The Long War
Page 20
The lack of coordination between these different units was having damaging effects on the mission. Afghan civilian casualties caused in night raids by special operators had to be dealt with by conventional forces on the ground who had no idea they were coming. “The sun would come up, and there would be a burning compound,” said Lute. “A conventional infantry unit would have to go and figure out what happened, make amends with the locals, and it just went on and on.”16 Without more coordination between the ten wars, Lute thought the war lost. He recommended a crackdown on corruption, more coherence in the military and civilian campaign, and better training of the Afghan army.17
The one unit in the U.S. armed forces that was specifically tasked to train indigenous forces was the Green Berets, set up by President Kennedy to train the Montagnards in Vietnam. In Afghanistan, they delivered the best trained Special Forces in the region. But, Lute said, “it turns out they are still the only formation in the American force structure, organised, trained and equipped to enable and promote indigenous forces.” Most training and advising of Afghan units was conducted not by Green Berets but rather by soldiers and marines untrained for the task. During a visit to Afghanistan for his review, he encountered an ad hoc unit from the National Guard training Afghan troops. They did not have any specific Afghan training. “We had soldiers who were completely misfit for the advising job we gave them.” He asked them who was the intelligence adviser, the member of the team who would advise the Afghan intelligence chief. One answered, “Oh, that’s me, Sergeant First Class someone.” Lute said, “OK, what’s your intelligence background?” “None, sir. I’m a supply clerk.”
Lute is a large, amiable man with an easy laugh and an appetite for process. Obama asked him to remain in his post, another holdover from the Bush administration, valuing Lute’s capacity to make things happen, delivering alliances across competing parts of the administration. He retained his military rank as lieutenant general, only retiring from the army in 2010, and was influenced by General John Abizaid—the Arabic-speaking commander of CENTCOM until 2007, who was opposed to more American boots on the ground. Lute’s military friends said he “never saw a surge he didn’t like.”18 He would be an influential voice against increasing troop numbers.
But in the early days of the Obama administration, the most influential voice on Afghan policy was Bruce Riedel, who had been with the CIA in Pakistan’s northwest frontier in the 1980s struggle against Soviet rule in Afghanistan. After the new president appointed him to lead yet another review, Riedel stunned the first meeting of the team involved. As soon as they had been round the room to introduce themselves, he said he would have a first draft by the end of the week. The result would clearly be little more than a copy-and-paste job from a pamphlet he had written at the Brookings Institution about al-Qaeda. His cochairs were the veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke—whose experience went back to Vietnam and the successful Dayton Accords ending the Bosnian war—and Michèle Flournoy, the new undersecretary of defense for policy. “Michèle hadn’t even formed her own team yet,” said Lute, “she hadn’t had time to visit Afghanistan, she hadn’t had a chance to talk in depth to the commanders and suddenly Riedel announced, ‘I’ll have the first draft of our report by Friday.’”
Riedel’s analysis fitted the growing consensus that Pakistan was a strategic risk to the mission, actively training and supporting the Taliban. In the early days of cross-border drone strikes, the location and targets were shared with Pakistani intelligence ahead of time, but “This changed,” according to Riedel, “when it became apparent that some if not all of the targets were being tipped off.”19 By the time of his 2008 review, Lute had concluded that America had no vital national interests in Afghanistan. Their only vital national interests in the region were both in Pakistan—the security of Pakistani nuclear weapons and the location of the main commanders of al-Qaeda. Holbrooke agreed, putting it succinctly: “We may be fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country.”20
COIN-LITE
Obama made his first speech linking the two countries on March 27, describing the situation as “perilous” in a low-key appearance in the Executive Office Building.21 There were more than forty references to Pakistan, two-thirds as many as to Afghanistan. More than $8 billion of the $11 billion in U.S. aid to Pakistan since 9/11 had been in military aid,22 but there were to be “no more blank checks.” He unlocked $1.5 billion a year in aid to Islamabad, enraging the military establishment there by making it strictly nonmilitary. As for Afghanistan, the world faced an “international security challenge of the highest order,” and America “must no longer deny Afghanistan” what it needed. But this did not extend to more troops beyond the twenty-one thousand already announced.
McKiernan became increasingly frustrated. “We didn’t have enough Western security … we didn’t have enough NATO and other troop-contributing national forces to establish the security conditions that would buy time and space to support the growth of Afghan security forces … we didn’t have enough, period.”
The president’s solution to filling this gap was a civilian surge. “To advance security, opportunity and justice—not just in Kabul, but from the bottom up in the provinces—we need agricultural specialists and educators, engineers and lawyers … I’m ordering a substantial increase in our civilians on the ground.” It felt like COIN-lite and was the least successful initiative in the war. Some civilians did answer the call, brave men and women who did good work. But they were hard to recruit, and there were too few of them. It was the largest recruitment drive for civilians in conflict since the CORDS§ pacification program in Vietnam forty years earlier, and even though far smaller than CORDS, the systems to provide such staff did not exist. The State Department had to run some basic courses on things like “applying for a passport.”
