Most of my many other trips abroad during the Bush years, apart from the frequent visits to Iraq and Afghanistan, fell into the category of what former secretary of state George Shultz called “gardening”—shoring up or nurturing relationships with friends, allies, and others. The highlight for me always was meeting and talking with our men and women in uniform around the world. Each encounter seemed to provide a much-needed transfusion of energy and idealism from them to me, which I would need when I returned to Washington.
CHAPTER 6
Good War, Bad War
By fall 2007, the unpopular war in Iraq—the “bad war,” the “war of choice”—was going much better. However, the war in Afghanistan—the “good war,” the “war of necessity”—while continuing to enjoy strong bipartisan support in Washington, was getting worse on the ground. The politics in Washington surrounding the two wars both frustrated and angered President Bush. In a meeting with the Joint Chiefs and me in the Tank on May 10, 2007, he said, “Many in Congress don’t understand the military. Afghanistan is good. Iraq is bad. Bullshit.”
The war to oust the Taliban from power in Afghanistan and to destroy al Qaeda began auspiciously less than a month after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Within a matter of weeks, the Taliban had been defeated, and their leaders, along with al Qaeda’s, had fled to the border areas inside Pakistan. On December 5, 2001, Hamid Karzai was selected by an informal group of Afghan tribal and political leaders to serve six months as chairman of an “interim administration.” In June 2002, he was chosen by a grand assembly (loya jirga) as interim president for two years, then was elected to a full five-year term the following October. From the beginning, Karzai had strong support from the United States and the international community, which set about trying to help him and his government establish their authority and an effective national government beyond Kabul. When I became secretary, the United States had about 21,000 troops in Afghanistan, while NATO and coalition partners together had about 18,000 troops.
When interviewing with Bush in early November 2006, I had told him that based on what I read, I thought the war in Afghanistan was being neglected. I also said there was too much emphasis on building a strong central government in a country that had virtually never had one, and too little emphasis on improving governance, security, and services at the provincial and district levels, including making better use of local Afghan tribal leaders and councils. On my first trip to Afghanistan in January 2007, I quickly came to believe that, as in Iraq, from early on we had underestimated the resilience and determination of our adversaries and had failed to adjust our strategy and our resources as the situation on the ground changed for the worse. While we were preoccupied with Iraq, between 2002 and 2005 the Taliban reconstituted in western Pakistan and in southern and eastern Afghanistan. Headquartered and operating in Pakistani cities including Peshawar and Quetta, virtually unhindered by the Pakistani government, the Taliban recovered from their disastrous defeat and again became a serious fighting force. They received invaluable, if unintended, assistance from the sparseness of Afghan government presence outside Kabul—Karzai was referred to as the mayor of Kabul—and the corruption and incompetence of too many Afghan government officials at all levels in the provinces.
The first significant American encounter with a revitalized Taliban came in eastern Afghanistan on June 28, 2005, when four Navy SEALs were ambushed in a well-organized attack, and a helicopter with SEAL and Army Special Forces reinforcements sent to assist them was shot down. Three of the SEALs on the ground were killed, as well as sixteen U.S. servicemen on the helicopter. One of the three SEALs on the ground, Navy Lieutenant Michael Murphy, posthumously received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroism. American casualties that day were the worst yet in a single engagement in the Afghan War and a wake-up call that the Taliban had returned. The following spring, 2006, the Taliban increased the level of their attacks in both the south and east of Afghanistan. They were further enabled by a deal Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf cut at about the same time with tribes on the border, in which he pledged to keep Pakistani troops out of their tribal lands as long as the tribes prevented al Qaeda and the Taliban from operating in those lands. The feckless deal effectively gave the Taliban safe haven in those areas. The Taliban “spring offensive” was characterized by assassinations, the murder of teachers and burning of schools, the shooting of workers building roads, and other acts of targeted violence. The Taliban were joined in their depredations by other extremist groups, most notably those led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (to whom we had provided weapons when he was fighting the Soviets) and Jalaluddin Haqqani.
