As Afghanistan drifted and Iraq burned, simmering rivalries inside Bush’s war cabinet grew more heated. The biggest spats usually involved Rumsfeld and Powell. Both men were strong-willed with self-assured personalities and had contemplated running for president.
The only two-time defense secretary in history, Rumsfeld wrestled at Princeton, flew fighter jets in the Navy, ran Fortune 500 companies and showed few signs of mellowing in his 70s. A retired four-star general, Powell was a hero of the first Iraq War, the only African-American to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and by some measures the most popular political figure in America.
Each blamed the other and their staffs for fiascoes in the war zones. Rumsfeld complained that the State Department and USAID had bungled reconstruction and stabilization programs. Powell viewed Rumsfeld and his civilian aides as neoconservative ideologues who abused the military.
Their feud sometimes bubbled to the surface and turned petty during meetings at the White House, according to Pace, the Marine general.
“The two secretaries would kind of get nipping at each other’s shorts. Secretary Powell might say ‘Kabul’ and Secretary Rumsfeld would say, ‘Is it Kabaaal or Kabuuul?’ just to pimp him a little bit,” said Pace, who served as vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs from 2001 to 2005.
From the head of the table, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice would have to step into the fray. “She would say, ‘Now Don, now Colin,’ ” Pace recalled in his University of Virginia oral-history interview. “Condi, God bless her, would just kind of get in the locker room saying, ‘Okay, boys, break.’ ”
Rumsfeld promoted his reputation as a taskmaster who thrived on a relentless schedule, but there were signs that stress from the wars was affecting his health. Though the defense secretary kept it a secret, in December 2003 he became “very ill” for about three months, according to Pace. Asked in the oral-history interview if he meant Rumsfeld was suffering from nervous exhaustion, Pace replied: “I don’t know. He was very sick. He tried to cover that up and did cover it up I think, but it was during that time when he basically said—Pete Pace’s words, not his—‘Screw it. If Condi and Colin want to run the show, let them.’ ”I
Rumsfeld’s leadership traits—he often ruled by fear—generated resentment among the generals. In a University of Virginia oral-history interview, Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute said Rumsfeld was dismissive of people in uniform and not a team player. “When you see leadership that is divisive and caustic and that is disrespectful, it grinds on you,” he said.
Tommy Franks, another hard-headed leader, couldn’t stand Rumsfeld at first and resented him for questioning his war plans for Afghanistan, though he later came to admire the defense secretary for his patriotism. “Don Rumsfeld is not the easiest guy in the world for military leaders to get along with,” Franks said in his University of Virginia oral-history interview. “Being the contrarian guy that he is—keep in mind the personality issue—he automatically didn’t like anything, ever.”
Military officials in Kabul enjoyed a relative reprieve while Rumsfeld was fixated on Iraq from 2002 through the first half of 2004. In June 2004, however, he told his commanders he wanted to hold weekly video conferences about Afghanistan. The country’s first-ever presidential election was coming up in October—a major step in the nation-building campaign—and Rumsfeld wanted to ensure everything was on the right track.
Word of the defense secretary’s renewed interest ignited panic at Barno’s headquarters. Staff officers fretted so much about triggering Rumsfeld’s wrath that they spent most of their workweek prepping for a video conference that usually lasted less than an hour.
Maj. Gen. Peter Gilchrist, a British Army officer who served as Barno’s deputy commander, said he was astonished by how much Rumsfeld intimidated his American counterparts. “This was a real cultural shock for me,” Gilchrist said in an oral-history interview. “You should see these guys—and they’re great men, grown up, intelligent, sensible, but like the jellies when it came to going in front of the SecDef.”
Joining Rumsfeld in the meetings from the Pentagon was an imposing assortment of senior brass and deputy secretaries. In Kabul, the staff fielded their questions through a tiny video monitor propped up in the back of an interpreter’s trailer at the embassy. Barno called the sessions “very contentious, painful, difficult and tribulating” and said they required a “backbreaking effort” that “about brought us to our knees.” Eventually, he persuaded the Pentagon to scale back the conferences to twice a month, which he said was still “barely sustainable.”
