My Share of the Task (60 page)

I was awakened in the early-morning hours of October 2 by Admiral Mullen relaying concerns over remarks I'd made the previous day at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies. A reporter had asked whether I felt a more limited counterterrorism—CT-only—strategy was viable for Afghanistan. I'd answered that, in my estimation, a more holistic effort than a counterterrorism capture-and-kill campaign was required to leave Afghanistan stable. Although Vice President Biden was not mentioned in the question, and I was not thinking of him in my answer, my response was reported as a rebuttal of other policy options for Afghanistan and as criticism of the vice president's views.

It wasn't intended as such, but I could have said it better. I was a commander focused on explaining the mission I understood I'd been given and the strategy currently being prosecuted. Pending alteration through the current review, that strategy was a counterinsurgency campaign to win what Obama had, a few days before the Afghan elections, declared was “not a war of choice” but “
a war of necessity.” The London venue allowed me explain to a British audience the soundness of that strategy—under which, on that day, British troops were fighting and dying in Helmand. Still, I should have better understood that the president's review process, begun in September, was not just evaluating my strategy and force request to accomplish counterinsurgency mission but was reevaluating the mission itself.

Redefining ISAF's—and America's—mission in Afghanistan became a central issue. In June, I'd directed our team to conduct the strategic assessment based upon our understanding of the mission as outlined by President Obama in speeches prior to that time. Although the importance of Al Qaeda was never in doubt, we had interpreted that our mission included helping the nation of Afghanistan develop the ability to defend its sovereignty. This necessarily included building capacity across the government and providing the opportunity for economic development.

After Iraq, “nation building” was an unpopular term. But our assessment had concluded that Afghanistan's inherent weakness in governance was at the core of the problem. Security had to come first, or else the government could not function. But absent legitimate governance, real progress was impossible. We didn't think the country's government needed all the attributes and trappings of Western democracy, but Afghans needed to believe it was responsible and legitimate enough to offer a credible alternative to Taliban or local warlord control.

In the weeks ahead, policy makers reviewed a variety of alternative approaches. One envisioned maintaining control of a limited number of secure areas in Afghanistan and prosecuting a counterterrorist strategy of pinpoint kinetic strikes and raids against insurgents. It had the potential advantage of requiring fewer forces and avoiding the daunting challenge of pacifying areas long under insurgent influence or outright control. A counterterrorist approach shared some attributes with Britain's late-nineteenth-century “butcher and bolt” tactics in India's Northwest Frontier, now Pakistan, where potential adversaries were kept weakened and “in line” by periodic raids that demonstrated Britain's power.

My background in counterterrorism made the approach tempting, but I reluctantly concluded it wouldn't work. Watching efforts like Doug P.'s and Sean MacFarland's fight in Ramadi, I'd left Iraq with the conviction that strikes could damage insurgent forces, but I felt that a counterterrorism strategy would ultimately cede control of an area, and of its population, to the enemy. If our mission included an Afghanistan capable of defending its people and sovereignty, it would require more.

The day after the London speech, I flew to Copenhagen for a previously scheduled Air Force One meeting with President Obama, who was there to campaign to bring the Olympics to Chicago. I took Annie with me, and in both our initial greeting with spouses and our one-on-one meeting, the president was focused but friendly and supportive. I don't remember either of us raising anything about the speech.

Still, in retrospect, I never felt entirely the same after the leak of the strategic assessment and then the unexpected storm raised by the London talk. I recognized, perhaps too slowly, the extent to which politics, personalities, and other factors would complicate a course that, under the best of circumstances, would be remarkably difficult to navigate.

Not long before I spoke in London, I'd sat with David Martin of
60 Minutes
in front of a camera in ISAF's Kabul compound. “Can you imagine ever saying to the president of the United States, ‘Sir, we just can't do it'?” he asked.

“Yes, I can,” I said. “And if I felt that way, the day I feel that way, the day I'm sure I feel that way, I'll tell him that.”

