Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War

by Gates, Robert M

  All my overseas trips took a physical toll. Younger by a few years than my predecessor and my successor, I was nonetheless in my late sixties, and it usually took a week or so for me to recover from jet lag—and then I was off again. But the trips to Iraq and Afghanistan took a heavy emotional toll as well. I insisted on meeting and eating with troops on every trip, as I’ve said, and all too often I could see in their faces the cost of their deployments. There weren’t many smiles. The troops all carried weapons, and I would later learn, to my chagrin, that they had to remove the ammunition before meeting with me. I suppose I understood the security precaution—there had to be more than a few who were resentful that I had sent them to such dangerous and godforsaken places—but I still didn’t like the message of mistrust.

  The troop visits got harder over time because, as I looked into each face, I increasingly would wonder to myself which of these kids I would next see in the hospital at Landstuhl or Walter Reed or Bethesda—or listed for burial at Arlington cemetery. For those on the front line who ate with me, I realized it might well be the occasion for the first hot meal or shower in days if not weeks. Each forward unit I visited seemed to have its own makeshift memorial in a small tent or lean- to dedicated to those who had been killed—pictures of them, mementos of each, challenge coins. I always went in alone. Although the morale of the troops and their NCOs and officers invariably seemed high, on each visit I was enveloped by a sense of misery and danger and loss. I would fly home with my heart aching for the troops and their distant families. With each visit, I grew increasingly impatient and angry as I compared their selflessness and sacrifice with the self-promotion and selfishness of power-hungry politicians and others—in Baghdad, Kabul, and Washington. One young soldier in Afghanistan asked what kept me awake at night. I said, “You do.” With each trip to the war zones and with each passing day at home, maintaining my outward calm and discipline, and suppressing my anger and contempt for the many petty power players, became a greater challenge. Images of the troops weighed on me constantly.

  I didn’t socialize in Washington. Every day I had a fight of one kind or another—usually several—and every evening I could not wait to get home, get my office homework out of the way, write condolence letters to the families of the fallen, pour a stiff drink, wolf down a frozen dinner or carry-out (when Becky was in the Northwest), read something totally unrelated to my work life, and turn out the light.

  I got up at five every morning to run two miles around the Mall in Washington, past the World War II, Korean, and Vietnam memorials, and in front of the Lincoln Memorial. And every morning before dawn, I would ritually look up at that stunning white statue of Lincoln, say good morning, and sadly ask him, How did you do it?

  I first publicly discussed my concerns about Afghanistan at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on September 22, 2008, five days after a visit to the country. I was accompanied by General Cartwright. I—and everyone else—thought it would be my last hearing as secretary of defense, and so most senators preceded their questioning with very kind words about my time in office. The eulogies complete, we got down to business. Levin asked me why we weren’t responding promptly to the commander’s request for more troops in Afghanistan. I replied that the requirements had been changing, and I mentioned McKiernan’s request just the previous week when I’d been in Afghanistan. But, I continued, “We need to think about how heavy a military footprint the United States ought to have in Afghanistan, and are we better off channeling resources to build Afghan capacity?” I added that without extending tours and deployment schedules again, we didn’t have the forces available, though we might be able to meet the force needs in the spring or summer of 2009.

  Levin then asked a politically loaded question: Could we meet the Afghan needs more quickly by reducing forces in Iraq faster? General Cartwright said we would need additional support structure in Afghanistan, and we would need to restructure deployment and training cycles for Afghanistan because currently both were strongly weighted toward the heavy brigade combat teams in Iraq, and the forces needed in Afghanistan would be different. Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama asked if we needed to be more humble “than we have been” in Afghanistan about how much we could change that country. The question went to the heart of many of my concerns. I told him, “We need to listen better to what the Afghan leadership is saying. If the Afghan people view foreigners as occupiers, it will never work—we need to make sure our interests are aligned with those of the Afghan people.”

  By fall 2008 the president also concluded that the war in Afghanistan was not going well and directed an NSC-led review of the war, directed by Doug Lute. On September 24, I met with Cartwright (Mullen was out of town); Edelman; the assistant secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict, Mike Vickers (a former CIA officer I had worked with on Afghanistan in the 1980s, made famous by the book and movie Charlie Wilson’s War), and others to go over the Defense Department contribution to the review. Central Command had advised us that they would not be able to flow the forces requested by McKiernan until June through October 2009. Lighter forces than the brigades coming up next in the rotation for deployment were required (fewer tanks and armor, among other things); facilities needed to be constructed—barracks, air fields, and parking areas for aircraft and helicopters; the infrastructure to support thousands of additional troops.

