Posted: November 19, 2009

Former USIP fellow Roy Gutman, author of "How We Missed the Story," details how past missteps in Afghanistan can help the U.S. formulate a better strategy for the future.

• Your book "How We Missed the Story: Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban and the Hijacking of Afghanistan" details the missteps of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, and how the West overlooked important developments there leading up to 9/11. As President Obama is conducting his second review of U.S. policy and strategy in Afghanistan/Pakistan since taking office -- why is it important to look back as we try to formulate a new policy in Afghanistan? How can the past help us prevent making mistakes in the future?
• Amid President Obama's policy review, one big topic of discussion is whether the Taliban should be in the same group as al-Qaida.  What do you find based on your reporting and writing "How We Missed the Story"?
• Another area of debate here in Washington is whether the U.S. should attempt to negotiate with the Taliban. What do you think is the best approach here?
• In your book, you argue that the U.S. erred in labeling bin Laden and his activities as terrorism.  What led you to that conclusion?
• In preparing and writing "How We Missed the Story," you conducted extensive interviews and research. Of all the interviews you did for the book, which ones stand out in your mind as most interesting and important, either as didactic for future U.S. strategy, media coverage, or interesting because of the interviewees themselves?
• Another major focus of your book was the failure of media coverage of pre-9/11 Afghanistan.  What are some lessons the media should take away from that time?  What do you make of today's coverage of both in Afghanistan -- and here in Washington, D.C.?
• What lessons do you hope the U.S. government learned from the 1980s and 1990s in Afghanistan?
• What does your book instruct us for a way forward in Afghanistan?

Your book "How We Missed the Story: Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban and the Hijacking of Afghanistan" details the missteps of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, and how the West overlooked important developments there leading up to 9/11.

As President Obama is conducting his second review of U.S. policy and strategy in Afghanistan/Pakistan since taking office -- why is it important to look back as we try to formulate a new policy in Afghanistan? How can the past help us prevent making mistakes in the future?

In order to grasp what happened on 9/11 and thereafter it's vital to know what preceded it.  The players all have a history, and you have to know who's who. Americans like to think they can define and shape an event simply turning up at the scene and grabbing the microphone.

But that is why things have gone so very wrong.

Start by mastering the history, grasping the narrative, determining the realities on the ground, and devising a long-term strategy to achieve a result; this time, not just for us, but also for Afghans.

Amid President Obama's policy review, one big topic of discussion is whether the Taliban should be in the same group as al-Qaida. What do you find based on your reporting and writing "How We Missed the Story"?

While the Taliban originated in Afghanistan and now have a Pakistani offshoot, al-Qaida from its inception has been a group with global ambitions and networks. Al-Qaida and the Taliban became inseparable in the late 1990s. In the third of the internal Afghan wars over the decade, starting in 1996 -- when the Taliban took the Afghan capital of Kabul, and continuing until the U.S. intervention in 2001 -- the Taliban believed they had a divine right to rule the country but had no idea how to fight a war (their fighters were untrained conscripts, who fought in sandals).

Bin Laden may style himself as a religious leader, but he brought something down-to-earth to the low tech war that the Taliban didn't have: boot camp, basic training, and an ability to recruit volunteers from around the Muslim world and motivate them to fight to the death.

Bin Laden's advice on restructuring the Taliban fighting effort, his trained fighters, and his funding and organization cleared the way for the Taliban to conquer the country -- two days before 9/11, when his operatives assassinated guerrilla leader Ahmed Shah Massoud. For bin Laden's advice, training, funding and volunteers, the Taliban will be forever in his debt.

Another area of debate here in Washington is whether the U.S. should attempt to negotiate with the Taliban. What do you think is the best approach here?

Negotiations with zealots who have committed mass atrocities, operate through terror and intimidation and have no interest in a modern society, civil law or free elections isn't a promising track at this time.  Since 1998 the Taliban have grown more extreme, and more ambitious and now support and work with similar movements throughout central and south Asia. The Clinton administration tried to negotiate with them and failed. Moreover, the Taliban have very real grievances with the Karzai government -- over war crimes.

