The Longest War

by Peter L. Bergen

  America got what it paid for with this Afghanistan-on-the-cheap approach: as we have seen, after 2001 the Taliban reemerged, this time fused ideologically and tactically with al-Qaeda, and the new Taliban adopted wholesale al-Qaeda’s Iraq playbook of suicide attacks, IED operations, hostage beheadings, and an aggressive video-based information campaign.

  At the end of March 2009 the Pentagon was tasked to develop an operational plan to implement the fully resourced counterinsurgency campaign envisioned by the Riedel review, a task that fell to General David McKiernan. The commander of the land war in Iraq that had toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime in only three weeks in the spring of 2003, McKiernan was now the commander in Afghanistan. But his immediate bosses, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen, and CENTCOM commander General David Petraeus, had grown increasingly concerned that he was not up to the complex job of managing a successful counterinsurgency campaign. They decided to replace him with General Stanley McChrystal, a commander who had distinguished himself running Special Operations in Iraq and had presided over the hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda’s leader there. Petraeus remembers, “It was a very close-hold decision; it was basically three people.” Just as Gates had told General George Casey in Iraq two years earlier that he was being replaced early in his tour by Petraeus, so now the secretary of defense went to Kabul to tell McKiernan that his tour was over. Gates announced that McKiernan was retiring on May 11. This was widely portrayed as the first time that an American theater commander had been fired since President Truman had sacked General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War, but in truth Casey had also been relieved of his job, albeit in a far more graceful fashion than was the case with McKiernan.

  Removing McKiernan had important consequences because instead of an operational plan for the new counterinsurgency strategy going to the White House in June, the campaign plan would now be given to McChrystal to write, thus delaying its arrival until late August. “During those three months, the bottom fell out of the Democratic Party’s support for the war,” recalls Riedel.

  To write the assessment of the situation on the ground that would provide the basis for his campaign plan, McChrystal assembled a dozen outside civilian academics and think tank staffers to help him. Stephen Biddle, of the Council on Foreign Relations, who had worked with Petraeus in Iraq, was one of those summoned to Kabul on short notice in early June 2009 to work on the assessment, which had to be finished in two months. Biddle recalls McChrystal as being surprisingly open to dissent for a senior general: “It’s very unusual to have an officer who’s already been assigned this mission asking a dozen outsiders to tell him if his mission could be achieved or not. What would have happened if we’d said no?”

  Another of the civilian advisers recruited by McChrystal was former army captain Andrew Exum, a veteran of the Afghan War, who now worked at the Washington think tank Center for a New American Security, which served as something of a farm team for key members of Obama’s national security apparatus. Exum recalls that American intelligence about what was really going on in Afghanistan was quite poor. “I think what shocked me is that I first went there in 2002, and I don’t think we really knew that much more about Afghanistan in June of 2009 than we did back then.”

  The neoconservative military historian Fred Kagan, who had helped shape the debate in Washington about the “surge” in Iraq, was also tapped for the McChrystal assessment, as was his wife, Kimberly Kagan, similarly a military historian. They saw their mission as taking a hard look at the available intelligence on the Taliban’s capabilities and strategy. Kagan says, “The take in the theater was ‘They don’t have a plan—no terrain is more important than any other piece of terrain.’ And this is what drove us crazy. Because you’re describing a group such as has never existed. I’ve taught many, many cases of counterinsurgency, from the Boers to the American Revolutionaries.… I’ve never heard of a group that had no plan. So we spent a lot of time trying to figure out, what’s their plan? And one of the things that emerged from that was the importance, the centrality of Kandahar.” The Kagans also concluded that the Taliban were effectively the government in Kandahar province: “They’ve got provincial shadow governors, district shadow subgovernors for every district, they’ve got sharia courts.… We were going to wake up one day and discover that the Taliban controlled Kandahar.”