  The intelligence community was nearing completion of a national intelligence estimate—the most authoritative level of analysis—that would portray the situation in Afghanistan as very bleak. Even before publication of the estimate, the view was becoming commonplace in Washington that Afghanistan had a “feckless, incompetent, corrupt government”; the coalition was treading water; Taliban assaults on towns, even when beaten back, were undermining a sense of security and confidence in the coalition and the government; and the insurgents were getting closer to Kabul. As concerned as I was about the course of the Afghan campaign, I complained at that September meeting about the bandwagon effect of pessimism, observing that in terms of perceptions, “this situation has gone from twilight to dark in six to eight weeks.”

  To change both the direction of events on the ground in Afghanistan and perceptions at home, we reviewed a number of options: a dramatic acceleration of the growth of the Afghan army; the pursuit of tribal engagement while avoiding the creation of warlords and militias and undermining the central government and army; leveraging competent local governors; providing development aid on the Pakistani side of the border; building commerce and other connections between Pashtuns on both sides of the border; concentrating our forces in those areas strategically most important—the south and east; and planning for a larger and longer-term U.S. troop commitment.

  Just as in 2006, when the president decided things weren’t working in Iraq, we ended up with reviews by at least three different organizations inside the administration on what to do in Afghanistan—one at State requested by Condi, several in Defense (the Joint Staff for the military, Eric Edelman’s civilian policy unit in my office, Central Command, and probably others I didn’t even know about), and the NSC review led by Doug Lute. The key effort was at the NSC, and the recommendations looked a lot like what I had discussed with my Defense colleagues in late September: President Bush described the outcome in his memoir as “a more robust counterinsurgency effort, including more troops and civilian resources in Afghanistan and closer cooperation with Pakistan to go after the extremists.” Lute would lead a similar review a year later under Obama and come to very different conclusions.

  Given that the administration literally had only weeks more in office, we debated whether to make the review public. Based on past experience, I thought anything publicly identified with the outgoing Bush administration would immediately be junked by a new administration. Everyone agreed that it was better to pass it along quietly. And so, with some 33,000 U.S. troops in-country, several thousand more en route, almost 31,000 coalition troops there, and the commander�
��s pending request for another 20,000 troops or so, a troubled war in Afghanistan would be handed off to a new president. In December, Bush was prepared to approve the additional 20,000 troops, and Steve Hadley asked Obama’s national security adviser–designate Jim Jones whether the new administration preferred that Bush make the troop decision (and take the heat) or hold off. The new team opted for the second course.

  I made what was originally planned to be a farewell visit to the troops in Afghanistan on December 11, 2008. In comments to the press on the trip, I warned the incoming administration to be careful in carrying out a significant buildup in a country where the experience of foreign militaries “has not been a happy one.… I think there is a concern on the part of the Afghans that we sort of tell them what we’re going to do, instead of taking proposals to them, and getting their input, and then working out with them what we’re going to do.… This is their country, their fight, and their future.” We too often lost sight of that and would suffer the consequences.

  BUSH’S ENDGAME IN IRAQ

  Although several different Democratic legislative efforts to change Bush’s strategy in Iraq failed in September 2007, their criticism of the war did not flag; nor did their efforts to find new ways to get us out of there faster. There was now constant pressure to accelerate the troop drawdowns, and accusations that, despite the obviously improving security situation, the war was still a failure because the Iraqis weren’t enacting laws necessary to advance political reconciliation. As our own economic crisis began, there were growing demands in Congress that the Iraqis pay more of the cost of the war. In September, Congress gave us only enough money to run the war for two months. In October, Senators Levin and Reid began an effort to have the Senate Appropriations Committee include language in our next funding bill calling for the withdrawal of most U.S. combat troops from Iraq within nine months of enactment of the legislation—and to give us only six months of funding. Such legislative maneuvering would continue for much of the following year, but I felt increasingly confident no legislation inhibiting our strategy would pass Congress while Bush was president.

  During the fall months after the president’s surge withdrawal announcement in September, even as the security situation continued to improve, we faced a number of Iraq-related problems both in Baghdad and in Washington. One was a blow-up over private security contractors (PSCs). As the contractor presence developed in Iraq after the original invasion, there was no plan, no structure, no oversight, and no coordination. The contractors’ role grew willy-nilly as each U.S. department or agency contracted with them independently, their number eventually climbing to some 150,000. Out of some 7,300 security contractors Defense hired, nearly 6,000 did some kind of stationary guard duty.

  The State Department, however, hired a large number to provide convoy security for diplomats, other government officials, special visitors, and some other civilians, and it was those hires who caused most of our headaches. As David Petraeus put it in one of our videoconferences, “They act like the Toad in Wind in the Willows—‘out of my way!’ ” The behavior of some of those men was just awful, from killing Iraqi civilians in road incidents to roughly treating civilians. Obviously, their behavior undermined our efforts to win the trust and confidence of the Iraqis. I told Petraeus I felt strongly that everyone carrying a gun on our behalf in Iraq ought to be under his control, or at minimum, he should know what they were doing.

