Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War

by Gates, Robert M

  The same skeptics in the West Wing and the NSS second-guessed McChrystal’s decision to secure several key villages in Helmand early in the campaign. They argued that the significant population center in the south was Kandahar. This was coming from the same critics who had wanted to avoid counterinsurgency—which is focused on population centers—and had demanded a “proof of concept” for his overall strategy.

  The gap between the White House and senior Defense leaders became a chasm. Early in 2010, it had widened as the White House criticized the U.S. military relief effort in Haiti, the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was playing out, I resisted major cuts in the FY2011 defense budget, and I wrote my memo on shortcomings in our preparations for a possible conflict with Iran. While the military’s every move in Afghanistan was examined through a microscope, and we were under great pressure to speed the surge, no comparable attention was paid to the civilian side. Commanders in the field were the most insistent in pleading for more civilian expertise, citing one example after another where even a small number of U.S. diplomats or development experts would make a dramatic difference in provincial capitals, villages, and rural areas. One of the few things the NSC principals had agreed upon the previous fall was that a significant increase in the number of American civilian experts was essential to success, but the numbers trickled in far too slowly. Donilon would occasionally raise the problem with Hillary or her deputies in principals’ meetings, but little came of it.

  We at Defense certainly at times contributed to White House suspicions. For example, overly optimistic statements by McChrystal and others about the early success of military operations in and around the village of Marjah in Helmand—in particular, the claim of an Afghan “government in a box” ready to insert—gave ammunition not only to skeptics inside the government but also to the press. The more our commanders touted any success in the field, the more the NSS looked for evidence they were wrong. We should have done a better job of explaining what we were doing on the ground to implement the president’s decisions, although God knows we tried. Neither side was really listening.

  In mid-January 2010, I made my second and last trip to Pakistan. Mike Mullen and Richard Holbrooke had devoted significant time and energy to cultivating the Pakistanis, reassuring them we wouldn’t abandon them and trying to get them to work more closely with us on the Afghan-Pakistani border. No administration in my entire career devoted more time and energy to working the Pakistanis than did President Obama and all his senior team. On January 21–22, I met with President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, and most important, the chief of the army general staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. My message was consistent: we were committed to a long-term strategic partnership; we needed to work together against the “syndicate of terror” placing Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India at risk; we needed to remove safe havens on both side of the border; Pakistan needed to better control anti-Americanism and harassment of Americans; and the Pakistani army’s “extra-judicial killings” (executions) were putting our relationship at risk. In a speech at Pakistan’s National Defense University, I took direct aim at the many conspiracy theories circulating about us: “Let me say, definitively, the United States does not covet a single inch of Pakistani soil. We seek no military bases and we have no desire to control Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.”

  The visit was for naught. I returned convinced that Pakistan would work with the United States in some ways—such as providing supply lines through Pakistan, which were also highly profitable—while at the same time providing sanctuary for the Taliban and other extremists, so that no matter who came out on top in Afghanistan, Pakistan would have influence. If there was to be any reconciliation, the Pakistanis intended to control it. Although I would defend them in front of Congress and to the press to keep the relationship from getting worse—and endangering our supply line from Karachi—I knew they were really no ally at all.

  If you’ll remember, in recommending a surge of 30,000 troops to the president the previous fall, I was counting on our coalition partners in Afghanistan to contribute an additional 6,000 to 7,000 troops, which would get us close to the 40,000 McChrystal had requested. At a NATO defense ministers meeting in Istanbul on February 4–5, 2010, I leaned hard on my colleagues to find at least 4,000 more trainers to send to Afghanistan. I told them that effectively training a sizable Afghan security force was the exit strategy for all of us. I promised our allies more training to deal with IEDs and offered to make available to them counter-IED technologies we had developed. I then visited Ankara, Rome, and Paris to urge leaders in those governments to do more. The European governments eventually contributed an additional 8,000 to 9,000 troops. Even with this new infusion, though, we remained short of trainers needed to build up the Afghan army.

