A Marshall Plan for Afghanistan?
Despite the limited troop commitment, there were initial indications that the Bush administration might provide significant financial assistance to Afghanistan. In a speech on April 17, 2002, at Virginia Military Institute (VMI), President Bush invoked the Marshall Plan. The setting was highly symbolic. George C. Marshall graduated from VMI in 1901 as senior first captain of the Corps of Cadets. He served as secretary of state under President Truman and formulated an unprecedented program of economic and military aid to postwar Germany and other nations recovering from World War II. On June 5, 1947, Marshall addressed the graduating class of Harvard University, promising American aid to promote European recovery and reconstruction. While the speech itself contained virtually no details and no numbers, the United States under the Marshall Plan would go on to provide billions of dollars in aid to Western European countries between 1947 and 1951.19
Bush’s 2002 speech at VMI had similar overtones. He remarked, for example: “We know that true peace will only be achieved when we give the Afghan people the means to achieve their own aspirations.” He then invoked Marshall in describing the road ahead in Afghanistan:
By helping to build an Afghanistan that is free from this evil and is a better place in which to live, we are working in the best traditions of George Marshall. Marshall knew that our military victory against enemies in World War II had to be followed by a moral victory that resulted in better lives for individual human beings. After 1945, the United States of America was the only nation in the world strong enough to help rebuild a Europe and a Japan that had been decimated by World War II. Today, our former enemies are our friends. And Europe and Japan are strong partners in the rebuilding of Afghanistan.20
As with Marshall’s address at Harvard, Bush’s speech was vague on details, and the president did not specifically say that the United States would provide comparable levels of aid to Afghanistan. But the repeated references to the Marshall Plan certainly gave that impression. In any case, that’s how senior Afghan officials saw it; they interpreted the speech as a commitment to significant assistance.21 But the State Department, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the NSC initiated no major efforts to assess the requirements for a successful reconstruction effort or to generate the funding that would be necessary. Not until the fall of 2002 was Congress asked for additional money for Afghanistan, and most of that went to the Defense Department.
Despite the hope engendered by Bush’s speech, U.S. military officials had several reasons for adopting a light footprint. They wanted to prevent large-scale popular resistance similar to what the Soviet Union had encountered in the 1980s; they did not want the U.S. military engaged in peacekeeping or nation-building operations; and they ultimately believed that small numbers of ground troops and airpower, working with Afghan forces, would be sufficient to establish security.22
General Tommy Franks, who remained head of U.S. Central Command until 2003, argued that “our footprint had to be small,” after major combat ended, “for both military and geopolitical reasons. I envisioned a total of about 10,000 American soldiers, airmen, special operators, and helicopter assault crews, along with robust in-country close air support.”23 Several of his key advisers agreed, including General Victor “Gene” Renuart, the director of operations, and Lieutenant General Paul T. Mikolashek, the ground component commander. In several video teleconference calls, Franks and Secretary Rumsfeld agreed that the United States should not flood Afghanistan with large formations of conventional troops. “We don’t want to repeat the Soviets’ mistakes,” he told Rumsfeld during one meeting. “There’s nothing to be gained by blundering around those mountains and gorges with armor battalions chasing a lightly armed enemy.”24 Instead, they sent in three brigades from the 10th Mountain and 101st Airborne (Air Assault) Divisions, as well as the Marine Expeditionary Unit already at Camp Rhino in Kandahar. As mentioned earlier, most senior U.S. officials—especially in the Defense Department and the White House—did not support deploying a peacekeeping force outside of Kabul, preferring to spend the money on training an Afghan army.
U.S. military officials were also primarily interested in countering al Qa’ida, not in nation-building. One senior U.S. official explained to Afghanistan National Security Council staffer Daoud Yaqub: “Our objective in Afghanistan is to combat al Qa’ida. Everything else is incidental.25
The UN’s Lakhdar Brahimi also agreed on a light footprint. While he had advocated expanding NATO’s peacekeeping presence outside of Kabul, his vision of the international community’s role in Afghanistan was different. Brahimi felt that the guiding principle of international efforts in Afghanistan should be to bolster Afghan capacity—both official and nongovernmental—and to rely on as limited an international presence and as many Afghan staff as possible. This marked a significant departure from the expansive UN missions in Kosovo and East Timor. Both missions, which began in 1999, included a large international military and police presence per capita, and the United Nations temporarily took over governance in both cases. Afghanistan needed to be different, Brahimi argued, and a heavy international footprint was “not necessary and not possible.” Bolstering Afghanistan’s capacity to govern itself, he thought, required Afghans taking charge of their situation wherever possible, an end that could be compromised by throwing international staff into the mix.26
In practice, the light footprint translated into one of the lowest levels of troops, police, and financial assistance in any stabilization operation since the end of World War II.
