My Share of the Task

by General Stanley McChrystal

  The instinctive way we reacted to alleged incidents made it worse. Americans frequently responded defensively to charges of misguided strikes. Afghans viewed our skepticism about the validity of their claims as obfuscation, even if we followed our comments with thorough investigations. They thought our hesitation to quickly, publicly apologize for Afghan deaths was an indicator of callousness. Americans cared, of course, but perceptions mattered. Even when an apology was forthcoming, Afghans would rarely, if ever, see any change in our behavior. “Afghans hear with their eyes, not just with their ears,” a group of elders had reminded members of my staff on the listening tour.

  I prioritized ensuring ISAF made careful use of its awesome firepower. But from the start I knew doing so would be sensitive. Resistance would come from both the take-the-gloves-off proponents of more aggressive counter-guerrilla operations, but also from thoughtful commanders and units whose experiences in Iraq were seared into their psyche.

  I would ask soldiers and Marines to demonstrate what we soon termed “courageous restraint”—forgoing fires, particularly artillery and air strikes, when civilian casualties were likely—even if it meant a firefight dragged on longer, or a group of insurgents was allowed to flee only to ambush ISAF forces another day. I was emphatic that fires could and should be used if the survival of our forces was directly threatened, but in cases where the only purpose was to kill insurgents, the protection of civilian lives and property took precedence. To communicate as clearly as I could, I personally wrote the key parts of a tactical directive that was designed to explain my intent in straightforward, nonlawyerly language. I wrote it not to prescribe tactical decisions for sergeants and junior officers closest to the fight, but to help them understand the underlying logic of the approach I was asking them to employ.

  “I expect leaders at all levels to scrutinize and limit the use of force like close air support (CAS) against residential compounds,” I wrote. “I cannot prescribe the appropriate use of force for every condition that a complex battlefield will produce, so I expect our force to internalize and operate in accordance with my intent.” They were points I reinforced almost daily in commandwide VTCs.

  More important, the directive did not change any part of the soldiers’ rules of engagement—the military’s legal code that governs how and when soldiers can use force when confronted by the enemy. I left untouched the rules by which soldiers could defend themselves. “This directive does not prevent commanders,” I wrote, “from protecting the lives of their men and women as a matter of self-defense where it is determined no other options . . . are available to effectively counter the threat.” I wanted them to think creatively about how they could avoid getting stuck in a situation where, to defend themselves, they needed airpower. But I never took that right away from them.

  Many of the lower-level battalion and brigade commanders had reached these conclusions long before I issued my tactical directive. They had been prudently restricting their use of firepower. Some made it a de facto policy to drop munitions on compounds in only the most dire situations.

  But I also knew that the military coalition was an immense organization, and that there was a constant risk of misunderstanding the directive at the lowest levels, where the fight and these decisions were the most difficult. This was especially true since many lieutenants and sergeants never directly read the directives that top-level commanders, like me, put out; they often received the guidance secondhand. One young Marine, for example, told me that as a lieutenant in Iraq, he learned of new tactical guidance or directives through TV news reports about them. Thus, I used every opportunity, and leveraged the leadership and credibility of combat leaders like Dave Rodriguez and Mike Hall, to articulate the policy. Charlie Flynn, my exec, who quickly grasped the importance, also spread the gospel by answering e-mails from battalion and brigade commanders, many whom he knew, or by talking with them frankly, commander-to-commander, when we visited outposts and regional headquarters.

  My decision to limit fires wasn’t primarily a moral one, although a single visit with a child, staring blankly at where her legs had been, or a widowed spouse, mouth twisted in grief, was enough to convince many people that it was the right thing to do. Rather, mine was a calculation that we could not succeed in the mission I thought President Obama had outlined for Afghanistan without the support of the people. That support was based upon the premise that we were there to protect them—and to support the Afghan government. For many Afghans, we were in their country because their government had asked us to be. Thus, every time we killed or maimed civilians, it not only made us more unwelcome but it corroded the government’s reputation. We needed to curate and grow that reputation in order to make it a bulwark against the insurgency.

  Additionally, as I sought to make our force more mindful of civilian casualties, I also wanted to dissuade a myopic focus on insurgent deaths. Thus, shortly after taking over, I directed that all of the units cease reporting, in their public affairs releases, tolls of insurgents killed. While these units were not using insurgent deaths as an official metric, I knew that forces performed according to what was measured and scrutinized. So I wanted to take away any incentives that might drive commanders and their men to see killing insurgents as the primary goal.

  * * *

  We were, of course, not alone in trying to fight smarter and learn from the mistakes of the past eight years. So too were our enemies. That summer, the Taliban’s senior leadership—the rahbari, or Quetta, shura—released an updated version of the layha, the rule book that ostensibly governed how its insurgent ranks could conduct themselves. The Taliban had distributed the layha internally since 2006. But that summer they revised it, and then leaked it to the media as part of their campaign to counteract our counterinsurgency. The new layha aimed to rein in the conduct of insurgents—or at least appear to do so—so as to make the insurgency more acceptable to the Pashtun population.

