Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (82 page)

McChrystal’s departure and Obama’s stern lecture did nothing to diminish the split at the highest levels of the administration over Afghanistan. Petraeus made a couple of early moves that had positive effect on the battlefield. To reduce civilian casualties, McChrystal had issued restrictive guidelines about when troops could fire and when air strikes could be called in for support. Unfortunately, to be sure they were compliant with his intent, every subordinate level of command added a margin of error on the restrictive side. The result was that the troops on the front line felt exposed and vulnerable, unable to defend themselves adequately. Petraeus issued a new set of guidelines that were less restrictive and explicitly forbade anyone to add further limitations. This helped morale. Also, while McChrystal had always supported targeting specific Taliban commanders and officials, Petraeus significantly stepped up the intensity of these attacks. By the end of August, we were beginning to see signs of progress in the counterinsurgency effort around Kandahar—above all, a significant decline in Taliban activity—as well as the impact of stepped-up attacks against the Taliban leaders. We had long done both, but the added troop numbers enabled us to show some better results.

Whatever was happening on the battlefield, the debate at home was already beginning to rev up over how fast U.S. forces should withdraw beginning in July 2011. Democrats in Congress were urging steep reductions right away, a view held by Biden and the usual suspects at the White House and the NSS. Mullen, Petraeus, and I reminded everyone that the last of the surge troops were just arriving, and we needed time to show what they could accomplish; the drawdowns would begin as the president said, but they should be gradual. As he had at dicey moments in Iraq, Petraeus now went public, granting interviews to major newspapers in August in which he talked about gains that had been made in routing the Taliban from traditional strongholds in the south and in training Afghan troops. He asked for patience and time, two commodities in short supply in Washington, D.C.

I again visited Afghanistan in early September, flying in from the change of command ceremony in Baghdad. There were several very touchy issues to discuss privately with Karzai. I explained to him what
had happened with McChrystal. We then discussed his edict that essentially required all private security contractors to leave Afghanistan, including those guarding development projects intended to help the Afghan people. He had been privately expressing his concerns to U.S. officials about the behavior of these men for many months, and as happened all too often, we didn’t pay enough attention until he blew up and we faced a crisis. Another perennial issue was corruption, this time not the penny-ante stuff that was alienating average Afghans but rather reports that the Kabul Bank’s Afghan chairman and others had looted the bank of anywhere from $800 million to $1 billion. The bank’s troubles were additionally a problem because electronic payments to Afghan soldiers, police, and most civil servants were paid through the bank, and if it collapsed, we would have a huge problem. Karzai furiously asserted that he had taken corrective actions, that he had briefed Petraeus and Eikenberry, but that leaks from our embassy had led to a panic and the withdrawal of huge sums. Karzai said that the U.S. embassy “doesn’t understand the Afghan public” and that he resented Afghan officials “being summoned” to meetings at the embassy. I assured him we would work with and through him on issues and be respectful of Afghan sovereignty. I also told him his government needed to implement corrective measures regarding the Kabul Bank in a way that was credible to the international community and our Congress.

The next day, September 3, I flew to Kandahar to see things for myself. At Camp Nathan Smith, Brigadier General Nick Carter briefed me on what his forces were doing in and around Kandahar City, as well as the surrounding areas—Arghandab, Panjawi, and Zheray, all longtime Taliban strongholds—and the next steps he planned to take in securing the populated areas. We spent a lot of time discussing the local strongman, Ahmed Wali Karzai (AWK), the president’s half-brother. He was powerful and regarded as notoriously corrupt, but every time Hillary or I asked for evidence of his criminality, the intelligence community had nothing to offer. Carter captured the near-term challenge well, I thought. He said that for the foreseeable future, the choice facing us was a theocracy run by the Taliban or a “thugocracy” run by the likes of AWK. He said that working with AWK offered the best way to show results quickly against the Taliban. I told Carter that “if working with AWK helped keep our troops alive and succeed in their mission, then that’s no contest.”

