The story I will tell of my command there is from my perspective. I will describe the evolution of my understanding of the challenges we faced in Afghanistan, the mission I believed I’d been given, and the strategy I felt could succeed. I’m not unbiased. Afghanistan can do that to you. In Iraq, though we fought to destroy Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Al Qaeda with all the ferocity we could muster, I never connected with the population. In Afghanistan, as my time in command progressed, I would develop strong feelings for the Afghans and their nation.
At the heart of the story is Afghanistan itself, a complex swirl of ethnic and political rivalries, cultural intransigence, strains of religious fervor, and bitter memories overlaid on a beautiful, but harshly poor, landscape. Without internal struggles or outside interference, Afghanistan would be a difficult place to govern, and a challenge to develop. And there have always been struggles and interference.
But it’s not just that. In her beauty and coarseness, in her complexity and tragedy Afghanistan possesses a mystical quality, a magnetism. Few places have such accumulated layers of culture, religion, history, and lore that instill both fear and awe. Yet those who seek to even budge her trajectory are reminded that dreams often end up buried in the barren slopes of the Hindu Kush or in muddy fields alongside the Helmand River.
When I arrived to take command of the war in June 2009, in addition to the rising violence and sense of insecurity, I found a creeping, fatalistic pessimism, as though the fight were over, the effort failed. Some pointed to history and declared the country intractable. Few countries or NGOs were leaving, but many wanted to. There was growing unease with the viability of the mission.
Indeed, in those early days, as I assessed the war, I wasn’t sure the mission could be done. Although I’d known it would be difficult, the situation was even worse than I’d anticipated. I was further cautioned by the fact that I would be the twelfth commander to lead the NATO effort in Afghanistan, the latest in a succession of experienced professionals. Any solution would not be only a military one; it had to encompass much more. But as we looked closer and considered a range of strategies, I concluded that it was possible. The intimidating specter of Afghanistan as an impossible challenge belied the reality. The obstacles were numerous, but the accrued problems were not insoluble, just incredibly difficult.
Against the fatalism that the cause was doomed, I believed a unique confluence of factors, personalities, and events in Kabul, Washington, D.C., and other locations offered a real opportunity to succeed. But radical change was needed, quickly. We needed to leverage the movement those factors had created in order to convince Afghans, ISAF, and other players that the status quo had changed, that the trajectory had been altered for the better. It couldn’t be false—cynicism would overtake any progress that was too slow or wasn’t real. But I thought that if we did smart analysis, got the strategy right, worked to exhaustion, and came into a bit of luck, the mission could be accomplished. I would never have sought additional forces to fight an effort I felt was doomed.
As the story unfolds many things appear: extraordinary sacrifice and teamwork, often alongside an atmosphere of mistrust, uncertainty, media scrutiny, and politics. There is a temptation to seek a single hero or culprit—a person, group, or policy—that emerges as the decisive factor. This makes for better intrigue, but it’s a false drama. To do so is to oversimplify the war, the players, and Afghanistan itself. Because despite their relevance as contributing factors, I found no single personality, decision, relationship, or event that determined the outcome or even dominated the direction of events.
Afghanistan did that. Only Afghanistan, with her deep scars and opaque complexity, emerged as the essential reality and dominant character. On her brutal terrain, and in the minds of her people, the struggle was to be waged and decided. No outcome was preordained, but nothing would come easily. Few things of value do.
* * *
This story begins one year to the day before I arrived to command in Afghanistan. On Friday, June 13, 2008, in the same parachute-packing facility at Fort Bragg where Annie had mouthed the words “I love you” seventeen hundred days before, I passed command of TF 714 to my friend and former deputy, then–Vice Admiral Bill McRaven. My boss at SOCOM, Admiral Eric Olson, officiated. Friends and colleagues from throughout our career, like then–Lieutenant General Marty Dempsey and his wife, Deanie, and Dave and Ginny Rodriguez, were there. But mostly the rows were filled with familiar faces I’d shared the turbulent years with since 2003.
