by David Loyn
The project was the biggest part of the infrastructure of the canal scheme built by American engineers in the 1960s, when this part of Afghanistan was known as “Little America.” McNeill saw renovation of the power plant as an important part of his mission. This was against the stereotype often portrayed of this general, that he was interested only in killing Taliban. But it would be another year before British forces succeeded in moving a huge new turbine into position—a complex undertaking since it could only be moved slowly along roads under constant threat of Taliban attack—and even then continued insecurity meant the upgrade work to bring the plant into full production could not be carried out.
The opportunity to retake Musa Qala came in November 2007, after a local warlord allied to the Taliban, Mullah Salaam, came over to the government side. Karzai called McNeill and said, “What do you know about Mullah Salaam?” and McNeill said, “I’ll kill him if I get the chance.” The president said, “I don’t want you to do that.” McNeill was skeptical when he heard that Salaam had come over, believing him to be “an opportunist of the worst order,” one of many small warlords, fueled more by his desire to control the poppy crop than any ideological beliefs. There turned out to be two Mullah Salaams—the one that was the more significant Taliban commander had not changed sides. But that detail did not deter President Karzai, who was now willing to back an operation to retake Musa Qala.
By the late summer, British forces had reinforced positions across a larger part of Helmand, with U.S. military support, making the assault on Musa Qala easier to mount. Operation Snakebite in December was a textbook military success. The British commander in Helmand, Brigadier Andrew Mackay, one of the more enlightened, had conceived a far more population-centric policy than his predecessors, despite the small number of troops at his disposal. He had been concerned when he arrived that officers seemed to have been “making up policy as they went along.” He wanted to reduce civilian casualties as much as possible in the battle for Musa Qala. The assault was led by a fast maneuver across the desert by British and American forces. Afghan soldiers tagged along, although ISAF tried to promote the fiction that the operation was “Afghan-led,” ensuring it was Afghan soldiers who entered the town first once the Taliban were defeated and put up the Afghan flag on the district headquarters.
The governor of Helmand was now the unwilling and ineffective Assadullah Wafa, whom McNeill could see “wanted to live in the western part of the United States more than he wanted to be in Helmand Province.” Wafa had been appointed for no better reason than Karzai wanted Governor Daoud out, because he was the British favorite. The Afghan president had never forgiven Britain for disrupting things in the first place by insisting he remove Sher Muhammad Akhunzada, his brother-in-law, from the post of Helmand governor. And just after Christmas 2007, he expelled two diplomats, Michael Semple and Mervyn Patterson. Neither represented Britain—Semple, from Ireland, was an EU official, and Patterson was with the UN. But they were in the firing line for holding meetings attempting reconciliation with the Taliban in Helmand, funded by Britain and not sanctioned by Karzai.
Semple was a Pashtun-speaking adventurer who wore local clothing and claimed to have met “more Taliban field commanders than [their leader] Mullah Omar.” He was able to show that he had informed Afghan intelligence, the NDS, about his initiative. But Karzai’s mind could not be changed, and he did not trust the Tajik-dominated NDS, now led by Amrullah Saleh, whom McNeill had met five years before when he was interpreting for the Tajik warlord Marshal Fahim. Expelling the diplomats was Karzai’s way of signaling opposition to a British-backed plan to introduce a big-hitting international diplomat to coordinate the international effort. The name of the former Balkan envoy, a British ex–Special Forces marine turned politician, Paddy Ashdown, was in the frame for the role, which infuriated the Afghan president.
McNeill was opposed to talks with the Taliban. Fitting his no-nonsense image as a soldier who did not stray from the military lane, he wanted to stack them up like cordwood, not negotiate with them. He thought their strength exaggerated by international media. They were a “ragtag bunch” who did not “pose a strategic threat to Afghanistan.”8 He met and gained insights from enough people who were talking to the Taliban, including Semple, but did not want to see them recognized as a political entity, which would acknowledge their success in returning to Afghanistan. Unlike Richards, who went sailing with Semple on a Kabul lake, McNeill met him in his office.
