bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2015), pp. 37–38
tion has its share of intr about being themselv promoting the commur ideas (both to help secu: ment support and to see lated into communicati sum, for a truly succes tions effort, every releve organization should wor! her own “wow” moment
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kent@appraisalot marketing of seminal ideas and key messages. That lacuna aside, these books remain very useful because employees as a whole — and
every organizaroverts — can learn inh WRUNG ENEMY: AMERICA IN AFGHANISTAN, 2001-2014, by Carlotta Gall, 2014, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 352 pp, $37.00
When the Editor of bout de papier suggested a review of another book about the war in Afghanistan, this reviewer moaned. She believed that there was little new to be said. She picked Carlotta Gall’s, The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan 2001-2014 because hers was a familiar name from the dispatches in the NY Times since 9/11. Gall, the daughter of a distinguished journalist, is a prominent journalist in her own right. In the words of Ahmed Rashid, the doyen of the interpreters of the region, she had emerged as “the leading Western reporter living in Kabul” with an enviable rolodex.
This is Gall’s first book in which she is the sole author but it has a long list of acknowledgements. It is a superbly written account of the 14 year war, the longest in US history which cost the US $685.6 billion. At its peak in 2009, the US had 142,000 pairs of boots on the ground, clearly not enough to defeat an insurgency, according to C. Christine Fair, the US scholar. The book has several pages of striking colour photographs from a Quetta photographer who remains anonymous for his own safety. Reviewers of her book, also experts in the region, have called it “well-informed”, “important and long overdue”. Predictably, her book caused controversy in Pakistan while Afghans mostly approved. Conspiracy theorists will find plenty of grist for their rumour mills.
The title of the book comes from the epigraph, a quote from the late Richard Holbrooke, US Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2009 to 2010. He was the first high-ranking US official to openly state that Pakistan was the USA’s real adversary in the Afghanistan war, a view to which Gall wholeheartedly subscribes. Building from the epigraph, she constructs a convincing case about the double-dealing by Afghanistan’s neighbour and putative US ally, Pakistan and its secretive and powerful Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). In Gall’s book, the USA are a gullible lot for ever thinking that Pakistan would walk away from the Taliban, having made such a huge investment in building it up from 1994 to 2001, and who believed that they needed Afghanistan in their camp to provide “strategic depth”.
It is common knowledge that the dreaded ISI is a “state within a state” that has had a long history of nurturing various jihadi groups to fight its proxy wars in Afghanistan and India, something Gall is not afraid to assert. But, she does not credit Pakistan for birthing the Taliban. In fact, she writes that as early as 1994, ISI acted quickly to co-opt an indigenous Pashtun movement by sending in at least two Pakistani army trainers, a Major Gul and the legendary “Colonel Imam”. The latter “went native” and immersed himself wholly in the Afghan jihad. In fact, an American reporter heard Imam directing the Battle of Shomali Plain from his desk at the consulate in June 1996!
Gall is an extremely courageous woman. In 2006, she ran afoul of ISI for sniffing around the Pashtunabad area in the sensitive border town of Quetta where the ISI’s clients, the Taliban were headquartered. ISI officers burst into her hotel room, roughed her up and confiscated her notebooks and laptop. She was rescued by her NYT “connections” to the Pakistan civilian establishment, itself a hostage of the ISI but not before they had copied all her information. Her informants were questioned by ISI. This did not deter her from continuing her work for another eight years.
The book opens with the defeat of the Taliban in 2001. Many of the subsequent chapters begin with a date, and give the impression that the author is writing a journal. For example, Chapter 2 The People Turn, opens with the words, October 2001. Among other things, it describes the first days of the clandestine return to Afghanistan of Hamid Karzai, an Indian-educated, Quetta-based, “minor tribal politician”. Karzai, who had been working on an alternative to Taliban rule for a while had managed to link up with some former mujahedeen commanders and was moving around hoping to rally the Pashtuns to his cause. The Taliban soon got wind of him and there is a vivid description of the run-in with the Taliban where Abdul Haq, a Pashtun and former resistance leader, one of the two best potential US allies, died.
Gall worked with an interpreter. But she had an uncanny “feel” for the local culture and customs such as: privacy, hospitality, the complex inter and intra-clan relationships and the role of women something that the American military seemed to completely lack. She was able to penetrate the world of ordinary folks: farmers, day labourers, housewives all of whom paid the price, and were still paying, for almost four decades of war and conflict. Gall’s innate curiosity and determination to bring to light facts, however repellant, have made her run to earth key informants like, “retired” mujahedeen commanders, ISI “thugs”, Taliban foot soldiers and Afghan warlords. At the same time, she had access to top politicians starting with Karzai down, government officials, diplomats and both US and Afghan top military brass.
Ahmed Rashid refers to her as a one woman human rights agency. Gall worked relentlessly to uncover human rights abuses, torture and killing of Afghans by Americans and get this into the American media. As early as 2002, she was first on the spot, having driven three days over rutted roads to Uruzgan province to report on the “collateral damage” after the US bombed a wedding celebration. Fifty-four people including many children died and over a hundred injured. The victims were In spite of her trenchant criticism of US policies, Gall is no US-hater. She makes no secret of her admiration for individual US officers for example, General Stanley A. McCrystal who on arriving in Afghanistan in 2009, opted for a counterinsurgency campaign centred on protecting civilians. He enforced stricter rules of engagement, fewer air strikes and a huge increase in night raids using airborne specials op forces. But it all came too late to make a difference. The Taliban were well-entrenched and the local population had lost confidence in President Karzai and the Americans.
The reason this book speaks to this reviewer is because Gall is so much more than a mere journalist. She is a gifted storyteller in the dramatic tradition of the bard-storyteller, the Bakshi of the Central Asian chaikhane (tea houses). Her riveting account of the battle of Qala-i-Janghi (House of War) in Mazar-i-Sharif, in Kunduz province, in November 2001 may yet pass into oral history as a dastan (epic) to be narrated over bowls of kok chai (green tea) some day! It describes the desperate fight put up by the POW Taliban fighters and the Northern Alliance troops guarding them after the surrender of the Northern sector. The battle raged for over five days and left hundreds dead. As one Pakistani Talib said in English to Gall, “we did not come here to surrender”. The POWs managed to inflict considerable damage before help arrived from US and UK Special Forces supported by US airstrikes. Gall makes a very astute observation: the US had under-estimated the Taliban.
At the time of writing, the Taliban are back. They have been mounting a spas of to implement projects. In fact, providing security for these contractors has enriched many an Afghan. Rampant graft and corruption, that burgeoned under the previous administration continues to this day fueling donor fatigue and scepticism. Gall herself proffers no solutions. Pakistan, in the meantime, is racked by internal terrorism, sectarian conflict and a stagnant economy. But, there is no proof that ISI have abandoned the Taliban.
The Turkish writer Elif Shafak once said in an interview that she did not believe in writing about what she knew, but about what she felt. That way, she continues “we can write about any and everything as long as we feel a connection”. Carlotta Gall both knows her subject and feels a connection to it, a rare combination.
Ottawa-based Anu Bose is a friend of the Foreign Service. She was born in Calcutta ta a hiahlv nalitical Rrahmo Samai
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2015), pp. 37–38. Read the rest of this issue →
