by David Loyn
McChrystal did not blame McKiernan, who had requested more troops that did not arrive until his last days in command. But he thought the problems more serious than had been reported. Failure was inevitable unless there was a radical shift in direction. He put his chances of success at fifty-fifty, “and only then if we made serious changes.”11
DEFEAT OR DESTROY
It was still no clearer what winning meant. At the beginning, President Bush sent troops to Afghanistan “to destroy the Taliban and al Qaeda,”12 before drifting into an ill-formed dream of building democracy. The language of President Obama’s first speech on the war in March signaled narrower aims: “To disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan and to prevent their return to either country in the future.”13 But neither president was willing to commit to the long-term stability that would indeed “prevent their return.”
The paradox of not wanting to commit to nation-building but only short-term fixes was that it condemned America to be in Afghanistan for the long term. Obama recognized that because of the wasted years, when the long war was overshadowed by Iraq, “we’d have to start from scratch in Afghanistan. But it nonetheless dawned on me that even in the best-case scenario—even if Karzai cooperated, Pakistan behaved, and our goals were limited to what Gates liked to call ‘Afghan good enough’—we were still looking at three to five years of intense effort, costing hundreds of billions more dollars and more American lives.”14 He was wary of committing the resources needed. During the arguments in 2009 over troop increases requested by McChrystal, the president was clear. “I’m not doing ten years. I’m not doing a long-term nation-building effort. I’m not spending a trillion dollars.”15 As a consequence, America would indeed be in Afghanistan for another ten years, spending many billions of dollars, still without a plan for anything other than the short term.
The pity was that rethinking the war in 2009 was supposed to be different—making judgments based on more than the numbers of boots on the ground, the only metric that ever seemed to matter. But it did not turn out that way because of the narrow aperture of the war aim, as if looking down the wrong end of a telescope. If the only target were al-Qaeda, the administration would not commit to a whole of Afghanistan policy, including security, long-term programs for governance, infrastructure, land reform, justice, higher education, a road map for talking to the Taliban, and a coherent approach to the continued threat played by the non-Taliban warlords.
Obama saw the decision he had to make as consequential as LBJ being asked to send ground troops to Vietnam in 1965.16 By 1965, Richard Holbrooke had been in Vietnam for three years as a foreign service officer; his experience haunted the deliberations over the Afghan surge. Staffers born far later than 1965 were handed photocopied pages from Holbrooke’s ghostwritten autobiography of Clark Clifford, the Kennedy and Johnson adviser who opposed the troop increase.17 Across the administration in 2009, they were reading Lessons in Disaster, a book just out about national security aide McGeorge Bundy’s missteps in pushing for more troops in 1965. Obama’s team were determined to learn from Lesson Five—“Never Deploy Military Means in Pursuit of Indeterminate Ends.”
It was unclear what the ends were. McChrystal regretted not pushing Obama to give him clearer guidance when he was appointed. “I should have given him a piece of paper and said, write down what you want me to do, and I will try to do that. It would have forced him to get in his own mind what he wanted me to do, and me to understand it.” He was appointed quickly on Gates’s recommendation when McKiernan was cast aside, and did not take the chance when he could to insist on a focused conversation about war aims. Instead, his appointment meeting in the White House was little more than a photocall. Obama was unnerved by the lean, muscular intent figure with no small talk. “McChrystal’s whole manner was that of someone who’s burned away frivolity and distractions from his life.”18
On arrival in Kabul in June, McChrystal was asked for his strategic assessment, and Gates told him to provide it without any troop numbers attached. The administration wanted to know the full effect of the twenty-one thousand committed at the beginning of the year before sending more. Speaking marine to marine on a fact-finding trip to Helmand, National Security Adviser Jim Jones told Brigadier General Larry Nicholson that if Obama were asked for more troops at this stage, he would likely have a “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment”19—meaning what the fuck.