These include the mass killing of prisoners of war in Mazar-i- Sharif, an Afghan city, in 1997 by forces now affiliated with the Karzai government; the mass execution of captured prisoners of war in late 2001, their burial in mass graves, and the subsequent destruction of those graves in the past two years.  The Karzai government shows no sign of intending to do anything about these atrocities, and the U.S.government has also concealed the record.

How the U.S. or the Karzai government expect to sit and negotiate with Mullah Omar, who has an interest in giving a decent burial to his own forces killed in action, is a mystery. Moreover, the Taliban are now on the advance and in no mood to compromise.

That said, the Taliban is a movement, an agglomeration of groups with tribal and ethnic allegiances, and there are, on the fringes of power, a number of figures who worked with the regime but never were at the core of it.  Separating these "Taliban in name only" from the main movement is a smart tactical goal.

In your book, you argue that the U.S. erred in labeling bin Laden and his activities as terrorism. What led you to that conclusion?

Bin Laden's tactics are terror and intimidation, but his real power - to recruit, train and retain killers who are ready to blow up innocents anywhere - is based in his political appeal.

Any strategy that doesn't counter him on the political level cannot be effective.  An assassination, using a "surgical strike," may not lessen his appeal and his 'martyrdom' could even increase it.

Counter-terror police methods are one means among many.

To undercut his political power and charisma, start by examining his methods of recruitment. If there's a substantive basis to bin Laden's appeal, address the substance. His worldview is twisted and comprised of big lies. The way to discredit him in recruiting more volunteers is to rally universal support, bringing in governments, religious leaders and civil society.

Bin Laden pretends he's above the law, issuing illegal fatawa (religious edicts) and organizing the killing of innocent civilians with no reference to civil authority.

The U.S. and its allies shouldn't follow suit and abandon the values of lawful society in countering him.

In preparing and writing "How We Missed the Story," you conducted extensive interviews and research. Of all the interviews you did for the book, which ones stand out in your mind as most interesting and important, either as didactic for future U.S. strategy, media coverage, or interesting because of the interviewees themselves?

Amir Sultan Tarar, aka "Col. Imam," the Pakistani special forces officer who trained Hamid Karzai during the anti-Soviet war, may be the most surprising of all the interviews. He was Pakistan's eyes and ears in Afghanistan throughout the Taliban period, but he lived hundreds of miles from Kandahar, the seat of Taliban power, and disputed that Osama bin Laden had ever taken up residence in Kandahar.  No wonder the Pakistani government got next to everything wrong about Afghanistan and al Qaida in the late 1990s.

I was amazed when I interviewed Ahmed Shah Massoud's brother to learn the state of impoverishment and complete penury in which the great guerrilla leader - and pro-western fighter - lived in the years before al Qaida operatives assassinated him.

Rupert Colville, the representative in Pakistan at the time for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, told me he was deeply disappointed by the news media's failure to report the massacre in Mazar-i-Sharif.

"If ever there has been a major atrocity in the past twenty years that didn't get the attention it deserved, it is this one," he said. He called the media "the main villain in the piece."

I was impressed by the success of an unassuming low key diplomat named Peter Tomsen, who helped clear the way for Massoud and Burhanuddin Rabbani to come to power in 1992 when the Russians pulled the plug on their puppet regime headed by Mohammad Najibullah, who had led the country since 1987.

It was disappointing to learn from former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that members of the Clinton administration had no second thoughts or soul-searching about what they might have done differently during the Taliban period. "I don't have the sense that we failed in any way," she told me. "We did the right thing."

This may help explain why so many Democrats in Congress seem to have so slight a grasp of what's at stake in Afghanistan.

Another major focus of your book was the failure of media coverage of pre-9/11 Afghanistan.  What are some lessons the media should take away from that time?  What do you make of today's coverage of both in Afghanistan -- and here in Washington, D.C.?

The big lesson for the media is that if the U.S. government has no interest in a small and continuing war in a faraway place, we should focus on it nonetheless. The Taliban also didn't want reporters there; they restricted television and closed down whole regions when they were undertaking military operations. But the attitude in the media should be: if the door's locked, that's where I want to be. If there's a black hole somewhere, that's where the spotlight must shine.

