by David Loyn
RAMPANT TRIBALISM
The only specific disagreement Gates had with McKiernan was over a decision in October 2008 to bring all U.S. troops in the country under him, including those on Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF). Instead of the unified command, Gates wanted to appoint a three-star lieutenant general under McKiernan to be “totally focused on the fight,”37 taking command of day-to-day operations—“down” and “in.” This would leave McKiernan’s focus “up” and “out”—strategic command of the conflict and liaison with President Karzai and the hydra-headed international political and military structures with an interest in Kabul. But McKiernan wanted to end what he saw as “rampant tribalism” between different forces on the ground in Afghanistan. And so Gates agreed to change the structure, extending McKiernan’s command to the fifteen thousand or so American troops deployed under OEF—mostly in the frontier region in the east, as well as most special operations forces, although CIA operations remained outside his control. The lack of overall command had led to many arguments between President Karzai and ISAF commanders unsighted on operations that caused casualties. The move meant that for the first time since 2001, nearly all U.S. military assets in the country were under one command. The ISAF commander was held accountable by Afghan politicians for everything that international forces did in the country; he needed to be responsible for it as well. NATO allies were opposed. They felt the U.S. had “sucked them into Afghanistan as an alliance project” before wanting to put it all under an American again.38 They feared they would be implicated in American black ops.
McKiernan returned to Kabul from negotiating with Gates in October, confident he now had the mandate he needed for the new combined command role. But while in Washington, he missed the importance of key changes in the administration of the army. In August 2008, McChrystal was brought back from five years commanding special operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to become the director of the Joint Staff at the Pentagon. This was Gates’s move against what he saw as the inertia of a large bureaucracy that was comfortable planning wars but not geared to fighting them.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, told McChrystal to “attack and destroy the network,” and the network he was talking about was the Pentagon itself. “Tear it down and rebuild it to be faster, more transparent, and more effective.”39 Petraeus, the other force used as a creative disruptor from the inside, arrived back from Iraq to the center of things three months after McChrystal, in October 2008, as commander of CENTCOM in Florida. And Petraeus was one of the architects of the plan to split the Afghan command that McKiernan opposed. It was not just McKiernan who felt the heat of the administration’s impatience with progress in the wars. To get to CENTCOM, Petraeus elbowed aside Admiral William “Fox” Fallon, who had fallen out with the administration over Iran, where he was more cautious than the Bush White House.40
McKiernan’s whole career was in the field—Germany, Korea, the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan—apart from a brief spell in the Pentagon, where he was called in just after 9/11 to be G-3 of the army, responsible at the highest level for operations and planning of America’s response to the attacks on the homeland. He never did the more political jobs that were available. He had not been a general’s aide, or stalked the corridors with a mission to dismantle the bureaucracy or shake up the army—the roles given to the disruptors McChrystal and Petraeus. McKiernan’s distance from the political machine was more than physical—he inhabited a different world, where virtue was demonstrated by delivery, not by shouting about it. “Ambition is looked upon favorably in life, and I’m not sure I would hold it in that high a regard.” Where once quiet competence may have been enough, it was not now.
McKiernan remains disappointed with the decision and angry that it has often been reported that he was relieved of command. “When you’re relieved of your command in the military, it’s for an error. I was not relieved … I was replaced.” Gates came to speak to McKiernan in Kabul two weeks after Mullen’s call and said, “He acceded with extraordinary dignity and class.”41 McKiernan called in all the general officers then in Afghanistan, about a dozen, for a dinner, and told them that while it was not how he would have wanted to go, he was not bitter. “I’ve had these incredible experiences serving my country. This is just the way it is.”42 The decision shocked the military establishment—it was the first time a commander had been replaced in the field since Douglas MacArthur in Korea in 1951. The day before he met Gates in Kabul, McKiernan appeared on Time magazine’s list of the one hundred most influential people in the world. General Wesley Clark, who had been McKiernan’s superior officer in Iraq and Kosovo, wrote the citation for the magazine. “He’s extraordinarily calm under stress, a clear thinker, tough and morally courageous … McKiernan is not afraid to stand up and ask for what he needs.”
The issue that had caused him trouble throughout—civilians killed by U.S. air strikes—also reemerged that week. There were riots by rock-throwing protestors in Farah in the deserts of the southwest, one of the poorest provinces in Afghanistan, after the deaths of at least sixty-three women and children in an air strike—one of the worst death tolls in a single incident of this kind. A B-1 bomber dropped munitions in two waves after dark, destroying a mosque. As so often, the American military had good reason to respond at first to a request by Afghan troops who came following the public beheading of three villagers by the Taliban. The air strikes were called in after intense fighting in which both U.S. and Afghan troops took casualties. But investigators later found that the bombing hit compounds where women and children were sheltering sometime after the shooting stopped, against McKiernan’s commander’s intent.43
NO NEW STRATEGY
Dave McKiernan retired to Marblehead, Massachusetts, where the only intelligence briefings he gets are from The Boston Globe, and there is nowhere he would rather be than a ski slope. At his retirement ceremony, Secretary Gates said he had “handled everything the Army and his commander in chief have thrown at him with supreme professionalism, intelligence and dedication to our nation, and the men and women under his command.” In the June sunshine at Fort Myer, across the Potomac River from Washington, his last event in formation in uniform, McKiernan said he was “dismayed, disappointed, and more than a little embarrassed” to be standing there, while encouraging those who sympathized to spare their condolences “for those who truly need them—the families, friends and comrades of men and women who either will not return home or whose lives have been permanently scarred by war.”
