Knife Fights

by John A. Nagl

  The political decision to allow democratic elections so early in the lifespan of the new Afghanistan was far from the only error of U.S. policy there. The lack of significant, well-resourced U.S. effort in Afghanistan over the eight years preceding President Obama’s two decisions in 2009 to increase troop strength there had given the Taliban a second chance. They took the opportunity to regain strength both in the south around Kandahar, where their movement had begun, and in the east, close to their sanctuaries in Pakistan. General McChrystal’s request for 40,000 additional troops provided sufficient resources to take on both problem areas nearly simultaneously, but it would prove too big a bill for the president to swallow in the fall of 2009 after already doubling down on troops for Afghanistan earlier in the year.

  Along with several other think-tank denizens, I was invited to the White House Situation Room to hear the results of the months of Afghan policy deliberations on the afternoon of December 1, 2009, as Marine One was preparing to ferry the president to West Point for the announcement. The troop numbers were about 10,000 short of what I had recommended, which seems like a small “commander in chief tax,” as some in the White House called it, but was actually hugely important. The president’s decision to send just 30,000 American troops—and to pledge to get the rest from coalition countries—meant that the effort to defeat the Taliban could not be carried out simultaneously Afghanistan-wide but would instead have to be sequential—focusing effort first on the south and swinging to the east later.

  Although America’s allies in the Afghan effort did, over time, promise an additional 10,000 troops, they came in packages of varying size, capability, and thus utility. And the sad truth was that only American soldiers were consistently effective enough in an offensive role to clear the Taliban from their sanctuaries in the south and east; the additional allied troops might be able to hold areas that Americans cleared, but that was about it. The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) consisted of troops from nearly forty countries, and they varied widely in degree of commitment to the fight. While some were excellent—the Canadians for many years paid a heavier toll in blood per capita than did the United States, while the Brits, Australians, and French were also great fighters—the many jokes about the acronym ISAF, such as “I Suck at Fighting” and “I Saw Americans Fight,” hint at a bitter truth about which nations were willing to pay the high cost of doing the hard work of clearing the Taliban.

  The Afghan “surge,” to be announced that evening at West Point, suffered from another problem. In Iraq, the fight to build host-nation security forces began in earnest not long after the Iraqi Army had been disbanded. Real assets were devoted to the effort to rebuild it, including, already in June 2004, putting Lieutenant General Petraeus in charge of the effort, although it took some six months to assemble the organization he needed, and many of the troops under his command who were assigned advisory and training duties were not the first tier. But unlike in Iraq, in Afghanistan the effort to build an Afghan Army and Police force was cursory at best. I had discovered this at Fort Riley in my last assignment in the Army, when I could tell advisers assigned to Iraq exactly where they would be assigned even before they arrived in Kansas, while their counterparts assigned to Afghanistan literally got their assignments when they landed in Kabul. As a result, the American soldiers who cleared Baghdad during the Iraq surge had capable, well-advised Iraqi forces to help hold what they had cleared with U.S. forces, while the effort to build a decent Afghan force began roughly simultaneously with the commitment of American forces to clear southern Afghanistan. There would be no Afghan troops trained and ready to hold what Americans cleared, much less to build a better country in the newly purchased free territory.

  But the biggest flaw in the president’s decision to commit more forces to Afghanistan was not in the sequencing of building Afghan forces simultaneously with the commitment of American surge forces (a decision that had effectively been made for him by the neglect of the advisory effort under the previous administration) or the commitment of insufficient U.S. forces to clear both the south and the east simultaneously. Instead, the critical error was the decision to announce that the “surge” troops for Afghanistan would begin their withdrawal in just eighteen months, during the summer of 2011.

