by John McCain
The civil war in neighboring Syria began to engulf Iraq in 2012. In the summer of 2013, ISIS attacked Abu Ghraib and another prison, liberating five hundred jihadis. By January 2014, ISIS was in control of Fallujah, much of Ramadi, and most of Anbar Province. In June, they attacked an Iraqi army camp, and massacred 1,700 Shia soldiers. That same month, they overran Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. The Iraqi security forces, poorly led, fractured by sectarian politics, abandoned the defense of the city. The Kurdish military, the Peshmerga, offered to help take it back. Maliki declined the offer. Iran began supplying Shia militias with weapons and supplies, even aircraft, and Iranians assumed leadership roles in planned counterattacks. By August, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had sent Quds Force fighters to Iraq. ISIS conquered Sinjar in Nineveh Province, and massacred five thousand Yazidi men, enslaved Yazidi women, and forced fifty thousand Yazidis to flee to nearby mountains. President Obama gave a live address on August 7, announcing that he had ordered U.S. air strikes against ISIS positions in Sinjar and around Irbil to protect the Kurds. He had dispatched eight hundred soldiers to Iraq the month before. General Austin took command of all U.S. efforts against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. The U.S. was soon coordinating air strikes with Iraqi army offensives. By December, American soldiers were fighting alongside Iraqi units to repel an ISIS attack on a base where U.S. advisors were stationed. The U.S. appealed to its allies to send warplanes to help dislodge ISIS, and nine countries did. By the end of September, U.S. Navy and Air Force planes had flown a few hundred sorties in Iraq and Syria. In December, a Kurdish offensive in Sinjar with close U.S. air support stemmed the tide of ISIS’s advance, and began to push them back. Another inconclusive election left Maliki in power for another several months, but from within and without Iraq, including the U.S., pressure mounted on him to relinquish power. In September 2014, a new prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, took office. In March 2015, the long campaign to retake Mosul began, spearheaded by Kurdish forces and U.S. and allied airpower.
The war against ISIS in Iraq was a long, hard slog, and for a time the administration was as guilty of hyping progress as the most imaginative briefers at the old “Five O’Clock Follies” in Saigon had been. In May 2015, an ISIS assault on Ramadi and a sandstorm that grounded U.S. planes sent Iraqi forces and U.S. Special Forces embedded with them fleeing the city. Thanks to growing hostility between the Iraqi government and Iranian-supported militias in the battle, the city wouldn’t be taken until the end of the year.
Before it was over we had sent well over five thousand military personnel back to Iraq, including Special Forces operators embedded as advisors with Iraqi and Kurdish units. A Navy SEAL, a native Arizonan whom I had known when he was a boy, was killed in northern Iraq. His name was Charles Keating IV, the grandson of my old benefactor, with whom I had been implicated all those years ago in the scandal his name had branded. He was by all accounts a brave and fine man, and I mourned his loss. Special Forces operators were on the front lines when the liberation of Mosul began in October 2016. At immense cost, Mosul was mostly cleared of ISIS fighters by the end of July 2017, though sporadic fighting continued for months. The city was in ruins, and the traumatized civilian population was desolate. By December ISIS had been defeated everywhere in Iraq.
I believe that had U.S. forces retained a modest but effective presence in Iraq after 2011 many of these tragic events might have been avoided or mitigated. Would ISIS nihilists unleashed in the fury and slaughter of the Syrian civil war have extended their dystopian caliphate to Iraq had ten thousand or more Americans been in country? Probably, but with American advisors and airpower already on the scene and embedded with Iraqi security forces, I think their advance would have been blunted before they had seized so much territory and subjected millions to the nightmare of ISIS rule. Would Maliki have concentrated so much power and alienated Sunnis so badly that the insurgency would catch fire again? Would Iran’s influence have been as detrimental as it was? Would Iraqis have collaborated to prevent a full-scale civil war from erupting? No one can answer for certain. But I believe that our presence there would have had positive effects. All we can say for certain is that Iraq still has a difficult road to walk, but another opportunity to progress toward that hopeful vision of a democratic, independent nation that’s learned to accommodate its sectarian differences, which generations of Iraqis have suffered without and hundreds of thousands of Americans risked everything for.
• • •
I had made more trips to Afghanistan than I had made to Iraq these last seven years. I spent Christmas there in 2014, and managed another holiday meal with Jimmy, who had deployed to another combat zone, this time as a corporal in the Army National Guard. With Afghanistan, too, I had a profound difference with the President’s decisions. He had campaigned on disengaging in Iraq, and though I thought his decision to get out was a disaster, I have to acknowledge that at least it was consistent with his campaign pledge. He had also promised to get Afghanistan right, and I welcomed his decision in February 2009 to surge seventeen thousand desperately needed troops to Afghanistan to confront a resurgent Taliban and al-Qaeda that required, in his words, “urgent attention and swift action.” He ordered another four thousand troops there the next month after completing an Afghanistan policy review, along with a surge of civilian aid workers for what was clearly a counterinsurgency strategy rather than one focused more narrowly on counterterrorism. I welcomed that as well.