Part of the reason the meetings were so painful is because Rumsfeld asked smart questions that exposed core problems. Col. Tucker Mansager said the staff could not prove that the war strategy was working. Although they collected all sorts of statistics, it was hard to know what conclusions to draw.
“The secretary was beating us up. Secretary Rumsfeld was always asking, ‘Where are your measures of effectiveness? How can you make progress?’ ” Mansager said in an Army oral-history interview. “I was working long hours, doing lots of stuff, and even a couple of times in my journals, I said, ‘Are we making progress?’ So the frustration there is, how do you know?”
Despite its internal misgivings about the war, the Bush administration maintained its happy face in public. In August 2004, Rumsfeld delivered a speech in Phoenix and cited indicator after indicator of progress in Afghanistan: a boom in highway construction, a spike in voter registrations, more energy in the streets. He swatted away evidence that the insurgency was spreading. “There is absolutely no way in the world that we can be militarily defeated in Afghanistan,” he said. The following month, while campaigning for a second term in the White House, Bush went even further and falsely declared that the Taliban “no longer is in existence.”
In October 2004, the Afghan presidential election went off largely without a hitch. Karzai won convincingly and secured another five years in the palace. It was a slice of good news for the U.S. government, especially compared to Iraq, where the Pentagon was still reeling from the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal and a sectarian bloodbath.
In a Pentagon press briefing, Rumsfeld hailed the vote as the clearest sign yet of progress in Afghanistan. He also seized the opportunity to mock the skeptics. “Everyone said that it wouldn’t work in Afghanistan. ‘They’ve never done it in 500 years, and the Taliban are reorganizing; they’re going to go in there and kill everybody. And we’re in a quagmire.’ And lo and behold, Afghanistan had an election. Amazing.”
Three years in, it was the high point of the war.
I. Rumsfeld did not publicly disclose any serious health problems during this period or in his 2011 memoir, Known and Unknown. He did not respond to requests for comment on Pace’s assertion.
CHAPTER FIVE Raising an Army from the Ashes
In 2003, the United States pinned its hopes for ending the war on a washed-out tract of land next to a Soviet tank graveyard on the eastern edge of the capital. Known as the Kabul Military Training Center, the rundown site functioned as a boot camp for the new Afghan national army. Each morning, drill instructors rousted Afghan volunteers from their stone-cold barracks to teach them the art of soldiering. If recruits survived the horrible sanitation conditions and dodged the old land mines buried around the property, they could earn about $2.50 a day to defend the Afghan government.
The road leading from Kabul to the boot camp was so riddled with potholes that the driver for Maj. Gen. Karl Eikenberry had to zigzag along at five to ten miles an hour. As head of the Office of Military Cooperation at the U.S. embassy, Eikenberry’s job was to create, from scratch, a 70,000-man indigenous army to protect the weak Afghan government from an array of enemies: the Taliban, al-Qaeda, other insurgents, renegade warlords.
A Mandarin-speaking scholar-general, Eikenberry had recorded two tours of duty as a military attaché in Beijing. On 9/11, he narrowly escaped death when American Airlines flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon and the
shock waves threw him against the wall of his outer-ring office; two people working nearby were killed. When he arrived at the Kabul Military Training Center, the hardscrabble scene reminded him of the suffering that George Washington’s Continental Army endured at Valley Forge during the winter of 1777.
“Everyone was having some pretty rough nights,” Eikenberry said in an Army oral-history interview. “It was just an extraordinary set of challenges.”
Because the Afghans had no money, it fell to the United States and its allies to pay for the new army and supply the trainers and equipment. NATO ally Germany, with help from the State Department and other countries, agreed to oversee a parallel program to recruit and train 62,000 officers for an Afghan national police force.
In spring 2003, Eikenberry set up a new command to oversee the massive training effort for the Afghan army. He named it Task Force Phoenix to symbolize the rebirth of the Afghan state from, as he put it, “the ashes of thirty years of very brutal warfare.” The entire U.S. war strategy hinged on the program. As soon as the Afghans could field competent security forces to secure their own territory, the U.S. military and its allies could go home.
