One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War (28 page)

“We left Sangin with a sense of accomplishment,” Sibley said. “Our losses weren’t in vain. We made progress. Now [three years later] … I don’t want to talk about it.”

Tom Schueman, the 1st Platoon commander, summarized the conflicting feelings.

“There were some good people among the farmers,” he said, “but not the Taliban. Looking back, I had the worst time, and the best. It was my greatest honor.”

In January of 2014, Battalion 3/5 lost their twenty-sixth brother. In early 2011, an IED in Sangin had sheared off the legs of Cpl. Farrell
Gilliam, twenty-five, from Fresno, California. Farrell had wanted to be a Marine since he was in the fourth grade. For four more years, he fought off massive infections and underwent thirty operations. In 2014, he took his own life.

“
The war doesn’t stop just because they come home,” his mother said. “The war is not over for them. It still rages on in their hearts and in their heads and physical bodies.”

The Strategy

In 2001, we went to war to destroy Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. When the terrorists escaped into Pakistan, Mr. Bush massively enlarged and changed the mission.

“
Write this down,” he said. “Afghanistan and Iraq will lead that part of the world to democracy. They are going to be the catalyst to change the Middle East and the world.”

The question was how to destroy Al Qaeda. The answer was to build two democracies in the Islamic, authoritarian Middle East. In Afghanistan, at a cost of 2,400 American dead and
one trillion dollars, we did not succeed in destroying Al Qaeda, or defeating the Taliban, or creating a true democracy. Our basic mistake was handing over freedom as a gift and doing the fighting for others. Our intention was good; our wisdom was bad.

Our military commanders willingly agreed to expand their mission. The defining document was the 2006 field manual on counterinsurgency, which was widely praised by academics and the mainstream media for its emphasis upon constructing rather than destroying. “
Soldiers and Marines,” the manual instructed, are expected to be “nation-builders as well as warriors.” Our most revered generals embraced the mission of changing the Afghan culture.

While running for president in 2008, Mr. Obama had insisted,
“
Afghanistan is the war that must be won.” But Mr. Obama and his White House staff did not trust our commanders. He felt they were trying to trap him into rubber-stamping their decisions. As commander in chief, he did not stand behind his troops. He made it clear his heart wasn’t in the fight. By December of 2009, he had downgraded the mission from “defeating” to “diminishing” the Taliban.

“
What was interesting was the metamorphosis,” National Security Adviser James L. Jones said in December of 2009. “I dare say that none of us ended up where we started.”

“Metamorphosis” was a pompous word for pulling out without accomplishing a specific goal. Mission clarity and confidence decayed. In 2010, Secretary of Defense Gates replaced the top commander in Kabul with General McChrystal, who ordered the troops to focus upon winning over the population rather then defeating the Taliban.

To reduce civilian casualties, he severely restricted coalition firepower. Although the Taliban inflicted six times more civilian fatalities, President Karzai escalated his rants about American-caused casualties and released those imprisoned for killing Americans. The Pashtun tribes never came over to our side. Rather than positively altering Afghan attitudes, McChrystal negatively affected the attitudes of his own troops.

McChrystal was replaced by General Petraeus. Distrusting our military, Obama had extracted from Petraeus his assurance that a surge of American troops would yield success within eighteen months—by about January of 2011. Obama put in 30,000 more troops, bringing the U.S. total to 100,000. According to Secretary Gates, both military and civilian officials agreed that this number provided “
a fully resourced counterinsurgency strategy.” Actually, twice that number was needed to control thousands of Pashtun villages in a mountainous country the size of Texas. Petraeus persisted with expanding the “oil spot” deployment of U.S. troops that risked
clearing districts beyond the areas Afghan forces were willing to control once we left.

Sangin was the inevitable overreach of a strategy blindly willful and excessively ambitious. Operational success in Sangin required the installation of a turbine at the Kajacki Dam. That never had a chance of happening unless the Marines stayed. So why were they sent there, knowing the Afghan soldiers could not hold open the road to the dam?

The most elementary risk assessment would include four enormous obstacles to victory: an unreliable Afghan government; Pashtun tribes not amenable to persuasion; a vast country requiring hundreds of thousands of troops; and a secure sanctuary for the enemy.

