Reign of Terror

by Spencer Ackerman

  With the exception of the CIA, the Security State and most of the Obama administration arrayed against Biden. There was a large appetite in the military, and particularly from Admiral Mike Mullen, Dempsey’s predecessor as Joint Chiefs chairman, for recommitting to the Afghanistan war through some version of counterinsurgency. Petraeus, now at CENTCOM, considered Biden’s war unviable, since a collapsing Afghanistan wouldn’t tolerate an indifferent American military presence focused on its neighbor. Clinton, now secretary of state, backed Mullen and Petraeus. By March, Obama approved an extant request from the military command in Kabul for twenty-one thousand troops, in part to secure an upcoming presidential election, a move that could have satisfied his campaign pledge to escalate. While Obama said the mission was to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” he described a meandering path to victory running through Afghanistan. It called for “promot[ing] a more capable and accountable Afghan government,” a goal that required a “dramatic increase in our civilian effort,” extending as far as enlisting agronomists. Michèle Flournoy, the CNAS cofounder who now ran the Pentagon’s policy directorate, described the strategy as “very much a counterinsurgency approach” to a counterterrorism objective. It implied that nation building was necessary for durable counterterrorism, an expansive commitment.

  That was not the sort of war that had been waged by the Joint Special Operations Command, the raiders of Zarqawi, but their commander, Stanley McChrystal, took it over in mid-2009. McChrystal’s experience in Iraq sent him searching for an endgame in an endless war, something night raids would never deliver, and he accordingly became more Petraeus than Petraeus. His definition of victory—“a condition where the insurgency no longer threatens the viability of the state”—looked entirely past al-Qaeda. Backed by his fellow generals, McChrystal requested forty thousand more troops, even as the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, the former war commander Karl Eikenberry, called the entire strategy folly. But the Iraq surge established that losing a war only empowered those who wanted to escalate. Obama, granting thirty thousand more troops to generals he now distrusted, extracted from them a promise to deliver results within eighteen months. The discomfited officers, in no position to refuse without undermining confidence in their strategy, acquiesced. The stage was set for the Afghanistan surge: a campaign none of its factionalized architects fully embraced. In December Obama set “breaking the Taliban’s momentum” as the objective, a purposefully subjective definition that would cover everything short of outright defeat.

  It started coming apart from the start. In February, McChrystal picked his first major engagement, a town of eighty thousand in Helmand called Marja that the Taliban had occupied. He flooded it with fifteen thousand U.S., NATO, and Afghan forces. After only one day of fighting, McChrystal had to apologize for the deaths of civilians, the result of an errant artillery strike. He suspended the use of the artillery system and constrained air support. What McChrystal considered necessary to avoid alienating Afghans seemed to his infantrymen like disarmament before a resilient enemy. Anticipating victory in Marja within weeks, the first step in his plan to retake Helmand Province by occupying one river town after another, McChrystal boasted that he had brought “a government in a box, ready to roll in.” But throughout the coming year, the Taliban continued to harry his forces in territory he had thought retaken, preventing him from turning security over to the Afghans as he had promised the local tribal leadership he would. Echoing Napoleon, he called Marja his “bleeding ulcer.”

  As the intractability persisted, the United States fought itself. McChrystal’s relentless intelligence director from their JSOC days, Major General Michael Flynn, publicly accused the rest of the U.S. intelligence apparatus of not knowing anything about Afghanistan. His major complaint was that it was focused on the insurgency and not on the Afghans—who, counterinsurgency doctrine held, would determine the war’s winners and losers—people, Flynn warned, who the U.S. still didn’t understand. As McChrystal visited with his troops, he came under the opposite criticism. Soldiers at an outpost near Kandahar resented him after they were denied permission to destroy an abandoned, booby-trapped house where twenty-three-year-old Corporal Michael Ingram had been killed. “We aren’t putting fear into the Taliban,” one told McChrystal. “The more we pull back, the more we restrain ourselves, the stronger it’s getting.”

