It was an unmistakable show of staying power by the in­surgents. "You might be going home," they seemed to be taunting the United States, "but we'll still be here."

American officials consistently downplayed the in­cidents. In briefings in Kabul, I heard a string of commanders argue that the Taliban had in fact been weakened by coalition offensives and that the attacks amounted to a desperate bid to score propaganda points. Every Afghan I relayed this to just shook his head at the rhetorical gymnastics. The insecurity they felt was real and exposed yet again the failings of their Western-backed government and security forces. "When I leave my house in the morning," a 25-year-old real estate agent named Sayed Aman Abed told mfe in

his office, not far from the site of the Rhino attack, "to be honest, I don't know if I will come back alive."

• • •

The United States, which frequently said it had invaded Afghanistan to help liberate its people, long ago lost the plot of the war. A calamitous string of crises this past winter—the video of marines urinating on Afghan corpses, the burning of Korans by U.S. soldiers, the retaliatory kill­ings by Afghans of their Western military trainers, the lone Army soldier's nighttime massacre in a sleeping village— served merely to emphasize that even after 11 years, thou­sands of lives lost and hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the war, Afghans didn't like Americans, and Ameri­cans didn't trust Afghans. One U.S. official who worked in Afghanistan until recently e-mailed me in exasperation,

"Half the time I feel like this would've been over years ago if we just learned Afghan Etiquette 101: Don't lift up bur-kas, don't spit on people, don't kill kids, apologize when you do, don't piss on dead bodies, and, oh, by the way, don't burn their holiest religious text."

Now, in the twilight of America's longest foreign war, it is too late for those lessons. U.S. troops are coming home as Afghanistan hurtles deeper into uncertainty, and what they're leaving behind doesn't look anything like victory.

"In November or December of 2001, if you were sitting in Kabul and thinking about what we need to do in die next 10 or 11 years to build Afghanistan, you would not do anything diat we have just done," said Paul Hamill, a Briton who previously worked in Kabul as an advisor to the Afghan government.

It wasn't supposed to end like this. Afghanistan was the good war, bloodthirsty hawks and bleeding-heart liberals alike agreed at the start—the one worth fighting. If Iraq was the foolish joy ride of a swaggering empire, Afghanistan was the place where American pride, values and idealism

intersected. The goals, to many, were just: Hunt down Al Qaeda and oust its fundamentalist Taliban protectors, and help build the foundations of a modern society where girls could go to school, people could get decent health care and women could enjoy greater rights. An international coali­tion pledged its support, and in the weeks after 9/11, U.S. forces swept into Afghanistan and flushed out the enemies with barely a fight.

What came next was far more complicated and some­thing U.S. officials hadn't planned for. "We won against Al Qaeda, but we did that in three weeks," Hamill said. "Then we wanted to build this Valhalla country and show the world that America can turn around people's lives." Look­ing back, it seems ludicrous that anyone thought this could be achieved even with a military that wasn't distracted in Iraq. But the story of the American war in Afghanistan isn't one of a lack of vision or, until recently, a lack of public support. Even last June, after nearly a decade of conflict and stubborn economic troubles at home, a solid major­ity of Americans polled by the Pew Research Center—57 percent—still believed that using military force in Afghani­stan had been the right thing to do.

Instead, the past decade has demonstrated the limits of using military might to achieve political results. The United States never understood the terrain of Afghanistan, was re­luctant to dirty its hands with the hard work of nation build­ing and waited far too long to invest enough resources. It relied on a series of proxies—brutal Afghan warlords, a devious Pakistani military establishment, a graft-riddled central government in Kabul—each of which proved more problematic than the last. When the Taliban returned af­ter a few years, the U.S. military turned to deadly drone strikes and clandestine special operations to kill militants swiftly and silently. Those raids became deeply controver­sial and—although coalition forces rarely acknowledged it—-were associated with the deaths and injuries of inno­cents, which turned more Afghans against the U.S. mission.

