The Afghanistan Papers

by Craig Whitlock

  Faced with dissension in the ranks, the commander in chief tried to thread the needle. In a December 2009 speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Obama announced he would deploy 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. With all the forces he and Bush had already authorized, that meant McChrystal would have 100,000 U.S. troops under his command. In addition, NATO members and other allies agreed to increase their forces to 50,000.

  But Obama added a wrinkle. He imposed a strict timeline on the mission and said the extra troops would start to come home in eighteen months. The timetable stunned many senior leaders in the Pentagon and the State Department. They thought it was a serious strategic error to commit to a withdrawal schedule in advance and make it public. The Taliban just had to lie low until the U.S. and NATO surge forces left.

  “The timeline was just sprung on us,” Petraeus said in a Lessons Learned interview. “Two days before the president made the speech, on a Sunday, we all got called and were told to be in the Oval Office that night for the president to lay out what he would announce two evenings later. And he laid it out, there it is.” Petraeus added, “None of us had heard that before.”

  “And we were then asked, are you all okay with that? He went around the room and everyone said yes. And it was take it or leave it.”

  Barnett Rubin, the Afghanistan expert working for Holbrooke, didn’t see eye-to-eye with the generals on much. But like Petraeus, he said he was “stupefied” when he heard Obama reveal his timeline during the West Point speech. Rubin understood that Obama wanted to put the Afghan government and the Pentagon on notice that the United States wouldn’t fight the war forever. “But there was a mismatch between deadline and strategy,” Rubin said in a Lessons Learned interview. “With that deadline, you can’t use that strategy.”

  Instead of resolving the inherent contradictions, Obama administration officials set aside their qualms and presented a unified front in public. They promised the United States would not get bogged down in Afghanistan. Some pledged outright victory.

  “The next eighteen months will likely be decisive and ultimately enable success,” McChrystal testified at a Senate hearing in December 2009. “In fact, we are going to win. We and the Afghan government are going to win.”

  But doubts persisted among the troops on the front lines.

  Maj. Jeremy Smith, the Army quartermaster whose unit installed the first showerheads at Bagram Air Base shortly after the war began, returned in February 2010 for a year-long tour of duty. He barely recognized Bagram, which had transformed into a medium-sized city, though it emitted the same “unique” smell. “I can’t describe the smell other than you’d know it if you were there,” he said in an Army oral-history interview.

  But Smith saw no strategic accomplishments after nearly a decade of war. “Been there, done that,” he said he thought to himself. “I was there at the beginning. I’m here now. Wow. This whole situation should be a lot further along on the road than it is.”

  Maj. Jason Liddell, an Army intelligence officer who served at Bagram from November 2009 until June 2010, said he and his soldiers followed orders and did their jobs without flinching. But he said neither he nor senior U.S. commanders could explain to anyone’s satisfaction why they were putting American lives at risk and what they were trying to achieve.

  “I have had the pleasure of working with a bunch of soldiers, great Americans, and the biggest questions these young soldiers ask: ‘Hey sir, why the hell are we doing this?’ ” Liddell said in an Army oral-history interview.

  “I have a difficult time answering this because I can give them the written answer, but when I go back and look at it myself and do a sanity check on it, it doesn’t always make sense,” he added. “If I can’t make sense of it as a leader after some ‘no kidding’ soul searching and doing some good logical critical thinking, then I have to question if our leaders are doing some logical critical thinking.”

  At first, Obama administration officials counseled patience and said it would take at least a year to determine whether the troop surge and McChrystal’s strategy were working. But after a few months, they couldn’t resist proclaiming success.

  “The evidence suggests that our shift in approach is beginning to produce results,” Michèle Flournoy, Obama’s under secretary of defense for policy, told the House Armed Services Committee in May 2010. She cited “signs of progress” with the Afghan security forces and said she was “cautiously optimistic.” The insurgency, she added, was “losing momentum.”

  “When do we declare victory?” asked Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), the committee chairman.

  “I believe we are achieving success,” Flournoy replied. “We are on the right road for the first time in a long time.”

  The upbeat declarations were premature. U.S. casualties soared and would soon reach a peak, with 496 U.S. troops dying in 2010—more than the previous two years combined.

  Meanwhile, a major offensive that spring by 15,000 U.S., NATO and Afghan troops to seize control of the city of Marja, a drug-smuggling hub in Helmand province, hit unexpectedly ferocious resistance from a much smaller force of Taliban fighters. McChrystal called the drawn-out campaign “a bleeding ulcer.” Plans to secure Kandahar province—the Taliban’s historical stronghold—ran into repeated delays.

  In June 2010, Flournoy returned to Congress to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. She acknowledged “challenges” in the war but remained steadfastly positive. “We believe we have been making gradual but important progress,” she said.

  Also testifying at the Senate hearing was Petraeus. The committee’s vice chairman, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), grilled the general about whether he concurred with Obama’s eighteen-month timetable for withdrawing troops. Petraeus started to answer, but suddenly slumped forward and collapsed head-first onto the witness table.

