The Long War

by David Loyn

  The bribe was small beer compared to the huge sums involved in the investigation of New Ansari, suspected of involvement in money laundering, including the movement of tens of millions of dollars stolen from Kabul Bank. Set up with $1 billion to develop credit for new business, the bank was run as a giant Ponzi scheme, whose directors handed out money with no conditions attached, much of which went to buy houses on Palm Jumeirah, a new luxury island in Dubai. Arresting Salehi was one thread in attempting to recover the cash from the Kabul Bank sinkhole by a new anticorruption unit set up with FBI support, the Major Crimes Task Force.

  The bank’s founder, Sherkhan Farnood, was a colorful character—a world-class poker player who gambled with the Afghan economy. Investigators got lucky when he fell out with Khalilullah Ferozi, his former driver and bodyguard whom he had appointed chief executive, and decided to talk.45 When the fraud was discovered, the bank was handling salaries for Afghan security forces and civil servants, as well as other crucial government services, and its collapse could bring down the state. But the capital had gone—in a failing airline, property in Dubai, and into thin air in bribes and $100,000 credit cards. Farnood told the whole story, implicating the vice president and the brother of the president, as well as many other prominent Afghans in scams that included setting up fake companies to siphon money out of the bank.

  Karzai opposed the investigation all the way, proud of how he had ordered the release of Salehi at the beginning. “Yes, absolutely, I intervened,” he said. “Not only I intervened, but I intervened very, very strongly.”46 He demoted two prosecutors involved in the case against Salehi and forbade the UK from continuing to pay top-up salaries for anticorruption investigators, so their salaries dropped from $800 to $200.47 When Kabul Bank charges were finally brought in 2013, he ensured some bank regulators who had tried to stop the rot also appeared in the dock, and they were jailed for negligence. It turned out that Salehi was Karzai’s main conduit to the Taliban.

  These were murky waters. There were no public protests from the international community to Karzai’s intervention in the Salehi case, and the reason soon became clear.48 He was on the CIA payroll, and the U.S. were beginning to discover limits to what could be done against corruption in 2010, if they were not willing to restructure the state. As the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) put it, “The Afghan government was so deeply enmeshed in corrupt and criminal networks that dismantling them would mean dismantling major pillars of support for the government itself.”49

  The international intervention had done a deal with the devil that was hard to unravel. As U.S. Marines stabilized northern Helmand in 2010, they insisted the police chief of Musa Qala, Commander Koka, be fired. He was believed to be taking $20,000 a day in taxes on opium. Security immediately became worse, so he was reinstated. Just at the time when the military force was at its largest, peaking at 150,000, the limits on action to combat corruption exposed frailty at the heart of the counterinsurgency.

  Congress, who were paying the bills, were asking increasingly tough questions about corruption, voting to suspend aid flows until there were improvements. Senator Lindsey Graham said, “Karzai needs to be told that how you handle Kabul Bank depends greatly on what kind of support you’re going to get in the future.”50 But heading for the exit, the administration began to accept that corruption would not be resolved. In his White House statement in the summer of 2011 announcing the surge drawdown, Obama said, “We won’t try to make Afghanistan a perfect place.”

  The White House coordinator for the war, Doug Lute, always a surge skeptic, said he never thought they would be able to end corruption, so the counterinsurgency was flawed from the start. “I didn’t believe that we had a capable partner there. Corruption was endemic, capacity for governance was so limited, and the balance between the center and the periphery politically was so skewed, that counterinsurgency wasn’t going to work.”

  FRAGILE AND REVERSIBLE

  Before he left Afghanistan in July 2011, Petraeus wanted to do more to ensure the surge would deliver its full potential, and troops would not be pulled out until Afghanistan could fight on its own. But just as Obama felt boxed in by generals pushing for more troops in 2009, so he felt himself “gamed” in March 2011 after Petraeus told a NATO meeting that transition to Afghan forces should “commence” at the end of 2014.51 For the president, 2014 was to be the end date of transition.

