The Long War

by David Loyn

  After the killings at Azizabad, the damage to relations with Karzai was permanent. Eide said his “increasingly confrontational approach … shocked visiting ministers as well as ambassadors in Kabul.”50 Rumors of his mental state swirled around; many observed that a nervous tic in his left eye seemed to be getting worse. America’s concern about the negative publicity and his highlighting of the Azizabad incident were strongly expressed in a phone call by Condoleezza Rice. He claimed that she threatened to cut off U.S. aid. Karzai angrily responded, “If you continue to be this way, we will treat you like we treated the Soviets. We treated the Soviets as an invader.”51

  A DINNER TO REMEMBER

  The Afghan president’s opposition to civilian casualties was rational. “When you hurt normal civilians they become Taliban,” said his chief of staff, Muhammad Umer Daudzai.52 But Karzai’s increasingly unpredictable moods made it difficult for the military and international donors to deal with him. He was mocked in private by senior Western diplomats as “the mayor of Kabul,” with limited influence beyond. As he set his face against cooperation, he was further undermined by news that Western diplomats were sounding out other credible candidates to run in the presidential election scheduled for the following year.

  In November 2008, he faced the most radical shift in his relationship with the West with the election of President Obama. President Bush had treated him as an equal, a fellow president—“My man Karzai”—and they talked on a videoconference twice a month. “Bush conducted himself with Afghanistan with dignity,” said Karzai. “In conversations, he would understand my point of view.”53 He was used to getting his own way with U.S. officials who knew he could appeal to the president. Karzai thought Bush “treated Afghans with respect; he would have tea with us, he would have coffee with us, he would have our food, he would meet the Afghan leaders.” This easy access was abruptly cut when he faced the chill blast of the skepticism of Obama, who barely acknowledged him.

  A month after the U.S. election, in the depths of the Kabul winter, Obama sent his newly elected vice president, Joe Biden, on a tour of the region to reset relations. Biden came in a very different mood from a trip in early 2002, when he had been one of the first international politicians to visit the new Afghan president. “Whatever it takes we should do it,” he said then, and warned that history would judge America harshly if they “failed to stay the course.” By 2008, he was warier of long-term commitment and became the standard-bearer in the Obama administration for cutting troops and pursuing only a limited policy of hunting down enemies of America, not rebuilding Afghan forces or developing government institutions. In a bipartisan gesture, Biden was accompanied by Senator Lindsey Graham, an air force reserve colonel, and close friend of the defeated Republican candidate John McCain. They had what Graham called “a dinner to remember”54 in the presidential palace.

  It began cordially enough with a one-on-one meeting between Biden and Karzai, and they then went into a large hall with the whole Afghan cabinet sitting at a dinner table. With the U.S. economy in meltdown following the crash, Karzai was told that American voters would no longer sign a blank check. Voices were raised on both sides—Biden repeated the “mayor of Kabul” gibe and complained about corruption, referring to the ornate homes of many of those at the dinner that were on display in central Kabul. The breaking point in the conversation came over civilian casualties. There was a growing American sense that while the vast majority of Afghan civilian deaths were at the hands of the Taliban, those killed by international troops were given undue prominence by the president’s very public complaints. Karzai pleaded that Afghans should be “partners and not victims.” The U.S. ambassador, William Wood, vainly tried to intervene, but failed, and when Karzai said, “We are just poor Afghans, nobody cares,” the evening abruptly ended when Biden threw down his napkin, and stalked out of the room, saying, “This is beneath you, Mr. President.” On his return to the embassy, Wood was flooded with phone calls from distressed ministers asking what was going on. In the Afghan context, the tone and manner of Biden’s abrupt walkout was as important as the substance—no friend would treat a friend this way. His treatment of the president would have been a snub in any country; here it was interpreted as a hostile act.55

  Karzai felt increasingly cut off. No personal contact with Obama, insults from Biden, the businesslike demeanor of McKiernan, and then to cap it all was the appointment of the forthright Richard Holbrooke in a new role as representative to both Afghanistan and Pakistan. The proposal for the diplomatic role linking the conflict was one of the recommendations made by McKiernan in his initial review, feeding into a growing awareness in Washington that they should take a tougher line on Pakistan. Holbrooke’s abrasive personality won him few friends. Karzai gloomily told the emollient UN head, Kai Eide, after Holbrooke’s first trip to Kabul, “He wants to get rid of you and me.” In Washington, Karzai was increasingly seen as an obstacle. To Gates, he was the most troublesome ally since De Gaulle. “Both were nearly totally dependent on the United States and both deeply resented it.”56 And Karzai had lost his privileged access to the top.

