The Long War

by David Loyn

  RENDEZVOUS AT MIDNIGHT

  The deals in Kabul on detainees, air strikes, and night raids in March 2012 came ahead of the signing of a new strategic partnership governing future relations between Afghanistan and the United States. Hard as it was to negotiate, the partnership agreement that emerged was more symbolic than substantive, with fine words on an enduring relationship, but no detail on payments, numbers of bases or America’s military commitments. At the beginning of May, a year to the day since the death of Osama bin Laden, President Obama made a brief midnight visit to Afghanistan to sign the deal. Pausing at Bagram Air Base for a speech and selfies with troops, he took a helicopter ride to the Arg. After the briefest of meetings for a signature, Obama moved on, leaving Karzai bruised in his wake. Obama’s swift midnight turnaround committed the worst of insults for the Afghan president. “He didn’t even take a cup of tea with us.”

  The White House had invited Karzai to America for the signing, but he refused, wanting the deal on Afghan soil. “I wanted to have a good ceremony … to have Afghan leaders, to have all the Afghan traditions and dress.”40 In his mind, this would have presented the deal to the Afghan people in a better way. But Obama’s security detail refused to admit tribal elders without full security checks. Since the head of the government’s peace council, Burhanuddin Rabbani, had been killed after being embraced by a man with a suicide bomb in his turban, they were not taking any chances. As a compromise, Allen arranged for the elders to watch on a TV feed from just outside the Arg, while the signing was held with the minimum of ceremony.

  The mercurial Afghan president now had few friends in the U.S. administration. The White House deliberately kept the signing low-key in an election year when Obama did not want to remind voters of an enduring relationship with Afghanistan. Even where America’s interests coincided with those of Afghanistan, such as in stopping fighters coming across the border from Pakistan, it was hard to coordinate policy.

  The problem was that Karzai swung around like a weather vane. In an interview with a Pakistani TV channel, he said his government would support Pakistan if it came under attack by the U.S.41 Allen had to fire a senior officer in his command, Major General Peter Fuller, for criticizing Karzai. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Fuller said. “I’m sorry, we just gave you $11.6 billion and now you’re telling me, ‘I don’t really care?’”42

  To Allen, Karzai would say, “You’re fighting the war in the wrong place. You’re fighting the war in the homes of the Afghans, you ought to be fighting the war in Pakistan.” The wrong enemy in the wrong country. It was the same formulation used by Holbrooke. America’s two fundamental security interests over Pakistan had not changed: to keep Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal in secure hands, and end global jihad coming from the region. By 2012, in the years since the money taps were turned on again after 9/11 when the military dictator Pervez Musharraf signed up to President Bush’s war on terror, the U.S. had given the country $15 billion in military aid.43 But there was a new willingness expressed by senior voices in Washington to stand firmer against Pakistani threats and call out their clear duplicity. The Obama administration was becoming less willing to sign a blank check.

  PAKISTAN’S INSURANCE POLICY

  Allen worked at his relationship with General Ashfaq Kayani. Several attacks on Kabul, tracked to the Haqqani network, were stopped after direct appeals to the Pakistani army chief. But the assault on Kabul continued. September 13, 2011, Allen’s headquarters and the adjoining embassy complex came under sustained attack for several hours from fighters who had found their way into a multistory building under construction that overlooked the site.

  The administration had had enough. Ten days after the embassy attack, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mike Mullen, in his last press conference, went further than any senior U.S. official before in naming this for what it was. “The Haqqani network,” he said, were a “veritable arm” of the ISI. He had evidence for their complicity in several recent attacks, and they were just one of the extremist groups operating with “impunity” from Pakistani soil.44 The Pakistani state’s response, as so often, came in the language of a mobster demanding protection money. The foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, said any threats by Mullen to change the relationship could harm the U.S. “If they are choosing to do so, it will be at their own cost.”45 Kayani saw the Haqqani network as Pakistan’s insurance policy for influence in Afghanistan when U.S. troops left.46

  Despite the growing war of words, Allen continued to keep contact with Pakistan at several levels. He did not meet the civilian government, whom he saw as irrelevant. But at the local level, there were coordination mechanisms along the border, and above that, his senior commanders had regular contact with their opposite numbers in Pakistan. He maintained links with Kayani and in November was taken aside by him at a map table in Peshawar military headquarters while planning joint operations along the border. Kayani took an envelope out of his pocket and showed Allen a letter he had written to Mullen after the killing of bin Laden. Kayani warned Mullen that if anything like that happened again, he may not be able to restrain Pakistan’s forces from doing something violent in response. Taking the letter back, he said to Allen, “If something bad ever really happens, you and I need to be careful what we say publicly so that we can, at some point, recover the relationship.”

  Allen stayed overnight and was woken to be told that U.S. forces were involved in a major fight on the border with Pakistani troops. Allen said his troops never crossed over, although it was not clearly marked, and the actual border is disputed. In places, there is a gap as wide as eleven kilometers between the original Durand Line, marking the boundary in 1893 between British India and Afghanistan, the Soviet-imposed border, the modern Afghan border, and the line recognized by Pakistan.

