My Share of the Task (61 page)

Although blame for getting to that point could fairly be spread far and wide, the scar tissue, particularly the indignation that Karzai felt, was deep and permanent. The mistrust on both sides became a critical issue, further hindering the partnership between NATO and Afghans and eroding confidence in the viability of the mission.

Despite the controversy, and perhaps more so because of it, I increasingly made my relationship with Karzai a priority and sought to base it on genuine respect. I was aware of his flaws, and the allegations against his brothers. I had seen him exhibit both impressive and poor leadership in my first three months. But I increasingly understood the unique challenges of the physical and political environment in which he had to work to make the partnership to which NATO, America, and Afghanistan had committed as effective as possible.

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M
y close relationship with Dave Rodriguez remained important to me on both a personal and a professional level. Whenever I could, often at the end of trips to locations across the country, I'd land at Kabul's airport and walk the two hundred meters to Rod's headquarters to see him for a few minutes before I moved across the city to ISAF's compound. We'd developed the strategy together and were now partners in implementing it. Sitting in his small office, we would often compare notes and talk candidly about the war. Seeing the poster-size photo Rod kept of his son, Andrew, whom I'd known from birth, in his West Point football uniform, I'd remember all Rod was missing.

Late one evening after flying back from Kandahar at the beginning of November, two months into the president's review process, I went to Rod's office and became aware of a set of cables U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry had recently sent. In them, he raised a number of questions and concerns on the troop increase and the Afghans' ability to take responsibility for their country in a reasonable time frame. I would later learn that he had written these at the request of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in order to provide her with a candid and personal assessment of the campaign. While I may not have agreed with Karl on all matters, I always valued his analysis and judgment, particularly given his years of government service in Afghanistan as a soldier and then as a statesman.

In the cables Karl voiced a number of reservations about the counterinsurgency approach and the impact of more troops, including the American public's patience for a relatively long and expensive campaign. He expressed concerns that the U.S. civilian effort was underresourced: A recent request for increased funding by the embassy, he reminded Secretary Clinton, had been rejected. He also noted that NATO and the U.N.'s wider civilian effort remained uncoordinated and thus undermined—an unsettling reality when the civilian component needed to be an equal pillar in a joint counterinsurgency strategy.

But Karl's strongest criticisms were of the Afghan government. He worried the Afghan army and police were unlikely to be able to establish and maintain security, and the Afghan government lacked the institutions and manpower to establish governance in areas we cleared. Combined with his reservations about President Karzai's personal commitment and effectiveness, it was a powerful warning from a soldier-diplomat with extensive Afghan experience.

Karl's cable reminded me of Bob Komer's well-known 1972 Rand study raising the alarm about U.S. performance in Vietnam, a document I'd read and reread for the instructive way it captured the pitfalls counterinsurgency efforts too easily fall into.

There was little of Karl's analysis that I disagreed with. But based on my understanding of the mission the president had given us, I concluded that we had few options, and none of them were easy or enticing. Complete withdrawal would reopen Afghanistan to Al Qaeda and enable the Taliban's resurgence. And at the status quo, the situation had been steadily deteriorating. So, as we'd outlined in our strategic assessment, I believed that if we were going to pursue the objectives that comprised our current mission, we had to simultaneously do more, and also do it better.

While our objective had to be the most rapid transition possible to Afghan defense of their own sovereignty, by the fall of 2009, for a variety of oft-cataloged reasons, Afghanistan was not yet ready to assume responsibility. As expensive as it would be, particularly in the lives of our service members, I had concluded that in order to provide both the Afghan government and its security forces an opportunity to grow the necessary capabilities, we would need additional U.S. and Coalition forces to enhance security and to accelerate training of the army and police. These Afghan units would need to be mentored by U.S. and international forces in the field, as they jointly fought back the enemy. Doing so, in time, would bring the insurgency down to a size that the Afghan security forces, with continued improvement, could then manage. Rather than increasing the Afghan army and police's dependence, more American troops, seriously focused on integrating the Afghans would set conditions, as President Obama later put it, so that “more Afghans can get into the fight.”

