The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014By Carlotta GallHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014 

“I am not happy with civilian casualties coming down; I want an end to civilian casualties… Because the war against terrorism is not in Afghan villages, the war against terrorism is elsewhere, and that’s where the war should go.” Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan “Elsewhere” was Pakistan.There was a period of relative quiet after the Taliban government fell to a motley constellation of Afghan rebels and NATO forces in late 2001. But each Spring after 2003, as the mountain passes thawed and fighting season began, the Taliban infiltrated in larger and larger numbers over the border from Pakistan. By 2006, when Karzai made the statement above, a note of desperation had crept into his voice.Eight violent years have passed since then. Karzai’s anger toward the United States evolved into utter distrust, his desperation into fatalism. Afghanistan's peace and stability,” he told his government this September as he stepped down, “are in the hands of foreigners.” He said, “Afghans on both sides are the sacrificial lambs and victims of this war,” and advised the incoming government to be “extra cautious in relations with the U.S. and the West,” which were pursuing their own selfish interests.Pakistan did not respond to the speech, but the American response was revealingly narrow. “It makes me kind of sad,” said James Cunningham, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul. “His remarks, which were uncalled for, do a disservice to the American people and dishonor the sacrifices made by Americans here.” Having ticked the box for domestic appeal, the ambassador lauded Karzai’s presidency, and there he left it. The United States, like Pakistan, prefers not to talk about what happens on the other side of the Durand Line.But any serious discussion of Afghanistan can’t avoid it, because there can be no peace in Afghanistan without change in Pakistan. Carlotta Gall’s The Wrong Enemy is the most forceful book yet to connect the Pakistani government, America’s ostensible ally, to the Afghan Taliban, America’s adversary. _____ “Over twelve years, I lost friends and acquaintances in suicide bombings and shootings, and saw others close to me savagely maimed. I do not pretend to be objective in this war. I am on the side of the victims.” Carlotta Gall This passage is from the Foreword. Gall reported from Afghanistan for The New York Times for a dozen years, and is as understandably frustrated with the situation as some of her sources. But the body of The Wrong Enemy is written in solid, unassuming, reportorial prose, and is mostly concerned with what she saw, and especially with what she heard, on the ground. History is sketched just enough to connect these reported events.Pakistan’s relationship with organized Islamic militants dates to the 1970’s, when its military began using them as a proxy force against Indian influence in Afghanistan and the disputed territory of Kashmir. The links were tentative, but the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan sparked a resistance that drew American cash and war materiel. Distribution was mainly handled by Pakistan’s intelligence directorate, the infamous ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence).General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq had taken power in a coup two years before. He viewed the secularism of his predecessors as an affront to Pakistani identity and fatefully stuck to his “Islamic System,” with its demagogic appeal, even in the face of fundamentalist bombings and attempts on his life (one of which may have finally killed him in 1988). In keeping with the new state philosophy, the ISI channeled its resources into the most fanatical elements of the anti-Soviet resistance, which operated out of a safe haven in Pakistan’s northwestern provinces. The frontier became a nexus of displaced Afghans, holy warriors, and radical Islamic clerics and their madrassas, whose young students became today’s veteran mujahedeen. Osama bin Laden cut his teeth there, as did Mohammed Omar, future leader of the Taliban.“Although Pakistan did not create the Taliban,” Gall writes, “it acted swiftly to co-opt the movement.” Omar formed the Taliban in 1994 by quickly taking over an effort by local mujahedeen to clear Afghanistan’s Kandahar province of banditry. Within months he had Pakistani advisors. Three years later he declared the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The Taliban government was immediately recognized by Saudi Arabia (the Afghan resistance’s other major patron), the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan, which viewed the nascent client state as a bulwark in its frozen war with India.America’s relations with Pakistan deteriorated in the 1990’s, as Islamabad set off dueling nuclear tests with India. After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush Administration presented Pakistan with a stark choice: America or the Taliban, and Pervez Musharraf (who had taken power in a coup himself) appeared to choose the United States. American aid, lavish during the Reagan years, reduced to a trickle by Clinton, would soon flow again. But there were warning signs from the beginning. _____ “We reached out to them and they told us to get lost.” Jehangir Karamat, former Chief of Staff, on Pakistan’s attempt to persuade Omar not to destroy the Buddhist statues in Bamiyan Even before 9/11, Pakistan was discovering that it had unleashed forces it could not fully control. It pursued a deliberate policy of isolating the Taliban from the outside world in order to magnify its own importance, but in all likelihood this only left the devout Mullah Omar more susceptible to the religious arguments and financial largesse of his infamous guest, Osama bin Laden. “There is evidence showing that bin Laden became an increasingly powerful influence over Mullah Omar in the last few years before 2001,” Gall writes. There was the Bamiyan incident, and the fact that “moderates in the Taliban leadership,” some of whom probably advised Omar to give up bin Laden after al Qaeda bombed two US embassies in Africa in 1998, “were sidelined.” Even Ziauddin Butt, the head of the ISI under Pakistan’s civilian government at the time, could not convince Omar to expel the Saudi.The next head of the ISI, Mahmud Ahmed, who took over the agency after Pervez Musharraf’s coup in 1998, was a product of Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamic System and a perfect demonstration of its short-sightedness. After 9/11 Musharraf sent him to ask Omar to cut ties with bin Laden. Unfortunately, as Gall explains, Ahmed, “who was deeply caught up in the Taliban cause and a committed Islamist, told Omar to hold on to bin Laden and resist the attack.” Washington complained and Musharraf sacked him. Musharraf himself, though not particularly devout, was still a child of Pakistan’s long conflict with India. This meant, Gall writes,

