The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat

by Vali Nasr

  Riedel met the president alone to brief him on his report’s findings. Holbrooke thought the president should have heard from more people. Absent a proper debate on the report’s findings and recommendations, thought Holbrooke, the president moved too quickly to deepen the war.

  In February 2009, Obama announced that he was sending 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan, buying enough time for the president and his advisers to determine their next steps. Soon after, he also asked his commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, to review the war strategy and outline what we needed to do to win.11 As General McChrystal prepared his review, the National Security Council (NSC) pulled together facts, figures, opinion, and analysis from across the government (mostly from the Pentagon, State Department, CIA, and U.S. Agency for International Development) in order to prepare the president to evaluate McChrystal’s recommendations. The goal was to place before President Obama a set of clear options from which he could choose.

  The Obama administration was facing a bedeviling two-headed problem. Even as the Taliban were regrouping and growing more formidable, our local partner, the Karzai government, was proving to be weak and ill suited for the task of democracy building.12 The shine had come off Hamid Karzai even before Obama took office. In the administration’s and Congress’s minds the smartly dressed, enlightened leader of a new Afghanistan had somewhere along the line been reduced to a venal, corrupt, and unreliable partner, and as such a chief reason why the Taliban were doing so well. Whatever the “new” Afghanistan was supposed to look like, in the real, existing Afghanistan, clans and extended families mattered. Karzai’s clan, unfortunately, looked a lot like the Sopranos. The president’s brother Ahmad Wali was actually the fixer in Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold. He worked notoriously with both the CIA and the Taliban and had his hand in every deal and all the political wrangling in that wayward city. Karzai also patronized an array of corrupt local grandees with ties to the drug trade. They bolstered his rule and he gave them the means to line their pockets while abusing the local population.13

  Aid workers, members of Congress, ordinary Afghans, and ordinary Americans alike were angry and frustrated, but the situation regarding corruption tended to be misunderstood. Yes, there was waste and graft, and millions were embezzled. But it was also true that Afghanistan was still a tribal society in which tribal leaders and local bigwigs saw it as their duty to take from the state resources for their community. Karzai felt the need to satisfy that demand to survive at the top. That sort of corruption is not alien to politics, and certainly not in Afghanistan.14

  Did Karzai’s corruption really matter to the ebb and flow of the insurgency? Yes, but not in the ways that we might think it does. There was never evidence that most who joined the Taliban did so in protest against the corruption of Karzai’s ministers. The problem was local. The corruption that really mattered, that angered the small peasant and drove him to pick up a gun and join the Taliban, was being shaken down by local police and government officials. We treated Karzai as if he was head of an independent sovereign government, but in reality his was no government at all. He was holed up in the capital, reliant even there on foreign protection for his physical security, and had a writ that could not run much of anything without U.S. help. Karzai was (as he remains) no more than a glorified “mayor of Kabul.”

  His government was poorly designed, too. On paper it was overcentralized—the central government controlled the purse strings and made every decision on education, health care, or development. Yet in practice it was absent from large parts of the country, and where it was present people did not welcome it but wished that it would go away.15 The economy was a shambles, too. Infrastructure remained inadequate and industry nonexistent, and agriculture barely dented endemic poverty in the countryside. The country’s economy was a sum of the drug trade plus the money that international aid and military operations sloshed around.16

  Afghans blamed the sorry state of the economy on Karzai’s failings and on America, his main backer. In growing numbers, they were lending the Taliban a hand to take back the country.17 The situation was particularly bad in the Pashtun heartland of southern Afghanistan, which had served as the Taliban’s power base in the 1990s. Southern Pashtuns felt excluded from Karzai’s government. They viewed the December 2001 Bonn Agreement—the result of an internationally sponsored conference to decide the shape of Afghanistan’s constitution and government—as having favored their enemies, the Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Hazaras of the Northern Alliance. They felt that Karzai, though a Pashtun of the Durrani tribe himself, had never done much to address their concerns. Feeling disenfranchised, many had thrown their lot in with the Taliban.

  The Obama administration’s initial reading of the crisis in Afghanistan was to blame it on the spectacular failure of the Karzai government, paired with wrongheaded military strategy, inadequate troop numbers for defeating an insurgency, and the Taliban’s ability to find a safe haven and military and material support in Pakistan. Of these, Karzai’s failings and the need to straighten out the military strategy dominated the discussion. Above all, the Afghan conflict was seen in the context of Iraq. The Taliban were seen as insurgents similar to the ones whom the United States had just helped defeat in Iraq. And what had defeated the insurgency in Iraq was a military strategy known as COIN.

  COIN, shorthand for counterinsurgency, was not new, and it had a checkered past. The British had adopted it while fighting rebellious Boers in South Africa at the dawn of the twentieth century, then used it again in Malaysia in the 1950s. The French had employed a version of it at around the same time with less success, in Algeria, and America had tried it, disastrously, in Vietnam. COIN strategy recognizes that a rebel group does not always organize into regular military units or hold on to territory. Insurgents avoid fixed positions and hide among the people, denying them to the adversary. An insurgency wins by controlling people. Its center of gravity is not a place on the map, but its support base among a sympathetic (or at least cowed) population.