There were nine long meetings between the president and senior cabinet members before Obama stood in front of the latest cadets in the long gray line at West Point to announce his decision in December, and there were many WTF moments along the way as the White House felt boxed in by generals going public with demands for more troops. At the beginning of September, Petraeus called Michael Gerson at The Washington Post to rebut a David Ignatius column saying counterinsurgency would fail in Afghanistan. Far from it, said Petraeus. More troops were needed for a fully resourced counterinsurgency. “We have to get ahead of this, to arrest the downward spiral, to revive momentum.”20
The comments outraged the White House, and Petraeus, who had an easy relationship with reporters, was forced to tone down his rhetoric. One speech prompted Tom Ricks to write, “Dave does dull.” Petraeus sent him an email: “You have no idea how much skill is required to do dull on a topic as emotional right now as Afghanistan.”21
Afghan experts and think tankers brought to Kabul to inform McChrystal’s strategic assessment wrote op-eds on their return saying more force was needed, with bylines associating them to McChrystal.22 Having his staff contact them to lay off was just locking the stable door. To the White House, it looked like a coordinated campaign. Biden called it “fucking outrageous.”23 Gates called in Mullen and Petraeus with McChrystal in a videoconference call from Kabul, where Petraeus protested his innocence. “We all resolved that we need to again avoid any perception that we are trying to jam the President or that we’re trying to go around him to the press.”
There were leaks too from officials in the administration attracted to a plan Biden called counterterrorism-plus. “The New York Times was besieged by unsolicited White House sources offering their views,” according to Gates.24 Under CT-plus, involving fewer than ten thousand U.S. personnel, the U.S. would keep only Kandahar and Bagram air bases, with enough capacity to dominate the skies and human intelligence networks to feed information to Special Operation Forces and CIA counterterrorist teams targeting al-Qaeda.
Doug Lute said the arguments through the fall swirled round the “action verb.” What were troops there to do? “Disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda” was what Obama said in his March speech. Steve Coll reported that defeat was inserted in place of the original draft word destroy only twenty minutes before he stood up. When Mullen told the president destroy was a very high bar, he changed it.25
At Gates’s insistence, the strategic implementation plan, effectively the orders given to McChrystal, had stronger language than the Obama speech. The enemy who should be defeated was not just al-Qaeda but also the Taliban.26Defeat is defined by the U.S. Army as “rendering a force incapable of achieving its objectives.”27 It may not involve any military action at all, if the political environment could be altered. Defeating the Taliban meant denying them space to operate, so to McChrystal, the campaign “necessarily included building capacity across the government and providing the opportunity for economic development.”28 It set alarm bells ringing, as it sounded like nation-building.
Defeat “scared the hell out of NATO,” according to a member of the drafting team for the McChrystal assessment, Colonel James McGrath. “It was a tall order to get our NATO brothers to understand that we’re going to call a spade a spade and frankly be very American about it.” Many NATO nations had signed up to support development, peacekeeping not war fighting. Germany deliberately did not call it a war, forcing the resignation of a president in 2010 who used the wrong language. McGrath said NATO command at Brunssum had “101 issues” with the word defe
at, which was an affront to “NATO sensibilities.”29
The parrying over language went on throughout the long White House meetings to decide a policy, McChrystal talking at cross-purposes with those promoting CT-plus in some “really contentious” videoconferences.30 Biden said at one meeting, “Wait a minute, why are you trying to destroy all the Taliban?” McChrystal said that was not what defeat meant. If the Taliban were prevented from accomplishing their mission, they would be defeated, “even if we kill nobody.” For the next meeting, he produced a slide with defeat in the middle and a series of other words around it, from degrade to eradicate, to show what he was being asked to do and how it had derived from the March speech and his strategic implementation plan. “It seemed to surprise some of the participants,” McChrystal said.
