The Fiasco In Afghanistan.

The New York Times on Aug. 12 published a long article on what went wrong in Afghanistan. It said that, two years after the Taliban fell to a US-led coalition in late 2001, a group of NATO ambassadors landed in Kabul to survey what appeared to be a triumph - a fresh start for a country ripped apart by years of war with the Soviets and brutal repression by religious extremists.

With senior US diplomat Nicholas Burns leading the way, "they thundered around the country in Black Hawk helicopters, with little fear for their safety. They strolled quiet streets in Kandahar and sipped tea with tribal leaders. At a briefing from the US Central Command (CentCom), they were told that the Taliban were now a "spent force".

The New York Times quoted Burns, now the under-secretary of state for political affairs, as recalling: "Some of us were saying, 'Not so fast'. While not a strategic threat, a number of us assumed that the Taliban was too enmeshed in Afghan society to just disappear". But that scepticism had never taken hold in Washington. Since the late 2001 war, US intelligence agencies had reported that the Taliban were so decimated they no longer posed a threat. The US sense of victory had been so robust that the top CIA specialists and elite Special Forces units who had helped liberate Afghanistan had long since moved on to the next war, in Iraq.

Those sweeping miscalculations were part of a pattern of assessments and decisions which helped send what many in the US military call "the good war" off course. Like Osama bin Laden and his deputies, the Taliban had found refuge in Pakistan and regrouped as the US focus wavered.

Taliban fighters seeped back over the border, driving up the suicide attacks and roadside bombings by as much as 25% this spring, and forcing NATO and US troops into battles to retake previously liberated villages in southern Afghanistan. They have scored some successes recently, and since the late 2001 invasion, there have been improvements in health care, education and the economy, as well as the quality of life in the cities. But Karzai recently said in Washington security in Afghanistan had "definitely deteriorated". The NYT quoted a former US national security official as calling that "a very diplomatic understatement".

President Bush's critics have long contended that the Iraq war has diminished America's effort in Afghanistan, which the administration has denied. The NYT said an examination of how the policy unfolded within his administration revealed a deep divide over how to proceed in Afghanistan and a series of decisions which at times seemed to relegate it to an after-thought as Iraq unravelled.

Statements from the White House, including from Bush, in support of Afghanistan were resolute, but behind them was a halting, sometimes reluctant commitment to solving Afghanistan's myriad problems. At critical moments in the fight for Afghanistan, the Bush administration diverted scarce intelligence and reconstruction resources to Iraq, including elite CIA teams and Special Forces units involved in the search for terrorists.

As sophisticated Predator spy planes rolled off assembly lines in the US, they were shipped to Iraq, undercutting the search for Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders. Then defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed credit for toppling the Taliban with light, fast forces. But in a move which foreshadowed America's trouble in Iraq, he failed to anticipate the need for more forces after the old government was gone, and blocked an early proposal from Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, and Karzai for a large international force.

As the situation deteriorated, Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials reversed course and cajoled European allies into sending troops. When it came to reconstruction, big goals were announced, big projects identified. Yet in the year Bush promised a "Marshall Plan" for Afghanistan, the country received less assistance per capita than did post-conflict Bosnia and Kosovo, or even desperately poor Haiti, according to a RAND Corporation study. Washington has spent an average of $3.4 bn a year reconstructing Afghanistan, less than half of what it has spent in Iraq, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The White House contends the US troop level in Afghanistan was raised when needed and that it now stands at 23,500. But The NYT quoted a senior US commander as saying even as the military force grew last year, he was surprised to discover that "I could count on the fingers of one or two hands the number of US government agricultural experts" in Afghanistan, where 80% of the economy is agricultural.

A $300m project authorised by Congress for small businesses was never financed. Underlying many of the decisions was a misapprehension about what Americans would find on the ground in Afghanistan.

The NYT quoted James Dobbins, Bush's former special envoy for Afghanistan, as saying: "The perception was that Afghans hated foreigners and that the Iraqis would welcome us. The reverse turned out to be the case". US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended the administration's policy, saying: "I don't buy the argument that Afghanistan was starved of resources". Yet she said: "I don't think the US government had what it needed for reconstructing a country. We did it ad hoc in the Balkans, and then in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq".

