Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (56 page)

“Let’s do it but do it right,” I concluded. I told the president I would appoint a task force to study the impact of changing the policy and how best to implement such a change. A few weeks later Rahm urged me to
begin preparations throughout the force for repeal right away, to ease pressure from the “advocacy groups.” I refused, telling him I would not throw the military into turmoil in the middle of two wars to prepare for a controversial change that might or might not happen. When the president went to Congress and got the law repealed, then I would act.

That said, Mullen and I were thinking about how to structure a dialogue within the military to have an open discussion for the first time ever about gays serving openly, what the challenges would be, and how they could be mitigated. I asked Jeh Johnson to examine ways in which I could change the regulations to make it harder to discharge gays and to place the responsibility for such a decision higher in the chain of command. At the end of June, in response to a question, I told the Pentagon press corps that Mullen and I were actively discussing a change in the DADT law with the president and the senior military leadership. Among other things, we were looking at how to prepare for a change without disrupting the force, and for areas where there might be some flexibility in how we applied the law; for example, if someone was “outed” by a third party, would we be forced to take action? Those two issues would be debated internally through the remainder of 2009.

CHAPTER 10

Afghanistan: A House Divided

On a crisp, sunny day in October 1986, I stood on a ridgeline in northwestern Pakistan near the Afghan border. I was the deputy director of CIA, and I was visiting a mujahideen training camp, escorted by officials of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI). There were thirty to forty fighters, all wearing brand-new parkas, and they were learning to shoot rocket-propelled grenades, using as their target whitewashed rocks on the mountainside in the outline of a Soviet T-72 tank. I assumed everyone there knew CIA was providing the funds for their war, and they were putting on a great show for the man who wrote the checks. The new parkas, the handpicked marksmen, the chilled Pepsis at lunch, and the professions of gratitude for the munitions and other supplies—it was a well-staged snow job. It would not be my last.

Behind Oz’s curtain on the Pakistani frontier that day were harsh realities. I was there principally because the ISI was stalling on providing our new Stinger antiaircraft missiles and other supplies to the Tajiks of the Panjshir Valley and other non-Pashtuns fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. It was the Pakistanis who decided which mujahideen groups—which warlords—got our weapons. CIA could cajole and exert pressure, but President Muhammad Zia ul-Haq and the ISI were the “deciders.” While we were working closely with Zia to defeat the Soviets, he was at the same time enacting laws that would promote the Islamization of Pakistan and the strengthening of Islamic fundamentalism.

A lot of American weapons, accordingly, went to Afghan Islamic fundamentalists. Our lack of understanding of Afghanistan, its culture, its tribal and ethnic politics, its power brokers, and their relationships, was profound. After becoming secretary of defense twenty years later, I came to realize that in Afghanistan, as in Iraq, having decided to replace the regime, when it came to “with what?,” the American government had no idea what would follow. We had learned virtually nothing about the place in the twenty years since helping defeat the Soviets there.

These experiences—these ghosts—led to my strong conviction, as I stated earlier, that the idea of creating a strong, democratic (as we would define it), more or less honest and effective central government in Afghanistan, to change the culture, to build the economy and transform agriculture, was a fantasy. Our goal, I thought, should be limited to hammering the Taliban and other extremists so as to degrade their military capabilities, and to building up the Afghan army and local security forces to the point where they could keep the extremists under control and deny al Qaeda a future safe haven in Afghanistan. We needed to be thinking in terms of three to five years to accomplish those narrow goals, but we also needed to figure out how to sustain a modest civilian and military presence for many years—as necessary in Afghanistan, I believed, as in Iraq. We couldn’t just walk away again. As I thought about how to achieve those objectives, the memory of 120,000 Soviet troops and more than 15,000 dead Soviet soldiers stuck in my mind. If we had too many foreign troops in country, if there were too many civilian casualties and too little respect for Afghans and what
they
wanted and what
they
thought, the Afghans would come to see us, too, as occupiers, not partners. And we would lose, just as the Soviets had. My thinking along these lines was reflected consistently between December 2006 and late 2009 in my public statements, in my congressional testimony, and in my skepticism about adding significantly more troops there.