  In a marathon session of more than three hours in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee two weeks later, Petraeus continued to push for a sustained commitment. Leaving immediately would damage Afghanistan, since the plan was working but was not finished, so needed more time. “While the security progress achieved over the past year is significant, it is also fragile and reversible.”52 He had first used the phrase in Iraq and now deployed it for Afghanistan to persuade politicians to continue supporting a cause that ten years after the fall of the Taliban was being seen with skeptical eyes. He was aware of other political pressures on the president—“congressional politics, national politics, strain on the force, budget deficits, coalition politics, you name it.” Obama wanted the surge over by the 2012 election. But Petraeus had seen the surge deliver success in stabilizing parts of Afghanistan for the first time for many years, including Helmand and Kandahar, and knew those gains were “reversible.”

  Before the NSC met to decide the date of the end of the surge, Gates made his twelfth and last trip to Afghanistan as secretary of defense, including an emotional journey to visit marines holding Sangin in the Helmand River valley. The 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, lost 25 killed and 184 wounded during their deployment, the highest loss for any marine unit during the Afghan war. One of the dead marines, Robert Kelly, was the son of Gates’s military assistant, Lieutenant General John Kelly, who spent some time in private with his son’s comrades. They gave him a photograph of Robert taken shortly before he fell, signed by the marines in his platoon. There was discussion of pulling the 3rd Battalion out early, as they had suffered such grievous losses. But commanders in the field strongly opposed the idea, and Gates supported them. The marines were “proud they had succeeded” in stabilizing Sangin, “where so many others had failed.”53

  That is why Gates came down on the side of those, led by Petraeus, who wanted surge troops to stay longer; American armed forces needed the chance to finish the job. He agreed with Petraeus that “the pieces were coming together” and that Washington analysts were missing signs of progress on the ground. As always, the CIA analysis was less rosy than what was reported by commanders in the field. He told Obama that the picture was much better than sometimes depicted on the news. The surge had delivered results, and “the closer you get to the front, the more optimistic things are.” Sangin was the main insurgent route into the capital of Helmand, Lashkar Gah, and it was a sign of progress that this district was to be in the first tranche to transition to full Afghan control in 2011.

  General John Allen, preparing to take over the Kabul command from Petraeus in July, was deeply concerned about a timetable-driven drawdown. “We would have troops actually leaving the theater before the full surge got on the ground.” He was facing a double transition, to repurpose ISAF from combat to advising, and to stand up more Afghan independent capacity. To him, the end of the surge should be decided on whether the task was done—“an end state not an end date.”

  The decisive meeting to decide future troop levels was June 21, 2011, less than a month before Petraeus left Afghanistan. Obama opened the meeting with a decision to pull out ten thousand troops the following month, and twenty-three thousand in July 2012, saying, “You are welcome to try to change my mind.” This was more troops out, more quickly than Petraeus had advised. Clinton said she would support Gates’s date of late September, although she and “the entire State Department team preferred December.”54 Biden had been campaigning for months for an earlier drawdown and was a strong counterweight in the room. The president’s only comp
romise to his commanders in the field, and secretaries of defense and state, was to push the 2012 date a few months to the “end of the summer.” He asked each person in the room if they would support the decision.

  Petraeus reminded him that his confirmation hearing to be director of the CIA was later that week, and he would be asked to provide his recommendation, which he was required to do. He told Obama he intended to say that the timetable was “more aggressive” than he would have preferred. He added that he would also say, “I fully support the decision of the Commander-in-Chief (the President) and will do everything humanly possible to implement the decision.” But he was not changing his recommendation. Petraeus could almost “feel the oxygen being sucked out of the room.” His rationale was solid. There had been no change in the facts on the ground in Afghanistan during the week since he made his recommendation, and that was the basis for him noting that his recommendation was unchanged.