By the time an Army staff sergeant in the southern prov­ince of Kandahar allegedly shot and killed 17 villagers, including nine children, in a slaughter that horrified Amer­icans, most Afghans were too jaded even to protest. My colleague AH Safi, a journalist (continued on page 152)

THE GOOD WAR

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for McClatchy Newspapers in Kabul, wrote to me, with weary understatement, "Everyone believes that this wasn't the first incident of civilian casualties in the last 10 years of war, and it won't be the last one."

In some ways, the United States lost the propaganda war before it even began. In the 1980s, U.S. military and intelligence agencies funneled billions of dollars in aid, much of it coverdy, to Afghan mujahideen rebels who were battling a Soviet occupa­tion. The USSR finally withdrew in 1989, and when the Cold War ended soon after­ward, the United States decided it no lon­ger had a strategic interest in Afghanistan and abruptly turned its back on the coun­try. That touched off a period of chaos that gave rise to the Taliban. Ryan Crocker, a veteran American diplomat who came out of semi-retirement last year to become am­bassador to Kabul, has described that aban­donment as a mistake the United States won't repeat. But Afghans learned then that the American attention span is short and that our foreign policy can be fickle.

The George W. Bush administration quickly set about proving that axiom cor­rect. Believing it had prevailed in Afghani­stan, it launched into Iraq barely a year lat­er. Its focus diverted—and without a real strategy to replace the Taliban with a new government—the Bush team funneled bil­lions of dollars to Pakistan, expecting that its powerful military would keep a lid on things next door. It soon became painfully clear that Pakistan far preferred to have a weak and pliant state for a neighbor than one with a robust government that could potentially alter the delicate geopoliti­cal balance in South Asia. When militants from Afghanistan fled over the border into Pakistan's lawless tribal areas, Islamabad didn't crack down. That region soon be­came a safe haven for the Taliban and Al Qaeda—the staging ground for everything that came next.

As U.S. troops deployed in massive numbers to Iraq—reaching a peak of well over 160,000 in 2007—a force of about 25,000 Americans remained in Afghani­stan. In relative obscurity, they set about trying to perform an extremely difficult task—ground-up nation building in a tribal society deeply hostile to outsiders— using the only tools with which they'd been equipped: blunt force and cash. It was the foreign policy equivalent of trying to stop a gusher with a toothpick. Young American soldiers and their coalition allies, trained to kill, found themselves advising Afghan politicians, building hospitals and schools, interceding in land disputes and doling out money to tribal elders like Wall Street-ers making campaign contributions.

When they did confront the enemy, mili­tary operations were large and disruptive, with hundreds of soldiers storming moun­tain ranges as if their commanders planned

to take Normandy, all to root out handfuls of insurgents armed mostly with aging as­sault rifles. "We were just kind of lost," re­called an Army Special Forces officer who first deployed to Afghanistan in 2006 and who asked not to be identified because he was criticizing military strategy. "It was re­ally sad. We were obsessed with these big sweeping operations, whole battalions try­ing to clear people out, and we just did not get it. We would clear up this valley, be there for a week and just kind of leave." When they left, the insurgents, many hav­ing melted into the countryside or into Pakistan, often promptly reappeared.

In 2008, the mission adrift, Barack Obama ran for president promising "a responsible redeployment of our com­bat troops that...refocuses on Afghani­stan and our broader security interests." Once in office Obama ordered a detailed review of the war strategy and ultimately decided to send more than 50,000 troops into Afghanistan—nearly tripling the U.S. military presence. Since then, there have been some battlefield successes. The surge pushed the Taliban off balance in their southern strongholds. The shadowy cam­paign of nighttime "kill/capture" raids on insurgent hideouts eliminated thousands of suspected commanders, bomb mak­ers, financiers, propagandists and others. The coalition poured tens of billions of dollars into building and training—from scratch—a force of Afghan soldiers and police who are gradually taking over responsibility for security.

