The Longest War (56 page)

Vice President Biden was a
strong outlier
from this consensus. Riedel recalls, “He had real doubts that Afghanistan can be stabilized; much gloomier appraisal of the prospects to stabilize Afghanistan. But second and I think much more important to the vice president, very gloomy about the prospects for sustaining domestic political support for the war, and especially Democrats’ political support for the war. And in that case, I think he read the tea leaves better than almost anyone else.”

Biden favored an approach that emphasized the use of American drones and U.S. Special Forces to take on al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies and eschewed any large-scale ramp-up of U.S. troops and counterinsurgency efforts. Riedel recalls, “The
killer argument against
his approach, in political terms, is—Well, that’s what Bush and Cheney did. [The vice president was] much more a nay-sayer on this than someone who had a viable alternative. And that’s why, at the end of the day, the president was not swayed by that argument.”

For Obama’s key political advisers—David Axelrod; his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel; and Biden—the ghost hovering over the discussion of any ramping-up of the Afghan war effort was that of Lyndon Johnson, who had destroyed his presidency as he expanded the American involvement in Vietnam. Riedel recalls, “They are just very, very mindful that a Democratic president with big ideas for domestic change can see all of that destroyed in a war in Asia that destroys the party in the process.… Biden
does not want to be the Hubert Humphrey
. He doesn’t want to be the guy who went along with something which he profoundly disagreed with, but he went along with it because he was a loyal supporter of the president.”

But was Afghanistan really likely to be a rerun of Vietnam? Hardly. The similarities between the Taliban and the Viet Cong ended with their mutual hostility toward the U.S. military. Although the Taliban had roughly quadrupled in size between 2006 and 2009, still the some
twenty-five thousand Taliban full-time fighters
were too few to hold even small Afghan towns, let
alone mount a Tet-style offensive on Kabul. As a military force, they were armed lightly enough to constitute a significant tactical problem, not a strategic threat. By contrast, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army at the height of the Vietnam War numbered more than half a million men, were equipped with artillery and tanks, and were well supplied by both the Soviet Union and Mao’s China. And the scale of casualties in the two conflicts were orders of magnitude smaller. One hundred and fifty-four American soldiers died in 2008 in Afghanistan, the largest number since the fall of the Taliban. In 1968, the deadliest year of the Vietnam conflict, the same number of U.S. servicemen were dying
every four days
.

One participant in the Riedel review recalls that early on in the process, “the military came in and said look, we really need to get more troops in now, kind of in a
holding pattern
because we’re losing ground and we need to make sure that we stop losing ground while we think about the longer-term strategy. And we need to secure the elections better than we can secure them with the forces we have in place now.” So Obama agreed to send in
21,000 more
soldiers in addition to the some 12,000 that President Bush had already ordered in at the end of his administration but hadn’t yet arrived in-country. The net result was that there would be around 33,000 additional American forces going into Afghanistan in 2009 from January to the summer, so doubling the U.S. military presence there.

While agreeing to the significant troop increases, Obama told his national security team, “
I want to see the impact
of that; I want to constantly assess where we are, and the critical assessment point will be the Afghan elections, because we’re doing some of this to secure the elections. Let’s see where we are then and let’s make sure that the strategy is appropriately on target.”

On March 19, five weeks into the review, Riedel sat down with Obama on Air Force One on the long flight to California, where the president would later appear as a guest of Jay Leno’s on
The Tonight Show
. During the trip Obama asked Riedel, “Is it sustainable to really send more American troops. What assurance is there that that’s going to turn things around?” Riedel’s reply was blunt:
“There’s no guarantee.
This has a chance of success; the alternatives are worse. And I am firmly of the view that you should have a pretty good idea if it’s working in eighteen to twenty-four months.… It’s either going to work, or all those statistical indicators that are going bad, will just keep going bad. And if that happens, then the patient arrived on Mr. Obama’s doorstep, dead on arrival. And a brave attempt to resuscitate it hasn’t produced. But I think
you’re better off having tried to see if you can revive the patient, than to just give up right now.’”

On March 27, as the Riedel review debuted publicly, Obama announced that the goal of his campaign in South Asia was “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.” Few could quibble with that goal, but the Riedel review would set the stage for another eight months of wrangling about how best to achieve it.
Recommendation number one
of the Riedel review was a fully resourced counterinsurgency campaign in south and eastern Afghanistan, but the likely costs to implement such a campaign, in particular the sizable number of American boots on the ground needed to execute it, was poorly understood by key players in the administration, which was by now only two months old.

As a result of the Riedel review, Obama announced he would aim to modestly improve the size and professionalism of Afghanistan’s police force, and nearly double the ranks of the Afghan army over the next two years. To help train those Afghan security services, Obama ordered to Afghanistan
some four thousand trainers
from the 82nd Airborne.

President Obama had now made Afghanistan a defining element of his foreign policy, and just as Iraq became “Bush’s war,” so the conflict that now embroiled both Afghanistan and Pakistan was “Obama’s war.” This caused consternation among some in the Democratic Party. On May 14, 2009, fifty-one House Democrats
voted against
continued funding for the Afghan War. Around the same time, David Obey, the chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, which helps determine federal spending, said the White House had to show concrete results in Afghanistan within a year, implying that if it didn’t do so he would
move to turn off the money spigot
. It wasn’t just politicians who were souring on the Afghan War. A March 2009
USA Today
poll found that 41 percent of Americans believed
the war was a mistake
, up from only 6 percent in 2002. American opposition to the Afghan War rose to
57 percent
five months later. The media only added to the gloom and doom.
Newsweek
ran
a cover story
speculating that Afghanistan could be Obama’s Vietnam. And the
New York Times
ran prominent opinion pieces with headlines like “The ‘Good War’ Isn’t Worth Fighting” and “
Fearing Another Quagmire
in Afghanistan.”

