President Bush replied, “Drawdown is the right thing. The announcement before the election is the problem.” The President had put his finger on the crux of the issue: If we signaled a drawdown before the December 2005 Iraqi elections, it might discourage people from coming out to vote for a new parliament. Ultimately, Bush decided to hold back one of the two brigades we were considering sending and to deploy the other only as far as Kuwait, to stand by in reserve in case violence in Iraq spiked during the election period.
On December 15, 2005, more than twelve million Iraqis voted for their national legislature, as provided for by the constitution the Iraqi people had ratified. The 70 percent turnout included many Sunnis. A quarter of those elected were female, as mandated by the new Iraqi constitution.
I had sent a memo to President Bush in November 2005 listing some signs of progress in Iraq. The Iraqi Security Forces were beginning to show signs of promise. The Iraqis had a new constitution they had written and approved, and were forming their own governmental institutions. There were tentative, early, and still modest efforts to bring Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds together. In the memo, I also called the President’s attention to some of the remaining difficulties: “bursts of violence, including assassinations and attempts to intimidate Iraqi leaders; Iran and Syria continue to be unhelpful, and US casualties.” I concluded that there was cause to be somewhat optimistic. “The central question is whether the U.S. will be safer by succeeding in Iraq or by precipitously withdrawing. The answer is clear. Quitting is not an exit strategy. Victory is the only acceptable exit strategy.”25
The Iraqis were moving forward toward a free, self-governed future. The majority of them showed they were willing to defy the insurgents. But the foreign fighters were not ready to give up. More terrorists continued to flow in from outside, most from Syria and Iran. They continued to stage bloody attacks and inflame sectarian tensions.
Though it was not clear at the time, the Samarra Golden Mosque bombing on February 22, 2006, touched off a new phase of the war. In the wake of the bombing, just ten weeks after the election of a national legislature, Shia militias and death squads, some loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, joined in the violence.26 The ranks of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi militia swelled with new recruits. Baghdad witnessed pitched battles, as sectarian militias savaged each other, with civilians often caught in the middle. Shia militias roamed the capital city with handguns and power drills exacting revenge for anyone suspected of cooperating with Sunnis. The death squads’ victims were often innocents who happened to have Sunni-sounding names. Many Sunnis, in turn, supported the attacks waged by al-Qaida. Iraqis fled mixed neighborhoods or risked becoming victimized by the militias.
The Golden Mosque bombing also jeopardized ongoing discussions over the seating of a new Iraqi government. It derailed Generals Abizaid and Casey’s plans to turn over more responsibility to the Iraqi Security Forces month by month and to reduce U.S. troop levels gradually. The situation was now too precarious to contemplate that shift. Casey recommended doubling the number of troops in Baghdad. If large swaths of neighborhoods in the capital city were engulfed in violence, there could be little progress elsewhere. It would be difficult for national politicians to reconcile and forge a countrywide consensus as long as sectarian militias rampaged within earshot of the seat of their national government. And the Western media, based in Baghdad, would focus on the violence in their immediate area and report that the situation in the country was in decline.
CHAPTER 47
Eyes on Afghanistan
On December 7, 2004, I had arrived in Kabul as a member of the U.S. delegation led by Vice President Cheney for President Karzai’s inauguration. The frigid Afghan air was no match for the warmth shared by millions that day as they celebrated their first democratically elected leader in the country’s long history. In a repudiation of the restrictive, repressive Taliban rule, Afghan women were given prominent roles in the ceremony. They were even allowed to sing again. Some choked back tears as they did so. A stirring sight that day was children flying kites—a practice that had been banned by the Taliban. It was a wonderful moment, filled with promise and potential, justifying what our forces had fought for.
Three months earlier, in the country’s first-ever free national election, Afghans had turned out at polling stations to vote for their nation’s president. There were reports that women in Bamiyan province awoke at 3:00 a.m. the day of voting. Because the Taliban had threatened to kill any women who cast ballots, they began their day with a ritual wash and cleansing as if they were preparing to die. In Konar province, the Taliban launched an attack on election day. Although it was one hundred yards from the polling place, the Afghan voters stayed in line. Not one person left.
I thought that the initial success could be attributed to the modesty of our goals. The strategy was based on the idea of letting Afghans solve Afghan problems, assisting them and amplifying their successes where we could—such as helping to build a national army and train a police force—and executing light footprint counterinsurgency operations to protect strategic towns from Taliban influence. There were fewer than fifteen thousand American troops in the country until 2004 and fewer than twenty-five thousand through 2006.1
Afghanistan experienced relatively few incidents of violence until the summer of 2005. Intelligence collected from around the country indicated that after the October 2004 elections, the successful vote had so demoralized the enemy that many Taliban were prepared to give up the fight. Aside from a few major engagements, such as Operation Anaconda in the spring of 2002, coalition troops skirmished with Taliban forces only occasionally. There was a visible Afghan government in place early and quickly, led by Hamid Karzai. He persuaded many former warlords to put down their arms and join his government in pursuit of an agenda of peace.2 Afghan technocrats, many of them Western educated, advised the nation’s leaders. We accelerated the buildup of the Afghan National Army (ANA) and the police force, knowing that ultimately they would need to be the ones securing their nation.3 We encouraged the Karzai government to consolidate and build its country’s institutions while recognizing that ultimately much of the state’s power would be wielded by tribal leaders and power brokers at the provincial and local levels, as it had been for centuries.4
My position was that we were not in Afghanistan to transform a deeply conservative Islamic culture into a model of liberal modernity. We were not there to eradicate corruption or to end poppy cultivation. We were not there to take ownership of Afghanistan’s problems, tempting though it was for many Americans of goodwill. Instead, Afghans would need to take charge of their own fate. Afghans would build their society the way they wanted. With our coalition allies we would assist them within reason where we were able.