By the end of 2006, U.S. commanders in Afghanistan were telling the press that the number of Taliban attacks had surged by 200 percent in December from a year earlier and that since Musharraf’s deal with the tribes had gone into effect in early September, the number of attacks in the border area had gone up by 300 percent. Military briefers reported that suicide attacks had grown from 27 in 2005 to 139 in 2006; the number of roadside bombings in the same period had risen from 783 to 1,677; and the number of direct attacks using small arms, grenades, and other weapons had gone from 1,558 to 4,542. Two thousand six had been the bloodiest year since 2001. When I became secretary, the war in Afghanistan, as in Iraq, was clearly headed in the wrong direction.
Recognizing the deterioration, just prior to my becoming secretary, President Bush had ordered an increase in the number of U.S. troops from 21,000 to 31,000 over a two-year period—what he called a “silent surge.” He also doubled funding for reconstruction, increased the number of military-civilian teams (provincial reconstruction teams) carrying out projects to improve the daily life of Afghans, authorized an increase in the size of the Afghan army, and ordered more U.S. civilian experts to Afghanistan to help the ministries in Kabul become more effective (and less corrupt). Bush also encouraged our allies to do more in all these areas, and to drop the “national caveats” that limited the combat effectiveness of their troops.
It was against this backdrop that I made my first visit to Afghanistan in mid-January 2007, less than a month after being sworn in. As on my first trip to Iraq, General Pace joined me. It was nearly midnight when we landed and rode in a heavily armored motorcade to the main U.S. base in Kabul, Camp Eggers. There was snow and ice everywhere, and the temperature was about twenty degrees. My accommodations at Bader House consisted of a small second-floor bedroom with dim lighting and a bed, couch, easy chair, desk, and drapes that all looked like they had been salvaged from an old college dorm. The staff shared one room with four bunk beds. We all knew we were “living large” compared to our troops, and no one complained.
The first morning, I met with our ambassador, Ronald Neumann; then the senior American commander, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry; then other U.S. commanders; and finally with the commander of the International Security Assistance Force (the NATO-dominated coalition), British general David Richards. I heard a consistent message from everyone: the Taliban insurgency was growing, their safe havens in Pakistan were a big problem, the spring of 2007 would be more violent than the previous year, and more troops were needed. I was told that NATO nations had not provided some 3,500 military trainers they had promised, and Eikenberry—who was due to rotate out less than a week after my visit—asked that the deployment of a battalion of the 10th Mountain Division (about 1,200 troops) be extended through the spring offensive.
I told Eikenberry that if he thought more troops were needed, I was prepared to recommend that course of action to the president. At the same time, Pace made clear that additional troops for Afghanistan would increase the strain on the U.S. military at least in the short run. While I said I wanted to keep the initiative and not allow the Taliban to regroup, Pace had put his finger on a huge problem. With the surge in Iraq and 160,000 troops there, the Army and Marine Corps didn’t have combat capability to spare. My intent upon becoming secretary had been to give our comman
ders in Iraq and Afghanistan everything they needed to be successful; I realized on this initial visit to Afghanistan I couldn’t deliver in both places at once.
That afternoon we helicoptered east across the snow-covered mountains to Forward Operating Base Tillman, at an elevation of some 6,000 feet in eastern Afghanistan, only a few miles from the Pakistani border and near a major Taliban infiltration route. When we landed, I couldn’t help but reflect that a little over twenty years before, as deputy director of the CIA, I had been on the Pakistani side of the border looking into Afghanistan and doing business with some of the very people we were fighting now. It was a stark reminder to me of our limited ability to look into the future or to foresee the unintended consequences of our actions. That was what made me very cautious about committing military forces in new places.
