Wide-eyed congressmen saw poppies growing everywhere: near homesteads, inside mud-walled compounds, even all around the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah, according to a classified diplomatic cable summarizing the visit. “Poppy fields were truly ubiquitous. Hundreds of large fields of poppy could be seen easily from the helicopters in varying stages of growth. Many fields were in full bloom,” the cable read.
Yet some senior U.S. diplomats said they understood the military’s reluctance to turn farmers and field hands into enemies. “I sympathize with the troops. If I was in my flak jacket and there was poppy—I would just say they were pretty flowers,” said Richard Boucher, who oversaw South Asia policy for the State Department from 2004 to 2008. “They were not there to start chopping flowers and then have someone start shooting at you.”
During Neumann’s stint as ambassador from 2005 to 2007, he and other officials in the U.S. embassy in Kabul tried to persuade visiting members of Congress that the United States needed to take a long-term approach. He thought it would take many years for the Afghans to transform their rural economy and find realistic alternatives to growing poppies.
In a Lessons Learned interview, Neumann said there was “desperate pressure for short-term results.” Ground eradication and aerial spraying were “driven by Congress wanting to see something tangible,” he added, even though it was clear there was no simple solution. “Washington did not understand that a successful counternarcotics effort was going to be a function of a massive rural development effort.”
By the end of 2006, it was clear Operation River Dance had accomplished little. That year, Afghanistan reaped a record opium harvest, with the number of acres under cultivation up by 59 percent, according to U.N. estimates. The next year proved even more bountiful, as cultivation increased by another 16 percent.
In 2007, the White House named a new U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan: William Wood, formerly the top U.S. diplomat in Colombia and a strong advocate of aerial spraying. Nicknamed “Chemical Bill,” Wood pressed Karzai to accept a major spraying campaign. But by then the Afghan leader had grown distrustful and doubted Washington’s assurances that the herbicides were safe. Even after receiving a personal appeal from Bush, Karzai said no. It was his final answer.
In January 2008, Richard Holbrooke, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, trashed the Bush administration’s war on opium in an opinion column in The Washington Post. He said the emphasis on eradication “may be the single most ineffective program in the history of American foreign policy”
“It’s not just a waste of money. It actually strengthens the Taliban and al-Qaeda,” Holbrooke wrote. He called for a reexamination of the U.S. government’s “disastrous drug policies” in Afghanistan.
He would soon get to try it his way.
PART FOUR OBAMA’S OVERREACH
2009–2010
CHAPTER TWELVE Doubling Down
Wearing his habitual poker face, Robert Gates strode purposefully into the Pentagon briefing room on May 11, 2009, for a hastily arranged news conference. In his left hand, he clutched a four-page statement, folded over so no one could peek. He sat down at a table next to Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to face about three dozen journalists who had no inkling why they had been summoned. Except for the clicking of cameras, the room fell silent.
The defense secretary, never one for small talk, got right down to business. He briefly addressed the news of the day: a U.S. Army sergeant had inexplicably gunned down five fellow service members at a health clinic in Iraq. Remaining somber, Gates began reading from his statement. After a careful review of operations in Afghanistan, he had concluded the U.S. military “can and must do better” and that the war required “new thinking and new approaches.”
Then he dropped the big news: Five days earlier, he had sacked Army Gen. David McKiernan, the commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. Though the Pentagon was notoriously prone to leaks, Gates had kept the bombshell under wraps. Even the reporters who had just traveled with Gates to Afghanistan the week before and met with McKiernan had no clue.
Two and a half years into his tenure at the Pentagon, Gates had earned a reputation as an unsentimental boss who held the brass accountable. But dismissing a war commander was another thing entirely. The last notable instance occurred in 1951 when President Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur for insubordination during the Korean War.
Yet Gates was better at safeguarding his secret than he was at explaining why he had taken such drastic action. He said McKiernan had refused no order, nor done anything wrong. “It was nothing specific,” he said, just “time for new leadership and fresh eyes.”
Admiral Mullen was equally cryptic. He said he was “very encouraged by the progress being made” in parts of Afghanistan, but nevertheless thought “it was time for a change.”
The press corps looked at Gates and Mullen skeptically. Barbara Starr, a hard-nosed CNN correspondent and a fixture inside the Pentagon’s corridors, prodded them for a fuller answer. “Is it just loss of confidence?” she asked. “I haven’t heard anything yet—I’m so sorry—about why you both think he couldn’t do the job.”
Gates repeated the line that it was just time for a change. He noted that President Barack Obama, the new commander in chief, had unveiled his “comprehensive strategy” for the war six weeks earlier and agreed to send 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan, bringing the U.S. total to about 60,000. Given all the changes, Gates said that he and Mullen wanted a new war commander: Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a Special Operations warrior who worked for Mullen on the Joint Staff.
On the surface, McKiernan’s abrupt removal made little sense. Gates and Mullen were the ones who had put him in the job eleven months earlier. McKiernan had been pleading for more troops and equipment ever since he landed in Afghanistan. Now, with reinforcements finally on the way, he was getting the ax.
