From the incident site, we visited injured civilians in a very rudimentary local hospital. One young man of about sixteen was badly burned, a bitter reminder of the paratroopers I’d watched suffer back in 1994 at Fort Bragg. The staff and families were stoic and not confrontational. They were doing their best to keep the sheets clean and sterile. It was an atmosphere of quiet tragedy.
Before going to the site of the strike, we’d met in a conference room at RC-North with a group of some fifteen local leaders gathered to provide their thoughts about the situation. Interestingly, they were strongly supportive of the air strike, and the group expressed satisfaction that direct action had finally been taken against the Taliban threat in their area. Kabir Sekander, one of my cultural advisers, was there to translate when one of the elders spoke. Even with a skilled translator like Kabir, communication was always challenging, but today their message was clear.
“We need these kinds of operations to tell the opposition that ‘we mean business,’ that ‘the people are fed up with you,’” the elder said. “The people are hostages in the hand of this opposition; the people do not want to participate; they’re forced to participate in these kind of activities. But the people want to live in peace and harmony, so we have to have some of these kinds of operations like we did last night. We have to do these things, so people can live in harmony.”
Their views were unusual for the aftermath of such a grisly civilian casualty incident. Usually, we heard outrage. But I wasn’t surprised, as I suspected the leaders whom the regional command had invited to meet with us were not broadly representative of all the people in the area. Moreover, I knew they were caught in a particularly tough position: For years, the north, around Kunduz, had remained quiet. But insurgents had been steadily gaining power in the area. Many there wanted NATO to target the Taliban more aggressively. I believed the elders had shrewdly calculated that anything less than effusive support would reduce our willingness to conduct operations against the feared Taliban.
The elders complained that the media was focusing on the air strike—an event that I knew had been a tragic mistake with potentially far-reaching consequences in Kunduz and in Kabul—not the insurgents’ use of suicide bombings.
“Tashakur,” I thanked them, and turned to Kabir. “Also, please convey that I agree with him that the actions of insurgents on things like suicide bombs are terrible and in no way compare to how we operate.” I continued: “And what I want to do is to partner with the Afghan people to protect the Afghan people, so I am here today to ensure that we are operating in a way that is truly protecting the Afghan people from all threats.”
That evening, as we headed back to Kabul, I decided to do two things. I directed a general officer to lead an investigation of the incident. I wanted to take quick action; we had a moral responsibility to do so. Also, on the advice of my cultural advisers—Kabir and Abdullah Amini—I recorded a statement of sympathy and issued an apology to the Afghan people for broadcast on local television. Dedicated Afghan Americans who had joined ISAF in 2006, Kabir and Abdullah had worked for the previous two ISAF commanders. I was soon glad I took their advice, and came to rely on their ability to parse interactions I had with Afghans for revealing cues I overlooked. Despite some western concerns and criticism over potentially accepting culpability for the incident before an investigation was complete, the television statement was the right move. Afghans typically knew the reality of incidents like this before we did and thought our sluggishness in acknowledging their loss was disrespectful.
“To the great people of Afghanistan, salam alaikum,” I said in a recorded statement, which was soon dubbed in Dari and Pashto and distributed on Afghan television. “Friday morning, the International Security Assistance Force launched an attack against what we believed to be a Taliban target in Kunduz, in northern Afghanistan. . . . I take this possible loss of life or injury to innocent Afghans very seriously. . . . I have ordered a complete investigation into the reasons and results of this attack, which I will share with the Afghan people.”
* * *
If our submission of the strategic assessment on August 30 seemed to end the first phase of my tour at ISAF, the Kunduz civilian-casualty incident seemed to begin the second. The air strike was a clear mistake, and a setback. But I recognized that the tragic event was salutary: After the call with President Karzai, I felt as though our relationship had just taken a step, albeit a small one, from being polite and correct toward something closer to genuine trust. If so, such a development cut against the grain of larger forces in the backdrop. Relations between the United States and President Hamid Karzai were rapidly deteriorating, and had been for the past two weeks since the presidential elections. The postelection controversy of widespread fraud by the Karzai campaign and pressure for a runoff election between Karzai and his strongest rival, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, were producing bad feelings all around.
From a Western perspective, signs of outright fraud, including stuffed ballot boxes and other irregularities, were damning. Combined with increasingly detailed accounts of widespread corruption, they undermined arguments that Karzai’s government was a credible partner. Such determinations were crucial for the United States. The key period of the policy-review and the decision-making process had begun ten days after Afghans cast their votes, when I submitted my strategic assessment. That document, soon accompanied by the associated recommendation that additional forces be deployed, provided a point of reference and debate for the strategy sessions the Obama administration convened over the next three months. From the seats inside the White House Situation Room, as the Afghan elections looked bad, so too did a long-term, large-scale engagement in the country.
