Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War

by Gates, Robert M

  I went through our very specific list of requests: capture three named Taliban and extremist leaders; give the United States expanded authority to take action against specific Taliban and al Qaeda leaders and targets in Pakistan; dismantle insurgent and terrorist camps; shut down the Taliban headquarters in Quetta and Peshawar; disrupt certain major infiltration routes across the border; enhance intelligence cooperation and streamline Pakistani decision making on targeting; allow expanded ISR flights over Pakistan; establish joint border security monitoring centers manned by Pakistanis, Afghans, and coalition forces; and improve cooperation for military planning and operations in Pakistan. Musharraf kept a straight face and pretended to take all this seriously. While the Pakistanis would eventually deploy some 140,000 troops on their border with Afghanistan and endure heavy losses in fighting there, and while there was some modest progress on joint operations centers and border security stations, we’d still be asking for virtually all these same actions years later.

  The real power in Pakistan is the military, and in November 2007 Musharraf handed over leadership of the army to General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. At that point, I turned the Pakistani account over to Mike Mullen, who would travel to Pakistan regularly to talk with Kayani.

  It became clear to me that our efforts in Afghanistan during 2007 were being significantly hampered not only by muddled and overly ambitious objectives but also by confusion in the military command structure, confusion in economic and civilian assistance efforts, and confusion over how the war was actually going.

  The military command problem was the age-old one of too many high-ranking generals with a hand on the tiller. U.S. Army General Dan McNeill had replaced British general Richards on February 1, 2007, as commander of ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) in Kabul. McNeill was the first U.S. four-star commander dedicated to Afghanistan. There he had command of all coalition forces, which included about two-thirds of U.S. forces in country. Because his was a NATO command, McNeill reported to U.S. Army General John Craddock in his NATO role as supreme allied commander Europe. McNeill commanded only about half of some 8,000 to 10,000 additional U.S. and other coalition soldiers assigned to Afghanistan, who, under the rubric of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), reported to a separate U.S. three-star general, who in turn reported to the four-star commander of Central Command in Tampa. A significant percentage of the Special Forces operating in Afghanistan reported to yet another commander, also in Tampa.

  This jerry-rigged arrangement violated every principle of the unity of command. And to make things worse, Craddock and McNeill did not get along with each other. Craddock guarded his NATO turf zealously; whenever I wanted the ISAF commander to brief the defense ministers at our meetings, Craddock was recalcitrant unless I insisted. I can think of only one occasion in my years as secretary when I directly overruled a senior military officer. It was right after General Stan McChrystal was appointed to command ISAF: on his way to Kabul, I wanted him to join me at a meeting of NATO defense ministers, whose troops he would be commanding, and say a few words. I passed word to Craddock to make it happen. We sat next to each other at a formal luncheon, and he passed me a note formally objecting to McChrystal appearing before the ministers, saying he didn’t think it set a good precedent. I scribbled back to him on his note, “Noted. Now make it happen.”

  I heard about this command and control problem in the Pentagon from Undersecretary Eric Edelman, Assistant Secretary Mary Beth Long, and from Doug Lute at the NSC, on my visits to NATO and in Afghanistan. I asked Pete Pace to recommend how to fix it, and he came back to me exasperated with the complexity and the politics. The apparent trouble was that OEF had the mission not only of training and equipping the Afghans but also of carrying out covert (“black”) special operations. The Europeans, especially the Germans, characterized our interest in putting everything under one American commander as having sucked them into Afghanistan as an alliance project and then wanting to take it over again. They also saw it as an effort to make NATO complicit in black special ops, which their publics wouldn’t stand for. Pace concluded that, as Craddock put it, the command and control “is ugly, but it works on the ground.” Actually, it didn’t. This problem would not fully be resolved until the summer of 2010, nearly nine years after the war started.

  International civilian assistance and reconstruction efforts were also confused. Scores of countries, international organizations, and nongovernmental organizations were engaged in trying to help the Afghans develop an effective government, improve the infrastructure, strengthen the economy, and carry out humanitarian projects. It was—and is—a massive endeavor, made significantly more difficult because no one knew what anyone else was doing. Each country and organization worked strictly within its own sector on its own projects. There was little sharing of information on what was working or not, little collaboration, and virtually no structure. To make things worse, the outsiders too often did not inform the Afghan government about what they were doing, much less ask the Afghans what projects they would like. Strictly speaking, this was not my area of responsibility as defense secretary, though historically the U.S. military, with its resources and organization, has taken on many traditionally civilian tasks in war zones. But the war was certainly my responsibility, and if we couldn’t get the civilian side right, our chances of achieving the president’s objectives were reduced, if not impossible.