But McKiernan had violated an unspoken rule. In the waning days of the Bush administration, he became the first general in Afghanistan to admit the war was going poorly. Unlike other commanding officers, he did not deceive the public with specious language. He told it straight until the end.
In what turned out to be his final press conference in Kabul on May 6, 2009, McKiernan described the war as “stalemated” in the south and “a very tough fight” in the east. Hours later, at a private dinner at military headquarters, Gates told him he was done.
Whether Gates or Mullen intended it or not, they had sent a message to the rest of the U.S. armed forces: They were cashiering the commanding general for telling the truth.
Days prior his firing, McKiernan confided to other officers in Afghanistan that his candid assessments and repeated requests for more troops had upset senior officials at the Pentagon. In a meeting with Army Brig. Gen. John Nicholson, the regional commander in Kandahar, McKiernan said: “We may have done too good of a job explaining how bad it is over here,” according to Maj. Fred Tanner, Nicholson’s military assistant.
In retrospect, McKiernan must have already known his fate, Tanner said in an Army oral-history interview. “He said it very professionally. He wasn’t angry. But now I can look back and reflect that he had just gotten the word.”
The change at the top made headlines. But it failed to solve the underlying problems. Instead, it led to more doubt and uncertainty about the erratic U.S. war strategy.
Obama won the election in 2008 after he promised to end the unpopular war in Iraq and pay more attention to the one in Afghanistan. Most Americans at the time still viewed the war in Afghanistan as a just cause because of 9/11.
After he took office, Obama retained Gates—a Republican—as defense secretary and put him in charge of what the president called a new “comprehensive strategy” for Afghanistan. Obama said he would emphasize more diplomacy with Pakistan, where Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders had found sanctuary and rejuvenated their networks. But the new strategy largely resembled the old one. Obama stuck wi
th Bush’s plan to contain the insurgency and strengthen the Afghan government until it could fend for itself.
In the field, U.S. troops continued to wrestle with many of the same basic questions that had gone unanswered since 2001. What were their specific goals, benchmarks and objectives? In other words, to what end were they fighting?
By 2009, many soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines had logged multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan. The war made less sense each time they went back. Years of hunting suspected terrorists had gotten them nowhere. The Taliban kept holding their ground.
“At the time, I was looking at Afghanistan and I was thinking that there has to be more to solving this problem than killing people, because that’s what we were doing and every time I went back security was worse,” Army Maj. Gen. Edward Reeder, Jr., a Special Operations commander who served six combat tours in Afghanistan, said in a Lessons Learned interview.
Maj. George Lachicotte, born in Caribou, Maine, first deployed to Afghanistan in 2004 as an infantry officer. Five years later, he returned as a team leader with the 7th Special Forces Group, serving under Reeder.
“It was a lot more convoluted. It was a lot harder to tell who was the enemy and who was not,” he said in an Army oral-history interview. “Even the guys who were the enemy one day, were not the next.”
Partway through his 2009 deployment, as the U.S. military moved troops to reinforce beleaguered NATO forces in southern Afghanistan, Lachicotte’s Special Forces team was suddenly reassigned from Helmand province to neighboring Kandahar without much explanation. “There wasn’t a clear strategy,” he said.
When Alabama native Joseph Claburn first deployed to the war zone in 2001, he was a young Army first lieutenant with the 101st Airborne Division. His unit fought in Operation Anaconda, the last major battle with al-Qaeda forces, in March 2002. By the time he returned to Afghanistan six years later, he had been promoted to major. As a brigade-level staff officer with British forces in Kandahar, he found it hard to visualize how, or when, the fighting might end.
“What does it look like when it comes time for us to leave?” Claburn asked in an Army oral-history interview. “If I was to give you a piece of paper right now and say, ‘In order for us to leave, this is what it has to look like,’ we could be there for an extremely long time.”
Obama’s new strategy lasted only a few months. As soon as McChrystal took over as the war commander in June 2009, he ordered yet another review of the war strategy—a clear signal that the conflict had deteriorated further and that he did not think the president’s plan would work.
The son of a two-star Army general, McChrystal had served previously in Afghanistan but made his mark in Iraq, where he led a Special Operations task force that hunted down and killed hundreds of insurgent leaders. He had grown close to Army Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq and the architect of the Pentagon’s counterinsurgency strategy in that country. Petraeus had since been promoted to head of U.S. Central Command, overseeing military operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan. He had recommended McChrystal for the war commander job in Afghanistan.
Both generals nourished public images as cerebral, multitasking, workaholic supermen.
The 56-year-old Petraeus held a doctorate from Princeton and liked to challenge reporters to push-up contests. He answered their questions if they could keep up during his daily five-mile runs.
The 54-year-old McChrystal portrayed himself as an ascetic taskmaster who absorbed audio books while running eight-mile circuits. He had no time for breakfast or lunch. “He pushes himself mercilessly, sleeping four or five hours a night, eating one meal a day,” The New York Times Magazine gushed in a profile.
Fresh off their experience in Iraq, McChrystal and Petraeus wanted to adopt a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. Other generals had tried a similar approach in Afghanistan since 2004, but with only a fraction of the troops that McChrystal and Petraeus thought were necessary.