Year after year, U.S. officials reassured the American public that the plan was working and gave the Afghan forces rave reviews. In June 2004, Lt. Gen. David Barno, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, boasted to reporters that the Taliban and al-Qaeda were scared of fighting the Afghan army “because when they do, the terrorists come out second best.”
Three months later, Army Lt. Gen. Walter Sharp, director of strategic plans and policy for the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, testified before Congress that the Afghan army was “performing admirably” and called it “the principal pillar” of the country’s security. In a set of talking points released at the same time, the Pentagon bragged that the Afghan army had become “a highly professional, multi-ethnic force.”
In reality, the project flopped from the start and would defy all attempts to make it work. Washington wildly underestimated how much the Afghan security forces would cost, how long it would take to train them and how many soldiers and police would be needed to battle the country’s rising insurgency.
The Bush administration compounded the miscalculations by moving too slowly to strengthen the Afghan security forces during the first few years of the war when the Taliban presented a minimal threat. Then, after the Taliban rebounded, the U.S. government tried to train too many Afghans too quickly.
“We got the [Afghan forces] we deserve,” Douglas Lute, an Army lieutenant general who served as the White House’s Afghanistan war czar under Bush and Obama, said in a Lessons Learned interview. If the U.S. government had ramped up training “when the Taliban was weak and disorganized, things may have been different,” Lute added. “Instead, we went to Iraq. If we committed money deliberately and sooner, we could have a different outcome.”
The Pentagon also committed a fundamental mistake by designing the Afghan army as a facsimile of the U.S. military, forcing it to adopt similar rules, customs and structures in spite of vast differences in culture and knowledge.
Almost all Afghan recruits had been deprived of a basic education during their country’s decades of turmoil. An estimated 80 to 90 percent could not read or write. Some could not count or did not know their colors. Yet the Americans expected them to embrace PowerPoint presentations and operate complex weapons systems.
Even simple communications posed a challenge. U.S. trainers and combat advisers needed a cluster of interpreters who could translate between English and three separate Afghan languages: Dari, Pashto and Uzbek. When words failed, the troops did a lot of talking with their hands or drawing in the dirt.
Maj. Bradd Schultz, who served with Task Force Phoenix in 2003 and 2004, recalled trying to explain to newly minted Afghan soldiers what it would be like to board a military aircraft. “When you get down there, there’s going to be a thing there called a helicopter,” he said in an Army oral-history interview. “It was like, ‘This is an airplane. Touch it.’ ”
In another Army oral-history interview, Maj. Brian Doyle, a geography instructor from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, recounted tutoring a class of young Afghan officers in Kabul. As he explained the significance of high tide and low tide during the D-Day invasion at Normandy, his interpreter, a trained medical doctor whom Doyle described as “a very smart man,” interrupted and said, “Tides? What are tides?” Doyle explained to the landlocked Afghans that it was when ocean waters rise and fall. “Well, you would have thought I’d just told him that the world was round and he’d been thinking it was flat. He was like, ‘What do you mean the water comes up and down?’ ”
Robert Gates, who later served as defense secretary under Bush and Obama, said U.S. goals for the Afghan security forces were “ludicrously modest” during the early years of the war and that the Pentagon and State Department never settled on a consistent approach.
“We kept changing guys who were in charge of training the Afghan forces, and every time a new guy came in he changed the way that they were being trained,” Gates said in a University of Virginia oral-history interview. “The one thing they all had in common was they were all trying to train a Western army instead of figuring out the strengths of the Afghans as a fighting people and then building on that.”
In the beginning, the Pentagon underscored its minimalist expectations for the Afghan army by trying to build it on the cheap. In a January 2002 snowflake, Rumsfeld blasted as “crazy” a request from the Afghan interim government for $466 million a year to train and equip 200,000 soldiers. Three months later, he sent an angry memo to Colin Powell upon learning the State Department had committed the United States to cover 20 percent of the Afghan Army’s expenses. Rumsfeld thought allies should foot the bill instead.