The NYT said three former US ambassadors to Afghanistan were more critical of Washington's record. It quoted Robert Finn, the ambassador in 2002 and 2003, as adding: "I said from the get-go that we didn't have enough money and we didn't have enough soldiers. I'm saying the same thing six years later".

Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-born neo-con who was the next ambassador and is now the US ambassador to the UN, said: "I do think that state-building and nation-building, we came to that reluctantly. I think more could have been done earlier on these issues".

Ronald Neumann, who replaced Khalilzad in Kabul, said: "The idea that we could just hunt terrorists and we didn't have to do nation-building, and we could just leave it alone, that was a large mistake".

A Big Promise, Unfulfilled: The NYT said: "After months of arguing unsuccessfully for a far larger effort in Afghanistan, Dobbins received an unexpected call in April 2002. Bush, he was told, was planning to proclaim America's commitment to rebuild Afghanistan". It then quoted him as saying: "I got a call from the White House speech writers saying they were writing a speech and did I see any reason not to cite the Marshall Plan" - referring to the American rebuilding of post-war Europe. He added: "I said, 'No, I saw no objections', so they put it in the speech".

On April 17, Bush travelled to the Virginia Military Institute, where Gen George Marshall trained a century ago. Bush then said: "Marshall knew that our military victory against enemies in World War II had to be followed by a moral victory that resulted in better lives for individual human beings", calling Marshall's work "a beacon to light the path that we, too, must follow".

Bush had belittled "nation building" while campaigning for president 18 months earlier. But aware that Afghans had felt abandoned before, including by his father's administration after the Soviets left in Afghanistan 1989, he vowed to avoid the syndrome of "initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure".

Bush added: "We're not going to repeat that mistake. We're tough, we're determined, we're relentless. We will stay until the mission is done". The speech, which received faint notice in the US, fuelled expectations in Afghanistan and bolstered Karzai's stature before a loya jirga meeting in June 2002 at which Karzai was formally chosen to lead the government.

The NYT said: "Yet privately, some senior officials, including Rumsfeld, were concerned that Afghanistan was a morass where the United States could achieve little, according to administration officials involved in the debate. Within hours of the president's speech, Rumsfeld announced his own approach at a Pentagon news conference. 'The last thing you're going to hear from this podium is someone thinking they know how Afghanistan ought to organize itself', he said. 'They're going to have to figure it out. They're going to have to grab a hold of that thing and do something. And we're there to help'. But the help was slow in coming.

"Despite Bush's promise in Virginia, in the months that followed his April speech, no detailed reconstruction plan emerged from the administration. Some senior administration officials lay the blame on the National Security Council, which is charged with making sure the president's foreign policy is carried out. The stagnation reflected tension within the administration over how large a role the United States should play in stabilizing a country after toppling its government, former officials say.

"After the fall of the Taliban in December 2001, Powell and Rice, then the national security adviser, argued in confidential sessions that if the...[US] now lost Afghanistan, America's image would be damaged, officials said. In a February 2002 meeting in the White House Situation Room, Powell proposed that American troops join the small international peacekeeping force patrolling Kabul and help Karzai extend his influence beyond the capital. Powell said in an interview that his model was the 1989 invasion of Panama, where American troops spread out across the country after ousting the Noriega government. 'The strategy has to be to take charge of the whole country by military force, police or other means', he said.

Richard Haass, a former director of policy planning at the State Department, said informal talks with European officials had led him to believe that a force of 20,000 to 40,000 peacekeepers could be recruited, half from Europe, half from the US".

The NYT quoted Douglas Feith, a neo-con then the Pentagon's under secretary for policy, as saying Rumsfeld contended that European countries were unwilling to contribute more troops. Feith said Rumsfeld felt that sending US troops would reduce pressure on Europeans to contribute, and could provoke Afghans' historic resistance to invaders and divert US forces from hunting terrorists.

The NYT quoted US officials as saying they also feared confusion if European forces viewed the task as peacekeeping while the US military saw its job as fighting terrorists. Rice, despite having argued for fully backing the new Karzai government, took a middle position, leaving the issue unresolved. She said: "I felt that we needed more forces, but there was a real problem, which you continue to see to this day, with the dual role". Ultimately, Powell's proposal died.

Haass said: "The president, the vice president, the secretary of defense, the national security staff, all of them were skeptical of an ambitious project in Afghanistan. I didn't see support". Dobbins, the former special envoy, said Powell "seemed resigned", adding: "I said this wasn't going to be fully satisfactory. And he said, 'Well, it's the best we could do'".

