Obama had pledged during the campaign to send more troops to Afghanistan to remedy the inadequate resourcing of the war during the Bush administration, which had begun shifting its focus and priorities to Iraq within months of the fall of the Taliban. I think that all the senior national security officials of the incoming administration shared the view that we were neither winning nor losing in Afghanistan and that we needed to take a hard look at what we were doing there. I had told President Bush in my job interview in November 2006 that I thought our goals in Afghanistan were too expansive, and my concerns had only increased over the ensuing two years. In my January 26 meeting with Obama, I told him that we should have “no grandiose aspirations” in Afghanistan; we just wanted to prevent the country from again becoming a source of threats to us or our allies, as it had been under the Taliban. In a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee the next day, I was even more explicit: “If we set out to create [in Afghanistan] a central Asian Valhalla, we will lose. We need to keep our objectives realistic and limited, or we will set ourselves up for failure.”
The new administration’s first NSC meeting on Afghanistan was on January 23. There was much discussion on the lack of a coherent strategy. Petraeus and Mullen both pushed strongly for quick approval of McKiernan’s requested 30,000 troops. I was supportive of some more troops but ambivalent about the number, partly because of the rationale the military was advancing. The additional troops were supposed to blunt the Taliban’s summer offensive and provide security for the August elections, but many of them could not get there in time to do either. I was also still concerned about the size of our military “footprint.” Biden quite logically objected to sending more troops even before we had figured out our strategy.
The president decided to reach outside the government to ask Bruce Riedel, a Middle East expert who had advised his campaign, to lead a sixty-day review of the situation in Afghanistan and recommend changes in strategy. Holbrooke and Defense Undersecretary Flournoy would cochair the effort, with Doug Lute and his staff at the NSC in support. Riedel had been a longtime analyst at CIA and had worked for me. He was one of the best, most realistic Middle East analysts.
The immediate problem facing the president was timing: if we were to get thousands of troops, whatever the exact number, trained, equipped, and into Afghanistan in time to deal with the Taliban’s summer offensive and the elections, we needed a decision before Riedel’s report would be finished, to the chagrin of the vice president and others in the White House. On his return flight from the Munich Security Conference in early February, Biden had told the press that he wasn’t going to let the military “bully” the White House into making decisions about more troops for Afghanistan because of “artificial timelines.” The president had wanted to announce his decisions on the troop drawdowns in Iraq before announcing more troops for Afghanistan, but that wasn’t going to happen either. As the Deputies Committee, chaired by Tom Donilon, parsed the request for 30,000 troops and focused on when they could get to Afghanistan and what they would do, it became clear that the Joint Staff had not worked through how many could get there by summer. The request was eventually pared to about 17,000 additional troops.
This pressure for an early decision on a troop increase in Afghanistan had the unfortunate effect of creating suspicion in the White House that Obama was getting the “bum’s rush” from senior military officers, especially Mullen and Petraeus, to make a big decision prematurely. I believed then—and now—that this distrust was stoked by Biden, with Donilon, Emanuel, and some of Obama’s other advisers joining the chorus, including, ironically, Jim Jones and Doug Lute. The distrust may also have been attributable in part to the lack of experience with military affairs—particularly, in this case, training and logistical timelines—among the senior civilian White House officials from the vice president on down. I believe the military had no ulterior motives: failure to approve at least some troop movements quickly would, in itself, limit the president’s options, rendering him unable to blunt the Taliban summer offensive or add security before the Afghan election. Nonetheless, the suspicion would only fester and grow over time.
Incidents unrelated to Afghanistan worsened it. In late February, for example, Admiral Tim Keating, commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, told a press conference about U.S. capabilities to shoot down North Korea’s Tae Po Dong 2 missile and that a prospective launch would be “a stern test” of the new administration. The president was furious at what he called “freelancing” as well as the admiral’s presumption in appearing to judge the president. In his view, Keating’s remarks created serious problems for the administration: if the president ordered the missile shot down, Keating had telegraphed our punch and made non-attribution difficult to sustain; if the president decided not to act, people would wonder why. Mullen and I asked the president if he wanted Keating relieved. Obama said no, that everyone deserved a second chance, but he told me to recall Keating and reprimand him. Keating flew from Hawaii to Washington for a ten-minute meeting with me. I told him of the president’s unhappiness but that we all wanted him to stay—and to learn from the experience. Tim asked me to convey his apologies to the president and tell him this kind of thing would never happen again. And it didn’t (at least with Keating). This episode, along with the president’s problems with the outspoken director of national intelligence, Denny Blair, and increasingly Mike Mullen, showed that presidential irritation with publicity-prone admirals was another source of continuity between the Bush and Obama administrations. All too early in the administration, suspicion and distrust of senior military officers by senior White House officials—including the president and vice president—became a big problem for me as I tried to manage the relationship between the commander in chief and his military leaders.
