Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (79 page)

Later the same day, September 1, Biden and I presided over the inauguration of the new U.S. training and advisory mission in Iraq, Operation New Dawn, and the change of command ceremony in which Ray Odierno handed responsibility to his successor, General Lloyd Austin. The ceremony was held in Al Faw palace, crowded with American and Iraqi commanders and as many troops as could be stuffed into the ornate hall built for Saddam. We all made speeches. Biden’s was the longest as he paid tribute to Odierno, his family, and the troops. (It was a little awkward listening to the vice president, knowing that he had vigorously opposed the military surge that had made this relatively peaceful transition possible.) My remarks focused primarily on Odierno’s
accomplishments, noting that without his leadership as Multi-National Corps commander under Petraeus in 2007 and his ability to turn plans into results on the ground, “we would be facing a far grimmer situation outside these walls today, and more broadly a strategic disaster for the United States.” I recalled asking him to return to Iraq as overall commander in the fall of 2008; he subsequently kept a boot on the neck of al Qaeda in Iraq and expanded the capabilities of the Iraqi army and police, all while overseeing the drawdown, restructuring, and repositioning of U.S. forces. I also welcomed Lloyd Austin. In addition to praising the troops, both Biden and Odierno called upon the Iraqi government to end its squabbling and get on with forming a government and addressing the country’s challenges. During the speeches, I noticed that my jet-lagged senior staff sitting in the front row, to a man, had fallen sound asleep.

Fifty thousand U.S. troops would remain in Iraq, deployed in six “advise and assist” training brigades, with all American forces scheduled to depart Iraq by the end of December 2011 unless there was a new agreement of some sort with the Iraqis. During my remaining time in office, 26 more Americans would be killed in action in Iraq, and another 206 wounded in action. But the war that President Bush in November 2006 asked me to help salvage and that President Obama two years later asked me to help end was over. The future of Iraq was up to the Iraqis. I was indescribably proud of what our troops and their commanders at every level had accomplished, against all odds at home and in Iraq itself.

A
FGHANISTAN

As I’ve said, the president had made a tough decision on the surge in Afghanistan in November 2009, and he had, for all practical purposes, made me, Mullen, Petraeus, and McChrystal swear a blood oath that we would support his decision. Unfortunately, Biden and his staff, the White House staff, and the NSS apparently had not taken the same oath of support. From the moment the president left West Point, they worked to show he had been wrong, that the Pentagon was not following his direction, and that the war on the ground was going from bad to worse. The president’s decision clearly had not ended the rancor and division over war strategy inside the administration, or the White House–NSS suspicion of the senior military—and me—on this issue. Indeed, the suspicion seemed to have increased.

Everything each side said and did was perceived through this distorted prism. A big issue in the fall 2009 debate had been the need to get the additional 30,000 U.S. troops into Afghanistan quickly, as had been done in Iraq in 2007. The logistics challenges in Afghanistan were beyond daunting, but Mullen, Petraeus, and the military’s logistics professionals pretty much pulled it off. When the Defense Department informed the White House in January that the last few thousand troops might not arrive until early September, we were accused of having misled the president. Almost none of the critics in the White House or the NSS—whose ranks were filled primarily by former Hill staffers, academics, and political operatives—had ever managed anything, and so there was no understanding of or sympathy for the challenges involved in what we were trying to do, only an opportunity to accuse us of walking away from our commitments to the president.

Biden, Donilon, Lute, and others bridled when McChrystal referred to his strategy as “counterinsurgency,” accusing him of expanding the mission the president had given him. But words that had been so carefully parsed in the White House debate were not adequate to explain the mission to 100,000 soldiers and Marines, and the core of that mission was, in fact, counterinsurgency, albeit with fairly tight geographical and time limits. Troops risking their lives need to be told that their goal is to “defeat” those trying to kill them. But such terms were viewed in the White House as borderline insubordinate political statements by generals trying to broaden the president’s strategy. Biden publicly asserted that the drawdowns beginning in July 2011 would be “steep.” I said I thought they would, and should, be gradual. When I said in testimony on the Hill that the president always had “the freedom to adjust his decisions” with respect to the timing and pace of drawdowns, it was interpreted by administration skeptics as my saying that the drawdowns might not begin in July.