that when Musharraf agreed to cooperate with America after 9/11 and abandon the Taliban, he was going against nearly thirty years of Pakistani strategic thinking. American officials should have realized that it was inconceivable for Pakistan to give up on so much time and investment, or that the military and security establishment could change its institutional thinking so easily.

Indeed, Musharraf hedged right from the beginning. Pakistan would help the United States against the Taliban, but would not end its support for Pakistani and Kashmiri militants, who were “off limits” because Musharraf believed they could be “compartmentalized” and held in reserve against India. The war against the Soviets suggested that this kind of compartmentalization was unrealistic, that religious fanatics are dangerously fickle helpmeets, but Musharraf submitted to inertia. One of Gall’s sources explains:

“As a matter of policy, he did want the Taliban to be controlled,” [Talat] Masood [a retired general and analyst] told me. “But when this invasion took place, the Taliban were pushed into Pakistan, along with al Qaeda. And as there was no anvil, and there was only a hammer, and the border was porous, there were large, large numbers in Pakistan, and they filtered all over the place in Pakistan, wherever they found it more convenient to carry on their activities and to feel safe. And Pakistan did not really understand the implications of having the Taliban based in Pakistan, and that in turn gave rise to their own Talibanization.” Massood was not the only person to warn Musharraf in the months after 9/11, but the general was set on keeping at least some militant groups alive. His decision was to have dangerous repercussions for Pakistan and the wider region.

And yet here is where things get murky, and where the certitude of Gall’s portrayal, despite mounds of circumstantial evidence and publicly established facts, runs up against the limits of her sources and the stonewalling of the American and Pakistani governments.

_____ “Pakistan's generals make their country's Afghan policy. Nawaz Sharif told me that in 1998 when I first meet him. The elected civilians just go along for the ride or get assassinated like Benazir Bhutto. Nawaz once said if he crossed the ISI-Army-Taliban axis, America would next find his successor to be a bearded jihadist in a uniform.” Bruce Reidel , ex-CIA analyst, on Pakistan’s former and current Prime Minister Sharif was deposed a year later. His successor was Musharraf, who was not a bearded jihadist but had many working for him.That much we know, but there are several important questions which neither Gall nor anybody else can completely answer. How much control does Pakistan have over the Islamic militants within its borders? How deep is the fracture between Pakistan’s relative moderates and the Islamists seeded throughout its institutions? How powerful is the latter group, and who are they? How high does their influence reach?Some of the confusion rests in Gall’s methodology. The next two sentences after the one quoted above where Musharraf declares some militants “off limits,” are these: “Senior leaders of the Afghan Taliban were secretly taken into the protective custody of safe houses. The rest were left to fend for themselves.” The “off limits” sentence is followed by an endnote citing a book by Bruce Reidel, but these two are not—they’re followed by a section break and then the interview with Masood. That has a footnote as well, but it’s far from clear that Masood is corroborating the implication that Musharraf was protecting the Taliban leadership right after 9/11. Reidel’s book doesn’t make the charge, either.What is almost certain, however, is that elements of Pakistani intelligence were assisting the Taliban and al-Qaeda by 2003, and likely never stopped. Part of the suspicion toward Musharraf lies in Pakistan’s long habit of denying the presence of terrorists within its borders—even in Quetta, where the leadership of the Afghan Taliban eventually settled after the US invasion, living in a kind of open secrecy. But as the insurgency grew, the evidence, circumstantial and otherwise, could no longer be ignored.The most damning piece of circumstantial evidence might be that Washington, after years of deflection, started leaking accusations of Pakistani complicity in the insurgency – at first anonymously, then, cautiously, for the record – because the Bush and Obama administrations had good reasons for keeping Pakistan’s entanglement with Islamic fundamentalists quiet. America’s domestic politics are unsuited to the nuances and calculations its leaders take for granted every day.Pakistan’s leaders, as Sharif’s quote attests, must dance precariously between suppressing militants for the sake of the alliance with Washington, and supporting them to maintain support from the military, who would otherwise throw them out or worse—Pakistan’s leaders often wind up dead. From the American point of view, the two faces of Islamabad’s government must be tolerated because the consequences of destabilizing a nuclear power rife with Islamic militants and terrorists are unthinkable. The greatest weakness of this otherwise excellent book is that Gall doesn’t seem to have enough patience for this context. It appears mostly between the lines, by implication, whereas talk of the “right” and “wrong” enemy is free and direct.What The Wrong Enemy provides is a nearly endless litany of suspicious circumstances, anonymously-sourced accusations, and hard evidence. The upshot is rather like an impressionist painting: the subject is clear, but its outlines are not. But the picture, however fuzzy, is disturbing.For instance, once the Afghan insurgency began adopting the tactics of its fellow travelers in Iraq, the Bush Administration began pressing Musharraf to crack down further on the militants within its borders. Musharraf denied they had anything to do with the suicide attacks and roadside bombs. “Yet,” as Gall points out,

