The Long War
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There was one more condition attached. This was the last throw of the dice. There would be no more troops for Afghanistan, and the withdrawal would begin in 2011. In a separate videoconference with McChrystal and Eikenberry, the president made this limitation clearer: troops should not go to areas that could not be handed over to full Afghan security control by 2011. McChrystal told Obama he did not agree with the deadline, but would salute and get on with it. “You have made your decision and I appreciate being listened to.”
In the president’s mind, the troop surge would be on a standard distribution bell curve, out on as steep a slope as they went in. There should be no more policy drift. He wanted troops on the ground at the “fastest pace possible” and tried to shift the start date to the left.51 The eighteen-month timeline was designed to focus attention in the Afghan government to step up, improve their forces, and take on the fight for themselves, based on Pentagon assessments of how long it would take for the surge to take effect.
The withdrawal schedule was opposed by almost every senior military figure in the land, handing tactical advantage to the Taliban, who would know how long they had to hold out. Immediately, Petraeus and others worked to move the reverse slope of the bell curve to the right, or at least flatten the top of the surge, so troops could stay for longer.
Nine days after announcing the largest increase in troops since the start of the Afghan war, Obama went to Oslo to collect the Nobel Peace Prize. The same day, McChrystal headed out to spend a night next to the Gettysburg battlefield with his wife, Annie. It was a place where he often sought inspiration at important moments in his life. He had just given testimony to Congress and, as always at big moments, went running.
I strongly believed we could succeed, and committed myself completely. As I ran that evening alongside the grass of the battlefield, gray and dry in the wintry early evening, I knew that despite all I’d done, all I’d learned, and all of myself that I was prepared to devote, in war, nothing was certain.52
MARINE-ISTAN
Four days after McChrystal arrived in command in Kabul in June, Operation Panther’s Claw kicked off a rolling series of offensives in Helmand. More than three hundred soldiers from the Scottish regiment, the Black Watch, were dropped at night from twelve CH-47 helicopters into farmland at Babaji in the west of the main populated zone in Helmand.
Nowhere in the long war can the words missed opportunity be used more accurately than for Helmand. Issues of land rights, justice, access to water, as well as security were not dealt with in the years after the Taliban fell. In many places, a predatory police force alienated people from the government and weakened local security, so that when the Taliban returned, they found people willing to support them again. British troops had been outnumbered and pinned down in daily firefights in the three years since they arrived in the province in 2006. Panther’s Claw was designed to change that—to allow a British withdrawal to the main population centers around the capital, Lashkar Gah, while U.S. Marines moved in strength to the more scattered communities on either side of the Helmand River in the north and south of the province. This was one of the most consequential strategic decisions of the war. Not only were McChrystal’s first six months dominated by the protracted reexamination of the war in Washington, but his ability to shape the war on the ground was limited. The plan was already in place and hard to change. The British protectorate of “Helmandshire” was to become “Marine-istan.”
Marine commandant General James Conway had been trying to get the marines out of Iraq and into Afghanistan since 2007 but had been turned down by Gates, who relented “for one-time only” when McNeill needed extra troops for a summer offensive in Helmand in 2008, sending the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit.53
They first took an airstrip built by Saudi falconers to hunt in the southern Afghan desert and then destroyed Taliban forces in the southernmost populated district of Garmser, causing up to five hundred casualties for the loss of one marine. As at Arghandab when assaulted by Canadian troops in Operation Medusa in 2006, the Taliban were confident they could hold the ground, and reinforcements were sent by the Quetta Shura. It was the “worst defeat in the recorded history of the district,” according to a physically brave and intellectually curious State Department political officer who arrived in Garmser in 2009, Dr. Carter Malkasian.54
The marines used the Garmser battle as a wedge to lever open the door for a far larger deployment to Helmand. In February 2009, anticipating the first Obama surge announcement, Brigadier General Larry Nicholson went to look around and saw the empty desert next to the main British base in Helmand, in the center of the province, where they had laid down a modern airstrip long enough for civilian airliners. “Who owns that space?” he asked a British colonel, who said, “Fucking you do, if you want it.”55 A huge new marine base, Camp Leatherneck, was built by navy Seabees in the desert, and ten thousand marines began to arrive in June, comprehensively equipped with their own artillery, air capacity, and other assets. This was most of the effective fighting strength of the twenty-one thousand troops Obama agreed ahead of the 2009 assessment—plans on track when McKiernan was abruptly moved out.
Given a clean slate, McChrystal would have secured Kandahar first, “get that squared away, go out from there.” Helmand was a sideshow; Kandahar was the key. But his capacity to act was limited. Canada was deeply committed to its role as the main player in Kandahar. Not only did the marines want their own battle space, but they went to Helmand with a remarkable condition attached, meaning they were not under McChrystal’s command. They would be under the direct command of a marine lieutenant general at CENTCOM, not Kabul. Even if McChrystal had wanted them to move to Kandahar, he could not have ordered it. Marine Corps exceptionalism goes back to their founding legend in the Revolutionary War. The sense they need to look after themselves was strengthened on the beachheads of Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, where they felt let down by the army and navy. They are separate, elite—in their minds frankly superior.
