My Share of the Task

by General Stanley McChrystal

  Finding fault with both the army and police was easy, but that wouldn’t get the job done. So we pushed to expand the existing organization responsible for their training and development into a vastly more capable international effort called NATO Training Mission–Afghanistan (NTM-A). At the same time, we sought increased force levels for both the army and the police.

  There were a number of reasons to doubt this goal. We knew that rapid expansion of Afghan security forces risked producing units that lacked the training, discipline, and needed professionalism. And we projected that for a decade or more, Afghanistan could not afford forces of this size without donor funding. But we knew that fielding Afghan forces cost a fraction of what it did to deploy Coalition forces, and that the final stages of the war would be fought not by Americans, but by Afghans.

  Leadership would be critical. But development of leaders was a long-term prospect. So Rod and I intended to leverage partnership with ISAF forces to help mitigate the risks of fielding Afghan units that lacked a seasoned leadership cadre. The only way to build not just more security forces but better policemen and soldiers was to put into motion the “radically improved partnership at every level” I had called for in the assessment. Afghans and NATO soldiers would train, eat, bunk, plan, patrol, fight, celebrate, and mourn together. We knew this course of action, however, carried its own risks. It’d be impossible to keep out all attempts by the insurgents to infiltrate the forces, or prevent soldiers turning sides. And we anticipated there would be cultural friction. Most difficult to stomach were tragic cases when uniformed Afghans killed NATO service members. Still we judged true partnering was the only viable option in the time frame we believed we had for the mission.

  * * *

  Piercing stares, animated conversation, and pointing followed my every move. Even separated by chain-link fencing and carefully placed sheets of Plexiglas, the prisoners were menacing. I was visiting the detention facility at Bagram air base, still housed in the same old buildings I’d visited in 2002. As I walked among the series of small chain-link group “cells” occupied by eight to ten detainees each, I was struck by the seething rag coming from what looked like cages. The Plexiglas was there to prevent food and other things from being flung at the guards, who, for the conditions, remained impressively professional. Construction was already under way for a new facility. But it couldn’t come quickly enough.

  Sensitive to both the importance and risks of detention operations, I was anxious to create a detention operation like I’d seen developed in Iraq in 2007–2008. I remembered sitting in a meeting in Baghdad in early 2007 when a Marine Reserve major general named Doug Stone had arrived to take command of detention operations. I’d known Doug from his tour in Islamabad back in 2003–2004 and frankly doubted he would be up to the task.

  I was dead wrong. He began by creating a short but frightening video illustrating the depth of the problems we had in the theater detention system in Iraq. To haunting background music, his video showed escapes, frequent violence, even buildings being burned down by prisoners. It also revealed the systematic indoctrination of countless Iraqis who’d arrived into the system with little ideological fervor, but were soon exposed to the extremism then plaguing our detention system in Iraq. He argued that inside our detention facilities, we were losing to the insurgency. Then, in a systematic campaign, Doug and his team changed the environment inside the prisons. What had been a dramatic vulnerability for the Coalition became an effective component of its counterinsurgency campaign.

  Now, in 2009, with Dave Petraeus’s support, Doug came out to Kabul to lay the groundwork for the creation of a new organization we named Joint Task Force 435. It would redesign our detention operations in Afghanistan with the objective of transitioning them to Afghan control as quickly as possible, we hoped by January 1, 2011. When Doug became unavailable for long-term assignment to Afghanistan, I sought Vice Admiral Bob Harward. Bob was a relentlessly energetic SEAL who’d been one of my assistant commanding generals in TF 714 for my last two years in command. I tasked him with implementing Doug’s design. A Dari speaker, Bob brought an ability to drive change and build key relationships with Afghan counterparts.

  Bob completed the new detention facility, managing every aspect of its operating plan. It was superb, allowing us to provide better living conditions, conduct effective interrogations, and prepare detainees for integration back into Afghan society. To eliminate Afghans’ recurring concerns over the typically opaque way the United States detained their countrymen, we hosted a series of visits and tours by officials, media, and Afghan opinion makers. From the beginning, there was a robust Afghan government presence in the facility, and I directed Bob to place a high priority on the transition to Afghan control as quickly as possible.

  More important than reforming how we handled the detention of insurgents, we sought to reestablish the “rule of law” in Afghanistan. Traditional tribal systems—called shuras or jirgas—and the more official police and judicial functions provided by the districts, provinces, and national government were in disarray. Courts, which should have provided essential government services for common problems like land disputes, were plagued by corruption, inefficiency, or a complete lack of capacity. The Taliban had skillfully exploited this vacuum, and further highlighted the government’s failings by providing basic legal arbitration.

  Joint Task Force 435’s operations quickly became far wider than U.S.-run detention operations and, in concert with the U.S. embassy, included an effort to transform the Afghan government’s ability to build up the rule of law. We brought to Afghanistan Mark Martins, an army brigadier general I’d known at Fort Bragg and in Iraq, and now asked him to spearhead urgent change. Mark had been first in his West Point class and a Rhodes Scholar, but his energy was just as critical as his intellect in the task ahead.