  “Mujahedin,” Mullah Omar instructed that summer, “are obliged to adopt Islamic behavior and good conduct with the people and try to win over the hearts of the common Muslims,” by which he meant ordinary Afghans. The sixty-seven sections of that summer’s layha regulated a range of behavior—from smoking cigarettes to cutting off Afghans’ noses or lips, both “fiercely” forbidden. They reiterated rules for taking prisoners and managing funds—likely worried that their “brand” would be tarnished if their fighters ran kidnapping rings or other criminal enterprises under the guise of holy resistance. The Taliban in Helmand, however, were allowed to continue financing operations through drug trade.

  We took most notice of the provisions that mirrored our own directives: The layha advised all fighters to take all precautions not to unnecessarily kill Afghan civilians. Significantly, to this end, the directive appeared like an effort to limit the use of suicide bombing. “A brave son of Islam should not be used for lower and useless targets,” it said, “The utmost effort should be made to avoid civilian casualties.” The Taliban leadership was reckoning with the mixed legacy of Mullah Dadullah Lang, the one-legged commander whom British special forces killed in 2007. Through his personal sadism and his success integrating suicide bombings into the Taliban’s repertoire of tactics, Dadullah had made the insurgency appear more radical and less pious to many Afghans. Suicide bombings were not just scandalous among Afghans, but remained highly controversial among Islamic extremists, clerics, and fighters. (Throughout the entire 1980s, the Afghan mujahideen never used a suicide attack against the Soviets.) The Taliban leadership knew this. And they had taken notice of the blunders made farther afield in Iraq: They knew of the damning criticism of Zarqawi—his sympathizers complained that his default use of suicide bombing, particularly against fellow Sunnis, had turned Iraq into a “crematorium” of young Muslim men—that had undercut his movement.

  But the fact remained that in many cases the Taliban’s leaders now had only tenuous supervision over their dispersed
units and local commanders, who were often obsessed with making short-term gains to the detriment of the strategic contest. Omar’s efforts with the layha were, thus, mixed—and mostly for show. The Taliban continued to forsake the rules of war on nearly every battlefield in the country. And while the insurgency killed fewer Afghans through suicide blasts the year following the book’s release, they started killing more civilians through targeted assassinations.

  But they also continued to selectively mitigate their fanaticism in order to win the support of the people, and to avoid looking ridiculous or draconian. The Taliban, for example, soon began working with Karzai’s government and the United Nations—whom they branded as slaves and infidels, respectively—to run polio vaccination programs. Mullah Omar’s signature appeared at the bottom of a letter that vaccinators carried in order to gain safe passage into Taliban-controlled areas (local commanders had sworn an oath to Omar), and showed to Afghan villagers to persuade them to participate. This ensured that the villagers knew the Taliban had allowed these vaccinators in.

  I took satisfaction seeing these developments, not least because it might mean fewer Afghans would suffer and die. The effort to moderate the movement divided the Taliban’s pragmatists and hard-liners, presaging a larger schism within the insurgency over whether it could, and should, alter its principles and become a political movement. Moreover, that the enemy leadership felt compelled to respond in kind to our efforts (many of them started by my predecessor) to protect and engage the population affirmed our strategy. They knew what we did: Afghans did not automatically detest the Afghan government and back the Taliban, who enjoyed active support from only a sliver of the population, even in areas like Helmand where they’d made alarming gains. The crucial support of Afghans was not to be taken for granted, by either side.

  In our fight with the insurgency, we were making an argument to the people—that we would win, that the future we promised was better, and that we could deliver it. The insurgents made counterproposals. Ours was a kinetic debate, growing more heated that summer.

  | CHAPTER 18 |

  Design

  June–August 2009

  On the afternoon of June 26, 2009, I walked to the small theater across from our primary headquarters. By this time, most of the civilian experts we’d gathered to help advise on our strategic assessment had arrived into Afghanistan. They joined members of ISAF whom we had specifically chosen for their intellect and candor. It would be the first of many sessions with the full team.

  By that afternoon, I had already begun to rethink the importance of the strategic assessment. When Secretary Gates had first assigned me the task before I deployed, I had viewed it as merely another in a series of assessments, from the previous fall and spring, that would plow the same ground. I expected ours would produce no discernibly different conclusions and merit no greater notice than the others. But as each day passed since my arrival in Kabul, I realized the stakes were rising. The deteriorating situation and my arrival had focused attention on Afghanistan to the point that despite all the previous work done, what we reported would be more prominent and important than I had anticipated.

  I thought again about a question National Security Adviser Jim Jones had asked during his visit three days earlier: “Where do we want to be a year from now?” He indicated that was President Obama’s question as well. The assessment would help us determine where we could be. It was easy to criticize Afghanistan and our effort, but we had been asked to distill the situation and to prescribe a solution.