  Two organizational changes in Afghanistan in early 2010 helped the allied effort considerably. The U.S. leadership had long thought that having a senior NATO civilian in Kabul to partner with the military commander would be important. Earlier efforts along these lines had not been successful, but in January the British ambassador to Afghanistan, Mark Sedwill, was appointed to the senior civilian role. He would prove a valuable partner for the ISAF commander and a useful influence both in Brussels and in Afghanistan.

  The second change was solving the U. S. command and control problem once and for all—for the first time, to bring all American forces (including both special operations and the Marines) under the U.S. theater commander, at last establishing “unity of command.” I told McChrystal at the February defense ministers meeting that I wanted him to be like Eisenhower in World War II and have complete command of all forces in the theater. Toward the end of February, I told Mullen and Petraeus the same thing. To accomplish this, Petraeus said, getting the Marines under McChrystal’s command was “the Holy Grail.” After deferring for too long to multiple senior military voices supportive of or resigned to the status quo, I simply directed the command change. By late spring, every American in uniform in Afghanistan was under McChrystal’s command. It had taken far too long to get there, and that was my fault. I had fired several senior officers and officials because once they had been informed about a serious problem, they had not acted aggressively to solve it. I had been guilty of doing the same damn thing with respect to Afghan command and control.

  As we surged troops into Afghanistan and McChrystal honed our military strategy, his staff began to tackle a problem that had concerned me all along—the inadequacy of our intelligence on the ground. McChrystal’s intelligence chief, Major General Michael Flynn, prepared a report detailing our ignorance of tribal, social, and political relationships in local areas, and our lack of understanding of power relationships and familial and clan connections. His diagnosis was on target as far as I was concerned, and I thought his proposals to remedy the situation made sense, including having our troops on the ground report what they learned as they went into villages, met with tribal elders, and brokered local deals. My only concern with Flynn’s remarkable analysis was that in January 2010, he published it in a think-tank journal so that everyone, including our adversaries in Afghanistan, could read about our deficiencies. Still, he was on the money in a critically important part of our effort.

  I traveled once again to Afghanistan in early March and, as usual, met with Karzai. The prospects for reconciliation with the Taliban and reintegration of their fighters into Afghan society were much on everyone’s mind, especially Karzai’s, since he had convoked a national peace conference in late April. I told him we supported reconciliation but that it had to be on his terms, not those of Taliban chief Mullah Omar. He should negotiate from a position of strength, and I suggested he could probably do that by the coming autumn. I informed him that the request for an additional $30 billion needed to fund the surge would be before Congress about the time of his visit to the United States in May. “You could help Secretary Clinton and me,” I told him.

  As always, though—sorry to be predictabl
e on the subject—the high point of the trip was getting out of Kabul to see the troops. I was flown to Forward Operating Base Frontenac near Kandahar to visit the 1st Battalion of the 17th Infantry Regiment, a Stryker unit that had suffered twenty-one killed and sixty-two wounded in its successful campaign. Roughly one out of seven soldiers in that unit had become a casualty. As a memorial to the fallen, they had set up a tepee with shelves along the sides holding photographs of those who had been killed, along with small mementos and coins left by comrades and visitors like me to honor them. It was, I thought, a sacred place, and I stayed in there alone for several minutes.

  My spirits were revived by lunch with 10 junior enlisted soldiers and then a meeting with 150 of their buddies. As always, they were refreshingly candid. They were concerned about the tighter rules for engaging the enemy to prevent civilian casualties. Although they understood the consequences of hitting innocent people, they wanted to be able to fire more warning shots. They wanted more female soldiers to help search houses. They said the Afghan army troops were “good but lazy” and the Afghan national police were “corrupt and often stoned.” Someone always caught me off guard in these exchanges, in this case a soldier who said there was a design flaw in the soldiers’ combat uniform (fatigues)—the crotches tore out too easily crossing fences. He added with a smile, “It’s not a problem in the summer, but it can get a little breezy in the winter.” I allowed as how I probably wouldn’t have heard about that problem back in the Pentagon. (It turned out the Army was aware of this problem and had already ordered replacements.)

