An important way station in my “pilgrim’s progress” from skepticism to support of more troops was an essay by the historian Fred Kagan, who sent me a prepublication draft. I knew and respected Kagan. He had been a prominent proponent of the surge in Iraq, and we had talked from time to time about both wars, including one long evening conversation on the veranda of one of Saddam’s palaces in Baghdad. His essay, “We’re Not the Soviets in Afghanistan,” subsequently published in The Weekly Standard, reminded me of the brutal realities of my first Afghan war. In that conflict, an ill-trained, loutish, and often drunken Soviet army had gradually turned to an out-and-out war of terror on the Afghan people, killing at least a million and creating somewhere between three and five million refugees. (Other accounts put the number as high as seven million.) They tried to upend Afghan culture by redistributing property on a large scale and by trying to destroy “key pillars” in the social structure. As Kagan wrote, “Increasing frustration led to increased brutality, including a deliberate campaign to de-house the rural population (forcing people to concentrate in cities that the Soviets believed they could more easily secure).… The Soviets also used chemical weapons, mines, and devices intended to cripple and maim civilians.” Kagan wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t remember about Soviet behavior in Afghanistan in the 1980s; after all, at CIA, I had watched it, reported on it, and beginning in 1986, had a direct part in countering it. What I had not done consciously as secretary of defense, Kagan’s essay made me realize, was contrast the behavior of the Soviet troops with our own. As McChrystal had said in Belgium at our meeting, the size of the footprint matters far less than what you do with it. There were reasons to be cautious about more troops, and I still was, but I now saw our experience in a light different from the Soviet one.
My thinking about more troops was further affected by President Obama’s speech on August 17 to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He said, in reference to the war in Afghanistan, “The insurgency in Afghanistan didn’t just happen overnight, and we won’t defeat it overnight. This will not be quick, nor easy. But we must never forget: This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.” This was the only time I could recall him being so forthright and committed in terms of prosecuting this war to a successful conclusion. Maybe my comment to Emanuel a few days earlier about the president needing to take “ownership” of the war had penetrated.
Because the Pentagon was more accustomed to Bush’s style of decision making than Obama’s, the military’s proposed timetable for getting a decision on more troops by the end of September was naïve. As planned, McChrystal submitted his assessment to me on August 31. Only Mullen, Petraeus, and Stavridis (at NATO) got copies initially. Petraeus endorsed the assessment the next day and, contrary to later claims, specifically supported Stan’s view of the need for both reintegration of lower-level former Taliban fighters into Afghan society and reconciliation with senior Taliban commanders. Flournoy discussed the process with Donilon, and they agreed we would pass the assessment to the NSS right after Labor Day (September 7), and it would then be discussed at limited-attendance meetings of both the deputies and the principals.
Donilon didn’t want a firm deadline on resource decisions; he correctly wanted to focus discussion initially on the assessment—as I had hoped would happen—and to make sure we had the strategy right before talking about troop numbers. He said there should be no discussion of the assessment at NATO until the White House was comfortable with it. Stavridis in Brussels agreed to sit on his copy, but he and I would have to deal with a very unhappy NATO secretary general, who expected to be brought into the loop early—a reasonable position, since McChrystal was a NATO commander.
Nobody was going to keep Barack Obama in the dark for a week about what McChrystal’s assessment said. Mullen and I met with the president in the Oval Office on September 2 and, as he had insisted, gave him a copy of the report. I told him it did not represent a new strategy but focused on implementing what the president had approved in March. I indicated that the following week I would forward to him the views of Petraeus, Mullen, and the Joint Chiefs, as well as my own, on the way ahead. I promised he would get a full array of options for discussion from McChrystal, noting that there were three elements to the troop issue—combat units, trainers, and enablers (medevac, counter-IED, and the like).
Yet again I told the president I wanted to move quickly on the enablers, sending perhaps up to as many as 5,000. With increased IED attacks and casualties, the message to troops and commanders in delaying the enablers was unacceptable, I said. I requested flexibility to respond to these requests as they came in; I had been sitting on some of them for weeks, to stay under the presidentially imposed troop cap of 68,000. I asked for a decision within a week and offered to report weekly to the NSS on any additional troops sent in this category.
To my astonishment and dismay, the president reacted angrily to my request. Why do you need more enablers? he asked. Were they not anticipated as part of the 21,000? What had changed? Is this mission creep? The public and Congress don’t differentiate between combat troops and enablers, he said. Incremental increases lead to a sudden increase in commitment. Any more troops would be a heavy lift in terms of numbers and money. Biden jumped in with the familiar refrain that the Republicans would start calling it “Obama’s war.” I told them I had gotten a phone call from Senator Joe Lieberman saying that he, John McCain, and Lindsay Graham wanted to be helpful, and I had told Lieberman that they couldn’t let the Republicans take a pass on this key national security issue. I told the president I understood his concerns about an open-ended commitment and mission creep but that “war is dynamic, not static. At the end of the year, whatever the troop numbers, we’ll reevaluate and change our strategy if it’s not working.”