  McChrystal lost his command after Michael Hastings reported in Rolling Stone his camp’s disrespect for everyone else involved in Afghanistan except Clinton. Obama replaced him with Petraeus, who was effectively demoted from CENTCOM. With a year to go before the surge forces began coming home, Petraeus prioritized the kind of killing he had spent years arguing was counterproductive. His campaign plan was now reliant on overhead surveillance and Special Operations raids, as if he was commanding JSOC. He dismissed questions about the shift in tactics. “Targeted, intelligence-driven precision operations by those [Special Operations Forces] elements are absolutely part of a comprehensive, civil-military counterinsurgency campaign,” Petraeus said soon after taking command.

  Petraeus removed McChrystal’s hated restrictions and air strikes returned in force. In October 2010 there were one thousand aerial weapons releases, the most since the invasion began. An extreme example occurred at a place called Tarek Kolache. Lieutenant Colonel David Flynn arrived in the heavy vegetation of the Arghandab River Valley, near Kandahar, to discover fields densely packed with IEDs. His task force suffered seven killed and eighty-three wounded in months spent fighting for control, mostly from the IEDs, which hindered efforts at clearing the local towns. After determining that the villages of Tarek Kolache, Khosrow Sofla, and Lower Babur were cleared of civilians—the Taliban having driven the people from their pomegranate trees, he claimed—Flynn informed the local leaders in exile that unless the villagers told the task force exactly where the IEDs were, he would have no choice but to blow up their homes. One journalist reported he framed it as a threat; Flynn denied it. But on October 6 Flynn dropped twenty-five tons of bombs and destroyed the villages to save them. He remembered telling the village elders, “I promise, I will rebuild the homes.” Petraeus backed his officer. “We’re being forced into these things,” said his spokesman, Colonel Erik Gunhus. A Washington Post reporter visiting Tarek Kolache three years later found “a sandy ruin.” The village elder, forty-seven-year-old Niaz Mohammed, asked, “What did we win in this war? We lost our homes. We lost our village.” The Taliban, he said, were only fighting the Americans because the Americans were there.

  To the northwest in Helmand Province was what one marine called a hell on earth. The marines had bled, twice, in taking Fallujah, sometimes one house at a time. But they had not yet experienced Sangin, where the Taliban had kept the British at bay for four years. From September 2010 to April 2011, the one thousand marines of the Third Battalion, Fifth Regiment—the Darkhorse Battalion—entered a brown expanse of mud, vegetation, canals, and animal shit that the Taliban had turned into a killing field. Getting off their outpost involved dodging a maze of IEDs and small-arms fire. What awaited, as Flynn had encountered, were dense thickets of bombs. “You could not move outside of the district center without getting shot,” the Darkhorse commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jason Morris, told NPR. The 3/5 marines suffered the highest casualty rate of the war: twenty-five dead, two hundred wounded, including dozens of men who underwent amputations and suffered other life-changing injuries. The military leadership responded as it had in Iraq: with delusional statements of assured victory. “We believe [the Taliban]’ll be returning to a significantly different environment than when they left last year,” General David Rodriguez, the deputy commander, said.

  One of the Sangin dead was a twenty-nine-year-old second lieutenant named Robert Kelly. A Fallujah veteran, Kelly stepped on an IED leading his men on a dismounted patrol. Marine general Joseph Dunford rang the Washington Navy Yard doorbell of marine lieutenant general John Kelly to tell his cl
ose friend that Kelly was now the most senior Gold Star parent of the war. Four days later, in St. Louis, Kelly gave a caustic speech accusing the nation of indifference to the unfathomable sacrifice of marines in faraway places. “We are in a life-and-death struggle, but not our whole country,” said the anguished Kelly, who directed his venom not at those who ordered his son to Sangin to die for a marginal U.S. interest, but at those who opposed the war. Kelly claimed that combat veterans broadly “hold in disdain those who claim to support them but not the cause that takes their innocence, their limbs and even their lives.” After this display of contempt, Gates made Kelly his senior military assistant, ensuring Kelly’s ascent in the military and beyond.