Some political opponents of the administration claimed that the war in Iraq “distracted” the Bush administration from what was referred to as the “good” and “right” war in Afghanistan.5 Yet it was precisely during the toughest period in the Iraq war that Afghanistan, with coalition help, took some of its most promising steps toward a free and better future. In my visits to the country every few months, I felt a palpable energy and excitement. Women were beginning to claim their place in society: starting businesses, serving in the parliament, and once again receiving education and medical aid. Afghan presidential and parliamentary elections in October 2004 and September 2005 took place essentially without incident and were heralded as free and fair. A vibrant media—many dozens of radio and television stations and newspapers—was free to comment on and criticize the coalition presence and Afghanistan’s new leaders. By 2006, nearly four million Afghan refugees had returned to their homeland.6
An Afghan “face” on the effort was enormously beneficial. Though most of the participant nations had failed to deliver fully on reconstruction pledges made at the 2001 Bonn conference, members of the international community were finding it harder to ignore the pleas of a legitimate Afghan government they had earlier offered to support.
Levels of violence remained relatively low, in part because would-be insurgents seemed reluctant to challenge the popularly supported Afghan government. I did not think Afghanistan had suddenly shed centuries of ethnic strife and endemic corruption, but it did seem Afghans might be finding their way to managing their problems without our permanent assistance.
If some later contended that we never had a plan for full-fledged nation building or that we under-resourced such a plan, they were certainly correct. We did not go there to try to bring prosperity to every corner of Afghanistan. I believed—and continue to believe—that such a goal would have amounted to a fool’s errand. It struck me that sending U.S. servicemen and-women in pursuit of an effort to remake Afghanistan into a prosperous American-style nation-state or to try to bring our standard of security to each of that nation’s far-flung villages would be unwise, well beyond our capability, and unworthy of our troops’ sacrifice.
Our more modest goal was to rid Afghanistan of al-Qaida and replace their Taliban hosts with a government that would not harbor terrorists. We were willing to let Afghan traditions and processes determine the political outcomes. Our objectives reflected a healthy sense of the limitations of what we could achieve in a country suspicious of foreign influence.
I also did not see more U.S. troops as the solution to Afghanistan’s many challenges. “I am persuaded that the critical problem in Afghanistan is not really a security problem,” I wrote President Bush in August 2002. “Rather, the problem that needs to be addressed is the slow progress that is being made on the civil side.”7 Hamid Karzai’s government needed help building his country’s institutions so he could show the Afghan people that a life of freedom offered more prosperity and security than life under the Taliban. With the exception of Afghanistan’s national army, building these institutions required first and foremost assistance from the non-military departments and agencies of the U.S. government and the coalition countries.8 Sending more troops to the villages and valleys of Afghanistan would not resolve the country’s long-term problems. In fact, they could exacerbate them by fostering resentment among a proud population and providing more targets for our enemies to attack.
The interim government of Hamid Karzai had to deal with a fundamental question of what role the nation’s former warlords, the titans who had dominated Afghan politics and effectively ruled different parts of the country since the 1970s, would have in his government and in Afghanistan’s future. The warlords commanded sizable militias and patronage networks that could be used in the service of an Afghan state; their considerable resources could just as well be used to tear the country apart if they decided it was in their interests to return to the civil strife of the 1980s and 1990s. A government dominated by warlords risked alienating the Afghan people, the majority of whom did not want a reprise of the lawlessness, factionalism, and brutality that had marked the previous two decades. On the other hand, Karzai could neither confront them militarily nor ignore them altogether. The result would be more internal conflict and very likely the fall of Karzai’s government.
To assist the fledgling Afghan leadership, it helped that we had outstanding American leadership on the ground from 2003 to 2005, led by Ambassador Zal Khalilzad and General David Barno. Khalilzad had a charm, confidence, and casualness about him that was appealing and effective. He was a tenacious negotiator and loyal to the presidents he served. Lieutenant General Barno was the widely respected commander of the American military forces in Afghanistan. When he arrived there, Barno moved his office into the U.S. embassy in Kabul and lived in a trailer on the compound, eschewing more official trappings. Every morning Khalilzad and Barno held a country-team meeting with their senior advisers to ensure the closest possible coordination of civil and military activities across Afghanistan. This tight linkage between the State and Defense Departments was a model of how civil-military relations should work.
