Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (33 page)

At the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, in April 2008, President Bush lasted longer at the meeting table than most of his counterparts—at least five hours—but as the afternoon wore on, he was eager to get a little downtime before a long formal dinner and “native” entertainment. Condi and I, sitting behind him, also wanted to leave. But who would stay and represent the United States until the bitter end? I offered the president and Condi a deal: I would stay at the table by myself until the meeting was over in exchange for not having to attend the formal dinner. They agreed immediately. Over time I made some good friends among my ministerial colleagues, and I would continue to value the alliance greatly. But I didn’t have the patience for those long meetings.

I made three trips to Asia during my first fourteen months as secretary. The first, in early June 2007, was to Singapore for the “Shangri-La” Asia Security Summit, named for the hotel where it was held every year. My maiden speech in Asia focused on urging the Chinese to explain the purpose behind their major military buildup, but I also tried to turn down the temperature in the relationship with China by calling for a bilateral dialogue on a range of issues. During this trip, I again visited the troops in Afghanistan. In Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, where Manas airfield had become a vital link in our aerial resupply of soldiers in, and troop movements to, Afghanistan, the amazingly corrupt government of Kurmanbek Bakiyev saw our continued need for the airfield as a rich source of revenue or, as I called it, extortion. The Kyrgyz were once again making noises about closing Manas to us, and we had to have it open, so I had to see Bakiyev and let him pick our pockets again. He, his officials, and his generals looked and acted just like the old Soviets, whose vassals they had been. Bakiyev reeled off a list of areas where we were ignoring Kyrgyz sovereignty and Kyrgyz people, and how we were “cheating” them of revenues. In the crassest kind of insult in that part of the world, the big crook didn’t even offer me a cup of tea. He was, without question,
the most unpleasant foreign leader I had to deal with in my years as secretary, and I celebrated when he was overthrown in April 2010.

My trip ended at the American cemetery in Normandy on June 6, the sixty-third anniversary of D-Day, where French defense minister Morin and I presided over the commemoration ceremonies. It was rainy, windy, and cold, just like that historic day in 1944. After the ceremony, I walked alone among the countless rows of white crosses, deeply moved by the sacrifice they represented but also reflecting on the new gravestones being erected at home above the remains of young men and women I was sending in harm’s way, making their own sacrifice for our country just as the GIs had done at Normandy. It was a hard day.

I went to China, South Korea, and Japan in early November 2007 on my second trip to Asia. President Bush and Chinese president Hu Jintao had agreed that the military-to-military relationship between our two countries needed to be strengthened, and so I made my first pilgrimage to Beijing in more than fifteen years. My first visit had been as a CIA officer at the end of 1980, when bicycles still reigned supreme on the capital’s streets. Now traffic was horrible, and the pollution made the air nearly unbreathable. The Chinese were preparing to host the Olympic Games the next year, and it was plain they had a lot of work to do to avoid all the visitors having to wear gas masks. In all of my meetings, the same three topics were discussed: international and regional security issues, with me spending a lot of time on Iran; state-to-state relations between our two countries; and specific issues in the military relationship. Bush and Hu had agreed in April 2006 to pursue bilateral discussions of nuclear strategy, but it was pretty plain that the People’s Liberation Army hadn’t received the memo. Still, I pushed for beginning a “strategic dialogue” to help us understand each other’s military intentions and programs better.

My third trip to Asia, at the end of February 2008, was an around-the-world jaunt including stops in Australia, Indonesia, India, and Turkey. This trip was made difficult by the lamentable fact that a week before we departed, I slipped on the ice outside my house in Washington, D.C., and broke my shoulder in three places. I had been lucky in that the bones had remained where they needed to be, so I didn’t need surgery or a cast, just immobilization in a sling. The arm caused some awkward moments during the trip. At a very nice dinner given in my honor by Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, I was doing fine at table conversation until Rudd began a long soliloquy on the history of Australia. I had made it
just past World War I when the combined effect of a painkiller, jet lag, and a glass of wine caused me to fall asleep. This led to not-so-subtle attempts by my American colleagues at the table to rouse me. Rudd was very gracious about the whole thing; my team less so, as they took raucous delight in making fun of my undiplomatic snooze. I was shocked when I got out of bed the next morning to see that my entire upper body was totally black and blue and yellow. The U.S. Air Force doctor traveling with me called in a couple of Australian physicians, and everyone was puzzled that the bruising had appeared a week after my fall, but in typical Aussie fashion and with good cheer, they said it would take care of itself. The rest of the trip was uneventful, if long.