  I was then flown to Combat Outpost Caferetta in northeastern Helmand province to see the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment. Captain Andy Terrell led me on a walk through the town of Now Zad, once home to 30,000 people and a former Taliban stronghold so laced with IEDs as to render it uninhabitable. The Marines had taken Now Zad the previous December and cleared most of the mines, at a great cost in double amputations. I was told that about a thousand residents had returned, and economic life was reviving. As I walked down the dusty main street, a few shops were open with a handful of men and boys standing around. I wondered, as I saw the significant number of Marines throughout the town and noted the paucity of open shops and the absence of livestock, whether this was a show for my benefit, or whether my visit and the presence of so many Marines to guard me had simply led people to hide. There was no question about the courage and grit the Marines had shown in taking this town or of the sacrifices they had endured. The question in the back of my mind was simply whether it had been worth what it cost them.

  Before leaving Afghanistan the next day, I visited Camp Blackhorse, outside Kabul, one of the largest training camps for the Afghan army. Afghan defense minister Abdul Rahim Wardak met me there wearing a three-piece suit. He escorted me to various training demonstrations. I took a few minutes to thank the U.S. soldiers who were trainers there and then spoke to several hundred Afghan trainees through an interpreter. Wardak insisted that I end my remarks with a few encouraging words in Pashto. He wrote them out phonetically for me on a card. I gave it my best shot, which I suspected was none too good, and to this day I don’t know what I actually said to them. Presumably it was nothing too insulting because they didn’t appear offended.

  My comments to the press on this trip weren’t exactly brimming with optimism. I told those traveling with me to Now Zad that my visit there had reinforced my belief that we were on the right path, “but it will take a long time.” “People need to understand there is some very hard fighting, very hard days ahead.… The early signs are encouraging, but I worry that people will get too impatient and think things are better than they actually are.” No one could accuse me of looking at Afghanistan through rose-colored glasses. I’d seen our soldiers and Marines and what they’d accomplished, but I also understood what lay ahead for them.

  Obama made his first trip as president to Afghanistan on March 28, 2010. He was on the ground for six hours, meeting with Karzai and with American troops at Bagram Air Base. His appearance gave a boost to Karzai, even as the U.S. president delivered some tough messages on corruption, drug trafficking, and governance. They also discussed reconciliation with the Taliban. The troops gave him a tumultuous welcome. Jones later told me angrily that a senior embassy official had told the Afghans prematurely about the visit and that not long after the president’s plane departed Kabul, a rocket hit the tarmac less than a quarter mile from where it had been parked.

  The divide over Afghanistan between State and Defense on one side and the White House and the NSS on the other, smoldering since December, flamed again at the beginning of April. Mullen and Michèle Flournoy returned to Washington from separate trips to Afghanistan, both deeply disturbed by what they had seen. Flournoy came to see me on April 2 to express her concerns about Ambassador Eikenberry’s skepticism regarding the president’s strategy, his treatment of Karzai, and State-NSS wrangling over who was in charge of the civilian side of the war effort. Mullen shared those concerns. A few days later I told Hillary I wanted to use my regularly scheduled time with the president that week to discuss these issues and asked if she would join me. She said yes. Jim Jones asked if the three of us could meet first without the president to come up with some ways forward. I said okay.