But Obama's idealistic, open-ended promise has given way to Afghanistan's hard realities. Even the beefed-up U.S. mission hasn't been big enough to match the country's monumental needs. It has struggled to prop up an Afghan govern­ment, led by President Hamid Karzai, that is drowning in corruption and has lost the confidence of its people. A new gen­eration of insurgents—the neo-Taliban, in some ways more extremist than their predecessors—has found new ways to strike, turning to roadside bombs and suicide attacks that have driven violence against civilians to record levels. Months of secret U.S. meetings with militant lead­ers, aimed at persuading them to negotiate a truce with Karzai, have failed to yield a breakthrough, and the most recent Penta­gon report to Congress on the progress of the war determined in May that the Tali­ban still have designs on toppling the gov­ernment and retaking the country.

Coalition reconstruction efforts, de­signed to win hearts and minds, continue to be bogged down by waste and violence, while Afghanistan's economy appears to be headed for a post-American collapse. Currently, of every dollar of its national budget, an estimated 90 cents comes from foreign handouts—leaving it unclear who will pay future salaries for Afghanistan's new security forces. Those forces too have been plagued by incompetence and shown a penchant for turning their weapons on their international partners. Sometimes the

killers are Taliban infiltrators, but U.S. mili­tary reports suggest that, more often, Af­ghans are retaliating against what they see as the Americans' disrespectful behavior or a widespread perception that the foreign­ers are in their country to destroy Islam.

Indeed, even the Obama administra­tion's renewed focus underscored the limits of conventional American power. Like the Soviets in the 1980s and the Brit­ish a century earlier, the United States is the latest invader to be worn down by Afghanistan's complexities and a seem­ingly bottomless pool of local fighters. By throwing more soldiers and money at the problem, the Obama administration confirmed that while it might have had a more serious commitment to Afghani­stan, it didn't have a better strategy.

"In 2009, when Obama put these plans into place, what was needed was a radi­cal change in direction," Joshua Foust, a former U.S. military intelligence analyst who writes frequently on Afghanistan, told me recently. "And what he really did was triple down on the current direction of trying to occupy big swaths of territory, trying to impose a central government. These are things the Bush administration had been trying to do for the previous six years and had failed at."

Weeks after a February incident in which U.S. troops burned the Koran, Obama told a news conference that the subsequent violence against American sol­diers was "an indication of the challenges in that environment, and it's an indication that now is the time for us to transition." It was a belated acknowledgment that Af­ghanistan's problems had outlasted Amer­ica's ability or willingness to solve them. Last summer Obama announced that he would pull 33,000 U.S. troops out by this September, just before voters are to decide on his reelection. By the end of 2014, and very likely earlier, U.S. troops would cease combat operations and move into a sup­porting role behind the Afghans.

Anthony Cordesman, a defense policy analyst at the Center for Strategic and In­ternational Studies, wrote recently that the Obama administration's early promises of a withdrawal based on military conditions "went by the wayside, and by mid-2011, the political realities shaping U.S. and Eu­ropean efforts became a rush to leave by 2014." The Taliban and their allies, know­ing the United States is headed for the exit, seem content to lie in wait.

Among Afghans, whatever hope once ex­isted for the American presence has van­ished. One day last October in the provin­cial capital of Ghazni, 90 miles southwest of Kabul, I met a tall, round-bellied Af­ghan named Temour, who spoke English with a buttery British accent developed after years of living in west London. In the 2000s, with a civil war raging, Temour returned to Afghanistan to join an anti-Taliban militia commanded by his uncle. In late 2001, riding the wave of the U.S.

invasion, the militiamen chased the Taliban out of Ghazni, and coalition forces set up a base on the city's outskirts.

At first, Temour offered his services to the Americans, using his contacts to locate Tali­ban weapons caches, traveling alongside co­alition forces into enemy territory and me­diating between rival tribes. "We did a lot of good things together," he told me. Sitting in his living room, which was covered with car­pets and lined with embroidered cushions in the typical Afghan style, he reached into an envelope and pulled out a sheaf of pa­pers. One was a letter signed by the Ameri­can commander in Ghazni in 2005, praising him for "motivation and energy that will be an asset as Afghanistan rebuilds itself into a great nation." In photos of his daughter's first birthday party, at a restaurant in the town's main bazaar, uniformed American soldiers are among the guests.

