The Afghanistan Papers

by Craig Whitlock

“We’d ask the Afghans why and they’d say, ‘Because the British came and they killed my grandfather and my great-grandfather,’ ” he said in an Army oral-history interview. “There are so many reasons why people fight over there.”

  * * *

  Even when they had it explained to them, however, the Americans still failed to grasp the forces behind the insurgency. More than anything, that inability condemned them to year after year of repetitive warfare.

  When Brig. Gen. James Terry, the deputy commander of the 10th Mountain Division, deployed to Afghanistan in 2006, he thought his personal background would help him comprehend the complexities of rural Afghanistan. A native of the mountains of north Georgia, he told people his great-grandmother was a Cherokee, that one of his grandfathers was a farmer and the other a bootlegger. When he grew up during the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, Lester Maddox, a populist demagogue, was governor of Georgia, and George Wallace, another strident racist, governed the state of Alabama.

  “So you’d think that I’d have an appreciation of clans, tribes, illegal substance trafficking and corruption,” Terry said in an Army oral-history interview.

  Still, Terry saw the enemy as an enigma. One day, he sat down with an Afghan army general and pleaded for enlightenment. “I said, ‘Tell me about the Taliban,’ ” Terry recalled. “And he looked at me and through an interpreter said, ‘Which Taliban are you talking about?’ ”

  “The Taliban, tell me about the Taliban,” Terry repeated.

  “There are three kinds, tell me what kind you want to hear about,” the Afghan general said.

  “Tell me about all three,” Terry said. “Tell me what they are.”

  The Afghan general explained to his American ally that one type of Taliban were “radical terrorists.” Another group was “in it just for themselves.” The rest were “the poor and the ignorant, who are simply influenced by the other two groups.”

  “If you want to do something significant, you separate the two groups from the poor and the ignorant,” the Afghan general said, “and you’ll have stability and prosperity in Afghanistan.”

  It was an oversimplified explanation, but Terry thought it made more sense than anything else he had heard. “Pretty insightful guy,” he said.

  I. One year after the failed attack on Cheney, Captain Dalrymple would help rescue the man destined to become the next vice president of the United States: Joseph Biden. In February 2008, two Black Hawk helicopters carrying three members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—Biden, John Kerry and Chuck Hagel—and other personnel were forced to make an emergency landing in a snowstorm about twelve miles from Bagram. Dalrymple led a ground convoy to rescue the senators, who had been touring the war zone with Army Maj. Gen. David Rodriguez. The convoy returned safely with the VIPs to Bagram five hours later.

  CHAPTER NINE An Incoherent Strategy

  The veteran Cold Warrior woke up before 5 a.m. on a Sunday—November 5, 2006—to begin his clandestine mission. Robert Gates, the 63-year-old president of Texas A&M University, hadn’t worked for the government since his term as director of the CIA ended thirteen years earlier. But the White House had asked for him personally and he felt obligated to help.

  An inscrutable Midwesterner with a doctorate in Russian and Soviet history, Gates took care to leave his brick home on the College Station campus without drawing attention. He drove northwest for two hours through central Texas to the nondescript town of McGregor. As instructed, he pulled into the parking lot of a Brookshire Brothers grocery store. His contact was waiting in a white Dodge Durango with tinted windows. Gates climbed in and they headed north another fifteen miles to the Prairie Chapel Ranch for the rendezvous with the man who had summoned him: President Bush.

  The Durango passed the security checkpoints and dropped Gates off at a one-story building away from the main residence on the ranch. Bush wanted to hide his visitor from the other ranch guests present for his wife’s 60th birthday. The November 2006 congressional elections were in two days. The president worried that if word of Gates’s presence leaked, people might realize he was planning to shake up his Cabinet. Voters might see it as an admission that the wars were going badly.