  * * *

  At the beginning of October, I got a serious wake-up call. I was in London for engagements conducted to explain and strengthen support for ISAF’s efforts, which had expanded significantly with our campaign to secure the Helmand River valley. The rising violence and risks within Afghanistan prompted political challenges to the leadership of contributing nations, such as Germany and Italy, which had joined ISAF with the expectation of nonviolent peacekeeping operations. Over my year in command, I recieved a number of requests for me to provide such direct ISAF commander observations and insights, and I wasn’t able to fulfill most of them in person. But given the ongoing Helmand operations and the British role in them, I judged this invitation to be particularly important. After consulting with Secretary Gates, I agreed to speak in London.

  I was awakened in the early-morning hours of October 2 by Admiral Mullen relaying concerns over remarks I’d made the previous day at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies. A reporter had asked whether I felt a more limited counterterrorism—CT-only—strategy was viable for Afghanistan. I’d answered that, in my estimation, a more holistic effort than a counterterrorism capture-and-kill campaign was required to leave Afghanistan stable. Although Vice President Biden was not mentioned in the question, and I was not thinking of him in my answer, my response was reported as a rebuttal of other policy options for Afghanistan and as criticism of the vice president’s views.

  It wasn’t intended as such, but I could have said it better. I was a commander focused on explaining the mission I understood I’d been given and the strategy currently being prosecuted. Pending alteration through the current review, that strategy was a counterinsurgency campaign to win what Obama had, a few days before the Afghan elections, declared was “not a war of choice” but “a war of necessity.” The London venue allowed me explain to a British audience the soundness of that strategy—under which, on that day, British troops were fighting and dying in Helmand. Still, I should have better understood that the president’s review process, begun in September, was not just evaluating my strategy and force request to accomp
lish counterinsurgency mission but was reevaluating the mission itself.

  Redefining ISAF’s—and America’s—mission in Afghanistan became a central issue. In June, I’d directed our team to conduct the strategic assessment based upon our understanding of the mission as outlined by President Obama in speeches prior to that time. Although the importance of Al Qaeda was never in doubt, we had interpreted that our mission included helping the nation of Afghanistan develop the ability to defend its sovereignty. This necessarily included building capacity across the government and providing the opportunity for economic development.

  After Iraq, “nation building” was an unpopular term. But our assessment had concluded that Afghanistan’s inherent weakness in governance was at the core of the problem. Security had to come first, or else the government could not function. But absent legitimate governance, real progress was impossible. We didn’t think the country’s government needed all the attributes and trappings of Western democracy, but Afghans needed to believe it was responsible and legitimate enough to offer a credible alternative to Taliban or local warlord control.

  In the weeks ahead, policy makers reviewed a variety of alternative approaches. One envisioned maintaining control of a limited number of secure areas in Afghanistan and prosecuting a counterterrorist strategy of pinpoint kinetic strikes and raids against insurgents. It had the potential advantage of requiring fewer forces and avoiding the daunting challenge of pacifying areas long under insurgent influence or outright control. A counterterrorist approach shared some attributes with Britain’s late-nineteenth-century “butcher and bolt” tactics in India’s Northwest Frontier, now Pakistan, where potential adversaries were kept weakened and “in line” by periodic raids that demonstrated Britain’s power.

  My background in counterterrorism made the approach tempting, but I reluctantly concluded it wouldn’t work. Watching efforts like Doug P.’s and Sean MacFarland’s fight in Ramadi, I’d left Iraq with the conviction that strikes could damage insurgent forces, but I felt that a counterterrorism strategy would ultimately cede control of an area, and of its population, to the enemy. If our mission included an Afghanistan capable of defending its people and sovereignty, it would require more.

  The day after the London speech, I flew to Copenhagen for a previously scheduled Air Force One meeting with President Obama, who was there to campaign to bring the Olympics to Chicago. I took Annie with me, and in both our initial greeting with spouses and our one-on-one meeting, the president was focused but friendly and supportive. I don’t remember either of us raising anything about the speech.

  Still, in retrospect, I never felt entirely the same after the leak of the strategic assessment and then the unexpected storm raised by the London talk. I recognized, perhaps too slowly, the extent to which politics, personalities, and other factors would complicate a course that, under the best of circumstances, would be remarkably difficult to navigate.

  Not long before I spoke in London, I’d sat with David Martin of 60 Minutes in front of a camera in ISAF’s Kabul compound. “Can you imagine ever saying to the president of the United States, ‘Sir, we just can’t do it’?” he asked.

  “Yes, I can,” I said. “And if I felt that way, the day I feel that way, the day I’m sure I feel that way, I’ll tell him that.”

  His question got to a fundamental paradox military leaders face in communicating about the effort they are leading. The public deserves candor about the situation and prospects for success; politicians demand it. Anything less is deemed incompetence or equivocation. But once a decision has been made to conduct an operation, a commander has to believe it can be accomplished and has to communicate that confidence in countless ways to the soldiers he leads. Failure to do so can undermine the determination of the force and can risk a fear of failure becoming self-fulfilling.