  The next day I was discussing a sensitive personnel matter in private with the president when he asked me about Afghanistan. I told him I had agreed with Jones not to discuss my concerns with him—Obama—until Jones, Clinton, and I met. Obama said, “Consider that overruled.” So I said that Eikenberry seemed convinced the strategy Obama had approved would fail. I said the ambassador, and others, had to deal more positively with Karzai, especially in public statements. It was a matter of Afghan sovereignty and pride. The Department of State and the White House/NSS were wrestling for the steering wheel on the civilian side, I continued, and this was going to take the entire effort into a ditch. Obama was quite reserved in his response, commenting only that the principals needed to work out the turf issue.

  A few minutes later Clinton, Mullen, Donilon, and I met with Jones in his office. I repeated my concerns with added vigor and details. I said Eikenberry’s pervasive negativity radiated throughout the embassy and was like a general telling troops going into a fight that the campaign would fail. I was very critical of his, and the White House’s, treatment of Karzai, reminding all that Karzai knew we had interfered in the election the previous fall and noting that press secretary Robert Gibbs’s public statement that very morning—that the United States might withdraw the invitation for Karzai to visit Washington in May—had been a horrible mistake. (Gibbs was reacting to Karzai’s public statement that if foreigners didn’t stop meddling in Afghanistan, he might join the Taliban—yet another of his many impulsive public statements that caused all of us heartburn.) I then described the White House–State problem as we saw it from Defense. Mullen endorsed what I had said, adding that we would be looking at rule of law, corruption, and governance issues in a few months, and yet there were no plans. “The civilian side is not happening,” he said.

  Hillary had come to the meeting loaded for bear. She gave a number of specific examples of Eikenberry’s insubordination to herself and her deputy, Jack Lew, including refusals to provide information and plans. She said, “He’s a huge problem.” She agreed with me on the administration’s treatment of Karzai. Then she went after the NSS and the White House staff, expressing anger at their direct dealings with Eikenberry and offering a number of examples of what she termed their arrogance, their efforts to control the civilian side of the war effort, their refusal to accommodate requests for meetings, and their refusal to work with Holbrooke and his team. As she talked, she became more forceful. “I’ve had it,” she said. “You want it [control of the civilian side of the war], I’ll turn it all over to you and wash my hands of it. I’ll not be held accountable for something I cannot manage because of White House and NSS interference.”

  At that point, I asked Jones how
many people Doug Lute had working for him on the NSS. About twenty-five, Jones said. I angrily said that the entire professional NSC staff under Bush 41 had been about fifty people. “When you have that big an operation at the NSS,” I told him, “you’re doing the wrong things and looking for ways to stay busy.” The National Security Staff had, in effect, become an operational body with its own policy agenda, as opposed to a coordination mechanism. And this, in turn, led to micromanagement far beyond what was appropriate. Indeed, on one visit to Afghanistan, I spotted a direct phone line to Lute in the special operations command center at Bagram Air Base. I ordered it removed. On another occasion, I told General Jim Mattis at Central Command that if Lute ever called him again to question anything, Mattis was to tell him to go to hell. I was fed up with the NSS’s micromanagement.

  Both Donilon and Jones were generally quiet in the face of Hillary’s and my criticism, though Donilon said that Holbrooke’s team refused to work within the interagency process. Jones said, “You want a meeting, you get one.” Further, he said, if the secretaries of state and defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs thought Eikenberry should go, “then he should go.”

  It was a real air clearing. I called Jones the next day to ask if we would discuss all this with the president. He said yes. But it had become clear that Eikenberry and Lute, whatever their shortcomings, were under an umbrella of protection at the White House. With Hillary and me so adamant that the two should leave, that protection could come only from the president. Because I could not imagine any previous president tolerating someone in a senior position openly working against policies he had approved, the most likely explanation was that the president himself did not really believe the strategy he had approved would work.

  I could understand the president’s skepticism even if I didn’t agree with it. I did not believe that Karzai would change his stripes, Pakistan would stop hedging, corruption would appreciably diminish, or the U.S. civilian surge would actually materialize. Just the same, if I had ever come to believe the military part of the strategy would not lead to success as I defined it, I could not have continued signing the deployment orders.