Afghan views varied, but President Karzai frequently raised with me his frustration at what he interpreted as Western efforts to find and support other candidates to supplant him. Although I felt much of his frustration stemmed from misinterpretation and misunderstanding, watching events as they unfolded, I could appreciate how he arrived at his perspective. Combined with long-held dissatisfaction over how international forces and agencies operated inside his country, President Karzai strained against what he felt was improper meddling. I reminded myself that my view of what had happened in the elections, even if accurate, must be informed by an appreciation of how Afghans viewed it. This proved to be critical on most issues.
As President Obama began a necessarily rigorous and deliberative review of our strategy, and the election controversy grew more heated, the war meanwhile continued apace. Against that backdrop, we worked to lay a foundation for the way ahead, using the strategic assessment to clarify the challenges and the necessary changes.
* * *
“We can win this war,” I told the command on September 14, as part of the normal morning update that included personnel at ISAF headquarters and other locations by teleconference. “But we can only win one war. We need to stop fighting multiple wars.”
Three months into my command, we still waged an uncoordinated campaign. In some areas of Afghanistan, ISAF soldiers conducting autonomous operations and those advising Afghan forces worked for different commanders and reported up separate chains. So too did Special Forces building local capacity, and special operating forces conducting precision raids against the Taliban. And within those different elements I saw varying interpretations of our mission, strategy, relationship with Afghan security forces, and use of firepower. Our disjointed military effort was complicated further by similar misalignment on the civilian side. It was a recipe for failure.
Secretary Gates’s decision to create IJC was a significant step toward redressing this. A strong operational headquarters, empowered with robust communications and intelligence assets, helped foster long-needed synergy. Further, Rod and I pushed relentlessly to achieve “unity of command,” the simple military concept that a single person should be in charge of every significant mission.
Viewed bro
adly, achieving unity of command was vital to our counterinsurgency, which had to be effective in both its civilian and military components. But achieving such unity of command across the more than forty nations of ISAF’s Coalition and the wider international community sometimes felt impossible. I remain convinced that a single leader, most appropriately a talented civilian willing to spend at least several years in the job, with authority to direct and coordinate all military, governance, and development efforts, would have been the best step toward unifying our war effort. But that fall, no such person existed.
Although I’d outlined my position to Dave Petraeus and Admiral Mullen that I needed control over all U.S. forces in Afghanistan, I faced resistance from some organizations. This was a historically contentious issue, and I didn’t obtain formal operational control over Marine and special operations forces until Secretary Gates directed it, months after I’d assumed command.
* * *
On September 18, a couple of weeks after Kunduz, I arrived into Lisbon for a two-day conference of the NATO Military Committee, typically the chiefs of defense of the NATO member nations.
At Chairman Mullen’s request I’d flown in to provide an update on Afghanistan. Ever mindful of the time Annie and I had been apart, Mullen had flown her over with him.
Seeing Annie at that time was important to me. About a month after my departure for Afghanistan, in response to intelligence reports indicating a potential threat, Annie had been placed under protective security. I’d long accepted the reality that my role in TF 714 could put me at risk, but it was unnerving to have Annie identified as a potential target. I understood both the rationale behind the protection and the impact it would have on Annie. In addition to the pressure of uncertain danger, Annie’s life for almost the next full year involved a security detail who controlled her movements. Trips to the store became orchestrated procedures, and her morning runs through Washington, D.C., required that detail members run or bike close by. Predictably, she maintained her sense of humor, became close to the professionals who spent so much time with her, and tried to ensure that her situation was as little a concern for me as possible.
On September 19, the first morning of the conference, Chairman Mullen and I met for breakfast. Over coffee he gave me a D.C. update. It was a bombshell.
“The strategic assessment was leaked. Bob Woodward is reporting he has it, and the Washington Post is going to print a version of it,” he stated flatly. “I’m not happy about it, but it’s out there.”
I wasn’t shocked, as things in D.C. leaked often. But having it leak so quickly after reaching Washington was frustrating. I’d expected the analysis to receive wide scrutiny, and I was comfortable with what we’d written, but the leak meant that the media and public would form their judgments at the same time as the policy makers. That would create pressures for each of the players and wouldn’t help the subsequent decision-making process. That morning I didn’t anticipate insinuations that I, or my staff, had been the source of the leak, which we were not.
Nor did I fully appreciate that morning that many observers and some policy makers felt the leaking had begun six weeks earlier, when the civilian advisers who had participated in our strategic assessment returned to the United States and began to say more forces were needed. They weren’t speaking for me, nor in concert, but it often appeared that way when they carried a byline that listed them as an adviser to me. Upon seeing this, members of my team contacted them and sought to put an end to any such announcements. But it was a shortcoming on our part to assume, and not to take preemptive steps to ensure, that they would respect the confidential way in which my team sought to guard the assessment’s conclusions. The trickle of opinions from these civilian advisers came on top of other prominent public statements made in D.C. by members of the military. As a result, some in the White House felt as though the military had limited the president’s options before he had a chance to weigh our professional advice. This was never my intent, nor that of my staff.