Prior to Obama’s inauguration, Joe Biden visited Afghanistan and Iraq, as I said. Talking to U.S. diplomats, commanders, and soldiers in Kabul, Biden found confusion at all levels about our strategy and objectives. His previous encounter with Afghan president Karzai, at a dinner in February 2008, had gone badly and ended with the then-chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee throwing down his napkin and walking out on the Afghan president. At dinner with Karzai in January 2009, there was another tempestuous conversation, during which Biden
went after the Afghan president on both governance and corruption. One of Biden’s messages to Karzai (and Maliki) was that Obama would not engage with them nearly as often as had Bush. There was concern among Obama’s team that Bush’s frequent videoconferences with both leaders had led to an unhealthy dependence on direct communications with the U.S. president that undercut the ability of Americans in country to do their jobs. I thought there was some validity to the concern, but I was torn. Bush had been a useful mentor for both, and when he raised issues, both leaders knew there was no higher-level appeal. Biden also met with International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) commander General David McKiernan, who made his case for 30,000 more troops, particularly to improve security before the Afghans’ August election. Biden was deeply disturbed about what he had found in Afghanistan. (Things went much better on his visit to Iraq.)

Obama had pledged during the campaign to send more troops to Afghanistan to remedy the inadequate resourcing of the war during the Bush administration, which had begun shifting its focus and priorities to Iraq within months of the fall of the Taliban. I think that all the senior national security officials of the incoming administration shared the view that we were neither winning nor losing in Afghanistan and that we needed to take a hard look at what we were doing there. I had told President Bush in my job interview in November 2006 that I thought our goals in Afghanistan were too expansive, and my concerns had only increased over the ensuing two years. In my January 26 meeting with Obama, I told him that we should have “no grandiose aspirations” in Afghanistan; we just wanted to prevent the country from again becoming a source of threats to us or our allies, as it had been under the Taliban. In a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee the next day, I was even more explicit: “If we set out to create [in Afghanistan] a central Asian Valhalla, we will lose. We need to keep our objectives realistic and limited, or we will set ourselves up for failure.”

The new administration’s first NSC meeting on Afghanistan was on January 23. There was much discussion on the lack of a coherent strategy. Petraeus and Mullen both pushed strongly for quick approval of McKiernan’s requested 30,000 troops. I was supportive of some more troops but ambivalent about the number, partly because of the rationale the military was advancing. The additional troops were supposed to blunt the Taliban’s summer offensive and provide security for the
August elections, but many of them could not get there in time to do either. I was also still concerned about the size of our military “footprint.” Biden quite logically objected to sending more troops even before we had figured out our strategy.

The president decided to reach outside the government to ask Bruce Riedel, a Middle East expert who had advised his campaign, to lead a sixty-day review of the situation in Afghanistan and recommend changes in strategy. Holbrooke and Defense Undersecretary Flournoy would cochair the effort, with Doug Lute and his staff at the NSC in support. Riedel had been a longtime analyst at CIA and had worked for me. He was one of the best, most realistic Middle East analysts.

The immediate problem facing the president was timing: if we were to get thousands of troops, whatever the exact number, trained, equipped, and into Afghanistan in time to deal with the Taliban’s summer offensive and the elections, we needed a decision before Riedel’s report would be finished, to the chagrin of the vice president and others in the White House. On his return flight from the Munich Security Conference in early February, Biden had told the press that he wasn’t going to let the military “bully” the White House into making decisions about more troops for Afghanistan because of “artificial timelines.” The president had wanted to announce his decisions on the troop drawdowns in Iraq before announcing more troops for Afghanistan, but that wasn’t going to happen either. As the Deputies Committee, chaired by Tom Donilon, parsed the request for 30,000 troops and focused on when they could get to Afghanistan and what they would do, it became clear that the Joint Staff had not worked through how many could get there by summer. The request was eventually pared to about 17,000 additional troops.

