My Share of the Task (59 page)

On September 19, the first morning of the conference, Chairman Mullen and I met for breakfast. Over coffee he gave me a D.C. update. It was a bombshell.

“The strategic assessment was leaked. Bob Woodward is reporting he has it, and the
Washington Post
is going to print a version of it,” he stated flatly. “I'm not happy about it, but it's out there.”

I wasn't shocked, as things in D.C. leaked often. But having it leak so quickly after reaching Washington was frustrating. I'd expected the analysis to receive wide scrutiny, and I was comfortable with what we'd written, but the leak meant that the media and public would form their judgments at the same time as the policy makers. That would create pressures for each of the players and wouldn't help the subsequent decision-making process. That morning I didn't anticipate insinuations that I, or my staff, had been the source of the leak, which we were not.

Nor did I fully appreciate that morning that many observers and some policy makers felt the leaking had begun six weeks earlier, when the civilian advisers who had participated in our strategic assessment returned to the United States and began to say more forces were needed. They weren't speaking for me, nor in concert, but it often appeared that way when they carried a byline that listed them as an adviser to me. Upon seeing this, members of
my team contacted them and sought to put an end to any such announcements. But it was a shortcoming on our part to assume, and not to take preemptive steps to ensure, that they would respect the confidential way in which my team sought to guard the assessment's conclusions. The trickle of opinions from these civilian advisers came on top of other prominent public statements made in D.C. by members of the military. As a result, some in the White House felt as though the military had limited the president's options before he had a chance to weigh our professional advice. This was never my intent, nor that of my staff.

*   *   *

F
ive days later, in Germany, I again met with Chairman Mullen to review and submit by hand, through Central Command, the resource requirements for the strategic assessment. After the previous week's leak experience, the documents to be submitted were tightly controlled, and we inserted markings unique to each copy to make it easier to narrow down the source of any leak. In a long session with Mullen, Petraeus, and Admiral Jim Stavridis, the Supreme Allied Commander–Europe, my staff and I briefed in detail our analysis and conclusions for how to implement the recommendations of the strategic assessment.

Since we had briefed Chairman Mullen and Secretary Gates on our initial thoughts in early August, continued analysis had reinforced our conclusions. Counterinsurgency doctrine argued for 20 security force members, military or police, for every 1,000 residents in an area. Afghanistan, with a population crudely estimated to be about 24 million people, would require 480,000 soldiers and police. That rough math had to be adjusted for the severity of insurgency in each geographic location, and we graded the security of all 364 districts to determine the necessary force ratio in each. Our assessment found the Afghans needed at least 400,000 security force personnel—240,000 from the army and 160,000 from the police—to have a reasonable ability to combat the threat. We explained that if we were willing to accept moderately or significantly more risk, the targets could be
lowered to 328,000 and 235,000, respectively. Although we did detailed modeling and analysis, I understood that counterinsurgency doctrine on security force levels was as much art as science.

At the time, the army was roughly 92,000 strong,
approved to grow to 134,000, while the police were
84,000 strong. This was too small for a country of Afghanistan's size and terrain to fight an ongoing insurgency. So, as we worked to grow the army by 150,000 (or 100,000 past its previous target) and the police by 80,000, we recommended deploying an additional 40,000 Coalition forces, no doubt mostly American, to provide a “bridge” capability of sufficient security forces until the Afghan army and police could assume a larger role.

We also shared what we believed the impact of smaller and larger force numbers would be, but recommended 40,000 forces were necessary to implement our strategy within the essential time frame and with what we assessed as “acceptable risk.”

I received advice to recommend a higher number to give myself “negotiating room” to the lower, true requirement, but I decided against it. This was no time for games; I had to provide accurate, honest inputs. I viewed the troop calculation not as a request, but as providing what is termed “best military advice” to the commander in chief on what I felt was necessary to accomplish his articulated mission with an acceptable amount of risk. I remain comfortable we followed the right approach, but not “asking high” likely made me appear unwilling to compromise in later stages of the decision-making process.