At Combat Outpost Senjaray, twelve miles west of Kandahar, I spent
an hour having lunch with ten junior enlisted soldiers. A private first class named Brian told me his wife had stepped on a nail back home, but the Navy hospital nearby, at China Lake, had refused to treat her even with a military ID because she didn’t have the right Tricare (military insurance program) policy. She was told she could go across the hall and sign up for the right policy, but it would take a month to process the paperwork. When she gave up and went to a private doctor to be treated, she was told she was lucky not to have gotten blood poisoning. This was exactly the kind of bureaucratic bullshit that set my hair on fire. I told Brian to send an e-mail to Marine Lieutenant Colonel Kris Stillings, a member of my staff who was notetaker at the lunch. When Stillings e-mailed him back that I would get answers for him, the PFC responded, “Even though I am just a private in this vast military world, it’s nice to see that you and the Sec-Def will always take care of the little guy.” I was so moved by his humility, I sent him the only e-mail I ever sent a soldier:

Brian, Lt. Col. Stillings has shared with me your exchange of e-mails with him. The facts of your wife’s medical treatment as you report them are completely unacceptable to me and we will follow up vigorously.

Brian, you may be “just a private in this vast military world,” but you and those like you are the backbone of America’s military. Just sitting and talking with you and your fellow soldiers at COP Senjaray—and experiences like it with other troops of similar rank—is the most inspiring thing I do. And being able to do everything I can to look out for you all is the most satisfying thing I do each day. You may be “just a private,” but you and those like you are the only reason this Secretary of Defense continues to do this job. Whatever else you accomplished today, you and your buddies provided renewed inspiration for an old Secretary of Defense.

Brian’s wife would get a personal apology from the commander of the Navy hospital at China Lake, and I was told changes would be made to prevent such a recurrence at any other military hospital. Several new washing machines were helicoptered into COP Senjaray a few days later, and their Wi-Fi was fixed; both had been requested by the soldiers at lunch. If only the bigger problems were so easy to tackle.

On this trip, I heard two stories that brought a smile. A joint U.S.-Afghan patrol had come upon a stolen pickup truck parked near a tree,
and everyone concluded it was probably a truck bomb planted by the Taliban. An Afghan soldier decided to fire a rocket-propelled grenade at the truck to blow it up. He missed the truck and hit the tree, where it turned out a Taliban fighter had been hiding. The Taliban was blown out of the tree and onto the truck, which promptly detonated. A nice, if unintended, carom shot. Separately, I was told of a report that Taliban commanders in the Sangin area of Helmand had instructed their fighters not to engage U.S. Marines in large-scale attacks: “Taliban fighters say U.S. Marines are unkillable and invincible.… The Marines are insane. They run toward the sound of our guns rather than run away.”

I came away from my visits to Camp Nathan Smith and COP Senjaray impressed with the commanders and their sense that they had the right strategy and enough forces to implement it. Cautious as always, though, I told the press, “Everybody knows this is far from a done deal. There is a lot of hard fighting to go. But the confidence of these young men and women that they can be successful gives me confidence.” I observed that the question to be addressed in the December review would be whether the strategy was working—was there enough evidence of progress to indicate we were on the right track? “Based on what I’ve seen here today, I’m hopeful we will be in that position.” I also said I thought it would take two or three more years of combat before we could transition to a purely advisory role.

A couple of weeks later, because of the continuing negative public narrative about the course of the war, I sent the House and Senate Armed Services Committees a report on my trip, something I had never done before. I affirmed that we had well-understood, clear objectives. I told them that 85 percent of the Afghan army was now partnered with coalition troops, and that the Afghans had led a successful operation against a Taliban stronghold outside Kandahar, an area never taken by the Soviets. I reported on briefings I had received at Camp Nathan Smith about increasing numbers of Afghans reporting IEDs, working with us to build schools and bazaars, and sending their children to school. I said that our approach “is beginning to have cumulative effects and security is slowly expanding,” although tough fighting still lay ahead and challenges remained in the areas of governance and corruption. I said that a big problem was the fear of many Afghans that we were leaving, causing them to hedge their bets. “We must convince the Afghans that both the United States and NATO plan to establish a strategic partnership with
Afghanistan that will endure beyond the gradual transition of security responsibilities.” I concluded, “In contrast to some past conflicts, what I find is that the closer you get to this fight, the greater the belief we are moving in the right direction.”