McNeill strongly disagreed with the head of the UN mission, Tom Koenigs, who wanted the Taliban “accommodated into the political process.” He never believed that the Taliban would negotiate freely anyway, since they were managed from Pakistan. He had no doubt “there were certain people in the Pakistani military that had reasonably close associations with the insurgent leadership.” Whatever their protestations to the contrary, significant parts of the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment “were actively working” against the U.S. He did not speak in public about his strong distaste for Pakistan at the time, because of the wider strategic need to keep good relations with Afghanistan’s troublesome eastern neighbor. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had gagged officers from talking of Pakistani duplicity, along with a list of other heretical views such as the need for more troops, the likely return of the Taliban, issues with the Afghan government, or counternarcotic strategy.
THE PROBLEM OF PAKISTAN
In May 2007, McNeill experienced one of the worst incidents in his time in Afghanistan, with the death of a major from 82nd Airborne, Larry Bauguess, shot at close range with no warning by a Pakistani border guard—supposedly an American ally. Bauguess was from his home state of North Carolina, and McNeill knew the family, Larry’s wife, Wesley, and two small daughters.
Bauguess was part of a small group of U.S. and Afghan soldiers and officials who had gone to a meeting in Pakistan at a small border post called Teri Mangal. They were aiming to reduce tensions after several people had died on both sides in a worsening dispute over where the border lay. Bauguess was shot with no warning as they left the meeting, and other Pakistani troops opened fire from inside the building, injuring three other American soldiers. It was clearly a planned ambush, not one rogue gunman. There was an attempt to kidnap another group of soldiers, who had to stop their Pakistani driver at gunpoint, abandon the vehicles, and run to waiting helicopters to escape. McNeill was badly affected by the incident. “There’s no good way to die and there’s no good day to die either, but that one bothered me greatly, still does.”
The initial news reports did not reveal the full story, saying instead that Bauguess had been killed by a “militant.” In public at the time, McNeill talked of how hard it was to defeat an insurgency, when there were “sanctuaries for the insurgents that lie just out of the reach of this country,”9 not naming Pakistan, although he was privately fuming at their deceit. At a Pentagon press conference after he left Afghanistan, McNeill revealed the full story. “If I live to be as old as Methuselah, I’ll be forever scarred by one event that occurred, and that was the assassination, and I don’t have a better expression for it, of Major Larry Bauguess, a fine officer of the 82nd Airborne Division, spring of last year.”
COUNTERINSURGENCY MATH
During McNeill’s time in Afghanistan, Army Field Manual 3–24 was published—the first attempt by U.S. forces to systematize counterinsurgency in the modern age, drawing on lessons identified in Iraq and Afghanistan. Using the manual, McNeill’s staff came up with a total figure of 480,000 security forces that would be needed to make COIN work in Afghanistan. Bush had increased U.S. forces at the end of 2006 and increased funding for “military-civilian teams carrying out projects to improve the daily life of Afghans.” By the time McNeill ended his term of office, he had 47,000 ISAF troops and, at least on paper, around 150,000 Afghan soldiers and police. Even if all the Afghan forces were where they should have been, the total was still less than half the number needed to run a COIN operation under the ne
w doctrine as his staff calculated it.
McNeill illustrated how he would like the average ISAF soldier to present himself—offering the choice that he could fight or build. “When you look at this soldier, you’d see a shovel in his right hand, an assault weapon of his country’s choice—G5, M4, M16, whatever—in his left hand. He’d be standing in front of his Afghan hosts and offering this question: ‘I’ve got the will and capability to use either. Which would you prefer I use, and where would you like me to use it?’”10
America was at war, with more willingness to employ the assault rifle than most of the countries in the coalition, who had made the commitment to send troops to Afghanistan when there was far less fighting going on and could not stand the heat of the increased intensity of war, nor were they equipped for it. American trainers found themselves supporting European soldiers, who would arrive without vehicles, electronic countermeasures against IEDs, or any means of supporting themselves in the field.