  After some particularly egregious incidents in the summer and fall of 2007, there were growing demands from the Iraqis and from Congress (it took a lot to put those two on the same page) to bring these contractors under the supervision and coordination of State and Defense. This included a debate over whether to bring them under the jurisdiction of the military judicial system or the Justice Department. Turf issues between State and Defense, complicated by aggressive congressional involvement, made solving the matter much harder than it should have been. Secretary Rice and I on too many occasions had to untie bureaucratic knots. There were months of negotiations on this issue, and we finally reached an agreement involving much closer State and Defense oversight of the contractors, coordination of their activities, and their placement under the jurisdiction of the military commander. The situation improved.

  We also had to address the problem of Kurdish terrorists in northern Iraq crossing the border and killing Turkish officials, troops, and police. The Turks demanded that the Iraqi government stop this infiltration, even though Baghdad was helpless without the active cooperation of the leaders of Iraqi Kurdistan. The Turks launched a number of ground and air attacks across the border, and the situation was very close to getting out of hand. Petraeus worked hard to get the Turks to at least give us advance warning so we could ensure that Turkish and U.S. forces did not inadvertently clash, but Turkish notifications were haphazard and often after the fact. Some of the Turkish air strikes were very close to the Iranian border. On more than one occasion, the Iranians scrambled fighters to react, and one of our worries was that they might not be able to differentiate between Turkish and U.S. aircraft.

  These incursions lasted for some months and included a major cross-border ground operation at the end of February 2008 that began just before I arrived for a visit in Ankara. The Turkish government was being assailed domestically for not being more aggressive. Nonetheless, my message was to stop the current operation, with its attendant risks, and get Turkish troops back across the border. When American reporters with me asked if I thought the Turks had gotten my message, I said yes, “because they heard it four times.” Our inability to help the Turks deal with the Kurdish terrorists, among other bilateral issues, led to a real downturn in the relationship that began to improve only when we provided some new ISR capabilities to help them monitor the border and target those terrorists with much more precision; when we persuaded the leadership in Kurdistan to cooperate better with the Turks; and when President Bush worked out a plan for broader cooperation with Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

  One issue that caused a dispute within the administration in the fall of 2007 was what to do with five Iranian Quds Force officers we had captured in Iraq the preceding March. The Quds Force is a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards responsible for “extraterritorial operations.” It reports directly to Ayatollah Khamenei. The leader of the group we captured, Qais Khazali, was a particularly bad guy who had been responsible for smuggling the lethal “explosively formed projectiles” and other arms into Iraq, training extremist Shia militias, forming death squads, fomenting sectarian violence, and carrying out kidnappings and assassinations. He also planned the attack in Karbala, Iraq, on January 20, 2007, in which five U.S. soldiers were murdered in cold blood. The Iranians obviously wanted these five Quds Force officers back very badly. They put great pressure on the Iraqi government, and within the Bush administration, some supported returning them. Among that group, much to my surprise, was Admiral Fallon, who told me he thought we ought to let the “Iranian hostages” go if we could get something for their release. I told him we had been approached by the Swiss to negotiate a deal, but that “I am not for it.”

  I told Petraeus in one of our regular videoconferences that the issue of release was being hotly debated in Washington. The Iranians apparently had made some sort of commitment to stem the tide of “illicit arms” flowing across the border, and Hadley and Lute were planning to take the question of releasing the Quds Force officers to the president. I told Petraeus there was a divide in the administration: Rice and Hadley wanted to “wring them dry” of information and then release them; Cheney and I wanted to keep them indefinitely. The issue would continue to come up from time to time, and while three of the five were released during the Bush administration, Qais Khazali was not released until January 2010, when he was exchanged for Peter Moore, a British computer consultant in Iraq kidnapped by the Quds Force. After what Khazali did to our soldiers at Karbala, I would never have let him go.

  One of my more awkward mom
ents as secretary arose during the fall of 2007, when the president promised Speaker Pelosi a copy of Petraeus’s and Crocker’s Joint Campaign Plan for Iraq—and I had to figure out a way to renege on his commitment. The issue grew out of a request Senator Clinton had made the previous May for our plans for drawing down in Iraq. Eric Edelman denied that request, which prompted the Democrats in Congress to rally around a request for our military plans in Iraq, a request that flew in the face of long-standing Defense Department denial to Congress of military and operational plans. This was another attempt to force the administration to commit to specific drawdown plans, regardless of conditions on the ground, which I thought irresponsible. Legislation had been introduced in the House in mid-July and in the Senate in early October requiring Defense to report regularly on the status of planning for redeployment of our forces from Iraq. A day after the Senate legislation was filed, I received a letter from the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Ike Skelton, urging me to begin the planning; he wanted to know what our “footprint” in Iraq would look like when the transition was complete, among other things, and insisted on detailed briefings.