  The assessment had to be unbiased. Not only were circumstances in Afghanistan quickly making it more urgent. But after long fights against insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, the renewed interest in counterinsurgency seemed to peak that summer. Two years after the surge introduced the concept to many lay Americans, our assessment fell amid an ever more robust and heated intellectual debate among policy makers and the military over counterinsurgency’s value and limitations. So as I reviewed the composition of the team, I was happy we’d included a wide range of thinkers. Energetic former Ranger and think-tank fellow Andrew Exum, Iraq assessment veterans Fred and Kim Kagan, and the helpful, ever-skeptical Tony Cordesman were joined by Steve Biddle, a clear-eyed authority, Catherine Dale, Jeremy Shapiro, Terry Kelly, and others. Kevin Owens, who’d come to Afghanistan on a call from Charlie Flynn, not knowing what role he’d take, would orchestrate the effort. It would benefit from the knowledge and passion of Colonel Chris Kolenda, one of the Army’s most experienced Afghanistan experts, and the insights of Lieutenant Commander Jeff Eggers.

  With the full team assembled, I gave them the same initial guidance. Keen not to pollute the process, I gave no indication what I thought the problem was. Instead, I asked three questions.

  “First, tell me: Can we do this mission?”

  “Second, if so, how would we do it?”

  “Finally, what will it take to do it?”

  In this and subsequent discussions, I used a car-mechanic analogy to describe the mindset I wanted us to maintain. We were to avoid becoming emotionally tied to any particular course of action or outcome. As “car mechanics,” we would diagnose what was wrong with the car and recommend what actions and resources we would need to fix it. It was up to the car owner to decide whether they wanted the car fixed, whether they wanted only limited repairs, or, indeed, whether the car was worth fixing at all. Our role was to conduct an accurate diagnosis and offer effective fixes.

  “Remember,” I reminded them, “we don’t own the car.”

  The team then traveled across the country to speak with every regional command, several brigades and battalions, most Afghan ministries, and a variety of government officials and local Afghan elders. What they saw in many places astonished them and matched what I saw on my own circulations. They noted a persistent focus on force protection. In many places, our forces had actually sealed themselves off from the Afghan population, whether on base, while driving, or even on dismounted patrols. Few units appeared to take interaction with the population seriously. Most units had little idea what ordinary Afghans were thinking. Those Afghans’ decisions to side with either the government or the Taliban would determine our success, but many distrusted our efforts and those of the government.

  “The government robs us, the Taliban beat us, and ISAF bombs us,” said one group of elders. “We do not support any side.” Partnering with the Afghan Security Forces was episodic at best. In most places, ISAF and the Afghan National Security Forces operated separately. ISAF units would sometimes ask for a few Afghan National Army soldiers to “put an Afghan face” on a mission.

  The assessment team’s inputs and my own observations, which had been building since my listening tour, convinced me that more than anything else, Afghanistan was gripped by fear. Lack of faith in their government, concern, bordering on paranoia, over Pakistani-supported Taliban expansion, and an almost primal fear of abandonment by the West: These factors left Afghans angst-ridden about the future. Whatever actions ISAF took would have to be as much about building Afghan confidence as killing Taliban insurgents.

  * * *

  When I’d arrived on June 13, one of the largest operations ISAF had yet conducted was to begin in less than a week. In the pitch of night on June 19, twelve Chinooks, their elongated hulls loaded with 350 troops from the 3rd Battalion, Royal Regiment of Scotland, known as the Black Watch, descended into Babaji—a heavily contested area northwest of Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital of Helmand. The Scots’ first steps out of the blacked-out helos and into the caked sandy ground marked the opening stage of a systematic campaign that summer to retake control of Helmand Province.

  Their operation to clear Babaji initiated Operation Panchai Palang, or Panther’s Claw. It would soon introduce more than three thousand British, Afghan, Estonian, and Danish troops into a series of towns along the Helmand River valley. They aimed to secure and connect key populat
ion centers and agricultural areas, many long controlled by the Taliban, with the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah and then Kandahar. In the near term, we hoped expanded security in the Helmand River valley would enable greater participation in the August elections, but we knew at the outset that real progress would be measured in months, if not years. Indeed, the problems we faced had been gestating that long.

  * * *

  The intersection of tribes, corruption, insurgency, poppy, tyranny, and family feuds and loyalties that would make waging counterinsurgency in Helmand so complicated had its most visible roots in the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s. Although 92 percent Pashtun, Helmand’s tribal structure was a rich tapestry of tribes and subtribes. Competition for power and resources among the Barakzai, Alizai, Noorzai, and Ishaqzai was old and remained, and in some districts twenty or more tribes were represented and sought sway. Since the 1980s, the power of maliks, khans, and elders to represent constituents to the government and control land had been largely superseded by the rise of nontraditional strongmen.