The Long War

by David Loyn

  Richards was jubilant. He felt that “NATO had come of age.” Kandahar had been saved, and many Afghans were in no doubt of its significance. When he returned to Kabul, he “had never been hugged by so many men in beards in my life.” Neither President Karzai nor the higher command levels of NATO had realized how narrow the margins were, or how close the Canadian troops had been to losing.

  The soldiers who did the fighting, at the cost of five dead and forty wounded on the ground, knew that the Taliban would be back.28 Canadian troops and their allies could not hold the ground. Intelligence estimates suggested that twelve thousand Taliban fighters came into the south in 2006. “The Taliban flowed in immediately behind the withdrawing troops,” according to the commander of the assault force at Operation Medusa, Lieutenant Colonel Omer Lavoie. “Now we must go and retake them again, compound by compound.”

  But any planned Taliban offensive on Kandahar had been stopped. If the southern city had fallen in 2006, the government in Kabul would have been threatened. Despite the success, Richards knew that his superiors did not trust him. “After all we have achieved against the odds,” he wrote in his diary, “bollocks to the pusillanimous, ignorant and cravenly political lot of them.”29 His success in Kandahar would be quickly overshadowed by an impending crisis in Helmand that dominated his remaining months in command.

  ANOTHER MAIWAND IN MUSA QALA?

  The intensity of fighting for British troops, strung out in isolated posts across Helmand, led to Butler proposing they withdraw, at least from the remotest, Musa Qala in the north. Richards knew it would be used by the Taliban—“another Maiwand,” referring to the nineteenth-century defeat of British forces in the same area. The artillery regiment where he began his military service had a “Maiwand Battery” in memory of the battle; every Afghan knew the story of the British defeat. He had been opposed to British troops going up as far north as Musa Qala but now was against them leaving, and was involved in arguments with Butler, who did not want to risk any more casualties after a fierce summer of fighting. The crunch point came when it became impossible to secure a landing site for a Chinook. The Taliban would have greatly benefited from the propaganda value if one had been shot down—not to mention the loss of life it would have entailed. The big twin-rotored helicopters were the workhorses of the Afghan war, but if they could no longer land near Musa Qala, then medevacing the injured would become impossible. One pilot had already been given a medal for touching down only the rear wheels of his Chinook in a space between houses, then hovering with the front in the air, while wounded were loaded on board.

  As a fig leaf to cover withdrawal, British forces handed over Musa Qala to local elders, who said they would not allow the Taliban within four kilometers of the center. Richards tried to make the best of this deal, calling it a redeployment, not a pullout. “The security of Musa Qala itself, the town, is now ok. So we don’t need to stay there any more, we can use them in other ways.”30 He claimed it was the same kind of deal that U.S. forces had done to bring security to the countryside in Iraq by empowering tribal elders: “I had a lot of intelligent American interest in how you might make this work. President Karzai absolutely knew all about it and encouraged it and it was all being held up as an example of the way things might work out. It was, if you like, an experiment in practice.”

  No one believed it. No amount of spin would diminish the humiliation, made worse by TV pictures of the evacuation of British soldiers on locally hired “jingle trucks”—with brightly colored silver chains hanging down and flashing in the sun. U.S. forces in the country, particularly those who had fought hard in the operation in June to disrupt the Taliban in Helmand, were contemptuous. Ambassador Neumann met with Richards and got an assurance that no deals like it would be struck again. Neumann felt the political impact when several delegations of worried Afghans came to remind him of how their wily mujahideen commander Ahmed Shah Massoud would do similar deals with the Russians during their occupation. The elders warned him that Massoud would use the breathing space to regroup and build up his forces.31 “Musa Qala was unimportant in itself,” said Neumann. “The problem was political. It sent a message reverberating round Afghanistan that the Taliban were going to end up with safe havens.”32 And Richards knew it. He confided to his diary that Britain was in danger of becoming “ISAF’s laughing stock,” because of continued failure in Helmand. Officials were going round Kabul claiming that it was some kind of exemplar province, but little of any substance was happening other than fighting. He blamed his own country for being “inward-looking and lacking in vision at both the strategic and tactical level.”

  PLEASE ASK THE GENERAL

  Richards enjoyed his reputation for making his views known and leading from the front. In 2000, he mobilized resistance to a takeover of Freetown in Sierra Leone, going well beyond his stated mission, which was to evacuate the government and British citizens. When reminded of what he had been sent for, he cheerfully said, “Bugger the orders!”33 Freetown was threatened by a murderous rebel army, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), which specialized in cutting the hands off civilians, including children, with machetes. The RUF were stopped by a coalition of British troops, foreign mercenaries, and various local militias, including a notorious band called the Westside Boys, who were persuaded to come on the government side. A small UN force also played its part. Richards wanted to apply the full spectrum of tools available for influence, knowing that victory is about perception of power as much as its application. The government stood firm, backed by a small force, judiciously applied, because the people believed they could win. “We started to do what they should have been doing in the first place, but hadn’t realized.”34 The key lesson he took away from Sierra Leone was not so much about the application of military force but more about the psychology of war.