International troops and police are critical to establish security after a major war. Often, in the immediate aftermath of civil or interstate conflict, states will undergo a period of anarchy in which groups and factions seek to arm themselves for protection.27 These groups and factions may have offensive intentions and want to impose their ideology on others, seize the property of rival factions, or exploit public resources for private gain. Large numbers of troops and police are critical for defeating and deterring these groups, patrolling borders, securing roads, combating organized crime, and policing the streets. Many of these general law-enforcement functions are best performed by police and units specially trained for urban patrols and crowd control.28
There is no simple metric for determining how many troops are necessary to secure a population.29 As Figure 7.1 illustrates, 89.3 U.S. troops per thousand inhabitants were necessary to establish security in the American sector of Germany after World War II, 17.5 troops per thousand were used in Bosnia, 35.3 per thousand were used in Eastern Slavonia, 19.3 per thousand were used in Kosovo, and 9.8 per thousand were used in East Timor. None of those conflicts were resolved easily, even at those levels of troop involvement. But the U.S. and other international forces had only about 1.6 soldiers per thousand Afghans. In terms of historical troop levels, the Afghan mission ranks with some of the international community’s most notable failures: the UN mission to the Belgian Congo (1.3 troops per thousand); the American and international intervention in Somalia (5.7); the U.S. rescue of Haiti (2.9); and the French operation in Cote d’Ivoire (0.2).
FIGURE 7.1 Peak International Military Presence Per Capita30
There were also no international civilian police deployed to Afghanistan to conduct law-enforcement operations.31 As Figure 7.2 shows, this was in marked contrast to such operations as Bosnia and Kosovo, where international paramilitary police had been used effectively to help establish law and order. In Bosnia, Italy deployed a small battalion of its carabinieri as part of the Multinational Specialized Unit to assist with refugee return, help with crowd and riot control, and promote public security by acting as a strategic reserve force.32 In Kosovo, the carabinieri joined the French paramilitary gendarmerie as part of the Multinational Specialized Unit to engage in patrolling, riot control, criminal investigation, and other public-order tasks.33 These paramilitary police forces interacted with the UN’s International Police and Training Force, who worked with
civilian police. In both Bosnia and Kosovo, international police were pivotal in establishing security.
The United States has traditionally lacked a national police force like the carabinieri and the gendarmerie that it could deploy abroad. Rather, it has approximately 20,000 state and local police forces in jurisdictions scattered across the United States.34 Policing and law-enforcement services have historically been under the jurisdiction of local government. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is involved in high-level investigations but has little experience in such policing tasks as patrols and riot control. International police training has been handled by two federal agencies: the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs and the Justice Department’s International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program. Neither, however, has a cadre of civilian police ready to be deployed abroad. Both have instead relied on private firms such as DynCorp International to recruit and deploy civilian police abroad. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense have also been involved in police training, but policing is not a core mission of either of those organizations.35
FIGURE 7.2 Peak International Police Presence Per Capita36
At $60 per Afghan, foreign assistance over the first two years of a nation-building operation was lower than most operations since World War II (see Fig. 7.3). States emerging from interstate or civil war have generally suffered significant damage.37 High levels of funding are necessary to cover the costs of deploying military forces and police, train indigenous police and army officers, provide lethal and nonlethal equipment, and build infrastructure.38 Assistance generally comes from an amalgam of donor states and international organizations such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the European Union. Despite the fact that Afghanistan was a safe haven for al Qa’ida terrorists and that it was the first front in what the administration referred to as a “global war on terrorism,” a wide array of U.S. government officials from the beginning of the conflict strongly opposed providing more resources for reconstruction efforts.39
Despite promises of aid, many countries never delivered. In 2002, Rumsfeld appointed Dov Zakheim—who was already serving as the under secretary of defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense—as the Pentagon’s coordinator of civilian programs in Afghanistan. Zakheim had played a pivotal role as Rumsfeld’s principal financial adviser, overseeing all aspects of the department’s accounting and auditing systems, and negotiating major defense agreements with U.S. allies and partners. Rumsfeld asked Zakheim to take the lead in getting nonmilitary equipment to Afghanistan, including trucks and potable water. Zakheim then began a tour of allied capitals with Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs John Taylor, asking for contributions from U.S. allies.