Those Americans left Ghazni long ago. U.S. forces in Afghanistan constantly rotate in and out, with new teams arriving every few months, meaning that lessons and con­tacts usually don't last. Temour reckons that he's met a dozen American commanders in Ghazni. Sometime last year—after he com­plained several times about not being paid $15,000 he'd been promised for his help

locating a cache of 27 Taliban mines—U.S. officials decided they no longer wanted to deal with Temour and effectively barred him from the base. When I asked one se­nior civilian official about it, he dismissed the onetime friend as a nuisance. "I'd say he's about 50 percent bullshit," the official said by way of ending the conversation.

With the Americans' limited local knowl­edge, their efforts to engage directly with Afghans had a decidedly ad hoc quality. Rolling into a new village or town, Ameri­can teams would call meetings of tribal el­ders to ask, "What can we get for you?" Af­ghans quickly set about extracting as many high-dollar projects as possible. Schools and hospitals pleased the military's paymasters in Congress, who were eager for concrete results. But on the ground, in places unac­customed to any outside investment, they were terribly corrupting.

Military commanders were unabashed about their goals for the billions the Penta­gon had made available for development projects. In 2009, the Army published a handbook called Commander's Guide to Money as a Weapons System, codifying the policy of using aid to win over local populations and strengthen the legitimacy of the Kabul gov­ernment. The trouble was that, depending

on whom the Americans chose to deal with, the projects often exacerbated tribal rival­ries and allowed some groups to consoli­date their power at the expense of others. Andrew Wilder, a scholar at Tufts Univer­sity, conducted hundreds of interviews and found that the aid was in fact fueling mas­sive corruption, worsening perceptions of the government. In some cases, contractors paid off the Taliban to ensure security so that a project could get built, funneling U.S. cash directly to the insurgents we were fighting.

Early in 2009, Foust, the former intel­ligence analyst, was based in the eastern province of Kapisa, where U.S. forces had planned to build a school. Two rival elders immediately tussled over the location, trig­gering shoot-outs on the main road that occasionally took aim at American troops. Under the traditional Afghan system, Foust told me, the elders would have settled such a dispute among themselves by convening a tribal assembly, or jirga, with the winning side making some concessions to the loser. "If we hadn't meddled, they would have figured it out," he said. It got so bad that Afghans would beg the Americans to stop building big projects because of the destabi­lizing effect they had on local politics.

Even the facilities that were built often lacked an Afghan government commit­ment to use them or enough international or local forces to secure them. Many turned into derelict white elephants—symbols of a malfunctioning mission and easy targets for insurgents. Washington spent $300 mil­lion to repave the country's most important road: the section of Highway 1 stretching south from Kabul to Ghazni and ultimately to Kandahar, the second-largest city and traditional Taliban heartland. By the time I visited Ghazni, making the 90-mile journey along the highway from Kabul was an in­vitation to a kidnapping, roadside bombing or worse—so I hitched a ride on a U.S. heli­copter. One of the passengers who traveled with me that morning was Ghazni's gover­nor, Musa Khan.

Many analysts and American officials viewed Ghazni as a bellwether for Afghani­stan. Home to the longest stretch of High­way 1 in the country, it is large and ethni­cally diverse and sits on an axis connecting Kabul, Kandahar and the volatile eastern provinces along the Pakistan border, the new focal point of the insurgency. As the chopper passed over dun-colored moun­tains, I could make out a long, whitewashed schoolhouse outside the provincial capital that an American reconstruction team had built a few years back. I learned later that the campus had never been used and had slipped into disrepair, its windows broken and plumbing backed up. One American soldier I met called it "the $1.2 million mon­ument to failure." Afghans refused to drive me the short distance outside the city to see it, because they feared that Taliban fighters were hiding in the surrounding hillsides.

Ghazni is a grim, dust-blown settlement with skeletal infrastructure and an air of menace. The afternoon I arrived, a uni­formed police officer was gunned down at close range near the center of town, not a hundred yards from a checkpoint manned by Afghan security forces. In the space of

four weeks last fall, local officials told me, more than a dozen Afghan government personnel had been assassinated, includ­ing two female provincial employees who worked to promote women's rights. No one claimed credit for the killings, but the mes­sage was simple: The Afghan government wasn't in charge here.

