The Longest War

by Peter L. Bergen

  The sum result of the McChrystal presentation about how much a fullblown counterinsurgency campaign would cost was a reevaluation of whether such a strategy was really necessary anyway, something the Riedel review had not considered in any detail. “There was a general assessment that Riedel had done a bit of a rush job and, gosh, you know, we should have done this in the spring,” recalls one national security official advising Obama. Another political appointee says, “The idea of a nationwide nation-building effort seemed to be beyond our capacity, both in terms of the drain on military resources, economic resources, and then third—less important, but nonetheless real—political capital was included. Would we be able to sustain that?”

  Simultaneously, senior military officers came to realize that the Obama administration would not simply rubber-stamp their requests for large-scale ramp-ups in troops and resources that would then go on for more than four years. One national security official says, “There was a point where the Defense Department realized that there had been an election in November of’08. This is not the [era of] ‘Just tell us what you need; you’re going to get it.’ And there was a real ‘ah-ha’ moment that this was going to be a two-way street between what was requested and what was provided. And once that soaked in—and it wasn’t immediate, because remember who you’ve got around the table: you’ve got McChrystal, who got everything he ever wanted as the JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] commander; you’ve got Petraeus, who got everything he ever asked for—and they’re sort of saying, ‘Hey look, we don’t understand what the problem is: We’re the military. We’re all together on this. We’re telling you what this is going to take. We kind of expect you to deliver it.’”

  One official says, Obama’s national security advisor, James Jones, a former U.S. Army four-star general, was “the most effective intermediary because of his links back into the Pentagon. So he was able to go back to [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs] Mullen, for example, and Gates and Petraeus, and say ‘Look, you know, I’ve got all this, but it’s not in the cards, guys.’”

  The real costs of a full-scale counterinsurgency campaign in terms of blood and treasure prompted a narrowing of the focus of the American effort in Afghanistan. The key question became: Was it really necessary to “defeat” the Taliban? “Several folks argued, including Biden, that it was neither possible nor necessary to defeat the Taliban … They were going to be part of the fabric of Afghan society, whether we liked it or not,” recalls one White House official.

  Another official says, “The president led us to the conclusion that even the Riedel objective, which was intended to be circumscribed, and constrained and focused on al-Qaeda, was not. And there was this sort of ‘ah-ha’ moment that we had really bitten off more than we needed to chew and probably could chew, with regard to defeating the Taliban, and that was central. Now, once you got past that, all sorts of things open up. So now, reintegration, reconciliation, a political settlement of some sort, a counterinsurgency that’s limited in scale, and scope and duration—all those things start kicking in, because you no longer have to defeat them; you just have to degrade them to a point where they can’t take over Kandahar, and Kabul.”

  During these discussions, Obama, the former law professor, did not show his hand but rather asked focused questions throughout, synthesizing the debates at the end of each meeting by saying, “OK, here’s what I’ve taken out of this.”

  Outside the White House, the deliberative pace of the Afghan review was drawing fire. On October 22, former vice president Cheney charged in a speech that “the White House must stop dithering while America’s armed forces are in danger.” This was, of course, quite rich coming from the number-two official of the administration that had shortchanged Afghanistan for most of the eight years that it was in office.

  October was also the deadliest month of the war so far for American troops; fifty-nine had died. On October 29, Obama visited Dover Air Force Base in Delaware late at night with a small group of journalists to salute eighteen American servicemen and Drug Enforcement Administration officials who had recently been killed and whose bodies were coming home for burial. Obama’s visit to Dover signaled that the rising death toll in Afghanistan was going to play an important part in his calculations about what he planned to do there. On the forty-five-minute helicopter ride home to the White House, the normally affable president was silent.

  If one ghost hovering over the discussion of Afghanistan was that of Vietnam, another ghost was that of the Iraq “surge,” which had been opposed by many of the officials presiding over the Afghan review, including the president himself, the vice president, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Of course, the surge in Iraq had succeeded for a number of reasons, including the Sunni Awakening, but Obama, who had never publicly conceded that he had been wrong about the Iraq surge, ironically now used its success as an important way of informing his way forward in Afghanistan. A national security official recalls, “He admitted inside the Situation Room that ‘look, basically [the Iraq surge] worked. Now, we’re not going to settle, today, why it worked.’ … And there was the laughter around the table [and someone said] ‘OK, Mr. President, we’re just going to leave that where it is.’”

  On November 11, Obama examined what the military had named “Option 2A” for the deployment of new troops to Afghanistan. The 2A schedule would take a year and a half to get all the additional troops into place. Obama was annoyed when he saw the chart describing this option, saying, “I don’t know how we can describe this as a surge.”

  Obama jokingly quizzed General McChrystal about the leisurely pace of this new deployment, saying, “Wait a second, Stan. You know, I read your assessment in the Washington Post. I had my own version but I could have read it in the Post. And you paint a very urgent picture here. So OK, how does that urgent picture get addressed by deploying troops deliberately over eighteen months?” Obama turned to General Petraeus, telling him he was “looking for a surge” and peppering him with questions about how he had implemented the surge in Iraq: “How fast did we get them in? How many were there? How long? How long did they stay before we started thinning them out?”

