The Long War

by David Loyn

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  Only one who knows the disastrous effects of a long war can realize the supreme importance of rapidity in bringing it to a close.

  —Sun Tzu

  INTRODUCTION

  A SIMPLE GOLDEN CROWN lay in a glass case on the marble mantelpiece in the inner office of the Afghan president, next to a gold medallion. President Ashraf Ghani gestured to these relics of a ruler of Afghanistan’s past, “one of the successors of Alexander.” Ghani saw himself in a line with the ancient kings and borrowed these symbols of power from the national museum. It was part of his vision of destiny. On his way to file his nomination papers when running for president in 2014, he had sought a blessing from Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, the last representative of a clan who were the kingmakers in Afghanistan’s past.

  In 1996, when I first entered the Arg, the presidential palace and seat of Afghan power, I had come in with the Taliban. A Taliban tank, festooned with garish plastic decorations from the shops on “Wedding Street” nearby, smashed through the gates. Fighters wandered in and out of the Arg buildings through broken windows and sat in groups on the large lawns eating pomegranates, littering the ground with red-juiced rind. When the Taliban took the capital, two years after emerging out of the desert near Kandahar, my TV crew were the only foreign journalists reporting from their front line. The ruthless speed of the assault surprised their enemies, and when they broke through the defenses of the Sarobi Gorge to the east, thought to be impregnable, the city lay at their feet. These singular fundamentalists were opposed to any depictions of men or animals, and by dawn, they had cut the heads off stone statues of dogs on either side of the staircase in the palace and shot out the faces of men in paintings on the wall.

  On one side of the staircase, the walls of a bathroom were covered in blood, where the Taliban had killed the former president Najibullah and his brother overnight. Their castrated bodies hung from a nearby traffic control point on a roundabout, with cigarettes and dollar bills shoved into their hands and mouths—symbols of depravity. Hundreds of Taliban fighters stood around, watching quietly in the dawn.

  In 2001, the Taliban were in their turn quickly swept aside in a war from the air with just a handful of mostly American special operators on the ground standing up local militias. What began as an act of righteous revenge for harboring the 9/11 planners turned into America’s longest war. Twenty years on, more than a trillion dollars spent, and many lives lost, this book asks why it was so hard.

  At the peak, there were 150,000 troops from more than fifty nations under the umbrella of NATO. Those who commanded this first “out of area” campaign for an alliance originally conceived to keep the peace in Europe had a unique task, because of the nature of the conflict and the challenges of alliance warfare. Keeping the coalition together when the predicted peacekeeping and reconstruction mission turned out to be something very different called on unusual skill. The lessons in leadership they learned have an importance beyond the military.

  Commanding in Afghanistan raised questions about the ideal division between politicians and the military envisaged by Samuel Huntington in The Soldier and State—where politicians decide policy and the military execute it as independently as possible. “The demands of the job made this difficult,” wrote General Stanley A. McChrystal. “The process of formulating, negotiating, articulating, and then prosecuting even a largely military campaign involved politics at multiple levels that were impossible to ignore.”1 They had to deal with a fractious and unpredictable host, an ill-equipped coalition, nervous of the worsening conflict, and in Pakistan, a neighbor who proved a duplicitous and dangerous ally. And they were making up a new way of fighting counterinsurgency warfare in the glare of the media. McChrystal and his predecessor as commander, General David McKiernan, would be replaced by President Obama—the first field commanders to be fired since MacArthur in Korea in 1951.

  Under Ghani, the traffic control point where Najibullah’s body had been displayed was no longer needed. No traffic was allowed near the Arg. A bustling street market had gone, and that roundabout was well inside a new high-security zone behind blast walls. Since 2001, millions of dollars were spent renovating the eighty-acre Arg compound. Scent from a rose garden fills the air where Taliban fighters once sprawled in the dust. But the security threats meant that Ghani lived in isolation, with little contact to the country beyond the manicured lawns of his huge compound. I worked in his office in 2017 and 2018 as a communications adviser and suggested he see a daily news digest, with polling showing his popularity, but did not succeed. He had to fight isolation from reality, living and traveling in a security bubble, the only media in attendance coming from his team in the Arg.

  I knew Ghani well before coming to work in his office. He was the country’s first finance minister after the Taliban, but soon fell out with the first president, Hamid Karzai, and as a BBC reporter, I interviewed him several times in the years that followed, when he was a strong critic of the international aid effort, and worked as a consultant for several other governments, putting his thinking into a book—Fixing Failed States. In office, he consciously saw his administration as completing the reforms begun by King Amanullah, cut short in a coup in 1929 in which rural tribes rose up to oppose their Westernizing progressive king. As part of the renovations Ghani ordered when he took over, he found the desk made for Amanullah, had it restored, and worked at it daily. To him, it was as important a symbol as the Resolute desk in the White House.