  When this fact was briefed to the think-tankers in the White House Situation Room on the afternoon of the president’s West Point speech, our reaction was immediate and unanimous: this was a disaster of the first order. In Afghanistan, and just as important in Pakistan, the announcement of an increased American troop commitment to the war would be instantly overshadowed by the announcement of the time limit on the American troop commitment. The only words that our allies, and our enemies, would hear from the president’s speech would be the withdrawal date. The president was cutting his own policy off at the knees before it had even gotten up on its feet.

  The cause for this self-defeating policy decision was domestic politics. The president paid a heavy price with his Democratic base for the increased troop commitment to Afghanistan. They apparently hadn’t believed his repeated promises on the campaign trail to increase the U.S. troop commitment to Afghanistan. I explained to Rachel Maddow that night on her program on MSNBC that the president had done exactly what he had promised to do in Afghanistan, at some cost to his popularity among Democrats. Announcing that the Afghan surge would be limited in duration was in part at least a commitment to his political base to start ending the war in his first term, before the 2012 election.

  But nothing is free. The president undercut the value of the increased U.S. troop commitment by announcing its withdrawal date, giving both the Taliban and Al Qaeda a finish line in sight: if they could hold on for eighteen months, the American tide would recede. The Afghans were listening as well, and the lesson they took was similar: The Americans are going to abandon us again, just as they did after we defeated the Soviet Union in the 1980s, so get everything you can now while the getting is good. Announcing the withdrawal date in advance was a grievous self-inflicted error, or “own goal” in the British parlance.

  The White House would claim that Secretary Gates, Admiral Mullen, and Generals Petraeus and McChrystal agreed to or at least accepted the president’s decision to announce the date to begin drawing down the surge at the same time as he announced the additional forces. However, some of those involved stated later that there was no true discussion; rather, they were confronted with a “take it or leave it” moment, and they decided to take it, knowing that leaving it would have given no chance to achieve our objectives. General McChrystal had no choice but to comply with the president’s directives, and he set to work attempting to implement a fully resourced counterinsurgency strategy for the first time during our decade of war in Afghanistan—at least in the south, as he didn’t have the resources to simultaneously get started with a fully resourced COIN campaign in the east.

  The process began in Helmand province, which had been the responsibility of the British Army, who called it “Helmandshire,” but was now being buried under the weight of Marines. They were no longer responsible for Al Anbar Province in Iraq, my old stomping grounds. The first test of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan was slated to be the town of Marjah, where on February 13, 2010, Marines poured in to clear out the Taliban. General McChrystal made the mistake of overpromising, telling The New York Times’s Dexter Filkins, “We’ve got a government in a box, ready to roll in.”

  We didn’t. Afghan forces were not yet developed enough to hold what the Marines had cleared, and there were insufficient political and development specialists in Afghanistan to roll into Marjah for the build phase. The fight in Marjah, which had been scheduled to take just a few weeks, dragged out for the rest of the year, consuming vast resources and attracting far more attention than it deserved. It became an early indicator that Afghanistan was not going to “flip” as quickly as had Iraq under General Petraeus. Afghanistan was harder because of the insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan, insuf
ficient Afghan human capital, the lack of adequate governance and institutions, and limited infrastructure and government revenues.

  McChrystal was deeply concerned about civilian casualties in Afghanistan, correctly understanding that counterinsurgents who killed the innocent created recruits for the enemy. This was a primary tenet of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, and the war in Afghanistan was one of the cases we were thinking about when we wrote it. John Paul Vann, a famous counterinsurgent during the Vietnam War, had noted of that conflict, “This is a political war and it calls for discrimination in killing. The best weapon for killing would be a knife, but I’m afraid we can’t do it that way. The worst is an airplane. The next worst is artillery. Barring a knife, the best is a rifle—you know who you’re killing.” Unfortunately, given how underresourced the fight in Afghanistan had been, there were too few rifles available, and when troops got in trouble, often the only option available to bail them out was airpower, which sometimes went astray and killed the innocent. McChrystal imposed firm restrictions on the use of airpower and artillery in his attempt to win over the Afghan population, dramatically reducing civilian casualties—but perhaps overcorrecting, at least in the eyes of subordinate commanders.

