The Afghanistan Papers

by Craig Whitlock

  PART TWO THE GREAT DISTRACTION

  2003–2005

  CHAPTER FOUR Afghanistan Becomes an Afterthought

  Six weeks after the invasion of Iraq, on May 1, 2003, the commander in chief boarded another flight to deliver another victorious speech with a military audience as the backdrop. Unlike his visit to the Virginia Military Institute one year earlier, this address would be broadcast live by the networks during prime time.

  Instead of taking the usual presidential aircraft, Bush zipped himself into a green flight suit, donned a white helmet and climbed into a Navy S-3B Viking warplane waiting to transport him to a rendezvous thirty miles off the coast of San Diego. The back of the jet was marked “Navy 1.” It had been more than three decades since Bush had flown with the Texas Air National Guard, but the Navy flight crew let him take a brief turn at the cockpit controls before landing at sea on the USS Abraham Lincoln, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier returning from the war in the Persian Gulf.

  Thousands of sailors cheered as Bush stepped off the plane and exchanged salutes with crew members on the flight deck. The president mingled and posed for photos before changing into a civilian business suit to give his speech as the sun dipped over the Pacific Ocean. Standing in front of a billowing red-white-and-blue banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished,” Bush announced that “major combat operations have ended” and thanked the U.S. military for “a job well done” in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

  In fact, the worst in Iraq was yet to come and Bush’s visit to the aircraft carrier would haunt him as the biggest public-relations blunder of his presidency. It also overshadowed an equally nonsensical claim that his defense secretary had made hours earlier about the war in Afghanistan.

  Traveling in a bulky, gray C-17 military transport plane, Rumsfeld landed in Kabul on the afternoon of May 1 for a four-hour visit that attracted far less attention than Bush’s stage-managed trip to the aircraft carrier. Rumsfeld’s convoy rolled through the capital’s decrepit streets to the presidential palace, where he met with Karzai and his cabinet.

  Afterward, they held a joint news conference in a wood-paneled reception room that looked like it had not been remodeled in decades. The Afghan president opened by saying he was surprised to see so many international journalists. “I thought you had all gone to Iraq,” Karzai joked in English. “Still here. Good. That means the world is interested in Afghanistan.”

  When his turn came, Rumsfeld read from a script similar to Bush’s and declared that major combat operations had also ended in Afghanistan. “The bulk of this country today is permissive, it’s secure,” he said.

  The defense secretary qualified his statement by adding that “pockets of resistance” and other dangers still existed—a hedge that Bush repeated about Iraq. But as in Iraq, the fighting in Afghanistan was far from over. Combat operations would re-intensify and turn much more deadly. More than 95 percent of U.S. casualties in America’s longest war had yet to occur.

  In oral-history interviews, Army officers who served in Afghanistan in 2003 said Rumsfeld’s assertion that combat had ended was absurd. “We used to laugh,” said Lt. Col. Mark Schmidt, a Special Forces officer with a background in psychological operations. “There was still plenty of fighting going on… Quite frankly, we were just going around killing people. We’d fly in, do a mission for a few weeks, then we’d fly out—and of course the Taliban would just flow right back in.”

  At his press conference in Kabul, Rumsfeld said the mission in Afghanistan would shift from combat to “stability operations”—military jargon for peacekeeping and nation-building. But Army officers said nothing on the ground really changed.

  “Essentially, there was no written order, there was nothing else that came out about it,” said Col. Thomas Snukis, who arrived that summer to serve as a staff officer at military headquarters in Bagram. “There was still a lot of combat action going on.”

  Others suggested that Rumsfeld’s remarks were a combination of wishful thinking and a desire to move on. “I think Washington had probably lost a little bit of interest in Afghanistan,” said Col. Tucker Mansager, another staff officer who arrived in July 2003 after serving as a military attaché in Warsaw. “That is not to say we were neglected, but clearly, people had their eyes on Iraq a lot.”

  It soon became apparent that Bush’s decision to invade Iraq was a titanic mistake—not just for Iraq, but for Afghanistan.

  The Iraq War was a far bigger undertaking at first. It required an invasion force of 120,000 U.S. troops, about thirteen times the number deployed to Afghanistan. Lulled into overconfidence by its rapid defeat of the Taliban, the Bush administration figured it could handle two wars at once. It was a rash assumption that defied history and common sense.

  “There are certain sorts of basic policy conclusions that are hard to legislate. First, you know, sort of just invade only one country at a time. I mean that seriously,” James Dobbins, the U.S. diplomat who helped negotiate the Bonn Agreement, said in a Lessons Learned interview.

  During the 1990s, Dobbins was dispatched as a special envoy to one trouble spot after another: Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. He wrote several books about his experiences, including The Beginner’s Guide to Nation-Building. Although Bush had bashed Clinton for sending the U.S. military to war-torn countries on nation-building missions, at least Clinton didn’t try to tackle two at a time, Dobbins said.

  “If you look at the Clinton administration it very consciously did not invade Haiti until it had withdrawn from Somalia. It did not do anything about the Balkans until it had withdrawn from Haiti. And it didn’t do anything about Kosovo until Bosnia had been stabilized,” Dobbins said. “They take a lot of high-level time and attention and we’ll overload the system if we do more than one of these at a time.”