Despite my own cautious optimism, I had come to realize, as I suggested earlier, that both Presidents Obama and Karzai, whose commitment to the strategy was essential to success, were both skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail. (Bush had seemed to believe wholeheartedly that the Iraq surge would work.) I wondered if we had gotten the strategy and the resources right in Afghanistan too late, after patience there and in the United States had run out. Had the diversion of attention and resources to the invasion of Iraq sown the seeds for future failure in Afghanistan? I believed we had to succeed there because the stakes were higher than perhaps any other senior official in the government understood. For Islamic extremists to defeat a second superpower in Afghanistan would have devastating and long-lasting consequences across the entire Muslim world. For the United States to be perceived as defeated in Afghanistan at the same time we were suffering an economic crisis at home would have grave implications for our standing in the world. Nixon and Kissinger had been able to offset the consequences of U.S. defeat in Vietnam with the dramatic openings to Russia and China, demonstrating that we were still the colossus on the global stage. The United States had no such opportunities in 2010.

In early October, the president announced that Jim Jones would be leaving and that Tom Donilon would become the new national security adviser. Despite our disagreements, Donilon and I had developed a solid working relationship since the air-clearing between us months earlier, and I welcomed his appointment (although he continued to harbor deep suspicion of the senior military and the Pentagon). He had access to and great influence with both Obama and Biden, was comfortable disagreeing with them, and was considered an insider by the rest of the senior White House staff. As with his counterpart in the Bush administration, Steve Hadley, I bridled at the number of meetings Tom summoned us to attend in the Situation Room—but then, the world was a mess and required a lot of tending to.

My last autumn as secretary was a busy one, with the wrap-up of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” review and all the court actions surrounding DADT; a trip to Vietnam and Belgium (a NATO meeting); another
to Australia, Malaysia, and Iraq; and my unforgettable visit to Santa Cruz, Bolivia. We had to deal with a very dangerous crisis beginning on November 23 when the North Koreans unleashed an artillery barrage at the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong. South Korea had suffered such provocations for thirty years with restraint, but North Korea’s sinking of its warship
Cheonan
the previous March had produced a change in attitude in the South, and there were demands for retaliation against the shelling, especially since several innocent South Korean civilians had been killed. South Korea’s original plans for retaliation were, we thought, disproportionately aggressive, involving both aircraft and artillery. We were worried the exchanges could escalate dangerously. The president, Clinton, Mullen, and I were all on the phone often with our South Korean counterparts over a period of days, and ultimately South Korea simply returned artillery fire on the location of the North Koreans’ batteries that had started the whole affair. There was evidence the Chinese were also weighing in with the North’s leaders to wind down the situation. The South Koreans and we agreed to carry out a naval exercise together—led by the aircraft carrier
George Washington
—in the Yellow Sea to assert our freedom of navigation. Never a dull moment.

The president had insisted all along that he wanted the December review of progress in Afghanistan to be low-key, avoiding the spectacle of the preceding year. Petraeus kicked off the review at the White House on October 30 with a briefing for Donilon and Lute. He had the usual packet of PowerPoint slides. One showed where the surge troops had been deployed; another highlighted that the Afghan security forces had doubled in size to more than 260,000 since 2007. Then he focused on the Kandahar campaign. He said among other things that the current operations were Afghan-led and that nearly 60 percent of the forces involved were Afghan. He was particularly enthusiastic about the “Afghan Local Police” initiative, in which young men were recruited in villages, trained and equipped, and returned to those same villages. The key was keeping them connected to the regular police and Afghan authorities so they didn’t turn into independent militias. The early results had been quite encouraging.