  Obama was looking not only for a surge into Afghanistan but also for a deployment that pulled the soldiers of the surge out far faster than the 2013 pull-out envisaged by his senior military officers. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates came up with a compromise, saying, “We propose to surge troops for eighteen to twenty-four months and then we can begin to come down,” which translated into a withdrawal date for at least some of the surge troops in July 2011.

  While a target withdrawal date could send a message of lack of resolve to the Taliban, it also provided an important signal to both the American domestic audience and to the Afghan government that the large U.S. troop commitment would not run on for many years into the future. “Obama, at the end of the day, thought it was more important to light a fire for the Afghans as well as to demonstrate to our own people this was not an open-ended thing. That weighed more heavily than any risk in sending a message to the Taliban, that it could wait us out,” says a national security official.

  The July 2011 withdrawal date also papered over the real policy differences that continued to exist between senior officers in the Pentagon and top White House officials about what the ideal length of the Afghan deployment should be. Both sides could take from the July 2011 date that they had won the battle: for the Pentagon the important point about the timing of the withdrawal was that it would be “conditions based,” which meant that the drawdown could be relatively token if, as seemed likely, conditions in Afghanistan continued to be largely insecure, while White House officials could point to a date certain for a real withdrawal.

  During the course of the review an important signal of growing American impatience with his government had been sent to Karzai: that he had to abide by the electoral laws of his own country. When the votes in the August presidential election were finally tallied Karzai had only 49 percent, just
under the 50 percent he needed to be declared the outright winner, which meant that under the Afghan constitution he had to go to a runoff election with his main challenger, the former foreign minister Dr. Abdullah. Karzai refused to do this, which added to the aura of illegitimacy that now surrounded his government. As Holbrooke recalls, the stakes were quite high if Karzai refused to accept a constitutionally mandated runoff: “It would turn him from a legitimately elected leader to a man whose tenure in office was so tainted by the refusal to follow procedures he had sworn to uphold, that we would have had a constitutional political crisis which could have ended or destroyed our venture in Kabul.”

  Over several days in late October, Senator John Kerry, the head of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, met with Karzai in Kabul for twenty bruising hours of talks. Kerry recalls, “I think we were able to work through things in constructive ways so that he felt comfortable that I was helping to guarantee a structure for a second round [of elections] that wouldn’t be artificial; that wouldn’t be a trumped-up, ‘Remove Karzai’ initiative.” Finally Karzai acceded to the American pressure and agreed to the runoff, which in any event his challenger Dr. Abdullah had never had the votes to win. Recognizing that fact, Dr. Abdullah announced he was standing down on November 1, leaving Karzai the legitimate winner of the presidential election.

  Five days later, U.S. ambassador Karl Eikenberry filed the first of two stinging cables to his boss, Hillary Clinton, and the rest of the participants in the review. The first described Karzai as “not an adequate strategic partner” and raised serious questions about the abilities of the Afghan army and police to grow in size and efficacy. In his next cable, Eikenberry poured considerable cold water on McChrystal’s counterinsurgency plan, which he pointed out was not matched by a similar effort on the civilian side, and would cost a great deal, while it had scant chance of success if the Taliban continued to have a safe haven in Pakistan. Eikenberry’s cable came as a surprise to the military, especially to McChrystal and his staff, who typically met with Eikenberry three times a week. The broad outlines of Eikenberry’s dissents, of course, quickly leaked.

  Meetings of the Obama national security team continued through November, yet the participants remained unsure where the president would finally come down. In the penultimate meeting, on November 23, Hillary Clinton, a vocal opponent of the surge in Iraq, sided with the military and was the most forceful advocate in the room for a substantial troop increase. The final meeting took place on Sunday, November 29. Obama appears to have made his decision the day before. As dusk fell Obama gathered Gates, Mullen, Petraeus, Jones, and Rahm Emanuel in the Oval Office to tell them that his mind was made up: he would be sending 30,000 more troops, asking NATO for at least 5,000 more; a review of the strategy would take place in December 2010; and at least some of the troops would be coming home in July 2011. From there Obama went to the Situation Room, where he had a videoconference with General McChrystal and Ambassador Eikenberry, who would be responsible for implementing the new strategy.

  Why did the alternative offered by the Obama administration, committing large numbers of boots on the ground and significant sums of money to Afghanistan, have a better chance of success than the policies of Bush there? In part, because the Afghan people—the center of gravity in a counterinsurgency—were rooting for the Taliban to lose. BBC/ABC countrywide polling found that in 2009, 58 percent of Afghans named the Taliban—whom only 7 percent of Afghans viewed favorably—as the greatest threat to their nation. There was nothing quite like living under Taliban rule to convince one that their promises of creating a seventh-century utopia here on earth were fantasies. And the same poll found that an astonishing 63 percent of Afghans continued to have a favorable view of the U.S. military even eight years after the fall of the Taliban. (To those who say you just can’t trust polls in Afghanistan, it’s worth noting that the same organizations that commissioned polls in Afghanistan also did so in neighboring Pakistan, which was consistently found to be one of the most anti-American countries in the world.)