  In his confirmation hearing to be CIA director, Petraeus was asked if this was a resigning issue, and his answer was clear: “Our troopers don’t get to quit. And I don’t think that commanders should contemplate that … this is not about me, it’s not about an individual commander, it’s not about a reputation. This is about our country.”55

  Obama was refocusing his presidency in drawing down troops to bring the war to what he called “a responsible end.” Eighteen months after launching the civilian surge alongside the troop surge—the most ambitious, if flawed, civil-military cooperation since the CORDS program in Vietnam—the president was turning his attention inward. “America, it is time to focus on nation building here at home.”56 The enormous cost of the war in blood and treasure would be reduced, and not a moment too soon for public opinion. In 2009, when the surge began, Pew Research were tracking 40 percent against keeping troops in Afghanistan. By the summer of 2011, as Allen took over command, this had tipped above 50 percent for the first time.

  Decision-making on the end date of the surge was reminiscent of earlier arguments, if higher octane because of Petraeus’s high public profile. The president set a mission—in this case, transition to Afghan control; military commanders made recommendations based on what they needed to achieve success, and the president, suspicious he was being manipulated, approved a smaller force for a shorter period of time than the commanders thought they needed to do the task he had set.

  The impending departure of troops had its own destabilizing effect. On the ground in Helmand, Carter Malkasian saw the effect of the president’s 2011 announcement. Villagers held shuras to decide what to do, believing that police officers would desert and the Taliban would return. Two elders traveled fifteen miles to tell him they had heard the speech. “Without the Marines the situation will go backwards,” they said. “The people have great fear … Because of the announcement, the Taliban’s morale has risen, the government’s morale has fallen.”57

  Until then, there had been a steady trickle of ex-Taliban laying down their weapons and coming over to the government side. That stopped overnight. Malkasian had successfully used local militias as a stopgap, cycling members through training to build a uniformed police force as fast as possible, handing over the war to competent Afghan forces. Between September 2009 and 2012, the number of U.S. Marines went down from 1,000 to 150, while the number of Afghan soldiers increased from 200 to 1,200, and the police went from 50 to 300. But only two years later, after the withdrawal of the marines, the district was in the hands of the Taliban.

  Malkasian now saw it was a vain hope that “the impending U.S. drawdown would spur cooperation, rallying Garmser’s leaders together against the common Taliban threat.”58 As Petraeus said, “fragile” progress was indeed “reversible.”

  I’M NOT SURE I KNOW HIM

  Dave Petraeus had not wanted to go to Afghanistan; it was thrust on him at the end of his military career. He admitted that when he arrived in Kabul, he did not have the knowledge he had of Iraq, although he had written reports on the conflict and visited many times as commander of CENTCOM.59 He left Kabul knowing he had not made the decisive change he wanted—delivered a turning point, “flipped” the country. Violence was up, and while there was clear progress against the Taliban in Kandahar and Helmand, they were growing in strength, particularly in the ring of provinces around Kabul itself. Petraeus’s will alone was not enough to turn the war in America’s favor. While he liked to quote Lawrence, Petraeus exerted far tighter central control than Lawrence, who saw himself as an adviser, a partner in another man’s war. Lawrence would never have talked of his role in fighting counterinsurgency warfare as “guiding a sometimes frightened and unthinking herd of cattle to its destination,” Petraeus’s favored Stampede image.

  Petraeus spent his life thinking, reading, and writing about counterinsurgency operations, from his first encounter, fresh out of West Point, with French troops who had served in Indochina, through his distinguished rise to the top. But when it came to it, his take on his year in Kabul was clear. “I don’t think you can characterize what we did in Afghanistan as truly being a fully-resourced counterinsurgency campaign—though, to be fair, the Obama Administration did very significantly increase the levels of forces and other resources. We just about got the inputs right from late 2010 through the summer of 2011, but then the drawdown began and it became increasingly difficult to continue to push the Taliban and other groups back in order to maintain the space and time needed to develop the Afghan Security Forces and essential institutions.”

