Killing Machine (8 page)

His confidence persuaded Obama to put Afghanistan on a fast track to stability with its assurance that getting at al Qaeda’s top leadership was the key, even though the Marshall Plan stuff might take a little longer. Riedel presented his new strategy paper to President Obama on board Air Force One flying to California. Counterinsurgency talked about eliminating breeding grounds for insurrection, often referred to as “draining the swamp,” but that was an inappropriate image for Afghanistan’s mountains and arid terrain. Riedel’s version skipped that step and talked about the need for holding on to Kabul. Afghanistan was a symbol, said Riedel in an interview on PBS
NewsHour
. “If they can defeat us in Afghanistan, they will trumpet that this is the second superpower that they have defeated in the same place. It will have enormous resonance throughout the Islamic world.”
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Riedel’s emphasis on global implications, Kissinger style, of the struggle turned local conditions into a side issue of the clash of civilizations. Yet Riedel pooh-poohed Afghanistan’s reputation as a graveyard of empires. It was a myth that Alexander the Great had
failed there; he had established Kandahar (ironically now a strong hold of the Taliban/Pashtun insurgency). Neither had the British failed. It was only the Russians who had failed. Riedel saw no option for the president except a “bold gamble” to rescue the war from eight years of neglect by George Bush.

If the situation a year from now is not moving in the right direction, then Obama will face the same tough options he has looked at since his inauguration. He knows he can’t cut and run. That would give al-Qaeda a world-changing victory, threaten the stability of both Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as India and vastly increase the threat to the American homeland from a larger terrorist base. The future of NATO itself will be in doubt.
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Despite its almost blithe assurances that Afghanistan was no Herculean task, Riedel’s white paper for Obama on U.S. policy to ward Afghanistan and Pakistan, made public on March 27, 2009, was loaded with these dire predictions. A clue to the confusion it harbored could be found in its introduction, where Riedel inverted the usual priority accorded to America’s enemies, placing “the Taliban and related organizations” ahead of al Qaeda, now downgraded to a related organization. But why the change? The Taliban had not launched the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, yet here it became the first objective of the war, even though the “core goal” still must be to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its safe havens in Pakistan, and to prevent their return to Pakistanor Afghanistan.”
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What stands out about Riedel’s efforts to clarify the issues in the Afghan War—after all the toing and froing—was that the war still lacked a clear strategic vision, resting on a cloudy set of contradictory assertions. The paper’s recommendations could be read either as support for a counterterrorist effort to prevent al Qaeda’s “return” or as a counterinsurgency strategy for securing Kabul’s total victory over the Taliban and extending its rule across the land from East to West. Reconciling these divergent attack plans proved a daunting challenge.

As these gaps in logic opened a vast and yawning gulf, Obama turned more and more to CIA veteran John Brennan for answers. Brennan offered a different plan, one involving drone attacks, but the counterinsurgency advocates were far from finished and resisted drone attacks as unproductive and, worse, a leading cause of surging anti-Americanism. For a time (quite a while) the debate was a stand off, with each side getting some—but not all—of what it wanted.