Once in Afghanistan, tours for the new civilians were too short to make a difference—one year was the maximum contract with frequent “hardship” breaks out of the country. The normal turnover time was between May and August, losing continuity at the height of the Afghan fighting season. Leaving aside the more searching questions asked by development professionals engaged in longer-term projects in Afghanistan about whether these experts could do anything to make a difference, there were basic issues of logistics that were never resolved. Apart from not having the “required skills,” Gates said, many new recruits “spent their entire Afghan tour holed up in the fortified embassy compound.”23
The civilians found it hard to communicate with each other, let alone Afghanistan. State and Defense had different computer systems, one frustrated official reporting that “in the time it could take for an email to pass through the various firewalls of the different systems, he could print off the email and walk it across the embassy to a colleague’s office.”24 There were agricultural experts available and ready to go, but the Department of Agriculture did not have a budget to send them to Afghanistan, and when they asked for help from the Department of Defense, the money could not be transferred. The new recruits were hugely expensive to deploy, requiring protection, but hampered by security restrictions on their capacity to make a difference, limiting contact with Afghans.
Michael Waltz, who worked for part of the war as a policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and part as a Green Beret commanding special operators in eastern Afghanistan, told of one incident where an American agricultural specialist could not get to the rural college where he should have been teaching.25 After his first day at work, the college asked him not to come back because the heavily armed convoy that brought him and stayed while he taught made the center a Taliban target. The district police chief, whose son was a student, promised local security if the American adviser came in a civilian car, a solution rejected by the State Department security officer responsible for his safety. Ignoring this, Waltz arranged lower-profile U.S. vehicles to take the adviser to the agricultural college before dawn—on random days, varying the route. “To me, it was a much bigger risk to have a
n expert in agriculture sitting on his rear end doing nothing a stone’s throw from people who wanted his help.”26 He knew he would have lost his job if harm had come to the civilian expert. But he had been in enough meetings in Washington where Pentagon officials berated the State Department and USAID for not providing civilian assistance, and thought it a risk worth taking.
FRESH EYES
In June 2009, Obama fired McKiernan, taking the advice he was given that he stood in the way of introducing COIN—the new map out of the labyrinth of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The decision was a recognition “that we have to apply some fresh eyes to the problem,” according to Obama.27 Petraeus had not backed McKiernan, and Petraeus’s mentor Jack Keane had been working behind the scenes to oust the Kabul commander since the inauguration, telling the new secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, that McKiernan was “the wrong man for the job. Too old school.”28
Gates had approved McKiernan’s appointment to Afghanistan in 2008, but in his memoir, Duty, written with the benefit of hindsight, he said his confidence waned several months before he made the decision to remove him. “To this day it is hard to put a finger on what exactly it was that concerned me, but my disquiet only grew through the winter.”29 He thought McKiernan lacked the capacity to innovate—and was not quick enough to change plans when things did not work out. “McKiernan was a very fine soldier but seemed to lack the flexibility and understanding of the battlespace required for a situation as complex as Afghanistan.”30 He had seen the ISAF commander close up in the twice-monthly videoconferences down the line that linked Presidents Bush and Karzai, free-ranging discussions that demanded a lot of the general. The videoconferences did not play to McKiernan’s strengths. “I’m not sure things change as rapidly as you’d think they change every two weeks in Afghanistan,” he said.
To Gates, the administration was short of the quality of analysis needed to sort through the blizzard of different reports on the state of the Afghan campaign. He constantly challenged the differing analysis of those on the ground and those in Washington. CIA reports remained constantly less positive than those from the military in Kabul. In a videoconference with McKiernan in Kabul, Gates exploded, “You guys sound pretty good, but then I get intelligence reports that indicate it is going to hell. I don’t have a feel for how the fight is going. I don’t think the president has a clear idea either of exactly where we are in Afghanistan.”31
As early as 2007, Gates had signaled a different shape for the army by bringing Petraeus back from leading the counterinsurgency fight in Iraq to head the promotion board, deciding which forty colonels went on to their first star as brigadier generals. Those promoted were those who showed counterinsurgency flair, a quality not highlighted by promotion boards until then, among them H. R. McMaster.32
McKiernan was a man out of time. He was one of the best armored-maneuver commanders in the world, with a background training on the German plains to combat Russia. He spent seventeen years in Germany altogether, five tours during his army career, where he met Carmen, a German national working for the U.S. military, who became his wife. In the 1980s, once a month, as part of Operation Lariat Advance, they moved into position to defend against a Russian attack. Tanks would be armed for combat, and the men inside them did not know if this was a training exercise or for real. At the end of the day, they would drive to an agreed rendezvous point, “And we’d all look at each other and say ‘This probably is not going to happen. We’re not going to reconstitute. It’s going to be a fight right along the border, and there’s not going to be any combat power left.’”