  Amanullah was lucky to escape with his life. All but one of his successors in the twentieth century were murdered in the Arg. Ghani’s election saw the first democratic handover in Afghan history. Facing formidable challenges, he found it hard to fix his own failed state. He trusted very few people, and some he did trust exploited their access in their own interests. Far too much government effort was absorbed in bitter infighting over influence and resources, in a country where control of personnel brings power through patronage networks. Senior government roles come with tashkils, allocations of staff, and control of tashkils is more important than delivering government services. Soon after Ghani’s team came into office, one of his most senior officials fired a gardener, who was useless and deserved to be fired. But absurdly, he had to be reinstated after lobbying by cabinet ministers; firing the gardener had upset a complex web of interlocked interests.2

  At the other end of the street, about half a mile away from the seat of presidential power, lies the small headquarters compound of the international military alliance, where unlike the government buildings, there was little outside space as accommodation filled every gap. While working in the president’s office, I was on a U.S. contract and lived on the base in a converted shipping container. The temporary housing was deliberate, a legacy of the “light footprint” warfare promoted by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Nearly two decades after arriving in Afghanistan, and with the long war not at an end, the maze of alleyways of shipp
ing containers, some residential, some offices, showed how flawed this was.

  The Afghan campaign was far less divisive internationally than the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq two years later. Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan had a clear connection to the attacks of 9/11. Even in 2004, when NATO agreed to expand the mission across the country, the Taliban looked finished, and the small international force then in the country took few casualties, so other Western nations were willing to contribute troops for what was seen as a peacekeeping operation, not a war. It turned out to be very different.

  The coalition strategy for Afghanistan developed along several lines—the joint civil/military campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda and to build Afghan capacity; transition to Afghan control, while building a more long-term strategic partnership; regional diplomacy; and belatedly reconciliation, or talking to the Taliban. The extent that the military operated across these lines of effort depended on the commander at the time, with some more invested in a political strategy than others during a campaign that broke into distinct phases.

  Phase One 2001–2006: The operation was improvised with shifting policy goals never adequately scrutinized. The main U.S. effort was against the remnants of Taliban leadership and al-Qaeda, and development spending was uncoordinated.

  Phase Two 2006–2009: The Taliban regrouped with far more intensity, sending shock waves across some European troop contributors who had not signed up for a shooting war.

  Phase Three 2009–2011: The period of the Obama “surge,” a big increase in troops with a clear end date, “one last heave” to hold ground before handing over to Afghan forces.

  Phase Four 2011–2014: A period of complex management as hundreds of bases closed and President Hamid Karzai became an increasingly difficult partner. NATO combat operations formally ended at the end of 2014. But the war would not end according to the timetable.

  Phase Five 2015–2021: The mission was defined as “train, advise and assist,” not combat. But under President Trump the war from the air intensified again. Taliban control grew across rural Afghanistan. President Biden ordered a full withdrawal before there was a final peace deal, precipitating a swift collapse of the Ghani government.

  Obama was president for the key combat phase and engaged in long discussions over how many troops to keep for how long. The arguments over troop numbers crowded out longer-term policy thinking. Obama’s staff felt boxed in by the military, thinking they were always coming back for more, a sense backed by a growing mood in Congress and the media against the “forever war.” For their part, the generals felt they were given less than they needed after giving their best advice based on the task set by politicians. In a National Security Council meeting in the summer of 2014, as Obama was trying to set a course to zero troops by the end of his presidency, then two years away, he said, “The fever in this room has finally broken … We’re no longer in nation-building mode.”3 The truth is that they never were. That was not the plan. But while taking Afghanistan was easy, leaving it secure would be far harder, and twenty years later, the task is not complete.

  At the beginning, they neither had enough of the right troops to stabilize the country nor a long-term vision. The nations who sent soldiers, development workers, and cash to Afghanistan after 2001 came with their own national baggage but did not share a contemporary doctrine—way of operating—to deal with the situation they faced, as security gradually spun out of their control. It would be five years after the fall of the Taliban before the U.S. military produced a new counterinsurgency manual—the first doctrine on this scale since Vietnam.

  On 9/11 every year in the main base in Kabul, small groups of soldiers carry out a solemn ritual with great reverence, raising, saluting, and then lowering American flags, before folding them in the regulation way and putting each one in its own box. The flags are presented to the families of the fallen, with a note that the flag was flown in Afghanistan on 9/11. Hundreds of thousands of good young Americans, and their comrades from many nations, have served to secure Afghanistan. Their service should not be forgotten.

  Sending them weighed heavily on the presidents who bore the burden. After one long meeting to decide Afghan policy in 2009, Obama’s first year in office, he walked out to smoke a cigarette by the White House pool, to clear his mind and unknot his shoulders. He contrasted his decisions with those taken by Lincoln and FDR—one to save the Union, the other when America and the world faced a mortal threat. “But in the here and now, the threats we faced—deadly but stateless terrorist networks; otherwise feeble rogue nations out to get weapons of mass destruction—were real but not existential.” He wanted analysis, understanding, context, before commitment. In Afghanistan, “resolve without foresight was worse than useless.”4 Eight years into the war, it was already a cliché among analysts that lessons had not been learned, that it was “Year One for the eighth time.”

