Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (60 page)

The election outcome was deeply marred by security problems but also large-scale fraud perpetrated by Karzai. He failed to get the magic 50 percent in the first round but still ended up with a second term. It was all ugly: our partner, the president of Afghanistan, was tainted, and our hands were dirty as well. The senior UN representative for Afghanistan, Ambassador Kai Eide, subsequently gave a report on the election to the NATO defense ministers during which he sat next to me. Before speaking publicly, he whispered to me that while he was only going to say
that there was blatant foreign interference in the election, he wanted me to know he had in mind specifically the United States and Holbrooke. Our future dealings with Karzai, always hugely problematic, and his criticisms of us, are at least more understandable in the context of our clumsy and failed putsch.

For two and a half years, I had warned about the risks of a significant increase in the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan, and during that period we had increased from about 21,000 to 68,000 troops. I was torn between my historical perspective, which screamed for caution, and what my commanders insisted was needed for accomplishing the mission they had been given by the president and by me. Three very different commanders—McNeill, McKiernan, and McChrystal—had all asked for more troops. I believed, with Mike Mullen, that the war in Afghanistan had been neglected and underresourced in the Bush administration. But how many troops were too many before reaching the tipping point in terms of Afghan attitudes and support? Embassy polling showed that in 2005 about 80 percent of Afghans saw us as allies and partners; by summer 2009, after nearly eight years of war, that was down to 60 percent.

As I thought about the tipping point, it seemed to me we had several vulnerabilities with the Afghan population. One was civilian casualties; every incident was a strategic defeat, often caused and always manipulated by the Taliban and then magnified by Karzai. Another was our thoughtless treatment of the Afghans in routine encounters, including U.S. and coalition military vehicles barreling down the roads scattering animals and scaring people. We often disrespected their culture or Islam and failed to cultivate their elders. We collaborated with Afghan officials who were ripping off ordinary citizens. In Kabul and all over the country, we and our coalition partners, as well as nongovernmental organizations, far too routinely decided what development projects to undertake without consulting the Afghans, much less working with or through them on what they wanted and needed. Was it any wonder that Karzai and others complained they had no authority in their own country? Or that even reasonably honest and competent Afghan officials got no respect from their fellow citizens? For all our hand-wringing and hectoring about corruption, we seemed oblivious to how much we were contributing to it, and on a scale that dwarfed the drug trade. Tens of billions
of dollars were flooding into Afghanistan from the United States and our partners, and we turned a blind eye or simply were ignorant of how regularly some portion was going to payoffs, bribes, and bank accounts in Dubai. Our own inspectors identified how lousy—or nonexistent—U.S. government controls were. From Karzai on down, Afghans had to shake their heads at our complaints about their corruption when elements of the American government (and almost certainly a number of our closest allies) were paying off them and their relatives as agents and to secure their cooperation. Hillary Clinton and I repeatedly objected to this contradictory behavior by the United States, but to no avail.

An important way station in my “pilgrim’s progress” from skepticism to support of more troops was an essay by the historian Fred Kagan, who sent me a prepublication draft. I knew and respected Kagan. He had been a prominent proponent of the surge in Iraq, and we had talked from time to time about both wars, including one long evening conversation on the veranda of one of Saddam’s palaces in Baghdad. His essay, “We’re Not the Soviets in Afghanistan,” subsequently published in
The Weekly Standard
, reminded me of the brutal realities of my first Afghan war. In that conflict, an ill-trained, loutish, and often drunken Soviet army had gradually turned to an out-and-out war of terror on the Afghan people, killing at least a million and creating somewhere between three and five million refugees. (Other accounts put the number as high as seven million.) They tried to upend Afghan culture by redistributing property on a large scale and by trying to destroy “key pillars” in the social structure. As Kagan wrote, “Increasing frustration led to increased brutality, including a deliberate campaign to de-house the rural population (forcing people to concentrate in cities that the Soviets believed they could more easily secure).… The Soviets also used chemical weapons, mines, and devices intended to cripple and maim civilians.” Kagan wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t remember about Soviet behavior in Afghanistan in the 1980s; after all, at CIA, I had watched it, reported on it, and beginning in 1986, had a direct part in countering it. What I had not done consciously as secretary of defense, Kagan’s essay made me realize, was contrast the behavior of the Soviet troops with our own. As McChrystal had said in Belgium at our meeting, the size of the footprint matters far less than what you do with it. There were reasons to be cautious about more troops, and I still was, but I now saw our experience in a light different from the Soviet one.