McChrystal found the desire for marine autonomy to be “very limiting and frustrating.” He could not employ their formidable airpower flexibly across the south, as it was there to support marine operations. “It’s the sanctity of the Air-Ground team. And it’s stupid; it was stupid in Vietnam and it’s stupid now. And it was a real point of contention for me.” Gates wrote that agreeing to this command structure was his “biggest mistake in overseeing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”56 It was wasteful of resources, as back-office and support functions were replicated by what was seen by McChrystal’s headquarters as a “42nd member of the coalition.”57
McChrystal may not have been able to decide where troops should go, but he could determine how they could fight. If the population were the prize in counterinsurgency warfare, protecting them should be the first priority of all military decisions. Two weeks after arriving in Kabul, he issued a tactical directive designed to change the way the war was fought. It laid down that airpower and artillery should never be used against Afghan family compounds, except under very restricted circumstances of self-defense, and that mosques should never be entered or attacked. Afghan homes should be entered only with Afghan forces in the lead. There should be more respect shown by military convoys, instead of forcing civilians off the road as they muscled through. To change the mindset, he introduced the idea of “courageous restraint,” which meant troops could not open fire if there was any risk of civilian casualties, unless facing imminent threat to their own lives.
McChrystal knew that limiting the capacity to call in air strikes or artillery entailed risks to coalition troops, although there was no change to the principle of self-defense when troops were directly threatened. But more than any commander before or after him, he grasped the damaging impact of civilian casualties on Afghan public opinion. “The Taliban cannot militarily defeat us—but we can defeat ourselves,” he wrote in his directive.
He ordered that units should no longer publicize numbers of enemy de
ad, wanting to take away incentives that made it look as if killing was the “primary goal.”58 Instead, winning depended “on our ability to separate insurgents from the center of gravity—the population.” This was driven not only by a moral imperative but to connect people to the state by winning their support. “Gaining and maintaining that support must be our overriding operational imperative.”
After failing to get adequate details of one civilian casualty incident, McChrystal let rip at the morning briefing, watched by hundreds of people on screens across the country. “What is it that we don’t understand?” he said, pounding the table. “We’re going to lose this fucking war if we don’t stop killing civilians.”59 To McChrystal, the focus on the people and not the enemy was not a revelation. “You can’t win in Afghanistan unless the Afghan people think you should win, it’s in their interests. That’s not hard.”
It turned out that it was hard to get the message down to every platoon. Nine months into his command, he told a virtual town hall meeting of soldiers that on no occasion when a suspect vehicle was shot approaching a checkpoint was a suicide bomber found. “We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.”60
GOVERNMENT IN A BOX
The new way of fighting had its toughest test in February 2010—Operation Moshtarak—the biggest battle of McChrystal’s time in command. The target was the densely populated farmland west of Lashkar Gah, in the widest irrigated part of Helmand between the river and a big loop in the canal built by the U.S. in the 1950s, an area of about one hundred square miles, with the town of Nad Ali in the south and the small village of Marjah at the center.
Moshtarak was the first operation where McChrystal sought the formal consent of President Karzai. This was the relationship he cultivated above all, seeing the head of a sovereign government as an essential element in the counterinsurgency plan and wanting to build Karzai as the commander in chief in the American model. He called himself “Karzai’s general.” Now he wanted Karzai to own the war. In their meetings in the Arg, out of respect, he wore his green army service uniform and polished shoes, with a shirt and tie, rather than the combat fatigues and boots he wore the rest of the time. For Karzai, more than the dress uniform, McChrystal’s quick acceptance of civilian casualties made the difference. “He would let me know if there was a casualty,” Karzai said. “He would immediately call me himself. And he would apologize, and he would say, ‘How can I help?’”61 This had the effect of defusing this most contentious of issues, so instead of emotional accusations, the president would go on TV, say there had been an apology, and move on.