*   *   *

“I
want to defend Afghanistan,” the frightened young soldier said in Dari. The skinny, dark eyed young man from northern Afghanistan wore a baggy green fatigue uniform, nylon “web” gear holding his basic combat equipment, and a curiously shaped steel helmet of indeterminate age. In his hands he held a worn AK-47 rifle his leaders had told me was now inaccurate due to overuse. The soldier was young and uncertain, but seemed sincere in his desire to serve.

That fall afternoon in 2009, I was on a bare dirt maneuver area on the Afghan National Army's training center, on the north side of Kabul. With staccato gunfire on a nearby range as an appropriate soundtrack to the moment, I was heartened by the young soldier's commitment to the fledgling Afghan National Army. But after a lifetime of training soldiers, I could see how far we had to go.

I had left the August meeting in Belgium with Mullen and Gates confident that all the participants understood and accepted our analysis that Afghan forces needed to expand sizeably. But in Afghanistan, like everywhere else in the world, building an army and police force takes time, money, leadership, and patience. Afghanistan's long, proud military tradition had endured a three-decade-long hiatus when the country went without a functioning national army. That hiatus had depleted both its stores of equipment and reservoirs of human talent.

In combat, the performance of Afghan National Army units had shown promise, but the dominance of former Northern Alliance leaders, corruption, and uneven leadership continued to hobble their development. Initiatives like the Afghan Military Academy—Afghanistan's West Point—helped. But leaders needed time and political will to create a self-sustaining institution.

The police were far behind, almost depressingly so. They had received little international attention since 9/11, and despite Minister Hanif Atmar's energetic efforts, they lacked training and leadership and suffered from chronic corruption and drug use. By nature, police are far harder to build than armies. Their decentralized employment disperses them in small elements that are vulnerable to improper pressure and corruption. It also makes small-unit leadership critical, something that in Afghanistan was weak. Further, in the press to field police around the country, the Ministry of the Interior adopted a recruit-deploy-train model, instead of the more logical recruit-train-deploy one, guaranteeing that most police in service lacked even a basic level of training.

As a result, the police struggled for legitimacy with the people. In a number of locations, predatory police were the single greatest factor undermining support for the Afghan government. Still, against the cacophony of withering criticism they regularly received, I'd point out that the Afghan National Police were dying in far greater numbers fighting the insurgency
than any other force.

Finding fault with both the army and police was easy, but that wouldn't get the job done. So we pushed to expand the existing organization responsible for their training and development into a vastly more capable international effort called NATO Training Mission–Afghanistan (NTM-A). At the same time, we sought increased force levels for both the army and the police.

There were a number of reasons to doubt this goal. We knew that rapid expansion of Afghan security forces risked producing units that lacked the training, discipline, and needed professionalism. And we projected that for a decade or more, Afghanistan could not afford forces of this size without donor funding. But we knew that fielding Afghan forces cost a fraction of what it did to deploy Coalition forces, and that the final stages of the war would be fought not by Americans, but by Afghans.

Leadership would be critical. But development of leaders was a long-term prospect. So Rod and I intended to leverage partnership with ISAF forces to help mitigate the risks of fielding Afghan units that lacked a seasoned leadership cadre. The only way to build not just more security forces but better policemen and soldiers was to put into motion the “radically improved partnership at every level” I had called for in the assessment. Afghans and NATO soldiers would train, eat, bunk, plan, patrol, fight, celebrate, and mourn together. We knew this course of action, however, carried its own risks. It'd be impossible to keep out all attempts by the insurgents to infiltrate the forces, or prevent soldiers turning sides. And we anticipated there would be cultural friction. Most difficult to stomach were tragic cases when uniformed Afghans killed NATO service members. Still we judged true partnering was the only viable option in the time frame we believed we had for the mission.