  None of the surge’s architects bothered explaining how any of this knitted up into an acceptable outcome. No politician pressured them to. Some soldiers reacted with barbarism. A platoon from the Fifth Stryker Brigade formed a “kill team” to hunt and murder Afghan civilians, including children, whom they called “savages.” Only low-ranking enlisted men were prosecuted for what a whistleblower described as an open secret within the company. In March 2011 Staff Sergeant Robert Bales snuck off his Panjwei base to methodically open fire on house after house until sixteen men, women, and children were dead, in the worst U.S. wartime atrocity since My Lai. The following year Clint Lorance, a lieutenant only days into his command, ordered his soldiers to open fire without provocation on three civilians. The platoon, many of whom suffered lasting scars from the experience, turned Lorance in. Yet the atrocities of Afghanistan barely registered with U.S. public opinion.

  What passed for a theory of victory—pummeling the Taliban into suing for peace—was frustrated by the war’s tangle of competing interests. Furtive and occasionally farcical diplomacy—the U.S. negotiated with an imposter at one point—had been official policy since September 2010. It sidestepped an outraged Karzai, prompting the Taliban to declare that further talks were off, thanks to the United States’s “ever-changing position.” The most the talks ever yielded was an exchange of five senior members of the Taliban at Guantanamo for army sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, an American deserter who would soon become widely loathed. The gesture had been intended as a confidence-building measure. All the Americans could do now, as the Taliban reconquered more of Afghanistan, was train Afghan soldiers in the hope they could take over the war. Some, in so-called Green-on-Blue attacks, fought the United States instead.

  A year after the surge troops came home, Sergeant Rob returned to Afghanistan. Now thirty-five, he was beginning his second tour there, after an army career that began in 1996 when he was seventeen years old and had taken him to Bosnia and twice to Iraq. While on patrol in Pul-e-Alam on November 3, 2013, Rob’s platoon came under small-arms and rocket-propelled-grenade attack. He had been scheduled for redeployment home to his wife and three daughters three weeks later. As Sergeant Rob died in eastern Afghanistan, his last words were said to be “Go get ’em, boys.”

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  LATE ON SUNDAY, MAY 1, 2011, a SEAL team under McRaven’s command helicoptered into a Pakistani town called Abbottabad, near the military academy it hosted and far from the tribal areas; raided a compound; and shot Osama bin Laden dead. At 11:00 p.m., Obama announced the end of the leader of al-Qaeda, the embodiment of the threat that for a decade had consumed America. Hundreds of college students ran into Lafayette Park, near the White House, and, unfurling American flags, partied. The cathartic, patriotic, vengeful joy struck New Yorker writer Peter Maass as uncomfortably reminiscent of “young Muslims on the other side of the world burning our flag and shouting ‘Death to America!’ ”

  Bin Laden’s death suddenly brought into relief the fact that, even as John Kelly considered them strangers to the war, the young Americans celebrating in Lafayette Park had not known peace since they were children. “All my life has been defined by what Osama bin Laden did,” said Ann Garcia, who had just begun high school on 9/11. Samantha McGowan, only ten years old on 9/11, who had run to the park in her pajamas, said: “This was more a celebration of conquering terrorism, an idea that has permeated our lives for ten years.” Annabel Hogg, three years older, felt discomfited by the celebration but defended it. “I have and people of my generation have been profoundly affected by 9/11,” she explained. Bin Laden “took away what the country had been before, one without terror alerts and men in caves who we are told want to kill us.”

  By defining the enemy so vaguely, Bush ensured that any declared end to the war would be a matter of political dispute. Different parties, factions, and interests would always be able to offer contending claims of who the enemy actually was and, accordingly, when the task at hand was actually completed. But with bin Laden dead, no alternative outcome in the War on Terror could more plausibly and universally be used to declare that the war was not only concluded but won. Instead, Obama squandered the best chance anyone could ever have to end the 9/11 era.