  By early 2010, 70 percent of Afghans said their country was going in the right direction. Considering Afghanistan’s rampant drug trade, pervasive corruption, and rising violence, this seemed counterintuitive—until you recalled that no country in the world had ever suffered Afghanistan’s combination of an invasion and occupation by a totalitarian regime followed by a civil war, with subsequent “government” by warlords and then the neo-medieval misrule of the Taliban. In other words, the bar was pretty low. No Afghan was expecting that the country would turn into, say, Belgium, but there was an expectation that Afghanistan could be returned to the somewhat secure condition it had enjoyed in the 1970s before the Soviet invasion, and that the country would be able to grow its way out of being simply a subsistence agricultural economy.

  There was one potential skunk at this garden party, and it was a rather large one: Afghanistan’s nuclear-armed, al-Qaeda-and Taliban-headquartering neighbor to the east. The Pakistani dimension of Obama’s “Af-Pak” strategy was his critics’ most reasonable objection to his plans for the region. It was difficult for the United States to have an effective strategy for Pakistan if Pakistan didn’t have an effective strategy for Pakistan.

  Pakistan had also long stirred the pot in Afghanistan by supporting elements of the Taliban, in particular the Haqqani Network, which was paid by the Pakistanis to conduct operations against Indian targets in Afghanistan, including the bombings of the Indian embassy in Kabul in 2008 and 2009. That was compounded by the fact that the so-called Afghan Taliban continued to be headquartered in Pakistan, particularly in and around the western city of Quetta.

  The most worrisome development in Pakistan as Obama assumed office was the gradual Talibanization of Swat, a northern region of lakes and mountains that had been one of the country’s premier tourist attractions. In February 2009 the provincial government did a deal with the Taliban leader in Swat, Maulana Fazlullah (in his previous life a ski-lift operator), which allowed his self-styled religious warriors to impose their version of sharia law on the region’s inhabitants. As they had with other “peace” deals, the Taliban took the agreement as an opportunity to expand into new territory, pushing this time into the neighboring Buner district just sixty miles from Islamabad.

  By 2009 there were some hopeful signs that the militants had shot themselves in the feet in Pakistan. Jihadist violence had grown exponentially, insurgent attacks had increased nearly 800 percent since 2005, and suicide attacks had increased twentyfold. Suicide bombers managed, for instance, to strike in three different places in Pakistan in just one twenty-four-hour period on April 4, 2009. There was no single “9/11 moment,” but the cumulative weight of the Taliban’s assassination of Benazir Bhutto; al-Qaeda’s bombing of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad in 2008; the widely circulated video images of the Taliban flogging a seventeen-year-old girl; and on October 10, 2009, the twenty-hour Taliban attack on Pakistan’s equivalent of the Pentagon, provoked revulsion and fear among the Pakistani public. Where once the Taliban had enjoyed something of a religious Robin Hood image among ordinary Pakistanis, they were now increasingly seen as just thugs.

  The Taliban’s decision to take up positions only sixty miles from Islamabad was the tipping point that finally galvanized the sclerotic Pakistani state to confront the fact that the jihadist monster it had helped to spawn was now trying to swallow its creator. When the Taliban had been largely confined to Pakistan’s tribal regions (which are known in Urdu as “foreign area”), the Pakistani government and military could more or less live with them, but as they marched on the capital, bombing police stations and military posts along the way, the Pakistani establishment began to see the Taliban as a real threat.

  After ordering more than a million residents out of the Swat Valley during the spring of 2009, the Pakistani military launched operations against the Taliban, which largely ended the reign of terror of the militants there. Then, after having suffered three defeats in
the tribal region of South Waziristan over the course of the previous five years, the Pakistani army went in there again in October 2009, this time with a force of at least thirty thousand troops, following several months of bombing of Taliban positions. These operations were done with the support of at least half of the Pakistani public, which did not view them as solely for the benefit of the United States, as previous military operations against the Taliban had generally been seen.

  Simultaneously, President Obama, far from curtailing the drone program he had inherited from President George W. Bush, dramatically increased the number of U.S. drone strikes into Pakistan’s tribal regions, targeting not only al-Qaeda but also the Taliban. There were fifty-one American drone strikes in Pakistan in 2009 alone under Obama, compared to forty-five in the entire eight years of the Bush administration. The leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, the mastermind of Benazir Bhutto’s December 2007 assassination and many of the suicide bombings in Afghanistan, was a frequent target of these drone attacks. But he still didn’t see it coming. On August 5, 2009, Mehsud, a diabetic former gym instructor, was receiving a leg massage on the roof of a house in South Waziristan when a drone slammed into his hideout, killing one of his wives and the terrorist chief himself.