  That Kandahar was the key to the Taliban’s strategy was not surprising. The Taliban movement had first emerged in Kandahar in 1994, it was the traditional capital of the Pashtuns, and it was also the largest city in southern Afghanistan. Yet the main American effort in the summer of 2009 was in the neighboring province of Helmand, where ten thousand Marines had begun to be deployed in July. This was akin to trying to end World War II by attacking Austria but not Germany. In counterinsurgency doctrine “protecting the population” is the key to success, yet in Helmand there wasn’t much of a population to protect. In the southern half of Helmand lived less than 1 percent of the Afghan population. One senior U.S. official recalls, “So you’ve got car bombs going off in Kandahar, but Nawa and Garmsir districts of Southern Helmand have ten thousand fucking Marines in them.… We sent [them] to the place which was only very marginally important—very minimally important. So that was a huge fucking mistake.” That mistake had been grandfathered into the system because the two commanding generals in Afghanistan in 2008, Dan McNeill and later David McKiernan, had already signed off on the deployment of the Marines to Helmand.

  There was, however, some logic to that decision because while Helmand might not have been the strategic prize that Kandahar was for the Taliban, it certainly was their bank. If Helmand were a country, by 2009 it would have been the world’s leading producer of opium and its derivative, heroin. More than half the world’s heroin originated there—much of it destined for the veins of junkies living in Europe. And money from that drug trade helped support the Taliban, who used it to help fund their operations. According to a threat assessment by the Afghan army in April 2009, Helmand had the highest percentage of territory controlled by the Taliban of any of the country’s thirty-four provinces. Nearly 60 percent of Helmand in April was fully Taliban-controlled, and the remainder was classified as “high risk” for Taliban attacks.

  In early July 2009, some 4,500 U.S. Marines and hundreds of Afghan soldiers launched offensives against the Taliban in Helmand and, according to a senior U.S. Marine officer, three months later the Taliban were “on their ass, literally.” The officer claimed that of the thirteen districts in Helmand, only one was now fully controlled by the Taliban.

  During the summer of 2009, in Nawa district, in central Helmand, Marines living at Camp Jaker, a dusty, spartan base with no electricity or running water, ventured out on several-hour foot patrols. They moved through canal-fed cornfields armed with metal detectors and a bomb-sniffing dog looking to discover and disable IEDs. The IEDs ranged from simple victim-operated bombs, typically pressure-plate devices made from wood and springs, to more complex devices that were remotely detonated using a command wire. The corn rows standing ten feet high provided ideal cover in which the IED triggermen could hide. An astonishing 80 percent of the U.S. casualties in Helmand were caused by IEDs. Improvised explosives did for the Taliban what surface-to-air missiles once did for the Afghan mujahideen fighting the Soviets—somewhat equalizing the fight against a superpower.

  At the end of August, a few weeks after the Marines had deployed in force into Helmand, the McChrystal assessment arrived on Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s desk. The assessment made a number of key points—that the situation in Afghanistan was “serious,” that the Taliban, as the Kagans had described, were running a de facto government in southern Afghanistan with shadow governors, sharia courts, tax collectors, and even Taliban ombudsmen to handle the complaints of the population, and that their key objectives were the control of Kandahar and Khost provinces in southeastern Afghanistan. To reverse this McChrystal recommende
d a “comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign” to be achieved by protecting key population centers and main roads and doubling the size of the Afghan army and police. McChrystal also pointed out that “resources will not win the war, but under-resourcing could lose it.” Translation: We need significantly more troops or we will lose this war.

  Three weeks later, as is the Washington way, the closely held assessment landed on the front page of the Washington Post under the byline of Bob Woodward and the unambiguous headline “McChrystal: More Forces or ‘Mission Failure.’” The public airing of McChrystal’s dire assessment did not come at a propitious moment for the Obama administration. A month earlier, on August 20, Afghans had gone to the polls for the first time in five years to elect their new president. The election was marred not so much by predictable Taliban violence, but rather by low turnout and by multiple and credible allegations of serious election day fraud, in particular by supporters of the incumbent president, Hamid Karzai.

