by Jim Mattis
Much talk has been given to having an “exit strategy.” My thought was that “exiting” a war was a by-product of winning that war. Unless you want to lose, you don’t tell an enemy when you are done fighting, and you don’t set an exit unrelated to the situation on the ground. Dave Petraeus now faced a very short window in which to turn around a deteriorating war effort. It would take months to even get the additional troops on the ground, and more months to make an impact. Nevertheless, he thought he could show progress. The challenge was threefold. First, the Taliban were a zealous and determined foe. Second, the Taliban enjoyed a sanctuary in Pakistan, Afghanistan’s neighbor to the east. Third, Afghanistan’s government lacked capable functionaries. Three decades of fighting since the Soviet invasion had destroyed the country’s social fabric and much of its economy, while reducing its educated class to a fragmented minority.
After coalition troops cleared a district, Afghan soldiers had to move in to hold what had been gained. The time needed to do this proved as indeterminate as it was critical. In a torn-apart society, Dave Petraeus had to choose where to deploy his coalition and Afghan troops to gain the most before time ran out. Near the top of his list was the district of Marjah, the epicenter of the opium trade. In the spring of 2010, it had taken an assault by more than seven thousand Marines and Afghan soldiers to wrest it from the Taliban. Afghan officials were then flown in to set up what was called “government in a box,” a governance team with directors for health, water, agriculture, schools, police, and education. But once the “box” was opened, only a few scared Afghan officials appeared. When those officials stepped inside Marjah’s marketplace, they faced menacing farmers furious at losing the lucrative poppy trade. The officials fled, leaving governance to the coalition.
When I visited—a year after the initial assault—both an American battalion and a Special Forces advisory team were still there. In the summer of 2011, President Obama declared, “The tide of war is receding….These long wars will come to a responsible end.” But I had been assigned two contradictory objectives: The forces under my command at CENTCOM were to degrade the Taliban while building up the Afghan army. They were also to withdraw on a strict timetable, independent of circumstances on the ground. We could do one or the other, but not both.
I told Secretary Gates when I took command that I would give him my independent judgment of progress and challenges. To do that, I knew I needed a balanced risk assessment that included outside perspectives. Perhaps I and our combat commanders in that country were too close to the people and their problems, grasping every success as a sign of impending victory, even if only transient. After all, our military is hardwired with a can-do spirit; otherwise we could not take on what war requires of us. Further, with repeat tours, some of our battle-tested leaders had developed a fondness for the Afghan people that could reasonably cloud their judgment. I sensed that I needed someone to stand back and scan the horizon. Twenty years earlier, during Desert Storm, I had first dispatched experienced officers to observe the battle and report back, outside my chain of command. They were my “focused telescopes” or “Juliet officers.” Now, at the strategic level, I turned to three accomplished, savvy friends: David Bradley, chairman of The Atlantic magazine, retired Army General Jack Keane, and my old mentor, retired Marine General Tony Zinni. I knew they would tell me without reservation what they perceived to be ground truth. Separately, they flew to Afghanistan, licensed to talk to leaders and troops at all levels. They returned and gave me their individual assessments of our counterinsurgency effort.
They saw real progress, steps in the right direction, but cautioned that it was an enormous undertaking and would take a lot of time. Tony Zinni later wrote that counterinsurgency “can be expensive in treasure and casualties, require large numbers of troops, fall on an unreceptive populace, and fail to implant permanent change. Buyer beware!” After hearing their reports, I had a chance meeting with retired General Colin Powell. I explained what I was hearing, and he cut to the heart of the matter: “Jim, the central question is: Will all your successes just be transient, because you don’t have the forces or the time to solidify them?” The question rode in the back of my mind in every briefing and in every visit to Afghanistan.
Although Regional Command East, under the U.S. Army, provided the most complex geographic and tribal challenges, it was there that I also saw the unique value of allied forces. King Abdullah of Jordan, ever our ally, had allocated one of his most capable battalions to support us in Afghanistan, despite the pressing need for them at home, along his Syrian border. The commander, Colonel Aref al-Zaben, was a resourceful leader who brought fresh ideas to bear. He deployed his men on frequent patrols, and his interpreters kept him updated on the Taliban’s hateful messages going out over the airways to isolated communities in the mountain valleys. Using his own Muslim clerics, he began a daily radio barrage contradicting the fundamentalists’ misinterpretation of the Koran. The program was titled “Voices of Moderate Islam.” His troops distributed small radios to the families, and his clerics took to the air, challenging the Taliban’s ideology in a manner only fellow Muslims could. In call-in shows, it was clear that the Taliban were losing their hold on the people. On patrol, female soldiers wearing camouflage head scarves actively engaged with Afghan women in the villages in a manner that men or non-Muslims could not. Aref arranged for Afghan village elders to be flown to the Jordanian capital. In Amman, King Abdullah would address them in person, standing in front of a mosque but across the street from a Christian church in full view. The message of tolerance was clear, from the valleys of Afghanistan to the mosques of Jordan.
From his infantrymen’s patrols in the district villages to moderate Islam broadcasts on the radio fighting the “battle of the narrative” to the king’s talks as a leader of his faith and his people, the Jordanian unit batted well above its weight, bringing strength beyond numbers to our NATO-led coalition.