“There will be few markers from this war,” I said to those present, and those still far away, “and much of the history will be inaccurate or incomplete. Cannons won’t reflect where you stood and bled, or markers to record the cost. But in the minds and hearts of those who have known you, and in the soul of the nation, the fact that you were there is indelibly written. You have done your duty—and it was the honor of my life to have been here to witness it. Thank you.”
With those words, I gave up command of TF 714.
A few weeks earlier, I had been confirmed by the Senate to become director of the Joint Staff, essentially chief of staff to the chairman and the joint chiefs. DJS, as it was called, was a prestigious post, one John Abizaid and then George Casey had held during my previous tour at the Pentagon. I’d been told that the chairman, Admiral Mike Mullen, had sought me for the position. Having appreciated his keen interest in how TF 714 operated when he was the chief of naval operations, I suspected he’d be a kindred spirit.
The Senate confirmation process had been unexpectedly jarring. Although every military officer’s promotion to field grade or higher must be confirmed by Senate vote, my experience to that point in my career had been as a name on long promotion lists that the White House recommended and the Senate confirmed. My promotion to lieutenant general in February 2006, when I was deployed in Iraq, had not involved individual testimony or significant issues.
This time the experience was much different. I was informed in December 2007 that I’d be nominated for the DJS job and to anticipate an early 2008 confirmation and departure from TF 714. In the end the process took until the first week of June. Although questions surrounding the death of Pat Tillman were raised and I addressed them, the major issue regarded TF 714’s detention operations. Legitimate questions and concerns were intertwined with an ongoing inquiry into the Bush administration’s overall detention policies led by Senator Levin. I was happy for the opportunity to address any questions about TF 714 head-on, but it felt as though the delay was the product of a larger political issue.
I reported for duty to the Joint Staff on August 13, 2008. Because I’d disliked the ponderous Pentagon bureaucracy during my previous tour I was pleased with the guidance I received in my first meeting with Chairman Mullen.
“I want you to do what you do,” he said. “I want you to attack and destroy the network.”
I was confused. We were sitting in his quiet office in the Pentagon, not Baghdad. “Chairman, what network are you talking about?”
“Ours,” he said. He was referring to the Joint Staff, and by extension to the parts of the Pentagon and military we in the Staff interacted with. “Tear it down and rebuild it to be faster, more transparent, and more effective.”
That was clear enough, even for an infantryman. A navy admiral with extensive experience in the Pentagon had identified an enemy who must be defeated, and it was us. Much of my next ten months were spent implementing changes to shape the Joint Staff into the more agile, focused team that Admiral Mullen desired. My close partner in this, and in Afghanistan afterward, was my executive officer, Charlie Flynn. Since he had commanded a company under me in the 2nd Ranger Battalion in the mid-1990s, Charlie and I had stayed close. He was, on the surface, charismatic and easygoing, with a quick smile and kind face. But as the youngest of a rough-and-tumble Rhode Island brood of nine, Charlie had a scrappy, hard-charging energy. He came to the Pentago
n that year directly from commanding in Iraq—his third combat tour since 9/11. He and his wife decided the family would stay in North Carolina to let their kids stay in the same schools, so Annie insisted he bunk in a small third-floor room in our quarters on Fort McNair.
During our year at the Pentagon, we shared most moments of what became a mechanical schedule: Each night, he and I ate a quick dinner together before I got up the next day at 3:30 A.M. to run to the Pentagon, in time to shower, change, meet Dave Rodriguez at six and then host the 6:30 A.M. standup—a knock-off of the TF 714 O&I—that I soon instituted to tie together the Joint Staff and other offices in the Pentagon. When the day ended around 8 P.M., Charlie and I walked across the Pentagon’s big plateau-size parking lot to his car, drove home, ate, and did it again the next day. But as busy as we were, I was home with Annie.