McChrystal encouraged Karzai to travel widely, recognizing his gift for retail politics. A special pod was installed in a C-130 so the president could travel in more comfort.62 This had the added advantage that in the relative quiet of the pod, McChrystal was able to “frame key issues during uninterrupted flights in a way that hectic palace schedules often prevented.”63
In seeking Karzai’s prior approval for Moshtarak, he sought to move the commander in chief role from appearance to reality. The evening the assault was due to begin, with troops already loading into helicopters, McChrystal’s attempt to see the president was initially blocked, as Karzai had a cold. He insisted and met the president in his home—a modest 1970s concrete house in the grounds of the Arg. Karzai was surprised to be consulted, saying it was an unprecedented request. The two leading security ministers, Hanif Atmar and General Abdul Rahim Wardak, were at the meeting, and after briefly seeking their advice, Karzai gave his consent. McChrystal said he would have canceled the operation if approval had been withheld.64
The British major general Nick Carter, who had been McChrystal’s planning colonel in the tents in Bagram in 2002, commanded Operation Moshtarak. He had taken command of southern Afghanistan in the fall. Carter was an enthusiastic advocate of courageous restraint, although he preferred the term tactical patience. “The problem with courageous restraint is it’s quite difficult for a soldier to understand what it means.” The principle was the same, and however expressed, Carter knew it was hard to grasp on the ground. “What you don’t want is them thinking that the brave thing to do is not to fire your weapon, which it may well be, and inadvertently giving first advantage to the insurgent, but it’s quite a challenging concept.”65
In Moshtarak, the plan was to project the threat of overwhelming firepower, while using as little as possible. In previous operations of this size, before the new emphasis on reducing civilian casualties, there would have been preparatory salvos of rocket and artillery fire, but not this time. “The rubble the soldiers would have walked through,” McChrystal wrote, “would have been the remnants of the bodies, homes and livelihoods of the very people we sought to protect.”66
No assault was ever better signaled ahead of time through shuras, an information campaign, and targeted special operations. The Taliban responded with their own “night letters,” dropped in homes to warn of consequences for working with the Americans. Prior warning also meant the Taliban could liberally lace IEDs across the landscape in a lethal welcome to ten thousand American, British, French, and Canadian troops, and five thousand Afghans. When the assault finally began, thousands of troops were dropped from more than sixty helicopters across the region. Others walked in through deep-rutted fields, already green with the first poppy shoots, fording thigh-deep irrigation canals—slow, methodical, dangerous work to dominate the ground, with no prior bombardment to cut a way through.
Moshtarak was designed as the beginning phase of an operation to move east and stabilize Kandahar, but it took a long time and turned into a public relations failure, mainly because it was so oversold at the start. At the start of the offensive, one marine colonel told his troops, “Be prepared for catastrophic success,” and reporters were briefed accordingly in Kabul and outside the country.
Less than a month after the fighting started, McChrystal brought Karzai into Marjah to face a shura of elders. They did not hold back in the presence of the president. It was fine, they shouted, to clear out the Taliban but not to replace them with the predatory police who had been there before. There were angry denunciations of Abdul Rahman Jan, ARJ, the notorious former police chief, who was at the meeting, whom the elders knew collaborated with the Taliban to protect his poppy fields.67 Also standing in the shadows, waiting for his chance to return to power, was Sher Mohammad Akhunzada, SMA, the provincial governor Karzai was forced to fire at the insistence of the British.68 McChrystal knew SMA was corrupt, but he was a skillful political operator and succeeded in shaking McChrystal’s hand with a photographer present at the end of the meeting, to try to imply how close they were.69
The problem was that in taking Marjah, McChrystal did not have anything better to offer. Since his arrival in Kabul, he had been pushing for better civil-military relations but faced the same cultural divide that had been there from the beginning. A year into the “civilian surge,” there was some more capacity, but not enough, and most of those who came were not good enough. There was still not the quick-response military commanders needed, while for their part, civilian officials felt the military had unrealistic expectations.
McChrystal came to regret a phrase he had adopted that behind the marines there would be a “government in a box ready to roll in.” One senior aid official said, “It was very clear to us in the embassy that anyone who talked of that did not understand. You can’t clear a district, and then roll up with a thing called governance and unwrap it.”70 Without competent officials able to provide services with clear budget lines they could access, it would not work. McChrystal’s problem was that USAID were not offering anything better.
After several months of looking, the only choice who could be found for district governor of Marjah was Haji Zahir, who had served time in Germany for stabbing his stepson. Seven other officials, immediately known as the “Magnificent Seven,” were supposed to ride into town a
longside him and immediately set up government services. At some risk to his own life, the marine brigade commander went to Lashkar Gah to collect them, but they refused to come. A senior State Department official, Marc Chretien, working as an adviser to the marines, personally apologized to the marines for the failure. Haji Zahir did at least go into Marjah, but he had spent so long away from Helmand that he did not speak good Pashto. He did not last long—the first of three district governors for Marjah in the next twelve months. The Magnificent Seven were never heard from again.
Two months after the operation began, the NATO senior civilian in Kabul, Mark Sedwill, came to visit, his helicopter failing to find anywhere other than a field of waving poppies to land in.71 Sedwill was meeting the provincial governor, Muhammad Gulab Mangal, and the message they heard from people who came for an impromptu shura had not changed—the U.S. Marines were fine, but they should not be replaced by Afghan police. In the makeshift district center, still with no functioning administration two months on, young marines patiently took details from farmers lining up to claim damage for property or livestock damaged in the attack. The money for compensation came from the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) fund, which also went to compensate owners of shops in the bazaar for damage by the Taliban and looting by Afghan soldiers in the offensive. Other CERP money went to put loudspeakers on the wall of a mosque to amplify the call to prayer, immediately torn down by the Taliban. As so often, competing visions of development clashed in the field. A cash-for-work scheme to clear clogged canals was soon stopped, as it did not fit the “quick impact” aim of CERP, although the marines who set up the program said it was one of the most effective interventions they made.72