The Long War

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The Long War Page 14

by David Loyn


  He had no illusions about Pakistani duplicity, confirmed years later when Osama bin Laden turned out to have been living in Abbottabad all along, a town Richards visited as a guest of the Pakistani army. Kickbacks from U.S. funding for Afghanistan had been lucrative for Pakistani military and intelligence officers since the 1980s, and Richards knew there were some “who could not put the habits of a lifetime behind them.” He would raise the issue of Pakistan’s clear protection for senior Taliban figures living in the Quetta area every time he visited, and a handful of Taliban would be arrested a few days before he came to blunt his criticisms. But he recognized that his regular visits to Islamabad “certainly constrained” his influence back in Kabul. He would try to put Pakistan’s case to Karzai, who believed he had gone native and never trusted him again.

  LEARNING THE LESSONS

  Richards’s belief in his ability to influence political events was part of his boundless belief in his own capacity. He saw self-confidence as the “priceless” commodity “that a commander must have if he’s to do anything out of the ordinary. And if you haven’t got it, you’re playing at it.” This extended to a strong belief that he could manage the media in pursuance of his broader view that victory was as much a matter of belief as physical power.

  In July he was reported as saying the situation was “close to anarchy.” In vain he told Jones his comments were misreported—he had been talking only about the problem of international coordination. He received an official warning and was later banned by Jones from further contact with the media. This followed a phone press conference that Richards treated too casually, as the audience were Washington’s most vigilant observers of Afghanistan in the Pentagon press corps. A remark he made about the lack of progress in the war was taken as criticism of U.S. government policy. But the gagging did not last. Inevitably, within a few weeks, when there was a vacuum in information from ISAF, Jones asked him to speak to the media again.

  Shortly before Christmas 2006, Richards became dangerously ill and was taken to a French field hospital and was then flown out of Afghanistan to a hospital in Germany. He had pneumonia, and while still in Kabul, overheard a request to his protection team for his religious denomination, as there was a priest outside. Richards’s robust response was, “You tell the effing priest that I am not going to die.” The sheer stress of the job had contributed to his collapse, and in Germany, the doctors tried to stop him going back to Afghanistan. But he insisted, flying first to have talks with Musharraf in Islamabad. His remaining days as ISAF commander were dominated by the British retreat from Musa Qala.

  McNeill was due to replace him in February 2007 and did not want to take over with the Musa Qala deal in place. Britain tried to change his mind, briefing him in Washington and London, when he held meetings in late January, shortly before he flew to Kabul. As American concerns rose, Richards was asked to prove that tribal elders, not Taliban, were in control of Musa Qala, or cancel the deal and retake the town before McNeill arrived. Richards developed a series of tests to prove the town’s neutrality. “The first one was that police had to be able to go in and out. Then the governor’s representatives had to go in, and I insisted that the British were able to patrol through it.”

  That old thorn in the British side, the governor they had forced out, Sher Mohammad Akhunzada, was conspiring against the continuation of the deal. His scheming bore out the strong view of some Afghan analysts, such as the British soldier turned political adviser Mike Martin, that the conflict in Helmand was not so much between the “government” and the “Taliban” but a far more complex battle for control of opium poppy fields between different tribal power brokers, using Taliban as a flag of convenience.21

  January 26, 2007. Less than a week before Richards handed over command to McNeill, a missile was dropped on a group of Taliban vehicles just outside the four-kilometer exclusion zone around Musa Qala. Even if technically outside the zone in which both ISAF and the Taliban had agreed there would be no hostilities, it was against at least the spirit of the Musa Qala deal. The intended target was identified by ISAF as a Taliban commander, Mullah Ghafour, but the strike actually killed his brother Mullah Ibrahim and several other fighters. It had been ordered by an American officer in the Special Forces, under Operation Enduring Freedom, the U.S. troops still outside ISAF command, and there was some suspicion in Richards’s mind that it was orchestrated to wreck the Musa Qala deal ahead of McNeill’s arrival.

  In response, Taliban fighters stormed into the town, killed elders who had been loyal to the deal, and bulldozed part of the district headquarters. The Taliban commander Mullah Ghafour was killed in a separate air strike on February 4, the day of the handover of power. Richards left a letter on his desk at ISAF for McNeill, showing that the decision to pull British troops out of Musa Qala had been taken in London, not by him.

  Richards returned to his home base in Germany and was disillusioned by the reception he had from the British government. In Downing Street, Tony Blair was warm enough, but the atmosphere in the Ministry of Defence was frosty. Richards found them preoccupied by the British withdrawal from Iraq, and he had to put together meetings to brief people on the Afghan war. It was perhaps a relief to his superiors that he was out of Afghanistan because of his constant demands for more planes and other resources the forces so clearly lacked. Meeting NATO chiefs in Brussels, Richards told them that while progress had been made, Afghanistan was “ours to lose.” He would finish his career as the head of Britain’s armed forces.

  While in Afghanistan, he had visited the battlefield at Maiwand, scene of the epic defeat of British troops at the hands of an Afghan army in 1880. He felt emotional looking across the flat Afghan landscape, wondering if we ever learn the lessons of history. The “biggest lesson coming out of Afghanistan” to him was the need to commit enough troops to deliver effect.