  GOING TO WAR

  The Americans who commanded in Afghanistan over the two decades after 9/11 were Vietnam-era recruits, although only one, General Dan McNeill, actually served in Vietnam. They were the generation who rebuilt American forces after the destruction of that most controversial of conflicts—hard, sapping work made more so because of the attrition toll the war took on U.S. sergeants, leaving a gap that piled more pressure on young officers. After a couple of years, McNeill could not take it anymore and handed in his resignation, although he was persuaded to withdraw it. Much later in his career, during a meeting where ten of the eleven serving four-star generals in the army were present in person or on a video link, the chief of staff, General Peter Schoomaker, asked how many had handed in unqualified resignations, intending to leave in the years after Vietnam. McNeill was one of eight who put up their hands. He was not surprised. He had witnessed “dramatic missteps” in building a volunteer army after the years of the draft. They had all been “in the trenches building the volunteer force, there was nothing easy about it, nothing easy.” Of those who would command in Afghanistan, General Joe Dunford too attempted to resign his commission, two years after first joining the marines. In the 1970s, both the army and the marines fell short of the oath they swore as young officers. They had seen how hard it was to remake their own army—valuable lessons as they built new forces in Afghanistan.

  From the moment the planes hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11, the men who later took command in Kabul knew that their world had utterly changed. During those strange days in September after 9/11, McNeill visited every military facility on the Eastern Seaboard, including nuclear sites, to check security. Flying into Washington, the pilot called him up to the cockpit to look at the radar. Theirs was the only plane in the air.

  General John R. Allen had the distinction of being the first marine to be commandant of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis in its 150-year history. It is only thirty miles from the Pentagon, and when 9/11 happened, he immediately responded, sending everything from medical support to chaplains to assist in the recovery. The next thing he did was to find the names and photographs of the thirteen USNA graduates who died that day, in the planes or at their desks in the Pentagon, and put them on a prominent board near the mess hall so that the midshipmen now going through the academy would know that the U.S. was now at war. Allen remembered walking past the lines of boards of those who died in Vietnam when he was a midshipman5 in the early 1970s, and he wanted the new reality to be driven home quickly to a new generation. Unlike his own generation, most of the midshipmen in 2001 did not come from families with a military past.

  Allen’s father served in the navy through World War II and Korea—eleven years at sea. A picture of USS Kearny, torpedoed while he was aboard in 1941, hangs on Allen’s office wall. His mother was a nurse in a navy shipyard helping out the war effort. Allen enlisted four months before his seventeenth birthday at the height of the Vietnam War in 1970, inspired by his father’s sense that “if you want to make a difference in your country you should pursue a life of service.” When he was a midshipman, l
earning to be an officer at Annapolis, many of his instructors had served in Vietnam, some still recovering from wounds.

  While the 2001 generation did not have that background, Allen knew they “wanted to do something bigger than themselves but they didn’t know what that meant.” The memorial boards were one way of bridging the gap. He watched as the USS Normandy, an Aegis-class cruiser, moved into the Chesapeake Bay to extend its missile envelope over Washington. “And we thought, my God, what a different world we’re in now. Here’s a guided missile destroyer built from the keel up to fight the big, deep blue battle against the Soviets, now providing a missile defense of the capital.” But the forces they commanded were not ready for the new environment. They did not need guided missiles but tactics to fight in dusty villages in faraway countries, where poverty and state failure nurtured a deep hatred for the West.

  Vietnam cast a long shadow over the military, with its enduring lesson that the U.S. should not engage in counterinsurgency warfare, which meant they did not train for it. Instead, America would only go to war employing massive firepower, for clear goals, with an exit in sight, and then only if backed by clear public consent. These principles were later gathered up as the Powell Doctrine, whose author, Colin Powell, secretary of state at the time of 9/11, knew more than anyone what a bad war looked like. As a major, he had been G-3, the key operational planning role, of the 23rd Americal Infantry Division in Vietnam at the time of the My Lai massacre.6

  Even without the specter of Vietnam, America had deep-rooted legends that governed the way it behaved abroad. The belief that the U.S. did not do nation-building was deeply embedded in its military and political psyche. Americans came always as liberators, not occupiers, and not to stay. The Bush administration was strongly in this tradition, determined not to follow Clinton’s example of engaging in small, complex conflicts that led to the Black Hawk Down humiliation in Somalia. The rhetoric of American exceptionalism defined the U.S. role in overseas military operations not as an imperial invader but a force for good, spreading enlightenment and democracy, and this was upheld as a virtue against the colonial history of the Europeans. Afghanistan and Iraq tested this legend to destruction.