At some points during the long war, ISAF commanders were grappling with up to eighty different restrictions on their ability to employ the troops nominally under their command, so-called caveats on action. McNeill had a chart of the caveats that each nation imposed on the use of its troops on the wall of his office that he liked to show people.
Of the large troop contributors, Germany was the most risk-averse, refusing to send troops out of “their” area north of the Hindu Kush. They would not go out at night, refused to release aerial footage if it might be used for offensive operations, and they had very few helicopters, so little mobility. The caveats were constantly changing as European parliaments debated an increasingly unpopular war as fighting intensified after 2006. Alongside the reluctant NATO members were countries outside the alliance like Georgia and Macedonia—hanging on American coattails, and doing base security but unwilling to fight.
“Nothing was harder for me than NATO partners putting caveats in place and then denying they had caveats,” said McNeill.11 To him the “extreme limitations” imposed on his ability to employ troops flexibly contravened the basic principles of war set down by Clausewitz—including speed, mass, supplies, security. “You can use any one of them to explain why caveats are not good.”
McNeill had a consistent message to his frequent senior Western political visitors, including prime ministers and presidents from across the multinational alliance: he needed more to fight the war, and it was not just a question of troop numbers. He needed more air mobility, and more intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems. Only the American military had the depth of capacity in these areas that were the critical deciding element in modern warfare. Afghanistan tested the resources of other NATO forces, and all were found wanting. Most NATO nations were not equipped for expeditionary warfare. Even if they had been willing to fight, they did not have the equipment, and every military move was subject to political decisions made in dozens of capitals by politicians nervous of rising casualties and reports that security in Afghanistan was getting worse.
When Robert Gates succeeded Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense in December 2006, he thought the Afghan war was awry. He had worked on the country as deputy national security adviser at the end of the 1980s, admitting that they did not anticipate that international terrorism could emerge from the region. “Our mission was to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan.”12 Returning to the file as secretary, he thought effort was going to waste. There was “confusion in the military command structure, confusion in economic and civilian assistance efforts, and confusion over how the war was actually going.”13
Gates was wary of a syndrome in the military identified in Vietnam, that assessments by those in the field were often more upbeat than analysts in Washington or Brussels and that the military tended to believe things were going better than their civilian counterparts. The phenomenon was most famously observed in 1963 when President Kennedy asked, “You two did go to the same country, didn’t you?” to Major General Victor C. Krulak and the retired foreign service officer Joseph Mendenhall, who came back from a four-day fact-finding tour of Vietnam with diametrically opposed views of the prospect of success. Gates sent the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Jim Clapper, to assess views in Kabul. “He reported a couple of days later that the disconnect was worse than we thought; there were differences in assessment between General McNeill’s headquarters, Central Command, NATO, and both CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency analysts in Washington. Not a good situation in the middle of a war.”14
As well as not being able to employ NATO forces flexibly, McNeill did not have overall American military authority in Afghanistan. The contrast with Iraq could not have been clearer. There, David Petraeus was the sole commander of the U.S. effort. If Gates wanted a videoconference to discuss Iraq, it was just Petraeus and Admiral William “Fox” Fallon, the head of CENTCOM, on the call. With Afghanistan, every screen on the wall was full of generals on satellite links, like a scene from a movie. As well as Fallon at CENTCOM, there was the NATO element with the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), General Bantz Craddock, and two other Americans as well as McNeill coming in on screens from Afghanistan—Major General David Rodriguez, commanding U.S. forces in OEF separate to ISAF, and Major General Robert Cone, training Afghan armed forces. It may have been brilliant IT, but it was not a good way to run a war. Gates observed dryly, “The military command problem was the age-old one of too many high-ranking generals with a hand on the tiller.”And it was made worse because Craddock and McNeill did not get on. “Craddock guarded his NATO turf zealously,”15 wrote Gates, and tried to keep McNeill away from briefing European defence ministers.
