Killing Machine (10 page)

Within a short time, however, the clock hands moved in the wrong direction. The seventeen thousand troops Obama sent were supposed to guarantee that the upcoming election in Afghanistan was held under circumstances ensuring not only that the Taliban would not intimidate voters but that Karzai would keep to his promise that the election would be fair and free. Instead, the presidential election in Afghanistan reeked of fraud, threatening stability within Afghanistan and worrying American policy makers. Even with his attempt to rig the results, Karzai still did not gain a majority, and there was a need for a run-off. At first Karzai, who had expected full backing from the United States and resented its neutral stance, refused to participate, declaring he had won. Obama had to send out a special emissary, Senator John Kerry, to persuade him otherwise. As matters turned out, however, there was no runoff, because the opposing candidate, Abdullah Abdullah, pulled out, declaring there could be no honest result under the prevailing conditions.

It was the fist bitter disappointment of the war for Obama. The administration’s sense of the situation, commented an adviser, had been that the election would show “whether Afghanistan was taking a turn for the better or whether it was going in a downward trajectory.” And another aide worried, “It’s hard to say that we are sending your children off to fight and die for a guy who steals elections.”
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Karzai had enjoyed a good relationship with George Bush and frequent teleconferences with the president. Obama had stopped that, which the Afghan president interpreted to mean that he was no longer considered indispensable and could no longer count on unconditional support from the United States. But instead of making him more amenable to Washington’s demands, this “tough love” made him all the more recalcitrant, as would become clear over the next several months.

Against this troubled background—reminiscent of the struggles with earlier American-imposed strong men, who often proved to be weaklings at crunch time or, conversely, unwilling to allow the United States to pull their strings when it wished—the first assessment of the new policy was due. Secretary Gates told interviewers
that he wanted that assessment to be an honest endeavor. But he left himself plenty of room: “That is not to say we will accept all of their recommendations.” Gates had insisted military commanders would have to try hard to convince him to fulfill any more requests for additional troops. Setting a date for McChrystal’s report, therefore, was supposed to be a way of keeping control of the situation, but in the event it had the opposite effect. When McChrystal’s sixty-six-page assessment arrived on Gates’s desk at the end of August, it immediately flew out a Pentagon window to the front pages of the
Washington Post
. The White House saw in that maneuver a Pentagon plot to deprive the president of any real choice but to send more troops. That interpretation was too simple, however. It had not been McChrystal and his sponsors in the Pentagon who had outlined the full-scale plan to rebuild Afghanistan from the bottom up and to guarantee how Afghan women would be treated. The president’s dilemma was largely of his own making, and when he came up against a blank wall, on the other side would be the drones.

The very first paragraph of the “Commander’s Summary” of the report was meant as a stark warning, but what it did was perfectly capture the assumptions policy makers (and pro-war commentators in the media and think tanks) worked from, and the real costs a counterinsurgency strategy would exact.

The stakes in Afghanistan are high. NATO’s Comprehensive Strategic Political Military Plan and President Obama’s strategy to disrupt, dismantle, and eventually defeat al Qaeda and prevent their return to Afghanistan have laid out a clear path of what we must do. Stability in Afghanistan is an imperative; if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban—or has insufficient capacity to counter transnational terrorists—Afghanistan could again become a base for terrorism, with obvious implications for regional stability.
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Neither success nor failure could be taken for granted, the report continued, because Afghanistan faced a resilient and growing insurgency, while at the same time “a perception that our resolve is
uncertain makes Afghans reluctant to align with us.” Doubling down on previous strategies was no answer. The momentum of these intertwined threats required a new strategy to bring together all aspects of an “integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency campaign”—just, the author might have added, as outlined in the new Petraeus manual, which built on the “new” history of the Vietnam War. “If only Gen. Creighton Abrams had been allowed the time to finish the job” had now become the rallying cry for counter-insurgency enthusiasts about Afghanistan.

It seemed almost surreal. In this nearly invisible thread stretching across the decades from the Pentagon to think tanks and back again,
Afghanistan would prove that the Americans had actually prevailed in Vietnam
. The conflict in Afghanistan had become a war to redeem the greatest lost victory in American military history. Would Americans show the world that its mistakes in Vietnam would not be repeated?

There were two fights that had to be won, said McChrystal’s report: a long-term struggle, which required patience and commitment, and a short-term fight. The latter was the one he worried most about. “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near term (next 12 months)—while Afghan security capacity matures—risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.” Even without a specific request for additional troops (as it turned out, that would come later), the report posited the need for many more American boots on the ground, perhaps as many as 80,000 additional military personnel. Keeping the top number that high was a strategy designed to take advantage of the “gulp factor”—once civilian policy makers got past the initial gulp, getting approval for a smaller number would be much easier. By highlighting as critical the next twelve months, the phrasing of McChrystal’s report did appear to offer President Obama a little leeway to put a time limit on any surge. But such predictions about the capacity of the Afghans were more on the order of a sideshow barker’s promises of astounding sights inside the tent than serious statements about the outlook for either the short-term or the long-term struggle.

On the other hand, McChrystal was candid about the difficulties of achieving an integrated counterinsurgency strategy in coalition warfare, which of course was another reason more troops from the allies could not satisfy the needs of a new strategy. In the past, in addition to the inherent problems of coalition warfare, the United States had run a strategy that “distances us—physically and psychologically—from the people we seek to protect,” McChrystal said in the report. Tactical wins that caused civilian casualties or unnecessary collateral damage threatened strategic defeat. “The insurgents cannot defeat us militarily; but we can defeat ourselves.”