I was met by Captain Scott Horrigan, the commander at FOB Tillman, who gave me a tour. His troops were partnered with about 100 Afghan soldiers in this fortified outpost in the mountains, named for Corporal Patrick Daniel Tillman, a professional football player who had enlisted in the Army and was killed in Afghanistan in a friendly-fire tragedy in 2004. The walking tour across snow, rocks, and mud brought home to me just how much we were asking of our young officers and troops in these isolated posts. Captain Horrigan was overseeing road building, negotiating with local tribal councils, training Afghan soldiers—and fighting the Taliban. His base was attacked by rocket and mortar fire at least once a week. The range of his responsibilities and the matter-of-fact way he described them and conducted himself took my breath away. I thought to myself that the responsibilities this young captain had and the authority and independence he enjoyed would make any return to garrison life—not to mention the civilian world—very hard. More than any headquarters briefing, the quiet competence, skill, and courage that he, his first sergeant, and their men displayed gave me confidence that we could prevail if we had the right strategy and proper resources.
In a dramatic shift of setting and circumstance, I met that evening for the first time with President Karzai in the presidential palace in Kabul. Karzai owed his position—and his life—to American support, yet he was very much a Pashtun leader and an Afghan nationalist. Accordingly, distrust and dislike of the British, who had famously failed to pacify Afghanistan in the nineteenth century, was in his DNA. I would meet with him many times over the next four and a half years, often alone, in every subsequent visit. He and I were able to speak very frankly to each other. His wife had given birth to a son a few days before my initial visit, and in future meetings I would always ask about the boy, of whom he was very proud. While dealing with Karzai could be incredibly frustrating and maddening, especially for those who had to do it nearly every day, I quickly understood the importance of actually listening to him—something too many of my American colleagues, including all our ambassadors during my time as secretary, did too rarely—because he was very open about his concerns. Long before issues such as civilian casualties, the actions of private security contractors, night raids, and the use of dogs on patrols became nasty public disputes between Karzai and the international coalition, he would raise these matters in private. We were far too slow in picking up on these signals and taking action. Karzai knew he needed the coalition but he also was sensitive to actions that would anger the Afghan public, undermine their tolerance for the presence of foreign troops in their country, and reflect badly on him in the eyes of his countrymen. “I know I have many flaws,” Karzai once told me, “but I do know my people.”
Wholly dependent upon the largesse and protection of foreign governments and troops, he was exceptionally sensitive about any foreign action or commentary that did not show respect for Afghan sovereignty, Afghan citizens, or himself. He was especially allergic to foreign criticism of him or his family, particularly on the issue of corruption. He tracked the foreign press zealously (or his staff did) and once showed me an article critical of him in The Irish Times. I thought to myself, Who in the hell reads The Irish Times outside Ireland? But all too often, in both the Bush and Obama administrations, American officials failed to calibrate their criticisms of Karzai in terms of what was said, how often, at what level, and whether publicly or privately. The result was to make a challenging relationship more difficult than it needed to be.
I returned from the January 2007 trip determined to provide more American troops, to try to persuade our NATO allies to provide more troops, and to see if we could get better cooperation from the Pakistanis on the border. I wasn’t optimistic about my chances for success.
Getting more American troops was a challenge. With the surge in Iraq, our ground forces were stretched very thin. The expression I most often heard from senior officers when discussing this was “We are out of Schlitz”—meaning there was nothing more available. Thinking it very important to blunt the Taliban offensive in the spring of 2007, within days of my return to Washington I recommended, and the president approved, extending the deployment of the 10th Mountain Division battalion for another 120 days, as Eikenberry had requested. I also asked the president to approve accelerating the deployment of units of the 82nd Airborne Division. All together this provided roughly another 3,200 U.S. combat troops, bringing our number to about 25,000, the highest level yet in the war. I could send no more troops for the rest of 2007, given our commitments in Iraq. The commanders still had an outstanding request to NATO for 3,500 additional trainers for the Afghan army and police.
President Bush was sensitive to the charge that the war in Iraq—and the surge—were holding us back or distracting us in Afghanistan. This was an ongoing source of his irritation with Mike Mullen, whose public commentary suggested just that. In late September, the president expressed his displeasure to me over a statement Mullen had made in an interview to the effect that Iraq was “a distraction.” And he also disliked Mullen’s later repeated characterization to Congress that “in Iraq, we do what we must. In Afghanistan, we do what we can.” Mike was describing reality, however politically uncomfortable, but it was public statements like these that I think led the president to question whether Mullen would continue to support the effort in Iraq under a new commander in chief.
