by David Loyn
Had the surge troops stayed alongside Afghan troops for just one more year, Allen believes the Taliban would have had their backs to the wall. “Another year of that beating probably would have driven them to the peace table, and probably to peace talks.” Cordesman agreed that the withdrawal decision was “tailored largely to meet political timing in an effort to rush to the exits.”58
THIS IS VICTORY
There was one more meteor strike before Allen finished in Afghanistan, and it was personal to him. When he was deputy commander at CENTCOM, Allen and his wife, Kathy, had socialized with the woman appointed by Petraeus as a “goodwill ambassador” at CENTCOM, Jill Kelley, in her Florida home, including spending Christmas with her and her husband, Scott. Kelley knew a number of generals and, in her words, created a role to “cement relations between our military brass and the foreign leaders who came to Tampa to visit with them.”59 But Allen’s emails from Kabul to Kelley were trawled by the FBI after she was stalked and threatened online by Petraeus’s lover, Paula Broadwell.
The idea of Allen having an affair is absurd to anyone who knows him well. He was a “Southern monk,” according to his political adviser Chretien, deeply devoted to Kathy and valuing traditional virtues of loyalty above all. “The Petraeus train-wreck was so big,” said Chretien, “that the locomotive landed on our track.” The supermarket tabloids had a field day, and the story proved an unnecessary distraction for the last months in command for the longest-serving ISAF commander of the combat era.
Allen had an emotional connection to Afghanistan. Leaving was “like leaving family behind to an uncertain future.”60 He asked a nearby school to send a girl and boy from the senior year to sit in the front row at his handover to his marine comrade and friend General Joe Dunford. The young people were symbols of the future America and the coalition were building—“Afghan forces defending Afghan people, and enabling the government of this country to serve its citizens. This is victory, this is what winning looks like, and we should not shrink from using these words.”61 But as he departed the base in a Black Hawk for the last time, he knew it was victory at a high cost in coalition and Afghan lives. Afghan independent capacity “would have happened far more easily with far fewer casualties amongst the Afghans if we’d had one more year to get them ready.” Soon after leaving the command, he wrote a personal letter to Karzai, warning of the dangers of corruption. The Taliban were an “annoyance” compared to the threat of corruption, he wrote. “The existential threat to the long-term viability of Afghanistan is corruption.”62
Allen was offered one of the best plums on the tree—the Supreme Allied Commander Europe—the job created for Eisenhower after the end of World War II. It was a job made for him, given his deep understanding of the value of the NATO alliance. Quickly cleared of any suggestion of impropriety in the Kelley scandal, the job was his. But citing Kathy’s health and the long periods away from home he had already spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, he chose to retire. He soon found himself in demand as an adviser to the Obama administration and was the president’s special envoy on the Islamic State crisis in Syria and Iraq. Later as president of the Brookings Institution, he had challenge coins made, of the sort given out by generals when they “coin” people in a handshake—the first head of the think tank to do so.
The month he left Afghanistan, there was one metric he could be proud of. Civilian casualties fell for the first time since the UN started collecting figures in 2009, and a large part of the cut was a reduction in people killed by air strikes.63 Kabul never left him. He has a persistent cough he puts down to two winters in that air, and he sleeps only a few hours a night, blaming that on the pressure of the command responsibility.
12
TRIPLE TRANSITION
It’s less about what you do than why you do it.
—General Joseph F. Dunford Jr.
BACK TO BASICS
Joseph F. Dunford Jr. grew up in the shadow of one of the oldest military sites in the U.S., the pentagon-shaped seventeenth-century Fort Independence, commanding the entrance to Boston Harbor. Three uncles fought in World War II. His father, Joseph F. Dunford Sr., joined the marines as soon as he was old enough in 1948, and spent his twentieth birthday as one of the “Chosin Few,” who fought their way out of the frozen Chosin Reservoir against eleven Chinese divisions in the Korean War. Joe Dunford Sr. went on to serve in the Boston Police.