  Iraq posed an enormous distraction from the start. The U.S. military began making plans to take Baghdad in December 2001, while bin Laden was escaping from Tora Bora. On the day after Christmas, General Tommy Franks was working at Central Command headquarters in Tampa when Rumsfeld called from the Pentagon and summoned him to a secret meeting at Bush’s secluded ranch in central Texas, according to Franks’ University of Virginia oral-history interview.

  “The president wants to see you in Crawford,” Rumsfeld told Franks on the phone. “Be ready to talk to the president about what you’re thinking about Iraq.”

  Within forty-eight hours, the general departed for the small town of Crawford to brief the president on military options for Iraq. Among other questions, Bush and Rumsfeld asked Franks if he thought it was too much for a single commander to oversee a war in Iraq—if it came to that—and the war in Afghanistan at the same time. Franks persuaded them he could handle both operations from his Central Command post in Tampa.

  In his oral history, Franks defended the decision to allow him to manage both wars. He said he never neglected Afghanistan and noted that troop levels there actually increased as the Iraq War got underway. “So this idea of people taking their eye off the ball in Afghanistan is simply not true,” he said. “That’s not to say we did everything right, but what we didn’t do right wasn’t because of an absence of attention.”

  But other U.S. officials said there was no question that the Bush administration looked away from Afghanistan. Many at the White House and the Pentagon thought there was nothing left to accomplish other than catching bin Laden and tying up a few loose ends.

  By August 2002, “for lots of reasons, the Bush administration had already concluded Afghanistan was done,” Philip Zelikow, a member of Bush’s foreign intelligence advisory board, said in a University of Virginia oral-history interview.

  Most U.S. officials wrongly assumed the Taliban would never pose a serious threat again. In his Mission Accomplished speech, Bush declared flatly: “We destroyed the Taliban.” Robert Finn, who served as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2002 to 2003, said in a Lessons Learned interview that he figured remnants of the Taliban might survive, “but basicall
y would be nuisance bandits up in the mountains.”

  That strategic miscalculation reverberated down the chain of command. With the Pentagon preoccupied by Iraq, the already blurry mission in Afghanistan grew even hazier for units in the field.

  Maj. Gregory Trahan, an 82nd Airborne Division officer, said troops were unsure of their objectives. “Before we left, my soldiers wanted to know if we were going there for humanitarian assistance, or were we going there to—in the soldier’s vernacular—kill people,” he recalled in an Army oral-history interview.

  Maj. Phil Bergeron, an artillery officer who deployed to Kandahar in 2003, said he never got a handle on the big picture. “We had Iraq going on at the time so that just pulled all the focus,” he told Army historians.

  In a Lessons Learned interview, an unnamed U.S. official who worked at the White House and the Pentagon during the Bush administration, said work on Afghanistan took a back seat to Iraq starting in spring 2002. At that point, Americans serving at all levels in Afghanistan recalibrated their expectations; their job was to simply avoid defeat.

  “Either materially or politically, it all seemed to be about Iraq,” the U.S. official said. “It was hard to come to terms with the reality that your whole portfolio is a secondary effort or, at worst, an ‘economy of force’ mission. Your job was not to win, it was to not lose. Emotionally and psychologically, this is hard.”

  During summer 2003, the U.S. military rapidly lost its grip on the war in Iraq. Fifty American troops died there in the six weeks following Bush’s Mission Accomplished speech and nobody could find the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein supposedly had been hiding.

  Still, the Bush administration reassured the public it had everything under control. At a June 18 press conference at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld belittled the Iraqi insurgency as “pockets of dead-enders.” He also said the U.S.-led military coalition was “making good progress”—a dubious phrase he and other Pentagon officials would repeat countless times about both wars in the years ahead.

  Meanwhile, the dead-enders grew stronger. In August, insurgents blew up the Jordanian embassy and the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad. U.N. workers and relief organizations fled the country. In October, al-Qaeda piled insult on injury by circulating a video of bin Laden. From his undisclosed location, the 9/11 mastermind mocked the Americans for getting “mired in the swamps of the Tigris and Euphrates.”

  That same month, a new Army general arrived to take charge of the increasingly overlooked war in Afghanistan. Lt. Gen. David Barno was a native of Endicott, New York, a small town in the state’s Southern Tier. After graduating from West Point, he led a company of Army Rangers that invaded Grenada in 1983 and a battalion that parachuted into Panama during the 1989 invasion of that country.

  Barno landed in Afghanistan at a turbulent time. The Pentagon had downsized the military headquarters at Bagram and, due to unexpected turnover, Barno was the fourth commanding general in six months. Operations were equally unstable on the diplomatic side, where the U.S. embassy had lacked a permanent ambassador for an extended period.

  “The whole effort in Afghanistan was in a bit of a sideways drift,” Barno said in an Army oral-history interview. “There was a tremendous, in my view, dysfunctionality in unity of command inside of Afghanistan, inside the military.”