* * *
When I arrived at the Pentagon, I found, as I had six years earlier, the nation’s energy and resources shifting from the theater I’d left to a war I’d soon rejoin. When I joined the Joint Staff from Afghanistan in 2002, I was surprised to find the Pentagon’s focus on Iraq. Now, returning from Iraq in August 2008, I was less surprised to find a growing focus on Afghanistan. From the day I became the DJS I sensed that Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan would dominate our energy. In 2003, there had been a troubling velocity to the decision making. Now, with rising war fatigue and an impending change in administrations, I sensed the opposite.
As we knew better in 2008 than immediately following the 9/11 attacks, our war in Afghanistan did not begin in 2001. The fighting reflected forces brewing in Afghanistan for centuries, and the conflict’s modern roots dated back to 1973. That year, after a forty-year reign, King Zahir Shah was unseated in a bloodless coup (he was vacationing in Europe) by his former prime minister and brother-in-law Daoud. Daoud’s soft entrance belied his authoritarian reign, which soon prompted a group of eager Afghan communists to overthrow him in 1978. As these communists’ early attempts to rule faltered and provoked a violent backlash that showed signs of an impending insurgency, the Soviet Union intervened on Christmas 1979.
For the next ten years, the Afghan government and ever more Soviet troops fought against a collection of diverse opposition movements. They were eventually subsidized by Saudi Arabia and the United States, but largely manipulated by Pakistan, which dispensed the funds as it saw fit. The long struggle polarized Afghanistan’s many ethnic groups, and turned the mujahideen resistance more extreme. The perennial warring catapulted into positions of power a group of nontraditional leaders like Abdul Rashid Dostum, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and Ahmad Shah Massoud, whose talents ranged from military acumen to cold-blooded murder. Ultimately, the Soviets withdrew their military forces in 1989, but the government they left behind, under President Mohammed Najibullah, survived for three years. When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, however, Najibullah’s regime lost funding, credibility, and was weakened by infighting. The amassing opposition movements soon took control of the nation, advanced toward Kabul, and began fighting one another in civil war.
The year the civil war had begun, 1992, wasn’t that long ago, and adults in Afghanistan remembered well the behavior of the groups that had struggled for wealth and power. Alliances arose and shifted quickly. Fortunes were amassed and used to construct garish homes or private fiefdoms. The traditional relationships that balanced local and national interests, and formal and informal power brokers, struggled to reemerge from the wreckage of war. In the chaos, Afghans retreated to relationships most familiar and trustworthy to them: family, tribe, and ethnic group. A cadre of well-educated elites labored to stitch together structures on which to build the future, but most were upended with each new spasm of violence and turmoil.
In 1994, the Taliban rose to power. They emanated from the Pashtun south and were populated by young Afghans often schooled in madrassas, or religious schools—talib means “student”—across the border in Pakistan. These idealistic, religiously inflexible young men seemed at first like a summer rain that would wash away the excesses of “warlords” who had robbed, raped, and terrified Afghans living under them. The Taliban’s personal piety and quick punishment of pederasts and thieves appeared, at first, a welcome respite for a people weary of conflict. They skillfully advertised it as such. Of course it was too good to be true. Quickly, the Taliban exhibited administrative incompetence and displayed a stunning propensity for draconian violence and intolerance. Their cruel and tone-deaf actions, like public executions for adultery, and the destruction of ancient Buddhist statues, eventually earned them the contempt of the international community. So too did the sanctuary they gave to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, who helped the Taliban lay siege to the few remaining holdouts of resistance in northern Afghanistan.
For many Afghans, the tragedy of 9/11 and the American response represented an opportunity. With Afghanistan again the attention of the world, they had a chance to remove the Taliban and reshape their country. For a short period it would be possible to leverage the presence of international peacekeepers and donations to establish a government dominated by neither extremist ideologues nor the predatory warlords who’d haunted the country. Nearly seven years later, their vision remained unfulfilled.