*   *   *

P
iercing stares, animated conversation, and pointing followed my every move. Even separated by chain-link fencing and carefully placed sheets of Plexiglas, the prisoners were menacing. I was visiting the detention facility at Bagram air base, still housed in the same old buildings I'd visited in 2002. As I walked among the series of small chain-link group “cells” occupied by eight to ten detainees each, I was struck by the seething rag coming from what looked like cages. The Plexiglas was there to prevent food and other things from being flung at the guards, who, for the conditions, remained impressively professional. Construction was already under way for a new facility. But it couldn't come quickly enough.

Sensitive to both the importance and risks of detention operations, I was anxious to create a detention operation like I'd seen developed in Iraq in 2007–2008. I remembered sitting in a meeting in Baghdad in early 2007 when a Marine Reserve major general named Doug Stone had arrived to take command of detention operations. I'd known Doug from his tour in Islamabad back in 2003–2004 and frankly doubted he would be up to the task.

I was dead wrong. He began by creating a short but frightening video illustrating the depth of the problems we had in the theater detention system in Iraq. To haunting background music, his video showed escapes, frequent violence, even buildings being burned down by prisoners. It also revealed the systematic indoctrination of countless Iraqis who'd arrived into the system with little ideological fervor, but were soon exposed to the extremism then plaguing our detention system in Iraq. He argued that inside our detention facilities, we were losing to the insurgency. Then, in a systematic campaign, Doug and his team changed the environment inside the prisons. What had been a dramatic vulnerability for the Coalition became an effective component of its counterinsurgency campaign.

Now, in 2009, with Dave Petraeus's support, Doug came out to Kabul to lay the groundwork for the creation of a new organization we named Joint Task Force 435. It would redesign our detention operations in Afghanistan with the objective of transitioning them to Afghan control as quickly as possible, we hoped by January 1, 2011. When Doug became unavailable for long-term assignment to Afghanistan, I sought Vice Admiral Bob Harward. Bob was a relentlessly energetic SEAL who'd been one of my assistant commanding generals in TF 714 for my last two years in command. I tasked him with implementing Doug's design. A Dari speaker, Bob brought an ability to drive change and build key relationships with Afghan counterparts.

Bob completed the new detention facility, managing every aspect of its operating plan. It was superb, allowing us to provide better living conditions, conduct effective interrogations, and prepare detainees for integration back into Afghan society. To eliminate Afghans' recurring concerns over the typically opaque way the United States detained their countrymen, we hosted a series of visits and tours by officials, media, and Afghan opinion makers. From the beginning, there was a robust Afghan government presence in the facility, and I directed Bob to place a high priority on the transition to Afghan control as quickly as possible.

More important than reforming how we handled the detention of insurgents, we sought to reestablish the “rule of law” in Afghanistan. Traditional tribal systems—called
shuras
or
jirgas
—and the more official police and judicial functions provided by the districts, provinces, and national government were in disarray. Courts, which should have provided essential government services for common problems like land disputes, were plagued by corruption, inefficiency, or a complete lack of capacity. The Taliban had skillfully exploited this vacuum, and further highlighted the government's failings by providing basic legal arbitration.

Joint Task Force 435's operations quickly became far wider than U.S.-run detention operations and, in concert with the U.S. embassy, included an effort to transform the Afghan government's ability to build up the rule of law. We brought to Afghanistan Mark Martins, an army brigadier general I'd known at Fort Bragg and in Iraq, and now asked him to spearhead urgent change. Mark had been first in his West Point class and a Rhodes Scholar, but his energy was just as critical as his intellect in the task ahead.

*   *   *

A
t the beginning of October, I got a serious wake-up call. I was in London for engagements conducted to explain and strengthen support for ISAF's efforts, which had expanded significantly with our campaign to secure the Helmand River valley. The rising violence and risks within Afghanistan prompted political challenges to the leadership of contributing nations, such as Germany and Italy, which had joined ISAF with the expectation of nonviolent peacekeeping operations. Over my year in command, I recieved a number of requests for me to provide such direct ISAF commander observations and insights, and I wasn't able to fulfill most of them in person. But given the ongoing Helmand operations and the British role in them, I judged this invitation to be particularly important. After consulting with Secretary Gates, I agreed to speak in London.