My thinking about more troops was further affected by President Obama’s speech on August 17 to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He said, in reference to the war in Afghanistan, “The insurgency in Afghanistan didn’t just happen overnight, and we won’t defeat it overnight. This will not be quick, nor easy. But we must never forget: This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.” This was the only time I could recall him being so forthright and committed in terms of prosecuting this war to a successful conclusion. Maybe my comment to Emanuel a few days earlier about the president needing to take “ownership” of the war had penetrated.

Because the Pentagon was more accustomed to Bush’s style of decision making than Obama’s, the military’s proposed timetable for getting a decision on more troops by the end of September was naïve. As planned, McChrystal submitted his assessment to me on August 31. Only Mullen, Petraeus, and Stavridis (at NATO) got copies initially. Petraeus endorsed the assessment the next day and, contrary to later claims, specifically supported Stan’s view of the need for both reintegration of lower-level former Taliban fighters into Afghan society and reconciliation with senior Taliban commanders. Flournoy discussed the process with Donilon, and they agreed we would pass the assessment to the NSS right after Labor Day (September 7), and it would then be discussed at limited-attendance meetings of both the deputies and the principals.

Donilon didn’t want a firm deadline on resource decisions; he correctly wanted to focus discussion initially on the assessment—as I had hoped would happen—and to make sure we had the strategy right before talking about troop numbers. He said there should be no discussion of the assessment at NATO until the White House was comfortable with it. Stavridis in Brussels agreed to sit on his copy, but he and I would have to deal with a very unhappy NATO secretary general, who expected to be brought into the loop early—a reasonable position, since McChrystal was a NATO commander.

Nobody was going to keep Barack Obama in the dark for a week about what McChrystal’s assessment said. Mullen and I met with the president in the Oval Office on September 2 and, as he had insisted, gave
him a copy of the report. I told him it did not represent a new strategy but focused on implementing what the president had approved in March. I indicated that the following week I would forward to him the views of Petraeus, Mullen, and the Joint Chiefs, as well as my own, on the way ahead. I promised he would get a full array of options for discussion from McChrystal, noting that there were three elements to the troop issue—combat units, trainers, and enablers (medevac, counter-IED, and the like).

Yet again I told the president I wanted to move quickly on the enablers, sending perhaps up to as many as 5,000. With increased IED attacks and casualties, the message to troops and commanders in delaying the enablers was unacceptable, I said. I requested flexibility to respond to these requests as they came in; I had been sitting on some of them for weeks, to stay under the presidentially imposed troop cap of 68,000. I asked for a decision within a week and offered to report weekly to the NSS on any additional troops sent in this category.

To my astonishment and dismay, the president reacted angrily to my request. Why do you need more enablers? he asked. Were they not anticipated as part of the 21,000? What had changed? Is this mission creep? The public and Congress don’t differentiate between combat troops and enablers, he said. Incremental increases lead to a sudden increase in commitment. Any more troops would be a heavy lift in terms of numbers and money. Biden jumped in with the familiar refrain that the Republicans would start calling it “Obama’s war.” I told them I had gotten a phone call from Senator Joe Lieberman saying that he, John McCain, and Lindsay Graham wanted to be helpful, and I had told Lieberman that they couldn’t let the Republicans take a pass on this key national security issue. I told the president I understood his concerns about an open-ended commitment and mission creep but that “war is dynamic, not static. At the end of the year, whatever the troop numbers, we’ll reevaluate and change our strategy if it’s not working.”