Several Afghans told me that a Taliban network had taken root in the countryside around Ghazni: a "shadow government" that resolves disputes, metes out justice and in short does what many Afghans say their corrupt local officials can't or won't do. Of­ten ruthless—reports circulate of women being stoned for crimes such as adultery— their methods suggest that the Taliban are far from ready to renounce violence, which the Obama administration said they must do before any peace talks could commence. But their brutish efficiency, for some Afghans, fills a void. Whereas taking a complaint to an official court might cost several weeks and upward of $100 in fees and bribes, a Taliban court could haul witnesses in and settle the matter in a day. "It shames the local gov­ernment," Temour said. "The gap between them and the people is getting bigger."

The few hundred American and Polish personnel stationed on a fortress-like base just outside Ghazni's city limits seemed like bystanders. When I visited, American civil­ians ostensibly there to work on reconstruc­tion projects could venture off the base only with a heavily armored convoy of at least four mine-resistant, ambush-protect­ed trucks, known as MRAPs. Polish forces seemed rarely to leave the base at all.

Even so, Ghazni was one of the deadliest provinces for coalition forces in Afghani­stan in 2011, with nearly as many fatalities as in the previous three years combined. The area south of the provincial capital was "the number one area in the country to get blown up," said Navy Commander Tristan Rizzi, head of the U.S. team working in the area. Nearly 11 years into the war, the first-world armies deployed in Afghanistan are still bedeviled by cheap fertilizer bombs. "The weapon of the poor," one European commander told me, "and what's scary is there is not much we can do to detect it."

The insurgents have proven remarkably good at adapting their tactics. When coali­tion forces beefed up their vehicles with more armor or employed radio-jamming equipment to stop remote-control deto­nations, the insurgents just built bigger bombs and switched to command wires to set off the explosions. So nearly every day, route-clearance teams went out to scout the roadsides—a mind-blowingly risky job that requires soldiers to dismount from their ar­mored vehicles and hunt for trigger wires in the scrub and dirt. While I was there, the danger became all too apparent when a 26-year-old American sergeant, John A. Lyons of Seaside Park, New Jersey, was struck by small-arms fire while on a bomb-clearing patrol near a village known to be populated by insurgents. He died hours later. "Coming from the West, we consider that the insurgents are stupid, uneducated

and so on. That's to a certain extent true," the European commander said. "But at the same time they are learning very fast." And, it seemed, they could keep at their deadly game indefinitely.

"The Americans are helpless here. But we are helpless too," said a man I'll call Abdullah, a tall, square-jawed investigator with the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan's main intelligence service. He and his colleagues have grown increasingly frustrated by what he described as collusion between top levels of the Afghan govern­ment, including his own agency, and the Taliban. About a year ago, he told me, the NDS in Ghazni arrested an important Tali­ban suspect. Abdullah organized a heavily secured convoy to transport the prized cap­tive to headquarters in Kabul. A few hours after handing over the suspect, Abdullah went to the bus station to catch a ride back to Ghazni—and there he saw the suspect, who'd apparently been set free, looking to find his own way out of the city.

"We risk our lives to collect evidence against these people. We arrest them and hand them over to the courts," he said. "But these people just bribe the courts and get re­leased." He feared that his work was putting

him in the crosshairs of powerful people; six months earlier he'd narrowly survived an assassination attempt when a gunman pulled up alongside him and opened fire as he was riding his motorcycle. He blamed one man: Musa Khan, Ghazni's governor. Handpicked by Karzai, Khan is a former protege of Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a powerful Islamist politician who helped bring Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan in the mid-1990s and also served as a mentor to 9/11 master­mind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

His dubious pedigree notwithstanding, Khan, with his impeccable English, early on had charmed U.S. officials, who hoped that with his religious and ethnic credentials (he was a Pashtun, like the majority of the Tali­ban), he could persuade insurgents to join the peace process. Their optimism gave way to dismay at Ghazni's worsening insecurity and Khan's unpredictable behavior. Last year, Khan went on television to announce that he'd allowed insurgents to fire rockets into a supposedly uninhabited area because they were under pressure from their com­mander to carry out an attack. The remarks left Afghans nationwide dumbstruck. Many suspected he was interested more in safe­guarding his own power—or protecting the Taliban—than in achieving peace.