In one memorable videoconference at the Pentagon, Gates asked McNeill, down the line from Kabul, “Dan, I’m trying to get a sense if we are making progress. Are we making gains in quelling the insurgency? If we are making gains, by what measure?” McNeill’s reply was shocking in its directness. “Mr. Secretary, I was sent here to get our NATO partners in the fight. I can tell you, sir, they are in the fight every day. Some may be fighting more than others, but at the end of the day, we are racking and stacking the Taliban in a big way.”16
This focus on piling up enemy dead, attrition warfare, where the only metrics that matter are body counts, was the opposite of the population-centric approach demanded by counterinsurgency tactics. It was McNeill’s only measure of success in fighting his elusive foe with the limited resources at his disposal. But his rhetoric spoke of a more aggressive fight than many NATO allies were willing to join.
McNeill employed larger concentrations of forces than Richards in “clear and sweep” operations and ordered more air strikes, a decision that coincided with an increase in the tempo of night raids and air strikes carried out by special operators outside his command. Civilian casualties inevitably increased. News releases denying any civilian harm, while announcing precise tallies of Taliban dead, began to cause disquiet across NATO.
In April 2007, two months after McNeill took over, a release reported, “87 Taliban killed, no civilian injuries reported,” after two days of fighting in Shindand in the western province of Herat. Those fighting against American forces in the Shindand villages turned out not to be Taliban but local people coming together to defend themselves after American raids on the homes of leading tribal elders.17 Local people said that fifty-seven civilians died, half of them women and children. The (Canadian) chief public information adviser to the chairman of NATO’s military committee in Brussels, Colonel Brett Boudreau, wrote a memo warning that releases focused on Taliban body counts were “damaging” NATO’s interests. “It is disingenuous to write ‘there were no civilian injuries reported’ after 20,000+ pounds of ordnance were dropped in two battles, in multiple locations in about 24 hours worth of pitched fighting.”18
In July, the NATO secretary-general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, said the alliance should use smaller bombs, and new instructions had gone out to hold off attacking the Taliban where civilians were at risk. “If
that means going after a Taliban not on Wednesday but on Thursday, we will get him then.”19 The change did reduce civilian casualties for about six months, but they increased again at the beginning of 2008.
There was increasing anger too from the Afghan president, who said, “NATO has no respect for Afghan lives,” criticizing them for frequent use of long-range artillery. McNeill said that the increase in violence, was because of an increase in ISAF activity, taking more ground. He denied that the Taliban were any stronger than they had been the year before. “We had a basic operational concept which was get out of the wire, stay outside of the wire, advance against the enemy,” he told a Pentagon media briefing.20 His constant complaint was that too few allies would go on the offensive. He pointed to U.S. success in the east with population-focused counterinsurgency, where units were in country for more than a year, and that had made it more stable than the south.
GETTING SKIN IN THE GAME
In January 2008, General James Jones, now retired as the SACEUR, cochaired an influential independent commission into Afghanistan with former U.S. ambassador Thomas Pickering. He urged the Bush administration to decouple the conflict from Iraq and give it more resources. “The United States and the international community have tried to win the struggle in Afghanistan with too few military forces and insufficient economic aid, and without a clear and consistent comprehensive strategy.”21 McNeill’s next appeal for troops was heeded, with the deployment of three thousand extra U.S. Marines to Helmand.
But building up Afghan forces to fight alongside was a slow process. Desertion rates of around 50 percent meant that the new army was disappearing as quickly as it was being trained. Desertion depleted the ranks more swiftly than combat. An avid reader of military history, McNeill was lenient on Afghanistan for poor retention. He knew that at crucial moments in American history—the Continental army at Valley Forge, the 7th Cavalry on the frontier—desertion rates were as bad or worse than in the new Afghan forces. One solution might have been a draft. Karzai would talk in colorful terms of former Afghan kings, who would expect to be able to raise an army by sending messages out to the provinces, calling for troops, but was not willing to try it in his time, fearing a backlash.