Killing Machine (18 page)

A Bleeding Ulcer

No sooner had Obama returned to Washington than Karzai was at it again with provocative statements, this time denouncing the “West” for demanding that “foreigners” oversee parliamentary elections. The Americans wanted a weak parliament, he told a gathering of election officials, “and for me to be an ineffective president.” He castigated Americans for saying he had perpetrated a fraud in the presidential election. All those accusations, he said, were aimed at diminishing him in the eyes of his countrymen. “They wanted to have a puppet government. They wanted a servant government.”
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On April 16 Obama met with the National Security Council for its monthly update on the situation. McChrystal’s report on his
progress was not what Obama wished to hear. The model had been to clear, hold, build, and then transfer. The general had to admit that he had not yet been able to transfer authority to the Afghan national security forces anywhere in the region. “Are we on timeline?” Obama asked. Yes, replied the general. Obama then ran down the list of places where the model had stalled at the “hold” level. Were any of them close to being transferred? Not one, the general said. As Bob Woodward put it, “The model had become clear, hold, hold, hold, hold and hold. Hold for years. There was no build, no transfer.”
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At the end of April a new Pentagon report requested by Congress offered up a very mixed picture of where matters stood. It reaffirmed faith in the “reintegration” process for peeling away foot soldiers in the Taliban, but the enemy’s momentum had not been halted, let alone reversed. Despite the Taliban’s having killed more than twice the number of civilians than had been killed by ISAF forces, the Karzai government was less popular in more than 90 of 120 key districts considered essential to success. And despite the growing number of American troops arriving with their new technology, better even than that used during the Iraq War, the report said that the insurgency had the advantage of drawing upon poverty, tribal friction, and lack of governance, as well as access to small arms and explosives for roadside bombs, to support “robust” military operations.
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The report also suggested that the effort to implement counter-insurgency through reintegration had failed to produce any measurable successes. Instead, special operations forces—carrying out the nighttime raids that McChrystal had roundly criticized only weeks before as the Marja campaign got under way—had accomplished the most of what had been achieved. Then came this list of bad indicators for the future: peeling away midlevel Taliban had not been effective; separating out the population from the Taliban had not succeeded; forcing Karzai to provide competent, honest officials for local government had not worked. It did not mention his CIA “slush fund,” a topic much too hot to handle. Perhaps, however, what we now know about Obama’s “private army” (as the CIA
would become known as among insiders) the Pentagon authors were unaware of at the time.

On May 1—as if to accentuate the impotence (or irrelevance) of the counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan—a naturalized American citizen from Pakistan, Faisal Shahzad, attempted to set off a bomb in Times Square, New York. The bomb did not go off, but Shahzad nearly escaped before being taken off a flight out of JFK airport at the last minute. Investigations and interrogations led back to contacts and training Shahzad had obtained from the Pakistan branch of the Taliban, and more shadowy connections with the Pakistan military. He revealed that he had had several choices of targets and had decided on the center of New York City, where memories of 9/11 would maximize the explosive power of his crude device. Shahzad failed in his mission because his training was not perfect, nor even highly professional. But how many more like him were out there, seething with anger and ready to strike a blow against their adopted country? Here was something very new. In the past, expat groups schemed against the rulers of the country they had left; now they were plotting against their host countries.

Shahzad’s bomb attempt was headline news for a few days. But its real impact probably was in nudging Washington faster away from reliance on the McChrystal-Petraeus strategy. The Pentagon report had already hinted at the shift before the Times Square incident, and its sober tone provided the background for the upcoming visit of President Hamid Karzai. Instead of another upbraiding from national security adviser James Jones, however, Karzai was treated to a walk with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a private garden in Georgetown, and then to a full state dinner at the White House.