  Bush had secretly decided to sack Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary and needed a replacement. Rumsfeld had alienated Congress and NATO allies by mishandling Iraq, and his combative personality had worn thin with the public. Bush had heard good things about Gates, who worked for his father’s administration, and he wanted to hear his ideas about how to fix the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  They chatted for an hour, mainly about Iraq. Gates said he supported Bush’s undisclosed plan to send a surge force of 25,000 to 40,000 more troops to Iraq, even though an expansion of the war would buck public sentiment. But Gates also told the president he had overreached in Afghanistan and needed a new strategy there.

  “I thought that our goals were too ambitious in Afghanistan, that it was being neglected and that we needed to narrow those goals,” Gates said in a University of Virginia oral-history interview. He thought the Bush administration’s democratic aspirations and nation-building agenda for Afghanistan “were a pipe dream” that would take generations to fulfill.

  He favored a scaled-back strategy to “crush the Taliban, weaken them to the extent you possibly can, strengthen the Afghan security forces so that they can keep the Taliban out or down on their own, and prevent anybody from ever using the country as a launch pad against us again, period.”

  Gates caught a ride back to the grocery store, then drove himself to College Station. Late that afternoon, he received a call from Joshua Bolten, the White House chief of staff, asking him to fly to Washington. The president wanted to hold a news conference the day after the election to introduce Gates as the new boss at the Pentagon.

  The taciturn former spymaster represented fresh leadership and a change in temperament from the brash, polarizing Rumsfeld. Yet Gates would find it just as difficult to extricate the U.S. military from Afghanistan. In fact, he would send far more troops to fight and die in the war than Rumsfeld ever contemplated.

  Despite their reassuring talk of progress in public, Bush and his national-security team knew their strategy in Afghanistan was not working. Nobody had a clear idea of what they were trying to accomplish, let alone a timetable or benchmarks for achieving it.

  With its hands full in Iraq, the United States leaned on its NATO allies in 2006 to accept more responsibility in Afghanistan. The U.S. military retained control of operations in eastern Afghanistan along the Pakistani border, but NATO agreed to take a lead role in the south where the Taliban was gaining strength. The British moved forces into the deserts of Helmand province, the Dutch sent troops to Uruzgan and the Canadians took over in Kandahar, the Taliban’s birthplace.

  In May, British Lt. Gen. David Richards arrived in Kabul to take charge of NATO forces. A few months later, he also assumed command of U.S. troops in the east—the first time the Americans and their NATO allies served under the same banner in Afghanistan. A veteran of far-flung conflicts in Sierra Leone, East Timor and Northern Ireland, he oversaw a combined force of 35,000 troops from thirty-seven countries, a formidable presence on paper.

  In public, Richards embraced his role as the commander of NATO’s first combat mission outside Europe. But in private, he was appalled by the coalition’s absence of strategic thinking and its inability to agree on the war’s objectives.

  “There was no coherent long-term strategy,” he said in a Lessons Learned interview. “We were trying to get a single coherent long-term approach—a proper strategy—but instead we got a lot of tactics.”

  The 54-year-old Richards wanted to pursue a counterinsurgency strategy to build popular support for the Afghan government. Under that approach, NATO would target specific districts, clear out the guerrillas and help the Afghans stabilize the area with reconstruction projects. But it all proved harder than NATO expected.

  In September 2006, on Richards’s orders, Ca
nadian and allied forces launched Operation Medusa, an offensive to seize control of Panjwai district, a Taliban stronghold in the province of Kandahar. The operation quickly veered off course.

  On the first day, the Taliban ambushed the Canadians and forced them to retreat. The next day, a U.S. Air Force A-10 Warthog—a low-flying attack aircraft with fearsome teeth painted on the nose cone—mistakenly strafed a Canadian platoon with cannon fire and “just completely knocked the stuffing out of them,” according to Richards. The Canadians wanted to call off the operation, but Richards told them that would humiliate NATO and persuaded them to stick with it.

  After two weeks, the Canadian-led force finally won the battle, killing an estimated several hundred Taliban fighters. But the allies suffered unusually heavy losses: Nineteen Canadian and British troops died and scores were wounded. Making matters worse, the allies failed to maintain security in Panjwai and insurgents gradually returned. Richards said the Canadians “were knackered” and short on forces because they also needed to secure the city of Kandahar, a higher priority. The “Canadians fought a tough battle and nearly were beaten, so they were collectively exhausted,” Richards said.