On February 13, the president chaired an NSC meeting to consider whether to wait until after the Riedel review to decide on more troops, to send 17,000 as soon as possible, to send some troops now and the rest later, or to send the full 30,000 McKiernan had requested. Riedel and all but two of the principals—Biden and Steinberg—supported sending 17,000 at once.
On February 16, in our regular weekly meeting, the president told Mullen and me that he would have preferred to announce the Iraqi drawdown first, as we knew, but that he had decided to authorize the 17,000 troops to help stabilize the situation in Afghanistan and prevent further deterioration. Obama then said to me, “I trust you and your judgment.” The next day the White House announced the decision in a written press release. Although Obama later characterized the decision as the toughest he had made early in his term, he did not bother to announce it in person.
There would later be questions about why so many of the additional troops—Marines—were sent to Helmand province with its sparse population. Their deployment was intended primarily to prevent the security situation in the south from further worsening; that took precedence over providing election security. But an important reason the Marines deployed to Helmand was that while Marine Commandant Jim Conway was eager to get his Marines off their duffs in western Iraq and into the fight in Afghanistan, he also insisted that all the Marines deploy to a single “area of responsibility”—one battlespace—with Marine air cover and logistics. Only Helmand fit Conway’s conditions. The Marines were determined to keep operational control of their forces away from the senior U.S. commander in Kabul and in the hands of a Marine lieutenant general at Central Command in Tampa. The Marines performed with courage, brilliance, and considerable success on the ground, but their higher leadership put their own parochial service concerns above the requirements of the overall Afghan mission. Despite several failed attempts through Pace and Mullen, I did not get this and other command problems in Afghanistan fully fixed until 2010. I should have seized control of the matter well before that. It was my biggest mistake in overseeing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The other major issue discussed at the February 13 NSC meeting was the timing of the A
fghan elections. The Afghan constitution required that the presidential election be held by May 22, 2009, when Karzai’s term would legally end, but the United States and our coalition partners were pressing hard to postpone the election to August 20. Holbrooke argued that a May election could undermine the opposition’s ability to compete and the ISAF’s ability to provide security. The president directed Holbrooke to tell Karzai that he, Obama, was aware of the constitutional problem of going beyond May and that we would work with him to help find a “bridge” to August elections. No one, including me, was indelicate enough to mention that the new administration, dedicated to building “the rule of law” in Afghanistan, had just decided to violate the Afghan constitution and to connive with Karzai on keeping him in power illegally for several months. In its most favorable light, the decision was intended to provide time for other presidential candidates to get organized so there would be a credible election in Afghanistan. For Holbrooke and others at the table, it provided the time necessary to identify a viable alternative to Karzai, who they thought had to go. If the Afghan constitution was an impediment to achieving this goal, the hell with it.
About the same time, Michèle Flournoy returned from her first visit to Afghanistan with some disquieting observations:
I saw little to convince me that we have a comprehensive interagency plan or concept of operations. I still believe that many competing—and often conflicting—campaigns are ongoing in Afghanistan: counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, counternarcotics, and efforts at nationbuilding. Interagency planning, coordination and resourcing are, by far, the weakest link.… Commanders believe that the substantial planned increase of U.S. forces and capabilities, combined with growth in the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces], will improve their ability to “clear” and “hold” some key areas. These forces alone will remain insufficient to “build” enough to reduce the insurgency and promote Afghan self-reliance.
She told me that the civilian-military assistance teams—the provincial reconstruction teams—intended to help bring services and better governance to areas the military had cleared of insurgents were “woefully underresourced.” I was dismayed but not surprised by her assessment of deficiencies on the civilian side—after all, I’d been talking about this problem for two years.
I told my staff in early March that I was very disappointed in the Riedel review so far, which contained no new ideas. Among other things, his report called for significantly greater U.S. civilian advisory capacity without offering any concrete proposals as to where it could be found. Flournoy said that the draft report was all about what should be done but the how was missing. There were four options under discussion: (1) “whack-a-mole” counterterrorism—also referred to as “mowing the grass”—and walking away from any other goals; (2) counterterrorism plus some training of the Afghan security forces, cutting deals with warlords, and then getting out as soon as possible; (3) limited counterinsurgency (COIN); and (4) more ambitious COIN, going beyond McKiernan’s request in terms of troop numbers.