We needed to persuade our NATO allies to do more. As I said earlier, I attended my first NATO defense ministers meeting in Seville in early February 2007, where I asked the Europeans to deliver the combat troops, trainers, and helicopters they had promised. I pressed them to lift restrictions on the kinds of missions their forces could undertake. I told them it was important for the spring offensive in Afghanistan to be an “alliance offensive.” Several ministers, including my German colleague, Franz Josef Jung, countered that a more “balanced, comprehensive” approach was needed in Afghanistan and that the alliance should be focusing more on economic and reconstruction efforts than on boosting force levels. This was a refrain I would hear constantly in the future. The approach favored by the Europeans, however, looked a lot like nation-building, the work of decades in Afghanistan and not the kind of mission accomplished in the middle of a war. The Europeans—especially those deployed in the more peaceful west and north of Afghanistan—wanted to focus on a very broad long-term mission, just as there was growing sentiment in the Bush and then the Obama administration that we had to narrow our objectives to those that could be realistically achieved in the time that an increasingly impatient and war-weary American people would give us. No one ever focused explicitly on this divergence of views between the United States and our NATO allies either in our meetings or publicly, but it was an important underlying source of friction and frustration.
When the Europeans agreed to take on Afghanistan as a NATO mission in 2006, they had thought they were signing up to something akin to armed peacekeeping, as NATO had undertaken in Bosnia, not a full-fledged counterinsurgency. Their publics did not want to be in a war and had very low tolerance for casualties, and most governments faced significant political opposition at home to their military commitment. While I would pester an
d nag the Europeans for years to do more, I actually was surprised they were so steadfast in supporting the mission, given their domestic politics, especially in the several countries where coalition governments held on to power by a thread. The hardest fighting, and greatest sacrifices, fell to those countries deployed in the south and east (the United States, Britain, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Australia, Estonia, and Romania), but the French, Germans, Italians, and Spanish contributed thousands of troops elsewhere in Afghanistan. Getting many of those troops to venture outside their fortified base camps, however, was a continuing challenge. Over time national caveats would diminish, the numbers of allied troops would gradually increase, and no one would bail out.
I wanted to get the Pakistanis to do more to end safe havens and to stop Taliban infiltration from their side of the border. As important to the United States as Pakistan is, both in Afghanistan and in the region, I would travel there only twice because I quickly realized my civilian counterpart had zero clout in defense matters (dominated by the chief of the army staff). My first and only significant visit was on February 12, 2007, about three weeks after my initial trip to Afghanistan. The purpose was to meet with President Musharraf, who was then also still chief of the army staff, to see if he would step up Pakistan’s military efforts along the Afghan border, especially in anticipation of the Taliban’s spring offensive. I talked about the need for the United States, NATO, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to do more. His response was one that we would hear ad nauseam. The international media and some foreign leaders portray all problems in Afghanistan as coming from Pakistan, he said, but we needed to take on the Taliban where they come from and operate, which was in Afghanistan. He went on to say that only the Pakistani intelligence services seemed to catch high-ranking Taliban and al Qaeda and that “Pakistan is the victim of the export of the Afghan Taliban.” After he reviewed his plans for border control, the refugee camps, and military action in Waziristan (in northwestern Pakistan, on the Afghan border), we retired to a small room for a private meeting. I gave him a list of specific actions we wanted Pakistan to take, actions we could take together, and actions the United States was prepared to take alone. In private, Musharraf acknowledged Pakistani failures and problems on the border, but he asked me what a lone Pakistani border sentry could do if he saw thirty to forty Taliban moving toward the Afghan border. I responded, You should permit the sentry to warn us, and we will ambush the Taliban. He said, “I like ambushes, we ought to be setting them daily.” If only, I thought.
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