His question got to a fundamental paradox military leaders face in communicating about the effort they are leading. The public deserves candor about the situation and prospects for success; politicians demand it. Anything less is deemed incompetence or equivocation. But once a decision has been made to conduct an operation, a commander has to believe it can be accomplished and has to communicate that confidence in countless ways to the soldiers he leads. Failure to do so can undermine the determination of the force and can risk a fear of failure becoming self-fulfilling.

The paradox was real. As I watched from the Pentagon during the year leading up to my assignment to Afghanistan, I thought I understood the political sensitivities that existed around America's and NATO's role in Afghanistan. I had assumed command believing we needed to reverse both the reality and perception of a deteriorating situation, and through the assessment had concluded that only with significant changes, energetically implemented, could we succeed. After three months of command that included extensive travel around Afghanistan and daily interaction with Afghans from Kabul to rural villages, I also believed the mission was worthy of the risks and sacrifices it would entail. But in the coming months I found myself in a balancing act between trying to aggressively accomplish the mission I believed I'd been given, and not corrupting a valid policy-review process that quickly came to question whether the mission itself was the correct one.

Like many soldiers of my generation, my ideal for how a military leader should advise and answer to civilian, democratic authority had been drawn from Samuel Huntington's seminal treatise,
The
Soldier and the State
. He argued a military commander should endeavor to operate as independently of political or even policy pressures as possible. And yet I found, as much as I wanted my role to be that described by Huntington, the demands of the job made this difficult. The process of formulating, negotiating, articulating, and then prosecuting even a largely military campaign involved politics at multiple levels that were impossible to ignore.

My position as director of the Joint Staff had offered a window into civil-military interaction that was at once disconcerting and instructive. Inevitably, as the Obama administration decided whether to increase our forces in Afghanistan, some drew comparisons between Afghanistan and Vietnam. As a student of history, I was sensitive to the Vietnam analogy. That summer, I reread Stanley Karnow's
Vietnam: A History
, which portrayed the challenges of that war. During a memorable night in Kabul, Richard Holbrooke and I spoke on the phone with Karnow. But the lessons to be drawn were anything but incontrovertible. Civilians looking back on Vietnam had cause for wariness when reading of the military's propensity for unrealistic assessments of the probability of success, exemplified by Westmoreland's famous “light at the end of the tunnel” phrase.

I also thought of Daniel Ellsberg's book
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
, which I'd listened to on audiobook while in Iraq commanding TF 714. Ellsberg's story, intensely controversial in my youth, now offered me more nuanced lessons. His outrage stemmed from his conclusion that many of the failures in Vietnam owed not to flawed analysis but to politically driven decisions to ignore the difficult conclusions the analysis offered. The Pentagon Papers, which he famously leaked, convinced him that decision makers had not been misled into disaster by ignorance or bad advice. Rather, faced with two politically toxic but militarily sound options—withdrawal or full escalation—they chose to pursue other policies for political reasons, even though analysis told them these policies were likely to fail. It was a chilling thought.

At one point, a story arose that I was considering resigning if not provided the forty thousand troops I'd recommended. That was simply not true. As a professional soldier I was committed to implementing to the best of my ability any policy selected by civilian leadership.

*   *   *

T
he following week, on October 8, a version of the “What is our mission?” question surfaced during one of the early National Security Council–sponsored video teleconferences, organized to review America's policy. Beamed into the White House Situation Room from our headquarters in Kabul, I began the briefing by explaining the mission as I understood it: “Defeat the Taliban. Secure the Population.” It prompted a participant on the other screen to ask why I interpreted our mission as requiring the destruction or eradication of the Taliban. I said I wasn't. The word we'd used was “defeat,” which in military doctrine was defined as rendering an enemy incapable of accomplishing its mission. As Sun Tzu had advised, if that could be accomplished cheaply, with little actual fighting, so much the better. I was then asked why we'd defined our mission as defeat, and not some lesser objective, like “degrade.”

“Because that's the mission we provided them in a tasking document,” I remember Lieutenant General Doug Lute interjecting into the discussion. “They are using what we told them.”

Recognizing the disconnect, I walked into the next VTC with a slide that outlined the sources from which we'd derived the mission we'd used for our assessment, including the president's public speeches and the marching orders that flowed from the administration's March strategy review. We also showed the origins of NATO's mission statement for ISAF. It seemed to surprise some of the participants in the session.

