The Longest War

by Peter L. Bergen

  Between the rising Taliban insurgency, the epidemic of attacks by suicide bombers, and spiraling criminal activity fueled by the drug trade, by the time Obama took office Afghanistan looked something like Iraq in the summer of 2003, when the descent into violent conflict had begun. According to a threat assessment map provided by the Afghan National Security Forces to the United Nations in April 2009, 40 percent of Afghanistan was now either under direct Taliban control or a high-risk area for insurgent attacks. These high-risk and Taliban-controlled areas were located primarily in the troubled south and east of the country, along the fifteen-hundred-mile border with Pakistan. As a former senior Afghan cabinet member explained, “If international forces leave, the Taliban will take over in one hour.” A U.S. military slide of “security incidents” in Afghanistan, running the gamut from small-arms attacks to ambushes, showed that while there had been some 30 a week in 2004, that number had risen to 300 a week during the summer of 2008.

  By then the Taliban had largely re-created the command structure they had before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in fall 2001. The new structure was headed by the “inner shura” (inner council), an eighteen-member group led by Taliban leader Mullah Omar that arrived at decisions based on consensus, but “within Omar’s guidance.” Those decisions were then communicated to regional shuras of up to twenty members, then to provincial shuras and the Taliban’s shadow provincial governors. The Taliban had effectively created a parallel government, in competition with the Kabul government. Eleven of the thirty-four Afghan provinces had a Taliban shadow governor in 2005. By 2009 there were thirty-three.

  A couple of weeks before he was inaugurated, Obama had sent his running mate, Joe Biden, to Afghanistan to get a feel for the deteriorating situation. Biden was already quite skeptical about what could be achieved there. A year earlier, in late February 2008, then-Senator Biden sat down to a formal dinner with Afghan President Hamid Karzai at the presidential place in Kabul. The subject of corruption in Afghanistan, among the worst in the world, was discussed. According to one of the dinner guests, the discussion “was just going around and around in circles and Karzai not really acknowledging the corruption issue and just sort of saying, you know, we’re working on things.” Biden said, “Look, I think we’ve come to the point where we’re not getting much more out of this discussion,” threw down his napkin and declared, “This dinner is over.” And he and his delegation walked out of the dinner early.

  A year later, in early January 2009, Biden and his top aide, Antony J. “Tony” Blinken, visited Karzai again, this time as emissaries of Obama. On their return to the States, Biden briefed Obama at their transition headquarters in Washington. Blinken recalls, “The vice president said if there’s one thing I bring back to you, in terms of Afghanistan—and it’s obviously intimately related to Pakistan—it’s that if you ask ten of our people in Afghanistan what we’re trying to accomplish, what the mission is, you’ll get ten different answers. And we need strategic clarity on what we’re trying to accomplish. And the president said, ‘That’s exactly the first thing I want to come out of this review that I’ll order when we get in.’”

  Tapped to do that review was Bruce Riedel, a three-decade veteran of the CIA who had played a critical role in helping to formulate South Asia policy in the Clinton administration. In 1999, Clinton, advised by Riedel, had helped to pull Pakistan and India back from the brink of what could have turned into a nuclear war over the disputed territory of Kashmir. Riedel was now retired and had no desire to go back into government: “And they asked me if I wanted to be considered for various things, and I said, ‘No, I really don’t want to go back in.’ So I’m minding my own business on the thirtieth of January, and the phone rings. ‘Please hold for the president.’ And ten seconds later, ‘Hi, Bruce, it’s Barack.’”

  The president asked Riedel if he would chair the Afghan review, which, given Obama’s election campaign rhetoric about the importance of the war in Afghanistan, was the most predictable foreign policy challenge of his young presidency. Riedel remembers asking, “Can I talk to my wife?” The president replied, “Smart move.” “And I immediately knew I was cornered,” Riedel recalls. “But he came up with this idea of a sixty-day review. And there was logic to the sixty days; it wasn’t arbitrary. He had to be in Strasbourg on the third of April for the NATO Sixtieth Anniversary Summit, and he had to have an Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy by then.” Also driving the pace of the review was the upcoming Afghan presidential election scheduled for the summer of 2009, which necessitated the deployment of more troops to protect polling stations. At the same time the Taliban were also gaining momentum, which needed to be blunted if that election were to be held safely.