  7

  OBAMA’S WAR

  Changing the commander is not the silver bullet that’s going to change all the dynamics in Afghanistan.

  —General Dave McKiernan

  COIN OR CT

  In the “Yes, we can!” optimism of the change of power in Washington, D.C., in January 2009, a profound rethinking of “Bush’s wars” was one of the top priorities. The defeat of the Vietnam War hero John McCain by Barack Obama, the first president too young to have faced the draft, was more than a generational shift at the top. Afghanistan was no longer the “other war” but the “good war,” Iraq the unnecessary “war of choice.” While both wars were to be ended, the administration was not united on how that should be done.

  Obama hedged between values and interests in foreign policy, idealist promotion of democracy against realist focus only on U.S. economic and security concerns. Recognizing that American interests with the Middle East were sundered by the Iraq war, he made a speech in Cairo promising a “New Beginning.”1 But he was wary of deeper involvement. Counterinsurgency was fashionable, but few in the administration were committed to the number of troops that would be needed to make it work. The leading realist, Vice President Joe Biden, argued that America should not throw any more money or lives into the maw of Afghanistan other than the bare minimum in adopting counterterrorist tactics (CT), pursuing the remnants of al-Qaeda with drones and Special Forces.

  Far older than most in the administration, Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972, aged just thirty, when he ran on an anti–Vietnam War platform. He had been on the other side of the argument from the soldiers who had joined up then and were now the generals commanding America’s wars. In Afghanistan, his stripped-down counterterrorist plan was derided by many in the army as unworkable. “To defeat a network, you have to attack the network,” said McKiernan. “It’s not just about getting the top guy; it’s about attacking somewhere, and developing intelligence that leads you to somewhere else to defeat the network.” Military thinkers going all the way back to Sun Tzu have known that force should be the last resort, and the use of force has unintended consequences that are hard to calibrate. In the complex post-9/11 wars fought among poorly educated rural people, understanding the context—history, religion, tribal dynamics—was too rarely achieved. Precision bombing, the main CT tool, had a deceptive simplicity in dealing with one problem, while causing others.

  If I approve a strike by our special operators to go in and target, kill or capture a bomb maker in a village in rural Afghanistan, and I don’t ask the question of, what are the second and third order effects of that, besides killing the bomb maker or capturing him, and what if I find out, well, he’s the son of an influential tribal elder. So is there another way of taking him out of the picture in the bomb-making capabilities, besides going in and killing or capturing him? What’s the effect on
the population? I might create a far greater threat by allowing that raid to happen, and find out, well, this is maybe not the individual that we really wanted to go out and kill.

  It is a well-tested military maxim that to win, insurgents need only outlast the will of those fighting them—contained in the much-quoted line said to be used by the Taliban, “You may have a watch, but we have the time.” Unlike conventional armies, insurgents can face tactical defeats, losing every battle, and still prevail if they have enough support from the population.2 Counterterrorist tactics alone would not deliver the minimum result required of the campaign—that it prevented Afghanistan again becoming a haven for people planning attacks on the homeland. This was the Afghan dilemma the Obama administration never resolved.

  By 2009, the Petraeus-Mattis COIN doctrine was more widely accepted across the U.S. military. McKiernan was employing it in Afghanistan. “I’m a war fighter, but the nature of the war in Afghanistan is such that you have to use counterinsurgency ways and means to achieve your ends. At the same time, you have to use counterterrorist ways and means to defeat terrorist networks that operate in the region … It’s not COIN versus CT; it’s COIN and CT … you have to do both. You can’t do one or the other and have lasting effects.” Fighting, training local troops, and building up the Afghan government were all parts of a virtuous circle, where security would sustain better governance, building a stable economy to provide jobs, to make it easier to encourage those insurgents not deterred by tough military action to lay down their weapons.