  For the counterinsurgency strategy to succeed, Richards said he needed more troops as well as financial support and manpower for reconstruction. But the alliance did not furnish enough of either.

  In his Lessons Learned interview, Richards recalled a tense encounter with an unsympathetic Rumsfeld around the time of the Panjwai debacle. The Pentagon chief asked why the war was deteriorating in the south. Richards replied that he lacked money and personnel. “And Rummy said, ‘General what do you mean?’ I said, ‘We don’t have enough troops and resources and we’ve raised expectations.’ He said, ‘General, I don’t agree. Move on.’ ”

  Washington bore plenty of frustrations with its allies. Each NATO member imposed different restrictions on its troops as a condition for joining the coalition in Afghanistan. Some bordered on the ridiculous.

  Germany would not allow its soldiers to join combat missions, patrol at night, or leave mostly peaceful northern Afghanistan. Yet it permitted them to enjoy copious amounts of alcohol. In 2007, the German government shipped 260,000 gallons of home-brewed beer and 18,000 gallons of wine to the war zone for its 3,500 troops.

  In contrast, U.S. troops did most of the fighting and hardly any of the drinking. General Order Number 1—the U.S. military’s biggest restriction—prohibited the consumption of alcohol on U.S. bases to avoid offending Afghanistan’s teetotaling Muslims.

  “We felt that we were giving it our all, and we didn’t always feel that way about some of the other allies,” Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to NATO under Bush, said in a Lessons Learned interview. “So, it was a tough issue in NATO.”

  The NATO-led coalition—formally known as the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF—located its headquarters in a large yellow building adjacent to the U.S. embassy in the Wazir Akbar Khan quarter of Kabul. Behind its tall concrete blast walls, the ISAF compound stood out as a pleasant oasis in the capital and featured a well-tended garden.

  Inside the headquarters building, however, the coalition battled bureaucratic dysfunction. Representatives from the thirty-seven countries had to coordinate operations, make staffing decisions and iron out political conflicts. Constant turnover made things harder. Coalition members limited their personnel to short tours of duty, usually three to six months. By the time new arrivals got up to speed, they had to train a replacement.

  Maj. Brian Patterson, a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, spent four months in 2007 at ISAF headquarters running the air-support operations center at night. He could call on British Harriers, Dutch F-16s, French Mirages and Rafales, as well as U.S. fighter jets and bombers. But juggling the patchwork of capabilities and restrictions took nerve and patience. German Tornado fighter-bomber aircraft, for example, could only be used in certain emergencies.

  Patterson likened the headquarters to “a Frankenstein organization” that emphasized inclusion over efficiency. “We like straight lines, but if you go to a NATO headquarters, it’s going to look like spaghetti. It’s going to be very convoluted,” he said in an Army oral-history interview. “It’s kind of like kindergarten where everybody gets to play, everybody gets a speaking part.” (Working for NATO did have an upside: The Americans could drink. “There were several bars that were located on the base, which was a pretty nice situation,” Patterson conceded.)

  While the Americans had legitimate complaints about the coalition, the other partners nursed their own resentments about the United States. After 9/11, Canada and European members of NATO deployed troops to Afghanistan to show solidarity. But the alliance members felt Washington took them for granted and disparaged their contributions, especially as the war morphed into an open-ended mission and the Pentagon grew preoccupied with Iraq.

  In December 2006, British Defense Secretary Desmond Browne sent a letter to Rumsfeld that highlighted the lack of a war strategy and asked for a meeting of allied ministers “to give better political shape” to the military mission. Rumsfeld, by then a lame duck, called it a “commendable” idea but said he would defer to Gates, who was still awaiting Senate confirmation. The NATO ministers met two months later, but nothing changed. As Gates later recalled, he had three priorities: “Iraq, Iraq and Iraq.” Without U.S. leadership, the Afghan mission stagnated. “There was no center. There was no sense of common purpose,” an unidentified NATO official said in a Lessons Learned interview. “In reality, strategy wasn’t treated urgently.”