The president came down on his side. “Stan is just doing what we’ve asked him to do.”31 But later, given how far the options then being considered were from full resourcing for counterinsurgency, Obama said, “We have done a disservice to McChrystal” by not making clear the goal was shifting.32 Experienced counterinsurgency experts began to despair of the delays and overthinking at a time when there were only two choices—either leave or commit more troops. David Kilcullen likened it to a burning building with firefighters already inside. “It is not appropriate to stand outside pontificating about not taking lightly the responsibility of sending firemen into harm’s way. Either put in enough firemen to put the fire out or get out of the house.”33
MORE FORCES OR MISSION FAILURE
The word counterinsurgency was not used in the president’s March speech; he took it out of the National Security Council draft.34 But it was recommended by Bruce Riedel’s paper and was at the heart of McChrystal’s strategic assessment, a sixty-six-page document sent in September. “We must conduct classic counterinsurgency operations in an environment that is uniquely complex,” McChrystal wrote. “Success demands a comprehensive counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign.” Like so much, the strategic assessment leaked. The American people could read it in The Washington Post before McChrystal had briefed it to senior military commanders—four columns under the headline MCCHRYSTAL: “MORE FORCES OR MISSION FAILURE.” It could not have been timed worse, appearing online on the evening of Sunday, September 20, a day the president had been on several talk shows wanting to move on to talk about health reforms and, when asked about Afghanistan, stressed he “did not want to put the resource question ahead of the strategy question.” Senior commanders thought the leak a turning point, damaging trust, perhaps irreparably, in the relationship between the president and the military.
The main writer of the assessment was Jeff Eggers, a former SEAL close to McChrystal, who said the sense of impending failure was put in by McChrystal “to stick a finger in the chest of people reading it.”35 McChrystal knew the shock effect of what he was doing. In the military, it’s cool to understate and say things are fine. This was not going to be an understated report; its conclusions were deliberately stark. “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near term … risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.” While there were no troop requests in the document, McChrystal wrote, “Inadequate resources will likely result in failure.”
Later that week, CBS’s 60 Minutes aired an interview with McChrystal in which he revealed that in his first two months in command, he had spoken to Obama only once on a VTC from Kabul. It made the president look remote, unconcerned.36 Ten days later, in answers to questions after a speech at a London defense think tank, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, McChrystal was asked if he would support counterterrorism alone, the Biden option, although Biden was not mentioned by name. He said, “The short answer is no.” Reducing the mission to drone attacks and air strikes would lead to “Chaos-istan.” He went further, in what was construed as an implied criticism of White House delays in taking a decision. “Waiting does not prolong a favorable outcome. This effort will not remain winnable indefinitely.” He said he was encouraged by the administration to express his views, but “they may change their minds and crush me someday.”
The day after the London speech, McChrystal was called to Copenhagen, where the president was on a stopover, to be reprimanded, and earned a further public rebuke from Secretary Gates, who said advice to the president from civilian and military leaders should come “candidly but privately.”37 The president called in Admiral Mike Mullen and Gates, asking, in controlled anger, “Is it because they figure they know better and don’t want to be bothered answering my questions? Is it because I’m young and didn’t serve in the military? Is it because they don’t like my politics?”38 He met with America’s most respected military leader, retired general and former secretary of state Colin Powell, who told the president, “Don’t get pushed by the left to do nothing. Don’t get pushed by the right to do everything.”39
The conversation continued both in lengthy deliberations in Washington and in public. Kabul ambassador Karl Eikenberry’s opposition to more troops in a memo to Clinton was leaked.40 More troops, he wrote, would mean deeper engagement “with no way to extricate ourselves, short of allowing the country to descend again into lawlessness and chaos.” He was particularly critical of Karzai as an unreliable partner, and recommended the U.S. take more time before deciding—which Gates saw as “ridiculous” after a yearlong reassessment.41 The memo made Eikenberry’s position in Kabul unworkable since Karzai now refused to see him on his own, and it damaged his relations with McChrystal, who was “completely blind-sided by it. I thought it was just discourteous.” He thought Eikenberry was getting his opposition on the record for the history books.42 The memo arrived in Washington (and inevitably leaked to The New York Times) in the last critical weeks of decision-making in November. Eikenberry remained in post for several more months, backed by Biden, although Clinton and Gates wanted him out.43
McChrystal’s troop request, separate from his strategic assessment, did not leak. His three alternatives depended on what the president decided to do. If all that was planned was a training operation, then eleven thousand troops would be enough. A counterinsurgency would need forty thousand, a more robust counterinsurgency eighty thousand. It was a classic Goldilocks ploy, with the expectation that the middle number would be chosen. There was no mention of CT-plus, the preferred Biden option, which McChrystal saw as “pretty close to the status quo.” That was what was not working.