  Key members of Riedel’s team on the review included Holbrooke; General David Petraeus; Michèle Flournoy, the number-three official at the Pentagon and the highest ranking female ever at the Defense Department; Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, the Afghan “war czar” in the Bush administration who had been held over in that job; and Tony Blinken. Riedel recalls there was largely a consensus in the group: “People agreed on the threat: al-Qaeda; that al-Qaeda and the Taliban are closely linked; not a monolith, but closely linked, and unlikely to delink when they think they’re winning; delinkable if they think they’re losing, maybe, but not when they think they’re winning; that the war in Afghanistan is going very, very poorly.”

  But most of the participants in the review also believed that Afghanistan could be turned around because the marked deterioration in security was largely confined to the south and east of the country, home to most of the country’s Pashtun ethnic group, which makes up about half of the Afghan population. Riedel said that provided an important basis for hope: “Because not all Pashtuns are Taliban, either. So the population the Taliban can work with is probably less than a quarter, maybe less than a fifth of the population. Now, they can intimidate and terrorize more, but they’re not going to recruit from a broader audience.”

  This calculation had an important impact on the discussion of overall troop numbers in Afghanistan. Classic counterinsurgency doctrine indicated that to stabilize Afghanistan you needed a ratio of one member of the security forces to every twenty of the population, and that would dictate you needed some 600,000 soldiers and policemen given the Afghan population of 30 million. But an insurgency largely confined to the south and east of the country suggested a lower number of security forces could work. Petraeus, the leading American practitioner and theorist of counterinsurgency, made the point that the number of forces needed to stabilize Afghanistan was in fact closer to 300,000, a figure that seemed relatively doable given that at the time the Afghan army and police numbered some 150,000 men and the U.S./NATO contingent was already around 50,000 strong, supplemented by a force of around 12,000 additional American soldiers that Bush had ordered deployed there in the last months of his second term.

  Vice President Biden was a strong outlier from this consensus. Riedel recalls, “He had real doubts that Afghanistan can be stabilized; much gloomier appraisal of the prospects to stabilize Afghanistan. But second and I think much more important to the vice president, very gloomy about the prospects for sustaining domestic political support for the war, and especially Democrats’ political support for the war. And in that case, I think he read the tea leaves better than almost anyone else.”

  Biden favored an approach that emphasized the use of American drones and U.S. Special Forces to take on al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies and eschewed any large-scale ramp-up of U.S. troops and counterinsurgency efforts. Riedel recalls, “The killer argument against his approach, in political terms, is—Well, that’s what Bush and Cheney did. [The vice president was] much more a nay-sayer on this than someone who had a viable alternative. And that’s why, at the end of the day, the president was not swayed by that argument.”

  For Obama’s key political advisers—David Axelrod; his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel; and Biden—the ghost hovering over the discussion of any ramp
ing-up of the Afghan war effort was that of Lyndon Johnson, who had destroyed his presidency as he expanded the American involvement in Vietnam. Riedel recalls, “They are just very, very mindful that a Democratic president with big ideas for domestic change can see all of that destroyed in a war in Asia that destroys the party in the process.… Biden does not want to be the Hubert Humphrey. He doesn’t want to be the guy who went along with something which he profoundly disagreed with, but he went along with it because he was a loyal supporter of the president.”

