Killing Machine (7 page)

What, then, was the primary lesson of the war for Obama? That the United States had to be prepared for an age of nation building, and that simply breaking up a dangerous conspiracy or axis of evil was not enough. For Obama, as he moved from war protester to presidential candidate to White House occupant, the problem became how to get beyond his role as Iraq dissenter and stay on track with Bob Gates and the new icon of counterinsurgency General David Petraeus—a very different direction than most of his supporters had ever imagined. It proved a complicated business.

2

AFGHANISTAN SHORTCHANGED

Now let me be clear. None of this will be easy. The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly, and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan. It will be an enduring test of our free society, and out leadership in the world. And unlike the great power conflicts and clear lines of division that defined the twentieth century, our effort will involve disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies
.

—President Barack Obama, “The Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” speech at West Point, December 1, 2009

To all appearances, the new president seemed headed on a course toward nation building in Afghanistan. The reappointment of Bob Gates was seen as a follow-up to Obama’s preelection pledge to send three brigades to shore up American forces there. These developments had been greeted with something less than enthusiasm by the supporters of his 2002 speech, but they “had no place else to go,” as the pundits put it. Yet this commitment—outlined in his West Point speech near the end of 2009—was not rock solid, but in fact a temporizing balancing act to test how well Hamid Karzai’s government could hold up its end of the arrangement. Looking back, it almost seems COIN’s rise and fall passed in a display that lasted less than a Fourth of July fireworks show.

The president’s speech to West Point cadets deserved, and received, a lot of press scrutiny nevertheless, for it was thought to be the culmination of a debate that had gone on for months, ever since General Stanley McChrystal’s review of the Afghan situation “leaked” to the
Washington Post
in September. But the debates continued and, as they did, more questions were raised than answered. Before the speech there were rumors that Gates and Petraeus were
ready to resign if the president turned down his field commander’s request for large numbers of new troops to implement a counterinsurgency strategy. Afterward there were questions about sending more troops but putting a time limit on the Afghan surge, as he had said the troops would start coming home after eighteen months.

Other presidents had often used uncertainty to their advantage, but Obama had come into office carrying on his back a heavy load of specific promises, and that made things much more difficult for him. He had promised to shut down CIA “black sites” where suspected terrorists were held. He kept that promise. But he had also pledged to shut down Guantánamo, which, along with Abu Ghraib’s history of abuses, was characterized in the media as a prime indicator of whether Obama would make a clean break with the Bush policies pursued under the cover of the 2001 Authorization to use Military Force and the subsequent rulings out of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2002 authored by John Yoo, whose interpretation of the president’s power to deal with prisoners taken in the global war on terror (as it was being called) clashed with common understandings of the Geneva Conventions on treatment of POWs.

Obama issued an executive order two days after delivering his inaugural address that called for Guantánamo to be shut down within a year, beginning with speedy reviews of the 241 detainees then being held there. But Republicans who had been open to arguments in favor of the closing—even George Bush had talked about closing down the facility—turned away and made the issue a loser for the administration. The worst moment came when the White House sought to arrange for a secret transfer and integration of seventeen Uighurs of Chinese extraction into a northern Virginia community of Uighurs—a plan that had been approved at the end of the Bush administration. The
Washington Post
reported on what happened next: “Before the plane could leave Cuba, word leaked to Rep. Frank R. Wolf that Guantanamo detainees were on their way to his district in Northern Virginia. Wolf, a Republican, had not been briefed on the matter by the White House, despite his history of defending the Uighur community in his district, and was
infuriated by the move.” He faxed a letter to the White House and released it to the news media, declaring that the “American people cannot afford to simply take your word that these detainees, who were captured training in terrorist camps, are not a threat if released into our communities.”
¹

It was a taste of things to come. From that moment on, the administration backed off, citing the pressing need to enact health legislation. But the Post’s investigation revealed that the real problem was a lack of coordination and an unwillingness to challenge congressional opposition, which after the Uighur debacle included many Democrats as well. It was perhaps not surprising, then, that the West Point speech encountered similar criticisms as the sort of mishmash that could be expected from an administration unable to make up its mind about what it really wanted to accomplish in Afghanistan.

The Early Decisions

Obama had pledged during the campaign to send more troops to Afghanistan. But had he really given thought to what a counterinsurgency strategy would entail? After a meeting in Canada with other defense ministers with troops in Afghanistan—including the defense minister of Estonia, which had sent 150 troops—Secretary Gates said that Afghanistan needed a surge. The purpose of sending additional forces, however, would be to shield the Afghan elections scheduled for August against efforts to disrupt the process. “The notion that things are out of control in Afghanistan or that we’re sliding toward a disaster, I think, is far too pessimistic,” Gates said. The Canadian defense minister wondered why Obama wasn’t knocking on the door of other NATO countries not present at the meeting. Gates reiterated that the American mission was to protect a “freely elected” government against the threat to elections. “This isn’t our war, necessarily.”
²

It was a somewhat ambivalent answer, to say the least. Had Gates gone back on his own commitment to a counterinsurgency strategy? Close observers were puzzled. In congressional testimony before the
election he questioned the Afghan commander’s call for additional troops: “Are we better off channeling resources into building and expanding the size of the Afghan national army as quickly as possible as opposed to a much larger western footprint in a country that has never been hospitable to foreigners, regardless of why they are there.”
³
Gates even expressed doubts about the long-term outcome in Iraq, and warned that the greatest threat to American security “was in western Pakistan,” where al Qaeda and Taliban fighters plotted attacks against Afghanistan and “against the United States and other western countries.” And after Obama took office, Gates said he would be “deeply skeptical” of any further troop increases, again repeating his warning that unless the Afghan police and national army took the lead, there were greater problems ahead. “My worry is that the Afghans come to see us as part of their problem rather than part of their solution, then we are lost.” The idea of exporting democracy to Afghanistan he dismissed as a perfectionist illusion.