  “His death does not mark the end of our effort,” the president said in announcing the death. The following day Brennan called it merely the beginning of the end for al-Qaeda: a “strategic blow” necessary but insufficient to destroy it, “but we are determined to destroy it.” (Brennan also claimed bin Laden was “engaged in a firefight” with the SEALs, which the White House later retracted, and he neglected to mention that the CIA had been gathering DNA information in Abbottabad by faking a vaccination drive, thereby putting at risk real, lifesaving public-health efforts.) Obama does not grapple with this decision in his memoir and treats it as self-evident. “[N]one of us believed the threat from al-Qaeda was over,” he wrote in 2020, just that now it was “a step closer to strategic defeat,” which he did not further define. Equivocally, he writes that bin Laden’s death offered “a catharsis of sorts.” At the time, his administration instead feared political exposure from overpromising what bin Laden’s death meant. Few reporters even asked Brennan if the Forever War was now over, or could be over. It reflected a political consensus that would have punished Obama for declaring victory during the last, best chance for it that America would have.

  “His read of political realities and public opinion is that he can’t do that, and that part of being president is shaping public opinion and part of being president is understanding it,” Rhodes offered. “He was president of a country where, let’s say he did that, and dismantled our counterterrorism apparatus over that summer, and there’s a terrorist attack and then the world ends.”

  The apparatus Obama built to constrain the War on Terror also generated the internal processes sustaining it. Unless it was disassembled, there would always be another target. And each subsequent target would be worse than the last, as tomorrow’s enemy would react to the compounding outrages of torture, invasion, occupation, and everything else America inflicted. The resting state of the War on Terror was expansion, expansion of both action and enemies. Yet dismantling the War on Terror, rather than maintaining it, was considered irresponsible. What bin Laden began required a U.S. invasion to yield an al-Qaeda in Iraq. Awlaki was sympathetic to the Bosnian and Chechen jihads, but he only encouraged Western Muslims to attack in the West after Ashcroft’s raids and what followed. A year before the bin Laden raid, a Pakistani American MBA named Faisal Shahzad attempted to detonate an SUV in Times Square. Pleading guilty, Shahzad explained that Americans should expect vengeance.

  “I’m going to plead guilty a hundred times forward,” he said, “because until the hour the U.S. pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and stops the drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan and stops the occupation of Muslim lands and stops killing the Muslims and stops reporting the Muslims to its government, we will be attacking [the] U.S., and I plead guilty to that.”

  Shahzad blamed America, and America refused to listen, as doing so would contradict American exceptionalism’s self-conception of innocence. That was another aspect of the War on Terror that Obama did not attempt to change. Ever since Sont
ag, elites from both parties and the Security State treated blowback explanations as calumny, no different than proclaiming that America deserved attack. The fact that any attack could take place ensured the maintenance of the apparatus of mass surveillance, detention, border security, and any other tool of the state of exception; the wars themselves were more controversial, taxing, and hence expendable. But even as America now had to face Hasans, Abdulmutallabs, Shahzads, Zarqawis, and Awlakis, none of them had the money, organization, or patience to execute a 9/11. Samir Khan’s Inspire magazine encouraged American Muslims like himself to ram their cars onto crowded sidewalks; this generation of jihadists was not going to learn how to fly planes. None of that stopped substantial elements of the right from arguing that they faced an Islamic besiegement: certainly not the rarity of domestic U.S. deaths from terrorism, and least of all the fact that one of the street vendors in the square who alerted police to Shahzad’s smoking car was a Senegalese Muslim immigrant named Alioune Niasse.

  Yet having deprived the country of a chance at closure, Obama soon found himself in need of a plausible vision for how the War on Terror would come to an end. Part of how he got there was by conceding that a prime danger of the war was the spiraling American bloodthirst it had unleashed.

  As terrorist attacks by self-starters, including Americans, persisted, Obama began speaking of “resilience” as a component of successful counterterrorism. He didn’t only mean the resilience of counterterrorism institutions, focus, and funding. He meant the resilience of Americans against overreaction. It would be safer, certainly more sustainable, to respond to terrorist attacks through law enforcement and intelligence channels—left unsaid was how that ensured more Adham Hassouns and Faheem Qureshis—rather than by, say, invading foreign countries. It was a version of what John Kerry proposed in October 2004. It was also a combustible, politically dangerous position, especially for a Black president who millions continued to believe—despite the surge, despite bin Laden, despite the drones—palled around with terrorists. Obama did not go beyond an unfinished thought about how “a perpetual war would alter our country in troubling ways.”