The Long War

by David Loyn

  McNeill’s sense that people should be willing to serve went back to his own experience. His family were dirt farmers scrabbling a living in the tobacco fields of North Carolina, and as a route out of poverty, his father was determined the boys go to college, where it was a condition of his grant to spend two years in ROTC. With the Vietnam War at its height, his father said, with a sense of duty, “Son, I think this Indochina thing is here to stay with us for a while; you might want to consider staying a little longer in ROTC.” It would be another thirty-five years before he retired from the army.

  McNeill thought the draft would be good for Afghanistan, as it would mean larger numbers of people invested in success. He told the Afghan president that it would be good if more Afghan families had skin in the game. But Karzai dismissed it out of hand. McNeill watched his approach with some frustration. “Karzai could not think in a broader context beyond the model laid out by his father, holding court, reconciling and leading tribal groups. That’s not what we needed him to do, that’s just the way he wanted it to be. He was what he was, and he thought he would make the most progress by resolving tribal disputes. But he didn’t have his father’s instincts.”22

  McNeill saw Karzai several times a week. He was keen to get him out to meet people more, and move beyond the tribal elders who courted him, to be seen to be accountable to the people who had elected him. Isolated in his palace the president risked being out of touch. But there were dangers. Leaving the governor’s compound in Kandahar, where he had flown in a U.S. plane, Karzai was talking to a young well-wisher out of his car window when shots rang out. The assassin was killed by Karzai’s close protection team, and the youth talking to Karzai died in the cross fire.

  On another occasion in Kabul, at a rally to celebrate the Afghan victory over the Soviet Union, fire from automatic rifles and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers was directed at the crowd from a nearby hotel. McNeill was sitting alongside Karzai and many members of his government. The Afghan president appeared on state TV an hour later to appeal for calm. But the far more popular channel TOLO TV was carrying long items criticizing him and senior ministers for running from the scene, while McNeill was said to have stood his ground. McNeill tried to persuade the president to appear on TOLO, but he was unwilling. McNeill was interviewed in his place and said that the president had not run away but been moved out of danger by his security team.

  “IF THEY CALL ME TONIGHT, I’VE STILL GOT A RUCKSACK”

  McNeill’s last months in Afghanistan were as the 2008 election campaign was entering its final stages. The Democratic chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Armed Services Committee, Joe Biden and Carl Levin, respectively, sent a letter arguing for a change in tack in the region—to combat the terrorist threat emerging in Pakistan. The letter called the Afghan/Pakistan frontier “the freeway of fundamentalism.” Biden came through Kabul in February and articulated what McNeill derided as an “offshore strategy,” in which the only focus was on counterterrorism “and the hardcore ideologues who won’t change.” McNeill disagreed, telling the man who Obama would pick as his running mate only a few months later that his policies would “lead to greater insecurity and instability in the region.”23 But “there was no reasoning with Biden.”

  Shortly before he finished his tour, McNeill was invited at the personal invitation of President Karzai to a gathering at the Ministry of Public Health. He did not know what it was about and was wary of a political ambush, but went along to discover there were very few other foreigners there and no ambassadors. He found himself sitting next to Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, one of the most senior figures in the Afghan tribal hierarchy; his family had the role of choosing kings in the past. Three Afghan women and several Afghan children came in and sat at the other end of the front row, and Mojaddedi pointed out Karzai’s wife and son among them, whom McNeill had never seen before. The event turned out to be an announcement that Afghanistan had climbed a number of places in the world ranking of countries for child mortality. McNeill had discreetly assisted in providing security for a polio vaccination program in the south—although the program was managed by an NGO that was opposed to any links with the military. His presence at the event was in honor of that support.