  The flawed election of Karzai and the pervasive corruption of his government raised serious questions connected to a key aspect of counterinsurgency doctrine: Was there a legitimate Afghan government for the United States to support? The day after the election, Richard Holbrooke met with Karzai and over a meal the American envoy asked, “Mr. President, supposing no one gets fifty percent in the first round?” Karzai became quite agitated, saying, “That’s not possible. I know how the people voted. I know that I got fifty-three, fifty-four percent.” Holbrooke replied, “OK, congratulations—but supposing you didn’t? You need a fair election according to your own procedures. If no one gets fifty percent, it calls for a runoff.”

  Karzai was not happy about this exchange and over the next weeks he continued to insist he had won the election, and denied the charges of fraud, but a panel of experts appointed by the United Nations issued findings in October showing that fraud was in fact so widespread that almost a quarter of all the votes had to be thrown out and as a result Karzai had not won the 50 percent of the vote he needed to be declared the winner.

  On September 13, 2009, President Obama convened the first meeting of his war cabinet to develop a strategy to stabilize Afghanistan and reverse the gains that the Taliban had made during the past several years. The meetings took place in the White House Situation Room, a basement conference room whose walls are lined with digital clocks showing the time in Baghdad and Kabul, one end of which is dominated by large flat-screen TVs connected to secure video links. It was in this same room eight years ago to the day that President Bush had first been briefed about the CIA plans to overthrow the Taliban.

  Obama’s Afghanistan review process is reconstructed here based on interviews with several of the participants. Unlike the earlier Riedel review, which was largely conducted at the subcabinet level, this review involved Obama’s top national security officials and his key political advisers in all of its phases. The first couple of sessions of the ten-week review focused on three foundational questions: the exact nature of the relationship between al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the relationship between events in Afghanistan and those in Pakistan, and what was actually achievable in Afghanistan. One senior administration official attending recalls, “A lot of the assumptions and premises that everyone brought to the table were kind of exploded like a piñata with a baseball bat.… A number of us thought that it was not at all a given that if the Taliban were to reemerge in a more significant way in Afghanistan, that al-Qaeda would necessarily follow.”

  In short, wouldn’t the Taliban change their tune if they returned to power in some form? Wouldn’t Mullah Omar and his allies become deterrable in the same way that leaders of most other states are deterrable—and realize it was in their interest to drop al-Qaeda? It was impossible to know for sure, but the last time the Taliban had controlled a state, they were not so interested in realpolitik; after September 11, the group made clear that it was prepared to lose everything (and it did) rather than betray bin Laden. And since then, the Taliban’s leadership had grown more closely aligned with al-Qaeda’s ideology and tactics—not less.

  Another key discussion at the White House centered on Pakistan. Vice President Biden often made the point, “We have al-Qaeda Central in Pakistan, nuclear weapons in Pakistan, the Afghan Taliban leadership’s in Pakistan, and yet our resourcing is thirty to one in favor of Afghanistan over Pakistan. Does that make strategic sense? Obviously, there are good reasons why it’s thirty to one. We have sixty-eight thousand troops there; they cost a lot of money. That’s fine, but do we need to think more over time whether sustaining that ratio makes sense.” (Biden, along with Republican Senator Richard Lugar, had long pushed for legislation that funneled American aid more directly to Pakistani civilian institutions rather than to the military, the recipient of the lion’s share of U.S. aid during the Bush administration.)

  But there were real limits about what the United States could do in Pakistan. Obviously the United States could not go to war with a country which hadn’t attacked America, possessed nuclear weapons and a half-million-man army, and was deeply opposed to any American boots on the ground. But just because the United States couldn’t send ground forces into Pakistan was not an argument for scaling back in Afghanistan. It was into the vacuum caused by Afghanistan’s civil war in the mid-1990s that militants with deep roots in Pakistan such as the leaders of the Taliban, many of whom were educated in Pakistani madrassas, and al-Qaeda itself, had expanded.