This pressure for an early decision on a troop increase in Afghanistan had the unfortunate effect of creating suspicion in the White House that Obama was getting the “bum’s rush” from senior military officers, especially Mullen and Petraeus, to make a big decision prematurely. I believed then—and now—that this distrust was stoked by Biden, with Donilon, Emanuel, and some of Obama’s other advisers joining the chorus, including, ironically, Jim Jones and Doug Lute. The distrust may also have been attributable in part to the lack of experience with military affairs—particularly, in this case, training and logistical timelines—among the senior civilian White House officials from the vice president on down. I believe the military had no ulterior motives: failure to
approve at least some troop movements quickly would, in itself, limit the president’s options, rendering him unable to blunt the Taliban summer offensive or add security before the Afghan election. Nonetheless, the suspicion would only fester and grow over time.

Incidents unrelated to Afghanistan worsened it. In late February, for example, Admiral Tim Keating, commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, told a press conference about U.S. capabilities to shoot down North Korea’s Tae Po Dong 2 missile and that a prospective launch would be “a stern test” of the new administration. The president was furious at what he called “freelancing” as well as the admiral’s presumption in appearing to judge the president. In his view, Keating’s remarks created serious problems for the administration: if the president ordered the missile shot down, Keating had telegraphed our punch and made non-attribution difficult to sustain; if the president decided not to act, people would wonder why. Mullen and I asked the president if he wanted Keating relieved. Obama said no, that everyone deserved a second chance, but he told me to recall Keating and reprimand him. Keating flew from Hawaii to Washington for a ten-minute meeting with me. I told him of the president’s unhappiness but that we all wanted him to stay—and to learn from the experience. Tim asked me to convey his apologies to the president and tell him this kind of thing would never happen again. And it didn’t (at least with Keating). This episode, along with the president’s problems with the outspoken director of national intelligence, Denny Blair, and increasingly Mike Mullen, showed that presidential irritation with publicity-prone admirals was another source of continuity between the Bush and Obama administrations. All too early in the administration, suspicion and distrust of senior military officers by senior White House officials—including the president and vice president—became a big problem for me as I tried to manage the relationship between the commander in chief and his military leaders.

On February 13, the president chaired an NSC meeting to consider whether to wait until after the Riedel review to decide on more troops, to send 17,000 as soon as possible, to send some troops now and the rest later, or to send the full 30,000 McKiernan had requested. Riedel and all but two of the principals—Biden and Steinberg—supported sending 17,000 at once.

On February 16, in our regular weekly meeting, the president told Mullen and me that he would have preferred to announce the Iraqi drawdown
first, as we knew, but that he had decided to authorize the 17,000 troops to help stabilize the situation in Afghanistan and prevent further deterioration. Obama then said to me, “I trust you and your judgment.” The next day the White House announced the decision in a written press release. Although Obama later characterized the decision as the toughest he had made early in his term, he did not bother to announce it in person.

There would later be questions about why so many of the additional troops—Marines—were sent to Helmand province with its sparse population. Their deployment was intended primarily to prevent the security situation in the south from further worsening; that took precedence over providing election security. But an important reason the Marines deployed to Helmand was that while Marine Commandant Jim Conway was eager to get his Marines off their duffs in western Iraq and into the fight in Afghanistan, he also insisted that all the Marines deploy to a single “area of responsibility”—one battlespace—with Marine air cover and logistics. Only Helmand fit Conway’s conditions. The Marines were determined to keep operational control of their forces away from the senior U.S. commander in Kabul and in the hands of a Marine lieutenant general at Central Command in Tampa. The Marines performed with courage, brilliance, and considerable success on the ground, but their higher leadership put their own parochial service concerns above the requirements of the overall Afghan mission. Despite several failed attempts through Pace and Mullen, I did not get this and other command problems in Afghanistan fully fixed until 2010. I should have seized control of the matter well before that. It was my biggest mistake in overseeing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.