Intel Wars Read Online Free PDF Page B

views as the increasingly pervasive influence of the United States in the conduct of his government’s affairs. Karzai makes no secret that he detests Vice President Joe Biden and the former U.S. ambassador in Kabul Karl W. Eikenberry. He takes as a personal affront the repeated efforts by the Obama administration to push him to be more aggressive in countering corruption inside his own government, and he has taken to resisting attempts by the U.S. embassy in Kabul to influence key government appointments. He complains constantly that the economic aid that he has been promised by the United States and European countries has never been delivered. Karzai is also convinced that the Pakistani government is actively seeking to overthrow his government.
    If you want to find the real war in Afghanistan, not the “feel good” version of the conflict that you usually see on the nightly news across America, drive thirty minutes southwest of Kabul on the nation’s only fully paved road, Highway 1, into Wardak Province. The moment you cross the line into Wardak, you leave behind the twenty-first century and enter a rough-and-tumble, inhospitable world that has not changed appreciably since the birth of Christ.
    Time has stood still in the 383 poor and isolated villages of Wardak for centuries. Village life continues to revolve around the qalah (pronounced kala) , the picturesque whitewashed compounds that have been the homes of the same families going back generations. The villages have none of the basic services that even the smallest and most impoverished town in America would take for granted: no town hall, police station, fire house, post office, hospital, school, stores, or telephones. Basic infrastructure is nonexistent. Absent are paved roads, running water, electricity, or even cars. The venerable donkey is still the preferred means of transport in the province.
    For years after the U.S. invasion, Wardak was a sleepy, peaceful provincial backwater, its 540,000 inhabitants largely untouched by the war raging to the south. The U.S. military’s public relations people in Kabul routinely directed reporters to Wardak if they wanted to see what a peaceful Afghan province looked like. Cut off from the rest of the world, the average Wardaki knew little about the war going on all around them. In their lifetime, average Afghan villagers rarely venture any farther than ten to twenty miles from the village where they were born. With no newspapers (80 percent of all Afghans cannot read), radio, or television, their knowledge of the world outside their village or valley is largely limited to what they hear on the local grapevine.
    But behind its peaceful façade, Wardak was seething with discontent, and nobody on the ISAF intelligence staff in Kabul seems to have noticed. In 2007, the Taliban infiltrated into Wardak from Pakistan some young field commanders and recruiters whose mission was to organize a guerrilla force from among the local Pashtun villages. Once the Taliban recruiters reached Wardak, they found the province ripe for recruiting. The local Pashtun tribesmen, who made up 70 percent of the province’s population, were angry. Since the U.S. invasion in 2001, they had been treated as second-class citizens by their own government and had been forsaken by the American military, who had promised both to protect them and lift them out of poverty but did neither. Their economic lot in life had deteriorated sharply because little reconstruction money had ever made it to their impoverished villages, and what money had gotten through was promptly stolen by venal local Afghan government officials and police commanders.
    So when the Taliban recruiters arrived, almost one thousand Pashtun tribesmen flocked to their banner. According to U.S. Army intelligence reports from this period, the fact that the Taliban were able to successfully recruit such a large number of fighters in Wardak in such a short time indicated that