I met with Khan one morning in his plush office, inside a well-guarded com­pound ringed by razor wire. A somber, pious man with a long, jet-black beard, Khan told me that he had personally con­vinced hundreds of insurgents to put down their weapons. Asked for names or particu­lars, he demurred. "I know who is fighting and who is not fighting," he said. "There is no use for more explanation." His de­meanor had been cool, almost serene, but after I left his office I learned that my line of questioning had irked someone. A few days later, while I waited to meet an ex-Taliban fighter, Temour sent me a terse e-mail. "We have information that the Tali­ban inside the city are looking for you. As a friend I would not advise you to come out." I had no way of knowing whether the threat was real, but I took no chances. Two days later, I left Ghazni to return to Kabul.

Two months passed, and Karzai's gov­ernment announced that the city of Ghazni would be among the areas where Afghan forces would take over from the coalition in the next phase of the security transfer. This would have been surprising, given what I'd seen there—except that the city had been slated for transfer based on the wishes of the governor and others. Polish officials had also been eager to shed their involve­ment in a mission that had become increas­ingly unpopular at home. One U.S. official told me that the Poles' lobbying campaign had "apparently succeeded...despite facts, reality or appearances." The coalition had a schedule and was sticking to it.

The transition hinges on passing the baton to Afghan forces, but there are seri­ous questions about the local soldiers' ca­pabilities. In Ghazni I met a tall, leathery Mexican American named Vasquez who had spent the past several months help­ing train an Afghan police contingent. "They're a bunch of clowns, most of them," he said, shaking his head. Vasquez worked for a private security contractor, where his job was to teach the Afghan police how to maintain their vehicles. Once, he said, the trainees needed to inspect the undercar­riage of a pickup but couldn't figure out how to operate the jack. Instead they used a forklift—and nearly dropped the truck on another soldier. Then there was the time an Afghan accidentally backed a ve­hicle into a trailer. Rather than appearing embarrassed, he stumbled out of the driv­er's seat, laughing uncontrollably while two fellow soldiers slapped him on the back. "I don't know what we're leaving behind," Vasquez said. "Some days it just seemed like kind of a mess."

Even worse—and long before the Ko­ran burning in February inflamed ten­sions—the coalition had documented a growing number of cases of Afghan sol­diers and police attacking their trainers. In April 2011 an Afghan air force colonel brought a gun to a routine meeting and wordlessly shot dead eight U.S. Air Force personnel and an American civilian. An Air Force investigation released this year found no conclusive evidence that the Af­ghan, Colonel Ahmed Gul, was a member of the Taliban. But the report described an atmosphere of such mutual mistrust and

loathing on the joint base in Kabul that one of Gul's victims, Master Sergeant Tara Brown of Deltona, Florida, had taken to carrying a loaded weapon with her when she walked past Afghan soldiers on her way to the gym. One American trainer's first reaction to the shooting was simply, "I knew it." The rampage, however, hardly made Gul a pariah. Investigators found that more than 1,500 people attended his funeral—possibly including some mem­bers of the Taliban.

The costliest piece of the U.S. aid program—the Pentagon set aside $11.2 bil­lion for the training mission in 2012—faces a dire future with the United States and its allies slashing spending levels. Many ex­perts believe that the Afghan security force will be cut to well below the initial target of more than 300,000. It seems inevitable that American troops will leave Afghani­stan in the hands of a smaller than hoped for contingent of soldiers and police of questionable skills and loyalty. Cordesman, the defense analyst, concluded, "The force goals and funding levels set in early 2011 are now clearly unaffordable, but there is no real plan for the future."