  A senior civilian coordinator was needed, someone with a broad international mandate to oversee all the economic development, governance, humanitarian, and other projects under way in Afghanistan and then to work with President Karzai and his government to bring some greater structure, coherence, and collaboration to those efforts—with significant Afghan involvement. We discussed this first at the NATO defense ministers meeting in Seville in February 2007, then for months afterward. I believed the coordinator had to be a European and, if possible, have a mandate from the United Nations, NATO, and the European Union, thus encompassing virtually all the international organizations and countries with projects ongoing in Afghanistan. The effort was sidetracked for months by a strong British push for Paddy Ashdown, a longtime member of Parliament who had served as high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2002 to 2006. The United States and other allies were all prepared to go along, mainly because the British felt so strongly about his appointment. The problem was that Karzai was familiar with Ashdown’s role in the former Yugoslavia. Karzai told me during my visit to Kabul in December 2007 that his cabinet had unanimously rejected Ashdown as the senior civilian coordinator because Afghanistan was “not interested in a viceroy for development.” He said he was wary of Ashdown because of reports of his high-handedness in the Balkans. Karzai said he wanted the scope of the coordinator’s role and authority clearly defined and his writ limited to making international support more coherent and to lobbying for greater assistance.

  In March 2008, Norwegian diplomat Kai Eide was named as senior civilian coordinator, operating under the mandate of the United Nations. Eide, who would develop a good relationship with Karzai and could speak frankly with him about delicate matters, often to good effect, would offer his appraisal of the current situation in Afghanistan at every NATO defense ministers meeting. Kai was frank about the challenges but usually fairly upbeat about how things were going. I got to know him pretty well and strongly supported his role so he was very forthright with me. Given the UN bureaucracy, it took months for him to get additional staff, let alone fulfill his mandate. Despite Kai’s best efforts, the structured coordination of international assistance I had hoped for never developed, just like everything else in Afghanistan involving multiple governments.

  No less confusing was determining whether we were making progress in Afghanistan. I was enormously frustrated by the divergent views of intelligence analysts in Washington, who were pretty consistently pessimistic, and the civilians and military on the ground in Afghanistan, who were both much more positive. In my years at CIA and the NSC,
I had seen this movie a number of times—in Vietnam, in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and during the Gulf War, to mention only a few examples. It’s hard to say whether the field or the Washington analysts were more accurate, but I gave a slight edge to the experts in Washington (probably reflecting my bias in having been a Washington-based analyst). However, my experience made me wary because, contrary to conventional wisdom, intelligence analysts far prefer showing that the decision makers don’t know what they’re doing rather than supporting them—especially when they can testify to that effect before Congress.

  After months of reading and hearing the conflicting analysis, my impatience boiled over during a September 25, 2007, videoconference with McNeill in Kabul, Craddock in Brussels, and the chairman and others in Washington. I vented about the gap between D.C. intelligence evaluations versus “the take of the guys in the field.” I said I didn’t know how to get the most accurate assessment of the situation on the ground. I confessed, “I’m confused and I’m sure others are as well.” I asked Jim Clapper, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, to adjudicate the differences in analysis between those in Afghanistan and those in Washington. He reported a couple of days later that the disconnect was worse than we thought; there were differences in assessment between General McNeill’s headquarters, Central Command, NATO, and both CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency analysts in Washington. Not a good situation in the middle of a war.

  In mid-October, Clapper reported that there was a “robust” dialogue under way among all of the different analytical communities with respect to the “real situation” in Afghanistan. He said that analysts from CIA and other agencies had gone to Afghanistan and, working with the experts there, had come up with forty-five to fifty questions to try to sharpen where they disagreed and what they could agree upon. I thought the intelligence folks were missing the point. Too much of the reporting was tactical—day-to-day combat reports—and anecdotal; everyone saw the same data, but interpretation of it varied widely. What was the broader picture?

  In mid-June 2008, I again let loose my frustration in a videoconference with the generals in Kabul and Brussels and the senior Pentagon leadership in Washington: “You guys [in Kabul] sound pretty good, but then I get intelligence reports that indicate it is going to hell. I don’t have a feel for how the fight is going! I don’t think the president has a clear idea either of exactly where we are in Afghanistan.” The differences in perspective and views were genuine, but still …

  The lack of clarity fed my worry that things were not going well. Our insufficient levels of combat troops and trainers, inadequate numbers of civilian experts, confusing military command and control, the lack of multinational coordination on the civilian side, and deficient civil-military coordination were matched and then some on the Afghan side—corruption at every level, the mercurial Karzai, the scarcity of competent ministers and civil servants, problems between the capital and the provinces. Eric Edelman told me about these Afghan weaknesses as early as mid-March 2007. Eric also said that the Ministry of the Interior was probably involved in the drug trade and that Karzai spent far too much time in his palace and not enough time showing the flag around the country. Edelman, a career diplomat, ended his litany with a line perhaps designed to keep me from getting too depressed: “I’m not discouraged, but there are issues.”

