My Share of the Task (57 page)

Their convincing analysis argued that at least forty thousand troops would be required to establish enough security in enough areas to achieve progress that was credible to Afghans and fast enough to arrest and then reverse the deteriorating situation around the country.

Rod and I struggled with this conclusion. We knew it would be politically contentious, and we challenged the planners repeatedly. But by the end of July, I was convinced that to accomplish the mission we'd been given within the time frame we thought we had, we'd need additional U.S. and NATO forces. Without them, we were unable to halt the insurgency's momentum and buy time until the still-nascent Afghan forces were both big and effective enough to stave off the insurgency and allow the Afghan state to survive. The only other option, as I saw it, was to alter the mission and objectives.

Although we'd finished the guts of the assessment well before the sixty-day deadline of August 30, Secretary Gates directed me to hold the document until after the August 20 Afghan election. He would ask for it then. Given the likely impact of the assessment, the secretary no doubt wanted to ensure that we provided it to the appropriate policy makers before it received wider distribution and scrutiny.

After the long meeting, I sensed Secretary Gates reluctantly accepted the analysis, but recognized the challenge of convincing some in D.C. Its reception would inevitably be affected by factors beyond my view there, but I resolved to try to steer clear of politics. That wasn't always easy. An August visit by a delegation led by Senators John McCain, Joseph Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham had included a pointed exchange in which I declined to outline the recommendations I would provide to President Obama regarding U.S. force levels in Afghanistan. I knew the friction wasn't personal. It reflected the passion that the intersection of policy and politics engenders. But I wanted no part of it.

I left Belgium that afternoon knowing our prescription would be a tough sell. Its reception would hinge, in large part, on how the Afghan presidential elections went.

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T
he elections were already controversial when I arrived in June. After intense wrangling, the date had been pushed from April. There were accusations that President Karzai was unfairly maneuvering to disadvantage potential opponents. Additionally, foreign involvement, including some foreign diplomats' energetic search for opposition candidates, had produced an atmosphere of skepticism and distrust among many Afghans.

For outsiders, the world of Afghan politics was a baffling recipe of ethnicities and personalities seasoned with corruption and intrigue. Even a small taste could produce painful heartburn. Afghans were used to it. The mix of economic, tribal, historical, and personal relationships that produced the colorful swirl of their political scene could frustrate and even enrage them. But they seemed to understand it. The worst amassed power and wealth with callous arrogance. The best cut deals, paid bribes, and even for the best of motives, played by rules they hoped to someday change. The Uzbek commander Abdul Rashid Dostum became the poster child of shifting Afghan loyalties when he turned to, and then against, the Taliban in 1996. But he reflected a long tradition. Often called intractable, Afghan culture was rooted in practicality and compromise.

The election stakes were high. Afghans would select their chief executive for the next five years, a time when the immediate future of that nation and the outcome of NATO's and America's effort in the country would likely be decided. For a weary international audience, and an increasingly worried Afghan electorate, the conduct of the election would be an important metric—and, hopefully, a milestone in the maturation of the fledgling democracy. For ISAF and our Afghan security-sector partners, success in securing a complex election conducted across the country could spur needed improvements and build confidence.

By August,
thirty-two candidates were running for president. Karzai, after having been appointed to the office in 2002 and elected by Afghans to a five-year term in 2004, was the clear favorite. But the choices he made that summer for running mates—Marshal Mohammad Fahim, a northern Tajik, and a Hazara, Karim Khalili—worried some onlookers, who hoped for a new crop of leadership to supplant the existing power brokers whose roots were in the country's civil war. Karzai's main rival was another northerner, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, a confidant of the late Ahmad Shah Massoud and Karzai's foreign minister until 2006. The candidates included a number of other prominent Afghans—including Dr. Ashraf Ghani, a well-respected Pashtun economist and onetime minister of finance, and Ali Jalali, the former interior minister and a journalist by trade. Throughout the summer, Karzai polled at roughly 45 percent of the vote, but Afghanistan's constitution required that a runoff be held if no candidate won at least 50 percent.