Life unquestionably has become more wretched for Afghan civilians. In 2011, the United Nations office in Afghanistan documented 3,021 civilian deaths due to the war, an increase of eight percent from 2010 and 25 percent more than in 2009. The vast majority of those deaths—nearly four in five—were attributed to insur­gents, and the biggest killers were roadside bombs and suicide attacks. The figures have been rising even though the Taliban's mysterious Pakistan-based leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, has repeatedly called for civilian casualties to be avoided. Some analysts in Kabul told me they believed this was a sign that the coalition's assaults had broken up the Taliban's traditional command structure and drawn younger, more radical militants into their ranks. It could also reflect the growing power of the Haqqani network, an allied militia that U.S. officials blame for some of the biggest attacks in Kabul over the past year.

In any case, it suggests that any peace effort the United States tries to patch to­gether on its way out could be undermined by the insurgents' internal divisions. The specter of a wide, post-American conflict— involving elements of the Taliban, the new security forces, the former anti-Taliban mi­litias and who knows who else—is growing in the minds of Afghans.

"Only God knows" what will happen when the Americans leave, Sayed Aman Abed, the young real estate agent, told me in Kabul. "But I think civil war is inevitable." When the Kabubble was swelling, Abed did a brisk business selling homes, earning enough to pick up the $27,000 tab for his wedding two years ago. But his wife had moved to live with relatives in the safety of suburban At­lanta, and lately he'd been thinking of try­ing to join her. Faced with their country's bleak prospects, many Afghans are voting with their feet. Asylum applications from Afghanistan are at their highest levels in a decade, according to the United Nations, with more than 30,000 Afghans seeking of-

ficial refuge abroad in 2011—a 25 percent spike from the year before.

In the waning months of the United States' Afghan adventure, no one is talking about vic­tory. "It is possible that we will fail. I would say the margin for a kind of messy success is quite narrow," Ronald Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador to Kabul, told a security conference I attended in Washington in April. On May 2, the anniversary of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, President Obama made an unannounced, middle-of-the-night visit to Afghanistan to sign a strategic pact with President Karzai and deliver an address to U.S. troops. It was an election-year attempt to begin to tie a bow on the war, but two hours after Obama departed Afghanistan, a series of suicide bombings targeted a housing complex used by foreigners in Kabul. Just a few weeks earlier, a senior advisor to the coalition had told me that, after U.S. forces draw down, Af­ghan soldiers and police would be prepared to set up a multilayered buffer to protect Ka­bul, starting in the south in Kandahar and Helmand provinces, going on up through Ghazni and tightening outside the capital—a 400-mile belt where the majority of Afghans live. "We can maintain that indefinitely, for an­other decade, if we're willing to pay the bill," the advisor said. "That, to me, is as close to vic­tory as we're going to get. I don't see anything better than that." If so, the Taliban may not be able to retake Kabul, but they're likely to con­trol large swaths of the country and pose a di­rect challenge to the government's legitimacy.

Meanwhile, the good war isn't over; it's expanded. The fight against Al Qaeda is being won, but as much for what the U.S. military is doing in the shadows in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen as for what it has done in Afghanistan. Some have argued that last year's intervention in Libya—multilateral in nature, limited in scope, with no American boots on the ground—was the result of the harsh lessons learned from the heavy wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the Special Forces officer, a veteran of both wars, reminded me that the United States has been fighting such light conflicts against Islamist insurgents in the Philippines and Marxist fighters in Co­lombia for years, with no more than a few hundred soldiers on the ground at any given time, and achieving results. It's not a ques­tion of rewriting the American military play-book, he said; it just means using more of it.

"It's 1,000 troops over 10 years as opposed to 10,000 for one year," the officer said. Af­ter Afghanistan, he added, "a certain num­ber of options are off the table. It may not be feasible to do ambitious nation-building campaigns given what we now know about our institutions and our people, and that's something we're going to have to come to terms with. We may just have to say, 'Well, that country's collapsing and we just don't have the resources to engage it in a certain way.' We've got a much more real sense of the limitations of our power. I hope that is the lesson we come away with." If the United States truly learns that lesson, then perhaps the good war won't have been a total defeat.

U.S. TROOPS ARE COMING HOME, AND

WHAT THEY'RE LEAVING BEHIND DOESN'T

LOOK ANYTHING LIKE VICTORY.

"The Americans are helpless

here. But we are helpless too.

We arrest people and hand

them over to the courts. But

these people just bribe the

courts and get released."