  He needed to leave Pakistan fast. As he drove to the airport, he had updates of the Pakistani dead. By the time he arrived at the plane, the figure had climbed to twenty-seven as he pieced together the story. American Special Forces had been on a night operation on the ground in Afghanistan close to the border region, and every time they came out of cover on high ground, they took heavy fire from two Pakistani posts on the other side. It was a dark night, and the special operators could only be identified through infrared strobes on their helmets. The Pakistani soldiers who opened fire must have been watching with night vision goggles. The American response was a show of force by Apache attack helicopters, F-15 fighters, and even low passes by a B-1 bomber. But the firing continued. Finally, an AC-130 was brought in. Allen knew the devastating effect that would have had. When he called Kayani, the Pakistani general was shaken and said, “You realize what you’ve done. You’ve taken away any white space that I had to have a relationship with you and with ISAF and the war in Afghanistan.” Allen reminded him of their conversation over the letter to Mullen, and both agreed they had to be careful about what they said publicly so they did not burn their relationship.

  Pakistan closed the border for eight months and ordered the closure of a secret U.S. drone base in Baluchistan in the southwest of Pakistan, where flights had anyway been restricted since the killing of bin Laden. The border closure added to the cost and complexity of withdrawal, and it would take months of hard bargaining to reopen, which happened only after an apology from Clinton for the attack. Some months later, through a trusted intermediary, Allen sent a message to Kayani to say that he had kept his end of the bargain and not said anything publicly against him. In response, Kayani called to rebuild the contact.

  But having the channel of communication did not stop the attacks. On Fridays in the summer, young Kabulis head out to the guesthouses and kebab shops lining the large Qargha lake west of Kabul with friends or family—renting small, plastic pedaled boats with duck or swan heads to go out on the water. Traditional musicians play in small cafés set on the forested hillsides above the lake. It is hardly a den of vice, but this is just the kind of activity that threatens the Taliban’s view of
the world. On June 22, 2012, a minivan pulled up outside the Spozhmai hotel by the lake late at night, and a group alighted, dressed head to toe in the powder-blue coverall burkas worn by some Afghan women. Throwing off the burkas, seven insurgents, wearing suicide vests, shot their way into the hotel. They demanded to know where the alcohol and prostitutes were. In vain, hotel guests and staff denied any such activities and were shot as the fighters said they must be there. A young boy who survived said he had a gun pointed to his head, with the gunmen insisting he show them the alcohol. At ISAF headquarters, Allen listened to the communications with the gunmen as they took hostages and settled in for a siege that went on for more than twelve hours through the next day. The instructions were coming from Miramshah in Pakistan, admonishing the raiders to come off full auto in their AK-47s and go to single shot, so they could conserve ammunition to kill more of the guests at the hotel. Afghan Special Forces saved the lives of more than forty guests when they stormed the hotel, but twenty died. In September 2012, after pressure from Allen, the Haqqani network was designated a terrorist organization by the U.S.

  Allen discovered by chance that he had one secret weapon for relations with Pakistan, his British deputy, Lieutenant General Adrian Bradshaw. On one occasion when Allen could not make a routine meeting with Kayani, Bradshaw went instead, and the tall upper-class Englishman, whom Allen called “a consummate gentleman,” had a good effect, to the point that Pakistani officers were saying Bradshaw should always go. Drawing on the shared history of Britain and Pakistan, and connections through the Commonwealth, Bradshaw was able to have conversations no longer available to Allen because of the breakdown in trust. On another occasion, Allen planned to send his most senior French officer. The Pakistanis, with quite a different relationship with the French, said, “You might want to rethink that.”

  MEASURING THE UNIVERSE

  Allen was the most educated of the ISAF commanders, with four degrees. “For the first time since Obama became President,” reported The Washington Post, “White House aides have ceased complaining about the military command in Kabul.”47 After two ISAF commanders were fired and the high-wire act of Petraeus, Allen’s cool analytical style suited the temperament of the president. Walking out of a lunch in the White House, the president put an arm around Allen and said, “John Allen is my man.”48 It did not mean there was any letup in the imposed deadlines for withdrawal, but it did give Allen some breathing space in how he delivered it. In one National Security Council meeting, there was a lot of advice being offered around the table in Washington to Allen on a video link from Kabul, but the president cut it off. “This is between the Commander-in-Chief and the commander on the ground,” he said. “Leave him alone. Let him get the mission done.”

  The Taliban could read the plan as bases were closed down. “The enemy sees what’s happening,” Allen said to his fellow marine, General Jim Mattis, commanding CENTCOM. “He’s trying to fix me in place and create a lot of casualties.” Mattis took his request for significant extra combat power to the White House—three thousand troops—a reinforced paratrooper task force in the north, and a reinforced marine task force in the south. The president said, “So long as you don’t break your ceiling, and you don’t keep them for a longer period than about a month, you can have them.” Allen used the extra combat capacity “to fight like hell for a month to buy me the white space to close down a whole series of bases.”