From a security standpoint, I'd been tracking the upcoming elections for almost a year. Dave McKiernan's troop request, which had been a focus of ours in the Pentagon, had identified the need to increase security for the elections, particularly in the turbulent and largely Pashtun south. Now, although preparation for the elections had been under way for some months, there was much left to do. Soon after my arrival, detailed planning for Afghan-led security, backed up by Coalition support, moved into high gear. A credible election would require, at a minimum, making secure polling stations accessible to the vast majority of Afghans, even in physically remote or Taliban-controlled areas. It meant the Afghans, led by the government's electoral body, the Independent Election Commission (IEC), needed to identify voting locations, hire staff to run them, and physically deliver and retrieve ballot materials, all the while protecting not only the polling sites but also protecting potential voters.

Incidentally, the planning and coordination process served to force the ISAF-Afghan partnership Rod and I wanted to materialize. In a series of marathon meetings and video teleconferences with our Afghan partners, we hammered out point after point. Afghan leaders I had barely known before, like Wardak, Atmar, and chief of the army General Bismullah Mohammedi, first became operational partners, then friends.

Among the Afghan leaders with whom we worked most closely, a young Tajik named Amrullah Saleh stood out. I'd first met Saleh on September 9, 2004, when he took me to the Panshir Valley for a memorial service at the old headquarters of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the legendary mujahideen leader. At that spot three years earlier, Massoud had been assassinated by Al Qaeda operatives posing as cameramen. As we watched the memorial, surrounded by a hillside of bearded, serious-looking men, Massoud's former fighters, Saleh, still only thirty-three that day, explained how he'd served Massoud as a deputy. His crisp, fluent English, intimidating intellect, and fervor against the Taliban made an immediate impression. Since then, he had risen to be the director of Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security (NDS), and he remained in that role when I arrived in 2009.

I realized that for many in ISAF, true partnering was new and uncomfortable, but that couldn't dissuade us from it. Just about the time we got everyone comfortable, we would have lost.

That same day, with elections nearing, I spoke to the Afghan National Security Force Partnering Working Group. “Looking for a decisive battle is our instinct. We're in it now,” I said. “Elections are about what is in people's minds, and that is what will ultimately determine success.”

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T
he enemy was surely thinking the same. On the morning of Saturday, August 15, five days before the election, the headquarters staff sat assembled in the tiered rows of our operations center for our morning update. Suddenly, a loud explosion shook the small ISAF compound. A voice on the sound system immediately directed the briefing to end and all personnel to depart the operations center. Mike Hall leaned over to me. “And where are we going to go, to the bunkers? What are we going to accomplish there?” he asked. “I suggest we let the people responsible for securing the compound do their jobs, and we stay here and do ours.”

It was sage advice that I transmitted as an order. The evacuation of the command center stopped abruptly, people settled back into their seats, a few with obvious nervousness, and the briefing continued. We weren't noncombatants disconnected from the fight; we were going to command it. Within minutes, it was reported that a car bomb had detonated just outside our main gate. The explosion had
burst the cinderblocks lining the street, spraying chunks of cement into a large group of Afghans queued up outside our gate. The tall concrete slabs lining our compound had withstood the blast, which sent shock waves reverberating back across the street toward the unshielded Afghan buildings on the other side, blowing out the glass windows. Those first on the scene came to find the bomber's sedan, charred but coursing thick orange flames out of its windows and up from its carriage. The blast waves had shot up through the tree limbs overhanging the usually quiet street, sending leaves fluttering down over the tops of the pavement and parked cars. Half obscured beneath the green spread of leaves lay the motionless bodies of Afghans. The blast
killed seven people, and wounded ninety-one others. It was never entirely clear whether ISAF was the bomber's primary target. But it was a jolt to everyone in the command, and a reminder of the stakes.