For the first few years following the Taliban’s overthrow, Afghanistan appeared under control. But after a period of waiting to see how the Karzai government would perform, and treat former Taliban, an insurgency soon gestated. To the degree that the insurgency had a central command, the Taliban regime’s former leaders dominated it. Most decamped to Quetta, Pakistan, eighty miles from southern Afghanistan, and the city became the rallying point for turning the now-exiled Taliban government into an insurgent movement to contest the Karzai government. Theirs was a natural reinvention. Although they had largely fought costly conventional campaigns in the civil war of the 1990s, many of the movement’s elders had cut their teeth in the guerrilla war against the Soviets. The structures they’d used to govern Afghanistan—shuras, or councils—were reconstituted, populated by leaders who’d survived the initial salvo of war as well as new up-and-comers.
They led heavy recruitment efforts throughout Pakistan’s madrassas, and began to root themselves into the country by dispatching small bands of fighters. Primarily in the south and east, these mobile units pestered NATO forces but, more important, waged blanket assassination campaigns against any Afghans—government officials, civilians, NGO workers—who collaborated with NATO or the Afghan government. The memory of these fatal visits by roving bands ensured that Afghans did not regard future Taliban threats as empty. Larger bands of fighters, and more distinct military commands, followed.
The Taliban benefited heavily from the weakness and predatory behavior of the Afghan government. Frustration, then rage, at the inability or unwillingness of the government, despite its clear progress in certain sectors like education, to provide basic justice and economic opportunities yielded fertile ground into which the Taliban planted the seeds of resistance. Worse still than the disappointing nondelivery of goods were the predations of the warlords, who gained political sway, entrenched themselves economically, and built up military clout in their corners of Afghanistan, which they often ruled as corrupt autocrats.
It was a dynamic we’d exacerbated. For years, seeking to maintain a light footprint in the country, the NATO approach had largely been to remain in Kabul and use local power brokers—too often the corrupt and despised warlords—whom we paid handsomely. An effort to extend a greater NATO presence into the provinces had begun in 2004, creating regional commands in the north, west, south, east, and in Kabul, but a lack of both Afghan and ISAF forces limited their ability to influence events on the ground. As the Taliban made inroads, sometimes without firing a shot, they sought to compete with the Afghan state. Particularly appealing to many Afghans were the Taliban’s rudimentary but swift courts. In 2005, they had “shadow governors” who sought to institute a parallel gove
rnment to compete with the Afghan government in eleven of the country’s thirty-four provinces. Now, three years later, they were established in thirty-one provinces.
In May 2008, shortly before leaving TF 714, I’d spent an afternoon with ISAF commander Dan McNeill, my old boss and mentor. In a series of briefings and discussions, Dave Rodriguez, then commanding the 82nd Airborne Division in eastern Afghanistan, Dan, other key leaders, and I had reviewed the war. As always, indicators were mixed and often contradictory, but both empirical data and the anecdotal observations of my strike forces convinced Rod and me that trends were negative. More Americans—and more Afghan civilians—were dying each year. The insurgency was laying bigger IEDs, and more of them—four times as many as they had implanted in 2005.
Now, in September 2008, it looked even worse. So I was not surprised when General Dave McKiernan, who had led ground forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and replaced Dan McNeill at ISAF in June, requested additional forces in order to reverse Taliban gains in southern Afghanistan and improve security in advance of the Afghanistan’s upcoming 2009 presidential elections. Improving security would be essential to achieving durable improvements in governance and development.
Also in September, after several years largely fixated on the crisis in Iraq, President Bush launched what would become the first in a new round of assessments on Afghanistan and Pakistan, conducted by Central Command, the Joint Staff, and the National Security Council in order to align current policy with on-the-ground reality. The reviews were each fairly comprehensive but ultimately identified no silver-bullet solutions to seemingly intractable problems. The obvious options—do more, do less, or do the same—were unappealing.
My Share of the Task Page 42