Khalilzad and Barno worked with Karzai to enlist the warlords’ support for the central government and reached out to Afghan tribal leaders to bring security to the country’s far-flung provinces. The tribes had contributed greatly to stability throughout Afghanistan’s history. Most of the country was too remote and ethnically diverse to be effectively controlled by a centralized government. Though it was much different than our American notions of government, Afghanistan’s tribes had been the ribcage of governance at the local level for millennia. This was one Afghan practice the United States wasn’t going to change.
The agreed-upon warlord strategy called for building up the capacity of Afghan national institutions, such as the army and police. Karzai managed to rebalance his government through the selection of new personnel for key positions, broadening popular support. That strategy was successful in bringing about the disarmament and demobilization of the warlord militias and in promoting conciliation with some lower-level Taliban fighters. Karzai brought in Tajik leader Fahim Khan to head the new Ministry of Defense and Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum as the military’s chief of staff. I argued that we should train as many Afghans as we could so they could begin to take over the security responsibilities for their country.* By late 2003, there were more recruits from every ethnic group and every corner of Afghanistan signing up for spots in the Afghan National Army than there were slots to fill.
As in Iraq, there was a glaring deficiency in our training of local security forces: the police.10 Germany had agreed to train Afghanistan’s police in early 2002 at the Bonn conference. It sent forty police advisers to Kabul, which was enough to train only several hundred for the capital city.11 In light of the modest efforts by our coalition partner, the State Department took over the effort a year later. State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) had the statutory responsibility for police training by the United States. Unfortunately, they lacked the resources and expertise to fulfill it and so sought help from contractors. Their eight-week basic training course did not include weapons training, and only thirty-nine hundred of the thirty-four thousand “trained” police officers had even been through the eight weeks of training.12
I tried to have the police training responsibilities transferred from State to Defense, where the crucial mission could be given the attention, resources, and focus it needed, and where our trainers had backgrounds in training for counterinsurgency.13 I had worked out an agreement with Colin Powell in 2004, only to have his turf-conscious deputy scuttle it with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.14 Without a viable Afghan police force, U.S. forces would be taking on the policing duties at an inordinately high cost in taxpayer dollars and American lives.15 I wrote to NSC Adviser Steve Hadley:
It is costing the US taxpayers a fortune as long as the US, instead of the Afghans, continues to provide for Afghan security. . . . I don’t think it is responsible to the American taxpayers to leave it like it is. We need a way forward. I’ve worked on it and worked on it. I am about to conclude that it is not possible for the US Government bureaucracy to do the only sensible thing. If anyone has an idea as to what can be done about it, I’d like to hear it. I’m ready to toss in the towel. The only solution I can see is to fashion an old-time decision memo and have the President decide it. If that is necessary, please draft the memo; or, if you prefer not to do it, tell me and I’ll do it.16
Months later, I was finally able to get permission for the Defense Department to assume responsibility for the police training. Over the next two years, we invested more than $1. 5 billion in the mission.17 An institutional fix to the underlying problem took even longer—over the continued objections of some in the State Department bureaucracy and members of congressional oversight committees who did not want to relinquish budgetary control over their failing State Department foreign police training programs.18 It was not until January 2006 that we managed to realign our country’s authorities for training foreign forces when Congress passed Section 1206 of the National Defense Authorization Act.*
On the military side of our coalition effort, Gene
ral Barno and Ambassador Khalilzad recommended shifting the strategic emphasis from counterterrorism to counterinsurgency, since most of the remaining al-Qaida and Taliban had fled into the tribal areas of Pakistan.20 Our forces would still pursue terrorists when and where they found them, but coalition forces would move to strategically located outposts in key population centers outside of Kabul and the main base at Bagram airfield to help to defend the population from enemy infiltration and intimidation. This approach to counterinsurgency didn’t require tens of thousands of U.S. troops. It used Afghan army and police to bolster the small American presence and the twenty-two Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT) we had established, supposedly comprised of experts from different agencies and bureaus of the U.S. government. The PRT was a well-conceived idea. It was a decentralized way of enabling Americans to work with local Afghan (and Iraqi) leaders on reconstruction projects—but the teams proved difficult to staff with the needed non-military experts able to help Afghans in agriculture, education, civil society, and building local government institutions. Ninety-eight percent of the U.S. contingent in our PRTs ended up being military personnel.*
In June 2005, the tours of Khalilzad and Barno were over. Khalilzad was sent to Baghdad to become the new U.S. ambassador there. Five months before Khalilizad’s departure, I had asked the President that I be involved in the decision on his replacement. Typically deciding on diplomatic representation was a matter between the White House and the State Department, but to my thinking, Afghanistan was a different matter given the Defense Department’s deep involvement there. “We suffered not getting Zal in earlier than we did,” I wrote, referring to the unfortunate selection of Khalilzad’s predecessor, a career Foreign Service officer who had had little success in advancing the political process for much of 2002 and 2003. “We need to have someone who can carry [Khalilzad’s] level of representation forward without a hitch.”22
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