the Pakistani militant groups that were conducting the first suicide bombings, Harakat-ul-Mujahideen, Jaish-e-Mohammad, and Hesbe-Islami, were organizations that Pakistan’s ISI had created and sponsored for years. They were among those that Musharraf had told U.S. ambassador Wendy Chamberlain and Talat Masood that he would not dismantle. Musharraf instead paid off their leaders to go quiet for several years and wait out the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.

Sources from all the relevant players – the Afghans, the Americans, and the Pakistanis – say the same thing and more: elements of Pakistan’s intelligence and military establishment are providing militants with money, recruits, and safe houses, which are then used to attack American troops, Afghan troops, and Afghan civilians. And it is likely that those same elements, in addition to all this, provided protection for Osama bin Laden and the terrorists who assassinated Benazir Bhutto, Musharraf’s one-time rival for the Prime Ministry.As the war ground on, Pakistan’s intentions seemed to diverge even further from those of its putative ally in Washington. It took the American government a long time to realize that any peace would entail diplomacy with significant elements of the Taliban, but when that realization finally came, it was difficult to find any Taliban to talk to because Pakistan had developed a habit of arresting them.One former Taliban who Gall spoke with told her that “far from opposing his connection to the Taliban, the ISI agents threatened him with prison unless he returned to Afghanistan to fight U.S. forces.” This was not an isolated incident:

Over the years a number of senior Taliban members were detained by the Pakistani authorities in such circumstances… The detentions ostensibly complied with U.S. and Afghan requests for Pakistan to crack down on Taliban cross-border activities, but Pakistan never cooperated in handing over the Taliban suspects to the Afghan government or American forces.

After Barack Obama took office and peace efforts began in earnest, “Pakistan detained several dozen Taliban members that the Karzai government was trying to talk to.” These detentions, Gall concludes, “were clearly part of a Pakistani program of internal control of the Taliban.”

Pakistan, like the Taliban, seems to think that the presence and support of the U.S. and its allies are only a temporary fact on the ground. When they leave, the reasoning goes, Pakistan can deal with the current government in Afghanistan, which has forged closer ties with its enemy, India, or it can use the Afghan Taliban to either take over the government in Kabul or pressure it into aligning itself more closely with Islamabad.There is a brutal logic to this line of reasoning, given Pakistan’s geopolitical obsession with India. But Pakistan’s effort to use the Taliban to its own purposes would result in unforeseen consequences, just as America, in its pursuit of the Taliban, would undermine its goal of creating a coherent state in Afghanistan by misreading the mood and needs of its people. _____ “The foreigners are guilty. Why don’t they bomb their targets? Instead they come and bomb our houses.” Afghan villager, to Carlotta Gall No reporter who spends much time in Afghanistan can avoid the pain and ill-feeling American bombs and troops have brought to so many Afghans. This is the other thread running through The Wrong Enemy, and for a taxpayer in any of the countries making up the U.S.-led coalition, the stories of civilian casualties are the most wrenching parts of the book.Gall visited many scenes of carnage, where the American policy of bombing suspicious-looking activity from the air resulted in dead civilians on the ground. In one such case American drones wiped out dozens of villagers at a wedding celebration. Another story, involving the death of a single tribal elder, is emblematic in the way it shows how NATO forces, in attempting to win a military conflict, lost the support of the civilian population:

One night in May 2002, American troops made an airborne assault on a village on the edge of the blistering hot red desert of Registan. Bandi Temur was a smuggling crossroads… It was the home of Haji Berget, one of the first sponsors of Mullah Omar. He was a mujahideen leader and prominent smuggler, and his tribe, the Ishaqzai, dominated the opium business. Yet by 2002, Haji Berget was old and frail… That night he had wandered from his home to the village mosque and lay down on the cool stone floor. American soldiers shot him where he lay, with a bullet to the head. They took his body away along with fifty-five men detained in the village. They left behind a bullet mark and shards of his skull in a pool of blood on the mosque floor.