And I was enthusiastic about his subsequent choice to command the effort. General Stanley McChrystal was a brilliant and inspiring officer, who had commanded the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a strong advocate of a counterinsurgency plan for Afghanistan, and an ideal choice to command the allied effort there, blandly named the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). He assumed command in June and after a top-to-bottom review of our war policy reported to Defense Secretary Gates and to President Obama that “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the next . . . [twelve months] . . . risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.” To run an effective counterinsurgency, he needed more troops. Forty thousand was his preference but the minimum he needed was thirty thousand. Either figure was more than the White House wanted to hear. He had been instructed not to present a plan for destroying the Taliban but for degrading them. The report leaked. Purportedly, an angry Obama felt he had been boxed in by McChrystal and by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mike Mullen, into making a bigger investment in Afghanistan than he wanted to. But, in truth, there were not many senior officers who would have advised any other policy. If you’re going to commit American lives to a conflict, you must give them a mission they can win and the support they need to do it.
The situation in Afghanistan was indeed dire, the cost of mistakes by the previous administration and commanders. I had a general idea what McChrystal would report, but I was anxious for it to reach the President’s desk and for the President to make a decision. Lindsey, Joe, and I bylined an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that September arguing that “only a decisive force can prevail.” The three of us had last been in Afghanistan the month before when we could see the changes made since our visit nine months earlier when we had been alarmed by the direction of the war and the strategy then employed there.
“Our mistakes are infuriating, but they are also reversible,” we continued. “A significant shift in our strategic leadership and focus has taken place.” But we would need a further significant increase in the force level there and warned against deciding on a number that would represent a middle path between the force level needed to win and no further increases. That was the kind of split-the-difference thinking that had sunk us in a quagmire in Iraq before the 2007 surge decision. We urged the President to do the hard thing and assured him of our support in “the tough months ahead.”
The President chose the lower number McChrystal had presented, and announced the decision in a spe
ech to the cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He had ordered thirty thousand more troops to Afghanistan to “bring this war to a successful conclusion.” Then, to my intense disappointment, he set a nineteen-month deadline for beginning to withdraw our forces from Afghanistan. I issued a statement welcoming the surge of troops, and blasting the utterly arbitrary deadline for ending their mission.
What I do not support, and what concerns me greatly is the President’s decision to set an arbitrary date to begin withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan. A date for withdrawal sends exactly the wrong message to both our friends and our enemies—in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the entire region—all of whom currently doubt whether America is committed to winning this war. A withdrawal date only emboldens Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, while dispiriting our Afghan partners and making it less likely that they will risk their lives to take our side in this fight.
The President hadn’t been in office that long, and I don’t think he understood warfare at that point. All warfare, even a counterinsurgency, is ultimately about breaking an enemy’s will to fight. You won’t do that by telling the enemy, We’re going to send more troops to the fight, but we’ll bring them back in less than two years. You’re incentivizing him to wait it out. The way to shorten a war is to make clear to the enemy you’re going to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to defeat them. The Afghanistan war has lasted more than sixteen years. It seems paradoxical to suggest that we can only win by committing to stay indefinitely, but that is the reality. Obama was signaling to the enemy the limit of our resolve, and the enemy calculated they could endure it. Additionally, insisting on the lower number, lower than the one most of his generals were recommending, meant that we would have to fight the Taliban sequentially, surging troops to one part of Afghanistan and turning back the insurgency there, then deploying to another part of the country, leaving the area you had just cleared vulnerable to a resurgent enemy. I don’t think any President should ever accept his military commanders’ recommendations without challenge. But I kept hearing stories that White House skepticism was becoming dismissiveness. And I heard them again in 2011 when we started to draw down in Afghanistan and the military was warning that they were risking a disaster. The White House would phrase the question, What could you do with five thousand troops? Ten thousand? The right question is What do you need to succeed?, and challenge them on why. Even as a political decision it was dubious. Whatever criticism you got from opponents of the war for increasing the force level, it wouldn’t be appreciably more or less if you deployed forty thousand rather than thirty thousand.
The President relieved General McChrystal in June 2010 after some of his subordinates had criticized administration policies and personnel and claimed they were the general’s views to a reporter for Rolling Stone. I admired General McChrystal a great deal, and I believed his departure to be a serious setback for our efforts in Afghanistan. I was also not certain that the reporter’s story was entirely credible. But McChrystal hadn’t denied it, at least not publicly. And so, I released a statement criticizing his alleged comments as “inappropriate,” and signaled that I would support whatever decision the President made about his future. I also expected the loss of this intelligent and inspirational commander would be a setback for our efforts in Afghanistan, and I was much relieved when the President appointed General Petraeus to replace him. He would command ISAF until the President’s scheduled drawdown commenced in the summer of 2011, when another exceptional commander relieved him, Marine Corps General John Allen, a Naval Academy graduate and a blunt, honest leader who never evaded difficult questions about his mission and what he needed to achieve it. After the leaked McChrystal report, the administration never again asked military commanders to provide a number of troops they thought they needed to achieve their mission, but would ask them to respond to proposals they suggested, the what-could-you-do-with-X-number approach. I heard that Allen would answer something like, “I’ve been asked to respond to the following numbers, but before I do let me say that my best military advice is we need X number of troops here. Now I’ll respond to your homework assignment.” I also heard that General Joe Dunford, who succeeded Allen as commander of ISAF, while perhaps not as blunt as his predecessor, also chafed at White House micromanagement.