  The costs of the war to civilians affected him too. He had been very emotional at the bedside of a young girl in a hospital in Mazar-e-Sharif. “She said, ‘This doctor’s taken care of me, has fixed me up.’ And, of course, the doctor’s trying to tell me in my other ear, ‘Whoever did this to her butchered her.’” And he remains troubled that years after he left Afghanistan, the state of women had not improved. “There ain’t a hell of a lot of movement there.” He was troubled too that the nation changed its name to become the “Islamic Republic” of Afghanistan. McNeill lived the American constitution and had a deep sense that the state and religion should be kept apart.

  Back in Washington, President Bush invited him and his wife, Maureen, to the White House. Like many people who came close to Bush, McNeill thought his public image unfair. One on one, he was direct, intelligent, and informed, unlike his performance at a press conference or TV interview.

  Bush asked him to give him an account of Afghanistan, “without varnish,” and then said, “OK, what about my man Karzai,” and when they were done, reporters came in for a photocall. Gates arrived late, almost at a run, and said, “Mr. President, it’s my duty to tell you that Dan’s served 40 years as an American soldier, and he’s never served a day in Washington DC.” Three times McNeill had the papers to go to D.C. for an office job, and every time, he found a reason to avoid it and go back to Fort Bragg. Gates said deadpan, “Nobody else will do it, Mr. President.”

  Some years after retiring from the army, Dan McNeill finally put his brother, Boone, to rest. The son of one of the other men on Boone’s plane made a trip to the crash site in 2012 and recovered what were said to be human remains. DNA testing, not available when the plane went down, established that the remains were not American, and some were not human at all. But now the air force had reopened the case, they polled the families and asked if they would like the mass grave site at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery, Missouri, to be opened to see if they could identify the bodies using DNA samples.

  It was a difficult decision. The fallen had been buried with their comrades forty-six years before. Some wanted to leave them where they were. But most, including the McNeills, agreed that the bodies should be disinterred. In the event, they found 60 percent of Boone’s body. For Dan McNeill, it was the “second best possible outcome.” The best, Boone walking out of the jungle alive, had not come about. In 2014, air force sergeant Clarence “Boone” McNeill returned to North Carolina to be buried in Warsaw, close to his father and mother. When his coffin came into Raleigh-Durham, the airport was decked in flags, and he was given a hero’s homecoming.

  Dan McNeill was overwhelmed by the generosity of the reception. “It was a scene of Americana that every American should see—to see how respectful and how nice people were, it was just extraordinary. I don’t have better words for it, it was the most extraordinary occurrence.” Four air force F-15 jets flew over the funeral, the day after Thanksgiving. One of the jets broke off the V formation, leaving a gap, in the traditional pilots’ homage to one of their own.

  Dan McNeill may have retired from the army the day he left Afghanistan, but still sees himself as a soldier. “If they call me tonight, I’ve still got a rucksack, I’d go back tomorrow.”

  PHASE THREE

  2009–2011

  THE SURGE

  6

  COIN

  What is war doctrine? Basically, it’s a written guide, based on historical precedents, of the best fighting practices for commanders and troops to follow … based on lessons learned in experiments or at great cost in bloody battles.

  —General Jim Mattis1

  FIGHTING SMALL WARS

  In 2008, the last year of the Bush presidency, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said sh
e was “struggling to master the challenge” of counterinsurgency.2 Since 9/11, Western leaders managing the new wars were on a steep learning curve. Few elected politicians had military experience, and most came from cultural backgrounds with no contact with military affairs. This led to an inevitable time lapse between changes in the highly technical business of military practice and the awareness of it by politicians, the press, and the public. In her last week in office in January 2009, just before Obama’s inauguration, Rice signed a joint State/Defense agreement on a new counterinsurgency guide with Defense Secretary Gates. Until this late feel-good moment, most in the Bush administration were wary of COIN, counterinsurgency’s catchy new acronym; it sounded too much like nation-building. Rice’s deal was drawn up with little reference to troops on the ground,3 and given the timing, was more of a gesture than a serious redirection of policy.