  U.S. leaders braced for a rough year in 2007, knowing it would be difficult to contain the spreading insurgency. Reinforcements were in short supply. NATO allies had brushed off requests for extra troops. The Pentagon was tapped out because of Iraq. “As the military saying at the time went, at that point I was ‘out of Schlitz.’ I had nothing more to send,” Gates said in his oral-history interview.

  In public, however, U.S. leaders expressed complete confidence in their approach. In a February 2007 address to the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank, Bush reported that his administration had completed “a top to bottom review of our strategy” and he announced a fresh “strategy for success.”

  Other than a commitment to expand the size of the Afghan army and police, however, the new strategy was really more of the old. Bush gave no indication that he had taken Gates’s advice from their meeting at the ranch three months earlier to truncate the war’s objectives. Instead, he declared that his ambitious goal was not just to “defeat the terrorists,” but to transform Afghanistan into “a stable, moderate, democratic state that respects the rights of its citizens.”

  “For some, that may seem like an impossible task. But it’s not impossible,” Bush said. “Over the past five years, we’ve made real progress.”

  Yet even the president’s new war commander had a hard time making sense of the so-called “strategy for success.”

  Army Gen. Dan McNeill arrived in Kabul to take charge of U.S. and NATO forces a few days before Bush’s think-tank speech. It was the second command tour in Afghanistan for the silver-haired soldier from eastern North Carolina. Like Richards, his British predecessor, McNeill quickly judged that the United States and NATO didn’t have a coherent war strategy. Instead, the conflict had shifted into automatic cruise control, without a roadmap or a destination.

  “In 2007, there was no NATO campaign plan, a lot of verbiage and talk, but no plan,” McNeill said in a Lessons Learned interview. “The instructions were kill terrorists and build the [Afghan army]. Also, don’t fracture the alliance, and that was it.”

  Six years into the conflict, there was still no consensus on the war’s aims. Some officials thought the goals should include tackling poverty and child mortality. Others, like Bush, talked about freedom and democracy. The high-mindedness and lack of clarity baffled the four-star general. “I tried to get someone to define for me what winning meant, even before I we
nt over, and nobody could,” McNeill said.

  Lower-ranking soldiers in the field also sensed that no strategy existed. The unofficial mission, they said, was to keep a lid on Afghanistan and not let things spiral out of control while the U.S. military surged into Iraq. “Iraq was sucking up all the resources and all the time and attention,” Lt. Col. Richard Phillips, who ran a combat support hospital in eastern Afghanistan in 2007, said in an Army oral-history interview, “Afghanistan was nothing… It was a backwater second effort for everybody.”

  Maj. Stephen Boesen, an officer with the Iowa National Guard, described the U.S. war effort as “just spinning our wheels” and lacking “any kind of strategy” when he served in 2007 as a combat adviser to Afghan infantry forces. Senior commanders, he said, failed to articulate expectations or benchmarks.

  When he returned home, he predicted—accurately—that the war would muddle along aimlessly for years to come. “I’m sad to say that my children will probably be doing the same mission I did when they’re old enough, if we don’t get our act together,” Boesen told Army historians.

  In spring 2007, the White House recognized that it needed better strategic advice. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley persuaded Bush to appoint a White House “war czar” to coordinate strategy and policy for Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush selected Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the director of operations for the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, an Indiana native and West Point graduate who had served in in Kosovo and the first Iraq War.

  In a reflection of the Bush administration’s focus, Lute estimated that he spent 85 percent of his time in his new job on Iraq and just 15 percent on Afghanistan. At his Senate confirmation hearing, lawmakers asked him only a single question about the war in Afghanistan, a query about the Taliban’s sanctuaries in Pakistan. Despite Bush’s public pronouncements about his “strategy for success,” Lute found that few people at the White House had done any real strategic thinking about Afghanistan.