The same skeptics in the West Wing and the NSS second-guessed McChrystal’s decision to secure several key villages in Helmand early in the campaign. They argued that the significant population center in the south was Kandahar. This was coming from the same critics who had wanted to avoid counterinsurgency—which is focused on population centers—and had demanded a “proof of concept” for his overall strategy.

The gap between the White House and senior Defense leaders became a chasm. Early in 2010, it had widened as the White House criticized the
U.S. military relief effort in Haiti, the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was playing out, I resisted major cuts in the FY2011 defense budget, and I wrote my memo on shortcomings in our preparations for a possible conflict with Iran. While the military’s every move in Afghanistan was examined through a microscope, and we were under great pressure to speed the surge, no comparable attention was paid to the civilian side. Commanders in the field were the most insistent in pleading for more civilian expertise, citing one example after another where even a small number of U.S. diplomats or development experts would make a dramatic difference in provincial capitals, villages, and rural areas. One of the few things the NSC principals had agreed upon the previous fall was that a significant increase in the number of American civilian experts was essential to success, but the numbers trickled in far too slowly. Donilon would occasionally raise the problem with Hillary or her deputies in principals’ meetings, but little came of it.

We at Defense certainly at times contributed to White House suspicions. For example, overly optimistic statements by McChrystal and others about the early success of military operations in and around the village of Marjah in Helmand—in particular, the claim of an Afghan “government in a box” ready to insert—gave ammunition not only to skeptics inside the government but also to the press. The more our commanders touted any success in the field, the more the NSS looked for evidence they were wrong. We should have done a better job of explaining what we were doing on the ground to implement the president’s decisions, although God knows we tried. Neither side was really listening.

In mid-January 2010, I made my second and last trip to Pakistan. Mike Mullen and Richard Holbrooke had devoted significant time and energy to cultivating the Pakistanis, reassuring them we wouldn’t abandon them and trying to get them to work more closely with us on the Afghan-Pakistani border. No administration in my entire career devoted more time and energy to working the Pakistanis than did President Obama and all his senior team. On January 21–22, I met with President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, and most important, the chief of the army general staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. My message was consistent: we were committed to a long-term strategic partnership; we needed to work together against the “syndicate of terror” placing Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India at risk; we needed to remove safe havens on both side of the border; Pakistan needed to better
control anti-Americanism and harassment of Americans; and the Pakistani army’s “extra-judicial killings” (executions) were putting our relationship at risk. In a speech at Pakistan’s National Defense University, I took direct aim at the many conspiracy theories circulating about us: “Let me say, definitively, the United States does not covet a single inch of Pakistani soil. We seek no military bases and we have no desire to control Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.”

The visit was for naught. I returned convinced that Pakistan would work with the United States in some ways—such as providing supply lines through Pakistan, which were also highly profitable—while at the same time providing sanctuary for the Taliban and other extremists, so that no matter who came out on top in Afghanistan, Pakistan would have influence. If there was to be any reconciliation, the Pakistanis intended to control it. Although I would defend them in front of Congress and to the press to keep the relationship from getting worse—and endangering our supply line from Karachi—I knew they were really no ally at all.

If you’ll remember, in recommending a surge of 30,000 troops to the president the previous fall, I was counting on our coalition partners in Afghanistan to contribute an additional 6,000 to 7,000 troops, which would get us close to the 40,000 McChrystal had requested. At a NATO defense ministers meeting in Istanbul on February 4–5, 2010, I leaned hard on my colleagues to find at least 4,000 more trainers to send to Afghanistan. I told them that effectively training a sizable Afghan security force was the exit strategy for all of us. I promised our allies more training to deal with IEDs and offered to make available to them counter-IED technologies we had developed. I then visited Ankara, Rome, and Paris to urge leaders in those governments to do more. The European governments eventually contributed an additional 8,000 to 9,000 troops. Even with this new infusion, though, we remained short of trainers needed to build up the Afghan army.