But the growing skepticism about Obama’s chances for success in Afghanistan were largely based on some deep misreadings of both the country’s history and the views of its people, which were often compounded by facile
comparisons to the United States’ misadventures of past decades in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Afghanistan would not be Obama’s Vietnam, nor would it be his Iraq, although it could be his Afghanistan.

Objections to Obama’s ramp-up in Afghanistan began with the observation that Afghanistan has long been the “graveyard of empires”: as went the disastrous British expedition there in 1842 and the Soviet invasion in 1979, so too the current American occupation was doomed to follow. In fact, any number of empire builders, from Alexander the Great to the Mogul emperor Babur in the sixteenth century to the British in the successful Second Afghan War three decades after their infamous defeat there,
have won military victories
in Afghanistan. The graveyard-of-empires metaphor belonged in the graveyard of clichés.

More importantly, Afghans had generally embraced international forces after the fall of the Taliban. In a
2005 poll by BBC/ABC
, eight out of ten Afghans expressed a favorable opinion of the United States and the same number supported foreign soldiers in their country. Contrast that with Iraq, where BBC/ABC also polled the same year and found that
less than one in five Iraqis
supported international forces in their country. While the
same poll taken in Afghanistan in 2009
found, for the first time, that just under half of Afghans had a favorable view of the United States, that was still a higher approval rating than the United States received in any other Muslim-majority country save Lebanon. And a solid majority of Afghans
continued to approve
of the international forces in their country. What Afghans wanted was not for American and other foreign soldiers to leave, but rather to deliver on their promises of helping to midwife a more secure and prosperous country.

A corollary to the argument that Afghanistan was unconquerable was the argument that it was ungovernable: that the country has never been a functioning nation-state, that its people, mired in a culture of violence not amenable to Western fixes, had no interest in helping to build a more open, peaceful society. Certainly endemic low-level warfare is embedded in Pashtun society, but the level of violence in Afghanistan was actually far lower than most Americans believed.
In 2008 more than two thousand Afghan civilians had died
at the hands of the Taliban or coalition forces out of a population of 30 million—that was too many, but it was also
less than a fourth
as many as had died the year before in Iraq, which is both more sparsely populated and often assumed to be easier to govern. At the height of the violence in Iraq, some
three thousand civilians were dying
every month
, making the country around
twenty times more violent than Afghanistan was as Obama assumed control of the war.

An assertion that deserved a similarly hard look was that nation building in Afghanistan was doomed because the country wasn’t a nation-state, but rather a jerry-rigged patchwork of competing tribal groupings. In fact, Afghanistan is a much older nation-state than, say, Italy or Germany, both of which were only unified in the late nineteenth century. Modern Afghanistan is considered to have emerged with the first Afghan empire under Ahmad Shah Durrani in 1747—it has been a nation for decades longer than the United States, and Afghans have an accordingly strong sense of nationhood. What they have had just as long, however, is a weak central state. The last king of Afghanistan, for instance, Zahir Shah, who reigned from 1933 to 1973, presided lightly over a country that Afghans recall with great nostalgia as a time of relative peace and prosperity.

Skeptics of Obama’s Afghanistan policy said that the right approach to the country was either to reduce American commitments there or just get out entirely. The short explanation of why this wouldn’t work is that the United States had tried this already. Twice. In 1989, after the most successful covert program in the history of the CIA helped to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan, the George H. W. Bush administration
closed the U.S. embassy
in Kabul. The Clinton administration then effectively
zeroed out aid
to one of the poorest countries in the world. Out of the chaos of the Afghan civil war in the early 1990s emerged the Taliban, who then gave sanctuary to al-Qaeda. In 2001, the next Bush administration returned to topple the Taliban, but its ideological aversion to nation building ensured that Afghanistan was the least resourced per-capita reconstruction effort the U.S. has engaged in since World War II. An indication of how desultory those efforts were was the
puny size of the Afghan army
, which two years after the fall of the Taliban numbered only six thousand men.

America got what it paid for with this Afghanistan-on-the-cheap approach: as we have seen, after 2001 the Taliban reemerged, this time fused ideologically and tactically with al-Qaeda, and the new Taliban adopted wholesale al-Qaeda’s Iraq playbook of suicide attacks, IED operations, hostage beheadings, and an aggressive video-based information campaign.

At the end of March 2009 the Pentagon was tasked to develop an operational plan to implement the fully resourced counterinsurgency campaign envisioned
by the Riedel review, a task that fell to General David McKiernan. The commander of the land war in Iraq that had toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime in only three weeks in the spring of 2003, McKiernan was now the commander in Afghanistan. But his immediate bosses, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen, and CENTCOM commander General David Petraeus, had grown increasingly concerned that he was not up to the complex job of managing a successful counterinsurgency campaign. They decided to replace him with General Stanley McChrystal, a commander who had distinguished himself running Special Operations in Iraq and had presided over the hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda’s leader there. Petraeus remembers, “
It was a very close-hold
decision; it was basically three people.” Just as Gates had told General George Casey in Iraq two years earlier that he was being replaced early in his tour by Petraeus, so now the secretary of defense went to Kabul to tell McKiernan that his tour was over. Gates announced that McKiernan
was retiring on May 11
. This was widely portrayed as the first time that an American theater commander had been fired since President Truman had sacked General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War, but in truth Casey had also been relieved of his job, albeit in a far more graceful fashion than was the case with McKiernan.

Removing McKiernan had important consequences because instead of an operational plan for the new counterinsurgency strategy going to the White House in June, the campaign plan would now be given to McChrystal to write, thus delaying its arrival until late August. “During those three months,
the bottom fell out
of the Democratic Party’s support for the war,” recalls Riedel.