Beyond Bin Laden (4 page)

 

The basic objective, according to Gates, was to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a haven and launching pad for extremists. That was less ambitious than nation-building. To achieve that minimalist end state required three tasks: 1) provide decentralized security in rural Pashtun tribal areas to drive out the local Taliban, 2) link that security system to the central government in Kabul, and 3) cope with the sanctuary provided by Pakistan.

The first task—providing local security—depended upon the morale of the fighters on both sides. War is about killing until the other side quits. The preferred American way of war, prior to the publication of the counterinsurgency manual, was to fix and destroy the opposing army. That didn't apply in insurgencies. Instead, the population had be separated from, and persuaded to inform against, the insurgents. That required forces spread out across seven thousand Pashtun villages. The eleven million Pashtuns—about thirty percent of the Afghan population—lived in the mountains and farmlands adjacent to the fifteen-hundred-mile border with Pakistan. The Taliban were fundamentalist Pashtuns who operated in diverse gangs. Altogether, there were about twenty thousand Taliban fighters and a like number of supporters. About ninety-five percent of the fighting took place inside the Pashtun belt.

Since 2001, the basic goal of the NATO coalition and of the Kabul government had been to persuade the Pashtuns to turn against their Taliban relatives. The example cited is Iraq, where Sunni tribes came over to the American side starting in late 2006. That change in attitude, called the Awakening, provided the bedrock upon which General David Petraeus anchored his winning strategy. Shortly before Al Qaeda killed him, I asked Sheik Abu Risha Sattar, who led the Awakening, why the tribes hadn't awakened earlier and saved bloodshed on both sides. "You Americans couldn't convince us," he replied. "We Sunnis had to convince ourselves."

Sattar's words were a warning about predicting when and why the tide of insurgent battle begins to ebb. We don't know what dynamic, if any, will cause the Pashtun tribes to band together decisively against the Taliban gangs. Americans can provide a temporary glue, but eventually the Afghanis must work out their own tribal dynamics. As Ahmed Rashid's book
Taliban
vividly describes, deceit among the tribes is perpetual. Our objective is to prevent the re-emergence of extremist dominance. Whether this can be achieved in the face of a weak central government—nation-building lite—remains an open question.

The second task was creating a responsive central government that merited the support of the population. The Taliban bring a fervid religiosity intensified by jihad against foreigners. Yet while the majority of Afghanis detest the Taliban, the Karzai government has degraded its own legitimacy through corruption, selfishness, and inaction.

The Iraq case showed that the U.S. government could exert leverage with tenacity and moral suasion. In Iraq, American officers and diplomats took up residence in key ministries, both mentoring and intervening when catastrophe loomed. Over ten thousand U.S. officers and NCOs were attached to the Iraqi government at every level, from the neighborhood to the prime minister's office—a ratio of twenty or thirty U.S. military officers to one U.S. civilian. The Pentagon did not have the manpower or desire to repeat that model in Afghanistan.

The third task was the hardest: depriving Al Qaeda and the Taliban of sanctuary in Pakistan. Pakistan's Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has long believed it could manipulate the Pashtun fundamentalists, collectively called the Taliban, to ensure Afghanistan did not align with India. In the '80s, CIA contacts with mujahideen were controlled by the ISI. After the Russians were driven out of Afghanistan, the ISI provided the Taliban with equipment and advice. After 9/11, the Pakistan government claimed to reject the Taliban, but in fact did not do so. Inside the Pakistani army, officers were wary of one another's loyalties, not knowing who among them felt a basic allegiance to the fundamentalists.

Pakistan's leaders were often duplicitous, always cunning, and forever amber. Admiral Mullen said the problem was that "a whole generation of Pakistani military officers either doesn't know the United States, doesn't trust us, or both."
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The United States and Pakistan have reason to distrust each other. Congress has switched aid to Pakistan on and off, while the executive branch has alternately embraced and deplored Pakistan's leaders, whose motivations and constancy are opaque. Pakistan has developed dozens of nuclear weapons and allowed the transfer of nuclear blueprints and equipment to Libya and to North Korea.

In 2009, Obama believed that Pakistan could be wooed with a billion dollars a year. The hope was that Pakistan would respond by attacking the fundamentalists. Instead, Pakistan objected to any U.S. ground raids against terrorist bases and complained whenever the United States launched a small strike using a unmanned aerial vehicle called the Predator.

Since Pakistan remains a sanctuary, the U.S. military has concentrated on fighting a defensive war inside Afghanistan.

 

In 2010, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates again addressed the military objective. "Doing things to improve governance," Gates said, "to improve development in Afghanistan, to the degree it contributes to our security mission and to the effectiveness of the Afghan government in the security area, that's what we're going to do." That was obfuscation, not guidance. No commander can carry out a mission that the secretary of defense cannot define.

"Our young military leaders," he said, "in Iraq and Afghanistan have to one degree or another found themselves dealing with development, governance, agriculture, health, and diplomacy."
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This suggested that nation-building was a military mission, but beyond his control. Gates had a knack for getting on both sides of any controversial debate. While he appeared stern, rational, and judicious, it was hard to know where he stood on core issues.

Army Chief of Staff General George Casey was more prescriptive about the mission. "We are not going to succeed by military means alone," he said in 2008. "You are only going to succeed when the people perceive there is a government represented by their interests, when there is an economy that can give them a job to support their families, when there are educational systems that can educate their family. All those things are essential to the long-term success of the military operation."

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff supported Casey's view that nation-building was the basic mission. "Moving in a direction that provides security," Mullen said, "so then we can develop governance, so then we can develop an economy and they can take over their own destiny."

The sequential approach of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs meant that U.S. commanders had to fight, then govern, and then deliver services to the population.