  Two weeks later Rice, Hadley, and I met in Washington with NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. His message was familiar: “I feel we can ‘contain,’ but cannot ‘prevail’ ” against, the Taliban. He questioned the sustainability of the NATO commitment and told us the alliance needed better coordination, better integration of our forces, better training of the Afghan army, and more consistency in the public statements of NATO and contributing governments about the war. He added that someone with real clout was needed who could speak to Karzai on behalf of all the countries working in Afghanistan, someone who “can tell him what the truth is.” We agreed with everything he had to say, and Hadley asked whether we really needed three senior representatives in Kabul—one each from NATO, the EU, and the UN, as at present. I asked if NATO should own the entire role, and Rice chimed in, “You can do it de jure or de facto, but make the NATO guy the strongest.”

  During my second visit to Afghanistan, in early June 2007, I continued to worry that we were strategically more or less in the same place as we had been in Iraq in 2006—at best, at a stalemate. In my comments to the press, I said, “I think actually things are slowly, cautiously headed in the right direction. I am concerned to keep it moving that way.” In fact, I was very concerned. In a meeting on July 26 with the senior civilian and military leadership in the Pentagon, I said we were losing European forces because they didn’t have the stomach for the fight; we were doing well in conventional military terms against the Taliban, but the level of violence was rising; a new U.S. president would have to decide whether to put more forces into Afghanistan without much NATO support; the Pakistanis weren’t pushing al Qaeda or the Taliban from their side of the border so that we could take care of them in Afghanistan, nor would they let us go after them unilaterally in Pakistan. The one comparatively bright spot was the Afghan army, which for all its problems was significantly more competent and respected than any other Afghan government institution.

  The problems I faced with command personalities, as well as figuring out what was going on in Afghanistan, were demonstrated in a videoconference on September 13. The deputy U.S. commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, Brigadier General Joe Votel, assured me we still held the initiative in eastern Afghanistan, but he went on to describe the situation there as deteriorating, with the Taliban and their allies increasing the number of suicide bombings, kidnapping of women and beheadings, and moving their support bases closer to Kabul. He said there were increased numbers of the enemy across the border in Pakistan; that attacks in the east were 75 percent higher than the previous year; and that collusion was growing among the disparate insurgent groups. General McNeill questioned Votel’s “dire assessment” and asserted, “We’re not going down the tubes here and the Taliban does not have the upper hand. We’re killing a lot of them, getting to sufficient numbers of their leaders and having great effect. I think we’re in pretty good shape when it comes to the Taliban.” I thought to myself, Well, that’s just great. Even the military commanders on the ground don’t agree on how we are doing. Admiral Fallon then added, “I’m with Dan [McNeill] on the prospects in Afghanistan—it’s not as gloomy as some would have you believe.”

  I arrived in Kabul on December 4 and helicoptered to Khowst province in eastern Afghanistan. The 82nd Airborne had, in fact, done a superb job there of fighting an effective counterinsurgency, and despite the increase in violence, it was clear, as Votel had said, that we still had the initiative. While in Khowst, I flew to a small village to meet with a group of provincial officials and tribal elders. We landed in a field outside the village, and there didn’t seem to be a living green thing in sight. Everything was brown. As so often in visiting such remote places in Afghanistan, I asked myself, Why are people fighting over this godforsaken place? The officials and elders were already assembled in an open-sided but roofed structure and did me the favor of providing chairs to sit on. There were some stunning beards in the room, many of them white and streaked with red henna. It could have been a scene out of the eighteenth century—until one of the elders told me he had read my recent Kansas State University lecture on soft power on the Internet. It was a useful reminder that traditional customs and dress do not equate with technological backwardness—a lesson to remember in dealing with the Taliban as well. I came away from Khowst impressed with the effective partnering of military efforts with civilian experts from State, AID, and the Department of Agriculture. It was a genuinely comprehensive counterinsurgency, combining military operations with robust reconstruction efforts, with Afghans fully integrated. Khowst at that time was a model of a sort: open-minded and skilled U.S. military leaders, adequate numbers
of U.S. civilian experts, Afghan involvement, and a competent Afghan governor.

  My briefings in Kabul from the various regional commanders were uniformly upbeat. They said the situation overall was “no worse” than before, “just different.” The commander in the south said that his forces there “had a better year than the media gives them credit for and than the European capitals think.” The west was described as in pretty good shape, and the north has “no insurgency—organized crime and warlords are the biggest threat to security.” In the east, “the counterinsurgency strategy continues to show progress.” Each commander expressed frustration that the growing violence—due to more aggressive coalition efforts to root out the Taliban—was viewed in Washington as evidence of failure. Every commander wanted more troops, and McNeill said he was about four battalions short, plus trainers, of what he needed.