What accounts for the dramatic change? Washington was not at all convinced that Karzai had suddenly seen the light about the need to change his ways. When Obama and Karzai held a joint press conference at the conclusion of the Afghan visit, on May 12, the American president talked about how important success in Afghanistan was for American security. But the frame of reference he used was the May 1 attack and how it demonstrated al Qaeda’s determination to foster plots originating “in the border regions
between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And a growing Taliban insurgency could mean an even larger safe haven for al Qaeda and its affiliates.” There was a lot in that sentence to think about. The Marja campaign was still important. “We have taken the fight to the Taliban,” said the president, and “pushed them out of their stronghold in Marja.” And “we are working to give Afghans the opportunity to reclaim their communities.” So it is too much to say that the Pentagon report and the abortive May 1 attack caused priorities to shift away from counterinsurgency, but the enthusiasm for what could be accomplished by troops working with Afghan national forces had begun to wane. Clinton’s hospitality and the wording of Obama’s comments suggested not a warming of relations but a kind of public display reserved for visiting Indian princes in the days of the British Raj.

At the press conference Obama talked about his recent flight into Kabul, declaring there was no denying that progress had been made in recent years, “as I saw in the lights across Kabul when I landed—lights that would not have been visible just a few years ago.” American policy makers were addicted to “light” metaphors in describing evidence of progress in winning the wars against dark forces of the world, but the operations that were working the best, the Pentagon report had said, were those carried out by the special ops forces, who struck at night in the darkness. Obama also reinforced the hard-line position on “reintegration” versus “reconciliation,” declaring that while the United States supported the upcoming “peace jirga,” or peace conference, that Karzai planned for Kandahar, the basic requirements for a settlement had not changed: before anything could happen, the Taliban’s momentum had to be reversed. “The United States supports the efforts of the Afghan government to open the door to Taliban who cut their ties to al Qaeda, abandon violence, and accept the Afghan constitution, including respect for human rights. And I look forward to a continued dialogue with our Afghan partners on these efforts.”
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Around the edges of the Karzai-Obama meeting, McChrystal secured a commitment to supply $200 million worth of diesel generators to Kandahar and, to his great satisfaction, to keep control
over their delivery and installation. The general and his aides thought Obama had made a deeper commitment at this press conference than in even his West Point speech. Only one of the aides expressed doubts to a reporter about the stability of the relationship with the Afghan president: “This is just a honeymoon period. I doubt if it’s going to last two weeks.”
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Three weeks later senior
Washington Post
writers Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe described the expansion of U.S. “secret war” capabilities. Special operations commanders, they wrote, had become a far more regular presence in the White House than they had been during the George W. Bush years.
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The advantage of a surge in special operations deployments in various places inside Afghanistan, but also in Pakistan and Somalia and Yemen, was that these forces seldom talked about what they were doing. For a Democratic president facing criticism from left and right, the journalists asserted, the unacknowledged raids and drone attacks in Somalia and Yemen “provide politically useful tools.” “We have a lot more access,” said one special ops commander. “They are talking publicly much less but they are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly.”