In the end, the US deployed 8,000 troops to Afghanistan in 2002, with orders to hunt Taliban and Qaeda members, and not to engage in peacekeeping or reconstruction. The 4,000-member international peacekeeping force did not venture beyond Kabul. As an alternative, The NYT said: "officials hatched a loosely organized plan for Afghans to secure the country themselves". The US would train a 70,000-member army. Japan would disarm some 100,000 militia fighters. Britain would mount an anti-narcotics programme. Italy would carry out changes in the judiciary. And Germany would train a 62,000-member police force. But that meant no one was in overall command. Many holes emerged in the American effort.

The NYT added: "There were so few State Department or Pentagon civil affairs officials that 13 teams of CIA operatives, whose main job was to hunt terrorists and the Taliban, were asked to stay in remote corners of Afghanistan to coordinate political efforts, said John McLaughlin, who was deputy director and then acting director of the agency. 'It took us quite awhile to get them regrouped in the southeast for counterterrorism', he said of the CIA teams. Sixteen months after the president's 2002 speech, the United States Agency for International Development, the government's main foreign development arm, had seven full-time staffers and 35 full-time contract staff members in Afghanistan, most of them Afghans, according to a government audit.

"Sixty-one agency positions were vacant. 'It was state-building on the cheap, it was a duct tape approach', recalled Said Jawad, Karzai's chief of staff at the time and Afghanistan's current ambassador to Washington. 'It was fixing things that were broken, not a strategic approach".

Shift To Iraq: "In October 2002, Robert Grenier, a former director of the CIA's counterintelligence center, visited the new Kuwait City headquarters of...[Lt Gen] David McKiernan, who was already planning the Iraq invasion. Meeting in a sheet metal warehouse, Grenier asked McKiernan what his intelligence needs would be in Iraq. The answer was simple. 'They wanted as much as they could get', Grenier said.

"Throughout late 2002 and early 2003, Grenier said in an interview, 'the best experienced, most qualified people who we had been using in Afghanistan shifted over to Iraq', including the agency's most skilled counterterrorism specialists and Middle East and paramilitary operatives. That reduced the United States' influence over powerful Afghan warlords who were refusing to turn over to the central government tens of millions of dollars they had collected as customs payments at border crossings.

"While the CIA replaced officers shifted to Iraq, Grenier said, it did so with younger agents, who lacked the knowledge and influence of the veterans. 'I think we could have done a lot more on the Afghan side if we had more experienced folks', he said. A former senior official of the Pentagon's Central Command, which was running both wars, said that as the Iraq planning sped up, the military's covert Special Mission Units, like Delta Force and Navy Seals Team Six, shifted to Iraq from Afghanistan. So did aerial surveillance 'platforms' like the Predator, a remotely piloted spy plane armed with Hellfire missiles that had been effective at identifying targets in the mountains of Afghanistan.

"Predators were not shifted directly from Afghanistan to Iraq, according to the former official, but as new Predators were produced, they went to Iraq. 'We were economizing in Afghanistan', said the former official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly. 'The marginal return for one more platform in Afghanistan is so much greater than for one more in Iraq'.

"The shift in priorities became apparent to Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon's [neo-con] former comptroller, as planning for the Iraq war was in high gear in the fall of 2002. Rumsfeld asked him to serve as the Pentagon's reconstruction coordinator in Afghanistan. It was an odd role for the comptroller, whose primary task is managing the Pentagon's $400 billion a year budget. 'The fact that they went to the comptroller to do something like that was in part a function of their growing preoccupation with Iraq', said Zakheim, who left the administration in 2004. 'They needed somebody, given that the top tier was covering Iraq'.

"In an interview, President...Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, insisted that there was no diversion of resources from Afghanistan, and he cited recently declassified statistics to show that troop levels in Afghanistan rose at crucial moments - like the 2004 Afghan election - even after the Iraq war began. But the former Central Command official said: 'If we were not in Iraq, we would have double or triple the number of Predators across Afghanistan, looking for Taliban and peering into the tribal areas. We'd have the 'black' Special Forces you most need to conduct precision operations. We'd have more CIA. We're simply in a world of limited resources, and those resources are in Iraq', the former official added. 'Anyone who tells you differently is blowing smoke'.