Just outside the Oval Office after the meeting, exasperated, I told Biden and Donilon that with respect to the 5,000 enablers, “From a moral and political standpoint, we cannot fail to take action to protect the troops.”
I was deeply disturbed by the meeting. If I couldn’t do what I thought was necessary to take care of the troops, I didn’t see how I could remain as secretary. I was in a quandary. I shared Obama’s concerns about an open-ended conflict, and while I wanted to fulfill the troop requests of the commanders, I knew they always would want more—just like all their predecessors throughout history. How did you scale the size of the commitment to the goal? How did you measure risk? But I was deeply uneasy with the Obama White House’s lack of appreciation—from the top down—of the uncertainties and inherent unpredictability of war. “They all seem to think it’s a science,” I wrote in a note to myself. I came closer to resigning that day than at any other time in my tenure, though no one knew it.
During the deliberations over Afghanistan in the weeks to come, events would routinely drag me back to the sacrifices our troops were making and to the obtuseness of many of those at home. One such event occurred two days after I received McChrystal’s assessment. That day twenty-one-year-old Lance Corporal Joshua M. Bernard’s Marine unit was ambushed, and he was mortally wounded by a rocket-propelled grenade. An Associated Press photographer took a picture of the dying Marine, being tended by two comrades. His wounds were graphically portrayed in the photo. After Bernard was buried ten days later, the AP sent a reporter to talk with his family and tell them they were going to publish the photo. Bernard’s father asked that the photograph not be circulated to the news media for publication, saying it would only hurt the family more. The AP’s intent to run the photo came to my attention on September 3, and its callousness toward the family both sickened and angered me. From early in my tenure, I had had a good relationship with the press and had spoken publicly and often to military a
udiences about its importance in upholding our freedom (and identifying problems that needed fixing). But publishing this photo was an outrage as far as I was concerned.
I called Tom Curley, the president and chief executive of the AP, and asked him, in consideration of the father’s wishes, not to run the picture. I said at one point in the conversation, “I am the secretary of defense, and I am begging you not to run that picture.” I had never begged anybody for anything, but the sacrifice of this young Marine and the anguish of his family had suddenly become very personal to me. Curley said he would review the decision with his editors, but he didn’t hold out much hope they would change their minds. I followed up with a letter, in which I said, “The American people understand that death is an awful and inescapable part of war,” but publishing the photo would be “an unconscionable departure from the restraint that most journalists and publications have shown covering the military since September 11.” I called the decision “appalling” and said that the issue was not one of law or constitutionality but one of “judgment and common decency.” The AP was fresh out of common decency that day and put the photo on the wire. Fortunately, most newspapers and other media had better judgment than the AP and refrained from publishing the picture. The AP’s insensitivity continues to rankle me.
I formally sent McChrystal’s assessment to the president through Jim Jones on September 10, along with a separate paper by McChrystal on why he thought a counterterrorism strategy alone would not work in Afghanistan. At that point, McChrystal was almost certainly the most lethal and successful counterterrorism practitioner in the world. The successes of the U.S. forces under his command in both Iraq and Afghanistan were legion and legendary. The paper I gave to the president was a distillation of years’ experience in hunting bad guys. McChrystal wrote that while CT (counterterrorism) operations are highly effective at disrupting terrorists, they are not the endgame to defeat a terrorist group. “CT operations are necessary to mitigate a sanctuary, but to defeat a terrorist group, host nation capacity must grow to ensure a sustainable level of security.… Without close-in access, fix and find methods become nearly impossible.… Predator [drone] strikes are effective where they complement, not replace, the capabilities of the state security apparatus, but they are not scalable in the absence of underlying infrastructure, intelligence, and physical presence.” Given McChrystal’s counterterrorism credentials, I was both astounded and amused in the weeks to come as Joe Biden; his national security adviser, Tony Blinken; Doug Lute; and others presumed to understand how to make CT work better than Stan did.
Along with the assessment, I gave the president the written endorsements and comments from Petraeus, the Joint Chiefs, and Mike Mullen. I said that “they all are essentially of one mind: that McChrystal is the right man, has the right military approach to accomplish the goals set forth in your March 27 decisions, and that he should receive proper resourcing to carry out his plans. As well, they all are, with difference only in degree, convinced that no strategy will work as long as pervasive corruption and preying upon the people continue to characterize governance in Afghanistan.” It did not dawn on me at the time that my practice of having the president hear directly from each level in the chain of command, because of the unanimity of the senior military in support of McChrystal’s recommendations, in this instance probably only reinforced Obama’s and Biden’s suspicion of a “military bloc” determined to force the commander in chief’s hand.