The Taliban, while in power, didn't want to be questioned or challenged. Take August 1998 in Mazar I Sharif, where, after their conquest, they set about systematic killing of non-Pashtuns, in particular Hazara, executing thousands in plain daylight.  No reporters were allowed in until December 1998, when the city had been cleaned up.  But refugees escaped and turned up in Pakistan just weeks after the killings. Only a few reporters ever took the trouble to write about this massive crime, and none to my knowledge reconstructed the event. Yet that coverage could have aroused public interest in Afghanistan and put it on the map. The failure to train the media (and governmental) spotlight enabled the Taliban to continue with war crimes in the months and years that followed with impunity.

Today's coverage is more plentiful but still diffuse. But many reporters don't seem to have done their homework on the subject, and view it often as a question of how many troops will be sent in. I've noted that major newspapers also run op-eds that carry remarkably uninformed opinion by people who know nothing of the history of Afghanistan.

I would also like to see a lot more reporting from the front, not just because the dramatic encounters make gripping reading but also to determine who's on the other side, why U.S. intelligence seems so inadequate, and how U.S. and NATO militaries are learning to master the situation. I'd like to see a continuing focus on human rights: the Taliban practices, for certain, but indeed violations committed by any side in t he conflict. I'd like to see a lot more reporting about governance or the lack of it in Afghanis tan.

This calls for investigative journalism, and there can never be enough of that.

What lessons do you hope the U.S. government learned from the 1980s and 1990s in Afghanistan?

A historic lesson is that the Afghans lost one million countrymen to fight the Red (Soviet) Army until it withdrew, and that demoralization of the Red Army in Afghanistan was a vital component in the collapse of Communism in Europe and the Soviet Union. The CIA celebrated the Russian pullout as its own victory, although not a single American life was lost. I wonder if this is why the United States for over a decade didn't seem to feel a stake in that country's future.

Throughout the 1980s, the U.S. -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- failed to work for a stable political outcome in Afghanistan; when the fighting ended, they quickly abandoned the field. So the lesson is that the sole remaining superpower cannot just walk away from a battlefield where it was the major beneficiary in a 45-year struggle.

I believe that the U.S. -- and all of Europe -- are in debt to the people of Afghanistan for their sacrifices in that crucial final phase of the Cold War.

The second lesson, and it follows from the first, is that Afghanistan is not just a platform for attacking U.S. adversaries; it is a real country with real people, who also have aspirations and who have to be consulted and supported, not treated as props in a broader strategic battle for U.S. interests.

A third lesson should be that a focus on human rights and ending impunity allow us to relate our civic values to an ongoing conflict, but this has been entirely missing in the case of Afghanistan.

In 1997, the Taliban were victims of a massive war crime against prisoners of war in Mazar-i-Sharif by an aide to (the temporarily ousted) warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, who recently returned to Afghanistan. The U.N. tried to launch an investigation, but the Clinton administration wouldn't lend any support. Had they, it would have been an excellent way to establish human links and working ties with the Taliban. A year later, the Taliban committed a massive war crime, killing thousands of civilians in Mazar-i-Sharif; once again, the U.S. government was silent.

In late 2001, Dostum was responsible for the killing thousands of Taliban prisoners of war and burying them in mass graves (he admitted that several hundred were killed), but the U.S. government concealed any knowledge of the crime. In 2007-8, Dostum was responsible for disinterring those graves and destroying the remains, and once again the U.S. government was silent. There is no way to establish rule of law -- or political contact in order to reach a political resolution -- if the U.S. government conceals what it knows about crimes committed by its Afghan allies against the Taliban.

What does your book instruct us for a way forward in Afghanistan?

The U.S. has to focus on the Afghans, their culture, their security, their economy and their infrastructure and engage seriously in every problem area until their country is stabilized. The U.S. should become the champion of the rule of law, of exposure and dealing with war crimes, and of ending impunity.

The U.S. has to deal straightforwardly with Pakistan and support Pakistanis as they attempt to build a democracy and find a way to convince Pakistan to crack down on criminals who have taken sanctuary in the tribal areas. The U.S. has to be engaged in both places, and well beyond, over the long haul. Nothing other than a bipartisan approach to foreign policy else will work. Interestingly, in 1998, when Bill Clinton decided to fire cruise missiles into Afghanistan, conservative Republicans rallied in support. So there is a bipartisan basis already there.