Joe Dunford Jr. joined the marines after Vietnam—a war that took the lives of twenty-five men from the tight-knit Irish Catholic communities of South Boston where he grew up, traditional recruiting ground for the marines.
To encourage recruitment to rebuild the Marine Corps amid widespread drug abuse and lack of discipline, officers were offered commissions for just two years, and Dunford took the opportunity to resign two years in. Vietnam was tearing America apart at the time he was recruited, and the reality of military life did not live up to the idealistic picture in his mind. His commanding officer, Colonel Joseph Hoar, a fellow Bostonian, failed to talk him out of it, but his gunnery sergeant succeeded. As a first lieutenant, Dunford was in charge of about 150 marines, and when he called his senior NCOs together to tell them he was leaving, the sergeant said, “Well, that’s great, Lieutenant. What about the rest of us?” So he stayed for his men, because like all good officers, he had built a team and could not leave the men he loved.
Thirty-three years later, now a four-star general, he once again requested to leave, but this time to retire, from his post as assistant commandant of the Marine Corps. When the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Marty Dempsey, asked him to consider commanding in Afghanistan instead, he did not even tell his wife, Ellyn. He thought there would be a few people in the frame, and he had never served there. “I knew there was a lot of people who felt like, you had to have been in Afghanistan for a significant period of time to command there, and so I didn’t think much about it.” There was already a marine commanding in Kabul, making it less likely that another would get the post. It was only after he saw President Obama, who said, “I think we’re going to be seeing more of each other,” that he told Ellyn he might be going.
Dunford had commanded the 5th Marine Regiment when they were first over the line into Iraq in 2003, the day before the rest of the invasion force, and his troops painted the name “Fighting Joe” onto their vehicles. The 5th Marines had a storied history going back to the Battle of Belleau Wood in World War I, which earned them the right to wear the fourragère, the braided cord marking the award of France’s highest military honor, the Croix de Guerre, to the entire regiment.1 Promoted to brigadier general in the field in Iraq, Dunford looked set for high command positions when he skipped the rank of major general on the way up, going straight from one to three stars as a lieutenant general in 2008.
Joe Dunford is a tall, well-built, square-headed man, “the damn epitome of a Marine leader,” in the words of a former sergeant major of the corps.2 He has a warm manner and intent gaze and is a people person, remembering the birthdays of staff and names of camera crews who interview him. His greatest extravagance is the black Jeep Sahara he drives; he does not consider himself an intellectual, seeing this as an overrated virtue, and has little interest in the political maneuvering of Washington. But he knows the military lane better than anyone and knows how to stay in it. “My job was to provide military advice; my job wasn’t to advocate.” This attracted Obama, who replaced one cool, clear-thinking, no-dramas marine with another, when time came for General John Allen to retire. Dunford would do eleven days fewer than the nineteen months of Allen’s time in command in Kabul.
Dunford saw the campaign through a clear counterterrorist lens as the overarching structure that contained all military effort—a view that could be muddied by the several audiences for any message. In NATO nations in Canada and Europe, there was more attention paid to governance and development, and in Afghanistan, more concern about the growth of their own forces. “I had fifty nations in a coalition when I ar
rived, and we had the Afghans we had to work with, and this thing had to be characterized as something that was being done to address all those interests.” It meant mixed messages were heard in the U.S. when the counterterrorist bell should have been rung more soundly. “We weren’t singularly focused with the American people on counterterrorism.”
Counterterrorism was America’s “enduring objective” in Afghanistan—Dunford saw development and governance as subsets of that strategic requirement. Preventing Afghanistan from once again becoming the launchpad for attacks on the homeland needed a “place to do counterterrorism operations from,” and that needed a legitimate partner in the Afghan government who would share intelligence, and effective Afghan security forces. “So we’re helping Afghan governance develop, we’re helping with development, we’re helping develop the Afghan forces.” All these efforts were “enabling capacity for counterterrorism.”