  To defeat an insurgency, therefore, you must secure the populace. They must be shielded from insurgent violence and their trust gained. Only then will they stand against the insurgency and help with its defeat. The keys to COIN are small, socially and politically aware units; local cultural and linguistic knowledge; and good relations with civilians, whose loyalties are the real prize.

  In Iraq, American troops had fanned out into districts and villages, setting up small posts from which they could mount patrols, see to security and governance at the local level, and squeeze the insurgency out of villages, towns, and entire districts in restive Anbar Province.18 It worked. As more and more places were freed from insurgent control, community leaders asserted their authority and joined hands to form the so-called Sons of Iraq. They took over local politics and security, and, with American financial assistance, rebuilt the local economy. American troops protected these leaders, but eventually it fell to Iraq’s own American-trained security forces to provide that security and help local leaders finish off the insurgency.

  Success in Iraq crowned COIN as America’s military strategy of choice for winning “asymmetric” wars against terrorists, tribes, and what used to be called guerrilla fighters in failed, or failing, states. The relevance of Iraq to Afghanistan seemed self-evident. COIN had won Iraq; it was the right choice for Afghanistan.

  Still, COIN requires governance, and governance requires a government. The Afghan government did not have the means (or the will) to follow the marines into areas cleared of Taliban to provide governance, and thus COIN could go only so far and no more. President Karzai would prove singularly instrumental in dashing America’s hopes of anything good coming out of Afghanistan. But in early 2009, Washington was hopeful it could knock some sense into him. Failing that, Afghan presidential elections in the fall of 2009 might return a better partner.

  The strategy review proved torturously long. The president sat with his national security team through ten meetings�
�twenty-five hours—over the course of three months, hearing analysis and debating facts. There were many more meetings of those advisers and their staffs without the president present to dig further into the relevant issues, and go through stacks of folders, each one the size of a phone book, answering every question that came down from on high. At SRAP (the office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan), we managed the State Department’s contribution to the paper deluge. We worked long hours preparing memos and white papers, maps and tables, and then summaries for each. The Pentagon and CIA had their own stacks. In fact there was a healthy competition between the agencies over who did a better job of producing more.

  Early in the process, Holbrooke came back from a meeting at the White House, called us into his office to give us an update, and said, “You did a good job, the Secretary [Clinton] was pleased with her material but wants her folders to be as big as [those of Secretary of Defense Bob] Gates. She wants color maps, tables, and charts.” Clinton, continued Holbrooke, “did not want Gates to dominate the conversation by waving his colorful maps and charts in front of everybody. No one reads this stuff, but they all look at the maps and color charts.” Everyone in the office looked at him. “So who does read all this?” I asked him, pointing to a huge folder on his desk. “I’ll tell you who,” he said. “The president reads them. He reads every folder.”

  The amount of time spent on the process seemed absurd. Every time Holbrooke came back from the White House, he would say, “The president has more questions,” and warn us that we should be ready to go to work the minute formal instruction came from the White House. Frustration was written all over Holbrooke’s and Clinton’s faces as the process dragged on. The White House attributed this to Obama’s meticulous probing and the degree of thought and analysis that went into this historic decision. But increasing numbers of observers and participants began to worry that the delay was not serving America’s interest. President Obama was dithering. He was busybodying the national security apparatus by asking for more answers to the same set of questions, each time posed differently.

  Holbrooke thought that Obama was not deciding because he disliked the options before him, and that the NSC was failing the president by not giving him the right options. The job of the NSC, Holbrooke would say, is not to make policy for the president, but to give him choices. The NSC was not doing its job, and hence the president was not making his decision. The decision-making process was broken. To make his point, Holbrooke took to handing out copies of Clark Clifford’s description of how the NSC works from Clifford’s 1991 memoir (on which Holbrooke had collaborated), Counsel to the President.

  What Holbrooke omitted from his assessment was that Obama was failing to press the NSC to give him other options. As a result the process had come down to a slow dance in which the president pushed back against the options before him but neglected to demand new ones, and his national security staff kept putting the same options back in front of him.

  At the end of the day, President Obama had two distinct choices. The first was “fully resourced” COIN, which meant more troops and more money to reverse the Taliban’s gains and put in place the kind of local security and good government that would make it unlikely they would come back.19 It would be Iraq all over again. But the president was not sold. He did not think a long and expensive counterinsurgency campaign was the way to go, particularly as his domestic advisers were telling him that public support for the war was soft (and getting softer), and especially when the economic news at home was bad. So Obama kept kicking the tires on COIN and kept asking questions. The military’s answer every time was the same: Fully resourced COIN is the way to go.