Some Army officers with experience in Afghanistan thought McChrystal, Petraeus and their aides arrogantly assumed they could make their version of counterinsurgency work while ignoring the lessons learned by previous commanders. “It was disappointing to come back in 2009 and hear people, primarily drunk on their Iraq experience, talk about, ‘Now I’m going to fix things here in Afghanistan,’ ” Maj. John Popiak, an intelligence officer with the National Security Agency who deployed three times to Afghanistan between 2005 and 2010, said in an Army oral-history interview. “I personally believe there is sort of a misnomer that good counterinsurgency began somewhere around the time when General McChrystal arrived in Afghanistan.”
McChrystal finished his strategy review in August 2009. His classified sixty-six-page report called for a “properly resourced” counterinsurgency campaign. As part of that, he wanted as many as 60,000 more troops—almost double the number he already had. The new war commander also wanted a massive infusion of aid to build up the Afghan government and expand the size of its army and police force. At the same time, he pushed to restrict the U.S. military’s rules of engagement to limit civilian casualties in airstrikes and raids, a recurring problem that enraged many Afghans.
But McChrystal’s new strategy failed to address other basic flaws that undermined the effort in Afghanistan. In a jarring disconnect, the United States and its allies could not agree whether they were actually fighting a war in Afghanistan, engaged in a peacekeeping operation, leading a training mission, or doing something else. The distinctions were important because some NATO allies were only authorized to engage in combat in self-defense.
“There are big implications with calling this a war,” an unnamed senior NATO official who assisted with McChrystal’s review said in a Lessons Learned interview. “Legally under international law that has serious implications. So we checked with the legal team and they agree it’s not a war.” To paper over the problem, McChrystal added a line in his report that described the conflict as “not a war in the conventional sense.”
The official U.S. and NATO mission statement was even more convoluted. It said the objective was to “reduce the capability and will of the insurgency, support the growth in capacity and capability of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), and facilitate improvements in governance and socio-economic development, in order to provide a secure environment for sustainable stability that is observable to the population.”
McChrystal’s strategy glossed over another fundamental question: Who was the enemy?
The first draft of McChrystal’s report did not mention al-Qaeda because the group had all but disappeared from Afghanistan, according to the NATO official who helped with the review. “In 2009, the perception was that al-Qaeda was no longer a problem,” the NATO official said. “But the entire reason for being in Afghanistan was al-Qaeda. So then the second draft included them.”
Even Afghan leaders had a hard time following the logic behind the ever-changing U.S. war strategies.
“I’m confused,” Hamid Karzai told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during a 2009 meeting in Kabul. “I understand what we were supposed to be doing from ’01 to ’05. It was the war on terror. And then all of a sudden I started hearing people in your government saying that we didn’t need to kill bin Laden and Mullah Omar. And I didn’t know what that meant.”
McChrystal based his new counterinsurgency strategy on some questionable assumptions. It presumed that most Afghans saw the Taliban as oppressors and would side with the Afghan government if it could provide security and reliable public services.
But a substantial number of Afghans, especially in the Pashtun regions in the south and east, sympathized with the Taliban. Many joined the insurgency because they saw the Americans as infidel invaders and the Afghan government as a foreign puppet.
“Taliban presence was a symptom, but we rarely tried to understand what the disease was,” an unnamed USAID official said in a Lessons Learned interview. When U.S. and Afghan forces tried to tak
e over insurgent strongholds, they sometimes just made “the cancer worse because we didn’t know why the Taliban was there.”
In his strategic review, McChrystal also minimized Pakistan’s critical influence on the war. His report acknowledged the presence of the Taliban’s safe havens in Pakistan but concluded that the United States and NATO could win the war despite the protection and aid the Taliban received from the Pakistani intelligence services.
That judgment put McChrystal at loggerheads with other senior U.S. officials. Among them was Richard Holbrooke, the longtime diplomat who had trashed the Bush administration’s war on opium. After the election, Obama named Holbrooke as his special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Holbrooke had served as a civilian in Vietnam and saw parallels between that war and the one in Afghanistan. “The most important similarity is the fact that in both cases, the enemy had a safe sanctuary in a neighboring country,” he told NPR.
Pakistan aside, Holbrooke doubted McChrystal’s strategy would work. “He didn’t believe in [counterinsurgency], but he knew he would get in trouble if he said that,” Barnett Rubin, the Afghan expert who joined Holbrooke’s team at the State Department, said in a Lessons Learned interview.
The new U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan also held strong doubts about the merits of McChrystal’s plan. Karl Eikenberry, the Mandarin-speaking general, had retired from the Army in spring 2009 to become Obama’s top diplomat in Afghanistan. After serving two tours of duty in the war zone, he had grown pessimistic about what he thought the United States could achieve.
In November 2009, Eikenberry sent two classified cables urging the Obama administration to reject McChrystal’s counterinsurgency plan. In the cables, Eikenberry warned that “Pakistan will remain the single greatest source of Afghan instability so long as the border sanctuaries remain.” He also predicted that if Obama approved McChrystal’s request for tens of thousands of additional troops, it would only lead to more violence and “dig us in more deeply.”
The Afghanistan Papers Page 16