Like generals before him in many conflicts, he wished that political leaders at home spoke “more forcefully about the need for us to continue the mission in Afghanistan. We had people dying, so presumably everybody agreed that we needed to be there.” By now, though, that was no longer true. A poll in the summer of 2013 showed just 28 percent of Americans supported the war—a steep decline of 11 percentage points since the spring. Afghanistan was yesterday’s war, eclipsed for attention in the media and in Washington by the unraveling horror of Syria. Dunford’s focus on the counterterrorist mission suited Obama’s desire to put Afghanistan into proportion alongside other challenges. He would ask, “Why can’t you conduct operations in Afghanistan like we do in Somalia, with a relatively low U.S. footprint?”3
Five years into his presidency, Obama had become a confident, if reluctant, war leader. Dunford found he gave clear guidance and listened to discussion, with a well-defined appreciation of the ownership of risk. Risk management is of course an important skill for military commanders at all levels. The Kabul commander’s task was to give the best advice to inform the president, who owned the risk to the mission. Those discussions became more critical as troops were reduced.
The decision to cut U.S. troops to thirty-four thousand by the end of 2013 had already been taken when Dunford succeeded Allen in March 2013—and they were set to reduce further. Obama was relaxed about the precise numbers during 2014, allowing Dunford twenty thousand for the Afghan election and its aftermath. Dunford said, “He really did give me the latitude on the timeline so that we could conduct the campaign and conduct the retrograde simultaneously and still provide the requisite level of support to the Afghans.” There were long discussions about what level to keep when the combat operation “ended” on December 31. The president wanted as few as possible.
But events elsewhere added to nervousness about what would happen if there were a total withdrawal of troops in Afghanistan. The collapse of authority in Iraq following the withdrawal of all U.S. troops in 2011, and the terrifying emergence of the Islamic State group, led to heightened political noise around the Afghan discussions. And then there was the violent mess of Libya—which had been showcased back in 2011 by Obama as the sort of intervention he preferred, with no U.S. ground troops, and was now the poster child for the failure of the policy, revealing why halfhearted intervention does not work.
Against this backdrop, Senator John McCain, with his usual showmanship, said he was “disappointed” that Dunford, in his first hearing after taking up command in April 2013, could not tell the Senate Armed Services Committee how many troops he believed should stay after 2014. McCain saw this as sending a signal to terrorists worldwide. “They see us withdrawing every place in the world … And they know which way the wind is blowing.” McCain wanted more troops to stay for longer. Dunford answered that he had not at that time made a recommendation, which to McCain was “a tragic and terrible mistake for which we may pay a very heavy price.”4
The discussions went on through the summer—with four options of fifteen thousand, ten thousand, five thousand, and the lowest option of two thousand that many around the president favored, led as always by Vice President Joe Biden—minimal counterterrorism forces, embassy-level security, and no more. Dunford told Obama that the last two options, with forces below ten thousand, put the mission under too great a risk. “My perspective was that if we were going to be below ten thousand, we ought to think about getting out completely.” It would be hard to deliver either an effective U.S.-led counterterrorism campaign or support for Afghan operations. “The probability of success would be so low that the risk of putting people on the ground during that period of time would not be worth it.”
There was also a question of how long the troops should remain. In the grand language of international summits, the NATO agreement in Chicago in 2012 that set a new course for Afghanistan talked of a “decade of transformation” for Afghanistan. Dunford preferred to talk about a “decade of opportunity.” But there was no agreement over how long into that decade there would be international troops in the country, beyond the “end of combat” in 2014. In a BBC interview in June 2013, with a new take on “fragile but reversible,” Dunford moved the target to 2018. “At this point we have made significant progress, but we are not yet at the point where it is completely sustainable,” he said. “That’s why we need to start now, especially with the Afghan security forces, to talk about 2018 not 2014.”5 The comments were a surprise to NATO allies, but it was a classic Dunford pitch—clear, sending a political message without making waves in Washington or demanding a surge, just more time to do the job.