The commandant of the Marine Corps, General James Conway, disagreed fundamentally. "We [marines] can't fix the economy," Conway said. "We can't fix the government. What we can do is affect the security."

With four-star generals aligned on opposing sides of the debate, no senior civilian official had addressed head-on whether the U.S. military should shed the missions of governance and economic development. Instead, the senior leadership evaded responsibility by saying the battalions would do only the amount of governance and development that was necessary. By 2011, many American battalion commanders were devoting more effort to governance and development than to killing and arresting an enemy that held the offensive.

 

The fundamental governance problem was that we had given full sovereignty to a set of officials who behaved irresponsibly. When we placed ourselves in the position of assisting—by shedding American blood—officials whom we could relieve of command for corruption or incompetence, we became advisers rather than decision-makers. In Afghanistan, we have spent more than $20 billion on construction and "governance," and we don't know whether that money was wasted. We do know that corruption was scandalous and yet we had no authority to curtail it or to prosecute the thieves.

More basically, it was not clear how corruption affected governance. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Roger Myerson offered an explanation about when corruption worked and did not work to support a state. Chiang Kai-shek's 1949 government in China is cited in counterinsurgency theory as an example of how corruption corrodes a regime, leading to victory by the guerrillas. Not so, Myerson argued. "The problem was that highly connected government agents took profits from their positions without providing the governance and services that were expected of them."
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Chiang failed as a leader because he did not ensure his subordinates were rewarded only when they performed their jobs correctly. When they were rewarded even while failing, then those failures became the insurgents' gains, spreading the perception that Chiang's rule was doomed and motivating his subordinates to steal more while they could. The government did nothing to prevent the collapse they had engineered by their own ineptitude.

Conversely, the British in India in the 1860s granted local authority as a property right to landlords called zamindars. Permitted to tax and benefit, the zamindar bureaucracy ruthlessly stamped out any anti-British movements because a rebellion meant the end of their livelihoods. Similarly, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Russia had apparatchiks who understood they had to do their jobs in order to receive payoffs. Appointed and elected officials in Afghanistan expected payoffs regardless of whether they performed their jobs.

Although it offended the U.S. military to know that many Afghan officers and high officials were thieves, the behavior of officials in many countries demonstrated that a corrupt state could provide security and some meager services for the people. It was not clear how the United States, unable to resolve the issue of corruption and relegated to the role of advising a sovereign government led by an erratic president, could build a stable, democratic, economically viable nation in Afghanistan.

 

After a decade, we must begin to close down our open-ended commitment in Afghanistan. Nation-building will take several more decades and the commitment of hundreds of billions of more dollars. After the Great Recession and given the staggering cost of social transfer payments in the U.S. and the West in general, we don't have the resources to invest on a continuing giant scale. Worse, after giving the Afghans billions each year and doing the fighting for them, we have created a culture of entitlement and dependency.

There is no way of withdrawing substantially from Afghanistan without accepting a degree of risk. How one assesses progress in a war, however, is highly controversial. Seven months after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, retired marine general Anthony Zinni gave a blistering speech. "My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam," he said, "where we heard the garbage and lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
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The audience of navy and marine officers rose in applause, presumably cheering a criticism of civilian officials and not of themselves.

That was a misleading illusion. In Vietnam, generals as well as policymakers and politicians contributed to failure. In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered General William Westmoreland, the commander in South Vietnam, to undertake a strategy to "attrit (sic) … (the Communist forces) at a rate as high as their capability to put men into the field."
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Westmoreland enthusiastically championed the attrition strategy. Inside the military, only the marines dissented. Overall, the U.S. military command agreed with a strategy that substituted physical for moral determination and led to body counts as the measure of progress. McNamara gradually came to disbelieve the military reports and quietly turned against the war.

There was "garbage" in the form of body counts inflated by the military and "lies" (deception) by a secretary of defense who did not believe in his own strategy, plus a Joint Chiefs of Staff that did not demur to a flawed strategy. Generals and civilian officials alike shared responsibility for the conduct of the war.

Similarly, in Iraq the generals weren't on one side with the civilian officials on the other. Former secretary of state Colin Powell, who had served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on
Meet the Press
that he didn't think the preparations for war were adequate. But he went on to argue that both the civilians and the generals knew of the difficulties before invading Iraq. "Those that had experience in war understood," he said, "that we were taking on something that was going to be a major burden for many years, and I think the president was well aware of that."
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According to the multinational force campaign assessment written in Baghdad, the outlook in Iraq at the end of 2005 was bright. Yet a few months later, Iraq disintegrated. Excessive optimism was shared by civilian officials and military staffs alike.

Reports from Afghanistan reflected similar optimism. In 2002 the Taliban were routed, Al Qaeda driven out, and a national government elected. Things seemed good. Yet in 2008, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs said we weren't winning and ordered a new strategy. How had the situation deteriorated over six years without warning bells clanging? How could so much "garbage and lies"—faulty assessments year after year—have accumulated in two theaters of war?

Dishonest military or civilian officials were not withholding bad news. Instead, the staffs, military and civilian alike, were wrestling to assess risk in a fledgling sovereign state racked by violence. Risk assessment was the art of relating the odds of achieving stability in a foreign country to varying levels of American military involvement.

Risk assessment—does the situation require more Americans in combat?—was poor for three reasons. The first was the culture of large guild organizations. Military officers have spent their careers preparing for battlefields where they were expected to prevail. If they didn't have enough forces, that was no excuse. The divisions and battalions charged with winning were asked to evaluate themselves. Every commander believed he could get the job done with the forces he was allocated. Officers at all levels of command and staff knew one another; they had served together and come up the ranks together. Given that cultural context, it was unreasonable to expect even-handed candor from the commanders charged with controlling a battle space. The military rewarded progress.