Election preparations continued. Challenge after challenge surfaced, from transporting the more than ninety-five thousand ballot boxes, which moved on trucks, helicopters, and even on the backs of some three thousand donkeys, to finding ways to put enough security in embattled areas to allow voting. The election was a significant undertaking for the Afghan government, and the IEC recruited a temporary staff of more than 120,000 for the day of the vote. (Although 40 percent of them were women, there were not enough to staff the
women-only voting stations.) The IEC planned to open 27,000 polling stations, for which the U.N. procured 58,000 plastic chairs, 116,000 voting screens, and 180,000
tunics for poll workers. The Afghans were remarkably transparent in admitting that they were making accommodations with insurgents in selected areas in order to facilitate the election. But I sensed there was a genuine effort to secure the polls as well as possible. With the Afghans' limited capacity and the Taliban trumpeting their intent to violently disrupt the vote, the outcome would be imperfect at best. Yet from a security standpoint, a clear failure by the Taliban to derail the process would be a win. However, for the elections to have real credibility, they would have to be judged sufficiently fair. That judgment would be an imprecise, but critical, metric.

The political process moved roughly in parallel, although over an even rockier road. It left IEC director Dr. Azizullah Lodin, a quiet, courtly man, constantly buffeted by demands and accusations of impending problems.

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A
s election day unfolded, in ISAF we were initially pleased with the result. Although the number of
Taliban attacks was extremely high, the election was not effectively disrupted. The government opened roughly
90 percent of the polling sites that it had planned to, and on the day of the election, violence or
threats inactivated just 12 percent of those originally opened to voters. While hard numbers were scarce, between 35 percent and
39 percent of voters turned out. Fewer people voted than we had hoped for or anticipated—particularly in Helmand and Kandahar.

In most provinces the Afghan army and police had performed admirably. They were out in more areas simultaneously than most of my commanders had ever seen, and the Afghans had taken impressive responsibility for security.

Our guarded satisfaction didn't survive long. Almost immediately there were accusations of fraud, ballot stuffing, and other improprieties. Opposition candidates complained, as did many election monitors. Unquestionably, many of the complaints were valid, but I couldn't judge whether these were typical warts of the democratic process or indicators of a “stolen election.” President Karzai, the incumbent and clear Pashtun candidate in a country that was 42 percent Pashtun, hardly needed fraud to be reelected. But he had sought a convincing mandate. I had no doubt that some of his supporters had, with or without his direction, taken it upon themselves to ensure success by any means they considered necessary.

The entire process had been flawed, and recriminations abounded. U.N. special representative Kai Eide's public break with his deputy, Peter Galbraith, and President Karzai's rage at Ambassadors Richard Holbrooke and Karl Eikenberry increased the toxicity in the atmosphere. Most worrisome, the international community's disgust with apparent fraud led many to call into question the feasibility of our effort in Afghanistan. Although the outcome of the election and the health of the government mattered greatly to our mission, my position as military commander allowed, indeed required, that I stay out of the particular postelection political fray.

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O
n an early morning at the end of August, I took my regular run around the compound. The tiny enclave made for monotonous laps through alleys and behind buildings and still came up well short of a mile. It wasn't fun running, like an interesting city could be. But it was an opportunity to take stock of what we'd done and where I thought we were.

The aftermath of the elections was becoming a mess. Although the vote count was still ongoing, I could sense a looming political crisis. But there were also reasons for optimism. ISAF was becoming a different organization. We hadn't changed the culture entirely, but we were transforming to a more focused team. When the ISAF Joint Command became active late in September, I expected ISAF would be able to mold itself more effectively toward the strategic role that was needed.

Across Afghanistan, ISAF's operational focus on protecting the people wasn't complete. But there were improvements. The U.S. Marines and Brits in Helmand were producing change, not through miracles that suddenly appeared, but through muddy, often bloody fights under the eyes of skeptical locals, followed by patient engagement. It was two steps forward, very carefully taken to avoid IEDs, and one step backward. But it was real progress. On battlefield visits I'd hear my own words on counterinsurgency echoed back to me by young leaders, often unaware of their origin. With more time, and Rod's leadership, I was confident that sustainable improvement was possible.