The President announced the beginning of the phased drawdown of U.S. forces in June 2011. The “tide of war is receding,” he declared, justifying his decision to withdraw ten thousand troops by the end of the year, and another 23,000 within a year, and continuing on “a steady pace” until all forces were out of the country in 2014. Sixty-five thousand American troops would remain after the first two drawdowns. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta declared in 2012 that the U.S. would cease combat operations in Afghanistan in 2014 but the administration was still considering the structure of the phased drawdown and how many trainers and Special Forces would stay to conduct counterterrorism operations after 2014. In his 2013 State of the Union address, the President announced that the number of troops in Afghanistan would be reduced to 34,000, after which military commanders would determine the pace of the rest of the drawdown. In May 2014, he announced all U.S. combat operations would end by December of that year. Fewer than ten thousand troops would remain in country, and they would be reduced by half by the end of the following year, and the rest of the force would be out of the country by the end of Obama’s term.
I knew these numbers were lower at every phase than the numbers military commanders believed were necessary. And I knew, too, that every date, every announcement, encouraged the Taliban to keep fighting, not to negotiate, but to keep pressing and wait us out. Before he left office, President Obama had decided to keep more than eight thousand troops in Afghanistan. The security situation had so deteriorated, and the Taliban had made so many gains, that the Trump administration wisely announced that henceforth, conditions on the ground would determine troop levels and has to date increased the force to fourteen thousand. I am glad that they did, although it is not clear to me what exactly our strategic plan is for Afghanistan. I am encouraged that Secretary Jim Mattis, with the President’s support, recognizes the folly of substituting arbitrary dates for an exit strategy, and I expect the Taliban see the overdue change in approach in how we make decisions about force strength as detrimental to their interests.
• • •
As I mentioned earlier, I traveled to Afghanistan frequently over the last seven years, more than once a year on average. I have a great many powerful memories from my visits there, some of them quite unusual. On a trip in 2011, Petraeus, who had really ramped up the village stabilization effort in Afghanistan as he had in Iraq, wanted Lindsey and me to visit one of the projects in the middle of nowhere in northeastern Afghanistan. We flew by helicopter. It was a very austere, ominous place, and you could sense the danger. A Special Forces major, Jim Gant, ran the show, and he was quite a character. He had gone full mujahedeen in his appearance, long beard, native attire, baggy pants, vest, headgear, the works. He had made friends with the village leaders and a lot of the locals, who appeared as amused by him as we were. He would provoke the Taliban on the radio and leaflet their areas, questioning their manhood, taunting them to come out and fight. Reportedly, he had a girlfriend, an American reporter who came to interview him one day, and never left, or something like that. He was quite an operator, and brave as hell.
Of all my memories of Afghanistan, I treasure most of all the many reenlistment ceremonies I’ve attended there. Some were big events in a Bagram hangar or in an ISAF headquarters courtyard. Others were smaller and more subdued affairs in a Forward Operating Base in some remote part of the country. They all meant so much more to me than they could have possibly meant to the soldiers there. I mean it. There they were, many of them after multiple combat deployments, aged beyond their years, having seen the worst and the best of humanity, having risked everything for our country and its causes, signing up to do it some more. My God, they are a blessing
to this nation, a living rebuke to cynicism and empty patriotism.
For many years, I often told the story of a friend of mine from prison, a man who epitomized to me the soldier’s strained and selfless valor. But I had mostly stopped recounting it after 2008 because I thought by that time there weren’t many Americans who hadn’t heard me tell it. I told it for the first time in a long time at a reenlistment ceremony in Jalalabad in 2012. There were hundreds of soldiers there. As I looked out on their tired faces, I couldn’t think what else to tell them, other than I’d seen such perseverance before and that it had inspired me forever after.
In 1971, the North Vietnamese moved us from conditions of isolation into large rooms with as many as thirty to forty men to a room. This was, as you can imagine, a wonderful change. One of the men moved into my cell was Mike Christian. Mike came from a small town and a poor family near Selma, Alabama. He didn’t wear a pair of shoes until he was thirteen years old. At seventeen, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He later earned a commission, and became a flying officer. He was shot down and captured in 1967. Mike had a keen and deep appreciation for the opportunities this country—and our military—provide for people who want to work and want to succeed.