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NATO’s key operational vulnerability for our allies like Jordan and for all our forces across Afghanistan was the terrorist havens provided by neighboring Pakistan.
In the days following 9/11, American officials had insisted that Pakistan align with us. Pakistan initially cooperated. But the country’s leaders soon returned to playing a double game, providing the Taliban with a sanctuary. When we cleared them out of Afghan villages, they could retreat across the border to lick their wounds, rest, resupply, and bide their time to come back in again. The history of counterinsurgency teaches us that an enemy who can roll in and out like waves on a beach is devilishly hard to beat.
To understand how we found ourselves in that box, we have to look back. In 1949, as the era of colonialism ended, England returned sovereignty to predominantly Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan, separating them in a bloody partition that cost approximately a million lives. Since then, they have fought four wars, and both now have significant numbers of nuclear weapons. Pakistan views all geopolitics through the prism of its hostility toward India. Afghanistan lies to the rear of Pakistan, so the Pakistan military wanted a friendly government in Kabul that was resistant to Indian influence. This is why, after Russia left Afghanistan in 1988, Pakistan nurtured and supplied the Afghan Taliban movement.
We were now providing substantial economic and military aid and paying large sums for the passage of goods to Afghanistan. These payments did not reassure me. Pakistan was a country born with no affection for itself, and there was an active self-destructive streak in its political culture. I was uneasy that more than 70 percent of NATO’s logistics lifeline depended upon one route, via Pakistan. I took one look at the map and decided we had to change the pieces on the chessboard.
I heard a bit of grumbling about why CENTCOM had not attended to this weak link before. While I wanted honest feedback, we needed to focus on removing the vulnerability, not whining about the problem. I had great confidence in our logistici
ans, directing them to work with our diplomats and develop alternatives. Our ambassadors and U.S. Transportation Command worked zealously with countries to the north and west of Afghanistan to open supply routes from the north. In addition, I directed a buildup inside Afghanistan of ninety days’ worth of all critical supplies—ammunition, food, medical replenishment, and fuel. The northern route was more expensive, and I didn’t want to use it if I could avoid it. But in conditions of high uncertainty, you must develop alternatives that may or may not come into play: always keep an ace in the hole.
Then, in September 2011, General John Allen, having replaced Dave Petraeus as our NATO commander in Afghanistan, gave a warning to the Pakistani military: he’d learned the Haqqani terrorist group, harbored in Pakistan, was preparing a massive truck bomb. General Ashfaq Kayani, the Chief of Staff of Pakistan’s army, said he would take action. Two days later, that bomb detonated at a U.S. base near Kabul, wounding seventy-seven American soldiers and killing five Afghans. A few days later, Haqqani terrorists attacked our embassy in Kabul. At a diplomatic function in Washington, I bumped into the Pakistani ambassador, Husain Haqqani (no relation to the terrorist group). My diplomatic skills were lacking.
“You have a Pakistan Army division headquarters,” I said, “in the same city as the terrorist headquarters. You say you’re not on their side, but now they attack our embassy in a raid coordinated from your side of the border. You’re supporting the very people who will kill you one day.”
My obscenity-laced message was overheard by a U.S. diplomat, who sent me a congratulatory email.
My numerous frank talks with General Kayani in Rawalpindi had little effect. By October the U.S.-Pakistan relationship had reached a low ebb. In late November, a night fight broke out between an Afghan company with American advisers and a Pakistani unit, which initiated the fight, using mortars to fire on us. When efforts by the advisers to identify themselves did not stop the firing, they called in an air strike, killing twenty-four Pakistani troops. The Pakistani leadership reacted with outrage.
To confirm what had happened, I sat down with the senior American who had been on-scene, an experienced Special Forces warrant officer. He explained how he had repeatedly radioed to the joint NATO-Pakistan coordinating headquarters to stop the shooting. He even called an F-15 to fly low-level, dropping flares and illuminating the Pakistani position. The Taliban do not fly F-15s, and our on-scene commander was making every effort to stop the firing from the high ground. When the incoming Pakistani fire continued, becoming more concentrated, we bombed the mountaintop position. I explained this all to General Kayani on the phone, offering a joint investigation. He declined my offer. His military was still smarting over our killing Osama bin Laden without informing them, and Kayani could not show any willingness to work with us.
Using the F-15 bombing as an excuse, Pakistan abruptly closed its supply route into Afghanistan. The Pakistani leadership had chosen to turn a battlefield tragedy into an indictment of America. No doubt they thought they had us logistically over a barrel and in a political corner. Fortunately, by that time our ninety days of supplies had been stockpiled and the northern network was tested and ready. We shifted to the north, canceling payments to the Pakistani shippers. Caught by surprise, the Pakistanis could only wait, hoping the northern route could not be sustained through the icy winter and muddy spring.
It didn’t work. After a year of brinkmanship, Pakistan backed off the cliff. Both sides acknowledged coordination “mistakes that resulted in the deaths of Pakistani soldiers.” Pakistan quietly reopened its supply lines, and the truck convoys to Afghanistan resumed.