Karl proposed President Obama take more time before making a decision on a strategy or troop levels, and instead extend the review process and bring in further viewpoints. In the meantime, Karl suggested, the president might incrementally add smaller amounts of troops to mentor and fight, adding more forces only as the Afghan government's performance improved. I shared the desire to see the Afghan government make significant improvements before putting more Americans in harm's way. But I felt that incrementally adding troops would parallel our experience in Vietnam and, to a degree, in Iraq. In those wars, we had underestimated, then lagged the insurgency. By periodically adding more troops but not enough to finish off the insurgency, we'd made it stronger: The combat made the enemy a wiser foe, and their ability to survive made them appear more credible and fearsome to the population.

Unfortunately, within days of his sending the cables, the broad outlines of Karl's conclusions were leaked to the
New York Times
, which paraphrased many of his concerns. Like the leak of our strategic assessment, it was disruptive to have such classified documents shared with the press, particularly at that sensitive period of the campaign. Then, and again when the
Times
released the cables in their entirety in January, my immediate concern was the impact they would have on the Afghans, particularly President Karzai. As is typical in confidential correspondence, the language was frank. Karl took the position that Karzai was “not an adequate strategic partner.” Karzai and his administration soon read that phrasing themselves. I did not share Karl's viewpoint, knowing that a relationship with any one person, even the president, in a campaign as complex as the one in Afghanistan would not make or break the entire effort. Instead, the partnership that we had with Afghanistan collectively—its government, its security forces and, most important, its people—would drive our success or failure.

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T
wo weeks later, on November 23, President Obama convened the last of his full National Security Council sessions on the direction forward in Afghanistan. The president opened the floor, and Vice President Biden spoke first. Secretary Clinton followed. Throughout the fall, she'd been a strong voice during the deliberations. Now she quickly made clear that she supported sending forty thousand additional troops to pursue our strategy. As it had been refined, that strategy involved protecting select geographic centers; continuing to target Al Qaeda; and growing and improving the Afghan army and police to be able to secure the state against a weakened insurgency. Even on the wide angle of the VTC screen and through our headquarters speakers in Kabul, her strong tenor was unmistakable. Secretary Gates spoke immediately after her, and echoed her sentiment. So did Ambassador Holbrooke when it came time for him to weigh in.

Six days later, on November 29, President Obama conducted a VTC with just Karl and me. From our seats in the Kabul embassy's secure conference room, the president appeared alone, and the feeling was strangely intimate. His tone was friendly but serious as he explained his decision to approve the deployment of thirty thousand additional U.S. troops, beginning in December, and to press our Coalition partners to provide the additional ten thousand I'd requested. He also stated his intent to begin withdrawing those surge forces in July 2011. The president then directly asked Karl and me if we could live with the decision as outlined, and we each said yes.

Among other things, the president seemed to be eliciting my reaction to an announced withrawal date. Earlier, Secretary Gates had asked what I thought about the idea. I cited concerns that it would give the Taliban a sense that if they survived until that date, they could prevail, and that it might decrease confidence in the strategic partnership we were trying to build on so many levels with the Afghans. But I also knew it would provide a clear impetus for Afghans to speed up efforts to assume full responsibility for their future.

I recognized there were political realities outside my view, and I judged that the combination of our ability to expand secured areas over the next eighteen months, and to increase Afghan security force capacity during that period, could allow us to reduce the force size with acceptable risk. If I'd felt like the decision to set a withdrawal date would have been fatal to the success of our mission, I'd have said so.

On December 1, the day before President Obama was to announce his decision publicly, I flew to Chaklala Airfield, the military part of Islamabad's primary airport. Security was tighter than ever. Seven weeks earlier, on October 10, six terrorists had conducted a daring assault of the base, killing six Pakistani soldiers, including a brigadier general I'd known and a lieutenant colonel. It was the equivalent of an attack on the Pentagon to kill senior Defense Department officials and highlighted the serious nature of the threat the Pakistanis were facing.