  General Petraeus had done a good job of underpromising and overdelivering in Iraq, but McChrystal took the opposite approach. He also misread Petraeus’s skill in managing members of the media. Although Petraeus worked the media constantly, answering press e-mails at all hours of the day or night, he was very careful about how he talked with members of the press and how much he revealed to them. Between his time at grad school at Princeton and in the Social Sciences department at West Point, he had gotten to know a large number of writers, and he worked assiduously to show them only the sides of him that he wanted revealed on the front page of The New York Times.

  McChrystal hadn’t had the same developmental experiences during his long career in the special forces and didn’t have the same natural caution. When, encouraged by his staff, he allowed Michael Hastings, a stringer with Rolling Stone magazine, to embed with him for a few days in early 2010, he let Hastings inside the circle of trust. A veteran of many years of service inside the close-knit special operations community, knowing almost no one who did not adhere to his personal code of loyalty to mission and command, it was beyond Stan McChrystal’s ability to imagine that a fellow American would report things that would hurt him.

  He was wrong. The Rolling Stone article that was published that summer under the title “Runaway General” featured comments by members of McChrystal’s staff about Vice President Biden that were deeply disrespectful and, according to Hastings, encouraged by the general. McChrystal was recalled to Washington and, on June 23, tendered his resignation to the president, who accepted it and announced on the same day that Petraeus would step down from his position at Central Command in order to take responsibility for the war in Afghanistan. Petraeus hadn’t had time to tell his wife, Holly, that he was going back to war.

  He did so on July 4, almost immediately overriding his predecessor’s overly restrictive guidance on the employment of lethal force in the counterinsurgency campaign. Although counterinsurgency is mostly political, there are committed insurgents who cannot be persuaded to quit and who have to be captured or killed. Even those who are persuadable are more likely to abandon their objections if they face a real threat of being killed or captured; one of the indices of progress we tracked in Khalidiyah in 2004 was the rising price the insurgent leaders had to pay to get a poor subordinate to fire a rocket-propelled grenade at one of our tanks. The cost went up in consonance with the likelihood that the RPG firer wouldn’t survive to enjoy his earnings.

  McChrystal had overinternalized the guidance in the Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Only some of the best weapons for COIN don’t shoot bullets, and although dollars are weapons in this kind of fight, bullets work pretty well in a lot of circumstances. McChrystal’s guidance had limited the ability of American units to call in air support or artillery fire even when they were under enemy fire, but Petraeus restored firepower to its proper place in a counterinsurgency fight, noting that “protecting the Afghan people does require killing, capturing, or turning the insurgents.”

  This change was enormously popular in theater, and the results were almost immediate, as the employment of air strikes and of joint special operations raids increased rapidly. Petraeus and his team implemented a number of other changes, including the commencement of the Afghan Local Police program, support for an insurgent reintegration program modeled on the one that had paid off in Al Anbar, an anticorruption task force led by newly promoted Brigadier General H. R. McMaster, a huge increase in the program to train and equip Afghan forces, and an effort to build capability and capacity to expand the rule of law led by Brigadier General Mark Martins. All made progress in key areas, but time was always the limiting factor.

  Petraeus succeeded in putting more pressure on the Taliban and in rapidly increasing the size and capability of the Afghan security forces, but he was fighting an opponent as implacable as Afghan government corruption: the Washington clock. He would later tell me, “We didn’t get the inputs even close to right in Afghanistan until the late fall of 2010. . . . And, in the end, we only had the benefit of all the forces for some six months or so, with the drawdown commencing in the summer of 2011.” By the time he left his position in Afghanistan in July 2011, the drawdown of U.S. surge forces from Afghanistan had already begun. President Obama was true to his word; he announced the end of the Afghan surge in June 2011, exactly eighteen months after it had begun, and began bringing the troops home in July.