  The paradox was real. As I watched from the Pentagon during the year leading up to my assignment to Afghanistan, I thought I understood the political sensitivities that existed around America’s and NATO’s role in Afghanistan. I had assumed command believing we needed to reverse both the reality and perception of a deteriorating situation, and through the assessment had concluded that only with significant changes, energetically implemented, could we succeed. After three months of command that included extensive travel around Afghanistan and daily interaction with Afghans from Kabul to rural villages, I also believed the mission was worthy of the risks and sacrifices it would entail. But in the coming months I found myself in a balancing act between trying to aggressively accomplish the mission I believed I’d been given, and not corrupting a valid policy-review process that quickly came to question whether the mission itself was the correct one.

  Like many soldiers of my generation, my ideal for how a military leader should advise and answer to civilian, democratic authority had been drawn from Samuel Huntington’s seminal treatise, The Soldier and the State. He argued a military commander should endeavor to operate as independently of political or even policy pressures as possible. And yet I found, as much as I wanted my role to be that described by Huntington, the demands of the job made this difficult. The process of formulating, negotiating, articulating, and then prosecuting even a largely military campaign involved politics at multiple levels that were impossible to ignore.

  My position as director of the Joint Staff had offered a window into civil-military interaction that was at once disconcerting and instructive. Inevitably, as the Obama administration decided whether to increase our forces in Afghanistan, some drew comparisons between Afghanistan and Vietnam. As a student of history, I was sensitive to the Vietnam analogy. That summer, I reread Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History, which portrayed the challenges of that war. During a memorable night in Kabul, Richard Holbrooke and I spoke on the phone with Karnow. But the lessons to be drawn were anything but incontrovertible. Civilians looking back on Vietnam had cause for wariness when reading of the military’s propensity for unrealistic assessments of the probability of success, exemplified by Westmoreland’s famous “light at the end of the tunnel” phrase.

  I also thought of Daniel Ellsberg’s book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, which I’d listened to on audiobook while in Iraq commanding TF 714. Ellsberg’s story, intensely controversial in my youth, now offered me more nuanced lessons. His outrage stemmed from his conclusion that many of the failures in Vietnam owed not to flawed analysis but to politically driven decisions to ignore the difficult conclusions the analysis offered. The Pentagon Papers, which he famously leaked, convinced him that decision makers had not been misled into disaster by ignorance or bad advice. Rather, faced with two politically toxic but militarily sound options—withdrawal or full escalation—they chose to pursue other policies for political reasons, even though analysis told them these policies were likely to fail. It was a chilling thought.

  At one point, a story arose that I was considering resigning if not provided the forty thousand troops I’d recommended. That was simply not true. As a professional soldier I was committed to implementing to the best of my ability any policy selected by civilian leadership.

  * * *

  The following week, on October 8, a version of the “What is our mission?” question surfaced during one of the early National Security Council–sponsored video teleconferences, organized to review America’s policy. Beamed into the White House Situation Room from our headquarters in Kabul, I began the briefing by explaining the mission as I understood it: “Defeat the Taliban. Secure the Population.” It prompted a participant on the other screen to ask why I interpreted our mission as requiring the destruction or eradication of the Taliban. I said I wasn’t. The word we’d used was “defeat,” which in military doctrine was defined as rendering an enemy incapable of accomplishing its mission. As Sun Tzu had advised, if that could be accomplished cheaply, with little actual fighting, so much the better. I was then asked why we’d defined our mission as def
eat, and not some lesser objective, like “degrade.”

  “Because that’s the mission we provided them in a tasking document,” I remember Lieutenant General Doug Lute interjecting into the discussion. “They are using what we told them.”

  Recognizing the disconnect, I walked into the next VTC with a slide that outlined the sources from which we’d derived the mission we’d used for our assessment, including the president’s public speeches and the marching orders that flowed from the administration’s March strategy review. We also showed the origins of NATO’s mission statement for ISAF. It seemed to surprise some of the participants in the session.

  Not the president, however. “Stan is just doing what we’ve asked him to do,” he explained. But it was clear to me that the mission itself was now on the table for review and adjustment.

  Redefining the mission was an important, maybe the most important, task in front of policy makers. I’d repeatedly advised my staff not to be wedded to our first interpretation of the mission. We would have to provide our best military advice on the course of action and resources necessary to accomplish whatever directives we were given. Our strategic assessment provided a partial foundation for the process, but had not considered significantly different missions.

  While the review debated whether to defeat or degrade the Taliban, I never thought we’d crush the Taliban in a conventional military sense; I calculated we didn’t need to. I hoped to defeat it by making it irrelevant: We’d do so through limiting its ability to influence the lives and welfare of the Afghans, and reducing the grievances that pushed recruits to its ranks. But we also needed to craft realistic avenues and opportunities for insurgents to reconcile with the government in safety. Five months earlier, almost immediately after being alerted I would deploy to Afghanistan, I had decided I wanted to create an organization to orchestrate that process. To lead it, only one man came to mind: Soon-to-retire Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb, the Scottish maverick who had so quietly done so much in Iraq to produce much needed spurts of momentum in our favor during a crucial time.