  But was Afghanistan really likely to be a rerun of Vietnam? Hardly. The similarities between the Taliban and the Viet Cong ended with their mutual hostility toward the U.S. military. Although the Taliban had roughly quadrupled in size between 2006 and 2009, still the some twenty-five thousand Taliban full-time fighters were too few to hold even small Afghan towns, let alone mount a Tet-style offensive on Kabul. As a military force, they were armed lightly enough to constitute a significant tactical problem, not a strategic threat. By contrast, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army at the height of the Vietnam War numbered more than half a million men, were equipped with artillery and tanks, and were well supplied by both the Soviet Union and Mao’s China. And the scale of casualties in the two conflicts were orders of magnitude smaller. One hundred and fifty-four American soldiers died in 2008 in Afghanistan, the largest number since the fall of the Taliban. In 1968, the deadliest year of the Vietnam conflict, the same number of U.S. servicemen were dying every four days.

  One participant in the Riedel review recalls that early on in the process, “the military came in and said look, we really need to get more troops in now, kind of in a holding pattern because we’re losing ground and we need to make sure that we stop losing ground while we think about the longer-term strategy. And we need to secure the elections better than we can secure them with the forces we have in place now.” So Obama agreed to send in 21,000 more soldiers in addition to the some 12,000 that President Bush had already ordered in at the end of his administration but hadn’t yet arrived in-country. The net result was that there would be around 33,000 additional American forces going into Afghanistan in 2009 from January to the summer, so doubling the U.S. military presence there.

  While agreeing to the significant troop increases, Obama told his national security team, “I want to see the impact of that; I want to constantly assess where we are, and the critical assessment point will be the Afghan elections, because we’re doing some of this to secure the elections. Let’s see where we are then and let’s make sure that the strategy is appropriately on target.”

  On March 19, five weeks into the review, Riedel sat down with Obama on Air Force One on the long flight to California, where the president would later appear as a guest of Jay Leno’s on The Tonight Show. During the trip Obama asked Riedel, “Is it sustainable to really send more American troops. What assurance is there that that’s going to turn things around?” Riedel’s reply was blunt: “There’s no guarantee. This has a chance of success; the alternatives are worse. And I am firmly of the view that you should have a pretty good idea if it’s working in eighteen to twenty-four months.… It’s either going to work, or all those statistical indicators that are going bad, will just keep going bad. And if that happens, then the patient arrived on Mr. Obama’s doorstep, dead on arrival. And a brave attempt to resuscitate it hasn’t produced. But I think you’re better off having tried to see if you can revive the patient, than to just give up right now.’”

  On March 27, as the Riedel review debuted publicly, Obama announced that the goal of his campaign in South Asia was “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.” Few could quibble with that goal, but the Riedel review would set the stage for another eight months of wrangling about how best to achieve it. Recommendation number one of the Riedel review was a fully resourced counterinsurgency campaign in south and eastern Afghanistan, but the likely costs to implement such a campaign, in particular the sizable number of American boots on the ground needed to execute it, was poorly understood by key players in the administration, which was by now only two months old.

  As a result of the Riedel review, Obama announced he would aim to modestly improve the size and professionalism of Afghanistan’s police force, and nearly double the ranks of the Afghan army over the next two years. To help train those Afghan security services, Obama ordered to Afghanistan some four thousand trainers from the 82nd Airborne.

  President Obama had now made Afghanistan a defining element of his foreign policy, and just as Iraq became “Bush’s war,” so the conflict that now embroiled both Afghanistan and Pakistan was “Obama’s war.” This caused consternation among some in the Democratic Party. On May 14, 2009, fifty-one House Democrats voted against continued funding for the Afghan War. Around the same time, David Obey, the chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, which helps determine federal spending, said the White House had to show concrete results in Afghanistan within a year, implying that if it didn’t do so he would move to turn off the money spigot. It wasn’t just politicians who were souring on the Afghan War. A March 2009 USA Today poll found that 41 percent of Americans believed the war was a mistake, up from only 6 percent in 2002. American opposition to the Afghan War rose to 57 percent five months later. The media only added to the gloom and doom. Newsweek ran a cover story speculating that Afghanistan could be Obama’s Vietnam. And the New York Times ran prominent opinion pieces with headlines like “The ‘Good War’ Isn’t Worth Fighting” and “Fearing Another Quagmire in Afghanistan.”

