The Long War

by David Loyn

  The case for a continuing presence was made in a series of papers put together by the head of Campbell’s advisory group, Cliff Trout. He put five options on the table, with assessments of the risks attached to each. They ranged from 1,200 troops at embassy level, up to 8,500, which would keep a headquarters in Kabul, with troops in Bagram, Kandahar, and two bases in the east. This presumed that Italy would keep troops in the west, Germany in the north, and Turkey at the Kabul airport. Trout said that rather than asking for an increase for more offensive capacity, the plan was to build the case from the bottom up, defining “a pathway of how we can reduce the force presence for the United States over the long term.”14 The memory of McChrystal’s battles for more troops in 2009 were fresh. Campbell knew that if they went in demanding a large increase, they would get nowhere. “That was a non-starter and would fall on deaf ears, and it would be like crying wolf.”

  There were several ghosts in the room during the deliberations—from the British garrison in Kabul left with too little support and slaughtered in the winter of 1841, through the staircase on the roof in Saigon, and the 2012 incident in Benghazi, when Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed when the consulate was overrun. National Security Adviser Susan Rice was blamed for what looked like a cover-up of the Benghazi incident. The implication of the lowest of Campbell’s five options, with the clear risks to troops at “embassy level,” was uncomfortable for her. “It becomes very difficult,” said McCarthy, “especially for someone like Susan Rice, who’s already had Benghazi hung around her neck, to ignore the commander in the field who says if you do that, that will be high risk to mission and force.”

  The way Campbell brought Carter round when he came to Kabul in the spring was to point out that the reductions to 1,200 troops, the “embassy level” option, would not provide any regional counterterrorist capacity. That got Carter’s attention. The U.S. would lose the opportunity to use Afghanistan as a launchpad for attacks, which might be needed when facing instability in nuclear-armed Pakistan.

  After his two terms, Obama wanted to be able to say he had closed down Bush’s other war. But he recognized the counterterrorism imperative, and Campbell continued to press his case, believing Afghanistan deserved it. “They wanted our help. They wanted to get rid of the Taliban. They wanted to have a democratic and peaceful and secure, stable Afghanistan. We had a government that wanted to work with us, I felt we needed to give that a chance.”

  Obama’s change of course was announced in a low-key event in the Roosevelt Room in the White House in October 2015. The president was flanked by Biden and Carter, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Joe Dunford, two weeks into his new post. Still setting himself against “endless war,” Obama conceded that 5,500 troops would remain beyond the end of 2016. He was persuaded that some troops should remain but did not take the maximum option of 8,500. One further base in the east would close, leaving less oversight of the Pakistan border. Close to the end as at the beginning of the long war, successive administrations continued to frame the Afghan project narrowly. Just chasing terrorists at the beginning rather than focusing on the environment that created them was one reason why the war took so long. The mantra that this was not a nation-building project remained intact.

  Campbell returned from Washington after the announcement and laid into Afghan forces for their failure to manage the situation for themselves. At a meeting of the Afghan National Security Council, he said, “The Taliban are not Ten Feet tall.” He said, “The blame game must stop now … If I hear one more policeman complain about the army or vice versa, I will pull my advisers immediately.”15 In a transcript of the meeting obtained by The Washington Post, the Afghan army chief of staff, General Qadam Shah Shahim, admitted that recruitment could not keep up with deaths and desertions. The Afghan army were in danger of losing Helmand Province. The CEO, Dr. Abdullah, admitted, “We have not met the people’s expectations.”

  Helmand Province had totemic status. Much British and American blood was spilled in taking it. In the meeting, the head of the NDS intelligence service, Rahmatullah Nabil, said that for the Taliban to have retaken much of the province was their “biggest recruiting tool.” But with 40 percent of Afghan armored Humvees in Helmand out of action because of poor servicing, troops were stuck at vulnerable checkpoints—sitting ducks for the Taliban. Campbell tried to rally his Afghan partners, saying the U.S. was as guilty as they were of “just putting our finger in the dike in Helmand.” He offered increased U.S. support, but reclaiming ground was the responsibility of Afghan forces. “You have much more equipment than they do. You’re better trained.”

  Less than a year after General Karimi had addressed the gathering of elders and Afghan soldiers in the former U.S. and UK bases at Camp Leatherneck/Bastion, to mark the handover of Helmand to full Afghan control, the area surrounding the huge desert base was effectively under Taliban control, particularly at night. Campbell sent U.S. troops back into “the same camp within a camp because it got so bad in there.”

  KUNDUZ HOSPITAL

  On October 3, 2015, Campbell touched down at Joint Base Andrews ahead of the final National Security Council meeting on Obama’s troop decision, to be told of one of the worst mistakes of the war. While he was in the air, an AC-130 had attacked a hospital run by the French agency Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) in Kunduz in the northeast, killing forty-two people. There were running battles for the town for most of 2015—with the Taliban twice holding the center—the first time they had taken a provincial capital since 2001. U.S. special operators, who had arrived to shore up local forces four days before, had to turn back retreating soldiers at gunpoint at the airport. Their plane was nearly overwhelmed in what they said was like “the scene from the Saigon embassy.”16 After securing the airport, they turned to the city, mostly in the hands of the Taliban. The hospital was in the area under their control. There is no doubt that some Taliban fighters were among the patients, but they respected the neutrality of the hospital; they were not using it as a base.

