Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (62 page)

As impatient and frustrated as I would get at different points, not to mention just being sick of sitting in the Situation Room hour after hour, day after day, I believe the process on Afghanistan was an important and useful one. In my entire career, I cannot think of any single issue or problem that absorbed so much of the president’s and the principals’ time and effort in such a compressed period. There was no angle or substantive point that was not thoroughly examined. If I were to fault the process, I would say that vastly more attention was focused on every aspect of the military effort than—despite Donilon’s and Holbrooke’s best efforts—on the broad challenge of getting the political and civilian part of the equation right. Too little attention was paid to the shortage of
civilian advisers and experts: to determining how many people with the right skills were needed, to finding such people, and to addressing the imbalance between the number of U.S. civilians in Kabul and elsewhere in the country. Nor did we focus on the tension between our ambassadors and commanders in Afghanistan, Eikenberry and McChrystal in particular. During my tenure as secretary, there were three U.S. ambassadors to Kabul; none did well, in my opinion. None could compare to Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul from 2003 to 2005, in coaching, counseling, and working with Karzai—or to a couple of CIA station chiefs in Afghanistan. Even Secretary Clinton would speak of Eikenberry’s insubordination, that he would not do what she directed. Though both Clinton and I wanted Eikenberry replaced—because his relationship with Karzai was beyond repair and his relationships with both Defense and State were so poor—and repeatedly told Jones so, the ambassador was protected by the White House.

From September through November, over and over again we would rehash the issues and get further into the weeds—details beyond what was needed or appropriate. Broadly, there were three substantive areas on which our many meetings focused. The first was the nature of the threat. What were the relationships between the Taliban, al Qaeda, and other extremist groups in the Afghan-Pakistani border area? Was defeat of the Taliban essential to the defeat of al Qaeda? If the Taliban regained power, would al Qaeda return to Afghanistan? Would a more stable Afghanistan change Pakistan’s strategic calculus? The second issue was which strategy for dealing with the threat would be most effective and efficient, COIN or CT-Plus. The key question with COIN was whether there was an Afghan model of governance that would be “good enough” to meet our objectives. Did the government have enough legitimacy in the eyes of its own people to permit our strategy to succeed? In the case of CT-Plus, could it work if the United States lacked the resources on the ground to protect the population and without adequate intelligence to be effective in its counterterrorism strikes? Third, if we stayed with the president’s March strategy, how would we know if and when it was time to change course?

Pakistan continued to be a critically important factor in our discussions. If Pakistan was so critical to the success of our strategy, Biden asked, why were we spending thirty dollars in Afghanistan to every one dollar in Pakistan? There was a lot of talk about more military and civilian
aid to the Pakistanis. Their military was deeply suspicious of U.S. intentions in Pakistan, believing any effort to increase the number of our uniformed personnel there was part of a nefarious scheme to seize their nuclear weapons. They welcomed our cash and our equipment but not our people. And they were not particularly interested in letting us teach them how to go after targets in their own country. As for civilian assistance, their paranoia and our political ham-handedness reinforced each other. After much political effort, and the leadership of Senators John Kerry and Dick Lugar and Representative Howard Berman, Congress passed a five-year, $7.5 billion aid package for Pakistan. It was a great achievement and just what was needed, especially the multiyear aspect to demonstrate our long-term commitment. Then some idiot in the House of Representatives attached language to the bill that stipulated that the assistance was conditional on the Pakistani military not interfering with the civilian government. Not surprisingly, there was outrage in Pakistan, especially among the military. In a flash, all the actual and potential goodwill generated by the legislation was negated. I knew that nothing would change Pakistan’s hedging strategy; to think otherwise was delusional. But we needed some level of cooperation from them.

