The Afghanistan Papers

by Craig Whitlock

  Once again, the University of Virginia oral-history interviews conveyed an unusual degree of candor. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, who served as chairman and vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Bush, voiced regret that he had failed to level with the public about how long the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq might last.

  “I needed to be saying to the American people that this isn’t about months and years, this is about decades,” Pace said. “Because I didn’t do that, because to my knowledge President Bush didn’t do that, the American people I think had a vision of quick-in and quick-out.”

  * * *

  This book does not aim to provide an exhaustive record of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Nor is it a military history that dwells on combat operations. Rather, it is an attempt to explain what went wrong and how three consecutive presidents and their administrations failed to tell the truth.

  All told, The Afghanistan Papers is based on interviews with more than 1,000 people who played a direct part in the war. The Lessons Learned interviews, oral histories and Rumsfeld snowflakes comprise more than 10,000 pages of documents. Unedited and unfiltered, they reveal the voices of people—from those who made policy in Washington to those who fought in the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan—who knew that the official version of the war being fed to the American people was untrue, or aggressively sanitized at best.

  Yet in public, almost no senior government officials had the courage to admit that the United States was slowly losing a war that Americans once overwhelmingly supported. With their complicit silence, military and political leaders avoided accountability and dodged reappraisals that could have changed the outcome or shortened the conflict. Instead, they chose to bury their mistakes and let the war drift.

  PART ONE A FALSE TASTE OF VICTORY

  2001–2002

  CHAPTER ONE A Muddled Mission

  Marine One, the white-topped presidential helicopter, made a gentle landing on the perfectly clipped grass of the Virginia Military Institute’s Parade Ground around 10 a.m. on April 17, 2002, a hot and sunny spring morning in the Shenandoah Valley. In Cameron Hall, the school’s basketball arena, about 2,000 cadets were trying not to sweat in their starched gray-and-white full-dress uniforms as they waited to welcome the commander in chief. When President George W. Bush walked onto the stage a few minutes later, winking and waving and flashing upright thumbs, the audience rose to its feet and gushed with applause.

  Bush had reason to smile and bask in the attention. Six months earlier, he had ordered the U.S. military to go to war in Afghanistan to retaliate for the 9/11 terrorist attacks that killed 2,977 people in New York City, northern Virginia and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Unlike any other war in American history, this one began suddenly and unexpectedly, provoked by a stateless enemy embedded in a landlocked country on the other side of the globe. But the initial success of the military campaign had surpassed the expectations of even the most optimistic field commanders. Victory appeared in hand.

  Relying on a combination of punishing airpower, CIA-backed warlords and commando teams on the ground, the United States and its allies toppled the Taliban-led government in Kabul in less than six weeks and killed or captured hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters. The terrorist network’s surviving leaders, including Osama bin Laden, went into hiding or fled to other countries.

  There had been blessedly few American casualties. By the time of Bush’s speech, twenty U.S. troops had died in Afghanistan—one more than had been killed during the four-day U.S. invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983. Encounters with hostile forces became so sporadic that some soldiers complained of boredom. Many units had already returned home. About 7,000 U.S. troops remained.

  The war transformed Bush’s political standing. Although he barely won the presidency in the disputed 2000 election, polls showed 75 percent of Americans now approved of his job performance. In his remarks at the military academy, Bush confidently appraised the months ahead. With the Taliban routed and al-Qaeda on the run, he said the war had moved into a second phase, with the United States focused on eliminating terrorist cells in other countries. He cautioned that violence in Afghanistan could flare up again, but offered reassurances that he had the situation under control.

  Alluding to disastrous forays by Britain and the Soviet Union during the past two centuries, Bush promised that the United States would avoid the fate of other great powers that had invaded Afghanistan. “It’s been one of initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure,” he said. “We’re not going to repeat that mistake.”