  The night of the attack was clear, and the hospital was one of the only buildings in town with lights on, as it had a generator. Two MSF flags had been placed on the roof that day, as well as their flag flying at the gate. The hospital was overflowing with patients from the fighting, who spilled into corridors. One hundred MSF staff were sleeping in the basement, taking refuge from the fighting in the city. An internal MSF inquiry found that “those who were awake after 10:00 p.m. report having noticed how calm the night was in comparison to the intense fighting of the previous days.”17 Guilhem Molinie, the head of MSF in Afghanistan, had written to a contact in the Third Special Forces Group, the U.S. unit deployed to Kunduz after the fall of the city, to confirm the hospital’s neutral status, and sent the GPS coordinates to a dozen Afghan and international entities in the country. But this was not enough. The AC-130 is a huge, slow-moving airplane, stable enough for cannons, a Gatling gun that will fire 350 rounds in twelve seconds, and a 105 mm howitzer, and it devastated the hospital complex during several runs, lasting more than an hour.18

  From the moment of the first shots, MSF contacted anyone they could, from Resolute Support headquarters in Kabul to the political adviser of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, but they could not make it stop. At 2:59, forty minutes into the attack, MSF received a text from RS saying, “I’ll do my best, praying for you all.”19 The shooting did not stop for another twenty minutes. Amid scenes of horror, an MSF doctor died on an office desk, turned into a makeshift operating table, as colleagues tried in vain to save his life.

  In Washington, Campbell initially stated that U.S. troops were under threat when the air strike was called in, the information he was given.20 Initial media attempts to uncover what happened were confused by Afghan government statements that there were Taliban in the hospital. In a brief news conference at the Pentagon a few days later, Campbell changed his account to say that Afghan forces near the hospital were under fire and called
in the strike. His style was to allow command decisions to be taken at the right level, not approving every action. “I didn’t keep everything to myself. I would make sure that my commanders on the ground had the ability to make some tough calls as well.”

  Six weeks later, back in Kabul, Campbell announced the results of an investigation he had ordered, headed by someone outside his command, and including a special operator and an AC-130 pilot. Their report showed a catalog of errors. The aircrew had not followed the rules of engagement, since the strike was called without eyes on the target and was unnecessary for force protection. Calling in an air strike of this sort against a Taliban target was an offensive operation, not then authorized for U.S. forces.

  The investigation found that the aircraft had initially taken off to support Afghan troops who were under pressure, but its mission changed to target an Afghan NDS building in the hands of the Taliban. The coordinates the crew were given took them to an empty field because of a technical malfunction, so they attacked the “closest, largest building,” the well-lit hospital. Worse, through computer failure, the crew had lost the ability to send or receive information.21 The TF-714 command at Bagram were looking at the building that was the planned target, and inexplicably, the control room at Resolute Support in Kabul were looking at another building. When they began to receive desperate messages from MSF to stop the attack, they sent a Predator drone to circle round, and it saw the attack on the hospital a long way from the target, but they took no action to stop the onslaught of fire. Calling it a “perfect storm” of errors, Campbell recommended that several people be relieved from their positions, but was overruled by Special Operations Command, who took no disciplinary action.

  NOT THE LAST FOUR-STAR

  Campbell was called the last four-star in a CBS 60 Minutes film by Lara Logan. She reported that one troubling factor in the conflict remained unchanged since she interviewed him in the east in 2010—Pakistan’s continued backing for the Taliban. Like so many commanders before him, Campbell had tried to influence the relationship with Pakistan so the Taliban could no longer have the safe haven they had enjoyed. He talked weekly to the army chief Raheel Sharif and visited when he could. Pakistan claimed it was doing what it could to prevent insurgents from crossing. In 2014, the Pakistan Army launched a big offensive across the frontier region against insurgents, whose actions now threatened to destabilize the Pakistani state. They pushed back thousands of Afghan refugees, many of whom had lived in Pakistan since the 1980s, and they began to fence the frontier, causing clashes with Afghan troops as the boundary line was disputed. But there were still big questions over whether Pakistan had also acted against the Haqqani network. Sharif flew Campbell over the Haqqani heartland, Miramshah. The town was deserted after the offensive, but they did not land. Campbell flew over a madrassah known to be under Haqqani control, wondering if they had “let the senior Haqqani network leave before they actually went in.”

  There was one authority to use military force he did not succeed in winning, and that was to go after the Taliban leadership. It was frustrating that the Taliban were on the offensive, but he could not respond in the same way. “That’s why the whole Pakistan issue was such a big thing.”

  He would not be the “last four-star.” On March 2, 2016, Campbell handed over command to his West Point classmate, General John W. “Mick” Nicholson Jr., who would command until September 2018.