Nor did the general shy away from talking about a problem that bedeviled any efforts to win over the population: the rampant corruption of the Afghan government, starting with the president’s family. “The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials, and [the coalition’s] own errors, have given Afghans little reason to support their government.” The coalition “requires a credible program to offer eligible insurgents reasonable incentives to stop fighting and return to normalcy, possibly including the provision of employment and protection.”
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George Packer, the
New Yorker’s
frequent in-depth commentator and a onetime supporter of the Iraq War, called the report an unsurprising document. While the noise in the Washington debate would be all about the troop increase question, its real emphasis was on developing a better approach to counterinsurgency—in essence, the “better” war the United States did not fight in Vietnam until it was too late. It was an impressive effort, Packer said, filled with self-criticism and fully cognizant of Karzai’s great shortcomings, and consequently demonstrating a greater understanding of the situation than most journalists and academics had achieved. Packer himself was torn about the Afghan War, he said. On one hand, there was the question of whether Obama was more like JFK or Lyndon Johnson, with the former standing up at critical moments against the military’s desire for a wider war in Vietnam and the latter paying no heed to warning signs. His comparison left out the roles of the advisers who would have pressured Kennedy, and who
did press LBJ hard, such as McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara, but Packer was more troubled about other issues. “The McChrystal report is a shining example of intelligent military thinking—of the military’s capacity for learning and self-transformation through the searing events of the past eight years. Its authors will have a right to feel a little bitter if it appears at the very moment when the political class has decided that it just doesn’t work.”
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Packer added in closing that the Obama administration had considered alternatives when it decided on the new strategy in March, and had rejected them. “Since then no one has made a persuasive case why [those alternatives] would work any better.” One of Petraeus’s advisers, David Kilcullen, made Packer’s point another way, by positing the problem as having only two solutions, either getting out at once or doing it the right way. Having ruled out abandoning the fight in Afghanistan, he then said the worst option would be to compromise on the number of troops to send. “You either commit to D-Day and invade the continent or you get Suez. Half measures end up with Suez.”
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Looking at the analysis made by Packer and Kilcullen is a good way to make the argument that Obama was not “jammed” by the Pentagon, as his defenders would later insist, but followed a neoliberal agenda from the beginning. Perhaps he had been trying to stave off the moment of decision. Now it was too late to turn back. Kilcullen’s injection of the supposed analogy between D-Day and Suez was especially an almost perfect example of the abuse of history to make critical judgments about the future. It brimmed with “can do” salesmanship rather than a realistic understanding of the limitations of military power.

The Days Dwindle

The initial White House meeting to discuss the McChrystal report was held on September 13, 2009. Reports of what went on suggested there had been “a wholesale reconsideration of a strategy the president announced with fanfare six months ago.” Vice President Joe Biden led the charge, questioning the premise of the counterinsurgency
strategy in Afghanistan and offering instead the alternative of scaling back the overall American military presence to concentrate on a counterterrorism approach: “Rather than trying to protect the Afghan population from the Taliban, American forces would concentrate on strikes against Qaeda cells, primarily in Pakistan, using special forces, Predator missile attacks and other surgical tactics.” Pentagon officials were worried, it was said, that President Obama might be having “buyer’s remorse” after ordering twenty-one thousand troops there “within weeks of taking office before even settling on a strategy.”
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The theatrics around the White House bull sessions on the Afghan War grew as the process drew out, allowing for plenty of speculation in the press. Hillary Clinton was quoted as saying that the military was using the “Goldilocks option”—a phrase that also had been invoked about the Vietnam War. One was not supposed to say anything about Vietnam, but that was inevitable as word leaked out about the president’s reading of Gordon Goldstein’s
Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam
(2008); revealing his choice of reading matter was aimed at showing that the president was aware of the slippery slopes on the Afghan mountains. Another portrayal of the debates put the onus on counterinsurgency advocates, in much the same manner as the argument that Afghanistan would redeem Vietnam. “It was clear to McChrystal, Petraeus, and all the other commanders that soon Afghanistan would be the only war in town,” a White House adviser told David Sanger. “And so it was the last testing ground for counterinsurgency, and the last place where they could prove that this is the only strategy that would work.”
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But that was not really true—as the rapid growth of the secretive Special Operations Command (SOC) would demonstrate about war planning for the present and future.

Biden’s position in the debate, which he held on to throughout the discussions until President Obama went to West Point on December 1 to announce he was sending an additional thirty thousand troops to Afghanistan, had been shaped in large part by the Afghan election debacle and other evidence that an essential element in
the success of counterinsurgency was missing: a reliable and honest government in Kabul (a point also made by McChrystal). “Part of the reason you are seeing a hesitancy to jump deeper into the pool,” Bruce Riedel observed, “is that they are looking to see if they can make lemonade out of the lemons we got from the Afghan election.” Another leaked document, a cable from Ambassador Karl Eikenberry—a former military commander—in Kabul, briefly shook up the debate but did not have nearly the impact the McChrystal Report did. Eikenberry cabled the State Department on November 6, 2009.

Madame Secretary,

As we near the end of our deliberations on the way forward in Afghanistan, I would like to outline my reservations about a counterinsurgency strategy that relies on a large infusion of U.S. forces. I fully agree that the security situation in Afghanistan is serious and that additional troops will help reverse the worsening trends in areas where the troops are deployed. There is an unassailable logic to the argument that a robust counterinsurgency approach will yield measurable progress, at least in the security realm.