  Yet Bush’s speech masked worries circulating among the top members of his leadership team. As the president flew to southwestern Virginia that morning, his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was thinking out loud at the Pentagon, where he worked at a standing desk in a third-floor office in the outer ring of the building. Contrary to the soothing messages he and Bush had delivered in public for months, Rumsfeld very much feared the U.S. military could get stuck in Afghanistan and that it lacked a clear exit strategy.

  At 9:15 a.m., he crystallized his thoughts and dictated a brief memo, a longtime habit. He wrote so many that his staff called them snowflakes—white-paper notes from the boss that piled up on their desks. This one was marked classified and addressed to four senior Pentagon officials, including the chairman and vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  “I may be impatient. In fact I know I’m a bit impatient,” Rumsfeld wrote in the single-page memo. “We are never going to get the U.S. military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to see that there is something going on that will provide the stability that will be necessary for us to leave.”

  “Help!” he added.

  Rumsfeld was careful to keep his doubts and misgivings private, just as he had a few weeks earlier when he sat for a long interview with MSNBC. During the March 28 broadcast, he bragged about steamrolling the enemy and said there was no point negotiating with remnants of the Taliban, much less al-Qaeda. “The only thing you can do is to bomb them and try to kill them. And that’s what we did, and it worked. They’re gone. And the Afghan people are a lot better off.”

  Like Bush, Rumsfeld cultivated an image as a courageous and decisive leader. MSNBC anchor Brian Williams reinforced it by fawning over the defense secretary, lauding Rumsfeld’s “swagger” and suggesting that he was the “most confident man” in America. “He presides over a war like no other, and he has become arguably more than anyone else the public face and voice of that war,” Williams told viewers.

  The only tough question came when Williams asked Rumsfeld if he was ever tempted to lie about the war during his frequent press conferences at the Pentagon. “How often are you forced to shave the truth in that briefing room, because American lives are at stake?”

  “I just don’t,” Rumsfeld replied. “I think our credibility is so much more important than shaving the truth.” He added, “We’ll do exactly what we have to do to protect the lives of the men and women in uniform, and to see that our country is successful, but it doesn’t involve lying.”

  By Washington standards, Rumsfeld was not lying—but he wasn’t being honest, either. Hours before he taped the MSNBC interview, the defense secretary dictated a snowflake to two staffers with a completely different view of how things were going in Afghanistan.

  “I am getting concerned that it is drifting,” he wrote in the confidential memo.

  At the outset of the war, the mission seemed straightforward and narrow: to defeat al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of the 9/11 attacks. On September 14, 2001, in a near-unanimous vote, Congress swiftly authorized the use of military force against al-Qaeda and its supporters.I

  When the Pentagon launched the first airstrikes against Afghanistan on October 7, no one expected that the bombing would continue unabated for twenty years. In a televised speech that day, Bush said the war had two limited objectives: to disrupt al-Qaeda’s use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and to
attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.

  The commander in chief also promised the armed forces a clarity of purpose. “To all the men and woman in our military,” he declared, “I say this: Your mission is defined. The objectives are clear.”

  Military strategists are taught never to start a war without having a plan to end it. Yet neither Bush nor anyone else in his administration publicly articulated how or when or under what conditions they intended to bring military operations in Afghanistan to a conclusion.

  In the early days of the war, and for the remainder of his presidency, Bush dodged questions about how long U.S. troops would have to fight in Afghanistan. He didn’t want to raise expectations or limit his generals’ options by committing to a timetable. But he knew Americans had painful memories of the last time the country fought an interminable land war in Asia and tried to assuage concerns that history might repeat itself.

  During a prime-time news conference on October 11, 2001, in the East Room of the White House, a reporter asked Bush point-blank: “Can you avoid being drawn into a Vietnam-like quagmire in Afghanistan?”

  Bush had a ready answer. “We learned some very important lessons in Vietnam,” he said. “Perhaps the most important lesson that I learned is that you cannot fight a guerrilla war with conventional forces. That’s why I have explained to the American people that we’re engaged in a different type of war.”