  Barno stood up a new headquarters—the Combined Forces Command–Afghanistan—and moved it from Bagram Air Base to the embassy compound in Kabul so he could work more closely with the diplomats. For his quarters, he occupied a half-trailer located just fifty feet away from the double-wide trailer reserved for the ambassador.

  Cramped conditions aside, Barno had trouble building his staff. Military personnel commands back in the United States said there was a shortage of available officers because of Iraq. But Barno said it was clear they saw the war in Afghanistan as a backwater and didn’t want to send their best people. It infuriated him.

  “None of the people the Army sent me were people who would ever grow up to be generals,” he said. “The Army was unhelpful, to be generous… They clearly had Iraq on their minds, but there was no interest whatsoever in providing us with anything but the absolute minimum level of support.”

  At first, Barno had to make do with staff officers of unusually low rank. When he pushed for upgrades, the services sent reservists who had been out of uniform for years; “an extraordinary array of people who were kind of at the end of the pipeline,” as Barno put it. Many were older than the three-star general—he was 49—and the staff jokingly called itself the world’s most forward-deployed chapter of the American Association of Retired People.

  Although Afghanistan was nowhere as violent as Iraq, the nature of the conflict was changing and growing more worrisome. Days after Barno’s arrival, United Nations officials based in Kabul gave him an earful about worsening security in the south and east of the country and challenged him to do something.

  The general ordered his skeleton headquarters staff to review the war strategy. They concluded that—as in Iraq—a popular rebellion was taking root. The military would need to shift from a narrow focus on hunting terrorists to “a classic counterinsurgency campaign,” aimed at winning the support of Afghan civilians caught in the middle of the conflict.

  The problem was that the military had not run a counterinsurgency campaign since the Vietnam War. To figure out what to do, Barno scrounged up three textbooks on counterrevolutionary warfare he had read as a West Point cadet more than twenty-five years earlier. “We had no U.S. military doctrine whatsoever at that point in time by which to guide us,” he said. “None of us really had much of any training on the counterinsurgency business, so we were kind of scraping on how to think about this.”

  Meanwhile, other intrinsic doubts arose in the executive suites at the Pentagon. On October 16, 2003, Rumsfeld dictated a snowflake to a handful of generals and aides with a provocative question: “Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror?”

  Rumsfeld was pessimistic. “It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog,” he concluded in the two-page memo.

  Someone leaked the snowflake to USA Today, which triggered a cascade of news coverage about whether the defense secretary had been lying to the public about the wars. Rumsfeld was forced to hold a press conference to address the controversy. At first, he tried to joke about it, saying that his wife, Joyce, had asked him if “slog” was actually a word; then he jousted with reporters over the dictionary definition. He denied the Bush administration had been “putting a happy face” on the wars in public. “What we have done is we’ve put out a very straightforward, accurate, to the best of our ability, and balanced view of what we see happening,” he said.

  Defying Rumsfeld’s declaration about the end of combat, the Taliban slowly regrouped. During the latter half of 2003, the U.S. military found it necessary to launch three major offensives: Operation Mountain Viper, Operation Mountain Resolve and Operation Avalanche. Sticking with the alpine theme, U.S. forces kicked off Operation Mountain Blizzard and Operation Mountain Storm in early 2004.

  But with the Iraq War sliding downhill, the Bush administration decided it was more important than ever to minimize the fighting and showcase Afghanistan as a success. In December 2003, Rumsfeld visited Kabul and made a side trip to the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif. Asked by a reporter if he was afraid the Taliban was mounting a comeback, he dismissively said no. “They will not have that opportunity,” he said. “To the extent that they assemble in anything more than ones and twos… they’ll be killed or captured.” Upon his return to Washington, Rumsfeld told the board of trustees at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, that “signs of progress are everywhere” and that “Afghanistan has turned a corner.”

  In January 2004, Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan-American diplomat who had taken up residence in the embassy’s double-wide trailer as the new U.S. ambassador,
wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post praising the Afghans for holding a loya jirga, a traditional assembly, to draft a new constitution that embraced democracy and women’s rights. At the end of the column, Khalilzad mentioned as an aside that U.S. troops might have to stay in Afghanistan for several years. “Given the stakes involved, we must remain committed for as long as it takes to succeed,” he wrote.

  The op-ed prompted eye-rolling among other diplomats in Kabul who thought it put the most positive spin possible on what was happening in Afghanistan. Thomas Hutson, a political officer, said he bumped into a public-relations strategist in the U.S. embassy cafeteria who told him twenty people had teamed up to write Khalilzad’s column. He wondered why the government was paying the salaries of so many people to draft glowing press releases about the war.

  Hutson grew up in tiny Red Cloud, Nebraska, before embarking on a Foreign Service career that took him to Iran, Russia, the Balkans, Nigeria, Taiwan, Kyrgyzstan and Barbados. Having seen much of the world, he held few illusions about what it would take to transform Afghanistan into a stable country.

  A few days after the op-ed appeared, Hutson was chatting with a British military officer when a journalist asked them how long they thought U.S. and British troops might need to stay. “We answered almost simultaneously,” Hutson recalled in a diplomatic oral-history interview. “The colonel said, ‘forty years’ and I said, ‘check with my grandson.’ ”