Like many in the military, his children followed his career. His son, Captain Michael McKiernan, served in the military police, advising Afghan police in Gardez in 2009, and his daughter, Lieutenant Stephanie McKiernan, trained as a helicopter pilot in the 1st Cavalry, his old division, and flew her father in Kandahar in 2013 on a return trip to the country.
McKiernan had made a virtue of avoiding the political game, admitting that “visits in Washington, press conferences, or briefings to the civilian leadership, that’s not my comfort zone.” It meant he did not watch his back and had no notice of the growing concern about him in a new administration seeking to stamp their mark on the Afghan campaign. The foreign and security policy team around Obama thought they now grasped COIN—the shiny new policy that would change the course of the war—and thought that McKiernan did not. It was politically convenient for the Obama administration to promote a story blaming him for standing in the way of the policy.
Encouraged by Pentagon briefing, a characterization grew of McKiernan as an armored warfare expert who did not understand the nuances of the new war: “solid but uninspired,” according to David Ignatius of The Washington Post;44 “an excellent general in the old mold,”45 wrote Fred Kaplan at Slate magazine. This characterization was not recognized by those who served with him in Afghanistan. One senior Canadian officer wrote, “For the first time in the ISAF mission the coalition had a strategy that was not just working well, but was delivering results that
exceeded expectations.”46
His successor was General Stanley McChrystal, and Gates moved swiftly on the plan to split the command role opposed by McKiernan, appointing his own military assistant, Lieutenant General David “Rod” Rodriguez, to return to Afghanistan, where he had been the year before, to command the day-to-day fight. Gates had plucked the two commanders who were in his sight in the Pentagon every day to run a war that was now more in the public eye than ever, and they would be under the oversight of the regional commander and godfather of counterinsurgency, David Petraeus at CENTCOM.
On May 12, alongside Mullen at the Pentagon, Gates said, “We have a new policy set by our new president. We have a new strategy, a new mission and a new ambassador [the former lieutenant general Karl Eikenberry], I believe that new military leadership is also needed.”47 Those around McKiernan said there was no new strategy. All he lacked was the resources to do the task. One of his senior planning officers said McKiernan “had done the ground work, but Gates did not know that.”48
In his last encounters on the ground in Afghanistan before he was fired, in the south of the country, McKiernan revealed to the assembled elders, “I’m reading a very good book now about this part of the world. It’s written in English, but it’s all about you—it’s the Quran.”49 An elder spontaneously presented him with a fine piece of purple-, red-, and green-colored cloth to wrap his translated copy to give it respect. In separate meetings in Kandahar and Helmand, McKiernan apologized for past mistakes and addressed concerns about night raids and the need to respect women in Afghan homes. He received strong applause for saying the Taliban could not be defeated unless their safe havens across the nearby border were destroyed. U.S. troops would soon be stationed for the first time in these southern provinces close to the frontier, where mainly Canadian and UK forces had been leading the fight until then. McKiernan’s visits were deliberately aimed at laying the ground for the increases he had fought so hard for. By the time the troops arrived, he had been forced into retirement.
McKiernan’s career was over. He was skeptical of the claims of a “new strategy” made by those who succeeded him. “Changing the commander is not the silver bullet that’s going to change all the dynamics in Afghanistan.” He had been elbowed aside by the command team of McChrystal and Rodriguez, whom Gates believed had “a unique skillset in counterinsurgency,”50 as Afghanistan fully became Obama’s war.
8
OWNING THE VILLAGES
They own the villages. That’s where this is going to be won.
If we have lost our influence and legitimacy in the villages, we’ve got a big problem. It happened in Vietnam and it happened in Afghanistan.
—General Stanley A. McChrystal
TEAM AMERICA
Lieutenant Colonel Stanley McChrystal introduced a fitness regime in his first battalion command role in the 82nd Airborne in 1993.1 Over a four-week rotation, every soldier had to run first four, then eight, twelve, then twenty miles. His battalion wondered how McChrystal himself would fulfill his commitment when a conference was scheduled for the Thursday he was due to run his twenty miles. As they arrived on buses at dawn for the conference, McChrystal ran past them. He had set out after midnight. It was the beginning of the creation of a legend of an obsessive warrior-monk, sleeping four hours and eating one meal a day, a leader totally focused on the fight. His single-minded pursuit of wanting every soldier in the right frame of mind led admirers to compare him to General Matthew Ridgway, who took over from General Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War. Like Ridgway, McChrystal was known to lead by example.