Incensed, Ishaqzai tribesmen marched on Kandahar and threatened to storm the governor’s office… The tribe had threatened to withdraw its support for the Karzai government unless his body was returned and the villagers released, elders told me. The Ishaqzai thus became deadly opponents of the forces across a swath of territory. Haji Berget’s sons took up arms and joined the Taliban. By targeting their leader, American forces had incurred the enmity of an entire tribe.It would take almost a decade for the United States to change its strategy. In 2010 it began relying less on bombings and group detention and more on the presence of soldiers, who emerged from NATO bases with more stringent rules of engagement and orders to protect the civilian population. It paid dividends, but these gains were to some extent offset by the increase in night raids by special forces and the use of drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan—weapons the Obama Administration has deployed with far more determination that its predecessor.

_____ “We may be fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country.” Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Pakistan – insofar as anyone can refer to its mélange of competing interests as a single entity, at least – was being forced into its own reconsiderations. Not long after the war in Afghanistan began, Musharraf, in a bid to defeat his domestic opponents at the polls, encouraged the development of religious parties in and around the tribal areas. While they helped to provide him a margin of victory in the parliamentary elections, the newly empowered religious alliance channeled a growing discontent with centralized rule, which is astonishingly corrupt, and this, in combination with the myriad Islamists and criminal gangs populating the North and West, birthed for Pakistan a Taliban of its own, one even more brutal than its Afghan cousin. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan worked in loose affiliation with Pakistan’s extant separatist groups and terrorist organizations, including those Pakistan had hoped to divert towards India. Successive governments in Islamabad have made only fitful efforts to suppress this homegrown insurgency, which is also connected, to a significant but unknown extent, with elements of its own military and intelligence forces.In a sense, these ‘rogue’ elements in the military and the ISI are more firmly rooted in Pakistan’s historic geopolitical aims than their more moderate adversaries. They seem to be engaged in a quiet war against everyone, including their own civilian government, which in turn is trying desperately to placate everyone, including the rogue elements. It is a horribly complex and seemingly intractable situation. That is why it is so difficult to speak with any confidence about the “right” and “wrong” enemies. How can one point a finger and claim that Pakistan is the enemy, when its government has so often been at war with itself?But for all the tragedy and death the last 13 years have brought, Carlotta Gall is surprisingly optimistic. She takes heart in the recent uprisings of Afghan civilians and ex-mujahedeen against the Taliban, which she sees as an indication that “the Taliban was rotting at the core.” These local uprisings have received some, but not enough, help from the Afghan central government, which, in the person of Hamid Karzai, had been reluctant to cede any of its already tenuous central authority. Still, Karzai’s term is over, and his successors have just inked a power-sharing agreement. It is vague and precarious, and comes on the heels of yet another fraud-plagued election, but in Afghanistan, at least, it is progress.In Pakistan, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who has long been afraid of upsetting the sensibilities of the military, and whose administration has been plagued by protests linked to his own intelligence agency, may have just achieved the impossible. He has replaced the head of the ISI, who he believes was plotting against him, with Rizwan Akhtar, who is a protégé of Raheel Sharif, the recently appointed chief of the military. Improbably, given Pakistan’s history, both are said to have warm relations with the Prime Minister.As the Guardian reported recently,

many Pakistan watchers have argued that in recent years a new consensus has been forming within military circles, which increasingly see the fight against domestic terrorism as more important to the country’s survival than its traditional efforts to dominate Afghanistan and protect against the perceived threat from longstanding enemy India.

These twin developments in Pakistan amount to nothing less than a revolution in government and foreign affairs.Or they will, if they hold. As The Wrong Enemy makes clear, the forces of inertia are powerful and its foot soldiers are ruthless. Nawaz Sharif will need to stay in office – and stay alive – long enough to see his course correction through. The new Afghan government will have to limit corruption and support local authorities. The United States will have to see beyond the narrow confines of its bloody, endless “war on terrorism,” and encourage its distrusting allies to minister to the needs of their neglected peoples. It will take nothing less than a region-wide revolution in policy to stop the terror mills in Pakistan from churning out their walking dead._____Greg Waldmann is the Editor-in-chief of Open Letters Monthly, and a native New Yorker living in Boston with a degree in International Affairs.