  That was the theory at least. But a properly resourced counterinsurgency would take more time and more money than the Obama administration was prepared to commit. Afghanistan had “one of the lowest soldier-to-inhabitant ratios in a modern post-conflict setting,” an enthusiast for a bigger security footprint, the former envoy Jim Dobbins, pointed out.3 And Biden’s minimalist approach had significant traction in Obama’s Democrat support base inside and outside Congress, who feared being sucked further in. It cost $1 million a year to keep a soldier in Afghanistan.4 In the year of global financial meltdown, spending more on the long war was a hard sell.

  BOXED IN BY GENERALS

  When the Obama team came into the White House for transition talks, they faced an outstanding request from McKiernan for thirty thousand more troops, on the table since his first review in July. Bush handed the decision to the incoming administration for final approval. Obama’s national security adviser designate, retired general James Jones, said they would hold off for now.5 At CENTCOM, General David Petraeus, commander since October 2008, backed the troop demand. He was a powerful voice to tilt resources from Iraq to Afghanistan.6 His deputy General John Allen shared McKiernan’s alarm. “What was clearly happening was that the Taliban, having now licked their wounds for some period of time and rested and refitted for a number of years, were now coming into the battle space in ’08 and ’09 in a very big way.” Better trained and led, the Taliban were fighting in larger formations than previously, flexibly adapting to circumstances, and employing weapons for more lethal effect. Training camps in Pakistan, run by the ISI, were functioning more effectively than ever.7

  Obama was more receptive to increasing force levels in Afghanistan than in Iraq, a war that “distracts us from every threat we face.”8 But in his first meeting to discuss Afghanistan, in the White House Situation Room on the Friday of his inaugural week, he decided to hold off, pending a review. It was the beginning of a process to reexamine the war from first principles that would not be completed until December. Obama was skeptical of McKiernan’s demand, which would effectively double the number of troops in Afghanistan. On the way out of the meeting, Biden grabbed him by the arm and, in what Obama called a stage whisper in his book A Promised Land, told him he thought the generals were trying to jam him. “One thing I know is when these generals are trying to box in a new president.”9

  On February 24, in a low-key decision announced by media release, the new president agreed to an increase of seventeen thousand troops, not the full thirty thousand requested by McKiernan seven months previously. Four thousand more were added soon after to bolster training of Afghan forces. It set the tone for Obama’s relationship with his generals. They would put in a request based on what they needed in order to fulfill the task they had been given, and it would be pared back. McKiernan saw this approach as “not optimal” to achieve the task he had been sent to do. He had “insufficient combat power to gain momentum while the center of gravity is being developed, and that’s the Afghan National Security Forces.” The U.S. Army definition of a center of gravity is “the source of power that provides moral or physical strength, freedom of action, or will to act.”10 In 2009, Afghan forces fell well short of that.

  The problem of the piecemeal approval of troops was not just about numbers but effectiveness. McKiernan’s troop request was not an arbitrary figure but one that drew on a sophisticated process of planning to turn the war round and reverse what he called the “sky is falling” narrative.11 Delivering military power is a complex jigsaw with matériel delivered on the basis of “time-phased force deployment,” where sequencing matters almost as much as the amount of force. This model has more application in a conventional campaign than long-running wars such as Afghanistan, but without it, military resources were always behind the curve, commanders improvising as things arrived out of sequence, and combat power was reduced. McKiernan remarked dryly that the way troops were sent was “not what military commanders would prefer.”

  Surges of troops in response were “treating the symptom, not the illness.” McKiernan had watched Iraq slide into violence after his successful operation to take the country in 2003. The consequences were “ethnic strife, Sunni extremism, ISIS, and other things, and it’s disheartening.” The same mistakes were now being made in Afghanistan.