Two organizational changes in Afghanistan in early 2010 helped the allied effort considerably. The U.S. leadership had long thought that having a senior NATO civilian in Kabul to partner with the military commander would be important. Earlier efforts along these lines had not been successful, but in January the British ambassador to Afghanistan, Mark Sedwill, was appointed to the senior civilian role. He would prove a valuable partner for the ISAF commander and a useful influence both in Brussels and in Afghanistan.

The second change was solving the U. S. command and control problem once and for all—for the first time, to bring all American forces (including both special operations and the Marines) under the U.S. theater commander, at last establishing “unity of command.” I told McChrystal at the February defense ministers meeting that I wanted him to be like Eisenhower in World War II and have complete command of all forces in the theater. Toward the end of February, I told Mullen and Petraeus the same thing. To accomplish this, Petraeus said, getting the Marines under McChrystal’s command was “the Holy Grail.” After deferring for too long to multiple senior military voices supportive of or resigned to the status quo, I simply directed the command change. By late spring, every American in uniform in Afghanistan was under McChrystal’s command. It had taken far too long to get there, and that was my fault. I had fired several senior officers and officials because once they had been informed about a serious problem, they had not acted aggressively to solve it. I had been guilty of doing the same damn thing with respect to Afghan command and control.

As we surged troops into Afghanistan and McChrystal honed our military strategy, his staff began to tackle a problem that had concerned me all along—the inadequacy of our intelligence on the ground. McChrystal’s intelligence chief, Major General Michael Flynn, prepared a report detailing our ignorance of tribal, social, and political relationships in local areas, and our lack of understanding of power relationships and familial and clan connections. His diagnosis was on target as far as I was concerned, and I thought his proposals to remedy the situation made sense, including having our troops on the ground report what they learned as they went into villages, met with tribal elders, and brokered local deals. My only concern with Flynn’s remarkable analysis was that in January 2010, he published it in a think-tank journal so that everyone, including our adversaries in Afghanistan, could read about our deficiencies. Still, he was on the money in a critically important part of our effort.

I traveled once again to Afghanistan in early March and, as usual, met with Karzai. The prospects for reconciliation with the Taliban and reintegration of their fighters into Afghan society were much on everyone’s mind, especially Karzai’s, since he had convoked a national peace conference in late April. I told him we supported reconciliation but that it had to be on his terms, not those of Taliban chief Mullah Omar. He should negotiate from a position of strength, and I suggested he could
probably do that by the coming autumn. I informed him that the request for an additional $30 billion needed to fund the surge would be before Congress about the time of his visit to the United States in May. “You could help Secretary Clinton and me,” I told him.

As always, though—sorry to be predictable on the subject—the high point of the trip was getting out of Kabul to see the troops. I was flown to Forward Operating Base Frontenac near Kandahar to visit the 1st Battalion of the 17th Infantry Regiment, a Stryker unit that had suffered twenty-one killed and sixty-two wounded in its successful campaign. Roughly one out of seven soldiers in that unit had become a casualty. As a memorial to the fallen, they had set up a tepee with shelves along the sides holding photographs of those who had been killed, along with small mementos and coins left by comrades and visitors like me to honor them. It was, I thought, a sacred place, and I stayed in there alone for several minutes.

My spirits were revived by lunch with 10 junior enlisted soldiers and then a meeting with 150 of their buddies. As always, they were refreshingly candid. They were concerned about the tighter rules for engaging the enemy to prevent civilian casualties. Although they understood the consequences of hitting innocent people, they wanted to be able to fire more warning shots. They wanted more female soldiers to help search houses. They said the Afghan army troops were “good but lazy” and the Afghan national police were “corrupt and often stoned.” Someone always caught me off guard in these exchanges, in this case a soldier who said there was a design flaw in the soldiers’ combat uniform (fatigues)—the crotches tore out too easily crossing fences. He added with a smile, “It’s not a problem in the summer, but it can get a little breezy in the winter.” I allowed as how I probably wouldn’t have heard about that problem back in the Pentagon. (It turned out the Army was aware of this problem and had already ordered replacements.)