Knife Fights

by John A. Nagl

  But the biggest problem in Afghanistan was, and remains, Pakistan. The initial U.S. mistake of providing too few American troops to pin down Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora Mountains allowed Al Qaeda and much of the Taliban’s leadership to escape from Afghanistan. They settled in Pakistan, which either willingly or through lack of control over its own territory provided bases for both organizations to lick their wounds and regenerate. This they did with a vengeance. The Taliban regained strength in Pakistan and began reinfiltrating into Afghanistan in the mid-2000s while the attention of the United States was focused on the escalating disaster in Iraq. By 2008, when I had been shocked at the positive progress of the war in Iraq during my summer visit but disappointed to see the opposite in our other war, the Taliban clearly had the upper hand in Afghanistan. I reported this fact to Admiral Michael Mullen, who had replaced General Peter Pace as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in an office call upon my return from Afghanistan in the fall of 2008. Not long afterward he correctly told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “In Iraq, we do what we must; in Afghanistan, we do what we can,” with whatever resources we had left over after we had sent to Iraq what was needed there to prevent full-scale civil war in the heart of the Arab world.

  I had visited Afghanistan for the first time in early 2007, while training U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force teams at Fort Riley to serve as advisers to the Afghan Army and Police. It seemed like a good idea to have actually been to Afghanistan at least once before standing on a podium telling American soldiers, airmen, and sailors what their war would be like. I found a critically underresourced war, starved of the soldiers, dollars, and attention required to beat back a resurgent Taliban. It was difficult to return to Fort Riley and send advisory teams to a war that I knew was an economy-of-force effort.

  Although central Kansas was a long way from the Pentagon, there were still a few things I could do to help. I was astounded during my 2007 visit to find that many of the counterinsurgency lessons that had been painfully relearned in Iraq had not been transferred to the Afghan theater. Chief among them was the need for an in-country counterinsurgency academy to teach tactics, techniques, and procedures to those arriving for a tour of duty. General Casey had established one in Taji, Iraq, back in 2005, but two years later there was no comparable effort in Afghanistan, where knowledge of Afghan culture and the principles of counterinsurgency were sadly lacking among the troops we deployed there.

  I got in touch with a friend from my Pentagon days who was now working as a strategic adviser to the head of the Afghan training mission and suggested that he establish a COIN academy in Afghanistan, explaining how effective General Casey’s effort in Iraq had been at improving the counterinsurgency performance of U.S. units sent there, at relatively low cost. I was pleased to find a friendly ear. The idea was quickly adopted, and I was invited to head over to Afghanistan to set up the Counterinsurgency Academy myself, but Fort Riley and the First Infantry Division, in which I was then serving, denied permission. As a battalion commander training advisers for two wars, I couldn’t be released for this mission.

  Fortunately, I knew just the man for the job. Captain Dan Helmer had just completed the makeshift adviser training at Fort Riley and been deployed to Afghanistan as a combat adviser. Dan was a West Pointer and Rhodes scholar who had taught himself Arabic during a previous Iraq rotation, had read and internalized the counterinsurgency literature and philosophy, and was completely impervious to conventional views on the proper role of a captain in the U.S. Army. On my recommendation, he was given the mission of standing up the COIN Academy–Afghanistan. Working on a shoestring, Dan lied and stole to accomplish the mission, acquiring officers senior to him as meat puppets to put more authority behind his pronouncements and generally making miracles happen. When he left Kabul after a year, the COIN Academy–Afghanistan was fully up and running. At my encouragement and to the detriment of his Army career, Dan then came back to Fort Riley to train future advisers for Afghanistan, bringing with him a boxed flag for me that had flown over the COIN Academy in Kabul. He inscribed the flag box “To the architect of the counterinsurgency insurgency—the wheels are in motion.”

  Captain Dan Helmer teaching at the COIN Academy–Afghanistan he helped establish.

  I visited Afghanistan again as a civilian senior fellow working at CNAS in late 2008 and again found an underresourced theater of war, although General David McKiernan, who was now commanding the effort there, at least appeared to have a good handle on what it was he was supposed to accomplish. One of the highlights of my visit was a short session at the Counterinsurgency Academy that Dan Helmer had set up outside Kabul. The stage was set for an increase in American attention to the Afghan theater of war.

  Senator Barack Obama, who had campaigned in part on refocusing attention from Iraq to the war in Afghanistan, was elected to the presidency a few days after my return to the United States from my Afghan visit. Upon assuming office, President Obama recognized that the situation in Afghanistan was even more dire than he had thought as a candidate. When he took office, he found waiting for him a request for tens of thousands more troops to secure the Afghan presidential election scheduled for the summer of 2009. The request was already several months old, but the George W. Bush White House had not acted on it. Sending the additional troops to Afghanistan as General McKiernan had requested would have revealed the truth of then-candidate Obama’s argument that “the good war” in Afghanistan was being neglected. If General Casey had been correct that “President Bush has given me a load of shit” in Iraq, President Obama could perhaps be forgiven for feeling the same way about Afghanistan.