The president kept returning also to the matter of cost. He observed that the cost of the additional troops McChrystal was requesting would be about $30 billion; yet if he froze all domestic discretionary spending, he would save only $5 billion, and if he cut the same by 5 percent, that would save only $10 billion. He said that if the war continued “another eight to ten years, it would cost $800 billion,” and the nation could not afford that given needs at home. His argument was hard to disagree with. The costs of the war were staggering.

By the fifth NSC meeting, on Friday, October 9, some clarity was emerging on the key issues. Panetta set the stage with a simple observation: “We can’t leave, and we can’t accept the status quo.” The president said he thought we had reached “rough” agreement on that but also on what was achievable in terms of taking on the Taliban; that defining counterinsurgency in terms of population security as opposed to Taliban body count was sound; and that the basic “inkblot” strategy was sound—we couldn’t resource COIN throughout the country, so we had to deny the Taliban a foothold in key areas.

He then posed the next set of questions. Were the interests of the Afghan government aligned with our own? How could we ramp up
training of the Afghan forces to allow us to leave in a reasonable time? How would we transition from clearing out the Taliban in an area to transferring security responsibility there to the Afghans? Did we have a strategy for reintegration of Taliban fighters? What were the timetables, and how did we sustain the effort? If we were not sending enough troops for countrywide counterinsurgency, how did we choose what to protect? How would we deal with Pakistani opposition to our adding troops? I thought these questions in themselves reflected progress in our discussions. Apparently assuming the president was leaning toward approving significantly more troops, Biden jumped in: “What if a year from now this isn’t working? What do you do then? Are you increasing the consequences of failing?”

About eight that same Friday night, as I was eating my Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner at home, the president called. “I’m really looking to you for your views on the way forward in Afghanistan. I’m counting on you,” he said. Earlier that week Biden had leaned over in the Situation Room and whispered to me, “Be very careful what you recommend to the president because he will do what you say.” I spent the weekend deciding what to say.

When I met privately with the president in the Oval Office on October 13, I told him I had thought about his call a lot and had prepared a memo for him offering my thoughts on what he should do. He grinned broadly, stuck out his hand to shake over the bowl of apples on his coffee table, and said, “You have the solution?” I wasn’t sure about that, but in the event, one of the most significant decisions of his presidency largely tracked the recommendations in my paper.

I wrote that the Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda had become symbiotic, “each benefiting from the success and mythology of the other, both inside and outside Afghanistan.” Al Qaeda clearly believed that a Taliban victory over the United States in Afghanistan would have great strategic benefit for the group.

Because while al Qaeda is under great pressure now and highly dependent on other extremist groups for sustainment, the success of those other groups—above all, the Taliban—would vastly strengthen the message to the Muslim world and beyond that these groups (including al Qaeda) are on the side of God and the winning side of history. What makes Afghanistan and the border area with Pakistan different
from Somalia, Yemen, or other possible safe havens is that the former is the epicenter of extremist jihadism—the place where native and foreign Muslims defeated a superpower and, in their view, caused its collapse at home.… Taliban success in taking and holding parts of Afghanistan against the combined forces of multiple modern Western armies (above all, the United States)—the current direction of events—would dramatically strengthen the extremist Muslim mythology and popular perceptions of who is winning and who is losing.

I wrote that all three of the mission options we had been discussing were “doomed to fail, or already have.” Counterterrorism focused solely on al Qaeda could not work without a significant U.S. ground presence in Afghanistan and the opportunity to collect intelligence that this would afford us. “We tried remote-control counterterrorism in the 1990s, and it brought us 9/11.” “Counterterrorism plus,” or “counterinsurgency minus,” was what we had been doing since 2004, and “everyone seems to acknowledge that too is not working.” Fully resourced counterinsurgency “sounds a lot like nation-building at its most ambitious” and would require troop levels, time, and money that few in the United States or in the West were prepared to provide.