  “People often ask me, ‘How long will this last?’ ” he added. “This particular battlefront will last as long as it takes to bring al-Qaeda to justice. It may happen tomorrow, it may happen a month from now, it may take a year or two, but we will prevail.”

  Speaking confidentially years later to government interviewers, many U.S. officials who played a key role in the war offered harsh judgments about the decision-making during the conflict’s early stages. They said the war’s goals and objectives soon veered off into directions that had little to do with 9/11. They also admitted that Washington struggled to define with precision what it was hoping to accomplish in a country that most U.S. officials did not understand.

  “If I were to write a book, its [message] would be: ‘America goes to war without knowing why it does,’ ” an unnamed former senior State Department official said in a Lessons Learned interview. “We went in reflexively after 9/11 without knowing what we were trying to achieve. I would like to write a book about having a plan and an end game before you go in.”

  Others said no one bothered to ask, much less answer, many obvious questions.

  “What were we actually doing in that country? We went in after 9/11 to defeat al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, but the mission became blurred,” an unnamed U.S. official who worked with the NATO Special Civilian Representative to Afghanistan from 2011 to 2013, said in a Lessons Learned interview. “Also blurred were our objectives: what are our objectives? Nation building? Women’s rights?”

  Richard Boucher, who served as the State Department’s chief spokesman at the start of the war and later became the senior U.S. diplomat for South Asia, said the United States foolishly tried to do too much and never settled on a realistic exit strategy.

  “If there was ever a notion of mission creep it is Afghanistan,” he said in a Lessons Learned interview. “We went from saying we will get rid of al-Qaeda so they can’t threaten us anymore to saying we are going to end the Taliban. [Then we said] that we will get rid of all the groups the Taliban works with.”

  Beyond that, Boucher said, the United States set an “impossible” goal: to create a stable, American-style government in Afghanistan with democratic elections, a functioning Supreme Court, an anti-corruption authority, a women’s ministry and thousands of newly constructed public schools with a modernized curriculum. “You are trying to build a systematic government a la Washington, D.C.,” he added, “in a country that doesn’t operate that way.”

  With little public discussion, the Bush administration changed its goals and objectives soon after it began bombing Afghanistan in October 2001. Behind the scenes, the military was drawing up its war plans on the fly.

  Lt. Cmdr. Philip Kapusta, a Navy officer who served as a planner for Special Operations forces, said the Pentagon’s initial orders in fall 2001 were short on specifics. It was unclear, for instance, whether Washington wanted to punish the Taliban or remove it from power. He said many officers at U.S. Central Command—the military headquarters in charge of fighting the war—didn’t think the plan would work and viewed it as a placeholder to buy time to develop a more refined strategy.

  “We received some general guidance like, ‘Hey, we want to go fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan,’ ” Kapusta said in an Army oral-history interview. “In fact, in the original plan, regime change wasn’t necessarily an objective. It wasn’t ruled out but it wasn’t primarily what we were actually going to achieve.”

  On October 16, Bush’s National Security Council approved an updated strategy paper. The secret, six-page document—which was attached to one of Rumsfeld’s snowflakes and later declassified—called for the elimination of al-Qaeda and the termination of Taliban rule, but listed few concrete objectives beyond that.

  The strategy concluded that the United States should “take steps to contribute to a more stable post-Taliban Afghanistan.” But it anticipated U.S. troops would not stay for long: “The U.S. should not commit to any post-Taliban military involvement, since the U.S. will be heavily engaged in the anti-terrorism effort worldwide.”

  Wary of Afghanistan’s history of entrapping foreign invaders, the Bush administration wanted to put as few U.S. boots on the ground as possible.

  “Rumsfeld said our assumption was that we were going to use a small U.S. force in Afghanistan because we wanted to avoid the big footprint the Soviets had had,” Douglas Feith, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy, said in a University of Virginia oral-history interview. “We didn’t want to trigger a xenophobic reaction by the Afghans. The Soviets put 300,000 guys there and failed. We didn’t want to re-create that error.”