There was an alternative to “full-fledged, fully resourced counterinsurgency.” Early on, several experienced commanders had put forth
credible proposals based on
lessons from Vietnam. The basic concept was to place conventional small units under the leadership of Special Forces, creating task forces to work intensively with the Afghan forces, at a fraction of the size and cost of our standard force structure. As the Afghan military was trained, our military would get out, leaving Kabul politics to the State Department. That was the road not taken.

Instead, in 2009, Secretary of Defense Gates said, “
We are in this thing to win.” But by 2011, he had concluded that our troops could do only two things:
kill the enemy and train Afghan soldiers. He concluded that nation building was unattainable. Yet he appointed commanders—McChrystal and
Petraeus—who ardently believed it was attainable. The contradiction has not been explained. All three were honorable, dedicated men who tried to do too much.

As Gates desired, the Marines in Helmand did severely attrite the Taliban. Colonel Kennedy called his approach “Big Stick COIN,”
meaning his goal was to destroy the Taliban. This was what Gates wanted. But the secretary of defense also believed the Marines were fighting in the wrong places—like Sangin—and resisted being placed under the top command of McChrystal. Gates wondered if their sacrifices were in vain. But he never addressed his misgivings directly with the Marine generals.

Much worse, our high command dithered, unable to decide whether the Taliban was a distraction or a mortal enemy like Al Qaeda.

Marine General Kelly said, “
our country today is in a life and death struggle against an evil enemy,” engaged in “pursuit day and night into whatever miserable lair Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their allies might slither into.”

Kelly was clear: kill the bastards. McChrystal, who was his boss, held the opposite view.

“The conflict will be won,” he wrote, “by persuading the population, not by destroying the enemy.”

Which was it? Were we in a death struggle with the Taliban, or were they a legitimate force in Afghan politics, deserving to share in the political power? No nation should ever go to war without the will to defeat the enemy.

Our top command praised the warrior spirit of our Special Forces. The American public responded accordingly. Amazon sold 400 books about the SEALs—more books than there were SEALs in all of Afghanistan. Our commandos were lauded for attacking the Taliban.

General McChrystal ordered our conventional units to spend only 5 percent of their effort killing the enemy. This conveyed the message that the conventional grunt was second-rate, not expected to strike fear into his enemies. A warrior has to hold within himself the desire –the thirst—to kill his opponent. Lacking that, he is in the wrong job. A grunt must walk onto every battlefield to win.

“
Troops risking their lives,” Secretary Gates wrote, “need to be told that their goal is to ‘defeat’ those trying to kill them.”

Defeating the Taliban was impossible because Pakistan provided them with aid and sanctuary. After Vietnam, our military vowed never again to fight a war while granting a sanctuary to the enemy. In thirteen years, fifteen different generals served as the top coalition commander in Afghanistan. Several dozen other generals served under their commands. Yet not one general resigned or spoke out. We beat on against the tide, set on automatic by a refusal to review basic assumptions.

Despite the fine-sounding rhetoric of the generals, 3rd Platoon and all the other grunts were engaged in a war of attrition. The hope was that our forces would kill so many Taliban that their ranks could not be fully replenished, allowing the Afghan army to hold the remnants at bay. In Sangin and elsewhere, our conventional troops were engaged in slow-pitch attrition, accepting losses to IEDs in order to occasionally kill Taliban who chose to initiate contact. At the same time, our Special Operations Forces practiced fast-pitch attrition by means of heliborne night raids that minimized IED casualties.

Both methods inflicted steady casualties upon the enemy. By 2014, our commanders were saying the Taliban strength had fallen, giving hope to the Afghan army. Such success was
in spite of
, rather than because of, the counterinsurgency strategy. War, by definition, is a process of attrition. When it becomes the strategic goal, commanders have lost their way. Attrition is the absence of strategy.

In place of an exit strategy, Mr. Obama simply exited without a strategy, by moving the goalposts. In 2001, the objective for the invasion was to prevent terrorists from using Afghanistan as a safe haven. In 2014, Obama did away with that objective. The new goal, he said, was to show “
resolve that terrorists do not launch attacks against our country.”