  A politician who has never been on a course, even, to look at how correlation of forces work, is not in a good position to opine about military judgement, and I’m afraid, repeatedly, politicians have almost plucked the thing out of mid-air to say, “Well, I’m not giving you more than 30,000, whatever it is, but I still want you to do this.”

  Richards took the view that politicians ignored this simple rule and engaged in warfare without adequate resources for domestic political reasons. And the result was that “young soldiers will continue to be put into impossible situations, end up dying, or being very badly injured, because people have gone off at half cock.” The greatest regret in his life was “not having the opportunity to do Afghanistan properly.” Like many people who go there, Afghanistan got into his blood, and his wife, Caroline, set up a charity to support education in Helmand.

  5

  RACK ’EM AND STACK ’EM

  Pakistan were not allies … they were actively working against us.

  —General Dan McNeill

  DAY ONE FOR THE SIXTH TIME

  The day Dan McNeill took command of ISAF forces in Afghanistan, February 4, 2007, was the anniversary of the death of his brother, Boone, in the Vietnam War in 1969, aged twenty-one. Boone was less than a year older than Dan, and they were often thought of as twins when growing up. He would remember Boone every February 4 and every time—and there were many—that he watched the coffins being ferried out of Afghanistan for the journey home. “I doubt I ever went to a ceremony in Kandahar or Bagram that I didn’t think about him or ever a memorial service that I didn’t think about him.”

  When appointed in 2006, he was already a four-star general and commanding the largest part of the U.S. Army at FORSCOM, in Atlanta, Georgia. He had a maximum of one more job before retirement and hoped it would be Iraq, the largest overseas operation and the one with the political attention. He saw Afghanistan as a poor-cousin war. He and his wife, Maureen, were staying with friends on an island off the coast of North Carolina, and he was out cycling when he got the call to come and see Donald Rumsfeld. He protested that he was on leave, and the military executive off
icer on the phone said, “Secretary knows that. He doesn’t care.”

  They put McNeill on a special flight, and the next morning, he was at the Pentagon. Most of the meeting was about the situation in Iraq. It was only as McNeill rose to leave that Rumsfeld said, “Hey, are you standing up with Afghanistan?” And McNeill said, “Yes, sir, I am.” “And what do you think of this new NATO command arrangement?” And McNeill told him he thought it too complex. “I do, too.” And that was it. He went back to his cycling holiday and the next day had the call to go to Kabul. David Petraeus got the coveted Iraq post. He had been McNeill’s chief of staff and was several years junior to him.

  Maureen, normally 100 percent supportive of his life as a soldier, was not happy. McNeill had nothing left to prove after almost forty years in the army. She did not want him to die on this last deployment. He told her he wanted to get back in the fight. Yet they both knew they did not have many more memorial services in them. They felt the loss deeply, and McNeill knew what it was like. His mother wrote a letter to Boone every day until the confirmation of his death, and his father was never the same again.

  He would go to every memorial service that happened under his command and remembers one at Fort Stewart more vividly than others. It was for the deaths of four senior soldiers, including a lieutenant colonel, from a unit in the Third Infantry Division that had taken more than fifty casualties in a month.

  Four brand new widows, eight newly fatherless children. It wiped us all out. It was about as hard as anything I’ve ever done.… This one got to us in the worst kind of way, and that’s when we started saying, I don’t have many more. I’m out of gas, I don’t have anything left in my tank. We did keep doing it, and I had some conversations with bereaved ladies that, you know, I said, “Ma’am, I just don’t have the words, I don’t know what to say.” She said, “Just being here is good enough, General.” I said, “No, it ain’t good enough to me.”

  In January 2007, a month before going to Afghanistan, he found President Bush as consumed by Iraq as he had been during McNeill’s first deployment to Kabul five years previously. Bush told him to “always tell me what you need. You’re not going to get it, but you need to tell it to me anyway.” The president asked McNeill what he thought he could do, and he said, “There’s one thing I believe I can accomplish. I’ll get the Europeans outside to wire more into the act, more into the fight.” And the president said that would be good enough. McNeill did not rate the NATO campaign plan. “There was a lot of verbiage. There was no campaign plan. It just wasn’t there.” He asked several people in Washington what winning meant, but could not get an answer to the question. “Nobody would give me a good definition of what it meant … Some people were thinking in terms of Jeffersonian democracy, but that’s not going to happen in Afghanistan.”1

  His arrival in Kabul in February 2007 coincided with the targeted strike that killed the Taliban commander Mullah Ghafour near Musa Qala. McNeill immediately picked up a nickname, “Bomber,” that he could never shake, although it is not something he likes; his friends do not call him that. (Actually, they call him “Duffelbag.”) The strike had been ordered before he assumed command, but that detail eluded those who were looking for any sign that McNeill was going to take a more robust approach to the war and be less interested in development and governance. The concern was widespread. McNeill had a reputation as a fighting general. David Richards noted in his diary that the German general who had come out from NATO command to preside over the change of command, Egon Ramms, “pointedly warned Dan that it was necessary to engage at every level and not just the tactical.”2