  President Obama faced an immediate decision about Afghanistan even before the Senate had confirmed his whole defense team. Important voices in the debate included Michèle Flournoy, recently confirmed as the top policy official in the Pentagon, and my former West Point student Craig Mullaney, who after fighting in Afghanistan and leaving the Army had handled Afghanistan for Senator Obama during the campaign and been given a job in the Pentagon with responsibility for that war. With Michèle and Craig’s encouragement, President Obama immediately established a review panel headed by Brookings Scholar and South Asia expert Bruce Reidel, and within three months ordered the deployment of 30,000 additional U.S. forces to the fight there. Nate Fick and I attended the troop increase announcement at the White House and were heartened by the new president’s commitment to counterinsurgency principles and to success in Afghanistan.

  Changes in strategy often require changes in personnel to implement them. General David McKiernan understood the war in Afghanistan far better than any of his predecessors save Lieutenant General Dave Barno, who had run the war there in 2003 and 2004. Barno had worked to implement counterinsurgency principles despite being poorly resourced—he had only one Army brigade at his disposal to cover the requirements in all of Afghanistan. General Barno would later tell me that he’d kept his hardback copy of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife on his desk during his command in Kabul, and he had me sign it in General Helmick’s backyard after the Army ten-miler upon Barno’s return from theater in 2005. In a sign of how little the Pentagon cared about the Afghanistan conflict, Lieutenant General Barno was given the job of running Army installation management after commanding the U.S. effort in Afghanistan. He retired from the Army to teach at National Defense University, and I later hired him to run the CNAS Afghanistan program.

  McKiernan was judged to be too conventional and not energetic enough by Secretary Gates, who relieved him in favor of Stanley McChrystal in June 2009. General McChrystal had impressed the Pentagon through his leadership of Joint Special Operations Command for the past five years, making significant contributions to the kill/capture part of the counterinsurgency effort in Iraq and Afghanistan, and through his focus on supporting our efforts in those wars during his subsequent appointment as director of the Joint Staff in the Pentagon.

  While he was serving in the Pentagon in 2009, I helped Gen
eral McChrystal implement the long-overdue creation of “AfPak hands,” developing officers and sergeants specially trained and educated in counterinsurgency, regional languages, and local culture. Admiral Mullen dedicated the AfPak hands to repeated assignments to the region, either in theater or back in the United States in between deployments. That it took until 2009 to stand up a small corps of a few hundred military experts on the region was another indication of the Iraq War stealing all the oxygen from the Afghanistan effort. Despite significant flaws in execution—many of the people selected as AfPak hands had been “voluntold” that they would be participating in it, and the education they received has varied widely in quality—the program at the very least requires repeated assignments to the same region to build enduring relationships between Afghan and American leaders, a lesson that took far too long to learn.

  Upon being given command in Afghanistan, General McChrystal set up a strategy review panel and invited me to be a part of it. Although I dearly wanted to accept, I had just taken the position of president of CNAS and couldn’t afford to take the time away from my new responsibilities of hiring talent and raising money. For the first time I understood fellow defense policy analyst Mike O’Hanlon’s incredulity that I had accepted the promotion to head CNAS; he told me that I would no longer be able to serve as a thinker and opinion leader because of the administrative burdens of my new role. I wasn’t smart enough to figure out that he was right until I had to tell McChrystal no. In my stead Nate and I sent Andrew Exum to serve on the Afghanistan strategy review panel. Ex was a former Army Ranger with time in both Iraq and Afghanistan who was finishing his doctoral dissertation on the strategy of Hezbollah; he was one of the first people Nate and I had hired.

  General McChrystal’s strategy review panel included not just Ex but also Fred Kagan, who had been an important thinker behind the decision to “surge” troops to Iraq, and Steve Biddle, with whom I’d traveled to Afghanistan a few months earlier, visiting the COIN Academy in Kabul for the first time. The review panel found a situation that was “deteriorating,” as the first sentence of their assessment noted, and recommended “an integrated civil-military counterinsurgency strategy” to turn things around, which would require another significant troop increase on top of the one that had just been decided upon.

  This caused real consternation in the White House, which had only a few months earlier signed off on the troop increase for Afghanistan that the Reidel study group had recommended. McChrystal’s ultimate request for an additional 40,000 troops began a long period of deliberations in the White House that became quite public. I had the chance to influence the debate when I testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the prospects for fighting “a better war in Afghanistan” on September 16, 2009. I argued that the United States was trying to accomplish the ends of keeping continued pressure on terrorist groups in the region, preventing a sanctuary for terrorists (as was the case before 9/11), and ensuring that there was no regional meltdown—code for Pakistan losing control of its nuclear weapons to radical Islamists. The ways I suggested were the same clear-hold-build strategy that had worked in Iraq, and the means required to do it was a U.S. troop surge to create space in which to build and professionalize more Afghan troops and police. I also suggested a renewed effort to conduct more effective information operations—in Afghanistan, in the region, and here at home.