Because resolve can be demonstrated by a speech, the Taliban no longer had to be defeated in battle. In place of deeds, words sufficed.
He preemptively pledged in 2014 that all U.S. forces would leave Afghanistan before his term ended in 2016, regardless of what happened on the ground.

“
This is how,” Mr. Obama said, “wars end in the twenty-first century.”

What a tangled web we weave when we deceive ourselves. The war didn’t end because Mr. Obama quit. Al Qaeda and the Taliban remained on the battlefield, undefeated. When Secretary Gates left office, he hoped Afghanistan, no longer winnable, would not “
be viewed as a strategic defeat for the United States, or as a failure with global consequences.”

Such a disastrous defeat appears unlikely. Marines at the grunt level did not believe the Afghan army would hold on to the Green Zone, yet the generals reported progress. Both perspectives are probably correct: the Taliban will dominate in the Green Zone, but the Afghan army can hang on to district headquarters and the cities, if we provide funding and air support. For $5 billion to $10 billion a year, we can avoid a collapse like the one symbolized in the 1975 photo of despairing Vietnamese clutching at the last helicopter leaving the American embassy in Saigon.

In a subdued speech at West Point in May of 2014 aimed at explaining his foreign policy, Mr. Obama declared, “America’s character … will always triumph.”

Avoiding a humiliating defeat is not a triumph of the American character. Mr. Obama was an irresolute commander in chief. Pledging that all U.S. military forces will leave by 2016 was the act of a politician, not a statesman. Our generals tried to do too much, and our commander in chief settled for too little. After 2016, a duplicitous Pakistan will exert more influence in Kabul than will the United States. The Taliban, the drug syndicates, the Kabul kleptocracy, and the Pakistanis will cut murky deals. Afghanistan will gradually fade from the consciousness of the American public.

For what enduring gain did we expend so much blood and treasure?
The test of success is whether you would fight the war over again with the same strategy. No military commander would repeat our Afghan strategy.

Combat Cohesion

While our generals pursued the quixotic strategy of a benevolent war, our grunts remained loyal, tough, and realistic. Third Platoon fought the hardest sustained campaign of the war. One million steps, with death or amputation awaiting each step. Despite knowing the strategy made little sense, they did not falter or pull back.

I knew Colonel Kennedy was up to something when he first dropped me off with 3rd Platoon. As an old grunt, I could see the steel in them. But where did their resolve—and that of other platoons like them—come from? Who fights for us, and why?

To begin with, combat effectiveness has little to do with morality. Third Platoon didn’t fight well because they believed in democracy. The Spartans and Romans fought skillfully to enslave others. German soldiers fought well for Hitler.

Patriotism or nationalism, however, is a powerful motivator. Cpl. Jacob Ruiz had endured a lengthy investigation after BBC video showed him shooting a man. I asked him what message he wanted to convey about serving in Sangin. He had a right to be angry, so his answer surprised me.

Ruiz said, “We’ll do anything asked of us.”

Third Platoon understood that they weren’t pursuing, to put it mildly, the benevolent strategy of the high command.

“This war’s stupid,” Mad Dog Myers said. “Well, so what? Our country’s in it.”

Their sacrifices achieved no permanent goal, and won no Afghan hearts or minds. Counterinsurgency theory was irrelevant to them.

“The mission was never about hearts and minds,” Rausch, the Midwesterner with the Commandant’s coin, said. “We were there to fight.”

Other coalition platoons—American, British, Dutch—may have been more understanding of the population. But no platoon controlled more of the Green Zone. “War,” to quote columnist Kathleen Parker, “demands victory rather than understanding.” If you are not willing to fight, don’t come to Sangin. They were going to own the land on which they walked. That meant killing the Taliban. That was their objective.

“For thousands of years,” Jordan Laird said, “there’s been a group of people that has been set apart. They’re the warrior class.”

Third Platoon fought inside the structure of the Marine Corps. They embraced its traditions of discipline and toughness. They all wanted to be Marines, some since grammar school. Each had chosen to fight before he met those who would fight alongside him. In the Marine Corps, they learned how to shoot, obey orders, plan, and adapt. Everyone had a job, and every job focused on destroying the enemy. They believed in their tribe, “the few, the proud.”