  On October 1, the day after the second Afghan review meeting, McChrystal gave a speech in London at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a leading think tank. During his speech and in the course of the Q&A with the audience, McChrystal made it clear that he believed that a policy in Afghanistan that focused largely on counterterrorism, the vice president’s preferred option, would lead to failure there, instead it required a full-blown counterinsurgency campaign. While this was in line with the conclusion of the Riedel review, McChrystal had by then already participated in two meetings with Obama’s war cabinet in which considerable skepticism had been voiced about the need for a large-scale counterinsurgency campaign. The uniformed military now seemed to be staking out a hard position publicly ahead of the conclusion of the formal Afghanistan review by Obama. (Nine months later, following the publication of an article in Rolling Stone in which McChrystal and his aides made disparaging remarks about Biden and other civilian leaders, he was forced to retire.)

  On October 7, during the third Afghan review meeting, McChrystal explained over his video link to the Situation Room that his counterinsurgency strategy depended on securing key infrastructure such as the Ring Road around Afghanistan and important cities such as Kandahar. A participant recalled that the reaction to this in the room was “Well, that all sounds kind of reasonable.”

  There was another White House meeting on October 9, in which the mood dramatically shifted after McChrystal presented what this counterinsurgency campaign would cost to execute. McChrystal explained the thinking that had gone into his “force options paper,” which presented three options for additional troop deployments to Afghanistan; on the low end he requested 11,000 soldiers who would act only as trainers for the Afghan army and police, in the midrange he asked for 40,000 additional soldiers, and at the high end an additional 80,000 troops. According to a senior military officer the low-end and high-end options were both seen by the Pentagon as “throwaways,” since not much could be done in Afghanistan with just a cadre of new trainers, while the 80,000 number was recognized to be a political impossibility.

  During the Situation Room meeting McChrystal advocated the middle 40,000 option and elaborated that “I’m actually looking for American troops here; I’m not really interested in allied troops. And in my estimate, we’ll know if this is working in 2013. And in the course of doing this, we need to build an Afghan national security force of 400,000. And the building of that ANSF will be about $10–12 billion a year for five years.”

  Since the beginning of 2009, 33,0
00 additional American troops had already poured into Afghanistan and now the military was asking for 40,000 more. This provoked a case of severe sticker shock in the Situation Room. One of the participants recalls: “In the course of’09, we doubled the number of American troops on the ground in Afghanistan. And at the very tail end of that, we got McChrystal, who said, ‘Oh, that was a down payment, OK’ … One comeback was—‘Wait a second, what happened to the 33,000 we sent you this year? Where are those fuckers?’”

  Another problem with McChrystal’s troop request was that he envisaged those additional 40,000 U.S. soldiers to be on the ground through 2013. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation showed that was going to cost $160 billion in addition to the $55 billion a year the Afghan operation was already consuming. The reaction around the Situation Room to this was quite negative, with a number of officials saying versions of “Given the other priorities of the administration, we’re not going to go to 100,000 Americans in Afghanistan all through this term and into the next term—all through the 2012 election season, no end in sight.”

  A White House official said a further problem with the McChrystal plan was the cost of doubling the size of the Afghan army and police—at a cost of up to $60 billion—something that America could ill afford at a time of economic crisis and that also conflicted with other Obama priorities such as extending health-care coverage. And, in any event, it was well known at the White House that the Afghan security services were quite weak. A 2008 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office had found that $10 billion had already been spent to develop the Afghan army, yet only two of its 105 units were fully capable of operating, and a further $6 billion had been spent on the Afghan police and none of its units were fully capable of operating. A White House official recalls, “There was a whole debate about whether it was necessary or even possible to double the size of the Afghan security forces.… The conclusion of our review was that no, that wasn’t necessary and it might not be possible.”