I wrote that the core goals and priorities Obama had decided the previous March remained valid and should be reaffirmed. However,
we had to narrow the mission
and better communicate what we were trying to do. We could not realistically expect to eliminate the Taliban; they were now a part of the political fabric of Afghanistan. But we could realistically work to reverse their military momentum, deny them the ability to hold or control major population centers, and pressure them along the Pakistani border. We ought to be able to reduce their level of activity and violence to that which existed in 2004 or thereabouts. I recommended focusing our military forces in the south and east and charging our allies with holding the north and west. Our military efforts should be intended to stabilize the situation in Afghanistan and buy time to expand and train the Afghan security forces, who, despite their many deficiencies, were courageous fighters; many of them were prepared to die—and had died—fighting the Taliban. We should “quietly shelve trying to develop a strong, effective central government in Afghanistan.” What we needed, I wrote, was some central government capacity in a few key ministries—defense, interior, finance, education, rural development. We should help
broker some kind of “national unity” government or other means to give the Karzai government at least a modicum of legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghan people. We also had to get a handle on corruption. “Our kids must not die so that corrupt Afghan officials can line their pockets.”

All this would give us a mission that the public and the politicians could easily understand:
“Deny
the Taliban momentum and control,
facilitate
reintegration,
build
government capacity selectively,
grow
the Afghan security forces,
transfer
security responsibilities, and
defeat
al Qaeda.”

I supported McChrystal’s request for 40,000 troops, but I offered an alternative of about 30,000 troops. I urged Obama not to place a firm ceiling on the numbers because troop numbers are always estimates, and there are always unplanned needs. Because the fourth brigade combat team McChrystal had requested (bringing his number to 40,000 troops) was needed to replace the Canadians and the Dutch, who were leaving the south in 2010 and 2011, I suggested he leverage our own new commitment to get the allies to provide those replacement troops.

To assure Americans this wasn’t an open-ended commitment to a stalemate with constantly rising numbers of troops for years to come, I said I thought it was imperative to pledge that we would review progress at the end of 2010 and, if necessary, “adjust or change our approach.” I also wrote that while the deliberative process “has served you well, we cannot wait a month or two for a decision. Uncertainty about the future is beginning to impact Afghans, the Pakistanis, our allies, and our troops.”

In conclusion, Mr. President, this is a seminal moment in your presidency. From Afghanistan to Pakistan, from the Muslim world to North Korea, China, and Russia, other governments are watching very carefully. If you elect not to agree to General McChrystal’s recommendations (or my alternative), I urge you to make a tough-minded, dramatic change in mission [in] the other direction. Standing pat, middling options, muddling through, are not the right path forward and put our kids at risk for no good purpose.

Almost two weeks later, on October 26, the president invited Hillary and me to discuss the options. We were the only outsiders in the session, considerably outnumbered by White House insiders including
Biden, Emanuel, Jim Jones, Donilon, and John Brennan. Obama said at the outset to Hillary and me, “It’s time to lay our cards on the table. Bob, what do you think?” I repeated a number of the main points I had made in my memo to him. Hillary agreed with my overall proposal but urged the president to consider approving the fourth brigade combat team if the allies wouldn’t come up with the troops.

The exchange that followed was remarkable. In strongly supporting a surge in Afghanistan, Hillary told the president that her opposition to the surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. She went on to say, “The Iraq surge worked.” The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.

Rahm charged once again that the military had waged a campaign to limit the president’s options to what McChrystal wanted. Seething inside, I ignored him and turned to a question I knew was on the president’s mind—why 40,000 more troops were needed if we were narrowing the mission. I said that the early phase of any option other than pure counterterrorism was to reverse the momentum of the Taliban and degrade their capabilities. (A counterterrorism strategy alone could not do that.) The president commented that OMB had told him 40,000 more troops would cost an additional $50 billion or more a year, putting the cost of the overall effort at maybe a trillion dollars over ten years. What were the national security implications of that for the deficit, defense investment, and so on? he asked. He then wrapped up the meeting, saying he wanted to make a decision before his Asia trip (which was to begin on November 12).