  There was in fact nothing new about COIN. The U.S. Army had been fighting insurgencies since its early days against Native Americans on the frontier; its first manual on counterinsurgency doctrine, General Orders 100, was drawn up to deal with Confederate bushwhackers in 1862.4 In 1935, the U.S. Marine Corps produced Small Wars Operations, based on twenty years fighting “banana wars” in Central America. Revised as the Small Wars Manual in 1940, it has been reprinted since and was referenced in Vietnam and Iraq. But development of the doctrine was piecemeal and lacked consistency of support both in training and during conflict. The principles did not change, although some of the guidance in the manual was of its time, for example: “It is quite unbecoming for officers who accept the hospitality of the native club for a dance, whether local ladies and gentlemen are in evening clothes or not, to appear in their khaki shirts.”5

  The manual was not updated, because counterinsurgency was never given the attention it deserved. Time and again, after each of the small wars and insurgencies they faced, the army and Marine Corps defaulted to the routine norm of training to fight symmetrical enemies in big wars. Gates was keen to change course and despaired that he had to fight entrenched interests to put counterinsurgency doctrine at the heart of planning, training, and procurement: “The military’s approach seemed to be that if you train and equip to defeat big countries, you can defeat any lesser threat.”6 The military default was to train for conventional operations, and promotion to senior ranks continued to depend on expertise in large-scale mechanized warfare.7

  In trying to change the way America fought, he found he needed “to fight the Pentagon itself,” a system geared to preparing to fight conventional nation-states. Institutional inertia blocked training for the full spectrum of conflict, including counterterrorism and small wars like Afghanistan. The Pentagon—supported by major defense contracting lobbies, Congress members with pet programs, and most senior military commanders—saw Afghanistan and Iraq as “unwelcome military aberrations, the kind of conflict we would never fight again—just the way they felt after Vietnam.”8 Procurement requests went into what Gates called the “Pentagon Black Hole.”9

  By 2007, insurgents sharing information between Iraq and Afghanistan had found a way of making roadside mines—IEDs—that would destroy armored Humvees, until then the troop carrier of choice. Gates hustled the slow bureaucracy of government to rush mine-resistant vehicles, MRAPs, into service, after first hearing about their capability not through the Pentagon but an article in USA TODAY.10 It turned out in the post-9/11 wars, soldiers did not need more tanks but better-protected minivans.

  FOCUS ON THE WATER, NOT THE FISH

  Since those early pioneering days on the frontier, America’s capacity to engage in counterinsurgency warfare developed along three lines: first, training and adapting by troops on the ground; second, doctrine; and third, direction by politicians; and the three were never quite in sync. In 2006, before the Bush administration had politically signed up to counterinsurgency, the army turned to Lieutenant General David Petraeus, a storied officer with glittering Iraq experience, to devise a new doctrine. At the time, Petraeus commanded the army’s main powerhouse of learning, the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. His orders from the chief of staff, Peter Schoomaker, were clear: “Shake up the Army, Dave.”

  Petraeus’s lifelong interest in counterinsurgency came when, fresh out of West Point, he encountered French paratroopers at jump school in his first posting with the 509th Infantry Regiment in Vicenza, Italy. Among them were veterans of France’s colonial wars of the 1950s and ’60s, Vietnam and Algeria. He said, “I became fascinated with the conduct of French operations in, as they said Indochine, and then of course in Algeria, and read avidly the various books about various leaders, about various operations and sought to learn what I could from that.” He briefly served at Fort Stewart, Georgia, where Stanley McChrystal was also stationed, before becoming ADC to the incoming commander of 24th Infantry Division, Major General Jack Galvin, the most important influence in the development of General David Petraeus.