  Campbell retired from Afghanistan. Of all the U.S. commanders, only Joe Dunford went on to another military role. The post was so exposed, and the close contact with senior politicians over contentious issues always rebounded on Kabul. Campbell’s frank advice to keep more troop in Afghanistan for longer, against the wishes of the administration, cost him a promotion.22 He reflected that the administration’s focus on troop numbers sometimes obscured the need to see the bigger picture of where U.S. long-term interests lay. “Where we failed as a government was seeing how Afghanistan could play a constructive role in the national security interest of the wider region.” In a retirement ceremony with full honors, reviewing an old guard fife-and-drum parade in their Continental army uniforms, the army chief of staff, Mark Milley, called “JC” Campbell the “most respected four-star among us today.”

  15

  ENDURING COMMITMENT

  By 2017, the Afghan war effort seemed like a plane crashing on autopilot.1

  —H. R. McMaster

  THE FAMILY BUSINESS

  If General John W. “Mick” Nicholson Jr. had not been moving house on 9/11, he would have been at his desk in the Pentagon, one hundred feet from the nose of the plane that hit the building. His office was destroyed. “For me and for many of us it’s personal,” he said.2

  Few Americans in uniform have spent as much time in Afghanistan since 9/11 as he had. In 2006, he was in the mountains of the east, commanding a brigade, where he introduced counterinsurgency principles ahead of the general change in doctrine. In 2008, he became deputy commander of ISAF forces in the south when the marines arrived in Helmand. In 2009, he headed the Pakistan-Afghanistan coordination cell in the office of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when Richard Holbrooke was hyphenating the two countries in his diplomatic role. In 2010, Nicholson returned to Kabul as deputy commanding general of U.S. forces and deputy chief of staff for ISAF. This long engagement in Afghanistan was followed by command of the storied 82nd Airborne Division; Nicholson was the first out of the plane over France when the division joined celebrations to mark the seventieth anniversary of D-day in 2014.

  He developed close links with partners in India, and in Delhi visited the simple slab of stone marking the grave of the other General John Nicholson, who died fighting the 1857 Indian uprising against British colonial rule. The modern General Nicholson’s background and experience were described as “unique” for the role of Kabul commander by Senator Mark Kirk at his confirmation hearing on January 28, 2016.

  Nicholson called the military the “family business.”3 Three cousins and his daughter, Caroline, were serving. His father, John W. “Jack” Nicholson Sr., and his uncle Jim Nicholson fought in Vietnam, both served in the Department of Veterans Affairs, and Jim was the Republican Party national chairman through the 2000 election, which saw George W. Bush into the White House.

  American public opinion may have believed Afghanistan a lost war, but not those most closely involved. “We do need to think about an enduring commitment to the Afghans,” Nicholson said in his Senate confirmation hearing. His view, that America needed to stay the course, repeated in press conferences and in a further hearing at the Senate a year later, was shared by an influential group of thirteen former generals and diplomats who had served in Afghanistan. Led by John Allen, they wrote an open letter to President Obama arguing that troop levels should be kept at around 10,000 rather than cutting to 5,500 as he wanted by the end of his term. The group included all the generals appointed to command in Afghanistan by President Obama, apart from the two still serving—Nicholson and General Joe Dunford, who had become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in October 2015.4

  Since the end of 2014, when the combat mission ended on the timetable, support for Afghan forces was designed to be at only the most senior level, in the six corps headquarters round the country. Pulling advisers out from further down had a damaging effect—in particular on unglamorous but essential areas like maintenance and logistics. Campbell began to stretch the envelope of support below the corps level when he sent troops back to Helmand. They took the units in the Afghan 215th Corps out one by one, completely refitting them with U.S. support before sending them back into the fight. The decision stretched his manpower capacity as well as his authorities, the rules that governed use of force. He needed to provide troops “out of hide” since he was given no new forces.

  In July 2016, when he had seen Nicholson’s first review, Obama made the announcement he had avoided so far. Far from the war ending, there would be an expansion of the mission, with “tailored supp
ort” for Afghan forces at a lower level. For the first time since 2014, conventional U.S. troops would be in the field with Afghan forces who were fighting the Taliban. And other NATO nations also agreed to equip “expeditionary advisory packages” to advise below the corps level.

  General Joe Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff since October 2015, said the change meant that the U.S. and its allies would have the right number of troops, working at the right level, providing advice “where it matters to advance the campaign.” There were risks in putting more troops in harm’s way, judged worth it for the overall counterterrorist objective. Until then, among Afghan forces, there was “a perception, even if it wasn’t always a reality,” said Dunford, “that we were holding back support.”

  The group of former generals and ambassadors wrote a second open letter ahead of the 2016 election, this time to the next president, calling for an “enduring partnership” with Afghanistan and troop levels to be maintained. “We should prepare and posture ourselves for what could be a generation-long struggle against extremism, with Afghanistan a key part of that struggle.”5 After the lengthy, cerebral debates in the National Security Council in the Obama years, there was a very different atmosphere in dealing with Afghanistan with the arrival in the White House of a very different leader in President Donald J. Trump.