  General Jack Keane, longtime mentor of Petraeus and intellectual godfather of the Iraq Surge, urged Petraeus to resign in June 2011 when President Obama announced the drawdown would be carried out at a more rapid pace than Petraeus had recommended. General Petraeus, already nominated to become the CIA director, felt that he had been given every opportunity to make his case to the president and chose to continue to serve despite his disagreement with the decision to end the Afghan surge as originally promised.

  In fact, Afghanistan was harder than Iraq in some key respects, even though it was never anywhere near as violent as Iraq was in 2006 and the first half of 2007, and the outcome of the campaign was very much in doubt when he departed. The results on the ground were as mixed as we think-tankers would have predicted that afternoon of December 1, 2009, in the White House Situation Room. On the glass-half-full side of the equation, the U.S. troop increase had been substantial, and it did have a huge impact in the south and the west, where the main effort was led by the Marines and an Army division. The clear-hold-build transfer strategy proved its effectiveness on the ground, not for the first time in the history of counterinsurgency campaigns. After years of neglect, the Afghan National Army grew in both size and capability and was able to hold areas that had been cleared by U.S. forces with only a minimal advisory presence. The Afghan Police also improved, albeit from a lower base, and the Afghan Local Police program initiated by Petraeus was scaled across Afghanistan in an example of a historical COIN best practice that was eventually adopted across the campaign.

  Kill/capture operations to take down high-value targets proved successful as a result of improvements in the links between operations and intelligence gathering and some very innovative intelligence fusion operations. With our forces and those of our NATO and Afghan allies, we came tantalizingly close to the 1:50 ratio of counterinsurgency forces to the local population that the Counterinsurgency Field Manual noted had proved a tipping point in past COIN campaigns. The numbers were staggering: 600,000 troops would be indicated to protect the 30 million in Afghanistan’s population. At the peak in 2011, NATO had as many as 150,000 troops, with Afghan security forces still building to an expected total of 354,000 and an Afghan Local Police force of some 40,000. Unfortunately, Afghan forces were still being built up even as the NATO drawdown began, long before the Taliban had been defeated. A
fghan forces will have to confront a challenge that may be more than they can handle.

  Five years after President Obama doubled down on troops to Afghanistan and the AfPak hands program was stood up, the results are mixed. The greatest successes have come in the military field, but that is not the most important battlefield in this kind of war. David Galula said that COIN is 20 percent military and 80 percent everything else—political, economic, and information operations. It is possible to get everything right in the military domain and still lose the war, and there is some danger of just that outcome.

  Counterinsurgency is as much political as military, of course, and the political shortfalls in Afghanistan are also significant. The most pressing is the continued disappointment of Afghan governance, which remains marred by corruption that is excessive even by Afghan standards. Brigadier General H. R. McMaster was given the task to reduce corruption, and the fact that even he wasn’t able to put much of a dent in the problem shows what a significant—and potentially decisive—obstacle Afghan governance is to achieving our objectives there. Promoting democracy in the short term can perversely make it harder to achieve stability in the short term and human rights in the long term, and there are many indications that this will be the result of American and international decisions to move directly to democracy in Afghanistan.

  And if Afghan governance is troubling, Pakistan’s is worse. The most dangerous country in the world for the United States continues to allow the Taliban to operate from its territory, although it is unclear whether this failing results from a lack of ability to control its own territory or from a lack of will to do so; most likely it is a mix of both. The Pakistani deterrence triad has been described as nuclear weapons, the conventional Pakistani Army, and irregular forces including the Pakistani Taliban, which has turned into something of a Frankenstein’s monster that now threatens its own creator. Pakistan is the core of the problem in the region, the main driver of U.S. interests in Southwest Asia, and the keystone to solving it—but not for many years to come. It is worth underlining the fact that the success or failure of the Afghan security forces remains perhaps the most powerful lever to influence Pakistan’s strategic calculus.