Arriving in Afghanistan in the height of the summer of 2009, McChrystal took on Baskin-Robbins before he turned his attention to the Taliban, attempting to close a string of fast-food outlets at Kandahar and Bagram Air Bases that had sprung up since the days of the austere encampment he knew in 2002. He banned alcohol for non-American troops still then allowed to drink and saw as an affront the coffee bar in the garden in front of the “yellow building,” the main ISAF headquarters—one of the few places soldiers could smoke in the cramped alleyways snaking through stacks of containers that made up the base. The garden and bars were “relevant pieces of terrain” in McChrystal’s sights as he sought to refocus total commitment to winning.2 He ordered that flags should no longer be lowered to half-mast for losses, but kept fully raised. “A force that’s fighting a war can’t spend all its time looking back at what the costs have been.”3
To get his senior staff out of siloed single offices, he had a situational awareness room (SAR) built onto the side of the yellow building—a large rectangle with desks around three sides of a model map showing Afghanistan in relief and a bank of screens on the fourth side. It replicated what he had built in his previous role as commander of TF-714 coordinating special operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. To be close to the campaign 24-7, McChrystal slept and worked out in a small windowless cell above the Kabul SAR, furnished by just an iron-framed bed and gym equipment. He had given five years to his previous role and told Obama he would do three in Afghanistan. Alongside him in the nerve center, he brought a tight team of senior officers mostly from the special operations world, told not to see this as a tour with an end date: they would be in Afghanistan “for 18 months, two and a half years, for the duration, however long it took to win.”4
McChrystal was skilled at communicating to thousands of people, valuing input across a flat hierarchy—not the normal military model. The SAR idea grew from his experience when he arrived in Iraq in 2003. He discovered bags piled up as if trash, full of documents, CDs, and hard drives seized on raids that had not even been opened—a wasted resource. Special operators going out on raids nightly had little connection with the analysis of the products they brought back. He moved the analysts closer to the action to turn the intelligence into real-time information, and penetrated closed bubbles to get information shared with his TF-714 special operators across the alphabet soup of U.S. secret networks—the CIA, FBI, DIA, NSC, and NGA.¶
Unnervingly for people used to hoarding secrets, he made the whole Baghdad SAR a top secret–secure facility, so there was no excuse not to cooperate.5 The wide sharing of information had its downside. The material copied by Chelsea Manning, when she was Private Bradley Manning, onto CDs labeled “Lady Gaga” and sent to WikiLeaks, came from this access. But the upside was swifter analysis of information, turning a hard fight in Iraq to America’s advantage. McChrystal repeated the model in Kabul, building a flat network to link as many people as possible across the country into his morning briefing. He was less worried about leaks than troops not knowing what they should be doing. “It’s a tradeoff and I think I come down on this side every time.”6
It would take more than an open-plan office and interconnected communications to build a counterinsurgency campaign. The messy, complex, political and tribal world of Afghanistan could not be analyzed as easily as a terrorist group. For much of McChrystal’s military career, he had seen Iraq and Afghanistan through the lens of a Predator drone camera, the prisoner captured at night, the harvest of intelligence. “When our helicopters landed, our operators normally had the benefit of surprise, the cover of night, and intimate knowledge of whom they would find on their objective.” Success in Iraq was measurable. “We could both see and feel the impact we were having on Zarqawi’s organization.” Counterinsurgency did not have such clear metrics. A campaign where progress could not be measured by direct attrition of a terrorist network was harder to do, harder to assess, and harder to explain, both to his own troops and the public, weary of a lack of progress in the long war.7
The arrival of McChrystal’s retinue of thirty mainly American ex–Special Forces officers, immediately called Team America, brought friction into a multinational headquarters, where McKiernan had been liked. There was “palpable resentment” as one of the new arrivals, Colonel Kevin Owens, admitted. “Frankly we probably reinforced it at times, whether consciously or otherwise.”
There was no difference on paper between his counterinsurgency and the plan adopted by McKiernan. “You know these are not new ideas,” the deputy commander of ISAF, British lieutenant general Jim Dutton, sharply reminded Team America when they proposed a new directive to reduce civilian casualties. “We actually put out guidance to this effect several months ago.”8 But beyond the written guidance, to McChrystal, it was a question of belief down to every private soldier. He wanted to “change the mindset” in Kabul, where on arrival he found “a creeping, fatalistic pessimism, as though the fight were over, the effort failed.”9 The effort in Afghanistan was not just less than Iraq, it was “junior varsity, B-squad level,” starved of both resources and good people.10