  The night before General McChrystal was to release the report outlining what he needed to fight the war, Holbrooke gathered his team in his office. We asked him what he thought McChrystal would request. He said, “Watch! The military will give the president three choices. There will be a ‘high-risk’ option”—Holbrooke held his hand high in the air—“that is what they always call it, which will call for maybe very few troops. Low troops, high risk. Then there will be a ‘low-risk’ option”—Holbrooke lowered his hand—“which will ask for double the number they are actually looking for. In the middle will be what they want,” which was between 30,000 and 40,000 more troops. And that is exactly what happened, along with the “high-risk” and “low-risk” vocabulary.

  All along Vice President Biden had pushed for an altogether different approach. This was in effect option two. Biden noted that we had gone to Afghanistan to fight al-Qaeda, but that al-Qaeda was no longer in Afghanistan; it was in Pakistan. The CIA’s estimate was that there were as few as a hundred al-Qaeda operatives left in Afghanistan.20 Biden thought that over time there had been mission creep. Fighting terrorism (disrupting, dismantling, and destroying al-Qaeda and its affiliates, as the president defined the mission) had evolved into counterinsurgency and nation-building, and the Taliban had replaced al-Qaeda as the enemy we organized our strategic objectives against. We don’t need COIN, a functioning Afghan state, or the billions poured into rural development and local security, Biden argued, to allay America’s fear of al-Qaeda. In fact, for that we did not need Afghanistan at all. We could protect ourselves and advance our interests through a stepped-up counterterrorism effort—which was quickly dubbed “CT-Plus”—mostly directed at al-Qaeda’s sanctuary, the wild border region of Pakistan. We could use unmanned drones and Special Forces to check al-Qaeda activity from bases in Afghanistan, and achieve all the security we needed for a fraction of the money and manpower that COIN would require.

  Biden’s argument favored using the resources of the CIA over those of the Pentagon, and was seen at first as an outlier, too far-fetched in assuming you could win without boots on the ground. But Biden’s view had its sincere supporters in Congress and pragmatic ones among White House domestic advisers who thought the American public was tired of the war. Holbrooke, too, thought COIN was pointless, but was not sold on CT-Plus. He thought you could not have a regional strategy built on “secret war.” Drones are no substitute for a political settlement.

  There were other criticisms of COIN. In November 2009, America’s ambassador in Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, who had once led American forces in Afghanistan as a three-star army general, wrote in a cable titled “COIN Strategy: Civilian Concerns” that Afghans would have no incentive to take responsibility for government and security in their country if we kept putting more troops in. Karzai was not an “adequate strategic partner,” wrote the ambassador, and “continues to shun responsibility for a sovereign burden.”21 A troop surge would only perpetuate that problem. Holbrooke thought Eikenberry had it right.

  During the review, there was no discussion of diplomacy and a political settlement at all. A commitment to finding a political settlement to the war would have put diplomacy front and center and organized military and intelligence operations in Afghanistan to support it. Holbrooke wanted the president to consider this option, but the White House was not buying. The military wanted to stay in charge, and going against the military would make the president look weak.

  CT-Plus, too, looked risky—too much like “cut and run”—and there was no guarantee that CT-Plus could work without COIN.22 In Iraq, Special Forces had taken “kill and capture” missions to industrial scale, decimating the ranks of al-Qaeda and the insurgency, and yet this did not turn the tide of that war. Counterterrorism, unlike COIN, did not win territory or win hearts and minds of the local population; CT merely amplified the impact of COIN on Iraq.

  So President Obama chose the politically safe option that he did not like: he gave the military what they asked for. Months of White House hand-wringing ended up with the administration choosing the option that had been offered from day one: fully resourced COIN. But he added a deadline of July 2011 for the larger troop commitment to work; after that the surge would be rolled back. In effect, the president told both Karzai and the Taliban that our new strategy
was good for a year.

  Fully resourced COIN, however, failed to achieve its objective. There were ambitious pushes into Taliban territory, but gains were temporary. A much-ballyhooed counterinsurgency operation in the spring of 2010 failed to pacify Marjah.23 In mid-2010, six months after 30,000 troops were sent, an internal intelligence review presented the White House with a dire account of the security situation in Afghanistan. COIN was not bringing safety and security to Afghans as promised; more of them were dying.

  COIN’s success requires expensive nation-building. To win you have to provide good government and ample social services to wean the population away from the enemy. The Obama administration did much more in this area than its predecessor, but it was not enough. The State Department was put to work on civilian aid and assistance programs. Holbrooke the diplomat was turned into a development warrior, organizing development projects and deciding on budgets and personnel to support them. He was particularly keen on putting more agricultural workers on the ground, and became a veritable spokesman for Afghanistan’s pomegranate farmers. He would say that in a country where eight out of ten people depend on agriculture you are not going to get anywhere unless you revive the agricultural economy.

  Unfortunately, economic logic would not drive American development assistance. Aid was used to serve COIN. The harder American troops had to fight to win territory, the more money they poured into development projects in the neighborhood—and not all of it wisely. Only 1 percent of Afghans live in the Helmand province, but in 2010 nearly all COIN efforts (both troops and aid money) went to Helmand.24 Or consider that in 2011, although only 6 percent of all Afghans had electricity, the United States spent $1 billion to provide electricity to mere parts of Kandahar.25