  But the growing skepticism about Obama’s chances for success in Afghanistan were largely based on some deep misreadings of both the country’s history and the views of its people, which were often compounded by facile comparisons to the United States’ misadventures of past decades in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Afghanistan would not be Obama’s Vietnam, nor would it be his Iraq, although it could be his Afghanistan.

  Objections to Obama’s ramp-up in Afghanistan began with the observation that Afghanistan has long been the “graveyard of empires”: as went the disastrous British expedition there in 1842 and the Soviet invasion in 1979, so too the current American occupation was doomed to follow. In fact, any number of empire builders, from Alexander the Great to the Mogul emperor Babur in the sixteenth century to the British in the successful Second Afghan War three decades after their infamous defeat there, have won military victories in Afghanistan. The graveyard-of-empires metaphor belonged in the graveyard of clichés.

  More importantly, Afghans had generally embraced international forces after the fall of the Taliban. In a 2005 poll by BBC/ABC, eight out of ten Afghans expressed a favorable opinion of the United States and the same number supported foreign soldiers in their country. Contrast that with Iraq, where BBC/ABC also polled the same year and found that less than one in five Iraqis supported international forces in their country. While the same poll taken in Afghanistan in 2009 found, for the first time, that just under half of Afghans had a favorable view of the United States, that was still a higher approval rating than the United States received in any other Muslim-majority country save Lebanon. And a solid majority of Afghans continued to approve of the international forces in their country. What Afghans wanted was not for American and other foreign soldiers to leave, but rather to deliver on their promises of helping to midwife a more secure and prosperous country.

  A corollary to the argument that Afghanistan was unconquerable was the argument that it was ungovernable: that the country has never been a functioning nation-state, that its people, mired in a culture of violence not amenable to Western fixes, had no interest in helping to build a more open, peaceful society. Certainly endemic low-level warfare is embedded in Pashtun society, but the level of violence in Afghanistan was actually far lower than most Americans believed. In 2008 more than two thousand Afghan civilians had died at the hands of the Taliban or coalit
ion forces out of a population of 30 million—that was too many, but it was also less than a fourth as many as had died the year before in Iraq, which is both more sparsely populated and often assumed to be easier to govern. At the height of the violence in Iraq, some three thousand civilians were dying every month, making the country around twenty times more violent than Afghanistan was as Obama assumed control of the war.

  An assertion that deserved a similarly hard look was that nation building in Afghanistan was doomed because the country wasn’t a nation-state, but rather a jerry-rigged patchwork of competing tribal groupings. In fact, Afghanistan is a much older nation-state than, say, Italy or Germany, both of which were only unified in the late nineteenth century. Modern Afghanistan is considered to have emerged with the first Afghan empire under Ahmad Shah Durrani in 1747—it has been a nation for decades longer than the United States, and Afghans have an accordingly strong sense of nationhood. What they have had just as long, however, is a weak central state. The last king of Afghanistan, for instance, Zahir Shah, who reigned from 1933 to 1973, presided lightly over a country that Afghans recall with great nostalgia as a time of relative peace and prosperity.

  Skeptics of Obama’s Afghanistan policy said that the right approach to the country was either to reduce American commitments there or just get out entirely. The short explanation of why this wouldn’t work is that the United States had tried this already. Twice. In 1989, after the most successful covert program in the history of the CIA helped to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan, the George H. W. Bush administration closed the U.S. embassy in Kabul. The Clinton administration then effectively zeroed out aid to one of the poorest countries in the world. Out of the chaos of the Afghan civil war in the early 1990s emerged the Taliban, who then gave sanctuary to al-Qaeda. In 2001, the next Bush administration returned to topple the Taliban, but its ideological aversion to nation building ensured that Afghanistan was the least resourced per-capita reconstruction effort the U.S. has engaged in since World War II. An indication of how desultory those efforts were was the puny size of the Afghan army, which two years after the fall of the Taliban numbered only six thousand men.