The move into Baghdad that McKiernan commanded with such panache in 2003 would be the last big moment for the heavy army. The light army’s time had come, as infantry and counterinsurgency skills were more rewarded. Brigadier General Austin Scott Miller created a new career stream, turning out “Afghan Hands,” counterinsurgency experts who spoke the Afghan languages, Dari and Pashto. (Miller was a legend among special operators for commanding the team on the ground in the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia in 1993, and would later go to Kabul as the commander of the coalition.)
McKiernan’s fate was sealed after the undersecretary for defense, Michèle Flournoy, returned from a trip to Kabul in early April. She told Gates of her concern that civilian casualties were not being managed well enough, and he decided it was time for a change. Petraeus and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, quickly agreed. General George Casey, the army chief of staff, and McKiernan’s only ally at the top table, was a rare senior voice of dissent, saying it was a “rotten thing to do.”33 He called McKiernan and said, “Have you talked to the chairman lately?” And McKiernan said, “Not for a few days.” It was the first indication he had there might be a problem.
Mullen called McKiernan the day before he was due to go on his first leave for ten months; Carmen was waiting to meet him in Germany, and they were planning a week’s holiday in Oman. There was no reference to other NATO allies in making what was an American political decision. McKiernan knew he did not have a choice in whether to stay but only how he left, and when Mullen said he could “retire and go quietly,” McKiernan turned him down. He argued that he should be allowed to remain until the spring of 2010. He knew he would not be able to look at himself in the mirror if he walked out; he had made commitments to his team and to people in Afghanistan, telling them he would be there for the long haul, see the job through. “I basically said, ‘If you want to replace me you’re going to have to fire me,’ and naturally, they fired me.”
McKiernan did not lack understanding of the doctrine—he lacked the troops he needed to apply it to make a decisive difference. At a press conference in the Pentagon, he made a strong case for extra troops. “We’re into a very tough counterinsurgency fight there and will be for some time.”34 He had thought deeply about counterinsurgency before assuming command, and issued his own guidance when he arrived in Kabul in June 2008, defining his “operational imperative” as “protecting the population while extending the legitimacy and effectiveness” of the Afghan government—as good a definition of modern counterinsurgency as there was, and straight out of the manual. He put civilian protection ahead of defeating the enemy as the main goal of military action. “Success in Afghanistan will not come from the sole pursuit of a security line of operation by military forces. Claims that ISAF does only security have no place in this campaign. These lines of operation are interdependent and are intended to be complementary and comprehensive; failure in one means mission failure in all.”35
In his guidance he outlined the phases of “Shape, Clear, Hold, and Build,” the building blocks of successful counterinsurgency operations as defined in the new doctrine—Shape, meaning to understand and prepare the ground; Clear, eliminate insurgent activity; Hold, ensure sufficient force to establish security; and Build, deliver economic benefits to extend the effective reach of the Afghan government. Each of these phases needed to be in partnership with Afghans, and with them in the lead if possible, and the military did not have all the answers. McKiernan told his troops on his arrival in Afghanistan, “There is no purely military solution to the situation in Afghanistan.”
One of the concerns expressed by Flournoy in the visit that sealed McKiernan’s fate was that she believed he did not engage at political levels in Afghanistan. For those who knew him, this was far from the truth. It was only that he did not shout about it. He was constantly on the ground in Afghanistan, comfortable working at lower levels. One of his advisers, a former navy pilot, Paul Farnan, wrote:
I have seen our focus in Afghanistan shift from kinetic military operations to one of engaging the population, building the capacity of the Afghan government, and ensuring that the military’s top priority is the training and mentoring of the Afghan army and police. Integrated strategic planning with the United Nations and the Afghan government is now the rule rather than the exception, as it was when McKiernan arrived last June. The general has travelled a
round the country and has held countless forums, known as shuras, with Afghans in various localities. He has engaged local and provincial leaders one on one to hear their concerns and ensure that they understood the intentions of the international coalition. All of our Special Forces operations combined cannot win the support of the Afghan people the way these shuras do.36
COIN also required a sophisticated communications strategy, particularly in the new world of the near-universal availability of smartphones in Afghanistan, which caused McKiernan such problems managing civilian casualty incidents. And he understood the need to grasp it particularly at lower tactical levels. “When you’re in an environment of counterinsurgency, and trying to support the growth of a government, and dealing with population,” a successful communications strategy “is a vital ingredient to what the commander has at his disposal to create effects.” It was in pursuit of COIN principles that McKiernan was close to completing a new partnership deal with the U.S. embassy to encourage civil/military coordination when he was forced out of his post. If David Petraeus’s new way of doing war was to work, it had to be embraced by commanders with a conventional background like McKiernan, not only the charismatic mavericks like McMaster now on the ascendant. But a new administration wanted a new general for a new policy.