“The U.S. spent billions of dollars freeing Afghanistan and providing security. We are spending a fortune every day,” Rumsfeld wrote. “The U.S. position should be zero. We are already doing more than anyone.”
Powell responded in a memo that he was “naturally sympathetic” to Rumsfeld’s argument, but he didn’t back down: “Recognizing that others are unlikely to shoulder these burdens adequately unless the United States leads the way, we have pledged to do our fair share.”
Over the next two decades, Washington would spend exponentially more on security assistance to the Afghan government: more than $85 billion, the single biggest expense of the entire nation-building extravaganza.
During the Bush administration, the debate festered about how big the Afghan security forces should be and who should pay for them. “The way it gets resolved is the way everything gets resolved in Washington—by not getting resolved,” Marin Strmecki, an influential civilian adviser to Rumsfeld, said in a Lessons Learned interview.
Zalmay Khalilzad, a Bush White House staffer before he served as U.S. ambassador to Kabul from 2003 to 2005, said the Afghan government scaled back its original request and asked Washington to pay for security forces with 100,000 to 120,000 armed personnel. But he said in a Lessons Learned interview that Rumsfeld demanded further cuts and held the training program “hostage” until the Afghans agreed to cap the number at 50,000.
Over the years, as the Taliban grew stronger, the Americans and Afghans would be forced to lift the cap again and again to avoid losing the war. Eventually, the United States paid to train and maintain 352,000 Afghan security forces, with about 227,000 enlisted in the army and 125,000 belonging to the national police. “So we were fighting in 2002, 2003 about those sort of numbers,” Khalilzad said, referring to Rumsfeld’s 50,000 cap. “Now we’re talking about God knows what, 300,000 or whatever.”
Policy bickering about the size of the Afghan security forces was exacerbated by another shortcoming: the U.S. government lacked the ability and capacity to create foreign armies from whole cloth. Just as it had forgotten how to fight an insurgency since Vietnam, the U.S. military had not built anything on the scale of the Afghan army
in decades. Green Berets specialized in training small units from other countries, not entire armies. The Pentagon tried to figure it out on the fly and the lack of preparation showed.
“You wouldn’t invent how to do infantry operations at the start of a war. You wouldn’t invent how to do artillery at the start of a war,” Strmecki said. “Right now, it is all ad hoc. There is no doctrine, no science to it. It gets done very unevenly. When you are creating security forces for another society, it is the most important political act you will ever do. That requires an awful lot of thought and sophistication.”
Initially, in 2003, the Pentagon assigned an active-duty Army brigade from the 10th Mountain Division to run Task Force Phoenix. Just as it was getting established, however, the Bush administration decided to go to war in Iraq, placing an immediate strain on military units worldwide. The brigade at Task Force Phoenix pulled out and was replaced by a motley, undermanned collection of National Guard troops and Army reservists. “Our inability to keep up… became a very acute challenge,” Eikenberry said.
Many had no experience training foreign soldiers and did not know what they were supposed to be doing in Afghanistan until they got there. Staff Sgt. Anton Berendsen said he was preparing to deploy to Iraq in 2003 when he received last-minute orders to divert to Afghanistan and join Task Force Phoenix instead. “You’re in country and like, ‘What do we do now?’ ” he said in an Army oral-history interview. “There was a lot of growing pains.”
Maj. Rick Rabe, an engineer with the California National Guard, arrived at the Kabul Military Training Center in the summer of 2004 to oversee basic training. Under pressure to produce more Afghan soldiers, he tripled the number of enlisted recruits in the twelve-week program. But standards suffered. In fact, there were few standards at all. Recruits could flunk certification tests or go AWOL, yet not get kicked out of boot camp.
“You couldn’t fail basic training,” Rabe said in an Army oral-history interview. Weak qualifications became an open joke. “As long as they could pull the trigger fifty times, it didn’t matter if they hit anything. As long as the bullet went in the right direction, they were good.”
The Afghanistan Papers Page 7