How the peace was lost: Taliban’s brutal insurgency in Kandahar and the world’s failure to stop it

Operation Medusa was one the largest sustained military actions fought in Afghanistan by western forces and the need for it illustrated how a violent insurgency was raging five years after the invasion by the US and Britain and the fall of the Taliban regime.  

The offensive in Kandahar in September 2006 was, at the time, the biggest operation ever carried out by Nato. A force of 2,000, under Canadian command, attacked around 1,500 Talibs with the focus on clearing the district of Panjwayi, an insurgent stronghold seen as the main obstacle to exerting Afghan government authority in the province.

At the end of the mission, which lasted for two weeks, the western and Afghan government death toll was 17, the Canadians lost 12. Fourteen British also died in the crash of a Nimrod aircraft in Kandahar province, but they were on a different mission to Medusa. Taliban losses were claimed to be 512 killed with 136 captured. General Sir David Richards, the British commander of Isaf (International Security Assistance Force) called it a “significant success” which “clearly showed the capability that Afghan, Nato and coalition forces have when they operate together”.

Western forces had begun to redeploy in the country in 2006, under Nato, as the security situation had deteriorated. American and British troops which were meant to establish stability five years earlier had been moved to Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and the Taliban had moved back into the vacuum from their bases in Pakistan.

I was covering the British deployment in next door Helmand at the time and, along with other journalists, went to Kandahar to report on parts of the Medusa operation. It was certainly much larger in scale than the fighting elsewhere, and unusual because the Taliban attempted to fight a relatively conventional, rather than a guerilla campaign.

But there was ferocious violence across swathes of southern Afghanistan, with no end in sight, and every sign of continuing escalation.

The situation had changed rapidly. Before the arrival of the UK task force in Helmand, colleagues and I had stayed at a guest house in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gar, shopped and drank chai in the bazaar: I accompanied the British commander running a small team, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Worsley, as he went to meet imams and elders in village shuras without body armour and helmets.

Accompanied by my Afghan driver and translator, I went by road from Lashkar Gar to Kandahar to write on International Women’s Day on the emancipation of Afghan women after the fall of the Taliban. Then we drove back to Kabul stopping to do other stories on the way.  

But ongoing strife set in. In Kandahar a young Canadian lieutenant attending a shura was attacked with an axe and suffered severe injuries. Talibs opened fire in a school in Lashkar Gar, killing a 17-year-old student, followed by the first suicide attack in Lashkar Gar. British, Canadian and Afghan forces began to come under repeated attacks.

In the summer of 2006 Gen Richards (now Lord Richards), sitting at his headquarters in Kabul, wrote in his diary for 3 July: “Every UK position except the main base came under fire last night, but because, mercifully, there were no casualties, it did not merit a mention in the press. The situation down there is serious and we need to bring it home to people.”

Brigadier Ed Butler, head of 16 Air Assault Brigade, had sent his troops off to challenge the Taliban in remote areas following pressure to do so from Whitehall after President Karzai’s complaint that the insurgents had been gaining ground in Helmand.  

There were never enough troops on the ground. I accompanied British forces who fought hard to capture an enemy position and then had to withdraw because it was simply not possible to keep it occupied; within a day, rocket and mortar fire resumed from that position. In Kajaki, we also came across poignant reminders of previous foreign adventures in Afghanistan in a trench: a book by Pushkin and a letter home from a Russian soldier.

The insurgency spread across the country, and dozens of countries sent troops to join Isaf, with the US the largest contributor in what became America’s longest war. The total forces strength reached 130,000: there was a “surge” in operations and major missions, under two commanders, General David Petraeus and General Stan McChrystal.

But attacks by the Taliban and the Haqqani Network, aided and abetted by their allies in the Pakistani military and the intelligence service, ISI, continued.

As well as bombings and large-scale shootings, there were targeted assassinations.  Of five women I wrote about in the supposed new dawn for equal rights, three were killed by the Taliban and a fourth, Zarghuna Kakar, an MP for Kandahar, fled her home after she and her family were attacked in a market. Her husband, Mohammed Nasir, was killed.

Violence later trailed off for a while in Kandahar. The credit for this was claimed by Ahmed Wali Karzai, also known as AWK, the shogun of the south, a controversial figure and the brother of the then president Hamid Karzai.  

AWK’s supporters, some of them in the US and British military, pointed out that they had kept the insurgents out of Kandahar by robust action.

The powerbroker was also, however, accused of widespread drug dealing.

I met AWK on one occasion at his home in Kandahar City, just after it had been attacked by a salvo of missiles. “They have tried to kill me nine times already, they have got to do a bit better than this," he said, waving his arm at the damage. Over lunch he complained, "The stories about me are very hurtful. I have been accused of so many things that I have begun to forget them. The only thing I have not been accused of so far is prostitution."