Just outside the Oval Office after the meeting, exasperated, I told Biden and Donilon that with respect to the 5,000 enablers, “From a moral and political standpoint, we cannot fail to take action to protect the troops.”

I was deeply disturbed by the meeting. If I couldn’t do what I thought was necessary to take care of the troops, I didn’t see how I could remain as secretary. I was in a quandary. I shared Obama’s concerns about an
open-ended conflict, and while I wanted to fulfill the troop requests of the commanders, I knew they always would want more—just like all their predecessors throughout history. How did you scale the size of the commitment to the goal? How did you measure risk? But I was deeply uneasy with the Obama White House’s lack of appreciation—from the top down—of the uncertainties and inherent unpredictability of war. “They all seem to think it’s a science,” I wrote in a note to myself. I came closer to resigning that day than at any other time in my tenure, though no one knew it.

During the deliberations over Afghanistan in the weeks to come, events would routinely drag me back to the sacrifices our troops were making and to the obtuseness of many of those at home. One such event occurred two days after I received McChrystal’s assessment. That day twenty-one-year-old Lance Corporal Joshua M. Bernard’s Marine unit was ambushed, and he was mortally wounded by a rocket-propelled grenade. An Associated Press photographer took a picture of the dying Marine, being tended by two comrades. His wounds were graphically portrayed in the photo. After Bernard was buried ten days later, the AP sent a reporter to talk with his family and tell them they were going to publish the photo. Bernard’s father asked that the photograph not be circulated to the news media for publication, saying it would only hurt the family more. The AP’s intent to run the photo came to my attention on September 3, and its callousness toward the family both sickened and angered me. From early in my tenure, I had had a good relationship with the press and had spoken publicly and often to military audiences about its importance in upholding our freedom (and identifying problems that needed fixing). But publishing this photo was an outrage as far as I was concerned.

I called Tom Curley, the president and chief executive of the AP, and asked him, in consideration of the father’s wishes, not to run the picture. I said at one point in the conversation, “I am the secretary of defense, and I am begging you not to run that picture.” I had never begged anybody for anything, but the sacrifice of this young Marine and the anguish of his family had suddenly become very personal to me. Curley said he would review the decision with his editors, but he didn’t hold out much hope they would change their minds. I followed up with a letter, in which I said, “The American people understand that death is an awful and inescapable part of war,” but publishing the photo would be
“an unconscionable departure from the restraint that most journalists and publications have shown covering the military since September 11.” I called the decision “appalling” and said that the issue was not one of law or constitutionality but one of “judgment and common decency.” The AP was fresh out of common decency that day and put the photo on the wire. Fortunately, most newspapers and other media had better judgment than the AP and refrained from publishing the picture. The AP’s insensitivity continues to rankle me.

I formally sent McChrystal’s assessment to the president through Jim Jones on September 10, along with a separate paper by McChrystal on why he thought a counterterrorism strategy alone would not work in Afghanistan. At that point, McChrystal was almost certainly the most lethal and successful counterterrorism practitioner in the world. The successes of the U.S. forces under his command in both Iraq and Afghanistan were legion and legendary. The paper I gave to the president was a distillation of years’ experience in hunting bad guys. McChrystal wrote that while CT (counterterrorism) operations are highly effective at
disrupting
terrorists, they are not the endgame to
defeat
a terrorist group. “CT operations are necessary to mitigate a sanctuary, but to defeat a terrorist group, host nation capacity must grow to ensure a sustainable level of security.… Without close-in access, fix and find methods become nearly impossible.… Predator [drone] strikes are effective where they complement, not replace, the capabilities of the state security apparatus, but they are not scalable in the absence of underlying infrastructure, intelligence, and physical presence.” Given McChrystal’s counterterrorism credentials, I was both astounded and amused in the weeks to come as Joe Biden; his national security adviser, Tony Blinken; Doug Lute; and others presumed to understand how to make CT work better than Stan did.