  On the same March day that Petraeus was trying to win continued political support for the war at the Senate Armed Services Committee, making the case to keep more troops in Afghanistan for longer, nine Afghan boys were killed while collecting firewood in the eastern province of Kunar by a strike from Apache helicopters. A lone survivor, Hemad Khan, came down through the snow to his village, bleeding from shrapnel wounds, to raise the alarm. An inquiry carried out by the commander of 101st Airborne, Major General John F. Campbell (who would later himself command ISAF in Kabul), found that the Apaches were responding to two rocket attacks on a U.S. base in the Pech Valley.60 In the face of an outcry, Petraeus issued a rare public apology for civilian casualties, immediately rebuffed by Karzai. A week after the attack, U.S. forces finally pulled out of the Pech Valley.

  On July 4, 2011, Petraeus served his seventh Independence Day since 9/11 in a combat zone. He handed over to General John Allen two weeks later. The speculation that he was planning a political career had followed him into the field in Kabul. A Fox News correspondent, who came ostensibly to interview him, offered him his owner Rupert Murdoch’s support if he ran. And at a dinner in New York, a Republican booster said, “I’ll contribute a billion dollars if you’ll just run for president.” Petraeus told him, “You’ve never even asked me what my views are. So let me tell you I am a thoughtful internationalist, that’s probably okay, a fiscal Conservative, probably okay and a social inclusive, not okay and you’ll be torn apart by the base.” He was approached by Democratic boosters too, but he told them the same thing—that he stopped voting when he became a two-star and was not going to change his mind now. Rumors of his political ambition affected his dealings with the Obama White House, particularly when he was in the long discussions over the surge in 2009. “Some of them felt that I had presidential ambitions which I went to great lengths to assure them I did not have.”

  Any thoughts he might have had of a political career were cut down by the revelation of an affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, subsequent conviction for mishandling classified materials connected with giving her access to his emails, and swift exit from his new job as CIA director. In his first public speech after the affair on November 11, 2012, the sea captain’s son spoke of “slipping his moorings,” promising to return to the values he held before.61 After so many years in the limelight, America’s best-known modern general remained something of an enigma, even to many close to him. The counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen said, “I worked with him
. But I am not sure I know him.”62 Perhaps that was the way Dave Petraeus wanted it—behind the mask of command.

  PHASE FOUR

  2011–2014

  DRAWDOWN

  11

  PIVOT POINT

  Let’s pray for God to rescue us from these two demons … There are two demons in our country now [meaning the U.S. and the Taliban].

  —President Hamid Karzai, March 17, 2012

  THE FAR SIDE OF THE SURGE

  “History,” said President Karzai, “is a witness to how Afghanistan deals with occupiers.” The occupiers he was talking about were the international coalition in Afghanistan. His remarks betrayed the best hopes of the international intervention. Standing shaded by tall plane trees and larches in the large garden area of the Arg for a press conference on a fine May day in 2011, the president added to a growing catalog of complaints. He demanded an end to night raids; an end to all U.S. military operations if not partnered by Afghan troops; an end to foreign-owned private security companies; and the closure of provincial reconstruction teams, the joint military and development bases across the country, which he called “a parallel state.”

  As Karzai’s list of grievances grew longer, he was barely on speaking terms with General David Petraeus. In his last year in uniform, the most celebrated American commander of the modern age fought a relentless campaign, using the surge troops to their full potential, which put pressure on the Taliban but increased civilian casualties.1 Petraeus took a more transactional approach to the president than had McChrystal.2 The Afghan president’s renewed demand to end all air strikes in 2011 followed an attack in Now Zad in Helmand Province, where a U.S. Marine patrol called in a strike in a firefight that took the life of a marine. When the smoke cleared, more than twelve civilians, including several children, were dead in the house the Taliban had been firing from.