  McNeill visited a month before his arrival, and there was a cultural and personality gap between the upper-class Brit and the general who had risen from the North Carolina tobacco fields that went beyond their command style or the disagreement about Musa Qala. Richards found the American general “slightly ill at ease in company” and wondered if he had the “vision and impetus to get above the tactical fray and play his part on the wider stage.” For Richards, “the real challenges of a theater command are not necessarily the military ones, but the political ones.” McNeill thought Richards’s engagement in politics a defect—meaning Richards could not manage his ego. Unlike his predecessor, McNeill was never going to be banned from speaking to the media for talking out of turn. He did not see his role as a peace envoy to President Musharraf of Pakistan. For him, Richards was too much of a “proconsul”; he thought being a general was enough.

  He repudiated Richards’s approach from the beginning of his tour, telling the handover team that he disagreed with what had been going on—particularly in Helmand. He said bluntly, “We’re going to change strategy. The bad guys are all up in the north-east, and we’re going to kill them. We’re going to stack them up like cordwood.”4 His black and white view of the world was a very different tone and style from the more fastidious British general he had replaced. It is not surprising that critics called it “Day One for the sixth time.”

  Richards’s one political reform, the policy action group, was allowed to wither and die. It was not lamented. Its meetings had often been chaired not by Karzai but instead by the national security adviser, Zalmay Rassoul, so decisions had limited value. Afghan officials went through the motions. They had learned how to perform decisions for the event, but not actually using the meetings for meaningful engagement. The highly opinionated new British ambassador, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, was also opposed to the PAG, believing it reduced his influence. McNeill abandoned the Afghan development zone concept, which Richards had never managed to get off the ground. “Right from the get go” said McNeill, “I knew that a lot of resources were going into the ADZs and the Afghans didn’t understand it … On its best day it was dysfunctional, on its worst day it was non-existent.”3 He did not appoint a political advisory team to succeed Richards’s Prism group. And the party scene for NGOs at ISAF was stopped within a few weeks—a decision McNeill found easier to take after he was bitten by a dog belonging to one of the visiting aid workers. He introduced General Order No. 1, banning alcohol for U.S. soldiers at ISAF HQ, an order that was never rescinded.

  McNeill immediately noticed significant improvement in Afghanistan since he had been a commander in 2002. But there was no doubt either that the Taliban threat was growing. Whatever progress had been made was threatened. An independent survey in the south and east found that Afghans were “increasingly prepared to admit their support for the Taliban.”5 Almost half of the twelve thousand people polled believed that the international community would lose. More than five years after the fall of the Taliban, this showed how little real progress there had been, despite the surface improvements.

  RETAKING MUSA QALA

  Karzai was comfortable with McNeill, reminding him of the simpler times in 2002, when “there were just the two of us.” One crucial piece of U.S. influence was Karzai’s personal relationship with President Bush. “Mr. Bush treats me like a peer, another head of government, Karzai told McNeill.” Five years after they first met, McNeill now saw Karzai as something of a Jekyll and Hyde. He had a compliant, easy, biddable face in public with a ready laugh. But in private and later in public, he would rant about foreign forces, and in particular civilian casualties.

  In their first meeting, McNeill raised the issue of Taliban control of Musa Qala. Karzai was keen to leave things as they were, not wanting to interfere in local dynamics. McNeill told him that they could not afford to risk another Panjwayi, where the Taliban secured a strong defensive position close to Kandahar, needing the major offensive of Operation Medusa to clear them out. He would raise the issue five times across the summer, and every time, Karzai dodged it, not wanting another confrontation in northern Helmand. But the problem would not go away, and McNeill would not let it go.

  McNeill had been tracking the situation for many months before he arrived and thought that British forces had been wrong to try the “ink spot” strategy, as they did not have sufficient
forces. “The Afghans thought it was the nineteenth century all over again,” when they were often at war with Britain. He was particularly critical of the British decision to keep U.S. special forces out of Helmand, and to insist that Sher Muhammad Akhunzada was fired as governor. “SMA was dirty but he kept stability because people were afraid of him. It’s not good and I am not advocating dancing with the devil, but maybe one of his disciples, and that was SMA.” But once British troops had gone as far north as Musa Qala,6 he thought they were wrong to leave. Ironically, of course, he and Richards agreed on this, but Richards was blamed for the debacle of the British withdrawal. In a cable from Kabul, McNeill wrote, “The Musa Qala deal opened the door to narco-traffickers in that area and now it is impossible to tell the difference between the traffickers and the insurgents.”7

  In the months after McNeill arrived, the need to act became more urgent after a series of operations cleared other parts of Helmand. He knew he had to do something to stabilize northern Helmand, if only to give better protection to a British Royal Marine unit defending the Kajaki Dam, in the northeast of the province, beyond Musa Qala. The marines had moved into Kajaki after Operation Achilles, the first of the series of joint U.S./UK operations against the Taliban in Helmand beginning in March 2007. Their aim was to protect the hydroelectric scheme at the Kajaki Dam.

 

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