  As the surge troops left, a continued commitment from NATO allies, Allen’s strategic center of gravity, became more essential. May 2012 at a summit in Chicago, America secured the support of other NATO nations to stay with the mission beyond the end of combat operations in 2014. The new operation would focus on building Afghan forces with a price tag of $4.1 billion annually—a “mythical budget plan,” according to the analyst Anthony Cordesman, “based on a cost model that never seems to have serious review.”49 It was not the only figure now being questioned.

  The military were good at counting inputs—people, ammunition, fuel, food, and so on. But in the highly complex environment of Afghanistan, a robust and meaningful method of measuring progress was elusive. The metrics the public could see, as opinion shifted decisively against continuing in Afghanistan, were the cost in lives and limbs and the enormous payouts to what was increasingly seen as a lost cause. It was harder to measure outcomes—stabilized villages, better education opportunities, access to justice, confidence in the future, and better Afghan forces. In his first speech on Afghanistan in March 2009, Obama had set the tone, talking of the need to “set clear metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable.”50

  By 2013, there were serious doubts as to whether such metrics existed. Cordesman called out “largely dishonest claims of progress.”51 He criticized nonmilitary metrics too. “The State Department has never issued a meaningful report on its role in the war,” while the UN had done “no useful reporting on economic development and aid.”

  The twice-yearly Afghan data reports to Congress, called the 1230 reports,52 began to censor inconvenient statistics, removing maps that showed reverses in security and other failures; “shades of the follies in Vietnam,” according to Cordesman—where statistics showing progress were mocked for missing obvious ground realities that showed the opposite.53 And where progress was claimed, such as an increase in economic growth, the real reason—better rainfall, so better agricultural income—was not mentioned in the report.

  The principal indicator of the campaign counted “enemy-initiated attacks.” As recently as March 2011, 90 percent of these had involved ISAF. If the figures can be believed, September 2012 was the real crossover point of the war, when more enemy-initiated attacks involved Afghan forces than international troops. But the value of the indicator was coming under increasing question. The 1230 report to Congress said counting enemy-initiated attacks was “not particularly useful in evaluating progress against the insurgency.” A successful offensive by coalition and Afghan troops would inevitably provoke many enemy-initiated attacks, but meanwhile, the insurgency could be expanding its influence and strength in ways including “kidnappings, intimidation tactics and assassinations,” not counted in the same way.

  With combat troops going home and advisory capacity far more thinly spread, Allen also had far less knowledge of what was going on. “The ground was shifting under our feet, our assessment process had to change as well.” He had lost the granular knowledge at a local level that 150,000 troops had brought previously. “As we became smaller we didn’t have that kind of statistical clarity and we had to both measure something different and measure it in a different way, and that was the challenge that I put to my analysts.” His solution was to move from quantitative to qualitative analysis—judgments by individual advisers rather than raw numbers. He knew the limitations of the assessment process, since “it’s not possible to measure a war.” In February 2013, his last month in command, ISAF suspended public reporting of a number of indicators, admitting that claims of progress had been a “clerical error.” A reduction highlighted in January had officials declaring a “decrease in violence can be attributed to progress made in beating back the Taliban.”54 But when the figures were reexamined, there turned out to be no change in this key indicator, as information sent by Afghan forces had not been inputted into the database.

  Already some units had streamlined the assessment process. The 10th Mountain Division had a hard fight in 2010/11 to finally stabilize Panjwayi and Arghandab in Kandahar and reduce the capacity of the Taliban to threaten Helmand, and during it, they revolutionized the way they recorded progress. When they arrived, the system recorded 240 different metrics—in order to build the all-important scale of unstable to stable areas, going from red, through orange, yellow, to green, with white as unknown. Commanders inevitably wanted to move every district toward green during their tour, a preoccupation known as “shade-shifting.”55 The counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen wrote that too often the U.S. tried to “measure the u
niverse—attempting to analyze everything and accomplishing little.”56 To make more sense of actual progress, 10th Mountain built more multidimensional models than a simple color scale, cutting the number of metrics down from 240 to just 11, with 18 indicators to measure as inputs.57 This cut assessment down from six weeks to a matter of days, making it a far more valuable tool.

  Progress in Kandahar was matched in neighboring Helmand. The surge since 2010 had made a significant difference. I was able to travel widely to report on development initiatives in 2011, going into areas previously in Taliban hands. U.S. Marines had fought hard to retake the populated zone, running like a spine down the center of the province, where the canal system allowed farming on a wide strip of land on either side of the Helmand River. This included Marjah, now finally coming under control after a false start with the non–Magnificent Seven, and the failed government in a box. The foreman of a road gang, employed to build a new road to better connect the capital with the countryside, told me that until the previous year, he had been the local Taliban commander. He deserted in the winter, after too many of his friends died, and hanging round the bazaar, he picked up the job to build the road. It was a perfect metaphor for the positive feedback loop that was the aim of the operation—improve security, fracture the Taliban, build local economic opportunities (both through employing the road builders and the improved commerce the road would bring), all to connect people to the state by standing up local government and justice, and reduce the chances for the Taliban to recruit to damage security. This picture was hard to capture in the traditional indicators used to measure progress.