President Obama liked the idea of drones and hankered for some clear indication of the direction he should go. Classified briefings he received within days of his election from Brennan and Vice Admiral Mike McConnell revealed to him the “deepest secrets” of the intelligence community—the inner workings of the covert drone program. McConnell stressed the duplicity of the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, in aiding the Taliban as a supposed counter weight to Indian or Iranian influence in Afghanistan. But Brennan and Obama took to each other instantly: Obama had found his sounding board for quiet philosophical discussions about taking responsibility for life-and-death decisions. Terrorism dominated their first conversation, with Brennan speaking plainly of his unsentimental view about using hard power against terrorists when appropriate. They agreed, however, that the mow-them-down approach was useless and counterproductive in the situation confronting the United States in the present and in the likely future of American warfare.
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Obama was so impressed with Brennan’s perspicuity that he wanted him for his CIA director, but, writes Daniel Klaidman, as soon as his name surfaced, “left-wing bloggers railed against him for his supposed associations with the Bush administration’s enhanced interrogation program,” and the nomination was dropped. The way Klaidman puts it, “the left-wing bloggers” were the source of trouble, not really anything in Brennan’s record. However that may be, even though there was disagreement about drones within Obama’s inner circle of advisers, the president kept him close by inside the White House as special adviser on counterterrorism, where he “would come to have unrivaled influence with the president on matters of national security.”
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In some ways this episode prefigured Obama’s entire first term. He listened to Bruce Riedel, communed with John Brennan, and delivered contradictory policy statements. Rather than work from his base, as Republicans did with theirs, moreover, the Obama White House complained of unreasonable “left-wing” demands, thereby stigmatizing a large body of supporters, and supplying ammunition to Obama’s critics that would—whether the White House realized it or not—come back to haunt him on a whole range of domestic issues as well. Obama made his commitment to Brennan as his chief terrorism adviser knowing he was a drone advocate even before he had had an opportunity to review with other advisers the legal, moral, and practical questions that accompanied such a decision. What the president-elect took away from those first conversations with Brennan and McConnell were only the advantages of drones: fewer casualties, less need for more troops to dig out an enemy fighter, and—the strongest selling point of all—a way to strike at the Taliban and al Qaeda leadership inside the frontiers of an ambiguous ally, Pakistan, and eventually even to chase down presumed terrorist inspirers in Yemen and other places. Without an open discussion of drones, however, Obama and Brennan fostered a deceptive aspect to the new administration’s approach that did not provide space for serious discussions on the core issues of national security, including the problem of blowback.

The first instance of serious disagreement about the wisdom of using drones surfaced quickly inside the circle of Petraeus advisers in an op-ed article by David Kilcullen and Andrew McDonald Exum, “Death from Above, Outrage Down Below.” Drone missions had steadily grown in the early months of the new administration, they wrote. From September 2008 to March 2009 alone, “C.I.A. operatives launched more than three dozen strikes.”
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The direct pinpointing of CIA responsibility was part of Kilcullen and Exum’s argument that the American mission was being undercut from within the White House. They argued that while it was easier to kill some enemy leaders using the drones, and certainly less costly in terms of American casualties, the tactic was
sure to backfire and very likely increase the number of insurgents, plus spread the infection to other countries.

First, the drone war has created a siege mentality among Pakistani civilians. This is similar to what happened in Somalia in 2005 and 2006, when similar strikes were employed against the forces of the Union of Islamic Courts. While the strikes did kill individual militants who were the targets, public anger over the American show of force solidified the power of extremists. The Islamists’ popularity rose and the group became more extreme, leading eventually to a messy Ethiopian military intervention, the rise of a new regional insurgency and an increase in offshore piracy.

While violent extremists may be unpopular, for a frightened population they seem less ominous than a faceless enemy that wages war from afar and often kills more civilians than militants.
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What was remarkable here, although largely unnoticed in media commentary after the article appeared, is that the authors had written a piece that broke completely with the self-justifying explanation of the need for a war on terror—“they hate us for our freedoms”—to discuss what we might be doing to incur such anger. That had been forbidden territory after 9/11. Here as well was a sharp-edged controversy wrapped inside the larger controversy, for using the CIA to manage and direct the attacks was questionable under the international rules of warfare. The debate grew more confusing as it went on, as the defeated Republican candidate John McCain used his first speech on foreign policy since the election to decry counterterrorism advocates for giving up on nation building: “Some suggest it is time to scale back our ambitions in Afghanistan—to give up on nation-building and instead focus narrowly on our counterterrorism objectives, by simply mounting operations aimed at killing or capturing terrorist leaders and destroying their networks.”
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New CIA director Leon Panetta went after Kilcullen and Exum as well as McCain. There was really no alternative to drones, he
said, in his first speech after being confirmed by the Senate. “Very frankly, it’s the only game in town in terms of confronting and trying to disrupt the Al Qaeda leadership,” especially compared to other American military operations such as the “attacks from F-16s and others that go into these areas which do involve a tremendous amount of collateral damage.”
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Counterinsurgency Wins the First Toss