The upper-end figure of eighty thousand did not come out of the air. Working on a low estimate of the Afghan population of twenty-four million, counterinsurgency math would require 480,000 troops.44 If there were four hundred thousand Afghan troops, then the U.S. could make up the rest. But the math would only go so far. No American administration would fund an Afghan force that large, although Petraeus continued to push for it.45 McChrystal recognized there were command decisions on risk that could not be run through the computer. “Counterinsurgency doctrine on security force levels was as much art as science.”46
On December 1, 2009, in a somber atmosphere at West Point, in a long speech punctuated only five times with applause, the president unveiled his Afghanistan strategy, denying there had been any operational delay. “Afghanistan is not lost, but for several years it has moved backwards.” Just as he had second-guessed McKiernan’s request at the start of the year, approving only two-thirds of the troops requested, so he approved just thirty thousand of McChrystal’s forty-thousand request, with the hope that NATO allies would make up the rest. Again, counterinsurgency was not mentioned, and after months arguing over whether the mission was to defeat the Taliban or “deny,” “disrupt,” or “degrade” them, Obama said the goal was “narrowly defined as disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al-Qaeda and its extremist allies.”
Its extremist allies was ambiguous—and could be seen to refer only to international terrorists, not the Taliban. In McChrystal’s mind, the ambiguity was not cleared up in a six-page amended plan sent to Mc
Chrystal the White House called the “terms sheet”—as if a legal contract. It was an unusual document, issued as an “order” in the final meeting ahead of the public announcement, to the surprise of Gates, who had never heard anyone issue an “order” before at that level. He thought it revealed “the depth of the Obama White House’s distrust of the nation’s military leadership.”47 The leaks and sense of being jammed in by the generals had their effect. Obama wrote, “McChrystal’s lengthy timetable for both installing troops and pulling them out looked less like an Iraq-style surge than a long-term occupation.”48 So he wanted a clear exit. Bob Woodward reported that the terms sheet was personally dictated by the president, based on a memo written by Gates.49 Doug Lute said it was quite clear and deliberately designed to limit the mission, both in scale and duration.
Rather than spreading the surge forces across the country, they would be focused in less than a quarter of the country in what were called “Key Terrain Districts”—strategic hubs that would spread stability and join like ink blots. This was a classic COIN idea. Lute called it a “tailored or metered counterinsurgency.” But the document was “inelegant” in McChrystal’s eyes and lacking clarity, except in what not to do. The mission was not a fully resourced counterinsurgency, and it was not to defeat the Taliban, instead the document used words like reverse their momentum, deny their access to key population areas, disrupt and degrade them to a level manageable by the Afghans.50 McChrystal was sympathetic about the lack of clarity; Afghanistan was a tough conflict to define. “I’d watched all these different studies that say what you have got to do, and at the end of the day they reached pretty similar conclusions. But what you’ve got to do is really hard.” The counterinsurgency manuals defined this kind of conflict as 80 percent political. He kept his focus on the political need to stand up the Afghan state and its security forces, but was left with “a lesser level of effort” for the task as he saw it.