Most of my many other trips abroad during the Bush years, apart from the frequent visits to Iraq and Afghanistan, fell into the category of what former secretary of state George Shultz called “gardening”—shoring up or nurturing relationships with friends, allies, and others. The highlight for me always was meeting and talking with our men and women in uniform around the world. Each encounter seemed to provide a much-needed transfusion of energy and idealism from them to me, which I would need when I returned to Washington.

CHAPTER 6

Good War, Bad War

By fall 2007, the unpopular war in Iraq—the “bad war,” the “war of choice”—was going much better. However, the war in Afghanistan—the “good war,” the “war of necessity”—while continuing to enjoy strong bipartisan support in Washington, was getting worse on the ground. The politics in Washington surrounding the two wars both frustrated and angered President Bush. In a meeting with the Joint Chiefs and me in the Tank on May 10, 2007, he said, “Many in Congress don’t understand the military. Afghanistan is good. Iraq is bad. Bullshit.”

The war to oust the Taliban from power in Afghanistan and to destroy al Qaeda began auspiciously less than a month after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Within a matter of weeks, the Taliban had been defeated, and their leaders, along with al Qaeda’s, had fled to the border areas inside Pakistan. On December 5, 2001, Hamid Karzai was selected by an informal group of Afghan tribal and political leaders to serve six months as chairman of an “interim administration.” In June 2002, he was chosen by a grand assembly
(loya jirga)
as interim president for two years, then was elected to a full five-year term the following October. From the beginning, Karzai had strong support from the United States and the international community, which set about trying to help him and his government establish their authority and an effective national government beyond Kabul. When I became secretary, the
United States had about 21,000 troops in Afghanistan, while NATO and coalition partners together had about 18,000 troops.

When interviewing with Bush in early November 2006, I had told him that based on what I read, I thought the war in Afghanistan was being neglected. I also said there was too much emphasis on building a strong central government in a country that had virtually never had one, and too little emphasis on improving governance, security, and services at the provincial and district levels, including making better use of local Afghan tribal leaders and councils. On my first trip to Afghanistan in January 2007, I quickly came to believe that, as in Iraq, from early on we had underestimated the resilience and determination of our adversaries and had failed to adjust our strategy and our resources as the situation on the ground changed for the worse. While we were preoccupied with Iraq, between 2002 and 2005 the Taliban reconstituted in western Pakistan and in southern and eastern Afghanistan. Headquartered and operating in Pakistani cities including Peshawar and Quetta, virtually unhindered by the Pakistani government, the Taliban recovered from their disastrous defeat and again became a serious fighting force. They received invaluable, if unintended, assistance from the sparseness of Afghan government presence outside Kabul—Karzai was referred to as the mayor of Kabul—and the corruption and incompetence of too many Afghan government officials at all levels in the provinces.

The first significant American encounter with a revitalized Taliban came in eastern Afghanistan on June 28, 2005, when four Navy SEALs were ambushed in a well-organized attack, and a helicopter with SEAL and Army Special Forces reinforcements sent to assist them was shot down. Three of the SEALs on the ground were killed, as well as sixteen U.S. servicemen on the helicopter. One of the three SEALs on the ground, Navy Lieutenant Michael Murphy, posthumously received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroism. American casualties that day were the worst yet in a single engagement in the Afghan War and a wake-up call that the Taliban had returned. The following spring, 2006, the Taliban increased the level of their attacks in both the south and east of Afghanistan. They were further enabled by a deal Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf cut at about the same time with tribes on the border, in which he pledged to keep Pakistani troops out of their tribal lands as long as the tribes prevented al Qaeda and the Taliban from operating in
those lands. The feckless deal effectively gave the Taliban safe haven in those areas. The Taliban “spring offensive” was characterized by assassinations, the murder of teachers and burning of schools, the shooting of workers building roads, and other acts of targeted violence. The Taliban were joined in their depredations by other extremist groups, most notably those led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (to whom we had provided weapons when he was fighting the Soviets) and Jalaluddin Haqqani.