The Taliban had, since their expulsion in 2001, used Pakistan's undergoverned border areas as sanctuary from which to recruit, lead, and organize the fight in Afghanistan, often with Pakistani support. But their focus had always been primarily across the border, where they sought to reclaim Afghanistan, or parts of it. Parallel with their rise, however, was that of a Taliban movement focused not only on Afghanistan but also internally, on Pakistan. In December 2007, smaller, independent Pakistani militant groups that had existed in the border region organized themselves into a connected movement. They took the name Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, but established themselves outside the formal command and domain of the Afghan Taliban's leaders, such as Mullah Omar.

Instead, at the helm was Baitullah Mehsud, an uneducated thirty-four-year-old who controlled large swaths of South Waziristan. He brought his five-thousand-strong force under the TTP structure and sat atop a leadership council that drew from the agencies and
districts along Pakistan's border. At its inception, the group included a patchwork of various militant groups, some old, some new, with anti-Islamabad, anti-American, and anti-Indian leanings. Concretely, however, they aimed to expel ISAF forces from Afghanistan and, importantly, to contest Pakistani military incursions into the
border areas.

At the time, I felt the growing threat from the TTP had the potential to cause a shift in Pakistan's strategic calculus, aligning it more closely with NATO's objectives for Afghanistan. The TTP was becoming increasingly effective and lethal. The previous twelve months had been the deadliest year yet for suicide bombings in Pakistan. A Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, once envisioned by Pakistan as a desirable northern neighbor, would more likely become a sanctuary for the TTP, bent on opposing Islamabad. I knew we would not get Pakistan to cooperate fully, which would have involved aggressive operations to root out all Afghan Taliban. We would seek as much cooperation as possible, but I felt we could succeed in Afghanistan even without Pakistan's full partnership.

That day, General Ashfaq Kayani and I discussed President Obama's upcoming speech. We also surveyed the current state of both ISAF and the Pakistani army's ongoing campaigns against insurgents. Kayani was characteristically candid and clearly proud when describing Pakistani operations. I found his insights valuable. He expressed overall support for the ISAF strategy I outlined in this and earlier meetings. But he was openly skeptical that we would succeed. He stated quietly, in his low, sometimes inaudible voice, that while we had the correct approach, he felt we lacked the time to accomplish all that was necessary before support for our effort would fade. He particularly doubted our ability to create effective Afghan security forces to which we could later transfer control. I respected his perspective but felt our chances were better than he believed.

Like my relationship with President Karzai, I sought to build genuine trust with General Kayani. I was aware of the policy and cultural differences between us, but believed that different views, even strong disagreement on hugely substantive issues, would only be exacerbated by personal animosity or disrespect, particularly when expressed publicly or through the press. Despite frustrations I might have had with the Pakistanis, or they with me, I'd found it essential to offer small gestures, engage in honest conversations, and persistently commit to real relationships.

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E
arly the next morning, December 2, in Kabul, I decided, instead of running or lifting weights, to use an hour on an elliptical trainer for exercise so that I could watch President Obama's speech announcing his decision on Afghanistan. He was speaking at eight o'clock in the evening of December 1 in the United States. In front of the president's podium was a sea of gray wool. Young cadets in their slate dress uniforms filled the auditorium's tiered seats. In a moment, the memory of the particular itch and stiffness of the wool brought into focus my thirty-four-year career that had begun on the plain, so near to where the president was speaking. I remembered how our full dress uniforms had all been accidentally shrunk in the academy's washing machines the night before graduation, and how big Ken Liepold's frame had looked inside his tight gray tunic. Earlier that fall, I had phoned Kenny from Kabul. Stricken by throat cancer, he could not talk much, but expressed his support. Even at a distance, his company meant as much as it had when we shared a small dorm room at West Point decades earlier.