  In Afghanistan, the need he first identified when he arrived was to improve international coordination. He found a system of “ad hoc phone calls, visits, no mechanism for bringing it all together.” He proposed a committee to bring together people responsible for development, governance, and security so that efforts would be more effective. Hanif Atmar, a British-educated and reform-minded minister, told him Karzai would never agree, because it gave away too much power. Karzai did things like a traditional tribal elder, not sharing too much because, to him, “information, knowledge, was power.” Richards understood these pressures. He knew that Karzai had to balance the influence of the warlords. But as one elder said at a meeting in the palace, with Richards’s thirty-five thousand international troops, he was the “biggest warlord now.” And he wanted to use that to change things.

  His opportunity came early in his command when the sudden rioting in Kabul shifted the power balance. “Karzai was used to the warlords,” Richards observed. “But suddenly it was the people as well” exerting a new and frightening power. And in the wake of the riots, he persuaded the Afghan president to agree to a policy action group (PAG) that would bring together key international players with senior Afghan ministers in a coordinating committee chaired by Karzai himself.35 Karzai found it hard enough to deal with the uncoordinated and sometimes competing demands from different parts of the U.S. system, let alone the burgeoning international presence in Kabul. He would ask his staff, “Which is the real America?”36 Richards persuaded him to implement the PAG.

  For Richards, with his proactive personality, it filled a gap left by the lack of coordination. He felt he had to step in because “there was no diplomatic big hitter” in Kabul. “The military effort was not matched by a civilian one.”37 Unlike some of the later commanders, this was where Richards felt comfortable: playing in the political sphere as well as applying military force. As a schoolboy, he studied the speeches of Winston Churchill and would go off to the woods to practice speeches.

  Was he exceeding his authority as a military commander in introducing a political mechanism? Like Hillier, he liked to think that he was someone who “spoke truth to power” and di
d not ask permission from his NATO chain of command in Europe to do it, realizing that decision-making there took months and would stifle his ability to command in an agile way. The way he extended his reach led to comparisons with the legendary innovator in counterinsurgency warfare, Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer in Malaya in the 1950s. “I sometimes wonder if I am a politician or a soldier,” he wrote.38

  But he saw one crucial difference—Templer “had all the organs of the state under his command.” Unlike British imperial adventures, Richards realized the Afghan government was not under his control, nor did he have flexible command of the troops on the ground. As soon as decisions were referred back by members of the alliance to national capitals, “it was paralysis.” There was one lesson from Templer that Richards knew, but was too often forgotten during the long war in Afghanistan—it took twelve years to settle Malaya. Even the most successful counterinsurgency operations take time.

  The policy action group ruffled feathers in the small diplomatic community in Kabul. A London summit in January agreed a different mechanism, which met twice a year, too slow for Richards. His was a divisive policy; ambassadors of nations excluded from the group felt it a criticism of what they had been doing. The acronym PAG was mocked as “Please Ask the General” and “President Asks the General.” Richards was making his mark.

  He was aware that aid organizations also had a role, and he opened ISAF HQ on some Thursday evenings to aid workers and others. Richards had no illusions about them. “Anyone who thinks they’re meek and mild and only do-gooders, forget it; you have to see them for what they are, which is, on the whole, very competent organizations who ruthlessly propagate their own intents.” He knew too that they could be useful sources of intelligence who were better inside the tent understanding something of the military mindset.

  Thursday evenings at ISAF HQ became legendary in the summer of 2006—“like something from the Raj,” according to one official, as lines of Afghan ministers, ambassadors, and aid workers rubbed shoulders with journalists and soldiers sitting at tables with crisp tablecloths. To Richards this was vital coordination, helping to forge links. He had his own political advisory team, the Prism group, to keep across what was going on.

  All of this was in accord with his commander’s intent, written on a single sheet of paper, widely circulated around ISAF, that defined his mission. The language was focused on building a new nation, not defeating the Taliban and al-Qaeda, referring, for example to the protection of water, power, and mineral resources. Richards described his “Main Effort” as not to chase terrorists but to “extend and deepen” the areas where the government, international agencies, and NGOs could safely operate. To him, the mission priority was changing the political narrative, not piling up bodies of the enemy dead.

  He made clear in his commander’s intent that “where necessary, traditional military force would be required.” But it would always be for a “greater purpose” than destroying the Taliban. It was to create the conditions for a new state to emerge that governed with the consent of the people. Richards could see that international forces were not going to “win” in a conventional military sense—insurgencies are rarely quelled in that way. Some of his superiors questioned whether he emphasized the use of force enough, but his plan was consistent with the NATO strategy, and they backed him. Richards knew, though, he would have a problem explaining the emphasis to “many Americans” in Afghanistan “who hitherto had been more focused on just beating the Taliban in a military sense.”