AWK, a football fan, watched English games and supported Chelsea. Major-General Nick Carter, then the British commander of Nato forces in the south, now General Sir Nick Carter, the head of the UK military, said: "He tells me he would far rather be watching Chelsea win the double than waste his time to settle disputes at his house in Kandahar."  

AWK’s request to me, as we parted, was for a shirt signed by John Terry, "a real leader, tough guy". I managed to get the shirt, thanks to a colleague in the sports department, and phoned to tell him so. But by the time I next visited Kandahar, he was dead, gunned down by one of his bodyguards.

While the US continued their support for the Afghan government, financially and militarily, there was increasing exasperation in Washington at corruption and mismanagement. A group of US senators, including Joe Bidden, walked out of an official dinner during a visit to Kabul after President Karzai maintained that claims of graft were exaggerated. On a later trip, as Barack Obamas’ vice president, Mr Biden shocked Afghan officials by banging a table admonishing Mr Karzai on the same issues.

Mr Biden had opposed the continuous sending of troop reinforcements to Afghanistan, to the exasperation of others in the administration. Robert Gates, who served as defence secretary under both George W Bush and Mr Obama, wrote in 2014 that the vice president “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades” and his stance on Afghanistan was another example of this.

President Biden has now ordered a review of what is now the key plank of US policy in Afghanistan, the peace deal with the Taliban signed in Doha by the Trump administration which will lead to American and international forces pulling out in four months. The White House stated there is a need to examine whether the Taliban were "living up to its commitments, including reducing violence and cutting ties with terrorists”.  

There is scant evidence of Taliban compliance. Attacks have continued on the security forces and the public. There have been sectarian assaults on the Shia community and other minorities, and murders of civic society leaders, women’s rights activists, election officials and increasingly on journalists.  

Some of the atrocities have been claimed by Isis and al-Qaeda who have both established branches in Afghanistan: but there is significant evidence of collusion between them and the Talibs.

Meanwhile, the Afghan government, under pressure from the Trump administration, has freed 5,000 senior Taliban and Haqqani Network prisoners including 400 described as “the most hardcore”. Among the released are those responsible for the truck bombing in 2017 in Kabul, near the German embassy, which slaughtered more than 150 people in the worst massacre in the last 20 years of the conflict.

It is unlikely that the new US president will authorise the ratcheting up of the war. His administration has asked Zalmay Khalilzad to stay on at his job as the head of the negotiating team with the Taliban.  

But the timescale for drawdown may be reviewed. Mr Biden had, in the past, called for a lighter military footprint with special operations forces, advanced surveillance and targeting technologies, particularly sophisticated drones.  

The Pentagon will concentrate on these plans, something which had become difficult in the turbulence of the Trump administration with constant changes in personnel, including defence secretaries, and a president seemingly at war with the senior military and intelligence officials.

There have been attempts to assuage Afghan concerns with Jake Sullivan, Mr Biden’s national security adviser, telling his Afghan counterpart, Hamdullah Mohib, that the examination of Taliban breaches to the agreement will not be airbrushed out for the sake of expediency.

In Kandhar, the killing of Ahmed Wali Karzai was followed by the rise of another strongman, General Abdul Raziq Achakzi. He too kept the insurgents in check through robust action, he too was accused of corruption, and he was also assassinated by a bodyguard, a Talib infiltrator. The Independent obtained a Taliban video of Raziq’s killer training for his mission, with praise for his dedication in seeking to eliminate a hated enemy.

During my last visit to Kandahar, at the end of 2019, I met Maulvi Manzoor, a senior Taliban leader, who had returned to Afghanistan after an assassination attempt in Pakistan in which he was shot six times.

Mr Manzoor had reconciled with Gen Raziq, a former enemy and recalled meeting him three days before his death. “I told him to avoid invitations to meet people at night and also to be careful of people they had got into the police and the army, I knew they were doing that”, he recalls.  

“I was really sorry about his death, I helped put his body into the ground at the funeral. We had fought against each other in the past, but he was doing the best for people of Kandahar and Afghanistan. This just shows how much we need peace.”

Mr Manzoor and his sons are armed as they travel around Kandahar and areas outside. “Maybe we won’t have to sometime in the future, I hope that is the case. I am tired of fighting and I want to see if I can work to change things through politics, and try to get into parliament,” he said.

But he then pauses and reflected: “We know that 1,800 officials and religious scholars were killed in Kandahar in the last 10 years. Afghanistan is not safe now, so perhaps we’ll have to keep carrying guns for a while longer.”