  On October 19, the first U.S. Special Operations forces entered Afghanistan, joining a handful of CIA officers already embedded with the Northern Alliance, a coalition of anti-Taliban warlords. U.S. aircraft based in the region brought enormous firepower from the skies. Despite all the U.S. assistance, the ragtag Northern Alliance forces failed to gain much ground against Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters.

  On Halloween, during a late-morning meeting with top brass in his Pentagon office, Rumsfeld turned to Feith and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and told them they needed to rethink the war strategy. The impatient defense secretary said he wanted a new plan in writing and that Feith and Pace had four hours to get it done, according to Feith’s oral-history interview.

  Feith and Pace left Rumsfeld’s suite and trotted down the Pentagon’s outer-ring corridor to Feith’s office. They were joined by Air Force Maj. Gen. Michael Dunn, who led the Joint Staff’s planning team. With the two generals peering over his shoulders, the 48-year-old Feith sat in front of his computer and drafted a new strategic analysis for Rumsfeld, something that would normally take months and legions of staff to complete.

  It was an odd scene in more ways than one. A cerebral Harvard graduate with pursed lips and round spectacles who had never served in uniform, Feith drove many generals batty by presuming to know more about military operations than they did. Army Gen. Tommy Franks, a crusty Oklahoman in charge of the war, would later call Feith “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth.” Another four-star Army general, George Casey, described Feith in a University of Virginia oral-history interview as “intransigent” and all-but-impossible to work with, adding: “He was always right and he was so tenacious in his arguments and in his positions that it really became difficult.”

  Perhaps improbably, Feith got along well with Pace, who had fought in Vietnam as a rifle platoon leader and served in Somalia, Korea and other hotspots during his thi
rty-four years in the Marines. Together, while keeping a close eye on the clock, they banged out new strategic guidelines for Afghanistan and delivered them to Rumsfeld in time to meet their afternoon deadline. “In the course of this, I turned around to Pace and I said something like, ‘This is a little strange, isn’t it?’ ” Feith recalled. “This is like doing an all-nighter in college.”

  The paper revisited some obvious questions about the military campaign: “Where are we? What are our goals? What are our assumptions? What can we do?” Feith was proud of the final product. In his oral-history interview, he implied his boss approved as well. “It was, in mini-form, a proper strategic analysis from Rumsfeld’s point of view. If there’s urgency, you can’t study a thing to death.”

  Days later, many U.S. officials were stunned when the tide of battle abruptly shifted in their favor. With U.S. help, Northern Alliance forces seized control of several major cities in short order: Mazar-e-Sharif on November 9, Herat on November 12, Kabul the following day and Jalalabad the day after that.

  Kapusta, the Special Operations war planner, sat in a conference room at Central Command headquarters in Tampa with a group of senior officers as they marveled at the progress. “One of the guys actually said—and this was right after Kabul had fallen—‘Hey, you didn’t believe this shit would work.’ And everybody in the room was nodding their heads in agreement.”

  Leaders in the Pentagon were equally bewildered by the rapid turn of events. “Around November we were wondering, how much of the country can we take back or can we take over before the holidays? Can we carve out enough that we can survive the winter?” Pace, the Marine general, said in a University of Virginia oral-history interview. “Now we own the whole country, before Christmas. You go, ‘Whoa, that’s kind of cool.’ ”

  Having overthrown the Taliban somewhat unexpectedly, U.S. military commanders were unprepared for the aftermath and unsure what to do. They worried Afghanistan would fall into chaos, but they also feared that if they sent more U.S. ground forces to fill the vacuum, they might be saddled with responsibility for the country’s many problems. As a result, the Pentagon dispatched a few extra troops to assist with the hunt for bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders but limited their visibility and tasks as much as possible.