In March 2009, when he approved the Riedel white paper’s recommendations and ordered seventeen thousand additional troops to Afghanistan, Obama told the nation his goal was to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership. Afghanistan faced an “increasingly perilous” situation, the president said. After so many years of being misled about the war there, the American people deserved a “straightforward answer” to the question of why our men and women “still fight and die there.” The al Qaeda terrorists who planned the 9/11 attacks were now in Pakistan as well as Afghanistan. If Kabul fell to the Taliban—or if the Afghan government “allows al Qaeda to go unchallenged—that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.”
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He did not mention drone warfare.

Despite Obama’s promise of a “straightforward answer,” the constant interweaving of the Taliban and al Qaeda in policy statements did little to clarify what the war was about. There was Obama’s assertion that it was about keeping al Qaeda from enjoying a base inside Afghanistan. For others, the war was a crusade to prevent the Taliban from coming to power and setting back Afghan women’s rights. For still others, it was about the very survival of NATO as an effective instrument for combating threats to the international order. And then there was the underlying fear that an Afghanistan under Taliban rule would unsettle Pakistan to the extent that the latter’s government might fall, increasing the danger that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists.
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Theoretically (or even practically), therefore, it was perfectly possible, given Obama’s description of the “border region” between
Afghanistan and Pakistan as “the most dangerous place in the world,” to defeat the Afghan Taliban completely without eliminating the terrorist threat. Besides that border region, moreover, there were many other places where al Qaeda could set up camp, such as Yemen—where months later Washington would send more drones to attack supposed terrorist strongholds. The neglect of those possibilities would prove to be a major issue in coming years.

We were not in Afghanistan to dictate that country’s future, the president insisted in the spring of 2009, though he could not help mentioning the fate of women and girls if the Taliban won. What was still unclear was what would happen if al Qaeda was totally destroyed. Would the United States continue to fight until the Taliban had no chance of imposing its extremist views on issues of women’s rights? Leaving that unanswered, Obama turned to Pakistan, announcing a new aid package for Islamabad. It would not be a blank check: “Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al Qaeda and the violent extremists within its borders.” If necessary, the United States would take unilateral action. “And we will insist that action be taken—one way or another—when we have intelligence about high-level terrorist targets.”

He knew, he said, that the campaign would not succeed with bullets and bombs alone. While al Qaeda offered the people of Pakistan “nothing but destruction,” “we stand for something different.” In addition to a foreign aid program that included funds for roads and schools and hospitals, plus the seventeen thousand additional troops, the American emphasis would be on training security forces. The Iraq War’s need for funds had prevented this action from being taken earlier. “We will accelerate our efforts to build an Afghan Army of 134,000 and a police force of 82,000 . . . and increases in Afghan forces may very well be needed as our plans to turn over security responsibility to the Afghans go forward.” This was all part of a program to advance security, opportunity, and justice not just in Kabul but “from the bottom up in the provinces.”

For the time being, at least, counterinsurgency had been given its opportunity. Again using a reference to current counterinsurgency
theories, essentially those pushed hard by David Kilcullen, the president said there was an “uncompromising core of the Taliban” that must be met with force and defeated. But there were also those who had “taken up arms because of coercion, or simply for a price,” and who must be given an option to choose a different, better course. That was why it was necessary to work with leaders in every province. As their ranks dwindled, an enemy that had nothing to offer but terror and repression would be further isolated. “And we will continue to support the basic human rights of all Afghans—including women and girls.” Then, in a vague final gesture toward skeptics, especially so-called realists, the president promised that, “going forward, we will not blindly stay the course.” Instead, the United States would set clear metrics to measure progress and hold itself accountable.