To me, the episode illustrated the unpredictable twists and turns of war. It demonstrated the importance of never having only one course of action to achieve your aims. If in a crisis you find yourself without options, you will be pushed into a corner. Always build in shock absorbers. It was my military duty to help our diplomats by anticipating the negotiating strategy of our adversary, and provide options so our State Department would not be hamstrung in negotiations due to a lack of military alternatives.
The Pakistan military had lost more of their own troops fighting terrorists on their side of the border than the NATO coalition has lost in Afghanistan. Yet they thought they could control or at least manipulate the terrorists. But, once planted, terrorism was growing in ways that no one—not even Pakistan’s secret service, the ISI—could predict or control. I concluded that our military interactions with Pakistan could only be transactional, based upon the specific issue at hand and what each side had to offer the other. Quid pro quo. Pakistan could episodically choose not to be our enemy, but it chose not to be a trusted friend or ally of the United States or NATO.
Of all the countries I’ve dealt with, I consider Pakistan to be the most dangerous, because of the radicalization of its society and the availability of nuclear weapons. We can’t have the fastest-growing nuclear arsenal in the world falling into the hands of the terrorists breeding in their midst. The result would be disastrous. The tragedy for the Pakistani people is that they don’t have leaders who care about their future.
As an illustration of the lack of trust, when we believed we had identified Osama bin Laden’s hiding place deep inside Pakistan, President Obama sent in a team to kill him without informing the Pakistanis.
Ultimately, it was in our common interest that we maintain a cautious, mindful relationship, with modest expectations of collaboration. We could manage our problems with Pakistan, but our divisions were too deep, and trust too shallow, to resolve them. And that is the state of our relationship to this day.
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With Pakistan continuing to permit sanctuaries for the Taliban, in the summer of 2012 I flew back to Afghanistan. The surge was over, and we were reducing our numbers in accordance with Washington’s plan. I visited with John Toolan, my dauntless colonel from the march on Baghdad in 2003 and the Fallujah battle in 2004, who was now wearing two stars and commanded all coalition forces in fierce Helmand Province. Rugby-playing John, with his Brooklyn accent, cut to the essence. After a year in command, he had grave reservations about whether Afghan forces could keep control on their own in the farmlands. Helmand was the Taliban’s financial hub, with opium flowing out and finances flowing into the enemy’s coffers. The Taliban controlled the villages surrounding the provincial capital, without having to fight to hold them.
“The Muslim religion isn’t the barrier to progress here,” he said. “The problem is a whole culture that rejects Western concepts of playing by the rules and cooperating with each other.”
Decades of violence, ruin, and uncertainty meant that nobody believed in tomorrow. It was every tribe, every subtribe, and every man for himself. Despite pockets of progress and successes in education, public health, and more, the Afghan government lacked the unity, capability, and determination to take back much of the countryside. John and I talked about what bothered us most: How confident were we that the losses among our young men and women—all volunteers—were leading to a satisfactory outcome? Our company commanders told us the Afghan soldiers would not patrol in the Green Zone (the vast farmlands surrounding the district towns) once our troops left. Our troops from dozens of nations had remained steadfast, despite the war’s unpopularity in many of the nations fighting there. They evacuated their dead and maimed and went out again the next day to close with the enemy. They gave 100 percent and did their duty.
Strategy links the policy end state with the diplomatic and military ways and means. The policymakers, diplomats, and generals must bargain together, each informing the other, until they firmly resolve that they have a viable policy. That means that if you’re going to fight a limited war anywhere, it should be limited in its political end state but fully resourced militarily, to end it quickly. If the policy changes, the strategy and attendant resources must also change, adapted to the new goal. We did not increa
se our forces to the size needed, nor did we take into account the amount of time needed.
The example of South Korea is instructive. Since the cease-fire in 1953, we have kept tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers there. Our large troop presence and steady diplomacy safeguarded the transformation of that war-torn country from a dictatorship into a vibrant democracy. But it took forty years. In Afghanistan, we were unwilling to devote the resources and time needed to transform the country, decade by decade, into a thriving democracy.
We were trying to do too much with too little.
In light of the Taliban’s demonstrated unwillingness to break away from Al Qaeda, it would be foolhardy not to keep the Taliban off-balance and away from the populated centers. In repeated Situation Room meetings, when the White House asked for my judgment, I proposed that at least ten thousand American troops remain in Afghanistan, without any specified timeline for withdrawal, other than one based on the enemy threat to America and the development of the Afghan army. Yet we were pulled in two directions by competing missions: draw down and pull back, whether the Afghans were ready or not, but keep fighting the enemy to protect the population. Without a unified purpose, we would begin losing allies, and we did over the ensuing years, eventually dropping from forty-nine in 2013 to thirty-nine by late 2016. We were losing the very allies that could have carried more of the burden.
At the trigonometry level of warfare, with the absence of a clear policy end state and the resources for a strategy to attain it, it was inevitable that nonstrategic exigencies would win the day.
WHILE AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ received the most attention in the States, I had two superb commanders in charge who kept me fully informed. I spent the bulk of my time dealing with the other nations in CENTCOM’s zone.