Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [365]
Though it was not clear at the time, the Samarra Golden Mosque bombing on February 22, 2006, touched off a new phase of the war. In the wake of the bombing, just ten weeks after the election of a national legislature, Shia militias and death squads, some loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, joined in the violence.26 The ranks of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi militia swelled with new recruits. Baghdad witnessed pitched battles, as sectarian militias savaged each other, with civilians often caught in the middle. Shia militias roamed the capital city with handguns and power drills exacting revenge for anyone suspected of cooperating with Sunnis. The death squads’ victims were often innocents who happened to have Sunni-sounding names. Many Sunnis, in turn, supported the attacks waged by al-Qaida. Iraqis fled mixed neighborhoods or risked becoming victimized by the militias.
The Golden Mosque bombing also jeopardized ongoing discussions over the seating of a new Iraqi government. It derailed Generals Abizaid and Casey’s plans to turn over more responsibility to the Iraqi Security Forces month by month and to reduce U.S. troop levels gradually. The situation was now too precarious to contemplate that shift. Casey recommended doubling the number of troops in Baghdad. If large swaths of neighborhoods in the capital city were engulfed in violence, there could be little progress elsewhere. It would be difficult for national politicians to reconcile and forge a countrywide consensus as long as sectarian militias rampaged within earshot of the seat of their national government. And the Western media, based in Baghdad, would focus on the violence in their immediate area and report that the situation in the country was in decline.
CHAPTER 47
Eyes on Afghanistan
On December 7, 2004, I had arrived in Kabul as a member of the U.S. delegation led by Vice President Cheney for President Karzai’s inauguration. The frigid Afghan air was no match for the warmth shared by millions that day as they celebrated their first democratically elected leader in the country’s long history. In a repudiation of the restrictive, repressive Taliban rule, Afghan women were given prominent roles in the ceremony. They were even allowed to sing again. Some choked back tears as they did so. A stirring sight that day was children flying kites—a practice that had been banned by the Taliban. It was a wonderful moment, filled with promise and potential, justifying what our forces had fought for.
Three months earlier, in the country’s first-ever free national election, Afghans had turned out at polling stations to vote for their nation’s president. There were reports that women in Bamiyan province awoke at 3:00 a.m. the day of voting. Because the Taliban had threatened to kill any women who cast ballots, they began their day with a ritual wash and cleansing as if they were preparing to die. In Konar province, the Taliban launched an attack on election day. Although it was one hundred yards from the polling place, the Afghan voters stayed in line. Not one person left.
I thought that the initial success could be attributed to the modesty of our goals. The strategy was based on the idea of letting Afghans solve Afghan problems, assisting them and amplifying their successes where we could—such as helping to build a national army and train a police force—and executing light footprint counterinsurgency operations to protect strategic towns from Taliban influence. There were fewer than fifteen thousand American troops in the country until 2004 and fewer than twenty-five thousand through 2006.1
Afghanistan experienced relatively few incidents of violence until the summer of 2005. Intelligence collected from around the country indicated that after the October 2004 elections, the successful vote had so demoralized the enemy that many Taliban were prepared to give up the fight. Aside from a few