The comment was based on a pragmatic assessment of Afghan capacity. While Afghan forces were now improving—after many false starts over the years—there were still glaring gaps in key areas, such as logistics and maintenance, and Afghan airpower was negligible. Some of this was basic stuff. The landscape was littered with Ford Rangers and Humvees, supplied to the Afghan forces, that had gone into ditches or broken down for lack of maintenance. Sorting this required better Afghan leadership, which would take time to develop. But like Allen before him, Dunford found himself doing what he could to stand up Afghan forces with less time than he wanted as the drawdown went on.
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
The challenges faced by Afghanistan were daunting amid a triple transition. Not only were international forces reducing substantially and changing their mission to one of “train, advise, and assist,” but there was a significant cut in international aid and a political change as Karzai would complete two terms in 2014. Managing security around the prolonged dispute over the election result would be the main security preoccupation through 2014. But the aid cut too was a significant security challenge, as it dramatically worsened poverty. Much of the economy was kept artificially afloat by foreign support and collapsed as the money was withdrawn.
The chart showing the country’s economic growth was like that of a very sick patient, with massive swings—sometimes up to 13 percent annually and averaging 9 percent. In 2014, growth fell to 1.5 percent, not keeping up with the massive pressures from an increased population, with a bulging youth demographic.6 Income per head fell to less than $600 a year. The end of big spending was like a balloon bursting, letting the economy crash to the ground. Both at the beginning and now near the end of the intervention in Afghanistan, development spending had unforeseen negative consequences.
To communicate to his troops, Dunford did not issue lengthy tactical directives. Instead, he put five clear phrases on a five-by-eight card, which could be slipped into the side pocket of combat trousers. The card was entitled “What Winning Looks Like,” and the first of the five lines was the most important—about security transition to Afghan control. Then there was prevention of safe havens for al-Qaeda, a credible Afghan election, a constructive relationship between the Afghan and Pakistani military forces, and the “reposturing” of ISAF for training and the small residual counterterrorism combat force that would remain. There was no reference to the Taliban, and apart from the prevention of al-Qa
eda safe havens, there was no mention of combat. Twenty-two months ahead of the timetabled end of combat operations, Dunford was sending a message that things would be different.
Transition to Afghan forces, Inteqal, had been in hand since 2011, as district by district, province by province, Afghan troops took the lead for security in their own country. Dunford’s temperament was not to try to invent the wheel but to communicate the transition process to his forces in doctrinal language they understood from basic training about supported and supporting forces. “I didn’t need a new buzzword because everybody, really even in a NATO context, understands this idea of supported/supporting.”7 It meant the Afghan forces, now responsible for the security outcome of the provinces under their control, were supported by ISAF troops. “The key point,” for Dunford, “was that the Afghans were responsible for the outcome.”
This did not affect the continuing U.S. counterterrorism fight, now mostly in the hands of small detachments of Special Forces. On February 25, two weeks after Dunford took command, the governor of Wardak Province, Abdul Majid Khogyani, made the one-hour drive north to Kabul to complain to the Afghan National Security Council about the conduct of a U.S. Special Forces unit that had taken over a base from conventional troops in 2012. The governor brought reports of dozens of tribal elders who said they had been unfairly arrested and beaten, and specific allegations about nine missing men whose neighbors said had disappeared after being interrogated by U.S. Special Forces.8 Karzai immediately issued a strong public statement, claiming U.S. troops were responsible for the torture and murder of the nine men. For some months, he had been demanding the Special Forces leave Wardak complaining “What does Afghan control mean if these operations go on.” Nerkh District, where the mistreatment is said to have taken place, had only recently transitioned to Afghan control. Soon after Dunford took over command, there was a large, angry demonstration outside parliament demanding justice for the events in Wardak.