  Galvin encouraged him to study, and two years after they first met, on a break from Princeton, it was with Galvin that Petraeus saw his first small wars in action. Galvin was now commander of SOUTHCOM at a time the U.S. was supporting right-wing governments in a number of conflicts across Central America. In El Salvador, when Petraeus showed up at the house of the U.S. commander, “his wife greeted me, ushered me to the guest wing … and handed me a loaded MP-5 submachine gun to keep me company.”11 In contrast to Vietnam, Petraeus saw more willingness in Central America for the U.S. military to coordinate activities with civilian officials. But he recognized that this was not the norm across the army: “Civil-military integration efforts … seem to be an example of success in spite of the system, not because of it.”12

  Back at Princeton, he wrote a paper arguing for more specific training to fight insurgencies. He identified a paradox that while Vietnam had made U.S. generals more cautious about engagement in counterinsurgency warfare, training for them was essential since “involvement in small wars is not only likely, it is upon us.”13 He wrote to Galvin, “I think the next big debate will be about counterinsurgency operations—whether the U.S. should get involved in them, and if so, how.”14 And he recommended that Galvin produce a new army manual for counterinsurgency, to replace the “rather poor” field manual then in circulation.

  This thinking was gathered together in his final Ph.D. thesis in 1987. It took apart the conventional wisdom that had grown up since Vietnam, that the U.S. should not intervene unless with substantial force, clear public support, and a clear end in sight. The officers at the top of the military in the late 1980s were seared by their experiences as platoon and company commanders on the ground in Vietnam. They were influential advocates for the prevailing cautious approach to warfare, summarized by Petraeus: “When it comes to the use of force, contemporary military thinking holds, the United States should either bite the bullet or duck, but not nibble.”15 The consequence of this, he argued, was that the U.S. did not put enough resources into training for smaller wars and insurgencies.

  When 9/11 happened, Petraeus, now a brigadier general, was in Bosnia as assistant chief of staff for the NATO stabilization force. It was here that he first encountered special operations forces close up as they chased war criminals from the Bosnian conflict. He accompanied them on several night raids in civilian clothes. When their mission changed to tracking down Islamist terrorists in the region after 9/11, he became deputy commander of a new interagency task force on terrorism. This stood him in good stead in the wars to come.16

  Petraeus kept a photo on his wall of the French general Marcel Bigeard, and the two corresponded until Bigeard’s death in 2010. Bigeard was taken prisoner in Vietnam in the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and was the model for the hero of The Centurions, a novel by Jean Lartéguy, which Petraeus likes to quote from. In the book, the Bigeard character learns the guerrilla way of war from his captors, including one deceptively simple idea: “You’ve got to have the people on your side if you want to win a war.”
This was initially turned into doctrine by David Galula, another French officer who also learned the hard way, in captivity.

  Galula was alone on an operation in China in 1947 when he was taken prisoner by Mao Zedong’s Communists as they swept the country. Watching Mao’s forces, Galula gained the insight that the priority in a counterinsurgency should not be targeting insurgents but protecting the population—winning the support of the people was more important than taking ground. “Revolutionary war is 20 per cent military action and 80 per cent political.” It was Galula who popularized Mao’s maxim that guerrilla fighters are like fish and the people the water they need to survive.17 If the people are won, the guerrillas are left high and dry. Although his Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice was first published in the U.S. in 1964 by the RAND Corporation, it was not picked up by mainstream military thinking, nor applied in Vietnam, which was just then morphing into a full-scale war.

  LEARNING ON THE GROUND

  At different levels, the army and Marine Corps are sinuous institutions, often good at learning from experience, with internal networks where officers share best practice. Some officers recognized the need for counterinsurgency techniques in the early years of the post-9/11 wars. Sent to hold Mosul after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Petraeus moved quickly to stabilization, not wanting to lose momentum gained. He saw “money as ammunition” and filled not just the security but the administrative vacuum left by the collapse of the Saddam regime—arranging the wheat harvest, fuel supplies, negotiating with elders, ensuring payment of officials. It was a rare pivot. Elsewhere, and particularly in Baghdad, Iraq descended into chaos. Shocked by the lack of a follow-up plan when he commanded the marines who took Baghdad in 2003, a year later, Lieutenant General Jim Mattis ensured counterinsurgency training for the marine’s second tour of Iraq. “Never again” he wrote, “did I want to invade a country, pull down a statue, and then ask, What do I do now?”18