* * *
Five days later, in Germany, I again met with Chairman Mullen to review and submit by hand, through Central Command, the resource requirements for the strategic assessment. After the previous week’s leak experience, the documents to be submitted were tightly controlled, and we inserted markings unique to each copy to make it easier to narrow down the source of any leak. In a long session with Mullen, Petraeus, and Admiral Jim Stavridis, the Supreme Allied Commander–Europe, my staff and I briefed in detail our analysis and conclusions for how to implement the recommendations of the strategic assessment.
Since we had briefed Chairman Mullen and Secretary Gates on our initial thoughts in early August, continued analysis had reinforced our conclusions. Counterinsurgency doctrine argued for 20 security force members, military or police, for every 1,000 residents in an area. Afghanistan, with a population crudely estimated to be about 24 million people, would require 480,000 soldiers and police. That rough math had to be adjusted for the severity of insurgency in each geographic location, and we graded the security of all 364 districts to determine the necessary force ratio in each. Our assessment found the Afghans needed at least 400,000 security force personnel—240,000 from the army and 160,000 from the police—to have a reasonable ability to combat the threat. We explained that if we were willing to accept moderately or significantly more risk, the targets could be lowered to 328,000 and 235,000, respectively. Although we did detailed modeling and analysis, I understood that counterinsurgency doctrine on security force levels was as much art as science.
At the time, the army was roughly 92,000 strong, approved to grow to 134,000, while the police were 84,000 strong. This was too small for a country of Afghanistan’s size and terrain to fight an ongoing insurgency. So, as we worked to grow the army by 150,000 (or 100,000 past its previous target) and the police by 80,000, we recommended deploying an additional 40,000 Coalition forces, no doubt mostly American, to provide a “bridge” capability of sufficient security forces until the Afghan army and police could assume a larger role.
We also shared what we believed the impact of smaller and larger force numbers would be, but recommended 40,000 forces were necessary to implement our strategy within the essential time frame and with what we assessed as “acceptable risk.”
I received advice to recommend a higher number to give myself “negotiating room” to the lower, true requirement, but I decided against it. This was no time for games; I had to provide accurate, honest inputs. I viewed the troop calculation not as a request, but as providing what is termed “best military advice” to the commander in chief on what I felt was necessary to accomplish his articulated mission with an acceptable amount of risk. I remain comfortable we followed the right approach, but not “asking high” likely made me appear unwilling to compromise in later stages of the decision-making process.
* * *
“I want to defend Afghanistan,” the frightened young soldier said in Dari. The skinny, dark eyed young man from northern Afghanistan wore a baggy green fatigue uniform, nylon “web” gear holding his basic combat equipment, and a curiously shaped steel helmet of indeterminate age. In his hands he held a worn AK-47 rifle his leaders had told me was now inaccurate due to overuse. The soldier was young and uncertain, but seemed sincere in his desire to serve.
That fall afternoon in 2009, I was on a bare dirt maneuver area on the Afghan National Army’s training center, on the north side of Kabul. With staccato gunfire on a nearby range as an appropriate soundtrack to the moment, I was heartened by the young soldier’s commitment to the fledgling Afghan National Army. But after a lifetime of training soldiers, I could see how far we had to go.
I had left the August meeting in Belgium with Mullen and Gates confident that all the participants understood and accepted our analysis that Afghan forces needed to expand sizeably. But in Afghanistan, like everywhere else in the world, building an army and police force takes
time, money, leadership, and patience. Afghanistan’s long, proud military tradition had endured a three-decade-long hiatus when the country went without a functioning national army. That hiatus had depleted both its stores of equipment and reservoirs of human talent.
In combat, the performance of Afghan National Army units had shown promise, but the dominance of former Northern Alliance leaders, corruption, and uneven leadership continued to hobble their development. Initiatives like the Afghan Military Academy—Afghanistan’s West Point—helped. But leaders needed time and political will to create a self-sustaining institution.
The police were far behind, almost depressingly so. They had received little international attention since 9/11, and despite Minister Hanif Atmar’s energetic efforts, they lacked training and leadership and suffered from chronic corruption and drug use. By nature, police are far harder to build than armies. Their decentralized employment disperses them in small elements that are vulnerable to improper pressure and corruption. It also makes small-unit leadership critical, something that in Afghanistan was weak. Further, in the press to field police around the country, the Ministry of the Interior adopted a recruit-deploy-train model, instead of the more logical recruit-train-deploy one, guaranteeing that most police in service lacked even a basic level of training.
As a result, the police struggled for legitimacy with the people. In a number of locations, predatory police were the single greatest factor undermining support for the Afghan government. Still, against the cacophony of withering criticism they regularly received, I’d point out that the Afghan National Police were dying in far greater numbers fighting the insurgency than any other force.
My Share of the Task Page 51