  In a helicopter in Afghanistan with Mike O’Hanlon.

  My fellow expert witnesses included Rory Stewart, who had walked across Afghanistan in 2002, soon after the fall of the Taliban, and written about the journey in a book titled The Places in Between. He had later set up a nonprofit, Turquoise Mountain, to encourage economic development in Afghanistan. The other was Steve Biddle, freshly back from McChrystal’s review group; Biddle noted correctly that the answer to the question of whether Afghanistan was worth the cost of a fully resourced counterinsurgency campaign was “a close call on the merits.” Nonetheless, he came down in favor of more civilian and military resources for Afghanistan, applied in the same manner as they had been in Iraq, where Biddle’s support for the surge had played some role in influencing President Bush’s decision to implement the strategy.

  In addition to rather publicly advocating a counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I also had the chance to make the argument before a smaller but more influential audience. Vice President Joe Biden played a major role in the decision over troop levels for Afghanistan that occupied much of 2009. He was not an advocate of a fully resourced counterinsurgency strategy, believing that a smaller footprint of American troops focused on counterterrorism operations would be sufficient. I was invited to the White House to try to change his mind, spending ninety minutes in his office explaining that counterterrorism by itself would do nothing to change the dynamics that led terrorists to decide to wage war against the Afghan government and its American supporters. A counterterrorism strategy by itself was a recipe for endless war; it was necessary to resource improvements in governance, economic development, and the provision of services to the population to persuade Afghans not to support a Taliban insurgency that promised it would do all those things if it regained power. The other problem with a counterterrorism strategy was that it offered little to the Afghans themselves in return for basing rights; in order to get them to permit us to conduct such operations from their territory, I believed that we had to offer them something in return—economic development, greater security, and the prospect of eventual peace through the defeat of the Taliban. The vice president was unconvinced, but I appreciated the chance to make the argument in person.

  The White House debate over a second increment of troops for Afghanistan in 2009, in which the vice president played a major role, took place against the background of the summer Afghan presidential election that President Karzai won in an election aided by significant ballot stuffing on his behalf. He would have won without cheating, so the effort cost him in international credibility for no real gain. It also made it harder for American advocates to argue that the fragile democracy in Afghanistan was worth an increased investment of our blood and treasure.

  The Obama administration had inherited the summer elections in Afghanistan from the Bush administration, which pursued a “freedom agenda” throughout both of its terms in office. This was one of the critical errors of President Bush’s foreign policy and was ironically based on an overly simplistic understanding of international relations theory. The Democratic Peace Theorem notes that mature democracies do not wage war with each other very often. The key word is mature. Countries going through the process of democratization are actually more likely to wage war than are autocracies or established democracies. The essence of mature democracies is not honest voting to determine the will of the majority; it is effective institutions to protect the rights of the minority, even if the majority doesn’t like them. These institutions play a major role in establishing peaceful relations both internally and externally, but building them can take decades.

  The Bush administration’s misreading of international relations theory had real-world implications in many countries, including Iraq and Afghanistan. By moving too quickly to create democracies without doing the hard work to create institutions to protect the rights of minority groups—work that can literally take generations, as it did during the development of strong democracies in Taiwan and South Korea—the Bush administration simply made it more likely that the most ruthless and best-organized thugs would seize power in the Palestinian territories, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. We have since seen similar results in Libya, Egypt, and in the insurgency in Syria.

  The Bush administration’s “freedom agenda” mistake was even more consequential than it might appear at first glance. In Malaya, Gerald Templer had essentially embodied political and military power. He had no need to negotiate with the government of Malaya—he was the government of Malaya for the duration of the Emergency, during which Br
itain suspended the normal political order. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States and the international community granted sovereignty to regimes that didn’t yet have the capacity to exercise it and encouraged democratic elections before founding and nurturing the political parties and other institutions that underlay all functioning democracies worldwide. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, American commanders and ambassadors would have to cajole actions from the local political leaders that General Sir Gerald Templer could have simply ordered to happen. It is a crippling distinction in the history of counterinsurgency campaigns, and it was a self-inflicted wound for our efforts in both Iraq and Afghanistan—imposed at the national command level, well outside the control of military leaders.

  However, in 2009 it was far too late to undo the Afghan constitution, and so after the flawed elections of the summer, the Obama administration was stuck with President Karzai for another five years. Rather than making political decisions unilaterally, or even in consultation with junior Afghan partners, American ambassadors and generals were forced to plead with Karzai to fire corrupt governors and replace them with more capable successors. Improving governance and encouraging economic development would have been a challenge in Afghanistan in any case, given the limits of human capital in the country after three decades of war. Accomplishing these tasks when it was impossible for American leaders to independently fire or prosecute Afghan leaders who stole development funding (just one of many examples of corruption and malfeasance) added a degree of difficulty to the task that would prove almost insurmountable.