  “Oh my God,” McCain gasped.

  Petraeus passed out briefly but recovered after a few moments. He said he was just dehydrated and returned the next day to resume his testimony. But it seemed like a metaphor for how the war was really going.

  A week later, another general fell flat on his face.

  Rolling Stone magazine published a long profile of McChrystal titled “The Runaway General” and quoted the commander and his staff making a string of backbiting, catty remarks about Obama, Holbrooke and other senior administration officials. One anonymous McChrystal aide mocked Vice President Joseph Biden by referring to him as “Bite Me.” Obama fired McChrystal for insubordination, making him the second war commander in thirteen months to lose the job.

  The president replaced him with Petraeus. For the third time in two weeks, Petraeus stood before the Senate Armed Services Committee to answer questions about the war, this time for his confirmation hearing as the new commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

  Petraeus said he still believed they were making progress. But he sounded subdued as he acknowledged the recent setbacks. “It is a rollercoaster existence,” he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN “A Dark Pit of Endless Money”

  Barack Obama knew his December 1, 2009, speech about Afghanistan would be one of the most important of his presidency. After months of agonizing deliberations, he had decided to boost the number of U.S. troops in the war zone to 100,000, triple the number from when he took office. He needed a solemn backdrop to deliver his remarks and chose the Military Academy at West Point, the 207-year-old training ground for Army officers in upstate New York.

  After supper, about 4,000 cadets in their gray-wool uniforms filed into dimly lit Eisenhower Hall, the performing arts center on the west bank of the Hudson River, to hear what their commander in chief had in store for them. In his thirty-three-minute address, Obama announced the troop surge and tried to be frank without sounding hopeless.

  “Afghanistan is not lost, but for several years it has moved backwards,” he told the cadets. “I know that this decision asks even more of you—a military that, along with your families, has
already borne the heaviest of all burdens.”

  At the same time, Obama had another message for a different audience: the tens of millions of Americans who were watching his speech live on national television. Economically frail, the United States was recovering from its most brutal recession since the 1930s. The unemployment rate had peaked that fall at 10 percent. Obama was expanding the war, but he tried to reassure the public that he was mindful of the cost.

  “We can’t simply afford to ignore the price of these wars,” he said, noting that the Bush administration had spent $1 trillion in Iraq and Afghanistan. “The American people are understandably focused on rebuilding our economy and putting people to work here at home.”

  Obama said he opposed a drawn-out “nation-building project” in Afghanistan and promised to cap the gusher of war spending as soon as possible. “The days of providing a blank check are over,” he declared. “Our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended, because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.”

  But the United States would keep signing one blank check after another.

  The cornerstone of the Obama administration’s counterinsurgency strategy was to strengthen the Afghan government and economy. Obama and his generals hoped the Afghan people would choke off popular support for the Taliban if they believed Hamid Karzai’s government could protect them and deliver basic services.

  Yet there were two big hurdles. First, eighteen months was not much time for the counterinsurgency strategy to succeed. Second, the Afghan government still had no presence in much of the country. As a result, the Obama administration and Congress ordered the military, the State Department, USAID and their contractors to bolster and expand the reach of the Afghan government as quickly as possible. Troops and aid workers constructed schools, hospitals, roads, soccer fields—anything that might win loyalty from the populace, with little concern for expense.

  Spending in the destitute country skyrocketed to unimaginable heights. In two years, annual U.S. reconstruction aid to Afghanistan nearly tripled, from $6 billion in 2008 to $17 billion in 2010. At that point, the U.S. government was pumping roughly as much money into Afghanistan as the undeveloped country’s economy produced on its own.

  In retrospect, aid workers and military officials said it was a colossal misjudgment. In its rush to spend, the U.S. government drenched Afghanistan with far more money than it could absorb.

  “During the surge there were massive amounts of people and money going into Afghanistan,” David Marsden, a former USAID official, said in a Lessons Learned interview. “It’s like pouring a lot of water into a funnel; if you pour it too fast, the water overflows the funnel onto the ground. We were flooding the ground.”

  U.S. officials wasted huge sums on projects that Afghans did not need or did not want. Much of the money ended up in the pockets of overpriced contractors or corrupt Afghan officials, while U.S.-financed schools, clinics and roads fell into disrepair due to poor construction or maintenance—if they were built at all.

  One unnamed USAID official estimated that 90 percent of what they spent was overkill. “We lost objectivity. We were given money, told to spend it and we did, without reason,” he said in a Lessons Learned interview.

  Another aid contractor said officials in Washington expected him to dole out roughly $3 million daily for projects in a single Afghan district roughly the size of a U.S. county. In a Lessons Learned interview, he recalled once asking a visiting congressman whether the lawmaker could responsibly spend that kind of money back home. “He said hell no. ‘Well, sir, that’s what you just obligated us to spend and I’m doing it for communities that live in mud huts with no windows.’ ”

  Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, who served in the White House as Obama’s war policy czar, said the United States lavished money on dams and highways just “to show we could spend it,” fully aware that the Afghans, among the poorest and least educated people in the world, could not maintain the massive projects once they were completed.