Not the president, however. “Stan is just doing what we've asked him to do,” he explained. But it was clear to me that the mission itself was now on the table for review and adjustment.

Redefining the mission was an important, maybe the most important, task in front of policy makers. I'd repeatedly advised my staff not to be wedded to our first interpretation of the mission. We would have to provide our best military advice on the course of action and resources necessary to accomplish whatever directives we were given. Our strategic assessment provided a partial foundation for the process, but had not considered significantly different missions.

While the review debated whether to defeat or degrade the Taliban, I never thought we'd crush the Taliban in a conventional military sense; I calculated we didn't need to. I hoped to defeat it by making it irrelevant: We'd do so through limiting its ability to influence the lives and welfare of the Afghans, and reducing the grievances that pushed recruits to its ranks. But we also needed to craft realistic avenues and opportunities for insurgents to reconcile with the government in safety. Five months earlier, almost immediately after being alerted I would deploy to Afghanistan, I had decided I wanted to create an organization to orchestrate that process. To lead it, only one man came to mind: Soon-to-retire Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb, the Scottish maverick who had so quietly done so much in Iraq to produce much needed spurts of momentum in our favor during a crucial time.

In a gross adaptation of Churchill's famous tribute to the heroes of the Battle of Britain, I'm confident never has so much been extracted from someone for so little. Instead of offering an impressive dinner for a man who is a closet gourmet, I had taken Graeme to a cheap Mexican restaurant near the Pentagon before I'd deployed. Over burritos and beer I asked him to put all his plans for retirement life on hold, come to Afghanistan for an undetermined length of time, and do a job I couldn't precisely define. I had no idea what the mechanics of his employment would be, or what he'd be paid. He had no time to consult his wife, Mel, or his daughters, who'd waited years for Graeme to settle.

“Of course, Stan,” he answered with his characteristic laugh, “but I can't believe I'm selling myself for a pathetic Mexican dinner, yeah.”

Graeme arrived in Kabul in August and soon began organizing his team and establishing connections with relevant Afghan leaders. The Force Reintegration Cell, or F-RIC as it was named, became ISAF's arm to help provide both organization and energy to what was an almost nonexistent Afghan effort to reintegrate smaller bands of Taliban insurgents into society and to set the conditions for potential large-scale, top-level reconciliation between the Afghan government and insurgent leaders.

Years of halfhearted, mostly failed efforts to reintegrate former Taliban into society had produced deep skepticism. Insurgents doubted they would be adequately protected while loyal Afghans were unreceptive to the idea that former enemies might receive land, money, or political stature while they struggled.

Because feelings on the issue were so passionate, Afghan domestic politics were entrenched. Efforts to organize and implement reintegration and reconciliation programs moved at a frustratingly deliberate pace. The international community, anxious for an acceptable accommodation, struggled to maintain a consistent position on the issue. Into this environment I inserted Graeme Lamb, with confidence he would get people talking and, I hoped, acting.

“You can't roll up your sleeves while you're wringing your hands,” Graeme would aptly remark.

*   *   *

T
he increasing friction between the United States and Afghanistan was painfully evident a few weeks later, on October 20, in a press conference from the presidential palace. At the podium President Karzai appeared flanked by U.S. and Afghan flags, Senator John Kerry, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, and U.N. special representative Kai Eide. A month before, the Afghan government's electoral body had announced Karzai had won 55 percent of the vote, compared to Abdullah's 28 percent, initially making it appear Karzai had avoided a runoff and gained a significant mandate beyond his Pashtun base. But the independent U.N.-backed monitor, the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC), announced widespread fraud. The day before, the ECC had announced revised numbers, which put Karzai at less than 50 percent. Now he reluctantly agreed to accept a runoff election. In Afghan society, where a leader's personal stature and presence mattered, the press conference may have reinforced the image of Karzai as a puppet of the West—a portrayal that I knew cut him to his core. Less than two weeks later, the runoff was canceled when Dr. Abdullah withdrew over concerns the second round of voting would be no less susceptible to fraud than the first.