  He was responding to the same dilemma faced by all the ISAF commanders—how to find the right balance between war fighting and the political aspects of counterinsurgency, and coming down very much for counterinsurgency. But he did not have the force levels needed to engage in the population-centric approach he wanted in such a large country. And he overreached himself in one plan—for Afghan development zones (ADZ), a new application of classical counterinsurgency doctrine again going back to Malaya in the 1950s. Development and governance would move out from centers that were protected by the military.

  Richards always saw security as a means to an end—development and governance should provide the lead. More ambitious than the existing PRT idea, the ADZ was a “cohering mechanism that required all those trying to help a province, whether military or non-military, Afghan or international, to work closely together in a common cause.” There was opposition to the idea from his European allies, in particular France and Germany, although it was very similar to the “eighty secure districts” plan eventually introduced by General David Petraeus in 2010. Richards never had anything approaching the money or troops that were later available to Petraeus. Distracted by Iraq, policy makers did not put the resources needed into Afghanistan until the situation had dramatically deteriorated and it was almost too late.

  WHO IS THE FIVE STAR?

  U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld came to Kabul a few days before the first expansion of NATO’s ISAF command in July. As U.S. troops would be directly under Richards’s command, Rumsfeld wanted to meet him. When Rumsfeld asked why things were getting worse in the south, Richards replied that there were not enough resources to make people confident of ISAF intentions, and in too many places, the Taliban were being welcomed back. There were “insufficient troops and insufficient resources. The Taliban have realized this and they are coming back in. We have not met all our promises, so people are a little frustrated.” The lack of resources was a constant problem for all the ISAF commanders, and he was voicing the concern to the man most responsible for it, a true believer and the original architect of the light military footprint. Rumsfeld closed the conversation with a curt reply: “General, I don’t agree, move on.”

  Later that day, Rumsfeld singled out Richards among the group accompanying him for a meeting with the president. He asked Karzai, “What do you think of General Richard [sic].” And Karzai replied, “I like General Richard. What do you think of General Richard.” Rumsfeld’s reply was a put-down, and a clear response to him speaking his mind. “I like General Richard too. There is only one thing I would say about General Richard: he is sometimes confused about who is the three star and who is the five star.” At the time, Richards still had three stars as a lieutenant general. His fourth star, and promotion to full general, would come when he took over command of the east, and so the whole country, in October.

  Control of the east put Richards in direct command of Freakley, the competent, hard-bitten, and opinionated U.S. two-star general whose commitment to development he doubted. He had no doubt of Freakley’s capacity to run a battle, but that was not enough in a senior commander. “If I was in a major fight, I’d want Freakley running it for me, and indeed, I’d probably want him to tell me what to do. His problem was that he was very black and white in his interpretation. As you got more senior, and shades of gray start to affect decision-making, he didn’t have much time for that.” Richards noted in his diary at the end of June:

  I’m not certain that Ben Freakley yet has his heart in it. Everything about him suggests resentment, and absolute focus on so-called kinetic solutions. He doesn’t seem to understand that we’re not going to do things in the way the US has done them. Even if we could, which we can’t, I would not want to. Herein lies the source of his resentment. It’s combined with the belief that we don’t appreciate the strength of the enemy, but even this is not that pertinent. He thinks we can defeat the Taliban principally through killing more of them. I don’t share this view, seeing it as just one weapon in the armory, along with much speedier reconstruction and development, a political outreach program, and much else.39

  And even after he had assumed command of all of Afghanistan, bringing the east under the NATO umbrella, many U.S. troops remained outside that structure, some in Special Forces, and others under the umbrella of Operation Enduring Freedom, the original Afghan mission of destroying al-Qaeda. Fourteen thousand U.S. troops were inside the NATO tent, but twelve thousand were outside, and hence ou
tside his legal command and carrying on their own secret war in Afghanistan. Their commanding officer understood that this might cause problems, and although he could not give Richards opcon (operational control), he coined the term warcon, a common-sense arrangement, under which the ISAF HQ was made aware of what the Americans were doing. This meant that Richards was not embarrassed when he had to stand up in front of TV cameras, or the Afghan president, and explain when things went wrong. To the Afghans, it did not matter if a misdirected air strike came from OEF or ISAF—and Richards was the front man for both operations, so warcon was a valuable tool.

  To the Americans in Afghanistan, there were advantages in having a senior British commander; it was a counter to the criticism that this was an all-American occupation. Ambassador Neumann was grateful to Richards for telling ISAF headquarters they should listen to him, Neumann, because of America’s large role in the country. “If an American commander of NATO had said the same thing, this would have been seen as the American cabal at NATO trying to put everybody else down.”40

  Relations were not always good. In October, the Special Forces HQ gave Richards details of a suspect Taliban group they were monitoring near Musa Qala. Richards believed that they were probably there to talk to tribal elders, and killing them would cause “a huge problem of strategic scale.” The U.S. officer replied that if Richards did not “have the stomach to kill them,” then Special Forces would bomb them regardless.41