There were many signs that special ops and drones were becoming President Obama’s weapons of choice. He increased budget requests for the special operations forces by nearly 6 percent for fiscal 2011. But perhaps more important, an issue that had been brewing since Donald Rumsfeld’s efforts to make special ops capable of acting inside a country without the ambassador’s approval or even knowledge had now resurfaced. The secretaries of state in those years, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, had successfully held off Pentagon efforts to bypass the civilian representatives of the president in order to pursue their own agenda; now, it appeared, Obama was close to making advocates of such stealth operations his own personal representatives outside traditional chains of command.
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Admiral Eric T. Olson, head of Special Operations Command, acknowledged as much in a speech, though he placed the emphasis
on the supposed wishes of host countries: “In some places, in deference of host-country sensitivities, we are lower in profile. In every place, Special Operations forces activities are coordinated with the U.S. ambassador and are under the operational control of the four-star regional commander.”
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The place where authority seemed to overlap—at the level of “the four-star regional commander”—was also the area where Special Ops wanted more independence. And the regional commander they were concerned about was, not surprisingly, McChrystal. While all military personnel were supposed to be working for Central Command under Petraeus, one of the special ops people told reporters, “our issue is that we believe our theater forces should be under a Special Operations theater commander.” Obama seemed to agree. What began under George W. Bush as a Pentagon grab for independence now seemed to have evolved into something else, thanks to the “close relationship” between Bob Gates and Hillary Clinton, who have “smoothed out the process.”
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What the “process” had led to—at least in detail—remains a classified matter, but Obama’s wishes coincided with changes going on even in the midst of the Marja campaign. In effect, he was gaining a private army and air force to use in an unacknowledged manner. Meanwhile, the May 1 attack added impetus to Obama’s desire for a weapon to counter what counterterrorism adviser John Brennan saw arising out of the investigation of Faisal Shahzad’s background in the Pakistan Taliban: the threat of American citizens being recruited to carry out terrorist attacks inside the United States. Shahzad was only the latest, Brennan said, in a series of “American terror suspects.” He added, “They took advantage of their U.S. citizenship and were operating in many respects not necessarily alone, but in manners that made it more difficult for us to detect. These are the ones I am concerned about.”
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“Not necessarily alone” would turn out to be a key to understanding what was coming. It was not a long way from setting out the rationale for drone strikes on American citizens in foreign countries suspected of receiving (or giving) terrorist instructions.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, Gen. McChrystal made another visit to the Marja district and offered up another highly quotable comment: “This is a bleeding ulcer right now.” As a reporter traveling with the commander described the moment, the general sat gazing at maps of the area as the marine battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Brian Christmas, pleaded for more time to oust Taliban fighters from their strongholds.

“You’ve got to be patient,” Lt. Col. Brian Christmas told McChrystal. “We’ve only been here 90 days.”

“How many days do you think we have before we run out of support by the international community?” McChrystal replied. . . .

“I can’t tell you, sir,” [Christmas] finally answered.

“I’m telling you,” McChrystal said. “We don’t have as many days as we’d like.”
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Describing his access to the commander’s encounter with Colonel Christmas and a British major general named Nick Carter, the head of coalition forces in southern Afghanistan, as a rare opportunity to hear the frank conversations, reporter Dion Nissenbaum called the sessions a wake-up call that drove home the hard fact that Obama’s plan to start bringing home American troops had collided with the realities of the war. There simply weren’t enough U.S. and Afghan forces to provide the security that’s needed to win the loyalty of wary locals. “The Taliban have beheaded Afghans who cooperate with foreigners in a creeping intimidation campaign,” Nissenbaum wrote, and the government in a box held too few crayons to draw even a rough sketch of a workable local government. Carter backed up the Marine colonel: there had been too few troops to lock down the place. McChrystal was not impressed with that explanation. “You’re going to feel that way,” he said, “It’s your plan.”
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“What we have done, in my view,” McChrystal said, winding up the conference, “we have given the insurgency a chance to be a little bit credible. We said: ‘We’re taking it back.’ We came in to take it back. And we haven’t been completely convincing.”

There Will Be No Tanks

The setbacks in Marja had an immediate impact on the Kandahar objective. The NATO Office of Communication called down the McClatchy Newspapers for printing the “bleeding ulcer” comment out of context. Overall, wrote Admiral Gregory Smith to the managing editor, McChrystal felt—and had told Nissenbaum—that the campaign was “largely on track.” “It’s that it’s misperceived to be going badly.” McClatchy wasn’t buying—and neither were a lot of people in Afghanistan and Washington. Even before his trip to the Marja front line, McChrystal was in the process of shifting to more reliance on the night raids and other non-counterinsurgency methods of keeping the Taliban from gaining ground in Kandahar. First there was the change of attitude about the problematic Ahmed Wali Karzai. McChrystal’s intelligence chief, Gen. Michael T. Flynn, had once said about Wali Karzai and Kandahar, “The only way to clean up Chicago is to get rid of Capone.”
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