  “Once in a while, okay, we can overspend,” Lute said in a Lessons Learned interview. “We are a rich country and can pour money down a hole and it doesn’t bust the bank. But should we? Can’t we get a bit more rational about this?”

  He recalled attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony—complete with a giant scissors—for a fancy new district police headquarters that the United States built “in some God-forsaken province.” The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers oversaw the construction of the building, which featured a glass façade and an atrium. But it immediately became apparent that the Americans hadn’t bothered to ask the Afghans what they thought of the design.

  “The police chief couldn’t even open the door,” Lute said. “He had never seen a doorknob like this. To me, this encapsulates the whole experience in Afghanistan.”

  The U.S. government approved so many projects that it could not keep track of them all. Turnover among USAID staff and its contractors was so high that the people who drew up the plans rarely stuck around to see them through to completion. Follow-up inspections were sporadic, in part because civilian aid workers needed military escorts to move around the country.

  When it came to economics, the United States often treated Afghanistan like a theoretical case study instead of applying common sense. Government donors insisted that a large portion of aid be spent on education even though Afghanistan—a nation of subsistence farmers—had few jobs for graduates.

  “We were building schools next to empty schools, and it just didn’t make sense,” an unnamed adviser to a Special Forces team said in a Lessons Learned interview. He said local Afghans made clear “they didn’t really want schools. They said they wanted their kids out herding goats.”

  In some cases, U.S. agencies wasted money on phantom projects.

  In October 2009, Tim Graczewski, a lieutenant in the Navy Reserve, took leave from his full-time civilian job with Intuit, a Silicon Valley business-software firm, and deployed to Kandahar Air Field to oversee economic development projects in southern Afghanistan. One of his tasks was to hunt for a thirty-seven-acre project that appeared only on paper.

  Before his arrival, the U.S. government had signed about $8 million in contracts to build an industrial park for forty-eight businesses near Kandahar. But after reviewing the files, Graczewski could not figure out where the industrial park was, or if it even existed.

  “It blew my mind how much we didn’t know about the park in the first place when we embarked on this project,” he said in a Lessons Learned interview. “It was impossible to get info on it, even where it was located. It was that much of a blank spot. Nobody knew anything.” It took him a few months to finally pinpoint the property and arrange a visit. There were no buildings—only some empty streets and sewer pipes.

  “Don’t know who did it, but figured it was there, so let’s try to use it,” Graczewski recalled. Despite efforts to revive the project, it “fell apart” after he left in 2010. U.S. auditors visited the site four years later and found it largely deserted. A single company, an ice cream packing outfit, was open for business.

  The U.S. government had intended for the industrial park to benefit from an even more ambitious nation-building project—the electrification of Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-biggest city, and its surrounding areas.

  Because of a primitive electrical grid, Kandahar suffered from a scarcity of power. U.S. military commanders saw an opportunity. If they could generate a reliable flow of electricity, the theory went, grateful Kandaharis would support the Afghan government and turn against the Taliban.

  To do that, the U.S. military wanted to rebuild the aging hydroelectric power station at the Kajaki Dam, about 100 miles north of Kandahar. USAID had built the dam in the 1950s and installed turbines in the 1970s, but the power station crumbled from years of war and neglect.

  Since 2004, the U.S. government had been trying to jump-start the project and add capacity but had made little progress. The Taliban controlled the area sur
rounding the dam, as well as some transmission lines. Repair crews needed armed convoys or helicopters to access the site.

  Despite the risks, by 2010, U.S. generals were lobbying to invest hundreds of millions of additional dollars into the project, calling it a critical part of their counterinsurgency strategy. Some development experts argued that it made no sense to finance a giant construction project in enemy territory. They noted that the Afghans lacked the technical expertise to maintain it in the long run. They also questioned whether it would really help win the hearts and minds of Afghans accustomed to life without central power.

  “Why did we think providing electricity to communities in Kandahar, who had no concept of what to do with it, would convince them to abandon the Taliban?” a senior USAID official said in a Lessons Learned interview.

  In the end, the generals won the argument. Ryan Crocker, who had served briefly in Afghanistan at the start of the Bush administration, returned in 2011 to become the U.S. ambassador. He had deep misgivings about the dam project but approved a portion of it anyway. “I made the decision to go ahead with it, but I was sure it was never going to work,” Crocker said in a Lessons Learned interview. “The biggest lesson learned for me is, don’t do major infrastructure projects.”

  That was not a lesson the generals wanted to learn. In fact, the dam project was just the beginning.

  The turbines and power station at the dam would take years to fix. With the clock ticking on their counterinsurgency strategy, U.S. military commanders wanted to supply electricity to the Kandaharis right away. So they drew up a temporary plan to buy giant diesel-fueled generators that could start humming in a matter of months, not years. It was a horribly inefficient and costly way to generate electricity for an entire city. Expenses would run to $256 million over five years, mostly for fuel. Again, critics complained that the plan defied logic.