The same day I gave Jones McChrystal’s assessment, I also gave the president a long “eyes only” memo on my own thinking. I began by saying that, with the additional forces he had approved in February and March, I had hoped we would have until early 2010 to see if McChrystal’s approach resulted in changed momentum in Afghanistan and, if so, that we would be able to use that to justify continued and perhaps increased support. With the worsening situation the general had identified, and public statements of grave concern by U.S. officials, however, “the debate and decisions—including over resources—I had hoped could be delayed until early next year when we might be able to show some progress are, unfortunately, upon us now. In fact, circumstances have conspired to place us at a historic crossroads during the next few weeks.” I added that “as usual,” all the options were unpalatable.
The principal alternative to McChrystal’s recommendations, I felt, would be Biden’s “counterterrorism plus” strategy. I told the president that I thought that strategy had all the disadvantages of a counterterrorism strategy and not enough capability to reap any of the advantages of a counterinsurgency strategy; and “I also don’t know how to explain such a strategy to anyone.”
I wrote impertinently that any new decision that abandoned his decisions in March or the vow he had made to the VFW in August would be seen as a retreat from Afghanistan, with all the implicit messages that that would send to Afghans, Pakistan, our Arab and NATO allies, Iran, North Korea, and others about American will and staying power: “We need to give it [the March strategy] a chance.” Knowing this president, I realized that he, like me, had a number of questions that had to be answered before any decision would be made, and I laid out some of them:
• How do we tie more clearly and persuasively McChrystal’s approach to the goal of disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al Qaeda?
• How do we tackle the reality that a corrupt, predatory—and incompetent—Afghan government will significantly affect any good we do in either the military or civilian effort?
• How do we change the subject from “nation-building” with all that implies to a more minimalist objective of capacity-building, particularly in the intelligence, security, and law enforcement areas?
• What can be done about the Pakistanis’ unwillingness to take on the Afghan Taliban within their borders?
• How can we cut off funding from the Gulf states to the Taliban?
• How can we get our allies and partners to do more on both the military and civilian side?
• We owe you answers to questions about our current troop deployments: what percentage are actually working daily through or with Afghan counterparts, what percentage are defending terrain without leaving their forward bases, and what percentage is now focused on internal support such as construction and force protection?
• If you agree to more troops, how do we prevent troop levels from inexorably growing, making for the same kind of open-ended increases we saw in Vietnam? How do we reassure the American people we can keep control of this commitment both in troops and time? How does this government impose the discipline on itself to acknowledge when something isn’t working and change course? And how do we persuade the Congress and the American people we can and will do this?
The priority, I said, should be to expand the Afghan security forces as quickly as possible. Additional U.S. and allied forces should be considered a temporary “bridge” to train those Afghans while keeping the situation on the ground from deteriorating further, at least until the Afghans could protect their own territory and keep the Taliban and al Qaeda out. I also said we needed a clearer strategy for reintegration of the Taliban. “I am confident of this,” I said. “Your strategy—centered on building Afghan security capacity—gives us a chance for success; the more limited alternatives do not.” I ended on a very personal note:
Mr. President, you and I—more than any other civilians—bear the burden of responsibility for our men and women at war. I’m sorry to tell you that every day in office makes that burden harder to bear. But, I believe our troops are committed to this mission and want to be successful. Above all, they don’t want to retreat, or to lose, or for their sacrifices—and those of their buddies—to be in vain. What we owe them is not only our support, but a clear strategy and achievable goals. I think your March decisions do that, but we need to explain it better—to them and to the American people. How to do this is one of our principal challenges. I still bear fresh scars from the domestic battle associated with Iraq in my first two years in
this job; I am loath to take on another for Afghanistan. But I am more loath to contemplate a Taliban/al Qaeda victory or the implications for us around the world if we are seen to retreat.
During September, several events fractured what little trust remained between the senior military and the president and his staff. On September 4, The Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson published an interview with Petraeus in which the general stated flat-out that while there was no guarantee more troops would lead to success in Afghanistan, “it won’t work out if we don’t” send a lot more. He dismissed the “counterterrorism plus” strategy as insufficient, saying it had been tried before and that the way to target terrorists was with “on-the-ground intelligence,” which “takes enormous infrastructure.” Petraeus came down squarely in the interview behind McChrystal’s approach, “a fully resourced, comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign.” Virtually everybody in the Obama White House saw this as blatant lobbying designed to force the president to approve more troops. Their suspicion of Petraeus and his political ambitions was not allayed by the fact that Gerson had been a speechwriter for George W. Bush, something Petraeus denied knowing.
Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Page 47