By the end of 2006, U.S. commanders in Afghanistan were telling the press that the number of Taliban attacks had surged by 200 percent in December from a year earlier and that since Musharraf’s deal with the tribes had gone into effect in early September, the number of attacks in the border area had gone up by 300 percent. Military briefers reported that suicide attacks had grown from 27 in 2005 to 139 in 2006; the number of roadside bombings in the same period had risen from 783 to 1,677; and the number of direct attacks using small arms, grenades, and other weapons had gone from 1,558 to 4,542. Two thousand six had been the bloodiest year since 2001. When I became secretary, the war in Afghanistan, as in Iraq, was clearly headed in the wrong direction.

Recognizing the deterioration, just prior to my becoming secretary, President Bush had ordered an increase in the number of U.S. troops from 21,000 to 31,000 over a two-year period—what he called a “silent surge.” He also doubled funding for reconstruction, increased the number of military-civilian teams (provincial reconstruction teams) carrying out projects to improve the daily life of Afghans, authorized an increase in the size of the Afghan army, and ordered more U.S. civilian experts to Afghanistan to help the ministries in Kabul become more effective (and less corrupt). Bush also encouraged our allies to do more in all these areas, and to drop the “national caveats” that limited the combat effectiveness of their troops.

It was against this backdrop that I made my first visit to Afghanistan in mid-January 2007, less than a month after being sworn in. As on my first trip to Iraq, General Pace joined me. It was nearly midnight when we landed and rode in a heavily armored motorcade to the main U.S. base in Kabul, Camp Eggers. There was snow and ice everywhere, and the temperature was about twenty degrees. My accommodations at Bader House consisted of a small second-floor bedroom with dim lighting and a bed, couch, easy chair, desk, and drapes that all looked like they had been
salvaged from an old college dorm. The staff shared one room with four bunk beds. We all knew we were “living large” compared to our troops, and no one complained.

The first morning, I met with our ambassador, Ronald Neumann; then the senior American commander, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry; then other U.S. commanders; and finally with the commander of the International Security Assistance Force (the NATO-dominated coalition), British general David Richards. I heard a consistent message from everyone: the Taliban insurgency was growing, their safe havens in Pakistan were a big problem, the spring of 2007 would be more violent than the previous year, and more troops were needed. I was told that NATO nations had not provided some 3,500 military trainers they had promised, and Eikenberry—who was due to rotate out less than a week after my visit—asked that the deployment of a battalion of the 10th Mountain Division (about 1,200 troops) be extended through the spring offensive.

I told Eikenberry that if he thought more troops were needed, I was prepared to recommend that course of action to the president. At the same time, Pace made clear that additional troops for Afghanistan would increase the strain on the U.S. military at least in the short run. While I said I wanted to keep the initiative and not allow the Taliban to regroup, Pace had put his finger on a huge problem. With the surge in Iraq and 160,000 troops there, the Army and Marine Corps didn’t have combat capability to spare. My intent upon becoming secretary had been to give our commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan everything they needed to be successful; I realized on this initial visit to Afghanistan I couldn’t deliver in both places at once.

That afternoon we helicoptered east across the snow-covered mountains to Forward Operating Base Tillman, at an elevation of some 6,000 feet in eastern Afghanistan, only a few miles from the Pakistani border and near a major Taliban infiltration route. When we landed, I couldn’t help but reflect that a little over twenty years before, as deputy director of the CIA, I had been on the Pakistani side of the border looking into Afghanistan and doing business with some of the very people we were fighting now. It was a stark reminder to me of our limited ability to look into the future or to foresee the unintended consequences of our actions. That was what made me very cautious about committing military forces in new places.