Former U.S. envoy in Afghanistan worried about insurgent havens in Pakistan

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 13, 2010; 10:59 PM

After serving as the senior U.S. diplomat responsible for Kandahar, Bill Harris is convinced that American forces have made "staggering progress" against insurgents this fall in areas around Afghanistan's second-largest city.

But he is equally certain that the overall war will fail if the United States does not find a way to eliminate the de facto sanctuary that Taliban fighters have established in neighboring Pakistan. "As we sat there for a year . . . we knew the insurgents who attacked us were going to Pakistan to re-equip, replenish, retrain and get orders to attack us again," he said.

His alarm over Pakistan, which grew with each month he spent in Kandahar, contrasts with his diminishing concern over the behavior of President Hamid Karzai's half brother, the most powerful political leader in southern Afghanistan. Harris arrived thinking that Ahmed Wali Karzai was Afghanistan's equivalent of the notorious Colombian drug trafficker Pablo Escobar and should be expelled. Harris left believing that Karzai was supporting U.S. strategy and that decisions about his future should be left to Afghans, not Americans.

Harris's field-level insights on Pakistan and the Karzai family illuminate the challenges facing the United States as it seeks to translate recent security improvements into something more than transitory gains. Those issues are among the most important and complicated questions being discussed by members of President Obama's national security team as they assess the Afghan war this week.

"Pakistani sanctuaries are crucial: If you can't solve that problem, you can't win," said a senior military official who is participating in some of the review discussions and discussed the issue on the condition of anonymity.

Now back home with his wife in a quiet Colorado Springs subdivision that feels a world away from the bedlam and privation of Kandahar, Harris said in a lengthy interview that he saw "no signs that our government has made any progress" over the past year in stemming the flow of militants into the south. "I came away feeling a little abused and ripped off by my government."

His tan - a product of the scorching desert sun - has faded under the winter clouds of Colorado, and he has taken a razor to the silvery beard he grew to impress tribal elders, but he continues to stew about Pakistan. To him, the sanctuaries represent the most direct threat to all that he feels he has accomplished over the past year.

Because he no longer works for the government, Harris does not have to hew to the State Department line that the Pakistani government has made inroads against insurgent havens. But he also does not regard himself as a disaffected whistleblower. Indeed, his views are shared by many American officials in Afghanistan, including diplomats, reconstruction advisers and military officers.

"Bill has changed, but so have a lot of us," said a former colleague in Kandahar, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk to journalists. "There's nothing like spending a year on the ground to teach you what you can't possibly fix, and what you need to fix that the people back in Washington just don't understand."

Out of retirement

Harris, 60, first landed in Afghanistan in 2002 for a three-month stint as the political adviser to the top U.S. commander at the time. His roommate at Bagram air base was a one-star general named Stanley A. McChrystal.

When McChrystal was named commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan in May 2009, the stocky but fit Harris offered to come out of retirement for one last taste of adventure. He was not an Afghan hand - much of his State Department career was spent in Latin America and with the U.S. military - but "McChrystal was getting the band back together . . . and I wanted to be one of those guys."

By last fall, he had grown a beard and moved into a shipping container on the Kandahar provincial reconstruction team's compound, a former fruit-canning factory on the city's eastern fringe that was run by the Canadian military. With 10,000 U.S. troops rolling in over the year, Harris was charged with building up a team of American diplomats and development advisers to support the surge and eventually take charge of the reconstruction effort.

Harris said he was determined not to repeat the mistakes of 2002, when "we brought the warlords back like Lazarus."

His principal target was Ahmed Wali Karzai, the chairman of the Kandahar province council. Although the president's half brother has been on the CIA's payroll, he has been dogged for years by allegations of involvement in drug trafficking and land seizures, charges he denies. At the very least, Harris believed Ahmed Wali was relying so heavily on his cronies that it was driving many residents to support the Taliban.

By early this year, however, Harris began having second thoughts. He witnessed Ahmed Wali's impassioned response to a newspaper article that alleged he was corrupt. Harris talked to other Afghan leaders in Kandahar. And he saw his house.

"He lives in a compound that's guarded like Fort Knox," Harris said. "His children cannot go out and play. He can't go out to restaurants to eat. He's under effective house arrest. The argument that he wants to keep up that lifestyle is preposterous."