FIGURE 7.3 International Financial Assistance Per Capita over First Two Years40
“It was like pulling teeth,” Zakheim said. “In general, the levels of assistance were too low. We got some help from Gulf states, including some logistical support and petroleum, oil, and lubricants. But most of this was for support to forces moving through their countries. We didn’t get a lot of material support in theater. Allies simply weren’t providing a lot of support.” Zakheim and Taylor heard the same message during their meetings: “We have limited resources. We’ll see what we can do.” And then, Zakheim complained, “we just wouldn’t hear back.”41
U.S. assistance was also low. A major hurdle for U.S. policymakers in the Departments of State, Defense, and Treasury was the Office of Management and Budget. “The biggest scandal was OMB,” said Zakheim. “It was beyond our comprehension at the Pentagon that OMB refused to provide more support to Afghanistan than it did.” Zakheim and his staff found this baffling, because Afghanistan was largely peaceful. “There was no major insurgency in 2002 and 2003, yet we couldn’t get funding. The levels of poppy cultivation were low, and we lobbied to get assistance for alternative crops. But we couldn’t get it from OMB. Neither could State or USAID.”42
According to several senior officials at the White House and in the Departments of State, Defense, and Treasury, one of the biggest obstacles at OMB was Robin Cleveland, associate director for national security programs. “We repeatedly hit a brick wall with her,” one senior White House official told me. “Robin was the single biggest problem because reconstruction is partly a function of money. And we had major troubles getting it.”43
During this early period (2002 and 2003), the funding would have been especially useful for implementing reconstruction projects, because several competent Afghan government officials were overseeing finances. One was Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan’s finance minister, recognized in 2003 as the best finance minister in Asia by Emerging Markets magazine. He was seriously considered for the post of UN Secretary-General, which he didn’t get, but Afghan Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta described him in a private letter to UN officials as combining an unusual blend of “vision, management skills and a deep understanding of regional and global issues.”44 Ghani had earned master’s and doctoral degrees in anthropology from Columbia University and later served on the faculties of Kabul University, the University of California (Berkeley), and Johns Hopkins University. He joined the World Bank in 1991, working on projects in East and South Asia. Despite Ghani’s best efforts, however, he was unable to obtain adequate assistance from the United States and its allies.
That Colin Powell had been opposed to the light-footprint approach was not surprising. After all, he had espoused a doctrine of military engagement that came to be known as the “Powell Doctrine”: Military force, when used, should be overwhelming and disproportionate to the force used by the enemy during stability operations.45 When the United States deploys troops, he said, “we should win and win decisively.”46 But Rumsfeld’s position ran contrary to the Powell Doctrine as well as to former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger’s theory that “in those cases where our national interests require us to commit combat force we must never let there be doubt of our resolution. When it is necessary for our troops to be committed to combat, we must commit them, in sufficient numbers and we must support them, as effectively and resolutely as our strength permits. When we commit our troops to combat we must do so with the sole object of winning.”47
Without significant numbers of military personnel, ensuring security in an insurgency historically has been more difficult. Dissidents may be emboldened to use force. Borders may become porous and facilitate the movement of insurgents, drug traffickers, and other criminal organizations. Security along roads and highways may deteriorate, allowing criminals and insurgents easier transport.
It soon became clear that the light footprint allowed for too few U.S. and Afghan government troops to stabilize the country.48 Small numbers of CIA and Special Forces were sufficient to overthrow the Taliban regime in 2001, but they were not strong enough to establish basic security. The small number of military forces, coupled with low numbers of trained Afghan military and police, failed to establish security in rural areas of Afghanistan. Because the Coalition did not venture into Pakistan, where significant numbers of Taliban and al Qa’ida militants had fled, they were not able to defeat Taliban, Hezb-i-Islami, and al Qa’ida insurgent forces.49
A Fait Accompli
In the end, the result of the Powell-Rumsfeld showdown was moot; the war in Iraq obliterated America’s ability to contain the gradually deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. “From day one it was Iraq, Iraq, Iraq,” remarked Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. “Afghanistan was really an accidental war for much of the Administration. No one wanted to do it. And once it became clear the Taliban was likely to fall, senior Pentagon officials wanted to turn to Iraq as quickly as possible.” Most senior Bush administration officials supported an invasion of Iraq in principle. They differed, however, on such issues as how and when it would be done. Secretary of State Powell, for example, wanted to go in with much larger numbers and with overwh
elming force. “My objection was timing,” said Armitage. “I wanted to turn to Iraq perhaps in November 2004, after the elections and after Afghanistan was somewhat under control.”50
The prospect of invading Iraq surfaced immediately after the September 11 attacks. In a National Security Council meeting on September 13, President Bush asked CIA Director George Tenet whether he was looking into the possiblity of Iraqi involvement. “It’s a worldwide effort, yes,” Tenet responded. Rumsfeld went even further, contending that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the region and to the United States. “Iraq,” he noted, “was a state that supported terrorism, and that might someday offer terrorists weapons of mass destruction to use against us.” He added that, in Iraq, “we could inflict the kind of costly damage that could cause terrorist-supporting regimes around the world to rethink their policies.”51
Tension over Iraq surfaced again among senior U.S. policymakers at Camp David on September 15 and 16, 2001. Before the meeting, the staff of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice had prepared three options for review. The first option was to attack only al Qa’ida targets, the second was to attack the Taliban and al Qa’ida, and the third added Iraq to the list. In a classified memo to Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith and Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Peter Rodman supplemented Rice’s three options. They argued that “the immediate priority targets for action” should be al Qa’ida, the Taliban, and Iraq. Iraq was critical because Saddam Hussein’s regime posed a “threat of WMD terrorism.” The purpose of invading Iraq, their memo argued to Rumsfeld, would be “to destabilize a regime that engages in and supports terrorism, that has weapons of mass destruction and is developing new ones, that attacks U.S. forces almost daily and otherwise threatens vital U.S. interests.”52
In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan Page 16