  I really dislike the term “surge” … American people think surge is some sort of military strategy—“surge.” Well, we surged in Iraq and we surged in Afghanistan, because in both places, there was insufficient combat power to achieve our objectives. So, it was a reactive approach to ways and means, not a proactive approach to ways and means … It is really an admission that we don’t have enough combat power, we’re at risk of mission failure, so let’s surge; let’s put more forces in there for X period of time, and then bring them out. I don’t think we’ve learned that lesson. You can try to do war on the cheap, and I think you’ll pay more in the long run than you would if you had overwhelming combat power at the very beginning.

  Faced with a politically driven arbitrary head count of soldiers, commanders contracted out logistics and engineering tasks to non-uniformed contractors, who were not in the crucial military head count. This was the most expensive way to run a conflict, as contractors come at a higher cost than troops. Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, then director of the Joint Staff in the Pentagon, knew of the dangers of “incremental escalation.” A voracious reader, he drew a clear lesson from history. “Trailing an insurgency typically condemned counterinsurgents to failure.”12 The approach handed politicians a strategic military power they did not know they had. Democratic control of the military is of course essential, but the ideal is that elected officials define the task they want done and ask the military to do it. Partial increases of troops in Afghanistan tipped the balance of decision-making too far in the direction of politicians, and to seasoned military observers, there were too few people in the Obama administration with the right skills to make these decisions.

  Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a surprise holdover from the Bush administration, watched the new team in the White House with concern. Gates believed they mistrusted the motives of military commanders. “The suspicion would only fester and grow over time.”13 It was a clash of cultures that would have serious consequences for Afghanistan. On the one hand were soldiers trying to fit troops to task and wanting politicians to state the task, and on the other, politicians and officials desperate to avoid mission cr
eep, believing that whatever they provided, soldiers would always ask for more.

  McKiernan’s figure of thirty thousand was not plucked out of the air. He wanted to break the stalemate in the east and south. He needed two battalion-strength task forces for the provinces around Kabul to stabilize the east, and a brigade combat team for the south equipped with Stryker armored vehicles. He knew that high-tech assets—Predator drones, electronic surveillance planes, and so on—were a finite resource. In Iraq, there were then around sixteen Predator lines. He had only two and wanted some moved across. He needed more medics, more troop-carrying planes, and more route-clearance vehicles to combat IEDs, the increasingly sophisticated and lethal roadside bombs that were causing many casualties.

  McKiernan also wanted a significant increase in training, with two more brigade-strength training teams—around ten thousand troops, to put U.S. troops alongside Afghan units to mentor and advise them as partners on operations as well as training. He knew that building the Afghan army, in particular its leaders, would take time. It had taken the U.S. a generation to rebuild the army from the force broken by Vietnam he had joined in the 1970s, to what was available to him in taking Baghdad thirty years later. “It takes us twelve to fifteen years to grow a first sergeant of a company … Why would we think that we’d have great first sergeants in Afghan companies, when we can’t produce them any faster?”

  WRONG ENEMY IN THE WRONG COUNTRY

  Other troop requests would have to wait for the result of a yearlong rethink. “In my entire career,” wrote Gates, who served eight presidents, “I cannot think of any single issue or problem that absorbed so much of the president’s and the principals’ time and effort in such a compressed period.”14 The Bush team handed over an in-depth review on Afghan policy by deputy national security adviser, “war czar” Doug Lute, called because of a growing recognition that Afghanistan suffered from strategic neglect under the shadow of Iraq. “I think we may have lost sight of our national objectives in Afghanistan, our strategy to achieve them, and who’s in charge,” said Vice President Dick Cheney, launching the review process in the fall of 2008.15 A series of different campaigns had developed without coordination or single command. Lute focused on Kandahar in one slide in his presentation—counting ten different wars in the same battle space. From the CIA counterterrorist pursuit teams, JSOC “black SOF” raids, “white SOF” Green Beret operations, and U.S. conventional operations, the slide included other NATO conventional operations, training teams with the Afghan army and police, provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs), Afghan conventional operations, and the campaign across the border in Pakistan.