During a single week in mid-March, there were three Principals Committee meetings and two sessions with the president on Afghanistan. That Friday we reviewed the final Riedel report, which recommended disrupting the terrorist networks in Afghanistan and especially Pakistan, promoting a more effective government in Afghanistan, developing the Afghan security forces, ending Pakistan’s support for terrorist and insurgent groups, enhancing civilian control in Pakistan, and using U.S. diplomatic, military, and intelligence channels to reduce enmity and distrust between Pakistan and India. It was breathtaking in its ambition. Most significantly in terms of the conflicts to come between the White House and the military, the report stated, “A fully-resourced counterinsurgency campaign will enable us to regain the initiative and defend our vital interests.” All the principals except Biden concurred in the recommendations of the report and also supported full deployment of the 17,000 troops already approved and another 4,000 trainers for the Afghan security forces. Except for the focus on the need to treat Afghanistan in a regional context and, above all, the critical importance of Pakistan to the outcome of the war, the Riedel report had much in common with the review Lute had overseen at the end of the Bush administration. They also had in common the weakness pointed out by Flournoy: far too much attention was paid to what should be done and far too little to how to get it done.
Biden argued throughout the process, and would continue to argue, that the war was politically unsustainable at home. I thought he was wrong and that if the president remained steadfast and played his cards carefully, he could sustain even an unpopular war. Bush had done that with a far more unpopular war in Iraq and with both houses of Congress in the hands of the Democrats. The key was showing that we were being successful militarily, at some point announcing a drawdown of forces, and being able to show that an end was in sight. Nearly two and a half years later, when I left, we still had 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Contrary to Biden’s gloomy forecast in early 2009, the president had been able to sustain the effort.
The president embraced most of the Riedel recommendations and announced the elements of his new “AfPak” strategy in a televised speech on March 27 with his senior advisers standing behind him. The goal, he said, would be “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan and to prevent their return to either country in the future.” He said that the 17,000 soldiers he already had approved would “take the fight to the Taliban in the south and east, and give us a greater capacity to partner with Afghan security forces and to go after insurgents along the border.” Although he added that they would also help provide security in advance of the Afghan elections, implicit in his remarks was the priority of taking the fight to the Taliban in their heartland. There would now be some 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan. Further, we would increase the training and size of the Afghan security forces.
He also called for a dramatic increase in the U.S. civilian effort—agricultural specialists, educators, engineers, and lawyers—to advance security, opportunity, and justice and to help the Afghan government serve its people and develop an economy not dominated by illicit drugs. This civilian component was central to any political strategy for denying the Taliban influence. He never used the words counterinsurgency or counterterrorism in the speech, but the strategy he announced was clearly a blend of both. Two days after the announcement, I told a television interviewer that I did not think there would be any need to ask the president to approve more troops until we saw how the troops soon to deploy were doing.
I fully supported the president’s decisions although I was deeply skeptical about two fundamental elements of the strategy. Based on our experience in Iraq, I harbored deep doubt that the required number of civilian advisers from State, the Agency for International Development, the Department of Agriculture, and other agencies could be found and deployed. My doubts would prove justified. I also doubted we could persuade the Pakistanis to change their “calculus” and go after the Afghan Taliban and other extremists on their side of the border. When a Pakistani Taliban offensive that spring reached within sixty miles of Islamabad, the Pakistani army went after them in the border provinces of Swat and South Waziristan for their own protection. Their continuing toleration of the Afghan Taliban, including harboring their leaders in Quetta, was a hedging strategy based on their lack of trust in us, given our unwillingness to stay engaged in Afghanistan in the early 1990s. The Obama administration worked hard to alleviate that mistrust, but history was working against us.
My definition of success was much narrower than Riedel’s or the president’s at that point: using military operations—a combination of selective counterinsurgency and counterterrorism—to degrade the Taliban’s capabilities to the point where larger and better trained Afghan security forces could maintain control of the country and prevent the return of al Qaeda. I would take this position for as long as I was secretary. The president’s broad new policy would help accomplish th
at goal. I had told Petraeus in Iraq that a key to success was recognizing the tipping point—when the Iraqis doing something barely adequately was better than us doing it excellently. I thought the same principle should apply in Afghanistan and, even in the Bush administration, I had called it “Afghan good enough.”
In June 2008, on my recommendation to the president, General Dave McKiernan became the commander of ISAF in Afghanistan, a coalition force of American troops and troops from more than forty other countries. George Casey, Army chief of staff, and Mullen thought he was the right man for the job, and I had a very high opinion of him, in no small part because he had worked so well with our allies in Europe. Nonetheless, by mid-fall, I was openly expressing concern to my immediate staff about whether I had made a mistake. To this day, it is hard for me to put a finger on what exactly it was that concerned me, but my disquiet only grew through the winter. Perhaps more than anything it was two years’ experience in watching generals like Petraeus, McChrystal, Chiarelli, Rod Rodriguez, and others innovate in blending both counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations, and observing their flexibility in embracing new ideas, their willingness to experiment, and their ability to abandon an idea that didn’t pan out and move on to try something else. McKiernan was a very fine soldier but seemed to lack the flexibility and understanding of the battlespace required for a situation as complex as Afghanistan. Based on his recent background and experience—commanding coalition ground forces during the opening phase of the Iraq War and then leading the U.S. Army in Europe—I wondered if I had put him into a situation that did not play to his strengths.
Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Page 44