The military's push to remove him soon hit a roadblock. President Karzai demanded proof of his brother's misdeeds, but U.S. intelligence agencies did not have it. McChrystal, who shared Harris's initial view, was forced to back down.

Some civilian advisers at the coalition military command in Kabul insist that Ahmed Wali remains more of a problem than a solution, citing allegations of recent land seizures and election meddling. Harris "has an extremely naive view of the situation," one of the advisers said. "He got played."

But Harris counters that deciding the fate of Ahmed Wali Karzai is not America's task. "Our job is . . . to deal with the Taliban. It's the job of the Afghans to decide what happens to the power brokers."

A stick with the carrots

When he got to Kandahar, Harris assumed the U.S. government had a strategy for putting the squeeze on insurgent havens in Pakistan. He figured the details were being kept confidential.

"You couldn't do what we were being asked to do with the sanctuary open," he said, comparing Pakistan to Cambodia, which served as an insurgent supply line during the Vietnam War. "You can't win if the people on the other team can run away to a safe area."

Although the CIA has conducted scores of drone missile strikes against targets in Pakistan with the tacit approval of the Pakistani military, those operations have been confined to the country's federally administered tribal areas that abut eastern Afghanistan. The Pakistani government has not been willing to allow any strikes in Baluchistan, the province directly across the border from Kandahar. Many senior Taliban leaders are believed to be living in and around Baluchistan's capital, Quetta.

As his tour progressed and he witnessed attacks by insurgents who trained across the border, Harris became convinced that U.S. policy toward Pakistan is fundamentally flawed. "We're not having the sort of frank discussion about the sanctuaries with them that we need to have. We need to make it clear that this is essential for us," he said. "There has to be at least a little stick to go along with the heavy diet of carrots that they're on."

His concern reflects a growing conviction among many other American civilians and military officers in Afghanistan about the need to take more forceful action in Baluchistan, including unilateral airstrikes and cross-border raids. The Obama administration has been unwilling to authorize such steps because of worries that the Pakistanis would cease cooperating on intelligence matters and block NATO supply convoys, potentially dealing a worse blow to the Afghan mission.

Change in Kandahar

Harris contends Kandahar is on the cusp of a profound transformation. The infusion of the new U.S. troops resulted in massive, hard-hitting operations to clear out insurgents from farming communities around the city this fall. Hundreds of fighters were killed, and many others fled to Pakistan.

Areas that were once no-go zones for Afghan policemen and American reconstruction workers are now clear for travel, and people driven from their homes by the Taliban are returning.

That has created a "window of opportunity" for the Afghan government, with the help of the Americans, to win over the population by providing them with public services and security, Harris said, making it more difficult for the insurgents to once again exercise control over the area. He said his team of political advisers kicked off the effort by building more representative councils of tribal elders in key districts around the city. But thus far, he argues, neither the Afghan government nor the U.S. Agency for International Development is doing enough to capitalize on the changes.

"They need to put skin on the table," he said of the central government in Kabul, which has failed to send more than a handful of civil servants to fill 145 vacancies in the province. But Kabul also has restricted the ability of Kandahar's governor and mayor to hire people locally and increase salaries as an inducement to work in a dangerous environment.

Equally deserving of blame, he contends, are American diplomats and reconstruction officials in Kabul, "who have spent billions of dollars but generated precious little capacity." Although the U.S. government has advisers in many key ministries, Harris believes they spend their time serving as eavesdroppers and minders instead of building the necessary human talent needed to run the country.

He bristles at the U.S. government's reluctance to give more money directly to the Afghans, which he believes would induce them to take more responsibility. He noted that the mayor of Kandahar offered to hire local workers to build roads for a quarter of what USAID was paying an international engineering firm, but the agency has been reluctant to provide funds directly to local officials because it is concerned about waste and corruption. "There's no way in the world that the Afghans could steal as much as we waste," he said.

Harris said he recognizes such comments "probably won't lead to another call to go work in Afghanistan," but all he wants is for "those shaping the policy to fix what's not working."

"We now have another opportunity like we had in 2001," he said. "We can't let it slip away again."