This is going to be a long slog, and frankly, my view is that we need to be very careful about the nature of the goals we set for ourselves in Afghanistan. If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose, because nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience and money.
⁴

Gates almost seemed, in these comments, to be abandoning much of the rationale for counterinsurgency, which he had embraced in other statements. There were several possible reasons for the apparent contradiction. Perhaps he had looked down the road a second time, saw disaster ahead, and thought he had been too ready to credit Pentagon optimists who said a “clear, hold, and build” strategy—one in which the enemy threat is cleared, the area is held free of enemies, and local democratic institutions are built—could be achieved in Afghanistan with a lot more troops and a little more patience. Whatever the reason, Gates had moved to the “show me” position, willing to consider all options.

But there were those on the COIN side who stood ready with backbone implants for waverers harboring the slightest doubts about the American capacity to succeed—and the supposed disasters that loomed ahead for the faint of heart. Not surprisingly, as he did at the outset of every administration, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger stepped forward to offer his take, projecting a dark vision reminiscent of the “domino thesis” that once held policy makers mesmerized for almost a generation in Vietnam. “Victory for the Taliban in Afghanistan would give a tremendous shot in the arm to jihadism globally—threatening Pakistan with jihadist takeover and possibly intensifying terrorism in India. . . . Russia, China and Indonesia, which have all been targets of jihadist Islam, could also be at risk.”
⁵

At risk for what, exactly? Kissinger did not talk about specific dangers if this or that was not done, nor did he argue for a nationwide cleansing operation that some counterinsurgency advocates believed was the only meaningful way to eliminate a terrorist threat like another 9/11. “Gen. David Petraeus has argued that, reinforced by the number of American forces he has recommended, he should be able to control the 10 percent of Afghan territory, where, in his words, 80 percent of the military threat originates. This is the region where the ‘clear, hold and build’ strategy that had success in Iraq is particularly applicable.”
⁶

Leave 90 percent of Afghanistan alone for al Qaeda to roam at will? Where did that get anyone? Doomsday statements to boost sagging support for the war inside the government and among opinion makers were no help at all. How would it be possible to eliminate the terrorist threat unless all Afghan territory was under tight control by the friendly government the United States had set up in Kabul? Obama must already have been thinking of an alternative to taking on such a burden. Finding it difficult to articulate a doable strategic vision, policy makers drifted from rostrum to rostrum, seeking to satisfy all audiences that there actually were “metrics” being developed to measure “progress.” More and more the new president’s 2007 promise to eliminate al Qaeda strongholds in the “wild frontier of our globalized world” challenged his advisers (and
his critics) to show how counterinsurgency provided answers to any of the questions that most concerned the nation.

There was Richard Holbrooke’s view that the answer was not military—or at least not solely military. Within days of taking office, Obama appointed Holbrooke, a diplomatic veteran with counterinsurgency credentials that went back to Vietnam, and more recently an architect of peace accords in the Balkans, as his special representative to oversee the implementation of a new Afghan policy. Queried at a press conference about how to tell when victory in Afghanistan had been achieved, Holbrooke said that victory in the purely military sense had never been in the cards. Surrounded by ten newly appointed aides he had brought along to demonstrate interagency cooperation in the new Afghan project, Obama’s special representative declared that, ultimately, success would reveal itself as in a Supreme Court justice’s comment about pornography: “We’ll know it when we see it.”
⁷

The more statements there were about the stakes in Afghanistan and the likely outcome, the greater the confusion. A year later Holbrooke seconded an offer Afghan president Hamid Karzai made to insurgent groups to sever ties to al Qaeda, forswear violence, and accept the Afghan constitution in exchange for an opportunity to play a role in the country’s future. “If they are willing to accept the red lines and come in from the cold, there has to be a place for them,” the special representative told reporters at a press briefing.
⁸
This was identical to the offer Lyndon Johnson’s national security adviser Walt W. Rostow had once made to Vietnam insurgents, to quiet growing rumbles of dissent at home when prospects for “victory” vanished from sight under the jungle canopy beyond the rice paddies. And it had about the same chance of success.

Then there was Bruce Riedel’s vision. For the moment, he seemed to have the president’s ear more often than Holbrooke, who became (and wanted to become) the voice of “Vietnam past” in the Oval Office meetings. A long-term CIA expert who had advised the White House for several years on Middle East issues, Riedel had recently written a book,
The Search for Al Qaeda
. Obama asked Riedel to come up with a new plan for the region. If he looked closely at Riedel’s
book, however, he would see that it argued against itself at points. On one hand, Riedel wrote, al Qaeda constituted a serious threat to Pakistan and its nuclear arsenal, as well as a dangerous presence in countries around the world; on the other hand, he said, only a small splinter faction enjoyed support among Muslims.

To defeat al Qaeda would require a complete change of mission in Afghanistan, Riedel argued, involving military, political, and especially economic aid, something on the order of the Marshall Plan for Europe after World War II. And yet success was not really so far away, Riedel insisted, despite those who worried it would take decades. Not so, unless the United States pursued policies like those it had in Iraq: “More blunders like Iraq and more prison camps like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay can only help al Qaeda.” “At the end of the day, al Qaeda is not Nazi Germany,” said Riedel, “Imperial Japan, or the Soviet Union. It is a relatively small organization that can be defeated by wise and smart policy. Though it is responsible for the worst day save one in U.S. history, its demise should not take decades to achieve.”
⁹